Episode 845 : Lemon's Run-In with the Law

Don Lemon arrested. More Epstein files were released. And how screwed are the blue states? We'll discuss all this and more on this edition of the Editors. I'm Rich Larry, and I'm joined as always by the right Honorable Charles C.W. Cook, the good neighbor Noah Rothman, and the sage of authenticity woods, Jim Garrity. You are, of course, listening to a Nashville podcast. Our sponsor of this episode is Made In. More about them in due course. If for some reason you're not already following us on a streaming service, by the way, you can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts. If you like what you hear here, please consider giving us a glowing five-star review wherever you listen to your podcast. If you don't like what you hear here, please forget I said anything. So Jim Garrity, outrage against the press. Don Lemon arrested for his role in the disruption of the city's church in Minneapolis. One thing to say about this, it's just so amazing how just a couple years ago, we were supposed to believe that Don Lemon and Jim Acosta were straight down the middle journalists on our straight down the middle news network, CNN. And that was obviously untrue at the time. But as soon as they leave, the disguise totally falls off and they expose themselves as complete left wing hacks. Acosta on his podcast and Lemon on his live stream. And there's a number of hilariously stupid lines and incidents related to this disruption of the church, which was illegal. but one of them was lemon acted as though he was edward r murrow covering the blitz yeah i found this clip that actually when i searched murrow and the blitz the first clip i came up was murrow was on a roof and he's like for the safety of the people around me and myself you know i can't disclose my location or can't tell you what's going on which is fine if you're about to be bombed you know by the germans but lemon has this this attitude towards this operation which is at at the very least, immoral and unethical, and he should have known, and dumb and wrong, and is actually against the law, covering these morons who are about to disrupt the church service like it's a major news event, and he was in on it the whole time. You know, Rich, I've been thinking about Lemon for days now, and honestly, I really like him. High skill, high volume slot receiver, extraordinary ball skills. Oh, you meant Don Lemon. I was thinking of Makai Lennon of USC, thinking about the Jets picking him. No, Don Lemon. Very inside Jets joke there. All the USC fans out there are laughing uproariously. So the only flaw, look, if he, you know, it sounds like. Our friend Dave Bonson is the only one who got that joke. He's a big USC fan in the listener. So there are two curious things. One is that, look, people are like, ah, this is the Trump administration going after the First Amendment, blah, blah, blah. Well, look, you have to convince a grand jury. And we've all heard, yes, you know, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. But, you know, there's a grand jury, doesn't hear a defense attorney. There's no other side of the story. But as we saw from Jeanine Pirro and federal prosecutors in D.C., no, it's not a guarantee you're always going to get an indictment from a grand jury. So, you know, the evidence that was presented must have been compelling enough. Don Lemon will have his day in court. And the argument that we've seen on his behalf was that his First Amendment rights as a reporter cover him for interfering with the First Amendment rights of all the worshipers inside the church. Now, ordinarily, you could say, ah, okay, well, this is a state and local, you know, this is a trespass. This is, you know, it was not a public space. It was not a park. It was not something where anybody can just go on. Yes, you can go into a church, but if the people ask you to leave, you are then obligated to leave. You can't just stay there the way the protesters did and the way Don Lemon did. And oh, by the way, in his broadcast, I noticed Don Lemon used the pronoun we. Now, I'm not usually the kind of person who gets worked up about pronouns. We're going to do this operation, I think you said. Yes, so it's one of those things like, oh, I'm just reporting it. I'm just here as an observer. Your own words suggest that is not the case. There is, however, one tragic flaw in this indictment, and that is that I think Don Lemon was ecstatic the day he was arrested. I think this is exactly what he wanted. Hasn't been getting the same attention he used to since he left CNN after declaring that women aged out at, what was it, 30 or something? But I think Don Lemon's getting a little long in the tooth. I think he's just passed his prime, you know, just a little bit of his own medicine. And so the only way this could be any better is if the Trump Department of Justice has said, we have reviewed every aspect and every available piece of evidence, and we have concluded that Don Lemon simply is not significant enough to indict him. Because I think that would really drive him crazy. And I think you'd eventually see him running down the street naked or just trying to do crazy things, trying to get arrested. And no matter what happened, he could not get arrested. And that would really drive him crazy. So that's the only, I always believe let the punishment fit the crime. And because Don Lemon desperately wants to be talked about, I think if there was some way the law enforcement could just forever ignore him and never give him attention, that'd be nice. But otherwise, look, he'll have his day in court. And I suspect, but I suspect it's not looking good for him. Yeah. So no, some people are under the misapprehension that there's just a First Amendment carve out from laws. As long as you have your press badge or your mic, you can do whatever you want without consequence, and that's just not. Yeah, so I'm not an attorney, but the specific charges against him, according to a grand jury that returned the indictment, is conspiring to deprive congregants at the church of their civil rights and violating the Freedom of Access to Clinics Entrances Act, the FACE Act, which protects churches, but also abortion clinics from protests getting too close to the entryway and harassing people who would take advantage of their services. Constitutional, according to the Interstate Commerce Clause and Equal Protection Clause, the Supreme Court won't hear challenges to it, so you can't say that the law is the problem here. Todd Blanche was on CNN over the weekend, where he was pressed by Dana Bash to explain the motives behind the administration seeking this indictment and accused him point blank of attempting to make an example out of a critic of the administration. And Blanche says, I don't even know that the president ever thought of Don Lemon, he said, but I will tell you we're not making examples of people. You obviously are. That just has done past the smell test. Lindsay Halligan's saga in the Eastern District of Virginia, the resignation of the prosecutor who previously occupied that role, Susie Wiles' admission that the president takes the advantage of opportunities to seek retribution against his political opponents, they all attest to the lie there. But is Lemon safeguarding a protester who targeted this church? Is that embargoed information? No. As Jim said, it doesn't make a lot of sense. It's not like you're talking about U.S. troop movements or an embargoed press release. The government alleges that there was a conspiracy to commit a crime here of which Lemon was aware of and passively or actively participated in. It seems to me a pretty complicated case. And as Andy McCarthy says, the First Amendment does not protect a journalist from being charged with a crime, although it may protect him from being convicted of a crime. There's also a slightly bigger issue here, which is the degree to which guerrilla journalists in particular are putting themselves in the middle of scenes and making themselves part of the story that has been part of a journalistic culture for well over a decade. And it's not just these independent types who are trying to get attention. Lemon was one of the innovators of this tactic. I vividly remember how he and many others in his industry put themselves on the front lines, for example, in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. They were close enough to the police to dodge rocks that were being curled at the cops. they were they found themselves in the middle of being non-lethal ordinance being fired at protesters they were indignant when they got caught up in this crowd control stuff and this riotous violence and lemon himself at the time indicted the police for roughing him up even though the journalists were saying please or the police were saying please journalists get out of here very specifically going after journalists saying journalists you're making it impossible for us to do our jobs and the journalists would not oblige he said the following we're on national television he said as he's getting pushed back by police so imagine what they don't want you to see the implicit indictment there being that police are obviously being violent and the only reason they're not being violent right now is because the cameras are on us he's just always been a poppin jay and he's long put himself in the middle of the action he's not just chronicling great use of poppin jay maybe the first use of poppin jay on this podcast i mean it's the word that comes to mind when you see how this guy acts in the A's. Yeah. Speaking of Ferguson, wasn't it Ferguson where Chris Hayes was there and people started throwing rocks? Yes. Yeah. And I actually wrote this up for my forthcoming book because it was so obnoxious. But yeah, he was like, man, people are angry. That's a word he said when he almost got clocked in the head by a rock. Yeah. But you should actually get out of there. It kind of reminds me of the sequence in The Wire and the first season of The Wire where there's this club owner who really wants to get into the drug dealing games. He sees all this money around him and wants to get in on it and is immediately arrested and put away forever that's what happens man you wanted to get out of the game once you're in it you're in it don lemon got what he wanted he's in the game the chris hayes things remind reminds me a little bit when the uh the guy when don lemon was there was screaming about white supremacy and then lemon wanted to talk to him and the guy's i'm not going to talk to you you're the man or whatever it was and he's like you don't know me i'm don lemon i'm one of you i'm you're i'm on your side and the other the other agitator was vouching for him. So Charlie, he clearly conspired with these people. He was part of the disruption, right? The crazy scene part of it is all of a sudden there's this guy sticking his microphone in everyone's face, including the pastors. He's endorsing what is happening. He says people need to be traumatized and this is what protest is. I don't know whether it was on the scene there or later. He's compared this to what happened during the civil rights era. But actually, in the civil rights era, it was the black activists and civil rights protesters who would be in a church peacefully. And their church would be disrupted or bestieged by an angry mob. And the pastor asked him to leave. And he didn't leave, at least not when requested. But the defense he'll make if this thing gets to trial is, look, journalists don't disclose, you know, are in on things that they don't disclose right away all the time. You know, he'll make this ridiculous analogy that Noah was referring to. You know, it's like knowing we're going to hit ISIS and embargoing it for 18 hours or whatever. And that the protesters went in first and then it was an event. And he was just there covering an event. And actually, all the stuff we're outraged about, we know about a lot of it because of Don Lemon. because Don Lemon was there with a mic and a camera, and he was interviewing and getting both sides. It's like Tim Walls. Lemon seems unaware of which side he would be on if his analogies hold up. Tim Walls suggested that Minnesota might be the new home of Fort Sumter. It couldn't seem to work out that if that were true, that would mean that he was the Confederacy. I think there is a case here, and I think that the counter-arguments against that case have largely been ineffective, which is not the same thing as saying there are no counter-arguments or that Don Lemon won't have a defense. there is no blanket First Amendment carve-out in defense of lawbreakers. That is to say, you cannot simply shout First Amendment if you've broken the law and expect it to absolve you. Neither are journalists different than anyone else. This is a general misconception among the public and a particularly popular misconception among journalists who believe that they are protected by the First Amendment in a way that non-journalists are not. That is false. We do not license our journalists. We do not distinguish in the law between somebody who has a press pass and somebody who does not. if this conduct was legal for Don Lemon, then it was also legal for someone with a TikTok account. I mention these two things because as with the case of the judge in Wisconsin, the most popular and indignant argument I have seen has been, oh my goodness, they're arresting journalists now. And with the Wisconsin judge, the argument was, oh my goodness, they arrested a judge. Well, they did arrest a judge, a judge who interfered with the detention of an illegal immigrant, and who was convicted for that, not just charged or accused, but convicted for it because judges are not exempt from the law. Now, Don Lemon's argument will be that he has a First Amendment right to be there. The problem with that, not insurmountable, but the problem with that is that so do the people who are targeted. That is to say, this is a First amendment case on both sides it was funny watching i believe it's julian castro tweet out a defense of don lemon with an ellipsis in it that started congress shall make no law dot dot dot dot and then mention the bits about the freedom of the press and speech missing out the other part of it which is about religion also about assembly yeah it's also when they're in when they're in the church is this hilarious moment where lemon is showing this the service has just been disrupted all these peaceable people trying to worship their god as they see fit all of a sudden being brayed at by this protestor he's like this is what the first amendment's about right not people in a church being able to worship as they see fit without interruption now the question is why does this law exist. This law has two parts with opposite partisan violence. One applies to abortion clinics. The other applies to churches. In essence, this law applies in situations in which the local government is not trusted. In that sense, it is similar to some of the laws that were passed after the Civil War, the Freedmen's Bureau Act, for example. It's intended to protect civil rights where the people who might need protecting are unpopular. So in a red state, an abortion clinic. In a blue state, a church. Therefore, the federal case is that Minnesota should have dealt with this, and it would indeed have been a trespassing case, but that it won't, that its failure to do so contributes to the abridgment of civil rights and that Congress is empowered to protect civil rights under the 14th amendment. I think this is going to come down to the facts. I don't think there is a constitutional argument here that is going to matter. I think the question is going to come down to whether he was in on it. And he does seem to have been in on it. He did say we. He did turn the camera off at a point prior to their going in to discuss tactics. He doesn't seem keen to let the churchgoers leave. He's celebratory, not dispassionate. It's possible, though. In a sense, Charlie, that not just that he knew, but he was an operative. He was part of the operation rather than a general observer Let me put it this way Jim joked about his fame or lack thereof and suggested it would drive him crazy if the federal government told him he wasn't important enough. I see this slightly differently. The argument in favor of Don Lemon seems to me in large part to be that he's famous. That is, you can't do this to him. He's a famous journalist. If somebody had acted in precisely the same way as Don Lemon, but they had been a writer or videographer for Gateway Pundit or some absurd right-wing website, do we think that the defenses would have been as vehement? do we think the people who have argued Don Lemon's case would have? We can tell to some extent that they wouldn't have by looking at January 6th, which was an abomination and which also led to the prosecution of, I believe, eight people who claimed they were merely filming it. They had a First Amendment right to be there too. I think a lot of this comes down to the false belief that Don Lemon is different, that he had a cushy job, that he was on TV, that he is well known, that he had for years a press pass. He is seen as being part of some sort of clerisy that is allowed to do what it wants. It's not, though. So, yeah, I think that there is a strong argument, again, not dispositive, and you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he's guilty, and that's tough, and it should be. but I think there is a strong case to say that he was in on this, that he was thrilled by this, that he was part of the effort, that he did not behave differently in any material way from those who planned and executed it. So bottom line is I don't think this is an outrageous prosecution. I don't think that it is presumptively unconstitutional and I don't think the facts are such as to make it destined to be immediately thrown out. I do think, given quite rightly how difficult it is to prosecute people, and quite rightly how much we cherish the First Amendment, that he may be given a dispensation that others who took part in the same effort would not. What I think would be a real shame and a real problem, in fact, for the country, is if he were given dispensation that other people who were in the same position as him, that is an observer claiming First Amendment privileges, have been given. At that point, you have a two-tier system of justice that I think would be regrettable and dangerous. Yeah, an analogy a friend made to me, and Megan Kelly is making this yesterday. So what if you're kind of an advocacy journalist, and there are a bunch of people who go to an abortion clinic, you know about this beforehand, you know exactly what they're going to do, and they chain themselves to the door. And you don't chain yourself to the door. If you chain yourself to the door, it's not even close call, right? You're a participant, you're guilty. But you're there covering in a sympathetic way and hovering and also kind of obstructing, although you're not chained. In that instance, are you guilty of a FACE Act violation? And I do take your point. There's a double standard here. This person, Lila Rose, whoever, would not be. outrage about her being charged the way there has been. It is worth dwelling for a second on how little that I've seen any deliberation take place on the other side of this argument. If there is a guilty verdict that gets handed down, it will come as a huge shock to half the country that has just convinced itself of the fact that there is no evidence underlying this year that is purely retributive, and that any judge or jury that could find otherwise has been corrupted by this miasma that has consumed the country. They just won't have any deliberative way to understand the facts that will be presented to them. I don't think they'll even consume them. They're just not talking about it. Not like we are. No, and you saw that in the case of the Wisconsin judge I mentioned, where people were shocked to learn that she'd committed a crime, that a jury agreed that she'd committed a crime, and the story disappeared. I learned about it on page 36 of the New York Times because someone sent it to me. So Jim Garrity asks a question to you, slightly different topic, but a related one. And this is a snap question, really putting on the spot here. Nobody can be illegal on stolen land. True or false? Incorrect. Because by the way, if the land is stolen, aren't you illegal yourself? Hmm. Or maybe you're not, you're not illegal. I don't know. Possession is nine tenths of the law. Therefore stealing is okay. These are profound. It's a moral pretzel. Noah Rothman well it's a category error isn't it because we bought everything that we have so we stole some of it yeah not quite everything but it's good that we stole it I'm very proud of having stolen it you get compensation eventually I just reject the premise fundamentally but yes not illegal you can reject the premise of any exit question I'm impressed by this I reject the premise of the a young woman who we have not mentioned who made this allegation. Charlie? Well, as I joked on Twitter, at what point does that logic stop? Can I say no one needs to pay taxes on stolen land? No one needs to register their car on stolen land? If it's illegitimate to have any boundaries, if the land is stolen and thereby any government is tainted why are our laws sound it's silly it's just a silly thing that people say not least because the history of the world is the history of stolen land you go back to 1066 and the invasion of britain so i think unless you're going to reject the notion that the incumbent governments of pretty much every country in the world have a right to be there and to pass and enforce laws then you just have to dismiss this as being what it is which is the mutterings of celebrities it's a shorthand way of saying the united states is itself is itself illegitimate right and if the united states is illegitimate then all the laws that those people like ought not to be enforced either not just some of them yeah with regard to the normans what They did the doomsday book by tracking who owned what, every plot of land basically in the country. And there were only like two English people who were among the biggest landowners. The Normans just took over everything. And stealing land has been endemic to all of human history and Native Americans including. All these tribes, they say, oh, we got to give it back to this tribe. Then you look into it. That tribe stole it from some other tribe. And now we have a system where actually sovereign territory matters and borders matter. And ironically, she's sort of arguing, if you take this seriously, and we shouldn't take it too seriously, obviously, that we shouldn't have borders. We should go back to a system where it was all kind of in flux. Which she doesn't apply internally, of course. She doesn't want California to be indistinguishable from Arizona. And she doesn't want her home to be indistinguishable from her neighbor's home because she hasn't thought it through because she's a very silly person. so let me quickly double barrel it does anyone have a favorite billy eilish song on this podcast can anyone name the billy eilish song uh she's been a good host of saturday night live a few times oh i her that she had that hit she had one hit that i remember hearing many many years ago that i thought was kind of catchy all right noah likes the bass oh i'm like i'm the i remember the chorus i goes i'm the bad guy that's a good chorus That's a half-decent tune. You got to give it to her. All right. With that, let's go to our sponsor this episode, Made In. If you're considering the pros and cons of different cookware brands, you should know that Made In has more of the pros. Pros like Tom Colicchio, Brooke Williamson, and many other professional chefs who all trust their cooking to Made In cookware. 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No bombshells, no evidence of a massive cover-up to protect famous person X or Y or President Trump, but more embarrassing interactions with Epstein from various members of the elite who are charmed by him, who liked being around the girls, who thought he knew information and were interacting with this creep and monster. This whole enterprise is so sordid and so gross and anybody who associates themselves with it, including now the Justice Department is getting covered in garbage. And it's just not a pretty sight. First of all, the statutory deadline for the release of all of these documents was December 19th, 2025. I have no idea. And I just can't know. So maybe there's a legitimate rationale for it. But I have no idea why. A, it's taken this long to release the documents that they have in tranches, and there are still many outstanding. and B, why there were no redactions to the images, apparently, of underage naked women that were released by the Justice Department inadvertently. And then after a while, they got over it and got back to it. And then, okay, we're going to fix this for you. So what Todd Blanchard says, I have no independent judgment on this. He says the law says you need to release it and you also need to redact stuff. So it's intention and they're trying to redact and that's why it's taking so long. Yeah, it's also illustrative of why documents like these should not be released. And there was something that happened when they released the last remaining tranche of files from the Kennedy assassination documents earlier last year. And there was a lot of information on that that sounded credible or interesting, but there are threads you pull on that go nowhere and implicate people who have absolutely nothing to do with anything in something that an addled mind can put together into something that resembles a conspiracy theory. That's why you keep the lid on a lot of these things, in part because they impugn people who don't deserve to be impugned. Now, there's a lot of people who get caught up in this who probably deserve to be impugned. Bill Gates does not strike a figure of somebody who's extremely concerned with propriety in these documents. Howard Lutnick is caught up in them. Donald Trump's name appears more than once with some really awful allegations associated with him that probably go nowhere and have probably been very thoroughly investigated, but nevertheless, they're thrown out there. Steve Bannon, he's in the mix. Brett Ratner, the director who directed Melania. Dr. Mehmet Oz, who's at Medicare. Bill Clinton and Kathy Rumler, his solicitor. All these people are caught up in this thing. And by the way, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have now completely caved on their effort to avoid complying with a congressional subpoena for which they were held in contempt. Yeah, they had absolutely no choice. And now that they've caved, Mike Johnson is not letting them off the hook and insisting that they submit their statements for review within a very short period of time, lest they be held in criminal contempt. I mean, they deserve everything they're getting to Clintons. But there's a moral panic about all of this, which is why a lot of, for example, Democrats in particular, but Republicans too, should have kept their powder dry. And they were calling for the release of all these documents, in Senator Schumer's case, completely unredacted, so that there could be sunlight on all of this stuff. A lot of it we're not supposed to know because we're not entirely equipped to evaluate it. We do not have the requisite evidence to be able to compartmentalize and contextualize what's in these documents, unlike investigators with the Justice Department. There's a reason why we keep the lid on some of this stuff. And we're seeing why with the release of all these documents, because a lot of people are going to spin themselves up and convince themselves in the dark corners that they inhabit of the Internet. that something really untoward went on here. And the fact that only they are aware of it, only they are interested in getting to the root of it, implicates the entire federal government in this conspiracy that exists in their heads. It's a really, it's a sordid affair. And I'm sorry that I have to be party to it, albeit from my remove, because I pay taxes to this government that's engaged in it. So Charlie, something that's new, I don't think we saw in the prior tranches, is the inclusion of just totally wackadoodle accusations against famous people and Donald Trump. I don't know, like a dozen just obviously crazy things that people called in because they're crazy or they're just malevolent liars. But here you have the Justice Department releasing this material. I think my take on this over the last three months has been proven to be correct. Whatever it is that those who wish to release these documents are trying to achieve was inevitably going to be outweighed by the capacity for mischief that it would create. It was bad enough when emails were being sent around implicating people who probably hadn't done anything wrong and forever tarring them. But this? This is a tranche of lunatic accusations. Accusations that it seems were so wild that they were ignored. These are the dregs of the tip line. But unfortunately, they have been presented to many across the internet without that context and believed. And I saw it suggested over and over again over the weekend that these were official government reports. And that those who had been accused of this completely insane and obviously false conduct were guilty. And I think that's awful. I think that is an undesirable outcome of which the Justice Department and those who have been egging it on should be ashamed. You do not do that if you are a government with reach. So I persist in my belief that while Jeffrey Epstein was clearly an evil man, and perhaps some of those around him were too, that this process with which Washington has been obsessed for a while is a disaster for our civic life and particularly for those people who are being caught in its net. So how do you feel about Larry Summers? Because he's an example of someone, he's been harmed by this release, but the release is embarrassing for very sound reasons. Is it just that this is not the means through which we should learn about Larry Summers being a hound dog and trying to have affairs with students and getting advice from Jeffrey Epstein on how to do this Well as I said before I think you have to separate out the questions Do I think having read what I have now read about Larry Summers, that Larry Summers is a bad person who made mistakes? Yes. Separate question. Do I think that it was in the public interest to put that information out, no. You could do this with anyone. This is why we have small-l liberal systems. This is why we have presumption of innocence. This is why we have a preference for privacy. If you, and I understand this isn't a perfect analogy, but if you were to release 10% of the tax returns that the IRS receives this year, you could probably find all sorts of true information on people that would embarrass them. If you were to put recording devices in 10,000 people's homes across the United States at random, you would probably find all sorts of evidence of affairs, drunkenness, abuse. But we don't do that. Even though we might, after the fact, accept that what had been recorded was true and think less of those who had been implicated and i don't see why we did this i don't think that saying post hoc oh well we did learn that this guy was bad in any way makes the case for the release of these documents and i think that's been true throughout jim gary on june 30th 2008 jeffrey epstein pled guilty to a pending state indictment, charging felony solicitation of prostitution and criminal information, charging him with procurement of minors to engage in prostitution. Gentlemen, I'd like to think that if any of us found out that any of our colleagues, any of our associates, anybody we'd ever met had been pled guilty to procurement of minors to engage in prostitution, we would reevaluate our friendship and association with that person. Also, again, this is 2008, right? We know the Jeffrey Epstein's reign of terror continued for several years after that. And a whole bunch of questions about this extraordinary lenient deal he got way back when and why he was given such a minimal sentence and why he was able to continue this. But here's the thing. If you are, say, Bill Gates and you meet Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 and you choose to begin a friendship with him, you accept the risks that come from that friendship. And here's the thing. You or I, Yeah, you know, maybe we don't know the details of every single person we associate. When you're Bill Gates, you have people who can look into people. And when, you know, almost every single prominent person, every wealthy businessman, every celebrity who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein said, Oh, it was, I barely knew the guy. I had no idea any of this stuff was going on. Oh, my goodness. You know, we were only talking professionally. One of the revelations in this latest release of three million documents that jumped out at me was in the New York Times. In 2013, again, several years after he pled guilty to soliciting minors for prostitution, an email exchange with British billionaire Richard Branson hinted that he too had a familiar relationship with Mr. Epstein. It was really nice seeing you yesterday, Mr. Branson wrote, adding, anytime you're in the area, I would love to see you, as long as you bring your harem, end quote. A Branson representative said the two had a business meeting and stressed that the women were adults and had not attended the meeting. So guys, I figure he just meant harem in the professional sense. How many times in your life have you said to somebody, hey, as long as you bring your harem? I think there are a whole bunch of people who had a very good idea of what was going on with Jeffrey Epstein. Jim. Yeah, yeah. I've never said that. But in England, it is pretty common to make jokes about Hitler. And if my jokes with my dad about Hitler were released, you could take them out of context and make me look pretty bad. Charlie, what's the professional context? Yeah, but if you're talking about Hitler. What's the professional context of bring your harem? I'm not saying there is one. I'm saying that if you have this information and it is sent privately, you need a pretty strong public reason to release it. Also, you mentioned a guilty plea. Aren't guilty pleas public record unless they're sealed? well the idea that anybody was like oh i had no idea jeffrey epstein was involved in this kind of stuff after this but i'm saying but if if the issue is getting out there that a guilty plea was made in a court that's a matter of public record except in the few cases that they're why would you need this to get that information i think you're saying that everyone should have known all these people that we're learning about now right everybody was it was an open secret everybody joked about his proclivities they all knew it including a lot of his very famous friends And I think that was part of the effort on his part to at least indemnify and then entrap some of these people and get them to be associated with his sordid behaviors. If you're joking about a guy who really, really hates Jews and you call him Hitler, it's a little on the nose, right? I think, though, there's a distinction. Is Branson joking because he knows that this guy is trafficking underage girls or is he just joking because he knows that Epstein is another womanizer the way Branson is and looks at women the way he does? i say consider i when you already i would not say bring your harem to a guy who'd already pled guilty through soliciting minors for prostitution but if you did there's no reason for you to expect the federal government to release the emails that you had sent prior yeah but the reason everybody wanted to go to the quote-unquote epstein but by the way if anybody in the trump administration wants to complain oh we shouldn't have done this well trump agreed to do this on the campaign trail twice and jd vance did the same right i'm not arguing that any of these people are good i i'm not saying that these people had good judgment i'm not defending that line although i do think and this is why i brought up private jokes that there are cases in which people making entirely innocent jokes or in jokes would if their words were made public look pretty bad when the words didn't support that interpretation. But let's assume that Richard Branson is not at all on the level here. I don't think that that changes the argument that I'm making, does it? Why do you think the Bill Gateses of the world don't want people to know about their friendships and or hanging around with Epstein? Because Bill Gates wants to be considered an expate on climate change, on vaccination, on how every civilized society should be eating synthetic meat instead of real meat, right? These people have accumulated a certain amount of moral authority through their professional lives. Finding out about this, look, there's no getting around it. People look at Bill Gates differently. Anybody who we find out is a longtime friend of Epstein, you look at them differently and you have this sense of, oh, either you're unbelievably oblivious, which by the way, All of these people are remarkably successful in their professional lives. And you figure some of that success stems from an ability to judge a character and or be perceptive about people. So this whole thing of like, oh, I had no idea. None of that's believable. And we've seen this. The point I'm making, though, I agree with you on that. Let's assume that my neighbor is a white supremacist. And inside his house, I've never been in this particular neighbor's house. And inside his house, everywhere, are Confederate flags and swastikas. and he just really, really hates everyone who's not white and has horrible views. That, in my view, I think we would all agree, is a massive lapse of judgment. That is a terrible, terrible thing to believe, spend your life doing. I still think that I might have a lot of objections if that information were released by a government that took steps to go in and collect it and then release it. I don't think these things are... The difference is, Jim, I think the difference here is Charlie's making a process argument. it yeah it's good to know this but this isn't the way once i found that out i still dislike this guy immensely and think oh my goodness i'm really sad that i live next to a person of that low character but i could still have objections to the way that that information was obtained and disseminated all of that's my point here in the course of investigating epstein and his but it wasn't released in the course of investigating epstein that was a secondary decision and the one i'm objecting to not the collection now i look you know at any point the only congress had their chance to weigh in on this and every single member except one said yes release it and i think they got it wrong and that's the argument i'm making and if it was everyone in the country making that argument i would still stand up and say i think they got it wrong all right so exit question to you first noah roth a non-secretary here we've had some more polling ahead of the midterms your percentage odds that Democrats take the House come November? I am going high. I think it's probably 95% or more. I don't think there's very much that can be done between now and summer when essentially voters' preferences get locked in to enthuse Republicans sufficiently to offset the degree to which independents and Democrats who are hostile to this administration are enthusiastic to use their votes to send a message to Washington. We saw that. Do you remember where you've been, what your odds were the last percentage was the last time I asked? I don't. They were high, but it wasn't an all-but-sure lock at this point. The Texas government did their best to put off this special election to replace a Democrat in a dark blue district in Texas. One handily was, I believe yesterday, was sworn into office, which reduces the Republican majority in the House, I think, to a single seat at this point. am i right there it's 220 219 to 216 something like that it's a it's an impossibly small margin and it's it's going to be erased when voters weigh in on in november so yes republicans will lose the house the question is the senate charlie we got a 95 on the board i think i'm with noah around 95 25%. I think the scale of the Republicans' impending defeat in the House is going to be largely determined by the state of the economy. I think there are some signs that the economy could improve. If it does, it will take the edge off it, but it's not going to prevent it. Jim Garrity. I am grim, but nowhere near as grim as you guys. I'd probably put it about 75%, maybe inching up to 80% right now. Look, the outlook is bad, but there's still a significant amount of time between now and November, or really October, when the early voting starts. You know, you'll see Trump, the RNC has a ton of money. You'll see Trump going around the country trying to, you know, rile up his voters. Democratic candidates will have their own flaws. So I, again, you know, I think it's, the outlook is tough, but also remember there aren't that many competitive districts left, even with all the attempts at redistricting. So I, again, it's not looking good for Republicans, but I don't think it's quite the done deal that the higher percentages would indicate. I've been at 80. I guess I'll stick at 80. I could go higher. I don't know what the actual number for the chance of this is, but I was at 80 because I thought there's just some chance something could happen. There's a war, a foreign crisis, something that totally shakes things up. As we get closer and closer, I guess that gets less and less likely. Maybe I should bump the number up at 85 or something. But within that 85% chance the Democrats are going to take it, I'm a much higher number of seats. It's like a snow forecast. I was a little lower accumulation. Now I'm a much higher accumulation, 85% chance of snow, and it's going to be a foot rather than five inches or whatever. It's just everything now is blinking red. With that, let's go to our next topic to you first, Jim Garrity. We got some census data out showing that we're continuing to see this exodus from blue states to red states and all sorts of causes of this, all sorts of consequences from it. And one of it is that if you project this out, the electoral map is going to get tougher for Democrats. Yeah. Not for the coming presidential election, but after the 2030 census, if these shifts in population are verified by the next round, the Democrats, in theory, could win the blue wall states, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And if you have similar results to what we just saw in 2024, Democrats would lose the presidency. They would not reach 270 electoral votes. So if you're a Republican, the population shifts are making you feel really good, assuming, of course, that the red states stay red. This is kind of a multi-decade trend we've seen. You know, Northeast has always been less as a proportion of the nation's population for a while now. You saw the boom of the Sun Belt cities really going back like to the 70s and 80s. But nonetheless, this does appear to suggest that all of the criticisms of the blue state model that conservatives have been making for a very long time now are really starting to be seen in the way that people are voting with their feet. Cost of living in a whole bunch of places of New England, New York State, New Jersey, Chicago and Illinois, and the West Coast. It's just it's more expensive and you got to make more to be able to live there. You can buy less house. And you look at various other population trends, the degree to which Florida has become America's retirement home, as well as Arizona and places like that. You end up seeing people want to live in these places. They can afford to live there. Crime's pretty good. A whole bunch, you know, everything conservatives gripe about California also applies to places like Illinois and New York, New Jersey, most of the New England states. and there's this just, you know, frustrating observation that it's, you know, progressive government in these places has now become repellent. You always see it in the U-Haul numbers. People are leaving California and moving to Texas. So on the one hand, this is really good news. On the other hand, you kind of start to wonder if some of these blue states or blue cities, at least, are in a doom loop where everybody who would vote to change the policies and get themselves on the right track have already moved away. So Charlie, another element of what's going on here is the blue states are being propped up population-wise by immigration, including illegal immigration. Yes, and this is a good example of a circumstance that I'm reliably told never occurs in which the policy preferences of conservatives and the mandates of constitutional originalism clash. And in fact, happens quite a lot, because the vast majority of constitutional originalists are principled. It is, in my view, terrible policy to counter legal immigrants in the census, because it means in effect that people who are here in violation of our laws, and who do not have citizenship, change the way that those who do have citizenship and are here legally, run their democracy, elect their leaders, and select their laws. It creates perverse incentives. As a result, we're seeing those perverse incentives play out in Minnesota. We, I think, can fairly assume that one of the reasons that the Democratic Party has become so unhinged in defense of illegal immigration in recent years is that it understands that it benefits from it, and this is one of the ways in which it benefits from it. Unfortunately, the census clause in the Constitution, even as amended by the 14th Amendment, almost certainly requires us to count everyone, whether they are illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, or citizens. So this isn't something that could be fixed by a law, or an executive order it would have to be changed by constitutional amendment I think that the consequences of that are bad and I think they increasingly bad but it is what it is You either have a system of fixed law or you don and until it's amended, we're going to have to live with it, and the Democrats are going to have to hope that those who are counted, who in my view should not be, outweigh or at least offset the internal migration patterns that were just described no well uh i don't have much to add to what was said here save that there's a lot of vested interests that want to complicate this picture for you um there are those who tout the census bureau's conclusion in 2023 that changes in marital status were primary reasons for moves although most of those moves are intrastate rather than interstate. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities dismisses the phenomenon of tax flight entirely as illusory, saying that people move for job or family-related reasons. Washington, D.C.'s Fiscal Policy Institute insists that people aren't moving at all, that it's just completely an invented phenomenon that isn't really empirically observable. All this seems rather silly. Occam's razor, as well as analyses that are slightly more trustworthy, like the tax foundations indicate that people are moving in part in large in large part because the tax burden as well as the cost of living burden is too high in blue states 19 as of as of 2020 19 of the 28 states where people had a net inflow where there was a net inflow of population were um lower tax states and 16 of the 22 states had below median uh tax income tax rates it seems rather clear that people are moving because they want to keep more of their income. And by the primary reason that the primary way they want to maintain their incomes is by keeping more of the income that they make and not paying state income taxes or high state sales taxes or even high municipal taxes or property taxes. It's a huge burden in the blue states, which is why you have this apportionment forecast for 2030 that indicates that California will lose three congressional seats. New York will lose two. Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois will lose one. Rhode Island will lose one, whereas Texas and Florida will gain four each. It is easy to convince yourselves that a whole lot of factors are contributing to this phenomenon, but the simplest is the likeliest, and that is these governments provide high quality of life with services that work and have a limited burden on you, financial burden, as well as compliance burden with a lot of the social policies that blue states like to pursue and impose on you that red states eschew. It seems to me that the American public is indicating that they prefer Republican, limited governance and Republican prescriptions for tax policy. There are a lot of ways you can argue that, but it seems to me like that's the likeliest explanation. Excellent question to you, Charlie Cook, another non-secretary. Excellent question. So far, a month into the Mamdani administration, he is living down to your expectations or a pleasant surprise? Well, it's not a pleasant surprise. It's probably a little early to judge him, other than for this terrible decision to kill homeless people with weather. everywhere else seems to understand that it's not good to have homeless people outside when the climate becomes lethal but apparently progressives can't so i think that is a good example of where he is a ideologue in ways that are going to hurt and hurt him it's kind of weird right because socialism in other regards is coercive right it's yeah very restrictive and here you have this bizarre permissiveness around this class of people yes but it's not just this class of people it's all people who are sorted into hierarchies and unfiltered through academic jargon this is something peculiar about modern leftism and is sometimes at odds with socialism bernie saunders has adopted a lot of it because he understands that he has to. But I think if you gave him sodium pentothal and put him in a chair and asked him what he really thinks, he would say, take people's money to build shelters and forcibly put homeless people in them so they don't die from snow. Yeah, he's an old school socialist. He is, but he knows that the new school socialists think that it's, I mean, I don't know, what is it, imperialistic, capitalistic, racist to tell people that they shouldn't be outside and die, and that that's some sort of construct. Yeah, that is precisely it. They're there because of the pernicious influence of capital. Right. So this is a remedy to that. Yeah, it's a final one, isn't it? But I think that that's the problem, is that we've got this weird hybrid ideology at the moment, and Mamdani represents both sides of it. You know, there are probably 14 people who could have used some warmth of collectivism during the deep freeze. So one of the, look, there were a lot of reasons that anybody right of center looked at Mamdami's election as a, you know, just disaster for the city. And I have no reason to expect anything is going to get better. But there's another observation that like he'd never run anything bigger than the state assembly office and remember, or state senate office. And that's a part-time job. They meet for like 60 days a year and get paid a ton. But like, it was one of those things, he's never run anything this big. And this sense of whether at some point early on, he was just going to be overwhelmed. But, you know, New York City mayor is one of the toughest jobs in the world because on any given day, terrible traffic snarl, giant scandal in some city department, you know, so here's, you know, we got a big snowstorm and like they just can't collect the trash, right? It's turned into Gotham City within like, you know, four months of this guy being in office. So I look, it's bad. I think we should not, and a lot of people thought, oh, Momdami's going to be bad because he's a rabid ideologue. Yes, but we also shouldn't forget the fact that he's also spoiled. He's an incompetent, spoiled young person. So there's that factor too, which may mitigate some of his radical ideology mistakes. No. There have been some nods in this administration early on towards investigating reforms to duplicative, for example, requirements on businesses. uh streamlining things getting rid of red tape i have no faith that that will produce anything valuable because the presumptions that the people who are conducting these inquiries uh conflict with what would be sound public policy again they believe that the influence of capital is wholly pernicious and needs to be extirpated from all public life and if that's your view you're not going to come to the proper conclusion about what um how to get rid of red tape and what would be valuable to business owners and those conclusions contribute to the disaster that we're seeing unfold in the streets of New York. They can't figure it out. They say that, well, you know, these people, if they're dressed improperly, we may consider that because involuntary confinement, you know, that is a last resort. We never want to do that. So we'll ask them very nicely. And we make it very easy for you to filter your way into a shelter, including, by the way, something that they're proposing, which is to relax restrictions on drug and alcohol use in these facilities, which would be positively disastrous for anybody who actually is of sound mind and wants to take advantage of these facilities because that will be a deterrent to them taking advantage of it. They think they'll be hurt inside these facilities, so they won't go. The very act of declining public services when it's 19 degrees out at night is an act of deranged thinking, is indicative of a disordered mental process that requires state intervention. And the city can't figure it out. It couldn't figure it out really under Eric Adams. So I don't want to give too much grief to Mamdani. This is a systemic problem. But it's systemic because it afflicts the progressive mind. The notion here that these individuals can't be interfered with because to do that is to victimize them a second time. The assumption being that they're victims to begin with, which is flawed. Yeah, it's just so wrong and so disgusting. These are helpless people. It's the equivalent, I think I've made this analogy before, of an Alzheimer patient wandering out in the street at zero degrees temperature. And if this person's confused and doesn't want to go with you, you say, okay, that's your choice. The first thing they have in a, you know, your loved one is in a memory care unit because they lock the door because you don't want them wandering out anywhere. So this is just so profoundly wrong. It's a little bit like, you know, when someone's going to throw themselves off the Brooklyn bridge. And it's like, okay, you know, go ahead. It's your choice. You have to see, you know, try not to hit the boat. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you have members of the police putting, putting their own lives at risk to stop the person from, from doing it. So it's just, it's awful and stomach churning with that. Let's hit a few other things before we go. Happier topics, Jim Garrity, bowling and Chinese food. Yeah. I know, as listeners probably know, the DC area has not just had cold weather. It has had really frigid weather. You know, the streets are mostly plowed, but you've got, you know, the snow has turned to like ice. There's nothing really fun to do. And so last weekend, you know, I would do the usual stuff on the weekend, run around household errands, working out. But like my wife says, okay, let's go to a, let's go bowling. I've done that a long time. And it was a nice offsetting the pain in my shoulders from doing all the snow shoveling to have a different pain in the shoulders from bowling. for several matches. But I had a lot of fun. Then went to a very good Chinese restaurant that just happened to be right across the street. Managed to talk my wife not into walking across the street. We got into our car. It was really that bitterly cold out. But we found a way to get through it on what is, you know, sadly, the first of what will soon be many weekends without NFL football. So bowling is a lot of fun. It's never going to be as big as it used to be. I used to have neighbors who owned their own bowling shoes. We're never going back to that. How many other chances do you get a chance to wear somebody else's shoes for an evening. So what's your favorite Chinese dish? I went out by usual because this was, well, you might as well give it a shout out, Mama Chang's near my neck of the woods in Authenticity Woods. Very highly regarded one. And it has stuff on the menu that you, like intestines and things like that that you're not usually going to find. Now, I know I'm triggering flashbacks. You guys are the Taiwan trip. You're like, oh, I couldn't eat anything there. No, I was thinking that we now know, Jim, how you were onto the origins of COVID so far ahead of everyone else. You insisted. My bad soup was fine at the local place. There was a dish that was called Wuhan rice. And my wife just looks at me and says, stop making jokes. Don't get me before I even do it. So the best Chinese dish, I think it's hands down, is General Tso's chicken. It's very high up there. And I'm glad that his military record will be forever remembered by how he made the chicken. so no one of your kids is getting cast in a play big news it is big news um so it's a third fourth fifth grade play and third graders are not allowed to try out for speaking roles and my kid was in youngest was in ensemble last year and this year he got to go out so he went out and play as charlie and the chocolate factory and he got charlie we're very proud of him for beating out you know some fifth graders and i did a lot of musical theater when i was a kid so there's a bit of a stage mom element to this for me i suppose i'm trying to suppress that instinct but it's this is a sports house and that's my wife's territory she's the athlete of mine so i finally get to live vicariously through one of my youngest it's gonna be fun so charlie you saw flockham hall the spoof i did why you suggested that i see it i take all credit here and i didn't spoil the ending for you no you didn't you didn't my wife and i watched it it's a parody of downton abbey in the style of naked gun or other pastiche movies it is pretty good there's lots of laugh out loud moments and i would recommend it another thing i didn't mention rich when we were relating the funny part it's just uh damian lewis who's in band of brothers plays one of the main characters his haircut with the weird little you have to see it but it was just it was just really really well done and uh if you like and have seen downton abbey and and like parodies then this is a good one So I went to a Yankee memorabilia show, got Goose Gossage, Bucky Dent, and Craig Nettles signatures live and in person, and one also from Jazz Chisholm. This was a lot of fun. Also acquired signed photos of Ron Davis, Ed Figueroa, and Jimmy Key, a key part of the Yankee revival in the mid-1990s. This was a lot of fun, and some people, they're so devoted to this. I dabble, but there was one father-son team. They had this beautiful painting of Yankee Stadium and had 200 Yankee signatures on it. This is a big piece. It's a lot of trouble to cart it around, and I just can't imagine how many shows they've gone to. But that thing now, after having accumulated so much on it, is literally priceless. So a lot of fun for a small-time memorabilist such as myself with that. it's time for our editor's picks. Jim Garrity, what's your pick? Well, I'm going to go with the House editorial, the god-awful homeless deaths in Momdami's New York City. You know, I understand some people are like, oh, you know, America pays too much attention to New York City. The media pays too much attention. But like, Momdami is making bad decisions. We talked about it just a few moments ago, and I think it very much deserved to be called out. So I'm glad this got the attention of a House editorial. Well done, whoever wrote that. No, what's your pick? Richer Latest is on one of my favorite subjects, which is the abuse of the English language. Don't abuse the word protester. It's a very good piece. It has to do with how we discuss the activities in which people like Renee Good and Alex Peretti were engaged before they were killed. And they did not deserve to be killed, but they were not engaged in protest if the word has any universal meaning. They were engaged in agitation. they were members of groups who direct operatives to disrupt the activities of law enforcement that is their stated objective and they succeed often in that objective you might be able to call it demonstrators i don't know pedantry is probably the wrong way to approach this nevertheless the word protester does not suffice it conjures up a lot of images that are just not applicable to what the activities that we're seeing on the ground are okay i'm going to take a piece by dan McLaughlin, where does Ron DeSantis go next? I think about this quite a bit too. DeSantis is term limited, and this will be his final year as the governor of Florida. He is extremely talented and thoughtful. He is still opining on all manner of public policy questions, but there's no obvious next step. He's got a couple of years to the next Republican presidential primary, which is probably close to him anyway. So what does he do? And Dan runs through the various options. So my pick is Noah's piece on Mamdami calling on for major tax increases because, surprise, the city has fiscal problems. So that's it for us. You've been listening to National U podcast, any rebroadcast, retransmission or account of this game without the express written permission of National U magazine is strictly prohibited. This podcast has been produced by the incomparable Sarah Schutte, who makes us sound better than we deserve. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Noah. Thank you, Jim. Thanks to Made In. And thanks especially to all of you for listening. We're the editors. We'll see you next time. Thank you.