FIRE Challenges Trump’s Deportation of Pro-Gaza Immigrants

Hello and welcome once again to the American Mind podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Clavin, Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books and Benevolent Lordling of the American Mind, Monarchist King. We'll find out today because we're joined by a special guest, Richard Lim, who is the host of the This American President podcast and the resident historian at Prager University site and an organization we know and love well. He's written a new book called Refusing a Crown on what he takes, and I agree, to be one of the most extraordinary moments in human history, certainly in American history. The moment in which George Washington voluntarily gave up power and refused to become a monarch or dictator in perpetuity. This is something that has become such a staple of our national lore that it's kind of fashionable perhaps to be a bit skeptical of it or to downplay it and say it wasn't really that big a deal. But Lim is arguing here that it really is that big a deal. It really did shape the course of history and require extraordinary, even not superhuman, then perhaps supernatural virtue. Richard Lim, welcome to the American Mind. Glad to be on the show and to meet all of you guys. Yeah, congratulations on the book. I should say we are joined, of course, as well by old stalwarts, managing editor Mike Sabo and publisher and president Ryan Williams, and we're looking forward to getting into this book with you. The obvious question that suggests itself, Richard, and it's one you probably won't have to do a lot of convincing for this crowd, but I think for the general public, it'd be worth just asking why another book about George Washington? Why now? What was it that suggested to you that this is a subject that needs revisiting? The vast majority, especially of mainstream scholarship about George Washington, is so warped towards the secular mindset. It's all part of this idea that the Founding Fathers were a bunch of deists and secularists, and they wanted to create a country in which Christianity, well, that Christianity didn't really have any role politically or socially. And you can get a number of facts right, but miss the big picture, and that is the big picture about the Founding Fathers, that they actually believed in a society in which Christianity was the dominant force in national life. And I would say the vast majority of them believed in Christianity to be true, and even among the ones that didn't believe that it was the best foundation of national life, politically and socially. And so I think if you miss that aspect of George Washington, you miss the most important story. And his decision to leave power is based on what he believed was his duty to God and to man and to country, to his fellow citizens. And again, if you don't understand that framing, you don't understand the whole point of what he did. Yeah, you cite an interesting line that Washington wrote to Henry Knox, former Secretary of War, in which he says, I think this is really telling, Washington writes, if any power on earth could, or the great power above, would erect the standard of infallibility in political opinions, there is no being that inhabits this terrestrial globe that would resort to it with more eagerness than myself. Obviously, the implication there being that the if is counterfactual, there is no such standard of infallibility. And yet, important note that you're perhaps reminding us of here, there is also implicit in that statement, the idea that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong. There is a great power above that governs things. It's simply that it's not been within his pleasure to put the power of infallibility in the hands of any mortal. Can you tell us a little bit about Washington's religious upbringing, his outlook? You cover a lot of ground in this book, not just the end of his political career. I'm curious, what is the story that we should know that is different from the kind of deist, enlightenment, rationalist interpretation that we took? Well, the funny thing about the deist thesis is that it's so easily disprovable. You just have to ask people, what is a deist? Give me a definition of a deist. And by definition, a deist believes that you have a convenient God, a God who created the universe and then walked away and didn't really care about what happened in that universe, which really strains credulity to think that God would create the whole universe and not care about it, but that's its own issue. And there's this idea that the founding fathers were this group of people and there was this club to get in, and one of the requirements to get in was to be a deist, which again is ridiculous, because if you grabbed a hundred people in America during the founding, what would you get in terms of religious affiliation? Well, you would get pretty much mostly Protestant Americans, and you would also get several denominations. You would get Baptist and Anglican and various different sects, but nonetheless, it would be overwhelmingly Protestant. The vast majority would be believing. It's like today, in a sense, where if you grabbed a hundred Americans, what would you get? Well, you would get a number of Christians, a number of Protestants, and some Catholics, and a certain percentage of them would be real believing Christians. And then you'd have a number of Jews and different people of different faiths. Well, back then it was that, but even more Christian. And so this idea that the founding fathers somehow came out of that as deists, not to mention if you looked at a lot of what they wrote, people like John Witherspoon and Patrick Henry, it's explicitly Christian. George Washington talked so much about God's intervention in the American Revolution. He called it a standing miracle. He said that he would talk about how God intervened, and that if you did not believe God intervened in this contest, then you were worse than an infidel that lacks faith. During his first inauguration, he said that any country that ignores the eternal rules of order and right that heaven has ordained could not succeed. I mean, he says this, he talks about universal morality. He talks about God. And when he talks about his own life, his private life and his motives, he says, and this is a letter, a private letter, so it's not like a public posturing in August of 1788, the great searcher of hearts is my witness that I have no wish, which aspires beyond the humble and happy lot of living and dying a private citizen on my own farm. So he's saying God is my witness that I'd rather be a citizen. This is my preference. And he's talking about his own conscience. And so these are, and again, this isn't a private letter. And I think that often when people like to say that Washington didn't believe in any of this, they're really inputting their own cynicism about faith onto George Washington. I have a friend who says, well, Martha was a Christian, but George was just going through the motions. He would just go to church and all that stuff. And I said, well, what's your proof for that? You're telling me that George Washington was actually doing this cynically. I would like proof from you to prove that. And they never can. It's just his own cynicism. And I think, unfortunately, that's mainstream scholarship on Washington. Just moving to Washington's military career, it's amazing just going through the campaign during the French and Indian War, and then obviously being recalled, serving the country during the Revolutionary War. Could you just talk about that aspect, how his religious foundation then did that at all? How did he see that in relation to military? Was there any kind of problematic aspects there, or did he think a good Christian is a good soldier, and a good soldier fights in defense for his country? He definitely did not see contradiction between serving his country, and serving God, and serving in the military. There was no pacifist element. I believe that he saw serving God as being an honorable person who fought for a cause. And I would say that the bigger conflict was that in his youth, he, like so many people at that time, were very ambitious. And I think you could argue that Washington was a bit of a social climber in that early part of his life. He was somebody who wanted military glory. He wanted the title. He wanted to rise in status, and he did in many ways. But what the war also taught him was that it wasn't a light thing. Combat is not a light thing. Leading men into battle and having them die under your command is not a light matter. This is something that is very weighty. This is something that reflects on him, and his honor, and his character. And in his letters later on, where he talks about the events of the French and Indian War, he talks about the cost of it. And he's haunted by some of the battles he fought in, where he heard the cries of his soldiers after defeat, after so many of them were killed, and their comrades being killed, and seeing the gruesomeness of war. And basically, that whole experience really sobers him to what war is, and to the type of leadership he needs to demonstrate in order to succeed. So, from then on, he sees discipline as critical to winning wars, and to minimizing casualties. And so, I think from then on, he did not ever want to lead soldiers into battle, unless it was a situation where he could win, and he could win at a lesser cost than would have been incurred otherwise. Yeah, it strikes me that the question of divine intervention is really important for this distinction you're drawing between deism and a more orthodox Christianity, right? The deist model being the wind-up clock idea of the universe, which leaves no room, really, for actually human freedom, but also divine contact and active relationship between an individual on the stage of history and the overseer of the universe, right? Whereas, if you're saying that Washington has these moments where he thinks that God is actually reaching in and altering the course of events, one interesting implication of that is that human beings also have the ability to alter the course of events. So, there's a political significance to that theological difference as well, if you see what I'm saying. And I wonder, you know, given that this is a guy in potential possession of world historic power, right? He's aware of himself, I think, on the stage of history. All the founders give the impression, really, knowing that they're in the midst of something that's going to alter the course of events and that this is a momentous thing, not just a major element of their life, but something that's really going to change things. Can you talk a little bit about how Washington thinks about that decision and its consequences and his responsibility? You know, you're obviously leading up throughout the book to this major rejection of absolute power, which is not something that you also show. He's aware that monarchy is the default, de facto mode of government for most people, and so it's not like he's got precedence for this. He really is doing something new. Can you talk about how he views that and how he thinks about its effect on the larger course of history? Yeah, absolutely. I would say that Washington was definitely not a fatalist in the sense that, oh, well, God has it all figured out and I don't have to do anything and Americans don't have to do anything. He talks a lot about human agency. He talks about in his 1783 circular, which I think is one of the greatest things he had written in his entire life, and had he not served as president in the 1780s and 90s and issued his farewell address at the end of those two terms, his circular at the end of the war would have been his farewell address. It would have been the one that kids would have learned in school. And in that document, he talks about how there are all these different trends to America being founded. And he cites the experience of self-government, the work of legislatures in just Western history. He talks about the increasing understanding of natural rights through the work of philosophers. But he says that the biggest factor in the creation of America was the benign light of Revelation, capital R. So that's a clear reference to scripture. And in that document, he also talks about how Americans shouldn't be so ungrateful to God for this whole situation where they were able to win the war that we dash the cup of blessing, which is another Christian reference, that we essentially squander this. So he's talking about how Americans have agency and there would be nothing more ungrateful to God to basically say, thanks for getting us through the war and having us win and all that stuff. But we're going to reject all of these blessings and basically squander this whole situation. So he talks about God's blessings in that way. And yet, he also says throughout various crises after the war, Shay's rebellion, and later on when he's president, in private letters that he just couldn't believe that God who had gotten the American people so far in this whole experiment would abandon them now. And I think that's what sustained him throughout all the crises. The American experiment was so new and so untried, and the odds were constantly against them in so many situations, whether it's the evacuation at Long Island, whether it's at the winter at Valley Forge, and so on and so forth. And yet, he had seen America triumph over and over, and he credited that to Providence. So I think it's very clear that he understood that man had to act, but at the same time rely on God. Now, as far as you asked about the decision to leave power, I believe that it's one of the things that's so remarkable about George Washington. And yet, we tend to just take it for granted because we think, well, the war was over and it was time to leave. Well, first of all, how many times in American history was somebody supposed to do something and yet found a way to fudge it? Cromwell technically refused the crown in the 17th century, but he still took basically monarchical power. Caesar Augustus remained the first citizen in Rome, and yet he became emperor and essentially a god. And I'm not judging those characters. I think you have to allow for the fact that they lived in a different time. But it was expected that somebody was going to fudge it a little bit, and Washington refused to do that, which I think makes it remarkable. And the other thing that makes his decisions to leave power so remarkable was the fact that he had very clear ideas about what he felt America had to in order to succeed. And yet he refused to put his weight and coerce those ideas onto the American people, even though he very well could have. His prestige was so high. He could have very well justified, well, look, we have so many problems. We have a national debt that we have to pay off. Our national credit is in the toilet, all this stuff. I think I need to stay in power a little bit longer as commander-in-chief in order to ensure that these things happen. But he refused to do that. He made a major gamble and said, nope, people's representatives, they're the ones who decide because we're a nation in which the people rule. He was willing to take that gamble, and it's extraordinary that he was willing to do that. Washington presided at the Constitutional Convention but rarely spoke. And one of his very few suggestions for modification was to make the House of Representatives slightly more representative. I think it was dropping the threshold for House members from 35,000 constituents, so to speak, down to 25,000. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but it certainly confirms his small-R Republican leanings, to say the least. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to portray Washington as this populist Democrat, little-D Democrat figure. I think he certainly believed in rule by the people, but he also believed in very clear constraints on the system to ensure that demagogues couldn't just convince the people of fleeting, light, transient causes. He was somebody that believed very much in liberty and order, and he hated mob rule. There are quotes of him where he expresses disdain for what happened at the Boston Tea Party and what he felt were elements of lawlessness. So I think it's definitely a balance that you have there. And I think socially and politically, he believed that if you look back at ancient Greece, that you could see the problems of too much democracy. But at the same time, yes, you're right. He believed that the legislature was basically the primary driver of policy after the Constitution is ratified. He talks about the entire federal government as a clock in which the first gear that pushed every other gear into motion was the Congress, because they were closest to the people. And it was only after that gear, that wheel acted, that all the other wheels would act as well. And that's how he governed as president. As president, he deferred to the legislature as far as legislation. And in my opinion, that's quite refreshing because we now live in an age where the president has become the national savior, and Washington didn't want to be the national savior. And just what lessons would you think that we should take from Washington to apply to our politics today, to how we view politics has become this kind of all-encompassing thing in the partisan sense, not in probably the higher Aristotelian sense, unfortunately, is going away. But yeah, how would you say, what are the lessons we can glean from Washington? So one of the greatest lessons, and I think this applies personally as well as publicly, and Washington talked about it in both terms. So his farewell address, whenever people cite it, they always say two things, political parties are bad, entangling alliances are bad. And in a very broad sense, yes, those were Washington's most prominent recommendations, his policy recommendations. You could also throw in him talking about how religion and morality are key to the country. When he says religion, he's really talking about Christianity. And in addition to that, virtue cannot be cultivated without religion, again, Christianity. So those are the main recommendations. With the exception of the religion thing, I think people miss the point, because when he talks about entangling alliances, he's really talking about permanent alliances, or political parties, those are policy prescriptions or recommendations, but we miss the underlying principle behind them. Policies are going to change depending on the situation. Washington, when he talked about permanent alliances, he was talking about a country that was so weak, and it really had to be independent of European wars in order to succeed. So that was very much rooted in the time and the place. But the broader principle underlying these policy recommendations is this concept of Christian realism. He talks so much about human nature in his farewell address. He talks about how there is a lust for power that is in every human heart. He literally says that, in every human heart, and how that needs to be restrained. It needs to be restrained by morality in every single citizen's heart, and it needs to be restrained by a national government, which can prevent not only factions from oppressing people within the country, but foreign empires from trying to essentially influence our country and undermine our independence. To me, really, what the farewell address comes down to is Jesus's admonition that we be wise as serpents, but innocent as doves. And the innocent as doves part is where he talks about how America, because we believe in liberty and these broader principles, these universal principles of morality, that America needs to adhere to that, and so will be an example to the world. So there you have the innocent as doves part, but also wise as serpents, because we know human nature and how it's a problem in our country and outside our country. The last thing I would say is that Washington talks about how there are times as a country when we are going to be able to get an advantage in the short term by acting contrary to our values, but how losing that advantage in the short term will mean a long-term gain. And so he essentially says that if we have a choice between doing something convenient but essentially immoral now, whatever gain we'll have from that, we will lose in the long term. And I think that speaks to his own career. He was constantly giving up the short-term gain for the long-term vision. And that's what he did, giving up power. There was a cost to giving up power. He lost that power immediately, and he lost the ability to influence something directly. But in giving up power, he gained a long-term influence and long-term prestige that is really incalculable. It led to him being elected unanimously twice as president and maintaining that prestige his whole career. And so I think that's something that as Americans we should think about, that it's tempting to want short-term gain, but what we'll lose in the long term isn't worth it. Yeah, he was ambitious for eternal glory. I don't want to be cynical about this, but Washington is a wonderful example of maybe an older kind of statesmanship and prudence in the sense that this decision by him, especially the decision to go home after two terms, let alone the Newburgh conspiracy, which has maybe made a little bit too much of it, was never really that much of a going concern. But the decision to step down after two terms, he knew, I think, that history would judge him quite favorably for that act and it would be in many ways the defining act of the early republic and would cement his position as first among his fellow citizens for maybe forever. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned Caesar Augustus, you mentioned the Cromwell, any number of figures from the Western history or just human history to show how extraordinary this act was. And I do think the kind of reasoning you're describing requires, if not a specifically Christian point of view, certainly an eternal point of view, an idea that your own actions kind of extend beyond your life and beyond those immediate gains that you might acquire from just seizing power and living out your life with the maximal enjoyment in the here and now. So it's definitely something worth marveling at. I mean, it really, as we both, Rich, I said this in my introduction, you eloquently kind of expanded on this, that people like to downplay this because it is such a mythic moment in our history, because it has this kind of sheen of glory around it. But I do think it's really worth acknowledging that sometimes, once in a blue moon, people really do perform acts of towering greatness. And this was certainly one. The book is called Refusing a Crown. It's by Richard Lim. Tell people where they can get it, Rich, and where they can find you. Yeah, absolutely. So the book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Simon Schuster's distributing it. So you can, I think Amazon's probably the best place to get it. It helps out with the algorithm and all of that. It's kind of the main game in town. This is the way we live now. Yeah, you can check out my podcast. Exactly. Yeah. You can check, although I do like to plug Barnes & Noble and make sure people still buy stuff from there to keep it alive, because going to an actual bookstore is nice too. But yeah, and then my podcast is This American President. You can listen to that anywhere you listen to podcasts on Spotify or iTunes app. And then I have a website, richardmlim.com, which is where you can keep in touch and, you know, keep up to date on my different appearances. But yeah, Refusing a Crown, How George Washington Changed the World. It's a project that I started in 2022. And yes, even though Washington, it's often said that Washington refused a crown. And there's always mythology behind it. I mean, it wasn't like there was an actual crown being offered, but it was mostly a suggestion. But my point is that his decision to leave power allowed America to refuse a crown. Because at the time, monarchy was the ubiquitous system of government for great empires, for small city states even. And he was the main figure in this large gamble in America, not just leaving the British monarchy, but really forsaking monarchy as a legitimate system of government. And I talk about how so much of that was driven by a greater understanding of scripture. When Thomas Paine, a man who had heterodox religious views, when he wrote Common Sense, which did so much to convince Americans to reject monarchy, he was citing a biblical argument because he knew his audience, he knew how Christian the nation was. And so that's actually the bigger backdrop in my book is, is okay, you know, you can argue to the extent to which Washington refused the crown, but his decision to give up power allowed America to ultimately refuse a crown. You thrice did see that on the loop recall, I thrice presented him the kingly crown he thrice refused. Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? Yeah, it was not like a moment of actual ceremonial gesture like the one described in Julius Caesar. But that, as you point out, was an insincere refusal, whereas this was a more lasting and a genuine abnegation of absolute power. Richard Lim, thank you so much for joining the American Mindpipet. Thanks for having me. It was, it's great to be on. Well, we're going to say goodbye to Richard and let him get back to what I'm sure is a very busy book tour. But we've got a couple other topics we wanted to hit. Starting with this case from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. This is an organization, I'm not sure how much we've talked about them on the show, but in general, I think it's fair to say we're friendly toward their enterprise. But this is a controversial case and we thought it was worth kind of getting into. It's focused on Mahmoud Khalil, somebody we have talked about on the show. This is the Columbia protester who was instrumental in the kind of mini autonomous zone that was set up to advocate for Palestine. And I'm being as generous as possible here. I mean, there was a lot of serious turmoil and a lot of Jewish students felt very threatened on campus, but it's Mahmoud Khalil and then a woman whose name I'm going to have a hard time pronouncing, but it's Rumeysa Ozturk, I think, is a Tufts University PhD student who wrote an op-ed, co-authored an op-ed, demanding basically divestment in Israel. And both of them were detained under immigration law, essentially, because they were here on student visas. And the Trump administration used the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 as reason to say, look, if you're here on a visa, your free speech is not protected in the way that American citizens First Amendment guarantees American citizens' free speech rights. If you're kind of on the provisional good graces of the government and you participate in actions that seem to pose a threat to the government or to the national interest, then your free speech is actually not a good enough defense and you can have your visa voked, you can be detained, et cetera. FIRE has challenged this, challenged the two statutes used by the administration to try to deport Khalil and Ozturk and won a case in a California district court to the effect that basically visa holders get the same protections that citizens get. I'm just going to read Greg Lukianoff of FIRE has a tweet describing this victory. He says, The ruling does not say the government must admit anyone, issue anyone a visa, or grant anyone citizenship. It says that once a person is lawfully here, the government cannot deport them because they engaged in protected speech. The government cannot tell a legal immigrant an American is free to say this, but if you say it, you're out. So it's unclear to me and I should think somewhat unlikely that this ruling will stand. I think we haven't seen the last of it, but there's already been some objection, predictably. I'm going to read now a counter-argument by Ilan Werman that Mike sent by FIRE does amazing work, but this is just wrong. He says, The government is in fact allowed to condition public privileges, including immigration privileges on the recipient forgoing rights he might otherwise have. So long as the condition is germane to privilege, the government should absolutely be able to kick out foreigners if they say things like death to America or whatever. He's not sure this is what Khalil Oster said, but the point stands broadly. Once again, I am not a lawyer, so I'm going to ask the guys to weigh in here, but my initial reading on this is just, yeah, I love FIRE's advocacy. Generally, I think they are a force for good in the world by and large. This seems like a misguided application of their principles to me. I don't think it's true that the constitution guarantees or should guarantee the rights within it to visa holders. I don't think that that should be licensed to roundly mistreat people who are here temporarily or provisionally in the country, but the whole idea of citizenship seems to be that when you are a citizen, then the constitution exists to protect your rights. Otherwise, there's really no meaning to the concept of citizenship or indeed cohesion or coherence to the idea of the constitution. So just at a basic level, it just seems wrong to me that a visa should come with the same kind of protections that the constitution grants to American citizens by default, by nature. What do you guys think? What do you make of this? I would say Lukianoff's position is generally the libertarian position, but even libertarians, and Ilan Worman has some libertarian leanings, but Eugene Volokh, many more libertarian leanings, says that this is a one interpretation of the precedent that the court looks at, and especially this case from 1945, Bridges v. Wixon, and this was about a sort of communist-leaning labor organizer who the US government had been trying to deport for quite some time, and it was mainly a statutory interpretation case. It didn't really touch on the constitutional issue, although there's a concurrence in that case by Justice Murphy that is what's relied on here by the district court. So this is a contestable thing. Eugene Volokh says that this is one interpretation of the precedent, but it's not the only plausible one. I would point to his colleague at the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Soman, who's kind of the maximalist on this. Lukianoff, as you mentioned, Spencer, said that this does not mean that the government is not able to exclude people from immigrating or to kick them out for various activities, but it just applies to resident aliens here who are expressing speech, who are exercising their First Amendment rights. But the leading edge of libertarianism represented by Ilya Soman, I guess I'd give him, Ilya has been outspoken on all this stuff for a long time, especially on immigration, broadly speaking. So I might, if I were being uncharitable, I would say Ilya Soman represents the suicide-packed constitutionalism of the leading left edge of libertarianism. Ilya thinks that you cannot even use people's speech abroad to exclude them from immigrating to the United States. And he also thinks that cross-border immigration is a fundamental human right, the movements of people. So Lukianoff wants to cabin this decision, I think, in a way that jives with public opinion. But the principle involved, at least by a lot of libertarians, is that the government really has no business policing people's speech or even investigating it, should they apply to come to this country. So I think that's what's at stake in the larger argument. And I think most reasonable Americans think that that idea is crazy. On one blog post about it, Ilya also talks about some related cases or related instances of action by the Trump administration, especially in its desire to deport various forms of fanatical resident aliens, that is, non-citizens who are Islamist of various stripes. Ilya Soman and a lot of his colleagues on the libertarian right, the libertarian left, I don't call it what you want, thinks that that's out of bounds as well. So that, I think, this will be the backdrop of this going to the Supreme Court, this larger question of the extent to which the public exercises its sovereignty through its elected officials, and especially through the president as commander-in-chief and Secretary Rubio as one of the principal officers overseeing this link between foreign policy and domestic policy, which we have seen in stark relief on the immigration question. If we get a circuit split on this, that is to say, if one of the circuits on one of these many cases, and many are bubbling up, decides the opposite, that is to say, the Trump administration is perfectly reasonable for them under the immigration acts that they're enforcing, which give a lot of discretion to the Secretary of State to bar foreign nationals from immigrating or even to initiate deportation proceedings against current resident aliens because they are acting contrary to fundamental foreign policy goals or what used to be called acting against public policy. These are the things that are at issue. So I would be surprised if this does not finally go up to the Supreme Court to get some real clarification, because as I mentioned, the 45 case is really a statutory case. The court has never really ruled on the constitutionality of this sort of question. And I think, as you said, Spencer, and I will just finish with, this is one of those things where the common sense American view by your average citizen is probably on the side of the government here and not on the side of fire or the libertarian argument, which is to say, if we have people here who are not fully in the political community, they're not fully in the people of the United States of America, as it's mentioned in the constitution and the declaration, because they're not quite fully part of the social compact. Any reasonable country, including America, with its extraordinary protections for individual rights, it should be an easy thing to say if you're here and you're openly hostile to our way of life and our principles of government, then it is incumbent upon us. In fact, it's maybe even a duty of responsible citizenship and leadership to send you home. And I'll just add, just to give some even more context to fire. I mean, they just recently changed their name to Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is interesting because that's a little bit more of a kind of liberal conflation, I would say, between free speech and expression that kind of happened in the 20th century jurisprudence, especially in the 60s with some of the obscenity cases going on at that time. And then too, just even with Ilya Somin, I mean, I think I just read a tweet, I think it was last week, it was a series of them talking basically about abolishing ICE. I think he does not think that ICE is actually constitutional in any way, shape, or form. So that just gives some more context, again, to this kind of leading edge of libertarian legal theory on some of this. And that I think, yes, the common sense of the American mind, I think, is more correct on this, definitely. And there were, you know, the Supreme Court, obviously, I mean, just with immigration in general, they've long recognized Congress has plenary power. And there were specific cases, I'm probably not going to say this right, but Heracliades v. Shaughnessy, it was a 1952 case, and that was actually upheld the deportation of lawful permanent residents for past Communist Party membership. There's another case, Kleindienst v. Mandel, Richard Kleindienst was Nixon's attorney general, I think it was for less than a year, 1972-1973. So that one allowed the government to deny entry on ideological grounds. There are still statutes, obviously, that make aliens deportable for endorsing or espousing terrorist activity. So yeah, so there's a little bit more here going on than I think first meets the eye. And even just to go to Ilhan Worman's scholarship, so he actually has a piece coming out, the Administrative Law Review forthcoming, it's called Unconstitutional Conditions and the Doctrine of Public Rights. And this is actually where he talks about this doctrine of unconstitutional conditions. And he really gets into it, he mentioned it a little bit in his tweet. But this is that, and I'm now quoting him from this forthcoming piece, that Congress may require forgoing private rights as a condition of receiving public benefits, if doing so is germane to the public benefit, and the condition is not coercive, leaving a genuine individual choice. The doctrine is disfavored and conditions must be rigorously examined. An unconstitutional conditions analysis, however, explains why Congress can often permit without judicial process, the imposition of fines, if the only consequence is loss of public privilege. So I think this gets into a lot more just, again, common sense, just even radiating kind of from the founding onward, where there's a difference between natural rights and civil rights. And then you kind of, you know, have shifted, Peter Myers has done good work on this to this kind of amorphous idea of human rights. I think this is all kind of a piece of kind of a general, you know, I would say, you know, kind of philosophical metaphysical kind of foundation of just kind, you know, basically doing what Apple is kind of doing just, you know, especially in the legal realm instead, which is, it's the corrosion of nationhood of sovereignty of citizenship and those very particular things. So I definitely agree with the general analysis. I'm sure that this will not be the final word on this case. I definitely hope the Supreme Court hears it and certainly issues a different ruling. Yeah, there was a telling admission, I think, or assertion in the foundation for, it used to be the foundation for individual rights and education. Mike, you mentioned their name change to individual expression, but in their press release, quoting Lukianoff and others about what this achieves, it gets to a fundamental, I think, break between libertarianism and conservatism for lack of two very broad, better terms. And Lukianoff says, you know, the idea that a government can decide based on your speech, whether you can be here as a resident alien or not, that sort of decision is more at home in the dictatorships of Russia and China. So what is Lukianoff implying there? He's implying the old libertarian saw that all government fundamentally is basically the same. It's all coercion at the end of a gun. And so he has trouble drawing any distinction between America, Russia, and China, at least on this discrete question. But the big thing he's leaving out, of course, is the legitimacy and the purposes of those regimes. I mean, the difference here is that Congress has empowered the Secretary of State to have pretty broad discretion over resident aliens and their consonance with American principles or with foreign policy goals of the country. Under what auspices does the Congress empower the Secretary of State? Well, under our Republican, that is small, our Republican auspices, the people that was set up by the declaration and is mentioned in the Constitution. We have a legitimate form of government by consent. And so the legitimizing mechanisms of America are very different, of course, than Russia or China. To paint with that broader brush, I think, gets at a very fundamental disagreement between mainstream American conservatism and I would say mainstream American public opinion on this question of government power and its rightful use. And then finally, this goes back to an old theme of ours, which is there's a certain segment of not only on the libertarian right, but on the conservative right as well in the jurisprudential area. That is to say, lawyers tend to legalize all these things, especially the Constitution. And I think the libertarians like to say, well, this is a very slippery slope. Ilya Soman and others make this argument. Look, if this is arbitrary government power, they could abuse it. Why would we give them this power? And our answer is, well, there are easy remedies for the abuse of government power in the United States. We have regular elections. And if you don't like that congressional policy and its delegation to the Secretary of State, argue about it, get the law changed, or kick out the administration that you think is abusing it. This absolute pursuit of natural rights under the U.S. Constitution morphing into human rights, as Ilya Soman might like it, and denying even the right of the government to have federal immigration enforcement, as you mentioned, Mike, or the ability to look at what people say and its hostility to American principles, and then they cannot use that to exclude them from immigrating here. It's all kind of nuts. Yeah. I've kind of come to think of libertarians as like these useful gadflies to the body politic. You need a few of them around, but you don't want it to become a governing philosophy. I mean, I think the conflation between libertarianism and the Republican Party or conservatism has been a bit unhelpful, especially for the reasons that you guys are laying out. It is true that freedom of speech and the other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and generally kind of these first principle level freedoms, are difficult to defend. There are always edge cases where you're going to be tempted to curtail and circumscribe them. One of them is a situation in which somebody's speech is repulsive to you, right? We do feel, and we especially feel this when the shoe is on the other foot, that you should be able to say things that offend the government without the government finding some workaround to say, oh, in this case, you actually don't get to say that. And so I think it's worthwhile to have people about in our body politic who are watching out for that scenario. I also think that by nature, those people are going to be inclined to see that scenario in places where it doesn't actually exist. And it would seem that this is one, right? I'm being cautious here because again, Mahmoud Khalil is somebody whose points of view I despise. I will make no bones about that. And so to some extent, perhaps I'm susceptible to the temptation of justifying or excusing a wrong curtailment of his speech. But it is also true that this larger issue is actually independent of your points of view, right? That the thing you guys are talking about, which has to do with whom the constitution protects, who gets the full protection of the constitution, seems to me definitively separate from the question of what it looks like for American citizens to have robustly defended freedom of speech. It's not the case that first they came for the visa holders and I said nothing, and then they came for me, right? There's a kind of slippery slope idea that sets in whenever you talk about this stuff that fails to acknowledge that there might actually be meaningful distinctions that would set a limit to this kind of reasoning. And one of them is the distinction between citizens and non-citizens, right? And if you don't think that, if you don't feel that the distinction between citizens and non-citizens is a meaningful stopgap that can allow you to apply different kinds of rules to different groups, then you don't actually think that citizenship means anything. Because if citizenship does mean something, then there is no reason to be worried that the way we deal with visa holders would then become the way that we deal with citizens. That would only happen if you felt that the distinction between citizenship and visa status is meaningless and empty. And since I don't think that, I'm comfortable saying what should be the rules that we apply to visa holders and how should they be distinct from people who are here as legal citizens in this country, it seems like they shouldn't be in different universes, right? You shouldn't say, well, you're a visa holder and therefore the state can summarily execute you for no reason, right? There are obviously certain principles of morality that are even broader than those articulated in the constitution. But the constitution describes a circumscribed and stronger set of protections that we're only able to and only should apply to full members of the social contract, as you guys said. And so given that, right, we can very comfortably say, look, let's take another example that libertarians are fond of and let's pause it for the sake of argument that you have the right to smoke pot on the streets, right? You have the right to go out and smoke pot or even crack, right? Like take whatever drug you want. If I say to you, I see you out there on the street, just like smoking a bowl and I'm therefore not going to invite you into my house because I feel like you're probably not in a state of mind to really treat my house very well. And you're like, you're curtailing my right to smoke marijuana. That's not a very good argument, right? Like I actually haven't done anything to your right to smoke marijuana. I've only decided who gets into my house on the basis of rational decisions about who I think is going to treat it well and treat it poorly. Now you say, all right, I'm out here. Let's take Khalil out of the picture first. I can talk about the immigration question. This guy's out here in his country. Some imaginary postulant is out here in this country saying, death to America. Now I want to become an American citizen. We can't say of that guy that he's unlikely to be a good American citizen on the basis of his speech and statements. I mean, how does that make any sense at all? How are we curtailing? I mean, he's perfectly allowed, so far as I can tell, to say death to America outside of our borders. What he's not allowed to do is then come into our borders without vetting and without a serious scrutiny from the lawful representatives of the people. So that seems really cut and dry to me. Then we get into this thing of like, okay, so you're here on a visa, you're doing a PhD, you're a student, whatever. I think it's fair to say that it's slightly more of a gray area. Once we've accepted that you are here, you probably have more latitude to express your sentiments and your ideas. You can probably say more things without getting deported than you can say without getting barred from entry. Yet, at the same time, if you are regularly agitating for the dismantlement of one of America's major allies or indeed the American state itself, it seems really reasonable to me to make your visa conditional on not doing that. I will close just with a point that was made by a friend of the pod, Inez Stepman, who writes for American Time to Time, which is that if it's the case that student visas afford full First Amendment protections to their holders, it's a really good argument for a moratorium on student visas. In other words, it makes it really, really hard to make the case that somebody should be allowed in here to study if by doing that, by extending that provisional invitation, we're necessarily beholden to, we're bound to then just basically grant that person the equivalent of American citizenship for his or her term in the country. Good reason for governments and administrations going forward to be really, really stingy with or even just not give out those sorts of administrations or those sorts of visas. It would seem like a bad case also for future student visa holders, especially under Republican or right-wing conservative presidential administrations. All told, I don't see a good argument here for protecting Kali or Ozturk, and I'm really not concerned that I am going to be crushed under as an American citizen by the same logic that we apply to student visa holders. We should wrap this up. Any last thoughts, you guys, on the whole libertarian thing? I kind of ranted there a little bit. It gets to this whole, we've had this argument before, the distinction between rights and toleration, you know, back in the sort of heady civil rights days, or even, I forget, I always forget when the case was exactly, but Jaffa commented on this in the context of the skokie Illinois marching Nazis sort of thing, and he sort of tried to echo George Washington when Washington was talking to the Quakers a little different because it's, in those two cases, it's citizens. But even in the case of citizens, Jaffa trying to echo George Washington said, you know, a society can tolerate a certain segment of it that routinely espouses in public the desire to permanently exclude a certain class of citizens from rights, or even to mildly threaten them, or tolerate the expression of sentiments, especially as long as they don't rise to actions that are seditious, sentiments that would be, if taken to their ultimate extreme, and if you populated the country with people that held those sentiments, would result in the dissolution of constitutionalism and the union that you're trying to protect. You can tolerate a certain amount of those people, but you don't have to tolerate them as a matter of right. It's a matter of prudential choice. And so I think that's what's at issue here in a deeper sense. And again, what led me to label Ilya Soman a suicide pack originalist or a suicide pack constitutionalist, because if he had his way and circumstances were unfavorable in a variety of ways, say you marry Ilya Soman with Matt Iglesias' argument that we need 1 billion immigrants, and 800 million of those are people who don't believe in the constitution or the declaration or the rights of their fellow citizens and want to impose an Islamic theocracy, or take your pick, want to slowly chisel away at America's ability to defend itself against communist China, for example, another form of anti-Americanism from an ideological perspective. You're just defenseless against the overthrow of your constitutional order. And so surely that can't be the right way to think about first principles, free speech, and American preservation. And I will add actually just one quick thought. I mean, for those, I think Soman, I would probably put him in his group, a radical, I would say, proposition nationhood. It's odd then that on the flip side, if you don't have the right ideas, that's somehow okay. It's like, wait a minute, I thought you had to have the right ideas. You could be from anywhere and that makes you an American. So that's, it seems to be just an absolute kind of contradiction, just kind of cutting through that argument too, as well. Yeah, no, rightly said. And I do think, well, I will just conclude by saying, Rand Paul and Ron Paul are great to have around. You wouldn't want Congress full of them. Really glad about the Fauci hearings, great work and service, but you need other people in government besides those guys for any number of reasons. Okay, cool. This was really fascinating. Thanks guys for this conversation. We're going to head over now to the Claremont Digital Plus members only exclusive behind the red velvet rope. And we're going to talk about the death of Dolly Parton, a great American celebrity, somebody that I think we all have some thoughts about. 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