Strict Scrutiny - All the President’s Henchmen

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

Huge news for lawyers: You can now listen to Strict Scrutiny for CLE credits in California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington, and Oregon! More info at crooked.com/strict_cleKate is joined by Liz Oyer, former DOJ pardon attorney and federal public defender, to tick through last week’s news. Among the items covered: Todd Blanche’s swearing-in by lackey Emil Bove, the latest attempt by the administration to expand executive privilege, the renewed vendetta against the Fed’s Lisa Cook, and John Roberts’ Substack debut…That’s right, the Chief is out here postin’. Then, a conversation with Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer about their new book, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. Check out Liz’s podcast, Is This Really Legal?.Favorite things: Kate: Just Security’s Reinvention Blueprints; One Woman’s Message From the Hell of ICE Detention, Maryam Tahmasebi; John Oliver on the DOJ; Trump’s catering cart caper  Liz:How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, Theo Baker; The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout; Ponies (Peacock) Follow us on Instagram, Threads, and BlueskyGet tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE on November 6th in Washington, DC: Crookedcon.comBuy Melissa’s book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern ReaderBuy Leah’s book, Lawless, now out in paperbackFollow us on Instagram, Threads, and BlueskyFor a transcript of an episode of Strict Scrutiny please email [e-mail]

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beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word. She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks. Hello and welcome back to strict scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. I'm your lone regular host today, Kate Shaw, and I'm very happy to be joined by guest host, Liz Oyer, former pardon attorney of the United States and federal public defender and host of the new podcast, is this really legal? Liz, welcome to strict scrutiny.

Thanks so much for having me, Kate. Well, I'm delighted you're here and listeners. Liz and I are going to run through the latest legal news. And after that, I am delighted to bring you a conversation with Julia Angwin and Ami Fieldsmeyer about their new book on courage, how to be a dissident in an age of fear. The book is incredible, so definitely don't miss that conversation. Okay, but Liz, let's get started. I am super happy to have you with me today because there is a lot of DOJ news to cover, and I know DOJ is very much your beat. So maybe let's start with the swearing in of one Todd Blanche. Now, you testified against Blanche in his Senate confirmation hearing, alas, to no avail because he ultimately was confirmed, although it was a squeaker, right? And I do take some small comfort in the fact that I think this was the closest. confirmation of an attorney general in history, 50 to 49. At least I haven't found any that were closer, which would have meant a tiebreaker by the vice president, which didn't have to happen here.

But I guess it was important that there was as much opposition as there was to Blanche. And Liz, will you just tell our listeners for a minute about kind of what you emphasized in your testimony against him? Yeah, this was a real nail-biter, Kate. I mean, it came down to the wire. There were about two weeks of negotiations between a couple of Republican holdouts and the White House over Blanche's confirmation. But I have to say, I was really disappointed that the number of issues that got any traction with Republicans as potential reasons to oppose Blanche was actually very, very small. There were really only two issues that broke through at all. One, to a lesser extent, was the Epstein matter and Blanche's mishandling of the Epstein files and his mistreatment

of Jeffrey Epstein's victims. And the other was this issue with the corrupt settlement fund that was entered into between essentially Donald Trump on one side of this litigation and Donald Trump on the other side of the litigation. And that was the one that ended up really holding up the negotiations over whether Blanche would be confirmed, this settlement agreement. But those were the only two issues. There are actually so many reasons to oppose Todd Blanche as Attorney General. And that's what I focused on in my testimony. I testified about my own personal experience of being fired by Todd Blanche shortly after he was confirmed as the deputy attorney general. And I was one of many people. I was part of a purge of the career workforce of the Justice Department. Blanche oversaw hundreds of

firings of people for political reasons, essentially, because of cases that they worked on under the previous administration and because of their refusal to essentially rubber-stamp political favors for friends of the president. In my case, I refuse to rubber stamp, the reinstatement of the gun ownership rights of a friend of the president who had lost his right to own a firearm because he was convicted of a very serious domestic violence crime. So Blanche has really decimated the career workforce of the Justice Department. He has eradicated expertise from the building and replaced it with political loyalty. And that is a major concern on the part of many ex-DOJ employees like myself. And can I just say that DOJ is one really important

part of the story and like the tip of the spear in many ways, but I do think it's about inaugurating an entirely new, well, new today, actually old, but ethos of government service in which really jobs in the federal government go to the patrons and cronies of the people at the very top, the president and the president's top aides. And then the apparatus of government is deployed to reward the friends and to punish the enemies of those at the very top of the federal government. And we actually did have a spoil system in federal employment for, not actually the first century, but starting in like the 1820s and 1830s, and we started to get rid of it in the late 19th century. And what they are trying to do is to bring it back. And I think the kind of firing federal workers at the Department of Justice is one part of this much larger agenda.

And I'm so glad that you highlighted it, both in your testimony and here. And I do think that it was an enormous missed opportunity to highlight that reason or set of reasons to vote against Blanche. Not that the other two that mishandling Epstein and you didn't even mention here, but obviously, obviously his treatment of Gileane Maxwell, the prison transfer, the sort of wildly, I think, for real experts, inappropriate the kind of way that the Blanche interview of Maxwell was conducted. But all of that, you know, got some traction, maybe not as much that it should have, but yes, obviously the corrupt settlement, I'm glad that it seemed to even for Republicans be too much to swallow.

But I think that that obviously wasn't enough at the end of the day to defeat his nomination and wasn't remotely the kind of full picture of his lack of qualifications for the office. Nevertheless, he squeaks by, he's confirmed. And I want to turn now to the swearing in, because that's happened since we last recorded our podcast. Now, it's actually pretty meaningful who a public official chooses to swear them into office, like at the very highest levels, like the Attorney General, I actually wrote a little piece about an aspect of this a few years back. And in that like essay, I told the story of being a young lawyer in the Obama presidential transition and then going into the White House counsel's office. And I tried, as a pretty junior lawyer in that operation,

as we were talking about the inauguration, to make the case that President Obama should have Justice Stevens swear him in. And my case was that Stevens was likely to retire very soon. He was a Chicago in like the president was, and it seemed like it would be just like an awesome gesture. And I'm a former Stevens clerk. And so obviously I was advocating for my boss. But I was quickly overruled. And the, you know, more senior people were like, no, it's usually the chief justice. And it would be not wise to start a presidential term alienating the most powerful jurors in the country by snubbing him. And that, I'm sure was right as a matter of kind of the politics of it. And so Roberts was invited to and he did administer the oath to Obama. He famously flubbed the oath. Like he didn't bring notes with him. And so

he transposed a few words Roberts did. And so Obama repeated them back kind of wrong. And it meant that we had to arrange for the readministration of the oath the next day because the presidential oath is in the constitution. And there was like 24 hours of kind of a question about whether he was the lawful president having not actually said, though, the Constitution requires. Anyway, so that's a long detour. Well, you were right. It should have been Justice Devenson. It would have solved all the problems and maybe so many more. But in any event, Liz, who did our new attorney general choose to swear him into office? Yeah, this is wild, Kate. So Judge Amel Bovet swore in Todd Blanche. And Judge Amel Bovay has been a judge for about five minutes. He was part of the original DOJ team on Trump too. And he came to that role from being one of Donald Trump's personal lawyers sitting next to to Todd Blanche in court for weeks and months as these criminal cases against Donald Trump played out.

So he and Blanche, Bovet and Blanche, were in the trenches together as Donald Trump's personal criminal defense team. They both went on to serve in the Justice Department. And then Bovay got this lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge on the Third Circuit as sort of a reward for his early service in the administration. He was doing the dirtiest of dirty work during the early weeks of the administration as they were trying to implement very aggressive deportation policies, invoking the Alien Enemies Act, etc. And shortly after, he was rewarded with this federal appellate judgeship. And then he was brought back into the Oval Office earlier this week to swear in Todd Blanche to the position of Attorney General.

It was really remarkable to see the gang back together that the Trump criminal defense team, the personal criminal defense attorneys reunited for the swearing in of the Attorney General, really is just kind of highlighting and underscoring the fact that Trump has surrounded himself by these lawyers who are loyal to him above everything else, and he has put them in positions of tremendous power in our society. Absolutely. you said this, Liz, the Oval Office, right? Traditionally, attorneys general are sworn in at the Department of Justice. That is customary. That did not happen here. The swearing in happened at the Oval Office. Beauvais, as you mentioned, has been a judge on the Third Circuit for about five minutes.

Now, judges, actually typically Supreme Court justices often do swear in attorneys general, sometimes vice presidents do. It is not typically a brand new judge on the Third Circuit. This was clearly, I thought, a signal being sent that, you know, echoes what you were saying before. that kind of personal relationships and personal relationships with Donald Trump in particular are the coin of the realm in Todd Blanche's Justice Department. And also that just kind of Donald Trump is the star around which kind of all of these players were bit, right? Like that message was, I think, crystal clear. I was just trying to think of like, is there anyone who could have been trollier to choose to swear him in? Like Alina Haba Don Jr.

Like it was just, I mean, because Beauvais, as you said, is not only if, former Trump defense attorney before he was in the Justice Department and then on the federal bench. His conduct since ascending to the bench has been pretty suss, as my kids would say. He attended a Trump rally as a sitting judge. He, according to the New York Times, at least has or at least had as of July, a photo of Trump after he was shot in the ear at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally, the one where his like fist is in the air as the background image on his iPhone. And that's obviously to say nothing of the kind of, you know, you sort of said sort of dirtiest of work that he did in the Justice Department. You mentioned the Alien Enemies Act, but like there,

you know, is pretty serious evidence, according to a DOJ whistleblower that the day before Judge Bosberg's order to turn the planes around of these individuals being sent to El Salvador pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act, that Beauvais allegedly said that DOJ might be. need to tell the courts, FU, and ignore an order. And then there's also evidence that Beauvais order de-planning of deportees even after Bozberg had ruled. Bosberg, right? And the judge in the D.C. District Court has found probable cause to believe the government willfully disobeyed his order. I think probably that means Beauvais did, although I think it's not, that's not explicit. Anyway, that's the guy that Blanche and Trump decided to highlight because he's now on the bench and they

think he and they are untouchable. Yeah, it's really pretty stunning. I mean, the fact that Bobe has Trump's picture on his phone says a lot about him. Most people on their cell phone screen saver, it's like their significant other or their dog or their cat. Yeah. So Trump occupies a special place in his heart and he does for Blanche too. I mean, Blanche said on national television, I love you, sir, directed to the president. They really have this close, like inappropriately close relationship. There is no arm's length objectivity, which is a really big problem here. We need people in these positions who can make objective decisions about what is in the interests of the people of this country, not how to best serve Donald Trump, the man. But Donald Trump doesn't want that

sort of arm's length objectivity. He wants people who are completely 100 percent loyal to him, and that's who he's surrounded himself by. And I thought it was really interesting that this swearing in was closed to the press, which is very unusual. I mean, Donald Trump has the press in the Oval Office all the time for every last little thing, but not for this. The only photos that we saw coming out of this swearing-in ceremony were taken by people who were in the room. I believe Caroline Levitt posted some of the photos of the swearing-in by Bovay, but the press was not allowed in there. So there was no opportunity to ask any questions about what the optics mean or what message was trying to be sent by having Beauvais back in the Oval Office, this sitting judge

appointed by Trump swearing in his best buddy, his bro, Todd Blanche. So that was a weird little quirk. So not even no questions, but also like nobody there to witness what was said or transpired. I mean, nobody like from the press corps or outside of the kind of core of the Trump operation. Okay, well, that's chilling. I hadn't even thought about that. Great. Another reason to be really disturbed by this whole sequence of events. Okay, but let's move on and canvas some other in Todd Blanche's Justice Department just in recent days. First, the developments around the reflecting pool. So Melissa and guest host, Ellie Mistal, discussed last week on our last episode the fact that just over a week ago, the Justice Department announced in pretty dramatic fashion

that it was dropping the clearly bogus charges of vandalism against Olympian David Hearn, DC U.S. attorney Janine Piro filed this pretty remarkable 20-page memo, basically admitting that a botched renovation, not vandalism, was responsible for the problems in the reflecting pool. And Piro lays the blame basically entirely at the feet of the Department of Interior and the Parks Department, which is a component of it, which on her telling did not supply the U.S. Attorney's Office with relevant evidence, despite like dozens and dozens, as she says, of requests for like full information. thereby somehow compelling the office to charge an innocent man with vandalism. That part isn't totally explained. But anyway, it's obviously the fault of the Interior Department. I have to say the filing is a pretty funny read in the age of the unitary executive.

But the bottom line is Ellie and Melissa made clear is that like Piro, who we've referred to in this podcast as a box of wine, should actually maybe be given some credit for having real spine here. Or maybe not? Did she grow a spine? Like, do you have theories on why she actually? actually eight crow the way she did and said, like, our bad, there was not a crime here. Like, it was quite striking. Yeah. So normally when the Justice Department moves to dismiss charges, it is a very

terse short filing, like one paragraph. They don't have to even explain themselves most at the time. So it was really notable that this was like a 20-page filing that laid out an incredible detail, all of the problems with the reflecting pool. And I think that that largely the audience for that was Donald Trump. I mean, that's the only. audience that most of these political appointees at DOJ really care about is how is this going to be perceived by the president. So Puro was trying to make the case to Donald Trump that this was not her fault. It was Doug Bergam's fault, the secretary of the interior who dropped the ball here and misinformed her. And she didn't need to, you know, provide this elaborate justification to

the court. She was doing it for Donald Trump. I think that there is a real problem here for Janine Piro, though, at the end of the day, which is that this filing makes it very clear that she proceeded with bringing these charges before she had done sufficient investigation to have a factual and evidentiary basis for the charges. The Justice Department's own internal operating procedures, as well as just basic common sense, say that you should not proceed with bringing a case before you have fully investigated it and you're sure that you have the evidence to make the charges stick. So the fact that Piro went ahead and charged a felony, which was the more serious of the two options on the table, a felony versus a misdemeanor, without doing any investigation to show

that she could even prove that A, Hearn caused the damage and B, that the damage rose to the level of a felony threshold, meaning that it caused more than $1,000 of damage to the reflecting pool. It's just really reckless, irresponsible, and potentially sanctionable conduct. I mean, Piro could be disciplined by the bar. The attorneys who brought this case in her office could be disciplined by the bar for proceeding in that way. Bringing criminal charges, it's not just a matter of like a piece of paper that you file. It endangers someone's liberty. It puts someone's liberty at risk, their constitutional rights at risk. It is incredibly traumatizing to be subjected to a criminal prosecution. So the fact that this was done so lightly and so recklessly is really pretty appalling

and her own filing makes that clear. Absolutely. And nevertheless, like despite how obvious, as it is that this case should never have been brought and maybe her effort to save her own skin in filing this kind of Mia culpa, it doesn't sound as though she's going to just like be allowed to let this thing go quietly because the president has made very clear that he is quite displeased with Piro who he has accused of having, quote, folded like an umbrella, which I think is Trump speak for like having paid even the slightest attention to the basic demands of the rule of law, or maybe as you're suggesting this, just sort of self-preservation. So what did we learn last week about whether the president is willing to just let this go and move on?

Yeah, he does not want to let this go. And it's all about saving face for him. He has put out there this theory that he invented that the reflecting pool was damaged by vandals, that there was nothing wrong with the installation job, that he had done at great expense to taxpayers. It was all about these vandals who for some reason wanted to, you know, destroy the reflecting pool. So he has to save face and he has chosen a scapegoat to save. face. And it is, unfortunately, for Mr. Hearn, it is David Hearn. He is the scapegoat. And Donald Trump wants to proceed with charges against Hearn despite what Piro put in this filing. So it has been reported by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets now that the Justice Department is exploring the possibility of bringing new charges against David Hearn. They're looking at possibly bringing a misdemeanor, which would mean that they don't have to present the case to a grand jury. So that would

make it a little bit easier and they don't have to prove the monetary threshold. They don't have to prove that his damage caused exceeded $1,000. The idea that they're exploring this at all is absolutely ludicrous and it is just so wrong. I mean, they're persecuting this man because Donald Trump is embarrassed, which is not the way our justice system is supposed to operate. And I find this to be one of the scariest prosecutions that this administration has initiated because this is just a person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I mean, he was riding his bike on the national mall like hundreds of other citizens and he stuck his hand in the reflecting pool and now suddenly he is at the center of a nationally important matter to the president and his rights are

imperiled. He's thrust into the spotlight. It is costing time and energy. And that could happen to any of us. And that's very scary. I think that's such a great point because the president and his Justice Department goons have targeted a lot of people that have displeased the president. And you might be tempted to say, well, those are people who have like really stood up and taken positions. And so they have been targeted. And like that, you know, is something that if you have the courage to stand up and like take on powerful players, like sometimes then you'll become a target, which is not a reason not to stand up. But I guess that the second point is that it's also, I think this episode makes clear that even if you don't stand up, you're not safe in like an

aspiring authoritarian regime because literally anyone, I think wrong place at the wrong time is exactly right. Like riding his bike, touch the water. Like this is a public place. It's a park. Like it is our park. We can all be there. And if that happens and somehow something that you do displeases the ruler, like you could end up charged with a felony and then charged again, even after it's become totally clear that there's no way to prove a felony. And so I guess at the end of the day, I think that the lesson here is no one is safe in this lawless administration, and that is all the more reason to stand up, which it seems like Hearn didn't invite this, but is very much standing up to fight it. And I think that that and his legal team have been really inspiring.

So we will see what develops. There is a hearing next month on whether the dismissal should be with or without prejudice of this initial round of charges, and I guess we'll see whether Trump manages to get his way. And I don't see how Piro having filed what she did could possibly. keep, you know, file another, like bring misdemeanor charge and keep her job. I think you'd probably need a new, you as a attorney, to start from scratch, but I guess we will see. Struck scrutiny is brought to you by Smalls. Cats thrive on protein, but did you know that some cat foods contain so much carbohydrate filler that they're closer to a granola bar than a

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Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. CimetMobil.com. Let's move on to the OLC opinion that we saw last week on executive privilege and outside advisor. So OLC, the Office of Legal Counsel, is the DOJ component that is sometimes described as like this kind of mini Supreme Court inside the executive branch. It is historically, or at least in recent decades, kind of the final arbiter of legal and constitutional questions

within the executive branch. So for the Department of Justice and for other executive branch agencies that want a legal opinion, OLC is typically the authoritative source of that. So tell us, Liz, about this latest executive privilege opinion. What was the topic? What did it conclude? And what do you make of it? Yeah. So on the same day that Blanche was sworn in by Amel Boe, DOJ's OLC issued this opinion on executive privilege. And it took a really expansive view of the president's ability to withhold information from public scrutiny based on executive privilege. There's a particular part of that privilege called the presidential communications privilege, which says that the president can keep

confidential certain communications with his top advisors. But that is a part of the privilege that's been narrowly construed by the Supreme Court in the past. And the court has made clear that it's not an absolute privilege. It applies to the president's top advisors when they're giving him advice on sensitive matters, but it has to be balanced against other interests, including the need for things like criminal investigations and congressional oversight. So, So DOJ issued this opinion that was really sweeping that said that the privilege is actually much broader than it's ever been applied in the past. And in fact, it applies to advice given to the president or communications the president has with people who don't even work for him. People who work outside government in the private sector who are communicating with the president.

Now, that is not only just as a legal matter, a novel and dubious interpretation of the privilege, but it is also as a practice. matter, an important signal about what Todd Blanche is planning and preparing for, which is likely a slew of congressional investigations if the Democrats win the midterm elections. The purpose of this decision is to be able to insulate as much as possible from scrutiny by Congress if the Democrats start investigating the corruption and misconduct by this administration after the midterms. So DOJ wants to be able to respond to congressional subpoenas by saying, we can't give you these documents or this witness cannot appear to testify because of executive privilege. There are some people in the private sector who are playing these really sort of shady roles in the administration. And I think those are the people in particular that Blanche and Trump are worried about.

There's this lawyer named Boris Epstein who has worked as Donald Trump's personal lawyer. for some years now and now is playing this role as sort of like a deal maker or deal broker within the administration. He was responsible for brokering these deals between the Trump administration and private law firms at the start of the administration where these law firms agreed to perform over a billion dollars worth of pro bono legal services for the Trump administration. He was also involved in negotiating the corrupt settlement of the IRS deal. He does not work for the government. He is not a White House employee, not a DOJ employee. He's in the private sector. Already, his records have been subpoenaed in litigation over these settlements with the law firms.

So he's kind of in the crosshairs right now. And undoubtedly, there'll be more scrutiny on the role that he is playing if the Democrats take over Congress in the midterms. And so to get ahead of this, they have issued this very broad opinion, which may or may not be upheld legally. at the end of the day, but it will allow the administration to tie this up in litigation for years and try to essentially obstruct any congressional investigations. Right, absolutely. I mean, and I think that executive privilege is complicated. First of all, you know, some people think it's an entirely invented, you know, non-constitutional concept. I actually do think that there are strong arguments that there is a constitutional foundation for some kind of executive privilege, but that it really has to be construed narrowly and that this kind of vision of executive privilege that would

undermine both courts and Congress's ability to engage in any kind of sort of meaningful oversight of or checking of the White House is wildly dangerous. I think you're totally right that this is about anticipating the midterms and also the ongoing efforts to get, you know, evidence and testimony from people like Boris Epstein. And I think that this is dubious and who knows what courts would do at the end of the day. You know, obviously the Supreme Court has been quite protective of executive power. So maybe they would uphold it. But even if they didn't, The ability to point to a legal argument that allows you to delay disclosure in response to things like congressional requests just provides another tool that will prevent access to information about what is actually happening inside this administration and between the administration and outside advisors. So just an additional tool of delay is going to mean an advantage, like an additional significant advantage for the executive branch if there are oversight fights on the horizon as I think there.

likely are. One thing, though, to say is that as expansive as this new kind of vision of executive privilege attaching to these communications with private actors definitely is, even on its own terms, it has some limitations, and it's supposed to relate only to official presidential decision-making. And so I do think that communications around things like, you know, the president's cryptocurrency activities should not even plausibly be covered by this vision of executive privilege. So there are still things that Congress could investigate that I don't think there's any even threshold argument would be shielded by this vision of executive privilege. So just putting that out there now, because I could imagine that arising. So let's turn to another set of developments here involving

Lisa Cook, the Fed governor, who is, you know, speaking of kind of targeting by the administration, is now being targeted afresh after winning in the Supreme Court in her efforts to rebuff the first attempt to fire her. So recall, just to kind of set the stage a little bit, that Trump-Lacky, Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency has concocted, concocted last year a case against Lisa Cook, extremely accomplished economist, Black woman, Biden appointed to the Fed to a term that doesn't buy its terms, end until the 2030s. So Pulte basically put together this case against her, suggesting that a mortgage application for a second home that has some reference and some document to the home being a primary residence is somehow tantamount to mortgage fraud.

Based on this incredibly thin case, Trump claimed that he was firing Lisa Cook for cause last year via social media because, of course, the lower courts blocked that effort, and then in June, the Supreme Court held that the government could not move forward immediately with removing Lisa Cook. But it did not foreclose the possibility of the administration, making another run at her, and that appears to be what they are doing. She has now been asked to submit evidence and arguments by the end of August explaining why the allegations against her are incorrect and or why they do not constitute cause for removing her from the Federal Reserve Board.

Liz, just kind of do you have a sense of what the administration's long game is here, and if they do, you know, try to fire her again and she fights it again, what do you think the reaction will be? And here I mean, not just in the Supreme Court, in the lower courts, and kind of kind of more broadly. Yeah, this is clearly a pretextual investigation. Bill Pulte has this job at this sort of obscure federal agency, the Federal Housing Finance Authority, which has mortgage records for every American with a mortgage, essentially. And he has really misused his access to that information to try to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump by digging up dirt on people that Trump considers enemies. And Lisa Cook is one of those people. So he has found,

what he describes as some evidence of mortgage fraud. She disputes that there was any mortgage fraud, and the Supreme Court ruled that she has to have an opportunity to respond to the allegations before she can be fired. But the ruling really doesn't require a whole lot in terms of due process. It may be that she responds and the government says, you know, well, okay, that's not a satisfactory explanation and we're firing you anyway.

And then there's further litigation over whether that was sufficient. And I do think it's possible based on what the Supreme Court said that her firing could be upheld by a court based on really very little evidence, not the type of evidence that you would need to actually convict her in a criminal prosecution of committing mortgage fraud. The standard is likely not to be that high. So it is possible that eventually she will be fired. And I think that this is really just an effort by the Trump administration to sort of, of resist any limitations that the Supreme Court has imposed on their authority. I mean, at the end of the day, her firing, I think, is less important to Donald Trump than it once was because he's now gotten his chosen director in place at the Fed. And that was a win for him. And I don't know how much he still really cares about Lisa Cook, but he definitely cares about showing that he is free to do what he pleases and is not subject to limitations by courts. So this is one of many contexts in which he is essentially fighting back against a Supreme Court decision that was adverse to him. And I think that is really the purpose of continuing to pursue and target Lisa Cook.

Yeah, I think that's well said. And I also think that it's an important reminder that even the kind of much-touted Trump losses this term were pretty qualified. So yes, he lost this case and this initial effort to remove Cook. But the court left him lots of leeway. And he is very much exploiting that. So at the end of the day, like, this could actually be a win for Trump. And so just yet another reason that many of the kind of takes about how the Supreme Court delivered all these rebukes to Trump last term were just wildly overstated. So I'm not sure if whether the next topic is exactly consistent with that theme, because here I think the court's rejection of Trump's arguments was more decisive, but to pivot to the birthright citizenship executive orders,

this new effort by the administration to kind of refuse to accept its even few losses in the Supreme Court. So as Melissa and Ellie discussed last week, we now have two new executive orders on the topic of birthright citizenship. And then since that episode, the team that brought and won Trump v. Barbara, the lawsuit that challenged the day one executive order purporting to just end birthright citizenship has brought a challenge to this new order. And Trump actually issued two new executive orders, but the one that's the topic of this new challenge is titled Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. It's just like a riff on the original day one executive order. And it seems pretty clear that this new executive order is

very much trying to strip American citizenship from at least some people that don't fall within what the Supreme Court recognized as the narrow exceptions to the rule of birthright citizenship, like for ambassadors. So the order would, for example, among other things, strip from all the children of any embassy employees and some international organization employees, birthright citizenship. I don't know what that overall number is, but it must number in the many thousands. And those are individuals who I do not think from the Supreme Court's decision in Barbara are outside of the background legal rule of birthright citizenship to individuals born in the United States, regardless of the status of their parents. So the complaint basically says,

this new order violates the existing preliminary injunction against the original executive order because it tries to strip birthright citizenship from some people protected by that initial preliminary injunction against the first executive order and basically says that, you know, it flouts what is in the Supreme Court opinion again in Trump versus Barbara. And I guess I'm curious, Liz, so you said maybe at the end of the day Trump does win in his attempt to fire Lisa Cook if it's something that he chooses to pursue. I guess do you have any sense of what the Supreme Court, if this case gets back to the court, would be likely to do with these executive orders? Yeah, I think this is another example of what Trump is really trying to do is to send a message.

He's trying to send a message that he about values more so than, like, I don't know if he really even cares about the children of people who work in embassies becoming U.S. citizens. I'm not aware of that as being like a concern that anyone has ever raised in the past. And it seems like it's relatively limited to a small number of people. So I don't know if substantively this really makes a big difference to that many people or if there's really any intent to pursue it. But I think it is about continuing this message that like we are this like white nationalist country that does not like immigrants. And they're just sending this this message again. They're saying that, you know, we're not deterred by the Supreme Court. That is still our view. That is still our values. And I think a lot of it is really about political messaging more than it is about a substantive

legal theory. But if this case does come back up to the Supreme Court, I mean, I do think that it's an opportunity for the administration to try to persuade them to make a broader carve out in the initial ruling. I mean, it was a little bit alarming that the ruling wasn't unanimous, that it wasn't a 9-0 ruling saying the Constitution says birthright citizenship, you know, and that leaves it at that. So it does seem like maybe there's an attempt to try to exploit some little divisions in here and try to get a broader carve-out. But even if that's not where this ultimately goes, I think that, you know, this messaging purpose is really like a big factor that's driving this at the end of the day. I think that's exactly right. Okay, just a couple more news items to highlight. And one, I'm just going to mention this briefly, but we had another installment in basically the arms race to get Trump's attention with, you know, basically bootlicking opinions from lower courts. And this one, and not for the first time, comes from Fifth Circuit Judge Andy Oldham. So at issue here is a sweeping new Texas voting law, which the lower court had held violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. And Oldham writing for a Fifth Circuit panel basically like had some gratuitous. kind of sneers about district court injunctions. He wrote, as so often happens in modern America,

a federal district judge, then countermanded the legislature with sweeping facial injunctions. And then basically says, we have to clean up those injunctions. It's also kind of, you know, sneering about the law's impact on Americans with disabilities, although the court dismissed most of the claims on standing grounds. But the most kind of pick me auditioning part of the opinion came in the very first sentence, which reads, quote, it has long been established that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud. That is why voting by mail jeopardizes election integrity and democracy itself, which literally just like a press release from the White House,

except for it's in a Fifth Circuit opinion. And the source that it cites is, you know, I guess credit-word-do, it's not just like the White House website, but it is one district court opinion from the year 2014 and one that was at least in part reversed by the Fifth Circuit. The procedural history of that one was really complicated. Anyway, it's just like it's turtles all the way down, but it's also a reminder that you can just like, if you don't care, you can put anything in a judicial opinion. And then that can be cited in future judicial opinions as though that's like real authority.

And I'm just reminded of John Roberts just citing himself on executive power in order to justify further expansions of executive power, which is what we just saw in the slaughter opinion last term where Roberts' own writing in previous presidential power and presidential firings cases are like a key authority. on which the opinion rests. And that is a segue to the next thing I want to talk about, which is this very weird thing that cropped up in various feeds last week. And I don't know if others, I don't know if you saw this, Liz, I don't know if listeners had the same reaction I did. But if you learned last week that the Chief Justice may be developing a side hustle as a sub-stacker, like that really did happen.

I saw this. I was like, oh, somebody has just penned something and affixed John G. Roberts Jr. to their essay, but it actually appears that the Chief Justice of these United States wrote a substack post for the In Pursuit Substack, which is a project of more perfect. Now, lots of other prominent figures have contributed essays. I don't actually really totally understand what the project is, but there are a series of essays penned by really important former office holders. Hillary Clinton wrote one about Eleanor Roosevelt, Michelle Obama, wrote one about Jackie Kennedy.

Carl Rove wrote one about William McKinley, because of course he did. Ken Burns wrote one about FDR. Barack Obama wrote one about Abraham Lincoln. So like, this is not the first installment of this series, but it's definitely the first by a sitting Chief Justice. And I think it must be the first on Substack. And even if it's not, it's still pretty weird. And I'm also really struck by the decision he made about what to sort of use as

his first foray into the genre, which is this kind of encomium to Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the only person to have served as both President and Chief Justice. So just a couple of things I will highlight, and then Liz, I'm curious to get your reaction to it. So one, Roberts pointed out and clearly loved pointing out that for Taft being president really was like just kind of the warm up, it wasn't that big a deal. It was kind of a waste station on his way to fulfilling his real dream, which was to be Chief Justice.

So obviously, like, that's the better gig Roberts, us all to know that. So the opinion also goes out of its way to praise Taft's opinion in Myers versus United States, which is one of these really important opinions about presidential power, which the slaughter decision about the president's power to fire FTC commissioners cited lovingly and in great detail as like the most important opinion ever written about presidential power. Roberts praises Tafts like deep reservoir of optimism and faith in the correctness of core principles and commitment to public service and devotion to the Constitution. And it's interesting he gets some digs in on outsized conceptions of presidential power. He like praises taft for when he was president

operating within the system, so, you know, acting only when the president was authorized by the constitution. And I just, I just had this thought which was like, John Roberts, if you were hoping to send a message to the White House about the importance of abiding by constitutional limits on presidential power, you have ample opportunities to do that that are not substack. Like, where was this energy so many other times in the last, you know, 20 months? Like, you know, It was wild to me. And also, final thing I'll say here is that as Nico Bowie and Daphna Renan point out in their masterful new book called Supreme, Taft is largely responsible for ushering in both this really jurisdocratic conception of the separation of powers that like disables Congress from regulating the president and like gives the court the final word about like when Congress can act. And that kind of all of this has its roots in white supremacist, lost cause post civil war post-reconstruction dogma.

And that, the person who's sort of the architect of that is who John Roberts decided to make his substack debut kind of defending. So I guess just like, Liz, any reaction to this or like any guesses about what John Roberts next substack might be about it. Yeah, Kate, I was trying to figure out why he wrote this. And it seemed like there was some element of self-pity in there. He wanted us to know that being the Chief Justice is actually a really hard job. and he talked about how Taft was this gifted administrator and all the administrative responsibilities that are so important that the Chief Justice bears,

which I think was kind of like a way of letting us know that he's actually really doing a lot. So for all his critics, you think he's not holding it all together. You know, he's doing a lot behind the scenes that we don't know about. And there was also this kind of like self-engrandizing quality. He said something about how he, like he quoted Taft saying, I forgot that I was ever president or something to that effect because becoming Chief Justice was so much more important.

important than that. So it's kind of like reminding us also that he actually has the most important job in the country, even though Donald Trump has a louder megaphone. And then there were like a couple of really odd things that I found about it. Like he talked a bunch about Taft's weight and his like the ups and downs of his weight and how his weight ballooned when he was president and then he lost 75 pounds and he became the Chief Justice. And I was just like, why is he so fixated on this man's weight? It was just truly bizarre, Kate. I really don't know what to make of it, but I do think that John Roberts should probably find another vocation and not pursue Substack as his primary livelihood. Was it a cry for help? I don't know. It was really so strange. But yes, I hope that this is the kind of one and done

of his career as a poster on Substack. And just speaking of John Roberts, like in venues that are not Supreme Court opinions, there actually was a really interesting profile in The New Yorker last week by Margaret Talbot, the delusions of John Roberts. You know, it definitely takes the position, as we have on this podcast many times, that Roberts has basically lost control of the court. And he comes across at points as sort of hapless. But it also ends on a note that I think is basically right, which is that like maybe Roberts is actually fine, happy even with this current state of the court and the country that, yes, maybe Roberts thinks, appreciates that there's like a madman at the helm right now. But that that's kind of a small price to pay for

the proper restoration of the separation of the separation of power. the end of affirmative action, the destruction of the administrative state, the end of the Voting Rights Act, you know, say nothing of, you know, the parts of ending doctrines that might limit the ability of, say, oil and gas companies to ravage the environment, etc., etc. One thing I did learn from the piece that I thought was pretty interesting was that in 1983, a young John Roberts as a White House lawyer, authored a memo, basically arguing that life tenure for judges or justices may have made sense when the Constitution was drafted and life expectancies were much short. order, but that today a term of 15 years might be preferable. And I will just end this discussion by quoting from a young John Roberts. The federal judiciary today benefits from an insulation from political pressure, even as it usurps the roles of the political branches. A stopped clock is occasionally right. Okay, Liz, before I let you go, will you share some recommendations with our listeners of things you've read or watched in the past, you know, the days, weeks that you think they might

enjoy. Yeah, so I was at the beach last week, which was amazing. Highly recommend the ocean, if you can get near an ocean as an incredibly therapeutic place to be. And I had the chance to read two books. And one of the books I read in large part because I have a rising senior in high school. And so I'm consuming all things higher ed. And I read this book, How to Rule the World and Education and Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker, who is the son of two very well-known. reporters and journalists. And it is really a terrifying glimpse into the machinations of sort of corporate tech America to grab up college students and throw money at them to try to recruit them into big tech. I was really kind of shocked by reading this. It's also a story about how Theo Baker

broke this incredible story about the president of Stanford and ultimately got him to have to resign. So that's sort of like the main purpose of it. But it was really just an incredible glimpse inside this elite academic institution at the undergrad level that was a bit terrifying. Highly recommend anybody who has kids who are college bound in the near future. And then I read this incredible book called The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, which was really just, I would say it's about adulting. It's like about all the things about being an adult that you don't think about until you're in your 40s like I am and start to have some existential angst. And it really made me feel all of the emotions. So highly recommend that. And then I also want to give a plug for what I think is the best TV show that nobody is watching, which is ponies. It is an incredible show about two women who go to Russia during the 70s and become spies. And it is like funny and dramatic and thrilling all at once. And I really want to encourage people to watch it because I'm hoping it'll get renewed for a second season. I have not heard about it. Thank you for that recommendation. That is great. Okay, I was not on the beach last week, although I will be able to.

be next week and I'm really excited about that. But so a couple of sort of more, you know, work-adjacent recommendations. Just security. The website has these, has started running the series of reinvention blueprints that are about just kind of rebuilding, reinventing government. It's nice to sort of dwell in an optimistic space sometimes in the first three installments about building government for the next pro-democracy movement and a government that works for the people all three of them are really excellent. So highly recommend those. There was a wrenching account from Dilley, Texas by a professor, Mariam Tomasebi, who is a professor again and a green card holder with no criminal record who has been held in Dilley, Texas, the immigration detention facility since

April. It is appalling. John Oliver had a great segment last week on the Department of Justice, the topic of most of our conversation today and kind of juries and the presumption of regularity. And like, God bless John Oliver for making the presumption of regularity such good television. Only he could do that and he really does. that segment out if you have not seen it. And then the reporting that keeps coming out and getting wilder about the incident earlier this summer in which Trump returned from Turkey via the old Air Force

one rather than the new one, or at least we thought so. But now it turns out actually he was hidden in a catering card and didn't even fly on the old Air Force one, but a third plane, but then the White House Press Corps and some staff were left on the Old Air Force one as decoys of some sort. Anyway, I think the story is like yet, all the shoes have not yet dropped. But it is wild to read about. And just like a reminder, in case there were any doubt, of like what this president thinks of the press and maybe his own staff. Okay. So those are my recommendations for now. Liz Oyer. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was really great to talk to you. Thank you, Kate. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Listeners, you can find Liz as lawyer Oyer across Instagram and YouTube and Substack and TikTok and X. And her podcast is available wherever you stream your podcast. So thanks again. Coming up, my conversation with Julia Engwin and Ami Fields-Meyer about their terrific new book on courage. But first, I want to remind our listeners that you can now listen to strict scrutiny for CLE credit. As you may know, but I'm going to tell you, if you don't, we recently launched our first course for CLE credit. It is our SCOTUS term recap episode. It came out in the first week of July, but it is now approved for CLE credit in a long and growing list of states, including California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia,

North Carolina, Georgia, Washington, Oregon. I think that's it right now, but maybe additional states will be added, so we'll keep you posted if and when that happens. And as we've said before, this is something new we are trying. If enough people sign up, we will hopefully be able to add more episodes in the future. If you were interested, go to crooked.com slash strict underscore CLE to learn more and by the course. And once you've purchased it, you will head over to our partners at Lawline, which is an accredited

CLE provider. People may have used. It's responsible for CLE administration, and you will use the code you got from Crooked to access our course for credit. Happy listening. And now let's get on with the show. Strict's journey is brought to you by Babel. I just got back from a great trip to London. And I'll say, I had no problems communicating. But I am gearing up for some more travels around the globe this fall. And I want to be ready. I'm not going to have the comfort of knowing that English will be spoken. even if it is with a Cheerio accent. So if you're traveling this summer or in the fall, here's a real travel hack.

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chefs make fresh, small-batch meals just for you. Go to cookunity.com forward slash strict or enter code strict before checkout to get 50% off your first order. That's 50% off your first order by using code strict or going to cookunity.com slash strict. For this segment, I'm delighted to be joined by Julia Angwin and Ami Fieldsmeyer, authors of the terrific new book On Courage, How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. Julia and Ami, welcome to strict scrutiny. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. So delighted to have you both.

Let me just quickly introduce you to our listeners. Julia is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who has spent decades investigating abuses of power in the tech industry, especially involving big data and surveillance. AMI is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a former senior policy advisor in the Biden-Harris White House. Their excellent new book expands on, I think maybe grows out of an amazing and very widely read essay that they published last year in The New Yorker titled So You Want to Be a Dissident. That piece, you know, in the early months of the Trump administration, examined how Americans were confronting heightened risks for protest and free speech and civil resistance amidst riot. authoritarianism in the second Trump term. This book is a much expanded version of that. And I think one thing that I think is really important to say at the outset is the book is really clear about the intervention that it is making. So it recognizes that there are actually a lot of works in the

genre of democratic resistance that are making the case that what we are witnessing is authoritarianism and that we need to fight back. And in some ways, like that's not the project convincing anyone of either of those first two kind of antecedent conditions. This book jumps in at the next step, which is, on its telling, for the individual who is trying to answer the question, now that I object, what do I do next? And it is both beautiful and bracing and extremely concrete and actionable. And I so appreciated all of those aspects of the book. So really, truly thrilled to have you here to talk to me about it. And maybe let's start with just method. So how did you go about trying to answer that question, the what do I do next question, really beginning on inauguration day in

2025. We were really lucky, like you said, to rest on all of the literature that's already come before us about describing the authoritarian threat and outlining what we were seeing. And so we didn't have to do that work. We really just had to, we really wanted to answer the question all of our friends were asking, which was, what the hell should I do now? Right. Like, what am I supposed to Do I have to go to a protest? Do I call my congressman? Like, what is the actual thing that I can do? So we started really locally.

Ami was at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School, which is honestly where dissidents go when they're kicked out of their country in exile. And so we had a sort of a ready pool of people that we could tap their expertise. So we started with some of them. And then we started calling people around the world. really basically like what do we need to know about what it's like to be in an authoritarian regime to survive one to resist one and what's really cool about this reporting project is that we didn't have a hypothesis going in like we weren't trying to prove a point like oh the right answer is x we

were actually really just interested in seeing what emerged what trends emerged and was cool to see that people in really desperate places places really like with incredible you know physical repression and gulags like Russia or places like Hungary where the repression has been more subtle, although very effective, had very similar stories to tell about what the psychological journey they went through was and then what they did after they sort of came to the realization that they needed to act. And I do want to kind of get into these sort of themes that emerge in many of these conversations. And we should say you mentioned Russia and Hungary and you're also talking to folks from Egypt and Hong Kong and Venezuela and many, many more places and also in the United States,

resisting from very early on. And, you know, you sort of pulled together all of this collective wisdom. And one thing that you do also for setting the groundwork early in the book is you take this very capacious view of what a dissident is. And I really appreciated that. Ami, when you talk a little bit about kind of what you offer up as a definition and how the people that you talked to or at least some of them kind of felt about the label or how they understood themselves. Well, Americans, I think, tend to think of a dissident as someone of another time and another place. That's a far away term. Navalny is a dissident and Mandela is a dissident. And they are. But I think that if we had written a book about those people, those people who are sort of preternaturally

courageous, that would have been an interesting book. I'm not sure it would have been such a useful book. for us. I mean, I mean, really people like us, normal people. And I'm not suggesting either of the two of you are normal, but I'm just a normal guy. And so I think for somebody like me and the people I know, part of what changes in as authoritarianism begins creeping into the United States is the level of risk that everyday things begin to feel like, at least feel like they are taking on. And so in ordinary times our democracy is defined by choices. We show up every two years, every four years, we call our senators, we make decisions in our civic life. Authoritarian times just feel, everything begins to feel more constricted and more risky. And so as a result, when everything

starts to feel a little bit more fearful, when that is the metier of the people in charge, it's really important that we learn the tools of how to take risk in whatever context that we're in. Not all of us are going to stand up in front of a tank, and many of us aren't going to have the opportunity to even make that choice. But all of us are going to go into an office or many of us are going to go into an office at some point. Many of us are going to have federal agents show up in our community or be the object of coercion at a university, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so we offer a more capacious, as you say, a more generous interpretation of what it means to be a dissident. And what we're doing is we're looking at people who have taken risk in their context. And sometimes that risk is in my neighborhood.

Like, I'm going to do this and I'm going to lose my social status. I'm going to lose my community. Sometimes that's something more concrete and physical. But it was important to us to expand the definition because the tools that we're talking about of what we call collective stubbornness, which is a term we got from Maria Stephan, who's a great political scientist, come from that risk taking. Now, I will say, to your initial question, Kate, nobody who we talked to was coming from, comfortable being called a dissident. And even people who were opposition leaders in other authoritarian countries who had been jailed, people just weren't comfortable with that. More frequently,

people weren't even comfortable with being called courageous. What they were comfortable with is saying, I am who I am. And when it came time for me to make a difficult decision, I wasn't motivated by becoming a dissident. I was just weighing these two fears against each other. Either I can keep my head down, but I'm going to be judged in the eyes of history or my children or a higher power. Or I can do the thing. And in those cases, I will be judged. There will be other consequences. So everyone is weighing those two things against each other.

And we decide to call all those people a dissident. Yeah. And in terms of the kind of weighing these competing imperatives against each other, you have this really useful concept in the book that you call a moral collision. Right. So you note that the people, many of the people that you're talking to, do find themselves in these positions of weighing powerful, competing kind of fears and desires, right? So like there are fears of like losing a job, money, status, physical safety, freedom, things like that.

And then there is another fear, which is often a deeper fear that is the fear of, quote, living a life that doesn't feel honest or dignified or maybe abandoning core values. And you write, quote, this moral collision. is where dissident life often begins with a small feeling and then a big choice. I guess, I want to ask a bunch of specific questions, but I guess a general question now, Julia, what do you take from all of these conversations about kind of what causes that second fear of, you know, betraying values, being someone you don't want to be to finally outweigh those kind of more parochial fears in the first category? And can people learn or train themselves to recognize these kinds

of moral collisions and act on them in ways that align with deep values before like rationalizing their way around or out of it. Yeah, I will say that like one of the things that is so true about our time is that there's always a reason not to do it. Right. And so you, we were really interested in the people who had chosen to do it because you can always find a way to rationalize it. And I think one of the best anecdotes from our book that I think tells the story well is the story of Paul Osdabe, who we opened the book with. He is a civil rights lawyer in HUD, and his job was to defend the Fair Housing Act in the civil rights office. And when the new administration came in, they basically said, everyone in this office can be reassigned. And he knew what that meant is that effectively it was a dead letter law, right?

that they weren't going to enforce it. So that meant racial and age discrimination, gender discrimination, housing would basically be effectively legal again, right? Why pay out, like one of the major achievements of Martin Luther King's legacy and the Civil Rights Act? So he was just like not perinnaturally interested in being a hero. He is a Nigerian immigrant. His parents came here.

He was raised in Texas, but his family has raised to keep your head down, go to law school, get a good job. you know, like he was not interested in being courageous. But he also was like, look, I wouldn't live in this country. I wouldn't have housing, honestly, as a black man, if these laws weren't enforced. And so I, and I've trained my whole life to be this person. And so I don't feel like I have a choice. And that was the thing that we heard so over and over again, I don't feel like I have a choice.

Because if I didn't do this, I wouldn't be who I am. We quote the great Soviet dissident, Andrei Sineyov, who said, I thought, the perfect thing. He said, it dissident is a man who does not consider himself guilty. And I think that that is really, like, encapsulates the poetry of it. But the real choice that we all face, which is, are we going to stand with our values or not? Yeah, that Osadabe story is great. And there are just like so many in the book that are all unique in their own way.

But there are, I think one of the really striking things about the book is that there are these remarkable kind of common themes and lessons. And that comes through in the book and you make that point explicitly. So you observe that, quote, I'm going to quote from the book a lot because it's so good. So you say, quote, these people seem to be relying on a shared set of principles, practices, and tools in order to live out their values. We were reminded of a phenomenon in the history of science in which researchers across the world have often arrived at the same discovery, independent of one another. Something comparable can be said of the dissident experience. Our reporting showed the dissidents are building on a deposit of accumulated knowledge. So on that point, in order to bring out the most that we can in a pretty short time,

I want to mention some of the kind of common strategies and lessons that recur throughout the book. So maybe I'll identify a theme and then maybe give you a line that captures it and let you kind of offer responses or reflection. So let me start with one, which is grassroots activism beats legalistic institutional strategies alone. So you describe a study that calculates that a backsliding, country, right, a country undergoing democratic backsliding as the United States obviously is. Its odds of halting the slide are something like 7% when it relies exclusively on institutional methods like elections and litigation and legislative action, but rises to something like a toss-up with non-violent civil resistance. And you argue that Americans, quote, will have to learn

a different mode of activism beyond the familiar cycles of electoral campaigns. So, I mean, you know, what, say more about that and kind of what those. modes of non-institutionally focused activism look like? Well, first of all, thank you for quoting from the book and for reading the book. And not to say that not every interviewer does, but we're very grateful that you have. This is the collective stubbornness thing that I was just talking about. So there's this amazing political scientist named Maria Stephan, who has this phrase, collective stubbornness.

Americans are really good at the stubbornness part, not so good at the collective part. Sometimes it freaks us out. We're really good stubborn individualists, unfortunately. but we can learn. We have perfected that, that modality. But these are the tools of boycott, the tools of strike, the tools of civil disobedience. What we learn from countries that have been able to push back, and this is what we're talking about in that study, but also that we see all over the book that have been able to push back

against authoritarianism, is that what they do is that they make it more painful to do authoritarian stuff. That's it. And the way that they do that, the way that movements do that is that they gum up the works, that they just increase the cost of corruption. As Julia likes to say, authoritarianism is about stealing your rights and stealing your money. And the work of defeating it is getting much better at making it harder to do that. And so that means creating friction. But the reason that we say that many Americans need to learn the new tools is because this is not.

the mechanism, these are not the mechanisms that we're used to in participating in democracy. We're used to, as I said before, litigating and legislating and voting. And as we've learned from a place like Hungary, you can't stop doing those things. You've got to keep using those tools as long as we have them. And Hungary just showed us that if you are able to seize such a massive victory that sometimes that those continue to work, even as you're descending. But it's never enough. And that's part of what we're arguing here. Part of what we need to find, part of what all of us need to do is find a political home, engage in a political practice, and be organizing, generally even starting in our neighborhoods, become used to some of these tools, study them, go to trainings, participate in civil resistance,

civil disobedience. Those are the tools that once it's time for us all to get to the streets, We hear all the time about the 3.5% rule, we can get there. But that number of 3.5%, which many folks have heard about which sort of the, it's repeated regularly, only really works as a victory lap. Everybody needs to be doing the training to participate in collective stubbornness beforehand, so that when it's time to get to the streets, we can do that as well. And just for folks who aren't familiar with it, right, that's the Erica Chenoweth is largely credited, right, with that sort of finding that in society in which you regularly have,

I'm not sure one-off. I think it needs to be regularly, right, have like something like three. 3.5% of the public basically hitting the streets in mass protests that your signs, I guess, of escaping from authoritarianism. Your chances are, if not, you know, 100% or good. I'm probably not getting all the nuances. But that's essentially the 3.5% figure, at least as it's sort of the significance has taken on in our popular discourse. Is that about right? Yeah. It's a sustained effort by 3.5% of the population to resist the authority. And so she's found that basically in history in the past 100 years studying movements, very few, like a single digits, have been able to withstand a revolt that had three and a half percent of the population in a sustained movement against them.

The problem with it, just to like flush it out a little bit, is it's not causal, right? She's observing. It's a sign that you've built a big enough tent and thrown enough sand in the gears, right? but it's not actually a magic number if everyone just we have three and a half percent on a one no king's day that we're going to win yeah yeah the hard work and like the really important work is what happens before that exactly this episode of strict scrutiny is brought to you by alloy health there's something nobody tells you your skin starts to change in your 40s and it's not just aging it's hormones specifically estrogen loss estrogen naturally helps maintain collagen supports elasticity

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Plus, you get $0 unlimited messaging with your doctor. Just head over to m-y-all-l-o-y.com and use code strict to get $20 off your first order. The What a Day podcast you know and love is shaking things up. You already know that five days a week, I, Jane Koston, bring you the need-to-know news an expert analysis on the big stories shaping today and tomorrow. Stories like how social media warps our perception of the world and the strange reality of who is signing up to work for ice. All in less time than it takes to roast a chicken.

And now, What Today episodes will be hitting your YouTube and podcast feeds in the afternoons. You'll get the breaking news even faster. Check out Whataday. Now dropping in the PM on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. So then another theme that I think recurs is this don't let the perfect to be the enemy of the good. And you write, all again, quote, over and over again, they, like the dissidents, the folks that you've talked to, cautioned us about the dangers of waiting to act until you have the perfect plan, the perfect coalition, the perfect moment.

Instead, dissidents argued for an approach that was rigid and principal, but flexible in approach. Julia, what does that approach look like? Well, I think that a lot of people are always asking us, we would just come back from like five weeks of book tour. And almost every place somebody will ask, well, why is it X working? I did X thing and it's not working. And they want success. And the reality is that you never know what's going to work. So, for instance, standing in front of a tank did not work in Tiananmen Square,

but it did work for the Nepalese students who stood in front of the tanks and overthrew their government. Right. There's no tactic that's like the perfect tactic. What you have to do is try all the things to throw sand in the gears of the authoritarian project and see what, works. And so what you need to be united around is your principles, right? Because you do know that, like, there are coalitions where it's, it's complicated to get to a big tent, right? This is one of the struggles that the Democratic Party is going through right now, right? Like, how big is this tent? How many people are in it? And it has to be something everyone can unite around. We, we often talk

about Hungary as the success, where they turned back the authoritarian tide. But one thing I think people in the U.S. are not necessarily aware of is that the person who won, the opposition figure is basically equivalent to a Liz Cheney here, right? So that is a coalition that required a lot of compromises from, you know, the student radicals in the city centers who had to make coalition with the farmers out in rural areas who were defecting from essentially being loyalist to the party. And so we just have to understand that you have to pick a principal. in Hungary, it was corruption. This regime is corrupt and we are not willing to stand for it. And it's often corruption. And then you have to get enough people united around that to make it work. And then

the tactics vary, right? Is it going to be strikes? Is it going to be protest marches? Is it going to be usually it's all of the above, right? Yeah. And you know, you're talking about kind of coalitions and big tense. And one theme, another of the themes that recurs is the kind of finding your people theme. And I guess That's maybe a little bit of thing because you're saying the broad tent needs to be really big and maybe will include people that you really disagree with, maybe despise, but share some set of goals with. But you also do emphasize the importance of finding political community. And you say in the book, quote, that going without political community is comparable to opting to go without health insurance, exercise, a core group of loved ones. It leaves a massive gap in our personal safety net. and there's science that supports this kind of intuition.

I mean, you know, why is community of that sort the critical foundation upon which so much else rests when we're talking about dissidents and mobilization? When you study the Soviet dissidents, and this is a movement that we think of as enormous because it helped with the aid of geopolitical forces to bring down an empire. But when you look to that movement, it was a movement that never actually grew to be more. more than about a thousand active dissidents at any given time. And these are people who knew each other from daily life or from their, from their professions and their careers. It was scientists and playwrights and artists and intellectuals. And when you read interviews with them and when they talk about gathering, often in secret, in these apartments in Moscow and across the Soviet Union, what they talk about is two things that gathering with others,

others helped with under repression. And this is not, we are not in the Soviet Union, but it's a principle that we can abstract to here. The first is practical. They say they were able to work together and figure out what to do, how to smuggle Samistat, how to smuggle their writings out in ways that might undermine the regime in the West and elsewhere. What do we actually do? What's the next protest? What's the next action? The other thing, though, I think, and I think that we try to get at this significantly in the book is actually less practical and more spiritual, more psychological, which is so much of authoritarianism is about lies. And so much of fighting back is about piercing those lies.

So when you gather with other people, authoritarianism is about saying, you thought you saw Renee Good shot in the street. No, you didn't. Don't believe you're lying eyes. When you gather with other people, you can turn to the others and say, are you seeing the stuff I'm seeing? I'm seeing this too. You're seeing this too, right?

And so there's something that shores up the spirit and shores up the soul as well. There's one other really important principle about why we spent so much time in the book talking about finding your people, which is also a practical thing, which is when you look to many successful campaigns and movements in this space, they didn't start from scratch. They were often the repurposing of networks and communities that already existed. And so there's also something very practical about this. Again, just to turn, because we're on the theme, to the, to the, to the, to the,

the end of communism, that the people who helped bring down communism in Czechoslovakia, Votslov Havl and his crew, were a group of theater actors. These were people who knew each other from making art together for years and years and years. And so when it came time in the midst of their activism, they repurposed their theater spaces as organizing spaces where people come together and have these civic discussions. They literally repurposed their playbill printers into leaflet print. And so having your people and being able to push back often starts with just repurposing what we already have. And then ultimately, what we hear over and over and over again is that if your political community, your political home begins with a group of people just big enough to house a few who share your committed values, you're probably only going to be successful when it grows.

But that embryonic moment is really, really important for emboldening people. And Julia, the growing piece is, of course, also critical. And you emphasize that inviting people in is key to building engagement. And there's this data that I'd never seen that you offer from a study of 15,000 adults that finds that the biggest predictor of protest participation is literally whether the person has been asked to take part in the protest. Is that amazing? It is just amazing.

I mean, there's obviously data like this in campaigns as well. Like, you know, door knocking and in-person conversation is actually still really. effective at political both persuasion and turnout. So I guess it's not crazy, but I had not seen this study. But the takeaway really is that literally there's not a factor that influences people to take on contentious political activism more than social connection. So I guess, Julia, how does that change how we should think about activism and effective activism? Yeah, I think we were really encouraged to see that because the whole point of this book was to be an invitation to action and to show people that there are so many things you could do,

like just pick a chapter. You feel like doing something legalistic, read the chapter on that. And if you want to protest, read that. And if you want mutually, do this, right? And so we wanted people to have an invitation. But the thing that was so interesting to us was how low the bar was for that invitation, right? Nathan Law, the leading Hong Kong dissident nominee for Nobel Prize, who led the umbrella revolution. He started because at his student government meeting, they asked him if he could bring water bottles to the protest line. And he was like, sure, I'll do that because I don't want to take any risk. I'm just going to show up, bring water bottles to the other people who are taking the risk, right?

And we hear that over and over that people, the way they begin is they get engaged by someone asking them to come do something very simple for the movement. And then when they see that those people are having fun, this is one thing that people do not understand is that actually there's a huge amount of like joy that people experience by finding a group of like-minded people working together for. a higher purpose. This is what humans are built for, right? And so seeing that joy and then also often, unfortunately, seeing the state violence enacted on the nonviolent protesters really radicalizes people to get involved, right? And so it turns out that the best thing that anyone listening to

this can do is if you're already an activist, ask someone to bring water bottles to your next thing. And if you're not, go find a thing to bring water bottles to. And not just to a protest. Right. to an organizing meeting beforehand or to a town hall or to people standing in line to visit their loved ones at a detention facility in New Jersey, as you guys write about. And yeah, mutual aid as a big part of the kind of dissident practice is I think another really important through line in the book. But also since you mentioned Joy, I love the chapter titles and subtitles, but you have one, and I can't remember if this is a title or a subtitle, but I wrote it down, the pleasure of agency and the joy and defiance. Like, yeah, there is joy and pleasure. It is not just like, this is a grind,

you should do it for like these kind of higher values. Like it's also something that feels good when you do it. And that I think is really important. And people, I think, realize this if they're like dipping their toe in for the first time to this kind of work. So you said, you know, kind of wanting the book to be useful at kind of different sorts of interventions. And I actually wanted to ask a very specific question, which is that last Thursday, as part of one of our bonus episodes, like a know-your-write series that we're dropping some special kind of targeted episodes around. Leah had a conversation with Brooklyn Law School's Jocelyn Simonson about the ins and outs of

cop watching, basically the practice of recording and observing law enforcement, including federal agents like ICE officers. This is, it's, I think, a very useful primer for this aggressive enforcement era. And I'm curious having spent some time, you know, looking at and talking to people about this question, do you have practical advice or best practices that you could share with our listeners who are specifically thinking about filming at protests, which is like one way you can get involved in this kind of work. Yeah, absolutely. We have a whole section of the book on, we take very seriously the threats and violence that will be enacted on you or if you choose to stand up for your values with others. And so we offer some specific tips. And we, for filming at protests,

you know, one of the things that Jocelyn very nicely described was that. that like the threat is not necessarily that it's illegal. It's that the cops are going to make your life very difficult, right? And so some of the best practices that we learned from the people we spoke to who are on the front lines of thinking about this stuff are, first of all, you turn off the facial recognition and any sort of biometrics on your phone so that the cops can't unlock it because a big threat is that they're going to take your phone from you and try to see what you have.

But often, unfortunately, she did mention, they will ask you to do your pin. maybe they'll detain you for a long time. You might end up letting them have access. So don't have the video on your camera roll. So one thing to do is to film in a signal chat. So before you leave, set up a signal chat with people who are not there. And then you're actually just accessing the camera feature within signal. So the footage goes directly to this group of people that you have already designated.

And so they have it stored, but it's nowhere on your camera roll. So even if they can get access to your phone, they can't do that. The other thing is there's a pin number you can set up on Signal and on WhatsApp so that the you can't open that app without an additional level of pin access. So and you can even do cloaking where Apple has a thing where you can change the icon for your apps, make it look like a weather app. So so there's layers. We call this the Swiss Chies theory where like every layer of defense has a whole, but if

you stack enough of them together, you can build somewhat of a better practice, right? Like this is still a who's running away faster from the bear. situation. Like you're not, there's no guarantees here. But, um, but these are some things I just thought it would be really nice to offer to readers as they're thinking about these issues. Those are terrific additional tips. So I'm glad that our listeners are now also able to hopefully take note of all of that. Okay. So you strike a, I think pretty inspiring and optimistic tone in the book's final pages. Um, you write, quote, the courage of the dissidents in this book forms the basis of a much more hopeful truth amid political repression. Countless tools are available to us.

Our task is people who desire a more just society is to learn how to use them. And, you know, you offer some concluding commitments for readers to follow. Can you just, like, walk us through a little bit those parting words and what you most want, your readers and our viewers and listeners, to take away from the book on me? Do you want to start? I would say four things. And these four things also track the structure of the book. And these are the themes.

I mean, Julia is absolutely right. we did not have a hypothesis here. And so these are the themes from talking to over 120 people on five continents that emerged. The first is when you hear that voice in your head that says something is wrong here, at work, in your community, in your faith organization, in your university, when you hear that, a voice of objection, follow it. And so that's one. The reason we wrote this book is because,

that is not a natural thing to do for most people, because we are all living in this Darwinian world where there are risks. And so the rest of the book is how to do that. And so that's one. When you hear the voice, the moral collision follow that voice. The second thing is the way that most people told us that they were able to do that was to find a few other people who shared their objection. they whispered their dissent and everyone found that as they whispered they found that more and more people in their office again in their community

in their home town whatever it was shared their views and they started gathering regularly so number one follow the voice number two find other people who who share that number three is where the principles and the ideas that Julia just described come in

which is and I will say it less eloquently than she did don't do stupid shit just no unforced errors. I think there's this sense that to be a dissident or to be an activist, you have to be chest out all the time, you know, come what may. And that is not what we found. What we found was that really good activists,

really good people who we call dissidents, are being very serious about their safety. So that means not doing things that are going to undermine the movement. And oftentimes the things that undermine the movement are the things that undermine the individual. So pay your taxes, don't get parking tickets, It's as, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And in this world of digital surveillance,

that's even more important what we do online. The fourth and final, and I think most complicated, but also hopeful, part of this, is we do need to commit to persuasion. We do need to make the group of people who we're organizing with bigger by many, many different means.

And sometimes that will be pressure. It will be saying, we're trying to pressure you. We're going to bring pain to allies of the regime. who don't come, you know, come join us, who don't defect. But oftentimes it's going to be bringing the water bottles and meeting people where they're at and a little bit more honey and helping people find a place to land. We call this the lily pad theory, which is that people,

even people who want to jump often won't if they don't have somewhere to land and feel like they have a home to end up in. And so those are the four things that we leave you with at the end of the book and that sort of structure our invitation in Oncourge. That's great. Julia, you know, after a year inside the heads of more than 100 dissidents, confronting sometimes immense personal and political hardship, but sort of staying the course. Like, what is giving you hope? How are you staying inspired and motivated in feet of genuinely challenging times? You know, it's so funny. I joke all the time that I've become like a hope truther because I...

That's a great thing to be. I love it and I want to be a hope truth. It's just, I think, reporting and spending time with all. all these people who were in such difficult situations and how they stuck to their values and fought for what they believed in. And then seeing it play out in my own country, right, where I didn't ever see it, think I would see this type of thing. And I have been so impressed. I mean, I do think my expectations for America were low, so that helped.

But I also do feel like we have done really well on one, the most important metric, honestly, that from the Erica Cichenda with data that we didn't talk. about is that movements that commit to nonviolence are twice as effective as those that use violence. And the reason for that is sort of what Ami was just talking about, which is this is a war of persuasion, right? There's going to be people who are just committed to the regime. They're sort of unmovable. And then there's people who are definitely dissidents and never going to be persuaded. But the vast majority of people are in the middle.

They're trying to, they're trying to keep their head down, they're trying to ignore it. And that's who we need to win. And so the reason nonviolence is more effective is not because it's morally better. It's because it's more persuasive to that middle group to be with the side that is not acting immorally, right? That that's why Minneapolis was such an effective win in the war of persuasion because the activists were so disciplined in their nonviolence. And the state's violence looked so ludicrous in response. And so I think focusing on that piece of it, I have been very impressed with what's been happening in the U.S. There's been boycotts, you know, Availa Airlines was contracting to do ICE deportation flights after sustained pressure from many small communities that had serviced.

They gave up that contract, right? We have seen like the, you know, universities have stepped up, you know, fingers crossed on Yale. But like, honestly, many of them rejected the second round of pressure from the administration. So we are seeing the right things happening. What we need is just more of those things happening. Like we just need exponentially more. But I've been very impressed that we are doing the right things. Yeah.

And when we see it happen, it opens up the possibility of more of it happening. So hopefully these virtuous cycles get created. All right, well, we will have to leave it there. Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Myer, authors of On Courage, How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. Thank you for this powerful and important book. And thank you so much for joining me today to share it with our listeners. Thank you, Kate.

Honored to be here. All right, that's all we have time for today. Leah will be taking the reins next week. I am going to be on vacation, but I will be back in your ears in a couple weeks. So see you then. Strict scrutiny is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Melody Rowell and Michael Goldsmith. Music by Eddie Cooper.

Our team includes Matt DeGroote, Ben Hethko, Johanah case, Kenny Moffat, Adam Lippert, and Eric Schute. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers' Guild of America East. The What a Day podcast you know and love is shaking things up. You already know that five days a week, I, Jane Koston, bring you the need-to-know news and expert analysis on the big stories shaping today and tomorrow. Stories like how social media warps our perception of the world and the strange reality of who is signing up to work for ice. All in less time than it takes to roast a chicken.

And now, What Today episodes will be hitting your YouTube and podcast feeds in the afternoons. You'll get the breaking news even faster. Check out Whataday, now dropping in the PM on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.