00:00:48.920So what was your reaction when FIFA tried to steal that World Cup game away from us?
00:00:54.680Yeah, no, I mean, I've been obviously watching the coverage for, you know, I can't even sleep. I'm so, because Pele, right, was kicking it with his head. I'll tell you, man, I am so black-pilled that Americans are taking soccer seriously.
00:01:12.560Well, we're taking it seriously because we're finally good at it.
00:01:15.160Yeah, I hate that. I don't want us to be good at it. I don't want us to play it.
00:03:17.800This World Cup has gone so well, and all of these foreign fans who came over have been so impressed by all the different aspects of it, that they're going to go back home and export American values and capitalism and say, what are we doing living the way that we currently live when we've seen the way that people live in America?
00:03:39.720Actually, that's the best argument to watch soccer that I've ever heard in my entire life and ever will hear.
00:03:44.580The fear, of course, with all of this cross-cultural pollination is that, you know, is it us exporting our soft power or are we just importing third worldism and, you know, this kind of lame sport?
00:03:55.440But to your point, yes, people are talking about Buc-ee's, they're talking about Waffle House, they're talking about ranch dressing.
00:04:00.660And did you see the guy Freddy is apparently going to the White House?
00:04:09.300Here's the thing with Freddy, and I don't know if you've followed this.
00:04:12.260We've been paying attention to it on the opinion side.
00:04:13.980The backlash against him on the internet has been insane because basically people dug up some vaguely right of center things that he might have tweeted out in the past and things that, you know, they've gone after him basically as being someone who clearly wants to stay sort of, you know, he hasn't shown his face.
00:04:36.160He wants to stay, have some degree of anonymity and like be normal when he gets back from this.
00:04:40.600Probably never had any expectation of going viral.
00:04:42.680But I also think it's phenomenal in the sense that all these different people, he is one of many, and there are so many people who are going to go back and, I think, import the values that we still have here in this country that are good and are valuable back.
00:04:57.280I think that this has been one of the best things that we could possibly do in America's 250th, and I did not expect that.
00:05:03.520I honestly thought it could be a complete crap show, but it turns out to be great.
00:05:07.380Yeah. Okay. Look, you, you have done more to convince me to like soccer than anyone has ever
00:05:14.900done. You don't have to watch it. I'm not saying you have to watch it.
00:05:18.640I, you know what I wanted? Oh, first of all, I guess I should say it's friendly fire.
00:05:28.980The 4th of July is coming up. So we're all getting ready to celebrate Somali independence
00:05:33.340day in columbus ohio i don't know if anyone's going to make the trek out there but do you guys
00:05:37.960do you have any big fourth of july plans uh might have my uh yes that's like that's an actual thing
00:05:47.180we are right on the verge yeah no we are right on the verge of of baby time uh i thought like
00:05:54.320one of the reasons that i can't stick around for the entire broadcast as you can hear my voice is
00:05:58.020totally gone the reason my voice is totally gone is because like two nights ago my wife started
00:06:03.040having contractions about 20 minutes apart and we thought for sure it was time to go to the hospital
00:06:06.960and uh that lasted until about two o'clock in the morning at which point it abated so i was so short
00:06:12.180on sleep that it totally wrecked my voice but yeah i mean any any moment and and i've had a deal
00:06:16.740for 20 years with my wife uh which is that if the baby is born between july 2nd and july 4th
00:06:23.540any year but particularly into 50 year then i get to use a founding father name so this is like uh
00:06:37.980Gouverneur Morris is going to be, yeah, exactly.
00:06:41.080But there are some good ones to choose from.
00:06:44.540Jefferson Shapiro sounds kind of wild, but there are some possibilities.
00:06:49.780Charles Carroll Shapiro, that could be a good.
00:06:52.360Dude, if your kid is born on the 4th of July, in the 250th, that would be,
00:06:57.500it's like Providence, you know, Providence has its ways. God has its way in history,
00:07:03.460has his way rather. Okay. Now, well then if I only have you for like five seconds,
00:07:07.720what I am told on this schedule that we have to talk about, and I actually do want to talk to you
00:07:11.700about is I was just in DC. I'm not totally on baby watch yet, but the reason I look terrible
00:07:19.240and sound only slightly better is because I've been traveling all over. We were in DC.
00:07:24.400I was already going for the unveiling of this statue of my great, great, great, great, great
00:07:28.760grandpa, Simon Knowles, part of the American Revolution displays. And then I was stopping by
00:07:32.900the great American state fair, play the yes or no game. But then at the last minute, the vice
00:07:36.820president was able to make some time. He actually gave us a whole hour to interview him about his
00:07:41.040book and Iran and 2028 and the Democrats and all this stuff. And so did you, Ben, I don't want to
00:07:48.520presume. Did you catch any of the interview? Yeah, I did. I caught much of the interview,
00:07:53.620actually. I thought you did a good job. It was a really interesting interview.
00:07:57.060Obviously, I have significant disagreements with the vice president on a wide variety of issues,
00:08:00.620as we've discussed on the program. I thought that, to me, the kind of bizarre fixation that
00:08:08.760the vice president has on criticizing people who are mad at the MOU is, I think, unbecoming for him.
00:08:14.680He's far more critical of the people who are critical of the MOU than he is the people who have been legitimately undermining the war and siding with Iran the entire time, which I find bizarre.
00:08:29.560You know, it's funny that you mentioned that, the criticism of criticizing the people who are criticizing the MOU.
00:08:34.800Because I did, even when he was talking about that, I wanted to clarify.
00:08:37.820I said, hold on, you're talking about the people who are upset about the war not continuing versus, you know, it's unclear which critics he was talking about.
00:08:44.680And, uh, but you made that clear. I, my take on it is that the media, at least, I don't know if
00:08:50.360it's really the admin as much, but the media at least had made him kind of the face of the MOU.
00:08:55.180And so criticism of the MOU is often seen as criticism of him, even though obviously look,
00:09:00.420it's, Oh, I mean, listen, I've criticized him directly for the MOU. I mean, I'm not gonna put
00:09:04.360it on the media. I've criticized the president for signing it, but JD Vance made himself the
00:09:07.940face of this. He personally negotiated it. He continues to personally do press on behalf of
00:09:12.500an MOU that is currently falling apart, not just in the Strait of Hormuz, but also because
00:09:16.580an actual good peace plan has been put forward in Lebanon, which runs directly against the
00:09:21.320MOU, you know, Vance's approach, which has been to essentially take sort of an Obama-esque
00:09:26.360tack with regard to opponents of the MOU.
00:09:36.680I mean, one alternative would be just to walk away from the strait and not hand them things.
00:09:39.680Another alternative would be to bomb Harga Island and provide as much aerial defense for the Saudis, Bahrain, and UAE as possible and basically destroy the Iranian economic capacity from this point forward.
00:09:50.840Another possibility would be to essentially arm up all of our allies and then attempt to actually project into the Strait of Hormuz.
00:09:58.860And if the Saudis don't like it, tell the Saudis to stick it.
00:10:00.840Project Freedom is something that the president wanted to do. And the Saudis apparently said, no, I have never and will never understand the idea that if we are funding and paying for a base in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia gets to tell us what to do with that base. That's insane to me. I think that we should tell the Saudis, listen, we're paying for your defense. All your F-35s belong to us.
00:10:20.000Right. But now we're trying to protect you from your moral nemesis in Iran.
00:10:24.780If we feel like opening the strait using bases that we are supplying, staffing and running, then we're just going to do that.
00:10:30.440But in any case, those are all, I think, fair critiques of the MOU without reference to eternal war, forever war.
00:10:38.160And I don't like the dumbed down version of this politics that sounds very much like Barack Obama's defense of the JCPOA, where Obama would say, if you oppose the JCPOA, it's because you want a forever war with Iran or you want a nuclear war with Iran or you want to obliterate.
00:10:49.900Iranian civilization or anything like that. I get the criticism, but isn't it in the context
00:10:54.800of not just the GOP, but in the context of Trump, a criticism of endless war is not just
00:10:59.580Obama-ian, it's also Trump-ian. Trump in 2016, one of his big breaks with the rest of the GOP
00:11:07.000is he criticized George Bush for endless wars and specifically Iraq. So when the vice president
00:11:12.780comes out and uses that language, that seems to me to be very much in line with Trump.
00:11:17.080Well, the problem is that Trump's version of the endless war.
00:11:33.480When he went on Megyn Kelly, Megyn Kelly read him a list of things that had been said about the MOU by some people, by Mark Levin, by others.
00:14:18.100So I don't think anybody disagrees on that.
00:14:19.620But it just seems like right now we have a couple of options, which is either, maybe
00:14:23.720there's a third, but you get some version of the MOU, or you get some version of continuing
00:14:29.540to bomb them and fire missiles at them.
00:14:31.700Or, you know, you could walk away, but now you're walking away with Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, so now you're in a much worse position.
00:14:38.200And they're effectively in control of the Strait anyway.
00:14:40.020Honestly, I'm of the opinion that we'd be better off walking away from the Strait of Hormuz completely, retaining the sanctions, making them float their ghost ship.
00:14:54.500So that was one issue that I had with what the vice president was saying.
00:14:57.960The other one was, of course, the vice president's bizarre attack on Milton Friedman's economics, as though Milton Friedman's economics stopped applying in the 1980s for some unspecified reason, because the vice president in 2019 read Rerum Novarum, which means that now Milton Friedman is irrelevant, which is a strange timeline, since it turns out that he wrote that after Rerum Novarum.
00:15:17.460Hold on, here's the clip for those who didn't see it.
00:15:19.300part of why Milton Friedman's ideas made more sense in the 1980s is because they were being
00:15:28.200advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity.
00:15:35.200And so like being laissez-faire in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything
00:15:42.440is a much different proposition than being laissez-faire in a world where
00:15:47.420globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of american elites
00:15:52.140okay so i'm not sure i disagree with that yeah there we go all right i i i thought i don't i
00:16:00.780don't think he's wrong there i think i think that one of the problems that we've known about when
00:16:05.460it comes to the american capitalism is that we didn't just import cheap televisions for people
00:16:11.680to watch we didn't just import you know these different goods uh from around the world that
00:16:16.120people enjoy here in America. We also imported a lot of their values with it unintentionally.
00:16:21.400We thought that this was going to change China, but it changed us. And it's one of these things
00:16:25.940that I think is sort of an underestimated aspect of it. You need kind of both of these things
00:16:30.720to have a really strong nation. That doesn't make Milton Friedman's approach wrong. It means that
00:16:36.760we need a religious revival in America, which is what I have argued consistently with my
00:16:42.320atheist libertarian friends, you guys should be the biggest fans of like Rick Santorum or,
00:16:47.900you know, pick your, pick your, Mike Huckabee, what have you, religious revivalism, because you
00:16:52.720need that strength of society and family and everything else that goes with it in order to
00:16:57.020have the type of laissez-faire free nation that we've enjoyed for centuries. Ben, other Ben,
00:17:02.780you totally disagree. Well, so I agree, obviously, that church is very, very important. I mean,
00:17:08.320I've spent my entire life preaching in favor of the idea that people need to go to church.
00:17:11.760And obviously, church membership was higher in the 1980s than it is now.
00:17:15.080I mean, if we're going to get factual about this, the reality is the church attendance in America really started to decline around the year 2000.
00:17:20.900That's really when things started to drop fairly precipitously.
00:17:23.560As late as 1999, 70 percent of people, adults, were members of a church synagogue, a church or a synagogue in the United States.
00:17:32.060But the idea that the fundamental basis of economics changes because of church attendance, and therefore what you need is government to somehow come in as the centralizing force that's going to re-inculcate a common good.
00:17:45.660So welfare programs or redistributionism or government regulation are going to re-inculcate virtue in the American population.
00:17:53.040It seems to me that if we are going to look at a correlation, the growth of government since the 1960s has been exponential.
00:18:00.220the attendance in church has dropped radically in that same exact period in fact i think it can make
00:18:05.780the very strong case that actually one of the reasons for attendance declining in church and
00:18:10.820church membership declining is government actually replacing the functionality of church in everyday
00:18:15.340life for people uh like this is certainly true to say social security is that you know if the
00:18:20.680government pays for social security you don't take care of grandma and she doesn't live in your house
00:18:23.940if you don't i don't have to give as much charity through my church or be a member of my church
00:19:22.520in which, you know, relatives and friends,
00:19:24.960and you could have trust teenagers that you could trust to watch your kids and not just
00:19:28.740have their nose in their phones. Like that's something that definitely we have lost here
00:19:33.860in the recent decades. And it's a major problem. And I think that it's one of the reasons why all
00:19:39.020these people are able to exploit a message of anti-capitalism to a bunch of dumb people who
00:19:44.360don't understand that it's what made the country as powerful as it was in the first place.
00:19:48.320But also when we talk about the growth of government, I agree with a lot of those
00:19:52.100observations. But we can't only think about it from a quantitative perspective. There is also
00:19:56.780a qualitative perspective. In some ways, in the earlier parts of our country, we had a much bigger
00:20:02.360government role than we do today when we were prosecuting blasphemy. At the very least, when
00:20:06.980we had blue laws that said you couldn't sell goods on Sundays or restricted the sale of liquor or
00:20:13.060what have you. So in some ways, we had a much bigger government then. Since the 60s, obviously,
00:20:18.380You've had this massive growth in the welfare state, but you've also had court rulings that have said the government has to pull back on certain moral matters.
00:20:27.040So I think there's a qualitative aspect there, too.
00:20:28.980So, Michael, I agree with a lot of that, actually, but that's not what the vice president is suggesting.
00:20:32.940He's not suggesting a return of blue laws and blasphemy laws.
00:20:35.600He's suggesting massive governmental intervention in the economy, and that reverses the arrow of causality.
00:20:41.420So I think that you can make a very solid historical case that church arrow capitalism because that's actually true.
00:20:48.020I mean, the reality is that market capitalism in the West was actually an outgrowth originally of property rights rooted in sort of Catholic perceptions of property and then later adamrated by Protestant perceptions of the value of free markets, capitalism, innovation, and work ethic.
00:21:05.600And so you can say these institutions precede capitalism, which clearly is true, but I don't think that you can then say the Marxist thing, and it actually is a Marxist idea, that economics precedes social institutions.
00:21:16.960And so what if we just change our economic system and then people go back to church?
00:21:21.820There are, I think we can say that political communities precede some social institutions or are coincidental with them.
00:21:29.600And so, you know, in the way, and you can't really firmly separate politics from economics, though maybe the Marxists would like to focus much more on the material and the economic.
00:21:38.480But the juxtaposition that the vice president is making here is not between Milton Friedman and Karl Marx.
00:21:44.660it's between Milton Friedman and the economics of Alexander Hamilton. Last I checked,
00:21:49.080Hamilton precedes Milton Friedman. I don't mean to diss Friedman. I like a lot about Friedman.
00:21:54.240But there are some things that seem to be important for the government to take on. Namely,
00:21:59.640under a totally laissez-faire system, which developed under the name of neoliberalism in
00:22:05.520the last 40, 50 years, we've outsourced a lot of our manufacturing or supply change to a degree
00:22:11.720that means that we are now very, very vulnerable to China.
00:22:15.100If we ever were to go to a serious war with China,
00:22:17.800we would be really up the creek without a paddle.
00:22:19.840We saw a preview of that during COVID.
00:22:21.720So that might suggest that maybe the government
00:25:58.9202026 is going to be a disaster area for Republicans.
00:26:01.700Right now, Republicans are running dead even or behind in all six of the various states in which they have races up to and including Iowa, Texas, and Alaska.
00:26:10.960He is hoping he wants the Republicans to get their asses kicked because then what he's going to say is the reason that they got destroyed is because they didn't cater to people like me.
00:26:18.800and me sitting outside here with my non-existent third party, if only they'd engaged with me,
00:26:24.700if only they'd come back to me, then they would have won. And so it's basically a blackmail play.
00:26:28.780And it's smart. It's smart. But the idea that Tucker Carlson, who, again, says in that same
00:26:33.660interview that he has no attention span and is widely known in the media as one of the lazier
00:26:37.320members of the media, that Tucker is going to sit there with the actual nuts and bolts of building a
00:26:43.260ground up political party based on the pretensions of thomas massey marjorie taylor green and joe
00:26:48.960kent yeah uh good luck i mean listen my dream is that he starts a third party i would love for
00:26:53.580tucker carlson to start a third party because then we could have a clear referendum on the
00:26:56.580stupidity of his ideas but instead what he's going to do is not that what he's going to do
00:27:00.120is he's going to falsely claim that 2026 happened because not because it was an off-air election
00:27:04.980not because trump was unpopular on a wide variety of issues but because tucker carlson personally
00:27:09.540was displeased with Donald Trump's policy on Iran and Epstein and all the rest. And therefore,
00:27:14.860the only way to assure Republican victory going forward is to put Tucker Carlson in the driver's
00:27:21.140seat of the party. And obviously, Tucker is very much aligned with J.D. Vann. So I think that's
00:27:24.500the political move he's making here. You know, I could sense that this was just a replay of the
00:27:29.320Reform Party, especially the 2000 Pat Buchanan version. Tucker himself. Can I disagree for a
00:27:35.340second, I've met Pat Buchanan. I know Pat Buchanan. Tucker's no Pat Buchanan. Pat Buchanan
00:27:41.720is smarter than Tucker. He's more consistent than Tucker. He is a more disciplined speaker than
00:27:48.220Tucker. I still think that his 1992 convention speech was something that presaged. It is
00:27:54.600essential viewing for anyone to understand American politics. And by the way, while being
00:27:59.860referred to as a culture war speech it is mostly about economics it is not it is about it is about
00:28:05.200crime economics and and working class issues and then they did this whole revisionist history
00:28:11.220where it was like oh no he came in and destroyed hw's chances for re-election uh by turning it
00:28:16.980into this uh you know election that was going to be about abortion and gays and stuff like that
00:28:20.740the truth is that i think that you have to understand you need to understand pat buchanan
00:31:39.460It was driving me nuts, man. I've only worked in media for like 10 or 15 years. I couldn't figure out how to do it.
00:31:46.140We got to be thing one and thing two or something like that.
00:31:50.460So, all right, Cabot, we already covered my interview with the vice president and Iran and Tucker's new political party, which I heard you just joined.
00:31:59.040But now I want to talk about the Dems. Where do the midterms stand?
00:39:16.080Yeah. And we saw J.B. Pritzker try to run as a socialist. But we saw J.B. Pritzker. I beg you for America. Do it. Pritzker went on CNN and he said, yeah, the strategy of these socialist candidates, he didn't fully endorse them. He said their strategy is one that's going to win in 2026 and beyond.
00:39:32.260Well, yeah, as a billionaire, he has to say that so they don't kill him.
00:39:35.960Yeah, but my point is that I think that these candidates, while they might not have a huge
00:39:40.780impact on Senate voters in Texas, they will have an impact on the broader perception of
00:39:46.380Democrats in that they're going to force Democratic leadership to go further left for fear of
00:42:07.900So we elect fascists to kill the communists.
00:42:09.860And then the fascists hand the economy to oligarchs.
00:42:11.940So we elect communists to kill the rich.
00:42:14.080And unfortunately, as someone who has been saying for a long time that I thought that American politics was starting to look more and more like Latin America, including, by the way, with Donald Trump, you know, you must, you know, elect the strong man, elect the man who's going to solve the problems, you know, kind of thing.
00:42:33.660I think that that is unfortunately, dangerously what we are setting up in this situation, which is a takeover of a decrepit, octogenarian Democratic Party that is out of touch with its most engaged activist voters.
00:42:50.780And it's going to, I think, completely reorient them.
00:42:53.740We saw this happen to a degree with the Tea Party, but the Tea Party, basically what happened was their ideas were subsumed into the Republican Party and the fundamental Republican kind of framework that that, you know, three legged stool that we have talked about, you know, for to the nth degree that remained intact.
00:43:12.580It just was sort of a change in priorities.
00:43:16.120But I don't think this is just a change in priorities.
00:43:18.380I think this is a change in one of the American parties.
00:43:21.340And I think that, unfortunately, capitalism may end up being a monopartisan affair faster than we could even imagine.
00:43:29.660We've had this huge movement of rehabbing Richard Nixon's image, and we've been Nixon-maxing this summer.
00:43:36.140I think we might have to start Pinochet-maxing.
00:43:38.420Y'all, don't threaten me with a good time.
00:43:42.580Exactly. But on the topic of socialism, that poll of the number of Democrats that view socialism favorably, I just can't help but think that that's more a reflection of their despair over the situation in America, their feeling that neither party is speaking for them.
00:43:57.160And to that point, I do think that a lot of people who are embracing socialism, while the ideas obviously are abhorrent, they're not all wrong in saying that they have reason to be angry with the way that they've been treated in the country.
00:44:08.820But I don't think that actually means what they necessarily think it means.
00:44:13.680Like, I don't think most of them would actually support the Democratic Socialists of America
00:44:17.920And to that point, if you actually look at the agenda, we know that the DSA supports
00:44:22.020universal health care, universal child care, and student loan forgiveness, and amnesty.
00:44:27.360That's child's play compared to where the DSA platform actually is.
00:44:31.760So this month, they published their new, what they call it, the Workers Deserve More plan.
00:44:36.760The official plan from the DSA includes abolishing the Senate, defunding the entire War Department, quote, replacing the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
00:44:52.500The official DSA platform is do away with the White House, do away with the presidency, do away with the War Department, do away with the Senate.
00:51:21.720That's what Paine was offering those soldiers.
00:51:23.460They knew in that night how desperate they were, that they were really down to the end.
00:51:28.320And this was the kind of desperate, brave, heroic act.
00:51:32.840and they could never have appreciated that they were in the midst of founding the greatest nation
00:51:38.300in the history of the world. And I think that that's something that we should appreciate now.
00:51:42.680And subscribing to Daily Wire is, you know, the way I think that you can help appreciate it and
00:51:47.660understand it now. And you know what else, you know, we now know, thanks to historians,
00:51:52.140is that Thomas Paine slept on a Helix mattress. So head on over to, no, no, he didn't. I don't
00:51:56.680think he actually did that. Okay. We are now bringing on Theo Wald to talk about, before we
00:52:00.920let all of you guys go. The Supreme Court decisions, I want to go through them. We talked
00:52:05.200about the political implications a little bit, but I want to know about the decisions themselves,
00:52:09.780and then also Idaho becoming the first U.S. state to use firing squad for executions. Is that the
00:52:16.520first U.S. state ever, or just we're bringing it back? I don't know. I don't know. I'm not expert
00:52:21.060on that. I think that's a question for Theo. Do we have Theo? Theo. There we go. Yeah, it's good
00:52:27.200to be with you guys. And I just want to say, Ben, you know, Thomas Payne was a pamphleteer and a
00:52:31.680hustler. I think he would actually appreciate the sales pitch there. I was trying to make a buck,
00:52:36.540right? He literally was the original, you know, I'm interested in your ideas and I wish to
00:52:41.040subscribe to your newsletter. That's right. So on the big case, on the one that really matters
00:52:48.380the most, on the birthright citizenship case, I never thought the court was going to go along
00:52:53.920with us out of cowardice. I thought there were good legal arguments and good historical arguments
00:52:58.160for the courts to go along with us. But I think the court is just institutionally cowardly for
00:53:03.700good reason. The Democrats keep threatening to destroy them for almost a century now. But in
00:53:09.080terms of the actual legal matters, what happened? Yeah, I think all of that as preparatory comment,
00:53:17.000that's correct. I think anyone who listened to oral argument knew that both Justices Kavanaugh
00:53:22.900and ACB, Amy Coney Barrett, were skeptical. That's probably the best way of putting it,
00:53:29.100skeptical at best of John Sauer, the Solicitor General, his arguments before the court.
00:53:34.820I think the Roberts opinion, one way of sort of distilling this down is to say it's essentially
00:53:40.160a discursive armchair historian's view of the 14th Amendment, but really rooted in Anglo common
00:53:46.620law. What is the notion of citizenship or subjecthood, more likely, that was imported
00:53:52.100from Britain into the United States. And that's where he kind of hinges his entire argument. And
00:53:57.480I think Alito is right to say in his dissent, and Thomas does the same, that Roberts really misses
00:54:03.900everything from the Declaration of Independence forward. And so you've got a very narrow reading
00:54:11.140of what citizenship requires. Hadley Arcus, the famous natural rights theorist, he really
00:54:17.760pinpoints this line from robert's opinion where robert says really what this is about is citizenship
00:54:22.540is the right to have rights which really would have struck the framers obviously as bizarre but
00:54:29.160also the framers of the 14th amendment as bizarre so i i think the the majority opinion is trying to
00:54:35.200do a lot and what it's really trying to do to your your point michael is to satisfy this question of
00:54:40.440what is the meaning of the 14th amendment what is the meaning of citizenship once and for all and
00:54:44.640as we've seen over the last 40 years, anytime the court tries to settle definitively what is really
00:54:51.000at root, something of a small P political question, the court ends up regretting it.
00:54:56.300You know, just think of Planned Parenthood v. Casey or some of these other sort of seminal
00:54:59.900cases where the court tried to say, no, this is the definitive answer for all time. And I think
00:55:04.300the dissents from Thomas and Alito both get at this, that not only is it a wrong reading of the
00:55:09.02014th Amendment, but it's also a political mistake the court's making. So Theo, I have a couple of
00:55:14.560questions about this. And I want to preface this by saying that I'm someone who has for a very long
00:55:18.140time, along with including hardline immigration people like my friend Mark Kotorian, supported
00:55:24.500birthright citizenship. And the reason that we support it is because we don't believe in having
00:55:28.920stateless children, and we believe that it's chaotic, and we believe in border control,
00:55:34.660immigration enforcement, the kind of things that prevent this from being exploited. But the
00:55:39.180situation that we face today is obviously dramatically different than everything that
00:55:44.100we've seen even just a few decades ago when it comes to the level of birth tourism, when it comes
00:55:49.540to the level of people who are aligned to come here for a brief amount of time just in order to
00:55:53.560have a baby who can claim dual citizenship, who are exploiting generous Medicaid and other
00:55:58.560welfare programs in blue states. Like this is a completely different scenario than we were in
00:56:04.580even 15, 20 years ago. And obviously that includes the importation of untold millions during the
00:56:11.560biden era the decision though to go with an eo that i know that you were you know uh obviously
00:56:18.240a key uh component of that you know is is from you i actually don't know how much of it you
00:56:23.020you worked on or if you draft the whole thing but that eo was always something that seemed to put in
00:56:29.740people's minds this thing is going to get kicked out because it's not congress it's not something
00:56:34.460that has the backing of you know a partisan or potentially even a bipartisan i think you might
00:56:40.360gotten some democrat randoms in the in the house that might have gone along with some kind of
00:56:45.120solution on immigration just based on where they are um that tried to deal with this birthright
00:56:50.700question which has loomed over us forever with all of these random decisions and no definitive
00:56:55.900answer i think robert's opinion is crap i think it's just like ridiculous um but i also think
00:57:03.160that this outcome is one that most americans are just kind of going to kind of shrug at
00:57:08.160unfortunately do you think that it was a wrong decision to do this via executive order
00:57:14.440yeah i mean i so the the executive order project that i worked on in 45 you could probably say
00:57:22.880it was much more about nipping and tucking and really getting at those uh four categorical
00:57:28.640exemptions that roberts kind of dismisses out of hand and says that's a closed universe right
00:57:32.400Native Americans, envoys or ambassadors. Right. Exactly. So really trying to hone in on is that the is that the defined space here or is there more sort of elasticity in the joints, if you will, because of the new situation we face with the millions of birth tourists in Miami or Southern California, you know, the false asylee claimants, etc.
00:57:54.220So I think the idea of tackling this through executive order and I'll note executive order alone, right, this could have always been dual tracked with a statutory effort in Congress from the word go back in January of 25.
00:58:09.000I think the idea of pushing this solely through executive order, it wasn't just Roberts and ACB who were uncomfortable with that.
00:58:14.380Obviously, Kavanaugh notes that, in his opinion, with the existing statute from the 1950s.
00:58:18.640And I think both Alito and Thomas both are kind of, you know, the idea that you could do this exclusively through unilateral executive power makes them uncomfortable.
00:58:29.520So I think that was also a mistake here and especially a mistake in that I don't think it teed up to your point, Ben.
00:58:36.280I don't think it teed up in a neat way the larger political discussion we need to have.
00:58:41.440What was missing was exactly what Alito said in his dissent, which is, you now have this very weird scenario where legal immigrants coming to the country applying for citizenship have to engage in kind of like this reason-based, Thomas Paine, if you will, based naturalization process.
00:58:57.280They've got to prove their loyalty, their understanding, civics, education.
00:59:01.040But then a whole host of people who come here as birth tourists or illegal aliens can just have the magic of birth and automatically give birth to an American citizen.
00:59:09.220And that that's a weird as a very weird scenario. And that's open. That would have been very promising ground for Republicans in Congress or elected Republicans in the state houses across the country to make that argument.
00:59:21.440What we require this of naturalization. Why wouldn't we require something more domicile and allegiance for any citizen who's coming here and giving birth and missed opportunity again?
00:59:31.800Yeah. And even so beyond the question of executive order versus legislation or even the Supreme Court precedent, which obviously comes from Wong Kim Ark or the public meaning from the framing of the 14th Amendment, you make this very good point, Ben, which is that Roberts is leaning on or sorry, Theo, you might have made this point.
00:59:52.500Well, one of you did, and probably the other one agrees with it, that Roberts is leaning on the Anglo tradition, which is where we get our law from, you know, the English common law.
01:00:03.200And the English common law had birthright citizenship, so we are told, you know, us soli versus us sanguinis, the right of the blood.
01:00:11.560But this, I think, misses a really important point, which is that you had a birthright as a subject of the king, not in any modern sense of citizenship.
01:00:23.900And so if we're going to make the parallel and we're going to cite the United Kingdom, we should look at what happens after the Second World War when the United Kingdom begins to change its previous sense of the relation of subject to king into a more modern national kind of citizenship.
01:00:46.040It goes into effect in 1983 precisely because of these problems of mass migration.
01:00:50.860And so you say, look, Wong Kim Ark does not decide this definitively in 1898.
01:00:54.980The Congress hasn't really weighed in on it.
01:00:56.980Obviously, the framers of the 14th Amendment didn't think that what they were doing was just giving a free ride to every Chinese spy that wanted to fly to Guam.
01:01:06.080And if you're going to look to the English common law, maybe we consider what the Brits did after that.
01:01:11.720Because the court ruled on the substance of the matter, because the court came in, 5-4, Kavanaugh would not join them for the substantive point.
01:01:19.840And they say, sorry, 14th Amendment gives every Nicaraguan peasant birthright citizenship immediately.
01:01:26.220Is there anything that we can do, the executive or the legislature, to fight back?
01:01:31.940Or do we need to fight another 49-year Roe v. Wade-like battle to get this case overturned?
01:01:38.620Yeah, I think that's an excellent distillation, Michael.
01:01:41.860And, you know, funnily enough, I was just in London a week ago giving a presentation on exactly what you just laid out on both the 48-49 citizenship bill that obviously Enoch Powell essentially made his career on, the early part of his parliamentary career, fighting that.
01:01:56.980And then the 1981 and then the subsequent mid-90s Citizenship Act. So the British have changed their notion of citizenship three times in a fundamental, massive way. And yet we have a chief justice who's saying, well, we got to go back to the 15th century to look at the way the British understand subjecthood. It makes no sense at all.
01:02:15.740So to answer your question, unfortunately, because of the expansive opinion here that this is resting on a constitutional interpretation, and I'd also add to Ben's point, because of the flaw in presenting this as an executive order assertion of power, I think in large part, most of what Congress can do has been foreclosed by this opinion.
01:02:35.820It will require a constitutional amendment. And I think the white pill, as I've shared elsewhere, is to say that might be a good thing to get people thinking again about the form of citizenship, what's required in a small r republic and having a fulsome discussion about what we want in terms of the rights and duties and obligations that citizenship imposes.
01:02:58.980part of the problem here is for 50 years we essentially neglected this entire conversation
01:03:03.940and left it to abstract legal theory or judges and ropes to determine who is and who is not a
01:03:09.620citizen right and this is can i just you know uh can i just make the point that the politics of
01:03:16.180immigration also played into this in the sense that for a long time republicans saw immigration
01:03:21.780as kind of a second uh you know third rail of politics other than like uh you know kind of
01:03:26.680medicare or something like that they didn't want to touch it because they were worried they were
01:03:30.600going to piss everybody off by doing it and the truth is that in that window where you could have
01:03:36.120probably moved something on something like this i'm thinking the late 90s early 2000s that didn't
01:03:42.120happen and because that didn't happen we're we're left with this situation as you said you know uh
01:03:48.760left with a legal academic comment and and judges and robes making this decision i think that we
01:03:54.680we need to have a real considered moment here
01:05:03.660I mean, you know, The Guardian and a couple of other international publications have lost their mind in the last 24 hours about this.
01:05:10.460You know, the archaic, barbaric, gun-obsessed Americans are bringing back firing squads is essentially how the op-ed from The Guardian read yesterday.
01:05:17.500Look, I mean, really, at issue here is something, a very basic premise. It's tied to our previous conversation, which was the people of Idaho, reflective in numerous red states and some blue states across the country, elected to have capital punishment for a certain class of offenses.
01:05:34.140and not you know abolitionist activists and a number of their sort of institutional backers
01:05:42.060have campaigned to restrict the ability of states like idaho to import the drugs that are necessary
01:05:47.060to create the three drug compound for lethal injection this is essentially their way of
01:05:51.480short-circuiting the preferred choice of the people and the establishment of the law and idaho's
01:05:57.200answer wasn't like some other red states well i guess they got us we don't have access to the
01:06:01.700drugs. We can't use compounding pharmacies anymore. So I guess we'll have no more capital
01:06:05.940punishment. Instead, what Idaho said was, OK, then we will revert back to a form of execution
01:06:11.360that is still recognized under the Eighth Amendment. And to your point, Michael, it turns
01:06:15.360out actually there are lots of criminal defendants across the country who prefer the firing squad
01:06:20.140because it is a far more effective and humane form of execution. The average firing squad
01:06:25.600a formalized medical death occurs in seconds as opposed to eight, nine, ten minutes in the few
01:06:31.860lethal injections that actually occur correctly. And I think, you know, you're using trained
01:06:36.720professionals, marksmen who are former retired military or police officers, and there's no
01:06:40.940violation of the Hippocratic Oath that you require with health professionals using the lethal
01:06:45.640injection form of execution. So it makes sense for Idaho. And really, again, at root here is just a
01:06:50.360way of saying you're not going to use your embargo and your activism to short circuit the legal
01:06:54.920choices that the people of our state have made. Yeah, I say kill them all, you know, no, no,
01:06:59.980kill them all. But, but, you know, if you're going to have capital punishment, that seems like the
01:07:03.280humane and right way to do it. Uh, totally, totally agree with you. Gentlemen, I have to run,
01:07:08.520but, but not before Ben gives his final thought. Great work, Theo.
01:07:13.720Thanks guys. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Mr. Dominic, I'm leaving. I'm leaving on a
01:07:19.980jet plane. I'm getting out of here, man. I want to go hang out for the 4th of July. And if anything
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