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Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 329 | Executive Orders? Hold My Beer! | Guest: Matt Kibbe
00:52:53
Matt Kibbe goes through the history of the expansion of executive authority, in which the presidency becomes more and more dominant over the other two branches of government.
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- [00:00]
Matt Kibbe
Foreign welcome to Kibby at Liberty. Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. And I know what you're thinking. Another solo episode with just me. I promise that next week I will have a legitimate guest with wisdom far beyond my own, and we will talk about something substantial and interesting and it'll be awesome. But I am going to be on the road when this goes on the air. So I thought that I would do something that I've been wanting to do for a while. I've been looking for a guest to talk about the abuse of presidential power and specifically executive orders and memoranda and all that stuff. And I probably should have groked it because Grok knows everything that I don't know, but I have yet to find that guest. If you have a suggestion after watching this episode, I would love to hear it because somebody much smarter than I will have much wiser opinions when it comes to the imperial presidency and this process that we're going through where one president expands executive power and does more executive orders and more sweeping authority is grasped and then there's a legal precedent when the courts and the Congress fail to act. And it is a classic example of hold my beer politics where one party complains about the other party abusing executive power only to eventually gain office and do the same damn thing. Now, I could go all the way back to Woodrow Wilson, I could go back to fdr, but I thought a good place to start was with the Obama administration, which is mostly going to start with the Obama administration because that is the moment that I remember where I noticed as a libertarian complaining about executive power since the moment I got to Washington D.C. as a 22 year old guy. But it strikes me that Barack Obama really started this nuclear arms race, expanding presidential power. But I want to start by drinking this beer because it's a metaphor. I'm old enough to remember when Tea Party Republicans, myself included, I was a Tea Party organizer. As you guys probably know. We complained and complained about the abuse of executive power and it was targeted at the the Obama administration. But now it seems like a lot of Republicans and a lot of conservatives, not so much us Libertarians. But they're like, well, Biden did it, Obama did it. So hold my beer. Get it. Metaphor. Hold my beer. I am going to use the power of the pen and the phone to expand my policy priorities because I can't get Congress to do it. Or in the case of the current administration, the Trump administration, there'll be plenty of criticism of them as well. I'm not even going to try to get Congress to do it. I'm just going to do it in my first weeks in office. Beautiful, beautiful hazy double dry hopped IPA from Monkish Brewing. If you can get your hands on one, I guarantee that you should. So here we go. Hold my beer. So I've already alluded to this, but in 2014, Barack Obama, President Barack Obama, increasingly frustrated with the Tea Party class that took over the House and eventually the Senate that took over the house and 2010. I was very much part of that effort and eventually took the Senate in 2014. And Barack Obama was increasingly frustrated that his big government agenda was being stymied and blocked by Republicans in Congress. Perhaps the last time that Republicans actually fundamentally differentiated themselves by defending limited government and opposing radical expansions in the size and scope of government. Obama gave this infamous speech while I still have my pen and my phone. And by that he meant that he had the ability, so he asserted, to sign executive orders and memoranda and other types of presidential briefs. I don't really consider, for purposes of this show, I'm not going to draw bright distinctions between those things. I'm not a legislative lawyer or anything like that. But the president's saying, I'm going to do this unilaterally. And he the phone part was perhaps less intimidating because he was basically saying, I'm going to use my bully pulpit to pick on Republicans and rally my Democratic supporters and try to win back Congress. Which of course he or the Democrats eventually did. But he decided to do this sweeping number of executive orders. And by the way, I'm not even going to quote these numbers, but there's all sorts of comparisons between how many executive orders did George W. Bush do? How many did Barack Obama do? How many did Trump 1.0 do? How many did Biden do? How many is Trump doing? Now, those numbers to me don't mean that much because it's not the number of executive orders that you sign, it's what they actually do. Like, are you doing something that dramatically expands the size and scope of government, something that appropriately should be left to the legislative branch of government? That's the question that we have to ask when criticizing the imperial presidency. Of course, the big ones that Barack Obama did pertains to immigration policy. The Democrats ramble tangent. The Democrats have had multiple opportunities to rationalize immigration policy based on their priorities. And for some reason, they never do it when they have the House and the Senate and the presidency, but are constantly complaining that Republicans are the bad guys. I've talked about this extensively. The problem with immigration and the reason we can't fix immigration, legal immigration, based on the principle that if you want to come here and you want to work, we would like you to be part of the American system. That's my policy. I think that's the reasonable policy of, of anybody. But it is not the policy of either Democrats or Republicans. They view immigrants, legal, illegal, whatever, as political pawns to be manipulated. And the Democrats are just as guilty of this as Republicans, maybe even more so because they want to own and control and manipulate the people that they let across the border illegally. I think it's a disgusting process, but I ramble tangent, but apropos of this Obama era executive order. In response to the failure to pass the so called DREAM act, which dealt with undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children, Barack Obama signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to defer deportation for undocumented immigrants. He also did fairly sweeping executive orders on climate change and reducing CO2 emissions. This at the time a fairly new and novel agenda for Democrats to push. He couldn't get his radical restrictions on CO2 policies through this new Republican Congress. So he wrote a series of commands, both executive orders and memoranda that empowered the EPA to basically go after carbon based energy. Fairly sweeping, fairly radical. He also raised the minimum wage for federal contractors, something that you would think obviously is the prerogative of Congress, not the executive branch. And then, of course, and we'll get into this probably a little bit later, he justified his fairly aggressive use of drone strikes as part of his foreign policy, which resulted in, infamously resulted in the killing of an American citizen who he claimed was a national security threat. So Obama well, I said I wasn't going to do this, but I got it right here, so I'm going to do it. Obama issued 277 executive orders, George W. Bush issued 291 and Bill Clinton 364. The difference being that he also wrote over 600 memoranda and thousands of agency rules. This was a sea change in how the executive branch dealt with Congress. He decided that he was just going to do this stuff unilaterally. You'll be surprised to know that the next president said, hold my beer, I got this. I'm going to do even more of that because that seems to be a lot easier than galvanizing the American public and moving the legislative process. And you know, particularly when it's not my party in control of Congress. But even when it is, and I think this is a big problem that the Trump administration is coping with that. Many Republicans in the House and Senate are fundamentally neoconservatives who actually kind of like big government. So if you want to do Doge, if you actually want to look at the Pentagon, maybe audit it, maybe not do so many wars as Trump himself has said that he wanted to do, we'll see if that's true or not. But if you actually want to do that stuff, your big challenge is Republicans and not Democrats. So they're going to do executive orders instead. Thank you for joining me today on.
- [12:03]
Unknown Co-host
Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now let's get back to it.
- [12:34]
Matt Kibbe
So we fast forward to what sort of precedence does this create when Barack Obama started doing all of this stuff? First of all, it usually is not challenged by Congress. There's always some cranky libertarian like Thomas Massie or Rand Paul shouting loudly from the sidelines and both Republicans and Democrats ignoring them. But generally speaking, Congress has been completely AWOL and remiss in their constitutional duties when it comes to reining in executive power. If anything, they like it. They like it when they give blank checks to regulatory agencies like the epa. The Supreme Court case on Chevron has pulled some of that back, and hopefully in a dramatic way. But they like to defer authority when it comes to war, when it comes to regulatory action, because then they can take credit when it turns out right, and they can divert the blame away from themselves when they don't do that. Congress has been remiss in using the power of the purse to defund this kind of stuff. And there's an interesting example that I found warning product placement. There's this great book by this guy Matt Kibbe, resisting hostile takeover, resisting centralized government stranglehold on America. And I've been rereading this book. I think this came out in 2012. I've been rereading this book book because all of the fights that we're having today and all of the predictions that I make well over a decade ago about the expansion of executive power, about overspending, about the possible inflationary impact of monetizing debt that you can't fund through higher taxes or borrowing, that's all in here. And I think some of my friends in Trump world would say my book came out a decade too early because there is a hostile takeover going on in certain aspects where citizens are trying to take back their government from the administrative state, from Washington elites, from this cabal of insiders that has corrupted the process. And the metaphor was not that the citizens are the ones who are hostile, but that when citizens try the shareholders of the country try to take their company back from entrenched management, it's management that gets hostile. And that metaphor seems completely appropriate. I suppose it's been appropriate ever since I wrote this book and, and maybe before that. But there was this thing during the Obama administration where he was appointing sort of extra constitutional czars for everything. There was a climate czar and there was a health care czar, supposedly to help implement the train wreck legislation, Obamacare that had recently passed. And get this, House Republicans attempted to defund four of Obama's most prominent and controversial czars, notably his health care and climate change czars, by including language that defunded the positions in budget legislation that was signed by the president. Obama basically said, screw you guys, I'm going to do it anyway because I'm declaring the executive authority to do this. And I quote the presidential memorandum in this chapter of the book. The President has well established authority to supervise and oversee the executive branch and to obtain advice in furtherance of this supervisory authority. The President also has the prerogative to obtain advice that will assist him in carrying out his constitutional responsibilities and and does so not only from executive branch officials and employees outside the White House, but also from advisors within it. Think about this statement in the context of the Democrats howling about Elon Musk and Doge. President Obama goes on legislative efforts that significantly impede the President's ability to exercise his supervisory and coordinating authorities or to obtain the views of the appropriate senior advisors. Vice violate the separation of powers. Therefore, the executive branch will construe the law as to not abrogate these presidential prerogatives. There is a statement that could come out of the current Trump administration and all of the Democrats that are complaining about Elon Musk would be howling about separation of powers and the abuse of executive authority and how Congress needs to take back its constitutional responsibilities. So we go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Now, of course, Trump took many of Obama's policies and said, hold my beer. A lot of what Trump did in his first term was simply repealing many of these executive orders, particularly the clean energy carbon regulations that eventually became the clean Power plan. Trump rolls that back. Trump does a travel ban from certain Muslim countries to the howl of Democrats. And I'd forgotten this, but he did border wall funding, which I don't think ever amounted to anything. And I won't get into Trump's first term. I'd like to spend more time on Trump's second term. But lo and behold, Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump for re election. And the first thing he does on day one is 17 executive orders rejoining the Paris climate agreement, revoking Trump's travel ban and halting border wall construction. Back and forth, back and forth. And I'm sure I'll say this again, but one of the things that enthusiasts of executive orders should be aware of is that if you don't do something with Congress regarding the budget, regarding spending levels, if you don't demand that Congress use the power of the purse, if you then don't move forward with authorizing legislation that fundamentally eliminates the types of programs like, let's say, usaid, something that absolutely needs to go away. If you don't do it the right way, and if you do it by executive order, the next time that a Democrat takes the White House, and I'm going to make a wild prediction, someday in the future, a Democrat will sit in the White House again. I know that's bold. If you'd like to bet against me, I'll take those bets. I won't go so far to say that it'll be Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, although I've been reading all of the articles that her team is leaking suggesting that she will in fact run in 2028. And I believe she'll be old enough. I'm not sure. I read it on cnn. So it must be true. It must be true. Biden reverses a lot of Trump executive orders on day one. But then it gets twice as bad. It gets infinitely worse than almost anything that the first Trump administration did. I remember, and maybe you do as well, right before the 2022 midterm election, Biden, out of frustration that he couldn't get Congress to act, forgave 400 billion in student debt via executive action. Do you remember that? Right before the election, he knew it was unconstitutional. He knew that it wouldn't stand. It was a brazen attempt to. To buy votes. I would say successful. Successful and brazen attempt to buy votes in that midterm election. And the Republicans didn't do nearly as well as they expected to. Surely a lot of that was their own fault, not Biden's brazen vote buying. And of course eventually the Supreme Court came back in 2023 and threw that out. And all of these students who were assuming that the President's executive order had the force of law were left feeling kind of screwed. Biden also expanded a lot of DEI initiatives and he expanded a lot of Obama era mandates regarding global warming and climate change and reducing carbon emissions. And this was, this was all bad stuff.
- [22:30]
Unknown Co-host
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- [22:38]
Matt Kibbe
Free the People.
- [22:39]
Unknown Co-host
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- [23:08]
Matt Kibbe
But that's just the beginning because the thing and you'll remember if you watch this show during the pandemic, you'll remember me, me just railing in an insane kind of way. Not insane, but righteously indignant. There was a host of Biden era executive orders mandating people's behavior during the pandemic. Do you remember this? Executive Order on Federal Employee Vaccination September 9, 2021 All Federal Employees had to get vaccinated or they would lose their job. Executive Order on Federal Contractors Safety protocols for federal contractors including vaccination and masking Private Sector Employer Mandate this was a big one, directing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration OSHA to issue an emergency temporary standard requiring businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure workers were fully vaccinated or tested weekly for COVID 19 why 100? This reminds me a little bit of the restaurant rule that if you had to wear your mask while you were standing up, but once you sat down you could take your mask off. Apparently once you hire that one 101 first employee, then the virus gets in there and you got to do something about it. You got to force the vaccination. Now there was also a health care worker mandate which was upheld by the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court threw out the OSHA mandate, which was in no way a slam dunk. Because the thing that you'll learn about executive power when you read these things, that every single time that the President abuses his power to pass things that should have been done through legislation, if done at all, it's either under the guise of national security or an emergency Safetyism. It all comes down to that. We learned this during COVID that that our constitutional protections against federal encroachment on our lives is very much limited during a crisis. And that is a loophole that defines the expansion of the power of government. So Joe Biden does all this stuff based on the precedent set by Barack Obama and then Donald Trump. Outrageous expansions of presidential power. There were mask and testing policies for Head Start and federal schools encroaching on education. And there's one more where to go. The final one was requiring the temporary suspension of eviction notices. I've lost the specific order here, but you'll remember this. People don't remember this part, but this was first done by the Trump administration. An executive order directing the cdc, the Centers for Disease Control, to consider suspending the requirement that people pay their rent. What does the CDC have to do with any of that safetyism? Again, it was an emergency. It was a national crisis. So suddenly we've determined that people don't necessarily have to pay their rent and landlords don't necessarily have to get paid. The collateral damage from that, we're still feeling, particularly in cities, that that went deep in on that. It started with Trump. Joe Biden extended that executive order again and again and again through his presidency. So here we are. I'm watching the Democrats and a few libertarians, a few of us and a few liberty minded Republicans raising the specter of abuse of executive power. And it seems to me that what happens is when the other guys are in control, we complain about it. But when, quote unquote, our guy takes control, we're like, hold my beer, we're going to do more. I think it's a bad strategy. I think it's also a fundamental undermining of our constitutional limits on government. And it seems to be an erosion of these norms. The Democrats like to talk a lot about the norms of democracy and governance, but the abuse of presidential power and the blurring of the lines between three branches of government is a fundamental problem. I want to go back just a little bit further. And this I think is an Achilles heel, particularly for Republicans, but for both parties. And talk a little bit about foreign policy and the endless wars that we have been fighting Again, since I first got to Washington. I got here at the end of the Reagan administration. I'm dating myself, some of you guys are going to judge me as being an old. But I got here at the end of the Reagan administration. But one of my very first experiences as a young policymaker was George H.W. bush getting involved in the conflict in Kuwait. And it seems like again and again and again, same sort of metaphor applies here. The more foreign policy adventurism that we get involved in, the next president says, I have more authority to do more wars. And that happened with Bill Clinton. You should Google sometime just how many conflicts Bill Clinton got us into. We don't call them wars anymore. We call them interventions. They have all sorts of fancy words that they use because you can't call it a war, because Congress actually has a responsibility to declare war. So we call it the authorization abuse of military force. And we've been leaning so heavily on 2001 legislation authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan that it's to the point where congressional approval of acts of war mean virtually nothing, and Congress doesn't do anything about it, and the courts don't do anything about it. And it's ostensibly under the guise of the President having the authority to conduct foreign policy. But it is a loophole, perhaps too big for the Constitution to sustain. And I bring this up because I want to talk about one of the things that I'm most optimistic about when it comes to the Department. What does DOGE stand for? Department of Government Efficiency. I got that on the first try. And one of the things that Elon Musk has talked a lot about is lifting the hood at the Department of Defense and all these other Alphabet agencies ostensibly designed to keep us safe. The DoD can't pass an audit. It laughs about it when you ask them about it. But if you actually want to do something about executive power, you probably need to take away some of those tools. You need to take away the blank check that allows them to indiscriminately engage in acts of war all over the world, in places that have nothing to do with Afghanistan, they have nothing to do with Iraq. We're all over the place. And as long as you have in a massive budget to fund all of that stuff, you're never going to rein it in. And this, by the way, was the Achilles heel of the Tea Party movement. Right after Barack Obama starts using his pen and his phone, there is, thanks to the Tea Party, an effort to put caps on both discretionary domestic spending and defense spending. And because both sides thought that the other would blink, for a couple years there, we had limits on defense spending. Can you imagine? Crazy. You know, why those caps went away wasn't because of Democrats. It was because Republicans, many Republicans, the neoconservative Republicans, wanted to fully fund the war on terror, which is an infinite number. The war on terror can be justified in almost any military action that the president chooses to take. So can you fully fund the Trump administration now bragging about? What is it? A trillion dollar. I forget what the number is. A trillion dollar defense budget for the very first time, which is upwards of a 20, 25% increase. I forget what the number is, but it's a huge increase in the defense budget. After having established that there's all sorts of waste, fraud and abuse, that there's all sorts of wars that the government has engaged us in, former presidents, and we're just going to throw more money at the problem. It's not how you do it. If there's more money, it means that Congress and the president in collusion will continue to engage in military actions against the American interests, against America first. And we need to do something about that.
- [34:10]
Unknown Co-host
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- [34:15]
Matt Kibbe
And breathe and wear every day. If that describes you, you need the.
- [34:20]
Unknown Co-host
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- [34:36]
Matt Kibbe
And I think DOGE is probably the best way to do that. Now, I've been a big defender of DOGE and I've been enthusiastically looking at all of the data and all of the discoveries coming out of DOGE as they went into usaid, as they go into these other federal agencies. I'm quite curious to see just how much fraudulent claims there are within mandatory programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. That number might be quite much bigger, maybe astronomically bigger than any of us would have imagined. DOGE itself is controversial because it is viewed amongst its Democratic critics as an abuse of executive power, which I think is kind of comical because the agency that was originally seated at the Office of Management and Budget was created by Barack Obama in response to the political crisis created by the passage and implementation of Obamacare. Maybe some of you guys remember this Obamacare in its implementation and the infamous website where you could go and sign up for Obamacare. It was a literal train wreck and they couldn't get the system to work and so they created this computer systems and data management agency within the Office of Management and Budget specifically to deal with these functions. Along comes. President Trump and his team discovered this and they repurpose this agency and they move it from OMB to, to report directly to the executive branch. And by the way, I would think that a key function of the Executive branch is, in fact, to oversee federal agencies and to make sure that their systems, their computer systems work and their data is secure, and that we're not making payments to people that don't exist, and that we're not wasting a lot of federal agency dollars on just, again, waste, fraud and abuse. So Barack Obama's expansion of executive power created the executive branch agency that has been repurposed for the Doge. And now, if you ask the Democrats, this is some sort of outrageous abuse of executive power. Explain that to me. Is it or is it not? I think the answer to that is, you're in Congress, step up, do the thing that you have failed to do. And this gets to the question of whether or not the efforts of Elon Musk and Doge will, in fact, matter at some point, because they can certainly expose a lot of these abuses. They can make changes at the margins. But ultimately, if you want to eliminate the wasteful and downright destructive programs at USAID or any other federal agency, you're going to need to get Congress to do what it has failed to do. For now, most of my adult life, that means budgeting, that means authorizing, and that means using the power of the purse, the exact thing that Barack Obama scolded the Republican Congress for in 2014. They're going to have to do that, and they're going to have to fight. And if President Trump actually wants to see the changes that he wants to make, I like some of them, I don't like others of them. But if he actually wants to make changes that won't be reversed by the next Democratic president, he's going to have to go through Congress and he's specifically going to have to go through the budget process. And this is something that, as Thomas Massie has pointed out and everybody life loves to yell at him for this. If you don't start with budget resolution and then pass the appropriate budget allocations through the appropriations process and then take that all to budget reconciliation, the expedited process by which you only need 50 votes instead of 60 in the Senate. If you don't do it that way and you don't actually get the numbers and some of the authorizations for budget cuts, which is allowed under reconciliation. If you don't do it that way, it's either not going to happen at all or it's going to happen for a very short period of time. And we're going to come back. Now, those of you who are more critical of the Trump administration are probably sitting there thinking that, you know, what You've mostly complained about Democrats expansion of executive power. Fair enough. And I want to talk about some of the things that I think are the most problematic in Trump 2.0. Now, I wanted to celebrate Trump's elimination of low flow toilets, because I think the abomination of George H. W. Bush signing legislation mandating low flow toilets, I'm all in with Trump's criticism of that. Who wants to flush twice? It's a clear abuse of federal power. But it looks to me like that would be one of the executive orders that probably is not going to pass court tests because there is, in fact, legislation that explicitly imposes low flow toilets on the suffering American people. Now, I would hope that the Republican Congress, we have a House, we have the Senate, they should pass legislation. And I'm for. Well, am I for banning low flow toilets? I think I am. It's kind of authoritarian of me, but I'm for it as long as it's done through the appropriate legislative process. But beyond that, let's talk about deportations for a while. A lot of this is done through executive order. And I will say as a libertarian who believes that if you came here legally and you want to follow the rules and you want to work, I want you here. I'm as pro immigrant as it gets. But if the Trump administration ICE is spending its energy going after violent gang members who are here illegally, I got no complaints. But as these deportations move forward, there's going to be more and more mistakes made because the actual process, let's say there's 11 million illegal aliens in this country. The actual process of weeding them out of civil society and weeding them out of neighborhoods and schools and even families, that gets pretty ugly. And I'm old enough to remember when Bill Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, became infamous for going after a small boy named Ilion Gonzales. And there's this iconic picture, if you Google this child's name, there's this iconic picture of a Clinton administration jackbooted thug pointing a military rifle at this kid. That is political death for people that are too zealous about deportation. Shouldn't be done this way. It's going to be disaster. My favorite Senator Rand Paul has talked a lot about the. I've lost count on how many executive orders the Trump administration has done on tariffs and trade. They seem to change almost every day. And I think the erraticness of it is a problem in and of itself. I am a free trader. I would love if Trump was successful in lowering barriers to trade in other countries. Almost every country that we trade with, with a few exceptions, is almost equally as protectionist, if not more than we are. This is the politics of protectionism. Every country wants to protect its politically favored industries at the expense of imports. And it would be better for the United States and the world if we could lower trade barriers and open up new markets to American goods. It would be bad for American workers and bad for American businesses if the net result of these executive orders was a trade war that ended up punishing our businesses and our ability to produce products, many, many of which actually depend on imports from other countries. I did a whole episode on this. If you want to see our arguments in favor of that position, check that out. And if you want to yell at me, go on social media. And please do that, because that's what social media is for. But Rand's point is that tariffs are taxes. And the president arbitrarily imposing taxes through executive order is a fundamental violation of the separation of powers. Only Congress has the power to tax. And the Trump administration's language when they talk about their tariff policies is quite confused because sometimes they're like, it's not a tax, it's a tax on them, it's a tax on us. This is about negotiating lower tariffs. But they do brag about all the revenue that's going to come in from the tariffs, and revenue comes from taxes. And taxes is the prerogative of Congress, not the executive branch. The one that sort of rubs me, I won't say the most, but it really rubs me the wrong way, is the Executive Order 14188 Additional Measures to Combat antisemitism. And I'm a free speech absolutist. And I'm also an absolutely. I find anti Semitism absolutely unacceptable. But I don't think the President or an executive order or the federal government or Congress or state legislatures have any business dictating the terms of speech, even speech that you might find offensive, even quote unquote, anti Semitic speech. And this reminds me a lot. And people that want to defend this will call this hyperbolic, but it reminds me a lot of what's going on in the UK right now. We made an awesome James Bond spoof called Censorship Royale Comedy spoof, making fun of the British censors for going after anybody that is shitposting on X. And you know, at the time, we thought we were sort of exaggerating a little bit, but now you can go on X and discover that British citizens are actually getting arrested and thrown in jail for saying the most innocuous things. And we seem to be going down this path with this executive order on antisemitism. Hey, buddy, my cat Reardon is in the house. He might join the show and he'll have his own opinions about all this. So this is primarily focused on college campuses and it's been controversial already because they have deported various provocateurs, pro Palestine provocateurs who have been here on, allegedly here on student visas. But I think it's sort of a bait and switch to say that this is about guests to our country. I think it's about censoring students who are critical of US Foreign policy in our relationship to Israel, critical of the Israeli government's foreign policy and its relationship to Palestine. And that, to me, seems so fundamentally un American. And we've federalized this. The Department of Justice is involved now. And to me, it's doing exactly what we made fun of all these Ivy League campuses for doing when it came to DEI sort of limits on free speech. Again, the Republicans are like, hold my beer. I don't like your speech. I hated it when you censored my speech. But now that I'm in charge, I'm going to pass an executive order. I think it's dangerous. And here's the. So I gotta have a shot of my beer. Mixing metaphors here. Here's the chaser. The Trump executive order that all the Democrats are upset about, outraged about. Civil libertarians pissed off free speech absolutists like myself. We're angry. It's actually built on a 2019 Biden era executive order. Executive Order 13899 directed agencies to consider the International Holocaust remembrance alliance definition of antisemitism when enforcing Title IX of the Civil Rights act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin. Hey, buddy, if you're listening to this, there is a cat on set. Now. I feel like, when's the last time Reardon came on set? It's been a long time. He wants my beer. That's the problem. So, and I remember Thomas Massie talking about this at the time. I think he was infamous and demonized by the Israeli lobby for actually voting against this because he said that he went and actually read the definition of antisemitism proposed by the ihra and it was a blank check on speech censorship. These definitions are absurd and it gives, wait for it, unchecked discretionary power to the executive branch of government to prosecute you and to otherwise demonize you and make your life miserable if you don't say something if you do say something that they don't like. So you're going to knock that over, bud. So I think Reardon is telling me that I've rambled on too long and that it's time for me to wrap this up. I would love your suggestions as to guests, perhaps a civil liberties attorney, someone like that. I just came up with an idea that probably might be pretty good, but I'd love to know who I can talk to on the expansion of executive authority and the abuse of executive orders and the hypocrisy of both sides when it comes to this stuff because I think this game is only going to escalate. The escalation of the nuclear powers of the executive branch can only lead to all out war and the war in this case is the government against you and I. Until next time, hold my beer. What's up buddy? Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure.
- [52:17]
Unknown Co-host
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- [52:20]
Matt Kibbe
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- [52:22]
Unknown Co-host
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