True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 499: Libbing Out
Aired: 2025-10-27
Duration: 02:09:13


=== Pro Se Podcaster's Dilemma (03:36) ===

[00:00:00]  What is the law?
[00:00:02]  It's a good question.
[00:00:03]  And one that judges love to hear.
[00:00:06]  Two things.
[00:00:07]  This entire podcast, no matter what our guest has to say about it.
[00:00:11]  No, don't say that.
[00:00:12]  Is legal advice.
[00:00:13]  It's not legal advice.
[00:00:14]  It is legal advice.
[00:00:16]  It's advice and it's legal.
[00:00:18]  It's that precisely.
[00:00:20]  Those two words, if it's legal advice, that's a hyphen.
[00:00:23]  But if it's just legal advice, it's just legal advice.
[00:00:27]  No.
[00:00:29]  I'd be a terrible lawyer.
[00:00:31]  I'd be a great lawyer.
[00:00:32]  Because here's the deal.
[00:00:34]  Everyone is a lawyer, but you can only activate it in one place, which is the pro se office at the courthouse.
[00:00:41]  You have the lawyer within you right now.
[00:00:44]  You have the capability to do it.
[00:00:45]  You have the gumption.
[00:00:46]  You have the legal knowledge because you've read all the words before just in different places, but your brain hasn't put them together yet.
[00:00:52]  And when you enter the pro-se office at the Southern District of New York courthouse and you say, fuck those sharks circling outside that they call lawyers, I'm going to do it.
[00:01:05]  It's like pulling Excalibur from the stone.
[00:01:10]  Do you remember the Pro Se Office?
[00:01:32]  Yeah.
[00:01:32]  Yes.
[00:01:33]  There was a darkness about it.
[00:01:35]  I, yeah.
[00:01:38]  The people that, look, it's one thing to say, look, okay, there's two levels of insanity.
[00:01:44]  Yeah.
[00:01:45]  There's many levels of insanity.
[00:01:46]  Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.
[00:01:48]  The type of person that represents themselves in small claims, let's say.
[00:01:53]  Okay.
[00:01:54]  That's normal.
[00:01:55]  I don't know if it's normal.
[00:01:56]  In small claims, you're like, I didn't do it.
[00:01:59]  Yeah.
[00:01:59]  Or, you know, let's say, but you're representing yourself in federal court.
[00:02:04]  Yes.
[00:02:06]  There's so much more to your story that I part of me wants to hear, and yet the other part of me wants to hands up, walk away.
[00:02:13]  You know, I think about this is that like, if I was Studs Turkle, first of all, great name.
[00:02:20]  Great name.
[00:02:22]  And an interesting, very, and I don't mean this in any kind of way, a kind of a gay name.
[00:02:28]  I do think Mr. Turkle is very, that sounds nice.
[00:02:32]  Mr. Turkle, well, I don't think, I think Studs Turkle sounds nice too, but if I was Studs, I'd be hanging out.
[00:02:38]  Studs is a, maybe I'll name my fucking, one of my kids that.
[00:02:43]  Yeah, well, what's the difference, you know, the way I treat them.
[00:02:46]  But I would just post up outside the fucking pro se door at the fucking federal courthouse.
[00:02:53]  And everyone who comes in, I'm like, what's your story, stranger?
[00:02:56]  Tell it to me.
[00:02:57]  And then that's my column.
[00:02:58]  And then you're like, fuck, dude.
[00:02:59]  I should pitch that to New York Post.
[00:03:01]  Do it via a friend's necklace.
[00:03:03]  I just have it.
[00:03:04]  I think I already broke it.
[00:03:05]  Damn.
[00:03:06]  They don't drown.
[00:03:07]  Hello.
[00:03:10]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:13]  And I'm Brace.
[00:03:15]  I'm Producer Young Chomsky.
[00:03:17]  And this is Trunan.
[00:03:18]  Hello.
[00:03:18]  Hello.
[00:03:20]  We're talking about the law today.
[00:03:22]  Nothing in this episode is legal advice.
[00:03:23]  Nothing is legal advice.
[00:03:25]  This is all just advice.
[00:03:27]  It's not advice.
[00:03:28]  No, this is just all advice from...
[00:03:31]  I don't even think we say advice in this.
[00:03:33]  It's more just like talking about stuff.

=== Poison Control Confessions (02:22) ===

[00:03:36]  I like to think that almost everything I say is sort of folksy wisdom.
[00:03:41]  And so while I may not be giving explicit advice, I think that there's a lesson in kind of everything that I say.
[00:03:48]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:03:49]  You know, that's don't take this.
[00:03:51]  Don't.
[00:03:52]  Well, depends on what this is cautionary tale.
[00:03:55]  Depends on what it is.
[00:03:57]  Not really.
[00:03:57]  Because I think if you find something, if it's a pill.
[00:04:02]  Could be a poison pill.
[00:04:03]  No, but they don't make those actually.
[00:04:06]  I almost took benzedrine.
[00:04:08]  What was the fucking, is it benzedrine?
[00:04:10]  It wasn't dexagrine, but it was like, it was an old style amphetamine.
[00:04:14]  Somebody gave me like an ampule.
[00:04:16]  It was a kind of way of method of ingesting drugs that I have never taken before.
[00:04:21]  I'm not even.
[00:04:21]  I'm not taking Nazi meth.
[00:04:23]  It wasn't Nazi.
[00:04:23]  It was American.
[00:04:25]  I mean, what's the difference these days?
[00:04:26]  But it was from back in the day in America.
[00:04:29]  Actually, I guess it was more racist then.
[00:04:31]  But you know what I'm saying?
[00:04:32]  It was regular in English.
[00:04:35]  At some point.
[00:04:36]  At some point.
[00:04:36]  No, it was, but it was from like the 40s or the 50s.
[00:04:39]  Oh, it could be Nazi meth.
[00:04:40]  And someone's like, yo, I found this at a fucking yard sale.
[00:04:44]  You love drugs.
[00:04:45]  Will you take this?
[00:04:45]  And I was like, who the fuck is selling meth at a yard sale?
[00:04:48]  Actually, probably a lot of it.
[00:04:49]  Meth.
[00:04:50]  What do you mean it wasn't meth?
[00:04:51]  You just said.
[00:04:52]  It's an amphetamine.
[00:04:53]  Meth is just the best one, but there's a lot of different kinds.
[00:04:56]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:59]  When is that folksy wisdom coming about?
[00:05:01]  Well, I took it.
[00:05:03]  I took it and then I called poison control, which is actually, this is the folksy wisdom.
[00:05:07]  This is a fucking crazy ass poison.
[00:05:09]  If I'm poison control control, shit.
[00:05:12]  Okay.
[00:05:12]  You're calling them and you're like, hey, I am a moron.
[00:05:17]  I didn't say that.
[00:05:18]  Well, this is in my version.
[00:05:20]  Hi, I'm a moron.
[00:05:22]  I took an ampule and they're like, excuse me?
[00:05:27]  And you're like, well, it's Nazi meth.
[00:05:29]  It wasn't Nazi.
[00:05:30]  I took Nazi method that my friend gave me that they bought at a yard sale and now I'm ski yard.
[00:05:37]  Oh, yeah, it was a Benny.
[00:05:41]  Oh, no, maybe it wasn't a Benzu.
[00:05:42]  But are you looking this up in your journal?
[00:05:44]  Yeah, I'm looking to see it with the fucking, because there's obviously the benzogene inhalers, which everyone used to take the ampule out of and fucking, but it was like, it was meant to be a bad thing.
[00:05:52]  It's not taken.
[00:05:53]  No one knows this stuff.
[00:05:54]  I don't know.
[00:05:54]  But anyways, yeah, I was like, am I going to die?

=== Suspended Animosity (09:25) ===

[00:05:58]  And they were like, I can, you know, you know, like every, you know, it's like when doctors are on the computer, like, I know you're fucking Googling.
[00:06:05]  Well, now it's ChatGPT.
[00:06:07]  I know your Chat GPT, how big is too big?
[00:06:10]  Um, about a skin tag, but I could tell that they were just googling because the person had never heard of the drug.
[00:06:17]  And I was like, Yeah, oh, you think?
[00:06:19]  They're like, How do you feel?
[00:06:20]  I'm like, I feel good because you're on drugs, but no, but dude, no, drugs don't even work after that long.
[00:06:26]  That's true, they don't work that good after that long.
[00:06:28]  Like they expire, yeah.
[00:06:30]  And I felt a little good, but it was probably, I didn't, I was like, that probably.
[00:06:33]  They're like, call us back when you eat a Tide Pod.
[00:06:35]  They did say call them back in an hour.
[00:06:37]  And I just, no, I got fucking, I got, I did some fucking, I did.
[00:06:40]  You were on drugs.
[00:06:41]  I didn't, I've never done drugs because I realize we have a lawyer on this.
[00:06:44]  I've never done drugs.
[00:06:46]  I suffered from drug addiction because of my mental illness, which I've been, no, wait, I can't say that because I have a gun.
[00:06:57]  You know what?
[00:06:59]  I was fine.
[00:07:00]  And this is the folks who wisdom from that is if you believe in something strong enough and hard enough, you can do anything.
[00:07:07]  That's not true.
[00:07:08]  You can do anything.
[00:07:10]  We do have an actual lawyer on the show today.
[00:07:13]  Yeah.
[00:07:14]  And we're talking about all sorts of things.
[00:07:17]  We're talking about, you know what?
[00:07:19]  And this is, we're having, this is, I've often said this is a liberal show.
[00:07:24]  I was just going to say, you know what?
[00:07:25]  We lived out.
[00:07:26]  This might be our most liberal show today because we have.
[00:07:30]  Which is tough for us as conservatives.
[00:07:32]  It was.
[00:07:33]  I know, but you know what we're doing?
[00:07:34]  We're building a bridge.
[00:07:35]  Always.
[00:07:36]  Building a bridge.
[00:07:36]  And I kind of a little bit felt like we were a cliff face.
[00:07:43]  What's the most liberal thing you could carve into a cliff?
[00:07:47]  Hmm.
[00:07:49]  Abraham Lincoln?
[00:07:51]  No.
[00:07:53]  He's problematic.
[00:07:54]  But this isn't that.
[00:07:56]  But I guess he's not that kind of liberal.
[00:07:59]  He's suspended, habeas.
[00:08:00]  Yeah.
[00:08:02]  He suspended it.
[00:08:03]  Yeah.
[00:08:03]  But famously, actually.
[00:08:04]  The liberals love him.
[00:08:05]  No, but he did a pretty illiberal.
[00:08:06]  I mean, he governed fairly illiberally.
[00:08:08]  Sure, but they still love him.
[00:08:10]  Yeah, but they love him because of his gestures towards wokeness.
[00:08:14]  Well, I'm conservative.
[00:08:16]  I like him.
[00:08:18]  Barack Obama.
[00:08:18]  I don't know what liberals you're talking about.
[00:08:20]  Yeah, but I think that he sued Barack Obama a bunch.
[00:08:26]  Anyways, imagine this is a cliff that's very liberal because we have a liberal goat on it today.
[00:08:32]  That took so long.
[00:08:33]  It took so long.
[00:08:34]  And you know what?
[00:08:34]  It's the process.
[00:08:36]  It's the fucking process that matters.
[00:08:39]  We have Ben Weisner from the ACLU, but he's one of the free speech guys from the ACLU.
[00:08:46]  We talk about a lot of liberal legal.
[00:08:49]  I was just like, we got to have this dude on to talk about the law.
[00:08:52]  And we did.
[00:08:53]  So let's get to it.
[00:09:05]  Let me ask you.
[00:09:06]  Whenever they're like, you may approach the bench, you're like, you don't need to be condescending about it.
[00:09:15]  What is the question?
[00:09:16]  I guess that's just what I would think if I was in your position.
[00:09:19]  Which is why you're not a lawyer.
[00:09:21]  No, but like many, many. annoying Jewish people, I've been told by my parents that I would have made a good lawyer.
[00:09:28]  Me too.
[00:09:29]  I've also been told that about myself.
[00:09:31]  This is what they tell all argumentative preteens.
[00:09:34]  Yeah.
[00:09:35]  Some of us actually.
[00:09:36]  Smart asses.
[00:09:38]  Take heed.
[00:09:39]  I regret to inform you that today on this conservative podcast, we have with us in the hot seat, soon to be in the defendant seat when I get my way, one of the, I guess the most liberal guy I know.
[00:09:55]  I think it's fair to say.
[00:09:56]  I don't know.
[00:09:57]  I mean, now that you're in the New York Times, you probably have a lot of liberal friends.
[00:09:59]  No, no, they put that there.
[00:10:01]  No, that's, that's, I'm going to be in the New York Post next.
[00:10:04]  That's the.
[00:10:04]  You've heard a defendant post.
[00:10:05]  I know, but I'm doing a positive story in the New York Post next.
[00:10:08]  Okay, here we go.
[00:10:09]  We have with us today Ben Weisner, the deputy legal director of the ACLU, the Assassinations, Crimes, Lesbians, and what's something that starts with the you?
[00:10:22]  Unctuous individuals law from the ACLU.
[00:10:26]  Ben, welcome to the show.
[00:10:29]  Thanks for having me in your lair.
[00:10:32]  Thanks for coming.
[00:10:33]  Sure thing.
[00:10:33]  We're very excited.
[00:10:35]  I want to start off by, as we talked about earlier, I'm waiving all attorney client privilege.
[00:10:39]  Well, you have to.
[00:10:40]  I mean, otherwise we can't tell the story of how we met.
[00:10:42]  It's true.
[00:10:43]  We've known each other for a little while.
[00:10:46]  When was it that you got back all scropulous from your overseas misadventures?
[00:10:51]  I would say nine years ago.
[00:10:53]  It's been that long.
[00:10:54]  Yeah.
[00:10:56]  Who put us in touch?
[00:10:59]  Someone.
[00:11:00]  It always lands on my desk.
[00:11:02]  I don't know what the root was.
[00:11:04]  Yeah, someone just gave me your phone number.
[00:11:06]  And you've been very helpful to me throughout the years whenever I've been scared about things.
[00:11:10]  I'm saying that sincerely.
[00:11:11]  Well, it's been more than once.
[00:11:15]  Ben is a, I guess you would say a storied legal professional.
[00:11:19]  He's been at the ACLU for a very long time.
[00:11:22]  What did you say, 24 years?
[00:11:24]  Yeah, I started in August of 2001.
[00:11:27]  Right before I was going to say something terrible, but before 9-11.
[00:11:32]  That is terrible.
[00:11:33]  The end of the end of history.
[00:11:34]  Yeah, there we go.
[00:11:36]  And because of 9-11, you worked on a huge number of cases relating to Guantanamo Bay.
[00:11:42]  We can talk about that, I think, in a second.
[00:11:44]  But representing all kinds of people in maybe difficult cases against the U.S. government.
[00:11:51]  And then later, of course, sort of famously represented Edward Snowden.
[00:11:55]  I guess you still represent Snowden.
[00:11:56]  It's mostly a friendship these days, but if he needs law, I'm there.
[00:12:00]  You can't imagine he's getting called into court too often.
[00:12:03]  These days.
[00:12:04]  And now, I don't know, you're dealing with, I guess, a lot of stuff with Trump.
[00:12:10]  Jesus Christ.
[00:12:11]  I did want to ask you, actually, I did want to start off talking about 9-11 stuff a little bit because you did join the ACLU a month before 9-11.
[00:12:20]  What was it like to work in law right after then?
[00:12:25]  You know, when I went to law school in the 90s, there weren't really courses in national security law.
[00:12:32]  It wasn't really mainstream.
[00:12:33]  We weren't thinking about human rights as something that would be a domestic legal issue in the U.S. People who wanted to do human rights were people who wanted to go work in Latin America or in South Africa or something.
[00:12:44]  And so all these issues that we were confronted with after 9-11 were things that we thought had been conclusively resolved.
[00:12:52]  Some of them by the Geneva Conventions, others by the Civil Rights Movement.
[00:12:56]  You know, I didn't think that we would be litigating torture cases in U.S. courts.
[00:13:02]  I didn't think we'd be litigating cases involving whether the president could essentially overrule the Magna Carta by creating secret detention outside the law with no lawyers and no claims.
[00:13:15]  You know, I didn't think that we would be litigating secret mass surveillance after the reforms of the 1970s and 80s.
[00:13:23]  So all this stuff was just kind of put back on the table, but it was a good, you know, I would say miseducation.
[00:13:31]  I was a little bit less shocked by Trump and Trumpism, having seen the distinction between enforceable laws and norms that could be cast aside.
[00:13:44]  Because essentially, the Bush-Cheney response to 9-11 has been protected by legal impunity.
[00:13:54]  The cases trying to hold them and their accomplices to account for serious war crimes, things that have always been deemed illegal in all countries, they failed.
[00:14:06]  And they didn't fail because the court said torture is legal or this kind of killing is legal.
[00:14:12]  They failed because the court said, we're not even going to consider these claims.
[00:14:16]  All the government has to do is come in and make an invocation of secrecy and national security.
[00:14:20]  And that's it.
[00:14:22]  The case is over.
[00:14:24]  No justiciability whatsoever.
[00:14:27]  And so again, when the Supreme Court says, you know, we're going to say Trump has some immunity for what he did in office, and people are absolutely shocked.
[00:14:36]  My response essentially was, what's new?
[00:14:39]  Yeah.
[00:14:40]  You know, it's funny.
[00:14:40]  I was just thinking, you know, that's very contra many of your extremely liberal comrades who have such rosy, you know, rose-eyed glasses for some of the Bush years and even some of the Obama years.
[00:14:57]  But I think if you speak to anyone on the legal side, especially people who are bringing cases against the government or journalists that were trying to report on things to help build cases against the government, none of that, you know, what you're saying is, you know, what's happening under Trump, none of this should be surprising, but feels like a lot of it is there's always been this wild disconnect between how, let's say,

=== Attacks Brought Back Into Question (06:09) ===

[00:15:24]  elites experienced life in the United States and how people outside the United States experienced the United States.
[00:15:30]  So we're talking about, you know, Trump kind of shattering this post-World War II long period of peace and normality, but that's not how it felt if you were in Central America in the 80s or Indochina in the 1970s or Iraq after 2001.
[00:15:48]  So there's no golden age of the U.S. if you're talking about those kinds of places.
[00:15:53]  But I think even here, most people in our society didn't experience concrete rights violations under the Bush-Cheney administration unless they were in Muslim or South Asian or Arab communities.
[00:16:11]  In Trump I, if you weren't an immigrant, you didn't feel that much.
[00:16:16]  But this time around is actually different in terms of the impacts here, where you're actually seeing, and we'll talk about this later, I'm sure, you know, attacks on major media companies, attacks on law firms, attacks on elite universities.
[00:16:30]  It really, you know, funding cuts to major scientific research, using all the levers of government to go after people in this country in a way that really is different.
[00:16:39]  So I don't want to diminish that.
[00:16:41]  Yeah, sure.
[00:16:42]  I just want to say I agree with you that that's not in contrast to some wonderful golden age.
[00:16:49]  Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
[00:16:51]  I was kind of taking a look at some of your cases, and you represented Khalid Al-Masri.
[00:16:56]  Yeah.
[00:16:56]  And Al-Masri, for those who don't know or don't remember, was a German citizen, is a German citizen, who in a case of mistaken identity was snatched in Macedonia, handed over to the CIA, flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, a country he had no connection to whatsoever, and held there for months, even after the U.S. realized that they had taken the wrong person.
[00:17:21]  Of course, we know that if he had been from Morocco or Yemen or Egypt, he would have just ended up another person in Guantanamo.
[00:17:28]  But because he was from Germany, they had to figure out some way of getting him the hell out of there.
[00:17:32]  And so they created with German intelligence some really Baroque plan to fly him to Albania, drop him on the side of the road, then by prearrangement, have him picked up and flown back to Germany with probably some kind of secret payment.
[00:17:46]  They told him to shut up.
[00:17:48]  Instead, he went to a German lawyer.
[00:17:50]  It ended up with a serious criminal investigation in Germany.
[00:17:53]  They indicted CIA agents and contractors.
[00:17:56]  When we tried to bring a lawsuit in U.S. courts saying this guy was kidnapped and tortured, the response from the U.S. was not, we didn't do it or not, we did it, but we're allowed to do it.
[00:18:09]  But any litigation of this claim will reveal state secrets and harm national security.
[00:18:14]  Therefore, the case has to be dismissed.
[00:18:16]  And that was the resolution of that case.
[00:18:18]  It just, it really reminds me in certain ways, like there's like a vulgarized version of that now with some of the renditions to El Salvador, right?
[00:18:27]  I mean, even obviously, like, I'm against any, the U.S. sending anybody to prison in El Salvador.
[00:18:34]  But there were some pretty famous instances of a few people who had like no, I mean, the gang affiliation of anybody sent to El Salvador is, I mean, we have to take the word of some of the biggest idiots in the fucking world that any of them have any gang affiliation.
[00:18:48]  Yeah, I think the Times did an attempted deep dive and found out that only a tiny percentage had a criminal conviction in any country.
[00:18:55]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:18:55]  And, you know, there was a bunch, but there was several people who were sort of like picked out as like, this guy obviously has no, you know, affiliation or whatever.
[00:19:03]  And the U.S.'s response was, it wasn't even like, oh, this is a secret.
[00:19:06]  It's just like, well, we can't do anything about it.
[00:19:09]  Interestingly, they've backed down from that.
[00:19:11]  Really?
[00:19:12]  And so the most famous example of that was the Albrego Garcia case.
[00:19:16]  He's back in the U.S. After they said, under no circumstances will he ever be back in the U.S.
[00:19:21]  They brought him back to the U.S. on a totally trumped-up criminal charge.
[00:19:25]  The lead prosecutor in Tennessee resigned over the criminal charge, the federal prosecutor.
[00:19:31]  And the judges have expressed complete skepticism about this case.
[00:19:35]  But they brought him back.
[00:19:37]  And then the other Venezuelan men who were sent down there were transferred to Venezuela.
[00:19:41]  Now, our legal position, and we represent many of them, is that they should be brought back to the United States and get a do-over on their immigration case.
[00:19:48]  I wouldn't blame most of them for not wanting to come back to the United States in these circumstances because they would be slapped into immigration detention, probably sent to a for-profit immigration jail in Louisiana.
[00:20:01]  Yeah, I mean, it's just, that's a good point.
[00:20:05]  Or bombed on the way here if they try to get on a boat.
[00:20:08]  Yeah, but I do think, I mean, there's so much attention that we pay when the administration flouts judicial orders.
[00:20:15]  And in this case, the judge said, turn the planes around, and they didn't.
[00:20:19]  And there's less attention paid when they quietly back down from their most extreme positions.
[00:20:24]  I think it's important to point that out because, you know, the claim they were making, which is El Salvador is a sovereign nation.
[00:20:31]  Courts have no authority to order them to do anything.
[00:20:34]  Would have been the same if they had sent 200 citizens down there, if they sent Trump's political opponents down there.
[00:20:39]  And conservative judges were deeply uncomfortable with that argument.
[00:20:44]  And you saw some impassioned opinions from pretty right-wing judges saying, Please don't make this argument.
[00:20:50]  And I don't know what the conversations were in the administration that led to what they regarded as a face-saving backing down.
[00:20:56]  We'll bring him back, but we'll, you know, we'll put him in jail for criminal charges.
[00:20:59]  That's collapsing now.
[00:21:01]  But they did happen and they did back down.
[00:21:03]  How, I mean, that seems to be happening more than I think people kind of realize.
[00:21:08]  I think because of what you're saying, which is that it's not getting as publicized, partly because I think the Trump admin is so good at throwing so much stuff at the media that they're.
[00:21:22]  It's a TV show.
[00:21:23]  Yes, and they're very good at producing the TV show.
[00:21:25]  Sure, you can fire a missile at a boat, and there's your story for the day.
[00:21:29]  Right.
[00:21:30]  Or tear a hole in the side of the White House.

=== Supreme Court Pressure Points (14:56) ===

[00:21:33]  Oh my God.
[00:21:34]  Did you see the plans for the thing?
[00:21:36]  I don't.
[00:21:37]  No.
[00:21:38]  That is exactly what I was talking about when I was saying that like global Dubai, Las Vegas, Macau aesthetics.
[00:21:43]  It's like going to be a podcast wing of the new ballroom.
[00:21:48]  It's literally like all gold.
[00:21:50]  I'm not even kidding.
[00:21:51]  But like that white, like white, glossy gold, the kind of shit you see in Russia or whatever.
[00:21:57]  Like that anora house.
[00:21:59]  Yeah.
[00:21:59]  Totally.
[00:22:00]  Are you going to do an aura to the East Wing?
[00:22:02]  It's horrifying.
[00:22:04]  I can't say I'm opposed.
[00:22:05]  Yeah.
[00:22:06]  I mean, make it as ugly as you want, I guess.
[00:22:08]  But it is really, really funny.
[00:22:11]  It's very gaudy.
[00:22:15]  I can't even find the word.
[00:22:16]  It looks like a hair salon.
[00:22:18]  You know what I mean?
[00:22:19]  It looks like in Brighton Beach.
[00:22:21]  Yeah.
[00:22:22]  That's a part of the problem with this kind of classist reaction to Trump.
[00:22:26]  And Trump is like, I know.
[00:22:28]  Well, you could have like a stronger person.
[00:22:30]  Maybe they'll like rent it out for Quinceanieras.
[00:22:33]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:22:34]  Well, probably not Quinceineras.
[00:22:35]  That's right.
[00:22:37]  No, but I'm curious what you said about the conservative judges, actually.
[00:22:41]  So how much because I know that especially at the higher courts, they very much, you know, they take their profession seriously.
[00:22:53]  They are for someone like myself who is very realist about the law, you'll say.
[00:23:01]  I do think that, you know, the higher up you go in the courts, a lot of these guys, even for as conservative as they might be, they still, you know, take themselves as legal scholars.
[00:23:11]  They still sort of want to embody that and not be sort of partisan hacks, you know?
[00:23:17]  And so I'm curious, like, how the pressure there, how many of them are kind of bending a little bit more to support some of these kind of wilder arguments that the Trump administration is making versus trying to kind of hold the line.
[00:23:35]  So I think there's a few things to say.
[00:23:36]  First, I agree with you.
[00:23:38]  I think there is a sort of narrative in some progressive circles that the Supreme Court is simply corrupt.
[00:23:44]  It's corrupt in the way that it was composed.
[00:23:46]  I agree with that.
[00:23:48]  You know, holding a seat open for 10 months and then rushing someone through in six weeks.
[00:23:53]  That is political corruption.
[00:23:54]  That was misconduct.
[00:23:57]  But I agree with you.
[00:23:59]  I think there are ideologues.
[00:24:02]  I do think that they are intellectually serious about their core project.
[00:24:07]  And the core project is a little different for each of them.
[00:24:10]  Sure.
[00:24:11]  And so you can get wins from some of them on issues that you wouldn't necessarily expect.
[00:24:15]  I mean, for example, Justice Gorsuch is a gettable vote on a criminal justice case.
[00:24:20]  And Justice Alito isn't on those kinds of cases.
[00:24:25]  I think there's a few things going on.
[00:24:28]  And not for the first time in U.S. history.
[00:24:30]  I think you will see the Supreme Court in some instances back down from confrontation in order to avoid the possibility of having an order being violated.
[00:24:44]  And again, you saw something like that with Roosevelt, where he threatened to add justices to the Supreme Court, and then the conservative Supreme Court started okaying the New Deal policies that they had been striking down.
[00:24:55]  This is the switch in time, save nine.
[00:24:58]  So I think you might see some of that here.
[00:25:00]  But I also think that Trump is going to win a bunch of cases before the Supreme Court, and he's going to lose a bunch of cases before the Supreme Court.
[00:25:09]  Unfortunately, I think they have signaled that they are going to let him wreck the executive branch, that it's his to wreck, even though Congress created it and created rules for it and funded it.
[00:25:20]  They seem to be signaling that Trump can more or less do what he wants to essentially wreck executive branch agencies.
[00:25:32]  Whether he can do the same with things like foreign aid, maybe.
[00:25:34]  We'll see.
[00:25:36]  You're talking specifically about the cases having to deal with whether he can fire, whether they can withhold funds.
[00:25:42]  Those kinds of cases.
[00:25:43]  I think there's probably a limit to the withholding funds.
[00:25:46]  I think if they were faced directly with the pocket rescission, can he just blatantly say, you appropriated this and I'm not going to spend it?
[00:25:55]  They might have to rule against him, but they're finding ways to rule for him on those cases.
[00:26:00]  You know, I think where they're going to face tougher sledding, the administration, I think like the Supreme Court and the War on Terror, they are not going to allow the Magna Carta to be overruled.
[00:26:11]  They're not going to allow basic due process to be overturned.
[00:26:14]  And here's an example of that.
[00:26:16]  You know, Trump wants to, or Stephen Miller wants to deport a million people a year.
[00:26:22]  The main barrier to that is due process.
[00:26:27]  Not that everyone has a great defense, not that everyone has a right to be here, but that they have a right to process.
[00:26:32]  And that process is cumbersome.
[00:26:33]  It takes time.
[00:26:34]  You have a lawyer, you have a court, resources, exactly.
[00:26:37]  Even detention beds.
[00:26:39]  And so how do you get around that?
[00:26:42]  You say we're under attack, we're being invaded, that the Venezuelan government has deputized a gang that none of us had ever heard of to invade the country.
[00:26:49]  They made up two years ago.
[00:26:51]  I literally had never heard of the gang until I saw the executive order.
[00:26:53]  And I'm in a Venezuelan gang.
[00:26:56]  Rival gang.
[00:26:57]  Bible game.
[00:26:57]  Yeah, and yours is the one that really is.
[00:26:59]  We're anti-woke.
[00:27:00]  You're the Jets.
[00:27:01]  I'm in their sharks.
[00:27:02]  Yeah, I'm in an anti-war funded by Machado.
[00:27:04]  It's all good.
[00:27:05]  It's all a dance-off, too.
[00:27:10]  So here's what they're trying to do with that.
[00:27:13]  So if we're being invaded, obviously we don't give deportation hearings to prisoners of war.
[00:27:19]  So we can grab all the Venezuelan gang members, put them on a bus, take them to the airfield, put them on planes, and fly them en masse to other countries.
[00:27:29]  That question has already gone up to the Supreme Court twice on the so-called shadow docket.
[00:27:35]  And twice, the Supreme Court, by large majorities, slapped down the Trump administration's position.
[00:27:42]  Now, they made it harder for us.
[00:27:44]  They said we had to file habeas corpus petitions on behalf of the man where they were being detained instead of just filing one lawsuit saying the whole thing was illegal.
[00:27:52]  So, you know, it's death by a thousand cuts.
[00:27:55]  But we have filed those cases.
[00:27:58]  We have prevailed so far, at least on the due process question.
[00:28:01]  And, you know, I don't know what the Supreme Court will say about whether Trump can invoke the Alien Enemies Act about a Venezuelan gang.
[00:28:08]  They may say we're going to defer to his judgment on that question, but they will say that everyone who is so designated still has a right to go before a judge to say, I'm not a member of the gang.
[00:28:19]  And so they won't be able to do these mass deportations without due process.
[00:28:23]  We still will have prevailed in adding friction to this process.
[00:28:26]  I'm pretty confident we're going to win on birthright citizenship.
[00:28:30]  I don't think they're going to let him overturn the 14th Amendment by executive order.
[00:28:34]  I just don't see that happening.
[00:28:35]  And most normally legal scholars agree with me on that one.
[00:28:39]  I'm really curious to see what happens with tariffs because it's really the right versus the right.
[00:28:43]  That's really.
[00:28:44]  It's conservative groups that are bringing the tariff challenges.
[00:28:46]  It's not the ACLU and public citizens.
[00:28:48]  It's really interesting.
[00:28:49]  Right, right.
[00:28:49]  And it really does kind of make them decide between their deference to the president on national security claims and their commitment to their corporate overlords and sponsors, right?
[00:29:02]  I'm sure that the groups that are bringing this litigation are coke-sponsored groups.
[00:29:08]  Of course.
[00:29:09]  So that's really That's a right-wing civil war over whether the president can unilaterally raise taxes on individuals and companies.
[00:29:18]  And so I don't know what they're going to do with that one, but I wouldn't predict an easy win for Trump on that at all.
[00:29:24]  Yeah, it should be in the next month or so.
[00:29:26]  The argument.
[00:29:27]  Yeah, I heard Trump said that he's going to go to the Supreme Court.
[00:29:30]  Yeah.
[00:29:30]  Wow.
[00:29:31]  Mr. Trump goes to Washington.
[00:29:32]  He says it's one of the most representative cases in American history.
[00:29:36]  He wants to be there.
[00:29:37]  Well, I like that he wants to be there.
[00:29:39]  There's something kind of gentle.
[00:29:40]  I kind of like it too.
[00:29:42]  But it also does feel a little bit like mob boss in the, you know, in the courthouse.
[00:29:47]  I think that's what he thinks.
[00:29:48]  Yeah, that's what he thinks.
[00:29:49]  But I don't think he's the mob boss of the tariffs in this situation, which is very, I mean, your point about it being right wing versus right wing, I think is obviously correct based on who's bringing these cases, like you're saying.
[00:30:00]  But also, like, you know, there's a lot of other people and a lot of other, I mean, there's a lot of other pressures even internationally over, you know, whether the U.S. is going to basically close down free, have the option to just close down free trade against the world that I just, I just, I don't know.
[00:30:21]  And the damage then, if that they don't win this case to the entire project, I think a lot of people within the administration would be very excited to get the tariff bullshit out of the, out of the White House.
[00:30:36]  I can't imagine that there's a faction who are not stoked that that has taken up a lot of energy.
[00:30:41]  Yeah, especially people that want to like move a lot faster on stuff that makes the tariffs create such pressure on, for example, doing mass deportations because of the labor issues, like all of those things or, you know, cutting taxes in other places.
[00:31:01]  Like it's creating all of these cross pressures that all of these different sort of like contradictory coalitions within the administration.
[00:31:08]  I just think there's very few people in the administration that actually care that much about the tariffs, which is making it a really interesting case.
[00:31:15]  Well, and, you know, this is way outside my expertise, but Trump can't be helping his case when he says tariffs on Brazil unless they let my friend Bolsonaro out.
[00:31:28]  Tariffs on Canada because I don't like the ad they ran with a quote from Ronald Reagan.
[00:31:34]  I mean, it's hard to square that with a national security kind of emergency argument.
[00:31:39]  And maybe a silver lining here is, and we're certainly seeing this in the lower courts, there is a lot less deference to their claims of emergency and national security.
[00:31:50]  I mean, deference was the dominant judicial response to the war on terror litigation, which was, we're not experts, they're experts.
[00:31:57]  These decisions are made under high pressure with high stakes.
[00:32:00]  If we get it wrong, it's going to harm the nation.
[00:32:02]  And therefore, we're just going to step out and abdicate our judicial role.
[00:32:06]  And I think, you know, just the litigation conduct of the Trump administration and the way that the DOJ is presenting its arguments in court is making that kind of deference so uncomfortable, even for putative Trump allies in the judiciary who want to preserve their integrity, who again, even if they're just district court judges, this is an apex job for an elite lawyer to be a federal judge with life tenure.
[00:32:32]  And some of them, the ones who have a chance of getting to the Supreme Court are the most craven because the one rule is you can never rule against Trump.
[00:32:42]  And so you can identify who those judges are throughout the judiciary and know that you can't win in front of them, whether they're on the district court or on a court of appeals.
[00:32:49]  But the others, and this is the other reason why I've been a little bit less panicked about the Trump administration defying judicial orders.
[00:33:00]  And it's because the conservative legal movement worked for generations, corrupted the Senate in order to do this to get this Supreme Court in place.
[00:33:11]  I know that's the thing that the Supreme Court is going to be there for two decades after Trump is gone.
[00:33:18]  And the worst thing for them would be for Trump to weaken the power of the federal courts before he leaves office because the federal courts are their counter-majoritarian check on progressive policy.
[00:33:33]  And they're going to want that to be strongly in place so that they can strike down progressive legislation for the next 20 years or president, whoever.
[00:33:42]  Yeah, I know that's what I find so interesting about it because I think a huge hallmark, especially the second Trump administration, has been Trump's, and I'm trying to be gentle here, his trauma response to some of the events that occurred during the Biden, the law affair against Trump by Biden.
[00:33:58]  But he's, you know, he really has been, he's been talking a lot of shit on the courts.
[00:34:03]  And Stephen Miller as well, you know, especially in relation to like the National Guard deployments.
[00:34:08]  But I do think there is this really interesting tension because obviously what is the thing that kind of everybody knows about this big conservative project is like the Federalist Society has been like pushing for judges and it for like for, again, like you said, decades.
[00:34:22]  And they're there.
[00:34:23]  Like they got their fucking plan.
[00:34:27]  But the problem is, is that we're also dealing with the problem.
[00:34:30]  It's all, listen, it's all out of my hands, right?
[00:34:32]  I'm just a balls and strikes guy.
[00:34:34]  I'm completely neutral.
[00:34:35]  But Trump is also doesn't tend to really take other people's plans into consideration sometimes when he does things.
[00:34:45]  And that I think really can't be discounted.
[00:34:48]  And, you know, like you say, they have been sort of quietly deferential to courts or like following court.
[00:34:57]  But I wonder that in when enough will be enough for them and if enough will be enough.
[00:35:04]  I mean, I'm not trying to be like, when is Trump going to like, you know, defy the Supreme Court or whatever?
[00:35:09]  Whatever question.
[00:35:10]  But I think it is.
[00:35:10]  I think at this point, it's not, it's not completely, yeah, completely out of the blue.
[00:35:14]  No, and there are absolutely people in the administration who have advocated for that.
[00:35:18]  And I mean, you saw the whistleblower complaint against Emile, is it Bove or Beauvais, or he's now strange looking?
[00:35:25]  Yeah, he's now on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals somehow, where he was saying, at some point, we're going to have to just say, fuck the courts.
[00:35:33]  Why them up?
[00:35:34]  So there definitely are those voices in the administration.
[00:35:37]  And Bannon is pushing for this from the outside.
[00:35:40]  I think Miller, too, which is, what army enforces court orders?
[00:35:44]  And they're right about that.
[00:35:47]  Like judicial review, the courts having the last word on the Constitution is itself a kind of norm.
[00:35:54]  Yeah.
[00:35:54]  Right.
[00:35:55]  And not enforceable by anything other than consensus.
[00:36:00]  I just think that they've underestimated the strength of that consensus.
[00:36:05]  And I think there are very, very powerful conservative forces that include the Senate, that include everyone who funds the Republican Party.
[00:36:15]  Now, Trump obviously has tectonically shifted a lot of those power dynamics, but not, you know, again, and this is why he has to leave open the possibility that he could run for a third term just to push those things down.

=== Unprecedented Kowtowing? (15:21) ===

[00:36:29]  But they're going to start erupting.
[00:36:31]  People are definitely thinking about life after Trump.
[00:36:35]  And that will rise more to the surface.
[00:36:38]  And, you know, and I think, you know, public opinion matters a lot too.
[00:36:42]  They've seen the same polls that we commissioned.
[00:36:45]  And defying court orders is incredibly unpopular across the political spectrum.
[00:36:52]  It's funny because I do think that there are some people on the right, some of the more, even some of the more extreme voices who do believe in a more radical long-term project, who are coming out against a lot of the Trump stuff and saying, like, we need to, like, you can't do all this and blow it up because it's too short-term thinking.
[00:37:18]  And they can see the writing on the wall with some of the stuff you're saying.
[00:37:21]  And I think they do see a like, they have a big fear of this sort of, you know, progressive, you know, counter-revolution or whatever they anticipate.
[00:37:32]  I think that's right.
[00:37:33]  And I think the counter argument inside the administration is we know we only have two years.
[00:37:37]  Yes.
[00:37:38]  Because they're running parties.
[00:37:41]  We know we're going to get smacked in 2026.
[00:37:44]  And we need to break as many things as we can in those first two years and move as quickly as we can and change things permanently in that period of time when there's no effective resistance.
[00:37:53]  And I think they underestimated how much the courts would be that resistance.
[00:37:57]  This, by the way, is why you go after law firms.
[00:38:00]  You don't go after law firms just because you don't like lawyers.
[00:38:02]  You go after law firms to keep cases out of courts.
[00:38:05]  Right.
[00:38:06]  Because if all the law firms are afraid to bring these cases, then we don't have a system like some countries where judges can initiate the cases themselves.
[00:38:14]  They have to be brought by somebody.
[00:38:16]  Now, we've brought almost 90 cases against Trump policies in, what, the first 10 months?
[00:38:23]  Is that a lot?
[00:38:26]  I guess that's right.
[00:38:26]  That's a fair question.
[00:38:27]  I don't know.
[00:38:28]  Yes, it's a shit ton.
[00:38:30]  Yeah.
[00:38:31]  Yeah.
[00:38:31]  I mean, that's a small staff, you know, working nights and weekends and carrying the weight of others who should be standing alongside us.
[00:38:39]  It's not us alone.
[00:38:40]  I mean, there are plenty of other organizations.
[00:38:42]  I did, you know, actually, I wanted to bring that up because I think one of the first, you know, Trump has, as I'm sure everyone listening knows, Trump has really gotten every kind of liberal institution by which I mean like NBC and maybe, I guess, Disney.
[00:38:58]  Well, maybe not Disney.
[00:38:59]  I don't know what dealings he's had with Disney, but he's gotten a lot.
[00:39:02]  No, Jimmy Kimmel was Disney.
[00:39:03]  Oh, yeah.
[00:39:03]  Kimmel was Disney.
[00:39:04]  And RIP.
[00:39:05]  He can only do so much because they have a big merger that they got him.
[00:39:08]  Exactly. But he's kind of like...
[00:39:10]  So they back down.
[00:39:10]  Yeah.
[00:39:10]  He's got.
[00:39:11]  No, but both ways.
[00:39:13]  First, Disney let the FCC bully them, let Trump bully them and kicked off Kimmel.
[00:39:18]  But what happened after that?
[00:39:20]  Almost 2 million people canceled their online subscriptions.
[00:39:23]  Their stock price went down and they reversed course in about a week.
[00:39:26]  Yeah.
[00:39:27]  Well, because also they rightly judge that people are going to forget after a week.
[00:39:31]  And now who the fuck is thinking about Kimmel, you know, either way.
[00:39:35]  But, you know, one of the, kind of one of his first targets were law firms.
[00:39:39]  And listen, I'm not going to pretend like I can remember the names of these law firms because they're like eight names.
[00:39:46]  And they should come up with different ones.
[00:39:48]  They should all be called like Edge.
[00:39:51]  Like sports teams.
[00:39:52]  Yeah, like sports teams or like, yeah, like, yeah, like the Nazareth.
[00:39:56]  Yeah, that'd be fucking sick.
[00:39:59]  Dude, Black Oak, Arkansas?
[00:40:01]  Imagine.
[00:40:03]  Dude, imagine if you were represented by fucking like, yeah, Hawkwind.
[00:40:08]  That'd be sick.
[00:40:09]  Wow.
[00:40:09]  That's literally the like, look who's my lawyer dog.
[00:40:12]  Yeah, it's fucking, it's Lemmy.
[00:40:15]  Yeah, ZZ Top.
[00:40:16]  Only the guy without the beard, though, whose last name, ironically, people don't know this, was Beard.
[00:40:21]  Is that true?
[00:40:22]  Yeah.
[00:40:22]  The only guy without the beard and ZZ Top.
[00:40:24]  The drummer.
[00:40:24]  He's still around.
[00:40:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:25]  But one of the brothers died?
[00:40:26]  I believe.
[00:40:27]  They weren't brothers.
[00:40:28]  They just look like that.
[00:40:30]  They weren't brothers.
[00:40:31]  No, they just had the beards, I guess.
[00:40:33]  Yeah.
[00:40:34]  Billy Gibbons and crazy that they made themselves look like twins.
[00:40:38]  Well, one of the first things that the Trump administration did was go after law firms and make these really weird deals.
[00:40:45]  And again, like, I am not a guy who is familiar with how this industry works, but I thought it was strange that all these, like, it was like Kamala Harris's husband's firm and shit, like, made these crazy deals in exchange.
[00:40:57]  They were going to give all this pro bono work for free to the government.
[00:41:01]  What the fuck happened there?
[00:41:02]  What was up with that?
[00:41:03]  Well, it was an early test.
[00:41:05]  So, yeah, so they targeted a bunch of law firms, and there were a couple of responses.
[00:41:12]  So, some of the law firms, Perkins Coy, Jenner, and Block, sued.
[00:41:17]  And all four law firms that brought lawsuits to challenge these executive orders, you know, won comprehensively.
[00:41:25]  And judges across the political spectrum looked at this and were so offended.
[00:41:29]  They're like, this is the most illegal executive order we've ever seen.
[00:41:33]  Because it targeted the law firms because either they had done pro bono cases that the administration didn't like, or they had hired as partners, people who had worked on Trump investigations or just were prominent Democrats.
[00:41:49]  They were unbelievably, manifestly illegal.
[00:41:54]  Other law firms made a different decision.
[00:41:57]  And they took the Acela down to Washington and went into the White House where they met with Trump and Boris Epstein.
[00:42:03]  We don't know if they actually signed anything.
[00:42:06]  No actual paper deal has ever emerged.
[00:42:09]  And people have been trying to get these.
[00:42:11]  People in Congress have been trying to get these.
[00:42:13]  But yeah, as they said, they pledged to do $40 or $100 million worth of pro bono work on causes that Trump supports.
[00:42:20]  And I think what they thought was, we'll represent some veterans.
[00:42:24]  They could use our help.
[00:42:25]  And what Trump thought was, you're going to negotiate trade deals for me.
[00:42:30]  I'm going to enlist you to go and, because we have to negotiate new tariff deals with 80 countries, and I'm going to get these law firms to do it.
[00:42:39]  And it's just, it's the classic schoolyard bully.
[00:42:42]  And you think you're going to hand over your 40 cents once.
[00:42:45]  And it's just the beginning of a long series of extractive payments.
[00:42:49]  And not only that, I mean, just the dignitary and reputational harm to these law firms has been immense.
[00:42:56]  But what really happened is that there's a divide in, and listen, I'm not an expert on corporate law either.
[00:43:01]  I've never worked in one of these places.
[00:43:03]  But they tend to be divided between the litigators who have some sense of the values of the profession and the transactional lawyers who are basically business people who work at the law firms.
[00:43:13]  But they bring in a lot more money.
[00:43:14]  The ones who are doing mergers and acquisitions.
[00:43:16]  And they're the ones who, you know, they want to keep their heads down.
[00:43:21]  They don't want to be targeted.
[00:43:22]  They don't care about the pro bono cases that they do.
[00:43:26]  They're making a lot of money.
[00:43:28]  And they think the best strategy is just get out of the way.
[00:43:31]  Don't be the slowest zebra.
[00:43:33]  Be the 20th slowest zebra.
[00:43:35]  Let the lion get somebody else.
[00:43:37]  But in the litigation community, I think you've seen people leave these law firms, including Paul Weiss is one of the law firms that people left.
[00:43:46]  Young lawyers being less willing to join them.
[00:43:50]  Real, real backlash among the alums of these places.
[00:43:55]  And I think part of the game here is to try to change the incentives for these elite sectors of society.
[00:44:07]  To me, one of the most important moments of the Trump administration is when Harvard University decides to sue.
[00:44:12]  They hire a bunch of Republican Supreme Court clerks and sue the Trump administration instead of going into the back room to cut a deal.
[00:44:19]  And then they get universally praised and the president gets a standing ovation at the commencement before he even opens his mouth.
[00:44:24]  And listen, Harvard deserves no end of criticism as well as praise.
[00:44:31]  But in this moment, just kind of demonstrating to others who are going to be confronted with that decision, the cost of capitulation might be higher than the cost of resistance.
[00:44:41]  Well, look at Columbia.
[00:44:42]  Look at Columbia and look at what's happened.
[00:44:44]  And then again, I think the same thing we just talked about Kimmel.
[00:44:47]  I think the ABC realized after, you know, sorry, Disney, after a week, wow, it might cost us more to obey Trump than it would cost us in this instance to resist him and put him back on the air.
[00:45:02]  And I think that's part of what I've been trying to communicate to people, which is like, if everyone thinks that authoritarianism is inevitable and Trumpism has already won, why wouldn't you accommodate yourself to power?
[00:45:15]  Why wouldn't you just say, like, let's make the best deal we can?
[00:45:20]  But if they realize, no, look, this guy's going to be gone.
[00:45:24]  We're going to win a bunch of these challenges.
[00:45:26]  And when another party is in power, they might investigate your backroom deal.
[00:45:30]  You might have to answer for it.
[00:45:32]  If you put that threat on the table, then maybe that rejiggers their incentives and their thinking about whether they should.
[00:45:40]  And essentially, we're talking about, do you give the president power he doesn't have?
[00:45:44]  And that's what all these news organizations are doing when they pay him off in his lawsuits.
[00:45:47]  Yeah.
[00:45:47]  When they agree to, I mean, these lawsuits are not winnable from the Trump side.
[00:45:52]  And that's not the point.
[00:45:53]  I mean, that New York Times lawsuit, or the Wall Street Journal lawsuit, rather, over the Epstein birthday book, which curious to see how that one's going now.
[00:46:03]  I mean, it's just like that one I think was a little too far afield.
[00:46:07]  They're like, we can't settle this.
[00:46:08]  You know what I mean?
[00:46:08]  First of all, it's too much for too much money, but also it was just so ridiculous.
[00:46:12]  But also, Down Jones, they are still fundamentally a media company.
[00:46:17]  And that's different from something that is fundamentally something else, an entertainment company.
[00:46:21]  And so, you know, people who warned about corporate media were right.
[00:46:24]  They're being really vindicated.
[00:46:25]  If you have your news organizations that are owned by companies that care less about their news business than their other businesses, then they're going to make their decisions about their other businesses.
[00:46:35]  But Rupert Murdoch, everything they own is, or much of what they own is fundamentally related to news.
[00:46:44]  And it would just be, again, for the Wall Street Journal, the cost of paying off Trump is higher than the cost of fighting him.
[00:46:54]  For the Times, that's obvious.
[00:46:57]  But they would destroy their own reputation and destroy Murnach's brand if they paid off Trump in this instance.
[00:47:06]  I think it is interesting because really, I mean, there was sort of this unprecedented kind of kowtowing when Trump got in, which I feel like it slowed a little bit, but also with the tech company.
[00:47:16]  I don't know, you still see the golden iPhone and stuff.
[00:47:19]  That's true.
[00:47:19]  I guess that's true.
[00:47:20]  The golden iPhone was amazing.
[00:47:22]  These are kind of, I mean, I was going to bring this up, but I feel like when we're talking about these different sort of institutions, for lack of a better word, because tech companies is not really that, but that they kind of stand apart a little bit.
[00:47:37]  I mean, I'm even thinking about Bezos and the Washington Post, right?
[00:47:40]  Like, you know, they were very early to bend the knee or just be in the picture at the inauguration, which was kind of incredible.
[00:47:50]  But the Post is still doing real journalism.
[00:47:52]  I wouldn't just throw, I mean, so they stopped doing real editorials.
[00:47:54]  Sure.
[00:47:55]  So their editorial page was taken over.
[00:47:57]  But like the Wall Street Journal editorial page is a shit show, but the Wall Street Journal reporters still do real reporting.
[00:48:03]  Maybe that's where the Washington Post is going to be.
[00:48:05]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:48:06]  But the tech companies and those guys, I mean, they basically signaled immediately, like what you're saying, Grace, like that's our friend.
[00:48:15]  Yeah.
[00:48:16]  And I think that was during Biden, too, because a lot of that was also weird crypto backlash or Biden shit.
[00:48:21]  But yeah, yeah.
[00:48:22]  They were the, I mean, they were, yeah, they were all sitting there at the inauguration.
[00:48:25]  Right.
[00:48:26]  And so I paid a million dollars for the ballroom, right?
[00:48:29]  Yeah.
[00:48:29]  And it seems like they're happy to deal with whatever that backlash might be.
[00:48:36]  And I'm curious, you know, kind of what you think about their sort of separate position there, I guess, from the others.
[00:48:43]  I mean, I think that it was one of the most worrying things to watch, you know, because I think from my perspective, you want to see powerful forces in society be adverse to each other and not in lockstep with each other.
[00:48:59]  So like one of the, I think, you know, good outcomes of the Snowden revelations was it forced the tech companies to be adverse to the intelligence community for a while, right?
[00:49:09]  They want to run global businesses.
[00:49:10]  They can't be seen as just being the tech arm of the NSA if they want to sell their products around the world.
[00:49:16]  And so you started to see them, you know, be more aggressive about encryption, be more aggressive about challenging surveillance.
[00:49:22]  To see all those tech companies kind of show up and bend the knee was when it gave me a few tremors at the beginning of the Trump administration.
[00:49:30]  And, you know, the alternative history would be if Trump had been much more moderate, had maybe pursued some immigration policies, but not as viciously, with much less vandalism, hadn't turned over the executive branch to Musk and kept that coalition together.
[00:49:55]  But again, I think we should never expect anything like principles from any corporation.
[00:50:06]  So they will always hold their fingers to the wind.
[00:50:09]  And if Trump's popularity is 38% and not 58%, they're not going to be able to totally genulete because they're going to have to be sensitive to what the public and their consumers and the rest of the world want.
[00:50:27]  I sort of share your horror at those images and they do represent something threatening.
[00:50:32]  And I think it's really the job of the rest of society to say this isn't the ship that you want to be on.
[00:50:41]  I mean, thinking back to some of the Snowden stuff, it is interesting.
[00:50:45]  You do mention like, yeah, that was a big sort of, I guess, moment of reckoning for a lot of the tech industry when a lot of this stuff got exposed.
[00:50:54]  Right.
[00:50:56]  And it feels like such different, I don't know, just a complete sea change since then.
[00:51:02]  I mean, especially with all the defense tech kind of startups, like, I mean, even there was a sort of like in like the first Trump administration, there was kind of, you know, these like backlashes at like tech companies about, you know, contracts with, you know, various government agencies or whatever.
[00:51:17]  And now it's just, I mean, it's just completely out the window.
[00:51:20]  And like Palantir is, you know, in the NHS.
[00:51:22]  I mean, that's obviously not the U.S., but like, it's just like this wide adoption of it.
[00:51:26]  And there's this real attitude change, public attitude change in Silicon Valley where you're like, actually, no, like we're doing, this is national security stuff.
[00:51:36]  Like we're keeping people safe.
[00:51:37]  And like it feels, you know, it's it's so funny.
[00:51:39]  I feel like a lot of those people transported back in time would probably laugh at a lot of this, the, the, the shit that came out in like 2013, just because it's like, well, okay, but that's like, you know, for national security.

=== Lot AI's Impact on Privacy (12:34) ===

[00:51:51]  We'll see.
[00:51:52]  So so imagine a world in which Trump and his party get wiped out in the midterms.
[00:51:59]  They're all going to change their tune again.
[00:52:01]  Or a lot of them will.
[00:52:02]  A lot of them will.
[00:52:03]  Now, some of them, you know, they just want to live in a world without taxation.
[00:52:08]  Yeah.
[00:52:09]  And they want to go seasteading or something.
[00:52:12]  Although, I don't know, did you see the most recent South Park that has Peter Thiel singing about the Antichrist?
[00:52:18]  They got Teal in it?
[00:52:19]  I'm Peter Thiel and I know about the anti-crisis.
[00:52:24]  No, well, I mean, they have a teal character.
[00:52:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:52:26]  It's pretty funny.
[00:52:27]  But so that part's a little weird.
[00:52:31]  No, I actually think some of the Snowden stuff has not been washed away.
[00:52:38]  And even the fact that everyone in the White House is now using Signal to communicate, right?
[00:52:43]  Like the idea that communication should be encrypted and that the government shouldn't necessarily be able to read everything that the government itself doesn't want the government reading.
[00:52:52]  That's right.
[00:52:52]  That's right.
[00:52:53]  Some of that shit gets you out of the Records Act stuff.
[00:52:55]  No, that's right.
[00:52:57]  And the companies are still spending large amounts of money to litigate in defense of their own privacy and security policy.
[00:53:05]  So you see them litigating here and abroad in the UK to say you can't break our encryption.
[00:53:10]  So I think a lot of that, some of those post-Snowden reforms are a little bit more robust than you're suggesting.
[00:53:16]  But I think you're right that the, you know, I will say that, you know, as an ACLU lawyer who works on these issues, I was invited into a lot more Silicon Valley living rooms in 2014 than I am in 2025.
[00:53:29]  Yeah, I can imagine.
[00:53:30]  Yeah.
[00:53:31]  I remember, you know, I remember a lot of, I followed all the Snowden stuff very carefully.
[00:53:37]  I was very into all of this stuff.
[00:53:38]  And I remember a big response being from the kind of like, I would say, classic American middle class, like not super in tune with things, but following the story was just, I'm not doing anything wrong.
[00:53:56]  So why should I care about this?
[00:53:59]  And I remember Glenn had, I think, a TED talk or something that like addressed that actual question.
[00:54:05]  That was very, that was very smart and well done.
[00:54:08]  But it's funny because that has, that attitude has basically just continued now as the tech has gotten more and more sophisticated, more robust, and more directly mediating our lives than it was in 20, what, 12, whenever that was, 2010?
[00:54:29]  2013.
[00:54:30]  There we go.
[00:54:31]  Somewhere in there.
[00:54:32]  Yeah.
[00:54:34]  And I don't, it's so I do think that, yes, we've like retained some of this stuff, especially people, let's say, who are doing, who are consciously doing stuff that they know they don't want to be tracked.
[00:54:48]  And yet at the same time, it feels like everything is, we're just so much more in the weeds with everything that it's harder to even create places for friction.
[00:55:02]  Well, let's think of it another way, right?
[00:55:04]  So, you know, one reason why these issues are abstract, I think that's partly what you're getting at for a lot of Americans, the privacy aspect as opposed to the convenience, right?
[00:55:18]  Is because we're not China, right?
[00:55:20]  There isn't a car waiting at the bottom of the stairs to drive you away unless you are a non-citizen talking about Palestinian human rights.
[00:55:30]  But we are not living in a society where there's a direct line between the surveillance technology and concrete physical repression.
[00:55:38]  And so that's why I thought the Stasi was a really strange metaphor for the, Just because that was a society that was really using the full force of the state, not just to surveil, but also to really coerce, detain, interrogate.
[00:55:55]  And so for most people, their nightmare scenario is not, I'm going to get arrested for my speech, but Ashley Madison is going to be hacked and put online, and one of my databases of ruin is going to be put online.
[00:56:10]  And all my private communications are going to be exposed to the ridicule of everyone.
[00:56:17]  And I think anyone, not just you, Brace, but everyone has some inbox that if it were published, would be a real problem for almost all of their personal and professional relationships.
[00:56:30]  That's what it is to be human.
[00:56:31]  So it remains, for most people, the U.S. is still a remarkably free society.
[00:56:40]  Yeah, of course.
[00:56:41]  Especially look at the U.K. You know, a lot of stuff that's happening in the UK.
[00:56:46]  Right.
[00:56:47]  And so, yeah, so in a way, we have the luxury of thinking of these longer-term challenges to free societies.
[00:56:53]  And that's how you have to think about mass surveillance is that the architecture itself will push towards the kinds of changes that will make the society more oppressive and will make it harder for us to turn around and steer back to a freer society.
[00:57:09]  And then also just, you know, the principal privacy protections that we've had for most of our history have not come from law.
[00:57:18]  They've come from just how difficult and expensive and cumbersome it is to watch all of us.
[00:57:23]  And then when that becomes trivially easy, you know, there is the kind of boiling frog part of it.
[00:57:30]  You wake up and you're in a society where all your communications are recorded.
[00:57:36]  Every CCDV camera has facial recognition and is a kind of digital checkpoint and is watching for suspicious activity.
[00:57:43]  So we do need to find ways to reintroduce that friction and to make political arguments that will persuade people who want to adopt the most convenient technology that's available to them.
[00:57:56]  And the difficulty, again, is that most people are not worried about being pushed into a van and flown to Louisiana.
[00:58:04]  Maybe those images can make the threats a little bit more concrete for people.
[00:58:11]  I think they have in a way.
[00:58:12]  I mean, this is why Trump is underwater on immigration issues, is that what people are seeing on the street is actually scary to them.
[00:58:19]  Yeah, talking about friction.
[00:58:21]  I do think that actually is a good point because, you know, it's funny, you mentioned the Stasi.
[00:58:25]  I'm like, damn.
[00:58:26]  You and I differ politically, but I was like, I would have been so fucking good at that.
[00:58:31]  I would have been like breaking into people's houses and chains and some shit around and be like, you do that now.
[00:58:36]  I know, I do that now, but there's not like political backing now.
[00:58:38]  No, no, that's just a catch it.
[00:58:41]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:58:41]  No, no, I do that to only males.
[00:58:43]  I only do that to males.
[00:58:44]  I gaslight girls in other ways.
[00:58:47]  But the issue of friction, I think, is something that's actually really important because a huge, I mean, we were talking with Trevor recently about this, Trevor Paglin, about like Flock and all of these like kind of, I mean, you know, it's hard to necessarily differentiate between some of their ad copy essentially and like what they're actually capable of doing, but it's very clear that like this technology is possible and it will eventually be deployed in a way that is frictionless.
[00:59:16]  If it's deployed in China, then it's possible and it's a good way to look at it.
[00:59:20]  Yeah, for us, maybe 10 years out.
[00:59:22]  Yeah.
[00:59:23]  Yeah, but I'm just saying, you need to look at that to see what could happen here.
[00:59:27]  And so, yeah, I mean, this is this is something that I kind of pay attention to a lot because, you know, there's, there's a lot of the intelligence units of like the NYPD, for instance, right?
[00:59:39]  Kind of depends on guys who were like working for the NYPD, which I'm sure that there's some really smart guys.
[00:59:44]  But like, luckily, you're going to get like a lot of morons being like, you know, yeah, it's all Muslims down here.
[00:59:51]  You know what I mean?
[00:59:52]  Like they're making their demographic maps insane.
[00:59:54]  You know, obviously they're kind of good at what they do, but there is a human element that I think a lot of the AI stuff kind of frightens me with where, yeah, we're collecting all this data, but previously, you know, there's algorithms to sort data, but at the end of the day, you need human eyes on it at some point in order to like put it in either like a legal brief or whatever, a warrant.
[01:00:16]  And I do think about like with the adoption of like a lot of AI shit, how that will be less necessary.
[01:00:23]  Well, here's a good example of that.
[01:00:24]  So, I mean, if you talk to people in intelligence or law enforcement and say, what's more valuable to you, the content of communications that are from wiretapping or the metadata from all of the communications, they would all say the metadata for a lot of reasons, right?
[01:00:42]  The metadata can't lie.
[01:00:43]  It can be analyzed at scale.
[01:00:44]  But the main reason is that no one has time to sit and listen to all the recordings.
[01:00:50]  I mean, it's just, it's so cumbersome to do that.
[01:00:53]  And I think you're right.
[01:00:54]  I think one of the things that these AI developments will do is they will allow analysis of recorded conversations at scale, not just for keywords, the primitive way that it's done right now, but actually with some greater form of comprehension in order to ferret out what it is that they're looking for.
[01:01:17]  It will incentivize the governments to do that kind of surveillance again.
[01:01:23]  They don't do it now that much just because it's so unbelievably labor intensive and the rewards are so little.
[01:01:31]  They use it in some criminal investigations, but they're certainly not doing it at scale, but they could.
[01:01:37]  One of the industries where you're seeing just currently a lot of deployment of new AI tech is actually in the medical industry or the hospital industry.
[01:01:48]  And this is something that like worries me about a lot of the AI stuff because so much of it we actually don't see.
[01:01:54]  It's so opaque.
[01:01:56]  And it's in these industries that are so large that you don't, like, you take the hospital industry or the insurance industry, Jesus Christ, you don't really interface with these people or anything like at any point.
[01:02:08]  And yet you have back-end systems that are being set up to start replacing staff, start replacing communication.
[01:02:17]  I think there are serious questions about HIPAA violations that would be kind of basically necessitated by having such efficient communication systems, right, between all these different parties and that then are making decisions about denial of care or denial of claims or, you know, prescriptions or all of these different things.
[01:02:41]  And yet for people, like you don't see these systems.
[01:02:46]  Like there's no, so when you're trying to bring a not a case, but when you want to make an argument against the use of this stuff, you can't even see it being deployed.
[01:02:55]  Right.
[01:02:56]  It's not legible.
[01:02:57]  I mean, so where we can attack it is where it intersects with actual substantive constitutional rights.
[01:03:07]  Right.
[01:03:07]  So if they're going to use it to decide who gets bail or who is detained, whose kids to take away or who can stay in the family, whose Medicaid benefits to reduce or keep the same way,
[01:03:23]  places where the person has a constitutional due process right, then courts have pretty consistently required the governments that are using these tools to make it legible enough so that they can determine whether this has been done fairly or not.
[01:03:41]  And so instead of, you know, from our standpoint, we don't think, what do we do about it about AI?
[01:03:46]  We think, how is AI changing substantive rights and liberties that we're already working on?
[01:03:51]  So that's happening in criminal justice.
[01:03:54]  It's happening in child welfare.
[01:03:55]  It's happening, obviously, in surveillance and censorship and those kinds of areas.
[01:03:59]  And then you have to kind of attack it from the inside out and say, whatever it is you're doing, and the problem for a lot of the developers of these tools is that they don't always know why it works or how it works.
[01:04:10]  But you can't use a tool like that if the result is going to be to deprive someone of medical benefits that they have a right to.
[01:04:17]  Yeah.
[01:04:17]  Right.
[01:04:18]  You just can't use it at all.
[01:04:19]  You know, I want to switch tack a little bit here to ask just some straight up legal questions.

=== Anti-Fascists and Black Bloc (02:24) ===

[01:04:25]  Yeah, we haven't talked about your friends at Antifa yet.
[01:04:29]  Listen, no, okay.
[01:04:32]  Whatever Antifa is.
[01:04:34]  And I'm not.
[01:04:34]  Can we talk about that actually?
[01:04:36]  I do want to talk about it.
[01:04:37]  What is that?
[01:04:38]  Antifa?
[01:04:40]  Are we saying Antifa?
[01:04:42]  I feel like, dude, am I going crazy?
[01:04:44]  I feel like they started saying Antifa like four years ago.
[01:04:47]  It was antifa.
[01:04:49]  No, Trump won.
[01:04:50]  I remember very, like, very clearly because someone made an edit of Trump going Antifa.
[01:04:59]  Like, and it was a meme online, and it was like a speech he gave.
[01:05:03]  To Tequila?
[01:05:04]  Yeah, to Tequila.
[01:05:05]  Classic.
[01:05:06]  Antifa.
[01:05:09]  And everyone was making fun of him.
[01:05:11]  And then now he says Antifa or communists or whatever he says.
[01:05:16]  He says Antifa now?
[01:05:17]  No, well, so I had never heard the word Antifa.
[01:05:22]  I mean, I never heard it pronounced Antifa.
[01:05:24]  And now I feel like that's like how style for a lot of commentators is they say Antifa.
[01:05:29]  For me for sure, like Watifa.
[01:05:31]  Well, wouldn't it be anti-fa?
[01:05:34]  Because it's like, that's how you put it.
[01:05:35]  You're not going to say anti-fascists.
[01:05:37]  You know what I mean?
[01:05:38]  You're going to say anti-fascists.
[01:05:42]  The emphasis is all wrong.
[01:05:44]  I first learned of Antifa as a saying, as a slogan, as a teen, like during the Iraq war protests, right?
[01:05:59]  And this was affiliated with people that we called the Black Bloc.
[01:06:01]  Yeah, it was just Black Block.
[01:06:02]  It was Black Block.
[01:06:03]  Yeah.
[01:06:04]  But they were running around.
[01:06:06]  I mean, I was, you know, they're like Market Street at whatever it was.
[01:06:11]  Whenever Bush gave the ultimatum that night, right?
[01:06:14]  San Francisco going nuts.
[01:06:16]  People doing their thing.
[01:06:18]  And it was like, oh, look, those are those crazy guys.
[01:06:20]  What I was told and what I understood was like, no, it's not really an organization, man.
[01:06:26]  We're just kind of, we're, we're just like, know each other kind of, but not really.
[01:06:31]  And we just know where to show up.
[01:06:32]  And it was always a very loose, I don't even want to say horizontalist because that even that, even that gives it too much of an organizational tone.
[01:06:44]  It was just like guys who showed up and kind of like broke the gap window or whatever.

=== Signs and Overrides (10:33) ===

[01:06:50]  Yeah.
[01:06:51]  Yeah.
[01:06:51]  And wore bandanas on their faces.
[01:06:54]  Yeah.
[01:06:54]  And dressed in all black.
[01:06:55]  It is like, I think that's what's so crazy.
[01:06:57]  And that's kind of why I brought up some of the 9-11 shit earlier because there's this weird sort of like, again, vulgarized kind of funhouse mirror version of some of that shit.
[01:07:05]  Like, but now kind of just being deployed against these really amorphous, I mean, I guess the concept of just like Muslim immigrant to America is also fairly broad and nebulous, which was, I mean, what they went after in the aftermath of 9-11.
[01:07:20]  But like, this is even more amorphous because it's just kind of like, what is this?
[01:07:24]  Well, there's also another distinction, which is, you know, they designated entities foreign terrorist organizations or, you know, not the Taliban.
[01:07:37]  But there is no such thing as a designation of a domestic terrorist organization.
[01:07:41]  So these orders that say, you know, when Trump says he's going to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization, there's two problems with that.
[01:07:50]  One is there's no such designation.
[01:07:52]  The other is there's no such organization.
[01:07:55]  It's tough.
[01:07:56]  But do those negate each other and then create a positive thing?
[01:07:59]  Exactly.
[01:08:00]  Yeah.
[01:08:02]  Is this some kind of negative dialogue?
[01:08:04]  I do think this is an area where, and I think this has been true actually for a fair number of Trump's executive orders, which is that there is a lot of noise, but actually no legal impact whatsoever.
[01:08:17]  And so, you know, they might direct agencies to investigate and come back in 90 days and tell us who the criminals are.
[01:08:23]  And, you know, the NSP7, the one that everyone's concerned about, about going after radical leftist organizations, I'm not saying that we should yawn collectively.
[01:08:33]  I mean, there is something pretty wild about the president saying that every federal law enforcement agency should make it its top priority to investigate left-wing organizations and foundations.
[01:08:48]  I hope everyone had good accountants because they can find all kinds of things if they bring that kind of investigatory lens.
[01:08:56]  But at the same time, I think there's a widespread panic.
[01:08:59]  All of our bank accounts are going to be frozen.
[01:09:02]  We're all going to lose our tax exempt status.
[01:09:04]  We need to relocate to Amsterdam.
[01:09:08]  That is a little bit out of step with what their actual authorities are.
[01:09:11]  Well, I mean, yeah, because there was two, there was an executive order, and then there was whatever the presidential memorandum, which I, what is the difference?
[01:09:20]  I don't know.
[01:09:20]  Yeah, I don't really know either.
[01:09:21]  And I looked it up and I was like, I kind of still don't know.
[01:09:25]  Because one is like it is the force of law, but the one that he did with the whatever, using the Article 2, but I'm like, but that's the first one, which like doesn't say anything.
[01:09:35]  It just says Antifa is a domestic terror organization.
[01:09:38]  So I'm like, well, I don't, there's not really a force of law, or there's nothing there.
[01:09:42]  You're probably like, force of law, he's saying the wrong words.
[01:09:45]  Whatever.
[01:09:45]  You know what I mean.
[01:09:46]  Yeah, I mean, I think all executive orders, you know, kind of have the same weakness.
[01:09:52]  And, you know, the president can direct the executive branch to do certain things, but they don't, you know, you can't use an executive order to override a statute that has been enacted by Congress or certainly to override a constitutional right.
[01:10:07]  You know, one question I have, and I'm curious about your thoughts on this too, is how much all of this is just pure opportunism and how much they kind of believe some of their own rhetoric.
[01:10:23]  I mean, because with Trump, he's so transactional.
[01:10:26]  I mean, you know, famously would walk through a military cemetery and say, you know, suckers.
[01:10:31]  Yeah.
[01:10:31]  Right.
[01:10:33]  I just think it is so outside his experience that someone might show up and carry a sign at a protest if they weren't being paid to do it.
[01:10:40]  Yeah.
[01:10:40]  It just, I think, and I, you know, especially to be against him.
[01:10:43]  I mean, wow, they all have the same sign.
[01:10:45]  So when they say, you know, there's a web and it leads back to George Soros.
[01:10:50]  I do think, and, you know, you all are experts on, you know, Epstein world, but you start to believe that all of this is probably true.
[01:10:59]  And all we need to do is investigate and open up the files and see their emails.
[01:11:02]  And if we could just see all their emails and their text and communications, we would find out that everyone who showed up at a No Kings protest got a secret payment and got their marching orders from Soros or Ford Foundation network.
[01:11:15]  Right.
[01:11:15]  So I think, I think, I do think that there are people who are so unworldly in the administration and also for whom that kind of ideological commitment is so foreign that they might actually think that they are going to find this evidence.
[01:11:28]  I think there's a kind of funny tension there.
[01:11:30]  I think one, you mentioned the signs and Trump frequently mentions the signs.
[01:11:34]  He's like, these aren't like the signs that people are making in their basements.
[01:11:37]  And I think he's literally like thinking of like in Forrest Gump or whatever when they're like doing the anti-war protests.
[01:11:43]  But I mean, he's obviously, at least I feel like he's almost certainly referring to either like the answer signs, like, you know, the answer coalition, they all have the big like hands-off Iran or whatever signs they hand out that are fairly uniform or whatever else.
[01:11:57]  And like, that's just kind of a basic organizational principle is you try to bring your sign to the protest to give to people who didn't bring anything because it says your website, your organization's website at the bottom of it.
[01:12:07]  But I think that Trump probably does believe that to an extent.
[01:12:11]  I think that Trump is, I mean, he's a difficult guy to get to know.
[01:12:16]  You know, I've spent many years trying to.
[01:12:18]  I think, however, there is this, there's this underneath him where a lot of this stuff is kind of like happening is you have an interesting aspect of like, it's basically like court and people trying to like impress him and sort of get their time.
[01:12:29]  That Antifa roundtable or whatever was a great example of that.
[01:12:34]  And then you have kind of down or almost maybe lateral to that, you have like a lot of the media figures who have like a huge amount of influence on both Trump and people in the administration whose job it is.
[01:12:47]  I mean, we saw this, for example, the other day on Canal Street when Nick Shirley, who is like a, you know, man on the street, right, right-wing YouTuber guy, and then some like TPUSA lady went there and just like took pictures of the African guys selling bags there.
[01:13:02]  And then the next day, huge ice raid, right?
[01:13:05]  50 people, yeah.
[01:13:05]  Exactly.
[01:13:06]  And so you see these things that are like, they really are, I mean, Nick Shirley, for instance, was also one of the people at the Antifa Roundtable because he had gone to, I believe it was Nick Shirley, he had gone to Portland and then someone was burning a flag, which Trump gets really angry about, but also, and yeah, but and he like grabbed the flag from them.
[01:13:23]  And then I don't know, either there was a scuffle or there wasn't a scuffle.
[01:13:27]  Either way, he got detained.
[01:13:29]  And then that became like this big sort of sort of the cause du jour for the for the Trump administration for a day.
[01:13:36]  And so you see this like, and then I think you see like someone like Stephen Miller, who I don't know what he believes in his heart of hearts, but I know that like politically he realizes that I think he is kind of the one who's like, actually like, we just need to go after like Tides, Soros, Rockefeller.
[01:13:52]  I'm sure that he knows that like.
[01:13:54]  aside, I'm sure from like bail fund shit and some whatever other kind of stuff, like these people don't have a direct connection to like the people in Portland or whatever.
[01:14:02]  But he recognizes that there's further utility there.
[01:14:05]  So I think that there's some asceticism.
[01:14:07]  And then I think that there's actual people who are like, this is a nice Reichstag moment.
[01:14:11]  Exactly.
[01:14:12]  They shot Charlie.
[01:14:13]  Let's go for it.
[01:14:14]  Yeah, I think there's like a both and like where also, I mean, a good case study in this is someone like Elon Musk, because that was someone who took an opportunity and I think was a cynical actor, you know, and understood what it would mean to sort of take the reins of X, the platform, nay, X, and, and sort of manipulate it in tandem with this political project that he was involved in.
[01:14:42]  And in the process of doing so, further radicalized himself and kind of got even further lost in the sauce of his own kind of right-wing algorithm hacking.
[01:14:55]  And when he came out the other side, seemed to fully believe that he was going to find, you know, tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicare fraud or whatever.
[01:15:06]  Right.
[01:15:07]  Or that all the money from USAID was going to be buying Gaussian condoms.
[01:15:10]  Yeah.
[01:15:11]  Seemed to sort of almost admit to himself at the end of the whole doggy experiment, like, yeah, there wasn't really anything there.
[01:15:19]  You know what I mean?
[01:15:20]  Even if he doesn't want to come out and say it because, you know, it's so bad politically.
[01:15:24]  And then the other figure that I think is really important for understanding this is someone like Vance, who is very cunning and very, you know, I think like Miller, much more like meta-aware of his.
[01:15:38]  Oh, and a serious and he can code switch completely.
[01:15:40]  Absolutely.
[01:15:41]  And, you know, he was so clear in that moment about, you know, when they were like, well, you're making up this stuff about the, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats or whatever.
[01:15:51]  And he had that very Rumsfeldian, Rovian, you know, direct to camera saying, well, we just, you know, if I need to make something up so that people pay attention, then that's what we do.
[01:16:02]  We make, you know, basically saying we make reality in the long line of, you know, Republican and Democratic administrations.
[01:16:13]  But so I do think that there's like, but at the same time, someone like Vance is also so lost, I think, in the sauce of his own beliefs and so, you know, tied to this kind of right-wing base, especially like content infrastructure, that you end up Elon-like kind of furthering yourself into the abyss.
[01:16:42]  Fundamentally, you're a shit poster.
[01:16:43]  Yeah.
[01:16:44]  And he is, and a group chatter and someone who eternally, I mean, again, not to psychoanalyze, but boy, I love to, who is so obsessed with impressing this sort of, you know, elite consensus that he feels he can never be accepted into, whether that's, you know, the cool people at the cool kids' table on, you know, Graper Chat or whatever, or if it's the Heritage Foundation or if it's whatever.
[01:17:10]  Now, Stephen Miller, I think, has very grand plans for the U.S. state that he has had since he was 12 years old.
[01:17:19]  And being annoyed by liberals in Santa Monica.
[01:17:21]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:17:22]  Can you imagine?
[01:17:22]  Santa Monica of all places.

=== Material Support Laws Controversy (14:50) ===

[01:17:24]  Anyway, but you know, so all of these things are sort of all at work at the same time.
[01:17:29]  Trump, I think, is on a different shit.
[01:17:32]  Yeah, he is on his own shit.
[01:17:34]  But I want to go back to something because I want to actually, I want to talk about the universities a little bit and just spend some time on that because you were Mahmoud Khalils.
[01:17:46]  Are Mahmoud Khalil's lawyer?
[01:17:47]  My team represents him.
[01:17:48]  Yeah.
[01:17:50]  And I think that case, you know, obviously everyone, I think all of our listeners have been following for a long time.
[01:18:00]  We were just in court this week in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.
[01:18:04]  What is the government is appealing.
[01:18:06]  So we got a district court judge in New Jersey to order him released on habeas corpus.
[01:18:12]  And the government is appealing to try to get him re-locked up and to try to deport him.
[01:18:16]  The complication with these cases is that they are deportation cases on the one hand and detention cases on the other.
[01:18:24]  So we, you know, to get out of these immigration courts that are totally controlled by the executive branch.
[01:18:31]  And, you know, if the immigration judges rule against Trump, he can just fire them.
[01:18:34]  Immigration court judges are not independent judges.
[01:18:37]  They actually are part of the executive branch.
[01:18:39]  Interesting.
[01:18:40]  So, you know, what we have done is we've gone to federal courts and said, these people have been detained in violation of the Constitution and their rights for their speech.
[01:18:52]  And regardless of what's happening in the immigration courts, you need to order them released right now.
[01:18:58]  They can't be held during this.
[01:19:01]  And so what the Trump administration is trying to do is get all of those habeas corpus cases in federal courts redirected back into the immigration courts, which of course would mean that they would be in Louisiana because they flew everyone to Louisiana.
[01:19:15]  They would go up through the Fifth Circuit, which is more right-wing than the Supreme Court.
[01:19:18]  And by the time they get to the Supreme Court, who knows what would be left to consider.
[01:19:24]  For now, we've been on a good run.
[01:19:28]  All four of the people who we represent, and it's Mahmoud Khalil, Ramesa Osturk, she's the Tufts graduate student who wrote the op-ed, Mohsen Madawi, another Columbia student, and Badr Khansouri, who teaches at the University of Virginia.
[01:19:43]  They've all been ordered released by federal courts, and Trump is still trying to deport all four of them.
[01:19:49]  And we are trying to throw as much sand in the gears as possible.
[01:19:52]  And again, you know, their argument is, you know, Marco Rubio can say this person's views and statements interfere with our foreign policy objectives, and therefore we can, you know, strip away whatever their status is.
[01:20:05]  And for a Khalil, that's not a visa to come here and study.
[01:20:09]  That's a green card.
[01:20:10]  Yeah.
[01:20:11]  That's a permanent resident.
[01:20:12]  That's someone who had a background check.
[01:20:14]  That's someone who we've said can say in the country.
[01:20:17]  And of course, in that case, they changed their argument midstream.
[01:20:22]  They were getting criticized even by right-wingers like Ann Coulter.
[01:20:26]  She said, there's almost no one I wouldn't want to deport, but there's still a First Amendment.
[01:20:30]  Do better than this with Khalil.
[01:20:32]  Now they say that when he applied for his green card, he lied because he didn't predict the future and say that he was going to be doing certain kinds of political activism a year and a half later, right?
[01:20:43]  I mean, a completely contrived argument, but the kind of thing that will fly in an immigration court that's controlled by Trump's executive branch and might even fly in the Fifth Circuit, which will say our standard review is so deferential.
[01:20:56]  So who knows how these cases will end?
[01:20:59]  I mean, of course, the nightmare scenario is they go to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says on the merits, something it's never said before, which is they're not citizens and they don't have First Amendment rights.
[01:21:09]  I think that's extremely unlikely.
[01:21:11]  And I think that even conservative judges will have a hard time with that position.
[01:21:16]  There's how many people who have green cards in this country?
[01:21:18]  12 million or something.
[01:21:19]  And the idea that every single one of them here can leave at the whim of the president or secretary of state is something that should be a threat to both parties and to everyone.
[01:21:30]  I think the more plausible route here is that the court will do what it always does, which is say this issue is not justiciable.
[01:21:38]  We're not reviewing that.
[01:21:40]  We're deferring to the lower court in here.
[01:21:44]  We don't have jurisdiction to consider this, that, or the other.
[01:21:46]  So we will fight these to the end, regardless of what the outcome is.
[01:21:53]  I think they're some of the most important cases that the ACLU has been involved in in my time.
[01:21:58]  You know, I had a question about some of the stuff about material support, right?
[01:22:03]  Because what is material support, right?
[01:22:06]  You know what I mean?
[01:22:07]  Like, if I say that I like something that is, you know, maybe disliked by other people, am I materially supporting that?
[01:22:15]  I mean, maybe I might be harming it because of my bad reputation.
[01:22:18]  So material support actually is a term of art.
[01:22:20]  Yeah.
[01:22:20]  It's not just something that can be, I mean, it's something that courts have interpreted, but basically you're talking about federal criminal laws that say that it is against the law for you to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
[01:22:34]  And the Supreme Court has considered what the scope of material support might be.
[01:22:40]  But for our purposes, it's enough to say you can use your speech to advocate on behalf of the views of any organization, right?
[01:22:52]  You can advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
[01:22:55]  You can say you hope Hamas, which is a designated terrorist organization, prevails in Israel and comes to America.
[01:23:03]  You can say all of those things.
[01:23:05]  What you can't do when you're talking about speech is coordinate with a designated terrorist organization.
[01:23:13]  And what we've seen is a conflation of those.
[01:23:15]  So you saw DeSantis in Florida saying, we're going to decertify the Students for Justice in Palestine on our campuses because we looked at their communications after October 7th and it looked like Hamas talking points to us.
[01:23:29]  Well, actually, students for justice in Palestine, if they wanted to, could publish talking points that are the same as Hamas's, as long as they haven't coordinated.
[01:23:40]  Now, I mean, you would say, use a little more caution.
[01:23:43]  Don't just reprint something that a terrorist organization has put out there.
[01:23:47]  That certainly looks like coordination.
[01:23:49]  And they didn't do that.
[01:23:50]  And of course, when we sued, the DeSantis administration backed down from their position, because, of course, there was no evidence of material support and coordination.
[01:24:00]  But like, you know, you obviously can't buy, you can't make a financial donation to a designated terrorist organization.
[01:24:09]  And you saw after 9-11, the Bush administration froze a bunch of Muslim charities on the ground that they were too close to designated terrorist organizations in the Middle East.
[01:24:20]  Holy Land Foundation, Kind Hearts was another.
[01:24:22]  We represented them successfully because the government's evidence of material support was weak in that case.
[01:24:31]  But generally, your speech is not going to be deemed material support unless it's coordinated with a designated foreign terrorist organization.
[01:24:43]  I say foreign because, you know, there's all this talk about domestic terrorist organizations right now.
[01:24:49]  There is no such designation scheme under U.S. law.
[01:24:51]  Well, you know, I recall another time we spoke in 2020 when there was that stupid DHS thing that was like possible foreign funding links to Antifa, and I was on it, which was obviously not true, blah, We cover that on a show.
[01:25:10]  But that to me, I was like, oh, they're trying to establish some kind of like foreign link to maybe legally make it.
[01:25:16]  This isn't just like them doing their due diligence.
[01:25:19]  Like, obviously, they're trying to, and must be pretty desperately trying to, if I'm on that, establish some kind of foreign link so that Antifa could be a foreign terror organization.
[01:25:29]  Again, same problems of like Antifa not existing as such organizationally.
[01:25:35]  And also, like, certainly not, they're not being like an international Antifa.
[01:25:39]  I mean, there is some kind of things that like, there's like football guys and or whatever, like anarchists in Germany who will wear like Antifa international shirts or whatever.
[01:25:49]  But like, it's not like there's like a conference every year.
[01:25:52]  But, but they've been sort of floating this again.
[01:25:54]  I mean, at that Antifa roundtable, obviously this is Trump saying this, so huge grain of salt.
[01:26:00]  But a reporter asks him, you know, is there any talk about designating Antifa a foreign terror organization?
[01:26:06]  He's like, we're looking at that.
[01:26:07]  And they mentioned like links to groups in West Germany.
[01:26:10]  And the reality is, like, you probably find some links, but you some kind of like not links as in like, I'm giving you $5,000.
[01:26:17]  I'm giving you $5,000.
[01:26:18]  But like, I'm sure some people who like do Antifa stuff here know people in, I don't know if I said West Germany or Western Europe.
[01:26:26]  I'm sure that that does exist.
[01:26:27]  I'm sure that some people know each other.
[01:26:29]  Obviously, that is very different than having like an international terror organization.
[01:26:33]  They also mentioned the Middle East, which maybe be like, oh, I don't like that for me.
[01:26:37]  But who knows what they mean by that?
[01:26:39]  But I think that I could see this.
[01:26:41]  I don't think it's, I know you're always Mr. You know what?
[01:26:45]  Like, it's going to be fine.
[01:26:47]  But I'm like, I kind of think that they might try to do some.
[01:26:50]  Yeah, they probably will try.
[01:26:51]  And this goes back to my question too, which is how much do they believe that they're going to find it?
[01:26:54]  But the fact that some of your friends are coordinating with people who are Sympatico in East Berlin or wherever isn't a legal problem for them unless those people in Berlin are part of a designated terrorist organization.
[01:27:16]  Now, there's sometimes a gray area where an entity is designated.
[01:27:23]  And then what about the period of time before they were designated?
[01:27:26]  But I just, it doesn't apply to the kind of radical left politics that you're talking about.
[01:27:36]  And again, I don't know who these people are or what they do.
[01:27:40]  Me either.
[01:27:41]  I just know about this from the news.
[01:27:43]  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, if this were in the 1970s, they might actually be terror cells in West Germany, right?
[01:27:49]  Because there was, you know, a fair amount of that.
[01:27:52]  And in West Germany.
[01:27:53]  Yeah.
[01:27:53]  Yeah.
[01:27:54]  Right.
[01:27:54]  That's what I'm saying.
[01:27:55]  Yeah.
[01:27:56]  I mean, but I feel like the thing is, so the second, NSPM 7 or whatever, NPN, whatever, the presidential memo, the second thing that came out, it did say that like, yeah, do this sort of whole of government approach tax stuff, which I think, again, is going to be aimed at like Soros and Tides Foundation.
[01:28:12]  We should save on the tax thing before we go a little bit further.
[01:28:14]  Yes.
[01:28:15]  You know, they do need to be a little careful there.
[01:28:17]  And I say this, right?
[01:28:19]  Part of me thinks I'm being naive when I tell you what the law is because they are pushing every limit and breaking all these norms.
[01:28:26]  But there is a federal statute that makes it a crime, a felony, for someone in government, and including the president, and the president is named in the statute, to sort of call on the IRS to do an investigation based on people's speech or activities.
[01:28:42]  So that's why when you saw earlier, Trump on whatever his social media platform said, Harvard should lose its tax exempt status.
[01:28:51]  And then a few hours later, you saw the White House saying the IRS was already investigating Harvard.
[01:28:56]  Because he had just like a director.
[01:28:57]  So it doesn't look like the director is actually a felony.
[01:29:00]  Yeah.
[01:29:01]  Right.
[01:29:01]  So again, that doesn't mean that, I mean, the easy way around that is you install one of Stephen Miller's friends to run the IRS.
[01:29:10]  And then you don't have that.
[01:29:12]  Or you fucking send a signal message.
[01:29:14]  You know what I mean?
[01:29:14]  Like that's the thing.
[01:29:15]  Yeah.
[01:29:16]  I don't know.
[01:29:17]  I think that like there's a common, Trump himself might be kind of out to lunch and some stuff, but I think there's a lot of people who are smart enough to realize like, I mean, they talk about the Obama going after the Tea Party.
[01:29:27]  You know what I'm talking about?
[01:29:28]  Like those and groups losing their tax status.
[01:29:31]  That's a huge, that still is like a talking point in a lot of even like normal conservative spaces.
[01:29:39]  I could see them absolutely coordinating with that kind of shit.
[01:29:42]  I mean, they are.
[01:29:44]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:29:44]  I mean, I certainly think they are exploring that.
[01:29:48]  And you saw Besson, the Treasury Secretary, saying we were going to use the IRS.
[01:29:52]  He almost came out and said it directly.
[01:29:54]  But, you know, they always say to shut down this left-wing network that is advocating violence.
[01:30:01]  So there's always that part at the end that I just don't think they're not going to be able to stick the landing on finding that advocacy of violence because it's just not there.
[01:30:10]  Right.
[01:30:11]  So whether they'll find other pretexts, I mean, I think, you know, the advice in NGO circles, you know, going back to the beginning has been get your books in order.
[01:30:23]  Yeah.
[01:30:23]  Right.
[01:30:24]  Because, you know, what did Stalin's henchman Beria say, you know, show me the man and I'll show you the crime?
[01:30:30]  No one wants to have every one of their documents poured over.
[01:30:34]  You have an organization that maybe has a budget of tens of millions of dollars and lots of complex transactions and this and that and the other.
[01:30:42]  If you scrutinize things with so much rigor, you might find technical violations.
[01:30:48]  You're not going to find the network of advocacy of violence, which is what they're talking about.
[01:30:54]  But yeah, there is understandable anxiety in civil society circles about this playbook.
[01:31:00]  By the way, it's a harder playbook in the U.S. than it is in some of the other democratic backsliding countries for a number of reasons.
[01:31:07]  Not only because we have the strongest First Amendment, the strongest freedom of association, but because we have by far the strongest civil society.
[01:31:14]  That's because we haven't been a welfare state like Europeans.
[01:31:17]  And so the private sector has done so much more.
[01:31:20]  So you have like real massive financial and political power in civil society that you don't see in Hungary or Israel or Turkey or those places.
[01:31:28]  But also because the civil society here doesn't depend on any foreign funding.
[01:31:33]  And that's the first move that these dictators do.
[01:31:37]  What Putin did, what Orban did, what Etanyahu tried to do is like cut off all foreign funding to civil society organizations.
[01:31:45]  And that can really hurt if you're in a country that doesn't have its own tradition or doesn't have its own ability to support its own NGO sector.
[01:31:54]  We don't have those vulnerabilities here.
[01:31:55]  So we've got a lot more that the like, I think it's almost like the obvious move.
[01:32:01]  We want to be more like Orban, so we've got to go after the NGOs.
[01:32:04]  Well, it's a lot harder to do here.
[01:32:06]  We're a lot stronger.
[01:32:07]  Our law is a lot better.
[01:32:09]  And so I've been telling people, look, don't panic.
[01:32:12]  Be ready.

=== FBI's Increasing Role (10:57) ===

[01:32:14]  Have lawyers ready for these investigations.
[01:32:16]  Be ready for congressional committees to start demanding all of your documents.
[01:32:22]  Think about what you can turn over and what you can't.
[01:32:25]  Be ready for all of this.
[01:32:26]  But you're not going to wake up tomorrow to find that your bank account is frozen.
[01:32:31]  God, I mean, I'm just imagining two months to us clipping that and be like, he was wrong.
[01:32:37]  Right.
[01:32:37]  I mean, this is the thing.
[01:32:38]  Like, this is, you know, I spent the first Trump administration being like, you know what?
[01:32:42]  Like, it is really bad.
[01:32:44]  Like, kind of what you were saying earlier, it's really bad for some people.
[01:32:46]  Yes.
[01:32:47]  But it's like mostly really coming down on immigrants.
[01:32:49]  Correct.
[01:32:49]  And I'm not saying like, oh, so it's, you know, fun or whatever, but like, that's just the reality of it.
[01:32:53]  In this second one, I think there is certainly like much more targeting.
[01:32:58]  I mean, I, you know, it's, I have, uh, I could see just people be sort of being visited.
[01:33:04]  I mean, FBI does that shit a lot.
[01:33:06]  I think that there's going to be a lot more interfacing between like the FBI and maybe people who hold not even necessarily radical views.
[01:33:16]  But, you know, I have to think of this too.
[01:33:17]  If a lot of Trump's war against the law firms is sort of revenge for the law affair stuff, I think a lot of this is also revenge against January 6th stuff or for like all, you know, all of the arrests and the, you know, and the, I guess, surveillance and then arrests on the people looking for them.
[01:33:36]  I think that they're going to essentially try to flip that on people who might be left-wing, whatever that means to them.
[01:33:44]  Yeah, look, they can try.
[01:33:45]  I mean, they're bringing contrived criminal cases and using Saturday Night Massacre tactics until they get a prosecutor who's willing to try to get an indictment.
[01:33:54]  So they're doing all kinds of things.
[01:33:56]  Now, the thing about the criminal justice system, although in some sense, it's the scariest because you can lose your liberty, you also have by far the most rights.
[01:34:06]  You know, they've got to go into a court and prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that you did something.
[01:34:14]  So, you know, I think with Comey, for example, he and his lawyers are trying to get that case thrown out just on procedural irregularities first.
[01:34:23]  But probably part of him is thinking, I'd love to see this before a jury.
[01:34:28]  I'd like to be acquitted by a jury and be vindicated.
[01:34:32]  So I think will there be that kind of harassment that you're talking about?
[01:34:37]  Maybe.
[01:34:37]  I don't know.
[01:34:38]  Are you hearing about it already?
[01:34:39]  Or is this just something that you think is gathering?
[01:34:41]  I just think it's gathering.
[01:34:43]  Yeah, I just think it's gathering.
[01:34:44]  I mean, they've also completely gutted the FBI.
[01:34:47]  I know.
[01:34:47]  Well, we have my goat in there, right?
[01:34:49]  Yeah.
[01:34:50]  I mean, and he's looking both directions at once.
[01:34:53]  That's what's like very confusing, but also interesting because they've gutted the FBI and then ICE is bigger than ever.
[01:35:03]  Right, $170 billion new dollars for us.
[01:35:05]  Yes.
[01:35:05]  And clearly getting directives beyond pure immigration enforcement.
[01:35:10]  Yes.
[01:35:10]  Can we talk a little bit about ICE?
[01:35:12]  Just because, I mean, so you've been, you know, you joined the ACLU literally right when DHS was being founded.
[01:35:19]  Yeah, just before.
[01:35:20]  Just before.
[01:35:21]  And kind of watching how this, I don't want to call it a slow creep, but the way that immigration was then sort of, or immigration law was kind of absorbed into this new, you know, this new homeland.
[01:35:36]  Yeah, the homeland.
[01:35:38]  But then also, you know, under the executive.
[01:35:40]  I get a new pronunciation for that.
[01:35:43]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:35:44]  Away from Congress, under the executive, right?
[01:35:47]  And then also, yeah, you know, continued to be weaponized.
[01:35:52]  I mean, as many, everyone knows, in the like decades that followed.
[01:35:56]  And then this being the most, you know, you can see it in the budget.
[01:36:00]  Many people have seen that graph where you just see the ICE budget jump shockingly.
[01:36:07]  Well, so I think, and, you know, this obviously relates to what they're doing in cities with the National Guard, call-outs and deployments.
[01:36:15]  And I know Brace mocks me for being too optimistic or Pollyannish sometimes, but I do think that there is a way to view that as a sign of weakness.
[01:36:28]  I think one thing that Trump doesn't have that a lot of his autocratic buddies have is a national police.
[01:36:33]  And it must be so frustrating to him that almost every police officer in the United States reports to someone who's not Trump.
[01:36:40]  Yeah.
[01:36:41]  Almost all of them, right?
[01:36:42]  I mean, it's a localized, it's really federated.
[01:36:43]  And so how do you deal with that, right?
[01:36:46]  These cities with defiant mayors who are, you know, they hate the idea that you could have a sanctuary city.
[01:36:53]  You do it by trying to send in a bunch of armed people who are answerable to you.
[01:36:58]  But then, you know, the National Guard, they're pretty cautious about their role.
[01:37:02]  They're mostly standing around and guarding buildings.
[01:37:04]  So what's the answer?
[01:37:05]  ICE.
[01:37:05]  Right.
[01:37:06]  And the thing that worries me a lot is $170 billion to ICE creates on a smaller scale, but still a significant one, this federal police force that we were talking about.
[01:37:17]  Now, the fact is their mission is supposed to be immigration enforcement, but you've already seen how in places like Chicago or LA or Portland, that expands.
[01:37:25]  So they're there to do these really controversial and violent kind of raids.
[01:37:34]  You have protests that comes out in response to that.
[01:37:37]  You have media that comes out in response to that.
[01:37:39]  And all of a sudden, these federal immigration officers are firing tear gas at journalists and less lethal weapons.
[01:37:45]  And the ACLU has brought lawsuits in both Chicago and LA for the targeting of journalists by these ICE enforcement officers at these protests.
[01:38:00]  And then you saw the raid on a building in Chicago.
[01:38:04]  What did they arrest like 12 or 14 U.S. citizens?
[01:38:07]  Yeah, I mean, that's being annoyed.
[01:38:09]  And they did that fucking video, like action movie video about it.
[01:38:12]  Yeah.
[01:38:14]  That's what's so, I mean, to go back to them managing this show, you know, there's so much of all of this stuff is also purposely, I think, red meat to the base.
[01:38:24]  Right, with Dr. Phil embedded.
[01:38:26]  Yeah, to then like stave off what you're talking about with what they know is going to happen or they anticipate will happen with the midterms and the sort of tide shifting.
[01:38:35]  And so like, on the one hand, there are these like very real material changes happening, right?
[01:38:43]  With the increase in the budget, the numbers coming in, also the kind of very speedy, you know, way in which their directives are just broadening, you know, without anyone kind of knowing.
[01:38:59]  They're just all these ICE guys.
[01:39:00]  I mean, you see them on video and you're just like, is this a fucking joke?
[01:39:04]  Like these guys are the least professional, most like just thugged.
[01:39:12]  That is their reputation in federal law enforcement.
[01:39:14]  Yes, everyone is like, these are people who could not actually anything else.
[01:39:19]  And, you know, I can't remember who we were talking about this with.
[01:39:21]  I think it was maybe Clippenstein.
[01:39:22]  Yeah.
[01:39:23]  But he brought up such a good point.
[01:39:24]  I think about this all the time, which is that DHS is such a new, it's such a new organization that it doesn't have a history of like rank and deference to like, you know, your superiors.
[01:39:41]  And they're, and because they're also pulling from such a large pool and they have such low standards.
[01:39:47]  Like, I mean, they literally do have a lot of people.
[01:39:49]  $20,000 signing bonuses.
[01:39:51]  No wage cap.
[01:39:52]  You know.
[01:39:52]  And also, I mean, there's all these stories coming out about how they're like, oh, yeah, these guys, they didn't pass a, you know, really like criminal background check, but we didn't care.
[01:39:59]  It's totally fine.
[01:40:00]  You know, all this kind of stuff.
[01:40:03]  It's really worrying.
[01:40:04]  And that it's created a culture that is completely both like horrifying and also necessary for their mission.
[01:40:12]  Right.
[01:40:13]  I mean, the masking is, you know, mask for me, but not for thee.
[01:40:18]  Right.
[01:40:19]  Right.
[01:40:21]  But on the other side of it, and it also plays into the like necessary theater that the administration needs to, one, continue the kind of like circus, the media circus, and create the backlash that it needs to then, you know, like you say, bring in the National Guard or push more extreme measures.
[01:40:45]  Yeah, that's why it's been interesting.
[01:40:48]  You know, I think they chose Portland because they remembered what Portland was like during the BLM protests and they were expecting, you know, fireworks to be shot at law enforcement officers.
[01:41:00]  And the protests there have been pretty normy and disciplined.
[01:41:04]  I'm very impressed by, you know, how we have not seen a lot of window breaking, a lot of, you know, smashing and burning of police cars, which, you know, you do expect a certain amount of that in any kind of protest movement.
[01:41:17]  But I think there's almost been a real effort to not hand the Trump administration those images.
[01:41:25]  I've been impressed.
[01:41:27]  Yeah, I mean, it's, I think on the issue of National Police Force, that really can't be discounted because they're explicitly trying to do that.
[01:41:33]  And they're also explicitly, and not to be like whatever about this, but like all of the kind of like propaganda, I guess, or the recruiting stuff that you see from DHS and like kind of related agencies, CBP or whatever, ICE, on social media is like some of it like pretty explicitly neo-Nazi, right?
[01:41:52]  Or like wink-wink alt-right kind of like jokey shit.
[01:41:56]  But like there is a, and again, like whatever, some like 37-year-old wife beating an alcoholic from San Diego who joins DHS just because he wants to crack some skulls isn't necessarily seeing that.
[01:42:06]  But that is certainly like a culture that they're trying to create around that.
[01:42:09]  And I think that like, and again, I don't know, I feel like I'm like 2016 lib where I'm like, dude, this is fucking scary.
[01:42:17]  You know, it's, it is, uh, it's not something that I love.
[01:42:22]  And I think a lot of these people too, I mean, we're talking about the administration really being driven by a lot of this like online content cycle shit.
[01:42:30]  I think a lot of the people who are joining or like influencers and shit like that, like reacting to them, I think a lot of people who are joining are like part of that ecosystem, not like players.
[01:42:39]  And we're not talking about like podcast hosts becoming DHS people, but like.
[01:42:42]  Do you think there's a story to be told about Trump's deplatforming in January of 2021?
[01:42:51]  First Amendment guy.
[01:42:51]  Well, no, no, no.
[01:42:52]  I mean, that's not a First Amendment issue because Facebook and Twitter, they had the absolute right to platform or deplatform whoever they want.
[01:42:59]  It's their associational speech community.
[01:43:02]  We still said it was unwise at the time, just because we regarded Trump's statements as newsworthy, even if they were shocking, as important for the public to receive.

=== Trump's Deplatforming Drama (03:46) ===

[01:43:12]  But it did seem to push him into much weirder online territory where he wasn't at all interacting as much.
[01:43:26]  He was being viewed by the media class, but it was a real different audience and a much swampier world.
[01:43:35]  And then he emerges back from that.
[01:43:38]  It certainly didn't work in terms of depriving him of enough of a platform that it hurt his political career.
[01:43:43]  Actually, he had quite, well, that's what I'm asking is.
[01:43:46]  Yeah, so a little bit the opposite in terms of the outcome, but I wonder whether also it was radicalizing.
[01:43:59]  It's funny because actually we mentioned this when we were talking about the Charlie Kirk assassination, which is that in the immediate aftermath of Jan 6, Trump was like a total pariah and especially from a lot of big-time Republican donors, which was a big issue.
[01:44:20]  And he was seen as he was like left alone as like the mad king with Giuliani trying to like make these like insane calls.
[01:44:27]  Charlie in the basement with a bottom.
[01:44:29]  No, seriously.
[01:44:30]  I mean, that's kind of what the vision was.
[01:44:32]  And so I think to your point, like you can trace that some of the people that did stand by him, which was Charlie Kirk, by the way, were of a more radical persuasion than the sort of institutional, you know, big, big wig Republican donor network.
[01:44:53]  Right.
[01:44:54]  And so as much as Charlie kind of laundered for a better, for lack of a better word, a lot of that money into kind of more radical organizing.
[01:45:04]  But I love why I say Charlie as if I knew him.
[01:45:07]  I did.
[01:45:08]  But so I do think that you can, and you can watch that kind of from the tail end of Trump one with the kind of like my pillowification of the whole thing, but I always say into what was so obviously, and we, I remember we said this when we went to MSG for that huge rally right before the election, which was horrifying.
[01:45:31]  Which we didn't go to report on.
[01:45:32]  We went because we support Donald Trump.
[01:45:34]  You just wanted to your comedian.
[01:45:35]  We had, well, there was this comedian that we really wanted to say.
[01:45:38]  Well, Liz loves Kill Tony.
[01:45:41]  No, but that the whole thing was the theme of the theme of the evening and the whole campaign was revenge.
[01:45:50]  And that that animated so much of what he wanted personally, but also someone like Stephen Miller, who was very much like sidelined and mocked during Trump won.
[01:46:01]  And I think also got clowned on by the courts a lot with the Muslim ban and everything else that he kind of wanted to do.
[01:46:10]  That coupled with the sort of years of like woke humiliation that they endured during the Biden revolutionary moment, whatever they saw it as.
[01:46:24]  And this includes, of course, the tech companies, right?
[01:46:28]  You know, everyone was kind of walking in to this, being like, okay, it's our moment to like actually exact revenge on all of our political enemies.
[01:46:38]  And that has always felt like a really animating principle.
[01:46:42]  And it took the big time classic Republican donor networks a moment to get on board.
[01:46:52]  Right.
[01:46:52]  It wasn't until like 2020, late 2023, maybe.

=== Twitter Files and Free Speech (14:57) ===

[01:46:58]  I mean, even Musk himself didn't start supporting until 2024.
[01:47:02]  Well, and he endorsed after the assassination.
[01:47:04]  Right.
[01:47:05]  After the bullet in the ear.
[01:47:06]  Sure.
[01:47:07]  Yeah.
[01:47:07]  That's really, that's really interesting.
[01:47:10]  You know, as a, as, it's funny.
[01:47:14]  My take has always been like, the Biden, I don't know, maybe you have to be diplomatic about it, but I'm like, they did do law affair against Trump.
[01:47:21]  Like the fucking, some of that shit was just like, what was the fucking point of it?
[01:47:26]  Well, I mean, look, I think, you know, what I didn't love about the classified documents case was not that it wasn't legally sound.
[01:47:36]  I mean, in fact, Trump essentially gave them no choice.
[01:47:39]  Yeah.
[01:47:39]  Like they just said a hundred times, can you please return it?
[01:47:43]  And instead, you know, he'd move it to another room.
[01:47:44]  So he, like, he essentially made them do it.
[01:47:47]  What I didn't love about it was hearing liberals in tone with great piety about how Trump was harming national security.
[01:47:54]  And I would say to them, I promise you, there is nothing in those documents.
[01:47:57]  Like 99.9% of what is classified as stuff that's already been published.
[01:48:02]  Like, please don't make that.
[01:48:03]  Please don't dignify it with that.
[01:48:05]  Of course, he's, you know, he's doing, he left them no choice.
[01:48:09]  And therefore, I can't say you don't bring the case, but the idea that he was doing it because he was going to sell them to China when he was president for four years and could have told China anything he wanted, right?
[01:48:19]  Like always seemed crazy to me.
[01:48:21]  I also didn't love the local cases.
[01:48:23]  The New York case.
[01:48:24]  Well, just brought by DAs.
[01:48:26]  I mean, I think, you know, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of local prosecutors in the country.
[01:48:30]  And the idea that they should be in the role of adjudicating national politics seemed strange.
[01:48:37]  You know, the main case against Trump, the main case against him for the election conspiracy, like, look, you can't try to get false slates of electors in states in order to retain power after you lost an election.
[01:48:54]  I think your view of it is it was a half-hearted, doomed effort, and it never was going to really amount to anything.
[01:49:00]  And, you know, that certainly seems true from where we sit.
[01:49:04]  But, you know, to me, that was the heart of the case.
[01:49:09]  You know, it wasn't an armed revolution, but it was a conspiracy for him to overturn the election.
[01:49:15]  The best way to have dealt with that is not through a bunch of criminal cases, but for the Senate to have voted to convict him after his impeachment for it.
[01:49:24]  And that's the constitutional remedy.
[01:49:26]  He wouldn't have been able to run again.
[01:49:27]  I don't care if he goes to prison for anything.
[01:49:30]  I'm not a big fan of prison.
[01:49:32]  But I think he was properly impeached and should have been convicted for his conduct in trying to stay in office.
[01:49:38]  The ACLU board voted to support that impeachment.
[01:49:41]  I think that was the right decision.
[01:49:45]  You know, is that law fair?
[01:49:47]  I mean, look, I understand why the Supreme Court was nervous about those kinds of cases.
[01:49:53]  And in fact, the immunity decision looks a little different now that Trump is in office because he can't prosecute Biden, which he might have tried to do.
[01:50:05]  Because Biden can't, he's not well enough to stay.
[01:50:08]  Yeah, he could plead out on medical grounds.
[01:50:10]  Biden is now immune for his acts in office because the Supreme Court gave Trump that immunity as well.
[01:50:16]  So, you know, there was a Trump-proofing aspect to that decision as well.
[01:50:21]  I mean, I think it's wrong.
[01:50:22]  I think we should have less immunity, not more immunity.
[01:50:25]  Obviously, I think that.
[01:50:27]  So I don't know.
[01:50:29]  Listen, we sue every administration.
[01:50:31]  Yeah.
[01:50:32]  On principle.
[01:50:32]  Yeah, on principle and everything, right?
[01:50:34]  So like, we can go through and I can tell you what I disagree with and think was illegal that every administration did.
[01:50:39]  But I will say, you know, and, you know, free speech has been my core issue for the last few years.
[01:50:46]  It's amazing that even after Trump has leveraged the entire federal government to go after every pocket of dissent, cutting funding, locking up immigrants, you know, targeting lawyers, you know, suing the media and all of this, if you say all of that, and I said all of this like on a Reason podcast, Reason is libertarians, you know, right?
[01:51:10]  The comment section will still be, does he know about the Twitter files?
[01:51:13]  Yeah.
[01:51:14]  Does he know about the Twitter files?
[01:51:15]  Like, yeah, I know about the fucking Twitter files, right?
[01:51:17]  Like, I don't love jawboning.
[01:51:20]  I don't think it's great for the federal government to be pressuring private companies to remove lawful speech.
[01:51:27]  But to equate that, you know, and I thought the record before the Supreme Court in that was not so strong, right?
[01:51:34]  I mean, and we can go into the details of that if you're interested.
[01:51:37]  But like, you know, the idea that, you know, the Biden administration, they were the real anti-speech administration.
[01:51:44]  And the Trump people, yeah, they're doing a little bit of payback here and there.
[01:51:47]  But the real story is the Twitter files, right?
[01:51:50]  There is, there's such accumulated grievance.
[01:51:53]  And that incident has such mystical significance to the audience to the online rights.
[01:52:01]  It's so impenetrable to read.
[01:52:04]  I'm sorry, but putting the Twitter files on Twitter and then on Substack made it just like impossible for you to do.
[01:52:10]  But then taking links to Substack off Twitter, the only website that they completely throttled was the one that the Twitter files were.
[01:52:17]  It made it just so complicated for anyone to parse what exactly was in these things.
[01:52:23]  Well, the other thing is that there were real stories in there.
[01:52:25]  Yes.
[01:52:26]  And they poisoned the well.
[01:52:28]  Yes.
[01:52:28]  You know, you hand it to Ideologs and people who would have given it.
[01:52:32]  And people who would have given it a fair hearing have to shut it out because they can't trust the source.
[01:52:38]  Yeah.
[01:52:41]  It should have gone to the New York Times and Washington Post.
[01:52:43]  It was, but it was Elon.
[01:52:45]  Right.
[01:52:45]  Yeah.
[01:52:46]  Right.
[01:52:46]  I mean, yeah, that's, I got, I forgot that Barry Weiss was given.
[01:52:49]  But now she's our fucking news goat.
[01:52:52]  She's a, she's, you know.
[01:52:54]  Look, can we, I know we're going long, but just I want to pivot.
[01:52:59]  I want to pivot.
[01:52:59]  He's not billing us hourly.
[01:53:01]  To free speech, even though we've kind of been talking about it around it.
[01:53:07]  Should we start with the first day of the administration when Trump actually signed a free speech executive order saying that this federal government will not engage in any censorship at all?
[01:53:17]  It was like his Twitter.
[01:53:18]  You told them to that?
[01:53:20]  I don't even remember it.
[01:53:21]  He got a little lost in the blood of that.
[01:53:24]  But that's what I'm saying.
[01:53:25]  about red meat to the base right and then it being so like insignificant because then the other thing is who has jawbone social media more than trump yeah They are pressuring every company right now to take down any content that, for example, reveals the location of an ICE officer.
[01:53:41]  So you saw they just drawboned Apple and Google to take down from the App Store Ice Block, which is an app that allows people to track real-time location of ICE, which is absolutely constitutionally protected speech.
[01:53:52]  I mean, isn't CitizenApp basically the same thing there?
[01:53:55]  Isn't Waze basically the same thing?
[01:53:58]  Because it tells me that there's police reported AI.
[01:54:04]  And obviously I can tell you there's a cop around the corner, right?
[01:54:07]  Using technology to do that isn't so different.
[01:54:10]  And they've pressured Facebook to take down all their pages that track the location of ICE.
[01:54:15]  So even in the one thing where they pretended was the most important free speech issue in the world, they're still worse than the Biden administration.
[01:54:22]  But go on.
[01:54:23]  No, I mean, no, that's a great point.
[01:54:26]  I was going to say, you know, we've talked a lot about this on the show, but it's hard to remember the last time the federal government has used other organizations on behalf of another federal, on behalf of another government to go after not just, I mean, green card holders, but also U.S. citizens for speech.
[01:54:50]  I'm talking about Israel.
[01:54:51]  Now, they would say they're not doing it on behalf of another government.
[01:54:54]  They're doing it on behalf of their own foreign policy and to protect their own citizens from anti-Semitism.
[01:55:00]  So that would be their justification.
[01:55:01]  They wouldn't say they're acting in the interests of a foreign power when they use their authority in that way.
[01:55:07]  And you can decide where you fall on that question.
[01:55:11]  Well, I mean, I think a curious part about that is that we learned that some of the lists of people that were compiled were made by groups like Batar and Canary Mission.
[01:55:21]  Wow.
[01:55:23]  By the way, protected speech.
[01:55:25]  Yeah.
[01:55:26]  I mean, I don't know Batar as well, but Canary Mission, what they do is incredibly ugly, but they link to public statements that people have made on social media and elsewhere, things that are already out there that have been said, and then they express their opinion about that public speech on matters of public concern.
[01:55:44]  So that's why there haven't been successful efforts to target those entities.
[01:55:48]  What they're doing is legally protected under the First Amendment.
[01:55:51]  Yeah, but technically, well, you don't have to comment on this.
[01:55:54]  There's a lot of FARA violators in that space.
[01:55:57]  I'll say that.
[01:55:58]  There's a lot of FARA violators.
[01:55:59]  FARA is, of course, the law that requires people who are working on behalf of foreign governments to register as lobbyists.
[01:56:06]  And there's a lot of First Amendment objections to FARA.
[01:56:09]  It's been abused.
[01:56:10]  Yeah, I know, I know.
[01:56:10]  And also, didn't the administration say that they weren't going to prosecute people for FARA?
[01:56:14]  And no one gets prosecuted for it anyway.
[01:56:16]  Greg Craig got prosecuted under Farah Obama's first White House counsel, and he was acquitted.
[01:56:21]  I cannot even remember what foreign state he was accused of or who he did represent.
[01:56:27]  I can't remember.
[01:56:27]  It's Jamaica.
[01:56:28]  But he was acquitted.
[01:56:29]  Yeah.
[01:56:31]  It is just, it is crazy, though, because there was this such insane effort to be like, it is basically illegal to talk shit on Israel.
[01:56:40]  And they would go through like, I mean, they were talking about going through any person applying for a green card, social media, or like whatever statements they made using AI to see if they ever said anything negative about Israel.
[01:56:54]  I mean, it's just, it is sort of fucking astounding to me.
[01:56:57]  And it's, it's, and the thing is, like, we, we talk a lot of the show, it's like, you call someone a hypocrite.
[01:57:02]  They're just like, okay, well, I'm still winning, you know, and that is.
[01:57:05]  Well, and on free speech, actually, everyone is a hypocrite.
[01:57:08]  Yeah.
[01:57:08]  Well, not me, because I don't.
[01:57:10]  Well, yeah, you don't, you don't pretend that you support it.
[01:57:12]  I know, but I do support it.
[01:57:13]  But yeah, yeah.
[01:57:14]  I do pretend that I'm supporting it.
[01:57:16]  So then you're a hypocrite.
[01:57:17]  Yeah.
[01:57:17]  So you are.
[01:57:18]  I mean, yeah, I mean, there's been an incredible reversal of roles.
[01:57:21]  And there, and, you know, I predict there will be another one when power changes again.
[01:57:26]  And, you know, I mean, to me, I will believe you support free speech when you stand up to defend the speech of someone you despise and speech that actually offends you.
[01:57:35]  And until then, I don't believe it.
[01:57:37]  I may be wrong.
[01:57:38]  You may actually, but I mean, you know, so the same Republicans who insisted that everyone on elite college campuses was a snowflake, right?
[01:57:48]  They're the ones who are now holding congressional hearings to scream at university presidents for not punishing students for protected speech and that they haven't cracked down on free speech hard enough.
[01:57:59]  And, you know, obviously on your side, our side, there was a lot of skepticism of the ACLU's liberal free speech commitments when we represent fascists and Nazis and Klansmen.
[01:58:14]  And now you've seen many people in the sort of academic left saying, hmm, maybe the ACLU is right, that it is dangerous to give the government power to make these kinds of distinctions.
[01:58:27]  Because ultimately what you're talking about when you talk about changing the rules on free speech is giving the government more power to enforce those rules.
[01:58:34]  And I hope everyone for the end of time will realize that that government might be Donald Trump.
[01:58:38]  And if he gets to decide what's hate, if he gets to decide what's fake or misinformation, what do you think he's going to choose?
[01:58:45]  Yeah, I mean, though, this is actually, this is the part where I'm like, I actually, I think I am a believer in free speech until I'm in charge, I guess.
[01:58:54]  Because I, I'm all, people, yeah, because I remember there was a, ACLU has had a sort of embattled period for a little bit.
[01:59:01]  We've had many in our history, so it's nothing new.
[01:59:04]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:59:04]  But like, I'm always like, no, I'm, I'm kind of glad that the defend because I'm like, I feel like if I was represented in such a case, then people would back, I would be the skokie of like 2026, I guess.
[01:59:15]  But you want to say they represented that pizza shit?
[01:59:17]  You need the Klan cases because those are the ones the right-wing judiciary will happily hold on and then they can create precedent.
[01:59:24]  That's what Eleanor Holmes Norton said.
[01:59:26]  Eleanor Holmes Norton, who's now the congressperson from D.C., was an ACLU lawyer in the 60s, black woman representing George Wallace, representing the Klan.
[01:59:34]  And she made exactly that argument.
[01:59:36]  Yeah.
[01:59:36]  But so, okay, this is kind of a out of left field, but a legal question about freed speech.
[01:59:42]  Because I do think that it's like, okay, there's all these legal things.
[01:59:45]  Unfortunately, it's like the universities are cracking down on free speech, but not in a legally actionable way, right?
[01:59:52]  The chilling effects and the, you know, there's been plenty of, and you can call it good advice, but it's still cracking down of, you know, plenty of mass emails that have gone out at all institutions saying if you are an international student, you should not have a social media account.
[02:00:08]  Now, that might be good legal advice given the situation, but that is also, I mean, that's also a chilling effect, right?
[02:00:18]  Right.
[02:00:18]  Although they're not enforcing it.
[02:00:20]  So that's what makes it advice.
[02:00:22]  Of course.
[02:00:22]  I'm just saying that like, it's not as if these institutions are putting their weight behind these kids or ready to, right?
[02:00:33]  I think maybe quite the opposite, but they, you know, they have their own vulnerability.
[02:00:38]  They're very responsive to their principal sources of funding, which are first and foremost, their donor community, and second, the federal government.
[02:00:47]  Yeah, of course.
[02:00:49]  A big right-wing talking point is about doxing.
[02:00:57]  What is doxing and what is free speech?
[02:01:00]  This is a good question.
[02:01:01]  Yeah, so I mean, doxing itself doesn't have a single legal definition.
[02:01:08]  Right.
[02:01:09]  And different states have different laws that respond to the phenomenon of doxing.
[02:01:14]  So that's just the first answer is that whether something is doxing or not does not tell you whether it's legal or not or whether it's protected or not.
[02:01:23]  You actually have to talk more specifically about what the conduct is.
[02:01:26]  And this is sort of like the same reason why, you know, from a First Amendment perspective, whether something is anti-Semitic or not isn't actually relevant because the First Amendment protects anti-Semitism.
[02:01:39]  Now, it may be very politically important and it may be very harmful.
[02:01:42]  Now, in the college context, there are other consequences to it being designated anti-Semitic.
[02:01:47]  But with doxing, I would say the answer to that question really depends on what we're talking about.

=== Addressing Doxing Laws (07:17) ===

[02:01:55]  Generally, you can take information that is public and republish it.
[02:02:05]  So you're posting information on the internet that you found on the internet, even if it's to a much larger audience, is going to be protected.
[02:02:15]  And that's important because if it weren't, it would intrude into news gathering, right?
[02:02:21]  Because when the New York Times takes information and publishes it, they're publishing it to a much wider audience.
[02:02:25]  If you had a definition that just turned on how many people get to see it, that would imperil important public interest journalism.
[02:02:32]  Now, some states have laws that say, you know, if you post, you know, information with the intent to cause physical harm to another person and, you know, sort of take concrete steps.
[02:02:45]  So like, you know, someone's home address with, you know, obviously threats are not are not constitutionally protected, but with more of an attempt to bring actual bodily harm to someone, that the law might have something to say about that.
[02:03:07]  But even some of those laws have been challenged.
[02:03:08]  Now, obviously, you know, when you Call a SWAT team to someone's house just swatting.
[02:03:13]  That's going to get you into trouble both civilly and criminally.
[02:03:17]  But there isn't a sort of stable, coherent definition of doxing that is legally significant.
[02:03:24]  Yeah, it's interesting.
[02:03:25]  I'm thinking about specifically after Charlie Kirk's assassination, there were those websites that went up that were canary mission style that were like, oh, this is a green card holder or Visa holder that had a tweet or a Facebook post that was negative against Charlie, but also here's their information that they got from one of those like whitepages.org sites that collect all this personal information.
[02:03:52]  And they just kind of like put it all in one place.
[02:03:55]  And you can say, I guess there's the argument that's like, I'm not doing anything, but it does feel a bit wink-wink, right?
[02:04:02]  Why is it necessary to put someone's home address next to their statement if not to point law enforcement or other pointing?
[02:04:13]  Pointing law enforcement would never be considered legally questionable doxing, right?
[02:04:18]  Because it's actually, so you'd have to be bringing, you'd have to be swatting.
[02:04:25]  Right, right.
[02:04:26]  In that sense.
[02:04:26]  But yeah, you'd have to be participating in bringing private violence against someone else.
[02:04:33]  Because calling someone to the attention of law enforcement, yes, except for the SWAT situation, is something that the government would deem admirable.
[02:04:41]  They can act on it or not.
[02:04:43]  There's a fucking reward for some certain things.
[02:04:47]  Yeah.
[02:04:47]  But again, I think when you think about it from the policymaking standpoint, any protection that you put in place has to be consistent with a free press having the right to publish private information or, you know, publicly available, but privately seeming information in the public interest.
[02:05:15]  And it's hard to do.
[02:05:17]  And so, I mean, there's been a fair amount of litigation over state anti-doxing laws and whether they go too far.
[02:05:27]  Now, I should say, you know, if you actually specifically threaten another person with violence and they reasonably fear that you're going to commit it, that's not protected speech.
[02:05:37]  Sure.
[02:05:38]  Right.
[02:05:38]  I do think, though, that, like, for instance, like, because I think a lot of people know that.
[02:05:42]  It's also against the terms of service of most social media sites, which is where a lot of that takes place.
[02:05:46]  And so people will just do the thing where they just post someone's address.
[02:05:49]  And obviously, any, you know, we all know what that means.
[02:05:54]  There's an implicit threat there, which I don't know legally that stands up.
[02:05:57]  But I mean, just that, but that is, I guess, non-legally speaking, that is what that is.
[02:06:02]  Right.
[02:06:03]  And Well, first of all, I just want to say to any of them listening out there, if you do a lot of people have been doxxed just over the years, but especially lately after the Charlie Kirk stuff, never post anything about your personal life or pictures of where you live or even your town or any identifying information online on your little account that you use to talk shit on people.
[02:06:29]  And also, really, it is a good idea to pay for one of those things that like it takes, scrapes your data, like takes your data off the aggregators aggregator websites that scrape where you live.
[02:06:40]  I mean, I think that is genuinely like something like delete me.
[02:06:43]  Yeah, I mean, that is just like some shit that you really should use.
[02:06:48]  I don't care who you are.
[02:06:49]  Yeah.
[02:06:50]  It's not that expensive.
[02:06:51]  No, we provide it for free to our staff, of course.
[02:06:53]  Yeah, I would hope so.
[02:06:54]  Yeah.
[02:06:55]  Yeah.
[02:06:56]  But yeah, I mean, it's, it's a, listen, I've been doxed before.
[02:07:00]  It's not a, it's not a funny.
[02:07:01]  I mean, you come to my house and blow your fucking brains out, but it's, I don't want to do that because it'll be a ghost.
[02:07:06]  You know what I'm saying?
[02:07:09]  We know what you're saying.
[02:07:10]  Okay.
[02:07:11]  Ben, thank you.
[02:07:12]  Do you have any do you have any legal advice before we get out of here?
[02:07:16]  This has all been legal advice.
[02:07:18]  No, none of it has been legal advice.
[02:07:21]  Let's be extremely clear.
[02:07:21]  I don't give legal advice to tens of thousands of your Patreon supporters.
[02:07:25]  No, they are now all your clients.
[02:07:27]  It's attorney client privilege, which means you can't share this episode with anybody.
[02:07:31]  Yeah, I said it before.
[02:07:33]  It's not legal advice.
[02:07:34]  It is, you know, don't give them power they don't have.
[02:07:38]  Yeah.
[02:07:40]  And we are actually broadly going to prevail against this moment.
[02:07:47]  The U.S. is bigger and weirder and more inefficient and just harder to take over than a lot of these other countries where you've seen more effective democratic backsliding.
[02:07:58]  So this is a, you know, it's a nasty moment.
[02:08:02]  We predicted a lot of it, but maybe not just the sheer vandalism of what we were going to see this quickly.
[02:08:09]  But, you know, we'll all be judged by how we respond at this time.
[02:08:14]  If it comes for you, do the right thing.
[02:08:17]  And if it doesn't come for you, support the organizations that are standing between, you know, the rest of you and it.
[02:08:23]  And never, under any circumstances, snitch.
[02:08:27]  Who is it?
[02:08:40]  No.
[02:08:40]  No.
[02:08:41]  What do you mean?
[02:08:42]  Who is it?
[02:08:42]  It's the judge saying court is fucking adjourned.
[02:08:45]  That didn't sound like a gavel.
[02:08:47]  I fucking did it with what I could, man.
[02:08:50]  Contempt.
[02:08:52]  Contempt.
[02:08:53]  You say order in the court.
[02:08:55]  Contempt.
[02:08:56]  Watch it.
[02:08:57]  Thin ice.
[02:08:59]  You may approach.
[02:09:01]  I didn't fucking ask you.
[02:09:02]  You may approach the brace.
[02:09:07]  I'm Liz.
[02:09:08]  I'm Brace.
[02:09:09]  I'm Princess Jankomsky.
[02:09:10]  And this has been Trunan.
[02:09:11]  We'll see you next time.
[02:09:12]  Bye-bye.