Ep 58 | Return to God and Return Power to the States | Josh Hammer | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Most people don't know this, but we have four branches of government: it's the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and I think the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Apparently we added a fourth branch.

You know, I don't remember constitutional amendment about it, but that's where we are.

Judicial overreach is raging, and my guest today has a lot to say about it.

He's a constitutionalist that doesn't mince words as a writer or an editor or speaker or a lawyer.

He graduated from Duke University, degree in economics, followed by a law degree from the University of Chicago, clerk for a federal judge on the U.S.

Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, later clerked for the U.S.

Senate Judiciary Committee.

He was on Mike Lee's staff for a while.

He's currently a lawyer at First Liberty Institute, specializing in cases involving religious liberty and the First Amendment.

He has written for Red State, The Resurgent, and is currently the editor-at-large of a good friend of mine's place called The Daily Wire.

Yes, Ben Shapiro is this man's boss.

How did our judicial system go off the rails?

How is our Constitution being violated?

How do we save it?

Our conversation with Josh Hammer.

What is going to happen with the Democrats in the next election?

Besides just total chaos and crap show.

Yeah.

I mean, my best guess right now is

Liz Warren, but I feel so weak in saying that because she's so unlikable.

I mean, who the heck gets up in the morning and says, I want Liz Warren to be president?

But who else would it be?

I don't know.

Who could you find in the country that was less likable than Hillary Clinton?

They found someone, apparently.

Right.

She is Hillary Clinton, yet a little more unlikable.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

It's absolutely crazy.

I mean, I actually think the odds of a brokered convention

doing the math for all these early states is actually decently high.

And if we get to a second, third ballot of a brokered convention, convention, I could easily see someone like Hillary or Michelle Obama trying to come in at the very end.

I think there's a real possibility of that, honestly.

I really.

You don't think Budujej might slip up?

See, Budujej, I mean, he speaks French.

He's Ivy League educated.

He appeals to that Upper West Side, New York Times reading, liberal elitist crowd, the blue check mark crowd on Twitter.

Does he have any black or Hispanic supporters?

No, none.

Zero.

Yeah.

So, I mean, he's going to lose South Carolina.

I mean, he's not going to compete well in a lot of these states that are driven by a large African-American population.

I don't see the path forward for him, but he's a smart guy.

I mean, he's a pretty intelligent guy.

Can't fall in the business.

They've got to find somebody that can

not look as extreme, even though, strangely,

communism.

Communism has gone up in the polling eight points in the last 12 months with millennials.

Gone up.

Communism, not socialism, communism.

Yeah, my generation just needs to go straight to Gitmo.

I mean, like,

that's literally, that is literally the only solution here.

Take your freaking avocado toast and your pumpkin spice and just get out of the country.

I mean,

literally, socialism is one thing, okay?

Everyone kind of flirts with their little socialist faiths in college, you know, like they smoke their dope and like utopianism, kumbaya, whatever.

Communism is literally what resulted in a hundred million deaths over the last century.

That is not just an economic system.

That is a totalitarian political ideology.

It is evil.

The only thing that killed more people in the last hundred years is all disease.

All disease.

The totality of all diseases, literally combined.

Right.

Now,

I deeply, deeply worry about where we're going as a country.

You know, we need to find God, as you and I were saying, offset earlier.

We need people to start attending religious services.

We need a great awakening.

That's really all I see.

We are a

let me say it this way:

in the 1850s, 1850s, there was a Great Awakening, and the argument at the time was,

where was the real birth of America?

Was it in Plymouth or was it in Jamestown?

And luckily,

we decided that it was Plymouth, but there was a strong argument that, no, it's Jamestown.

If you look at that, that argument is the argument that we're having right now.

Are we a covenant people who believe in God, who believe in being good and decent to one another, living side by side with people who are vastly different, but coming to an understanding where we can work together and be a covenant people that says we are going to try our very best to do the right thing and serve God?

Or are we going to make our God gold, like in Jamestown?

And we'll try every trick.

We'll try socialism, which in their case ended up in cannibalism.

All of this stuff.

It's what happened to

Columbus.

It's what's happening to us now.

We are a people focused on our God, which is gold or whatever.

It's not actually God.

If we don't pick

Plymouth, again,

we don't survive.

I'm convinced of it

that we are now at a place

only God can save us.

Yeah, no,

I think that's absolutely right.

I mean, if you go back to founding era political theory,

James Madison in Federalist 45 kind of encapsulates the theory of Federalism pretty well.

He says the powers delegated to the federal government are few and far between.

Those reserved for the states are numerous and indefinite.

But that premise, the federalist premise, the system of dual sovereignty by which the states would have largely plenary power to govern as they like, and then you could vote with your feet in a live and let live type mentality, all this was premised, as John Adams famously tells us, that the Constitution was intended for a religious people.

It is wholly inadequate for anyone else.

And the reason that it's inadequate for anyone else is exactly what you're saying.

It is this concept of covenant, of agreeing that we are one people.

We the people, as the Constitution's preamble quite eloquently speaks.

We the people, not we the individuals, not we the global citizenry, we a concrete people.

We need a sense of kinship with one another.

We need a sense of solidarity.

We are the most diverse group of people ever to be collected or assembled ever in the history of the world.

No country is even close to the diversity of the United States.

But we came here for a reason.

No matter where you came from, you came here for a reason.

And that reason was

our unum, e pluribus unum.

And that unum was: all men are created equal, endowed by their creator, and they can go their own way, and they can do their own thing, and they can become successful, they can keep their money, they can give their money away, they are the sovereign of their own life.

We don't have that anymore.

So, you know, you talk about we have to be more civil to each other.

How can we possibly come back together when

we have some people

saying

you should pay a penalty, you should maybe even have jail time or a fine if you're wearing an offensive Halloween costume?

We have people who...

I can't find any common ground with someone who believes that the state, large S, should control everything.

Right.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, maybe it's maybe it's a chicken or the egg question.

I mean, the way I formulated it just now was I said that the entire concept of federalism was premised on religiosity and on God.

But maybe we should try to just rediscover federalism as a way to rediscovering God again.

Maybe we need federalism.

Maybe we need local control.

We need to be able to vote with our feet and live as self-governing peoples as we choose according to the dictates of our own consciences, as our own local elected officials are going to dictate policy for us.

Maybe that will help get us to God.

And you know, the states that don't want God in the system, like Vermont or whatever, I mean,

go for it.

I mean, like.

This is the thing I just don't understand.

How so many in your generation can be

so far ahead on the cutting edge and grow up in a world that I never even imagined there could be.

I had to go through the system to go, I had to go through the FCC to get a license to be able to be on the radio.

And I had to have a corporation hire me and all of this stuff.

Now,

start a podcast.

And your life is like that everywhere.

And we know fundamentally that works.

Just let people be

how that generation can be the one that is saying, oh, yeah, but we want a huge 1950s communist kind of state that oversees all of that?

How do you make sense of

people putting those two worlds together?

It's extraordinarily difficult.

I mean, I don't have a whole lot in common with someone who supports communism, that's for sure.

I know you don't either.

But I think what's going on that is making all this so much worse is not just that we're disagreeing with one another, it's the sheer level of vitriol, of ad hominin attacks.

I mean, I spend more time on Twitter than I would care for.

I'm trying to cut down.

It's just not healthy for any of us.

It's fundamentally

this political volleying, this back and forth.

And yeah, there's been sniping going back to the beginning of the Republic.

The election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Awful.

Oh, the things that the partisan newspapers said about the opposing candidates there, the son of a half-breed mongrel.

Like, I mean, like, like,

disgusting stuff.

The difference is that we didn't have one of the differences at least that we didn't have all this technologies.

We would go out into the town square.

We would see our neighbors who disagree with politically at church on Sundays.

We would have a way to communicate and to empathize with one another.

But nowadays, and you know, Ben Sass, who I think wrote a book on like the loneliness epidemic recently, this loneliness epidemic is dramatically exacerbated, I think, by social media, big tech, and just the nature of living and working behind our machines all day.

Well, I think social media has

brought out the things that we always thought we were alone on, and now we're in a club,

but

it's still a pretty small club, but it doesn't feel like one anymore.

Because you can gather all your friends and social media.

And you can, you know, there's always a crazy guy that lives on everybody's street.

And we used to ignore him.

Well, now he's connected to all of the crazy people that lives on all of our streets.

You know what I mean?

And so they have a voice, and they,

and this happens with all of us, they have this sense of real power, and I'm going to tell you how you should live your life.

And if you're not listening to them, you can't just drive by and go, there's crazy Ed.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think social media has been good for helping us find like-minded people for sure.

It has been extremely bad for

incentivizing us to hate the so-called the proverbial other side much more.

And this tribalization mentality, it's not good.

It's just it is unhealthy.

And, you know, just to get back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, we just need to rediscover, hold God aside for a second.

I increasingly think that federalism, and Eric Erickson's been writing this for years now, federalism is one means, rediscovering local sovereignty.

We should be able to vote with our feet in this country.

You know, when I went out right after Donald Trump was elected, and I went out to California, and

I met

with probably 25

very big CEOs, leaders of industry, a lot of leaders of tech.

You couldn't come to the meeting unless you could take off your team jersey.

If you couldn't say something bad about your side, you couldn't come to the dinner.

And it was the first time in California I heard people talk about the Constitution.

And they were so afraid of Donald Trump and what he would do.

And they said, many of them said, and the whole table agreed, I used to think the 10th Amendment was racist.

I thought it was a ploy.

But I understand it now.

We shouldn't have to live under the rule of whatever Donald Trump says.

And I thought, there's a chance we could get back to this because no president,

either side, no president should ever have the power to make anyone afraid that they were going to be snuffed out, their business is going to be snuffed out, their point of view is going to be snuffed out.

They should not have that power.

And I don't have a problem with California, in my opinion, being bat crap crazy.

That's what they want to do.

But how do we get people to understand?

Leave everybody else alone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What a novel concept.

Leave everyone else alone, right?

I mean, but look, I agree with you.

I mean, but for the fact that my boss lives there, my company is based there, I have no problem with California just drifting off into the proverbial Pacific Ocean, right?

I mean, let them self-govern their way into leftist, socialist, communist oblivion for all I care.

I live here in Texas where I can, you know, tote my guns and pay no set income tax tax and enjoy a relatively free and peaceful life.

But the problem is

that what California decides to do affects us.

You know, Vermont had, what is it, Vermont care?

Yeah.

That's right.

Socialized medicine.

They did the whole thing after Obamacare.

Right.

And it failed miserably.

Why didn't we study that?

We didn't study that because it doesn't work unless you have the power to print money.

So you have to have the federal government do it.

And everything is pushed up to the federal level.

And even the mistakes of California, we will pay for.

Yeah, no, I mean, this is true.

It's also somewhat of a dangerous argument, though, because the gun control folks in Chicago always talk about how it's actually the guns in Wisconsin and Indiana that are always flowing through.

So I think we need to be a little careful about this concept of externalities, but it is a real concept.

I mean, externalities are real.

So I don't mean, no, no, no.

Hang on just a second.

For instance, California being

an illegal haven, that affects the borders and it affects Arizona and Utah and everybody else.

I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about money.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

I'm talking about when they collapse,

we're going to bail them out and we'll be forced to.

It is taxation without representation.

Right.

Right.

I'm going to be forced to pay for stuff that I knew was crazy.

Right.

Well, it's happening in Europe, right?

I mean, when Greece and Italy almost went under seven, eight years ago, it's the Germans and the Belgians and the Dutch who are bailing out the peripheral Spanish, Italians, Greeks who are grossly profligate.

I mean, this is what happens, as you were getting at earlier, when you don't have both a fiscal and a monetary union.

If you can just pass whatever crazy spending policies you want, but you're not controlling the currency.

And, you know, this kind of gets to monetary policy, which is a very dorky slide interest of mine going back all the way to college.

I mean, I'm personally an end-the-fed Fed guy in my heart of hearts.

I want competing private currencies that theoretically could solve a lot of our problems if we want to rediscover this federalist dual sovereignty structure.

But as it stands currently, with the Federal Reserve, the government having a monopoly on the currency, yeah, it's incongruous.

It's just not going to work the way that they want it to work in terms of passing these crazy spending policies, but not controlling the coin.

I don't understand.

I really don't understand

how people don't see

that competition

makes things better and stronger.

If the government knew that their currency could be taken out by a better, stronger currency, they'd be more responsible.

Yeah.

You know, and I don't, and especially when

if you are the product, the company, and the police,

who do you go to?

Right.

Who do you go to when that company is screwing you if they're also the police?

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

No, look,

it's a great question.

I mean, competition, the marketplace just solves so many of our problems.

I mean, the marketplace of ideas that the left is increasingly intolerant to, in theory, to once again beat this hammer hard of federalism, the competition of states.

I mean, you know, look, I mean, I am not a particularly big fan of drugs, but look at what's happening in Colorado.

And yeah, I think there have been some bad effects of marijuana legalization there.

The homeless problem in Denver has actually gotten a lot worse, honestly.

But if they want to try that, go for it.

Go for it.

And

you can't tell me that Texas, if they found a way to make this socialized medicine actually work,

which, you know, it can't, but let's just say, miracle, it happens.

And Colorado is the one that says, we got it.

And look, it's cheaper for everybody all the way around.

It's better health care.

You think Texas is not going to take that?

Just be stubborn?

Of course, as Americans, we will always adopt the best strategy in the free market.

But we're not really,

we're not going down that path at all.

No, we're not.

And, you know,

I think back to 2012, actually, so many people criticize Mitt Romney for signing Romney Care, Massachusetts, and then like the model for Obamacare.

All Mitt Romney had to say was, I was governor.

It was my plenary authority.

I thought this was the best program for my state.

I don't want to nationalize it.

I can't believe, in retrospect, he never said that.

Because

I think he did want to nationalize it.

I mean, that's usually what they think.

Well, this will work.

And it just didn't work here.

I mean, that's why communism happens over and over and over again and all the bodies pile up because everybody's like, well, they screwed it up, but I got it right.

And it doesn't work.

No.

Communism has worked precisely zero times in the history of times that has ever been implemented.

It will never work.

And it is foreordained that it will never work because the people,

it is inherent in the human soul, in the human fiber, a rudimentary willingness to control our own destiny that communist ideology

precludes.

Okay, so

how do you fix a country

that

its history has been stolen from it, doesn't understand its history, doesn't understand its place in the world, doesn't appreciate what it even has you know just wants more more and more

the culture is rotten yeah to the core um there is no virtue i mean look at the leaders of our country the leaders we're a representative government they represent us we don't care we just put that thief in charge um

A constitution that means nothing anymore.

I mean, I can't think of

any of the amendments in the Bill of Rights that's not violated on a daily basis.

How do you pull that back together?

Yeah.

Wow.

Million-dollar question, right?

I mean,

my mom's an elementary school teacher, so I think about education policy a lot.

That has to be a logical place to start, right?

I mean, I've been being the school choice drum for a very long time now.

I mean, talk about ending monopolies.

I mean, ending the public sector's de facto monopoly on education, incentivizing competing private schools, many of which will be religious, many of which will be secular, but perhaps a strongly secular, perhaps a Hillsdale college-esque emphasis

on the great books, on going back to Aristotle and all the Greeks and the Romans.

I mean, this is what it has to look like.

We need to learn civics again.

We need a better education system that is not going to be synonymous with leftist

indoctrination.

But you can't have a free nation and a government-run education system, right?

Because

you can't teach,

question the government,

watch them like a hawk, as Washington said.

They're a fire.

When you control them, it's fine.

If they get out of control and control you, it'll burn everything down.

How do you expect a

government-run institution to really instill

the rights

that come from God.

It goes against any kind of common sense, doesn't it?

Aaron Ross Powell, not only does it go against common sense, but it's been erroneously interpreted by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional.

You're not even allowed to talk about God in public schools according to these ridiculous First Amendment rulings.

So not only is it illogical, but it is literally unconstitutional, as the court has told us.

So are we getting better?

Because I've just talked to some people, you know, at your home of

First Liberty,

I'm being told that

we're in a better place that we have been in since maybe Lincoln's time on religious liberty.

Some of the rulings that have come down.

I mean, yes and no.

I mean, the Blatensburg cross case last term was a good, it was, it was a good victory for our firm First Liberty.

It was a narrow victory.

It wasn't a complete overturning of the so-called Lemon test, which is the controlling legal test.

So it was a narrow victory, but

from the law firm's perspective, from our perspective, a victory nonetheless.

But I look what happened yesterday at Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Lawrence Van Dyke, this Ninth Circuit nominee, who, former solicitor general of both Nevada and Montana, Harvard Law Review, brilliant, brilliant attorney, who broke down in tears during his confirmation hearing because the American Bar Association had erroneously and maliciously fabricated this outright lie that he was hostile to the LGBT community.

And why did they say that?

Because of his pro bono hours working with First Liberty and Religious Liberty groups.

So we have very powerful institutional actors, the American Bar Association, the ABA being one of them, that are trying to delegitimize religious liberty and paint it all as just the idiosyncratic province of bigotry and hostility.

And that is very, very pernicious.

That is dangerous territory right there.

You don't have anything.

If you don't have the First Amendment, you have nothing.

You lose the right to worship and live your life as God dictates to each of us.

Do you have anything?

Do you have any right?

Do you have any power after that one?

No, you have nothing.

The reason why our firm First Liberty is called First Liberty is because

the religion clauses are literally the first liberties enshrined in the First Amendment.

You open the Constitution to the First Amendment, it's the first one there.

And that logically makes sense, right?

Our country was founded on religious liberty.

I mean, say what you will about the Pilgrims.

They may not have been our cup of tea from a 2019 perspective, but fundamentally, they were sailing on the Mayflower to escape persecution.

This country was literally founded on the notion of religious liberty.

And you have these candidates.

I mean, look, you know, Bet O'Worre talking about stealing tax-exempt status from churches, the so-called Equality Act that the entire House Democratic Caucus supports, which would

all this to be.

I'll explain that for people who don't know.

The Equality Act would essentially statutorily add sexual orientation and gender identity to Title VII protected classes under the Civil Rights Act.

Here's the problem.

That is probably bad policy on its own merit.

I would actually prefer that we strip down anti-discrimination law because I don't think in the year 2019

there's really systemic discrimination in any matter.

So I would rather the marketplace just root this out.

But even granting the premise of adding additional layers of anti-discrimination law, the Equality Act actually expressly precludes a religious exemption.

They had the malicious, they had the malice and the foresight to put it into this bill to expressly say that religious institutions do not have a claim under RIFRAD, the Federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, to claim that they can't do this due to their faith.

That is malice.

That is intolerance.

That is intolerable.

That is secularist intolerance against the religious.

You know, Bill Barr gave a brilliant speech, I thought, earlier this month at the University of Notre Dame talking about how

in the year 2019, it is the religious people in America who are on the defensive.

They feel like they are being overrun, being outed from the town square by militant secularists.

And what happened in the Equality Act by putting in this provision to authoritatively say if you are religious, you will have no exemption, is, I think, a perfect example of what Bill Barr was talking about.

So I've belonged to a church that in the 1990s, everybody thought it was crazy.

I mean, the members of the church thought it was crazy because the leadership came out with what's called the Proclamation of the Family.

And it says, gender is ordained by God.

Men and women are here to have children and to raise families.

I mean, it explains everything that we're going through right now,

25 years ago.

And I know that's our doctrine.

It didn't come because of a shift of something.

If we have to

marry same couples, if we have to have in our temples

people who are in same-sex relationships,

our entire foundation

crumbles.

There is nothing left because we believe in the

of

gender and the sanctity of marriage being between a man and a woman to have children.

It's an eternal perspective.

Where's my protection?

Right.

Right.

No, that's exactly right.

You know, I think back to

Lawrence versus Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned Texas's statutory

banning of homosexual sodomy, effectively constitutionalizing sodomy across the country.

There were three dissenters,

Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas.

Justice Scalia had a vociferous 15, 20 page true culture war dissent.

Thomas had, I think, a one-paragraph dissent where he referred to the policy as uncommonly silly.

Uncommonly silly, but nonetheless constitutional under our federalist structure.

So

what I'm getting at here is that, you know, folks like you and I, Glenn, we would not tell people, I think, how to live their personal lives.

That is between you, God, the dictates of your conscience, whatever.

Whatever.

Whatever.

Smoke your dope in Denver, Colorado, engage in whatever sexual relations you want in Montana.

I don't care.

What I care about is that I and others like me, you and all of us, have the right to pursue truth and understand truth and pursue justice, understand justice through the dictates of our own faith, according to the dictates of our own conscience, unfettered by big government bureaucrats who are imposing their secularist morality and shoving it down our throats.

Are you concerned at all about

the real problem in our country right now is the pendulum is swinging between extremes.

I mean, I don't want to hang out with the people who are really, honestly, on the right that are saying, we got to shut them down and we've got to control the press and we've got...

No, we don't.

No, we don't.

I don't want anything to do with that.

And I don't want to be over here on the left where they're saying, you know, basically burn books, shut people, shut people up.

I don't want anything with that.

How do we get that swing of that pendulum?

Because the person who replaces Donald Trump, if they can't beat him this time, and look at what they're doing to try to beat him, they'll just find somebody bigger and better.

Somebody else who's more of a bully or an authoritarian.

we are going to, it just depends on who, which side is in power when an emergency happens that's going to grab the pendulum.

How do we get that pendulum in each of us to swing where we're like, dude, I have no problem with you?

Just live your life.

I don't care.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the reason why limited government was so politically palatable at the beginning of the Republic and really continuing until the Woodrow Wilson administrative state revolution in the early 20th century.

I hate that guy.

Probably the worst president of all time, from my probably.

Yeah.

I mean, James Buchanan, perhaps, but I mean, in terms of most actively destructive in the long run, definitely Woodrow Wilson.

But the reason why living in government was politically palatable to generation upon generation of Americans for the first 120, 130 years was because we had a robust, thriving civil society.

It was because we had churches, we had synagogues, we had private institutions that we could look look to to inform and imbue us with morals and virtue and conduct.

How do you respond to people who say, yeah, and you guys took it and you shunned us, you,

you know, you

homosexuals couldn't, you know, be out in the open because religious people had no tolerance of it.

What do you say to those people?

So, look,

I think that's probably not true.

But even granting the premise that that once perhaps was true,

maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.

Let's say it was.

That's just not the world we're living in right now.

Wait, wait, wait.

You're not saying that you don't think that people lived in the closet in the middle of the...

No, no, no, of course.

No, no, no.

Of course they were living in fear.

I'm talking about religious armies hunting down homosexuals with shotguns.

I mean, to my

knowledge, that's never happened in American history.

But certainly people were living in closet in fear, no doubt about that.

But that's just not what's going on in the year 2019.

In the year 2019, the LGBT groups have the backing of the Academy, of the media, of the Fortune 500.

I mean, I worked at a big law firm, Kirkland Ellis, down in Houston for 14 or 15, 15 or 16 months, probably.

LGBT was all about

what the law firm stood for.

If you were a religious person who belonged to a church or synagogue that did not preach the dictates of that particular agenda, you had to actively hide it on like firm-wide LGBT celebration moments.

It was very monolithically imposed.

So I think the pendulum has swung so much

on this particular issue, just the past 10 to 15 years, where they have all the institutional capital, all of it.

And

it is fundamentally the religious people who are feeling on the defensive.

And I go back to that Equality Act inclusion of saying that if you are religious, you cannot claim an exemption under RIFRA.

That encapsulates the whole thing here.

They are maliciously trying to preclude us from living our own life.

So is it worry you that,

you know, you know history well enough to know

this is happening all over the world.

When people feel that they are oppressed and

they are not being listened to by whomever is in power,

they tend to revolt.

They tend to get ugly.

We are in a situation where people are intentionally poking, trying to get riots happening in the streets.

Here's a group of law-abiding citizens who love the Constitution, love their country.

They've been violated every step of the way, called all kinds of horrible names by the media, by politicians, and everything else, who are not like that.

But they feel under attack.

And just like the people in Sweden or Italy or Great Britain, they don't hate the rest of Europe.

They just, they like what they have.

They like, I'm an Italian.

I like Italy.

I didn't mean I hate France.

You're a racist.

At some point, those people say, I've had enough.

I've just had enough.

Yeah, no.

Does that concern you?

That we're on that road, it seems?

It concerns me a great deal.

I really do try to be an optimist by nature.

I really do.

I mean, people read my columns, my tweets, and they're like, that can't possibly be true.

But I'm born Abraham Lincoln's birthday, okay?

Lincoln is my foremost hero in American history.

Lincoln is the eternal optimist in the history of America.

You can't go back and read his addresses at Springfield, the Intemperance Society.

I mean, his post-Dred Scott address,

his second inaugural, for God's sake.

Oh, it's the best.

His second inaugural.

Oh, my goodness.

I mean, he is the eternal optimist of all optimists.

So I really do try to channel this.

It's hard.

It is really, really, really hard because both sides are just increasingly embracing this authoritarianism, kind of stamp out the other side mindset.

The left has been there for a very, very, very long time.

I think one of the arguments against, you know, those of us who I think

were in the Ted Cruz camp in 2016 was that the putatively conservative party would go down a very similar mirror image what's been happening on the left if we elected the guy that we ended up electing.

And, you know, I've been pleasantly surprised by a lot of the policies that have been enacted.

I think he has largely governed in pretty traditionally conservative fashion, actually.

But there is.

Not in his words or his

public actions.

Right.

But in his actual policies.

If you separate him from the policies, he hadn't been bad.

No, not bad at all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, he's been very traditional conservative.

Right, right.

Look,

I personally clerked for a U.S.

Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit judge here in Dallas that was nominated by President Trump.

So I have personally benefited from the President Trump's

outstanding judicial nominations.

Obviously, we've gotten some tax cuts.

The DOJ seems very attuned to our core religious liberty issues.

They're very closely attuned to that.

Immigration,

he really, I think, could have done a lot more.

But he's overall been pretty good.

But the problem is just rhetorically.

Just

in the broader realm of public discourse, the ideas that are kind of percolating in the interstices of society just are embracing this kind of authoritarian ideal.

And I really do worry about that.

The momentum on both sides, on both sides, seems to be in the same ultimate direction of funneling towards greater state power, oftentimes of anti-federalism, of pro-national government, anti-state power.

No one on the right talks about federalism anymore.

I mean, to my, I mean, Mike Lee still does.

Bless Mike Lee's heart.

I don't know how that guy's still standing.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

I mean, I worked for him my first year of law school summer as a sentence year community law clerk.

I mean, he's great.

Wonderful man, a humble public servant.

I think the world of Mike.

But

we need more people who talk about federalism.

No one on the right even talks about this anymore.

It's crazy.

So let's talk about the Supreme Court a bit.

I think we got one good guy, maybe.

I don't know where the second Supreme Court nominee even came from.

And

I worry

about,

you know, we had a list, and that list

the Oval Office seems to go, where did I put that list?

Oh, well.

And I'm concerned that

because the world is going towards more

fascistic or autocratic sort of rule, that

if we as conservatives are not very clear in this next election,

where is that list?

We want you to pull from that list.

Things could get dicey.

Yeah.

So the list does need to be updated, to be clear.

They have not updated that list in a couple of years.

And there have been been some truly, truly terrific people who have gone on to the federal courts, including my former boss, since then, I would say.

I think

on the state and federal level of his appointments outside of the Supreme Court, I think it's been great, but that was Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.

Right.

No, that's right.

So, yeah, I mean, look, Justice Gorsuch is

he's generally very solid.

I actually do have some finer points to pick with him.

I think he kind of misunderstands some doctrines.

He had this weird concurrence in a case called Sessions versus Demaya a year and a half ago.

It was kind of an immigration criminal case where, for the first time in the history of the United States government, the court read an immigration statute as unconstitutionally void for vagueness.

And Gorsuch writes like a 15 to 20 page, very flowery concurrence talking about Blackstone and the Federalist papers, really kind of anchoring it, or at least masquerading as originalist thought, but I think kind of fundamentally misunderstanding whether a statute can be constitutionally void for vagueness in the first place.

That's just one example.

So I have some small bones to pick with Gorsuch.

He's generally very good.

On the core structural issues, separation of powers, federalism, religious liberty is a great example.

He is rock solid on most of these issues.

Justice Kavanaugh, look, he was not my first, second, third, fourth, or fifth choice for that seat.

He's off to a rocky start.

I think of him as a Beltway capital R Republican.

You called him, I love this, Carl Rove in robes.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I think that's exactly right.

I mean,

he was staff secretary for President George W.

Bush, okay?

He's literally from the Beltway.

He is a Beltway Republican.

That doesn't usually bode well for decisions down the road.

Those guys always go left.

Oh, yeah.

Always go left.

Yeah.

You know, I won't reveal

names here, but I have it on good authority, suffice to say, from people who are friends of mine in D.C.

who have

literally had breakfast breakfast or lunch personally with Brett Kavanaugh since he joined the court.

He actively follows what people say about him.

Like he actually seems to follow what various commentators, pundits, politicians, et cetera, write and talk about him.

And that scares me a lot.

A lot.

That produces John Roberts.

It produces John Roberts.

It produces Anthony Kennedy before John Roberts.

But John Roberts is, of course, the perfect example of this.

No one cares about the perceived intellectual and institutional integrity of the court more than John Roberts does.

And that's the road that I fear the Kavanaugh is very much on right now.

I really do.

I worry about him a lot.

Well, that doesn't make me happy.

Well, I told you I'd try to not miss.

So it's hard.

I know.

It's hard.

So

the next term.

How many appointments do you think the next president gets?

Great question.

I mean, God, Justice Ginsburg is, what, 85 years old now?

She's just, she's, God bless her.

She is, she's fought every battle.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

She's had three bouts of cancer, if I'm not mistaken now.

I love the fact that she and Scalia got

friends.

Beautiful.

I love that.

Beautiful friendship they had.

Oh, yeah.

They would attend operas together.

You know, it reminds me at Princeton University these days, you know, Robbie George, who's been there for a decades, perhaps the preeminent Catholic intellectual in the country, a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant statesman.

He loves touting the fact that he and Cornell West have this kind of speaking tour where they go from campus to campus just to talk.

And they're great.

They're wonderful at it.

They're amazing.

I love watching those.

Scalia and Ginsburg, they disagreed on everything.

Everything.

So how do we get there?

How did they do that?

Because

their job was the Constitution.

And I just said,

how do we agree when we don't agree on fundamental rights?

How did they get there?

Just don't talk about that.

I mean, like, I mean, no, like, no, but like, I think that's basically it.

I mean, Sculia was a devout, I think, lied a mass attending Catholic.

Ginsburg was a fairly secular Jew, if I'm not mistaken.

They didn't talk about religion, presumably, even though Sculia was actually very phylosemitic, if I'm not mistaken.

They didn't really talk about religion much.

They didn't talk about originalism versus living constitution, presumably, because that will just spike both their blood pressures.

They talked about their families.

They talked about the opera.

They talked about the arts and cuisine and culture and anything else that can possibly unify us.

Because politics is not everything, Glenn.

Politics, the Constitution, this is important stuff, okay?

I care about politics so much that I quit my big law firm job and I now do this for

a living.

That's how much I care about this.

But it is not everything.

There are so many more

just as and usually more important things in life than politics.

And I think Sclea and Ginsburg were able to find a lot to agree on on that.

And that is a wonderful example for us to follow.

So let me ask you this, though.

It used to be easy for

people to say,

let's not talk politics.

But now,

sports, footwear,

everything.

It's all political.

It's all political.

And by design, by design.

So there is nothing.

That's one of the real problems is you can't get past politics.

I don't care what you're talking about.

Hey, you know, well, that's a great car.

Well, is that adding to global warming?

You know, hey, let's go have a great, you know, great dinner.

Are you eating animals?

I mean, it's everything

is political.

Yeah,

this arguably is actually even more dangerous in the long run than political tribalism tribalism itself.

Because if we

we already are losing a physical common ground, a physical town square because of the internet and technology and we work behind our computer screens all day.

That's why federalism no longer works.

Right.

Because everything is a government issue.

All of it.

Right.

So all regulation.

Right.

Exactly right.

So we're already missing the physical town square, the physical kind of public gathering grounds.

But if we lose that in addition to kind of the more ethereal public square, these things we're talking about, sports,

cuisine, culture, if all of that is just then kind of siphoned off and cabined into the space of political tribalism too, that is what I really fear.

And I had a great conversation with my ex-college roommate about this actually this past spring.

He's center left for sure, so we don't agree on a whole lot politically.

But we were saying how we are risking going down the road of not just consuming our own media, but literally, as you're saying, shopping at

living in our own universes, living in our own political universes.

And we already are.

Yeah.

We really, we really already are.

They could tell just by what you buy at the grocery store with like 95, 98% accuracy

by the products you buy.

Wow.

Because we buy different ketchup, we buy, you know, different bread.

And I don't even know how that happens, but we do.

We just have already been sorted.

And now with high-tech, that sorting is encouraged.

Right.

Right.

It is a dangerous path that we are going down.

But I mean, you know,

let's not pretend that this is happening equally on both sides.

I mean, it is the left that is politicizing a lot of this

much more than

the right is.

I mean, Nike being a great example, obviously, with Kaepernick and the freaking Betsy Ross sneaker.

You know, I mean, to the extent the right has reacted, I look at like Black Rifle Coffee Company, a veteran-founded company.

I'm I'm not even sure if that counts as being on the right, honestly.

But I mean, it's the closest thing I can imagine.

This is increasingly happening on the left.

I mean, people like Taylor Swift, who once conscientiously avoided politics.

Taylor Swift used to like never, ever, ever get involved with this.

It's only over the past three years that she has become a pretty overt partisan Democrat.

And I suspect it's because she's just gotten so much pressure.

to conform or to essentially be, you know, proverbially excommunicated from the space of like, what it means to be a good musician.

Which gives you so much respect for people like Dave Chappelle and Kanye West.

I mean, I was never a fan of Kanye West.

I'm a fan of Kanye West.

I think that guy is, I don't know if he's a fraud.

I don't know him.

I don't follow him.

I don't listen to his music.

So I don't know.

But I am a fan of anyone who has courage to put it all on the line and just take a beating to the head over and over again.

He had no reason.

He was a genius.

No matter what he did, he was a genius.

Now he's Kanye West to half of the country.

Not a good business move by any stretch of the imagination.

Brave.

Extremely.

Same with Dave Chappelle.

Yeah, raise your hand if you saw five years ago that Kanye West would become a MAGA hat-wearing Christian living on on a ranch.

Insane!

I think he's literally living on a ranch these days.

I'm not positive about that, but well, he lives in Calabasas still.

Oh, he does?

Yeah, and he's got a big

horse.

Calabas has horses.

Got it, okay.

Got it.

Okay, so not quite right, but

close.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, these,

but it's crazy that we need to,

the Weez Society feels compelled to say, like, good job, brave bravery

for free thought, for thinking and correcting.

So it's just profoundly sad.

It's amazing to me

that his message isn't more universal.

I mean, it is the American message.

I don't have to vote like you.

I don't have to live like you.

I don't have to think like you.

And you don't have to think like me.

Let's leave each other alone.

That's controversial.

Yeah, you know, it's crazy.

I mean,

I'm only 30 years old, but I feel like I've heard dozens, maybe hundreds of times the question, how can the Republican Party reach out better to the black community?

And I always kind of wince when I hear that question because there is no black community.

There are black Americans.

There are black individuals, the same way that there are Asian individuals, Jewish individuals, et cetera.

There are no monolithic groups.

I hate the idea that

these parties reach out to

groups.

And the reason why I think Republicans are so bad at some things is because

they believe in the individual.

You know, and I'm not talking about the progressive Republicans,

but the constitutionalists.

They believe in the power of the individual.

Join me.

Don't join me.

I don't care.

You know what I mean?

And so it's not a collective mentality, which is hard when it comes to organizing for the collective.

It just goes against what we believe, I think.

No?

No, I completely agree with that.

I think collectivization or collectivism is fundamentally at odds with the American way of life.

Our constitutional structure is not secured.

It is not in place to tell the citizenry what to do for a living, how to treat their neighbors, how to treat their family, or how to basically engage in the fundamental day-to-day acts that a person goes through.

We are supposed to arrive at these conclusions on our own.

And that's why, to go back to the communist statistic, like 8% more communists, my generation over the past decade or the timeframe was.

Not only is that scary in terms of physical safety because 100 million people, again, have died from communism, but just to tie this all together, nothing could be more fundamentally at odds with what America is itself.

Nothing is more indicative of the fact that we have lost any semblance of what this country stands for, of civics,

of the Declaration of Independence, of any of this, than totalitarianism being bipartisanly on the rise.

I literally lose sleep over this.

I literally lose sleep over this.

And I think education is where it has to start.

I can't think of where else it possibly could start.

It's not going to come from the top down.

It's got to come from the top.

It's got to come from the home.

It's got to come from the home.

It's from the home.

Yeah, I found myself doing this a lot these days, too.

Yeah, I know.

I want to

specifically wanted to talk to you about one

thing,

but I think I want to

well,

let's just start with tech and then we'll go back.

I think the

only

time

that I agree with people who say the founders never saw this,

they didn't see machine guns, they didn't see airplanes, they didn't see going to the moon, but

they had enough vision to boil it down to the principles that cover all of those things, right?

What is it in the principles that covers

corporations becoming bigger, more powerful, and more frightening than the federal government?

Our Constitution is made for the government.

Conservatives, we all say, I don't want to regulate that company.

I don't want to do these things.

But I think

they are quickly becoming much more powerful than the government.

And

they don't have any,

they don't have to worry about rights.

They don't have to, they can, they can cut you, the public square is online.

You're cut out.

You don't have a voice.

What is it that our founders did or had as a tool or saw that could help us on this?

Is there anything?

I'm not sure there's anything in the constitutional fabric itself that directly addresses this.

And this is no doubt a huge, huge, huge challenge.

I was at Yoram Hazoni's National Conservatism Conference in D.C.

this summer when Tucker Carlson went on stage and said that these private corporations are now a bigger threat to your liberty than the government.

That may or may not be true.

I think people can probably disagree on that.

I'm not sure I would go quite that far, to be honest with you.

But the point stands.

And I'm not sure that we have constitutional tools at our disposal to address this.

We do have legal tools.

There are an assortment of legal tools.

I am not a big proponent of antitrust in particular.

I do not look fondly upon the days of Teddy Roosevelt trust-busting.

I think some Republicans

do, but that's not me.

What I am more sympathetic to is some kind of more statutory kind of nibbling around the edges.

So, for example,

controversial figure, but Senator Josh Hawley, the freshman senator from Missouri, had this bill earlier this year to take away the legal immunity from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from these big tech companies and essentially allow the common law of defamation to become the legal operating standard again.

That to me makes a lot of sense.

I think there are ways to nibble around the edges here to try and tow these companies in line, but I'm pretty averse to Teddy Roosevelt trust-busting.

Yeah, so am I.

But what are the tools?

For instance,

why has nobody proposed or have they?

And they just

went nowhere.

Why can't we say my information belongs to me?

And if I want to sell it to Facebook, okay.

But you can't collect it on me unless I say okay,

and you're going to pay me for that.

You know, you

you know, when products are free, you're the product.

And we've exchanged this, but now when we start to see, oh, wait a minute, hang on,

that information is extraordinarily valuable, and I'm not comfortable with them having it.

How can we claw back our personal rights and information?

Because that stops a lot of the things that are concerning.

Yeah, so I was a little too young to experience this, but I think in the early days of kind of the cell phone era, there was a mass consumer protection group, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, that essentially reached an agreement with cell phone providers such that you could transport your cell phone number if you switch providers.

That is the blueprint here.

I think that is the exact blueprint for what we should be doing with these tech companies.

We should have some sort of mechanism to personalize our own data.

And much like a health savings account, you can take that from one health insurance provider or et cetera, it stays with you.

That should be the paradigm, the example for going on in the technology space.

Our data, we can contract it, we can farm it out to Facebook if we want to interact with our friends on Facebook or whatever social medium you choose to engage in.

But there has to be a way, and I think the cell phone blueprint is the best legal example that I've seen to be able to take this in somewhat concrete fashion and then just take it to platform to platform no matter what sprouts up.

Holly might have had a bill on this, it might have been where I saw it, but I, or maybe I just read it somewhere.

But the cell phone number example is the best thing that I've seen to possibly analogize to, I think, what you're getting at.

Last question.

What is the thing

that if you could stand on a mountaintop and shout,

Wake up!

X is happening or coming, what would would it be?

Oh, boy.

Only get one.

Only get one, yeah.

So just to tie it all together, Glenn.

Our Constitution is the most enduring political charter in the history of Western civilization.

Now, federalism was a very, very, very unique American addition to

Western politics, okay?

Separation of power was basically directly borrowed from Montesquieu, the French thinker, but federalism was very unique.

But the totality of all this, the notion of enduring a physical constitution in contradistinction to England, which was just and remains a non-written oral constitution, to physically codify this and write this down, and then to have the foresight to have we the people, of which the constitution's preamble speaks, be the ultimate sovereigns, to have we the people be the sovereigns, and then to allow us to form our own destinies within our own federalist dual sovereignty structures structures according to the dictates of our own whims, our own conscience, our own local accountable elected officials.

This is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful political system.

There's been no greater political system that's ever been devised.

And we are ungrateful is what we currently are.

We have lost any sense of appreciation or gratitude and kind of a Edmund Burke Burkean sense for what has come before us.

And I think the best path forward, and Concerta's been beating this drum for decades because it's true, the best path forward is to just be grateful again, to appreciate this wonderful, vibrant, rich political, legal tradition that's been bequeathed to us by our forebears.

And I would just encourage people, if I'm staying on a mountaintop, yelling across the country, take out your pocket constitution, go online, access it whoever you were, just read the damn thing.

It takes literally 30 minutes to read.

It is a short document, but there is so much wisdom embodied in that short document.

And we are just sticking our proverbial middle fingers at the founding generation, but they knew so much more that we just fundamentally do not know.

Constitution better than the Declaration of Independence?

No.

No.

Abraham Lincoln famously, I think the way he formulated it, right, was that the Constitution was the frame of silver around the apple of gold.

That is the Declaration.

Yeah.

So the Declaration over the Constitution for sure.

But they're both important.

Right.

Well, progressive, you know, Woodrow Wilson, back to him, he hated the Declaration, said

there was nothing to it that

had anything to do with our day.

It was a document stuck in the past.

And

I look at it as our mission statement.

And there's no greater...

When we hit that,

all right, then let's go look for another mission statement grander.

But there is no grander mission statement than that.

I can't think of anything that if I got together with a group of people and said, we're going to start a movement and we're going to change the world.

And we want the world to be a happy, healthy, loving place that guarantees everybody can do whatever they want, but we still have parameters and guardrails, but you're free.

I would present the Declaration of Independence.

That is our mission statement.

Yeah, you know, I did a recent

online course through the Tikva Fund, a Jewish kind of intellectual right-of-center group, and it was taught by Mayor Soloveitchik, who's a pretty prominent Orthodox rabbi in New York City, a politically conservative guy, brilliant, PhD, et cetera.

The way he formulates it is that the Constitution is a contract, but then to tie it back to what you were saying at the beginning of our conversation, the Declaration is a covenant.

The Declaration is what embodies the covenantal relationship of the entire American people.

And Lincoln, who was a pious figure, completely understood this.

He completely understood that the way that

the country was currently being run, including the abhorrent Dred Scott case, of course, of 1857, Roger Taney's worst ever decision as Chief Justice, it was fundamentally at odds with the incipient covenantal nature of America.

And he fought a very bloody war, a very, very bloody and tragic war.

But in so doing, he redeemed the promises of the Declaration of Independence.

He ensured the longevity and I would hope, perhaps permanence, if we can keep it of our covenant.

And what's interesting though is that it actually, even after the war, or during and after the war, I should say, it took constitutional amendments, the 13, 14th, 15th amendments, to actually do it.

So, you know, I was talking to law school earlier this week, and this leftist law professor was commenting after my talk saying, oh, the framers were like these old white slaveholders, like garbage arguments.

My basic response to these people is, It literally took the Article V amendment process that the framers had the intellectual humility and the foresight to include in our governing charter to ultimately eradicate all the things that you're complaining about.

They literally used the amendment process to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

But I digress.

The Declaration is our covenant.

It is beautiful.

No one understood it like Lincoln.

No one hated it, as you say, more like Woodrow Wilson.

But if I'm shining from the mountaintops, I am preaching constitutional structure.

I'm preaching separation of powers and federalism because we need to get back to that or else I think we're in really bad shape.

Thank you.

You got it.

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