The Ricochet Podcast - A Law Unto Yooself

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

John Yoo returns to usher in SCOTUS opinion season, joining James and Steve for some friendly debates on law, politics, and most controversially, more than a few matters of taste. For our democrats in the audience, we've got chatter on California vote counting and Alabama map battles. News from the UK reminds us that the royalists are in even worse shape, as authorities there prove to be as confused in dealing with speech as they are with violence. Thankfully, Scott Pelley brings us a much-needed restorative laugh, and the gang finds something to agree on as they count down to the semiquincentennial. That's right: even petty celebrities can't rain on our Independence Day parade!Sound this week: CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil says goodbye to Scott Pelley while Fox News’ Brit Hume finds it all amusing.

He didn't watch the competition, he said, because he knew who he was, a journalist who valued truth at all costs. I never thought myself some great guardian of journalistic integrity who wasn't open to the ideas of others with whom I might at least at first disagree. And I've never had a problem finding a way to do the work in a way that would please me and please whatever boss I had or least satisfied them. It's the Rickettschae podcast with John Yoo. He's back. So is Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lillickson. about absolutely everything. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. This is the Rickashay podcast episode number 792. How did we get to that many episodes? Well, because we're loved over at Rickashay. And if you don't know why, you should go over there and see yourself.

I'll be telling you a little bit more about it to the end of the show for the 790 second time. But in the meantime, let's have ourselves a podcast as we promised. No Charles C.W. Cook. he's off doing Florida things. But instead, we have Mick Rib enthusiast and long-time ricochet friend, John U. John, how you doing? Good, you've upgraded to America and got rid of these cheap British substitutes who don't even know their own language. Right. Okay, well, Charles would never be back.

And we have, of course, Stephen Hayward. And I believe the two of you were swanning about Europe just a while ago in Italy, standing up at conferences with badges and saying things before heading out to have caviar in a room with some other Davos types. Explain exactly what you were doing there and why we shouldn't hold you a contempt as part of the globe-trotting tecto-crattie who just trying to run our lives. Well, it's not quite that extravagant. It was all Steve's fault. Yeah, well, actually, exactly a week ago right now at this hour that we're recording, John and I were out to a four-course dinner that took three and a half hours in the highlands of Sicily in the little town of Anna. It was great fun. Yep. And that's why I missed last week's episode because I had the time change all wrong in my head.

Well, and here you are. Gentlemen, so we have so many things to discuss. There was an election in California. And I do believe that California, of course, which is the home to all of these incredible, incredible technological advances and companies and the rest of it, they can do almost anything from rocketry to science to AI. And it's going to take about six months to count the votes. what do we know and everybody is more invested in this particular California election than any that I've seen since I don't know since Arnie was making a bid for it and for good reason we have an outsider a guy who just sort of came out of nowhere unless you were a reality TV official and made a series of ads or did not and basically told basic straight truths about California, and now he's in contention to win. So, Stephen, you're out there, I believe. Well, you're both up there. Well, John intermittently, but I'm here most of the time when I'm not traveling with John somewhere exotic. Yes, there's two things to say. One is the, I think the thing

that I haven't seen a lot of people comment on about the Spencer Pratt campaign is that it is, maybe you can call it the first crowd-sourced campaign in history. I mean, there's been social media and stuff, but here you had these viral ads produced independently. And that's going to drive the regulators out of their mind because, you know, you want to regulate political ads and communications. But look, it's free to do this. You know, you use AI tools and you just throw it up on Instagram or wherever and it goes viral. You've spent no money because the regulators only can regulate money. That's all the spending requirements and reporting requirements.

And so it's going to drive the regulators out of their mind that you have this freelance crowdsource campaigning going on. Second, the other problem you point to, it takes us forever to count the votes. We don't have election day in California. we have election month, if we're lucky. And, you know, we've had experience now, and this is what makes me suspicious about election integrity these days. We now have 20 years of experience of where votes that come in late always seem to skew in one direction.

I mean, I don't know of a single example yet in California where late votes coming in put a Republican over the top. But we have, I think, up to a dozen now of Republicans who are in the lead on election night, who end up losing nearly a week later. And, you know, that ought to make people. suspicious because it ought to be more random that. I think Republicans historically always used to be better at the absentee ballot drill. You go back 40 years to when George Duke Magin won the governorship over Tom Bradley. Bradley was ahead of election day. Then the absentee votes were counted,

and that put Duke Magian up over Tom Bradley in that election. But in those days, less than 5% of voters cast absentee votes, and Republicans were good at that drill. Today, it's like 25 to 30% of Californians, or maybe higher, who now vote by mail or the other. provisional ballots. You can show up an election day, register on the spot, cast a provisional ballot. They have to verify it supposedly, and that takes a lot of time. But we all remember, last comment, after the election debacle in Florida in the year 2000, they changed their laws. And now Florida counts all its votes by 11 p.m. on election night. And turnout's gone up. It hasn't suppressed the vote. I mean, this is a canard of the Democrats

is saying, oh, we can't have, you know, stricter rules on voting and, you know, requirements to actually count the votes in a timely way because it would suppress the vote. There's no evidence for that, quite the opposite. I'm against mail-in voting entirely. Of course, you are infirm and shut in. I believe in the civic ritual of going there, showing your identification to a judge who looks at it, looks at you, as scantz as though you're trying to do something you ought not to do, then grudgingly approves it, and you go someplace else. You get a little piece of paper. you walk into the sacred little booth and you put down your marks like it's Iowa basics. In the old days, there used to be these grand huge machines, these mechanical devices.

And after you'd made your little checks, you would take this lever and it was almost like you're flushing the vote. It was almost like you were sending it down a great, you know, tube like infrastructure to the place where it was tabulated. And I used to do that in a church. And once as I cast my vote, somebody was playing decada and fugue practicing on the organ upstairs. It was a wonderful civic experience. dropping a letter in the mailbox isn't the same. John? God, that sounds like my vision of hell sitting there, poking holes in a paper ballot by someone plays Bach repeatedly in the background.

I'll pay someone so I don't have to vote. Jesus. But, you know, this brings to mind a Supreme Court case that's not going to end these kind of abuses in California that Steve's worried about, but may put an end to some of that. There's a case called Watson versus Republican National Committee, which was argued just a few months ago. And this was a challenge to a law. Now, this is Mississippi, no blue state here. Mississippi law that allowed ballots to be counted that just arrived within a certain number of days within the election day. And the interesting case, I think from what I heard in our argument is that some of the conservative justices that are interested in this is when Congress,

using its constitutional powers, says election day is this day. Say it's November. second, then only ballots cast on that day are valid. And ballots are just kind of float in through the mail after that day. They don't count. Now, what Steve's discussing is, even if those ballots come in, is there a certain period of time you have to count them up? Right? That's where California's just falling down on the job, and it's embarrassing. And we could look at how Florida, which caused a 2000 election problem, has now fixed their problems and they get the vote out speedily. But at least the Supreme Court is starting to pay attention to this area and at least specifying that there has to be a single election day might start to end some of the greater abuses that are possible. Can I add just, can I have what's one little more dimension to it, which is a political dimension rather than a legal one?

And it's that the case for having just an election day with very few exceptions, like you say, James, is it then becomes a definitive expression of the public mind. of the voters on that instant. When you have six or eight weeks of early voting, things can happen along the way. I mean, I fully expect that October 15th, we'll get the final revelation about Graham Platner and Maine, and a lot of people will have cast their votes and regretted it. We've had cases of candidates who died,

and, you know, some states allow you to replace somebody at the last minute, but if you've already cast a vote, then you're shut out because you can't get your ballot back. So there's all kinds of, you know, common sense political reasons why we should not have this very flabby system that we've allowed to expand over the last couple decades. Well, this is not argued in the case because this case is about what about it's the ballots that come in after. But the logic Steve is setting out. It pains me to agree with him. We must come from eating out of the same bowl of pasta like in that Disney cartoon.

I hope we never met on the same spaghetti. But for some reason, I'm agreeing with Steve, which troubles me greatly. But the next case will be, will the Supreme. Supreme Court say all the ballots cast before election day. Don't count either. Going back to James's point, the election day is one day and you show up and vote on that day. No early voting, no late voting. I think the logic would carry over. And that would then cure some of these problems Steve's talking about where, right, the left kind of manages things through their control of the media to make sure revelations about some characters on fitness on their side don't come out until it's too late and no one can change their ballots. I don't know. There's a possibility after this case.

That'll be the next case. Well, now we have, no, no, we have the art for the episode, which consists of Stephen and John sucking on a single piece of spaghetti while a cartoon. Oh, no. Oh, no. And chef plays the accordion in the background in an alley somewhere. I knew, I knew this was, I knew I never should have shown up for Charlie Cook. This is just one of more reasons not to do that ever again. Also, if you, if you do away with mail-in voting, it does have the added positive effect of suppressing vote. I like that. Let's suppress that. I'm sorry. No, I don't.

But you won't have ballot harvesting the way you do now where somebody can get a stack of them. They can go into the old folks home or the place. There's some neighborhoods in Minneapolis that come to mind and go door by door, knock, knock, knock, sign here. And in they go. You would have to actually bring them to the polling place. And perhaps they still would. They would come up with a school bus and get everybody out of the apartment, all rope together like toddlers who are on a field trip. But at least you would see the human beings doing it.

And you would have ID and you would have all the rest of it. So election integrity is one of those strange things that the more you press for it and the more you insist upon it, the more you are told that you are destroying democracy. I think it's actually a preservation of it, but that's just me, right-wing crank that I am. Moving along, John Bolton, a man of one of the more extraordinarily theatrical moustaches in Washington, D.C., now finds himself bleeding guilty. We recall that this was weaponization of the justice system, that it was going after the enemies, that it was, well, he's agreed to plead guilty to retaining classified national security information. And he did so in an electronic diary entry that he shared with his wife and daughter. So it doesn't seem as if he was sending it to the, to Russian intelligence.

This is something that everybody seems to be getting busted about. Trump did, Biden did, Bolton did, that they kept something behind that they shouldn't have. Is it just a sense of, oh, this is a way of making myself feel special? I've got this secret information. I'm going to put it here in a drawer or this or that. I was Bolton fairly targeted for something that's fairly anodyne in defense circles. Well, we shouldn't, James, under, I mean, to question the importance of this law and preventing classified information from being spread around, even unintentionally.

On the other hand, I wish John had gone in. ahead and fought the charges because he didn't take any, unlike the cases you've mentioned, he didn't take any documents. Let's stop for, let's let everybody know. Between 2018 and 25, the indictment says that he shared more than a thousand pages of his daily activities, his national security advisor with two unauthorized individuals, which sounds bad, but again, one's his daughter and the other is, I don't know, Lowsky.

So go on. It was top secret stuff. And what you're talking about is a diary. So what he did is at the end of the day, he would write down what he did. And I'm so glad I've never done that, by the way. I don't know why people keep diaries. Why do people want to be reminded of all the stupid things they think and do? Anyway, so he wrote this diary out and then he would send it. Now, I believe he thought that he took all classified information out of the diary entries.

And then was sending it to his family who were going to help him write a book. Now, look, the case is that we know that people could include classified information. when they write books about their time and service because there's this whole process. I went through it. I wrote a book after I was government. I had a top secret security clearance. I didn't take any documents, but I wrote a book and I was worried that I might have put things in there that were classified just because they were my memory of what I did in government. And there's a whole process.

You submit it to the government and they review it to make sure all the classified information is out. You wouldn't do that if you already thought, right, you had this perfect system to punish people. for doing exactly that. Now, I think that he had better cases. All those cases, you also mentioned, James, are cases that didn't result in prison time. Some people pay the fine. I know, I've heard you, James, mock,

I think, quite deservedly so. Sandy Berger, the Clinton National Security Advisor who ran out of the National Archives with actual, what he thought were original documents stuffed in his underwear because it showed... Stuffed in his pants like Harry Shearer smuggling a cucumber through the TSA line. Simon Spiral Tap.

Did they catch him doing that again? And Berger, who was trying to cover up archival information that showed that Clinton administration had information about the al-Qaeda threat before 9-11. He got off with a misdemeanor and a fine. Bolton is on the hook here for $2.5 million, potential jail time. That'll be up to the judge. I think is a big overreaction. Second point is, I think, as quick as, look, I've written a lot of the case.

Look, I've written articles saying that the law fair that went on against President Trump was a violation of our norms and should be reciprocated. But to me, that means going after the Democratic officials who conducted lawfare against Trump, not going around punishing people, I think had no intention of violating the law here like Bolton, but were instead, I think he's one of the great public servants that we've had in our time in foreign policy. Now, last point. I'm a co-author with him. I consider him a friend. And so I do have somewhat biased lens when I think about him. I don't think he violate the law here. But I also get why he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life paying for litigation to defend himself. Or at age 77, spending an eight-year sentence in prison, which apparently could be the sentence if he was convicted of all the indictments. 60 months. Well, that's what he's going to get. They're saying. But I think the actual possible sentence I read something would be like eight to 10 years. And he's 70. years old. So you guys believe this is punishment. This is this is this is pushback. This is not somebody who took a banker's box worth of stuff with the intention of doing something with it, but actually

was on the up and up and intended no unauthorized release to foreign agents. So that would mean that this is punishment for for being anti-Trump for being well he says he started right. What do you guys think? Yeah, well I mean do this thought experiment. If he'd written a book saying Trump is the greatest things since sliced bread. Do you think he would have been indicted by the Trump Justice Department? It does look like a vindictive prosecution on Trump's part. I have some sympathy, and I know John pretty well too. His office was next door to mine when, you know, more than a decade ago when I was at AEI, and I used to talk to him fairly often. And it was helpful to me on a few occasions with various things. And also, he's a hero of the great campaign finance story going back to the

Buckley v. V. Vallejo case in the mid-1970s was a young lawyer. So he's long been in my good graces, I do think there's an element of hubris here. He always wanted to be national security advisor. I think he always knew that Trump and he were not a good fit together. And he decided to write the book while Trump was still in office, I think. Isn't that right, John? I think he did. And he should have waited. But even so, I think it's selective prosecution. But he kind of asked for it. I hate to say it. And it pains me to say that. And I'm sympathetic to the argument of game theory. John and I have talked about this repeatedly. That one way to stop law from the Democrats is to impose it on them.

And that's why, what, this is only, stories only with 36 hours old as we're talking. I haven't yet heard any Democrats or the New York Times saying, isn't this terrible what Trump is doing to John Bolton? They reserve that outrage for their own factotems in the deep state like James Comey. Right. Well, I mean, to say that he kind of deserved it, even though you said it with Rue,

does sort of say, I mean, if we are weaponizing the law to go, after people for personal reasons, then the asking for it part doesn't work with me. I mean, you should be able to say and do what you wish without worrying about the institutions coming after you, regardless of who we're talking about and whether or not we like them. What was the source of the dispute between the two? Just a personality clash because Bolton isn't exactly a squish, and Trump at the time wasn't striking anybody as a go-along get-along guy either.

You could say Trump with this war in Iran is the greatest new conservative president in America, in history. I'm all behind him, man, and I'm the last of the neocons still around. But what I would say is, I think John would have published this book, even knowing that he would be the subject of lawfare. Because if you read the book, and then you follow what he said since, he thinks Trump being president is the greatest threat to American national security other than China. I mean, he thinks that if you read that, it is a personality conflict because he thinks that Trump is unsuited to be president and it's just temperamental and characterized. I shouldn't be in charge of our national security. So he thinks he's, in his mind, I think he's becoming a martyr. Because of temperament

or because of particular politics? Not about the policies, personality, personality and character, fitness. All right, but okay, but look at the actual policies. Look at the actual things that have been done. That's, that's the metric that I'm going to use. I want to push back on one thing that Stephen said, though. I think, I think that we've had. something better than sliced bread since sliced bread was invented. I mean, you said it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. I mean, shouldn't we have a more modern standard than that? Because I believe that commercially sliced bread has been available for about 90 years. Is there anything you can think of that would be better than sliced bread?

I thought that was an ad segue for a minute, James. Are you keeping that one in storage where I don't see the spot on our show run? No, I'm just cauterizing the topic before I move on. Yeah. And there are so many things to this. All right, well, we'll see what happens to Bolton and we'll see whether or not nobody wants to seem to go to jail. The fall from his previous position does seem particularly, I don't know,

it kind of gets you in the sternum because I remember we use one of those characters upon whom you could reliably recall to protect America's interest and protect force, project force. Anyway, let's move over to the other side of the world to the UK. We are constantly being told

that they are on the verge of some sort of national reorganization. Not a revolution, but just a real big change that will cause the repair and the restoration of the Britain that a lot of people hold in their minds. And the latest example of this is a horrible crime that has to do with Henry Noick. So which of you would like to set the table on this one, describe it in term? It'll be interesting to see how you describe it because we're getting this through our media. necessarily the British media. Stephen, you want to take a crack at the Henry story? Yeah, I'll take a crack of this.

It turns out that, I forget, was this in Birmingham? I forget which city it was in, Manchester, one of the, you know, northern cities. Southampton, from which. Southampton. Oh, okay. So, right, other direction. Right. So there have been, apparently the Southampton police have scrubbed their webpage where

prior to last week, you could find all kinds of descriptions of all the DEI managers they had and statements on. you know, we want to have racial equity in our criminal procedures and arrests and so forth. So what happened here is, you know, a Sikh immigrant carrying what he claims is a ceremonial knife, which is okay. We keep hearing that England's going to have knife control next. Stabbed this kid, you know, some soccer dispute or something dumb. And the police came and the guy claimed, oh, he's a racist. He was, you know, hurling racial epithets at me.

So while this guy's bleeding a death on the ground, the police arrest the victim. Now they've later, this happened months ago, by the way, but the video and all the news just came out. They later subsequently charged the Sikh man with murder and have convicted him. He's going to go to prison for at least a decade. So it's still a bit of justice delayed as justice denied because Noak died of us. You know, he bled to death. They're on the ground for like half an hour telling people, ah, reverse George Floyd. He's saying, I can't breathe.

He can hardly talk. And they didn't attend to him. And I mean, it's absolutely shameful. And ideology is at the root of it. You know, there's a great picture of Kier St. St. St. St. St. St. St. Starmer, the prime minister from 2020, kneeling in honor of George Floyd. St. George Floyd, I call him, right? And he's been saying here the last few days, we shouldn't politicize a tragedy like this. Well, I'm sorry. They're so far gone into wokeery that they deserve it. I'll add, you mentioned, James, your broader point,

that there may be a political shakeup coming in England. You keep hearing rumors that Starmers in deep trouble. I suspect maybe he is. I don't know. But I, my, my My mind runs back to a book from almost 100 years ago, a classic from the 1930s by George Dangerfield called the strange death of liberal England. And it was all about how the liberal party went from a commanding position of British politics to ceasing to exist as a practical matter within the space of 10 years. He never really could quite explain it as the Labor Party is when they emerged. And I'm thinking now the Tory Party looks like it's, they both could go, by the way. You have a green party that's surging, but you have Nigel Farage's Reform Party that right now is. is, you know, winning all the by elections everywhere by big margins.

City council races around the country. And, you know, right now I'd put my chips on Nigel Farage to be the next prime minister at some point, or at least after the next election, which could still be another, what, three years off, I think, because the labor majority is so large right now. But they may fracture and fall apart. I know my pal, Lord Andrew Roberts, thinks that Starman and Labor Party are not going to make it to that election. And he's closer to things than I am. John, what's your take?

What worries me is about how easily and quickly police and Great Britain embraced DEI to the point of letting people die because of their race. If you look at the facts, not only the police show up, there's a white victim who says he's been stabbed and the police officer says, no, you haven't. And then they don't call the ambulance. I mean, this is a guy who might have been saved. Were the police actually willing to look at what was right before their eyes and not, you know, pursue DEI objectives? And so to me, you know, Steve's interested in the political ramifications there. What it underscores to me is the benefits of the American system of decentralization. That it's very hard, despite what happened we saw George Floyd, despite what we saw Black Lives Matter,

because police are controlled by thousands and thousands of municipalities all throughout the country with different values and policies, it's very hard to impose an ideology like that on the United States on law enforcement. You know, you could do it in New York City. You could do it in San Francisco, although that's turning around in San Francisco now. But, right, the federal government can't impose that on every police department in the country. The way you can in Great Britain, which doesn't have federalism, doesn't have state, independent states, and doesn't have the kind of independence our cities and counties are used to. So another reason why we should thank God that we live in the United States of America, and even Charlie Cook, our friend from Britain, shows that he voted with his feet in the right direction.

Yes, he would agree with you completely. Well, it's true because we have federalism and because we have cities and we don't have that centralized control. You can't impose it, but there are cultural imperatives to imposing it. And you saw in every single city that had to go through the usual paroxysms of the defunding the police. that happened in Minneapolis here. There was instantaneously the moment that somebody put together to defund the police ballot initiative, it was seated with $250,000, I think, of money from one of the Soros offshoots. And again, I know that sounds like crazy talk the minute you say something, but it's true right there immediately. So, and you had that, that, that baleful wind blow through city after city after

city. And even though you didn't have the effect of defunding the police, you certainly had the effect of demoralizing the very institutions that you hope to keep you safe. So we're not that bad, no. But, and I don't think that we will be because we've had a bit of a turn against the wokeery. But in England, it's, I mean, the cultural headwinds are extraordinary. I was watching this show that was recommended to me the other day. And again, television is television. You can't take it as a documentary of reality. But it reflects what the culture believes or is told to believe or should believe.

And it was a show in which it examined four crimes at four different parts of British history. And there's a detective chosen from every era. You can imagine that the detective from the Victorian era was a moustache-old white man. The detective from the 40s era was a dapper fellow with a mustache, who was Jewish, incidentally, and was constantly being railed at by all of his superiors for being Jewish, which seemed a bit odd. But there you go. The present-day policewoman was held up to be this paragon of determination, grit, intelligence, freedom, all of these things was a Muslim woman with a headscarf with amazing physical skills and the rest of it,

because that is a signal of virtue. That is a signal of moral standing. That's all you have to do is almost inconceivable that you would not have your modern-day police person be a Muslim. Well, she goes out to fight with the rally, and of course the rally is the greatest threat that these producers believe is there for Britain. It's men waving English flags.

Far-right lunatics, right down to somebody who was dressed like a crusader, with a red cross on his outfit, almost intended to be a Klansman. The culture still believes that all these people who pour into the square and follow Tommy Robinson and the rest of them, that they're all a bunch of racist lunatics, xenophos, who want to drag England back to this period where it was demographically different. Whereas people are seeing their cities being turned into something that they were not. When you have a population that goes from 10% to 40%, you are changing the characteristics. It's almost why you dare say colonialism, which was supposed to be bad. So the cultural headwinds that the people face, I think, in England are extraordinary.

And a lot of it has to do with passivity and just not wanting to say anything or do anything about it. Because the minute you say, you know, they've got a point. Birmingham is unrecognizable to me now. They've got a point. You are instantly lumped in with the worst of the worst of the sort of the person who would climb up on a stone lion and wave a flag. God forbid. So, yes, America is different. America is. And what's going to happen?

Probably nothing. Probably nothing. Well, also, free speech-wise, the UK received attention recently for refusing entry to Sank Wiger, if that's how you pronounce his last name. And Hassan Piker, how about that? They're supposed to speak at South by Southwest in London, addressed the Oxford Union, and the UK said they couldn't come in. I'm of two minds about this. I'm frankly let people speak, but on the other hand, it must have been quite something for these guys to get booted out. Here's the question we should probably go out on.

Does any of this matter? Is England remotely relevant to the world anymore? And it pains me deeply to say that. Well, you hate to see the country that we always said we had a special relation with go down the drain. And I think that would be bad because they can be our most reliable ally, despite the frictions about various things. I mean, I think you want to link or lump in three countries, France and Germany too. And you know, John will recall this.

Just last week over in Italy, I was talking briefly about how Charles de Gaulle came back to power in 1958. And that's because there's where I fell asleep during your talks. Oh, yeah, no, you did not. You did not. Anyway, there was a real crisis on their hands. There was credible threat of a military coup. I'll skip over all the details about that. And they all, the political classes, all the parties got together and said, we need General de Gaulle back.

And he demanded they change the Constitution as a condition of his taking office again. Okay. The reason I mention that is it doesn't make the American press very often, but I try to keep track of this. There have been rumors for several years now that the French military is very unhappy with Macron. By the way, his approval rating is about 12% or something. Merz in Germany, his approval rating is about 20%, I think. So you say Trump's in trouble at 40. he turns out to be the strongest leader of the industrialized democracies right now.

So I'm not sure that, you know, really dramatic episodes are impossible for France, possibly for Germany, or even for Great Britain. And I don't know what form that would take, but I think that the stability we've assumed for the last post-war era is not to be assumed. Here's something indicative, something small. Maybe it means something. Maybe it doesn't. But I was chatting this morning with my friend in England,

within my chat daily because small town Walterswick I go there at least once a year I love it it's my second home uh and the Suffolk council has introduced a new recycling bin they have added a bin specifically for cardboard and they have given a very small bin for for for kitchen waste everyone is unhappy about it there's a number you can call and when my friend called it said that she was the 76th person in the queue which says everything to me that they're willing to complain but they're also willing to just sit there on the and while 75 people in front of them are dealt with at the end of that passivity. And that I'll complain and then I'll wait for three hours to do so and then nothing will change. Well, it could be worse, James.

I had an Airbnb for a few days in Italy last week. And there in the kitchen, they have six different bins for the things you're going to throw out. So different categories of recycling. And of course, it's all in Italian, so I didn't know what it meant. But I think that's one of those European Union mandates that we have recycling that make your life completely confusing. Right. The sooner we free ourselves of the slavish idolatry to the British, the better. And I know I'm talking to you two guys who, for some weird reason, worship the monarchy, get all excited when King Charles came over.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, in front of Congress as if he had anything to do with the substance of what he's saying. Not me. I am glad that they were the forefathers for the founding of America, founding of the country, the important Anglo-American values of constitutional and rule of all that. Just because they have, you know, accents which people think make them more intelligent because they still have a lot of influence our culture. But they're just an average declining power in the world. And, you know, we have these strong ties to them, but they're not the future. They're the past. That's the reason why Rumsfeld called them and France and Germany old Europe and that our future was with New Europe, the Eastern European countries that were free to the Soviets and know what needs to be done on the continent. Why? You know, we've got to turn and face China and Asia. That's where the future is not worrying about what some Oxford Don has to say about Shakespeare, what some descendant of a minor German principality, comes to our Congress and gives us a lecture about the importance of separation of power. when they don't even have it in their own country themselves.

I agree with you about the monarchy thing. I'm not a monarchist, but I am an admirer of longstanding traditions and also of the ties between us linguistically, politically, culturally, and the rest of it. So yes, I agree that they are part of old Europe. They're the only part that I'd want to hang on to, frankly, and New Europe is the future as well. And I would include sort of... Why do you go on vacation there? Why do you go on vacation there?

There's so many other places in the world to see. and you want to go vacation every year. There's someplace that looks like it's probably out of the Lord of the Rings. It looks like the Shire, I bet what you're talking about. I have to at this point. I do go elsewhere. But do go on. You know, this is the point where I want to quote the great Anthony Eden from the 30s

saying about a person he didn't like, so unfortunate that the distinguished gentleman would use the solemn occasion to practice his quips and jests. And about the language thing, by the way, you know, John McWhorter, that was a great linguist. His latest article, I think, is about, and I've heard this before, in 1776, we and the British had the same accent, and it was what we now know as the American accent. What we now know is the BBC PBS British accent

actually evolved in the 19th century, and now, John, you can run off at a conspiracy. They did that to assert their cultural dominance over America by lulling us into thinking. But marketing people will tell you, you always want someone with a British accent who's doing telemarketing and sales because Americans fall for it, which is true. I will give you that.

All right. Good. Yeah. So we've got that settled. John is on record as being as not exactly the strongest angophile we've had on the podcast. He's a hater. He's a hater. Oh, no, I love watching British TV and reading their novels, but that's the extent of

their influence on our, should be on our country. Well, as Samuel Johnson said, a man who is tired of London is tired of life. So we can just shock John up to being tired of life. Yeah. But he does have his uses, though, and we're going to get them. here because it's SCOTUS opinion season. We should have a special music sounder for that. And we're going to find out what John U expects of all of this.

Let's start with the Alabama map this week's the SCOTUS granted the Alabama legislature's 23 map and rejected by the district court. And then there was that other decision and then there was that other thing. And so something's going on and we're trying to figure out the rules for redistricting. Are we going to get clarity when SCOTUS attacks the Alabama situation? Well, what's going to happen, James, is that we're going to stop seeing judges involved in redistricting. That's the overall objective of the court here. You might remember a few years ago in a case called Rucho, the court said,

we're not going to examine redistricting for purposes of giving too many seats to Democrats or Republicans. We're out of that game. Now the court has said, we're also going to stop forcing states to draw maps because of race. The story here, the back story here, is that the reason the court had to intervene and allow these states to draw the districts that they wanted is because district judges have been going around forcing states to create a certain number of districts designed to elect minorities to Congress. And that the court is saying is inconsistent, it's unconstitutional, and at odds with its greater project, Their greater project extends beyond redistricting, and that is to force the government to stop using race, right? The Harvard case, they got the, they're saying anyone, any university or sees federal funds, any state university cannot pick students with race in mind. It's done it in contracting, government hiring.

And so the real story here is that the court is saying, and we're not going to force states to consider the race of constituents when they draw maps. And so what you're going to see, I think, is this is all going to be up more to the political process. If states want to have mid-decade redistricting, if they want to draw the most wild districts like in New England, where I think there's not a single Republican in the entire region now, the court's saying, we're going to let you do it. We're out of this game. And we're not going to even use race, really, as the justification to slip back into it and meddle with redistricting. John, can I draw you back to a slightly bigger picture?

I noticed in that Per Curium opinion that came out in, what is it, Alan versus Milligan is the parties. There in the first paragraph, something really jumps out at me. In the first sentence, it refers to our colorblind constitution. And I've heard it claimed, and I think this may be right, that that's the first time you've seen colorblind constitution in a Supreme Court opinion since Harlan in Plessy, way back in 1890. And I have an incomplete recollection, and maybe you will remember the case, but one of those 70s there cases, I don't know if it was Weber on affirmative action or Baki. I think it was Justice Brennan who said in the text of his opinion, this court has never recognized a colorblind constitution. And then his footnote was to Cori Matsu, the famous, infamous case from World War II that said it was okay to use a racial classification to put ethnic Japanese in internment camps. I thought, wow, that's a pretty nervy citation to justify affirmative action.

But anyway, I think sticking that out there right in the front of this is, to my mind, a significant piece of verbiage. Well, first, you're right, I think that that was, I think, from one of the 70s cases, but shows you the kind of acrobatics and contortions that the left had to engage in in order to justify race-based affirmative action, that they were even willing to hold up examples where the government did the most terrible things on the basis of race to prove that race-based affirmative action was okay. It just should what a, I mean, should, what a core principle, fundamental principle that was to the left. I'm not sure about whether the colorblind

constitution hasn't been used in concurrences or dissents and Plessy's language was the dissent, as he said. But yeah, I can't remember this phrase being used in a majority opinion. And this was a per curiam majority opinion of the court. So it shows, I agree, that this court is finally living up to the promise of the 14th Amendment and ending the use of race. And that's why they decided the redistricting cases that James is asking about this way. Who would have thought we would have lived to see the day? I mean, right, this is a campaign that constitutionalists have been on since the first Reagan administration. And it's taken 40 years, right, to finally come to fruition. Supreme Court decided with a couple of death penalty cases too, and I suppose people say,

ah, there they go, getting, siding with the criminals again and not caring about the victim. It was a couple of technicalities, wasn't it? I mean, it was the courts. Yes. So Witten versus Dixon, that was Florida, right? So what's going on with these cases is, and I wish the court would just get out of the death penalty business. this is something that also Steve's favorite decade apparently is the 70s. This is also something that happened in the 70s, right, where the court started to superintend death penalty.

When I was a clerk at the court, every single death penalty that occurred, every execution in the country that occurs is reviewed at the last minute by the Supreme Court. Justices right before it happens, they can't help themselves. But to me, the Constitution clearly doesn't make. the death penalty unconstitutional refers to it in the text as a possible punishment. And nevertheless, the justices in the 70s started to try to superintendent. They tried to be the ultimate manager of death penalties. And they've not stopped. And so here, even in these cases, the case I actually would point out would be a different one

where the court was looking at whether how you would prove that the prosecution had deliberately excluded blacks from the jury. That was a death penalty case. And you had actually, I believe, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh, two conservatives. Kavanaugh wrote the opinion stopping a death penalty execution because they didn't like the way the prosecution had struck jurors, potential jurors from the jury, and then how the prosecution justified it to the court. And I think the dissenters, the conservative dissenters are like, why is it the business of the Supreme Court to go over the record of every single death penalty case in the country and scrub it to make sure every single procedural thing was done correctly. But the court can't get out of it.

The court just can't dig its way out of this unless they're willing to say, we're just not going to look at them at all, which was basically the way it was until the 70s. Steve's favorite decade. You want to defend this, Stephen? Well, first of all, just to annoy John, James and I are united against you, John, in liking the 70s for the simplest reason that that was the peak of progressive rock and roll. music. Oh my God. That's, Steve's trying to resurrect air supply again. See, that's progressive. There's nothing progressive about air supply. You know, that was a setup, John. I knew you were going to blunder to saying something stupid like that, but I know, right?

Well, it struck me on the fine distinctions between bad music. So I guess there's Abba, Air Supply, Genesis. I know Steve likes Genesis. I think he likes the name just because it's biblical, I think. Oh, God. Where do I begin? I know. It's hopeless, James. It's hopeless. I've given up on him, right? On the death penalty business, one angle of this that you left out, John, I think, is one of the ways that so many death penalty trials have been overturned and new trials ordered is the claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. It's Judge Danny Boggs, who actually did a great lecture about this some years ago that I don't think he ever published going through this in some detail. And among the things he points out is something that, you know, economists should like, which is there's a real perverse incentive here for lawyers. If you have a client who is probably guilty or, you know, what is your incentive not to make an error deliberately so that a death penalty sentence can't be carried out or drag it out for years with endless appeals?

And, you know, we don't, I don't think there's any other class of crime for which the courts will reverse a conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel. I think it only exists in death penalty cases. Maybe you can correct me, John, if I've overstated that. But I think that's a really interesting rankle to this that, again, I think the court ought to use that as a basis to get out of it. We're not going to review the quality of counsel on their performance in the trial. Actually, an effective assistance is something you can bring up for any criminal trial, not just that penalty. But it's really hard to prove because if you think about it, every time you get convicted, you could say there's an effective assistance. Because I lost.

Right, right. It's like, I guess, with doctors, you could always claim melbourne. practice if you aren't cured. Right. But, no, but it's very, it's become, but you're required, that was a huge loophole in death penalty cases in particular. And you did have these terrible cases where, I mean, red son of them, where, you know, the defense lawyer who appointed by the court getting paid almost nothing, falls asleep during the trial, these cases like this. But the court has tried to make it harder to prove to show that it actually, you have to show it made a difference in the outcome.

And so that's harder to prove. On the other hand, every criminal, every, I'm sorry, every death penalty person on death row will add this to their habeas petition. Right. The other thing about this is that it's very hard to actually carry out the death penalty. You'll notice from these cases you're referencing. Right. Can they keep kicking and screaming it? It's hard to keep.

Oh, I. Yeah, these are, no, no. These are, but these cases, death penalty is often imposed 20, 30 years after. the crime, because not only do you have the right to defend yourself in your trial, but then you have the right to go to court under the habeas corpus provisions of the Constitution and the law, and challenge your conviction in federal court for years over and over again. And so this has been a huge problem, but that also delays the death, no, death, and actually makes people both sides of prosecution and the defendants cynical about the whole system.

It's just so it's utterly manipulated by procedural. moves that the death penalty is very hard to carry out in this country anymore. From what I understand about the Japanese version of it, they don't give you an actual date that you're going to be executed. They don't tell you. They just tell you one of these days we're just going to show up at yourself, and that's going to be the day, which would concentrate the mind wonderfully day after day after day after day, but that probably would be struck down as cruel and unusual.

I'm not in favor of the death penalty, but for different reasons. first of all, yeah, there are some people who don't deserve it, who were innocent, who got it. And that happens. I mean, you see from time to time people being let out, new DNA evidence and the rest of it. And even if it's one out of a thousand, it just doesn't, I don't want these guys to be done with their, with their punishment. I don't want them to have a way out. I think just absolutely rotting in a cell for the rest of their days and then we're seeing the light again, you know, going to Pelican Bay and being a windowless place. without books. Yeah, for the rest of their days, sure.

So that, I mean, I'm opposed to the death penalty because I don't think it's cruel enough. Stephen, you had some other little ornate way of doing away with miscreants? Well, I mean, by the way, I kind of agree with you. I'm uncomfortable with the death penalty also for those and other reasons. And I like your idea that real life imprisonment is actually crueler or, you know, more harsh. but I favor the helicopter method of execution if we're going to have it, right? I kind of like throwing commies from helicopters. I think that was, I approve of that technique. So we've moved from death penalty to just commies.

I see. Well, with that little South American Philip there, we'll move on to another instance. We had a problem with 60 minutes this week. And again, 60, I don't know how many people watch it. It used to be the absolute mainstay for everybody on Sunday, right? you would go, you'd all sit down and you'd wait for some expose. You'd wait for that moment when Morley Safer would drill it and the camera would focus on the guy that they were accused, some corporate guy who was accused of poisoning a small town with something

or other. It was great. And then there'd be Andy Rooney at the rest of it and, you know, beloved, et cetera. It was destination television. I have the numbers on that actually. You said it, you know, whatever's that. The numbers I have is that the average audience peaked in 1980 at 25 million viewers a week or 25 million households.

And it bottomed out at 8 million in 2020. And now the last year it's about 8.5 million. So it is, but all downhill if you do a graph of it. And so it's got a third the viewership it used to have. It's no longer, I think that's true of mainstream media in general, right? Mainstream media is dead. And this is another one that's dead. And they killed it.

Scott Pelly complaining about your murdering 60 minutes. It looks more like assisted suicide to me. I wouldn't, if I was being paid $7 million a year, I would not stand up. a public meeting and excoriate the new leadership and sort of dare them to fire me, which they did. Is the nation horror for this, John, or have we sort of passed the era in which these anchor people are the avatars of decency and public democracy and all the rest of those things that they were held up to be?

I'm sorry to see the decline in 60 minutes. I think I differ with Steve there. I think it's great that you have these kind of deeper, long-form, you know, television investigatory journalism shows. And I think the answer is not to cheer on the decline of 60 minutes, but for places like Fox and other channels to create their own versions and create a competitive project. You know, that said, I don't see why these media people think they get to behave in a way that no, no employer would tolerate with any other type of employees. So I worry that these people who are just journalists, right? Their job is just to, you know, try to report on what they say. but they obviously think there's some kind of celebrities or stars, and they're swatting around acting as if they can't be fired or acting as if they can challenge management in the kind of,

if you read what Pelley did, you know, getting up in a meeting of all the employees and attacking the qualifications and abilities of the new editor of the show and I think, and of, right, Barry Weiss herself, well, then she should be, he should be fired, just like he could fire any employee for doing this? I recall when our newspaper was sold and it was it was sold to a billionaire, a right-wing billionaire. And the mood when everybody got together in this, you know, to hear the news and to finally meet the guy, the mood was, oh, you can buy us if you want. You just can't tell us what to do. And of course, he never did. But the idea was that we are an institution and you may have bought it. you may be the new guys, but we absolutely don't have to listen to what you say,

which seems to be unique in journalism, I think, really does, as if the idea of just keeping your head down and subverting them from within wasn't an option. No, we have to be conspicuously opposed to all of these things. Well, James, didn't I just hear that your former paper, the current owners wanted to become a nonprofit organization and get government subsidies? Did I read that right? Yes, and as I joke the other day when somebody asked me about this,

I said the paper has been trying to be a nonprofit for 20 years and generally succeeding. And I was a big fan of it back in the day until I watched what it eventually became for reasons. But yes, I think they're going to try to convert it into some sort of institution because, you know, for our democracy. And we do require news gathering organizations. We do require people whose job it is to go out there and sit in the boring meetings and attend the round. and interview people. And there has to be some sort of institutional gravitas that gives them, not I want to say credentials,

but just lets people know when they're talking to somebody, at least that there's a pretence of objectivity. But do I want to get all of my news from places that are definitively, conspicuously and proudly biased? I do not. Does that mean that newspapers are not those things and they're biased in their own way? They are. But, you know,

we're not going back. We're not going back to the days when you would have competing newspapers in town, and one would be the Democratic paper and the other be of the Republican paper, and you could read them both and make up your own mind. That model changed post-war, I think. And we sort of had the idea that the good old institutional paper, history in its first drafts, doing its best. I mean, for a long time, that was sort of kind of true, and it sort of kind of still is.

But, yeah, so more sources, yes, but let's not just throw everything to the bloggers. And I say that as a blogger. Last thing we got going on here is that the country is approaching its 250th anniversary and all the plans for the celebration seem to be a cluster bleep. And everyone's asking the question, is this because artists are properly standing up against the bat, the fascist boot that has descended upon the country? Or they just pitch in a fit because they don't want to be associated with anything that has to do with Trump.

I think it's, I think it's, you know, a combination of both. And I think it speaks poorly of the people who don't want to, look, it's the nation. birthday. Let's set all the stuff aside and let's have a good time of it. The bicentennial came at a time of cultural, you know, we weren't in the greatest of shape in 76, but we managed to get together for something that was kind of cheesy, kind of kits in a lot of ways, but we had the tall ships and, you know, Burger King had the ceremonial cups and the rest of it, and it was okay. Now, the right thinking people don't seem to want to celebrate anything at all. What's to celebrate?

Yeah, so, you know, I'm old enough to remember the bicentennial in 1976, and we had the tall ships sailing up the Hudson, which apparently is going to happen again. No good. And I've been saying for a year and a half now that if Campbell Harris had been elected, had won the election of 24, we would see a celebration that featured slave ships going up the Hudson, right? Back in 76, there was a left-wing effort. It's called the People's Bicentennial Commission. And basically they just appeared on college campuses to say how terrible America was.

And it didn't make much of an impression. Ronald Reagan did one of his radio addresses attacking it because he paid attention to these things. But this year, I think you put your finger on it. So much of our cultural institutions have fully embraced what Roger Scruton called the culture of repudiation. I haven't heard a lot about it yet,

but I'll bet in the next month, between now and the fourth, we're going to see that ramp up. And you're going to see actual protests on July 4th around the country. They could be considerable. It wouldn't surprise me. so it's going to be much louder than it was then.

I think, by the way, Trump has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever. I woke up here to realize that it's June is Pride Month. So, you know, right? I think Trump should lean into it and say, I'm going to embrace Pride Month, except I'm going to declare it to be Pride in America Month in the next four weeks before the fourth, just to watch more heads explode.

As they would. Right, of course. And in a celebrity thing, one last one, you may have noticed this one a week or 10 days ago. NFL quarterback, a young guy, Jackson somebody, I think, I forget. He introduced Trump at some event. Jackson Dart for the Giants. That's a Jackson Dart.

And boy, has he gotten in a heap of trouble with all the minders of the NFL. It's perfectly fine for celebrities to embrace literally, you know, a Democratic politician. But boy, lo and behold, anyone steps out of the line and says anything nice about Trump, you're in a world of hurt because that's the world we live in now. John, how will you be celebrating it? Will you be going down to the National Mall and saying, oh, the color of the reflecting pool is all wrong? I remember as a kid going to the celebrations in 1976 because I was a kid in Philadelphia. And so I remember my dad took me to the big parade.

You know, they do the parade up big there. You know, of course, I hope Wawa and McDonald's are heavily involved, as they should be, in any celebration of America. But this year, I think I'm just going to hang out at home in Tiburibri. on, I'm going to be doing some speaking events in Washington and Philadelphia just before. And I've written an essay, which Steve hates, I believe, that'll come out this June about the Declaration entitled, the Declaration as a Constitution. And it argues, of course, we love the Declaration for its claim about natural rights and everyone created equal, all the stuff that Steve and those

other Straussian Claire Monsters spend their whole lives talking about and writing about. But I said, what we should do this 250 to read the rest of the Declaration, the long list of accusations against those terrible British monarchs you guys love so much, and see within it that there's actually a lot of constitutional principles that would come to inform our Constitution if we read it closely enough. There's discussion, for example, about the executive right to veto, about an independent judiciary, about federalism. But we skip over all that stuff because is kind of boring compared to the Jeffersonian rhetoric about why all men are created equal. There you go again to quote Ronald Reagan, distorting my position, but we'll let that slide this time, John.

A great piece will link to it. We'll discuss it at a ricochet.com where you can go. And by the way, I'm not going to be in Washington for the fourth. I would like to be, though, because some of the things, some of the improvements that they've made for the day are good. And one of them is remarkable. They cleaned the statue, the fountain in front of the Union Station. And it was the spattered, old, ugly thing. You have these before and after pictures where the before is there hasn't been water coming out of this thing and God knows how many decades. And then it's covered with Hamas slogans and free Palestine and graffiti and the rest of it.

And now it's pristine. It's absolutely beautiful, shining like it was just quarried. And you know that there are people who look at the pictures and prefer the one that's ugly and spattered and doesn't work because it's indicative of the harsh truths of the world. and the other is just simply a fascist monument to some bygone glory that never existed in the first place. Irreconcilable views. What is reconcilable is the fact that you may not be a member of ricochet, which you can go there and find out and become one fast. Yes, if you want to go to the member's side, it costs a little bit, just a little bit. What doesn't this world?

It isn't worth something. But you'll have access to a member site that is the community you've been looking for all your days on the internet. Don't just discuss politics because that would be boring. supports art John Hughes culinary you know prediction everything we even discuss why progressive music is a fine art form that can in no way be connected to Abba

and air supply lost in love was simply a banal piece of overdubbing that made 10 Cs and the Waterloo however is indicative of a tight songwriting style that actually defines Abba in a way that John would perhaps like to learn about if he had any artistic aesthetic sense whatsoever.

This is all true. No, not interested. Hopeless. Hopefully. Anyway, if Charles were here, he would tell you what version of Rurkisset we're about on. 5.0 is coming out soon. And as I say, join right now so you can have, you know, like two days of Rickshaw 4.0 and then complain when 5.0 comes out and says you like the other one better.

It's going to be great. It still is one of the most unique sites on the Internet. And if you haven't discovered it yet, I don't know what's stopping you. John, it's been a pleasure as ever. We always love having you. Steven, same. I have no idea what configuration will await tomorrow. We just know that we'll be here for 793.

And in the meantime, we'll see you all in the comments at Rurkishay 4.0. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone.