Bulwark Takes - Federal Judge Shreds Rubio, Noem, and Trump in Scathing Ruling

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Sam Stein and JVL take on Judge Young’s scathing opinion against Trump officials who tried to deport pro-Palestinian students for their speech. Tickets to Bulwark Live in DC (10/8) with Sarah, Tim and JVL are on sale now at https://TheBulwark.com/events.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Sam Stein, and we're switching things up today. We have good news for a change. We have a decision from the District Court of Massachusetts in the case of the American Association of University Professors against Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. And this decision comes from Judge William G. Young, a rock-ripped Republican, a Reagan appointee. pages of hot fire. Sam, how excited were you when you saw this thing?

You know me. Thrilled. Could barely contain my excitement. I guess some background would be helpful here. Basically, if people remember, pro-Palestinian students were getting abducted by ICE, they were here on student visas. Mark Rubia was making sure they were deported. The justification was, well, they don't believe in America or America first, so we don't have to have them here in our country. National security threats, I believe, because they were acting contrary to the national security interests of the United States, Sam. And in one case, I think the entire, the entire issue was like a single op-ed that the student

had written, like, yeah, co-bileined op-ed in a student newspaper. And so this has been kind of working its way through the legal system. And this judge, you know, it's not just the rebuke that Judge Young issued because Judge Young has been at the center of a couple of these issues now. He's been overseeing some of the funding freezes that the Trump administration has done with Harvard. It's the way in which he did it. Now, I would say some of this was like gratifying to read, but some of it was actually like kind of chilling, both the fact that he felt the need to write it and that the administration's response to it seems to be like a big giant fuck you. We're just going to keep doing what we're

doing. I could get to it in a second. But it's worth noting. He wrote this as a response to an anonymous letter that he had received. And the anonymous letter he had received said, Trump has pardons and tanks. What do you have? And he responds with a little message. He says, Dear Mr. and Mrs. Anonymous, alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, we, the people of the United States, you and me, have our magnificent constitution. Here's how that works out in a specific case. And then the opinion flows from that. And I thought that was like, kind of interesting, kind of different, definitely different.

Not what you would get on Twitter. It's funny. The note is a tweet, right? It's just in the long hand, and he just responds not like a shit poster, but like a serious patriot and legal scholar. And he actually posts the note.

So again, like Twitter, it's like the attachment to it. And, you know, when I read it, you know, the first 135 pages are, you know, dismantling the case. But then the last 12 pages, or so are just him sort of really undressing Donald Trump and like in a way that I think, you know, probably was gratifying for him. It's become sort of this new fashion for judges to try to want up them each other about how badly they can rebuke Trump. But in this case, it was like

kind of dark underneath it. It's like we've really entered. It was like he's like, he'd overdosed on JVL columns. He's like, we've entered a dark place. I mean, he's not wrong. So this is Okay, so the reason this was American Association of University professors was because this is an attempt by Marco Rubio to revoke visas for some professors who are pro-Palestinian, and putting that in scare quotes. And what Judge Young is saying with this is that the real test on this case is, do First Amendment rights apply to people who are lawful residents? of the United States. So non-citizen lawful residence. And his contention is, by any reasonable reading of the Constitution, the answer is yes. Right. It's the Scalia. It's the Scalia contention. Right. And so he talks here, I mean, we'll just read some quotes from it. He says to Marco Rubio and Christine Nome, you acted in

concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech. They did so in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizen pro-Palestinian individuals proactively and effectively curbing lawful pro-Palestinian speech and intentionally denying such individuals, including the plaintiffs here, the freedom of speech that is their right. He says it's perhaps the most important case to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court. I mean, it goes on from there. Like, there's parts where he just directs it to the president's palpable misunderstanding

that the government cannot simply seek retribution for speech, she disdains, poses a great threat to Americans' freedom of speech. It is at this juncture that the judiciary has robustly rebuffed the president and his administration. He says, I fear the President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up fight for and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected. Is he correct?

I mean, as I read it, he's saying, I thought in your quote, the most children's word was effectively that they've done so as. And he feels like they've already been successful. And in here, he's just making the case that the act of retribution that Trump is so publicly engaged in is itself a threat to the Constitution. It's not even the deportation. It's the threat of retribution itself. And I think he's right, honestly.

I think people are self-censoring and the question of whether that's, you know, a form of infringement on the freedom of speech. I'm not a lawyer, but you can... A hundred percent they are. Yeah. This is like, I can just tell you because I know people who have friends of mine who have jobs, you know, in the civil service, in government who are like, no, I can't leave a comment on the Bulwarks website because I've got to keep my head down, right? Or, you know, I can't go to, I had somebody tell me, I can't go to the Bullwork Live event because I don't want to bump into somebody who, like, recognizes me from work and can cause me trouble.

We have Pete Heggseth talking yesterday about how they are scrutinizing the personal communications and social media histories of even junior officers as they evaluate who can be promoted and not promoted because they are looking for loyalty. I mean, this is all, it's all real. I'll just, let me just give you a quick update on the Hexsat front. breaking news from the Washington Post. The Pentagon is planning to require thousands of uniformed officers, officials, I should say, and civilian personnel to sign non-disclosure agreements, and submit to random polygraph

testing. There you go. I mean, you know, like there's speed running. I'll say fascism. I won't say the other N word. The third N word, we're not supposed to say. And we wind up in a place where it is important to understand. And Judge Young understands this clearly.

This isn't really about non-citizens' rights, right? I mean, this is all about eventually drawing lines about who real citizens are. And that's why you can't understand this case, except also in the context of the birthright citizenship case. Explain that. Because, so this is, the government gets to decide what is acceptable speech from people who are non-citizenship. citizens. Right. And also, the government gets to decide who are citizens. Right. Right. And that's, this is where it all all happens. And this is, again, go, go read through your Hannah Arendt. And the idea that you can render people stateless is like at the heart

of totalitarian oppression. Right. You create another class of stateless people. And then you say, oh, wait, now we're going to sift through all your social media feeds. And it's, man, like, it's just Bad. And the, I don't know, the response of DHS spokesperson, Trisha McLaughin, was that Judge Young has stoked the embers of hatred with his ruling. Well, I thought the State Department response was almost worst from Tommy Pickett. He said, quote, the United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country, commit acts of anti-American, pro-terrorist, in anti-Semiticate or in Syfant. We will continue to revoke the visas of those who put the safety of our citizens at risk. I mean, I read that as him saying, pound sand, right? And it goes back to the initial anonymous note.

Trump has partners and tanks. What do you have? So I get a question for you. Is there a tactical mistake on the part of Maga here in trying to dress all this up as attempt to really get people on not supporting Israel enough? Because we are at a moment where for the first time, you know, as long as I can remember, Israel is now underwater in American public opinion. Right.

With a majority of Americans now saying the United States should not be helping these people. what they're doing over there, what baby Netanyahu is doing, looks at best really, really bad and at worst, like, ethnic cleansing. Yeah, I would like to think, like this could keep getting worse, couldn't it? In terms of just public opinion? Of course, yeah, 100%. I'd like to think people draw the distinction between anti-Israel, anti-Semitic. I'm not sure they do all the time.

I do think from like just a strictly political standpoint, like it's very, it's unobjectionally true that even MAGA is deeply divided on support for Israel. And of course, it's also true that there is a profound strain of anti-Semitism within MAGA. I mean, the popularity of-Maga is even deeply divided on anti-Semitism. I was going to say, yes, the popularity of Nick Fuentes is very clear. And in fact, I'm going to engage with, we'll summer this, but like the new thing now is that because Nick Fuentes has said, no, no, no, no, a trial of crook wasn't killed by israel there are people now accusing dick fentes of being in the pocket of jews so we're like we're in we're in pretty deep waters here um i i wonder i think there's

i do think there's a risk here i think and it's not just because maga will be divided like that whole podcast brosphere whatever you want to call it like they've been speaking out about this stuff too like you you look at rogan clips you look at some other clips from these folks they're like why are we, what is it that we're doing here on college campuses? Like, isn't this what we're supposed to be against, like, policing campus culture to a degree that you're actually deporting kids? Like, is that, is that really where we want to go? Now, is it enough to, you know, tell Marco Rubio and Tony Piggott or whatever Tommy Piggott, like, chill out? I don't know. I fear, I do fear that these rulings from judges like this are just almost like the last gas

of people saying, hey, we're going down a dark path. And then by the time people read it, we're too far down. Ding, ding, ding. And also, Supreme Court will probably overrule young. Let's just be candid about that. Let's be real about it, yeah. Yeah, this is a case where one of my, and this is failures of imagination, right? So one of the things that I talked about a lot with Sarah, our colleague Sarah Longwell,

in the very early days of Biden's administration. was what are things that Democrats could do to Trump-proof the future? So, in other words, to remember the column. Trump comes back to power, right? And a thing which it is now clear they could have done, but which occurred to know, even me, who was like, you know, Mr. Catastrophizing was they could have gone and started clamping down on the discretionary powers of people like the Secretary of State to remove visas like this, right?

This is, I mean, never would have occurred to. to me. But it never would have occurred. And this is the problem, right? You can't anticipate everything that a fascist will do because they'll find something. Even if we had gone and Trump-proofed that, right? You can't, the system is designed to assume that the person, the people in the system are not fascists.

And it's also like, this is totally unrelated, but it gets to the point you're making. Like this morning, for instance, Russ Vatt, the OMB chair. announced, they're just going to hold back $18 billion in funding for New York City and infrastructure projects. And it has nothing to do with the shutdown because his whole rationale as well, these are unconstitutional DEI problems. It's like you just made up a pretext. Like this thing has been going on for 10 months of the administration, this thing has been

going on. And you never once said jack shit about it until now. So if they're just going to make up pretexts for these things in the courts, you know, the lower courts might slap them on the rest, but the Supreme Court says, well, Well, you have it in your authority. It's there. It's like you can play whackamol, but at some point, that's where the pinch point is, and that's just that.

Yeah. At the end of the day, the reality is, if Americans tolerate this, and they don't even need to approve of it, they just need to barely tolerate it, by which I mean, like, the disapproval is it a manageable net net? So, you know, it could even be 51% percent. disapprove, 44% approve, right? It's only May. If you're at that place, then you're going to keep getting this.

Yeah. I think that's right. You know, there ain't no solution except the American people being better. Well, that and maybe, well, it's not a solution because no one can bring it about, but natural events, right? Like a catastrophe of some variety, an outbreak of financial collapse. Yeah, exactly. Which convinced us all to be our best selves and made us realize that we're all in the same boat together. Maybe that wouldn't do it.

Let's not go down that path again. But, yeah, no, it is, it's true. It's something you think about. It's like, how do you get out of this cycle? And, you know, the most logical thing would be an election that goes the opposite way. But what if they fuck around with that, you know? And even if it goes the opposite way, it can't go, it's not going to go far enough, the opposite way to prevent us from getting back. here again, right? There will be a recession the next time. Let's pretend there's another

Democrat in power, right? We have a Democratic president, man. So what? Every Democratic president has to be absolutely perfect all the time. They can never make any mistakes. They can never have a recession happen nine months before their reelect or something like that, because otherwise, 40,000 voters in Wisconsin are going to choose fascism again. If you're in that position, and the country's already gone, right? It's because people are basically. People are basically, How do we end up here again? Because it's me. This is where I always end up.

Oh, Sam. This is why you and I don't do too many of these things together. No. I leave feeling really depressed. I know. But if you want to feel better, go read some. We'll put a link in the comments. This Judge Young thing, it's good stuff.

Take care, bud. All right, everybody. We are sold out of tickets to all of our shows on the fall tour, fall tour except for October 8th in Washington, D.C. I was on a call yesterday, planning out what we've got in store for you. It's going to be fun. Obviously, JV.L. will be there, so there'll be elements of darkness. We're also bringing in Sarah McBride for a conversation with Sarah Longwell that I'm super excited

for. Maybe we might get Will Summer up to talk about some of the crazy shit that's happened on the MAGA ride. I've got some other plans in store for you. So it's not too late. Get your tickets now. Washington, D.C., October 8th. You go to the bulwoolwork.com slash events.

It's the bulwark.com slash events. I hope to see it all there. It's at the Lincoln Theater. Awesome venue. Appreciate them for hosting us. And so I hope to see you all in Washington, October 8th.