The Daily Beast Podcast - A Fascinating Detail in the Herschel Walker Saga

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

The Daily Beast reporter who broke the story of Herschel Walker paying for a girlfriend’s abortion has provided behind-the-scenes details and thoughts on the case. Politics reporter Roger Sollenberger pointed to the key detail in the cobweb of Walker stories to host Andy Levy on this week’s episode of political podcast The New Abnormal: the woman behind the allegations. Speaking of the potential political ramifications for Walker, guest podcast host Josie Duffy Rice, who writes about prisons and prosecution at The Unnamed, told Levy that while the abortion bombshell could swing the vote, it is unlikely to make Republicans switch. Then, Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer at Slate Magazine who covers court and law, describes how the Supreme Court is blowing up Law School too. “The court has become, in many ways, corrupted by the political process and so just delivers these decisions that fall perfectly in line with the platform,” he says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. And I'm producer Jesse Kennett, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some great guest co-hosts, as well as some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try to make some sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What a great show we have today.

First, we're going to be joined by Mark Joseph Stern, who's a senior writer at Slate, and he's going to talk to us all about what's going on with the Supreme Court right now. Then we're going to talk to Daily Beast Politics reporter Roger Sullenberger, who's been, of course, breaking tons of insane stories about the Herschel Walker race, and we're going to talk all about what else he's seeing there.

But first, we're joined by Josie Duffy Rice, who writes the substact of the unnamed, where she writes about prisons and prosecution. Josie Duffy Rice. Andy Levy. Welcome to the new abnormal. Thank you so much for guest co-hosting today. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here. We've got a great topic on something that is sort of in your wheelhouse, as they say. Just before we were about to record this, President Biden, you may know him as Dark Brandon, he issued a statement saying that he is taking three steps to end the imprisonment of, of people solely for using or possessing marijuana. His first step, he says, he's announcing a pardon of all prior federal offenses of simple possession of marijuana.

And he's already directed Attorney General Garland to set up a process for this. This will affect roughly 6,500 people and free them from imprisonment, which is great news. He is also urging all governors to do the same thing at the state level. His third thing is he is asking the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General to start an administrative process to review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. Right now, it's a Schedule 1 drug, which is where we put what we consider to be the most dangerous substances, such as heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamines, etc. And marijuana, for some God only knows reason, is in that same classification. So he's going to look at changing that. Josie, what, you know, what's your take on this?

It's great news. I saw 6,500 as the number of people that will benefit from a pardon like this. It's not going to get a lot of people out of prison because not a lot of people are in federal prison for simple marijuana possession. But it does change a lot of people who are out of prison and are facing other obstacles. Like they can't get housing or they can't, you know, get jobs because of their criminal record. It helps them immensely.

So it's good news. It's also, I think, worth noting. kind of the bare minimum that we should expect from our president right now. Right. Yeah. I thought we were all on the same page. You shouldn't be in, have a federal record for simple possession of marijuana.

I think, you know, we saw this with Obama and the pardons. It's a much bigger exercise of clemency than we've ever seen, or not that we've ever seen, but then we've seen in the past couple decades, at least. But it's also like,

I think they could go bigger, right? There are a lot of people serving time in federal prisons. right now or fecing federal charges for things that like the general population would conclude are not worth like the fed's time or maybe any system's time. I'd like him to go bigger than simple possession of marijuana. And look, maybe he will. And I'm totally with you on this. And, you know, on the one hand, it kind of sucks that we're so used to things being so awful that the barest minimum gets us happy and excited. Right. So yeah, I completely feel you on that one. But on the And this is more than obviously any other president has done.

And so, you know, we got to give him credit for that at least. And look, there's also the, you know, I guess there's the argument to be made that by doing this in small steps, as you pointed out, you hope that this is the first step of potentially many. It sort of makes it an easier, this is a horrible metaphor for a drug thing, makes it an easier pill to swallow, you know, for the people who somehow are still a opposed to stuff like this and think that America's problem is that not enough people are in prison. Right. So I don't know. I mean, you know, recognizing political constraints and stuff like that, look, this is, there's nothing bad about this other than, ah, be nice if it went further. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I think, and also it's important to remember, these are real people. These are 6,500 real people, right? And so when we talk about it in sort of a theoretical sense, like, oh, he could go bigger, of course. And I want him to. And I recognize that this is life. changing for thousands of people. I think, like, you know, we've seen in the past, again, past couple decades, like, you know, after Jimmy Carter, really, we've just seen the number of people who presidents are willing to pardon or commute their sentences. It's just dropped so drastically. And Biden, by the way,

for the first year or even longer, didn't, you know, commute any sentences, didn't pardon anybody, hasn't taken action on the death penalty like we would have hoped, right? And so I think it's a good sign that he's embracing this huge executive power, which is clemency, this huge ability for a president to demonstrate mercy and kind of to impart that as a value more broadly. I mean, I'm glad to see him call on governors to do the same, right? It's shifting what we see as the median for what we should expect from executives and power. Yeah, totally agree. I mean, and look, there are going to be governors probably particularly on the Republican side who are just going to basically say, hell no. Right. And they're not going to do this. And look, let's be fair, there are going to be Democratic governors who do

the same thing because the Democratic Party is also filled with people who have completely unmoted and or outmoded and just archaic views on things like marijuana. But look, out of the three things, that to me is like the, yeah, okay, I'm glad he's doing it, but it has no force of anything. Right. Absolutely. I just want to make good. I am not interviewing you here. You are co-equal on this show right now. But because this is, you know, you are very much an expert in criminal justice and prison reform and stuff like that, there are just questions I want to ask you because you simply have more knowledge than I do on this thing. Yes, please. I think maybe I misspoke at the top because I saw the 6500 number and thought that that was 6500 people being released from prison,

but I think you sort of corrected me politely by not actually saying you were correcting me. Is it not 6,500 people will be released from prison, but it will affect 6,500 people? because some may be out of prison already, but it's on their record and it will now be expunged? That is right. Also, I didn't hear you say $6,500 at the top, so I wasn't secretly correcting you, but how I heard it, that might be able to what it was doing. So, yeah, so it's 6,500 people with federal convictions for simple possession. So that could mean a lot of things. It could mean that they did spend time in prison. It could mean they never spent time in prison, you know, for that. But maybe it has contributed to later charges, the, you know, punishments they face being higher. because they already had this on their record.

And like you said, it includes people who are already out. I don't know the numbers on this, but my informed read is that it's not like a lot of people are going to federal prison anymore for simple marijuana possession. And I couldn't honestly tell you how many went ever just for that charge alone. Right. As we know, like any kind of additional criminal charges make your life harder. So they either add more time to your sentence for something else or they make, like we said, kind of civil consequences and housing, immigration, custody, jobs, employment, like, all of those

get a lot more difficult. I think what you're saying is it's a gateway charge. It's a gateway charge. Exactly. A gateway charge. Okay. So even if I didn't say $6,500 at the top, in my mind, that's what I thought. So you did mind correct me. And I appreciate that. Yes. You're on the same page. Yes. Okay. So I want to ask you about this, the sort of the third provision or the third thing that President Biden is calling for. And that's the rescheduling marijuana under federal law. And what does it mean to reclassify that to, well, he can't classify it any higher. So it would have to be to a lower classification. The bottom line is that Biden can start this process, right? He can start the administrative process. But he can't actually, like he doesn't have the power to reschedule drugs on his own. That's the congressional. power, right? And there have been bills in the past, I mean, I think the first bill to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule I to Schedule 2 is like 1981, right? This is like a long process. I don't know when the last one was, but I know there was one in 2011. Barney Frank and Ron Paul introduced a bill

to remove it from the schedules entirely, which died. It seems like Biden's not saying it should be descheduled, but it should be rescheduled, which again is kind of like a simultaneous executive and legislative effort in a sense that like the executive can start the process and Congress needs to pass a law amending it. So, you know, I think what we're seeing here is the difference between law and and practice, you know, kind of almost like the difference between theory and practice when it comes to the law because marijuana is a Schedule I drug, obviously under federal law. And at times in the past, it's been treated much more seriously. Right now because of prosecutorial discretion and because of reasonable.

resource limitations. It's not as if it's being treated like fentanyl in the federal system. It's not, you know, like regardless of how it's classified, that's not how people who are caught possessing it or even trafficking it are treated or handled. But I think symbolically, and also on some level in practice, like we want our laws to reflect what we know about drugs and how drugs work. And right now, like they're just kind of these relics of the drug war where like we threw everything in one category and said like everything is equally bad, which is crazy. Yeah. It also feels like before we move on to the next story, and you know, it feels like this is the kind of thing that where cops could have someone in the room and say, you know, we've got a we've got a dime bag of marijuana on you. You know,

that's a schedule one drug. Right. You can go away for X number, you know, things that may be technically true but aren't true in practice, but you're a scared person sitting there. Exactly. And that is honestly a huge part of any of these kind of efforts to like, you know, reschedule drugs or pardon people or call for non-prosecution. Like, even if this stuff doesn't really play out in practice in a way that you can point to, you know, 10,000 people and say that they got put into prison in the past year for simple possession of marijuana on the federal level, they are bargaining tools that give prosecutors and police a leg up and they give the state a leg up when they're going after, you know, a regular person, right? They, they, they are a threat. They are a tool in the toolbox of the state. And I am a

big believer. I don't think it comes as a huge surprise that I'm a big believer that removing those tools is a way of getting closer to a just system. Because what happens in the interrogation room and, And, you know, at the plea bargaining stage is not going to show up on a, you know, a conviction, a listing who's convicted for what, but it matters. Yes. I'll give the last word on this story to President Biden, who ended his statement by saying, too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It's time that we write these wrongs. That just seems like a good way. To move on to someone close to home for you, Josie.

That is Herschel Walker, who, in a... a couple months may be your senator. Oh my God. Don't say it. So later in the show, I'm going to interview Roger Sollenberger, the Daily Beast reporter, who broke the story earlier this week that Herschel Walker paid an ex-girlfriend, or I'm sorry, well, yeah, I guess it was an ex-girlfriend even though he was married at the time to have an abortion. And this story has just exploded this whole week and Herschel Walker's son is involved now. His conservative son, who is now very upset with his dad publicly coming out really strongly against him on Twitter and in videos. This is Christian Walker, who is sort of a TikTok influencer.

And then, you know, Walker has pretty much denied, well, he's called the story lies, but he's also talked about how he's been redeemed. And he's used language that makes it sound like, well, maybe he did actually do this thing. Right. So he's sort of all over the place on this. But so let's talk about the political ramifications. of this. Do you think this will affect the vote at all in Georgia? At all? Yes. Enough. Enough. I don't know. You know, like, we saw a couple years ago, right, Georgia is on the cusp of being blue. I would not call it a blue state. I don't even know if I would call it, frankly, a swing state. But I would say that, like, it's closer to a swing state than maybe its neighbors are on all sides, pretty much. And I think that this is not nothing. I think that, like, it contributes to people's distrust and perception of Walker as kind of,

like a loose canon that's kind of unpredictable, right? But at the end of the day, like, Herschel Walker will vote with Republicans on literally everything. He'll do exactly what they want, right? He's essentially a puppet. And I say that because he doesn't seem to have like the cognitive skills to even think through some of those stuff. So, you know, we're talking about someone who will do what Republicans ask him to do. And at the end of the day, that's far more important to voters. Now, I do think there's a chance, you know, I'm hearing a lot of people say, people aren't going to vote for Warnock over, people who are for Herschel Walker are not going to change their vote to Wernock. And I think that's probably true, or I should say definitely

true, but I think it's also possible that they just don't vote in that race, right? Like, we're already seeing that Warnock has, like, more support than, for example, Stacey Abrams, which signals that, like, some people are already supporting Brian Kemp more than they're supporting Herschel Walker. So I think it's totally possible that like this just keeps a couple of people from even wanting to engage in the question of who will be your next senator. Yeah, I think that's probably true. I think we've, you know, we've seen stuff about these Kemp-Warnock voters, which, you know, always seems kind of weird to me, but okay, you know, you do you. Right. Look, if you're a Democrat, the best you can hope for is that this sort of keeps turnout low for

Walker. It's not at all that people are going to suddenly decide that they're liberals. Right. You know, and vote for Warnock. You know, I saw a lot of conservatives sort of having, I don't know if it's fair to call the meltdowns on Twitter, but there was a lot of, you know, I'm not mad type stuff. Dana Lash, who used to be the spokesperson for the NRA, went on like, I think, like it was one of those things where it was like a day later, it was like, really, you're still doing this? Just constantly saying how Walker was still the clear choice in Georgia. And all it made me think of was because if you're, look, if you're anti-abortion to the extent particularly that these people are, you think abortion is murder. And you've got a guy here who paid for a murder. And you're still saying,

oh, he's my guy. It made me think of, you know, when Trump said he could kill a person on Fifth Avenue and people wouldn't care. And this is sort of proving that right. Yeah, I mean, look, I guess they think abortion as murder. I think that there's always been a history in conservative circles of like abortion is wrong, except if my daughter needs one or my, you know, my son gets a girl pregnant, like, well, God makes exceptions for some mistakes, right? There is this kind of like dedication to it ideologically, but almost not in practice. And I know there are some people in Georgia who certainly feel like this is a non-starter for me. But the frame around abortion is so much about the law and not about people's individual choices.

I mean, I don't know which conservative it was, but someone said something like, you know, he doesn't need to apologize for this choice. Like, it was legal. And it's like, wait, I thought that was y'all's whole thing. I thought you guys had a whole thing about this, right? I am of the mind that, like, the only thing he needs to apologize for is not supporting abortion now. I don't care what decisions him and this woman made, you know, 13. Well, that's not my fucking business.

But what is my business is that he's trying to tell me that I can't make that same decision if something happens to me. And so, you know, I used to think that hypocrisy was really politically motivating for people until like five years ago. Right. And it turns out like nobody even cares that hypocrisy anymore. But like you would think that would do it at least. Yeah, no.

I saw like Ben Shapiro tweeted something like the people who are mad at Walker aren't mad that he, paid for an abortion, they're mad that he did it and he's anti-ab— It's like, yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What do you think you're saying here? Of course, people who are pro-choice aren't going to be mad that he paid for an abortion. They're going to be mad that he's, as you said, trying to deny you the right to do that,

even while he takes advantage of it. And also, like, there's something about—I think Walker was one who was like, people change, and you hear people saying, like, people change. And it's like, yeah, and if he had said, look, I did this a few years ago. I really regretted it and it changed my mind about abortion and I'm sorry. Like if there had been some indication that like, but that's not what's happening, right? He hasn't changed his mind.

If someone got someone pregnant tomorrow, he'd pay for it. But it's just politically salient. So he's going with what they say. You know, it kind of makes me think about Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin, just the worst ever in so many ways. But, you know, she had a son with Down syndrome, right? When she was running for vice president, her daughter who was a teacher. teen was pregnant and she was like, she's going to have this baby. Is that the choice that, like,

I would want my teen daughter to make? Maybe not. I don't know. You know, my daughter's two. So I have a couple years before I figure that out. But you, I at least in hindsight, respect the like living your values on that one thing. Sure, sure. And I don't respect the value, but I respect, again, not being a hypocrite about this one thing. And it's just like, that's out the door for for the Republican Party. Like, it doesn't matter if what you do is completely different than how you would legislate. They will elect you anyway. Yeah, I mean, I think in order to care about hypocrisy, you have to have a sense of shame.

And none of these people have a sense of shame. Yeah, zero. Right. You know, and I've been saying, like, I think maybe people have stopped doing this because they've come around. But, you know, for a while, it was always like someone was looking for the, you know, at long less or have you no shame. And it's like, well, that doesn't work because, no, they don't have it. any shame. Right. And there's no value. In fact, there's no political win in apologizing.

There's no political win in saying, like, shame is not electorally motivating for people, which is just, by the way, a terrible perspective for an elector to have. It's like, these people run your life. You actually, you want them to have some limitations. That's not a benefit anymore, if it ever really, really was. Yeah. And, you know, you pointed out that all Herschel Walker had to do was say, you know, that he's changed or whatever. The problem with that is he has repeatedly said that he has been, uses the words pro-life. That's not my preferred terminology. Right, right. But he has said that he's been that way his whole life. Right. Minus those couple of days in 2009. Right. Exactly. So I was going to say, so he really can't say now that he's changed,

but of course he could because nobody cares that he would be completely changing his story. They would just say, well, he was just saying that back then, but now he really means it. Right, exactly. I mean, there's just no, I think probably also, look, Herschel Walker does not come off as an incredibly ethical, thoughtful, straight up guy. Then this is scandal 100 of him, right? I mean, we're talking about a guy who said he had no secret kids and then he did. We're talking about a guy who said there were too many trees in Georgia. Like, nobody is going to him for, like, ethical or intellectual guidance.

and they are going to him for a vote. That is just kind of a dark truth. This idea that, like, they couldn't have gotten anybody else is depressing, although they probably could have. But, you know, he's a football star and he's a black Republican, and they like that, right? And so I think if you had surveyed every Republican voter in Georgia had said, what are the chances that he's paid someone having an abortion? Probably most of them would be, like, probably pretty high.

Right. But it's not looking great. Yeah, I saw some of, I wish I could remember. it was, but I saw some either Republican or conservative or both, I just can't remember, say basically like, well, he was a pro football player. Of course he spread his seed. Right. And I was like, are you kidding? Like, it's like, do you have no, none of these people have a soul. And it's just amazing to me. And the idea that, you know, in particular, like, it seems like evangelicals don't care about this. And even, you know, Ralph Reed is out there saying,

basically, I don't give a shit. And it's like, you are the people who, like, your whole thing was, these are the things you care about. And what a shock to find out that that wasn't true. Right. I mean, it is kind of fascinating because I think of political parties as like, almost like religious in the sense that they're trying to convert other people all of the time, right? And it has gone from being like, here's what we stand for. So join us to join us because we hate the live. Right. Like, that is the only operating value. And when that's the only operating value, like, it doesn't matter what else you believe in because you're not voting Democrat.

That's all they care about. You know, it's, it just, it just is so empty. And I know it works for them and it might work for them until the end of our democracy. Who knows? But, like, at the very least, it just feels, yeah, it feels empty, right? Like, if there are no rules other than we hate the other team, like, why are you in this fight at all? No, I agree. And my biggest fear is that when you say until the end of democracy, what you're talking about is 2024.

I'm talking about like, yeah, or November. I mean, who knows? Yeah, I know. Yeah. It's not looking great. Again, like, the fact that, like, we have to even have a little bit of admiration for Liz Cheney just as like, where are we? I know. Like, this is a person with objectively terrible views who just, like, actually thinks that, like, you should be able to go to whoever gets the most votes should win.

I know. That's her one value. Mark Joseph Stern is a senior writer covering courts and the law for Slate magazine, and he's covered SCOTUS, federal, and state court since 2013. Mark, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me on. So you had a great piece up on Slate earlier in the week called The Supreme Court is blowing up Law School 2.

Originally, that's why I asked you to come on, and I absolutely still want to talk about that. But before I get to it, I have to ask you, obviously, about the goings-on at the Supreme Court this week, where the new two. term began. Can you give us a brief overview maybe of the cases they heard arguments for? Merrill v. Milligan. That's the big one here, it seems like, the redistricting case in Alabama. Yeah, that's exactly right. The court heard arguments Tuesday in Merrill, and this is a case that challenges Alabama's new congressional districts. There are seven of them, and only one of them has a majority black population, which means that even though black people make up merely

a third of the state, they only control 14 percent of the congressional. districts. That is pretty clearly illegal under the Voting Rights Act. So the real question in Merrill is whether the court applies the Voting Rights Act or whether it rewrites or strikes down part of the Voting Rights Act to Greenlight Alabama's map. I've not covered, but I've followed the Supreme Court long enough to know that you don't necessarily say that, oh, based on oral arguments, this is definitely the way it's going to be decided. But based on oral arguments, it's not looking good for the Supreme Court to say to Alabama, hey, you can't do it. this. Am I right? Right. It never was. Yeah. You know that because the court actually stepped in and halted a lower court decision that tried to implement newer, fairer maps back in February. So on the shadow docket, as we call it, the Supreme Court already showed its hand. And what's happening now is the

court is just kind of like figuring out some justification for what it's already done. Seems very likely that by a six to three vote, the court will find some justification to allow Alabama. to keep this racial gerrymander. And the only question is how far the conservative block goes, whether it does a kind of modest decision that only partially guts the Voting Rights Act, or whether it goes all the way as Alabama is requesting and says that the Voting Rights Act actually violates the Equal Protection Clause. Right, which at this point wouldn't be anywhere near a shock if they went that far, it feels like. Nothing from this court surprises me.

Yeah. This was Justice Katanji Brown Jackson's first. hearing oral arguments. And I saw in particular in this case, there was a lot of stuff she was saying that was getting a lot of play on Twitter and some articles. I saw you tweeting about it. I saw some other people. She talked about the 14th Amendment. Can you tell us what she said? This was an incredible moment because for so many decades, the conventional wisdom on the Supreme Court about the 14th Amendment is that it requires a colorblind constitution that basically the government cannot take race into account under any circumstances ever, that it's bad to discriminate against white people,

it's bad discriminating as black people. It's also bad to help black people by, for instance, protecting their right to vote because you're taking their race into account, and that's wrong. And during arguments in the mayoral case, Justice Patanji Brown Jackson stepped in with a pretty extraordinary history lesson, where she drilled down to the actual history of the 14th Amendment, which was designed to bring newly freed black citizens up to the same level as white citizens. And as she pointed out, and there was great scholarship on this, to do so, the framers of the 14th Amendment needed to be conscious of color. The framers actually wanted to ensure that black people could reach the same stature of citizens that white people had already reached in the United States and took remedial measures, what we today call affirmative action to ensure that the freedmen had the same rights and privileges to enjoy. And so what Justice Jackson was trying to say was, how could it possibly?

be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment to consider race in protecting voting rights when that's exactly what the framers of the 14th Amendment were doing when they wrote this this provision into the Constitution. It's weird. You would think originalists would be open to that argument. Shocking, right? So shocking to hear that originalists are only starting with their outcome and then manipulating history just by getting there. Yeah, it's amazing what we've learned this last year that we never knew before now. So as I said, this was Justice Jackson's, this was her first week hearing arguments. What did we learn about her, you know, in addition to the apparently excellent 14th Amendment point she was making, what did we learn about her substance-wise,

style-wise, you know, we always talk about how Clarence Thomas never asks questions, other justices do this. What are we looking at here, do we think? She jumped in immediately. Some justices have waited days, months, years before they become really active questioners. But Justice Jackson just hopped right in and was all over the place in the best way. Starting with the arguments on Monday, which were about water pollution and the destruction of wetlands, she was grilling the lawyer about the text of the Clean Water Act and quoting from it and trying to kind of pin him down and counteract her conservative colleagues who were proposing very different questionable theories. And that held on Tuesday as well in the Merrill case where she was just

brilliantly expounding upon the history of the 14th Amendment and showing no signs of being a newbie. I mean, if you had someone who doesn't know any of this background listened to arguments on Tuesday and said, who do you think the new justice is? Zero people would have guessed that it was KBJ. Wow, that's pretty impressive. Before we get to your article, I know there's a case coming up that the court just agreed to hear Gonzalez v. Google. I've seen people talking about this as possibly a big case. It involves Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is what prevents or what protects Internet platforms, Twitter, your Facebook, whatever, from being sued for content published by its users. What do you think we're looking at here? So, you know, Section 230 is, it's often called

the foundational law of the Internet, and it ensures that platforms like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are not held liable for what people upload to them, which makes good sense. Sure. There are millions of people uploading all kinds of stuff all the time. There's no way these platforms can monitor at all. But in this particular case, what happened was these platforms allegedly allowed terrorist organizations to infiltrate their platforms and put all kinds of recruitment videos that radicalized individuals and led to actual real world violence.

And the argument here is that the platforms behaved so poorly. essentially that they can't claim protection from Section 230 that any kind of reasonable content moderation, any kind of reasonable observance of what was happening on their site would have led them to crack down on this very dangerous kind of speech that was infiltrating their network. And that just, you know, it didn't happen. They allowed it to go on and on and on until there was actual violence. And so it's an interesting case. I'll note that on the court below, it was a liberal judge who urged SCOTUS to take this case and reconsider the scope of Section 230. That's unusual because it's mostly been conservative jurists who have been assailing Section 230, Big Tech, all of that stuff.

Clarence Thomas has sharply criticized it before. So this is an area where there might actually be some cross ideological agreements that Section 230 immunity has gone way too far. The question is whether it's really possible to carve out an exception to the usual rule. for this kind of terrorist recruitment without toppling the entire structure that has led to the creation of such a vibrant and free internet in the United States. And I guess my question would be, you know, Section 230 is very much a conservative bugaboo these days. And is there, again, is there sort of this fear that a conservative court might go further than the facts that are presented to them in this case and sort of knocked 230 down completely or strip it of so much authority that it's de facto repealed? It's always a possibility, but I am skeptical that will happen, in part because the tech

giants who would suffer from that kind of outcome have actually hired a lot of conservative lawyers to make their case to the Supreme Court and to lower courts. They have been hiring these kind of big guns for famous conservative law firms from Red State Attorney General's offices and mounting this as a kind of conservative argument about free speech and free enterprise saying, look, the government doesn't need to be meddling in our business. We have our own right to moderate content as we see fit. This dovetails with these crazy social media censorship laws emerging from states like Texas and Florida. And in those cases, we saw Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett side with the liberal justices in halting a social media censorship

law. So I am skeptical that all of the conservatives will jump on board with Thomas to gut section 230. I think that they are persuaded that the argument for free enterprise and free speech is stronger here. I don't think that Section 230 is going to be destroyed by this court. But again, nothing really surprises me from SCOTUS. And there's a chance that they could watch so much Fox News that their brains turn into mush. And they think that that's what they are obligated to do to save the Republic. Right. Okay. Well, that seems to seg perfectly into your slate piece. The headline on the piece, the title is the Supreme Court is blowing up. law school too. Okay, tell me exactly what that means. So I went to law school some years ago. When I was in law

school, professors generally believed in the Supreme Court as a nonpartisan institution that tried its best to say what the law is without fear or favor to do equal justice. Yes, it was flawed. Yes, it had a checkered history, but this was still the court of Brown v. Board. This was the court of the great civil rights decisions of the 60s, the court that had protected gay rights and women's rights. And So there was just kind of an instinct to trust it. And obviously, over the last few years, any professor who held that view has had to really grapple with the reality of a court that has been captured by one of two major political parties through asymmetrical hardball, right? Mitch McConnell is just much more ruthless about these things than Democrats. And so the court has

become, in many ways, corrupted by the political process and just delivers these decisions that fall perfectly in line with the GOP platform. And so what I wanted to do is speak to a lot of professors, especially with professors who lean left and generally trusted the court in the past and asked them how they were dealing with this radical shift of the law. I mean, truly, these professors are having to rewrite their syllabuses on the fly. The bar exam is having to redo all of its questions every single year. You know, the court is moving fast and breaking a lot. And so I wanted to ask them not just, how are you dealing with your loss of faith in the court? But how are you dealing with this in the classroom? How are your students dealing with it? How do you teach law with law is increasingly a

moving target that just seems to align with what the Republican Party wants? The sense I got is that for a lot of these professors, it's not just the outcomes they don't like. Like that would be one thing, but it's the way that the court is getting to those outcomes that has really sort of shaken their faith in, I don't know if it's hyperbolic or not to say in the whole system. One point I tried to make here is that even these left-leaning professors tend to be small-C conservative. Right. So they're not, they're not anarchists, they're not radicals, they're not communists. Most of them probably vote for Democrats, but they believe in a kind of slow-moving, reliable legal system that does not try to radically remake the United States, but that rather kind of

takes cases as they come, decides real controversies, and hands-out wins that feel sufficiently reasoned and prudent and meticulous. And that is just not happening anymore. You know, I mentioned earlier, there's the shadow docket that the Supreme Court is now using to issue these major decisions sometimes in the middle of the night without a single line of reasoning. In cases like Dobbs, the court will overturn Roe v. Wade without any kind of groundwork being laid or any kind of precedent leading up to it. You know, the court could have spent several years reshaping the doctrine of privacy and individual rights. Instead, it just decided to go all out as soon as it had the votes. And it was very clear that the only reason this decision happened is because the personnel on the

court changed. And so what these professors are truly struggling with is not just the outcomes, which they find distasteful, but the processes that lead there. And they just feel like this is not the law they once believed in. This feels a lot more just like hardball politics dressed up in the garb of judicial decision-making. And that adds to a lot of the disturbance that we're finding in law schools and in classrooms and in faculty lounges where professors are finding it almost impossible to teach this stuff as law and really struggling to make students believe that this is a court that deserves anyone's trust.

Yes. Okay. Let me play devil's advocate for one second. Wouldn't conservatives and don't conservatives argue that the court's been doing exactly this for decades, but just in the other direction? And I feel like my entire life I've been hearing that Roe was made up law, for example. Yes, you are correct that conservatives have been accusing the court of doing exactly this in the other direction. And I interviewed a number of legal realists who never thought the court was anything other than just politics all the way down.

And I'm sympathetic to that perspective. And this is something Justice Kagan has written about very eloquently. I still think there is something about following the right process to, to legitimate decision-making. I mean, not to get too in the weeds of the theory here, but think about the way that the court developed its abortion jurisprudence. It didn't wake up one day and say, we're finding a right to abortion. It found a right to raise a family to direct your children's upbringing.

It found a right to use contraception. It found a right for even unmarried couples to use contraception. And then it extended that right to the right to terminate a pregnancy before viability. And that whole process took something like 50 years of, development. And the same is true of gay rights. You know, the court first embraced gay rights in the 90s. It took these incremental steps in the, in the odds, and finally struck down same-sex marriage bands in 2015. That was a 20-year process as well. This court is not even bothering to lay that kind of groundwork or legitimate its decisions with real process or real reasoning. It is not really

developing doctrine so much as declaring that this is the rule now and everybody better follow it or else. It is, again, moving so quickly that it's impossible for professors to even write a single syllabus and have it hold throughout the semester, because by the end of the semester, half of the cases on the syllabus might have been overturned. The law will have been changed very radically. And that is unusual for the United States. That is not how our court system has traditionally worked. And it's frightening in a country that has given its top court more power than any other branch of government, in my view, and then any other country has given its top court. You know, our Supreme Court is far more powerful than any other nation's Supreme Court.

And so the fact that it just looks like it's playing politics, it's extra disturbing. Well, and also what's disturbing is a lot of those examples you just gave, birth control, etc., are also on this conservative hit list, if you will, for things that they want overturned. So are we looking at, I mean, you know, people have been sounding the alarm on this. ever since Dobbs or before Dobbs, but particularly since Dobbs, that that ain't the end of it. Absolutely. And people have been sounding the alarm because Clarence Thomas said so in a separate opinion. He said after this, we should overturn the right to contraception, the right to marriage, all of these other crucial rights that spring from the same doctrine and just redo it all,

start on a blank slate. And that, that again gets to this question of where the court derives legitimacy from. You know, it does not have an army to enforce its decisions. It does have a police force, but its jurisdiction is exactly one block as soon as a Supreme Court cop steps into the street. He doesn't have any power anymore. So they can't send their little police force down to the Florida legislature and demand that it follow their rulings. It has to have the trust of the public, and it builds that trust by building precedence and by being careful not to shatter the law so quickly that everybody gets confused or outraged or disgusted, that people can rely on the court's decisions and structure their lives in reliance on those decisions. This is a point that the liberal

justice is made when dissenting from Dobbs saying, look, Rovi Wade has been on the books for half a century. People have truly ordered their lives around this decision and the rights that it guarantees. You are upending, sort of pulling the carpet out from under millions of women and girls by overturning this decision all at once without even any warning, except for the leak that came in May. And that, I think, is a huge problem. It's a problem for us as citizens, and it's especially a problem for law professors who often have fought into the mythology of the court and are now having to deprogram themselves. Well, and to me, and I won't even pretend to be, you know, unbiased on this, but to me, the problem is like, you know, when conservatives say,

well, the court's been doing this for decades and they point to row or they point to Grizzold or whatever, all those decisions were in the sort of service of expanding rights. and giving more rights to the people, whereas the decisions now are taking those rights away. And I do feel like there's a difference, particularly what you said in terms of like ordering society, structuring society. It's one thing to say, hey, you can't do that to those people anymore. You can't treat them unfairly or you can't stop them from doing this. It's another thing to say, that thing that you've been able to do for the last 50 years, oh, you can't do that anymore.

I think that's a great point. I would tag that Justice, Lido, in his Dobbs opinion, tried to frame it as the court just relinquishing its own power and handing power back to the states and to Congress and to the democratic process. I think that's a really dishonest way of framing it, because what the court is really doing is taking away power from individual people. Exactly. From the actual humans who make up the polity of the United States, it's telling them you no longer exercise this right. You are subject to the whims of state legislatures that may be extremely gerrymandered and unrepresentative of the state population as a whole. And so much of this really depends on how you are framing these rights. Conservatives try to

frame them in a way that makes the court sound very modest and like it's relinquishing its own power. I disagree with that fundamentally. I think it's clearly exercising and wielding power in a way that is very different from past courts, from the court that decided Brown v. Board and the court the decided row and kind of reordering society in a way that it prefers, which we had thought was not supposed to be the role of a conservative court. Yeah, and you mentioned, you know, in the piece, and you brought this up before, this legal realism. And I thought that that was really interesting, because as I was reading it, I was going, oh, I guess that's what I am. But like, not in a good way, like, not in a, this is how it should be, but in a cynical, like, okay, yes, this is the way it is.

I'm assuming, or I think it actually, you wrote about this in the article, the professors who sort of caught into this philosophy are probably less affected by the current goings on than the ones who don't. But the ones who aren't legal realist and the ones who are looking around going, I can't believe this is happening, what are they doing? And you mentioned, you talked also in the piece about your father, so maybe use that as an example. Yeah, well, my father retired. He was a law professor for 41 years. He's 67. And I don't know if you know much about legal academia, but many professors stay on into their 70s and 80s. Maybe he would have it in a different world, but he looked around when he hit retirement age and said, I don't want to be teaching this garbage. You know, I don't want to

teach the downfall of the Constitution for the remainder of my career. I'm going to take the offer to just retire and do what I like because this is way too depressing. And specifically, he told me, I cannot explain these decisions as law. I cannot dress up these decisions in the garb of legal reasoning. These are clearly political decisions that are driven by political considerations and personal biases, and I just don't feel like I can pretend anything otherwise when I'm standing in front of my students. That was a pretty common refrain that I heard among professors who felt like the scales had fallen from their eyes over the last few years, that they are kind of recalibrating how they explain these cases to students. A lot of them mention that there's

a big difference between how you teach one else. classes and how you teach upperclassmen. You know, your first year in law school, you're assigned to classes. You don't have much of a choice. And I think a lot of professors feel an obligation to teach things right down the middle and not inject their personal opinion because the students just had no choice but to be in that class. Sure. But for upper class courses where students have a choice, a lot of the professors I spoke with said, I am putting more of myself into my course every day. And I am not telling students what to think. I'm not telling them how they should view these cases. and what the court is doing. But I want to make it very clear how I feel and give them that

perspective so they don't think that we're all just worshipping at the altar of a totally apolitical SCOTUS. Students need to hear our perspective. They trust us more. Even if they disagree with us, they appreciate us putting our views out there so that they have some baseline when they're developing their own views. Well, again, you brought up the students and I want to close out the interview by asking about them. And, you know, because they are really, in terms of what's happening with the law schools, this obviously affects them more than anybody. The sense I got from your piece is that the students were actually giving some faith to a lot of these professors who have lost faith in the system. That's exactly right. That's like the one piece of optimism to be derived from

this piece, I think. Every professor said, I do not want to quit. I love teaching my students. I am so enlightened and delighted by them every day. Most of these professors were far younger than my dad, so retirement is not an option. And they told me, like, I need my students to give me that kind of energy and optimism now. And over the last few years, especially, students come into law school with a very cynical view of the court. They are much less idealistic and optimistic than past generations of law students. They are here to learn the tools that they need to work within a system that they understand to be imperfect at best and corrupted at worst. And these professors said, we feel like we are able to do that, that if not us, who.

and that they are ready to devote however much of their professional careers are necessary to helping these students become much more effective lawyers and try to litigate within a system that has been damaged, but hopefully not entirely beyond repair. So to sum up, we're all legal realists now. Yes, that is exactly right. Justice Kagan will be saying that at a future event. Yes. All right.

Mark, thank you so much. That was really enlightening, and I really appreciate you coming on. Of course. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. Joining us now is Daily Beast Political Reporter, Roger Salenberger, who is now very, very famous. Roger, thank you for being here. Hey, thanks all for having you. So on Monday, Roger, of course, broke the story of the former girlfriend of anti-abortion without exceptions. GLP senatorial candidate Herschel Walker says the former girlfriend says,

with receipts, that Walker paid for her to get an abortion in 2009. Roger, without obviously giving away any trade secrets, walk us through how you got this story. It's a long time in the making. The campaign likes to ding me saying that I'm obsessed with Herschel Walker, but the investigative reporter should be obsessed with Herschel Walker. He is one of the most fascinating figures in American public life. In the 40 years I've been alive, I'm convinced with what I've found out through my work. I've been doing this digging on. him starting back in, I guess earlier this year when I published a piece that was just based on a tip about his business record and some false claims that he made. As I started looking at these

false claims, I began to think, oh, is this guy's entire life a lie? Some details in the documents that I was able to dig up were just kind of strange, right? And merited further exploration. So, you know, in my downtime or when I was hunting for a story or something, I would just Google the dude, right? I would just do as much work on him as possible, do as much reading as I could. And I start to learn a lot of stuff about him. There's countless articles, by the way, from like way back in the day, the guy would do press all the time, like all the time. There's all these, like, local news articles on newspapers.com from like the 80s when he was in college and when he's in his prose. And, you know, he just does, you know, cannot turn down an interview.

And in those interviews, he says contradictory things that just left and right. Doesn't make sense. You know, he says he has a stuttered. He just made fun of, right? As a kid, that's where he says that his trauma came from is from being bullied for his stutter. I found an article where he said that he didn't even know he had a speech impediment while he was growing up. Like, he literally said that when he was an adult.

So, yeah, it's stuff like that just, you know, I would compulsively Google him because it's fun and funny and fascinating, really. And one of these stretches just happened across an old site. And there was a claim that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. And I'd never heard that before. I went, huh. And then proceeded to do a bunch of engineering on, you know, the way back machine that was able to track this thing down. And I broke the news that he had a secret son.

And he confirmed that. So like he says, you know, the Daily Beast, nothing's true in the Daily Bee. Like that's his denial. Yeah, right, man. You confirmed two of my stories all that yourself. Right. From these kids' stories, right? And in the process of doing that, I was able to find a number of people in Walker's close circles,

a number of past partners that I've spoken with and have spent like the last four months or so just working this story, just like working it and working it and working it. I've had ups and downs. There is a bunch of stuff. that is not in reporting shape for various reasons, but none of them being like factual error or something like that, right? Just into different stages of reportability. I've learned so much about the guy. And in the process of that, I got this story. And we reported it. We weren't sitting on it, by the way, for an October surprise. This is not opera research. This is nothing like that.

I'm sorry. I was just about to ask you that because I saw a clip of Megan Kelly the other day claiming exactly she was like this is clearly oppo research that was being held for an October surprise so you are categorically stating that neither of those things is true yeah there are two ways to look at that right one is that it's an insult and you know how dare you think that like I don't have the resources to possibly do this on my own right

the other thing is like that's a compliment they don't think that I could have the resources to report on my own I was like that fucking do buddy that's been a talking point and Walker in himself is like spinning it that way. Of course. He's like, this is from the Democrats. It is not that. This did not come from the Democratic Party. This did not come from that. Like, this was the product of like a series of convergences, thanks to, in large part, really just work. Right. You did research like a journalist does. Yes. And then met people. Right. Got so much has happened since you broke this story. And I don't want to, I was originally going to walk through it step by step, but there's just

quite frankly, too much at this point. What is the absolute latest on this as we are recording this on Thursday? It's about, what, 250 p.m. on Thursday, October 6, and Walker just held a press conference. And in that press conference, he was asked if he'd ever reached out to the mothers of his kids, because we reported just last night that it turns out that he not only had an abortion that he paid for with this woman. He also had a child. with this woman. So he implied later on that the reason he had not reached out to any of the mothers of his kids is because this person is, or he's trying to get people to think that this is, yeah, another allegation of another kid that this woman doesn't exist. Like he's trying to paint her

as someone who doesn't exist. Like, well, how could it be the mother of one of my kids? I know who they all are. I've already, you know, said that I love my kids. So I am breaking the news now that like, yeah, dude, you have acknowledged her. She is the mother of one of your kids by your own admission. So why haven't you reached out to her yet? He has not reached out to her. Another detail in this story, I know that there are many. It's a fascinating story.

Just like, I'm not like bragging your... No, it is. It's just like, it's fascinating. This woman is incredible. She's incredibly brave. I keep saying that. I know. but it's really important.

Yeah. But also his relationship with her is so strange, you know, like he wasn't around. He did not raise this kid, like, at all. He just didn't. And he's not in touch with her in any meaningful sense. However, this summer, a top campaign surrogate with whom she communicates from time to time, reached out to her after a report broke, asking her to vouch for Walker's character to provide a statement to say that he's,

you know, whatever. That person, that campaign circuit, has reached out to this woman as recently as late August, according to text messages that I had seen. That's crazy. And he's not reaching out to her now. Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely unbelievable. The night that you originally filed the first story on Monday, I guess it was,

he said that everything was lies and he was going to file a defamation suit on Tuesday morning. So have you been deposed yet in this suit? I regret to tell you that when I've come. On pending litigation, I really don't know that and cannot speculate on it. But I can say that we stand behind our reporting 100%. Okay. I mean, from everything I've seen, no such suit was ever filed. But I understand why you can't get into that.

Another big sort of fallout from the story has to do with Walker's son, Christian Walker, who came out really strongly after your story broke. and he did not defend his father to say the least. He went after his father pretty hard. And Herschel is now sort of painting Christian as part of the left, which, I mean, Christian is well known as a sort of conservative family values type person who, you know, a TikTok influencer. So what a weird thing for Herschel to say about his son. It is the what about, right? It's like that is, it's just reflex at this point, right? like, well, it's the Democrats.

It sort of sounds like what he's implying is the son is doing the bidding of the left, or doing the bidding. The Democrats doesn't know any better or whatever. But, yeah, exactly. If you spend 10 seconds on his son's TikTok feed or Twitter feed from like before, like June, I guess from before when these. Right. He started, like, shifting a bit.

You know, you could see. It was really interesting. Like, he put out some, like, some comments that I think people may have read the wrong way, like reading it now. Like he, he remarks something on Father's Day and people were saying, oh,

well, it's so hypocritical of you. But if you look back now, I don't, I think he's like, sent in some messages. And he said this himself from his videos,

actually. He was like, no, no, the reason that I speak out about, like, you know,

absentee fathers, about people like Nick Cannon or whatever. Like, he loves to hate Nick Cannon. He just rails on the dude, like in very, very,

very mean, awful way. And he's like, no, I'm doing this. Because this is my experience. I'm talking about my experience. I'm implicitly talking about my dad and I always have been. It's just what he says in these videos.

So yeah, the guy seems like, you know, he might be a bit more self-aware, I think, than many people will give him credit for. I'm not sure how much people, you know, credit people want to give to him, you know, on the left or whatever. I mean, that's another debate for some other thing. But like, it seems to me like the kid is going through a moment of, really painful growth. That kid, if you stop and think about it, is probably reckoning with a whole lot of hurt right now. And, you know, that's kind of what we're seeing, I think, play out

on him. No, I think that's entirely true. And look, regardless of what you think of Christian Walker and his beliefs, nobody deserves to have a father like he apparently does. And I also, like, you can't be mad at him for being implicit for so long. long until it just reached a point where he's like, I'd have to be explicit about it now. No 21, 22 year old out there really wants to go out there and trash their own dad, particularly when their dad is a famous figure who, you know, a lot of people admire or whatever. Yeah, I agree with you completely. Yeah, don't get me wrong, dude is a Republican. Oh, sure, of course. He bit the bullet for a while. An interesting thing about this has been the Republican reaction

to the story, which has pretty much been, I guess, not unexpectedly. at this point to close ranks around Walker from like the electives, like the Rick Scott, to the entire Fox News conservative media ecosphere with, you know, the usual exceptions, the bulwarks of the world, the SEP cups of the world, who actually are conservatives with, you know, principles. But like this is not even a surprise at this point, right? It's just all the Daily Beast is evil. You are a paid operative of the Democratic Party and we don't care. Yeah. I mean, like I just got a DM here that says we're not going to let you assholes ruin Herschel Walker's campaign in life. The more you try to, the more people will rally behind him. Your obsession,

there you go, your obsession with Walker is fucking creepy. I've had stuff sent like this that's like much, much worse. I'm sure. It does seem like they are rallying behind him. And, you know, I do want to steer clear of punditry and speculation politically on this issue, because I'm looking at it from a very narrow reporting perspective, right? Oh, understood, yeah. But what I can say is that the denials that are out there, right? I can talk about that. And the denials are super fascinating and disturbing because it's like, all right, on one hand, he calls it a lie.

Like, it's flat out why. And then on the other hand, he's also seeking or appealing to, I should say, more accurately, religious redemption and forgiveness. And he's doing both of these things at once. And this was already happening organically within, like, the right wing, within real, like, tried and true diehard conservatives. They were saying both things in the same sentence. Of course.

And you can't both be true, right? So which one is it? But, like, for someone in a whole movement, a whole party, you know, I don't think it is the whole party that believes this. But, like, a sizable number of people appear to believe that, like, both of those things are true at the same time. and they really do believe it. They're not being cynical, a lot of them.

They really believe it. That's fucking disturbing, right? I mean, what kind of mind, you know, do you have that you're rationalizing hypocrisy that is this deeply baked in to conservative ideology, right? This is, this is abortion. He's an anti-abortion absolutist. This is the thing. This is the religious right.

And this is their, they're called celeb, right? This is their raison dutch and other French phrases, whatever. But they are able to just like, square it in their brains. And so like, what else can you square? You know, if you, if you can get around this and say two things are true at the same time, I'm terrified of what minds like that are capable of justifying. And I think that there's a lot more buried in that response than people are really paying attention to. And that response really fucking creeps me out. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. And I think we've seen that with them with a lot of other issues. Roger, thank you so much for joining us. I know you're super busy and I appreciate you making the time for us. And obviously, obviously we'll be following along to see where this story leads. Thanks a lot, Roger. Josie Duffy Rice. Andy Levy.

So now we come to the segment of the show that we like to call Fuck That Guy. I will tell you who my fuck that guy is first, and then I will let you close out the show. So my Fuck That Guy is the guy running for Senate in the lovely state slash Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And you know him as Dr. Oz. A story came out a couple days ago that back when Oz was actually a real doctor, he did a bunch of scientific studies at the Columbia University Institute of Comparative Medicine. And in the 75 studies he did, they did over a thousand experiments on live animal subjects. And according to Jezebel, killed 329 dogs in these studies. now to be fair. Oz did not pull the trigger, so to speak. He did not kill these dogs themselves,

but he was, again, the principal investigator. So obviously this led to John Federman's crack social media team tweeting things like breaking Dr. Oz as a puppy killer. Other things like, I love my dogs, apparently some sick people like Dr. Oz get their jollies by harming animals. And all of that seems a little over the top. But look, at this point, we're so full. far gone that I can't even get upset about it. Anyway, so my fuck that guy for this week is, is not John Federman and his crack social media team. It's Dr. Oz, puppy killer. And while Jezebel says he didn't kill any of the animals himself, I have my doubts. I have to say, it also would feel different if it felt like he was a good doctor. Like I'm like, yeah, and then

you went and you like decided you were going to hawk stupid diet pills that don't work. It's like, what was the point of all this medical research? It's not like he cured cancer. He, you know, a lot of dogs died and then he was like, ice your fat and it will fall off. Right. Though, again, to be fair, he was a, you know, he was a fairly respected, I think, a heart surgeon, I think. Yeah, it's like Ben Carson, you know? Yeah, exactly.

Quick. It was, there was something there and then. I know. And then they went another way. Like, very other way. Yeah. So Dr. Oz. Fuck that guy.

Yeah, I'm with you. So who is your fuck that guy for today, Josie? I fuck that guy for today in all days is Matt Walsh, who if you don't know who he is, please enjoy your life. Do not find out. Don't even, don't look it up. Not the comic actor, Matt Walsh. Not the comic actor, Matt Walsh.

In fact, if you don't immediately know who I'm talking about, you don't know who I'm talking about. There is no possible other Matt Walsh that we could possibly be discussing who's as bad as this one. Matt Walsh, who is like the angriest conservative, I think I've ever encountered, sees liberals as like a, I don't know, some sort of like target to hit in war versus real other people that live in the country with him. There's evidence or there's recordings of him on a years ago on a radio show he used to do where he talks about how more 16-year-olds should be getting pregnant. His argument is that you're the most fertile at 16 and that the problem is not teenagers. pregnancy, it's unmarried pregnancy. Right. Now. Where to begin? Right. Where to begin? I mean, there's the obvious, like, that's weird and creepy and totally, like, that's gross and weird and creepy and misogynistic. There's all of that, right? But there's this other thing, too,

which is like, why are you so obsessed with people having babies? Like, people are having babies past 16 as adults. Fine, right? Like, you don't have a farm. You don't run a farm. You don't need 12 people to help you churn butter. Why are you so? obsessed with people having as many kids as they possibly can. What is that about? That's the thing I just don't get from like the Matt Walsh to the Elon Musk, like, we're underpopulated thing where I look around and I'm like, that does not seem to be our problem personally. And I don't understand this weird obsession with even saying out loud, well, we need more teenage pregnancy. Why? Are there, what's why? I don't get it. And that's beyond the fact that like here's a guy who says he's, you know,

cares about family values and ethics and, you know, people being upstanding and not being on the government's page role and long marriages, et cetera, that, like, thinks it's a good idea for 16-year-olds to get married and have children. I mean, we know where that ends up. We tried it, and it ends up with a very high divorce rate and a lot of people, you know, not able to pay their bills or get a job. What's the deal? I mean, there's so many things here. I mean, first of all, we could talk about how Matt Walsh is like one of those people who loves to call people groomers. Yes. Here he is advocating for, you know, 16-year-old child brides.

So there's that. And then there's, like, they do this whole thing. And I listened to the clip and it was him and I don't even know who the other person was. And they're talking about how until the recent past, this was the norm. Right. And it's like, well, you know what? A lot of things used to be the norm until the recent past. Most women died in childbirth until the recent past, you know.

Well, right. And one of the guys was like, back when 16-year-olds were getting married, you know, you saw a lot of people who were married for 50 plus years, you know, they didn't get divorced. And I'm sitting there going, yeah, you mean back when it was like impossible for a woman to get a divorce? Women can't have credit cards. So that would make it. Well, exactly. And they can't like, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And, you know, back when women could be getting the hell beaten out of them by their husband every day and not be able to leave them. And it's like to just pretend that none of that is true and just be like, see, here's a direct correlation. these people were happy because they never got divorced. It blows my mind how ignorant these people are. But the grooming thing is what really gets me. I mean, not wall just all over the internet talking about pretending to care about your kids and, you know, and teachers and everything like that. And then, of course, you know, it's so frustrating.

Just two thoughts on that. One is I do not believe for a second that any of these people, if they try and travel back to the early 1800s where like, yeah, having kids at 816 and getting married then, like, everybody did it. They were married forever. I don't think they'd like it. It's all theater. It's all pretend because these are all people who benefit from the like rise of a more independent and liberal family structure more than they're willing to let on. But I think the second thing is also like, Matt Walsh is explicitly not apologizing for this. He said on Twitter basically like, this is the part where I'm supposed to apologize and I never will. It is really indicative of like a strain of thought. I mean,

it ties back to the Herschel Walker thing, right? Like, there is no ability to say I was wrong. I apologize. I made a mistake. I thought something back then that I don't think now. I was exaggerating for a fact. Like, none of that, right? It's just unapologetic, hypocrisy, cruelty, misogyny, like conservative thought. It's the pseudo alpha male shit where it's like apologies are seen as a sign of weakness rather than maybe a sign of growth or like, yeah, I said shit and I was wrong. And guess but I'm older now and I know better, but you're never going to get that from any of these people. They'll either say you're lying or when there's audio or whatever. They'll just say, I'm not apologizing for that.

Right. And that works. Thankfully, Matt Walsh is not an office, but at this rate, in a few decades, we'll be calling him like, Sir Matt Walsh, or resident dictator or whatever. I don't know. It's not looking good. Hope you enjoyed checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend.

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