The Charlie Kirk Show - August 18, 2020


Universal Mail-In Voting, Critical Race Theory, and the Left's Assault on the Rule of Law w- Law Professor John Yoo


Episode Stats


Length

31 minutes

Words per minute

181.792

Word count

5,681

Sentence count

359

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Jon Yu is a professor at the People s Republic of Berkeley and author of 'Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power.' He's also the author of a new book, 'Defend the Constitution: How to Protect the Rule of Law from Mass Mail-in Ballot Referendum' and has been involved in the controversial recount of the 2000 presidential election.

Transcript

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Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
00:00:02.000 Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:09.000 What a night at the Democrat National Convention.
00:00:12.000 I encourage you to listen to our sister episode where we take down Michelle Obama, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Cuomo, and so much more.
00:00:19.000 We have a great legal expert with us today.
00:00:21.000 We talk about mail-in voting, critical race theory, an assault to the rule of law, and so much more.
00:00:27.000 His name is John Yu.
00:00:29.000 From University of California, Berkeley.
00:00:31.000 He loves his country, loves the Constitution.
00:00:32.000 We're honored to have him with us today.
00:00:34.000 Please consider supporting our program at charliekirk.com slash support.
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00:00:51.000 John Yu is here, everybody.
00:00:53.000 Buckle up.
00:00:54.000 Here we go.
00:00:55.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:56.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:59.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:01:02.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:01:05.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:01:06.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:01:07.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:01:09.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:16.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:24.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:28.000 Hey, everybody.
00:01:29.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:32.000 Honored to have with us today a first-time guest, John Yu, who is a professor at University of California, Berkeley, but may I say one of the more enlightened individuals in the place, People's Republic of Berkeley.
00:01:44.000 He has a terrific book out there, Defender in Chief, Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power.
00:01:50.000 I highly recommend you go check it out and get a copy.
00:01:53.000 And we look forward to learning from John throughout this podcast.
00:01:55.000 John, thanks so much for joining us.
00:01:57.000 Charlie, like I like to say, longtime listener, first-nine guest.
00:02:02.000 Well, thank you very much.
00:02:03.000 I am honored, and I enjoy your commentary.
00:02:06.000 And your writing in particular has been so clear when lawlessness seems to be so pervasive.
00:02:12.000 Let's start with the controversy around mail-in ballots.
00:02:15.000 We were just talking right before our program here.
00:02:17.000 You were involved in the Bush versus Gore recount in Florida.
00:02:21.000 I think it was 537 or 527 votes that determined the president.
00:02:24.000 You would know the number.
00:02:26.000 And it was a legal nightmare.
00:02:28.000 Some people are afraid that we might have that happen again.
00:02:31.000 Can you just give us some of your history and background with that and some of the concerns you have with mass mail-in voting?
00:02:37.000 Yeah, Charlie.
00:02:37.000 Well, of course, Florida 2000 was about mail-in, but the legal issue at stake there is going to multiply all across the country if states go to complete mail-in balloting.
00:02:49.000 And the way to think of it is this.
00:02:51.000 I was a law professor back in the late 1990s, and I'd written an article I thought was obscure at the time, which was federal judicial court control or not over states.
00:03:04.000 This was not considered an exciting topic back then, but then Florida 2000 happened.
00:03:09.000 And the way to think of it is what happened.
00:03:12.000 The reason the Supreme Court stopped the counting and recounting of all these ballots. 0.53
00:03:17.000 Remember the Chads. 1.00
00:03:18.000 You might remember John Bolton was one of those Chad observers back then. 0.55
00:03:23.000 That's where people first heard of Bolton.
00:03:25.000 Roger Stone was there too.
00:03:27.000 He was screaming outside.
00:03:28.000 He was by shooting a few holes in the ballots while he was at it.
00:03:31.000 But the reason it stopped it was this.
00:03:35.000 Elections in our country under the Constitution are the job of states.
00:03:39.000 There's always the backup of the federal government if the states don't do their job.
00:03:44.000 And what Florida was doing was that it was allowing each county to apply a different standard to what was a valid vote versus not a valid vote.
00:03:53.000 See, think about that.
00:03:55.000 And the country as a whole, if counties start having different rules about what counts as a mailed-in ballot that's legitimate and a mailed-in ballot that's not legitimate, for example, here's one justice.
00:04:05.000 When does it have to be postmarked by?
00:04:07.000 When does it have to be received by?
00:04:09.000 Under Bush versus Gore, if a state allows counties to have different standards, that's a violation of the right of the candidate Donald Trump.
00:04:18.000 And so what you could see is all these counties applying whatever standard they feel like, trying to do it for advantage so that Biden wins the election here or Trump wins the election there.
00:04:28.000 And Trump's going to have to sue all of these states to say, no, there has to be one standard.
00:04:34.000 Say it all has to be received by the state by the election day, or it has to be postmarked by a certain day, but it has to be the same standard.
00:04:41.000 You can imagine if it's, that's the future of having the election in person all on the same day, all at the same time.
00:04:49.000 Mail-in allows for this kind of abuse where votes are going to mean different things in different places in the country.
00:04:55.000 That's what the Supreme Court said in 2000 when it said, Florida, you have to stop counting because counties are cheating.
00:05:02.000 And you could see that happening, but all across the country now, not just in Palm Beach County in Florida.
00:05:08.000 Yeah, so if I can ask an obvious question for myself, the answer is not obvious, but I think it would be obvious to you.
00:05:14.000 Is the federal government able to set any standards at all to how votes are counted?
00:05:18.000 I mean, at least citizens, for example, right? 0.89
00:05:21.000 I mean, non-citizens can't vote.
00:05:23.000 Where is that line drawn exactly? 0.99
00:05:25.000 So two ways.
00:05:26.000 One is in the Constitution itself.
00:05:28.000 It says states are the ones that set the time, place, and manner of elections, but subject to being overruled by Congress.
00:05:37.000 So the federal government can step in, pass a law, and say elections have to be run a certain way.
00:05:43.000 Mail-in votes have to be counted a certain way.
00:05:46.000 The second way is the federal courts, because a candidate's right to a fair election is being violated.
00:05:54.000 The rights of the voters to having their vote count equally with another mail-in ballot, they also have a constitutional right.
00:06:02.000 They can sue in court the voters and the candidates and get a court to enter, a federal court, a judge to intervene in a state election, and the state, I'm sorry, the state running an election if the courts think it's unfair.
00:06:15.000 And we used to think courts would never do that.
00:06:18.000 But Florida 2000, Bush versus Bohr, was a good example where the court said what the counties were doing there was so outrageous that they were going to intervene and take over the standard for counting the ballots.
00:06:31.000 So what potentially could be happening then is every state has a different way of doing mail-in voting this November, right?
00:06:38.000 So as we are seeing sometimes some projections out there, say 10 to 15 to 20 percent, even upwards of 30 percent of the population could be doing mail-in voting.
00:06:48.000 Each state then has to decide exactly how that is counted.
00:06:51.000 This is going to be a legal disaster, right?
00:06:54.000 I mean, the Joe Biden campaign has 600 attorneys, I think, retained, and that's just the beginning of some of the lawyer army.
00:07:02.000 Can you walk through how these, how confusing this can be and how big the stakes are on the legal side of this?
00:07:11.000 Well, think about this, as we saw in Florida, unless the election results are clear in the battleground states, the election results themselves may not be known on that Tuesday in November because you're going to have litigation.
00:07:26.000 You have lawyers pouring over all the ballots, the mail-in ballots.
00:07:30.000 They're going to fight over whether they've been signed or not.
00:07:32.000 They're going to fight about when they were received or not and how they got there.
00:07:37.000 There's going to be litigation on that.
00:07:38.000 So a lot of those mail-in ballots may not be counted right away.
00:07:42.000 It would go days and days and days after the election, which means just like in Bush versus Gore, we may not know who won the election for weeks and weeks after the thing is over.
00:07:53.000 So that's just one possibility.
00:07:55.000 Then the second possibility is what if there's fraud?
00:07:59.000 What if people are collecting ballots and faking them?
00:08:02.000 Or what if they're paying people?
00:08:04.000 You can think of all the kinds of abuse that might go on.
00:08:07.000 Ballot stuffing could easily go on because of mail.
00:08:11.000 And here's another example Trump lawyers could sue about, which is how did you prove that that ballot actually was cast by that person?
00:08:21.000 You multiply that by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people.
00:08:24.000 How are you going to have enough time to check them all?
00:08:27.000 So I think this could mean, suppose this happens in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and those, suppose they're close again like they were four years ago, and there's irregularities at the county level, then you could see Trump and Biden both suing, and that could throw the election result into doubt.
00:08:46.000 And it might take, you might remember Florida 2000, we didn't have actually a final end to it until the middle of December.
00:08:56.000 I mean, it would be...
00:08:57.000 Or wanted it to keep going.
00:08:59.000 Yes.
00:09:00.000 And it was the Supreme Court that finally stepped in and I believe and finally put an end to it after the national legal circus.
00:09:08.000 And if I remember correctly, some news networks called Gore as the president-elect on election night.
00:09:14.000 I could be misremembering that.
00:09:16.000 I was seven years old.
00:09:19.000 Well, it's good.
00:09:20.000 It was good you don't remember it too well.
00:09:21.000 It was so crazy.
00:09:23.000 But what happened actually was some networks called it for Bush.
00:09:27.000 Well, some networks called it Florida for Gore.
00:09:29.000 Then they switched.
00:09:30.000 And then Gore refused to concede.
00:09:33.000 He was on his way to concede.
00:09:35.000 And then at the last minute, he refused to and plunged us.
00:09:38.000 Because in the end, it turned out that Florida, we counted actually all the votes afterwards.
00:09:43.000 It turned out that Florida had voted for Bush.
00:09:46.000 Yeah, and I'm afraid that we might be headed to another legal fight.
00:09:50.000 Could we talk more broadly about the assault on the rule of law?
00:09:53.000 It seems right now that there's a kind of a collision right now between two different types of ways to interpret the Constitution, the more textualist interpretation or the more judicial activist interpretation.
00:10:09.000 And it seems it depends on what circuit you're in and what city you're in.
00:10:14.000 And the laws almost seem as if they're completely and totally different than the same country.
00:10:19.000 I know a lot of our listeners are outraged.
00:10:21.000 It seems as if there's a complete and total double standard as the application of law.
00:10:25.000 What's your analysis of this, especially in the last couple months?
00:10:28.000 A great example would be the early release of prisoners in California, 18,000 people being let out of prison, yet pastors are being threatened to be arrested all across the state of California.
00:10:40.000 What is your thought on the kind of the assault of the core fabric or the rule of law in our country?
00:10:44.000 Well, the most obvious one, I think, is the treatment of Donald Trump.
00:10:48.000 And you mentioned I have this book out, Defender in Chief, about Donald Trump's constitutional fights.
00:10:54.000 I originally was a Trump skeptic four years ago, but I saw what the people who hated him so much, they wanted to bring him down so badly.
00:11:03.000 They were willing to, as you say, twist the rule of law in order to get him.
00:11:08.000 And I'll say, I'll give you some examples.
00:11:11.000 It's his opponents, not Trump, that wants to get rid of the Electoral College, the way we've picked presidents for over 220 years.
00:11:17.000 It's his opponents who talk about stuffing, you know, packing the Supreme Court with six new justices, which would be a direct assault on the rule of law, changing the number of judges just until you get the outcome you want.
00:11:29.000 We've talked about impeaching Brett Kavanaugh after he's already gotten on the court.
00:11:34.000 Who talk about independent counsels who are going to criminalize our politics and use investigations against political enemies, who want to nationalize the energy and transportation sectors for a grand new deal?
00:11:46.000 So that's just one area is the way people on the other side want to pull down all these constitutional rules we have used to govern ourselves, I think quite successfully for 200 years, just to get President Trump.
00:12:01.000 That's an assault on the rule of law.
00:12:03.000 And then the other thing, directly, there's some of the examples you mentioned then.
00:12:06.000 At the state level, you have governors and mayors who are directly trying to resist constitutional orders, federal orders.
00:12:17.000 To give you an example, the disorder in our cities.
00:12:21.000 Cities and states are the ones who are in charge of public health and safety.
00:12:25.000 But you have mayors in Portland and Seattle who are refusing to do their duty, who sometimes themselves are part of the mob, who are attacking federal buildings.
00:12:34.000 It's a rare thing, but unfortunately, Washington, D.C. has to send in law enforcement or even troops into these cities in order to restore the rule of law.
00:12:43.000 I actually, the only two times I can think of cases where city and state leaders stepped aside and just let lawlessness reign.
00:12:52.000 One was in desegregation when the Southerners fought the Supreme Court's decision of Brown versus Board of Education.
00:13:00.000 The other one was the Ku Klux Klan right after the Civil War.
00:13:04.000 Mayors, governors just stepped back and let these groups attack the freed slaves.
00:13:08.000 And Ulysses S. Grant actually had to send troops into the South to restore law and order.
00:13:13.000 I think that's a direct assault.
00:13:15.000 And I think that's a direct assault on the rule of law.
00:13:19.000 And I think, unfortunately, you don't want to see it all the time, but unfortunately, federal law enforcement have to come in and restore because for the rights of the inhabitants of those cities.
00:13:29.000 Yeah, and it's so incredibly Orwellian because they say that Trump is attacking the rule of law.
00:13:34.000 And I say he's upholding the rule of law.
00:13:39.000 You have Portland burning for 80 days straight.
00:13:41.000 You'd think there'd be some involvement, some need to bring in federal assistance.
00:13:45.000 One legal question I have, John, and maybe you can help me walk through this, is I don't like executive orders very much, to be honest with you, especially executive orders that I think centralize power too much.
00:13:58.000 And maybe you might have a different opinion of this because you wrote a whole book on it.
00:14:03.000 Specifically, I'm talking about the recent executive order about the unemployment benefits and the checks to Americans and the stimulus checks.
00:14:11.000 Let me be more clear.
00:14:12.000 I do like executive orders if I believe that they're consistent within the executive authority.
00:14:17.000 I'm not sure if this one is or not.
00:14:19.000 I think it's brilliant politically, and I support the president.
00:14:22.000 I'm just afraid that under a future liberal administration, which is inevitably going to happen sometime in the future of our country, they can reappropriate funding under some emergency clause of climate change or something to put forth their agenda.
00:14:36.000 Can you explain this recent executive order that the president put forward, why it's constitutional, what gives him the right to do it?
00:14:44.000 He referenced the DACA decision.
00:14:46.000 I could use some clarity on that.
00:14:48.000 A smart question, very smart question, and something people should be worried about because you don't want President Biden saying, I'm going to issue executive orders to stop global warming, as some people suggested during the Democratic presidential campaign, nomination campaign.
00:15:05.000 So actually, this is part of the reason I wrote my book was because if you were just listening to the regular media, read the newspapers, you would think President Trump had just seized the power of Congress and upset the constitutional order.
00:15:21.000 But if you actually look at what he did, he only suspended the payroll tax.
00:15:26.000 He didn't say he was going to forgive it.
00:15:30.000 He only spent money that Congress had already appropriated for the extension of the benefits.
00:15:38.000 If you look carefully, all of this was in the CARES Act.
00:15:41.000 Now, I think maybe Congress rushed to judgment in passing the stimulus programs.
00:15:46.000 Maybe they went too far.
00:15:47.000 Maybe they spent too much money.
00:15:49.000 But actually, Congress said to the president, if you want to, you can postpone the collection of taxes.
00:15:55.000 In fact, that's why we all paid our taxes in July and not in April this year.
00:15:58.000 That's very interesting.
00:15:59.000 Yeah.
00:16:00.000 And so actually, Congress gave him that authority.
00:16:02.000 Same with the unemployment benefits.
00:16:04.000 If the president declares a national emergency, which everyone was saying, even if you listen to Biden and Pelosi, he didn't call it fast enough.
00:16:12.000 Then he's allowed to access these billions of dollars that Congress and the CARES Act just put into the pot.
00:16:20.000 Now, compare that to what President Obama did in DACA.
00:16:23.000 I'm glad you mentioned DACA.
00:16:25.000 I think actually President Obama represented a sharp break with the way presidents had done executive orders in the past.
00:16:32.000 For the first time, President Obama said, I don't like the immigration laws.
00:16:37.000 Congress did pass them. 0.97
00:16:38.000 Congress does have the power of immigration, but I don't think it's fair to the 2 million dreamers. 1.00
00:16:45.000 So he issued what he called under his prosecutorial discretion, he issued an order just saying they're all free to stay. 1.00
00:16:53.000 I'm not going to enforce the law.
00:16:56.000 Presidents used to issue executive orders to explain how they would enforce the law, how they're going to carry out what Congress wants to do when they pass a criminal statute, for example.
00:17:08.000 I think President Obama is the first president in history who just said, and this is so different than Trump, right?
00:17:12.000 Trump is just carrying out Congress's delegation.
00:17:16.000 Here, President Obama said, yeah, I have a duty to carry out the laws.
00:17:20.000 That's what the chief executive power is to execute the laws.
00:17:22.000 But here he said, I just disagree with those laws, so I'm not going to do it.
00:17:26.000 That's really the sharp break.
00:17:28.000 That's really the seizure of constitutional power.
00:17:30.000 So the thing I find ironic is you have all these liberals attacking Trump for what we've just been talking about, the extension of unemployment or the suspension of peril taxes.
00:17:41.000 I didn't hear any of them attacking President Obama for DACA.
00:17:45.000 And if they were going to be consistent, they ought to be against both, but they're not.
00:17:49.000 You said that very well because even I looked at it and I said, how does he get the power to do this?
00:17:54.000 And I'm sure there was someone in the White House Counsel's office that designed it, of course, under an interpretation.
00:18:00.000 But the way you just described it is really perfect because it was appropriated by Congress to be able to suspend taxes and reallocate already allocated monies.
00:18:08.000 It wasn't as if President Trump, you know, all of a sudden said, I have the power of the purse.
00:18:12.000 I'm able to decide that we are going to allocate money as if it originates.
00:18:17.000 All spending bills must originate in Congress.
00:18:19.000 I think in the House, if I'm not mistaken, constitutionally.
00:18:22.000 And so the press or you listen to the news because they won't just assume Trump is, I guess, part of the story.
00:18:29.000 It's the Trump's critics who are the ones who are really misrepresenting what's in the Constitution.
00:18:35.000 They're the ones that are saying that he is the one that is assuming all this power.
00:18:39.000 And in reality, they're the ones that have been the ones doing it previously.
00:18:43.000 I want to get into critical race theory.
00:18:45.000 This is something that is very pervasive amongst the kind of academic circles.
00:18:51.000 What is your take on this?
00:18:53.000 Do you get questions about this ever amongst some of your peers at Berkeley?
00:18:57.000 And kind of the new idea of law now is it should try to be blind.
00:19:04.000 A lot of people believe justice should not be blind, but instead that the rule of law is kind of needs to be put aside and the preferences of trying to rearrange society as they see fit should be the primary concern.
00:19:14.000 Charlie, you're some kind of troublemaker trying to get me fired, aren't you?
00:19:18.000 Yeah. 0.97
00:19:20.000 No.
00:19:22.000 Look, you know, all these things we're seeing around the country now, 1619 project, the claim American society is fundamentally oppressive and racist.
00:19:33.000 You know, the claims for reordering of our economy.
00:19:38.000 Everybody in the country now is like Berkeley.
00:19:40.000 It's like, welcome.
00:19:41.000 I see that's like, welcome home.
00:19:43.000 You know, welcome to my colleague.
00:19:44.000 So funny.
00:19:45.000 You've been fighting this fight for much longer.
00:19:47.000 You guys, now you see what's really been going on for the last 20 years on the college campuses.
00:19:47.000 I know.
00:19:53.000 You know, it's our old hat.
00:19:55.000 And so part of this idea is that American, this is the critical race theory.
00:20:00.000 And I completely disagree with it.
00:20:02.000 The idea of critical race theory is that American society is structurally and fundamentally racist.
00:20:09.000 That you and I, even if we don't know it, we're being racist.
00:20:13.000 There's nothing we can do about it.
00:20:15.000 It's sort of hardwired into us.
00:20:17.000 And so then extreme measures must be taken to root it out. 0.74
00:20:21.000 And so, as you say, affirmative action in our universities is a great example.
00:20:26.000 None of the people, very few, if any, of the people benefiting from affirmative action now are the ones who suffered the harms of segregation or of slavery.
00:20:36.000 If there are some still left, then they have a right to some kind of remedy.
00:20:40.000 But most of the people today, right, those are not those people.
00:20:44.000 Why should they get any kind of extra benefit compared to other people?
00:20:50.000 That is judging people on the basis of their skin color.
00:20:54.000 I think that's fundamentally immoral.
00:20:57.000 But critical race theorists think we're all racists.
00:21:00.000 So if we're all racist, what's wrong with using race to benefit your side rather than their side?
00:21:05.000 It's really a grab for political power rather than really an effort to make up for past racial injustices, I think, because many of the people who are in the country now had nothing to do with slavery or Jim Crow, or in fact, might have, you know, some of them may be the descendants of people who put an end to those terrible rules.
00:21:29.000 So that's what I actually think it's in some ways very Marxist in origin because Marxists think that a lot of society's traditions and institutions are really instruments of oppression by some kind of powerful elite that doesn't want the common person to have their fair chance.
00:21:54.000 Look, I'm an immigrant.
00:21:55.000 My parents are immigrants.
00:21:56.000 I was an immigrant to this country.
00:21:58.000 If American society was so bad and so racist, why are tens upon tens of millions of people waiting in line to get in?
00:22:06.000 The reason why is because no matter what Americans' historical sins are, we've corrected for them.
00:22:11.000 There's what other country would willingly commit to the Declaration of Independence and try to make society better all the time and has succeeded in making itself better to the point where I think if you're you know if you're a minority, it's way better to be here than most other places in the world.
00:22:29.000 And that's why if people think it's such a racist country, you don't see them trying to move to Mexico or China or France.
00:22:36.000 All the people in the world want to come here because it is objectively much better here.
00:22:41.000 No, that's exactly right.
00:22:42.000 And I'm not trying to get you in trouble.
00:22:43.000 I think you articulated it perfectly.
00:22:45.000 No, no, I've got tenure, but you want to test the limits of it.
00:22:49.000 Fine by me.
00:22:50.000 No, it's so funny.
00:22:51.000 It's so funny because you said something that I can resonate with.
00:22:55.000 You say, yeah, when people are like, what's happening to our country?
00:22:58.000 I'm like, the whole country has become a college campus.
00:23:00.000 Now you see what I have to deal with whenever I go and visit.
00:23:03.000 People are afraid to hear the other side.
00:23:05.000 It's all about critical race theory and postmodern ideas and lifting up these ridiculous, deconstructionist, disintegrationist philosophies.
00:23:14.000 And it's just so incredibly pernicious if it's not challenged.
00:23:18.000 So kind of looking at the landscape, can you comment in the couple minutes we have remaining on how President Trump, and you talk about this in your book, the significance of what he's done through the circuit courts, Ninth Circuit Court, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, the amount of justices and the type of justices that he has instituted.
00:23:37.000 This is something I don't think gets talked about enough.
00:23:40.000 You understand the law extraordinarily well.
00:23:43.000 For our listeners, can you help fill them in on how historic the president has been on this specific issue?
00:23:49.000 First, remember that when President Trump ran against Hillary Clinton, there was a vacancy on the Supreme Court caused by the death of Justice Scalia.
00:23:58.000 And just imagine what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had gotten to fill that seat.
00:24:03.000 There are already four solid justices who are liberal on the court who always vote together.
00:24:09.000 And they fundamentally believe that the courts should be an engine for progressive social change, who want to achieve all those goals of all the postmodernists you were just talking about.
00:24:21.000 That is the best description I've heard.
00:24:23.000 I have to say, I want you to finish, but an engine for progressive social change, the courts.
00:24:29.000 Because if you're a critical race theorist and you think society is structurally racist, well, then the courts should be used to pull us out of it.
00:24:29.000 That's perfect.
00:24:39.000 So remember, for first, so one thing is just by denying that to Hillary Clinton, Trump already had won half the game.
00:24:46.000 But then he filled it with Neil Gorsuch, and then he filled a new opening with Brett Kavanaugh.
00:24:52.000 The actual reason the court is not being as strongly conservative as we would like is because of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has been voting a lot with liberals lately.
00:25:02.000 But that also ignores, as you said, Charlie, what's going in the lower courts?
00:25:06.000 You know, most cases never get to the Supreme Court.
00:25:09.000 They only hear about 60, 70 cases a year.
00:25:11.000 Most of the law in the country is made by the courts right beneath them, what we call the circuit courts, the appellate courts.
00:25:17.000 And Trump, I have to say, I've been involved with Republican administrations and Republicans in Congress.
00:25:23.000 I worked in Congress too, for, you know, since Bush versus, since before Bush versus Gore, I have not seen a Republican president appoint such a deep bench of conservative superstars as Trump has.
00:25:36.000 He way outdoes George W. Bush and President Reagan.
00:25:40.000 And so think about it.
00:25:41.000 That's the bench for the next set of Supreme Court justices.
00:25:45.000 Those are the ones who are going to develop the theories that will be applied, conservative theories that will be applied in the future.
00:25:50.000 And Trump, I think Trump has a record that surpasses any president in American history trying to appoint judges who believe the Constitution should be based on what those who ratified it and wrote it thought, and that the role of the judiciary should be a modest one.
00:26:09.000 I totally agree.
00:26:10.000 It's transformational.
00:26:12.000 I mean, just the Ninth Circuit came out recently because of President Trump's appointments on ammunition capacity, saying that ammunition limits of more than 10 rounds are unconstitutional.
00:26:22.000 The Ninth Circuit, I mean, if you try to judge shop and go around and try to find a judge to fit your, you know, your agenda, you usually would go to the Ninth Circuit.
00:26:33.000 That's like candyland for social justice, right?
00:26:36.000 I mean, you couldn't think of a better place to try to change the, you know, change America in their image.
00:26:41.000 Now, the social, you know, the social insurrectionists, they don't want, they're like, I don't know, the Ninth Circuit, it might not be the best place for us because of President Trump.
00:26:50.000 Can you just talk more about your book?
00:26:52.000 Tease it a little.
00:26:53.000 Yeah, please.
00:26:54.000 Yeah.
00:26:55.000 Four years, Trump has just brought the courts into a rough balance.
00:27:00.000 If he were to win a second term, then the courts would be really, really remade into conservative, you know, really conservative courts.
00:27:10.000 Right now, with the magazine decision, got kind of lucky in the assignment of judges.
00:27:15.000 It's even, even mostly, in most of the country.
00:27:18.000 It would take a second term to really lock in those gains.
00:27:22.000 Well, and that's everyone listening to this, that is just reason enough to go get President Trump re-elected is the rule of law and judges.
00:27:29.000 That's my children's children that will live under the implications of these decisions for generations to come.
00:27:35.000 Can you just tease your book a little bit more?
00:27:37.000 We'd love to continue to drive traffic to it.
00:27:40.000 Anything we didn't talk about, just some of the big ideas you argued for, and you talked about why you wrote it, but I just would love to have you comment more on your book.
00:27:49.000 Thanks.
00:27:49.000 Just really quickly, what I tried to think of was to tie together all the fights President Trump's been having over these last four years and try to take a step back and explain the sort of bigger constitutional fight that's going on.
00:28:02.000 And what I think it is, and people could disagree, but what I think it is, is if you look at impeachment, if you look at the Mueller report, if you look at some of the things we've been talking about, what you have is the 20th century's progressive government put into place by FDR and LBJ, and then Obama is sort of at the highest point, is fighting to resist the people's ability to control the government by electing a president that then takes command.
00:28:32.000 So think about the Mueller report.
00:28:35.000 Think about Russia collusion.
00:28:36.000 It's really an effort by the bureaucracy that doesn't want to be controlled, that thinks that it has the right to decide who's fit to be president or not.
00:28:45.000 It thinks that it should be independent, that they're experts.
00:28:48.000 They don't want to be controlled.
00:28:50.000 Our Constitution that the framers created in the 18th century was we elect the president, we elect members of Congress, and they control the government.
00:28:58.000 That's the way the people control the government is through, there can't be any independent technical experts.
00:29:05.000 But if you saw, that's what happened with the collusion investigation.
00:29:08.000 That's what happened with impeachment, right?
00:29:09.000 This was the Foreign Service was revolting against an elected president.
00:29:13.000 And so I think that's the theme.
00:29:15.000 And maybe that also, you know, you hear some people saying, what's Trump's second term agenda?
00:29:19.000 I think that might be the agenda, which is, okay, he's been fighting defense for four years against this sprawling bureaucracy.
00:29:25.000 If he wins re-election, he can finish the job of making sure we the people, through the president, through our members of Congress, control what our government does rather than the government controlling what we do.
00:29:39.000 That is true representative government.
00:29:41.000 And that is really said, really well said.
00:29:43.000 The book is Defender in Chief by John Yu.
00:29:46.000 John, we really enjoyed having you on the Charlie Kirk show here.
00:29:50.000 Thank you for making the time.
00:29:51.000 And I'll have to come visit you in Berkeley.
00:29:53.000 I'll have to come with a small group of protectors and security, but we'll have to come visit you in Berkeley.
00:29:59.000 But thank you for all that you do and your incredibly wise commentary for the Constitution and for our country.
00:30:05.000 Oh, thanks, Charlie.
00:30:07.000 And anytime next, when you come, let me know.
00:30:09.000 So at least I'll take you to dinner after you're done getting beaten up and fighting your way out of Sprout Plaza.
00:30:15.000 Yeah, exactly right.
00:30:16.000 Well, thank you so much, John.
00:30:18.000 We really appreciate it.
00:30:18.000 God bless you.
00:30:19.000 Thank you.
00:30:20.000 Thanks.
00:30:23.000 Thank you guys so much for listening.
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00:31:12.000 Thank you guys so much for listening.
00:31:14.000 God bless.