The President of South Korea has declared martial law and says that anyone who violates it will be punished under Article 14 of the Korean Martial Law Act. What exactly is martial law, and why is the government under martial law in South Korea?
00:00:39.000Sometime yesterday morning, the president of South Korea issued a command for martial law, and it read like this, quote, to safeguard liberal democracy and protect the safety of the people against anti-state forces threatening to overthrow the Republic of Korea, the following measures are declared nationwide effective December 3rd, 2024.
00:00:57.000One, all political activities, including the operations of the National Assembly, local councils, political parties, political associations, assemblies, and demonstrations are strictly prohibited.
00:01:07.000Two, any act that denies or seeks to overthrow the liberal democratic system, including the dissemination of fake news, manipulation of public opinion, and false propaganda is prohibited.
00:01:15.000Three, all media and publications will be subject to the control of the martial law command.
00:01:20.000Four, strikes, work slowdowns, and gatherings that incite social disorder are forbidden.
00:01:24.000Five, all medical professionals, including resident doctors currently on strike or absent from medical duties, must return to their work and perform their responsibilities within 48 hours.
00:01:32.000Violators will be dealt with under martial law.
00:01:34.000Six, measures will be implemented to minimize inconvenience for ordinary citizens except for anti-state forces and those attempting to overthrow the system.
00:01:45.000Invoked his powers under Article 9 of the Martial Law Act and says that violators will be punished under Article 14 of the Martial Law Act.
00:01:53.000Okay, so, what exactly is going on here?
00:01:56.000Because that is a pretty extraordinary move.
00:01:59.000Well, the president of South Korea is a person, and forgive the pronunciation here, named Yoon Suk Yeo.
00:02:05.000Yunsook Yeo is a member of a party that controls the presidency but is in the minority in the actual parliament of the country.
00:02:15.000And the claim that he is making is that the majority in the parliament, which is a party called the Democratic Party over in South Korea, that they're basically tools of the North Koreans, that they're crypto-communists, and that they are preventing the functioning of the government.
00:02:30.000So he put out a statement, and the statement says this, quote, Honorable citizens, as president, I appeal to you with a feeling of spitting blood.
00:02:39.000Since the inauguration of our government, the National Assembly has initiated 22 impeachment motions against government officials.
00:02:44.000Since the inauguration of the 22nd National Assembly in June, it is pushing for the impeachment of 10 more.
00:02:49.000This is a situation that is not only unprecedented in any country in the world, but has never been seen since the founding of our country.
00:02:55.000It is paralyzing the judiciary by intimidating judges and impeaching a number of prosecutors, and it is paralyzing the executive branch by trying to impeach the minister of the interior, the chairman of the communications commission, the chair of the board of audit, and the defense minister.
00:03:06.000The handling of the national budget also undermined the essential functions of the state and turned Korea into a drug paradise and a public order panic by completely cutting off all major budgets for cracking down on drug crimes and maintaining public security.
00:03:17.000The Democratic Party cut 4.1 trillion won from next year's budget, including 1 trillion won for disaster preparedness relief, 38.4 billion won for child care support allowances, and a project to develop a gas field in the city for youth jobs.
00:03:30.000They even put the brakes on funding to improve the treatment of military officers, etc., etc.
00:03:34.000The legislative dictatorship of the Democratic Party, which uses even the budget as a means of political struggle, did not hesitate to impeach the budget.
00:03:43.000The trampling of the constitutional order of the Free Republic of Korea and the disruption of legitimate state institutions established by the constitutions and laws is an obvious anti-state act that plots insurrection.
00:03:53.000The lives of the people are of no concern.
00:03:55.000The government is in a state of paralysis due to impeachment, special investigation, and the defense of the opposition leader.
00:04:00.000Our National Assembly has become a den of criminals.
00:04:03.000The National Assembly has become a monster that collapses the liberal democratic system.
00:04:07.000Dear citizens, I declare emergency martial law to defend the Free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces and to eradicate the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect the free constitutional order.
00:04:21.000So, the president, again, is a member of a more right-wing party in South Korea.
00:04:27.000The opposition party, the Democratic Party, is a significantly more left-wing party in South Korea.
00:04:31.000And essentially what is happening here is that the Democratic Party, which again represents a large majority in the National Assembly, has been threatening and attempting to impeach all of the state prosecutors who are looking into the Democratic Party leadership.
00:04:48.000So, the prosecutors were supposed to be looking into the family of the President of South Korea, and they had apparently decided to exonerate the wife of the President of South Korea.
00:04:59.000Meanwhile, those same prosecutors were looking into the leadership of the Democratic Party of South Korea for corruption charges.
00:05:05.000And so the Democratic Party of South Korea then attempted to impeach these prosecutors.
00:05:10.000According to the Korean Herald, this would have been just yesterday, the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea on Monday submitted motions to the National Assembly to impeach the head of the state audit agency and three prosecutors involved in two different scandals surrounding First Lady Kim Kyung-hee.
00:05:25.000The Assembly will put the motions to a vote during a plenary meeting scheduled for Wednesday in accordance with plans announced by the main opposition, which holds the majority in a 300-seat parliament.
00:05:34.000So again, the opposition party, which controls the National Assembly, is attempting to fire these prosecutors who are not going to be prosecuting the president's wife and are instead apparently investigating some of the leadership of the Democratic Party.
00:05:49.000Again, this is the Korean Times reporting this would have been A couple of days ago, quote, Which
00:06:24.000is the ruling party in South Korea is saying the real reason that they keep trying to get rid of these prosecutors is because the prosecutors are looking into them instead.
00:06:31.000And in fact, the Democratic Party in South Korea was attempting to unilaterally downsize the budget bill in order to effectively defund this prosecutorial office entirely.
00:06:44.000Basically, the South Korean president is looking...
00:06:48.000At the opposition party, which controls the National Assembly and says, you are attempting to clean out the prosecutorial part of the government in order to protect yourselves or weaponize it against me.
00:06:59.000And so therefore, I'm going to dissolve parliament and I'm going to basically declare dictatorial control of the country.
00:07:06.000So all of this resulted yesterday in some pretty extraordinary images.
00:07:11.000The military of South Korea entering the parliament, for example.
00:07:15.000You can see there are members of the military who are coming through the bushes en masse, and they are getting ready to enter the parliament.
00:07:32.000You're talking about armed members of the military.
00:07:34.000Members of the assembly then attempted to enter the parliament in order to vote, because there is a provision of martial law that overrules the declaration of martial law by a vote in the national assembly.
00:07:45.000And so here is some video of members of the assembly attempting to enter but being obstructed by the police in the process.
00:07:51.000Things is a scrum outside the parliament.
00:07:55.000Members of the assembly trying to push past the soldiers.
00:07:58.000That would include, by the way, members of the president of South Korea's own party.
00:09:23.000There's something deeper happening here because this sort of constitutional crisis is now taking place in a variety of countries, truly a variety of countries.
00:09:30.000It's happening, for example, not just in South Korea, but it's happening in Israel, where there are fights between the prosecutorial wing of the government and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:09:40.000It's happening in Hungary where there have been fights over state prosecutors.
00:09:43.000It's obviously happening in Brazil where Lula da Silva, the authoritarian left-wing leader of the country, is now attempting to militarize the justice system against Jair Bolsonaro, his predecessor.
00:09:54.000And, of course, there are shades of this in the United States.
00:09:56.000Folks, these sorts of constitutional crises seem to be happening more and more often.
00:10:00.000But you know what there's no shortage of?
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00:12:12.000To understand that, I think we need to understand the role of sort of the prosecutorial system in democratic republics because that has changed over time.
00:12:19.000I mean, this has implications, by the way, for everything up to and including the Hunter Biden pardon or the DOJ weaponizing itself against Donald Trump.
00:12:27.000Democratic republics typically rely on checks and balances to prevent the government from engaging in authoritarianism.
00:12:33.000And this is the basis of the United States Constitution.
00:12:35.000We have the House and the Senate, which check one another.
00:12:38.000We have both of them checked by the presidency.
00:12:39.000We have all three of those bodies that are checked by the judiciary and vice versa.
00:12:44.000Well, one of the checks and balances traditionally to avoid tyranny was impeachment.
00:12:49.000If you didn't like members of the government or you suspected that members of the government were corrupt, a bipartisan majority would work to oust those corrupt officials.
00:12:56.000Now, this was obviously problematic because when it comes to getting rid of corrupt officials, if the corrupt official happens to be a member of your party, then you are very unlikely to vote for their impeachment.
00:13:08.000Now, in the United States, our founding fathers understood this.
00:13:12.00065, Alexander Hamilton discussed this at length.
00:13:16.000He wrote, quote, The subjects of its jurisdiction, meaning the impeachment jurisdiction, are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
00:13:28.000They are of a nature which may, with peculiar propriety, be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.
00:13:35.000The prosecution of them for this reason will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.
00:13:43.000In many cases, it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence and interest on one side or on the other.
00:13:50.000In such cases, says Alexander Hamilton, there will always be the greatest danger the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.
00:14:00.000The convention, it appears, thought the Senate the most fit depository of this important trust.
00:14:04.000Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified or sufficiently independent, what other body would be likely to feel confident enough in its own situation to preserve unawed and uninfluenced the necessary impartiality between an individual accused and the representatives of the people his accuser?
00:14:20.000This is the argument Alexander Hamilton is making for the fact that there is an impeachment trial that takes place in the United States Senate.
00:14:26.000Because again, in Democratic Republics, the question of how you police corruption is a very real question.
00:14:31.000Let's say you have a corrupt public official.
00:14:32.000The United States Constitution says that person is impeached in the House and then there is a full trial in the Senate.
00:14:39.000Well, Hamilton and the rest of the Founding Fathers believed the Senate would be the most objective body.
00:14:44.000Back when the Constitution was designed, United States Senators were not appointed by party or by public approval.
00:14:50.000They were appointed by the state legislatures and they served six-year terms.
00:14:54.000And so the goal was that they would be more independent of sort of the public passions than the House.
00:14:59.000So you couldn't have the judiciary do it because the judiciary could be hijacked.
00:15:02.000But Senate was sort of half political, answerable to the public, but also indirectly answerable and thus more insulated from public pressures.
00:15:09.000So Alexander Hamilton says that this sort of model, in terms of impeachment, was based on the British model.
00:15:16.000He said, quote, the model from which the idea of this institution has been borrowed pointed out that course to the convention.
00:15:21.000In Great Britain, it is the province of the House of Commons to prefer the impeachment and of the House of Lords to decide upon it.
00:15:27.000The House of Lords was passed down paternalistically from parents to kids.
00:15:34.000It was an accepted aristocracy and thus was not So Alexander Hamilton pointed out that if you tried to set up a separate impeachment court, which we might now call the DOJ, that wouldn't actually solve the problem because that too could be politicized.
00:15:49.000So he writes in Federalist 65, quote, So again, the original solution for corruption in democratic republics was checks and balances of impeachment.
00:16:09.000Particularly in a body that was going to be somewhat removed and insulated from public pressure.
00:16:14.000Well, the problem is that over time, in a wide variety of countries, as democratic republics and their checks and balances have transitioned into administrative bureaucracies, in which enormous power is centralized in the executive branch, checks and balances have atrophied.
00:16:29.000Until Donald Trump was impeached twice, the impeachment power was almost never used by the Congress of the United States, for example.
00:16:36.000Instead, we made a decision at the outset of the 20th century, it's true in the United States, it's true in other burgeoning democracies as well, that law enforcement checking corruption was not to be done by the elected bodies of government.
00:16:48.000Instead, it was outsourced to so-called independent branches of government.
00:16:52.000So in the United States, that would be, for example, the Department of Justice.
00:16:55.000In South Korea, that would be the state prosecutor's office.
00:16:58.000In Brazil, the prosecutors, the police, the judiciary.
00:17:20.000It's not a matter of just replacing some people with other people.
00:17:23.000So if you fire some people, now that's considered interference with the magical objective branch.
00:17:28.000And if you leave people in place, and they target your political opponents, it's weaponization.
00:17:34.000That's what leads to constitutional crises.
00:17:36.000Once you have outsourced the job of policing corruption from the elected branches of government like the Senate of the United States or like the National Assembly in South Korea to state prosecutors, sooner or later there will be an attempt either by the state prosecutors to go after the wrong people or by the legislature to go after the state prosecutors or the president to go after the state prosecutors in order to prevent weaponization.
00:17:59.000This is the problem with sending up fake quote-unquote objective legal enforcement bodies.
00:18:07.000Because the only solution to a politicized law enforcement branch is to either overthrow the government for, quote, interfering with the system, which is what the president of South Korea is now attempting to do, or to call for the overthrow of the government for weaponizing the system.
00:18:22.000Constitutional crisis are the result of being supposedly untouchable nonpartisan institutions that either can be weaponized or interfered with.
00:18:30.000And you are seeing this happen across the West.
00:19:50.000Netanyahu has been in power for something like 14 out of the last 15 years in Israel.
00:19:55.000He's a masterful Machiavellian politician, just in pure, raw talent terms.
00:20:00.000And so the Attorney General's office has been weaponized against him, claims Netanyahu, I think largely correctly, in a wide variety of cases.
00:20:08.000But every time he tries to mess with the prosecution, he is accused of tampering with democracy.
00:20:14.000Once you set up these institutions as the final arbiter of guilt and innocence, then anyone who tampers with them on either side is now considered a threat to democracy.
00:20:24.000Even if the person who is actually militarizing law enforcement is the person who is in power.
00:20:31.000This is the case in Brazil, for example.
00:20:34.000So in Brazil, the law enforcement mechanisms have been weaponized by Lula da Silva against Jair Bolsonaro.
00:20:42.000And that means that while Lula is cleaning out the judiciary institutions, he is being lauded as someone upholding the norms of democracy while he engages in widespread censorship.
00:20:53.000And because instead of corruption being seen as a political issue to be answered by the political branches and eventually the people, because it's been outsourced to law enforcement, what that means is that the law enforcement branch can be routinely corrupted.
00:21:10.000You'll recall that it was not all that long ago that Lula da Silva himself had been banned from running because of his own corruption convictions.
00:21:17.000And then, in 2021, a left-wing Supreme Court judge annulled his corruption convictions and allowed him to run again.
00:21:27.000And then after he won, you now have the Brazilian police formally accusing former President Bolsonaro and his aides of an alleged 2022 coup attempt.
00:21:38.000Police said their sealed findings were being delivered to Brazil's Supreme Court, which will refer them to Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet, who decides either to formally charge Bolsonaro and put him on trial or toss the investigation.
00:21:49.000Apparently, the report here is 700 pages long.
00:21:54.000Bolsonaro said he would fight the case and dismiss the investigation as being the result of what he called creativity.
00:22:01.000Police said in a brief statement the Supreme Court had agreed to reveal the names of all 37 people who were accused to avoid the dissemination of incorrect news.
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00:25:47.000But all of this breakdown is again happening because so many people across so many westernized countries have decided that they no longer trust the mechanisms of checks and balance of the democratic republic and instead they were going to delegate all of that power to these impartial institutions.
00:26:02.000And then those institutions break down and then the entire country starts to break down.
00:26:06.000You're seeing that here in the United States with regard to the fight over the FBI. So, for example, the left has now declared that Donald Trump is some sort of authoritarian fascist for attempting to clean the FBI by appointing somebody like Kash Patel.
00:26:21.000They're freaking out over Kash Patel because Kash Patel has openly suggested that he's going to come into the FBI and clean out all the dead wood, going to look into the investigations, going to take a much more active role in determining what is investigatable and what is not.
00:26:34.000The specific reason Donald Trump was elected is because there is so little trust in these so-called impartial institutions.
00:26:41.000As Harry Enten points out, Americans do not trust the FBI. Here he was yesterday.
00:26:47.000If you look here, FBI is doing an excellent or good job.
00:27:47.000That's because of the weaponization of the FBI against Donald Trump.
00:27:49.000And the response to that will be a cleaning out of the FBI, which will lead the left to believe that the FBI has been weaponized.
00:27:55.000At which point you have a bit of a constitutional crisis.
00:27:58.000Because once the impeachment power has basically been done away with, How do you get rid of corrupt politicians at all?
00:28:06.000No one trusts the law enforcement mechanisms of the United States to do a proper job.
00:28:11.000And now nobody trusts the elected government to do the proper job because they haven't done the proper job on this sort of stuff for several generations at this point.
00:28:17.000And so every election becomes a sort of blood sport election.
00:28:23.000This is why you're going to get pardons from here till the end of time.
00:28:27.000And this is why, for example, Joe Biden has suggested he had to pardon Hunter Biden.
00:28:31.000Because after having politicized the FBI and after having politicized the DOJ, the Democrats know full well it can be politicized on the other end.
00:30:25.000The only solution for it is to minimize the power of these prosecutorial offices to go after corrupt politicians and instead return the question to the people themselves.
00:30:35.000This, by the way, is a case that Donald Trump actually made in this election cycle.
00:30:38.000Donald Trump said in the United States, listen, The question of whether you think I'm corrupt or whether January 6th was a presumptive bar to the presidency, that is not a question for Jack Smith or for the DOJ. That is a question for the American people.
00:30:56.000But too many Democratic Republics have abdicated on that question and have decided that instead they're going to appoint a bunch of special prosecutors to somehow police the boundaries of politics.
00:31:05.000It doesn't work out and it makes things much, much worse in the end as a general institutional rule.
00:31:13.000President Trump is doing a good thing, and he's doing a not-so-good thing.
00:31:15.000So, the good thing that President Trump is doing is he says that he's going to attend the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris on Saturday, which is his first major outing since winning the election, according to Politico.
00:31:28.000As I mentioned, Notre Dame is a wonderful symbol of Western civilization.
00:31:32.000Obviously, Western civilization was born in the Church.
00:31:35.000Western civilization is a creation, as I write in my book, The Right Side of History, of Jerusalem and Athens.
00:31:42.000And churches like Notre Dame are an amazing part of that story.
00:31:46.000The fact that President Trump is going to do that, I think, is a tribute to the history of our civilization.
00:31:54.000Trump said Monday in a post on Truth Social, President Emmanuel Macron has done a wonderful job ensuring that Notre Dame has been restored to its full level of glory, and even more so, it will be a very special day for all.
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00:34:06.000Well, now to a thing that I don't like either the Biden administration or actually the Trump administration They agree on it.
00:34:11.000And frankly, I think that they are both wrong.
00:34:13.000To understand why I think they are both wrong...
00:34:15.000We have to understand what China is doing on the world stage.
00:34:17.000So China is flooding the world with cheap goods subsidized by debt right now.
00:34:22.000According to the Wall Street Journal, a deluge of cheap Chinese goods washing over the developing world is jacking up tensions between China and the global south, complicating Beijing's plans to build alliances as it confronts escalating train tensions with the United States.
00:34:34.000Beijing is hoping to unload more of its excess factory production to developing world countries from Indonesia to Pakistan to Brazil.
00:34:42.000There are a lot of countries that are worried about China undercutting their manufacturing base right now.
00:34:46.000China also is retaliating against the United States by banning rare mineral exports to the United States.
00:34:54.000They're apparently going to begin banning that export as an escalation of the trade war between the world's two biggest powers, according to The New York Times.
00:35:01.000That move comes a day after the Biden administration tightened Chinese access to advanced American technology.
00:35:07.000The ban signals Beijing's willingness to engage in supply chain warfare by blocking the export of important components used to make valuable products like weaponry and semiconductors.
00:35:14.000Sales of gallium, germanium, antimony, and so-called superhard materials to the United States would be halted immediately on the grounds they have a dual military and civilian use.
00:35:23.000The export of graphite would also be subject to stricter review.
00:35:27.000So again, China is attempting to cut down on the ability of the United States to obtain materials that are necessary in manufacturing.
00:35:35.000China has been supplying 54% of the germanium used by the United States that is typically used in infrared technology as well as fiber optics.
00:35:43.000We also have not mined our own gallium used in semiconductors since 1987. Japan supplies 26% of our imports of gallium.
00:36:39.000Now, Donald Trump has said he doesn't want it either.
00:36:41.000He put out a statement yesterday saying, quote, I am totally against the once great and powerful U.S. steel being bought by a foreign company, in this case, Nipon Steel of Japan.
00:36:48.000Through a series of tax incentives and tariffs, we will make U.S. steel strong and great again, and it will happen fast.
00:36:53.000As president, I will block this deal from happening.
00:37:19.000And in fact, if Nipon Steel is unable to buy U.S. Steel, a bunch of plants in the United States are going to simply close because Nipon Steel is going to invest a bunch of new resources that are simply not available right now.
00:37:31.000And tariffs are not going to solve that problem because it turns out that the United States is a massive net importer of steel.
00:37:40.000In fact, U.S. Steel is not one of the contracting entities, for example, for the United States military, when it comes to the use of steel.
00:37:48.000As the Foundation for Economic Education points out, when U.S. Steel was formed through a merger in 1901, the United States was the global leader in steel.
00:37:56.000In recent decades, however, U.S. Steel has fallen behind its competitors, including foreign companies and even domestic companies like Nucor.
00:38:03.000U.S. Steel faces a number of problems.
00:38:31.000It ranks 27th in the world in crude steel output.
00:38:35.000So, Nipon Steel, first of all, Japan is an ally of the United States.
00:38:39.000Second of all, Nipon Steel was going to introduce technology to U.S. Steel that allows the company to produce the highest quality products for automotive construction and other industries.
00:38:48.000And the sort of bizarre attempt to block Japan from owning assets in the United States in order to make those assets more efficient to create more American jobs is strange.
00:38:57.000We're not talking about China owning U.S. Steel here.
00:39:01.000The Defense Department doesn't even contract with U.S. Steel.
00:39:04.000And in fact, the Department of Defense is not like a defense industry.
00:39:08.000The Department of Defense needs apparently, according to Scott Lincecum and Alfredo Carrillo-Obrego of the Cato Institute, the Department of Defense needs just 3% of domestic steel production to meet its procurement obligations.
00:39:26.000It's a sop to some of the unions, presumably.
00:39:29.000But it is not, in fact, a smart economic play, and it makes these industries significantly more inefficient at cost to American taxpayers and consumers.
00:39:42.000The CEO of U.S. Steel himself, David Burrett, has said that.
00:39:47.000Nipon Steel was pledging to invest $3 billion in the Pittsburgh company's older mills to revamp them.
00:39:54.000And if that doesn't happen, they're just going to shut those steel mills down.
00:39:59.000So you can see, again, for political reasons why there would be so much focus on U.S. Steel because it is a company called U.S. Steel with a historic pedigree.
00:40:06.000But the pedigree don't pay the bills in the morning.
00:40:11.000Again, steel represents just about 1% of total goods imported into the United States, according to the U.S. Trade Representative.
00:40:17.000So I don't think it's a particularly smart move.
00:40:19.000I think that making the West less economically efficient in the face of Chinese predations is not a smart move.
00:40:24.000You can see the same thing happening, by the way, in the EU. The EU is destroying its own car industry.
00:40:29.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Europe's carmakers used to rule the world.
00:40:33.000Now they're fighting battles on every single front.
00:40:35.000At home, tougher emissions rules are forcing them to sell more electric vehicles, which are less profitable.
00:40:42.000The turmoil is leading to thousands of job losses and risks, inflicting further damage on Europe's economy.
00:40:46.000The automotive industry accounts for 7% of GDP in the EU, which is a very, very large chunk.
00:40:58.000An enormous number of these industries in Europe are getting hurt by domestic regulation and unwillingness to recognize economic efficiencies.
00:41:08.000Bringing that to the United States for political reasons would be a rather large-scale mistake.
00:41:12.000Joining us online is Mary Margaret Olihan.
00:41:14.000She's senior reporter for The Daily Wire and the author of D-Trans, True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult.
00:41:24.000So obviously the oral arguments have begun in the Supreme Court case of United States versus Scrumetti.
00:41:30.000What are we expecting from the oral arguments?
00:41:32.000Well, what I've been hearing from people on the right is that they're very hopeful about how these arguments are going to go.
00:41:39.000And not just in light of the recent election in which we saw so many Americans come out and support Donald Trump because of the transgender culture wars, but also based on the case itself.
00:41:50.000You know, Ben, I'm sure you know that this case centers around a Tennessee law protecting kids from irreversible transgender interventions.
00:41:57.000The merits of this case, the justices are going to be evaluating specifically whether it counts as sex discrimination to allow some kids to get testosterone if they're boys or estrogen if they're girls and not to allow kids to get these hormones if they're undergoing transgender interventions.
00:42:15.000What I'm hearing from pro-family advocates on the right is that it's looking really good as far as these cases are concerned.
00:42:24.000So obviously there are a bunch of votes that are sort of up for grabs.
00:42:28.000Chief Justice John Roberts is always a little bit squirrely.
00:42:31.000Justice Neil Gorsuch famously wrote the Bostock opinion, which suggested that sex discrimination might apply to men who behave in traditionally female ways or vice versa.
00:42:40.000Is there any trepidation about, for example, Justice Gorsuch on this one?
00:42:45.000Well, I've been asking some legal experts around here, and the common refrain that you hear is, well, we can't predict what the justices will say.
00:42:52.000But again, the sentiment is very positive when it comes to this case.
00:42:57.000And I think when you look, Ben, at the people on the left here, specifically the ACLU, the Biden DOJ, there's a lot of fear and trepidation about how this case will go.
00:43:06.000The ACLU is sending their trans-identifying lawyer to argue this case before the court and there's been a lot of background and backlash among the ACLU lawyers specifically about this woman who identifies as a man because they're afraid that she's more interested in protecting and furthering transgender rights than protecting legal precedent as it pertains to As they say, as it pertains to gay rights themselves.
00:43:32.000So there's a lot of drama going on here, and I'm excited to see how it goes.
00:43:37.000So obviously, one of the big questions here is just how large this decision will be.
00:43:43.000It could theoretically be rather restrictive, but could also be a pretty broad decision.
00:43:50.000I mean, we're talking about trans-identifying children all over the country.
00:43:55.000We know that they're not actually trans-identifying children.
00:43:57.000They're actually children who are really in need of help, in need of loving families to help and guide them to adulthood, where they can make decisions for themselves.
00:44:06.000And we hope they'll choose decisions that will protect the dignity of all life.
00:44:10.000But these are families that are coming to the court and are asking the court to decide that all over the country, parents can transition their children before they reach the age of consent.
00:44:20.000And we know, Ben, across the board, these are kids suffering with This is not a decision that they should be making on their own.
00:44:27.000And so I was speaking with Chloe Cole.
00:44:29.000She's a detransitioner, one of the most outspoken.
00:44:32.000She told me that this case means everything to her.
00:44:35.000She did not get the help that she needed when she was attempting a gender transition.
00:44:41.000And she wants this case to defend kids all over the country and to make a line in the sand, draw a line in the sand and show American families this is how you protect your children.
00:44:51.000Don't be duped by these activist doctors and lawmakers.
00:44:54.000So, Mary Margaret, what exactly is the timeline here?
00:44:57.000You have oral arguments, then there could be a delay before the decision, obviously.
00:45:02.000So we're not expecting a decision immediately.
00:45:04.000But we're hopefully getting one, of course, by the end of the term.
00:45:09.000And like I was saying earlier, Ben, there's a lot of legal experts on the right that are telling me they're really hopeful and they're really excited.
00:45:16.000So we can't guess what the justices are going to rule.
00:45:20.000But I can tell you that this is going to be a very impactful decision.
00:45:25.000It's going to impact children all over the country.
00:45:27.000And the ACLU, I think, is banking a lot on this decision because they know that it will impact their organization and their narrative and their rhetoric about hateful Republicans, about hateful laws, what they call anti-trans legislation.
00:45:42.000It's harming trans youth, so-called banning care.