The Ricochet Podcast - Judgment Day

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Whoa. Wow. Golly. And Hooray! Big news from SCOTUS today. A fifty year judicial error is finally corrected, and Ricochet’s Supreme Court expert John Yoo joins us at the top of the hour to explain. He talks about the unofficial Thomas/Alito court, discusses what this could mean for other landmark cases, along with a few other fresh decisions that, on any other day, would’ve merited a visit from our... Source

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We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Roe versus Wade is history. That landmark 1973 ruling that said a woman had a constitutional right to abortion now goes back to the states. I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robertson and Rob Long. I'm James Monick. Today we talk to John Yoo about the court and Ian Rowe about agency. Let's have ourselves a long, serious podcast.

I can hear you! podcast. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet podcast number 599. Wow. Join us next week for the big 600, but also you can join us right now at ricochet.com and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. We're going to go right to our guests because it's a big day. John Hughes here. John is the Ricochet Podcast's top legal contributor. He's also the Emanuel S. Helder Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, Senior Fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. I think the power is out and everybody's now reading the decisions by candle.

He's here to talk about a couple of these enormous, big Supreme Court decisions. Turns out that something that was explicitly mentioned in the Constitution is right and something that wasn't is not. Here's the pull-away, take-away quote. Quote, the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey are overturned. And the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives. In other words, the dark night of fascism and handmade stale dissents. Or some will tell you, John, welcome. You've read the whole thing by now. It's been out for what, an hour, two hours or so with your speed reading ability. You've skimmed or you've

absorbed or you've completely read it. What's your take? Well, thanks. Thanks for having me back, guys. And I was able to read it quickly because a liberal clerk issued the cliff notes about two months ago. So that part went quick. In fact, Justice Alito's leaked opinion did not change that much other than to reply to the dissents. But it is, as you say, James, this might be, for a constitutional law scholar and practitioner, this might be the most important day in my lifetime. And since Brown versus Board of Education, I would say, the court, and if you tie it to the opinion that came out yesterday in the guns case, I think this is the sea change in constitutional law that conservatives have been working for towards for since the 1980s. It just took 40 years for it to happen. And as you say, James, one last thing is this decision, as we talked about before,

when the leak came out, returns the question of abortion to normal politics. People are now going to be able to argue and persuade and vote ultimately on what their state's abortion policy is going to be. And we're going to have a diversity of different abortion regimes throughout the country, just like we do on lots of other life and death issues. It would sound like that's something in favor of our democracy, as we're constantly being told is in peril. But yet, it doesn't seem that our democracy is that important, if it means that this right is taken away? Yeah, in fact, it's a strange juxtaposition to see our elected members of Congress demanding that they not decide these questions, demanding that the courts take it out of their hands. And so, in a way, this is going to

demand accountability on the part of, you know, people we vote for in state legislatures and in Congress, because now they're going to have to represent our views on abortion rather than kicking the question over to the justices and one last point about institutions i'm proud of the court today in a way whether you agree with abortion or not the thing that worried me beyond the issue of abortion was whether the court was going to lose its institutional independence if it were to bend the knee to all of these attacks up to including an attempted assassination on Justice Kavanaugh. And so the court, when you look at the opinions, the court's majority opinion did not really change one bit when it came to why it was overruling Roe. And so I'm proud of that for the court.

Are you surprised by that? I'm proud of that for the court. Are you surprised by that? I'm not. In a way, I thought that's what the leak was designed to do. I think the leak of the opinion, unprecedented leak, first time in the history of the Supreme Court, a leak of an opinion. The reason I think a clerk did that, but it was likely a clerk did that, was to try to increase the political pressure from the outside on the justices. And it didn't work. had not signed that leak. And the big speculation ever since has been with the Chief Justice, the expectation is the Chief might write some kind of concurring opinion, but refuse to sign the main opinion, and that he might be able to pull somebody off that main opinion and flip the

whole decision. Where did the chief justice come out so uh you can we can proclaim on episode 599 they mistimed it they should have waited one more week so this could happen at episode 600 of law talk i'm sorry i wish this was law talk i wish we were at 600 we're prepping you for the ricochet right we're we're just a little satellite circling the home planet. I know. But this is not the Roberts Court. Formally, it'll always be known historically as the Roberts Court. This is the Thomas Alito Court. Wow. Say that again. Say that again. It just sounds so beautiful. This was an effort, as you said, Peter, by Chief Justice Roberts to form some kind of compromise. He tried it at oral argument. He said, we're not going to overrule Roe today, but we will allow states to ban abortion after 15 weeks, which is pre-viability. That was the standard from Roe.

He tried it again. If you look at the opinions, he issued a separate opinion saying, that's what I would like to do. He got zero takers. None of the three liberal justices who issued an extraordinarily three-justice dissent, which is unusual, nor any of the justices in the majority joined him. And so, Chief Justice Roberts, he was rendered irrelevant, actually, in this case. He's lonely. The decision is 6-3. He did vote with the majority. So, we have a 6-3 rather than a 5-4 decision. What you would say strictly is he voted to

uphold the Mississippi law, but he did not join the reasons that the court gave. So he has a little delicate balance. The only thing that he says counts here is his vote. He specifically says he doesn't want to join the majority's opinion on the law. Okay, so, sorry, I don't want to get hung up on this, but you know where I'm going. We've moved right from law to politics. We are going to see a lot of mostly peaceful protests beginning this weekend, would be my guess. And what I want to know is whether the opposition can legitimately claim that this decision was narrow, that it was 5-4 uh you you could say the reasoning is narrow in terms of the votes in terms of what the opinion says is extremely broad and in that sense it's a twin to the gun case yesterday which was also extremely broad and uh when i actually when i saw the gun case come

out yesterday i knew they were going to overturn roe and stick to their guns because the opinions read the same could you just explain for me the difference between when you're making a distinction and i'm confused so it's a narrow vote five five to four but you're saying actually it's broad what's the explain i always have these difficult students in class but make you make you make sense yeah i'm still listening very good description of brother rob he is a difficult student we are still doing the we're still doing yale university's remedial work here but this is how as i said the vote so this is actually as peter says the difference between politics and law the politics of it are the votes are five one three there's five votes no hedging hemming hawing five clear full joins to justice alito's opinion which looks very much like the draft

that was leaked uh so you could say in terms of votes, that's narrow. Chief Justice Roberts is voting along with them because the court's action is to uphold the Mississippi law. But you could say, as Peter did, but the vote's tenuous because if one of those justices, say Justice Kavanaugh had bent the knee to all the external pressure and gone off with Chief Justice Roberts, then Roe would not have been overturned. The reason I'm saying it's broad is that the opinion itself, the reasons the court gives for why Roe is overturned are extremely broad. There's no wiggle room anymore. The Supreme Court is no longer going to decide abortion issues. Everything is returned to the states. The court says a state can now ban

abortion completely. It could ban abortion and give no... Explain the rational basis test. Can I just say, this is another remarkable thing. The court doesn't provide any exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother. That's extraordinary. That means all of abortion issues are returned back to the states. The only test the court's going to apply is the same test that it generally applies to most laws, which is called the rational basis test, which just says, could a state have a logical or rational explanation for why it passed a law? Only one law has ever failed that test and been struck down by the court, and that's the ban on gay marriage that some of the states enacted.

So, in fact, the court's opinion gives plenty of reasons why a state might want to ban abortion, because it talks actually at great length about why states could believe that a fetal life is worth protecting even before viability, and says that's a decision for states to make. The other thing that remained attacked from the opinion that goes to this rational basis question is that the court goes to great length, and Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately to emphasize this too, that this case does not touch the gay marriage cases, doesn't touch the contraceptive cases, and earlier cases that do identify a right to privacy, even though it's not mentioned in the text of the Constitution. But Thomas does. Thomas, yeah, Thomas said that. Well, you guys, unlike my students, did all the reading in class.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, explain what Thomas meant. Because what we're getting on Twitter is this is now the end of contraceptions and same-sex marriage, because that's what they want to do. It seems to me that they're just saying this basis on which these things have been decided is erroneous, is false. We have to look at them again through a different prism. It doesn't mean that they want to overturn them. It just means they want a rational, grounded foundation for them, as opposed to the castle in the air that they built before.

Does that seem about right? Yes, I think Thomas does take a little issue with Justice Alito's opinion. Justice Alito, he's trying to build a majority, which he did for this opinion. So he wanted to say, you can go with me on this train overturning road doesn't mean you're going on for the whole voyage of overturning gay marriage contraceptives. privacy that has come into fruition, started around the 1920s, and really is the root of all these cases. But Thomas says, and I think he's right, but he's not being very politic. He says, well, the logic that we apply today, well, that means those cases don't make sense either. And he's saying, in the future, I would re-examine all those cases don't make sense either and he's saying in the future i would re-examine all those cases but james is right he says i'm not saying we should overrule obergafell

and you know the contraceptive cases uh and so on but he's saying they might have other you know roots in the constitution there may be other reasons those laws are uh those decisions are constitutional but he says i wouldn wouldn't continue to justify them on the same grounds that we have justified Roe. But I don't think he has a, I don't think Justice Thomas has a majority support for that. I think Justice Kavanaugh actually wrote specially to say, I think those cases are still good law and it's still precedent, and Justice Alito does. As a matter of legal reasoning, John, who has the more persuasive case on that point? Justice Alito and Justice Kavanaugh, who say this is, we're talking here about abortion and abortion only, there is nothing in the logic that we use that even begins to undermine the rationale for the

other decisions, or Justice Thomas who says, oh, come on, fellas. This rationale, who says A must say B. The thinking here applies to the other cases as well. Whether you want to admit it or not, someday, sometime, somehow, somebody's going to raise these questions. Who has the better case? I'm not talking politics or who has a majority. I'm talking who has the better case. Pete No, in the terms of ideas, I think most people who study these issues would agree with Justice Thomas. Even if you were a liberal, there are some very famous liberal critics of Roe, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg before she went on the Supreme Court, or Larry Tribe, or John Hart Ely. They're all very critical of this idea. Very briefly, I don't want to bore people, the idea is,

there's a due process clause which says you cannot be deprived of your life, liberty, or property without due process of law create any rights other than you get to have due process before the government takes those things away from you. And so where the court made them error in Justice Thomas's mind was to say that clause actually gives you all kinds of substantive rights, not just the right to a fair process before. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia.

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actually be a right in there too. It doesn't make sense as a matter of logic and language. But Justice Thomas believes that the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment, which has been read to nothingness by the court, might actually be the source for these kinds of rights, but the court courts never explored it. And one other thing about why Justice Thomas has these views, as you all know, I clerked for Justice Thomas. I'm not trying to toot his horn, well, not excessively, but I do think that Justice Thomas does not believe in precedent at all. I don't think this is a surprise for someone who actually lived for a part of his life under Plessy versus Ferguson. So, you know, he benefited from the fact that the Brown versus Board Court did not believe in precedent either.

So he would say, yeah, all those cases don't make sense. I would toss them. But Kavanaugh and Alito don't agree. Justice Thomas said in public under your questioning on this show that got this interview. I have this reputation for engaging in unpleasant questioning, but it's not true. Yes, exactly. No. In any event, Justice Thomas said, you'll remember this.

If this isn't a quotation, it's a close paraphrase. You asked about stare decisis, and he said, you only argue to Isis when you don't have any good arguments. That was a breathtaking thing for a justice to say, and that was in public. Of course, he was talking to you. People's reason sometimes departs them. Now, I think he's been very upfront about that, that he's less motivated by precedent. And this is Rob's old college classmate. Brett Kavanaugh was the key in all of this. We want to talk about the politics of the

court. I think a lot of this pressure that was put on him, put on the court on the outside was on Justice Kavanaugh. I think Chief Justice Roberts was putting a lot of pressure on Justice Kavanaugh. And Justice Kavanaugh does care about precedent. This separate opinion he issued today talks about, well, I believe in precedent. It's very important. This is why Roe doesn't benefit from stare decisis. But if there was any justice who might have gone along with Chief Justice Roberts, it was Kavanaugh. And even though I sometimes criticize his jurisprudence, I'm very proud of Brett Kavanaugh, too, because he didn't give in to that pressure and did what he thought was right. And that's harder to do than you think, even though those justices have lifetime tenure and, you know,

their pay can never go down and they're never up for re-election. Yeah. And so, I think Justice Kavanaugh, in particular, showed unusual courage today. John, I know we want to touch on, it's been a big week. This case, of course, people will be writing dissertations about this case alone for decades to come. You and Richard Epstein will be recording a law talk. We're just teeing up cases here. By the way, I want to collect from Richard, because we bet a dollar on the law talk about whether Roe versus Wade be overturned. So I have my dollar here.

You can't see it, but that's it. One dollar. Richard owes me one dollar the first time I've ever won a bet. I'm expecting my – but as I said earlier, because of Biden inflation, I have now produced a $5 bill. I'm expecting Richard to hand over $5 to pay up on our bet. He's very much in the terms. John, before we go to other cases, if I may, just to return to Dobbs itself for a moment, could I just read you a couple of headlines? We have here the New York Times at this very hour.

Excuse me. This is the lead, it's not the headline, it's the lead. The Supreme Court on Friday overruled Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion. On the website of the Wall Street Journal at this very hour, Roe v. Wade overturned, Supreme Court ends constitutional right to abortion. Now, strictly speaking, isn't it the case, two comments, one is isn't it the case that it didn't end a constitutional right? It said that we were all under a legal illusion. There is no such right and never has been. B, couldn't you write a headline? Wouldn't a fair headline also have been, excuse me, wouldn't a fairer headline have been, Supreme Court returns the question ofyear-old error. Because that's what it said it was doing. It said, we were wrong. And the court actually explains greatly, much of the opinion explains why no constitutional right to abortion

had ever existed before Roe. And in fact, if anything, the states had primarily sought to criminalize it. And why the founders and the framers of the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment did not think there was any right to abortion in the Constitution either. So you could say, in a way, like I say, abortion becomes a right like most other rights. It's up to our legislatures and governors to decide whether to expand those rights. And what happened today was that the Supreme Court restored the Rob Long rule of democracy. This goes to the states, and it is now up to Americans of either side of this question to persuade their neighbors. This is a kind of great, I mean, I hate to use Obama-like language,

but it is a kind of healing, constitutional healing. This is a kind of great, I mean, I hate to use Obama-like language, but it is a kind of healing, constitutional healing. This is restoring the democratic process. We're going to be in for, my hunch is that we're in for a summer of love. Not. This could get rough. Really? What planet are you living on? I don't know.

You can't hear the helicopter. Breaking right now, D.C. police are apparently on full alert, full mobilization. Same in New York. Okay. So can I just – Go ahead, Rob. I think partly that's true. I mean, it is – I think the irony here is that we're going to suddenly be –

Americans are suddenly going to be interested in local government where they haven't been before. I mean, the L.A. Times might actually reopen their Sacramento Bureau for the first time. States will matter again. People, states will matter again um and all that's useful isn't it also possible that we've just taken an argument that's gotten even more complicated since 1972 thanks to ultrasounds and viability world rules etc and we've taken out the deep freeze at the most complicated time you could imagine. I mean, the right to privacy, we can all agree, I don't know if we can all agree, but I think, John, you and I agree, the finding of the right to privacy within this sort of 1972 road decision is just kind of weird, right?

And kind of like specious. You don't have a right to privacy to do a whole bunch of things. But as some states may be going to sort of, not viability, I mean, Dobbs doesn't. Dobbs says 15 weeks, but just say it's moment of conception.

You do get into privacy arguments, don't you? I mean, what happens in the first two weeks, three weeks, four weeks? What happened four weeks ago? What happened four weeks ago what happened five weeks ago i mean you there's there's it is possible that we could revisit this issue and be using some of the same terms and legal arguments just applied in a different situation or am i just kind of fantasizing about an extremely complicated future which i'm not against by the way but um just what it seems like to me, right? No, I think that's right, Rob. In fact, okay, so I was saying the opinion was very broad, but you could also read it as an expression of modesty. The court doesn't think it

can make those tough decisions anymore. All those factors you just laid out, should women have a right to privacy of one week, you know, you guys decide, you Americans decide that. You figure that out. We're just judges. The law can't give you the answer to that. That's balancing a lot of, like, in fact, the opinion that the court really relies on here is about euthanasia. Another case where the court said, we're not going to create a federal right for you to kill yourself.

We will let the states decide that it's a similar idea there's so many conflicting moral views conflicting values in all of these life and death questions the court says we are not going to be in the business i was also mentioned the death penalty is another one where the court has said the same thing they're saying right but eventually they're gonna have to rule the world we're gonna have to decide this right well uh-oh but eventuallyoh. But eventually they're going to have to decide. I was with you right up until that moment. Yeah. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. As you know, I didn't pass the bar in California. So, so few do. So, so, right. So, it is possible to make it. I mean, it is going to be a little thorny.

Someone from Mississippi drives to somewhere and gets an abortion and comes back. You're not wherever they go, whatever that neighborhood state is, Florida, say, it's fine, and then they come back to Mississippi and it's not fine. That's going to be an issue.

If I commit murder in New Jersey, they don't try me in New York. They try me in New Jersey. Obergefell, you could overturn it, but you're going to have a bunch of... I mean, if I get married, a gay married in New York, that's a contract that's got to apply if I move to Alabama, right? Although gay people marry for looks too, Rob rob so don't get your hopes up yeah well i understand that um it's only about money uh so my so my question is like we we are about to have and i think this is not a bad thing um we are about to put all of our legislators to work and that may be good thing i mean right now they're engaged in a lot of nonsense i mean if i was a democrat today just just go with me and tell me if i'm full of it politically and i'm talking about expanding the

court well there's one way to expand the court and that's to win the senate back and the best way to win the senate back is to stop being so weird right is to moderate that's how you win the senate um is that it it feels to me like even the application of this decision is going to have beneficial effects you know uh rob you can i want to put to create a game jersey for you because you are on Team Madison, player number one. Because you just won on James Madison. Wait, what am I, Chopped River? Oh, you're Team whatever. You're still on the bench.

He gets number one? You're still a sub. No, because you just gave the explanation that James Madison's hope James Madison's hope for our country, was that we would have this federal system, you know, we would have states, and it would be, right, the expansive, large republic. And he thought that, you know, you have all these centers of power, all these legislators, all these states, it would help diffuse conflict, right? It would help bring down the temperature, as it were. People would be able to make local decisions, and it would actually prevent the nationalization and polarization of everyone trying to kill each other over red versus green or whatever you want to fight over and make it a winner-take-all fight at the national level. And so that's the hope. Now, the court's interest in courts is we have no idea what's going to happen in the politics.

It's not our job anymore to be worrying about this. Unlike the past Supreme Court, the past Supreme Court in Casey, about 10 years ago, I'm sorry, 20, 30 years ago, 1992, the court upheld Roe and they said, we're trying to end the conflict. We are going to heal the land and our decision will reduce political fighting. It actually had a reversed effect. Maybe that's what happens, Rob. I mean, that's what has happened with lots of other issues in American politics. You know, euthanasia did go back to the states and didn't become a great political issue. The death penalty, too, has been at the states. It's not a national issue the way it was in the 70s. Maybe that's the hopeful story here.

You think that I know we want to move on, but one more question, because you've been inside that court and you know, those a lot of those people. I know they're like my same age, like classmates and people I went to school with. I'm getting old. Where have you like, you're just sitting there and like, yeah, I don't know. They're, they're, I don't know. I'm a professor. So I always sit back and go, well, those guys are working for a living. Yeah, that's right. A little earlier, and they did the reading.

That's why they're there. So what's the mood? I mean, this has got to be the most, I can't think of a more controversial and unpopular, right, in a lot of ways, decision, what are they thinking? Like, hey, it's too early, but you're welcome, America. We're going to give you back the way the government's supposed to work, or are they kind of hunkering down and thinking let's all go away for the summer and and and we create a big mess let's run away from it yeah we should you're starting to get mysterious airbnb rentals by

unnamed people from washington dc all around the country but i actually think uh they might at first be looking at themselves and saying, maybe the first thing we can do is heal the courts. Everybody knows, you know, from Robert Bork on, every confirmation of every Supreme Court justice has really been about Roe versus Wade. And they've all been about, what are you really going to do? That's why there's so much questioning about precedent and outright questions. What are you going to do about Roe versus Wade? So maybe if the court gets out of this business, that part,

at least one of the three branches can start to fix itself, that they can get back to decide. The thing that's interesting about these opinions too, is they explain how the Roe versus Wade question distorted so many other areas of the constitution, because if you lined up for against Roe, it would cause you to vote in other certain other ways on other important legal questions uh so maybe that's one and then i think yeah i think the second thing is the court might be saying here because here's the example that they have on their minds is dread scott i don't want to go back into far history, but... data center networking portfolio and they deliver that's them hey nokia right on time

get your data center ai ready someday is here with nokia they their dread scott was another case the slavery question being worked out by congress by the states the supreme court chief justice time said no we're going to decide abortion once, I mean, sorry, slavery once and for all. We will end it, and then it will no longer be a source of division. And instead, they made it worse. And so, this is almost as if the court's trying to learn that lesson from the anti-Bell and Peer and say, no, we will remove ourselves from this equation, give politics a chance to breathe, and for the American people to figure out their own solution without it being opposed by a five-justice majority. So maybe that's what they're saying. So I don't think they're saying, say you're America, you're welcome. But maybe they're saying,

you know, maybe this is the start. At least we can fix our own, you know, fix affairs in our own house. And then that can be the first step towards. And can I say that the opinions in their own way are a good example of what Americans might do is because even the dissent. You're right, Rob. This is the most consequential, most controversial decision by the Supreme Court in our lifetimes, I think, other than Brown. And even though I'm even I am not old enough to have been around for brown are you sure i'm sure so the the point is that you don't um even in the dissent they're upset they predict you to ruin right but they still argue respectfully they still argue within the bounds of good faith maybe americans can take a lesson from the opinions of the Supreme Court. And the majority

is not accusing anyone, for example, of killing millions of babies. They're just saying, look, you made a mistake. We made a mistake and we're fixing it. It's so respectful and in good faith, despite all the turmoil Rob's talking about, the protests at the justices' houses and assassination attempts, leaks of the opinion.'ve been through uh the worst i think the you know the worst attacks on the institution since fdr tried to pack the court and they came through it still maintaining respect and good faith argument maybe that'll have an effect on the country too i hope john we've just got a sentence or two on these two other, on any other day, either one of the other two decisions that came, two big decisions that came down this week, we'd be

talking about as historic in their own right. Dobbs is so huge that it's compressed our discussion of these other two cases to, you have to run, I know. In any event, we've got New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruin. And then we've got the Macon case, which was a school choice and freedom of religion case, which came down earlier in the week. Let's start with New York State Rifle. I happen to know, because I was on a text thread yesterday, that Professor Yu considered the decision in New York State Rifle more than any conservatives had even dared to hope. What was the case? What was the decision? Why did it take even you,

spelled both ways, by surprise? So, the case is, can New York State, consistent with the Second Amendment, place very high restrictions on who's allowed to carry a gun outside their house? So in New York, you had to basically show good cause why you should be allowed to have a gun in order to get a permit. And effectively, you had to show why your life might be under some kind of threat to get a similar law in California and I think Illinois. So a lot of the country's population lives under this kind of law. So why it's remarkable is every court that looked at these questions before said, we're going to have a balancing test. We're going to balance your right to have a gun versus why does the state want to restrict your right? And so that led to almost in the years since the Second Amendment was found to have an individual rights component, almost every handgun restriction in every state was upheld in the lower courts. And so the Supreme Court, using the same logic as it does in Dobbs,

said, nope, New York's law struck down and we are going to reconceptualize how we think about the Second Amendment. And the main line is the Second Amendment is no longer a second-class right. We're going to use the same way we protect free speech and religion or Miranda warnings and so on. We're going to give those same protections to the right to bear arms. That's incredible. That's actually much more than most conservative legal scholars thought the court would do. Yes, this week. It actually brings into doubt many, many restrictions on the carrying and use of firearms.

The court doesn't say this explicitly, but some of the concurring justices do. And I think it's right. It still means that you can restrict having guns in certain places like government buildings and schools. It still means you can bar felons from having guns it still means that you can have background checks but the court's not going to allow unusual burdens to be placed on guns and this is and let me just end with this this is the most important part of it is uh the court said this is fundamental to what's to be an american in a way which was in the second amendment until this week the government would say to us prove to us why you should have a gun and the court says that's not what it means to be an american it means you have the right first and then the government has to prove why they get to

restrict it that's uh you know europeans would have no idea what that means right there was a or you know people in the rest of the world would be like what are you talking about uh but the court says that's the nature of a constitutional right is you have the right you're the presumption is in liberty you exercise it and then if the government wants to try to limit your right it has to give reasons to the courts and generally have a good reason. You can't just arbitrarily take away your rights. And so, the court said, that's the rule we're going to apply from now on. That's a revolution, almost important as the cases from 20 years ago that first said that there is an individual right to bear arms. That decision was written by Mr. Justice Thomas.

Here's the earlier, Carson v. Macon, which was written by the Chief Justice. Maine, I'm going to try to summarize the facts really quickly here. Oh, no, forget it. You're the professional. Summarize the facts. Why did that one matter? Why are so many people saying, wait a minute, this is a big opening for religion to creep back into schools. That's what the left is.

Go ahead. Well, they're going to be worrying about other things now. So the facts and the decision and why it matters. Actually, of these three cases, that one is the least revolutionary because you could tell for sure this is the way the court was going and has been going for about 10, 15 years. This is one of the signal moves of Chief Justice Roberts and the court is to allow churches and religious groups that participate in public life as other groups do and not to be singled out for exclusion from the public square. This is a case where I've never been to Maine. I know Rob, you know, this is one of Rob's hunting grounds, Maine. He loves Maine.

Maine is like much of new England. So sparsely settled. No one wants to live there. That there aren't enough people to set up high schools in Maine. It's really quite a meeting. Like I think they said half the counties or something. It may, does Maine have more than one County? I don't even know. It's so small. But they say half of Maine doesn't have enough density of population to make sense to build a high school. So instead, what Maine would do is

they would give families the money to send their kid to school instead. And then Maine said, but you can't use the money at a religious school. And so the court said, as it has said in other contexts, when the government gives money to families and they choose where to spend the money, then the decision is up to them. The government's not blessing religion. And they also said there are other programs where the government gives out money. And the court said when the government decides to give out money, they can't single out religious groups and exclude them from participating. They're just groups just like any other groups. And so that one was actually an easy one. I'm actually surprised people are making these kinds of claims because the court decades ago decided school vouchers and said school

vouchers can be used at religious schools. So, you know, the idea of the government giving money to religious schools is, you know, that's old news. It's just you can't give them directly and only to religious schools. You give them as part of a general program. Well, it's been quite a week with amazing decisions. And stay tuned because I believe at 4.30 they're going to issue another opinion and strike down the basis for the entire regulatory state. So, at the end of the show... Sign me up. That's next year. That's next year. How about that fundamental transformation they were talking about? Just not the story that they

perhaps had imagined. John, thanks a lot. We'll talk to you soon about something or other, and I was good to talk to you. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks. Thanks for filling in, John. You're always useful on a slow news day. You know, I've been sitting here periodically opening and closing my window because I've got trucks going by. I've got planes going by. And you're thinking, wait a minute. Why don't you just turn on the air conditioning and close your window? That's because it's broken.

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and instead what he is doing is running a group of charter schools in the South Bronx and the Lower East Side. And that is because Ian Rowe is a good man. He has just published a new book called Agency. Ian, welcome. Peter, it is so great to see you. I've been looking forward to this conversation. Okay, so the book in a moment, but first, what on earth are you thinking? You could be down there in that big, beautiful Goldman Sachs Tower, or you could be there with Morgan State. You could be right there in Midtown or the financial district pulling down huge bucks. And instead, you have chosen to lead your life very substantially in the South Bronx.

How come? Wow. Well, if you want to connect it to Harvard Business School, you know, my philosophy on these kinds of things, if one gets such a great education, that isn't constraining where you must go do things like work on Wall Street. In fact, it's actually liberating because you now have, you always have your fallback plan. So when I graduated from Harvard Business School, I went to work for Teach for America in its early, early days for $25,000 a year.

Where'd you teach? Oh, that was when it was, so I wasn't a teacher. I was actually helping run the organization in those days when, frankly, we didn't even know if we'd make payroll every two weeks. But we put an incredible foundation into that organization. And, you know, now TFA has placed tens of thousands of teachers. It's got more than a hundred million dollar budget.

But, yeah, well, thank you, Peter, for that. I've always felt if I could use my talent in such a way that would accrue to the benefit of young people who didn't get the opportunities that I had yet. And yet I feel a great kindred spirit with those kids. Why not? And that's honestly been the whole course of my career for the last 30 plus years. Hey, can we talk a little bit about the, about your path yeah um i i just want to say before i went to um on my thing was not known last night two nights ago i went down to the village underground comedy cell of the village underground about four blocks from my house and i saw glenn lowry and john mcwarder and they do this thing they sit there they tell jokes they tell stories

and they bring some comedians on it's bizarre but it's really great and you were named checked about 10 times no uh yes they but so but i guess what i want to know is how did you get to the point where you're running a charter school like what and i'll give you my priors because my theory is that you had some experience in the real world running a business or in business or something like that that caused you to turn those talents to administering and coming up and running school hey move those routers there oh hey it's me your data center and as you can hear i'm making some big changes in here because ai is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia, super fast routers, optical interconnect,

fully automated the whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver that's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center. AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia.

And that, that makes you different. Well, you know, I have had a few epiphany moments in my life. Probably the first one, the most indelible one was actually at 12 years old, far before Harvard Business School, far and probably why I went to work for Teach for America after Harvard Business School. And it's connected to my parents. You know, my parents came to this country from Jamaica, West Indies. They came in the mid-1960s at a time when there was obviously, you know, intense racial strife in our country. A lot of factors that might make two Black parents and their kids not come to this country.

And yet they believed in the American dream. You know, they had a sense that this could be a great country for them, for their two children, the Civil Rights Act that just passed, the Voting Rights Act. So they came and my dad became one of the first Black engineers at IBM. My mom started working at Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Anyway, so they created a life for me and my brother we moved to brooklyn and then we ultimately moved to queens and this is where the epiphany moment occurred i think would link to help answer your question so i was going to junior high school 231

laurelton was a predominantly jewish and italian predominantly white community and yet it was becoming slowly racially integrated more black folks were moving in and unfortunately a number of incidents started occurring in my junior high school to the point where the school board said wow we have to solve this problem and so they decided to create an annex another junior high school building in Rosedale, Queens, which was a few miles away, but in a more permanently white part of town. And essentially all the white parents in our school took their kids out and moved them to the annex in Rosedale, leaving junior high school, junior high school, two 31 and all black segregated school.

And my parents, but equal in Queens. Unbelievable. Well, yes. And, and, and my parents, you know, on the premise that where the white kids go, that's where there's going to be a better education. We're going to take me out of my school as well. And the Sunday night before the Monday, the Monday morning where we had to issue the transfer papers with my dad in his recliner and my mom on her sofa, I did the unthinkable. I challenged my parents.

I begged them. No, seriously, I begged and cried. I remember this moment where, why does my school have to be worse? I love my teachers. Just because everyone that's left is black doesn't mean that it has to be bad. You know, it's just weird. Like I'd never stood up to my parents about anything. Like my parents would crawl through broken glass for my brother and me. And yet there was something about this moment that didn't feel right. And I begged and I cried and I pleaded and they ultimately acquiesced and

they said, okay. And I couldn't believe it because I'd never really asked my parents for anything of significance. And they granted me permission to do something that they did not want to do. And I'm convinced at that moment, I felt, I may not have called it then, but this sense of agency, that if there was something really important to me, I could influence it. It also influenced my belief that regardless of the demographic makeup of any institution, that should have no relationship to the expectations associated with what that organization can do. So that happened at 12 years old. And I'm convinced all the decisions, Harvard Business School, going to work for a nonprofit,

even running charter schools later on, because I know a lot of kids who are in conditions that unless there was an intervention like me or a school like mine, that their path could have been extremely different and uh so i think that's what that's that's what that's part of my path yes all right the book is called agency the byline is the four-point plan f-r-e-e for all children to overcome the victimhood narrative and discover their pathway to power um i heard that word a lot

glenn lowry uses it a lot john mccord uses a lot a lot of people use it a lot agency is a kind of a taking back of decision making power away from a bureaucrat and to a parent is that am i that's one way to think about an education but how would you describe the word agency has up you know if um if i'm a progressive social scientist or progressive politician and i hear a black man say agency i get like you're conservative i don't like it why do i have that reaction if i'm a progressive? Well, I'm happy to hear, by the way, that you say you hear the word agency. I presume you hear the word equity far more than you hear agency. Well, yes, that's very true.

That's very true. And the reason I draw that contrast is that in today's world, the word equity, and by the way, when I went to Harvard Business School, the word equity had great meaning. It meant that you had the opportunity to take ownership in an enterprise with unlimited potential. It was boundless in what this word equity represents. Today, it actually means much more of a zero-sum game around identity groups, where equity is, in practical terms, often a forced set of equal outcomes if you are unhappy with disparities by identity group. By contrast, agency is my framework for this idea of boundless opportunity at the individual level, provided that you are getting the kinds of supports from core institutions that I call free, family, religion,

education. And if you get those three, entrepreneurship is much more within your grasp. So I'm actually trying to push back hard on this idea of equity being the goal that we all seem to be striving for. But you're almost alone in that, right? if I'm watching TV, if I'm in the culture, every single message that he or she is getting from the New York Times and from television, from Hollywood and from everywhere else is, you don't stand a chance. It's all stepped up against you. Well, that's it. I mean, you know, in my book, I write about these two narratives, these two meta narratives. First, I call blame the system, and the other is blame the victim. In the blame the system narrative, that goes like what you're talking about. If you're not achieving the American dream, it's because America is systemically oppressive based on your race, your class, your gender, your gender identity. Something about you is making the whole system rigged against you. You know,

there's a white supremacist lurking on every corner. Capitalism itself is evil. These systems are so discriminatory, so rigged that you're helpless. You know, you don't have the ability without some massive government intervention. But on the other side, I'll also say, though, there's what I call the blame the victim narrative, which says if you're not successful in the country, it's not America that's the problem. You're the problem. It's some pathology that you have. You didn't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. failure, of course, ignoring the fact that if you're a 12-year-old kid and you weren't born into a stable family, or if you don't have a strong faith commitment or support, or if you

haven't had access to great schools because of a lack of school choice, then it's really hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. So these two narratives, to your point, I think add up to a singular lie that make it so that a lot of young people don't believe that they do have a shot. And so I've written agency is what I hope to be an empowering framework that is within your grasp. It is within your grasp as a young person. The book again is agency. And by the way, Ian, I'm, I'm really, thank you so much for explaining that incident with your parents, because now I understand. You have spent the rest of your life overachieving just to prove to your mom and dad that you were right.

Now I get it. You know, skidding the game is important. Yeah, exactly. Okay. I agree. Here's the question. if a kid if a kid is african-american and comes from a single-parent family and is raised in a part of the country where they get a pretty steady diet it's just in the air this notion of victimhood at one at what point does it become too late? You can take kids in... How early do you need to get a kid to save that kid's life in your schools? Wow. Okay. It's never too late because no matter what...

It's never too late. Yeah. The essence of life is that you never want to create the impression that once you've passed a certain point, you know, all hope is lost. So we can never rob anyone of that, even the, you know, the convicted criminal who's been, you know, so it's never too late. That's the core message. But it certainly would be great if we could help young people not absorb that message. You know, Nicole Hannah-Jones, who's the author of the, the lead author of the New York Times 1619 Project, when talking about Black kids, she wrote in an 8,000-word essay, she said, you know, there is nothing a Black person can do. Doesn't matter if you get married. Doesn't matter if you get educated.

Doesn't matter if you buy a home. Doesn't matter if you save. None of those things can overcome, quote, 400 years of racialized plundering, end quote, if you want to improve economic outcomes for black people. So imagine if you are in a classroom with a teacher that's been inspired by the 1619 project and brings that message into schools. You would feel like, what's the point of trying? You know, we call it learned helplessness.

And yet the irony is that Nicole Hannah-Jones, and by the way, more power to her, she's done all of those things in her own life to lead a quite prosperous life. And if you look at data about poverty rates, the poverty rate for black married couples has been in single digits for generations. So clearly there are factors outside of race, and I talk about those things a lot in my book, that supersede whatever levels of racism or racial discrimination still exist in our society. are the institutions that if you embrace them, what you can do, what you can accomplish, not these defeatist narratives that are so dominant today. So I have just one more question that's related to what you're talking about right now. What do the parents say to you?

Take my kid and teach him how to survive in a racist america what how the name of the book is agency i want to say that over and over and over again the author is ian rowe the name of the book is agency and there are there are two arguments in that book one is that kids possess agency yes and the other is that the united States of America is still a decent enough country that you can exercise your agency in this country and get ahead, right? That's a beautiful thing. So what do the parents say to you? Take my kid into your school, please, and here's why. What would the why be?

So parents enter our schools, you know, when I was running my last network for last decade, you know, we accepted a couple of hundred kids into our schools per year, but we had nearly 5,000 on the wait list, right? And this is a district where District 8 in the South Bronx, where only 2% of kids that start ninth grade four years later graduate from high school ready for college, right? Meaning that they start ninth grade and drop out, or they actually do earn their high school diploma, but still can't do reading or math without remediation if they were to go to college, right? So that's the backdrop of why when parents come to our schools, they are not looking for a set of theories about how,

you know, the system's rigged against them or their kids or they've got no shot. They want us to teach them the pathways to success. What are the pathways to prosperity? So, for example, there's great data that says if a kid finishes their high school degree, gets full-time job of any kind, just so they learn the dignity and discipline of work. And if they have children, marriage first, 97% of millennials who follow that path of decisions, avoid poverty and enter the middle class. When we tell parents, this is the kind of information we're going to be teaching your kids, not in a prescriptive fashion.

You say you must do this, but to let them know about the different rewards or consequences associated with different series of life decisions. Parents say, thank God someone is teaching that to my kids because I wish someone had taught me those things when I was much younger. And the reason this is important is that I often get a lot of pushback from what I call the gatekeepers, the elites, the adults who've empowered themselves to say that they're representing the interests of disadvantaged kids. You can't say this to these kids. You're imposing middle-class values. You know, you're insulting them because they may not have followed these decisions in their own life. Ignore the gatekeepers.

When you speak to real people in communities that want to live the American dream, to know that it's still alive, that this is a good, if not great country, that's what they want to hear. Not a narrative that says their kids can't succeed. Okay, I know we got to let you go. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia, super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated, the whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them.

Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. I got one more question. I mean, I live in New York. You're running schools in the South Bronx and Lower East Side. Suddenly you're in charge of it. What are the first three things you do on your first day as schools are to fix it? So, well, that's a big question. So the first thing I do,

I recognize that schools cannot solve all of these problems alone. There is the, the, the reason I've written agency and when I first wrote the book, I was pretty much only going to focus on education, but as a school leader, you are being dishonest. If you don't recognize the factor that strong families play, that the absence of a strong faith commitment plays and the absence of school choice, these are all interrelated if we're truly focused on human flourishing for the next generation. So if I was school czar, I guess I'd ask to be mayor. You're in charge of the other czar. You can do whatever you want. So you just mentioned school choice. So you mentioned gatekeepers and that kind of goes

into school choice. Yeah. By the way, in that district I just mentioned where only two percent of kids are graduating from high school ready for college, well, because of a cap on charters, if you had an idea to start a great school, you couldn't do it because right now the policy bans new schools. So that's certainly an immediate policy lever. Let's eliminate the restrictions on school choice. That's one. Two, in the last couple of days, the Supreme Court ratified a decision that parents now have greater power to use their public dollars to be used at a religious school if they were to, if that's what they believe would be most healthy for their own child. So I would try to do everything in my power to empower parents to be able to be able to choose the great schools for their kids.

But I wouldn't let families and faith-based organizations off the hook. Because I think sometimes in our conversations, we put so much onus on school choice or the education system to say, well, solve it. And it's necessary, but not sufficient. Right. So you wrote a book called Agency. You run a network of charter schools, South Bronx, Lower East Side of Manhattan. You sound like an optimist. Optimism is a fundamental part of the human being. We need hope and agency over grievance and dependency. We will never inspire a rising

generation to fulfill their greatest potential if we're constantly focused on all the things that are impeding their ability to have agency in their lives. Ian Rowe, the author of Agency. You know what you are, Ian? And I mean this quite strictly. You are a great American. Oh, wow. And a bit of a nutcase. I still think you yeah you're in big trouble 20 times more money down well you know it's just money there's far greater impact no seriously there's far greater impact you make your robbed mind and my mind just explode james may be with you on this but the dirty box as far as i'm concerned um there are a lot of people with money that don't feel that they have agency in their lives

they actually feel pretty trapped it's quite interesting that when you ask a lot of kids across race across class the levels of loneliness isolation depression um then these levels exist in places where there's lots of cash. But in the absence of strong families, strong faith-based commitment, strong access to schools, you know, we got to get back to basics. And we know a lot about human flourishing. Economic stability is certainly one component. But if we focus only on that, I think we're missing out on what it means to lead a truly flourishing life. James? To rather than burst in here with the last question, I've been just fascinated listening

to the whole thing, but I am here in Minneapolis, which was the epicenter of these societal convulsions that we went through a couple of years ago, you may recall. You did a great piece in Newsweek magazine just out where you're talking about these these uh these acts of performative allyship that we saw these ceremonial almost uh uh uh things that people did to assure everybody else that they were good people and on the right side and it rubbed you it graded you the wrong way like i you know and if you could explain that exactly why are these people simply trying to swab uh you know a mark on their door and say, Passover, I'm one of the good ones? Or do they believe that this is sufficient to do in order to affect change?

Tell us why you saw the people preening after the George Floyd riots. Yes, this is a fair question. So, you know, yeah, just not too far after the George Floyd murder, there was an incident in Bethesda, Maryland, in a park where about a thousand predominantly white folks were gathered and they were all gathered in chants and their arms were raised to the sky and they were chanting, I will love my black neighbors just like I love my others. And it was just this eerily symbolic thing where a lot of goodwill people were trying to demonstrate that we're allies, we want the best for Black people. And, you know, unfortunately, those kind of activities do nothing for the kids that go to my schools. That doesn't improve reading levels. And certainly, we all want all

of us in our society to be rowing in the same direction, to believe in equal opportunity. So I'm not discounting the well-intentioned efforts or well-meaning, but when that's the extent of what we're talking about, you might actually start getting the impression like, well, we need more, you know, in order for Black progress to be made, we need more Black Lives Matters lawn signs on everyone's porch. And then that's what demonstrates progress. And so I grow frustrated with that. And over the last two years, I've seen a lot of, you know, newspaper organizations are now capitalizing the B in black and leaving the white, the W in white, lowercase. That's nonsense. Why are we doing that? It's purely for virtue signaling. The governor of

Oregon a few months ago made the decision in order to help kids of color to eliminate the requirement to demonstrate proficiency in math and reading in order to graduate from high school. What? How does lowering standards help anybody? And so these kinds of symbolic or destructive or corrosive actions, A, they're incredibly cynical, but more importantly, they either have zero impact or a worse or adverse impact on the very kids that we're talking about. And by the way, there are lots of kids of color that are doing just great. And there are lots of white kids that are not doing great. So maybe we should not make race the factor in a lot of these decisions that we're talking about. And also maybe we need

to move away from these symbolic acts and talk to young people about the real pillars that are much more likely related to having agency in your own life, building strong families, having a strong faith commitment, exercising school choice. And if you've got those three, then exercising entrepreneurship, not just business ownership or work, but having control of your life so that you're the problem solver, you're the architect. That's the real conversation I want to have. Not symbolic, you know, let's put a black square on Instagram. That does nothing. It says something about the person who's doing it, not about the real impact for kids.

You know, it's interesting. We had a big conversation about abortion in the first part of this podcast. And connecting that with what you said, it's as if people are panicked suddenly by the idea of devolving responsibility back to the individual. As though the molecule frightens them. They want to be absorbed in some uh you know some big blob that actually makes that takes away their own agency because agency does imply that one is responsible which for some it's a horrifying idea but agency is the name of your book and the idea can be fleshed out there and you know to go back to what was said before the more we talk about that as opposed to equity that term with a little sleight of hand they've used to replace equality with agency is the is what we have to look forward to.

Thank you very much, Ian, for your visit with us today. Write another book, then we'll talk again. Okay. Thank you, Ian. Thank you, guys. Ian, thanks so much. Awesome. Peter, good to see you. Give our love to the South Bronx.

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We hope that you hear us every week here as a member of Ricochet.com. Well, before we go, gentlemen, anything else? It's kind of hard to think of anything that really matches the issues we've been talking here today. The trivial stuff seems incredibly trivial. I don't look forward to this as a matter of fact i mean this you know rob was talking before about how we now we're going to have the conversation and this is what america is all about etc but we seem as you pointed out this is a really fraught time to have that conversation i mean before when you were arguing about slavery for example you could argue there was a thing about which you were arguing.

Both sides recognized the thing, human bondage, chattel slavery. When you can't even talk about the abortion issue, because one side is seeing it primarily intensely, only to the prism of women's control over their own bodies, and the other side is seeing it primarily as a matter of life. Where do you find the middle ground on that to uh to have the the civil sane discussion are we going to find out or we just i mean you're right it was frozen and everybody kind of liked it that way yeah uh because we didn't we didn't have to grapple and now we got to grapple now we have to grapple now we have to do yeah democracy actually we mistimed it like the court mistimed it. If they timed it perfectly, they would have set this up so that this would have been our last show before the Fourth of July weekend. especially Dobbs, which reaffirm democracy and saddlers with a duty that should have been ours all along, which is to convince our neighbors. And Ian Rowe, between that and Ian Rowe, what a story!

What a story! They are connected, aren't they? They are connected. They are connected. They're all connected. Look what you can do in this country. Look what you can do in this country. Look what you can do in this country. Even the burned out, impoverished, written off neighborhood of the South Bronx.

Look what you can accomplish. Only in America. Yeah, it's sort of like that moment when you have your first apartment, or that moment in your life where you're on your own. And it's sort of scary, but you're on your own and it's sort of scary but you're on your own it's exhilarating it's full of possibility and it seems to me i mean i mean every with the the the dobbs decision was interesting is because it's sort of it's forcing a whole bunch of people to take a good hard look uh at their politics and their choices and their attention. I mean, if you're a United States congressman or senator, you've been demoted,

legitimately demoted in favor of your state assemblyman or state representative, whatever you have, you know, your House of Burgesses, depending on where you are, right? Suddenly those things are important. Suddenly it's important, grassroots politics is important. Suddenly how your neighbor is going to vote, it matters. We're not going to do this macro politics anymore on the big issues of like well i can afford to lose this these states and i'll get 11 000 votes in this state and i'll be president that's going to matter anymore for the big issues and i think that is the way it was designed and that is we've kind of lost

our way and now uh there's a lot of i think a lot of disquiet among people who some of whom even may be approached pro-life for the fact that we are going to enter a new phase of american politics i can't help but think it's going to be better the trick is convincing the other side that that's the case because if it requires a huge political effort and on 50 states or whatever to get back to the status quo, that's bad. That's just simply bad for them. They don't feel as if they should have to do the work because this is an obvious good.

And any institution or politician that stands in the way of the obvious good has to be brushed aside. I mean, for all the talk about our democracy and our sacred constitution and our elections and the rest of it, they really don't care about any of those things, as long as they can get these basic things enshrined forever. Hey,

move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here, because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio.

And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. So we're going to, I mean mean it's gonna be i agree it's gonna be exhilarating and it's a good and it's a good stress test for the for the society um and i don't think that we're any less virtuous than we were you know 100 years i mean the idea somehow

that we've fallen very far and that uh you know good honest decent farmers would have come to town 100 years ago and listen to a debate and then cast their vote with sober judgment. No, this place has been full of messy human beings since it was founded and still is. Human beings are messy, yeah. Right. And we have social media in the mix right now, which is going to be incredibly destructive. Because if you look at how these narratives are being framed on Twitter and the rest of it, you can say, no, Twitter doesn't matter. It's not the real.

No, it's not. But it feeds up into the major media machines. This is being portrayed as the patriarchy. This is being portrayed as fascism. This is being portrayed as a theocratic rule over America. And in order to have the conversation that Rob wants to have, and we have to, we got to get rid of that stuff first. I mean, we're already running. No, we don't. I mean the the beauty of the court the beauty of

the decision is that you you don't have a choice you know if you want to continue if you want to completely want you want to whine and cry and moan and bitch about it if you're a pro-choice or something you can but um you're not really going to help yourself the best thing to do is to sort of decide okay all the money we were spending on direct mail pieces and all this other stuff for big federal, either, you know, statewides or statewide elections, essentially. Now we need to figure out, you know, counties in Mississippi and we need to go door to door. Now we need to actually engage in American politics. I agree. What I'm saying is that the language determines how we debate the issues. And whoever has control of the terms helps shape the debate. Which is why nowadays we're not talking about equality.

We're talking about diversity, inclusion, equity, and the rest of it. Because these terms have been draped around ideas about issues that we want to argue about. And we have to fight those definitions in order to start to debate the real thing. That's all I'm going to tell him. Yeah, but this is the other side of, I think that no one gets everything they want, and this is the other side, I think, of the Supreme Court decision, the Dobbs decision,

is that a lot of conservatives don't know how to do that either. A lot of conservatives don't know how to go door-to-door and persuade somebody to excuse you either, and they're going to have to do that either. A lot of conservatives don't know how to go door-to-door and persuade somebody to excuse you either. And they're going to have to do that too. The biggest loser, it seems to

me, in this decision isn't the pro-choice movement and it's the media. It's Twitter. These things are now utterly irrelevant. There's nothing that in the big media can do that can affect how you vote for your state representative they don't even know your state representative is most people don't even know who the state representative is so

what they what we've just been assigned by the u.s supreme court is a civics lesson with a civics project attached to it and a lot of people don't like that and i kind of think the whole thing's exhausting myself but that's the country we live in and it's the country that was designed by some geniuses 200 plus years ago and that's the system that works and you know we can agree if only they but if only they agreed if only they agreed that the founders were in fact had a level they don't have to like it doesn't matter because that's what they have to do anyway. It's like it doesn't really matter what you say. I'm going to bust in because I have this little that you both agree with, I think.

Here's the second paragraph of Adam Liptack's report in the New York Times today. Liptack, by the way, beautiful writer and generally pretty dispassionate in reporting on the court. Just listen to this. The rule, paragraph two, the ruling will test the legitimacy of the court and vindicate a decades-long Republican project of installing conservative justices prepared to reject the precedent which had been repeatedly reaffirmed by earlier courts. It will also be one of the signal legacies of President Donald J. Trump. All three of his appointees were in the majority in the 6-3 ruling, close quote. So, there we have the line they're going to take. This is illegitimate. It's part of the

aberration of the Trump years. It was a totally partisan political project. Now, every bit of that is wrong. And one of the virtues of the Alito ruling is that it's so dry. Most of the decision is so dry, it's just legal reasoning. But there's the line they're going to take, and in a certain sense, this may be a difficult summer, honestly. My bet is that Rob is exactly right, that this will burn itself out. They've spent the last four or five years saying that it's Republicans and Trump support, blah, blah, blah, blah, who want to subvert the constitutional norms. You couldn't ask for a more clarion call. Well, you could ask for a more clarion call because it's the New York

Times. Everything is slightly muted. But you couldn't ask for better marching orders for challenging the constitutional norm here. My guess, though, is my feeling about it all is that Rob is right. The center will hold. The institutions will contain all of this. And eventually, even New York Times readers will understand that the job here is civics convincing our neighbors at one at some point it will occur to the exhausted or smart or strategic or just constitutional nerd on the pro-choice side that there is no federal solution to their problem. There is only a local solution to their problem. And when they figure that out, we're going to have a real conversation. But in the meantime, they could exhaust themselves, but there's no federal solution to this.

You just got to go past laws in the 50 states. True. But they believe that there is a federal state solution to everything that it is necessary to wrap everything into a centralized state because that ensures the proper outcome i mean i'm with you peter i mean the court doesn't the court disagrees and the court has the last say court has the final word and disagrees so all right so all this good news it's all good news i'm exhausted by all this good news so we'll all agree. All this good news. It's all good news. I'm exhausted by all this good news. So we'll all agree that I don't like the rest of the country.

We'll end on that. Hey, this podcast was brought to you by Bowling Branch. Support them for supporting us. Join and register today if you would. Give us that five-star review and whatnot. And Peter, Rob, are we on next week for the 4th? Or are we off? Or it can't be the 4th already.

It can't be the 4th already. All right. We're on for Friday. So good. And off the following week. My mom always said that when the 4th of July was over, then the summer was over. I hate that she said that, but I kind of feel that she's right. Then again, here I am in 95 degree temperature with no air conditioning, so the faster we

move to fall, perhaps the better. No, never wish away time was the other thing that my mother said. Anyway, speaking of time, we're done. See you in the comments. Next week. the thing that my mother said. Anyway, speaking of time, we're done. See you in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Ricochet.

Join the conversation. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated.

The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia.