The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3686 - Why Big Tech Wants Age Verification; SCOTUS Corruption w/ Caitlin Vogus, Alex Aronson

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

It's Fun Day Lindsey Graham Monday On today's podcast: Senator, war hawk, and confirmed bachelor Lindsey Graham dropped dead on Sunday and Trump and Netanyahu wasted no time sprinting to the nearest t...v station to use his death to further their agendas. Trump claimed that moments before he died, Graham called the president to discuss the importance of the SAVE America Act. Benjamin Netanyahu says that the last time he spoke to Graham he told the Senator that he was planning on phasing out military aid to Israel and he went ballistic. Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser to the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and a First Amendment attorney, joins to discuss her piece published in partnership with The Intercept and FPF: "Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing". In a pre-taped interview, Sam talks with Alex Aronson, co-founder and executive director of Court Accountability, about SCOTUS corruption and its billionaire-backed right-wing takeover. In the Fun Half: A republican strategist says that Maine Democratic voters owe the rest of the state an apology for voting for Platner in the primary. Cory Booker tries to "reach-around" the aisle and send warm thoughts and fond memories of dead ghoul, Lindsey Graham. Jake Tapper blatantly sucks up to Donald Trump on CNN. Brad Lander leaves CNN's Dana Bash dumbfounded as he tries to explain how Israel is not a democracy. A UAW worker in Michigan who voted for Trump in 2024 talks about why he is voting for Abdul El-Sayed.  All that and more. Join Emma for a virtual DSA event: Workers Deserve More: DSA's 2026-27 Program Launch on Tuesday, July 14 To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AM Quickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: FAST GROWING TREES: Get 20% off your first purchase.  FastGrowingTrees.com/majority ROCKET MONEY: Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster: RocketMoney.com/MAJORITY SUNDAYS FOR DOGS: Go right now to sundaysfordogs.com/MAJORITY and get 50% off your first order. Or you can use code MAJORITY at checkout. SUNSET LAKE CBD: Use coupon code "Left Is Best" (all one word) for 20% off of your entire order at SunsetLakeCBD.com.  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.

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Starting point is 00:02:39 It is Monday. July 13th, 2026. My name is Emma Vigland in for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program to the program to the
Starting point is 00:03:04 Caitlin Vogueis, senior advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which partnered with the Intercept to publish her piece. Online Age Verification Law could kill whistleblowing. And later in the show, Alex Aronson, co-founder and executive director of court accountability, joined Sam for a conversation about the Supreme Court's endless corruption. Also on the program, well, we were on dead Republican. Senator watch. The gods threw us a curveball. In what has been a bad week to be named Graham, bloodthirsty ghoul, Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly at the age of 71 and we are partying. He will be missed. Why are you lying? Because Sam's not here to raid on the parade. Every time somebody dies,
Starting point is 00:03:57 he's always, I just regret that they were never held accountable for their actions. Oh, yeah. No, we can party. I mean, he died pretty young, which is awesome. Speaking of Sam, no one's accounted for his whereabouts, have they? Nope. He might be joining us in the fun half. Mitch McConnell has provided photo evidence that he's alive. Dang it! Ice kills again this time in Maine.
Starting point is 00:04:19 Just days after killing a father in Houston, this story is still developing. IDF soldiers and armed settlers detained Congressman Rokana in the West Bank over the weekend. We will also have a friend of the show, for Nathaniel on this week to discuss the escalating violence there and a separate attack he and his reporting team faced. The U.S. and Iran continue to exchange fire in the Strait of Hormuz as oil prices rise once again. Trump says blockade back on.
Starting point is 00:04:55 It's just like it feels like the same headlines just recycling him. The DOJ subpoenas several New York Times journalists for reporting on the Qatari-donated Air Force The New York Times also reports that Marco Rubio is effectively in control of Venezuela. One in five Texas Hispanic business owners say they've had an employee deported in the last year, and among those surveyed, Tala Rico has a seven-point lead. Hmm. The bipartisan housing bill automatically became law over the weekend after Trump refused to sign it. veto-proof majority.
Starting point is 00:05:42 Multiple blue states are preparing to file a lawsuit to block Paramount's acquisition of Warner Brothers. And lastly, wildfires rage near Paris, and at least 12 people have been killed in southern Spain. This is Europe's third extreme heat wave of the summer. All this and more on today's majority report. Welcome to the show, everybody. It is Monday. Fun day, Monday. And we can actually say that with a little bit of gusto now.
Starting point is 00:06:14 You may be wondering where Sam is. He's still out as a Hollywood big wig. But these upcoming days, at least this week, he's going to be able to join for some parts of the show. So he will be joining us in the fun half for a little bit unless, you know, he gets scheduled to do something else, you know? Yeah. We're not. Take some kind of lunch meeting with the Hollywood executive. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:06:40 We're too small time for him now. So we're partying. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, arguably the military industrial complex's favorite creature of Washington. And when I say creature, I mean creature. He died on Saturday from a tear in his aorta. Oh. So, He was chairman of the budget committee, former chairman of the Judiciary Committee. You might remember him spitting and fuming and getting all red in the Kavanaugh hearings. You know, people might not remember that Lindsey Graham, despite being the most obvious closet case in America, ran for president in 2016. Yeah, he ran for president. He was one of those guys. Right.
Starting point is 00:07:33 It's like it's like remembering that Kirsten Gillibrand ran in 2020. You're like, what? That happened? Cory Booker did too. What? We'll get to Cory Booker, his hagiography about Lindsey Graham in the fun half probably. But, you know, he ran for president then and he lost pretty handily. And during that period, he was going on cable news and calling Trump a bigot and a xenophob
Starting point is 00:07:57 and said he represented the worst of America. He was against the Muslim ban. But it's a good reminder, I think, for people that any expedient rush to appear human by a senator that is this corrupted and is this okay with slaughtering children on behalf of money to interests can never be interpreted as anything more than aesthetic because as soon as Trump won that nomination, oh, Lindsay Graham bent the knee. and he was essentially Trump's biggest cheerleader for the rest of his life. One of the biggest Zionist plants supporters in Congress, look, it was an open secret that he was a gay man,
Starting point is 00:08:47 but you have to wonder, given Mossad's extensive blackmail operation, if they had anything on him, I guess it doesn't really necessarily. matter because what he supported stood on its own. He was a war pig. Yep. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, North of Grumman, and more were some of the major donors to him
Starting point is 00:09:06 throughout his career. And they got what they paid for, baby. His last public appearance was at a Ukrainian drone factory, posing with weapons of war, like a kid on Christmas. This is such a funny way to go. I know, right? Oh, and also, like, apparently refusing medical attention, because he was more interested in going on Meet the Press,
Starting point is 00:09:28 which would also match his record of loving to be on camera and television. Also, having this sort of a secret, as you alluded to earlier with Graham, that's just sitting with the Senate seat he took over from white supremacist, Strom Thurmond, who had a secret black daughter himself. So yeah, this sort of secrets, yeah,
Starting point is 00:09:48 it runs in the Republic, I mean, in South Carolina. What's up with Tim Scott, the other senator from... The normal guy? From South Carolina, right. normal guy who just got engaged. Yeah, lucky lady. So, um, but I, you know, he was a, uh, like Lindsey Graham was not really interested in delivering for the people of South Carolina. His whole career is about committing wars and genocides overseas.
Starting point is 00:10:17 That is his most consistent, um, through line in terms of ideology. He was reportedly one of the people in Trump's ear. pushing for this Iran war. He supported the Iraq war vigorously. He was furious that Biden withdrew from Afghanistan. He was a maximalist on Ukraine. And one of the most vocal supporters of the genocide in Gaza, here is Lindsey Graham in an interview from earlier this year in February with Sky News Arabia, defending Israel's genocide in Gaza, just to give you a sense of how rabid this freak was. When you look at the last few years since October 7th, many people in this part of the world say what happened in Gaza does not align with Christian values, killing children, killing mothers,
Starting point is 00:11:05 killing families. We're not militants. Yeah, I just, I don't buy that at all. Why? Because what did we do in World War II? Did we think one minute about starving the Germans? Did we bomb every city into smithers? You compare October 7th to World War II?
Starting point is 00:11:24 Yes, I am. is an absolute existential threat to the Jewish people. What happened on October the 7th was 1,200 people were slaughtered, raped, and murdered, and filmed by radical Islamists who would kill every Jew if they could, to the world. If you don't understand this is a threat to Israel's survival. And then they flattened Gaza. Just flattened. We flattened Berlin.
Starting point is 00:11:45 We flattened Tokyo. Were we wrong to drop an atomic bomb to end the Japanese reign of terror, were we? So my view, if I were Israel, I could probably run it the same way. Without military victory, there is no hope of breaking radicalism. We flatten Germany. We flattened Japan. How many Americans believe this? Out of that, we read.
Starting point is 00:12:12 How many Americans think the way that you do? I think most Republicans think the way I do. Even young ones. You're just out of touch if you don't understand Republicans when it comes to radical Islam is on Israel's side. It's not even close. Well, in terms of the political constituency that still supports Israel, he is right that that is solely based in the Republican Party and not for nothing. This is the kind of thing that he wanted to cement ironclad support for death and destruction abroad. You know, we keep calling
Starting point is 00:12:48 him a closet case, but like we're kind of seeing in real time that perhaps people are a little less afraid of NDAs now. We can't verify any of this, but you could just look on the internet what some people are claiming. He was also a vigorous opponent of LGBTQ rights. So the hypocrisy of that is, you know, not lost on me here. And it's especially disgusting in that way because he had immense wealth and privilege and knew that he could live his life in the way that he wanted to, supporting death and destruction. while other people's rights were being stripped away from them. So, you know, and he overcompensated constantly by trying to prove his masculinity by being in favor of as much death as humanly possible. So he's a pathetic figure in a variety, or was, he was a pathetic figure, I say, with a big smile on my face in many different ways. And so he's in death now being used exactly as he would have wanted as a political football for two of his favorite people on the planet.
Starting point is 00:14:06 Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Here is Trump in the immediate aftermath. Like was Lindsey Graham even brought to the morgue at this point? How warm was his body when Trump calls in to. push for the Save America Act and, you know, using Lindsey Graham as a way to do so. Anybody like him? He was so intent. I mean, he literally called me about the Save America Act.
Starting point is 00:14:37 That's why he's, you know, that's where I heard. Think of it. He's traveling for many, many hours. That's a long flight. That's a long trip. And he, you know, calls me about the Save America Act. he thought we were going to get it past. Do you remember the very...
Starting point is 00:14:54 This is a big... This is a big blow to the Save America Act, let me tell you. Do you remember, Mr. President, what was the last thing he said to him? What was the last thing he said to you? I said, we'll see you soon. Come over anytime you want. He came into the White House a lot because I liked him. He can't do that with everybody.
Starting point is 00:15:14 But he'd come in... There's another part of this interview where he talks about Lindsay. golf game, they were frequent golf buddies and has a critique of one of his swings. Not a great striker of the ball. That's what he said. You know, we gotta be honest about people, even win death. This was even more brazen. Benjamin Netanyahu went on Fox and Friends over the weekend to react to this as well.
Starting point is 00:15:47 And this is how he carried. characterizes his last conversation with Lindsay Graham. Or whatever, okay. And I think once or twice he got his way. But let me tell you, the last conversation I had with him, I said, Lindsay, we've come of age. We have a robust economy. We can take care of our own financing our own weapons for the defense of Israel,
Starting point is 00:16:12 and defense of our common interests with America. So I'm going to phase out the support, the military support, for Israel over a period of years and bring it down to zero. We can do it. And he went ballistic. He said, no way, you can't do that because he was so concerned with our security, which he believed was your security, that he actually fought the Prime Minister of Israel on keeping America's aid or actually increasing it. And that tells you what kind of a person, this extraordinary, extraordinary friend, You know, you can't accuse Lindsay of being a slacker or not passionate about politics because even as perhaps he felt his health ailing, he made a point to have two conversations about his political priorities, one with Trump about the Save America Act, which the Senate majority leader says we can't pass because we'd have to nuke the filibuster. But Lindsay was on Trump's side, says Trump.
Starting point is 00:17:15 and Benjamin Netanyahu, coincidentally, they had a conversation in which he was saying, hey, we get it. We don't want any more U.S. military aid from the United States. And Lindsay said, how dare you suggest that? Endless military aid from the United States to Israel. That's how on the ball he was and how his priorities were always at the front of his mind.
Starting point is 00:17:40 How un-message it is for Bip Netanyahu. This is the most important thing going on in the, at least the imperial relationship between Israel and America right now. Is this head fake of, oh, yeah, we actually want to be independent from y'all. When the exact opposite is the case, this is when responsible state-graft Congress quietly moves to integrate U.S. and Israeli militaries in first steps towards shifting aid further into the shadows. The House is 2027 NDAA would all but fuse the two countries armed forces together. This is insanity. And it's, I mean, of course, like somebody like Beavin' Netanyahu wouldn't, isn't going to waste an opportunity to use the death of somebody who was his servant in life toward his own ends.
Starting point is 00:18:26 And this is so controversial that later in that interview will play that probably in the fun half. He, Benjamin Netanyahu was saying to the Fox and Friends crew that we're moving from an aid situation to a, partnership, which is exactly what you're saying. So they're trying to do this head fake because Netanyahu is quite adept at understanding American public opinion. And he sees that like perhaps, yeah, we've lost the Democrats and independence, but we need the Republican Party to stand firm on supporting Israel and that you have younger Republicans that have this kind of more America first bent where they don't want all of this money going overseas. They want to, yeah, invested in their communities.
Starting point is 00:19:14 And I would say that's pretty bipartisan, frankly. It's just interesting that young Republicans are in that more isolationist mind view, worldview. So Netanyahu is seeing that and he's trying to head it off, specifically also before potentially Democrats take back control in the midterms and wants to move the ball forward on a merging, a permanent merging of the United States with Israel. military and their technology, as opposed to the just informal one that already exists,
Starting point is 00:19:43 because then there would no longer be a question about U.S. military aid to Israel. It would be automatic. It would be funding it in the same way that we have taxes that fund for payroll taxes, not funded in the same way, but like it would be in a bucket where it wouldn't need to even be essentially considered at all. And that's horrifying. So it's interesting that even Fox News had some skepticism about that. But yeah, rest in piss Lindsay Graham.
Starting point is 00:20:18 If there's a hell, he'll be there. Not for wanting more than anybody in maybe the United States Senate to have as much blood on his hands as humanly possible. It's a shame he got his Iraq war. Yep. And Iran War. Actually, that's what I'm doing. Okay, yeah. Yeah. In a moment, we are going to be speaking to Caitlin Voguez about the attempts to do this age verification stuff and why big tech wants it.
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Starting point is 00:24:56 slash majority. We will put a link down below in the video and episode descriptions and at majority.fm. Quick break. And when we come back, we'll be joined by Caitlin Vogueus. We are back and we are joined now by Caitlin Voguez, senior advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and a First Amendment attorney. Caitlin is here to talk about her piece published in partnership with the Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Online Age Verification Law could kill whistleblowing.
Starting point is 00:26:06 Caitlin, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me, Emma. Of course. So let's just start, I guess, from a few weeks ago when the House passed the Kids Act and sent it to the Senate. Overall, what is the Kids Act? How did it pass? And what is in this bill? Sure. So the Kids Act is a package of bills that combines actually a lot of different pieces of legislation. And they're all framed around this idea of online safety and protecting kids online.
Starting point is 00:26:39 And that is, of course, a framing that I think anyone can get behind. We all want to keep kids of course. But the issue with the bill is that buried within it, it also really strongly either incentivizes or actually requires social media platforms to engage in age verification or age gating, saying that social media platforms could be held liable if they offer certain content or certain features to kids. And the question comes up of, well, how could they do that unless they could determine which of their users are kids and which are adults? And the answer is that they can't. And so the bill would require platforms to use these kind of very invasive measures, invasive of people's privacy in order to determine their ages. And that's where our
Starting point is 00:27:24 concern is coming from at Freedom of the Press Foundation where I work. So it begs the question, if they're kids, they don't have IDs. So how is age verification going to be implemented? They know that there are different, I mean, maybe when they're 16 or 15, but earlier than that, no, they don't have IDs that they can use. Like, how is this being promoted and how do they think that they're going to be able to implement this? Right. That's a great question. So one of the methods for age verification is requiring a user to produce a government ID, as you mentioned. And as you say correctly, kids below a certain age are not going to have that ID. But it's not just kids below a certain age. It also might be people who are in the country and are undocumented, or it might be
Starting point is 00:28:08 people who just don't have the money in order to get a government ID, things like that. So it could impact a lot of people. If platforms are not requiring a government ID, another way that they might try to verify age is through biometric data. So they might take a scan of a user's face and then try to estimate their age based on that scan. But a problem with that is not only is that extremely privacy invasive, I don't want to have to share a state. Yeah, to go onto a social media platform.
Starting point is 00:28:37 it also is not always accurate. And studies have shown that it's especially not accurate when dealing with people of color, for example. So there are different methods, but none of them are foolproof. And I think the biggest problem with all of them is that there's no way to verify someone's age, but allow them to still remain anonymous online. And that's a huge issue when it comes to free speech and our ability to speak online. I'm just also thinking about so naturally, yes, children of color might, you know, be impacted and it's not accurate for them.
Starting point is 00:29:12 But I also think about, say, like, the biometric data for trans kids who are especially vulnerable right now. The idea that they would have to subject themselves to face scans as minors presents a whole host of problems. And also almost even though it says it's protecting kids, this is a privacy violation and a parental rights violation. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the impact on LGBTQ youth is really severe. And groups like Fight for the Future have been bringing that argument to the forefront. Because we know that the Internet has been a place for some of those kids where they can connect with communities of other LGBTQ people to help them navigate what can be a really difficult process for them as they are in communities that might not be supportive for them. And so the impacts on that group in particular can be very problematic.
Starting point is 00:30:02 people who want to maybe criticize or speak out against the government, their anonymity being impacted is extremely important. And from our perspective at Freedom of the Press Foundation as a press freedom organization, the impact on journalists and confidential sources who might want to speak anonymously online together is it's hugely problematic to require them to verify their ages and therefore reveal their identities in order to get online. And I want to touch on that huge element as well. But I just also wanted to put a point on the fact that this is kind of a rebranding of an argument that I remember growing up with.
Starting point is 00:30:39 And that still exists today, like Texas, I know, is cracking down on the availability of online pornography. But like this is a way almost like to say we're protecting our kids from the big, scary Internet. This is an argument that was said all the time from a more, you know, right-wing. Heritage Foundation, conservative evangelical corner of our politics, but now it's coming through the, you know, big techs lobbying, which is an interesting development to me.
Starting point is 00:31:13 Yeah, absolutely. This is an argument that is rewarmed from the fights in the 1990s when the Communications Decency Act was passed. That was a law that was about obscenity online. The Supreme Court struck down. Most of that law saying it violated the First Amendment. Now we're seeing those same arguments being rehashed.
Starting point is 00:31:29 And as you said, some of the big tech companies are even embracing this because they know that they might be able to comply with these requirements, and they don't really care about users' privacy, and they could maybe drive their smaller competitors out of business. So that's another reason why these bills are very problematic. If we want a free Internet that's not just dominated by the big tech platforms, well, this legislation is not going to give us that. So what are the big companies that are behind this bill? Who are they? Why is it kind of being, I mean, we know why, but I just feel like the national conversation around this has not caught up to the fact that there are tech companies that are pushing this. This isn't a tech regulatory bill in the same way that, you know, in the way that it's being framed as some sort of protection from big tech. Yeah, that's a great point. The tech companies have changed their positions at various times,
Starting point is 00:32:28 and so I don't want to speak incorrectly as to which ones may or may not be endorsing this particular bill, because also, as I said, this legislation has a lot of different bills that have been kind of smashed into it. In the Senate, there's another version. So it is changing all the time, who is supporting what. But unfortunately, we have seen some of the big tech companies come out and say that they would be okay with requirements like this, like age verification. And I think that should be disturbing and send the signal that maybe this is not the route we should be going. So on the on the piece for journalists and you know, Trump's attacks on journalists that's coming within this context. I mean, largely there have also been bipartisan attacks on activism, particularly around Palestine, where this could be really, really problematic. But like talk about the risk for journalism and for whistleblowers who would.
Starting point is 00:33:20 need to be able to provide information to journalists, what these barriers would do to that? Sure. Well, there's no doubt that the Trump administration has essentially declared war on the free press. Just this past weekend, we saw that the Department of Justice subpoenaed New York Times journalists over their reporting about the Qatari jet that was offered to President Trump. And they're trying to uncover the reporter's confidential sources. And this has been a repeated theme by this administration. They want to go after the confidential sources and the whistleblowers who are helping journalists hold them to account. And so the way that these laws could impact that is by essentially chipping away at or even destroying anonymity online. And we know that one of the
Starting point is 00:34:08 ways that journalists connect with confidential sources is through online communications. And in the past, we've seen the Trump administration, but also other administrations, try to target journalists' emails, for example, to see who are they emailing with, who are their confidential sources they're talking with? And so if all of a sudden you have to prove your identity to use a social media platform, that opens up a whole new pot of data that the Trump administration or a future administration
Starting point is 00:34:35 could target to try to discover who our journalist talking to on social media, send a legal demand to the tech company and make them tell us. And so that's extremely concerning when we need confidential sources and whistleblowers more than ever to know that we could be opening a whole other avenue for the government to crack down on it. So it's basically like, you know, if you are a source that's reaching out to a journalist on social media versus a, you know, secure communications platform like signal, that you could be immediately targeted by the administration for that purpose. And secondarily, my question would be,
Starting point is 00:35:14 how does it impact some of the encrypted communications app like signal? Would this be difficult for those kind of communications to continue? Well, lawmakers are usually careful to say that they don't intend the legislation to impact encrypted services, but I know the Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken a look at the Kids Act, and they say buried within the bill. There are hints that it could impact encryption as well because of the liability regime, that it could make platforms liable if they don't take action on certain content. And then the issue becomes, well, if it's encrypted, the platform's not supposed to know what content is being shared.
Starting point is 00:35:53 So how could they possibly take action on certain content? So it's complicated, but I think the answer is that there's at least the possibility it could impact encrypted communications, which is very concerning. We always recommend a Freedom of the Press Foundation that journalists use secure communication tools like Signal, if they're going to talk with confidential sources. But the truth is that some sources also are not sophisticated. And so they might make their initial outreach to reporters through unencrypted platforms just on social media.
Starting point is 00:36:24 And so in that case, the bill really comes into play, again, with the issue around age verification and platforms collecting people's identifying information. We have someone who wrote in and asked, more bad news says, could you ask how VPN usage fits into this? Sure. So with VPN usage, what we've seen with bills around the country. So in different states, they've passed laws that require age verification, maybe banning kids under a certain age from certain social media platforms.
Starting point is 00:36:52 And as they have passed those bills, what we've seen is that people in those states have turned to VPNs because they don't want to turn over their private information to tech companies. And so they use a VPN to try to get around it. But now lawmakers are taking notice of that, and they're actually trying to maybe potentially ban VPN. So recently, Utah became one of the first states to propose banning VPN usage in certain situations to try to crack down on this getting around of age verification. But that's a huge can of worms to open because VPNs do a lot more than just help people evade censorship and age verification. They also help people keep themselves safe online, keep their browsing private.
Starting point is 00:37:34 And so we're really headed down, I'd say, a slippery path where you start cracking down on the platform. Lawmaker's CEO, that's not working as well as we hope. Now we're going to crack down on VPNs. And what's next? I mean, more and more content could be banned and censored. So it's very concerning. Lastly, just from a big picture perspective, you mention how the, that it's a very natural impulse right now
Starting point is 00:37:57 for people to want their children to be protected online, right? And so that's why this bill is being framed as the Kids Act and protecting children. From your perspective, I know this is a little bit of field the, you know, talking about whistleblowers, right? But, you know, what would be possible as a way for children to be protected from some of the worst parts of the internet without using systems like this? I mean, I've seen some of these studies about foam bans in schools. That seems fair to me.
Starting point is 00:38:31 I know this is different. But, like, you know, I don't necessarily know if there's a way or if there should be a way to obstruct. children from accessing the internet and outside of, you know, parents kind of getting involved here? Well, I think one thing that Congress could do that would protect not only children, but all of us would be to pass comprehensive privacy legislation that governs online services. And what I mean by that is targeting the tech platforms collection of people's data that they then use to run their behavioral ad systems. And that's the engine that's powering all of this. Tech platforms are sucking in people's data and then using it to target advertisement. And that is going a long way towards the
Starting point is 00:39:14 harms that we're seeing kids, but everybody online encounter. So instead of requiring platforms to collect more data to verify users' ages, instead, what I think Congress should be doing is cracking down on data collection through comprehensive privacy legislation that covers everyone, children and adults alike. Because then you would be unable to specifically target children with harmful content because there would not be the mass data collection that would allow for these tech companies to target them via all the information they've collected essentially. Right, exactly, and not just kids, but all of us. None of us would be targeted with this terrible content. So, yes, it would go a long way to protecting kids and adults. Yes, I'm foregrounding the kids thing
Starting point is 00:39:59 because there's just like, you know, this puritanical anxiety about this certain stuff. And look, I'm not a parent yet, so I don't get it. But it is, that is what they're trying to tap into. regardless, I really appreciate your time today. You clarified a lot about this dangerous bill. Lastly, you said that there's a Senate version. Do you know what the status is of this bill now that it's passed the House? Are they debating it in the Senate? Is it a new version they're trying to meld with this House version?
Starting point is 00:40:25 The Senate has its own version of the bill, and I think there's actually a lot of competition between the House and Senate. The Senate is dissatisfied with the House version. The House is dissatisfied with the Senate version. So so far, they have not been able to make progress on, passing a version that they can both agree on, which I think goes to show how problematic the legislation is. Congress can't come together to work out the details because both bills are ultimately extremely flawed. Well, Caitlin Voguez, senior advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation,
Starting point is 00:40:55 First Amendment attorney. You can read her piece published in partnership with the Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation called Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing. Caitlin, thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Of course. All right, folks, quick break. And when we return from our break, you will be hearing an interview that we have a note on from our friend Matt Leck between Alex Aronson and Sam. Yeah, there's a little bit of an issue with Sam's microphone here.
Starting point is 00:41:26 So we had to sort of doctor up the onboard microphone there. So it will sound like Sam's coming in over a little bit of a bad connection. but the guest, Mike sounds great, and so just accept our apologies. Sam didn't pick the right, Mike, in his recording. Thanks trying to finesse that a little bit, but yeah, I think that is basically what happened. But we, we, it is legible, so, and there were good questions and even better answers. Yes. Yes, Alex Aronson, I should say, co-founder and executive director of court accountability on the Supreme
Starting point is 00:42:04 court corruption and the billionaire backed right-wing takeover of the courts. Here's that interview now. We are back, Sam Cedar. On the majority report, joining me now. It's a pleasure to welcome to the program, Alex Aronson. He is the co-founder and executive director of court accountability and a contributor to Midas touches legal AF. Alex, welcome to the program.
Starting point is 00:42:35 Thanks, Sam. Good to be with you. So we're talking literally just hours, more or less. less, 24, I guess, technically, from the end of the Supreme Court's term, we have seen their rulings. Of that batch, before we get into sort of like the more holistic, you know, a problem with the Supreme Court that I think hopefully this audience is pretty familiar with, what was the most disturbing? I mean, I know it's hard to sort of like pick one. But what did you find the most disturbing, I guess, from a broad structural problem.
Starting point is 00:43:16 Yeah. It is really hard to pick one because I think almost the most disturbing thing about the end of the term is the entire end of term ritual itself, this sort of baroque and grotesque process whereby we all sit around and wait to find out which of our rights and freedoms survive the latest John Roberts decree. It really, I think, shines a spotlight on just how broken the entire system is. how much power we've allowed this court to sort of take on for itself. Of the actual decisions that came down, I think two really stand out. One came several weeks ago, of course, the Calais
Starting point is 00:43:52 decision, the real culmination of a decades-long project to gut the Voting Rights Act that John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States, has really been at the helm of. And then of this week's decision, I think the one that we must pay extra special attention to is the decision in the FTC case about the independence of the FTC, which really was more about Congress's power to, on behalf of the American people, set up these independent agencies and insulate them from this type of mean political interference like we're seeing from Trump. And again, just like Calais, this represented the culmination of a decades-long project funded by right-wing billionaires to basically overturn the administrative state and put in place this tyrannical. presidency that Congress simply can't touch. So those two cases really stand out within this
Starting point is 00:44:46 broader context of a court that has become masterful at dominating the narrative and, I think, creating the impression that it is a guardrail against authoritarianism when it is, in fact, authoritarianism's central driver in this country. Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk about Clay's, and you talk about the FTC, I guess, Fed dual ruling, as it were, those are very, those are really structural issues. Like the 14th Amendment and the birthright citizenship is almost feels like that's the project that we provide for chum on some level. I mean, I feel like certainly the Voting Rights Act, we know John Roberts, that was his pet project in the early 1980s when he's working in the DOJ for Reagan. And of Calais is the sort of like culmination of an assault on the Voting Rights Act since 2013.
Starting point is 00:45:49 It may, you know, it may have predated. Obviously, there was a big problem the Republicans had with the Voting Rights Act years before that, of course, since 65. then the naturally born the birthright citizenship feels like if you had asked a your typical federalist society lawyer eight years ago 10 years ago they would have been like what no like right of course absolutely this came out of out of thin air it's egregious overreach normally when the right wing lea movement has a target like this, it takes a lot of time to develop a whole doctrinal assault on the existing precedent, right? This is the work that we did in the Senate, the work that we do at court accountability to expose this multi-hundred billion dollar scheme to invest in the development of doctrines and fake facts and an entire apparatus to advance this stuff. And normally that's what we see. It's what we've seen in pretty much every other doctrinal context. And here,
Starting point is 00:46:58 here, this Trump-driven attack on birthright citizenship was not similarly supported by that type of infrastructure. It was just a couple scholars at the last minute who threw this stuff out. And so I think you're right, on some level, it's less structural. I do think there's a structural dynamic here, right? They're trying to define what citizenship means so that they can start to really continue to to shape who gets to be a person in this country and who gets to have political equality. But, I think it's striking and jarring that this frivolous theory that had no, you know, no backing even from this movement, got four votes from this court, which suggests, and I saw you had Ellie Mistel on the show yesterday.
Starting point is 00:47:43 He's terrific. I'm sure he got into this, but this is not over, right? They're going to continue to hammer at this. And Alito or Thomas will retire, and they're going to re-up their majority. And these projects are far from over on citizenship, immigration, but many. other issues also. I know you're steeped in the how we got to this point, and we've sort of just touched on a little bit, but let's fill in some of the gaps because I think there's a tendency.
Starting point is 00:48:12 First off, from the center left, I would say a real problem with fundamentally understanding how powerful the Supreme Court is and how relevant it is. I can be supportive of Medicare for all. I am. But there's no reason to believe that if the House and the Senate and the president were to pass and sign Medicare for All, that it wouldn't get struck down, at least with the court as composed today, maybe even less so going forward. And that is by design. Take us back to, I guess this starts really, in many respects, the Powell memo is the first. sort of like the opening shot in this assault on the judiciary.
Starting point is 00:49:02 What did they understand? What was what did the right at that point sort of like, how clear was their agenda in terms of going forward? Yeah, it was pretty clear at the time. I think what they understood was power. They understood the structure and design of the Constitution, which parts of it were, you know, susceptible to sort of democratic progress and democratic power.
Starting point is 00:49:26 that had produced a whole bunch of stuff that these interests really did not like by the time that the Powell memo was conceived in 1971, right? We had seen, and this was a bipartisan push towards broad consumer, worker rights, social and economic progress, the civil rights movement. These were all the products of mostly congressional, democratic action. And they recognized that if they could concentrate and hold power within the less democratic features of our Constitution, such as the judiciary, they would be able to choke off that progress, take us backwards, and foreclose future progress. So that was the sort of structural design of the Federalist Society right-wing legal project that did really begin in earnest with the Powell memo. But you could trace it back earlier to the reaction to Brown versus Board of Education and racial integration.
Starting point is 00:50:16 This was actually, I think, the true origins of political originalism, which was offered as a more palatable alternative to just straight-up racist nullification of Supreme Court orders as the court was ordering schools to be integrated. And so right-wing thinkers like William F. Buckley and the National Review actually started developing originalism as a way to reach the same outcomes, but under the pretext of neutrality. And the Powell memo really brought in right-wing industrial and corporate money to infuse this into a whole movement. And it took power. And I think, you know, we have spent a lot, I'm sure your listeners are familiar with much of the story of the investment and of the organization and
Starting point is 00:51:00 coordination by Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society toward the installment of these justices with folks like Roberts and Alito in the George W. Bushet administration. But I think what we spend less time thinking about, which is just as important, perhaps more important than something we can actually do something about, is the way that the liberal left, the Democratic Party, the media treated this incursion on our Constitution, treated this court capture scheme, right? Because I think the main mistake we collectively have made for all of these decades is to think of the courts,
Starting point is 00:51:37 first and foremost, as the place to go for democracy and justice and equal rights. And then to miss mistake what originalism was as sort of a good faith intellectual adversary across the aisle, you know, in terms of this jurisprudence to go back to original intent, we took it at face value and engaged with it directly, rather than acknowledging it as a pretextual vehicle for an authoritarian political project. And along the way, we have been unwilling to call out what has become an untenable
Starting point is 00:52:11 concentration of constitutional power within the federal judiciary, and particularly at the Supreme Court. And this was the problem that Lincoln recognized with the Tani Court, when they were dealing with dread, Scott, and slavery, right? And he understood, and this is a, I'm sure I'll botch it, but I'll try. Lincoln understood and said in his first inaugural address that if the policy of the whole government is to be, on vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by the Supreme Court, then the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.
Starting point is 00:52:42 And that's the condition we're living under now, right? where even though 80% of America wants the same outcomes on questions like money and politics, even more than that, it's 87% that rejects Citizens United. We can't have that result because we have ceased to be our own rulers because we are living in a legal autocracy, where the Supreme Court, this tribunal with ultimate and exclusive prerogative over the meaning of the Constitution has set the terms for our lives. And until we reject their claim to that exclusive control over constitutional, constitutional meaning, which is not in the Constitution. That is a norm, like all of the other norms, until we reject that. We are stuck in the system because they have the Supreme Court majority until 2065 at the earliest. And there are ways out, though. There are ways out. Yes. And I want to get to those. And the, it is fascinating to me having been, I spent a year in law school at the beginning of the 90s. And the, the
Starting point is 00:53:45 the just fire hose of originalism and and textualism and as if these were sort of I mean, like you say,
Starting point is 00:54:00 good faith principles that were to be argued and they were, I mean, I just, every time I hear it, I just think of like a briar talking about, I believe in a living constitution and trying to debate these questions. And now we hear none of that. There is like, it is, it is, it's identical to sort of like the way that the deficit was used as a, as a mechanism to cut social security.
Starting point is 00:54:26 And then when it is no longer convenient to talk about the deficit, we don't. And it's, I'm really struck by that. Let's talk about, like, I think, you know, hopefully this audience is, is, has some awareness of, of the need. for a reform of the Supreme Court. And there's a lot of really interesting different ways of doing it that are not terribly radical. And obviously, the first thing is to get people to engage and recognize the problem that we're dealing with and how incredibly corrupted the process has been by money and by a politicization. And before we get into these, one of the frustrations,
Starting point is 00:55:15 I have is that the legal profession itself, which I think ultimately needs to be on board with this and accept the reality of this. And I'm talking about the legal profession that are theoretically non-ideological. They still can't, I mean, and you know, part of this is shaped by like my own dealing with my father, who's, you know, in his 80s. But, you know, time and time again, I bring to him like cases that I'm like, this is garbage. And there's still this sort of like lawyer mentality. These are very smart people. They're very accomplished.
Starting point is 00:55:55 And there is a grace that is given that is sort of otherworldly. How do you deal with that? I think it's starting to unwind a little bit. I talk to a lot of judges, former judges, a lot of folks who certainly I think, fall into this camp of people that have looked at people like John Roberts as an institutionalist. They might disagree with his jurisprudence, but they ultimately think he's principled. I do think that in the last few years, with decisions like Trump versus United States, the immunity decision, with leaks out of the Supreme Court, like we've seen there was this explosive leak showing the creation of the shadow docket
Starting point is 00:56:36 in the context of Obama's clean power plan, where John Roberts effectively said, we can't allow this to happen. and it would have too negative an impact on the fossil fuel industry. He said that in internal memos that got leaked. And I think as people see these results, the line that this is still a court in any sense, that it is not simply doing the bidding of the interests that put these justices in place, is less and less tenable. But I think you're right.
Starting point is 00:57:03 What we're working against is decades of entrenched cultural attachment to the idea that the court is above the law. and what we must do, I believe, and it's why we started at court accountability with research and investigative work to help uncover the sprawling gold mine of corruption and scandal that had been encircling this court that the mainstream media didn't want to touch, that the Democrats didn't want to touch. But it's by continuing to expose that to show just how extreme and radical, not only the justices themselves, but the people behind them calling the shots for this agenda, really they are, that they're going to start to do it. And I think the other thing that's happening,
Starting point is 00:57:44 and Kallay, to my mind, having done this now for over 10 years, working in this space, was the first thing that finally seemed to have flipped the switch with the Democrats, the mainstream leadership of the Democratic Party that I think understands, for the first time, perhaps, that there is no future for the Democratic Party unless they they take this seriously. And so what that looks like in terms of a reform agenda, I think, is the work of the next really like two years. But I think the realization is starting to dawn on it.
Starting point is 00:58:13 Was it not Bush v. Gore? I mean, that, that was the, I mean, not just the canary in the coal mine. That was, that was like a much larger bird in the coal mine. And then John Roberts' nomination as Chief Justice, just five years later after he had been, you know, a lawyer on that case. wasn't he actually, I think he, if I remember correctly, and I think Kavanaugh was working on that case too, frankly. But I think Roberts or Kavana, they were in that mob that was the Brooks Brothers Ryan. And so I don't, for me, that was that was the biggie. And then if you look at the way the Democrats treated John Roberts' nomination, he wasn't like a threat.
Starting point is 00:59:04 He got a lot of Democratic votes. Barack Obama, I've heard from leaders who were working on that nomination at the time. Barack Obama wanted to vote for John Roberts's confirmation and was told that if he did, he would have no chance of being the party's nominee. But this was, I mean, this reflects that I think the Democratic Party's complete miss on what they were up against when it came to judicial power and where this project was headed in terms of the permanent destruction of American democracy. I think one, I think a turn in that that I think people can see, like a material difference is the judiciary now, and we're seeing it with some executive branch appointments, asking the question, who won the 2020 election just to lay bare how non-independent these independent judicial nominees are and their failure to simply say like, yeah, it's noontime, the sun is shining, is, I think, indicative. And I think it's indicative of where the Democrats have moved that we're starting to see this on a regular basis. I think that's rather healthy. Let's talk about the reform ideas. There's a lot of them floating out there.
Starting point is 01:00:22 What are the ones that you think, based upon your experience, working for Sheldon Whitehouse, who's on the Judiciary Committee, and what? what you've heard in talking to people, what do you think is both the most effective and sort of like crossed referenced with the most doable? Yeah. This is a big question, super thorny. There are so many reforms that are needed to deal with so many problems that have emerged from our courts by virtue of the federalist society's capture scheme. We don't have time probably to get into all of the reforms that are needed to restore public faith.
Starting point is 01:01:02 and to have a court that's a court again. I do think it's likely that if for any pro-democracy agenda, like a substantive agenda to survive, some reform will be needed, some aggressive reform to constrain this court will be needed. Something like expanding the court, putting justices on the court, or deploying other less widely understood, talked about reforms like jurisdiction stripping.
Starting point is 01:01:28 The Constitution gives Congress significant authority to set the jurisdiction of the federal courts, both the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court. So it could use its powers to carve out jurisdictional exceptions to entire areas of cases where the courts would no longer have jurisdiction to meddle in democratically enacted laws. How does that jurisdiction?
Starting point is 01:01:52 How does that work like insofar as, you know, we're going to pass a law that says black people care of vote? And we have now said that the Supreme Court no longer has jurisdiction over voting issues that we have passed. I mean, how does that work? Right, right. You have, I have inadvertently or maybe not inadvertently, and you have taken the invitation, but we've opened the door to the nuclear question in constitutional law and federal courts, which is the scope of Congress's power to strip the courts out of the,
Starting point is 01:02:30 picture. And the concern that you raise is a very real one for a situation in which a sort of an authoritarian majority might want to do something like you describe and where we would want the courts to maintain a role, right? And the 20th century is a good proof point for the importance of having courts, particularly in the context of checking state power, right? I think we we think too much about the good that the court has done in sort of the abstract. Most of the good, that the court has done in the 20th century was in the context of checking state authoritarianism. And so, you know, there are real concerns about what could happen if Congress starts to use these powers to check the court. What I would argue is that it sort of let, it tends to be more democratic.
Starting point is 01:03:16 There's a reason the federal society and this, you know, faction of billionaires and extremists chose the unaccountable power of the courts to drive their agenda is because they couldn't advance it through the Congress. And so, we've seen efforts from the right to actually use jurisdiction stripping to advance a national right to life, to ban gay marriage nationwide. That never took hold. And in fact, those efforts in the 2000s were snuffed out by the Federalist Society folks who said, this isn't the way. The way to ban abortion nationwide is through the courts. And so these are questions that we need to get right as we think about what we think American democracy should look like. And I think they're not
Starting point is 01:03:57 easy to resolve. One last thing I'll say is that whatever reform we need to advance, we have to reckon with the fact that the broken political system this court created is still very much in play within the Democratic Party, which is deeply infected by the unlimited money in politics that Citizens United and before that Buckley v. Vallejo unleashed. And so while we might know in our community here that something like court expansion is necessary. The chances of the next nominee sticking their neck out to advance that, I think are very, very small. And I think we have to, rather than just get upset about that, we have to work with it. I actually think there are real reasons why the next nominee might not want to stick their neck out on something like court expansion, even if it is
Starting point is 01:04:41 something that they plan on ultimately trying to advance. Because we enter this fight from way behind. Our adversaries have spent 50 years cultivating a base that understands the power of the courts, and we simply haven't. And if we start to advance the most aggressive far-reaching reforms, we're going to walk into a propaganda buzzsaw. You know, we have talked about in this conversation, the cultural and mythological attachments that so many in the even the pro-democracy community attached to this court. And I would just simply suggest that as we prepare for what must be an ultimate contestation for power against corrupt and authoritarian judiciary, we should be strategic about how to enter that fight with the most legitimacy and the most durable public support behind our
Starting point is 01:05:29 cause as we possibly can. And I think in a moment like this where we all know that this is not tenable and we need something like court packing, it might feel good to demand that our elected representatives come out front and start calling for things like that. But I would suggest that there are actually better ways to approach the challenge. And let's just talk one of those. because I heard an interview you did with Representative Sean Kasten from Illinois, who had some
Starting point is 01:05:54 interesting ideas on this. And one of the ones that I think really struck me was and this is part of it. You know, people talk about expanding to 13 because that's the number of appellate courts we have, or the idea of essentially having a much bigger,
Starting point is 01:06:12 a rotating Supreme Court, which would include theoretically, I guess, all the appellate courts or maybe a couple of them, or where the practice of we're going to have somebody go in and try and buy, you know, deny a cake by a gay couple. And that's not going to be our test court case. And we're sending that out because we know we can rely on these five votes up on the court. And now's the time to do this.
Starting point is 01:06:45 you'd be unable to do that if you had a rotating crew. Just briefly lay that out because one of the things I really like about that is it's so processing, sounding, that it feels like you can't really call it radical because nobody's going to pay attention. Your average voter is just like, you know, whatever, like there's an appellate court. Like, they don't know, you know, your average, it's much hard to gain traction. You know, saying court packing sounds, even though we've seen it, and if I have, I don't know, half a dozen states, we've seen it essentially under a Republican rule. But talking about a rotating nine-person Supreme Court where each justice spends six months on the court or a year on the court or whatever it is, seems to me to be something that sounds so, we needy to people that it's very hard to argue to demagogue against, I guess. Yeah. I love Representative Kasten. I think he's unique, not unique, but he's one of the few
Starting point is 01:07:56 in the House and in the Congress generally who is willing to think creatively and to think about how to address these problems with powers that Congress has, I think, been too quick to ignore or leave collecting dust. He understands the power that Congress has to set jurisdiction limits to create different structures of courts like he has proposed. I think there's a lot of appeal in a proposal like he has laid out or like you are suggesting there. We could have hundreds Supreme Court justices and random panels. I think we could make a strong good government case for that. I do have concerns that people would see through it. Again, we are up against a propaganda juggernaut in a base that really understands the importance of this.
Starting point is 01:08:41 And it reminds me a bit of the pretextual justifications that FDR actually offered for his court-packing threat, which were that the justices were too old and overworked and needed support, which the American people didn't buy and really was a threat that only worked because FDR had tremendous political power on his side. He had 76 votes in the Senate. And we simply don't have that type of power. And so what I would offer is that, and we haven't done the work to advance court reforms, even sort of good government, super-defensible court reforms, as a big priority for our base and for the Democratic Party. And so the way we think about it is how can we advance this agenda in a way that brings more people along and that highlights
Starting point is 01:09:30 just how obscene and out of control this system has gotten? And where we think the place to start, is with the corrupt broken political system and with money in politics. Citizens United and Buckley versus Vallejo, the 1976 case that decided that money was speech and that really opened the door for this broken political system that we're all inhabiting. This is a very intentional design of the Federal Society project and the Chamber of Commerce's Powell memo. And we've all sort of accepted that to deal with Citizens United, we have to overturn the content, overturn Citizens United by amending the Constitution. Now, that is an impossibility. They have broken the political system to foreclose our ability to do that. And we have taken it as an acceptable answer for a democratic
Starting point is 01:10:16 reformer, a pro-democracy anti-corruption reformer, to say that they are against Citizens United and that they want to overturn Citizens United by amending the Constitution. But people like Hakeem Jeffries who make those promises, they know that those are promises they will never have to deliver because of the broken political system that they are now caught up in. And so what if we just stop accepting that we have to take the Supreme Court's word as final, like Lincoln did? And on a question like Citizens United, where every fact that they laid out in that case, supplanting Congress's bipartisan factual findings with their own assertions that independent expenditures could not be corrupting, everything about that decision is wrong, everything about the 16 now years since it was
Starting point is 01:11:03 decided has proven that to 87% of the Americans that, in fact, independent expenditures in politics are deeply corrupting and create the appearance of corruption. And so what if we try to just overturn that by statute, rejecting their claim to final exclusive control over the meaning of the Constitution? I think we could build a coalition around that. And I think it would be pretty hard for folks to start saying to say no to a bill that just does that because it's something that 90% of the country wants that we can't have because we live in a judicial T&A. And that provides a roadmap theoretically. Both has material impact on the ability to get more reforms in the future, but also provides a roadmap of how you do it in terms of essentially
Starting point is 01:11:46 jurisdiction stripping. It's fascinating stuff. If folks want more information, they can find court accountability where? We are at court accountability.org and don't miss our sister research organization, True North research led by my partner, the incomparable Lisa Graves. All right. And we will link to both of those and as well as Midas touches legal AF. Alex Aronson, I really appreciate your time today. Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Sam.
Starting point is 01:12:28 Hello. And look who it is. Oh, oh. Oh, hello, everyone. I'd like to welcome to the show. How do you pronounce it? How do you say it? It's Cedar. It's Sam Cedar, yeah.
Starting point is 01:12:45 Oh, Sam? I've been saying it wrong the whole time. Yeah. Yeah, hi folks. I am still on the road, as you can see. And it will be for a couple of weeks, but I'm going to be joining the fun half today. I'm still trying to record some stuff remotely. Feels like it was a busy week last week. Yeah, what'd you miss? What'd you miss? What'd you miss?
Starting point is 01:13:09 All the Jalen Brown talk. must have been dominant. Of course. Yeah, obviously missed a lot of stuff. I'm going to talk a little bit about that in the fun half when we got back. I just wanted to clear up some rumors about my involvement with Mitch McConnell falling. I had nothing to do with that. As far as other things that have been going on,
Starting point is 01:13:40 I think it I can't really talk about the project I'm working on now it is a sort of a Hollywood thing but it's going to create a lot of controversy relative cutting out and passing away Hollywood took you out took your signal out for a second
Starting point is 01:14:04 there it's going to come a controversy with what did you say with the Lindsay Graham passing away people are going to it's going great right now don't don't say I don't admit anymore I'm going to have to refresh Sam
Starting point is 01:14:25 all right well refresh you but all right that's the teaser for Sam then for the fun half all right we'll fix this Sam going into the fun half Matt what's happening on Left Reckoning and with the Jackman show yeah Ishmael Johnson
Starting point is 01:14:41 is going to be talking about a piece on the cost of youth soccer and why it is actually the capitalization of these sorts of youth sports is making us less competitive relative to the rest of the world and some other great stories so check that out coming up on tomorrow's left reckoning that's all sports now in this country I didn't realize baseball was like the most expensive because that was like the one that we never had to like raise money for as a kid yeah it's nuts and tomorrow I am going to be hosting the official
Starting point is 01:15:15 of DSA's new workers deserve more program. It is going to be Tuesday the 14th. You can go to the link, go. DSAUSA.org slash WDM for workers deserve more dash Emma, but we'll also put a link down below in the video and episode descriptions. It's going to be at 8.30 p.m. Eastern tomorrow night. It's virtual over Zoom, so check it out, folks.
Starting point is 01:15:41 If you want to get more involved in DSA and know what their upcoming program is, is for the 2026, 2027 year. You can join me there. All right. See you in the fun half. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now.
Starting point is 01:16:01 And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now. But I think around 18 months out, we're going to look back and go like, wow. What? What is that going on? It's nuts. Wait a second. Hold on. Hold on for a second. The majority. Emma, welcome to the program.
Starting point is 01:16:24 Hey. Fun hack. Matt. Who? Fun hack. What is up, everyone? Fun hat. No me keen.
Starting point is 01:16:32 You did it. Fun hack. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Bradley, you want to say hello? Sorry to disappoint. Everyone, I'm just a random guy. It's all the boys today.
Starting point is 01:16:46 Fundamentally false. No, I'm sorry. Women's... Stop talking for a second. Let me finish. Where is this coming from, dude? But dude, you want to smoke this? 7.8?
Starting point is 01:16:56 Yes. I think it is you. Who is you? No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind? We can discuss free markets and we can discuss capitalism. I'm going to go to Hawaii.
Starting point is 01:17:27 Who libertarians? They're so stupid, though. Common sense says, of course. Gobbled e-gook. We fucking nailed him. So what's 79 plus 21? Challenge met. I'm positively quivering.
Starting point is 01:17:37 I believe 96 I want to. say 857 210 35505501 1 half 3 8th 9-11 1300 for a 6,500 $1,900, $6,5, 4, 3 trillion dollars sold. It's a zero-sum game.
Starting point is 01:17:53 Actually, you're making think less of... But let me say this. Poop. You can call it satire, Sam goes satire. On top of it all? My favorite part about you is just like every day, all day, let you do it. Without a doubt. Hey, buddy, we see you.
Starting point is 01:18:09 obviously yeah sun's out guns out people just don't like they entertain ideas anymore i have a question who cares is enabled folks i love it i do love that um got a jump i gotta be quick i get a jump i'm losing we're already late and the guy's being a dick so screw him sent to a gulawrraged what is wrong with you love you love you bye love you bye

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