Liberal vs Conservative HEATED Debate: Is America Doomed? | DSH #2056

Summary

Digital Social Hour, Episode #2056

Title: Liberal vs Conservative HEATED Debate: Is America Doomed?
Host: Sean Kelly
Guests: Kai (Liberal) & Micah (Conservative)
Date: July 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Sean Kelly moderates a fiery, in-depth debate between liberal commentator Kai and conservative Micah, exploring the question: “Is America doomed?” The conversation interrogates the roots of American dysfunction, focusing on national identity, political polarization, institutional decay, gerrymandering, campaign finance, immigration, assimilation, and the evolving definition of “American.” The debate is notable for its ideological depth, point-counterpoint style, and moments of surprising agreement.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Fundamental Problems in America

Kai’s Perspective: Institutional Dysfunction

• Root Problem: Dysfunctional political institutions prevent America from addressing its biggest problems—healthcare, education, immigration, corruption, etc.
  • “There is the right thing to do for political leaders, and then there’s the thing that they’re actually incentivized to do. And in many cases, these things could not be more different.” (03:22, Kai)
• Fixing institutions will rebuild trust and potentially restore a sense of national identity.
• Emphasizes party incentives that punish politicians for doing the “right thing.”

Micah’s Perspective: Decline in National Identity

• Root Problem: Erosion of a shared national identity, which has led to polarization and societal fragmentation.
  • Cites Federalist #2, where national unity is rooted in shared ancestry, language, religion, principles, and customs.
  • “People don’t feel that their views are being reflected. A lot of the changes that have corrupted or significantly shifted the idea of the national identity… have come in undemocratic ways.” (01:32, Micah)

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2. Political Institutions & Systemic Dysfunction

Campaign Finance

• Both agree that money in politics is corrupting:
  • Example: Thomas Massie’s defeat tied to large-scale financial intervention from interest groups. (08:20)
  • Kai claims Democrats actively push for campaign finance reform, whereas Republicans block such efforts (08:25–10:08)
  • Notable Quote: “If we want to fix our institutions, there’s only one party that’s even trying and the other party, I think, is very clearly making things worse.” (09:54, Kai)

Gerrymandering

• Kai: Democrats consistently propose anti-gerrymandering legislation; Republicans block it. (06:49–09:02)
• Micah: Both parties engage in manipulation when possible; sees it as a zero-sum game of interests. (14:41)
• Debate over the moral implications and real-world effects of gerrymandering on representation, especially for racial minorities (12:10–14:41).
• “Republican Party is leading a gerrymandering effort nationwide to try to rig the House maps to make our Democratic systems even more dysfunctional than they were before.” (06:49, Kai)

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3. National Identity: What Makes an American?

Assimilation and Culture

• Kai: National identity can be based on English language, allegiance to the U.S., and classical liberal values; religion is not essential.
  • “The criteria to be a good participant in that society is acceptance of those basic liberal values... I don’t think you have to be if you’re Christian.” (23:32, Kai)
• Micah: Assimilation is essential and national identity historically included morality and religiosity, often Christian-flavored.
  • “I think they have to be moral and religious. I think the citizens of the United States of America... need to be a moral and religious [people].” (21:52, Micah)
• Both agree on the need for assimilation (language, culture, values), but differ on the degree and specifics.
• Notable exchange on “hyphenated Americans” and whether immigrants should shed previous national identities (25:00–25:46).

Historic and Evolving Conceptions

• Debate over founders’ vision: Did they mean for the U.S. to be a specific kind of religious or ethnic state, or a pluralistic society based on values?
• Kai: The founders’ views were diverse and often more liberal than modern conservatives admit; “America as an idea” has always been part of the story (31:04).
• Micah: Nativism and pressure to assimilate are historically central (33:12). Prejudice is a recurring dynamic, not to be celebrated, but recognized as shaping assimilation pressures.

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4. Roots of Polarization & Media’s Role

Kai’s Argument: Media & Institutional Incentives

• Modern media (especially social media) worsens polarization by incentivizing outrage and tribalism. (44:34–45:14)
• “We start looking at our brothers and sisters in this country that are so similar in so many ways, and we don’t see them as people that…” (44:46, Kai)
• Suggests reforming voting systems (e.g., open primaries as in Alaska) would incentivize politicians to appeal to a broader base and reduce polarizing rhetoric (36:44–37:10).

Micah’s Argument: Appetite for Division from Identity Loss

• Media amplifies, but underlying cause is appetite for controversy due to decline in shared identity, diminished community involvement, and social capital. (58:27–61:15)
• Cites Robert Putnam’s research on the effects of diversity and social capital (72:51–73:00).

Flashpoint Quotes

• “I think we've begun to see that disintegration.” (45:10, Micah)
• “You can’t fix the separation of people... by simply saying... it’s not going to be a competitive, you know, Republican or Democratic Party primary.” (77:09, Micah)

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5. Immigration, Assimilation, and Policy Solutions

Debate on Immigration Systems

• Kai supports a merit-based, points immigration system prioritizing English language, cultural fit, and economic contribution while ensuring genuine asylum cases are honored.
  • “If you believe... that one of the uniting things about Americans is that we believe in classical liberal values... can we put that in the form of a test?” (80:45–81:00, Kai)
• Micah is more skeptical, warning about declining assimilation and “pre-simulation.” (78:23–78:30)
• Both agree on reforming asylum—need to restrict abuse and ensure real refugees are prioritized (82:11–82:23).
• Concessions: Both endorse creating systems to better track assimilation and cultural fit, though they debate testability and implementation.

On Mass Deportations

• Micah asks if Kai would accept large-scale deportations if that's what the people voted for.
• Kai: Would accept deporting recent arrivals, asylum frauds, and criminals, but not blanket deportations of DACA recipients or long-term integrated immigrants (107:45–108:00).
• Micah: “And a border wall.” (107:51)
• Kai: Open to a secure border; “Why not?” (108:08)

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6. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Political Incentives

• “You are punished for doing the right thing with losing. And that’s because we have a broken political system." (03:22, Kai)

On National Identity Definition

• "English, identifying with the nation of America... If you’re part something else, that kind of makes you necessarily less American, right?" (24:57, Kai)
• "You should abandon a prior kind of allegiance to another nation, right?" (25:25, Micah)
• "I 100% agree with you. I think that's super important. But I think you're getting almost closer to me where you're trying to create and foster a national identity which removes the hyphens from individuals." (25:46, Micah)

On Polarization

• “We get more views whenever we fight harder... If we have a super polite conversation this whole time and we had no intensity, it would get 14 views.” (44:34, Kai)

On Assimilation

• "We agree that people that come here should assimilate to American culture and they should speak English and they should be loyal to the United States of America." (34:37, Kai)
• "Markers for it are the assimilation to a language, and it is cultural homogeneity to the best degree that it can be maintained." (71:54, Micah)

On Achievable Reform

• “Let’s ban gerrymandering. That would fix this problem.” (99:36, Kai)
• "Okay. Maybe the least progressive of the immigration prescriptions I’ve heard from a liberal, I'm much more inclined to agree with your perspective." (85:27, Micah)

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Timestamps for Critical Segments

• 00:41 — Host introduces the debate: "What’s the fundamental problem in America?"
• 01:05–03:10 — Opening arguments: National identity vs. institutional dysfunction.
• 06:49–09:02 — Gerrymandering: Who to blame and why it matters.
• 14:41–16:42 — Racial/political gerrymandering & polarization’s roots.
• 21:51–24:22 — Religion, morality, and definitions of “American.”
• 34:37–36:41 — Assimilation, divisions, and the real causes of hate.
• 44:34–45:37 — Media, outrage, and social divisions.
• 80:17–85:27 — Immigration policy negotiation and points-based systems.
• 99:36–108:08 — Final exchange: mutual policy concessions on gerrymandering and deportations.
• 108:08–end — Episode closing and reflections.

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Tone and Language

The conversation is intense but respectful, with each side defending their ground while showing openness to nuance and agreement. Both participants use direct, sometimes provocative language but avoid ad hominem. Kai’s language is policy-and-process focused, while Micah provides more historical and cultural references. The debate is energetic, candid, and models “disagreeing better”—ironically, a contentious topic in their own exchange.

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Conclusion

Despite deep ideological divides and heated exchanges, the episode ends with rare cross-partisan concessions on issues like merit-based immigration, gerrymandering, and asylum reform. The discussion highlights that, beneath polarization, there is some shared ground on national challenges—though the solutions, priorities, and interpretations of American identity differ sharply between left and right.

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For Listeners

If you missed the episode, this summary provides a comprehensive overview of the debate’s progression, notable moments, and key points of contention and consensus. Whether you’re seeking understanding or ammunition, this debate embodies the wild, necessary messiness of American democracy in 2026.

Transcript

[Kai]

He said Mark Kelly should be executed and so should all the other Democrats that spoke out against him. He said he posted an AI video of Obama being arrested. He said that JB Pritzker and Brandon Johnson should be arrested. This is extremely divisive rhetoric.

[Micah]

I think there are institutional issues, systemic issues that disadvantage conservatives and Republicans in such a way that even what this appears like now way downstream, these issues that appear undemocratic, I think a lot of it is the result of a system that disadvantages Republicans. Look at law schools. Liberal professors outrank conservative professors 30 to 1. That's the conservative estimate, that you have no right to hold a slave. I think that is a very clear argument to make. It's very easy to make from the Constitution. I think it's a lot harder to pull out of the Constitution a right to gay marriage or a right to abortion.

[Kai]

Well, and that's what the conservative Supreme Court ended up giving us. I mean, people always say, like, oh, we had this really far left, progressive Supreme Court. All right, guys, another debate for y' all today. We got Kai and Micah here. The prompt is, what's the fundamental problem in America? We're going to start with Kai, end off with Micah. You ready to do this, gentlemen? Yeah. Yeah, let's do it.

[Micah]

Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks so much for having us. This is obviously very daunting question that we have to try to answer, but I think in reflecting over it, the number one thing that I keep going back to is it is a decline in national identity. I think this has created probably all of the problems that you might cite to me today. I think it absolutely is something that develops into a lack of trust in democratic institutions. People don't feel that their views are being reflected. A lot of the changes that have corrupted or significantly shifted the idea of the national identity, and I would argue eroded it, have come in undemocratic ways. So I think that there is a decline then in social capital. I think that is one of the major reasons for a lot of the polarization that we're seeing today. And I would argue that basically any other fundamental issue that we could argue exists in US Politics proceeds from the fact that people have nothing that unites them anymore. At least nothing substantial, though the way that they have had it historically. And in referring to what I believe unites people historically, the place I like to go, because it was something that was discussed, although many people won't tell you this. It was discussed in Federalist paper number two, Classic, the Classic by John Jay. Right. And this is not to Say that this is something that has to be set in stone forever, but absolutely something that was at least conceptualized by the individuals who made up the founding stock of the country and then later went on to write founding documents. And in describing the people of the United States of America, he describes that with equal pleasure. I have as often taken notice that the Providence. That providence has been pleased. And that maybe plays into another point. The Providence, the part that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who by their joint councils, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

[Kai]

Cool. So I agree that national identity has declined, and I think it's a big problem. But I think there's a lot of problems in this country that are really, really bad. Right. We have a healthcare system that doesn't make any sense. We agree. An immigration system that doesn't make any sense. I don't know if we actually agree on how to solve that problem, but we have an education system. And you look at pretty much any domain of policymaking in the United States and there's this optimal policy or there's several possible optimal policies that, you know, different cohorts of people could agree on. Then there's what we have, which is not a compromise. It's just something that is abysmally awful in so many ways. The healthcare system doesn't make sense the way that we. The prevalence of corruption in this country is awful. So many people in this country are suffering unnecessarily as the result of the public policy of the United States government and its states and localities. And I think that the thing that created that and also the issue with national identity is dysfunctional political institutions. There is the right thing to do for political leaders, and then there's the thing that they're actually incentivized to do. And in many cases, these things could not be more different. And I want to point to one high profile recent example, which is Thomas Massie. I don't agree with everything Thomas Massie did, but Thomas Massie voted against Trump and the Republicans 9% of the time. And what were those votes? Those were votes that were with the American people. And I think arguably he was correct. He made the correct choice for America. He tried to get transparency with the Epstein files, something that we wanted. We've been demanding and he got it for us, working with some others. He fought against protections for the AI industry from any sort of regulation. Of course, he fought against a piece of legislation which would have made it impossible to sue people for toxic pesticides. These are the votes that he took against the Trump administration. Yet what happened? He lost because we live in a political system where whenever you do the right thing, that doesn't actually increase your probability of losing, of winning, it decreases your probability of winning. You're punished for doing the right thing with losing. And that's because we have a broken political system. And I want us to explore the different ways in which it's broken. But I think that if we had a political system that actually worked, that brought people together to fix our common problems, that identified the many things that still unite us in this country, this issue that we have with national identity too, would be maybe to a greater degree, solved. I don't know if that would single handedly solve it, but it's hard for me to imagine that it would be as bad as it is now.

[Micah]

I think if we continue entertaining a lot of the political trends that we currently entertain. And of course, immigration is a big part of that. It perpetuates the issues that you're discussing. And it is those kind of attacks on kind of original, the original culture of the United States of America, the original stock, the original kind of founding principles, the way that a more progressive vision of the country has interpreted the Constitution to say things that I don't think the Founding Fathers would have ever imagined. I think all of that is going to actually perpetuate the dysfunctional, the dysfunctional political institutions that you are rightfully concerned about. And one of the things I think about is the, you know, the fact that we have racial and group identity politics playing such a larger part of our politics nationally on both sides of the political aisle. And I think when we discuss Massie, I think it was less that he stepped out of line with the party establishment and it was actually more that there was a heavy push. And I would argue maybe money is more of a factor there than actually the institution around.

[Kai]

I would consider that an institution, the campaign finance system is a part of our political institutions.

[Micah]

I agree, but I don't think it's a Republican thing. Like, I don't think it's that he stepped out of line with the President. I don't think that that's the institutional issue. I think the problem occurs on the side of the money. And maybe that's what you were getting.

[Kai]

That's exactly What I'm getting at. Yeah. I don't think that it's just a Republican Party problem. I think that. But what I would say, of course, just very quickly, is I think the Democratic Party fights for institutional reforms to make these systems work better, and the Republican Party fights to make them worse. And I can give you an example. Democrats have pushed to influence partisan gerrymandering nationwide. They've introduced three pieces of legislation to do this, and they've reintroduced them every single year for the past five years. That would mean that we actually have more competitive districts in this country. That would mean that we'd have fairer representation. We'd have more incentive for our politicians to actually care about the voters, not to just care about the Republicans in the Republican district, the Democrats in the Democratic district. And every single time they've introduced this legislation, the Republican Party has said no. And right now, the Republican Party is leading a gerrymandering effort nationwide to try to rig the House maps to make our Democratic systems even more dysfunctional than they were before.

[Micah]

I think some of it is course correction. I think there are ways. You know, for instance, I agree with the recent Supreme Court ruling on the issue of racial gerrymandering. Like, I believe that there are issues, there are ways in which we can correct it. And that actually speaks, by the way, to my point of racial politics and the way that special interests and the interests certainly of racial or ethnic groups plays a role in making and this kind of American system dysfunctional and corrupts it. I want to pin down the point of Thomas Massie. I think the bigger thing there is that we had his opposition to the Iran war, but not just the Iran war, but also some vocal criticism of Israel.

[Kai]

Absolutely.

[Micah]

$20 million was funneled in specifically to have him lose that race by pro Israeli dopes.

[Kai]

And who wants to reform the campaign finance system? It's the Democrats. Bernie Sanders just introduced a bill to limit super PAC contribution.

[Micah]

We can get into that. And Bernie Sanders is a great example. Maybe he suffered the Democratic dysfunctionality, the. Because they totally rigged the game against him with superdelegates back in 2016.

[Kai]

Sure. I mean, I think the superdelegate system shouldn't exist.

[Micah]

You understand, though, that that is an institutional.

[Kai]

That's an institutional issue with the Democratic Party. But I believe that if you look at who's actually trying to solve this issue, because you're mentioning big money in politics, who talks about that? It's the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party.

[Micah]

Right now, optimistically, we have more bipartisanship on this issue now than ever.

[Kai]

Hawaii is the only state in the country that's banned corporations from directly contributing to politicians. They're the first state to do this. Democrats, Pete Buttigieg is going around the country trying to get more states to do this. Republicans are on. It's a Republican Supreme Court that ruled in Citizens United to say that money is speech and that corporations can buy or elections. It's Democrats right now that are trying to limit super PAC contributions and there's zero Republican buy in. If Republicans actually wanted these campaign finance reforms, they, they could sign onto them. But instead, right now, the RNC and JD Vance are actually fighting a lawsuit which is before the Supreme Court right now to deregulate our regulations on campaign finance even more. They're saying the few things that we have left, those are actually also unconstitutional. You know, Citizens United, Just one last thing. Yeah. Citizens United was a right wing organization attacking Hillary Clinton. They're the ones who argued that money is speech and that we should have no limits. So I think the right has clearly been much worse on this. Doesn't mean you have to identify with the Republicans that did this. But I think that we have to be honest that if we want to fix our institutions, there's only one party that's even trying and the other party, I think, is very clearly making things worse.

[Micah]

I think if the Democratic Party wants to fix the institutions, they should start with their convention.

[Kai]

They should start with their we reform superdelegates. That's been reformed.

[Micah]

Well, and I'm willing to give you that, and I would hope that you can give me the good faith as well of saying that there is more Republican effort to remove especially foreign spending, but also internally to remove the ability of major corporations and major political donors both on the right and the left, to sway the results of elections. There was a huge outcry by Republicans at Thomas Massie's defeat. Who do you think it was that was supporting Thomas Massie?

[Kai]

There's right wingers that are against what happened to Thomas Massie, but the truth is the Republican Party is very much in support of what happened to Thomas. It's Republican donors, it's Republican campaign operatives, it's Trump, it's Vance, it's Stephen Miller. The entire administration, the whole apparatus came down on Massie. There's right wingers in this country that want to solve problems. There's many good right wingers in this country, but they're not the ones that are in the Republican Party.

[Micah]

I think this is where you get though, as well, to the point of for instance, Mr. Senator Bernie Sanders, right? When you have Bernie Sanders, who is pushing for movement within the Democratic Party, is totally shut out by them, is totally pushed down by them, I could absolutely make the argument that, look, you had a guy who was really trying to cause some reform, and you guys crushed him. The dysfunctional Democratic Party, and we're making this into a partisan debate. I hope we can avoid that in just a second. But I do want to say that Thomas Massie represents the Republican side of a guy like Bernie Sanders, who is not a typical Republican, who's not like Bernie Sanders was, or a typical, you know, partisan. And nonetheless, he was crushed by the institution. So I think that that kind of argument goes both ways. But I do want to address that point. The kind of subversion of the Democratic system by individuals who do not even represent national interests. You know, it's one thing to have people spending money within the nation. It's another thing to have people spending money outside of it, or to have politicians, Republican or Democrat, pandering, specifically to certain racial groups, gerrymandering certain districts to ensure that there is a majority of one particular race. I think that is a much big, bigger threat to our democracy and has been so historically for a far longer amount of time.

[Kai]

I don't think that it's a threat to our democracy. The fact that for a long time, it was like 50 years or so, Republicans could not. And before that, it was Democrats could not crack black communities that are contiguous into multiple districts so that they have no representation. Look at what just happened in Tennessee, though. This is what the VRA stopped. There was the city of Memphis, Tennessee. It was in one district for like, 30, 40 years. The Republican Party, as soon as the VRA is gone, they take this. It's a majority black area. The city of Memphis is like 55% black. And they split it into three districts so that those people have no representation. The truth is that the Voting Rights act was enacted to protect black people from being. For having their votes diluted.

[Micah]

No representation as what? As black people or as Democrats?

[Kai]

No, no, as. As black people. But here's the thing.

[Micah]

Hold on. How. How are you. How are you showing that they have no representation as black people rather than no representation?

[Kai]

Because you are drawing lines where those people, those black people cannot elect the. They actually want.

[Micah]

How so?

[Kai]

Because these African Americans, 85, 90% of them, are voting for one candidate, which happens to be the Democratic candidate. And now you're saying, well, we don't like the candidates that you black people choose. So we're going to split you into three different districts.

[Micah]

I don't think that's the way it's framed. I don't think it's, we don't like the candidates that black people choose. I think it's that, well, the Republicans don't like Democrats and if black people choose Democrats, Republicans are going to. And then this, this is where we get into the Constitution. This is where we get into the Supreme Court. This is political gerrymandering. And we can have a conversation about the political gerrymandering.

[Kai]

Yes, yes.

[Micah]

And political gerrymandering. You can do racial gerrymandering. On the other hand, you can't.

[Kai]

Well, the Voting Rights act was enacted in such a way that it limited political gerrymandering that was targeted at a specific race such to such an extent that it was indistinguishable from racial gerrymandering. That's exactly what it did. It made gerrymandering less bad. Now you could. My preference was no gerrymandering, no racial gerrymandering, no political gerrymandering. But the old rule of, under the old test from the Supreme Court, I studied this in my law school classes as a first year law student, is that basically you could say you're targeting Democrats, but if you targeting Democrats looks just like you targeting black people, you can't do that. Which banned a lot of the most extreme racial gerrymandering. Now, I'm going to make something very clear. I don't think any states are obligated to draw super crazy looking districts so that they're majority black. But I do think no state should be allowed to target a contiguous community of interest, which is one city, and split it into three different districts. I don't think they should be able to do that. And I think the Voting Rights act actually protected us from that kind of extreme gerrymandering like we're seeing right now.

[Micah]

I think it also created some incredibly gerrymandered maps that drew up boundaries just so. And both parties competed for this. Both parties competed so that they could have a majority black district. But also, you know, if the Republicans could take it and say, look, you know, we need a majority black district, but we're going to like try and, you know, wiggle our way around it as best we can. I agree with you. In a perfect system, I don't think gerrymandering occurs. But I have a view of politics where this is like, this is a competition, this is a zero sum game. And you know, we could go back to the Beginning of time. And I think you would always find that there is no original mover. There's a constant competition of competing interests. Republican, Democrat, Whig, whatever it was.

[Kai]

But there's very clearly people that are making things worse. Right. Like Trump is the kind of person who says whenever the other person wins, that doesn't count. The Republicans right now. The Republicans right now started this mid cycling gerrymandering effort. I've counted the states. There's 10 Republican states that have gerrymandered or in the process of gerrymandering. There is one Republican was one Democratic state that's actually responded and there's one other Democratic state which tried to temporarily respond. That's the state of Virginia. Yeah, it's 10 to 8 to 10 to 2.

[Micah]

I think. I think a lot. I think a lot more would do it and a lot more would be in favor of if they could win. I think a lot of it. Now, as Democrats see that this is not a winning strategy.

[Kai]

We tried to ban political gerrymandering back in 2021, before any of the redistricting had happened. And the House map was actually biased a little bit towards Democrats. It was like 0.2 towards Democrats. And we were trying to ban gerrymandering right then and there. So the truth is Democrats have a genuine opposition to gerrymandering, and that's just one of many issues.

[Micah]

This is again, you know, I think, and maybe we just disagree about our level of analysis. I don't think that people are bipartisan. I don't think that they take this and well, actually, I do believe people can be bipartisan, but I don't think that people remove all of their biases and attempt to find a solution without any kind of political benefit. And I also don't just want to make this a gerrymandering debate, but for instance, in the state of Utah, we have a map that's newly been created where there is a very deep, progressive Democratic district. And what that's done actually is it's created more polarization in the state. Every single.

[Kai]

For Salt Lake City to have one representative instead of being split into four different districts.

[Micah]

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll tell you my issue with it. My issue is because there's not a procedural. There's not procedural stability. The Supreme Court ruled in a way which I think is totally unconstitutional, and I think plainly so. And it ruled not only in a plainly unconstitutional way, but also with the. With the group that actually started the initiative with better boundaries, with Mormon Women for Ethical Government, who proposed the map Instead of the legislature. Although the Utah state constitution says that the state legislature shall redistrict and draw these maps, there was a separate institution that was chosen by the supreme court that drew the map that we are currently using.

[Kai]

But that makes perfect sense.

[Micah]

Well, you can claim so, but it also treads on the constitution because.

[Kai]

Because the constitution was amended in the supreme court in route.

[Micah]

Hold on. Was.

[Kai]

What is it?

[Micah]

Article 10, section 1. I'm trying to remember the specific section of the Utah state constitution. I can check it if you want. But was that. Was that section of the Utah state

[Kai]

constitution amended in order for the other. Was it. In order for the other provision that was actually added to the constitution to be enforceable? The court must impose a new map within a timely manner. But you're an originalist, right? You believe in the original public meeting. Okay, yes. So whenever people ratify a constitutional amendment, we look at the text of what it says, but we also look at what's implied in order for it to be necessary, like, in order for it to actually be implemented. And if you have a gerrymandering ban that says, hey, you can't, like, split Salt Lake City into four different districts so that they have no representation, it is presumed that if you have to strike down a map that the legislature drew and there's not very much time, you can impose an actually fair map, that's presumed. It's not even enforceable otherwise.

[Micah]

Well, I think it's a big problem, though, is because it is enforceable. If you give specific qualifiers to the legislature, you give them the proper amount of time. There's a lot of internal state politics that made this process a lot more difficult for Republicans in the state than prior. And the issue is, at the end of the day, you created a situation where the supreme Court very clearly did something that is unconstitutional. You're claiming now that this amendment takes priority over the state constitution.

[Kai]

No, this amendment is part of the constitution.

[Micah]

But. But directly. Hold on. But. But an implementation directly contradicts in the most clear way, the way that the redistricting is supposed to occur, that the map must come from the body of the state legislature.

[Kai]

Every amendment takes precedent over previous parts of the constitution. If you look at the United States Constitution, we have three fifths still in there for how we count African Americans. But that's not effective language anymore because we have future amendments to the Constitution that nullify previous language.

[Micah]

Then that's. Then that's important. Do you think that that is no longer effective language, that section of the Utah state constitution?

[Kai]

Absolutely. There's a new amendment. That's how every amendment process works.

[Micah]

Hold on, hold on. But then this gets to the point, this gets to what I'm talking about. You will eventually arrive at a point where the treading on the Constitution and the reinterpretation of it to do things

[Kai]

that, you know, it's the treading on the Constitution have an amendment.

[Micah]

Hold on, hold on. I agree with you. But the way that you get your amendments begins to depart further and further away from the intent of the Constitution. I think absolutely that every single human being has the same moral value that is given to them, that is outlined in the Constitution, that they are all created in the image of God and the Declaration of Independence. I believe that there's a really easy argument to make and a very clear causal logic chain to be argued for the emancipation of slaves, for the idea that you have no right to hold a slave. I think that is a very clear argument to make. It's very easy to make from the Constitution. I think it's a lot harder to pull out of the Constitution a right to gay marriage or a right to abortion.

[Kai]

Well, and that's what the conservative Supreme Court ended up giving us. I mean, people always say, like, oh, we had this really far left progressive Supreme Court. We've had a conservative Supreme Court.

[Micah]

I didn't say anything.

[Kai]

No, I know you've not said that. I know you've not said that.

[Micah]

In fact, my issue here's bipartisan. What it is, is it's constitutional.

[Kai]

But you've mentioned, you mentioned that there's this been this progressive reinterpretation of the United States Constitution. It is literally progressive. And what I would say is, you know, we had a Republican supreme court majority for 55 years. One of the reasons why liberals feel so angry about the current state of the Supreme Court is the fact that it's been conserved for so long and now it's getting even more radically conservative.

[Micah]

And it doesn't rule in their favor.

[Kai]

Well, it rules in ridiculous ways. I mean, if you look at how the reasoning of the current Supreme Court's not originalist. I'm an originalist. I am somebody on the left.

[Micah]

Like in the case. Let's take one of the things I mentioned. Let's take abortion. Do you think the conservative court overruling the original Roe v. Wade decision?

[Kai]

I think the original Roe v. Wade decision doesn't even make sense because it's based on, I agree, due process. Now, what an originalist would argue is there's a different clause called privileges or Immunities. And that actually could make sense. You know, the way that Supreme Court doctrine has gotten divorced from what the actual text says is super crazy. But it's not just by, like, you know, like a bunch of liberal activists in the court. There's a lot of conservatives on the court, for instance, Kavanaugh, who thinks that anything that's traditionally been the case in the United States, you can just apply that as, like, interpretation of the Constitution, which is really weird.

[Micah]

I'm happy to agree with you that I think both Republican or originalist judges and progressive judges can both differ and defer from the Constitution, or not defer, but they can diverge from it very significantly. I'm not against that. I think what it does eventually is it undermines that critical institution.

[Kai]

I agree.

[Micah]

Here's the thing, though. I think the Constitution can only work if a sense of national identity. And certainly the people within the nation is retained or maintained pretty similar over time.

[Kai]

What is the people within the nation?

[Micah]

I think they have to be moral and religious. I think the citizens of the United States of America, like John Adams said, need to be a moral and religious.

[Kai]

So I am not religious.

[Micah]

Certainly there are a lot of people in the United States at the founding of the country that were not moral or religious. John Adams still said what he did.

[Kai]

So you would say I am what? I'm a problem for our national identity, the fact that I'm not religious.

[Micah]

No, I think that you are an individual, just like every other individual on a spectrum. On a scatter plot.

[Kai]

Right. Sure.

[Micah]

That arranges themselves around an average. Around the kind of typical general culture of America. Obviously, me saying that America has a specific culture or a general culture does not mean that every person in the United States fits in perfectly to that culture. The same way that, you know, although a state constitution could have said that the state was Protestant, was Baptist, whatever, did not mean that every individual in the state.

[Kai]

So. But if there's a lot of me. Right. Let's say half the country's me, do we have a national identity problem?

[Micah]

I think. I think eventually you do. And that's what I think is happening.

[Kai]

You look at all these Americans.

[Micah]

Yes.

[Kai]

Huge number of Americans.

[Micah]

Yes.

[Kai]

That are not religious in the way that you are, or they're not. Maybe, like Christian. Maybe that's your category. And they have moral values. But, you know, they believe in liberalism. They believe in. By liberalism, I mean small L, classical liberalism, democracy, tolerance, all these things that we have in America. They believe in those things.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

They have our culture. They speak English they only identify with America.

[Micah]

But in your view, made a lot of assumptions already.

[Kai]

Yes.

[Micah]

I don't think are true of the reality.

[Kai]

Well, this is what qualified. This was what counts for me. This is what counts for a lot of people.

[Micah]

Can I write down what counts for you? What do you need to be in America?

[Kai]

I think that. Well, I think there's multiple things that can contribute and, like, maybe you can hit some threshold where you're. Some people are like, maybe more American than others. It's kind of what I was saying

[Micah]

just now, how you can be included despite the fact that you are not necessarily religious.

[Kai]

But you agree with me. I don't think that America was ever founded to be a particular religious state. I think what makes America and liberal societies in general, the criteria to be a good participant in that society is acceptance of those basic liberal values. The idea that you have the right to author your own destiny and determine your own fate. And I shouldn't try to use the state or personally force upon you any particular set of practices. Right. The idea that the state is there to serve the people, to ensure social harmony between us, but not to control us and not to impose Islam or any other particular religion. I think once you meet, you have those values and then you comport with American culture, English, identifying with the nation of America. You are an American. I don't think you have to be if you're Christian.

[Micah]

I want to write. I want to write these down specifically. So regarding what makes an individual an American, they need to speak English.

[Kai]

Yeah, I think that people, if you need to be part of American culture to be purely American. Yeah, absolutely.

[Micah]

And so then to define the term that you used to be part of American culture. American culture is English speaking.

[Kai]

Yeah. Identifying with the nation of America identifies

[Micah]

and that kind of. You're describing allegiance. You mean political allegiance?

[Kai]

Yeah, I mean. I mean, like, you don't have to be loyal to Trump and the American government. Of course not. But you say I'm American. Right. I'm not like, I'm not like a Spanish person who happens to live in America. Right. That person's, in a certain sense, not American in the same way that other people are.

[Micah]

So, you know, there's maybe a problem with hyphenated Americanism.

[Kai]

Yeah. I think that whenever people come to America, they should come here to become Americans. You know, my dad came to this country from Iran, but my dad's not an Iranian. My dad is an American. He's an American who happens to have come from Iran, but he speaks English. He loves this country. Yeah, he does. Iranians, dude.

[Micah]

Iranians are, like, the widest people.

[Kai]

Yeah, we're pale as hell.

[Micah]

There were a lot of you at cpac.

[Kai]

Yeah, yeah, there is. There was a lot of IR Iranians at cvac, but.

[Micah]

Okay, so. So not hyphenated. You should. You should then abandon a prior kind of allegiance to. To another nation, right?

[Kai]

Yeah. I mean, to be fully American. Yeah, I think so. I mean, like, if you're part something else, that kind of makes you necessarily less American, right? I'm part Spanish and part American. I guess you could. You could be Spanish American, but you're not really fully American, the same way that people that are 100% American are

[Micah]

100% agree with you. I. I think that's super important. But I think you're getting almost closer to me where you're trying to create and foster a national identity which removes the hyphens from individuals. The problem is that what we've entertained over the course of now 60 years a little more, is absolutely working in the opposite direction. It is hyphenating Americans. It is bifurcating society.

[Kai]

But there's a difference between me and you. I'd say in many ways, what I'm saying is very similar to Obama in 2006, where he says, there's not a blue America. There's not a red America. There's not a Muslim America. There's not a Christian America. That's what United States of America. And I think that we've had political leaders in the past that have cultivated that national identity and helped us define the boundaries of. This is what unites us. I think one of the reasons why our national identity has declined is Trump has not done that in the same way. Now, I'm not gonna say Trump is to blame for everything, but I think that is something that we should be pointing out.

[Micah]

Well, I agree to that point. Just real quick. I think you're right. I don't think Trump caused it. I think he captured a moment, and the political polarization that we're both describing is a result of what I'm saying here. There's a collapse of identity.

[Kai]

I think it's a result of the political system that actually encourages people to be like Trump.

[Micah]

You're divided because of the political system rather than the fact that they don't identify with anything meaningful.

[Kai]

Well, I think that. That the political system actually helps generate that. But I want to go back one step, and then we can get to this.

[Micah]

Yeah, I do want to hear that.

[Kai]

So it seems like the difference between me and you, there's certainly overlap. I don't think that being Christian in the same way that the founders were is something that's essential or even a contributing factor to being an American.

[Micah]

Do you think it ever was?

[Kai]

Maybe at one point in time, which was like a defining feature, but it's like you're not Christian in the same way that Christians were at the very beginning, certainly. But I wouldn't say, oh, well, your Christianity makes you a little bit less American. I think America has shifted to a certain extent of what it means to be American. Any country over time shifts a little bit. And I think that the real thing that unites this country throughout its history is this basic acknowledgement of the. Of liberal values in a basic, common culture. Hold on.

[Micah]

Can I step in there? Sure. I think that this is a very radically progressive way of looking at the first 200 years of the United States's history, where you take a United States where people would very readily tell you, yeah, it's like, we got too many Chinese. We got too many Irish.

[Kai]

Too many Irish.

[Micah]

Yeah, we got too many Irish. You know, these mix. They got to get out of here. I hope you can say that on YouTube. You know, there's a whole controversy on Twitch with the word cracker. So, no, I think you're fine. I think it's fine. I think it's fine Irish people. But what you're doing now is you're taking the lens that we have today, which views what unites America is basically just lowercase L, liberalism, classical liberalism. And you're saying that so long as people kind of believe in that general liberal political philosophy, they can become an American as long as they also speak

[Kai]

English, which participate in American culture.

[Micah]

And if you define American culture, then it becomes circular as you speak English and you believe in classical liberalism.

[Kai]

No, no, no, I didn't say that. Because American culture is more than that. Right. What is American culture more than the bananas and rice? Well, you know, American culture, I mean, there's so many things like how we greet each other, how we talk to each other, you know, that we like. And I'd say, like, you know, there's. That you could very clearly tell somebody who has, like, American mannerisms and somebody who doesn't. Right. You can tell somebody who's recently arrived here and who doesn't. There's certainly variety amongst America. America is a very diverse and multicultural place in a certain extent. Like, some of us like Indian food. I don't think, like, liking Indian food makes you less American. But I think there are some cultural behaviors that we say, yeah, this is like the kind of stuff that's unique to America.

[Micah]

Here's what's interesting. That was Christianity for a significant part of the US's history only until.

[Kai]

What was it?

[Micah]

When was the ruling on prayer in schools? Was that 76?

[Kai]

I don't remember.

[Micah]

I think it was. I probably have it written down here too. I think it was in 1976. And this gets as well to my point about the imposition, by the way, of some of the morality. You have a situation in the United States of America where Christianity is basically taken as the law of the land. Not to say literally, like we don't have a state church. And I believe that's for the benefit, by the way of the religion rather than to the detriment of it. You know, it's. What is it? Quoting the great Supreme Court justices that we both love. I think it was. Who was it? Was it Scalia or was it Alito who said that? It's freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

[Kai]

I think that's Alito.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

I might be wrong.

[Micah]

And so I think so too. Anyway, there is a significant change and shift in the actual idea of what it means to be an American. And you are simply applying the standard that we hold today and you're applying it to all of the nation's history, despite the fact that now we live in a time where people identify less and less. In fact, the number of people who claim that they are happy to be American, I think it's lower than 40% now.

[Kai]

And I think it's a result of a media environment. But like, let me hold.

[Micah]

It's the result of a media environment. I think it's also the fact that people really don't know what it even means to be in America because it's reduced to like you can speak English and you believe in like progressive classical liberalism.

[Kai]

Nobody said progressive, but let's take a step back. So your argument, your argument against my perception.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

Was. Well, there was people in the past who thought that were prejudiced towards Irish people.

[Micah]

The people that founded the country had an entirely different conception of what it meant to be an American than you do now.

[Kai]

That's pretty, pretty much irrelevant. No, it's pretty much totally relevant. No, no. First of all, I think that certainly there's a lot of dispute amongst the founders about what the idea of the American project was.

[Micah]

Yes.

[Kai]

Some of the true believer liberals that like the idea that America is an idea is just like totally divorced from American history. Is just not true. There was not like one, you know, agreed upon. This is what the American project is. Now. There were certain features that everybody agreed on. They agreed on the liberal features to a certain extent. They disagreed on how much further we should go. Right. But they were. They were necessarily a more pluralistic society. You know, the whole idea of the establishment clause was a really, really progressive invention of like, hey, we're actually not going to establish a religion, and we're also not going to abridge free exercise. And they weren't just talking about free exercise for Christians. It was, you know, the first Jews that arrived in the United States. And nobody thought, you guys can't actually exercise Judaism in the United States. At least those founders didn't.

[Micah]

I agree. Do you think the founders would have had any problem with the way that, for instance, Islam currently presents itself in the United States?

[Kai]

I have Muslim friends. Yeah. It's not to be like, I'm not Islamophobic. I have Muslim friends. But I spoke to a Muslim friend of mine recently, and he is what I consider a fantastic example of assimilation. He says, I identify as American. I love this country. I'm not going to go put my prayer rug up in the corner of the gym and start praying super loudly and infringing on everybody else's ability to just live their daily life. Right. I'm not going to go, like, push my religion on other people. I respect that. I'm part of the United States.

[Micah]

Yes.

[Kai]

That is something I say. Yeah, I guess. American 100%. That guy's American. Just like African Americans who convert to Islam in the United States, they don't just stop being American because they, you know, America's not like some of the black Hebrew Israelites. They try. Yeah, but like, you're just like, stop being American because you happen to have the wrong religious views.

[Micah]

Right.

[Kai]

And the same way, if you come to the United States and you're like, you don't respect our country at all, you know, at least some radical Syrian immigrant who, you know, might have been part of the terrorist organization. You come here. Yeah. I don't think that guy actually counts as very American. But I want to talk about this Christianity point.

[Micah]

Yes.

[Kai]

Because there was a huge amount of dispute at the very beginning of the country about who counts as a Christian for the vast majority of American history. We're talking about all these prejudice people you're referencing. They didn't consider you a Christian.

[Micah]

You're absolutely.

[Kai]

And so I don't think that we should be engaging in this game of, like, well, you know, there's this specific sphere of real American religious values.

[Micah]

Hold on.

[Kai]

And then anybody beyond that doesn't have real American religious values.

[Micah]

Hold on, hold on. I think there's a distinction here. Is there suspicion? Absolutely. Towards Latter Day Saints? Was there a lot of suspicion? Yes. One of us was elected to the Congress. His name was Smooth. I forget his first name. But Senator. I believe he was a senator. Senator Smoot. There was hearings. I forget how long they went on. They called in members of the church. They called in the leadership. They were trying to deduce if he was truly interested in the good of the United States or if he was part of this, you know, runaway cult. They were really very skeptical. I think that skepticism, the nativism that the United States has had since its inception is the most American element that we could point to. It is the thing that has been sustained for longer and really only started to change in 1960.

[Kai]

So you think prejudice is something that's inherent to being in America? I mean, there's prejudice against African Americans for the majority of this country's history.

[Micah]

I think the way that you're framing it changes a little bit what I'm trying to describe. I think there is a significant balancing, or there's a force that creates an equilibrium. Right. Of people coming into the country and a strong pressure for them to assimilate. Right now that pressure to assimilate, it's off the scale. We've had a lot of people enter and we have dropped that weight completely off the scale.

[Kai]

I just don't think that's the same as what you were previously saying. Now, I don't think prejudice or nativism is an inherent feature of what it means to be an American.

[Micah]

But I think that it's necessary if we entertain a shift in who comes into the United States.

[Kai]

I believe that people that come here should assimilate to American culture and they should speak English and they should be loyal to the United States of America in the fundamental way that citizens identify with their own country.

[Micah]

Would you be in favor of getting rid of the 65:20 rule where if you've lived in the United States for 20 years and you're above the age of 65, you don't have to take the citizenship test.

[Kai]

Everybody should have to take the citizenship test in English.

[Micah]

Perfect.

[Kai]

We shouldn't be accommodating.

[Micah]

Hold on. Why did that law change?

[Kai]

Well, I think there's plenty of people who disagree with us on this issue. Right? There's plenty of people.

[Micah]

That's what I'm Talking about there's plenty

[Kai]

of people who don't believe in assimilation in the same way. But here's something that I would say when we talk about the division in this country and the lack of a national identity. You see all these people on the Internet all the time. They see these liberals, we need to have a civil war with them. And liberals say the same thing. These conservatives, I hate these conservatives. They don't hate these people because they're immigrants.

[Micah]

Yeah, right.

[Kai]

I mean, you look at the biggest division in this country, you see immigrants, you see Republicans all the time will be like, I prefer this Hispanic Trump supporter who has like a Latino accent and everything over that white liberal. He doesn't. You know, the issue is not immigration for this guy, it is hatred. And what's creating this hatred in this country? Well, it's political leaders that are divisive and it's political institutions that incentivize them to be divisive. If you are a divisive Republican candidate right now, you are more likely to win your Republican primary if you're some watered down Mitt Romney. Like, I really like everybody. Let's be all unified. You get hated. Look at your governor, Spencer Cox. He's so. Oh, I like some Democrats. He's so nice to everybody.

[Micah]

This is the Disagree better framework.

[Kai]

They hate him. They want somebody who's gonna go up there.

[Micah]

I don't hate Spencer Cox. Yes, I think he's totally wrong. Disagree better is a terrible political decision.

[Kai]

But the point is they want the Republican primary. Voters want somebody who's gonna come up there and say these dang liberals are destroying our country and turning the kids trans. That is the rhetoric that is incentivized by these partisan primaries. And there's rhetoric on our side, you know, like, there's so many people in the Democratic. If you're a Democratic primary candidate. Yeah, you wanna, we're gonna pack the Supreme Court and I don't know, did Trump actually get shot in the year? And you know, maybe Charlie Kirk deserved it. Like, that is what is incentivized.

[Micah]

It's like the Libertarian Conference and it's

[Kai]

like, well, that's political institutions. That's not immigration, that's political institutions. And you know, if we can fix those political institutions so that it's not a partisan primary anymore. You actually have to appeal to everybody to advance. And the way that you win elections is by actually appealing to the majority of people, not just 10% of them. I think you're going to get leaders that are a lot more unified and I think that's gonna help our political system operate better, fix these problems. But I think we're also gonna have more of a shared identity. Once again.

[Micah]

What do you think Utah is the least polarized of the states?

[Kai]

I don't know if. Is it the least polarized of all the states?

[Micah]

I don't know if it's the least polarized of all the states.

[Kai]

Look at Alaska.

[Micah]

But why has it trended? Why is it the only state that trended away from Trump?

[Kai]

I mean, I think North Carolina turned away from Trump, too. I'm not trying to be pedantic. Yeah, North Carolina. I mean. Cause y', all that. Not y'.

[Micah]

All.

[Kai]

But you are part of the College Republicans. You're part of the College Republicans of America. So I could say y', all to a certain extent. They nominated a guy who's cheating on his wife and posting about how his wife's sister, he likes it when she pisses on him. Right. Mr. Robinson, the Republican candidate for North Carolina.

[Micah]

I don't know.

[Kai]

I'm not familiar. So, yeah, made a very bad candidate and ended up making North Carolina more blue. But, yes, maybe Utah shifted blue, too.

[Micah]

Yeah. I think of Republican voters, Utah was the one state that shifted away from Trump. Why do you think that is?

[Kai]

I think that the particular religious community you come from supports the idea of treating people with decency and being kind. And I think a lot of religious people of certain perspectives have that kind of view, and that leads them to not like the kind of behavior of Trump where he talks about how he likes it when people die. When you're on the other side.

[Micah]

I think we're at an important point because I don't disagree with a lot of the things you're saying. Admittedly, I think that there need to be. You know, I think we should be more conservative. And actually, a lot of the voters who have turned away from Trump, it's not that they're less conservative, although they may identify less with the Republican Party.

[Kai]

I don't think Trump's conservative.

[Micah]

Well, we likely agree on many of these.

[Kai]

I don't think Trump's anything. He's himself.

[Micah]

I think he wakes up and he decides, no, but. But I think there's ways in which certainly he's advanced the. You know, I think on immigration, he's a conservative, certainly, and that's a whole can of worms I don't want to get into. I want to address the point that you're bringing up, which is particularly that people are gravitating to these more and more Polarizing candidates. They're going to Trump, they're going to aoc, maybe on the left, they're going to the Freedom Caucus. And then what's the. Are AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar? Do they have a caucus?

[Kai]

Yeah, they had a thing, but it's not really. It's like there's like a Bernie wing of the Democratic Party. It's not really united under one singular organization anymore. Yeah, there was a name for it. Well, they were just as Democrats.

[Micah]

They were.

[Kai]

The Justice Democrats was the name, but I don't really think it's. It's that important of an entity anymore.

[Micah]

Yeah, I haven't heard much about them, but let's say they're gravitating to these more hardline wings. I absolutely disagree with you, and you'll have to correct me if you did not claim this, but I don't think this is caused by the candidates. I think it is the temperature of the people in the United States. I think Trump was a man for his moment. Trump realized that there were so many millions, especially of white middle class Americans, who kind of felt that they'd been totally, you know, shafted by the political system in the United States. They were not being represented. And he was able to take a lot of their grievances and he was able to put them into a. I almost don't want to say, you know, a platform, but I mean, to some extent he had one and he was able to voice a lot of those concerns. I don't think it is the candidates or even the political institutions that cause that divide. I think it is that all of the people who have for a long time had a sense of meaning in their religion, like in Utah, which is why we're less polarized in the sense of being an American, that they were proud of that in their communities as part of civic groups, all of those markers declined because we began to think of ourselves less as Americans because we were unable to define it. And I think it is that decline that created the polarization.

[Kai]

I think. I think if you construt this broadly, it can kind of obstruct the very clear point, which is that when Trump came down the escalator in 2016 and started talking about Mexican immigrants, like the. Whenever he said Hillary Clinton should be arrested, whenever he started talking about reporters, like it was bad for them to criticize him, he even suggested it was illegal. Now he definitely says it's legal. You're not allowed to criticize me. It's the kind of Stuff he says. He said Mark Kelly should be executed, and so should all the other Democrats that spoke out against him. He said he posted an AI video of Obama being arrested. He said that JB Pritzker and Brandon Johnson should be arrested. This is extremely divisive rhetoric, and I want you to concede this. That is not helpful to uniting the national identity of the United States. It's not right.

[Micah]

I agree. And I think this is a place where you and I would agree that both sides are kind of running to the most extreme ends.

[Kai]

Both sides are not doing the same thing. Joe Biden did not do this.

[Micah]

Hold on, hold on, hold on. I think there are very different things. Who is it? Kamala. How do you pronounce her name?

[Kai]

Kamala Harris.

[Micah]

Yeah. Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris, I believe, described Donald Trump as a fascist.

[Kai]

Okay, here's a fun fact. Here's a fun fact.

[Micah]

Well, I don't want to dive too much into this.

[Kai]

I think we need to, though, because this is actually essential to the point here.

[Micah]

Okay?

[Kai]

And I want you to be able to acknowledge this and we can come to some agreement on this before we

[Micah]

get to that point. I just want to address that. It's one line. It's one line regarding your point about Trump. When he came down the escalator, whether you like it or not, there were a bunch of people who were ready to hear what he was saying. It didn't matter what he said or. I mean, it did matter, right?

[Kai]

It did definitely matter.

[Micah]

You have to address what caused those people to feel that way. It was not Trump.

[Kai]

It was the Tea Party media who hated Barack Obama. I mean, let's think those people were

[Micah]

mad because of the Tea Party.

[Kai]

The Tea Party.

[Micah]

The Tea Party got those immigrants.

[Kai]

Fox, Fox News, all of these media organizations before Trump were saying the craziest things about Obama. Obama was coming out and giving speeches and saying, you know, we need to be united as a country. I want to work with Republicans. He went to the Republican breakfast just to hear their criticisms. He literally would bring his legislation to them and try to get them to sign onto it. He was nothing like Trump. The Republican media apparatus, though, talked about Obama as if he was a Kenyan radical jihadist communist.

[Micah]

Okay?

[Kai]

And that is counterpoint.

[Micah]

John McCain, who ran against him, literally was telling old women to, like, not be mean to Obama.

[Kai]

Yeah. And that was a great thing. And that kept the country more united than it is now. Because here's the thing. We used to. We had a situation with the media that was divisive and it was much more divisive on the right than the left to begin with. Then we, eventually we had leaders that were trying to keep things unified. Mostly, of course, there was Republicans in the House that were still pretty controversial back in that period of time. Trump comes out, he starts using really insane rhetoric towards Democrats, which I'm glad that you can acknowledge. Right. And his rhetoric has been much more dramatic than Democratic rhetoric. And this has worked. It's a winning strategy in primaries because people are tribalistic. People want to feel like they're better than others.

[Micah]

What do you think has caused that tribalism, if not the fact that they have.

[Kai]

Not the erosion of religion? It's certainly not the erosion of religion because the reality isn't just the religion. The most tribalistic people in this country, probably in terms of the intensity of their views on partisan politics, are evangelicals. I know this because I'm from Texas, a rural town in Texas. These guys really hate Democrats in the same way that some woke college student really hates Republicans. And so people were amped out by the media. Now it's social media. People get into their own echo chambers. All they see from the other side is not how they're normal in human and similar to us. All they see is how they're terrible. Democrats love abortion. Democrats, you know, want to kill Trump and all this stuff. And what did Democrats see?

[Micah]

Hold on, hold on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kai]

What did Democrats see? We see stuff which is like Republicans just like the corruption, you know, Republicans

[Micah]

wants to kill trans people.

[Kai]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, like all you see.

[Micah]

And it's like Donald Trump believes that white supremacists are very fine people.

[Kai]

Right.

[Micah]

The mainstream media.

[Kai]

Right, right. So, like, you have all this stuff which is being fed to us, social media is contributing to it, the media, you get more views. We know this, you know this.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

We get more views whenever we fight harder. You know, if we have a super polite conversation this whole time and we had no intensity, it would get 14 views. If we get super angry at each other and we start raising our voices, it's going to get more views.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

That causes division and erosion of our national identity because we start looking at our brothers and sisters in this country that are so similar in so many ways, and we don't see them as people that.

[Micah]

Hold on, hold on. I love that you said that. That absolutely assumes that we are similar in so many ways.

[Kai]

I think we are. I think we absolutely are.

[Micah]

I think there were so many ways in which we were more similar. And we've begun to seen that we've begun to see that disintegration.

[Kai]

I don't think that we have to make everybody the same, though. I don't think America, you.

[Micah]

You and I want to be very clear about the language so that we can't wiggle at all. Correct. I don't think everybody needs to be the same. But you agree they need to assimilate. And if people don't assimilate, we cannot have a national identity. Until people assimilate, you cannot expect that you can let in millions of people with foreign cultures and get them to adapt to a culture that is going to, you know, mesh with the United States.

[Kai]

Yes.

[Micah]

And that for 200 years of American history was very easily understood. And then we changed it so significantly, and mind you, not democratically. In 1965, with the Hart Celler act, where we were specifically told that it would not significantly change the makeup of the country, Ronald Reagan in the 80s passed amnesty, saying to everybody, this was going to decrease the amount of immigration. We are not going to have as much illegal immigration.

[Kai]

I don't like Ronald Reagan either.

[Micah]

Hold on, hold on. I don't think this is even necessarily a problem with Reagan. I think he was stupid. I think it was not his intention. But I think that despite his intent, despite his best efforts thinking that we are going to be able to reduce the number of illegal immigrants, we have still seen this country transformed in a way that is absolutely against the wishes of the majority of its constituents or the majority of its citizens. The only way that that is shifting now is because you have more and more people who are not originally of that citizenry. You have more and more people who have come here in the last 20 years.

[Kai]

So I have a spectrum that I'm going to outline for us to make this maybe a little bit more helpful. There's a spectrum of how different people are, right? On one side, they're the exact same. On the other side, they're completely different. We both agree you can have a society of completely different people that have nothing in common. It's going to break apart. The question is, how similar do we need them to be? Do they all need to be Catholics? Do they all need to be wives?

[Micah]

Hold on, hold on. You're falling back into what we said at the beginning. I have never ascribed, and I don't believe any actual nativist or any actual nationalist would make the argument that every person in the nation has to be the same, only that there is a general.

[Kai]

Nobody's claiming that you're saying that. What I'M saying is there's this really extreme view, which is like, here's the question, where do we draw the line? I'm gonna tell you where I draw the line.

[Micah]

Okay. I had English and classical liberalism.

[Kai]

I say the basic classical liberal values is something that we actually pretty much all of us agree on. We agree in the idea of tolerance. We agree in the idea of institutions. We believe in the idea that the government's here to ensure social harmony amongst individuals. And we, like most Americans, almost everybody, don't believe in some sort of totalitarian state that enforces their particular perspectives on everybody else, certainly. And it's like, okay, respect for other people, respect for people's speech. To a certain extent. Of course, there's some dispute about, okay, how hateful can it be until it starts counting as violence. But it's like, there's these things that we agree on. There's certain cultural commonalities. There's the English language. I think that's enough. I think that is sufficient. And you could say, well, no, we actually have to add more. The question is, well, what is the line? That's like, what is the threshold or the methodology that you're applying to determine how similar people have to be? Because there could always be people to your right who say, no, it's not all Christians, Kai. It's only the real Christians.

[Micah]

Yeah, I talked to many of the evangelicals and they have not very nice words for members of the Church of Jesus.

[Kai]

Why are they wrong?

[Micah]

Well, what I can tell you, this is why I mentioned the example of smut. I don't think it is wrong. For instance, if you're back in the day, what I do think is wrong is just straight up religious persecution discrimination. Right. But I think it's all right to be able to examine. Hold on, are we talking about the same thing here? Maybe we have a difference in theological perspectives. Catholics do. Catholics and orthos and Protestants, they have different perspectives about real presence. Transubstantiationists, particular to the metaphysics of the Catholic Church.

[Kai]

There's even disagreements on the Trinity. Is it really one?

[Micah]

Absolutely. Well, that's the disagreement that we would principally have here. However, herein lies the issue. And by the way, I would say that there's by degrees of separation or by degrees of magnitude, not degrees of separation. There is substantially more of a difference between maybe members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Catholics and Muslims or Buddhists. I think to ignore that there is a difference between.

[Kai]

Nobody's ignoring the question is why are the People to your right. Wrong. What is the test you're applying to say, well, these people that only say Catholics, why are they wrong?

[Micah]

Wrong in what sense?

[Kai]

Listen, you think that, okay, we shouldn't. In order to have a common national identity, that's sufficient. That does what it needs to be done. We're not going to say that everybody needs to be your particular religion. Right. Or they're not going to allow it to be Catholic. That's not reasonable, right? What you think it is reasonable? There's really far right people.

[Micah]

No, no, no. I'm not getting what you're saying. Are you saying that I would never say that.

[Kai]

Yeah, you would never say that everybody has to be one particular religion.

[Micah]

Correct.

[Kai]

And I'm going to say. Well, I would never say that everybody needs to be Christian because I think.

[Micah]

I don't think the Founding Fathers would say that either.

[Kai]

I don't think that we have to draw the line that far. I think that you can get a national identity that's sufficient for what we need. What do we need with society? What we need to have a successful society? Well, we need a sense where people feel like they're united in some sort of fundamental way where we're not going to have ethnic enclaves or division or civil wars. And I think you get that with my standard.

[Micah]

Okay, why do we know I like your standard? Well, first of all, what I say, what I will say is that the standard that you're applying regarding religion, that there should not be a religious test to become a citizen. We agree on that. But there should be a question in the minds of all the viewers and also in our minds as we're discussing this. How can that be something that I agree with and you agree with, and more importantly, something the Founding Fathers agreed with, despite the fact that they existed at a time when this nation had as very integral, the fact that the people were moral and religious. That's why I like that quote by John Adams so much, is because for the Constitution, for the entire experiment to work, it presumes that the individuals would retain their morality, would retain their religion, or at least that the majority of them, the average, would be religious.

[Kai]

I don't think it's true. I don't think it's true.

[Micah]

You disagree with John Adams?

[Kai]

I don't think that necessarily John Adams is indicative of what everybody was thinking at the time. Whenever you look at Enlightenment liberal philosophy, which these guys were explicitly citing left and right all the time. Yeah, these guys were like. These guys were the super philosophical lips, even more philosophical Than me, certainly. What was the idea of liberalism in the Enlightenment? It was this idea of continuous social transformation. The idea that you needed institutions that were flexible to bend with the shifts of technology and all other types of social shifts. And that's one of the reasons why liberalism has been so stable over time. We had new ideas about, hey, actually, maybe black people should have rights.

[Micah]

And why is it so difficult to amend the Constitution?

[Kai]

Well, the idea is that obviously you should. The Constitution exists to protect people's rights. Right. And so. But you can shift that. Right. So you. Let's just be very clear here, because I don't want to skip this if you want to. I want to be clear here. You have the Constitution, which is this flexible democratic government, which can have policies shift with time through a designated process. And then you have this basic framework for society, which is the Constitution. And they say, yeah, even that can shift, but it's going to require even more. Right. Because this is the very basic constitution of this government.

[Micah]

Yes.

[Kai]

And so the idea of liberalism is that things were always shifting. I don't think that. That a lot of the founders thought that they were establishing some rigid social order that was gonna continue forever. And if they did, we would both agree they were wrong because they lived at a time of slavery. They lived at a time where women didn't have the right to vote. I hope you can agree that's a terrible thing to say, that certain people should be denied rights based on their immutable characteristics. Now, seriously, you think women should have the right to vote? Correct.

[Micah]

I think ideally fewer people should have the right to vote. I don't think that every man should. Every woman should.

[Kai]

So. Okay, okay, that's interesting. But you don't. You don't think on the basis of

[Micah]

a man or a woman does not return their shopping cart. They should not have.

[Kai]

No, no. Give me. Give me a serious answer, though. You might piss off some right wingers in the audience, but tell me you

[Micah]

don't think that wins in the practical reality. Yes, of course. Every man and every woman should have right wings.

[Kai]

And it was a terrible thing.

[Micah]

One more vote for every child that you have.

[Kai]

Yeah, I've heard people argue for that. I've heard people argue that. I don't think it's the craziest idea.

[Micah]

I think it's. I think it's probably a better idea. But it's like you currently have.

[Kai]

Even if they thought this is never going to shift, you know, our, like, racial and male sexual hierarchy is going to always be the same. Well, if that's true, then they were just wrong. But I don't think that's what they thought. I actually think they think something very similar to me, which is like the basic liberal ideals, right? Some basic, probably even some moral values. We agree that murder is wrong. Certainly these things, these got to stay the same. But a lot of other things they can shift.

[Micah]

I think that the amount of the shift would in many cases be absolutely unthinkable for them. You take the case of, you know, a federal protection for gay marriage, that would be unthinkable.

[Kai]

They didn't think slavery going away was thinkable. What?

[Micah]

No, they absolutely did. So many of the founding fathers wrote about the fact that they expected it to go away, that the fact that they wanted it to go away. Presidents of the United States of America,

[Kai]

there were certainly anti slavery people within the United States. I mean, there was a division from

[Micah]

the very beginning of the founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson himself. It's like even if they had slaves.

[Kai]

Had slaves?

[Micah]

No, even if they had slaves, they were still in favor. They emancipated their slaves.

[Kai]

Think about all the things that we have. Think about the voting rights we have for Blackfield, the civil rights we have for Blackfield. Maybe there's so many things this test you're applying, which is it's inconceivable the ways that societies have shifted, but a lot of the good things that we agree have shifted are also inconceivable to many of them. And I would say some of them, I really am skeptical that they concede with the idea of like slavery and black equality really happening. I mean, that was a really crazy idea for the time. Some people were really ahead of the time, like Franklin is a fantastic example. But it's like the, you know, that's okay that they didn't conceive of the changes that happened.

[Micah]

I can probably concede that they likely did not expect the amount of progress, especially as fast as it occurred. But I disagree that this was something that was totally outside of their mind. Because in the Constitution, like I mentioned earlier, you see a very clear causal logic chain to some of the things including emancipation. I think you make a very clear cut argument as far as the rights of every individual, including and you know, not just limited to white people, but including black people as well. I think that argument is right there at the beginning of the Constitution. I think it's right there in the Declaration of Independence. And so if that's the case, then it really is not ridiculous to say or it really, really isn't the case that we're asking them to extend their minds so much further. However, there are certain aspects. I mean, I would ask you this. If this kind of conception of the United States, certainly on the religious angle, if that was not one of the things that any advocate imagined, and I'd say, by the way, a lot of the things they imagined, the reason we don't have a precedent for them is because they took them for granted. I think they took for granted the fact that we were a moral and religious country and that the religion that they were kind of describing was mostly Christian. I think it's in fact, as basic as the fact that they don't mention a plurality of gods. They mention God. The God of nature is what they describe. Not the gods, not in a pluralistic Greek sense, but the God. I think their conception of God was framed in a Christian sense. But I mean, let's get to that point. I actually do want to find specifically when it was.

[Kai]

Well, I want.

[Micah]

Hold on. It was 1962. Why did it take until 1962 for prayer to be, you know, by the Supreme Court decided that it was not allowed. It was removed from public schools. You were not compelled to pray to a particular faith. I think that would be wrong if you compel people to feel faith and it's no longer faith.

[Kai]

Yeah.

[Micah]

I mean, why did it take until 1962?

[Kai]

Well, because obviously their understanding shifted. Right.

[Micah]

National identity.

[Kai]

No, I think it's our understanding of the Constitution, the Establishment clause and the free exercise clause, because the Establishment clause was codified in a period of time where they actually. It wasn't even clear that multiple establishments of religion were a problem. The way it's written, it just says we cannot establish all religion. But it was actually at the time when the Establishment clause was drafted. You might be aware of this history. Many states actually had established multiple religions. So the understanding of what these clauses meant has changed so dramatically over time.

[Micah]

Certainly they've never shifted away from religion. But there's hell recently.

[Kai]

But there's things. And this is what I was trying to ask you about earlier. Certainly you would agree that there's certain things that have changed for the better that they didn't conceive of of the time.

[Micah]

Of course.

[Kai]

And so it's clear that. But just the Founding Fathers conceiving of something happening in the future, that's not the test for whether it's good.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

That doesn't have to become our own. I want us to shift this conversation a little bit more from my territory so we can get into substance. We've covered a lot of the national identity stuff. Let's talk about our political institutions. Our political institutions seem like they're really, really broken. Look at the issue of the national debt. We borrow $2 trillion a year, Republicans increase the deficit, Democrats decrease it a little bit. We should get some credit for that. But they still don't fix the problem. And why? Because politicians are fundamentally short termist. They benefit from the borrowing now and they don't see the consequences.

[Micah]

I agree.

[Kai]

That is one example of a huge problem. The national debt threatens to throw our entire economy into a tailspin if our country goes bankrupt. That's a huge problem. And it's just institutions. The way that you fix that is you have to have some sort of law, some sort of amendment, just like the states do, to balance your budget or limit your deficit. So you would agree, okay, there's a lot of really big problems that really are the fundamentally the result of bad political incentives and therefore bad political institutions.

[Micah]

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

[Kai]

Okay.

[Micah]

Generally.

[Kai]

Okay. Right. So like, so it would seem to me like this really is the thing that we need to focus on a lot more. You know, I don't think so.

[Micah]

I think, I think. Well, I'll just give you my thesis. My thesis is that if your issue is that we now live in a time where people have this appetite for controversy, even the idea, right. That they have an appetite just for this short term win instead of the long term benefit. If they are, what's the libertarian thing? They have high time preference or low, I forget which one it is. We can agree on that. For me, the thing that it gets back to is the fact that that appetite exists in the people prior to Trump. And I don't think it's the institutions or the mainstream media that cause it. The media works to fulfill a demand.

[Kai]

Well, let's say a couple of things. We've had a national debt problem for a while.

[Micah]

Yes.

[Kai]

Certainly it's gotten worse over time. The only fixed to it is institutional. I think if you look at other issues, it's likely the same. The division in our country certainly would be better if we fixed our partisan primary system. You look at a country, you look like a state like Alaska, they don't have partisan primaries. So like Mary Patola, all these other candidates are actually trying to appeal to all voters. And it turns out your rhetoric is very different when you're trying to appeal to all voters than just Democrats or just Republicans. It's like that would generate a lot more unity in our country. It'd also be possible to cross the aisle. More like actually vote in a way that's independent. I mean, think about how many of these Republican politicians you basically get there and Democrats do, and you just have to go with your party line on literally every single issue. And you don't even want to work with the other party to help them pass something that's good because it's going to help them politically and you're going to get hit in your primary. Biden's going to go campaign against you. This is like a huge problem. Like, think about how many issues there are in this country that are economic in nature, housing. I mean, all this stuff that's afflicted is gun violence that could be solved with a lot of common sense policies that people broadly agree on that won't be solved unless we fix these institutions.

[Micah]

See, I think I, you know, it's difficult because I actually, I'm very sympathetic, but I don't think it's the root. And when we're talking about what they. The fundamental issue is, I think what you're describing is a lot of the symptoms. I think the polarization, the fact that you have people that are so stoked into one camp or the other because you can even measure their participation. People participate less if they see a candidate on either side who they really dislike. People are willing to actually punish a candidate at the ballot box. I think that exists and I think there are ways of improving that. But I don't think that's your fundamental issue. I think your issue is an issue of appetite and what has created the appetite. And to get back to what you were saying before you made the claim that it was the media that was stoking up this fear, it was inciting people. I agree to some extent that it do that. It does that. The kind of stochastic terrorism that you hear from streamers or from even on the mainstream news, Fox or cnn. I think that exists and it maybe perpetuates the problem. I don't think it creates it. I think that fulfills a demand that the people have because they don't have a sense of identity and they certainly don't have a sense of responsibility or love for anybody around them.

[Kai]

But, but, okay, I have a couple ways to take this. I think it's going to be very interesting.

[Micah]

Okay, I'm excited.

[Kai]

Something has changed that's made our country more divided politically because we already agree that it's. It's not that people hate Democrats because they're Hispanic. They hate them, they're still white people, white Christian people on both sides that really hate each other. Media changed and that made things worse. Media used to be a couple stations. It used to be very factual. Then it became like you had Fox News and certain innovation of like, like very politicized content, which is more entertaining to people. It's like bloodsports.

[Micah]

I mean, this forever. You've had political cartoons since the inception of the country. You've always had caricatures, you've always had portrayals of.

[Kai]

Would you really say that the media environment was just as unconducive to unity back in 1970? People were beating each other with sticks in 1970.

[Micah]

I think that was in the 19th century.

[Kai]

So whenever people look on Twitter every single day and they just see the worst possible representation of the other side and the most divisive, I don't. Yeah, you got to say, well, that's worse than back in 1970 when it was CNN and it was some guy who's just reading what the government did. And Americans trusted the government way more back then.

[Micah]

I think you have a very naive way of the way that people read the news. You don't think that, like the op EDS were the things that were exciting the most amount of people. You don't think that before Rush Limbaugh, there was somebody else who was doing the same thing that Rush Limbaugh does.

[Kai]

The mainstream media in the media environment is kind of an elite based system where there was this layer of elites between communications and the elites. You look at the elites in Washington, D.C. the elites in the media, you find actually they're a lot more united than Americans now. Right. Whenever you have social media, there's no elite filtration. Those journalists went to the same schools. And you might say, well, I have a populist issue with how that works. And I agree. It was like the Noam Chomsky work, which is manufacturer consent and all these things. But there was something that was different and better about that system. They were less mean to each other. The political elites which were responsible for all media were just a lot nicer to the other side and a lot more interested in being polite. I mean, look, fdr, they didn't even want to show the guy in his wheelchair. The Republican people didn't want to show him in his wheelchair because we don't want to make him look bad. That would never happen today. Like, Fox News is making edits about Joe Biden in a diaper, right? Like that's how things are now.

[Micah]

So that's.

[Kai]

That is a huge Problem. Now here's a question. How do we solve that? But I think that we first must diagnose the problem. The problem, and we can both agree, is that media has become a lot more divisive.

[Micah]

No, no, that is. That is exactly the symptom.

[Kai]

It's a symptom of like what a lot of Hispanics coming to the country.

[Micah]

This. It's perpetuating. Yeah, it's like self perpetuating, where the media stokes up more fear. So it creates appetite, it creates frustration. I agree with you there that it's an important part of this kind of positive, positive feedback loop.

[Kai]

But what started it?

[Micah]

I think it's the decline national.

[Kai]

What was the event, if there was.

[Micah]

If there was anybody? Well, it's, it's, you know, for mlds, it's like placing the great apostasy. I think it's. It's something that you can say occurred because you can look at how different things are in one point in time to the next, but you can't say one specific thing because it happens gradually. It's not as if a piece of policy passed, although policies can be symptoms thereof. This is why I mentioned Hart Celler. Hart Cellar was completely undemocratic. People don't feel that their voices are represented. When people don't feel that they are represented, they react negatively to politicians.

[Kai]

Hartzell was passed by a Congress. Right. It's just a Democratic as any other law.

[Micah]

Hold on. Just because it was passed. In fact, that's almost worse. It's like, okay, well, this was.

[Kai]

Well, what's your definition of undemocratic?

[Micah]

This was passed by Congress. Well, it was also said to not actually influence the country in any major way.

[Kai]

People say things about policies that are like, totally not true all the time. It's like everything is not democratic.

[Micah]

You're right, but that's. Then that creates more of it. That creates the division is the fact that people. People don't feel they're represented. This is undemocratic. They were not polled. They were told one thing. The opposite happened. They're being told by Supreme Court justices that, you know, okay, why can't we pray in schools? You know, I thought this was something that was as American as apple pie. The burning of the American flag. The burning of the American flag was illegal for the majority of the country's history in the majority of its states, the vast majority. I was taught in school that burning the American flag was freedom of expression. And it was as American as apple pie. It was as American as D Day. The boys on the beach. It wasn't.

[Kai]

Well, it certainly wasn't. I think that the original public meaning of the First Amendment probably does allow you to burn the flag. And that's why. Then why was that two centuries? Because people violate the Constitution all the time.

[Micah]

You think they violated the Constitution from the day that it was created.

[Kai]

I think that people have violated the Constitution immediately many times. I mean, actually, if you're an originalist, you think that's definitely the case. The case of the 14th Amendment was codified with these very progressive ambitions, the most progressive amendment. And the Supreme Court immediately was like, actually doesn't mean anything.

[Micah]

Actually,

[Kai]

they took clauses like the Privileges and Amendment, immunities clause or immunities clause, and they said, yeah, actually this only applies to stuff that, like, doesn't matter for black people at all. Right. And it was codified to give black people rights. So that's definitely the case.

[Micah]

I think when I Look at the 14th Amendment, that's another good example, because you have birthright citizenship, which has completely, totally been interpreted to be something that.

[Kai]

It was never intended for the tradition of birthright citizenship. I mean, I need to show you the work of my constitutional law professor Solon. This guy's amazing.

[Micah]

I do want to see that.

[Kai]

It is a tradition that goes back 500 years before the ratification of the 14th Amendment. I know. I already know. I've seen what you've said about this. You say, look, Congress immediately contradicted birthright citizenship by passing a law that. Am I wrong? They immediately contradicted birthright citizenship. It's very clear that they're understanding.

[Micah]

By passing which law?

[Kai]

I don't remember the law that you referenced, but I've seen people argue, look, you know, we have laws that say, yeah, actually these people, they can't get citizenship if they're born here.

[Micah]

Right.

[Kai]

Very quickly, after birth rate citizenship has passed.

[Micah]

You don't even need to look at a different law. You can look at the way they debated it in Congress. I have the perception. Yeah. And the perception was it's like one of the. I think one of the Democratic congressmen from California literally said, we don't have to worry about so many Chinese people here because whether dead or alive, their bodies go back to Asia. It's like they're going to leave. And they're constantly like, you know, supplying the same amount. The amount of immigrants here is really not going to change significantly. The exact same thing with Hart Celler.

[Kai]

The Senate debates are actually so much more helpful for other provisions of the 14th Amendment than that one because for other provisions, they have like this much of a definition. And then birthright citizenship is like two lines. But the argument that birthright citizenship, oh man, do we really want to get into. We'll do it very quickly.

[Micah]

I like it. I like it.

[Kai]

If you look at the British tradition of birthright citizenship, anybody who is born within the king's territory was, you know, somebody who was under a subject of the king, except if you were the monarch's child, if you were an ambassador's child, you were an invading, invading army, invading army's child. And pretty much everybody else was fine. At the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment, there was huge mass immigration. There was like no such thing as legal and illegal immigration. This was like the open borders hyper woke time. We had total ethnic enclaves in the country, even much worse than it was now because there wasn't social media and media to actually make people learn English. People were not even learning English. It was crazy. And nobody thought, okay, like this German guy, he's born here. Yeah, his kid is not American. Everybody thought they were American. And so the argument that, well, I mean, nobody thought that, that birthright citizenship amendment would not apply to them. Now you might say, well, their idea of what a person was that qualifies as an American only applied to white people for a period of time. And I might acknowledge, well, not just

[Micah]

that, but English speakers as well.

[Kai]

Well, Germans totally counted. Irish people totally counted.

[Micah]

Nobody had any disputes they could not become citizens. If German did not speak English, he could not become a citizen.

[Kai]

The entire process of formalizing legal status for immigrants was not even established at the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment.

[Micah]

Naturalization processes were not established at the time of the 14th Amendment.

[Kai]

There was not like a, oh, you need to apply to come here and have legal residency. Oh, yes, you know, there's standards for naturalization.

[Micah]

Maybe they were not as streamlined and

[Kai]

so was the standards for child.

[Micah]

There was a naturalization act that was passed 10 years after the Constitution or at the same year of the Constitution, parents.

[Kai]

So you're saying that if the parents weren't speaking English at the time that their child was born, the understanding at the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment was that that child wouldn't count because their parents didn't speak English.

[Micah]

I think it's a perception like, what if the child continued speaking, speaking German for any practical purpose, would the people consider that child an American?

[Kai]

I. I don't think there was like any sort of notion of this idea that somebody could be born in the country? Yes, to people who immigrated to the country and didn't fall into those categorical exclusions and that person wouldn't count. Now you could say, well, what if you really ask them a lot of questions about crazy hypotheticals? Then could have you have let people to like, think about it?

[Micah]

And like, I, I think that's just as crazy as asking somebody, okay, do you speak English? And okay, you speak English? Check. Do you agree with classical liberalism? And half the people like, what the heck is classical liberalism? Okay, well if you agree with it, you're an American. I think that's just as ridiculous. I think people had a pretty, pretty basic idea of, you know, if people are not willing to assimilate to the national identity and culture in significant ways.

[Kai]

So the kids born and they don't speak any language, but whenever they grow up and then they start speaking a language and it's not English, the citizenship they immediately got at the time of birth, they lost.

[Micah]

I think functionally they would not be perceived as American.

[Kai]

So how is this process supposed to work? The idea was they just kind of lose it.

[Micah]

I think we're talking about two different ideas now and that could well be my fault. What are you trying to describe here?

[Kai]

My claim is that the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment is the birthright citizenship standard that we still have today with the three categorical exclusions and maybe one for Native Americans. I think that's roughly correct. I think the majority of originalist scholars think that this is way off of what we originally were talking about though. So I want to bring it back to this dispute about the media because you said, well, the media's issues, actually this whole media divisiveness thing, it's the result of some sort of cause down the chain. And I think it does meet the demand. I think the result is the technology and the setup of the apparatus of media has interacted with human psychology in really problematic ways. But, but we can't change human psychology at the mass level. We can try. It's going to be really hard. We can probably reform immediate institutions. I'm open minded about ways to do that. I don't see how doing mass deportations or doing an immigration moratorium will fix the divisiveness between white Christians and white Christians in the Republican and Democratic Party. Will your immigration policies and your policies to restore national identity fix the fact that our media environment and our political institutions make people hate each other regardless of their race or the, regardless of the language they speak?

[Micah]

See, this is where, you know, to me I'm very sympathetic because I think it's almost a bit of a Pandora's box. It's like, that's like the question that I guess, like, well, you know, how would you legislate American culture? It's like, I think that's super tough to do. You can't just say, like, all right, and everybody's going to have to agree with this. But I do think that there are markers for it. Markers for it are the assimilation to a language, and it is cultural homogeneity to the best degree that it can be maintained. I think right now we're going completely in the opposite direction. And it is those differences that begin then creating less cohesion. Robert Putnam is the guy who did work into this back in the 1960s and then on from that point, measuring social capital. One of the big things that he realized was polarizing people, and it was also separating them from everybody else. It was screenshot back then. It was TVs. Now it's our cell phones. I agree with them. I think that it. That as we interact with people less, we are more and more polarized.

[Kai]

I agree with that. I think urban planning is part of it, too. Like, we don't walk around in community spaces anymore.

[Micah]

That's. That's why, you know, public transport, as much as it has terrible implementation, I think it's actually not terrible because you

[Kai]

need to be surrounded by people, walkable areas. You're not just in your car the entire time.

[Micah]

You know how bad it is to go to the Midwest. And I'm like, they're Ubering everywhere and you can't walk anywhere.

[Kai]

Yeah, it's disastrous.

[Micah]

But so I agree with a lot of those aspects. The problem is that right now, the diversity does not become our strength, and we have no way of mitigating it. And in fact, we've been even told now that it is diversity. It is pluralism ad nauseam. That is what America is. And I don't think that's the case. I think America was not pluralistic in the way it's being referred to now at its inception.

[Kai]

I think, think obviously pluralism to a certain extent is, like, not good. Right. You're not going to tolerate people that are, you know, like, there's ideas of, oh, some people have preferences for, you know, being attracted to children, and that's just their preference. That is a certain level of tolerance that I don't think that we should have, of course. But I think what separates America and liberal societies in general is that we had a lot more tolerance than what we had before. You look at the medieval regimes of everybody killing each other over everything. It was like every small difference, people kill each other over. And liberalism was like, we're not going to do that. Yeah. And I think that's unique. But I want us to be very clear here.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

We implement Chi's master policy plan to fix the national identity problem. And that seems like that's an immigration moratorium. We're deporting people left and right. You know, everybody's got to learn English and all this stuff. I don't agree with all these policies, but let's say we did it. Would that actually fix all these other problems? Because whenever I think about our problems, there's public safety issues. There's. You know, we don't rehabilitate people in prisons very effectively. Our recidivism rate's super high. Urban planning sucks. Homelessness is a huge issue. Drug addiction, addiction to lots of things. You know, economic issues. We can go run the gambit on those.

[Micah]

So you're asking me if the implementation of an immigration moratorium would fix the prison system?

[Kai]

Yeah. Amongst everything else. Like. Like, what are your. And here's the thing. I think that if you fixed our political institutions, I think that almost every single problem in America, it wouldn't be completely solved, but it would get us way closer. Like, what stops us from sort of.

[Micah]

My solution is like, we need to make people vote. Right. That's kind of how this sounds. You understand what I'm saying?

[Kai]

I don't think. I think, because this is. There's a big difference here. My solution is not let's just convince everybody to agree with my policies. I actually think that Americans agree on a lot of things that are really matter.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

And there's a lot of pragmatic steps that we can take as one united country towards solutions to our problems. They don't fully fix them. You know, we agree on how healthcare policy should work, but we agree on, like, a lot of stuff that is not working that should be changed. And so I think if you change the political institutions and we have political leaders that actually have an incentive to work together, to be pragmatic, to pursue policies in our. In our interest. You know, if you do something that's good for America, you actually get reelected and you get. You win instead of the opposite, I think that that would make a ton more progress on all of our issues than any other thing. I think it's kind of like the root cause that prevents us from even being able to make progress. All of our Big problems don't seem like they're getting better. In many ways, it seems like they're getting worse.

[Micah]

I think that's. It's compelling. It's difficult for me now because, like, I'm just with. I operate within a framing where a lot of, you know, I could say an immigration moratorium is part of it. That national identity, however, is my original argument. I think the decline in identity, the polarization, and then the fact that while we don't have a national identity, we've had individual groups begun to kind of spring up across the United States in ways that are then, you know, taken advantage of by the political institutions. You and I actually have overlap. Like, I think there does have to be changes made in political institutions, but I think even those changes then will fall short as people begin to further separate themselves the way that they are already doing. You can't fix the separation of people. You can't fix the way that they group themselves by simply saying that you're gonna be able to vote and it's not gonna be a competitive, you know, Republican or Democratic Party primary. You're gonna have to compete Republicans against Democrats. I think people will still separate into communities. And then what does it become? It becomes, okay, well, in this community, we have 60% of the population which is Indian American. Okay, well, whoever it is that's running for office, they're gonna have to make an appeal to that group because the group votes as a block.

[Kai]

But I actually think that you don't give credit to the extent of assimilation that does happen in this country.

[Micah]

That's why I don't give the credit.

[Kai]

True. It is true that people come to this country, especially first generation immigrants. That group, they don't learn the language. Like, you know, my grandparents came to this country after they spent a lot of time in Iran. They were actual refugees because, like I said, my grandfather went to prison. They didn't learn English. They just stayed in their home all day. And I think that's.

[Micah]

My grandparents did.

[Kai]

Yeah, yeah. It's like that happens all the time.

[Micah]

No, they. They learned English.

[Kai]

Oh, they learned English. Okay, good for German. German system, like, well, oh, good for you. Good for you. There's a period of time where they didn't think that, but it doesn't matter what they think.

[Micah]

If somebody assimilates, they assimilate.

[Kai]

Well, there was a period of time where we had Irish enclaves and German enclaves, and there was a lot of cultural differences. But here's the point when they didn't assimilate immediately, that's why people were frustrated.

[Micah]

But when they don't assimilate, they went back to their home countries. A third of Italians went back to their home country because they didn't assimilate.

[Kai]

So we had places like New York City, which literally just had ethnic groups in different parts of the city. And it was really, really divided. And eventually what happened is, and this is what still happens today, their children would grow up usually going through our education institutions and they would become like way more assimilated than their parents. They'd be kind of at least 75% American. And that's still what happens today, but it's declining.

[Micah]

Well, and we, the rate of language assimilation, for instance.

[Kai]

We should fix that.

[Micah]

Language retention in the second and third generation is higher now than it was even 10 years ago.

[Kai]

We should fix that. We should absolutely fix that.

[Micah]

Well, I agree with you, but you can just say let's just fix that. When I'm trying to point out that we're moving in the opposite direction. What we are doing is seriously wrong. And we have to be able to address those issues of identity. Identity if we want to actually fix the problems institutionally.

[Kai]

Well, but your policies for fixing identity are, okay, let's do reforms to immigration. My policy on immigration is, listen, if you want to come to America and you love America and you're going to speak English and you're going to be an economic contributor, certainly some people fall in that category. Yes, you can come to the country if you're a real refugee and asylum seeker.

[Micah]

On immigration, I don't know if you

[Kai]

need a hard cap. I think if you set the threshold with the points based immigration system high enough and you have your points allocated properly, it's probably fine. I think it's because if they're pre put that numerical value, the number of

[Micah]

immigrants to the United States in a

[Kai]

given year, I don't have a perspective on the ideal amount because I think if they're actually learning English, there's a thing called pre similation where they learn English before they come here. And it's like we actually have some influencers in American politics who are totally participating from Korea or something. I feel like those guys who come over here and they're like watching our culture, all this stuff, I don't think we can have too many of those people. I feel like they're already American.

[Micah]

See, that's where you and I disagree.

[Kai]

But, but here's what I'm trying to. Here's where I'm trying to go. Let's just see if we can come to agreement on some policy.

[Micah]

Let's do it.

[Kai]

Policies. Okay. Because I think this is a good way to wrap this up. If you're gonna come here and you're not gonna love America, or you're not gonna be fundamentally identifying with the United States of America, or you're not gonna learn English, or you're just coming here to be a drag on our economy, you're like a 65 year old person, you don't have family here, you want to get our welfare, whatever. Any of these groups of people don't come here, we don't want you here. If you are a genuine asylum seeker,

[Micah]

how would you put that in policy?

[Kai]

Well, that'd be in a points based immigration system. So we say you get a certain number of points for certain things. You get a certain number of points for speaking English. A lot of points. Right. You get a certain number of points for being culturally compatible. And we can have attestations, we can have tests for our culture.

[Micah]

How would you look at that?

[Kai]

What do you mean?

[Micah]

How would you put in policy the American culture? You've defined it so far as English, which you've already mentioned as the first point in the point based system and then second, classical liberalism.

[Kai]

So if you believe, I mean, do you disagree that one of the uniting things about Americans is that we believe in classical liberal values?

[Micah]

I think generally, yeah.

[Kai]

Yeah. So you don't even disagree with me. So. Yeah. Can we put that in the form of a test?

[Micah]

Well, that's what I'm asking is, I'm asking how would you put that in a test?

[Kai]

I mean, I think there's questions about implementation here, but I think you could definitely test like, okay, if there's a Muslim immigrant to this country, do you think that everybody should be forced to be subject to your religion? That's a question. Yes or no? If your answer is yes. Okay, sorry, you can't come. Right. And there's like a lot of other ideas. Like, you know, Sweden's had this issue and I think Sweden and some of these European countries have started to work out exactly how they want to test these things. Norway actually has done it a lot. So, like, you can have tests, you get points for passing the test, you get points for other proxies, for economic contribution. I don't think Americans want to bring in a bunch of people that are going to be. Yeah, no, but there are immigrants that are tremendous contributor to our economy. Certainly cannot deny that.

[Micah]

Absolutely.

[Kai]

And so it's like, okay, we have this group that's clearly Good for America. Like, they're going to come here, they're going to be American, they're going to contribute, take them. And then also, I think, as a generous people, we have a moral obligation to take some people who are genuinely asylum seekers. They're from. They're coming from China. There's nowhere else they can go. Nobody will take them. They're about to die. Okay, we could take a few of those guys. It's not like 15 million people a year. It's like, it shouldn't be. It's been, you know, I'm poor, I'm poor. You have to take me. And that's not an asylum claim, in my opinion.

[Micah]

We 100% agree. And they have a responsibility also to seek asylum in a different country prior to the United States if they're crossing another territory. I think that's pretty important too. You know, if you're a political refugee, it's like. And you cross three countries to get to the United States.

[Kai]

The way the asylum systems work is ridiculous.

[Micah]

Yes, well, so we can agree on that. Let's. And I want to. I want to write this down because if we get elected, then, you know, we're going to work across the aisle, assuming that's even something that you or I want to do.

[Kai]

But we have to get through the partisan primary system. So we might have to be a little bit more divisive if we were to cross the aisle. I don't know if we're going to make it through our primary.

[Micah]

Imagine that we do the primary. It's like the most contentious primary election ever. We both run super right, super left, and then we get elected and we're moderates. That's.

[Kai]

And then lose our problem, Lose our re election immediately.

[Micah]

Yeah, people think I'm too moderate. Well, okay, so we've got refugee. We're going to rework the asylum system, rework the refugees. I don't want to belabor the conversation with the issues of implementation of a test specifically, ideologically, because I think what you would probably be willing to admit as well is that the way that people live and the culture that they have is not just something you can write down on a piece of paper. It's unspoken. And it goes a lot further than the product of the culture, which are the food and the language. It goes to their perceptions, their practices, their religious ideas. It's something like the value that they put on age or timeliness, all kinds of things that cannot be properly communicated and cannot be properly accounted for, but that if then brought to the country in millions or even hundreds of thousands, or specifically to certain communities in the tens or dozens. That will certainly influence the culture of the area.

[Kai]

I mean, I think that. I think that you can get heuristics that are pretty good at approximating people's compatibility with our values in this country. I'm pretty flexible ideologically in how exactly you execute that. But I'd say at a certain extent, if you have immigration of this cohort of people, I'm going to say it's overwhelmingly net positive. Now, you might say, well, these people have a bit of an accent or something like that, or these people are a little bit different. These people are representing a form of Christianity that we don't have in this country. They're Nigerian Christians or maybe they're Muslims, but they're a liberal variety of Islam, which certainly exists in this world. Right. And there's illiberal forms of Christianity, which, you know, okay, you know, it makes us a little bit less united in the same sense, makes our demographics a little bit different. But I think it's net positive. I think that we have a demographic issue in this country.

[Micah]

When you describe the net positive, I think it's. From what I'm seeing, it's specifically fiscal.

[Kai]

No, I don't think it's just fiscal. I think we benefit from more people.

[Micah]

Okay.

[Kai]

I'm pro people, so I think that, you know, we need to have more children. I think life is a beautiful thing.

[Micah]

So true.

[Kai]

And I think that the people that come to this country that end up getting here, their lives are overwhelmingly improved.

[Micah]

So true.

[Kai]

They tend to love this country. I think when people come here and they love this country and they contribute, they do incredible things. They form charities, they give to their neighbors, and they contribute cultural, arts and works and all these things. It's not just economic. Of course, economic matters. You know, a lot of people are economically struggling. Of course I want businesses to be formed, but America's not just an economy. There's other things that matter, too. And so I would say, I think we can draw a line and say these immigrants are good for America and we should take them. And then people that are not in that group. Sorry.

[Micah]

Okay. Maybe the least progressive of the immigration prescriptions I've heard from a liberal, I'm much more inclined to agree with your perspective.

[Kai]

I think I agree with Americans. I think this is what the American, the majority of Americans.

[Micah]

Americans believe. I think maybe now, I don't think it would have been the case.

[Kai]

That's what Barack Obama said. You know, like, if you Actually, look at the speeches of Barack Obama.

[Micah]

I'm sure the speeches were great. Incredibly charismatic.

[Kai]

Yeah. And his actual immigration reform proposal, you disagree with it to a certain extent, but it was not never like the asylum system that we had for a period of time.

[Micah]

But what he also did is completely went over the Congress and established an amnesty for a bunch of immigrants. Well, despite the fact that the president very specifically did not have the power to do so, he absolutely abused his presidential powers to do so.

[Kai]

Well, there's a role.

[Micah]

I think you're making him out to

[Kai]

be a little bit more liberal than he was. The idea, I think. I don't believe that you should deport people who are brought here as children. And I believe that if you. I've read the immigration statute because the CSU comes up so many times. I read through the entire statute. That's how much of a law student I am. And it gives an insane amount of discretion to the executive. The Attorney General, specifically. I don't think that that's. I don't even know if that's constitutional because I believe that if you give enormous amounts of discretion away, there's a constitutional issue with a non delegation doctrine. But assuming it is constitutional, I think you can argue that it is illegal what Obama did. It's also legal what Trump did. And that, like, there's very few people that are actually contending the legality of Trump's deportation.

[Micah]

Do you think that what Trump and Obama did was good for the polarization of the country?

[Kai]

No, I don't think that we should have wild swings in policy just from the executive. I think that's one of the big issues with the Trump administration, this ideology of unitary executive theory. They want to have a super powerful president. I think it's like really bad. I think we should have a Congress that works together. But I want to see if you can sign on to my policies now.

[Micah]

Okay.

[Kai]

Okay. Do you think that we should ban gerrymandering nationwide?

[Micah]

Are we talking in like a pure hypothetical?

[Kai]

I'm talking about there's bans.

[Micah]

Practical policy.

[Kai]

Well, I'm talking that there's bans that are around right now. And we could say, well, I don't like this methodology. There's a lot of different ways to bandering. But one of these ways to ban gerrymandering, that should happen, Ideally, yes. Okay. And you could agree, you know, you're with the college Republicans, you're associated with the Republican Party. Do you think that Republicans should actually do something to work on a gerrymandering ban? You don't think so?

[Micah]

I think right now, like I said before, and I take a realist position, this is maybe where you and I differ on this. I think that Democrats support getting rid of gerrymandering insofar as it will eventually benefit them. And I think that they take cultural and political victories and then they try to get Republicans to back off of basically drawing a spine and putting their teeth.

[Kai]

I think that this is a really easy excuse that people use to justify not fixing our broken institutions. What Republicans. Can you hear me out?

[Micah]

Yeah, yeah, I'll hear you.

[Kai]

What Republicans say is, well, the Democrats are really bad and they take advantage of every single benefit they get. This is the kind of divisive rhetoric we see. And so they're bad. They're bad faith actors. We can't make the system fair because they don't play fair. We have to rig it in favor of us because they're gonna rig it in favor of them. And that is the same thing that Democrats will say about Republicans. But the difference is right now that most of the time, Democrats are actually. Their actual policy proposal is let's make things fair. And right now, Republicans don't even say, let's make things fair. We're introducing a gerrymandering man. We introduced it back in 2021 whenever it would have hurt us. Okay. Even when it comes to.

[Micah]

I need to look into that.

[Kai]

Even when it comes to court packing, which I think the majority of Democratic elected officials won't sign onto, but certainly a lot are. You know, what they point to. The Republican Party packed three Supreme Courts. You know, about one. It's your state of Utah. They packed this. They added two seats after they got a ruling they didn't like, and they said it wasn't about that, but we all know that it is.

[Micah]

I think it's overdue.

[Kai]

Georgia.

[Micah]

And I think there's also. There are instances. And this maybe speaks to my disagreement with you. I think there are institutional issues, systemic issues that disadvantage conservatives and Republicans in such a way that even what this appears like now way downstream, these issues that appear undemocratic, I think a lot of it is the result of a system that disadvantages Republicans. Look, at law schools, liberal professors outrank conservative professors 30 to 1. That's the conservative estimate.

[Kai]

So I have no.

[Micah]

That's true, though. But 30 to 1 liberal professors at law schools outnumber conservatives, which means in any state court. And this is the way it is in Utah, too, the selection of justices is usually from a biased liberal pool.

[Kai]

So I Think you can't make this argument? Well, of course you can, but I don't think it's a fair argument to make because look, I go to a school, many of my professors are classified as liberals because they identify fundamentally with the Democratic Party. There's a partisan part of the test here. And yes, educated people in this country do not support the Trump Republican Party because I'm not talking about the Trump Republican Party. We've had crazy education polarization. If you look back with Mitt Romney before that, before Trump came on the scene, the education polarization was not nearly as dramatic. And you look at academia and it was not nearly like what we see now.

[Micah]

So by what metric? How are you substantiating that?

[Kai]

Well, so I'm just saying if you look at studies of education polarization, if you look at academics, you look at college graduates, the academic split ideologically has become much more to the left over time. But here's another point I want to make.

[Micah]

I think that's also self perpetuating though, because guess who picks the faculty. Faculty. Yeah.

[Kai]

There's two other points.

[Micah]

If you have a liberal professor, if you have a bunch of liberal professors,

[Kai]

who are they going to choose as the next faculty? I think that a lot of professors actually pride themselves on being pretty objective.

[Micah]

I actually agree with you here. Maybe that's my bias at byu, but I think that the political science professors who I literally saw protesting ICE as I was counter protesting the protest, I don't think they mark me down for my idea.

[Kai]

If you came to my law school and you said this is a majority liberal law school, my professors could not be less ideological. A lot of the time I've had a left wing professor, I've had a right wing professor. Most of them are like super neutral, but they're classified as liberals. So I don't think they're all indoctrinated. I think that the court system for

[Micah]

it to systemically disadvantage conservative roles.

[Kai]

So we have a bias in terms of, you look at the number of judges appointed by Republicans versus Democrats. We have more Republican appointed judges than Democrats. In the state courts, there's more states that are Republican. Over time under Barack Obama, Democrats lost almost every state in the country, literally. We had two states that were all blue, tons of conservative originalist justices. The Federalist Society has existed for like

[Micah]

15 years and they've been totally outnumbered.

[Kai]

Come they're truly outnumbered by who it's the most.

[Micah]

Why do you think the Federalist Society has to exist?

[Kai]

The sophisticated apparatus of the Federalist Society is so much bigger than what we ever had on the liberal side. And yes, what you're seeing now, especially under Trump, is lawyers are super liberal because Trump is a threat to the rule of law.

[Micah]

I don't think it's just, I don't think it's just with Trump.

[Kai]

But. Okay, let me just take what you're saying for granted.

[Micah]

Yes.

[Kai]

Okay. We have a lot of people, a lot of law school professors are left leaning, A lot of lawyers are left leaning. And so the Republican appointments to the court, they can't help but appoint left leaning people. So what's happening is there's this bias in who they're appointing. They can't even find any conservatives to appoint. And so this is a bias in our system. And the way that we fix this bias is by rigging the congressional maps against Democrats to get more power for ourselves. Is that really what your solution is?

[Micah]

I think that's a weird way of framing what I'm trying to point out, which is the way that my logic trained on this works. I think there are systemic ways that Democrats are aware of. I'll give you an example. The disagree better framework that Spencer Cox is famous for, that John Curtis now is famous for because he was there with Mark Kelly talking about disagreeing better recently as well. That framework advantages Democrats.

[Kai]

Why?

[Micah]

Nobody disagrees that we should disagree better.

[Kai]

Right.

[Micah]

We should be nicer.

[Kai]

Of course the Republican Party disagrees. Trump doesn't disagree better.

[Micah]

Okay, I'm talking about individuals here.

[Kai]

A lot of individuals in the Republican Party don't think that we should disagree better.

[Micah]

Well, with the phraseologists, could you agree

[Kai]

with that, that everybody agrees we should disagree better?

[Micah]

I think that most people, the vast majority, if you ask them, do you think you should be harder and a worse disagreer, do you think you should be like, more polite? I think almost everybody, despite how polarized people are, I think when you go out and poll them, people are remarkably liberal. Everybody says, literally everybody says when you poll them that we're way too polarized. I mean, this is really funny, right? Is you're simultaneously quoting that, that we're way too polarized and these guys hate these guys and blah, blah, blah. But then when you poll those people, the thing that they cite as one of their most important issues, especially in the next election, is reducing polarization, reducing political.

[Kai]

I don't think that contradicts what I'm saying. I think it just people, they yearn for fixing this problem.

[Micah]

Okay, so if they yearn for it, then what I'm saying is true. That Most people would say, hey, yeah, when I disagree, I don't want to be as polarized. I think most people would agree.

[Kai]

Okay, so you see, excuse. It helps Democrats.

[Micah]

Yes, absolutely. Because the people who are always calling another individual out for disagreeing poorly are Democrats to Republicans. When was the last time you heard a Republican say to a Democrat that they need to disagree better?

[Kai]

This happens so much after, after every shooting attempt. You know, what happened to Trump, what happened to Charlie Kirk? There was a lot of language policing by the right of the left, I don't think. But hear me out, hear me out, hear me out. The left does the same thing to the right whenever right wingers do things that are deranged. For instance, Nancy Pelosi, his, you know, her husband was attacked by a guy and Trump made a joke about it. Yeah. What did Democrats say? They say, you shouldn't talk like that. You know, they've waved their finger.

[Micah]

A lot of Republicans did, too.

[Kai]

Yeah, sure. The mainstream of the Republican Party, the leadership of the Republican Party, the guys who are in charge right now, they didn't do that. But, yes, some people criticized on Assad. And it's just, I think what you're seeing is there's more times where there's just something that's patently outrageous coming from the Trump Republican Party than things that's patently outrageous coming from, like, Joe Biden, you know, that I guarantee, if I go look back at your condemnations of public statements within the last two years, you probably have, like, just as many for Trump as Biden, and you're somebody on the right.

[Micah]

Well, I was admittedly in Argentina for a year of those.

[Kai]

Okay, sure, sure. But, like, there's just a lot more outrageous statements. So you're saying, okay, well, this cultural idea of disagreeing better skews to the left. What's the like? I actually just think the right is the one that's disagreeing more unfairly. But I want to point to another example that counteracts what you're saying.

[Micah]

Yeah, I'd like to hear, but I also want specifically an example from policy. This is what I'm talking about. The disagree better framing, the way that I have seen it applied personally, is basically to say that Republicans can't have an opposition to men and women's sports on the issue of transgenderism or on issues that for a Republican would be like a basic party position to the left. This is something that has been, especially rhetorically, been reduced to dehumanization and stochastic terrorism.

[Kai]

Well, I mean, yes, people talk about right wing positions in like a really intense way. And I think that like people on the right do the same thing to the left, right. They say like, you want to go cut off the weenies of little boys. Right? Like that's what Democrats want to do. When Democrats, progressives think of their policy here, they're like, well, no, we actually want to protect people and allow them to deal with gender dysphoria and get health care. This is the way they think about it. That's the way the right wingers think about it. And they use really intense rhetoric with each other. Other. But it seems like you have two examples. Republicans are accidentally appointing liberal justices because law lawyers are really left way.

[Micah]

I don't think it's accidental. I think that the pool is skewed left.

[Kai]

But like they could still appoint conservative institutions. There's a lot of conservative lawyers, man.

[Micah]

I think so. I think again, there's not enough institutional and the systemic issues there. What's happening to all the left leaning lawyers? All the left leaning attorneys? What do you think's happening?

[Kai]

Doing. What do you mean? I mean a lot of them are losing their jobs because Trump's going after law firms. But so like, so they can't. They can't.

[Micah]

And this is this pretty revolutionary. There's some aspects of this where it's like a lot of this wouldn't have been conceivable prior.

[Kai]

Exactly. So it's like, you know, okay, they're accidentally appointing liberals. You know, there's language policing and maybe liberals do it more. Okay, let's just. I can see that. I don't know if I agree with it, but let's say we conceded the Senate skews in favor of Republicans because right now the way coalitions work, Republicans are way more competitive in more states than Democrats. The Electoral College skews towards the Republicans because of how the state, state orientation works. Puerto Rico is not a state.

[Micah]

Do you disagree with that, by the

[Kai]

way, how the Electoral College works? Yeah, I don't think it's a good institutional structure because I think it makes some states matter way more than others, which leads to biases in policy. For instance, we give huge subsidies to Iowa and Wisconsin farmers that we would not give if we didn't have it. So I think it leads to policy problems. But like Puerto Rico's not a state. We know they would vote for the Democrats. Three million people. They want to be a state. D.C. they don't have a single Congress person. Even if you think, think they shouldn't be a state, they'd at least have one congressperson. So there's all these institutional things I get. Boy to that. I'm like, well, these things are, like, not really working for Democrats. It's not very fair. But I would never say the way that we solve the fact that something's unfair is for us to rig all the maps so that we have a professional majority.

[Micah]

Well, then let me take your approach. I don't think that my policy would be to gerrymander the maps. That would not be my proactive.

[Kai]

So you disagree with what Republicans are doing right now?

[Micah]

I wouldn't have initially, like, that would not have been my angle. But I think that we are engaged now in basically, like, a war of attrition. I think we were in political attraction, and I do think that in political attrition, in real politic, it matters a lot who wins. And I think that both parties. I think absolutely both parties are willing to fight tooth and nail.

[Kai]

Now, I think that I don't want you to both sides this. Because I think that the way to national reconciliation is for Republicans to say, listen, we actually have the ammunition to tone down the temperature and stop increasing it. The reality is there has been things Democrats have done in the past to increase the temperature.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

Republicans have increased the temperature dramatically more since then, certainly. And so it's like, okay, we have this escalatory thing, and then if Democrats get power, they pack the cord and, like, everything is just a disaster. We're all killing each other. We can't do that. We can't. Republicans have accelerated the gerrymandering war to the worst state it's been in, like, 50 years.

[Micah]

Would you be in favor of getting rid of the filibuster?

[Kai]

I think that you could.

[Micah]

This is something that we want to do right now, and it would severely

[Kai]

disadvantage, I think, Jonathan. I think John Thune is an example of a person who really does believe in the institutions. I think he's a dying breed. I don't think they're gonna have another John Thune in the future. To me, I think the filibuster makes most sense for judges. I think it makes most sense for judges. I think that as a policy. No, I don't. I think the filibuster is a really good. Good institutional structure. Now, I. What I will say is, would you

[Micah]

be willing to concede that. That Republicans are.

[Kai]

I mean, I'm willing to concede that John Thune has done a really good job on this issue.

[Micah]

Okay. Okay.

[Kai]

No, he has. No. And John Thune and some senators that Are Republicans have actually tried to not turn up the temperature. I will 100% concede that. But it's like Republicans right now could. Could vote for gerrymandering. We introduced a bill. Or they could say, we don't like your bill. Here's another bill. Let's ban gerrymandering. That would fix this problem. But they're gerrymandering 10 states. They're gonna try to gerrymander another three more. They're gonna make us have a situation, Kai, where we are in an instance where Democrats should win the popular vote by 7 and a half points if they finish all their stuff and we don't even win the House. Isn't that immoral?

[Micah]

I'll give you my perspective. My perspective is that, that you have a popular vote that's won by the President of the United States. And this maybe goes to even my right wing critique. And maybe this is where we have the most significant overlap. The people did seem to vote for a very specific agenda in 2024. They voted against something as well.

[Kai]

Yeah.

[Micah]

And we have not seen a significant delivery on those points. And you and I take these. We were texting about this before. We take these very different perspectives. Where to you it's like Trump is like this borderline fascistic tyrant, not in a stochastic, terroristic way, but in the like, you know, 14 tenants kind of way. I think you have a more nuanced view of that word. But Trump is, you know, a tyrant. He's doing these things. He's like borderline dictator. Maybe you wouldn't say that. Maybe you would.

[Kai]

I think he wants to be, and I don't know if he's succeeding.

[Micah]

I think there's a lot of things that, like, he wants, and for me, a big thing that I measure up against that is resolve and will. And it's balanced by the reality. Like, like Trump, did he. Did he ever concede the 2020 election?

[Kai]

No.

[Micah]

Did he leave the White House? Yeah.

[Kai]

Well, he had to. He had to. A dictator.

[Micah]

To say like, well, he had to is a totally different conversation.

[Kai]

But he, but he had to. He was literally in the process of potentially getting prosecuted. His. The, the military was like, no, like, you have to go like, like these guys were turned against him so hard. Right. I mean, you remember all of the senior people in his administration resigned. The guy literally could not stay. If he stayed, he would have been arrested. Right. And now they're firing all the generals. He says, we're going to seize all the elections. Everything looks like he's like, oh man, they kicked me out last time. I don't want them to kick me out again. Isn't that like a pretty valid thing for us to be concerned about?

[Micah]

Well, look, look, look, I'm not saying that like there's no reason to be concerned. I'm saying that I, I, I very easily perceive that the way that Trump is being cast is simply not true of the reality. Like I, I, I do believe if he is the way that you describe him, I think he goes to jail. I think he, if he dies like standing, if he is the way the Democrats make him out to be. And I just don't think that's the case. I don't think. And, and, and this, this is my aspect is we have a people who voted specifically for an agenda. That was mass deportations, that was immigration restrictions, that was not in favor of foreign wars, that was very specifically and radically opposed to men and women's sports and all of the kind of bumper sticker Republican items, at least many of them. These were issues that galvanized people. And you know, now it may sound ironic, but also against political corruption. A lot of that has not been delivered. True, that is a significant issue for me. But I also think, you know, he's

[Kai]

done the opposite of a lot of it. Well, you know that with the war issue. Yes, with the war, with Epstein, with pardons and.

[Micah]

Absolutely. But when you look at that problem, what you see is, and this is maybe where we overlap, but my perspective is I see this guy who everybody is telling me is like a fascist dictator and I don't even see a border wall.

[Kai]

So why is, I don't think that Trump has a strategic ideological agenda. And so I think what you think is if he's a dictator, he's gonna execute a strategic ideological agenda. I think he's a narcissist. That's a totally different.

[Micah]

Ask me if Trump is a narcissist. Absolutely.

[Kai]

But let me, let me be clear. I think he's a narcissist personality. Call it dictator personality. He's not somebody who's like, I need to be a dictator so I can really close the border. Cuz I care about the border so much and I just love tariffs and like, like I really care about this vision. I don't think he has a vision for the country. I think he's a person who wants to be in power. He thinks if you disagree with him, you should be stopped. And he doesn't think of, oh, there's this constitution, there's like limits on My power. He's like. Like, no, I'm gonna stop you. I'm gonna try my best. And he tries to do everything he possibly can to get his way, and he's very unstrategic, and there's a lot of people that oppose him, and he loses a lot of the time. But that doesn't mean he's not dangerous. Because the Republican Party is increasingly a personality cult for the identity of Trump. You know it. Whenever you criticize Trump, there's a lot of Republicans out there that hate your guts because you are not fully in on the cult in the administration. They're saying, in order to work at the doj, you have to be a Trump cultist. They're going after people that are Democrats specifically because they're Democrats. So, like, this is a situation.

[Micah]

I think we could. We maybe caveat that with the fact that there was also very intentional.

[Kai]

Yeah, no, no. I don't mean to equivocate it, because we can't equivocate these things.

[Micah]

I don't mean to equivocate or equivocate. This is why I said specifically, I think we should be able to add an asterisk. I think we can add the asterisk.

[Kai]

I think you can acknowledge that under Democratic administrations, you have biased attorneys. You have more liberal attorneys at the top. When they think about problems, they think about problems with the skew. They think more about religious, conservative problems, religious groups, and they prosecuted them a little bit more than they should have. They did other groups, and there was some political bias.

[Micah]

And Trump was even elected. You even saw from. Who was it? Who was the general. Was it Flynn? Trying to remember who very specifically said Trump said this thing. I kind of, you know, something different.

[Kai]

Yeah, but. But you didn't see the kind of situation where you have. Only liberals can work here. If you're a conservative, you have to leave. Oh, if you're one of my friends and, like, you donated to me, I'm gonna pardon you. He's pardoned so many people. There's like, these guys are criminals, man.

[Micah]

Yeah.

[Kai]

And he pardoned them January Sixers. I mean, like, another one of them today got arrested.

[Micah]

Biden got all the weed smokers.

[Kai]

As if that was sort of the same thing.

[Micah]

Big problem.

[Kai]

But. But, you know, you didn't see Biden. Biden texting Merrick Garland. Like, hey, make sure you prosecute my political enemies today. And to give credit to Biden, his son got prosecuted, Menendez got prosecuted, Cuellar got prosecuted, Eric Adams got prosecuted. More Democrats actually were Successfully prosecuted, I believe, under Joe Biden than Trump. Not because Trump's not trying, but because Trump keeps failing.

[Micah]

So I think you and I absolutely agree in the fact that, you know, for instance, you look at the indictments by the. Usually that's like open, shut. Yeah. Now it's like.

[Kai]

And so that's why I want us to end this on, you can agree, we need to ban the gerrymandering. We need to go to every area of unfair partisan advantage or things that skew the ability for the American people to get what they want. And we need to tear apart those, those unfair things.

[Micah]

Okay.

[Kai]

Right. And I want, you know, I think gerrymandering is a big key one.

[Micah]

I'll make you my concession if you can give me one as well.

[Kai]

What is it?

[Micah]

The people voted for mass deportation. Would you be willing to provide the people mass deportation?

[Kai]

So I don't think that the American people voted for deporting 100 million people like what DHS is saying. So it depends on what you mean by mass deportation.

[Micah]

Not 100 million, but you know, at least deport criminals that came in in the last 10 to 15. No, no. I mean it was not just criminals. We, the Trump campaign was not just run on deporting criminals, deporting illegal immigrants to the United States of America and the largest deportation campaign in the U.S. history.

[Kai]

I think if you look at, at the median voter, because remember, he got like 50, he got 49.8% of the vote and there was a third party candidate. You look at those people that got him his victory. What do those people think? I think that's, that's, that's the question we should be asking. Right. Because that is the most moderate part of the faction of the winning coalition. They thought you should deport a lot of the recent arrivals. Absolutely. People that lied in their asylum claims. Absolutely. People that, that were criminals. Absolutely. I don't think that they thought that you were going to deport every DACA recipient. The one year old child that they tried to. They deported a kid who came here when he was one.

[Micah]

Yeah. With this, with his family.

[Kai]

Yeah. But I don't think they were thinking that there, or actually there was an adult actually who came here when he was one and he became an adult and they deported that person. And like, I don't think they were thinking about that guy. I don't think they were thinking about somebody who was 20 years ago. So I would agree, yes. They, they voted for a lot more deportations than we were having.

[Micah]

Okay, well.

[Kai]

Yeah. Okay.

[Micah]

And then mass deport everybody. Let's say ten years.

[Kai]

I don't say ten.

[Micah]

Five years.

[Kai]

I. I'd say underbody.

[Micah]

You give me five years.

[Kai]

Under. Yeah, five years.

[Micah]

Five years. I think. And a border wall.

[Kai]

I mean, I think. And a border wall.

[Micah]

That's the only way to get. And that was 2016 new. And it's the only way to get something that cannot be removed by political bureaucracy because it's a physical thing.

[Kai]

That's actually a pretty good argument for the border wall. I don't care about the border wall. I think you should have.

[Micah]

It's me then.

[Kai]

I think you should have a very secure border. Sure. Yeah. Border wall. There we are. All right.

[Micah]

That's a deal.

[Kai]

Yeah. Why not? Thanks, gentlemen. That was very respectful. Very respectful. That's skillful. Check out. Hopefully it still goes viral. Yeah. Check out their socials, guys. We'll link them below. Comment below who you thought won. And see you next time. Peace. Thanks for watching. All the way to the end, guys. Please hit like and subscribe. It helps us grow the show and helps us get bigger guests. Thank you so much.