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- [00:00]
David French
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- [01:03]
Yasha Monk
And now the Good Fight with Jasia Monk. My guest today is a good friend and one of my favorite writers. David French is a opinion columnist at the New York Times. He is an evangelical Christian who is socially conservative but also deeply critical of the Trump administration. And this conversation, which we recorded in person in Nashville, was really a kind of therapy session for both of us. It was our attempt to try and make sense what is going on in American politics to today, going back to the natural experiment which Francis Fukuyama posited in 2016 and 2017, of trying to figure out whether, as the founders intended, the institutions are going to be enough to contain a president who wants to undermine the checks and balances and the rule of law in the United States. We ask to what extent are the institutions holding? Is the Supreme Court doing Trump's bidding, or is it actually standing up to some of what Trump wants? Are we on the way towards people being deeply afraid to express themselves because of the administration's attacks on free speech, or do we continue to have a very robust media that is challenging the Trump administration in all kinds of ways? We also talked about how and why Democrats in the left are flailing, why they proved incapable of stopping Trump's re election, and why they may end up making big mistakes that allow him to entrench his power, perhaps to get his favorite Successor elected in 2028. The conversation was not necessarily optimistic, but it did feel like it grounded me in a deeper understanding of this moment. And I have to say that I felt rather better at the end of it. In the last part of this conversation, I press David on just how worried we should be, and I also press him on what to do, how people who care very much about defending our political institutions against the attacks from the administration, but who also see the flaws in the left, who also sees some of the strategic blunders that Democrats are making, can respond to this political moment in a principled and intelligent way. To listen to that part of the conversation, please go to yashamonk.substack.com that is yashamonk.substack dot com. David French, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:58]
David French
It's great to be back, Yasha. It's a real pleasure to be with
- [04:01]
Yasha Monk
you, and it's a real pleasure to do this in person in your natural habitat.
- [04:03]
David French
We're in Tennessee, my native habitat of Tennessee. Absolutely. It's great to welcome you here. Nashville, Tennessee, is a very among the American cities, it's among the happiest. It's growing exponentially. It's a purple city. You've got a lot of people from both sides of the spectrum here, and people tend to manage and get along, and there's just a lot of optimism here. So it's a good place to visit.
- [04:31]
Yasha Monk
I found out a surprising secret about you, which is that you've never been to Roberts.
- [04:34]
David French
I don't even know what Roberts is. So not only have I never been, I don't even know what it is. I'm also a very late adapter to Nashville Hot Chicken, which I will plant my flag on this hill. Nashville Hot Chicken is a tourist thing. It is not the genuine Nashville.
- [04:51]
Yasha Monk
Interesting. I tried that once and I love barbecue. I think there's lots of great food in America, actually, except for Italian American food, which takes a great cuisine from Italy and a good cuisine from America and combines them and somehow becomes terrible. But barbecue is great, and hot chicken didn't do it for me when I tried.
- [05:09]
David French
I mean, even though it's a tourist invention, in my view. I mean, there were a couple of hot chicken restaurants around, but the real Nashville food was what's called a meat in three, which is where you go to a little cafeteria and you have a protein, a meat, and then three vegetables you pick out. But that's not super exciting for tourists. Hot Chicken is very exciting. I love it. It's great. It's just a tourist thing.
- [05:30]
Yasha Monk
So, yeah, I mean, I went out to Broadway. Doug Shields, who's the sound producer for this podcast, is in a band and used to live here in Nashville, and he's just back with his band, rehearsing before we go on a big tour. And so they took us out to show us some of the music places. And Broadway on the whole is horrible in exactly the way that Bourbon street in New Orleans is horrible. But Roberts is a wonderful old timey country bar. So if anybody is ever in Nashville, go straight to Roberts, Ignore the rest of the horribleness on Broadway, and we have to go sometimes.
- [05:58]
David French
I will trust you on this. But I will also say, if you get a chance to come to Nashville and there's a good show at the Ryman Theater downtown, which is the mother, like the mother church of country music, go to the Ryman. It's historic. It's a wonderful place to see a show. There's not a bad seat. So it's that I wholeheartedly endorse the Ryman Theatre downtown.
- [06:19]
Yasha Monk
Do you think we're avoiding talking about politics because we're both so depressed about it?
- [06:22]
David French
We're doing that thing that nobody likes, which is podcast banter, but it's because it's just too horrible to talk about what comes next. Yeah.
- [06:30]
Yasha Monk
I was trying to think about what I want to talk to you about, and obviously I read you assiduously and listen to you and know that you have a lot of interesting things to say. But more than anything else, it kind of felt like a therapy session. You know, we've known each other for about eight years now, I think.
- [06:43]
David French
Yeah, that's right.
- [06:44]
Yasha Monk
We met, I think, in the spring of 2017.
- [06:47]
David French
That's correct, yes.
- [06:48]
Yasha Monk
It feels like things have only gone uphill since then.
- [06:51]
David French
You know, it's actually amazing. Yasha. I think the thing that has struck me so much is if you go back and you put yourself in a time travel machine and you go back to 2017, 2018, there were terms that we used a lot of times then that you just don't use anymore, like dog whistle. You know, people were constantly trying to determine was there some sort of emerging racist element on the right, and they were trying to determine that by things like dog whistles and subtle signals and subtle messaging. And is the okay sign an okay sign, or is the okay sign a white nationalist sign? And doesn't that seem, quote, quaint? I'm sorry. Because it's not dog whistles anymore. It's just nothing but bullhorns. It's remarkable how overt the racial, ethnic, religious aggression has become. Yeah.
- [07:42]
Yasha Monk
And other terms that we've given up on are normalization. Back then, we had this idea that There is a normal politics, and Donald Trump is outside of that normal politics. And if only we resist his normalization when this moment is going to go by, I think more broadly, it's interesting to think back to some of the assumptions we had wrong. I remember being in lots of debates at the time about who would win the civil war within the Republican Party and how quickly Trump would win it. And I was a relative pessimist because I thought that Trump would eventually win that civil war. But of course, it turned out there was no civil war. The old style Republican Party simply flipped over and played dead. The other thing that I think is very striking is that back then I was a little bit skeptical of that narrative, but not as much as would be warranted now. The assumption was that this is the last kind of stand of old rural white men who voted for Donald Trump. And he was really the nostalgic force in politics, the force of yesterday. And it's completely unclear whether that's true now either in the United States or anywhere else. When you look at the fact that reform is leading in the polls in Britain and the Randome Lenant Nationale in France and VAFD in some polls in
- [08:55]
David French
Germany, you know, I think if I'm going to look back at the 2016, 2017 period, I think one of the things that I did not anticipate was how much the parts of the left would view Trump not as a threat, but an opportunity that, in other words, he was going to so completely discredit the Republican Party, he was going to be such a destructive force for Republicans, Americans would turn on him so quickly that really what you would then have is sort of this opportunity to enact a lot of sort of left wing goals and visions for the country. And if you go back and you look at that original, like sort of hashtag resistance and the Women's March and some of the figures around it, you could really begin to see the emerging trends that culminated in that wave of cancel culture that we saw in 2019, 2020. I'll never forget your piece in the Atlantic about stop canceling the innocent and how the leftist overreach was going to empower Donald Trump is not something that I saw because the circles that we were in, a lot of people were not seeing Trump as an opportunity at all. They were seeing him as a real and genuine threat that was causing a lot of people who had a lot of traditional differences to put them aside. But giant chunks, I think, of the American left were not willing to do that at all. And in fact, doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on some really extreme, really unpopular and often really intolerant ways of moving, acting and thinking in the world. And that I think at this point it's just inarguable that that really helped Donald Trump a lot.
- [10:34]
Yasha Monk
And that I think is one of the fundamental truths about this moment that is not sufficiently remarked upon, which is that I think Donald Trump, of all the power he currently holds, is a bigger danger to American democracy and to basic American values than the progressive left. But fundamentally, the degree to which both parties have distanced themselves from where most Americans stand is the condition of possibility of each of them continuing to be so extreme. If Republicans were able to go into the cultural center of a country, they would blow the Democrats out of the water. But since they don't, Democrats can continue to be dysfunctional in all kinds of ways. And Donald Trump can get reelected, of course. Conversely, I think it's also true that if Democrats were only able to actually stand for decent, progressive, inclusive values, but in a way that actually speaks to most Americans, then Donald Trump would not have won in 2024.
- [11:28]
David French
I agree with that completely. I think that what you're watching though is MAGA essentially recreating a lot of the excesses of the radical left, except with much greater force and energy, because it's being directed and driven from the White House in a very decisive way and with all of the instruments and levers of power that the federal government possesses. So as strong as sort of the Twitter mob could have been in 2018 or 2019, it's still going to be nothing compared to the full weight and power of the federal government. And I do think also that by doing this in such a heavy handed way, what you're already beginning to see is that even things that Trump promised to do that were popular the way he's doing them have made his policies unpopular. And so there's that Newton's law of motion. For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. But what we've seen is for every extreme there's an equal and opposite opposing extreme. And that this big bulk of Americans, it's even wrong to say in the middle, it's just saying non extreme Americans are being left out of this. But I'm firmly convinced that at this moment MAGA is engaged in serious overreach. And they're going to learn much the same lesson that the far left learned when in engage in overreach. But because maga's overreach is so connected to the power of the federal government. The damage they can do before the backlash is very considerable, very dangerous.
- [12:59]
Yasha Monk
I mean, it's amazing how violent, protracted, the birth pangs of a political realignment turn out to be. I do think that the natural realignment of American politics is that the Republicans become a kind of multiracial working class party and the Democrats become the party of the relatively educated and the relatively prosperous in the more thriving parts of a country. But neither party has quite realized that that is what is going on and has been able to actually, in any kind of consistent way, pursue that new electorate. And that very much includes the Trump administration. I mean, it is remarkable how successful Trump was at winning. We now know from the Catalyst study, which is the most reliable analysis of voter trends, that he doubled the African American vote from a low base, but nevertheless doubled it. That he very significantly increased the Asian American vote. That among Latinos, he did just as well as exit polls suggested back in November 2016. But I also bet that a lot of those new voters, who could have become lifelong Republican voters if Trump had played his cards right, are now quite alienated and horrified by what Trump is doing. I mean, when I think of some of the most robust anti immigrant speeches I've heard in my time in the United States, they were very often from Latinos, often from Latino Uber or Lyft drivers, cab drivers, but also other people I've spoken to in my life. You know, I think Trump could very easily have gained a huge foothold with Latinos with very, very robust border enforcement policies and deportations of, you know, undocumented migrants who have committed crimes. But the kind of brutality with which he's pursuing deportations, the evident lack of regard for the fears that even documented migrants may have about the way in which ISIS entering neighborhoods, et cetera, that's going to alienate a huge chunk of that electorate. And according to recent polls, it is alienating a huge chunk of that electorate,
- [14:58]
David French
especially since a lot of the. I mean, if you're talking about a lot of the Hispanic Americans who are actual citizens are being brutalized right now. Actual citizens or green cardholders or people with legal authorization otherwise have legal authorization to be in the country.
- [15:13]
Yasha Monk
And it doesn't take a lot of examples of ICE agents getting the wrong guy and doing something wrong for a lot of people to start to feel legitimately afraid.
- [15:21]
David French
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, you had an incident where the reporting is that there was a Black Hawk helicopter descends on a Chicago apartment building. They end up separating the black residents of the apartment building into one area The Hispanic residents of the apartment building in another area mocking and laughing at kids who are crying. And that kind of behavior, which is much more reminiscent of Russia than it is the United States. It is circulating through. It is percolating through the United States of America. Most people don't follow the ins and outs of Twitter. They're not aware of this or that outrage on any given day. But what ends up happening is when you brutalize people at scale, even if they're not paying attention to news, the word of that leaks out very broadly. And, you know, look, the Republicans are, on the one hand, extremely proud that they've started to build this working class coalition, this multiracial working class coalition, and then are acting as if they don't have a working class multirational coalition. It's the strangest thing. It's sort of a kind of a reverse image of the way the Democrats basically took the highly educated, far left, black and Hispanic scholars and theorists from the academy and decided that that's what black and Hispanic voters are like. Right, right. And they're not.
- [16:49]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, we need to get better at reaching Latino voters. What are we gonna do? We're gonna get the president of Latinx Victory Fund, who has, you know, an MA in Migration Studies from Brown University, and get them to tell us how ordinary Latinos feel. I mean, it's an absurd undertaking.
- [17:06]
David French
And, you know, everybody knew this in real time because you go back to 2019, there was this tremendous Nate Cohn analysis of the Democratic primary electorate, and it found that one third of the Democratic primary electorate was online and 2/3 was offline. And the one third online was disproportionately white, disproportionately prosperous, and disproportionately progressive. And the 2/3, 2/3 offline were far more diverse, far more working class, and far more culturally conservative. And you had that 2020 primary election where how many Democratic candidates were there? 15, 16, 20, whatever. All but one of them ran for the one third. Only one of them, Joe Biden, ran for the two thirds.
- [17:48]
Yasha Monk
And of course, the tragedy is that because the only candidate who was, frankly too old and not with it to listen to the advice of strategists and so on, was Joe Biden. We ended up with a president who I think had some genuine strengths in communication, both because he was a genuine moderate and because he was able to connect with ordinary people. I'm thinking back to the time when he went to the offices of you're now employer in order to ask for the endorsement of the Editorial board. I think the editorial board didn't even take Joe Biden seriously and ended up, I believe, recommending in a split endorsement, which we had never done before, Elizabeth Warren and the senator from Minnesota, what's her name?
- [18:28]
David French
Amy Klobuchar.
- [18:29]
Yasha Monk
Amy Klobuchar, yeah. But Joe Biden won over the, you know, somebody who works at the New York Times in a custodial capacity or something like that in the elevator. And that was a viral clip. But of course, that also set up the tragedy that Joe Biden was way too old to run for president. And then you had all of the other, you know, horrible self demontage of the Democratic Party that came out of it. I want to go back to immigration for a moment. I think there is a genuine problem with immigration where you have cycling preferences of voters. I think what voters want, by and large, is very firm control of the border without state cruelty. And I think the reason why voter sentiment keeps switching on immigration is that for a while you have no state cruelty and then you have very porous borders. And they get very pissed off of those poorest borders and they say crack down on the border and then politicians try to crack down on the border, but that necessarily entails some state sanctioned cruelty. And then we say, well, we don't want the state sanctioned cruelty. And so that's why you have these kind of cycling preferences. Now, having said that, I think it's hard, it's really hard to know both normatively and in terms of just pleasing voters, how to trade those things off, because the preference of voters are incoherent. But what the Trump administration is doing is not even trying. Right? They're saying not just maximize on border control to some extent, maximize on border control and on state sponsored violence just to show how tough we are with no attempt to minimize the cruelty.
- [19:58]
David French
I don't think the immigration issues rocket science in the slightest. I think the immigration issue is the simplest issue imaginable. It's just that the parties are in the grips of extremists on both sides who make the. So here's the position that has been polling well for generations. Control who comes in the country. Show compassion for the people who are already here. Okay? So if you are a peaceful person, you're contributing to society, especially if you're a dreamer, especially if you're a kid, a lot of people either want that person to stay or want them to be the absolute lowest priority on the deportation scale. But if you're a criminal out immediately, instantly. Well, you can expel illegal criminal aliens Very quickly, without brutality. The brutality comes in when you do these giant sweeps of people trying to just gather up people in large, large numbers. And, and so. But here, where the extremes come in, on the extremes, on the Republican side, they don't just want. How little have we heard about a border wall? We've not heard a lot about a border wall this term.
- [20:59]
Yasha Monk
That's interesting, isn't it?
- [21:00]
David French
Yeah. They want absolute, total punitive repression. And the Trump administration is enacting that. And then it will be a mystery to me as long as I live how the Biden administration thought that they could permit that level of immigration on the southern border. It's one of the biggest own goals in history. We've talked about the far cultural left, but I think Biden could have still won if the border had been under control. It would have been tight, it would have been close, it would have been an absolute nail biter. But Biden or his successor could have won if the border had been under control. But the combination of inflation, which, truth be told, America did better than most countries, but inflation, a border out of control, and then just this sense that so many Americans had, that the far left isn't just alien to them, but actually hates them, actually despises them, looks down on them, thinks they're horrible people. And I think when you take those 1, 2, 3, it was like three strikes and you're out at that point.
- [22:04]
Yasha Monk
Yeah. In a strange way, I think from a political science perspective, there's one tiny good news story buried in that, which is that it's tempting to say, and some political scientists, some economists have argued that over the last decades that voters really are not very rational and that they don't reward or punish politicians for what they do. And of course, I think that on the whole, Donald Trump is worse for America. But actually, I think a lot of the voting behavior in 2024 was a retrospective evaluation of what Democrats did, and it was responsive to some of their mistakes. The United States did a little bit better than other countries on inflation, but there was also economic policies that accelerated inflation, like the size of the iia. And of course, on the border, the Biden administration took proactive policies and executive orders that hugely aggravated that problem. And in a sense, from a political science perspective, it's reassuring that we don't live in a world of lulls. Nothing matters. But when things go off the rails, voters punish incumbents, and more likely than not. And we'll get to what our outlook is for 2026 and 2028. But you know, I think for similar reasons, Trump is significantly underwater in approval ratings now and may sink further in approval ratings if some of the bad policies the administration is enacting, from tariffs to all the things we've been talking about, start to harm ordinary Americans.
- [23:18]
David French
Yeah, no, that's exactly correct. And it's also, there's another irrational response that we haven't mentioned that, and that was the absolutely disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden had a positive approval rating until then, and then, and then it went down and it never came back up. And this is what I want, people who are sitting there screaming at their iPhones right now, trump is worse. Trump is worse. Trump is worse. Trump is worse. Got it. I agree. I'm going to agree with you. I did not like the Biden administration on a number of levels. I really think this is substantially worse than where we were under Biden. I'm gonna agree with you 1 million percent on that. However, what I will tell you is if your party is failing in some significant areas and it's a two party system, at some point, the argument that the other side is worse isn't going to keep working. You just have to deliver at some point. That's why it's sort of like pedantic to say it, because it's been said so much. But if you really want a country in a two party system, if you want your country to prosper, you need two healthy parties. And the reason is, and somebody might say, no, if you have one healthy party, then it can just keep winning. No, no, no, no, no. Parties are made of human beings. Your healthy party might fail in some material ways. And you better pray to God at that moment that the other party is going to be ready, willing and able to step up in a constructive way that's oriented towards the common good and oriented towards, you know, the prosperity of the republic. But instead, what has happened is you've got a world in which the Democrats often will refuse to listen to criticism because they're always going to say Trump is worse. Well, fine, but at some point, don't we have to just kind of acknowledge that you've got to sell yourselves to the public in a positive way? It cannot simply be he's so bad, otherwise we're never getting out of this cycle. Yeah.
- [25:20]
Yasha Monk
And you know, I wrote a lot of articles in the first Trump term about how horrible Trump is and how this thing he's doing is dangerous and that thing he's doing is dangerous. And I still sometimes write those articles and I still sometimes talk about that. On the podcast. But there's a reason why, in certain ways, I've shifted my focus. And it's not that I'm less convinced of a case that Trump is dangerous. In fact, Trump is more dangerous now than he was in his first term in a number of ways. But that assumption we had in the first Trump term, that somehow this is a four year problem and it's gonna go away, is just fundamentally wrong. And so, you know, unless we look in the mirror and unless we figure out how it is that more moderate political parties in the United States, but also in other countries, can actually meet this moment and give voters an offer that allow them to win and win consistently and hopefully win big at the ballot box and force the right back to the negotiating table on democratic grounds, they are going to win eventually. And so, you know, when I think about where my competitive advantage is in terms of both who's listening to me, because I don't think I have a lot of far right MAGA listeners on this podcast. And where there's a lack of serious reflection in our intellectual culture, it is to try and build this project of how do you defend the basic principles of liberal democracy in a way that is able to win the ascent and the enthusiastic ascent of a large majoritarian share of a population? And if we're not asking ourselves that question, if we're saying it's enough to just preach to the choir of people who are already convinced about why. The thing that Trump did yesterday is terrible. The thing that Trump did yesterday is terrible. We were recording this a few days before the podcast is out. I'm sure as you're listening to it, yesterday, three or four days from when we're recording this, he did something terrible. I'm sure. I'm sure that's true. Absolutely. That's not gonna help rebuild the Democratic project.
- [27:06]
David French
Anybody can look at my work and know that I have absolutely gone with both barrels on every outrage in this Trump administration.
- [27:13]
Yasha Monk
And you've taken your fair share of incoming for that from the Magarite, an
- [27:17]
David French
immense amount of incoming from the Magarite. But I will tell you, my friends on the left, the idea that people got volcanically angry at Ezra Klein for writing a book about abundance and about how to make America be able to build big things and to build houses and to make housing affordable and all of these things, and they get volcanically angry at him because their niche, pet, whatever it is, sort of hyper specific left wing ideology is. I try so hard to be charitable, Yasha, I really do. But at Some point you just have to say when things are idiotic. Ezra made this really tremendous point when he was, I believe may have been to Ta Nehisi Coates when he said, you can imagine the end of the Republic more than you can imagine a Democrat winning Arkansas. And. But Democrats used to win Arkansas all the time.
- [28:07]
Yasha Monk
Didn't we have a president who.
- [28:09]
David French
A president from Arkansas? I remember when Democrats would win the state of Tennessee. And then I would just very modestly say, one thing you might want to do is make yourself open to a pro life candidate in the Democratic Party, social conservative candidate who shares your values on economic policy, on foreign policy, on immigration, you name it. But they're socially conservative. And you would have thought that I had sacrificed a goat on live television or something. It was unbelievable. And what it made me realize is for an awful lot of people, Yasha, politics is much more religion than it is anything else. And so in a religious context, if you're talking to, say, to a Christian and you're sort of talking about doctrine, they're not going to negotiate on the divinity of Jesus, they're not going to negotiate on the doctrines of baptism, because this is ultimate stuff. But in politics, which should be way downstream from religion, incremental change versus total change, that's a common choice you have to make. Is incremental change better than regression? These kinds of decisions that are made all the time. But if politics becomes religion, then let's suppose you're a strong supporter of trans rights. That the idea that having a Democrat who doesn't want biological males participating in women's sports or has real hesitancy about medical interventions for youth is somehow indistinguishable from somebody who sort of wants to reform the law so that a trans person can't even own a gun, or that they are deemed domestic terror or deemed by default almost the equivalent of domestic terrorists, to say that potato, potahto, one thing is not substantially different from the other strikes me as just beyond irrational. And it's only explainable from the context of an almost fundamentalist religious worldview.
- [30:13]
Yasha Monk
I think there's two interesting things about that conversation. And of course, broadly speaking, I agree more of Ezra Klein than with Ta Nehisi Coates. But I thought there was an interesting weakness in a certain kind of humming and hawing way that the moderate left often talks that came out of that conversation. And so first, on substantive grounds, I agree exactly with a point you just made. I was preparing to make it myself that even if you think that biological men should absolutely be allowed to play in female competitive sports. And even if you think that there should be no concerns at all about giving cross gender hormones to 12 or 13 year olds, you could still recognize that compromising on those issues may be worth it if it means that the serving trans service members aren't being booted out of the military with dishonorable discharges, as is happening because of Trump, that trans Americans are going to be spared the really nasty rhetoric from the White House that we're getting under Trump. Right. Even if you just care about the full package of what the more radical trans organizations want, you could say, well, perhaps we should compromise on those one or two things, if what it spares us is things. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Right? Yeah. But I also did find it interesting that I just think there's a kind of cowardice in that framing of just talking about it as a compromise. And I think too many people on the reasonable left are saying, well, the problem is just that the average American is a bigot and so they have these bigoted views about trans stuff. Or in the case of Kamala Harris, the average American is a bigot. So I can't choose Pete Buttigieg as my running mate because they were not gonna be ready for gay vice president, which is essentially what she says in her book, astonishingly. And so I just wanna compromise. And I'd say when I hear that stuff, a little bit of me wants to say, well, then I'll go with aoc. You know, I see why somebody who's just like, no compromises, proudly, this is my moral position, ends up looking like the more attractive option. The alternative is this. I agree, of course, with everything the progressives believe, number one. Number two, unfortunately, we live in a country of bigots. And so number three, I'm the person who's saying we should just cut deals with the bigots. Like, that's not a very attractive vision. And so I think that we need to have the courage to say we stand with trans Americans. We stand against the people being booted out of the military, we stand against the horrible rhetoric about trans people from the White House. And also there's just reasons on principle to worry about the fairness of competitive female sports if people who've gone through male puberty are allowed to partake in it. And also if there's good evidence that a bunch of 12, 13 year olds after one appointment at the doctors are being given puberty blockers when readily rushed into cross gender hormones and other things that make them sterile and give them all kinds of other health problems for the rest of their lives. Perhaps that's something we should worry about, not because we're selling our trans people, but because we care about the interests of those 12 and 13 year old kids.
- [33:16]
David French
Well, I think to treat all of these issues around sports, about youth gender transition, around intimate spaces like locker rooms, as if the position is bigotry or full participation, and there's nowhere in between that and, and as you were saying, compromise is really just this compromise with bigotry because we have other things we also need to accomplish. You're 100% right. But here's the thing, Yasha. You and I have spent enough time in center left spaces to know that by and large, a lot of folks in the center left do actually have concerns about youth gender transition. They do actually have concerns about.
- [33:54]
Yasha Monk
And I'm guessing that your dear colleague might secretly as well, even though that's not what he was saying on the podcast.
- [33:59]
David French
I cannot speak to that at all. But I do know for a fact that I have a lot of friends on the center left who genuinely have these concerns, and I will tell you why they don't voice them. That the left side of America has a very similar problem as the right side of America, which is if you deviate from the MAGA line, it's not just that people will disagree with you, they will brutalize you, they will treat you as if you are Satan himself. They, in extreme cases, they will threaten you, they will try to cancel your job. They will. And so there's this ideological discipline that exists in both parties that is brutal. It's brutal.
- [34:41]
Yasha Monk
And the discipline agent is always on your own side. Right. If you're a liberal or progressive professor at a university and the MAGA people are going after you, that's unpleasant. But you're not worried you're going to lose your job. You're not worried that your colleagues are going to look at you weird, but when you're being attacked from your own side, that's when it becomes scary.
- [34:58]
David French
Exactly. Exactly.
- [34:59]
Yasha Monk
And of course, the same on the right. If you criticize Trump, God help you.
- [35:03]
David French
Yes, exactly. And look, I say this from the standpoint. I have gotten enormous heat from the right for defending the basic civil liberties and human rights of LGBT Americans. I have been brutalized on the right, for example, defending basic free speech rights. But at the same time, if you take my exact set of beliefs and you move them over into the Democratic Party, I don't know if they would permit me to stay. Right. And so this is a. It's a really remarkable dynamic where when you nailed it, there's a lot of people in the center left who are just not standing up to this at all. They're all casting it in terms of purely pragmatic compromise as opposed to, maybe there is something to be concerned about here, and maybe there are some rational concerns, as you were saying, about starting youth gender transition so rapidly, so dramatically with untested, unproven medical treatments, that the very idea that saying that from the standpoint of, oh, there's good faith objections here could lead to total social death is. And now I do think it's less than it used to be. I think in 2019, 20, 2021, that was what was happening. You were talking total social death. I do think it's changing and changing in a positive direction, but honestly, given the urgency of the moment, not quickly enough.
- [36:29]
Yasha Monk
Let's go back to our therapy session and to the year of 2017. I think it was in early 2017 that my esteemed colleague Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion argued that we're living through a kind of natural experiment in the United States, that the idea of institutions is that they were supposed to be able to withstand people who don't have much respect for democratic institutions, because that's why we have checks and balances. That's why we have a division of power between the presidency and Congress and other branches of government. And so the question was whether or not those institutions would prove capable of withstanding even a president who, I think evidently lacked respect for those democratic values eight years in. How do you think we're doing on that natural experiment?
- [37:17]
David French
Terribly. I mean, and I would say my alarm about the state of our institutions has only accelerated in the last eight months, because what we have witnessed is some of the most powerful institutions in the most powerful country in the world have capitulated, in spite of possessing both strong political and legal positions, have capitulated utterly to pressure from Trump's authoritarian, and he's vicious. He's also incompetent. So we're not even talking about the most lethal sort of effective, vindictive form of authoritarianism. We're talking about a form of authoritarianism that's often bubbling and incoherent and incompetent, and they just capitulate. And, you know, I've said this a thousand times, but it's absolutely true. Lots and lots and lots of people imagine themselves to be brave, and lots and lots of those same people look at mistakes of the past, and they just can't Comprehend. How did this country allow that to happen? How did our country allow that to happen? Well, you're seeing it right now because an awful lot of people, when push comes to shove, it's not just that they aren't willing to bear a lot of risk. It's turning out that they're not even willing to bear much risk at all, not much at all. And they may be unhappy about it. They may be angry, they may still oppose Trump, but they're going to give him what he wants. Because the bottom line is it is actually hard to be brave. Courage is not easy. And sometimes even a little bit of courage is not easy.
- [38:58]
Yasha Monk
It's easy to imagine yourself being brave in past periods that you didn't live through totally.
- [39:03]
David French
And now when you're living through something that's actually less extreme than yours in the past and you're capitulating just as fast, I mean, there just needs to be, I think, sort of a wave of humility across this country and followed by a wave of resolve that essentially says, okay, I thought we were stronger. We're not. Now we have to gear up and really get ourselves some backbone and confront this administration lawfully, peacefully, and maybe with real civil disobedience, but again, peaceful. But, I mean, Yasha, if I had said to you before this second term of Trump that major networks, some of the most powerful law firms in the world, some of the wealthiest academic institutions in the world, in spite of grotesque violations of their rights, would just go ahead and preemptively capitulate to the president, I think we both wouldn't have predicted that.
- [39:58]
Yasha Monk
I agree with you. And I think during the first Trump term, I was very, very worried about the way in which these institutions would cave, because I'd seen it in many other countries. And then I think that American institutions actually fared reasonably well under the first Trump term, no thanks to him. But I think that actually, in part because he was less competent than he is now, and he had less of a team of lawless than he does now, and he had less of a clear program in his mind about what he wanted to accomplish when he does now, the institutions held up relatively well. And so I think that I was wary of being overly alarmist a second time, but as a result, probably did not predict that things would move as quickly as they have for the last eight months. And so I am very worried, for example, about the fact that Trump is now clearly in a position to bring politically motivated prosecutions against his opponents. And we're not talking here about tweet storms. And we're not even talking about people getting fired. We're talking about people getting indicted by the full force of the federal government and its investigative powers. So I'm very concerned about those things. At the same time, I feel like we're in a fog of war. And it's really hard for me to tell whether we're kind of in steps 1, 2, and 3 of the 10 steps towards a situation in which Freedom House would rightly, or at least should call the United States partly free, and we're in a kind of form of competitive authoritarianism or whatever political science terms are, or whether, in fact, the institutions are holding up somewhat well. Right. So Trump is able to go after James Comey to bring a prosecution that clear would not have happened if Trump wasn't directing it, and firing prosecutors and putting other ones in that are gonna bring this charge and all of those things. At the same time. It looks for now relatively unlikely that Comey will actually go to jail, that Comey will actually be found guilty by a jury of his peers. We see a lot of compromises, for example, by those law firms that were targeted by Trump in ways that are brazen violations of democratic norms. And I think those law firms really have acted quite shamefully. But at the same time, there's still lots of lawyers in the country who are willing to represent opponents of Donald Trump. And in fact, the federal government has lost an astonishing share of court cases in front of the courts. Right. We've seen the Trump administration note the
- [42:14]
David French
common thread there where Trump abuts against the judiciary. The judiciary, from my. To take the wonderful title of my podcast, co host and dear friend Sarah Isger's upcoming book is the Last Branch Standing. And so I'm not going to say I agree with everything that the court has done and the judiciary has done, but by and large, it's absolutely functioning.
- [42:36]
Yasha Monk
So let's stay with this argument for a little moment, because I find, especially in Europe, people think, well, the court now has a super conservative majority. We're going to do whatever Trump wants. But even in the United States, I hear a lot of people on the left, but also in the center kind of talking as though the Supreme Court is clearly captured by Trump. I share your skepticism about that, but lay out the case. I mean, tell listeners some of the things that the Supreme Court has done, which demonstrates in your mind that this is too simplistic a view of where it stands.
- [43:02]
David French
Oh, it's easy. Okay, so let's go back to Trump's first term. Trump's first term, he had the worst record at the Supreme Court of any modern president, and that was all four years. He had a majority Republican nominated. It was a majority Republican nominated court his whole first term. In the interim period between the two terms during the Biden administration, MAGA lost time and again at the court. Maga reach goals regarding things like the independent state legislature doctrine, extremely aggressive legal initiative. MAGA had had a miserable record at the court. Now, Trump did win the immunity case and he did win the 14th Amendment disqualification case. But I'm going to circle back to that. You go to this new administration and he took especially early some pretty significant losses, such as the you're going to have to provide notice and an opportunity to be heard if you're going to be deporting somebody. Even under the Alien Enemies act, that was a big deal. By saying it had to be a habeas petition. A lot of people who don't know much about sort of American court procedure, a habeas proceeding is a more intricate and complicated proceeding than your typical deportation proceeding by far. So it actually even put a bigger break on the deportations than people realized. Now what I'll give you the magic clue, the key to understanding the Supreme Court and its jurisprudence regarding Trump. These justices are old school, classical, liberal, originalist justices. By and large, I would say there's 5.3 originalist justices on the court. I give Roberts sort of a three in the originalism. But these are old school, classical, liberal, originalist justices and who are, to a greater or lesser degree, adherence to some version of the unitary executive theory. What that means is if a case is coming up challenging Trump's control over the executive branch, which has been many of the cases, the emergency docket cases lately, as a general rule, according to traditional sort of Federalist society originalism, the president's control over the executive branch is deemed to be very broad. However, when you see Trump moving out of that into dealing with substantive constitutional rights or the roles of Congress, then you see them having a much shorter rope. And you just saw this this week when Lisa Cooks, the court refused to let her be immediately fired. Now, the Fed is not exactly neatly in the executive branch. That's why it's different from some of these other firings. And they've set the oral argument while she's for months from now, while she's still in office. Okay. And so right there, you began to see a distinction. I would fall out of my chair in shock. If Trump wins the birthright citizenship case, I think he loses that 81 or 7 2, best case for him.
- [46:01]
Yasha Monk
And that was, by the way, an interesting case of complete misreporting, where.
- [46:04]
David French
Oh, totally.
- [46:05]
Yasha Monk
I mean, even if you read a lot of most esteemed news sources in the United States, but particularly when I looked at the media in Europe, when the court decided that we shouldn't have one federal judge out of hundreds be able to suspend executive action or legislation until it's been fully sort of negotiated in the courts. And the occasion for that was Trump's attempt to undermine birthright citizenship. Any educated German, French, Italian, British reader would have thought the Supreme Court allowed Trump to get rid of birthright citizenship. And I think that even a lot of readers of the Washington Post and the New York Times would may have gotten that impression. Now, of course, a few weeks later, the Supreme Court then certified, I think it was a collective action class action lawsuit.
- [46:55]
David French
Lower courts did class action.
- [46:57]
Yasha Monk
Lower courts certified a class action.
- [46:59]
David French
It was days later, maybe a day later.
- [47:01]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, it was very shortly after, which was saying, no, you cannot strip people of a birthright citizenship for now. And then once it's negotiated, we'll see. The judgment is yet to come out. But like you, I very much expect that Trump will not win that once it winds its way most probably up to the Supreme Court.
- [47:16]
David French
I would also be surprised, not fall out of my chair in shock, surprise, if he wins his tariff case. So if at the end of this Supreme Court term, you have a situation where Trump can fire members of the executive branch, but he can't change birthright citizenship, he can't unilaterally implement tariffs, he cannot deprive people of due process, he can cannot deprive people of free speech, then what you have is sort of classic conservative jurisprudence. Now, I disagree with a lot of elements of unitary executive theory. I actually think much of it is inconsistent with the originalism, but that unitary executive theory is not unique to Trump. This is part of the Venn diagram where Trumpism, a lot of it is not traditional Republicanism. Some of it is. And this is the area where some of it is. And so this is what I would say is knowing the judiciary and also, by the way, knowing judges as well as I do, it's the last branch standing for a reason, and I think it will continue to be the last branch standing. However, if Congress doesn't resist the president, then the amount. One thing I'd love to communicate clearly to people, you could have a perfect Supreme Court. The Supreme Court could rule for Trump every way you want them to rule for Trump. And he could still work enormous damage in American culture and society and law just by Congress being prostrate before him. And for example, these Venezuelan boat strikes. The court does not do things like enjoin military action. That's just not what what it does. It's up to Congress to check a president going rogue with the US Military. And they're just absolutely, absolutely not willing to do it. And so the last branch standing is think of it like a rear guard for a retreating army and that it can slow the defeat and maybe allow the retreating army enough time to gather its forces and counterattack. But if the retreating army continues to retreat, all the rear guard does is slow down the loss.
- [49:26]
Yasha Monk
So I think we have a similar mental model of how to think about the Supreme Court. The way I sometimes describe it to European audiences when I give media interviews, there is that the majority on the Supreme Court is broadly in the tradition of a Federalist Society. And if you read the sort of consensus ish opinions of where the Federalist Society stands on a bunch of issues, you know, in 2014, before Trump entered politics, you would do pretty well at predicting the decisions of the Supreme Court today. That's gonna overlap with what Trump wants to do on a bunch of things, but it's also very important. You're not going to overlap on a bunch of things. But let me play devil's advocate for a moment about why the last plant standing may not be as reassuring as you've been saying up until now. And one is kind of more of a question, and one is, I guess, a thought experiment. The question is, what about the immunity case? How does that fit into what you've been talking about? And how concerned should we be about that? Isn't that what has allowed the Trump administration to go very, very far in what it does with many of the members of the administration not afraid of legal liability for actions in office once Trump is no longer in the White House? The related question I have is if the court allows Trump this very fargoing control over the executive, is that going to be control enough? If, for example, it means that Trump can fire every career prosecutor at the FBI and put in place all of those loyalists, and they start going after methodically, one American after another who in any way displeases the president and rises to his attention, and the price of criticizing the president in ways that annoy him now becomes that you're very likely to be indicted by a grand jury. And famously, in the words of the New York judge from the 1980s, if he wants to, he could indict a ham sandwich.
- [51:15]
David French
Yeah.
- [51:15]
Yasha Monk
And perhaps eventually you get off after you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyers and, you know, defended yourself with a risk of ending up in jail for a very long time. Perhaps in the vast majority of these cases, juries of your peers are going to decide to let you off in the end. That is still a tremendously dangerous tool of power that the White House now suddenly has under its control. So how much will and can this last branch save us?
- [51:42]
David French
Okay, so let me talk about the immunity case, which I completely, 100%, totally disagreed with on originalist grounds. But let me put it in perspective. The immunity case was meaningless to Trump. Getting the reason Trump was not prosecuted and convicted had nothing to do with the immunity case. It had everything to do with how long it took to bring the case. And him winning the election in 2024, he, as Amy Coney Barrett very deftly did in the oral argument, it became very clear that a lot of the charges against Trump were related to his private conduct, and that immunity decision was going to do nothing for him. In fact, the strongest charges against him were related to his private conduct. So on the one hand, the immunity case, I think, is a problem.
- [52:24]
Yasha Monk
So if Stormy Daniels case would have been private conduct, what about the Georgia case where he, you know, ran private
- [52:30]
David French
country of state, that is, Amy Coney Barrett solicited that, that when he was, for example, pressing the secretary of State of Georgia, that was as a candidate, not as a president. And so a lot of what happened in the January 6 cases was clarified in the oral argument to have been private conduct. And so he was still absolutely on the hook for the most serious charges. The reason he was never prosecuted is because he won. That's why he was not prosecuted, not because of the immunity case.
- [53:01]
Yasha Monk
And so you think the same is going to be true of members of his administration going forward, that a lot of the damaging things they do, even if they did it in some ways, they're not going to be covered.
- [53:11]
David French
They're not covered by that case, the lower length. But the immunity case is not the dagger at the heart of the American Constitution. The dagger at the heart of the American Constitution is the pardon power. Because actually what happens is that the president has total authority. He could at the very last day of his, he could engage in political prosecutions. He could engage in graft, corruption, take bribes. His entire administration could be on the take from Qatar, for example. His entire administration could be making bitcoin millions by colluding with the crypto bros. And he could just Pardon everybody. And there is zero, nothing. He could pardon them from all federal.
- [53:54]
Yasha Monk
He could pardon every federal employee.
- [53:56]
David French
He could pardon every member of his administration completely from any federal charges. He could add a preemptive pardon. I mean, we're talking about, and this is something that the founders, a lot of the founders, the anti Federalists were screaming about in 1787 and 1788, and Madison in one of the few areas where Madison just got it wrong. It's like, no, no, don't worry about it. Impeachment. Impeachment will take care of it. And we know impeachment's a dead letter. So when people talk about the immunity case again, I'll say it a thousand times, I thought it was completely wrong. It is a non factor to the health of American democracy compared to abuse of the pardon power. And so that's what's. So if you combine the ability to fire, which even if you fire everybody and bring in your apparatchiks, in theory they're all bound by the Constitution. Right, right.
- [54:51]
Yasha Monk
But then you can pardon them, but
- [54:53]
David French
then you can just pardon them. And so it is the pardon power that in my view is the dagger in the heart of American democracy. Smart people have seen this for more than 200 years, that a particularly unscrupulous man could get into office and wreck the country in this way. And so I feel like, yes, I'm very worried about Supreme Court decisions that extend that unitary executive where you can just start scorching through the civil service and replace it with a pure spoil system, which would be, I don't think Americans fully understand what that could mean to their daily lives. If every four years you would sweep out a million people, sweep in a different million people, they're all part. I mean, it's just nuts.
- [55:34]
Yasha Monk
And there's very deep problem that incoming parties then face that we can see in Poland now. I'm calling it a post populist dilemma. And basically, if you have a government that has replaced civil servants with loyalists, and then that populist government loses power and you have a new government that broadly speaking, is committed to democratic norms coming in, they face this terrible choice, which is either you leave all of these terrible loyalists who are trying to undermine you in every way and don't care in any way about democratic norms enough to continue to do damage, or you fire them all in a similarly irregular way, therefore creating the new norm that each new incoming administration is going to do a clean sweep. That is a dilemma that helps to explain why the Polish government is floundering in deep ways. And Democrats are going to face that Absolutely. In 2028, and it's going to be a big problem.
- [56:28]
David French
We are singing from the same song sheet on that one. I'm totally with you on that. That is, I've been worried about that from the moment I saw the mass firings.
- [56:36]
Yasha Monk
I want you to keep helping me think through this moment more broadly and sort of see a little bit through this fog of war. Right. Let's take an area like free speech. Now, I'm deeply concerned about what the administration has done in terms of punishing students for unpopular political speech by canceling their F1 student visas and making them immediately deportable by trying to punish universities for engaging in unpopular speech or unpopular practices by threatening the federal funding and then imposing very harsh conditions on them, or now apparently giving them a kind of poisoned carrot and saying, eat this carrot or else. I was very worried about the commissioner of the FCC going on a podcast and saying about Jimmy Kimmel, who, by the way, I think said something that was factually wrong and disgusting about the assassin of Charlie Kirk, implying that he was somehow part of a MAGA crowd. But for the commissioner of the FCC to go on a podcast and say, you know, they gotta fire him. We can do this the easy way or the hard way, like some kind of mob boss, as even Todd Cruz recognized, is clearly really worrying. So I'm very, very worried about all of these attacks on free speech at the same time. You know, you look at the headlines of all of the mainstream news outlet, and you don't get the sense that they're pulling the punches. You know, I myself am now always asked, particularly outside of the United States, are you worried, you know, as a professor at an American university, to be criticizing Donald Trump? And I have to say, in this conversation, there's just no part of me that says, oh, my God, if I say this about Donald Trump, is he gonna come after. Now, perhaps that's naive. Perhaps two years from now he will. But I don't think that we live in that culture and climate of fear yet. And so this is another area where I just am deep in the fog of war, and I'm really torn about how to think about this. I mean, are we really on sort of step three and four towards people being incredibly afraid to criticize Donald Trump? Or do you think by 2028 it's obvious, but we're still gonna be able to say what we want about the president? And unless you get really unlucky, it's not gonna have consequence for you, where on that spectrum do you think we're gonna end up?
- [58:36]
David French
So let me just say the reason why I said I think that's a little bit naive about that. You don't have a concern. Is that the reason why? Let me put it this way. If something you said went viral, if you had a viral moment that really ticked off some people in maga, watch out. Watch out. So essentially what that means is often so long as just sort of through the accident of MAGA attention, who they choose in their own sort of moment in time to fixate on whoever they fixate on, whatever their status, whether it's an American citizen or it's green card holder or whatever, or it's Jimmy Kimmel or it's Jimmy Kimmel, you're going to suffer. You're going to suffer. And they will pick whatever avenue of control or authority they have over you to make you suffer. So with Kimmel, it's the sort of historical accident that he's on broadcast and they have, the government owns the airwaves and you have fcc, some degree of FCC control, not as much as the, the administration thinks that it has. So they use that lever with you, your academic institution, obviously the publication you started is not going to punish you. But what would be the lever that they would have over you? Well, the lever they might have over you is immigration status. And so the way I would look at it is if you are a public critic of Donald Trump and you've not experienced some sort of reprisal either from the MAGA movement or from now, the administration itself, a lot of that is just kind of a matter of luck, to be honest.
- [60:12]
Yasha Monk
So I agree with that. But it's interesting that I don't think it has created a culture of fear. Perhaps I'm wrong about that. But I know what it's like to look at the Hungarian newspapers and you see every newspaper print the same picture of Viktor Orban with the same positive write up of his speeches gave for last day and for now, that is just not what MSNBC and the Nation and NPR feel like. And it's not even what the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and CNN and other organizations that are kind of in some ways right of center, perhaps in the case of Wall Street Journal, but left of center in many of those cases, certainly not far left progressive. They are daily criticizing Donald Trump in a pretty robust way. And I guess the question I have is how likely is it that that's still gonna be the case two or three years from now? And that's where I think the real danger lies. And I don't know. I mean, this is a genuine question. Really hard to think through.
- [61:03]
David French
So I would agree that. So at the Times, for example, we don't have a culture of fear, but we have been sued for $15 billion.
- [61:11]
Yasha Monk
Right?
- [61:11]
David French
Okay. So Wall Street Journal, I don't think, has a culture of fear. It's continuing to report on Epstein. It's similarly been sued for 10 or 15 billion dollars. The difference is that the lever that Trump has against the New York Times is not as strong a lever as he has for an immigrant. Okay? Totally different strength of the lever. He's trying to do what he can do to the New York Times, but under current conditions, with current legal structures, et cetera, his ability to impact us is less than it is for Jimmy Kimmel.
- [61:43]
Yasha Monk
But that's the question I'm asking, right? I have no doubt whatsoever that Trump is willing to use any lever he has. And the federal government is very powerful in all kinds of ways, direct and indirect, and that's a very bad state of affairs. I guess I'm trying to ask this question from the perspective of this natural experiment that Frank Fukuyama talked about in 2017, saying, Right now, I think it is right to say that the administration is attacking free speech in deeply concerning ways. And it's also right to say that we clearly have a free press in the United States that is unafraid to report upon and to criticize the President. How do you think this is gonna look in two or three years?
- [62:23]
David French
If present trends continue, you're going to look at a substantially different media environment. So if present trends continue, you're going to have Twitter under the control, direct control of one of his closest allies. That's been the case for a while. You're going to have TikTok under the direct control of some of his closest allies. That deal is in the works. Right now you have a thoroughly cowed and an intimidated meta that is just going to jump when the administration says jump. Right now, the Zuckerberg position seems to be how high. And so right there, you have, in the world of social media, an enormous amount of existing and emerging control. So then you have broadcast, and we can't forget the $25 million that YouTube just agreed to pay to the President. Now, in broadcast, you have. ABC has paid out a very large settlement without fighting a case that was a stronger case than their case against cbs. But CBS has filed a large settlement with a specious, frivolous case. They've Settled. We're not settling. Right. The Wall Street Journal isn't settling. I think we. I feel like the Times would fight this to the ends of the earth. And that's one reason why I'm grateful to be where I am. But I would say when you talk about a culture of fear at this point, the administration's actions have been so aggressive on so many fronts that if you don't feel afraid as a critic of the administration, that's more a matter of disposition than it is anything else. So Paul Weiss, or it was it Paul Weiss, one of the firm, the firms that settled. Right. Had very strong positions, but dispositionally they weren't up for the fight. You have been in the middle of the free speech maelstrom for a very long time. You have had people come after you in very aggressive ways in cancel culture, et cetera, et cetera. And you've developed a kind of a thick skin here. And so you've already spoken in the face of criticism that the average person would wilt in front of. And so it's just going to be harder for you to look at a situation and go, this makes me afraid. That's your disposition. And so I bet a lot of people who've not been in the fray, who are not all about the fray or have been used to a certain kind of way of existing where you could directly challenge an administration without getting hit with a billion dollar lawsuit, that over time, oh, I think that we will never lose a robust. We are not going to lose a robust dissent in this country, even if people are just being sent to jail. You would have a robust dissent in this country, even if it just got to the point where he's rounding people up, which I don't think we'll get there. I hope not. But you would still have it. You'd still have it. But what you're doing is you're slowly and surely increasing the zone of fear to the point where, here's the way
- [65:26]
Yasha Monk
I would put it, and there's always some. And by the way, I think you're being far too kind about me and hugely overstating my personal level of courage. But of course, even in Russia, you have some people who are courageously speaking out. There's always some crazy people who are courageous and wonderful and heroic who are going to speak out no matter what. But you're right to point out that can't be the criterion.
- [65:49]
David French
One of my foremost goals as a free speech litigator. And a lot of people would ask me, why do you represent why did you defend this person who said this horrific thing? When I was at fire, when I was president of fire, we defended a professor named Ward Churchill who compared the World Trade center victims on 911 to little Adolf Eichmanns. I mean, just horrific speech. Horrific. And one of the things that I've said is if you imagine a speech like a. Imagine the zone of free speech like a big circle, your average person does not want to come close to the outer edge of the circle, right? So the bigger that you can draw the circle, the more of a permission you give the average American to express what's on their mind and heart. The more the circle constricts, the more, just look at it this way, wherever the line is, most normal people are going to be well short of that. And so the more this constricts, then the more the actual zone of conversation in America constricts even more. And so, yeah, I think that the people sometimes who are among the worst gauges of the actual free speech climate are the people who've been in the free speech trenches for a long time, because we're just used to representing, defending, talking about really deeply unpopular speech. And so you kind of get in this mode of. You kind of get a bring it on sort of mentality when you're defending free speech. If that's been a big part of your life's work. When that's not a big part of your life's work, it's when it's ancillary to your experience. I think people tend to really get shocked and extremely nervous at the very idea that their words can hurt them.
- [67:37]
Yasha Monk
Thank you for listening to this part of the conversation. In the last part of this episode, I pressed David on just how worried we should be about this political moment, on how bad things could get by 2028 and what the range of likely outcomes is. And I also ask him to give us some guidance for what people who share his analysis, who worry very much about Donald Trump, but also see Democrats blundering in response in many ways, should now do to defend the American Republic. To listen to that part of the conversation, to support this podcast and the work we do. To listen to more conversations like this, please go to jasamunk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber.
- [68:24]
David French
It.