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- [00:00]
Isaac Saul
Dear old work platform. It's not you, it's us.
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John Lowell
Actually, it is you.
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Isaac Saul
Endless onboarding, constant IT bottlenecks. We've had enough.
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John Lowell
We need a platform that just gets us.
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Isaac Saul
And to be honest, we've met someone new. They're called Monday.com and it was love at first onboarding. Their beautiful dashboards, their customizable workflows got us floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.
- [00:31]
John Lowell
I can't tell you how often I.
- [00:32]
Isaac Saul
Hear, oh, I'm a little ocd.
- [00:34]
John Lowell
I like things neat. That's not ocd. I'm Howie Mandel and I know this.
- [00:39]
Isaac Saul
Because I have ocd. Actual OCD causes relentless unwanted thoughts.
- [00:44]
John Lowell
What if I did something terrible and forgot? What if I'm a bad person?
- [00:48]
Isaac Saul
Why am I thinking this terrible thing?
- [00:50]
John Lowell
It makes you question absolutely everything and you'll do anything to feel better. OCD is debilitating, but it's also highly.
- [00:58]
Isaac Saul
Treatable with the right kind of therapy. Regular talk therapy doesn't cut it.
- [01:02]
John Lowell
OCD needs specialized therapy.
- [01:05]
Isaac Saul
That's why I want to tell you about NO cd.
- [01:08]
John Lowell
NOCD is the world's largest virtual therapy provider for ocd.
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Isaac Saul
Their licensed therapists provide specialized therapy virtually.
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John Lowell
And it's covered by insurance for over 155 million Americans. If you think you might be struggling with OCD, visit nocd.com to schedule a free 15 minute call and learn more.
- [01:28]
Isaac Saul
That's n o c d dot com.
- [01:32]
John Lowell
Picture this.
- [01:32]
Isaac Saul
You're halfway through a DIY car fix, tools scattered everywhere, and boom. You realise you're missing a part.
- [01:39]
John Lowell
It's okay because, you know, whatever it is, it's on ebay. They've got everything. Brakes, headlights, cold air intakes, whatever you need. And it's guaranteed to fit. Which means no more crossing your fingers.
- [01:50]
Isaac Saul
And hoping you ordered the right thing. All the parts you need at prices you'll love. Guaranteed to fit every time.
- [01:58]
John Lowell
EBay.
- [01:59]
Isaac Saul
Things people love.
- [02:08]
Phoebe Saul
From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.
- [02:23]
Isaac Saul
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Sull, and on today's episode, we are talking about the birthright citizenship arguments before the Supreme Court, which weren't totally about birthright citizenship. We're going to explain exactly why. Before we jump in, though, I gotta do something a little different, a little special. I need to say congratulations to my wife. It is Tuesday, May 20, 2025, and my wife, Phoebe, one of the most popular guests on the Tangle Podcast ever. She has finished law school and she graduates this week. About three years ago, I did a special Friday Edition newsletter and podcast about Phoebe. She had upended her career and decided to go to law school. She did something very few people do in our era of shortcuts and hacks and people basically cheating their way through all sorts of different challenges. She chose the incredibly hard and atypical path in order to pursue a career that meant something to her. Well, this week, she completed another chapter in that journey. She finished law school, and she didn't just finish, but she completed half of her final year pregnant and the other half after giving birth to our first child in January. She managed straight A's and will graduate with honors. I have the great privilege here on Tangle of doing my work publicly, which means when I write a good piece or I do my job well, I tend to get feedback, positive feedback from people. Some, like her, they do a much harder thing. They complete their work in solitude, with little more than their own motivation and discipline to get them through tough times. What she did these last three years, it was simply remarkable. And so I just felt it was important to say somewhere publicly.
- [04:21]
John Lowell
So.
- [04:21]
Isaac Saul
So, Phoebe, if you're listening to this, which I'm sure you're not, congrats. I'm proud of you. I love you, and as scared as I am of you being a lawyer, because I will never win an argument again. Not that I ever really did. I can't wait to see what you do next with that. I'm gonna send it over to John and I'll be back for my take.
- [04:47]
John Lowell
Thanks, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, following a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump said Russia and Ukraine would immediately begin ceasefire negotiations. Russia did not offer a timeframe for starting talks. Number two, the Supreme Court paused a federal judge's ruling that had blocked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from ending the temporary protected status of over 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, clearing the way for their removals. Separately, the Department of Homeland Security conducted its first deportation flight with 64 migrants who accepted the government's offer of $1,000 to leave the country voluntarily. Number three, the Justice Department charged Representative Lamonica McIver, the Democrat from New Jersey, with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers during a confrontation outside an immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, earlier this month. Number four, Israel permitted aid trucks to enter Gaza for the first time in nearly three months. Shortly afterward, the United Kingdom, France and Canada issued a joint statement calling the aid wholly inadequate and warning of potential concrete actions against Israel. At number five, the Trump administration agreed to pay approximately $5 million to the family of Ashley Babbitt, who was killed by a police officer while taking part in the January 6 Capitol riot, to settle a wrongful death lawsuit.
- [06:24]
Phoebe Saul
The Supreme Court is in the middle.
- [06:25]
John Lowell
Of a high stakes debate over who gets to be a citizen at birth.
- [06:29]
Isaac Saul
It all centers on a Trump era.
- [06:30]
Phoebe Saul
Executive order that challenges the long standing.
- [06:33]
John Lowell
Rule that anyone born on US Soil is automatically a citizen, even if their parents are here illegally or are on temporary visas. On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard opening arguments on whether to lift or narrow a series of lower court injunctions blocking the Trump administration from enforcing an executive order banning birthright citizenship. The arguments primarily focused on the constitutionality of federal judges issuing universal injunctions, which bar a specific law or policy from being implemented nationwide and did not engage the merits of the order itself. A decision from the court on the injunctions is expected in late June or early July. For context, on his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order ending the automatic extension of citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who were not in the country legally at the time of birth or who had only temporary legal status. The order was scheduled to take effect on February 19, but was quickly blocked by a US district judge who who called it blatantly unconstitutional. District court judges in Maryland, Washington State and Massachusetts also issued nationwide injunctions blocking the order, preventing it from being enforced even in states not involved in the challenge. After appeals courts declined the government's requests to lift or narrow the injunctions, the Trump administration brought the case to the Supreme Court, which expedited the case through its emergency docket. We covered the history of birthright citizenship in the U.S. and President Trump's proposal to end the practice in December 2020. There's a link in today's episode. Description During Thursday's arguments, U.S. solicitor General D. John Sauer characterized nationwide injunctions as a bipartisan problem spanning the last five presidential administrations. Such injunctions prevent the percolation of novel and difficult legal questions. They encourage rampant forum shopping. They require judges to make rushed, high stakes, low information decisions, sauer said. New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum, who is representing the states challenging the executive order, said the injunctions were properly designed to give states relief from significant pocketbook and sovereign harms. That execution of the order would have caused. Some Republican appointed justices seemed partial to Sauer's argument, with Justice Clarence Thomas remarking, we survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions. Justice Samuel Alito also suggested that federal judges had too much power to freeze executive actions nationwide. Separately, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Sauer about whether the Trump administration would follow district court rulings it disagreed with. Sauer responded, our general practice is to respect those precedents, but there are circumstances when it is not a categorical practice. Democrat appointed justices raised concerns about the consequences of curtailing nationwide injunctions. You're going to have to win individual by individual by individual, and and all of those individuals are going to win. And the ones who can't afford to go to court, they're the ones who are going to lose, justice Elena Kagan said. Justice Sonia Sotomayor also remarked that granting the Trump administration's request would limit federal court's ability to curb clear constitutional violations except through individual lawsuits. Today, we'll break down the arguments presented to the court with perspectives from the left and the right, and then Isaac's Take Foreign.
- [10:03]
Isaac Saul
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- [12:13]
John Lowell
All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left concedes some flaws with judges injunction power, but argues it was properly used in this case. Some say the Trump administration was ill prepared to defend its stance. Others argue nationwide injunctions are appropriate in cases where the president has clearly overstepped his authority. In the New Yorker, Ruth Marcus explored the stakes of the birthright citizenship case. Thursday's arguments weren't really about birthright citizenship. The Trump administration could have pressed the justices to tackle that issue, but it chose not to. Instead, the unusual mid May session, after regular oral arguments had finished for the term, focused on the technical matter of injunctions. That is an issue on which the administration has a far stronger argument, marcus wrote. Nationwide injunctions have been around for years, but didn't become a regular occurrence until 2015. Back then, they were a thorn in the side of a Democratic administration as Texas challenged Barack Obama's executive order granting legal protections to dreamers. But although there are legitimate questions about whether lower court judges have overstepped, there are also, as Thursday's arguments illustrated, situations in which broad injunctions may be necessary and birthright citizenship is particularly ill suited as a vehicle for curbing them, marcus said. Citizenship is by definition a national issue. It makes little sense to have a patchwork nation in which, while the question wends its way through the courts, children born in one state are citizens and those born in another are not. In the Atlantic, Amanda Frost wrote about the question the Trump administration couldn't answer about birthright citizenship. 46 minutes into the Supreme Court's oral argument in the birthright citizenship litigation, Solicitor General John D. Sauer got a question he couldn't answer. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, wanted to know exactly how the government would administer a rule denying citizenship to potentially hundreds of thousands of babies every year, frost said. We don't know, sauer candidly told the court. Really? With this one exchange, Sauer inadvertently revealed why nationwide injunctions are at times the only way to protect the public. The administration has no workable plan for its unconstitutional order, yet it wants to take away the best legal pathway for those affected to challenge the government's action. The government is right that nationwide injunctions come with real cost to any presidential administration. They encourage forum shopping, leading to a pattern whereby red state judges blocked President Joe Biden's policies and blue state judges blocked Trump's. They put pressure on the Supreme Court to decide cases quickly and at an early stage of litigation, frost wrote. Yet these injunctions are also essential in at least some cases, such as when a patchwork implementation of a law proves unworkable. That is the case here. Under such a system, pregnant women would be motivated to cross state borders to give birth, a bizarre variation on birth tourism incompatible with the fact that the United States is a single nation. In the Los Angeles Times, Erwin Chemerinsky asked how much power to stop the president should federal judges have consider what an end to nationwide injunctions would mean? A challenge to a government policy would have to be brought separately in each of the 94 federal districts and ultimately be heard in every federal circuit court. It would create inconsistent laws in the case of citizenship. A person born to immigrant parents in one federal district would be a citizen, while one born in identical circumstances in another district would not be at least until and unless the Supreme Court resolved the issue for the entire country, chemerinsky said. The president's primary argument is that nationwide injunctions prevent the executive branch from from carrying out its constitutional duties. But as Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, if the president is violating the Constitution, his action should be stopped. The three more moderate conservatives, Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett, did not tip their hand. Some of their questions suggested they might look for a compromise that would maintain nationwide injunctions but impose new limits on when they can be used, chemerinsky wrote. In his first months in office, Trump has issued a flurry of blatantly illegal and unconstitutional executive orders. The federal courts are the only way to check these orders and uphold the rule of law. This is not the time for the Supreme Court to greatly weaken the ability of the federal judiciary to stop illegal presidential acts. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying. Which brings us to what the right is saying. The right says the court should limit the use of nationwide injunctions, and many argue Congress should also take up the issue. Some worry that the narrow scope of the case won't stop judges from inhibiting Trump's agenda. Others say the case reflects the growing power struggle between the executive and judicial branches, National Review's editors said. It's time to rein in nationwide injunctions the Trump administration has been ensnared in a Lilliputian fashion thicket of nationwide injunctions almost since the moment that Donald Trump was sworn in and began issuing executive orders. Trump and others in his administration have tried slicing through these knots rather than putting in the legal work to untie them, the editor said. While the volume of orders binding Trump has been unprecedented, nationwide injunctions by individual judges in sympathetic locales have bedeviled the last two Democratic presidents as well. We think the better answer, however, is for both the court and Congress to place limitations on the use of nationwide injunctions rather than abolish them entirely. Congress should play the leading role in that process. We can hardly think of a better test case for reviving the national legislature's capacity to enact bipartisan legislation that improves the functioning of the federal government while fortifying its respect for individuals and the rule of written law, the editor said. After all, judicial activists hamstringing the executive's power to govern is bad, but it is also destructive for the executive branch to arrogate powers belonging to Congress or the courts trample constitutional rights and rule by presidential fiat or unaccountable bureaucratic dictate. The past decade and a half have not been short on examples of all these abuses, for which the intervention of the courts has been an essential check on an overgrown executive and administrative state. In the Federalist, Margo Cleveland suggested even if SCOTUS gives Trump a win on birthright citizenship, it will not end partisan lawfare. While President Trump seems assured of scoring a victory from the Supreme Court in these cases, a win will do little to stop the lower courts from continuing to flood the country with nationwide injunctions, interfering with the Trump administration's execution of its America first agenda, cleveland wrote. The reason why is simple. The issue before the Supreme Court is narrow and does not concern the propriety of nationwide injunctions in cases brought under the Administrative Procedure act and the majority of nationwide injunctions entered against the Trump administration since the president returned to Washington came in cases challenging decisions under the apa. While it seems likely, then, that the Supreme Court will limit the scope of the injunctions in the birthright citizenship cases, that will not put an end to nationwide injunctions. Because many of the nationwide injunctions making news since Trump began his second term came about from challenges under the apa, cleveland said. Until the Supreme Court reins in the lower court's misuse of the apa, then the abuse of nationwide injunctions will continue even if the Trump administration prevails in the birthright citizenship cases. In the Washington Post, Jason Willock wrote, the Supreme Court grapples with post congressional politics. Trump has put federal departments and agencies on a tight leash, consolidating more of the executive power in the White House. If the Supreme Court restricts nationwide injunctions, it will be making a parallel change in the judicial branch. By reserving for themselves the authority to block presidential policies, the justices will be consolidating more of the Constitution's judicial power in their palace on first street, willock said. That could be a necessary adjustment in the new age of presidentialism. Only the Supreme Court has the political legitimacy to definitively block the executive. But there's a risk that this check will also erode over time. The Trump administration has already gone up to the line of ignoring Supreme Court opinions in two immigration cases. Traditionally, the focal point of US Politics has been in the elected branches, the presidency and Congress. Now it has shifted away from Congress and toward the courts. There are various ideas for restoring Congress's centrality, paring back the Senate filibuster, enlarging the House of Representatives, or raising the salaries of members of Congress or their staff to attract more talent, willock wrote. But procedural changes are rarely a panacea. The Supreme Court will be swamped by executive actions in this administration and subsequent ones until something happens in US Politics to break the cycle of presidential aggrandizement and judicial reaction.
- [21:36]
Isaac Saul
Foreign we'll be right back after this quick break.
- [21:47]
Phoebe Saul
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John Lowell
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Isaac Saul
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John Lowell
Whether it's the recorded sounds of the.
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Isaac Saul
Ocean we doze off to or the succulents that adorn our homes.
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John Lowell
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Phoebe Saul
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- [22:55]
John Lowell
Before we head over to Isaac for his take, we wanted to give podcast listeners a special exclusive preview of an interview we'll be releasing this Sunday for paid members. Isaac sat down with Sarah Isger from the Dispatch to discuss the significance of nationwide injunctions and the ongoing birthright citizenship case.
- [23:17]
Isaac Saul
What do you imagine might be a clean way to resolve this? Or I don't know if that's like a what would Sarah Isger do if you were on the Supreme Court court versus like what you imagine the court might do? Because this seems like a particularly messy situation to get out of.
- [23:33]
Phoebe Saul
There is no clean way to resolve it. I think the justices were hoping over the last 10 years, with all of their public speaking and you've seen some separate writings telling the district courts to cut it out, to not, you know, issue nationwide injunctions like candy to trick or treaters. And it hasn't happened. The justices seem very frustrated with that, that the lower courts aren't taking that responsibility seriously enough. And so on the one hand you have the birthright citizenship EO where maybe a nationwide injunction is the only option, and on the other hand you have these much I don't want to use smaller because for the people that any administrative action affects, it's a big deal to them. But in situations where you probably didn't need a nationwide order on on a president's actions and yet nevertheless, the district judges were doing it because it's like, eh, what's the harm? Why not? It's like easier to do a nationwide injunction. And that's a problem. So there is no clean answer here. It's why the justices have taken 15 years to even take a case like this. What are they going to do about it? I think the like, Vegas odds are that they're gonna split the baby a little bit. They're gonna trim in what circumstances you can issue a nationwide injunction. There'll probably be some type of, you know, three or four factor test as the Supreme Court always enjoys coming up with. But this is directly in tension with the judicial philosophy of some of the conservative justices, where they're really trying to move away from these like judicially created factory tests. That's like a Justice Breyer model, which Justice Breyer has said is pragmatism. Judicial pragmatism is really his guiding light for the conservatives, or several of them, at least. They have tried to say, like, no, it's textualism, it's originalism. While there were no nationwide injunctions at the time of the founding, there's nothing in the Constitution about nationwide injunctions. Congress has never said anything about nationwide injunctions. So there is no text and there is no originalism. It's only practicalism, if you will. And so there's a lot of tension for some of these justices hearing this case. So I usually come on podcasts. I'm happy to tell you exactly how I think it will come down. Even if I'm gonna be wrong, I think it's hard for me to even guess what you're gonna get five or more justices to agree on. I will say I don't think this will be a 5, 4 opinion or a 6, 3 opinion along ideological. I think you saw all of the justices struggling with this. They know it's not a liberal issue or a partisan issue, even if it's the current administration facing the problem. You know, we did a live blog at SCOTUS blog during the argument, and we were all showing, I think, or talking about the necessity for nationwide injunctions in some circumstances. And a lot of the listeners, slash viewers were sending us comments that were like, it's because you guys are all liberal. First of all, I think it's a little hard to argue that I'm too liberal in this case, but my husband was the solicitor General of Texas during that litigation about dreamers, about DACA during the Obama administration. He's the one who got the nationwide injunction against DACA and dapa. And he wrote an op ed in the Wall Street Journal saying nationwide injunctions are necessary to good constitutional order and conservative housekeeping, if you will. So right now, it's liberals who like nationwide injunctions during the Biden administration, It's conservatives who like nationwide injunctions. I think the big thing I'd want people to take away from this is you've got to take this out of the current moment to really understand the issue and grapple with how hard this is for nine justices that are on the court. They see presidents come and go, man.
- [27:36]
John Lowell
All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take.
- [27:49]
Isaac Saul
All right, that is it for the left and the writer saying, which brings us to my take. So the Trump administration knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits, so it is avoiding that fight altogether. I'm going to say that again. The Trump administration knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits, so it is avoiding that fight altogether. That simple reality that the administration is basically finding a way not to fight the real case. Here it is being perpetually lost in all the noise. I find this incredibly frustrating, both that this is the administration's strategy and that we are all getting distracted by the other arguments. So I'm going to repeat it over and over again today on the podcast, just to make the most salient detail as clear as I possibly can. The Trump administration knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits, so it is avoiding that fight altogether. This obvious reality has created the current situation. The administration is grasping at ways to get a win at the Supreme Court, preventing it from hearing arguments about the legality of ending birthright citizenship because the Trump administration knows it will lose. Adam Liptak at the New York Times speculated that the Justice Department is exercising what lawyers call client management, appeasing President Trump by picking a somewhat related, smaller and winnable battle. It is reasonable to believe that the government's lawyers aren't trying to win this birthright citizenship case because they can't, but instead are trying to limit nationwide injunctions as a way to broaden Trump's ability to pursue his agenda through executive power. That strategy could work. While none of the justices seem particularly eager to end birthright citizenship, nearly every hypothetical and oral arguments was prefaced with some variation of let's assume this order is totally unlawful. Many of them have criticized nationwide injunctions, giving the Trump administration fertile ground to operate in. And as almost every writer we quote today says, in one way or another, the issue is very real and important, though I'm personally torn about how to best handle it. On the one hand, a single federal judge having the power to indefinitely halt the workings of the executive branch seems like a systemic flaw. An administration could exercise its power in a way that 95% of the federal judges in the country approve of, but still have its agenda halted by anyone who can find a single federal judge in the 5%. Through even a fast and orderly appeals process, this kind of injunction could hold up straightforwardly defensible policies for a year or two or more. More this is not just a hypothetical. It's already happening. On the other hand, barring all nationwide injunctions would open the door to authoritarian executive action that could invite lawless presidencies. For example, Justice Sotomayor, plucking at conservative heartstrings, floated the hypothetical of a president ordering the military to seize everyone's firearms. Was the administration really arguing that a federal judge should not be able to block such an action at the national level and Citizens who lost their firearms would have to wait until the case made its way to the Supreme Court. Or alternatively, imagine that the Trump administration has its executive order on birthright citizenship halted by a federal judge. That shouldn't be hard. It already happened. But federal judges could only block the order from applying specifically to the plaintiffs who challenged it, not to everyone. That would mean the order would exist in a kind of legal limbo where it applied to everyone but the plaintiffs who challenged it. Then, if the administration thought it was going to lose the case at the Supreme Court and there was no nationwide injunction stopping them from applying the order broadly, it could opt to never challenge the federal judge's ruling and just keep pursuing an end to birthright citizenship. How do we know an administration would or could do that? Well, the administration is doing that right now because the administration knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits. What's more, Solicitor General John D. Sauer indicated to the court that it would generally, but not always, follow appellate decisions signaling its willingness to just ignore court orders until it got to the Supreme Court. Sauer offered that response to a line of inquiry from Justice Barrett, which was one of the most head scratching moments of oral arguments. The Solicitor General is sometimes called the 10th justice because they are expected to act almost like a member of the court, to be forthright, fair and honest, to be collegial. Sauer, however, has been at times evasive and even confrontational with the justices. If you listen to Barrett's exchange with Sauer, you can hear her frustration bubbling to the surface. Yesterday, for an upcoming episode of the Tangle podcast, I discussed this case and other legal questions with the Dispatch senior editor and legal expert Sarah Isker. Isker has known Sauer since her first year of law school, and she told me that one Sauer is a brilliant lawyer, and he, more than anyone else, knows that he is being an irritant 2 he took similar tact when he argued Trump's immunity case, which resulted in a partial victory and 3 it is definitely a strategy. That is, he is doing it on purpose, and he is probably hoping to stake out an unrealistic position so that an eventual compromise could end up closer to what he actually wants. As for what's going to happen next, it's often easy to speculate about where the court is going to land, but in this case it is truly anyone's guess. Many of the justices seem open to limiting nationwide injunctions in some way. My best prediction is that the court will create a new, new test, as they love to do that dictates when a nationwide injunction is appropriate. Isger, when I asked her, seemed to agree. She said the vegas odds were the court finding some compromise, trimming the circumstances where you can issue a nationwide injunction and creating a kind of three or four factor test. However, she also noted that Amy Howe, the expert court watcher behind SCOTUS blog, thought the court could actually weigh in on the merits of birthright citizenship instead. Liptak, the New York Times Supreme Court reporter, floated this too. He said he thought there was a 20% chance of ignoring the nationwide injunction question altogether and forcing an argument on the merits of the executive order. Again, what actually happens here is anyone's guess. The Trump administration's options for pushing forward are limited because for the last time, it knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits, so it is avoiding that fight altogether. The justices options are limited because they seem genuinely interested in considering the problem of nationwide injunctions. Though they are aligned on a federal injunction for this case and slightly annoyed by the administration's arguments, none of this is setting us up for a clean or straightforward ruling. All right, that brings us to your questions answered. This one is from Kavan, from Mississippi, Cavan said. Are we approaching a time that we can never trust what we see and read on the Internet due to artificial intelligence and machine learning? Yes, that's my opinion. In fact, you could probably say we've long passed the point that you can trust what you see or read on the Internet. Anyone can use digital tools to spin up a fake testimonial, spoof an article, or even alter a video. But I have two caveats that can really help to frame why that isn't as apocalyptic a statement as it may seem. First, saying you can't trust everything on the Internet and you can't trust anything on the Internet are very different things. And I really only want to argue the first statement. Of course, you still have to go through the process of evaluating a source by comparing it to what other outlets are writing, talking to friends and family you trust, and comparing what it says to the things you can see or hear for yourself. Then you have to validate that what you're reading is actually from a source and not altered or misrepresented in some way. Social media is famous for doing this. As long as you're remaining healthily skeptical, you can definitely trust most of what the sources you can validate and vouch for are saying. Second, just get comfortable with being skeptical in general. I like to remind people that throughout the grand sweep of human history. The time period where you could point to hard photographic or video evidence as incontrovertible proof for anything is actually pretty small, only about 200 years. Considering multiple facets and keeping an open mind about what could be true is not only an essential adaptation to a post AI world, but also a reversion to a status quo that existed for thousands of all right, that is it for your questions answered. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the story and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Peace.
- [36:13]
John Lowell
Thanks, Isaac. Here's your under the Radar story for today, folks. According to internal documents at the Social Security Administration over the phone, anti fraud checks for benefits claims that were installed in April have only found two cases with a high probability of being fraudulent. The agency has fielded approximately 110,000 such claims since the checks were installed and reported less than 1% of claims as potentially fraudulent. However, the checks have slowed retirement claim processing by 25%, and the SSA now has more than 140,000 unprocessed retirement claims that are over 60 days old. The findings offer a stark contrast to claims from Elon Musk and engineers at the Department of Government Efficiency that bad actors were frequently defrauding the SSA through its phone systems. Nextgov has this story, and there's a link in today's episode Description all right, next up is our numbers section. The percentage of Americans who say they support and oppose ending birthright citizenship, respectively, is 28% and 53%, according to a May 2025 NPR Ipsos poll. The percentage of Democrats who say they support and oppose ending birthright citizenship, respectively, is 11% and 79%. The percentage of Republicans who say they support and oppose ending birthright citizenship, respectively, is 48% and 34%. The estimated number of babies born in the US each year who would not be granted citizenship under the executive order is 255,000, according to a May 2025 report from the Migration Policy Institute. The number of nationwide injunctions issued against President George W. Bush's administration's policies was 6. The number of nationwide injunctions issued against President Barack Obama's administration's policies was 12. The number of nationwide injunctions Issued against President Donald Trump's first administration's policies was 64, and the number of nationwide injunctions issued against President Joe Biden's administration's policies through 2023 was 14. And last but not least, our have a nice day story collapses in Bee colonies have increased recently, threatening food supplies reliant on bee pollination However, a study published in April successfully trialed a solution to this issue a new food source to sustain nutritionally stressed colonies. The new source resembles dry pet food and is packed with nutrients bees need. As the tested colonies continue to thrive, the innovation is expected to become a key ingredient to combating colony collapse. Washington State University has this story and there's a link in today's episode description alright everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, Please go to retangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership or a bundle membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y' all. Peace.
- [39:20]
Isaac Saul
Our Executive Editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul and our Executive Producer is John Lowell. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate Editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saw, Lindsey Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@retangle.com.
- [39:58]
Phoebe Saul
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