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- [00:00]
A
Hi, this is Alex Kanchowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to cnbc. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
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I'm Josh Hammer and this is the Josh Hammer Show. Hope that you are all enjoying the NCAA tournament. I certainly know that I am a full weekend of March Madness, certainly on the TV docket here in the Hammer household. But as always, there is no shorter news happening in the world. Sarah Hugby Sanders kicked out of a restaurant kind of sort of by the insatiable woke mom for not the first time, but this time it happens in her own home state in Little Rock, Arkansas. The woke mob will never be satiated. Speaking of people who will never be satiated, Jim Comey is actually now facing a subpoena in a Southern district of Florida DOJ probe. We've got the details on that later as well. Also, Chuck Norris, the the legend Chuck Norris has now sadly passed away. He has met his maker and frankly, death I think has a lot to be scared of in the form of Chuck Norris. We'll get to all of that later on today's show. But for now, we begin with this. The price of oil and the Strait of Hormuz, which is this narrow 21 mile wide crucial choke point through which roughly one fifth of the world's petroleum flows has been a topic of much conversation over the past two weeks. The latest when it comes to the US Approach to the highly destabilized oil markets came on Thursday when Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besant announced that he was actually going to waive sanctions. The US Will waive sanctions on Iranian oil, you might say. How does this possibly make sense? Well, think of it this way. As the price of oil has skyrocketed since the war started about three weeks ago. Now, the Iranian regime has actually profited from that because they are a petroleum exporting country. That's the number one industry. China is a mass purchaser of sanctioned Iranian crude. So if you're trying to hurt hurt the regime, you actually want to lower the price of oil, which in this case has the effect of also benefiting the United States consumers domestically here by trying to get those prices down. That means waiving sanctions on Iran. So a little bit of delectable 4D chess from Scott Basin as far as the war itself is concerned. Actually just another high ranking figure from the Basij, from the Iranian paramilitary, this SS Gestapo s secret police. The intelligence minister sitting on top of the besieged hierarchy was actually just taken out on Friday morning. I believe it was from Israel. It was not clear whether it's Israel or the United States. Likely Israel, if I had to guess there. So the war continues to be going quite well. Donald Trump having a little bit of fun with his Friday morning Iran briefing here. As far as he state of play in the war. Here is Donald Trump giving an update as to how things are going in Operation Epic Fury. I want to begin by just saying we're doing extremely well in Iran. The difference between them and us is they had a navy two weeks ago. They have no navy anymore. It's all at the bottom of the sea. 58 ships knocked down in two days. And we have the greatest navy anywhere in the world. It's not even close. So, but we are doing really well. We're not going to let them have nuclear weapons because if they had them, they'd use them. And we're not going to let that happen. Should have been done a long time ago by other presidents. So it's an honor to be here. This is fun. So the Strait of Hormuz is at the center of this whole oil price conversation. It's at the center really of the war more generally, because Iran's chokehold over this crucial waterway has always been their sort of Damocles that they hang and dangle over the world and have done for many decades there. So in recent days, the United States has been putting a lot of pressure on various countries, including some NATO countries, including Japan, to come to help the United States in trying to secure the Strait of Hormuz, which is the number one way to try to get oil prices in a more stable fashion. For a long time, these NATO countries, places like the UK And France, totally equivocated, completely and totally equivocated on this. And finally, finally, as of Thursday, some of them have seemingly given in to Donald Trump. So as of Thursday, the U.K. france, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Japan did all issue statements expressing, quote, a readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage of commercial and oil tankers and so forth through the Strait of Hormuz. This actually happened around the Same time the Prime Minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, was actually meeting with Donald Trump at the White House. So the pressure campaign from Donald Trump seems to have worked, but it took a lot. It really took a lot. And NATO has not exactly come to the defense of the United States and Israel for what it's worth in this conflict, have they? In fact, NATO has been something of a total non starter and as things are heating up now in the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, the lead story on Friday at the Wall Street Journal is how US Warplanes and helicopters are now starting this big battle to reopen the Strai. This is going to be a big story to watch this weekend is what is going to be the state of play when it comes to this crucial waterway on Monday? Will oil tankers be flowing there? And more to the point, who will be helping there? Will it just be the United States, will just be us centcom, or by that time a few days from now, will you have any British ships, any French ships, any German ships, Italian ships, Japanese ships, heck maybe even South Korean ships? It'll take them some time to deploy there. It takes physical time to actually sail to the Middle east from places like Japan, South Korea, et cetera there. But what will be the state of play? Donald Trump, what's worth none too happy when it comes to NATO. He is not satisfied with the fact that the uk, France, Italy and Germany out of the NATO countries. He's not satisfied with the fact that they have agreed, in theory at least, and we'll see how it plays out in practice to help the United States secure the straight over moves which in theory would necessitate and entail actually physically escorting various oil and natural gas tankers through the strait if need be. Donald Trump taking to truth social media on Friday with a pretty scathing blithering post. He writes, quote, without the usa, NATO is a paper tiger. They didn't want to join the fight to stop a nuclear powered Iran now that the fight is militarily won with very little danger. They complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay but don't want to help open the Strait of Hormuz. A simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So again, apparently they are reluctantly agreeing, at least some of them, a small handful, some of the bigger ones, uk, France, Italy and Germany are now saying that they will help the US Secure the straits. The other countries essentially are completely mia. Canada would be a good example. Where the heck is Prime Minister Carney's Canada. Well, they are totally missing in action here. So Donald Trump is essentially done with NATO at this point, and he has good reason to be done. NATO. And that is our working thesis for now. NATO is an organization that was founded in 1949. It was founded for one explicit purpose. The purpose of NATO was to defeat the Soviet Union, at least to contain it. You kind of want to go full realist Henry Kissinger Nixon, or if you want to go full Reagan, to defeat it. Obviously the latter is what historically happened there. But the point of NATO for our present purposes was to confront in some capacity and to roll back and detain in some capacity the Soviet Union. Here is the key point. The Berlin Wall fell literally in the year I was born. I am a grown dude, I am married, I am a father. The Berlin Wall fell the year that I was born. The Soviet Union formally dissolved into the Russian Federation when I was 2 years old in 1991. With all due respect to the generations that preceded us and so forth there, the geopolitics today fundamentally are different. What exactly is the stated purpose of NATO in the year 2026? I do this for a living and I literally don't know that I could tell you it's essentially just a transnational neoliberal boondoggle. Is NATO at this point distinct in any meaningful way from the United nations, from the wto, the World Trade Organization, from the who, the World Health Organization? How is NATO different? I honestly have no idea. I really don't. You know, funny enough, this morning I was reading up on some of the history of NATO and I noticed that they had a flag and the organization is so in the background that I don't even think I recognize the flag. So I couldn't tell you what the mission is here. And look, this is a very common thing when it comes to social and political activism. If you have an organization and the raison d', etre, the reason for this organization's existence actually met. So you had a successful operation there. Then there's all sorts of vested interests. There are people with salaries, there are people with reliance interest there. They want to keep it going. So then you have some sort of mission creep to a new fad or a new goal. I think sometimes here as a bit of an analogy between NATO and the Human Rights Campaign, you're going to say, what's the similarity here? I'll tell you. So the Human Rights Campaign, hrc, which was that yellow and blue equal sign, was a pro same sex marriage organization. Human Rights Campaign successfully, among other organizations, got Same sex marriage constitutionalized in the obergefell decision of 2015. A horrific decision. But the legal merits of that are neither here nor there for present purposes. The point is that they achieved their raison d'. Etre. They were successful in redefining marriage forcefully via judicial fiat for the entire country immediately. Then they shifted to not being a same sex marriage advocacy organization, but to being a transgender organization. You get it. So the mission must go on in some capacity because of salaries and health benefits, invested interest there. So it's very similar for NATO, but if NATO is not going to help the United States, and the United States is the overwhelming, the overwhelming funder of NATO. Donald Trump, to his great credit has always been clear eyed on this issue. In his first term he actually made tremendous progress in getting more NATO countries to at least meet 2% of GDP on defense spending. They really should have been a lot higher than that there, but he got more countries to meet that particular threshold. Actually just a few months ago, Donald Trump had another huge victory in this space when he visited the Hague in the Netherlands there for the NATO summit. And at the time, they actually did announce just a few months ago in the Hague that there is a new commitment to investing 5% of GDP on defense spending. Currently there are zero, literally zero countries that invest 5% of GDP on defense spending. Poland is the closest to their great credit at 4.48%. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, all these eastern European countries that are just scared out of their wits by Russia are the ones that are spending a lot of defense there. But notably a lot of these countries in the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, these countries were added to NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union by definition because these were part of the Warsaw path. These were Soviet satellite states during communism. So why exactly after NATO finished and was victorious in its raison d', etre, why were we adding more countries, let alone countries, let alone countries right on the border of Russia? Look, it really does not require thinking along the evil lines of Vladimir Putin or his so called brain, Alexander Dugin. It doesn't require thinking along those lines to suggest that maybe, just maybe, this ever eastward encroachment of NATO had something to do with our present contratemps with Russia. Russia is by far the blameworthy party here. We are not apologizing for Putin who is a horrible, horrible human being. But surely not NATO's insatiable desire to go ever eastward essentially right up until up until Belarus in Ukraine has something to do with it. So Donald Trump is fundamentally correct about NATO. I do not see what purpose NATO serves in its current form. I really, really, really don't. And unless and until this organization is seriously reformed, and unless there is a viable mission that meets today's challenges, whether it's a Chinese Communist Party, whether it's transnational Islamism or some other threat like that there, I don't see how, how or why it should continue. Donald Trump fundamentally is right on this. Trump's NATO tornado, frankly, is pretty, pretty sound on the merits, folks. We'll be right back after a short commercial break.
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Hi, this is Alex Kanchowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to cnbc. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
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Welcome back. So just to put a button on our previous conversation, I am not saying abolish NATO. Say what I would prefer to happen or see happen is for NATO to actually adapt to the times. Again, I literally could not tell you what the organization purports to stand for. And they are proving their fecklessness, their worthlessness in real time, in real time by the fact that they are not assisting the overwhelming funder and the overwhelming dominant country of the organization, United States, as we go to war with a country, Iran, that threatens all of NATO. It is a great test. Operation Epic Fury is a great test as to whether NATO means anything whatsoever. Now, you know, once upon a time, NATO kind of did mean something. The Korean War back in the 50s was largely a NATO war. Even during the Persian Gulf War during the early 1990s, NATO was at least a little more involved there. They're totally out to lunch today. Out to lunch. So I'm not saying abolish it, but Trump should be using at minimum, even more pressure to get them to actually articulate what they are for and to help a situation like this. And if they can't do that, if they can't define a coherent 21st century mission, if they can't actually help the overwhelming power of the US when we are at war there, then forget at that point, probably it actually should just go away there. You guys Served a purpose there. Bye bye, sayonara. Have a nice life. So back here on the domestic front, it's not just the war against Iran that is raging, but it's the domestic war against the Wokarati that is continuing to rage as well. You know, it's funny, a lot of our domestic conversation has gravitated towards other issues outside of the so called culture war of late. Unless you count immigration as a cultural issue, which to an extent it might be, but our politics, they are oftentimes discussed along the lines of foreign policy, immigration and economics. Well, it really wasn't that long ago that the big conversation here domestically, at least from my vantage point, was heavily, heavily focused around so called cultural issues. Whether this was the critical race theory era back in 2021, 2022. I live in Florida, back when Ron DeSantis was really the leader of the anti woke, anti critical race theory crusade there. Those are really the topics that really galvanize both sides of the aisle during the Biden administration. The Biden administration, which was peak woke, that was absolutely peak woke during those four years, National Transgender Day and this and that. So many examples to pick from there. The emphasis on the woke culture stuff has definitely died down a little bit since then. Sure. There are now different strands of it. There is this whole rise of radical subversive fifth column Islamism, which we discuss at great length here on the show, the recent terrorist attacks there. So it's transmogrified a little bit and now you find it under, under different categories and labels. But all these bread and butter culture issues, especially including the LGBT rainbow, jihad, a lot of this really has tended to fade a little bit into the backgrounds. At least that is until Thursday. So on Thursday, March 19, Sarah Hugby Sanders, who was the governor of Arkansas, one of my favorite governors in the country, for whatever is worthy, that she is deeply underappreciated. She's now out in the heartland. She's no longer the White House press secretary, a role that she served prior to Kelly McEnany back during the first Trump term. She was excellent, excellent in that role, actually. And she's been excellent as governor. She's been a really, really superb governor. And frankly, I think that Republicans could do a lot worse one day than nominating her for president. I'm not saying this is the card in 2028. There's been very little discussion of that there. But if you're looking at an outside the box possibility, whether it's 2028, 2032 or in the future, you could really do a lot worse than Huckabee Sanders. In fact, in 2024 she was easily in my top two or three picks what it's worth to be Trump's running mate anyway. So Sarah Hugby Sanders, who's of course the daughter, as her name would imply, of Mike Huckabee, she comes from a very prominent Arkansas evangelical Baptist family. I think her views on a lot of these so called cultural issues, abortion, same sex marriage, et cetera, are not exactly something that is hidden. She's quite vocal and public about that with her faith and with her convictions there. And she was asked to leave a restaurant in Little Rock on Thursday. Stop me if you've heard this story before. This actually happened to Hockey Sanders back in 2019, back when she was living in the D.C. area because she was part of the Trump administration as a press secretary. So it happened at a restaurant in Virginia called the Red Hen. Back then they asked her to leave even before her meal was served. It was a whole kerfuffle at the time. Well, on Thursday it was a little more peculiar because this restaurant, which seems like a French restaurant based on the name, the Croissanterie in Little Rock, Arkansas, essentially what they did was they allowed her to eat and then they kicked her out or asked her to leave after she was done. So what she actually said, the governor posted on X on Thursday, she said, I was having lunch with two other moms at a restaurant when the owner approached a member of the state Police Executive protection detail. My presence made their employees feel threatened. Again, the most hilarious part of this is that they actually let her finish the meal. So you can kind of just conjure up this image in your head as to these total scaredy cats, these people that are afraid of their own shadow just chattering in the kitchen, oh my God, this right wing troglodyte, this right wing fanatic, this governor is dying here. What are we gonna do? I feel microaggressed. I feel threatened. Are we going to let her eat? And you can just imagine how they're too afraid of having a standoff prior to letting her enjoy her lunch with these two other moms. And then they very cowardly wait till the end to actually do it. So the whole thing is just utterly ridiculous. By the way, the owners of this restaurant, I don't necessarily know a ton about their biography, but I guess I will just say this. The photos are making the rounds on social media. I guess I will say that they look like they are perfectly well suited to be the spokespersons for a New Subaru TV ad, if you catch my drift. Now, a lot of this raises some legal questions and indeed some cultural questions. Let's start with the legal questions. So a lot of this gets to the very thorny intersection of anti discrimination and public accommodation law on the one hand versus the First Amendment and your free speech and free exercise of religion rights on the other hand. The court has litigated a lot of these cases in recent years. You probably are familiar with the bake the darn cake bigot line of cases primarily centered around Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cake Shop over in Colorado. Now the court in 2017, in 2018 I believe it was, had a somewhat of a procedural narrow ruling on that case there. But they largely revisited this topic in a similar case out of Colorado called 303Creative in 2023, which was actually litigated as a free speech case, not a free religion case, but it essentially had very similar overtones. And in that case it was a Christian marriage website designer website and they were suing because they didn't want to be forced to use their talents to create marriage websites for same sex couples. And in a six year opinion the court said that they cannot be forced to do this. Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion and he wrote, among other things, he said that while public accommodation laws are not necessarily unconstitutional, someone who is in a private business cannot be forced to create a work of art which goes against the values that they would not produce for any client. So the relevant question is whether you are personally engaged in a line of business, in a service where your conscience or your religious principles are deeply intrinsically implicated. If you are just owning a restaurant, there's nothing faith based about this. It's about as public accommodation as it gets. In fact, the literal reason for the origins of American public accommodation anti discrimination law, aka the Civil Rights act of 1964, which Democrats like Strom Thurmond tried to filibuster. The very purpose of this statute was to overcome discrimination in exactly places like this, the old Jim Crow segregation lunch counters in places like North Carolina and Georgia and Alabama, etc. There. But if you are a lone Christian cake baker like Jack Phillips in Colorado there, and you are pouring your heart and soul into baking very handcrafted cakes, then yes, the First Amendment is implicated. So it's kind of a murky area there. So there's absolutely no First Amendment basis whatsoever to kick someone like Sarah Hugby Sanders out of the restaurant there. Again, they let her finish. There's not gonna be like a loss or anything there. But I did want to make that. The broader point, though, to make, I think is this. At what point will these people just get a life, really? I mean, can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Like, can you foresee a situation, especially in a red state like Arkansas? Can you imagine a small mom and pop Christian restaurant where the husband and wife are there and they see someone walk in and maybe they're conspicuously homosexual or maybe they have a lisp or they have some sort of other readily identifiable way of knowing that they are LGBT or left wing, etc. Can you imagine any Christian couple who owns a restaurant or some similar establishment who would try to kick those people out as patrons? The answer is no. The answer is no. Because every which way you look, this level of intolerance only runs in one direction. They hate us. They don't want anything to do with us. It is simply not true in the converse. We are always happy to have conversations with these people, to break bread in restaurants with them. Intolerance, unfortunately, in American politics, say in American society and culture, is a one way street. Sarah Huckabee Sanders yet again has learned that the hard way. It's highly, highly unfortunate, folks. Stay with us through another quick commercial break. We'll be right back with more on the other side.
- [23:17]
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Hi, this is Alex Kanchowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to cnbc. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
- [23:55]
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Welcome back. So let's finish our line of thought on the Sarah Huckabee Sanders story because it really is just, it encapsulates all that is wrong with the left many, many years ago. Erik Erikson, who was a recent guest here on the Josh Ammer Show, Eric, wrote a blog post that I believe he turned into a book many years ago and it has stuck with me after all these years. And he famously said in the context of the same sex marriage fight, and this is actually in 2013. So the Supreme Court litigated multiple same sex marriage cases. There was a 2013 case of Windsor. Then the 2015 case of Obergefell, where they tragically constitutionalized for the whole country. And the debate essentially has thus far ended there. But in 2013, in the lead up to this Windsor case, a litigation that was about the Bill Clinton era Defense of Marriage Act. Yes, hard to believe, but it was actually Democrat Bill Clinton that signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act. Really? Has there been any issue in our lifetime that just flipped on a dime with one major political party and then the broader public? And the polling like the same sex marriage issue, it's just astonishing stuff. In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned as being opposed to same sex marriage. You know, everyone in the right mind knew that he was lying through his teeth. He had supported same sex marriage as a radical left wing Illinois state legislator around the same time that he was opposing mandatory protections for infants that survive botched abortions. Yes, Barack Obama voted against that back in the Illinois legislature. So even he felt compelled to lie to designate and say that he opposed same sex marriage. So really, I mean, it's really astonishing no other issue moved, moved quite this quickly. And in the context of these rapidly shifting wins, Erik Erickson wrote this blog post 2013, where he said, you will be made to care. And what he meant by this is that you might think that we are living in a live and let live marketplace of ideas. Classical, liberal, free for all. You have your opinion, you have your values. I have my opinion, I have my values there. And sure enough, there arguably at least was a time in American history where that existed. That's not the case anymore. That is so, so, so far removed from the case. Now. This particular incident happened in deep red Arkansas. You can imagine if they were in a blue state, they might have felt a little more emboldened by the whole thing there. But there's really no reasoning with a lot of these people. I'm not saying that we shouldn't interact with them. We should absolutely should be willing to engage and break bread again. That's how we are in many ways different than them. But they don't want to engage with us. The polls on this are actually overwhelming. There's been all sorts of recent polling in recent years where they ask liberal women, liberal men, conservative women, conservative men, are you more likely to unfriend someone on Facebook or in real life or having different political views? By far the highest percentage of all of them are liberal women. By far, leftist women are the most intolerant people based on every statistically meaningful sample we've ever gotten in America. It's not even Close, actually, liberal men are the second. Conservatives are considerably more tolerant. We see this time and time again. Again, this could have been a bigger stink, but they essentially didn't ask her to leave until she was already gone. So we have obviated some of our problems down in Arkansas. In other news in the broader South. This is here in Florida, where I live. Jim Comey. You might forgotten about him, but Jim Comey has not forgotten about you. Jim Comey is now facing a subpoena from the U.S. attorney's office here in the Southern District of Florida. So the DOJ subpoenaing Jim Comey over his role in the infamous January 2017, what was known as the ICA, the intelligence community assessment. This was the infamous document that Jim Comey wrote that laid the legal predicate for Russiagate, that laid the legal predicate for spying on the Trump campaign into the Trump administration and that whole ordeal. And this assessment that Comey rushed through, he rushed through a total rushed process. It didn't even meet the right procedural thresholds. He concluded that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election and that therefore, that the Trump campaign was compromised, that this is the document that essentially led to the Mueller probe, that handicapped two years of the presidency there. And now Jim Comey is being subpoenaed. They tried to indict Jim Comey last year, that's to say the doj. Thus far, that indictment has not gone anywhere. We will see where this subpoena goes as well. But this whole broad conversation as to Jim Comey and various other left wing officials, a lot of folks have been saying, oh, what is, what is Trump doing? This is retaliatory lawfare. This is terrible. This is fascistic. This, this is totalitarian. Is. This is that. My longstanding thesis on this is that the only way out is through the rule of law is a delicate thing. It is true. No doubt about that. And the rule of law is never going to be entirely, truly neutral. This notion of a wholly neutral rule of law is a mirage, a facade, the same way that the notion of an entirely neutral anything is a mirage or facade. Neutrality is here, there and everywhere. A lie is one of the great, most important insights of the national conservative movement, which I have been a part of now for many years now. There is always going to be at least some thumb on the scale, some analytical prism, some lens through which to assess whether it's law, the tax code, markets, everything ultimately comes down at some level and some levels, doing a lot of work here at some level to which value system are we operating through the prism of Now, I say all that because when it comes to prosecutions, in particular, when it comes to launch prosecutions, when it comes to waging lawfare, that prosecutors do have a lot of leeway. There absolutely is such thing as prosecutorial discretion. You don't have to bring any particular case. You don't. It's been a feature of prosecutor's office going back hundreds of years, ever since medieval England. There simply are not enough resources, not enough money, not enough manpower. However, when this tends to be abused and abused and abused and abused, and let's just briefly recount how Democrats have abused this in recent years, it really begins in earnest with the second Obama administration. So the second Obama administration, after the DACA executive amnesty of 2012, Obama has the DAPA executive amnesty of 2014, which was actually much more sprawling than the DACA amnesty that preceded it by two years. What he essentially said was that he was not going to enforce large swaths of American immigration law, that if you were the children of people here illegally and so forth, that you would not be deported. But that's not prosecutorial discretion. That is actually a full fledged assault on the take care clause of Article 2, which says that the President must take care that the laws are faithfully executed. But it got a lot worse during the Biden administration, infamously by now this, when Merrick Garland, teaming up with so called special counsel Jack Smith, prosecuted Donald Trump himself, prosecuted plenty of other people on the right, people like Peter Navarro, people like Steve Bannon. They prosecuted the pro life grammar grandmothers praying outside abortion clinics on extraordinarily dubious statutory grounds. On the Face act, for God's sake, there they took lawfare to unprecedented extremes because to take us back to our early conversation about you will be made to care, because they don't want to live with us, they don't want to rationalize with us. They want us incarcerated, they want us bankruptcy. And in the most extreme case, I'm not saying this for all of them, but in the most extreme cases, people like Tyler Robinson out in Utah, they want us dead. So the question now is, what should the Trump administration do when it comes to the issue of lawfare? Look, I think it's all fun and games to say that we should aspire to a truly neutral rule of law. That absolutely is the lodestar, the aspiration. What I am saying here is twofold. One is that in reality, that's really never the case. It's something of a mirage. It's a load starts, an aspiration. But in reality, it's never the case, it's never truly attainable. Two, most importantly is what do we do to get there? And it is my thesis for years now that the way to get there is through mutually assured destruction. What I wrote in a column last year as mutually assured law enforcement destruction. You have to make sure that they know that the right is also willing to escalate in the short term in the service of a mid to long term truce. I don't want there to be permanent escalation. Far from it. Again, neutrality, equal protection, all this. This is absolutely the aspirational goal, the lodestar here. But to some extent, it's just Game Theory 101. We had John Yu, the esteemed constitutional law professor, former Clarence Thomas Garrett. We had him on the show a few weeks ago, around the time that the Iran war started. Well, I saw John Yoo give a speech at the National Conservative Conference about a year or two ago where he said the same thing. He said, it's basic game theory. If you want this result, then short term escalation makes sense. I'm not saying you manufacture charges that's stolen as garbage. What I am saying is that within the confines of the rule of law, within the confines of legitimate prosecutorial discretion, it is not just appropriate, it is desirable. It is necessary to put the left on their back feet to make sure they know that the right can get their hands dirty when it comes to lawfare and play this game as well. Again, within the confines of the rule of law, within the confines of discretion there. I'm not saying you make up charges. That's Joseph Stalin. But there was a role here for prudence. And frankly, I think this, this new Comey subpoena in South Florida fits very neatly into the realm of prudence. Folks, one final commercial break. Stay with us. We'll be right back with more on the other side.
- [34:01]
A
Every day the world gets a little weirder and a lot more awesome. Cool Stuff Daily takes a look at everything from mining in space to the latest in the fight against cancer to how AI is basically changing everything. It's all the cool stuff you didn't know you needed to know. Join us for Cool Stuff Daily as we take a quick look at science, tech and the old. Wait, what? Stories that make you sound way smarter at dinner. Subscribe to Cool Stuff Daily now because the future's happening fast and it's way too fun to miss.
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Welcome back. So a man who passed away over three decades ago is back in the news and is for unfortunate reasons and the man is Cesar Chavez, who you might not know a whole lot about. If you are a conservative, if you are a liberal, you probably know a whole lot about him. He was someone who grew up on the US Mexico border and became a famed left wing labor leader for Latin American farm workers. Probably above all, he was really, really renowned in a left wing labor circle. Someone who combines some of his more left wing economic views with some of his so called social justice views. He's kind of a social justice warrior, frankly. Decades before there ever was such thing as a movement, he was very involved with left wing politics and just a major labor leader. So the New York Times earlier this week had a story essentially revealing that Cesar Chavez was not necessarily the man that many people thought he was. In fact, he sexually abused and harassed numerous girls, people who were in their teens. So one woman by the name of Dolores Huerta, who was also a leader in the leftist farm worker labor union movement at the time there has, has come out, as have others, essentially confirming that he basically said, don't tell anyone there, we're gonna have like a little thing. And they did all sorts of terrible sexual things that we're not gonna talk about there. And it's awful. This is really terrible stuff. No one likes to hear these details. It's really sordid and ugly stuff. Already various left wing states, Democrat blue states, have started to rename their statewide Cesar Chavez days or their statewide Cesar Chavez parks or monuments or street names, street names. There's actually been these images of people literally going around campuses and actually tearing down the Cesar Chavez, like the physical bus of the statue on campuses there. Governor Gavin Newsom out in California essentially had a statement saying that we are no longer going to recognize Cesar Chavez. It's actually a very minor federal quote, unquote holiday for Caesar Chavez. So all this conversation to me raises a very interesting moral question. And the moral question is as follows, which is how do we judge people so long after they have died for terrible things that they did or said? And here is the moral distinction that I like to make when I think about these matters. The moral distinction is as follows. If you are trying to anachronistically judge someone from a very long time ago based on contemporary morals, and there is a notable difference between the morals of that day and the morals of today. And I think that that is inappropriate. So, for instance, Aristotle, Aristotle, the Greek philosopher from over 2000 years ago, one of the most important philosophers in human history, he literally might be number one, actually, at least outside of the biblical Inheritance. Aristotle was not exactly a lowercase D Democrat. He was not exactly in favor of full scale egalitarianism, racial equality, things like that there. Does that mean that his thoughts on political theory, on ethics of any sort can be tossed out there? And the answer is obviously no. He was living 2000 plus years ago in a totally different context. So I can appreciate what he says about politics or ethics while understanding that his views about race or misogyny, for instance, are just totally not worth engaging with and taking seriously. Abraham Lincoln is another example here. Abraham Lincoln did more than anyone in American history for racial equality. But in the eyes of some purists, even he, this is really, this is far out there stuff in the eyes of people like the Black Lives Matter, the George Floyd martyr, whole crowd, a lot of them think that Lincoln is actually now a villain because Lincoln, even though he literally freed the slaves. It's that whole Gettysburg Address thing, the Emancipation Proclamation, all of it. Despite all that, they think that he privately held some less than fully kosher views on race. And I just look at that and I laugh. He was living in the middle of slavery. Did you expect Nestle to have the purest views? Probably not. For God's sake, give this man a break. But in a case like this, like Cesar Chavez, the morals in this particular case, when it comes to diddling little kids and teenagers and abusing them in a horrific fashion, the morals of the day then were the exact same as today. Nothing has changed there. So I think it is totally fair, frankly, to judge him in that light. I actually really do. It's a reminder, frankly, you probably shouldn't quickly go lionize people and make people an icon with these holidays and these busts and these centers. I mean, look, I used to live in Texas. I spent a lot of time in Austin, Texas over the years. Great city. And Cesar Chavez Street Boulevard, whatever it's called there in Austin is a major thoroughfare. I've joined on that countless times before. You go to all these lengths to name these street signs there. Maybe, maybe, maybe just think whether it's worth it, whether this individual is truly, truly worth it. You know, I saw someone joke on Twitter, say that all these people that are trying to rename Cesar Chavez Day in these buss there, they probably should put up a bust and a statue or whatnot. Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris passed away earlier today at the age of 86. Just a tremendous loss. He was an incredible, incredible man. Originally known for his martial arts prowess, then he then became something of an action icon when it came to television film. Perhaps most famously for Walker Texas Ranger back in the 1990s, there someone who brought a lot of joy to a lot of people. And I never met him unfortunately, but I have been told by everyone who did that he was a genuinely very, very human being, a man of deep faith, a born again Christian who was a tremendous spokesman for the biblical worldview, who did a lot to advance biblical principles in the public square, was very outspoken about his conservative leaning politics. There was a robust supporter actually of the state of Israel, was a friend of Prime Minister Netanyahu's actually. But he was just a total icon and just a total, total, total, really in particular icon of just macho manliness. And as I joked earlier when we started our show, Chuck Norris has passed away and he has met death. But as Joel Berry, the Babylon B, I saw joke see joke earlier today on X. Death is almost surely now struggling with Chuck Norris because if I don't know anything at all about Chuck Norris, I'm pretty sure that he could beat the everlasting crap, frankly out of the Grim Reaper. And it's on that religious note that I want to close today's show. So I want to talk a little bit about this week's Torah portion. So the Torah portion, of course, this is the five books of Moses at the beginning of the Bible books of Genesis. Through Deuteronomy, the Jews, we Jews read it over the course of an annual cycle. Begin with Genesis chapter one, conclude with the passing away of Moses at the very end of Deuteronomy. So just this past week we actually finished the book of Exodus. And now, now this week we, we are beginning the book of Leviticus. And Leviticus, which is the third of the five books in the Torah, in the five books of Moses is probably the most skipped and glossed over of the five books. Genesis, I mean Genesis is absolutely incredible. There's, there's Creation, there's Adam, there's Cain and Abel, there's, there is Noah, there's Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Egypt. I mean there's a million things happening. Genesis, Exodus is Exodus. I mean there is the Exodus from Egypt and Pharaoh and the plagues and the crossing of the sea. The book of Numbers is in the wilderness, the crossing in the wilderness. A lot of very fascinating stuff happening there as well. Deuteronomy has a ton of prophecy, ton of moral lessons there. Leviticus, a lot of people think very hard line sexual codes, Levitical sexual mores. A lot of people kind of just gloss over it there. But there's a lot happening in the book of Leviticus. A lot of deeply, deeply important things happening. Among other things. Actually, the origin of the golden rule itself. Treat a stranger as your own fellow is actually right here in Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18. But the, the book of Leviticus begins with what might superficially seem to be a very dry emphasis on the various types of offerings. The offerings that were brought to God back in the tabernacle, back in the wilderness, ultimately to be brought in the temple upon the Jews crossing into the. Into the Holy Land there and founding the temple, establishing it in Jerusalem. And the important lesson here is to wonder why there is such an intricate, elaborate system of various offerings that. That. That man is making and offering animal, animal sacrifices to God. Does God really need this, this level of detail when it comes to sacrifice? Does God really need anything? And the answer, of course, is no. God is God. God is omniscient. He is omnipotent. He is all powerful. He doesn't need anything. The purpose of this very elaborate system of sacrifices is not for God. It's for us. Because the lesson here that the Torah is teaching us is that when you bring an offering, when you bring a gift, the person receiving it is not the ultimate winner. The winner is you. You benefit. You are brought closer to that person by the act of giving. Your value, your esteem, your worth, your view of your relationship, and the relationship itself is all bolstered by your act of selflessness. So that's the core lesson here. Whether it's your. You and God, whether it's you and your wife, you and your kids, you and your friends there, think a little bit more about giving. It's a very important lesson. I think this time of year in particular, especially as we gear up towards the holidays coming up, of Easter and Passover as well. Folks, have a great weekend. Enjoy that college basketball. We'll be right back Monday. Josh Hammer signing off. Until then, Hi, I'm Alicia. And I'm Stacey. And we make Trashy Divorces, everybody's favorite good podcast about bad relationships. Looking for something true, crimey, without the gore or the body count. We've been churning out funny, feisty feminist episodes since 2019. So if you're looking to put some scandalous stories told well into your ears this summer, check out Trashy Divorces. Wherever you listen to podcasts, trust us, we've covered someone you love or someone you love to hate.