Legal Expert Ilya Shapiro on Trump Conviction, Our Constitution, and Collapsing Public Trust

Ilia Shapiro welcome to Dad Saves America great to be with you John yeah so we've known each other for a while it's been a while since we've spoken I was excited to get you on the show because um I'm trying I think like a lot of us to Grapple with what's happening in the news with President Trump with the legal system and I'm going to read a little bit of your bio for viewers so people understand why your name would pop into my head so you are the director of con institutional studies at the Manhattan Institute you've got a forthcoming book Lawless the miseducation of America's Elites which I'm excited to talk to you about as well and you know you have testified be before Congress countless times you've issued more than 500 or fed more than 500 amicus briefs with the Supreme Court which um maybe we'll talk about what what that is and how those work and um and then you know you've got stellar credentials although we tend to mock credentialism here at dad Saves America but Princeton University London School of Economics you know a JD and of law from University of Chicago so you know your stuff before the places went uh completely crazy yeah yes yes before they all became hot beds of complete Insanity they were only partially insane right uh so let's jump right into this case um you called the Trump conviction a travesty of Justice in a relatively short piece you wrote um for the Manhattan Institute so why is that the case make your case yeah so uh you could teach entire courses in Trump law in in a law school I mean he is a frequent flyer in in courtrooms and cour houses around the country federal state civil criminal um this is quite possibly the weakest case uh and the most politicized case of anything that Donald Trump is involved in um this is uh a state prosecution by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin brag who campaigned uh in his in his last campaign on getting Trump and even though the previous Manhattan da declined to prosecute this same activity and Alvin brg himself had previously declined to prosecute it now he felt uh last year when the indictment happened a little over a year ago that this would be the opportune time to uh prosecute Donald Trump for okay let's get this straight uh paying money hush money to a porn star with whom he had an affair uh and Mis recording where that money came from such that it was a violation of business records law a technical fraud violation there but those violations have a two-year statut of limitations and this goes back to 2016 uh so how do you get to that well it turns into a felony and the statute of limitations is longer if that business broad records violation is in furtherance of a further crime what is that further crime well it's uh uh uh defrauding the election campaign maybe cheating on his taxes maybe further business records violations we don't know according to the jury instructions that judge Juan michon uh gave to the jury in in this New York cas case so it's unclear what that crime too is and this is a politically motivated Ticky Tac technical violation that if this is all that Donald Trump the real estate developer did then he's the cleanest real estate developer uh in New York but it's it's really a travesty that this you know the only reason this is being prosecuted is not because he's a former president not because it's Donald Trump but because he's running for president again and Alvin Bragg as a lot of Democrats do want to get rid of him and and hurt him through this lawfare process and at the same time this sham prosecution taints the more serious ones that are ongoing but now paused with respect to mishandling classified records in federal court in Miami with respect to trying to uh uh subvert the election process in Georgia uh and similar January 6th related uh activities in federal court in DC so those are all now paused or stayed but at least those have some serious allegations to them this is Ticky Tac Banana Republic stuff I don't necessarily blame the jury they're doing their best even if you know they might be you know not have voted for for Trump but the way that the judge uh acted during the trial and especially Alvin Bragg the prosecutor uh really uh uh bring us all down and further lower the confidence in our institutions this is the thing that I why I want to talk about this we don't we're not like constantly talking about politics here at dad Saves America I don't think America gets saved by being partisan political hacks of for for either party um but Civics understanding in our country is not great uh we test low on it our kids test low on it and then the trust in the system seems to have collapsed so the only thing that's left less trusted than the Congress is the news media and if the courts are also not trusted like how does a society function if we don't believe that the that the justice system can be trusted um we're at a we're at a historically low level of societal trust in America right now uh low level of confidence in our institutions um you know with respect to courts uh uh leftwing activists have been attacking trying to delegitimize the Supreme Court because they've lost control of it through various historical accidents and and political machinations and and whatnot in in recent years um but still the Supreme Court uh it's rebounded a little bit from from its low from a year or two ago but it's still much more trusted uh than as you said Congress the presidency basically any other institution other than the military uh trust in which has also uh declined and then yeah if you see the courts if courts are seen as being completely a continuation of politics that is bad indeed that is Banana Republic stuff that is how societies collaps that's the story of uh among other places Argentina which I know very well which was you know very well off through the 1920s uh and then took a wrong populist turn and kind of swung between uh left and right-wing populism through the rest of of the century from which they're now trying to uh recover but uh I mean Americans institutions are are very much under threat in our in our polarized time um this is just uh not good Bob not good I think um you know there's going to be there has already been a lot of and by the way John sorry to interrupt but um please I I have to say I'm not you know a rabid magga Trumper or something like this um you know I'd rather we have other choices for for our election uh I'm not going to tell you how I'm going to vote or how I did vote in the last couple of Elections but I'm not uh you know I'm a lover of the rule of law I wrote my last book about Supreme Court politics and and judicial nominations and surprise surprise politics has always been part of that process and what's different now is and this you know a parallel to whether the Trump case or our political analysis this General polarization you have differing theories in the Supreme Court's case of constitutional interpretation otherwise in terms of what policy you might want that's mapped neatly onto parties that are themselves more ideologically sorted and polarized than they've been since at least uh the Civil War uh if not ever and so we have this kind of no zero SU game uh you know battle to the death uh sort of situation which again is is not healthy well this is this does cut to the heart of I think the stuff that I think we should all be worried about which is how what let me ask you this to what extent do you feel like this this collapse in trust and I I do want to come back to this the particulars of the Trump case although that's not the primary objective for for having this conversation because plenty of people out there are covering it in every minute detail um but that collapse and Trust of in this in these institutions in our in our courts in the Department of Justice in the Supreme Court um I had Martin gur on the show a few years back he's written this book that Revolt to the public and he lays the blame at this collapse in trust first and foremost technologically at the internet and the information age that were now bombarded by just how crooked and broken everything is 247 in our feeds whereas it used to be you know the broken crookedness of our system in our institutions was hidden behind closed doors and you know you got the paper of record like the New York Times of the Washington Post and there were three articles that were fit to print and you know Walter kite said and that's the way it is and that would be that and so we so so one school of thought would be and this might be true and I'm curious what you think about this no no everything's always been a broken mess and now we just see it playing out in real time you know do is that part of what's going on is that part of how you think about happen yes and no so it's absolutely true that we've had crises and institutional crises um you know whether you whether you talk about uh uh Watergate whether you talk about other presidential scandals uh whether you talk about the Clarence Thomas hearings or Robert bour you know the the the entering ushering in the Modern Age of toxic confirmation hearings um you know what's what's different I think about the internet and perhaps it's more the Advent of the social media age more than the internet because we you know the internet has been with us for 25 years at this point um and Jonathan hey has written about this in terms of the addling of teenagers minds and and what that means for younger Generations across a whole gamut of socioeconomic uh criteria or or or uh factors you know you're on your social media feed or however you consume your information and it only accentuates your predispositions um you're in an echo chamber uh epistemic closure it's sometimes called to use the fancy word uh for it and we all kind of curate whether it's our entertainment that you know Netflix suggests based on what you've watched you'll like this uh same thing happens with news consumption oh you've enjoyed this try this slightly more crazy version of the same thing slightly more you know red meat of of your otherwise you know left-wing right-wing populist whatever proclivities uh and so we kind of talk past each other and not only do we have different opinions but different facts and you know alternative facts and and and all of that uh and there's been a geographic sorting such that fewer of us uh live around people who think differently than we do and even if we do live in a more uh ideologically diverse Community shall we say we still live in our imagined communities online where we're still communicating with people who all uh agree with us so there's that kind of longtail effect and sorting and uh and things like this combined with you know we're still only a few years past the pandemic some people have never left the pandemic that is a unique you know once in a century hopefully uh experience that changed a lot of things and and affected trust levels uh as well um so it's it's a Confluence of lots of things the racial Reckoning after George Floyd uh the explosion of of Dei and CRT and all the stuff that goes into education and the rest of it so you know I'm not a sociologist there there but there's a lot of complex stuff that that has gone on um you know I don't know when you where you put the the the the the ER the original inflection point whether it's 911 or the rise of Facebook or or smartphones or or what it is um but the challenges now seem to be different even than you know during such crises as the Great Depression or something I'm not saying worse I'm just saying different yeah it's it's true and it's like you look back to the Great Depression you have this the packing of the threats to pack the court and and and all kinds of it's always been a messy business um Poli we had FDR winning landslides uh during the ression and then the war which is a galvanizing uh uh uh unifying uh event hard to imagine that I mean I think we had like two weeks of unification after 9911 and then it went back to uh perhaps even even a worse Dynamic so um to come back to the to come back to this moment and to the case um with Trump in particular we have as I understand it as you've explained a misdemeanor at best of um labeling something a legal expense when it's you know essentially a settlement which I'm not really sure what else you would call settlement money on the books but a legal expense technically but that's for tax lawyers to sort out um but but a a past the point of statute of limitations misdemeanor bookkeeping thing that's covering up gross behavior from a moral standpoint as a father and as a adult male that wants us to live it you know be as virtuous as we can be uh like I don't want to talk to my kids about what Trump did wrong here that's gross any more than talking about what Bill Clinton did wrong in the 90s or or or JFK did in the 60s all gross these are gross people but why why is let's assume that this case is going to get overturned on appeal for the various reasons that it's such a contentious and seemingly small charge why is that important like why is it important for for you know there's obviously a whole school of thought saying No this is great this is this is the this is nobody's Above the Law in America this is the rule of law well you know it's it's you know people say that kind of liken this to uh getting Al Capone in jail finally on tax evasion we can't get him on racketeering and murder and all that but he did uh uh uh violate tax laws fair and square we got him this is not that uh this is more uh lenti Baria of of the Soviet Secret Police saying find me the man and I'll find you the crime um a friend uh mentor of mine Harvey silverglate who's a civil libertarian in Massachusetts wrote a book about a decade maybe 20 years ago now called three felonies a day saying that most of us who are professionals you know we commit three felonies a day because there's over loing over too much law you know overlapping federal state jurisdictions uh ambitious prosecutors who can indeed um you know uh make up uh uh violations and crimes and prosecute whoever they like uh if they really want to and especially in high-profile politicized cases like this that is what's uh going on no I mean if if this were conviction in one of those other prosecutions then we could debate uh debate it seriously um because I think those are serious uh charges there's a colorable uh and not uh politicized regardless of what again the I don't know why we have such crazy people involved in these stories but the the state prosecutor in Georgia has her own sex scandal and all of that paying off her Paramore who knows uh but regardless um this is not uh you know finally Donald Trump uh gets J asers this is he deserves to be in jail sure this as you know might as well put him in jail for anything well no that's not how we should be thinking about these things there's a part of me that um is happy about this in this sense we do have a problem it seems of our leaders committing often heinous crimes um now and I mean in this case in the context of their actual presidencies I mean uh you could you could argue President Bush lied to the public to get us into the war in Iraq um President Obama executed American citizens and had a kind of kill list that he was that he directed as the commander-in-chief um and sure the sure one of the guys had anounced his citizenship declaring because he was a is Islamic fundamentalist but we still like killed him and his son and he was an American citizen his son was certainly an American citizen um you know and the list goes on and on and on even more recently I could push back on both of those as as a lawyer um but but I get your point I mean American CI don't have more protections than non-americans if they are legitimate targets if they're actually terrorists as we're learning in a different context of international law and Rules of Engagement in in in now in terms of what legitimate targets are but I I take your point and that's why the Supreme Court is now taking up the case of presidential immunity which is one of the arguments that Trump is making in his uh classified documents case uh out of out of Miami uh where the court is not going to decide uh this was never you know uh in the realm of possibility that as uh some of the staunchest Trump acolytes are saying you know whatever the president does is uh Above the Law you know as Richard Nixon said if the president that it can't be illegal no no what they're looking at is official acts so as you said the Obama use of the Drone to to Target alaki um you know we can debate whether that's a good policy decision we can even debate the legalities but should presidents after they finished their term in office actually be prosecuted for those kinds of official acts and can a court draw the line between something like that and something that uh a president does in his capacity as a private citizen whether in the post president or beforehand some some sort of crime or you know if he's drunk driving I mean you know I don't know why the president would be driving he has his own limo but let's say you know ulyses srant back in the day was pulled over for speeding in his Carriage uh right is he's doing that in his personal capacity uh uh you know can he be prosecuted uh for that you know once he leaves office these are these are real issues and you know the Supreme Court will come up with some sort of test to determine that uh you know the feeling is that this is something different what what Trump is doing or what he did at least uh on January 6 or after the uh election because I would argue that by far the the worst and the only really debatable uh uh uh actions of trump in terms of constitutional violations or or you know is he a fit or not uh happened after uh the election before that it's mostly policy uh disputes so is is Donald Trump somehow different than um these other examples that you're leading you're saying a lot of our leaders commit crimes I'm not sure about that they do Shady things um and when they actually commit crimes they get prosecuted a fair amount look at Bob Menendez senator from New Jersey with the with the gold bars and all that or the congressman who had cash in his freezer and and things like that but um I mean Congressman Thomas Massie tweeted about uh an article that I think was from 2017 basically pointing out that us taxpayers have been forced to pay for millions and millions of dollars of settlements on behalf of con sitting congressmen which is in itself kind of an interesting context for this um that you gen you generally don't hear about that's right yeah so it's like Okay so we've got the taxpayer being forced to pay how is that not like an induced campaign violation what's going on there that that everything about that's bizarre but um I guess the bigger picture for me is and I don't know how I think about this and I'm really curious to talk about it with you when is there a philosophy or a way of thinking about when a battle should be played out in the in the in democracy versus in the courtroom and is that line blurry maybe I think all of these lines end up probably being blurry but but can you help sharpen that for me because I I I think we're all feeling like we don't know who's a criminal or not like is Anthony fouchy a criminal For What appears to be being caught lying to the public a lot is um former CIA directors that have gotten in front and current act like was it Clapper who got before Congress and uh while while in the alphabet soup I think it was maybe CIA saying no we are not actively spying on American citizens and that was a lie so isn't that a crime to get in front of the public and lie nothing happens these people come out of office they become pundits on television they get Netflix deals and end up with mansions in in Martha's Vineyard and all of that feels like it's part of the same um Corruption of of our so-called inst institutions to me um I hit you with a lot there I'm sorry but I mean those are bad things I don't know what there is to say about that uh you know Dave Petraeus was prosecuted for for sharing classified information with his mistress um uh yeah I mean I I I think more more uh uh officials should be uh probably prosecuted certainly more more executive officials federally should be impeach not just the president but we should have legitimate not you know politicized but der elction of Duty and doing all all sorts of things that are you know showing contempt for their office and for uh separation of powers and and things like that I think I think um you know probably we should have impeachments for more than you know sexual picadillos and coverups and and things like that I is there a is there a a sort of legal philosophy there there there are gray zones there are gray zones it's you know uh the the the Supreme Court has a Doctrine our judicial system has a Doctrine called the political question Doctrine where courts are not going to decide you know political disputes between the branches on the other hand what's a political dispute and what's you know applying the Constitution and the scope of the federal power to regulate interstate commerce you know the thinking uh with the Obamacare challenges uh that John Roberts uh said ultimately decided you know chickened out for from from invalidating Obamacare because he said oh it's an election year the American voters will decide whether they want it or not in in 2012 and that's you know first of all I don't want my judges playing you know JV politician or or pundit or or or what have you uh but secondly if there is a constitutional violation their job is to say you know what the law is and call it as they see it and then let the political branches respond uh if it's an unpopular decision the political branches can respond uh accordingly and and and for too long uh the courts have not been doing that and so have been allowing for example Congress to punt its power away to the administrative Branch uh so that then when the executive takes certain decisions congressman and Senators say hey that wasn't me I voted for all these good things and then this Deputy under secretary bureaucrat started screwing you over go go sue them um and so there's been a warping in in that kind of system um so there's no clear definition of what is a political question or you know what should be left the voters versus what should be left to uh to the courts other than you know policy decisions or clashes of values should be left to the voters or their elected representatives whereas if it's a a legal determination uh leave that to the judges and there's always going to be a judgment call that's why you know we have human judges we don't just you know no matter how sophisticated the AI will get I don't think we'll ever replace human judges with you know uh machines um uh but uh just because the the line is hard to draw doesn't mean that you take up cases and do your best and and call the shots as you see them help me um one of the things that you wrote about in the in the brief article about about the case calling it a travesty of Justice you know you pointed to the different things that are probably surface area for appeal um one of them being that um judge Maran his direction to the jury was peculiar and people have talked about that he he make I want to make sure I I represent this properly that functionally he said the reason this is these are these 34 counts which more or less are all basically triple quadruple counting the same underlying action well each time he wrote a check to Michael Cohen to pay off Stormy Daniels was a separate count right so it's all the same thing there's not 34 different unique things really they're all just like book every bookkeeping entry was considered a account um but that the reason this Rises to the level of a felony is because it is in the service of this other crime that this misdemeanor accounting thing is in the service of another crime which I thought would was supposed to be a felony although it seems like some of them might not be felonies and some of them might not even have jurisdiction in New York because it's campaign by yeah violation campaign Finance law and get this further thing that I didn't put in in my uh in my article and City Journal was that uh Trump's team had the former had a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission Brad Smith who's a friend of mine professional colleague uh ready to testify about as an expert about federal election law uh to basically say that you know even if everything was true on the facts that did not constitute a federal election campaign violation and the judge wouldn't let them bring that evidence in so that's appealable error as well a and what was the justification for for not allowing a a former FEC official to weigh in on whether this underlying crime is in fact even a crime it's unclear to be honest I mean again I wasn't the closest follower of this trial because I have better things to do and follow these uh weird manui um but uh I I the ruling had to have been that it wasn't relevant that it wasn't Central so if the legality under Federal campaign Finance law isn't Central or the definition of that law then what is it jurors have to conjure up their own other election violation or as you said as you were as you were alluding to the the judge's instruction was if you know some of them thought it was an election VI INF furtherance of a campaign Finance violation some of them thought it was in furtherance of tax evasion others thought it was in furtherance of further business records violations that was all okay they didn't all have to agree on what that uh Second crime that the that the original business records uh violations were in further ofar just bizarre if if that's a correct statement of New York law uh then I think Trump has a further sixth amendment uh uh claim due process Claim about the the propriety of the New York law in the first place that would allow that kind of jury charge and allow a conviction for this kind of nebulous undefined second crime the um I and prepping to come in and talk to you today we looked up this um the world Justice project has a uh um a proposed working definition of rule of law and I want to read the four principles and talk about them so these four principles are number one a system of self-government in which all persons including the government are accountable under the law so no one's Above the Law number two a system based on Fair publicized and broadly understood and stable laws so this one seems really important like that that people know about and understand the laws that they are being subjected to in order for their actions to be deemed criminal or not number three a fair robust and accessible legal process in which rights and responsibilities based in law are evenly enforced so no um to the best of our ability no discrimination like oh I don't like you so I'm going after you and I'm going to let you get off the hook cuz I like you and number four diverse competent and independent lawy lawers and judges those are the four system four components what do you think of that definition of rule of law let's start there the first three are pretty standard um I've never heard of the world Justice project so I don't know if they have a any sort of agenda but the first three are pretty standard the the last one diverse competent lawyers and judges I don't know what diverse means um whether it be uh you know our current battles over Dei or whether it be you know different ideologies or something but competent I I agree is is a necessary part of it but yeah generally speaking that's that that's a pretty standard uh definition and and you paused on the the stable understandable transparent law that is very important because you neither want you know what what is the opposite of the rule of law it's the rule of man it's the king saying I'm going to jail you why who cares I just you know whatever I just make up a law you violated it you're going to jail uh or secret law right um you could have uh you know it it it being applied equally to everyone but nobody knows when they're violating the law which in effect also gives the powers that be the power to arrest and imprison anyone uh whenever they like so that all of those things are very important and I think there's you know a failure of that here you um referen this book which I'd come come across a while back you know this three felonies a day or that we our system of laws is so monumentally complex that it seems like the complexity itself violates this second principle I mean is that fair is it escapable is there a solution to it I mean the federal registry is something like 75,000 pages so I can't even read statutes there are so I don't know who can read these things there's this self-referential 1500 page documents there are a lot of kind of ticky Tac rules and administrative regulatory crimes things that can get you sent to jail that no Cong or state legislature passed that's kind of scary um I do think we have an overcriminalization uh and also an over federalization of criminal law so uh it used to be you know we we talk from time to time or you hear about Double Jeopardy the idea of you know there's a constitutional protection against being prosecuted twice for the same crime well the Supreme Court recently decided in the last few years that it turns out the federal government and the state government can prosecute you for the same crime um that didn't used to be possible until maybe half a century ago at this point 70 years ago maybe the the decades keep slipping uh where the federal criminal code has expanded such that it overlaps with state criminal codes which you know would have been beyond the conception of uh of the framers so yeah we definitely do have a problem of of too much law uh and whether you're talking uh in the white collar realm whether you're talking in the political Realm realm um in the blue collar realm sometimes it's it's less of a problem but even there um it's not you know you know Murder is murder and and rape is rape and things like that but there are all sorts of weird you know whether it's drug crimes or or uh uh you know brandishing of gun crimes use of force in the armed career criminal act all of these sorts of things that uh you know it takes a a five to four Supreme Court to delineate what exactly the law is take me to I take me to school for a sec here so um the the the basic we the basic structure of of of of these institutions I want to make sure help help me understand so Alvin Bragg is the district attorney right and and and and and he's that's an elected office so explain what that role is supposed to be and why it's elected instead of appointed uh in the American system different countries do it differently but in the American system certainly at the state level uh Das are generally elected I don't know if there's some who are appointed there might be special da or what have you but uh so Alvin Bragg is the head prosecutor for Manhattan um the island of Manhattan which is uh its own its own County um and that means that he's responsible for enforcing state law he is one of many state prosecutors across New York State uh which again I'm not even though I'm a member of the bar of New York it's been a while since I studied New York specific law New York constitutional law how their relationship is to the Attorney General of New York who separately elected and is the head law enforcement officer of the State uh RIT large over all you know civil and and and criminal issues um and um so brag runs uh on a party line these are partisan elections and he campaigns and says you know in this case he said I was I was going to get Trump among other things that that he campaigned on uh which you know looks odd but again we've had elected prosecutors for a long time and they make all sorts of uh promises uh what's weirder though or a second derivative of that is that in a lot of places judges run for elections sometimes also on partisan lines you know you have contenders who are Republicans Democrats whatever else uh now there are more regulations about judicial elections typically and judges generally can't or they can be brought up on ethics charges if they say you know if you elect me I will put so and so in jail or something like that uh but still I think there's something unseemly uh about that so you know prosecutorial elections because at the end of the day you know this is the people's Justice and if we have checks and balances operating correctly Rogue prosecutors will be Rog will be roped in by by other aspects of the system judges I'm not in favor of of of electing I I like the federal system where you have the executive branch nominate and the legislative branch uh confirm them uh but different states do it in different ways is there a um is there a philosophy about when a role like this should be you're alluding to it should be appointed by elected officials versus being an elected official themselves is there is there is there like a a framework for thinking about when that makes sense it's it's um the idea is is this the people's representative or is their job something other than representing popular uh opinion or will or values or what have you and so the prosecutors are supposed to uh enforce the law on behalf of the people you know when you bring criminal charges uh as in the Trump case it's the people versus Donald Trump it's not Alvin brag it's not you know city of Manhattan or something like that uh you can you can't have City prosecutions but this one is the people uh uh versus Donald Trump um judges are different judges are often doing things that might be unpopular because they're enforcing constitutional rights and protections or saying that this government program that Everyone likes actually the government can't do that um so uh they play a different role in our system of of checks and balances uh presidents uh are elected um you know we can debate whether we like the Electoral College or not or whatever but there's there's a there there's an accountability to the people bureaucrats are appointed by the president to execute the law to enforce uh uh the law so we don't necessarily want them elected separately because they're all in theory supposed to be uh uh accountable uh to uh the president and there are court cases when uh arguably bureaucracies or or particular agencies go beyond their power and they're creating law in their own right when nobody elected them so those are continuing fights that we have um but again in our in our system of separated Powers uh we have different people playing uh different roles so the judicial power is fundamentally different than the executive power which is the prosecutor or the legislative power which is creating the the legislating the crimes that the prosecutor is is then enforcing I did a video um earlier this year and it's very Elemental video really it's like sort of civics 101 talking about the the sense in which America the United States is not a democracy we are Republic and that that properly understood should be seen as we are a nation first and foremost of laws not merely of popular will that the Bill of Rights is entirely basically a structure of things that says the government and therefore popular democracy shall not do XYZ Etc like the first amendments fundamental protection as I understand that is just because speech is unpopular it will remain legal and it must be so and that's why democracy is not allowed to act against our freedom of speech when you don't have that protection you have what's happening in the UK where if you say the wrong thing now you can get arrested in Scotland and um and and so that there's this tension between this concept of the rule of law and democracy help me understand that and help our viewers sort of understand what that means well it depends what your what your end goal is what your highest value is if it's majority rule then you want pure democracy that's majority rule uh which can put Socrates to death is is the classical example um I don't know what the closest thing we have to Pure democracy um uh at a national level probably Switzerland you know they have lots of local votes on particular policy issues and National votes and National referenda and so forth um in this country we have in New Hampshire and in New England in general they have a lot of town meetings where all the CI citizenry comes and participates the New Hampshire State Legislature uh has the uh lowest number of uh constituents per representative they have something like 800 people in their state legislature even though Representatives even though it's a very small state um but uh I don't think most people's end goal is majority rule it's something like Liberty equality um you know under our Constitution under our Declaration of Independence it's about securing and protecting our freedoms we Institute government to secure and protect our inalienable rights right and so the Dilemma as Madison explained uh right over my my right shoulder here I have the uh the authors of the Federalist Papers Madison Hamilton and Jay Madison wrote my federal favorite Federalist Paper number 51 I don't know what yours is uh but talking about how um uh the Dilemma in forming a government is in empowering it to do what it needs to do to secure and protect our rights and facilitate our flourishing our Pursuit of Happiness to borrow from the Declaration of Independence our our our rights to life and Liberty in the pursuit of happiness uh while at the same time obliging it to check itself to guard itself um because men are angels if men were Angels no government would be necessary if angels govern men government would be perfect um but you know we don't live in that Utopia and so in a world where men govern men have to write all these rules and force the government itself uh as you said in that first Criterion by the world Justice project of the rule of law you force the government to check uh uh itself so um uh you know people misunderstand this and you know they say well that's you know that's not upholding democracy well you know I don't care I want to uphold uh life liberty in the pursuit of happiness uh which should be the ultimate goal that's why I'm not an anarchist because I think you do need government to protect you against marauding gangs and and what have you um but um uh you know obviously Government Can can get out of control and can endanger those rights itself so that is the that's the the challenge of political Theory 101 yeah it's it's something that has seems to have been um almost banished from discourse and and lost in our education system that that is the fundamental tension we face when we when we come upon these crises uh that sit sort of at the intersection of our politics and and and and our legal system do you believe that this Trump case in particular but but the broader scope of what's happening in in in the justice system is fundamentally biased in a particular direction like are I think I think a lot of Americans feel like the system is rigged that that um that statement has purchased with the public for a reason how do you think about that well I just don't buy into broadscale conspiracy the conspiracy theories because it's very hard to get that many people to agree on one particular goal and row in the same direction and we even talk about the justice system there are many Justice systems you know Alvin Bragg does not report to Merck Garland for example even though for some reason he borrowed a doj prosecutor to to join his team um uh you know you can distrust various kinds of institutions um they could all be wrong and weak and Merit Improvement but not because there's some um nefarious force behind the scenes that's pulling uh all of these uh strings so I think we have you know this prosecution is particularly weak because we have uh an elected prosecutor uh in a blue City in a blue State uh with a judge who you know donated to anti-trump organizations who like all of these sorts of things that are um just fail the Constitutional and by constitutional I don't mean you know the the the document in the National Archives I mean in the sense of people's beliefs in the institutions the the structures that we are all uh part of uh uh in this country the polity it fails that that smell test um but it's kind of idiosyncratic I don't think the Alvin brg's prosecution of trump is the same kind of or exposed is the same kind of structural problem as I don't know warrantless wiretapping of Americans or something like this or Anthony fouchy I mean they're all complicated issues they all show failures of guard rails and how uh we can have temporary authoritarian moments and things like this um and they're worth discussing but I don't think it's all part of one kind of conspiratorial tale about the Deep State or the elites or something like that there is um uh several years ago I read a book um that I imagine you know pretty well uh Charles Murray's coming apart and for those that aren't familiar with this book um it's pretty powerful and it feels like it is like a predecessor to the moment we're in and that what he basically lays out in that book and he it's a it's a look at basically data like sociological data and it says hey we have become culturally to Americas and he's he's only looking to avoid the politics of race he only looks at the data for white Americans and what he notes is there is this super cluster of beliefs and behaviors and and and cultural norms and ways of living that constitute really frankly the elite and you know he says that the elite they they we work work in knowledge and information Fields um live in sort of clustered zip codes he calls them super Zips sort we all watch HBO I mean I'd be absolutely be in that category so would you um work hard to get into that category came as a as an immigrant Refugee from the Soviet Union and you know all that yeah right so he's got by way I'm not wearing a Princeton Polo on purpose I just happened to have gone to my 25th reunion two weekends ago and gotten a new shirt but it's very comfortable but lots of problems and and I my next book is called called Lawless the miseducation of America's Elites so yes there are tremendous pathologies uh in our uh Elites uh uh group think going along to get along kind of the uh the the the the the next development of what uh uh David Brooks when he came to Princeton 20 years ago after I graduated and wrote about the organizational kids who are kind of just in it not to make wave so much as to become the elite and they all kind of think the same way and Inter Mar and and and do all the rest of it which is different than what the elite was in the you know 60s or earlier days well this is a good segue into into you know your your forthcoming book because I think that that's I think I think Trump as a figure um even though he's you know a wealthy businessman in from in man a manhattanite like along every many dimensions maybe every Dimension you'd say he is absolutely an elite he was friends with the clintons he knew jeffre Epstein there's all kinds of reasons to say well of course Trump is obviously an elite but there's also this fact that he is um he's very much an avatar for for the every man or he is seen as that and I think to some extent credibly the way he talks the even just being a New Yorker has a certain amount of that like no BS way um how do you think about the elite what does it mean that they're being miseducated what's going on there well first of all I want to cabin the discussion of trump because I don't know how to think of him in this context he's an outer burrow guy from the Queens but he was born into a wealthy family and you know educated in in the ivy league if you count Penn as Ivy and uh uh you know he's been a real estate developer celebrity he's been a celebrity for you know most of my lifetime he was you know he was in what was it home alone or the Home Alone 2 I mean all these movies in the 80s but in reality TV too so reality TV is yes absolutely so he's been this celebrity wealthy real estate developer um so is he is he hated because he's a class Trader because he an impostor I mean who knows all of the above none of the above anyway cabin that um the the pro my focus of my book is legal education uh and law schools and the legal profession because you know other than I guess medicine which is literally a life and death practice and that's going to be a lot of problems the revelations last month about UCLA Medical School that's hiring and doing all sorts of Dei stuff so students can't even pass their boards and don't know the basics anyway that's a nightmare but yeah you know setting aside medicine law uh you know lawyers are The Gatekeepers of our political and legal institutions all this rule of law stuff that we've been talking about this is today's law students become tomorrow's judges General counsels prosecutors Partners at firms like all of it right uh yes uh and so if they're you know forget what's going you know if we lose the if we've lost already the English and sociology departments they go crazy uh you know with apologies to my friends and the humanities you know that's too bad for the you know loss to the richness of human life and the accumulation of human knowledge and all of this uh but it's not as big a deal as if you know tomorrow's federal judges are against the idea of due process and Free Speech because those are Hallmarks of white supremacy or something like that uh and that is the the the the cultural perversion that's going on in in legal education right now in a lot of um uh of higher ed particularly so-called Elite uh higher ed where admissions offices screen for activism rather than uh Acumen uh where then uh the student affairs and Dei offices inculcate these cultures of viewing everything through identitarian lenses and privilege hierarchies where professors then teach that certain you know things are illegitimate and the Supreme Court's illegitimate in this case should be ignored and don't even teach originalism which is malpractice because regardless of whether you think it's a good good theory of interpretation roughly half the federal Judiciary believes in it so to be a good Advocate you have to understand it but no anyway law schools have kind of gone off uh the rails especially the the elite ones and this is a story of bureaucracy uh and growing exploding bureaucracy as much as it is of uh shifting ideology or kind of the sociology of Youth my understanding is that a lot of what um philosophically rhetorically underpins our this identity politics time we're in was born in law schools that critical theory critical race Theory um you know is a product of the legal Scholars that intersectionality Kimberly kensaw that this came out of again out of the she's in my book absolutely Derek bell all those folks I mean it's it's an older story critical theory is um like returned with a Vengeance in the last 10 years when I was in law school I graduated law school in 2003 we thought all of that crit stuff the critical legal stuff at least was uh a thing of the past it had a spent for some Niche that kind of barely made a dent in in legal teaching and now is relegated to some you know optional clinical things that uh you know if you were kind of a crazy left Wier you might delve into but otherwise had no relevance and then it came back uh but but even before you had the Derek bells and the criminal khaws and the critical legal studies you just had critical theory itself which originated kind of came over from Europe from from Germany and Austria settled in Colombia uh University which has been in the news for for other stuff uh uh lately uh the the the Frankfurt School it's called and kind of um uh delegitimizing systems and there's no nothing there's no objectivity and it you know where you stand depends on where you sit and there's there's no objective truth and all of these sorts of things that are very philosophical that then uh entered uh Academia in different ways eventually entering the law um uh and that's uh that's a huge problem because this is completely orthogonal completely against the founding principles of America of you know life liberty Pursuit of Happiness equality securing Liberty everyone being treated equally Etc yes we have our sins and our warts and slavery and Jim Crow and all that and that's also against our founding principles um but it's also by the way against the core mission of any uh institution of higher education which is supposed to be about open inquiry and creating human knowledge uh the classical liberal values of academic freedom and uh and and due process is treating everyone equally um uh this post what's sometimes called postmodern Theory although it's decades old at this point um uh is against all that and and wants to blow it up because of fundamental uh injustices that call for burning down the system and replacing it with uh with something else so I um I can't recall exactly the wording but I have seen laid out um very explicit calls in some of these writers it might have been Derek Bell to reject liberalism and liberalism here meaning you know more broadly um the the Constitutional republicanism that we're talking about the notion that equality of under the law that the law applies to all of us equally regardless of our identity and therefore um shouldn't really take our identity into account it should take our actions and intentions into account but not our identity uh and not discriminate that discrimination is actually bad in the law and and it it this this school of thought as I understand it explicitly says no we reject that we are for as as ibram X kendi said discrimination to counter past discrimination is that is that a correct understanding on my part about what this critical theory framework Asser that's right and and to expand upon that a little bit your your rights your freedoms uh aren't the same not not you know every citizen or every person isn't supposed to have the same rights and freedoms but um vary depending on where you are in an intersectional that's kind of the the blending of identities Matrix or a hierarchy of privilege or whether you're in an oppressor or oppressed class um you know the foreign policy view of that is you know the attack on on Israel and and other things things like that the the postcolonialism the decolonial uh movement but the domestic uh side of that is uh as you said being against uh our founding uh Vision the you know against being liberal and there's some ironically there's some commonality there with those on the right who want a post liberal world as well because the liberal world of neutral rules will never get us to these fundamental basic goals uh that we all prefer these this virtuous Republic that that that you want and so there's a lot of problems with that too but of course the the the the right-wing non- Liberals are not the ones who are in control of of higher ed it's it's exclusively uh the the left that's there and sometimes the the left side the uh of of of the spectrum doesn't know what the farle is doing that that's at least uh the general story bureaucratically within law schools within higher ed more broadly where most Deans most presidents uh are not social justice Warriors they're not woke radicals uh but they will plate uh those illiberal Tendencies because of how they read the cost benefit analysis um and because they're often spineless cowards so that is the nefarious Dynamic uh that's been in place and and why higher ed has been revealed it's been in crisis for a while uh but really post October 7th and with the disastrous testimony of a series of University presidents has been revealed uh in the National discourse to be um you know fundamentally flawed so what has happened that um has given rise to this transformation at this time I saw on Twitter um it might have been Phil Magnus posted an image of conservative and liberal versus liberal self-identified uh University faculty and it's there was points where it was almost parody in the 60s and 70s and then 8085 starts to change and then 90s 2000s to today number of self-identified conservatives shrinks slightly number of self-identified liberal or progressives goes goes up dramatically so both the size the amount of Faculty increases but the ratio goes totally nuts so it becomes I know you know Jonathan Hy and Greg lukanov had laid have laid this kind of stuff out you know you could you go into some of these departments and you won't find a single person who would call themselves right of Center what happened there from your perspective it's it's partly a story of the creation and expansion of less rigorous departments the the blank studies uh departments you know not your traditional you know history economics English uh engineering Etc um but all these studies departments um that had you know different academic standards and were more about um you know how big of an activist uh you are or you know do you represent this or that demographic box and then there's relatedly uh the development of scholarship that's more in service to activism rather than development of knowledge um and so you know what used to be confined to those studies uh Fields has now entered those mainstream uh traditional uh departments and so um you know whether it's explicitly with Dei statements to be hired uh or just what kind of scholarship is rewarded and published by the academic journals and other Gatekeepers of uh you know and credentials uh that get people hired and and promoted and tenured um and and get grants and things like that uh have been more in an activist mode and so even if uh you kept constant for those ideological ratios the let's say Millennial Professor uh all other things being equal is more activist than his or her Boomer counterpart and you have a lot of the retiring older more senior professors now who are scared of their younger colleagues scared of their students don't want to be part of uh cancel culture or whatever else even though they've you know never voted for Republic in their lifetime that you know that would that that's that's silly they think you know Trump is just as bad as as as their colleagues do but this Dynamic their approach to um uh the professorial academic mic scholarship craft uh is very different but then as much or more of the story and in my book I try to focus on this because it's less sexy and doesn't get as much coverage is the bureaucratic part regardless of what's going on with ideological bias in the faculty and what Phil Magnus has pointed out is absolutely true that skew even more uh to the left as well as the dynamic of becoming more activist rather than scholar scholarly um the there are now more uh uh bureaucrats non-teaching staff than faculty in almost any University uh that is accentuated in the more Elite ones um and in many places there are now more non-teaching staff than students um which is remarkable Yale is one of these places like the joke is a hundred years ago every incoming y would have their own personal Butler with them well now all these educrats as I called them are they going to be Butlers for the Y's and in part they are because the student Affair staff the Dei staff is there to hold their hands and coddle them and deal with their quote unquote traumas and that's you know aspect of safetyism that is perverted kind of the the campus cultures uh as well but that bureaucratic bloat is not only expensive and a waste of money and sucks away funds that could be going to underprivileged scholar scholarships for underprivileged kids or whatever else hiring better faculty who knows um but uh in in and of itself that bureaucracy warps uh academic culture because they're not steeped in traditional academic values they have their own uh bureaucratic goals to expand their fums and in in various ways so that that has been a uh especially in the last 5 10 years has been such a huge part of the story why um why would bureaucratic bloat which seems to be an inherent problem of every it seems like an inherent problem in every Human Institution if it lives long enough you know I I worked in Viacom which is now called Paramount and maybe will soon be called sky dance uh but you know the HR department at Viacom had no idea what we did they were utterly useless for trying to hire anybody that would be good at their job inside of our inside of Spike or Nickelodeon they were bureaucracy they were there basically as a kind of everpresent liability management apparatus and then you know the thing that would happen inside of Viacom in other companies is you'd have a recession and suddenly you'd take a closer look at like wait what are you doing are you doing anything useful all right you're fired um is there is there a lack of feedback loop in Academia that allows this cancer to just grow unchecked forever is it because Harvard's basically like a hedge fund with a tiny school attached to it with $60 billion earning compound interest like why is this happening this way yes and this this is like an improv class yes all of that is true uh but also um the uh trustees aren't doing their jobs they they kind of just roll over for for whatever the the president and his or her coder of of of vice presidents and vice Deans and assistant Provost Etc uh want to uh uh foment because uh it's prestigious to be a trustee uh you get to you know be nostalgic about your college days uh you get uh you know regardless of whether you're nominally an r or a d you get good football tickets and basketball tickets and and all the rest of that um and uh so there's not that that check on the University administrations I should disclose that I'm a Rond de santis appointee to the board of Florida Polytechnic University which is a fairly Young School only 10 years old so we don't have these kind of crazy problems we're dealing with a problem of growth and brand uh management and and things like this but anyway um you know too few Governors for public schools by the way have have been doing what DeSantis yunan here in Virginia Abbott a little bit in Texas some others have finally learned that these appointments to especially their Flagship schools are just as if not more important than you know whoever your you know deputy secretary of transportation is or or or whatever but anyway so trustees is is a part of it um uh uh as you hire more bureaucracy because to be politically correct to respond to whether it's the racial Reckoning or covid or what have you they all have to busy themselves by growing their justifying their own roles and growing their budgets and so whether it's student orientations or continuing programming or uh enforcing speech codes or finding violations of you know me to related violations to uh investigate where the process is the punishment all of that uh Dynamic uh has been happening where the university leaders the the the real ones the ones that existed before this era of bureaucratic bloat are too scared or have no reason to check their power so even the Deans of elite law schools will defer to their Dei Dean or the University's Dei Dean or what have you um because you know uh if if they do you know that is the path of of of least resistance until very recently now we're in the eye of the storm where alumni is starting to pay attention and this makes national news and there's a you know a scandal at Yale every other week and and all the rest of it um but that's um you know that's grown unchecked and it's not the issue that bureaucracy grows yes bureaucracy always grows because everything always grows in the in the in the long term but uh it needs to be maintained as as a proper percentage uh of the total so if your student body isn't growing and your faculty isn't growing why would your bureaucracy need to be growing I've seen some critics of what's happened in the in universities lay the blame at what you would call maybe consumer ification of higher education that at what these things are are basically um lazy rivers and credential factories where you get to meet a bunch of people that you'll ultimately work together with at Goldman Sachs and while you're at it you binge drink and float down a lazy river that cost in a fortune to make and the reason why they made the Lazy River was to convince you to come to to their school and so it's a kind of like well please the consumer the consumer being the student model it's a kind of anti- capitalist critique of what's happened to higher higher ed how much of that's true lazy rivers are always invoked in that I'm I'm actually curious now I've never looked it up but I wonder how many universities in this country actually do have lazy rivers that and climbing walls tend to be invoked in this discussion if we include metaphoric lazy Rivers I think there's a lot right right uh well uh you know schools are competing with each other for students and so I guess they they they decide they can't compete on the quality of their history departments for whatever reason and so they have to compete on the size of their gyms and and things like this um which is which is bizarre that that so that's part of the bureaucratic bloat student affairs grew even before we had Dei departments and things like that to create more study breaks and you know uh Nerf gun fights and uh intramural Ultimate Frisbee games and all the rest of the things that student affairs offices have done and have uh were the bureaucratic bloat started um but the consumerization is also a complicated sort of thing it's kind of in in society it became you know this idea arose that you weren't successful or you couldn't um you know become part of the elite or you certainly couldn't join the managerial class unless you had that college degree um the federal government in in enhancing the availability and ease of getting student loans uh there's that part which obviously is now a political Hot Potato of a different kind uh but you know an 18-year-old can go to that school that offers them The Lazy River and four years of binge drinking while they major in you know feminist studies or or or what have you um and then gets a job in the HR department of Viacom and and and creates perversions there I suppose I I I don't know that's part of of of what's been going on but but yeah highered has certainly lost its Moorings as providing actual skills that will then be used in the uh postc Colgate world there's starting to be a bit of a market feedback to that in that in a lot of Industries a lot of companies now would rather hire someone from Purdue say uh where Mitch Daniels did a bang-up job when he was president uh rather than an entitled kid from Harvard Yale Princeton um because it turns out that you can't really monetize the latest inter intersectional Theory uh so well to sell more widgets to whatever your Market is yeah I uh as an employer myself it is uh it is a demerit to be overcome if you've got an Ivy League degree for me it's like okay and because of grade inflation and past fail you can't differentiate yeah I heard that the average grade at Harvard is an a there's no world in which anything based on Merit or achievement or Mastery produces such a thing take this back to why does this matter um you're a legal scholar constitutional scholar you know why does higher red matter to me as an American trying that wants my kids future to be bright well we need people who learn things uh to uh be able to fulfill certain jobs there is that trade school aspect to it uh as well as get them ready for professional schools whether that be medical school and law school you know clearly you need higher ed for that we can debate whether you need a four-year degree to be able to enter medical school or law school or what have you in other countries they don't necessarily do it that way that's a valid uh debate to beh have there's experimentation some law schools have agreements that you only do two or three anyway there's a creation of knowledge um there's the kind of you know uh the the classical Humanities uh uh education or scholarship for its own sake I think that's probably a rather small piece of the pie of why we need the the whole uh highered uh institutions and it's uh passing on the the the the culture of society at large Preparing People for to be leaders in in various Fields um and again we can debate whether it's working that way or it's working too well and the problem is with the exact cultures and mores that are being uh transmitted um but I I think you know uh higher ed is Done Right can be a a growth engine and a happiness uh engine for society uh done wrong it spew out pathologies that and we've seen too much of that in recent years um to come back to uh play out for me that that what happens now with our legal system as we get into Generations who are the product of of the the type of legal type of like legal degree that you've described where we now have this super identitarian activist thing taking place where you're not even studying originalism um when you're not studying the Constitution or if you are it's to to undermine it because it's an outmoded you know document written by uh rich white men slave owners right well let's pause here for a sec um why is the Constitution 250 years uh later just about uh it is it still oper operable is it still relevant I saw the current president President Biden is continuing to uh forgive student loans even though our Supreme Court has said no you cannot do that so is is this a dead letter why should I care about the constit ution well there's the question of is it relevant and is it being observed uh and the answer to the second is uh not always and not enough the answer to the first is absolutely it's relevant because it is the the governing manual for our government not for our society for our government how the checks and balance work the division of powers between the federal government and the states the relationship of the individual citizen to both the federal government and the states and here's where I should add that you said 250 years well we've amended it many times most importantly after the Civil War that we fought that fundamentally restructured the relationship between these levels of government and the citizens which is why people call uh the the post Civil War period the second founding uh getting rid of slavery of course but the 14th Amendment you know before the 14th Amendment you couldn't sue your state in federal court if it was oppressing you in various ways um very uh very uh important and the the the problem is starting in the New Deal era we sort of lost the ability to think about Constitutional Amendment um at that time of Crisis um the the new dealers basically said uh uh if something needs to be done then then let's just let's just do it the Constitution be damned uh and so we amended and expanded Federal power sub Rosa without amending the Constitution even though there would have been popular support for I don't know uh unemployment insurance or or widows and orphans benefits uh and if there hadn't have been support for that in the depths of the Great Depression well then maybe we should have rethought those programs but uh we're worse off uh with this idea of thinking that um you know constitutional amendments are only something for you know getting rid of slavery or giving women the right to vote it's supposed to be much more than that and we had many more amendments uh between the found and the uh uh in the early days than than than we have unfortunately in the last 100 years or so but the Constitution um protects is supposed to protect our rights it's supposed to protect our freedoms uh uh both against state governments Federal governments uh and against uh uh state and federal governments that set up their systems of Justice in ways that that violate uh our rights so if we get rid of the Constitution or we ignore it uh or we only observe it selectively which is the same as getting rid of it well then we go back to the rule of man then it's the arbitrary rule of of Might makes right and I'm I'm frequently reminded of the scene for a man for all seasons uh about this involves a you know in in medieval England where uh someone connives to get uh uh uh to betray Sir Thomas Moore to become Attorney General of Wales and the uh you know Moore says you know well you know profit not a man to sell his soul for the whole world world but for Wales that's the most famous part but there's another part where uh you know you try to convict someone regardless of any other concerns and uh again the the issue is well if you get you know would would you cut down all the laws in England uh to get to the devil uh and again uh I think Richard Rich is his name Richie Rich says uh yes of course I would it's the devil it's like oh well what would happen then if you've cut down all the laws and the devil turns around on you and then there's no more protections for you so it's very important and we have all these counter majoritarian protections for individual rights thereby um which are observed increasingly in the breach and this is to go back to education is the problem of uh Civics and otherwise and even before we get to higher ed in in kada 12 uh you know that that we're taught all the things that are wrong and bad and don't work about our country but not how you know what the what the Constitution says why it was done that way and and how it should work work uh in in an Ideal World how you know you've got the founders over your shoulder um you have a obvious reverence for the Constitution and for the framework that it laid out you know what for the viewer who is like I love this I'm going to share this conversation with my kids because they're probably not getting this in school what do Americans need to understand about the reasons why the founders set up our system of government with all of its restrictions on itself the way that they did what were they afraid of we you've touched on already like the rule like arbitrary rule of the majority but you know if you can expand on that like and place me in that time what are the founders saying that makes it so important to bind the government in and around itself in a fairly complex structure of checks and balances it's now almost common place to say uh but at the time this was revolutionary these political theories that the founders brought to bear uh about uh self-governance that people free people have a right to self-governance and uh you know if their rulers are not uh accountable to them and don't reflect their views as King George was not was oppressing them in various ways then they have the right and even the duty to throw off those shackles and create their own government um but as as we discussed the uh they have to create that government not as you know to replace one Tyrant with another but to oblig that government to to check itself um and so how do you do that that's the classic dilemma of political Theory they devised you know they thought we need to separate the powers we can't just have the king uh or or even the Prime Minister uh which you know United the continues to unite the executive and legislative powers in a parliamentary system we have to divide those uh even further so that executive legislative and and judicial are separated and we have these colonies which now become States uh of the new republic since we're we're independent that have their own powers and it's important to recognize that they have their own um uh uh legitimacy and sovereignty we have these dual sovereigns triple sovereigns really because the people retain their own sovereignty as well any power that they haven't delegated to the federal government haven't consented to giving to their state government they still they still retain uh and they took that very seriously the framers did so we have to have this kind of convoluted rub Goldberg device of a government system because if we make it too streamlined then there's a danger of Oppression maybe oppression by One Singular Tyrant so we can't make the president too powerful maybe oppression by the mob so we can't make it too majoritarian too purely Democratic maybe oppression by the ARIS rats uh by the elite so we have to have other kinds of checks on the various Departments of the government um and you know you have to constantly tweak that was their thought you know Jefferson said um you know maybe he was exaggerating that we need you know a new revolutionary 20 years but certainly every generation needs to examine are those checks and balancing working or is there a warping of power such that there are oppressions that we shouldn't allow uh uh if we believe in this classical theory of self-governance you have uh referenced the and we've talked a little bit about this term originalism um what is that what is originalism uh lay it out for me yeah uh it's it's simply the theory that first of all the law is fixed as written you write what the law is on the page and that does not change you try to understand um what that uh what that meant when it was written by using dictionaries by using you know the Federalist paper to try to explain those early Provisions or the debates in the Reconstruction Congress for the 14th Amendment what do those terms mean whether it's due process or uh unreasonable search and seizure or uh interstate commerce all of these terms that that let constitutional lawyers debate uh and um and and that's it uh it's not the idea that uh um our understanding of the law can't change or we can't apply uh that law to new circumstances for example um just because when uh Congress was given the power to regulate interstate commerce they didn't even have steam ships let alone trains or uh airplanes doesn't mean we can't understand that a plane flying from New York to LA is involved in interstate commerce um it also doesn't mean that if we're trying to figure out whether uh a state can restrict violent video games the question isn't to think about well what would James Madison have thought about violent video games well no it's look at the text of the First Amendment try to understand it try to use legal tools to analogize the concerns about restricting printing presses or newspapers or what you know uh how people thought about what Free Speech meant and apply this uh in this genre were they concerned were their exceptions understood for things involving kids for examp I mean you lots of things the lawyers have analogical uh reasoning tools that they're taught in law school to how to deal with these problems but of course some things are not foreseen and so that's why we have an amendment process to to provide uh new law or new structures uh or either it's not foreseen or it's keeps working in a way that we don't like so we give women the right to vote and and and things like that so originalism is neither about uh thinking about what men you know slave owning men and powdered wigs would have thought about a particular problem it's not getting into the their heads uh nor is it about uh uh uh fixing an Amber uh any type of Social Development or progress or what have you it's simply about applying the law on the page and trying to understand what those words meant when they were enacted how should I understand the differences between what I hear you saying as the letter of the law and then I've you know colloquially we hear this term the spirit of the law is are these just like turns of phrase is there a important way in which these two terms the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law are meaningful as a lawyer and as a constitutional scholar the spirit of the law is very philosophical it's kind of you step back and well let's take the Trump trial let's bring it back to what we started with um you know it that trial and prosecution observed the forms of the law a duly elected da uh brought a valid indictment uh presumably uh you know however that works with the grand jury or the the proper vehicle for for getting those charges laid before the court and presented to the defendant uh there was a duly sworn jury um that were vetted using constitutional protection so that both sides could strike someone they thought was biased uh there's a judge who is properly appointed you all of these formalities uh of the law and fundamentally the uh the the jury charge was was you know the both sides were able to present evidence and you know there are certain things on appeal that you know we might not agree with but that's all through the the normal process anyway so that's all the letter of the law but you step back is this really the spirit of the law in the sense that um if it was you know anybody other than if we do think that nobody other than Donald Trump would have been prosecuted in this manner then something fishy is going on and that sense of fundamental Justice or fishiness or or or what have you I think is is is one way of understanding uh the spirit of the law it's not about checking boxes uh or dot Crossing tees being uh you know very legalistic uh about things it's that background conception of why do we care about these legalistic things and that's to in have the rule of law um because otherwise if it weren't legalistic then it would all be Airy fairy and hand waving and arbitrary uh but again the legalisms are necessary but not sufficient to have uh the rule of law or a a well functioning or an accepted uh justice system in which the public has confidence is there um you know you you talked about the political change that takes place during the New Deal era where the the process of changing the formal law of the land through amendments is sort of thrown out the window um in in the name of just doing it like we we can just do it let's just do it let's just create new agencies let's just uh let's just declare for example one case I am familiar with uh from that time period is let's let's decide that a man growing wheat on his own own land for his own consumption impacts interstate commerce because he would otherwise buy wheat and probably across state lines I think this is the filburn case yes wicker versus filburn so so it's like so we see these things they happen they get baked into our precedent um how again I'm asking basic questions here like so precedent what role does precedent play in the law um and is that is that a function of like the like that we're sort of a British common law type thing like help me understand the role president plays because president doesn't feel like the letter or doesn't feel like it's the same thing as what's written it's something else well it is because we're a common law uh system a common law country yes the the the anglo-american tradition where judges um build upon previous decisions of judges that they respect uh because novel fact patterns come up and they have to apply the law to these situations and so they reason is this like this case or not like that case do we need to kind of have a new rule um you know how how will ruling in this way in this case affect some other case down the line does this make sense that's why when you hear oral arguments there's all these hypotheticals you know Council I understand what you're asking for that might make sense in this case but what about and they come up with some other thing that could happen if this is the new rule would that make sense would that be good uh law and so that's why uh uh judges are hesitant to overturn uh precedent because people rely on the law as it develops and uh sometimes it might cause more institutional disruption societal disruption to correct that small error from 50 years ago than to let it lie because people's expectations how they structure their lives how they organize their businesses all depend on that rule even if that's an improper uh uh uh application of the of the statute or of the Constitutional provision uh different judges different professors different legal Scholars have you know different views about the weight of precedent what's called star decisis the doctrine that that you let uh the decision stay uh sometimes when it's erroneous uh not too many are are consistent on the Supreme Court I would say that justices Kagan and Thomas are the most consistent in that Thomas always votes to overturn president if he thinks it's wrong and Kagan essentially doesn't um uh you know with the rest it's kind of it it depends they try to reason their way out of it but you can find examples where they both uphold or or or or or not um for a long time our debate over the strength of president was a proxy war over for Row versus Wade and the right to abortion of course two years ago uh row itself was overturned in the do's case so now maybe we'll be talking about precedent uh in a different way I'm I'm much closer to the Thomas view if something's wrong you fix it and you know maybe that means giving Congress a year you know stay your mandate for a little while to give Congress a chance to fix it or or something like that there are credential ways of handling things but often times these things called Reliance interests uh can be over stated I'm going to change gears here for a moment you are you're like the Shane Gillis of academic law in that you were invited into a prestigious institution and before you could even get started you were uh suspended and uh you know ultimately didn't join the institution um if you're familiar with the S Shane Gillis and Saturday Night Live um let's talk about that for a little bit because because it it's it's adjacent to a lot of the things you're writing about and um and it's interesting so what happened it's it's the reason why I'm now you know spending as much time on education policy as on you know what I'd rather be focusing on the dormant Commerce Clause and you know the uh the defamation law and all these other things uh so I had been at the KO Institute big libertarian Think Tank uh in DC for nearly 15 years I become vice president director of the Constitutional study center there and um got the opportunity to try to make an impact in a different way uh Randy Barnett the The Godfather of uh libertarian legal scholarship uh if you will certainly one of them uh hired me to become the executive director of The Georgetown center for the Constitution and a few days before I was due to start the that job in January of 2022 was when Justice Brier's retirement broke uh in the news so I was commenting all day you know I'm a supreme court expert so this is my bread and butter I'm doing media and that night I was on the road I was in Austin Texas I was in my hotel room and I was Doom scrolling Twitter which is not a best practice I don't recommend it um and getting frustrated uh that Joe Biden was uh uh keeping with his campaign promise to appoint a black woman you know I thought as it turned out most Americans agreed with this in in in various polls uh that he should pick the the best candidate it and I said I tweeted you know if I were a Democratic president I would pick the chief judge of the DC circuit which is considered to be the second most important uh Court uh he's very Progressive very intellectual respected also happens to be an indianamerican immigrant so checks some demographic boxes but alas under today's hierarchy of intersectionality we will end up with a lesser black woman by which I meant less qualified by which I meant everyone in the universe under my logic would be less qualified than this person who I was positing would be my pick as Democratic president but anyway those three words uh got me in trouble I went to bed after pushing send and I woke up and all uh hell had broken loose uh people were coming after my job it was uh you know cancel culture whatever you want to call it uh I I tell you John this was probably the second worst day of my life after my mom's untiring passing when I was in college I felt my whole life my whole career everything I'd worked towards everything my parents had sacrificed in bringing me from the Soviet Union was crumbling over one poorly phrased tweet so I started doing damage control and thankfully I have uh uh highly qualified experienced friends in this realm uh notably uh at fire the foundation for individual rights and expression uh who helped me with crisis management and PR and things like this as well as as many others uh reporters and others came out of the woodwork to tell my story and to defend me and things like this um four days later I was kind of I had four days of of Hell uh and the dean who was not a a profile encourage Bill trainer at Georgetown announced uh that he wasn't firing me he wasn't uh defending me on the basis of free speech he was uh uh deferring sending me into an investigation by the Dei office in Human Resources he was onboarding me and immediately suspending me with pay because his lawyer advised him that I would later less be able to sue him if I was being paid not to work during this investigation so four months later because it takes four months to investigate you know a tweet uh under a very short policy regarding discrimination harassment Free Speech these are the relevant policies four months later they determined that oh I hadn't been an employee when I tweeted and so these policies don't even apply to me four months for that yeah it's they spent you know a million dollars on a on a white shoe Law Firm to advise them and ultimately looked at a calendar I mean you know I'm I'm saying this uh factiously um they decided you know once the students were off campus and stopped protesting and counter protot they could they could have this kind of resolution uh I temporarily celebrated this technical Victory but then I got the report in fine print uh from the Dei office which in Georgetown is the office of idea institutional diversity equity and affirmative action idea uh which made clear that anytime I would say something that someone claimed uh offense from uh that would put that would create a hostile educational environment and would put me back into the Inquisition even though their free speech policy was supposed to prevent something like that but uh I realized uh over that weekend that I had to quit and I I did what we lawyers call a a noisy exit um publishing my resignation letter in the Wall Street Journal and then announcing my move my next move to the Manhattan Institute on Fox News the next day and away we went and ever since I've been using this platform I've been given this this Spotlight that I've inadvertently had uh shined on me to expose the the rot in Academia and and push back on these illiberal Trends I appreciate you sharing that the way you did and I I've got to imagine that that moment that next day must have must have truly been like it's a weird thing right we live in this bifurcated existence especially if for noisy loudmouths like you and I where um we go onto the screen actually all of us do this because our kids do it on Instagram and and and do things that that are like frictionless and they almost feel like they live in another world but then sometimes they come into the physical world and when they do you get the physical impact um you know what did you beyond focusing on higher ed what do you have a regret do you feel like it was um being too mouthy like what what like what what what else did you learn from that moment like how do you think about the being someone of uh like as whether it's being a public intellectual or being someone who's going to be in an environment where you're looked up to by students how do you think about that what are the lessons that came came away from that in retrospect now with time I mean I'm I'm more cautious on Twitter I suppose some might dispute that seeing what I've been tweeting necessarily you know but it's it's more um just the scales falling from my eyes about some of the pathologies in in our society you know I thought I had been open walking into this with my eyes open I had spoken at many many law schools around the country uh law review symposia Federalist Society events all sorts of different things um uh I knew the Constitutional battles I knew I thought I knew Georgetown and its ideological skew and yet I still stepped into it I mean look I poorly phrased that tweet and I freely admitted that I published a piece about should you apologize if you're being you know cancell and all this in U in City Journal uh a couple of months ago in the spring issue so I I'll commend that to your to your listeners uh so look I you know uh I said look this was a failure of communication um I'm sorry that I you know didn't convey what I meant to and that detracted from my message that Biden shouldn't have been using racial and sexual criteria for his Supreme Court pick but I'm not going to apologize beyond that I'm not going to apologize for holding that view I'm not going to apologize for being against affirmative action I'm not going to apologize for a whole host of things which would uh uh again have people protesting because Georgetown which you know controlled by the left dares hire this rabid right-wing you know KO person uh to be on their faculty I'm not going to not going to bend the knee to any of that Orthodoxy so you know my wife says I would have gotten in trouble sooner or later and that's absolutely true I think uh by something I wrote something I said on TV um you know who knows I I was interviewed by Megan Kelly in that brief period between when I got my technical Victory and when I realized you know read the fine print and realized I had to resign maybe I said something in that interview that someone would have seen and glommed onto like right away so you know I I just learned you know it's a depressing thought but the idea is um uh the left's institutional control uh is not you know they're going to be uh uh torn Kicking and Screaming to to give any of that uh power up so you know I'm back in the think tank world and I'm back in uh media influencer world and filing briefs and and all of this uh I have a higher profile for the experience I I got a book deal I'm on substack all these other things um but it's a different sort of impact than than where I on faculty uh at at a Georgetown or some other uh school like that so that's something that I'm still I guess working through a little bit uh whether you know my new found claim uh such as it is is worth those four days of Hell Followed by the four months of purgatory I don't know uh I don't know um but that's you know man plans and and God laughs and this is the This Is The Lazy River not so lazy river that I'm on now I you know one of the things there's so many pieces of of what happened that you could we could talk about um and I you know we're coming to the end of our time together I mean look I felt it a little bit the other way I was up for a senate confirmed position in the Trump Administration and uh was dinged by some 20-some in White House person for some uh deleted never Trump tweet from 2015 you know and and that's arbitrary because as I've learned you know there you know people who were much more in that vein that did get hired and it just depended on which 20-some in White House Personnel you got that you know the given week that the the vetting was going on it's always going to be messy life right we're always gonna confront these things that are like judgment calls but I think one of the things that to keep on on the sort of um legal and educational track so you you you you have this tweet which I don't have a problem with I mean yes lesser black women doesn't sound great taken out of context but I'll tell you what doesn't sound great to me is an pre-announcing that you're going to nominate people on B on criteria that have nothing to do with the competence of the job if I'm someone that wants that job like if if if the next president said I am going to I'm I am going to make sure that I nominate for something important and a you know a uh a bearded Italian American I would feel really I would not feel great if I got the job because I would kind of know that that was why I got the job it's like so fundamental the fact that this get has gotten like controversial to me is shocking because it's such an affront to the to the people who then have to step into the role right it's like nobody wants to be the diversity hire nobody doesn't matter what color you are I I joke that I'm I'm A diversity pick for that Florida poly board and that I'm I'm one of the three trustees that don't have a stem background it's a purely stem school so hopefully I'm adding something to that conversation but but I think there's something deeper going on here which I think cuts to the heart of um of the cases that we're seeing and this sort of wokeness Mind virus that's sweeping through the the our education system and that is the difference between intent and impact and I want I want to hear hear from you about this my my understanding you know Jonathan Heights talked about this in the coddling of the American mind this is part of the shift with this sort of critical social justice I intent is hey I said this thing but I didn't intend for it to be offensive in the way you're taking it and and and and that's the Judgment for whether you're you did something wrong or not I didn't intend for it to be offensive in that way impact is I don't care what you intended I feel offended therefore you're guilty and of course if that's the criteria for whatever it might be like whether I objectively feel butt hurt um well that's like that's a path to hell cuz anybody can feel anything we don't have control over other people's feelings in anything that we do but in in the case of the law isn't it isn't intent a really important piece of how we understand the nature of crimes committed from a legal perspective help me put intent versus impact and context absolutely I mean in the criminal law there's the idea of the guilty mind men's Ria which part of the problem with that we discussed about overcriminalization is we have so many regulatory crimes that don't even require that you know one of your employees running a bulldozzer uh you know hits uh some protected habitat and all of a sudden you're in jail for because you're the supervisor or something like that anyway there there's all sorts of things like that um here there's the overlay of uh that it's you know speech versus conduct um not that something you say should never get you fired um but an aspect of cancel culture is disproportionate punishment it's also um being uncharitable misreading what somebody says anyway uh but but but yeah I think it's I think it's problematic to apply punishments uh just uh just because of you know discounting um somebody's intent and not understanding the full picture and just going by um subjective uh effect or even claimed effect why is in why is intent important like I know there's a concept of I mean in the criminal law we want to punish guilty people we don't want to punish people who you know we don't want to allow someone who's you know gets offended all the time just to put people in jail uh when they when they're slighted um in in the non-criminal context um because you want to see if that person is is is qualified for the job uh or not uh and you know if they're attending one thing but uh you know the effect is something else um you know that that can matter sometimes and it sometimes it doesn't you know if you're recklessly shooting at something and you know kill someone we evaluate it's not you know that's the difference between uh you know first deegree murder versus second degree murder or manslaughter uh did you have the intent to kill or were you being Reckless or uh was it at the height of your passions or or or or something like that uh in the context of uh Speech I mean we're not we're not I hope criminalizing speech but in the decision whether to fire someone for speech it's you know what did you actually mean what did you intend to mean those are relevant to whether you can whether you can do your job um and and is the person uh claiming offense because they're actually offended you know should be objective offense or or subjective offense um anyway there's lots of layers here that we can uh discuss and and to coin a phrase it depends on the [Laughter] context um how has to speaking of it depends on the context how has uh you know you touched on this briefly what's happened in the aftermath of 107 and the um the way uh the elite universities have conducted themselves have um handled the student bodies over the past eight months how how has that has that had an impact on the way you think about things has it confirmed all your worst fears has it um been challenging in any ways for you it's it's elevated the crisis in higher ed into the national public discourse and so I'm I'm thinking and talking about it even more than I would have been otherwise the anti-Semitism gloss is certainly something um and I'm Jewish and so I've kind of you know a lot of American Jews have have kind of been rethinking their relationship to their Community what does their culture mean what does their you know the you know personal philosophical things like this as well as politically speaking you know Progressive Jews all of a sudden lost uh friendships and and Ally ships as they call it uh with uh folks they thought that were that were on their side um in in in terms of kind of public policy anti-Semitism is always as Bill Amman the the billionaire investor in Harvard Alum uh wrote the same day that claudi and gay resigned the Harvard presidency in January um anti-Semitism is always the canary in the coal mine it's a leading indicator um it's it's the the tip of the iceberg to throw even more metaphors at this um that signals that there are serious problems underneath and in this context that means double standards that means uh ideological discrimination that means uh academic Corruption of various kinds failures of leadership um all of that has been revealed through the prism of the failure to Grapple with um all of these anti-semitic uh protests not just in terms of upholding Free Speech but in failing to um uh enforce rules when there are violations of you know that go beyond speech um I wrote an essay for the Free Press Barry Weiss's publication about half a year ago delineating uh the differences between speech and action uh for example the most colorful example was somebody urinated on a hill L and claimed that well this is politically expressive so they shouldn't be charged sorry whether you're beating somebody up or urinating on a building you're not going to you know get off because you're claiming a First Amendment exemption uh to that so speech versus conduct then there's unprotected speech death threats true threats as the Supreme Court has defined them or uh incitement of violence again a high bar but has been reached in certain circumstances and then there's time place and manner regulations which we've been talking a lot about in the context of the encampments uh that you can't disturb classes you can't block uh access to things uh in the off-campus context uh think about we want to protect political speech that's the core of the First Amendment and yet I can't go into your neighborhood in the middle of the night and with a mega megaphone tell you exactly what I think about Donald Trump and Joe Biden time place man or can't block roads regardless of whether what expressive content that might be so those are some some legal Frameworks but but more broadly it's exposed the double standards hypocrisy uh leadership weakness the bubbles that all of these people are living in I mean the inability in December before you talk about the legal context and do a little seminar on First Amendment law that like the kind that I just gave you uh you know you can't saywell calling for anybody's death is against our values you can't open with that um that really shows what kind of a bubble and kind of a a failure of moral leadership there was then and I don't blame the lawyers who coached all these University presidents who are paid big bucks to think uh big thoughts and protect their University Brands and that was a a colossal failure uh there so um all of these things have come to the for and you know what it's not so much um you know there are some delicious ironies like the folks that would have um you know disciplined you for for using the wrong pronoun on October 6th now you know Demand free speech protections for uh you know hitting and blocking and and excluding Jewish students from the campus Square um uh Americans have the right to be to be Hypocrites it's more the you know not enforcing the rules and uh you know just just just complete failure to to um uphold the classical liberal values of uh any institution of learning how do you feel about where we're heading um like from a momentum perspective as a country meaning you know we're heading into this election with two uh I think it's just a statement of fact that they deeply flawed C candidates for the for our two major parties and um and then all this legal Cloud which includes the president's son on gun charges and and all kinds of stuff like that so it it we we feel like we're in certainly for my adult lifetime relatively uncharted waters they're maybe not unprecedented but certainly a former sitting President coming for reelection as a now convicted felon is is is a new thing um do you feel like this is the um the dark before the dawn um is it is there trends that are positive is or is it or is it as John McCain like to say It's always darkest before it's pitch black right uh right which you know is possible you mentioned Argentina earlier to to to you know briefly recount Argentina was at be before the peronists smashed the place to Smither it was in the running to perhaps be an even wealthier country than the United States of America um large natural Rich classical liberal tradition a country on the move and then in come the populist you know lunatics and Don't Cry For Me Argentina oh maybe you should cry for Argentina instead so should is it don't cry for me uh America or what do you think well you know we we thought the writers of 2016 couldn't be topped but then came 2020 and now comes 2024 so these I hope we don't we stop the sequels at this point uh I look um in terms of the the illiberal uh um political flows um the the wokeness and and all of that with Society r large I'm with Brett Kavanaugh I live on the sunrise Side of the Mountain I'm I'm optimistic with with higher ed I don't know we're in the we're in the um the eye of the storm um you know there's some push back now some possibility of Reform uh universities abandoning diversity statements and presidents resigning and uh trustees becoming a little more active maybe alumni holding back donations somewhat uh I don't know I'm I'm I'm not saying I'm optimistic but I'm I'm less pessimistic than I was uh when I when I quit Georgetown coming up on on two years ago now uh actually what is it we're recording this June 7th yeah it was two years ago yesterday that I quit Georgetown so happy happy Liberation day to me um but in terms of the political context uh gosh I'm just a simple constitutional lawyer I mean I just hope we can we can uh get past uh November's election with with truly uh mostly peaceful protests not ironically labeled as such um you know there are going to be bad things happening whatever the the Electoral outcome is I I hope um I hope they don't outweigh the good either way or not by too much um but but I don't know I mean hopefully we'll have new presidential candidates in 2028 um I guess only one of them will be able to run again uh if they're still alive uh but you know I try not to focus on the presidency unduly or even on the federal government I have my my little platoon of of four kids eight six and 18-month-old twins are are cancellation babies that's right during my Georgetown Purgatory we found out my wife was pregnant uh and then we found out she was really pregnant um so that's a delight uh and uh in in all seriousness and uh and and we'll see what happens but I you know I can't be I can't be down for too long and um you know I like visiting with interesting smart people like like you John and and talking about these important issues so hope hope you're uh your your some of your listeners start following me now I have a substack Shapiro's gavl my book coming out Lawless and I hope to continue to be engaged on on all of these issues going forward you put a great cap on that but I will ask you the question I end every show with um which is you know we call this Dad Saves America because I believe that as a man being a dad embracing that role is the most heroic thing we get to do and that when we do it as you just said we are helping with our wife to lead the platoon that matters the most first in as a family and then in our community and then by virtue of um of the fact that we're all doing it if we all did it well the country how do you understand your role in the American story I mean I'm living the American dream I was I was born in in the Soviet Union U my dad my dad's dad was taken by Stalin secret police and and my dad was exiled to Siberia uh coming back uh when kusov came during the thaw my mom grew up in the outskirts of Moscow uh in the 50s without running water and electricity at first um she ended up getting a PhD but was discriminated against for both being a woman and being Jewish and they eventually took me to Canada first I joke that we took a wrong turn at the St Lawrence Seaway and I ended up you know with an Ivy League degree in University of Chicago and all those great accolades that you read at the outset um uh meeting with with senators and and and developing legislation and and and you know talking to all the top shows and influencers and all the rest of it you know as as my urw Countryman Yakov smof would say what the country right and here with my wife from Kansas um uh uh with with with four kids I'm an only child she's an only child and we we're we're we're raising them here in in Suburban Virginia in the the the Cradle of the Republic right um just amazing um so I I you know Serendipity is is good and uh despite uh the the rocky world that we're in the the world on fire as some people put it um I do the best I can to uh to advance freedom to uh to help my family grow um and and and to continue the idea that the Next Generation to keep with your theme of of dad saving the world that my next Generation does um even better uh on on as many metrics as possible as as my wife and I have been able to do elao thanks for being on Dad Saves America my pleasure I'm sorry I wasn't able to uh somehow insinuate a a dad joke in here my wife's actually given me not one but two T-shirts that make dad jokes about my making dad jokes so we'll have to save that for for a future speed round or something well you you you know where I keep my dad jokes in a database you did it [Music]

Channel: Dad Saves America

Views: 4,913

Keywords: ilya shapiro, trump trial, alvin bragg, trump verdict, trump conviction, president trump, felon trump, constitution, us constitution, us constitution explained, constitutional law, bill of rights, american revolution, revolutionary war, founding fathers, framers of the, law, legal theory, originalism, living constitution, constitutional amendments, rule of law, elite institution, liberalism, liberal, illiberal, illiberalism, georgetown, cancellation, cancel culture

Id: wO4A_7rVnqg

Length: 118min 43sec (7123 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024