You can also watch the video here.

In light of the flagrant abuse of the FCC to shut down Donald Trump’s critics, I also recommend going back to check out a previous interview with Paul Matzko about how the FCC’s powers have frequently been abused. We really saw this coming and explained it all months before it happened.

Speaking of explaining what’s happening, check out my new book, Dictator From Day One: How Donald Trump Is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back, described by Damon Linker as “journalism of a very high order” and by Steven Pinker as “the best short summary of how Trump is turning the US into a dictatorship.”Get it on Amazon here.

This is a really in-depth discussion and will open your eyes to how serious the problem is and how much of it precedes the current administration. See also the study Paul co-authored a few years ago with highlights from the long history of the political abuse of the FCC. What’s happening now is objectively worse than before—but boy, have we been asking for it.

You can also watch the interview here:

We spend some time addressing the FCC’s role in Donald Trump’s shakedown of CBS, which has since moved one step forward with the resignation of the head of CBS News, following the resignation of the main producer at “60 Minutes.”

The president of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, was forced out of her post on Monday, the latest shock wave to hit the news division amid an ongoing showdown involving President Trump, “60 Minutes” and CBS’s parent company, Paramount….

Ms. McMahon’s critics also believed that the reporting at “60 Minutes” had become politically biased, exposing the company to unnecessary criticism. And it was clear that Mr. Trump was paying close attention.

The example of “political bias” given here is “60 Minutes” accurately reporting on the lawlessness of Trump’s attacks on law firms.

Yet Trump has now successfully used the power of the FCC—along with other regulatory agencies, particularly the Federal Trade Commission—to neutralize one of the most famous and influential bastions of investigative journalism. And you can see him following up on this by threatening ABC News over its coverage of his giant $400 million bribe from the Emir of Qatar.

This is a power that needs to be taken away as soon as possible, to protect us from this president, but also so no future president from either party can use it.

See his article on Unitary Executive Theory at The UnPopulist.

Or watch the interview here:

I don’t know what’s going on with the lighting, but in this case, the orange man is good.

The Library of Who?

One of the issues we talk about here that is not in Peter Shane’s previous article is that of course executive power cannot be unitary because each of the other branches of government has executive functions that must be under its own control.

The judiciary needs to build and maintain courthouses and hire bailiffs and pay the salaries of judges—and if all that is totally dependent on the president, if the judiciary has no independent executive functions, then it will have no independence as a branch of government.

Just after I recorded this interview, we got the best example: Trump trying to take over the Library of Congress. As I put it at The UnPopulist, “The question of who controls the Library of Congress would seem to be answered in the name itself: It is the Library of Congress.” And this is not a minor issue, because the Library of Congress also serves as the research arm for the legislature. This is another case in which an independent branch of government, the legislature, must be able to have independent executive functions, or it forfeits its ability to function.

I keep hammering this, because the unitary executive has a strangely devoted following among even the sane and reasonable classical liberals—but if this theory is taken to its logical conclusion, it results in a unitary government with only one branch and one man. It is a theory of autocracy.

A Note on the Future

Symposium has not been very active lately, for a number of reasons. First, it has been a victim of its own success, which is to say that it yielded so many opportunities for me to do things at other publications that I had less time for this one. And Symposium was also designed to be nonpartisan and avoid electoral politics, which is not entirely compatible with the current political environment.

More deeply, my original idea for this publication was to draw people together for conversations across the political aisle. And in the Biden administration, or in the first term of a Kamala Harris administration, that would have been a productive and appropriate undertaking.

But for reasons I have detailed elsewhere, we are in a fundamental crisis, a constitutional collapse that is changing our basic system of government. In these circumstances, there aren’t two sides of the aisle. There are only pro-democracy publications—and everyone else.

So this will simply be a pro-democracy publication, and the interview above is the beginning of a series of podcasts on the threats to democracy, how to revive it, the basic cultural reforms that are needed to protect it, and how we can amend the system to make it stronger.

You can view the video of this conversation here.

You can view the video of this conversation here.

The Mote and the Beam

We spend part of this conversation talking about various sex scandals within the church, and referring to it as a crisis. Here’s what I mean by that.

If were a more bitter and militant atheist, I could run a whole blog cataloguing one horrific example after another. David mentions Ravi Zacharias, but I was thinking about Paul Pressler, the architect of a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention who it turns out was abusing his power to make homosexual advances on young men.

I also recently saw the news about one of the Trump’s so-called “spiritual advisors,” a megachurch pastor who confessed to having an affair and being forgiven for it by the church—but now it has been revealed that his victim was 12 years old.

Remember that the right has been spinning QAnon fantasies about left-wing politics being a cover for the sexual abuse of children—yet a steady drumbeat of these stories keeps coming out about conservative Christians. Another Southern Baptist Convention conservative was just arrested “after an investigation revealed that he allegedly used cryptocurrency to purchase child sex abuse material.”

As they’ve been saying online: Somehow, it’s never a drag queen.

Then there’s the Republican State Representative in Michigan arrested “after alleged altercation with a stripper involving a firearm.”

Meanwhile conservative Christian are very eager to protect themselves from this:

With glowing performance reviews and above-average student evaluations, by most measures Matthew Warner’s first year as a communications professor at Grace College was a triumph.

But he spent most of that first year knowing it could be his last. After four months on the job, Warner was informed by the school’s president, Drew Flamm, that the board had “come to the conclusion that we don’t think it works out to move forward,” according to a recording obtained by Religion News Service.

Warner’s termination is the latest in a string of professor terminations at Christian colleges seemingly tied to clashes over narrowing and often unspoken political and theological criteria. While Flamm didn’t specify the reasons for Warner’s dismissal, it was preceded by an online termination campaign clear about its goals. Launched by conservative influencers and Grace College stakeholders, the campaign demanded Warner’s removal due to his social media posts about LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, and critiques of the GOP.

This is exactly what I mean by “conservative cancel culture.” It’s the exact process conservatives have complained about when it comes from the left, but used in their own institutions to impose their own orthodoxy.

In our conversation above, we spend a little time trading Bible verses. I think perhaps conservative Christians ought to give more thought to Matthew 7:3: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

We talk about the canceling of the Stanford Internet Observatory, why “misinformation” isn’t the right term for the Internet rumor mill, the power of “counterspeech” and why suspending social media accounts doesn’t work, how an “army of Davids” turned into an army of volunteer propagandists—and the curious imaginary life of “CIA Renée.”You can view the video of this conversation here.

A Culture of Truth

In our conversation, we discuss an article by an intern at The Free Press who used to be an intern at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which makes some dubious and highly inaccurate claims about what goes on there. (The intern did not work at the SIO until 2022 yet claims she was tasked with suppressing the 2020 story about Hunter Biden’s laptop—an issue outside the scope of the program’s focus.)

The Free Press seems to exist for the primary purpose of giving semi-respectable cover to far-right talking points. But this incident (and other things I’ve read at The Free Press) remind me of my final days at The Federalist, when it was already taking on the character of what others have described as an “intern blog,” in which very young and inexperienced right-wing activists pen poorly thought-out hot takes—like denouncing the universally beloved Dolly Parton as a false prophet.

The main thing is that this is done without adult supervision, with minimal and uncritical editing. I see something of the same thing at The Free Press in publishing claims about the Stanford Internet Observatory that fit the preferred right-wing narrative but don’t stand up to fact checking or critical scrutiny.

This underscores a point I bring up at the end of the podcast above. We need a “culture of free speech” that values pluralism and vigorous debate. But the point of a culture of free speech is that it encourages the kind of wide-ranging discussion that allows us to get at the truth. It needs to be paired with a culture of truth—a culture that values factual accuracy and careful reasoning.

That is precisely what is missing from the Internet rumor mill DiResta describes.

We also talk about the challenges for advocates of liberalism in rural areas—a closely related issue, because if you’ve got to back every cause in order to promote any cause, you’re going to encounter a lot more resistance.But first we talk about how women’s work in the household has historically been unaccounted for—in the most literal sense—and how the necessity of recognizing its value explains a lot about our current culture wars over gender, as well as the decline in fertility in the developed world

You can view the video of this conversation here.

Identity and Dogma

On a related note, I just posted at my personal newsletter an examination of the collapse of the Libertarian Party as it heads into a fractious convention that seems likely to wreck the whole party even more.

I lay the blame in part on the longstanding philosophical agnosticism of the libertarians, who in an effort to build a big tent ended up not having the intellectual guardrails to keep their movement from being co-opted by authoritarian nationalists. To be sure, the conservative movement arguably had more philosophical substance and still didn’t succeed in getting swept up in the mass hysteria of Trumpism. But at least they were trying.

It strikes me that this and the Omnicause are two sides of the same issue. Any cultural movement or political organization has to have some core of ideas and values—while also making accommodations for reasonable disagreement and heterodoxy. It has to have an identity without having a dogma.

The Libertarians and the Omnicause represent the two different ways a movement can fail at doing this.

.

We talk about the history of political realignments, the parallels to the fate of Republicans in the cities, why the left should spend less time appealing to college students with purple hair and more time on older black women, and how pursing a maximalist agenda can risk losing the bare minimum.

You can view the video of this conversation here.

We talk about the history of conservatism, the role of "liberalism" (in the broad sense) on the right, and whether race as a political dividing line is being eclipsed by education as the new dividing line, and why that might not be entirely a good thing.

Watch the video of our conversation here.

We talk about the hidden regulations that make our cities and suburbs the way they are, the often distorting effects of central planning applies to land use, the Housing Theory of Everything, and the recent bipartisan awakening on housing issues.

Watch the video of our conversation here.

Watch the video of our conversation here.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help support Symposium.

I talk with Anthony Sanders of the Institute for Justice about his book Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters.

We discuss the paradox of explicit constitutional protections for "unenumerated rights," how those protections were embraced not just on the federal level but in state constitutions, why those rights have often been ignored despite being popular, and the concept of "judicial engagement" as an alternative to "judicial activism" and "judicial restraint."

Buy the book here, or get a free download.

Watch the video of our conversation here.

For more on unenumerated rights, see my analysis elsewhere of the Dobbs decision.

And also check out a previous Symposium podcast on unenumerated rights.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help support Symposium.

Watch it here.

Speaking of online discussion and its sometimes perverse incentives, see my comments elsewhere on the travails of Twitter and the potential for a better alternative at Substack.

We discuss the precipitous decline of religious belief in Iran and its lessons for America—based on his recent article, “Integralism, Christian and Islamic”—and how “kicking the dog” is not just a trope but official regime policy.

Watch it here.

The kind of religious hypocrisy that is killing the Iranian regime is a warning for religious zealots in America, and one of them just got caught in it. A Florida state representative drafted a law targeting drag queen shows, but it turns out to also target his wife’s own “sultry” fundraiser.

The thing about the rule of law is that the laws have to be general and apply to everyone—not just to the people you don’t like.

Watch it here.

To support podcasts like this one, please subscribe, and also consider a donation to the Symposium Foundation for the Study of Liberalism.

Watch it here.

Also check out an acerbic post by Ken White, the law blogger known as Popehat, who takes on the recent shouting down of a conservative judge at Stanford Law School and makes a convincing case for “Hating Everyone Everywhere All At Once.” The whole thing is full of great observations and great lines, but I particularly liked this one.

Law students also persist in imagining that they invented the world. They believe they discovered that free speech laws and norms protect awful speech and awful people. They believe they discovered the plea “yes, but what you don’t understand is that this speech is really bad.” They believe that they are so self-evidently right, good, trustworthy, and noble that it’s obvious that we should let them decide who talks and who doesn’t. And they are too hubris-swollen—not too stupid, but too drunk with self-righteousness—to see that exceptions to free speech have always been used most harmfully against the powerless, and always will be. They’re too full of themselves to see that “let a crowd decide who is allowed to speak” is a horrific norm to promote with grotesque historic resonance. Some of them will grow out of this.

White makes the case that the conservative judge in this case is also an obnoxious culture warrior and criticizes our tendency to embrace dubious “free speech heroes.” But he reminds all of us that “A-holes have a right to speak.”

I may have Bowdlerized that a bit, but I recommend that you go read the whole thing.

To support podcasts like this one, please subscribe, and also consider a donation to the Symposium Foundation for the Study of Liberalism.

Watch it here.

For more on how the American right has embraced Orban, see a good overview in the New York Times. See also a history of conservative support for illiberal regimes in The Atlantic. This second piece is a bit one-sided and superficial, but it hammers home its point. An occupational hazard of the political activist is the temptation to wish for the power to wipe away all opposition and impose one’s own vision of the ideal society.

This leads some people to seek out places where this has supposedly been done, to uphold them as models, to defend them as superior to our own society, and to attempt to imitate the new model. The left has had its unhealthy fascinations with tyranny, from Stalin’s Russia to Chavez’s Venezuela, and so has the right.

I’m working on a forthcoming article of my own that defines the version of the Orban model that has filtered through to the American right, as reflected in recent attempts to put that model into practice. The discussion above was part of my research for that article. But one of the themes that emerges from it is the extent to which events elsewhere in the world tend to be distorted to fit into our own domestic political obsessions.

The Orban model as practiced by Orban is somewhat different from the version being promoted in America—and fortunately, it will be much harder to put in practice here in a larger, better informed, and more diverse nation.

Watch it here.

This is a follow-up on our previous conversation just prior to the Russian invasion, but this time we focus more on the prospective question of how Ukraine’s wartime economy will work and how it will rebuild after the war.

The issue I think is most important for people outside Ukraine to grasp is the under-appreciated connection between Big Government and corruption—the way that corruption is fueled by money and economic activity having to move through state institutions, especially state institutions warped by the Soviet legacy and decades of Russian influence. This led to a discussion of the problem of “state capacity,” i.e., the ability of a government to effectively implement its policies. Small-government types like us tend not to talk about “state capacity” because we don’t want the state to do very much. But this is another reason why Western aid and advice often goes wrong, because it assumes “state capacity”—a functioning and honest bureaucracy—that doesn’t exist.

For more coverage on Ukraine and its future, see my conversation last year with Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko.

To support discussions like this one, please consider a donation to the Symposium Foundation for the Study of Liberalism.

I talk with Claire Berlinski of The Cosmopolitan Globalist about the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, why the press should not cover this as a mere natural disaster, and the worst thing that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ever done.

Watch it here:

The earthquakes are a lesson in the hollow promise of a strongman who will end the “deep state,” drain the swamp of corruption, and fight against the “fake news” of the press—and what he actually does once he gets all that power. We are used to hearing about the death tolls of totalitarian regimes. But does this earthquake show us the death toll of authoritarianism?

Claire also passed along some essential reading, especially her prescient warning about Turkish building practices and one about the correlation between earthquake deaths and corruption and the prospect of one million dead in 30 seconds.

Also, see here for a written version of a lot of the material we cover in our conversation. In chatting after the interview, Claire also made me aware of this story of an honest man who saved a lot of lives.

Finally, here is the link she mentioned for those who want to support relief efforts in Syria that will actually reach the people they’re intended to help.

We discuss the long friendship between these three women in the years leading up to the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II, and how they all published books in 1943 that led them to be hailed as the “three furies” of the modern liberty movement. Most of all, we talk about the surprisingly “countercultural” aspect of their advocacy of freedom as a rebellion against conformity, contrasted against the small-town conformism and authoritarianism of many of their era’s “progressives.”

I refer to this as a “lost world” that Tim has uncovered in his book: a cultural context in which the prevailing political coalitions and their cultural affiliations are intriguingly different from what we expect today.

Watch the video here.

We discuss the reality of progress, why people refuse to accept it, the curious correlation of improvements to human life accompanied by increasingly apocalyptic films, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as an explanation for our pessimism, and the effect that recognition of progress would have on our public debate.

Watch the video here.

Read Sandefur's recent article about this at The Unpopulist, and see also his book The Conscience of the Constitution.

Watch the video here.

Watch the video here.

Watch the video here.

We also talk about how this feeds illiberalism by encouraging “Luddite populism” on both the left and the right.

Watch the video here.

We talk about the real facts about immigration, the phenomenon of “Schrödinger's Immigrant” (who is and isn’t at the same time), and why ethno-nationalism is a foreign import.

Watch the video here.

This last observation is particularly relevant given Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s recent comments about “race mixing,” which cast a clearer and colder light on his anti-immigration policies and show us the dark side of the current “national conservative” embrace of ethno-nationalism.

Orbán, it should be noted, still seems welcome among American conservatives, and he has received an enlightening defense from his chief American booster, Rod Dreher. The central argument is that rural Hungarians (and rural Americans) have a right to demand a country in which there is no change ever to any significant aspect of life. And I guess that includes change such as the presence of immigrants, particularly those with different skin tones.

This raises an interesting question: Does conservatism have a racism problem?

Many conservatives would deny it, and I have frequently defended friends on the right from lazy and opportunistic accusations of bigotry, which for a long time have been a favorite way to appear to win an argument without all the bother of coming up with evidence or new ideas.

And yet. Conservatism, not just as an ideology but as a mindset—conservatism in the temperamental sense of resistance to change—seems to have a certain temptation toward racism built into it. And if you then build the movement’s ideology, not on the basis of liberty and liberalism, but on the basis of standing athwart history yelling “stop," then you have drawn that element into the foundation of your thinking.

This is worth exploring in more depth at a future time. In this discussion, Alex and I end by going the other direction: celebrating change by discussing all of the growth and vitality that immigrants bring to American society and have always brought, and how we are unnecessarily passing up all these benefits when we restrict them.

It is very hard to get a third party off the ground in the American system, and after trying for decades, the Libertarian Party suffered the fate of many small movements. The best, most serious, most talented advocates of limited government and classical liberalism tend to set their sights on breaking into the mainstream, leaving the small party to be taken over by cranks and weirdos. If you think I’m being unkind, you should look up some footage from old Libertarian Party conventions.

This year, however, the Libertarian Party suffered a worse fate. A party of harmless oddballs was taken over by malevolent oddballs: the “alt-right” racists and authoritarians of the so-called Mises Caucus. (I say “so-called” because they have unjustly appropriated the name of a serious intellectual, the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises.)

Here’s the report on this in Reason, the flagship libertarian magazine.

A four-year battle for control of the Libertarian Party ended Saturday in Reno with a victory for the Mises Caucus at the party's national convention. The faction's chosen candidate for chair of the party's national committee, Angela McArdle, won on the first round of balloting with 692 votes—more than 69 percent of the voting delegates….

The caucus's official platform is plumb-line libertarian, but its foes say that too many Mises Caucus members and fans downplay libertarian positions that might offend the right, are intentionally obnoxious and bullying, and are often racist….

Two former significant donors to the LP, Kyle Varner and Michael Chastain, both with decadeslong history in the party, did say in phone interviews that the Mises turn, which they see as importing a level of racist edgelording they have no taste for, has made them stop funding LP candidates…. Varner and Chastain see a distinctly right-wing culture and policy bent from the Mises faction. The caucus…wants to eliminate from the LP's platform a statement that "we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant."…

The Mises-run party will continue to try to run local candidates especially, he said, with a preferred strategy of straight-up localist nullification of federal laws. "Decentralization" is a mantra of Heise's, and the caucus's Twitter feed has openly been against the long-held legal principle that the 14th Amendment means that states and localities also have to obey the federal Bill of Rights.

Removing a disavowal of bigotry and opposing the 14th Amendment are the milder symptoms. The Southern Poverty Law Center has the goods on the connections between the Mises Caucus’s expected Libertarian Party candidate for president, comedian Dave Smith, and a who’s who of white nationalism: Nick Fuentes, Chris Cantwell, Richard Spencer, and Michelle Malkin.

This is a return to the old “paleolibertarian” strategy once advocated by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell (and accepted for a while by former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul) of forming an alliance between libertarians and Pat Buchanan-style “paleoconservatives.” Now that Buchanan’s paleoconservatism has come roaring back under Donald Trump, the paleolibertarians are also taking over.

In response to that, Jeremiah Johnson, one of the organizers of a resurgent “neoliberal” movement, published a sales pitch to disaffected libertarians to join his left-of center movement.

Libertarians and neoliberals agree on some of the most important issues facing the world today. You’ll find no greater defenders of the value of free trade and immigration than neoliberals. Neoliberals are intensely skeptical of occupational licensing regimes that hamper poor people’s ability to make a living. Neoliberals are strident YIMBYs who want more development and more housing free from local regulations. Neoliberals are proud capitalists who believe in the power of (mostly) free markets. Neoliberals want to end the drug war and reform America’s overly punitive criminal justice system. 

And neoliberals are invested in the core philosophical ideals of liberalism. They stand for liberal democracy and the classical liberal values like equality before the law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. They reject all forms of racism, sexism, and bigotry, and notably there’s no internal struggle required for neoliberals to proudly and publicly declare that. The modern neoliberal movement is explicitly against the rising tide of illiberalism that characterizes so much of today’s politics. If you’re a principled libertarian, there is a huge amount to like about neoliberalism….

Libertarians who care about rejecting the Mises Caucus’s blatant bigotry, who want to stay true to the classical liberal values, and who want to advance liberty in practical and meaningful ways—come join the neoliberals.

This is similar in some ways to the kind of “neo-classical liberalism” Symposium has been exploring, so of course I had to ask Johnson to come onto the podcast. We had a wide-ranging discussion talking about the differences and potential areas of cooperation between classical liberals and explaining why you might have seen the Neoliberalism symbol 🌐 so often these days.

See the video here.

No, I’m not personally going to start calling myself a “neoliberal” or start putting 🌐 into my Twitter profile. But I am very open to the idea of seeking out neoliberals as allies and working with them on the big issues where we agree.

We talk about the parallels between America and Ukraine, which sees itself as “another America” or a “European America”—a “Wild East” settled by “free warriors of the steppe,” to match our Wild West. Think of it as Cossacks and cowboys.

The deepest philosophical parallel is the history of the Cossacks and their “contractual idea of politics,” in which power is defined by an agreement between the ruler and the ruled—as opposed to Russia’s long history of imperialist absolutism.

Watch the video here.

I discussed this recently with David French and Ilya Shapiro, talking about why the Constitution protects unenumerated rights and how we would tell what those rights are. How do we avoid having such determinations be a purely subjective projection of current ideological fads—versus what David calls “18th Century Infallibility Theory,” in which whatever laws existed when the Constitution was ratified are considered the final word?

And does the Dobbs opinion represent an overly restrictive view of unenumerated rights?

See the video here.

The Wit of the Staircase

There is a reference in this podcast to the “wit of the staircase,” that moment when you suddenly think of the perfect thing to say, just as you have left the party and are on your way down the stairs. Well, it was just after we recorded this discussion that I came across a blog post from Joseph Blass, a law professor at Northwestern and quite possibly the very last person still using Blogger. Blass perfectly captures my central concern about the Dobbs opinion’s approach to unenumerated rights. Blass notices a substitution of “and” for “or” in Justice Alito’s test for unenumerated rights.

Justice Ginsburg writes that a right is protected under the Constitution’s Due Process Clause “if it is fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty, or deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” (internal quotations omitted). But Justice Alito now writes: “Justice Ginsburg’s opinion for the Court in Timbs [concluded] that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against excessive fines is ‘fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty’ and ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’” See the difference? Justice Alito slices Justice Ginsburg’s statement of the test in Timbs in half around the word “or,” sandwiching her quoted statements of the branches around a new “and”. The opinion states the test four separate times, each time using “and” to connect the two branches. But up until this draft opinion the test has been disjunctive: in McDonald, Justice Alito states the test much as Justice Ginsburg did in Timbs, using “or.” And so does Chief Justice Rehnquist in Glucksberg, the case that originated the test by drawing together its branches from prior Due Process precedents. 

In effect, under the original standard described in Glucksberg, there are two tests for an unenumerated right: one is that it be “deeply rooted in history and tradition”; the other is that it be “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Either test would be enough, which is to say that a right does not have to be recognized in tradition in order to be considered implicit in the concept of liberty. That’s a good thing, in my view, because there are many aspects of liberty that have not always been recognized in tradition, and this is part of the reason those rights end up being litigated later on at the Supreme Court.

What Blass is arguing—and what I think the Dobbs opinion clearly implies—is that Alito has collapsed those two tests into one test. A right will only be recognized as implicit in liberty if it is also recognized in tradition. It replaces liberty as a standard with tradition as a standard, as I have argued elsewhere.

Contrary to what David and Ilya are saying here, that would greatly constrict the Supreme Court’s future protection of unenumerated rights. No, I don’t think the Supreme Court is going to overturn other similar cases immediately. As they point out, Justice Alito explicitly forecloses a challenged to Lawrence v. Texas or Loving v. Virginia. But then again, the current opinion cites a ruling from 30 years ago, so precedents matter. And who knows what new case will arise that we don’t even know about yet, in which the justices will be called upon to protect a right that is clearly implicit in the concept of liberty but not sufficiently grounded in tradition?

We ended this podcast with David French saying that a ban an abortion expands rights by recognizing the right to life of the unborn. But this implies an affirmation that a fetus at the very earliest stages of pregnancy is a separate being with rights. Ilya Shapiro thinks this is a question that can’t be answered by the courts and therefore should be left to the states. But I think for precisely the reason David raises, it has to be answered by the courts.

That just goes to show the kind of tough question that the Constitution’s protection of unenumerated rights requires us to face.

You can also watch this on video.

You can also watch this on video here.

See Shay's article in Symposium here.

You can also watch this on video here.

You can also watch it on video here:

I found Jaroslav’s perspective interesting because he blames US officials for overstating the risk of a Russian invasion in order to panic Ukraine into signing a bad diplomatic deal giving away its Eastern provinces. This seems to be the view held by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as well. Romanchuk also spells out the long-term Ukrainian strategy, which is to pursue an economic growth and dynamism that will eventually make it clearly a better alternative to the Putin regime.

Their assumption is that Putin doesn’t really have enough troops to take and hold Ukraine, not without disastrous casualties, so he is staging a giant military bluff intended either to panic Ukraine into a deal or to keep it mired in a “frozen conflict” that prevents the stability, investment, and growth that would make Ukraine a threat to Russia.

Thinking about this, I remembered a recent story about a hockey game with Vladimir Putin and Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, in which Putin scored an astounding seven goals and Lukashenko two—against famous Russian professional players. This is, of course, a ridiculous PR stunt meant to create a flattering image of Putin.

You could interpret that story in two ways. On the one hand, you could view it as evidence that Putin is a blustering coward who won’t take on any contest that isn’t already rigged in his favor—making an actual invasion of Ukraine too big of a gamble. Or you could wonder whether Putin has spent so long surrounded with sycophants and yes-men who assure him that he will always be a winner that he will actually believe there is no risk and he can get away with anything.

In the next few weeks, we ought to know which of these is the correct interpretation.

[Update: Yeah, well, we found out.]

You can also watch it on video here:

You can also watch it on video here:

You can also watch it on video here:

You can also watch it on video here:

You can also watch it on video here:

To keep getting access to these discussions and to help make sure we can keep hosting more of them, please subscribe to Symposium.

In this podcast, I host a conversation with Symposium contributors Helen Pluckrose, Cathy Young, and Robert Garmong on that elusive concept, the “culture of free speech”: the need for toleration and open debate, not just as a political or legal protection, but as a cultural norm. But what is the “culture of free speech,” how do we draw the line between ideas that are open for discussion and those that are beyond the pale, and why do we need this concept in the first place? Listen in as I talk these questions out with our contributors.

Oh, and I should mention that one of the benefits of subscribing is that you can add your own contribution to the discussion in the comments.

You can also watch it on video here:

And please share this with your friends.

See his article on the free-market welfare state here, which includes some of the graphs we refer to in the podcast.

You can also watch it on video here:

You can also watch it on video here:

You can also watch it on video here: