David French: MAGA Is Making America Less Free

This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. We've been talking about Kewpie mayo for a minute now, and wow, so many of you already love this stuff. And if you're thinking, wait, what is Kewpie? Do you not have the internet? It's the OG Japanese mayonnaise, the one with the red cap. What makes it different? Egg yolks. Kewpie is made with egg yolks only, giving it this rich umami flavor that elevates everything. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. Where chefs work, of course. Food and flavor lovers use it. You haven't tried it yet? Well, find the red cap and see what everyone's talking about, why don't ya? Kewpie. The original Japanese mayonnaise. Kewpie. Welcome to the Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, opinion columnist for the New York Times, co-host of the legal podcast, Advisory Opinions, former JAG officer. It is David French. Welcome back, David. Tim, great to see you. Good to see you too, man. We'll have much to discuss, including ending with your class conversation about just war theory and LSU football. So we'll get to that. I have minor good news for listeners and an appreciation for people that were calling Katie Britt and others' office. The Venezuelan family I'd mentioned a couple of weeks ago now, Edgariani and Freddys, did finally get out of the Dilley Detention Center and they are back in Venezuela. I mean, probably the best news would have been if they were able to stay in America, but that's neither here nor there. At least they're no longer in a detention center. I appreciate the audience that engaged on that. Less good news on some of the other stuff related to the detentions. I wanted to start there. You wrote a Times column this week talking about now, you know, about a year old, the Rameza-Osterk story. There's a legal ruling about that that reflected back to that story and talked about just kind of the perniciousness of this policy by the administration. So why don't you just cook on that? Sure, sure, sure. So let's go back to March 2025, March of last year. And there was this footage that was really, when you knew it in context, was really shocking. It's this young Muslim woman. She's bundled up for the winter and cold weather and some plainclothes officers come up to her. One of them puts her. His hands on her. She screams. Next thing you know, there are several other plainclothes officers. They kind of gather around her, lead her away, shackle her, lead her away. And if that was a video of an arrest for, say, a violent crime, you know, murderer, armed robber, something like that, it would not be a shocking video. It'd actually be kind of a benign arrest. I mean, she wasn't thrown to the ground or anything like that. But then you heard why she was arrested. She was arrested and detained for deportation because she was a. She was a co-author of, Tim, what is really a pretty milquetoast op-ed? Yeah. I mean, it was anti-Israel, no question about it. You know, it was calling for a Tufts University where she was a graduate student to, you know, boycott Israel. You know, wanted the school to call what was happening in Gaza a genocide. Like, very standard rhetoric. Yeah. She was one of four authors. And immediately the news comes out that she was being deported under this. Relatively obscure legal provisions that give the Secretary of State essentially total discretion to deport a visa holder when the Secretary of State, in total discretion, decides that they're a serious threat to the foreign policy of the United States. And when I first heard this, I thought, that can't be right. Like, even in the Trump administration. She's got to be texting ISIS or something. Yeah, she's texting ISIS. She's shoplifted. Like, something else. Something else is going on. But no, as the court proceedings unfolded and there was a bail hearing after she'd been detained for weeks, Tim, for weeks, there was a bail hearing. And the judge in the hearing was like, no, this is. She was detained for co-authoring. Again, this was not an op-ed calling for the violent overthrow of the United States of America. It was an op-ed engaging in bog-standard pro-Palestinian rhetoric. Like, the most standard pro-Palestinian rhetoric. It wasn't even written in an inflammatory way. It's pretty dry, to be honest. And no, in fact, she had been detained for weeks for writing an op-ed. And the reason I wrote about this, this incident that occurred in 2025, is because just last week, there was a federal judge in California who struck down the. Or issued a declaratory judgment declaring that the statutes that Rubio had used were unconstitutional. At least. At least as applied to protected speech. In other words, the government was relying on unconstitutional statutes to deport non-citizens for their speech. And so, I wrote about that for a couple of reasons. One is, I'm just getting all of this sort of, you know, normie Republicans who are desperate for a normie Republican to kind of unite behind in around 2028. And a lot of them have fixed their eyes on Marco Rubio. Well, Rubio, in his little sphere of influence, has been a bit of a ten-pot dictator. Yeah, the worst. The worst. I ranked him the worst last week in the cabinet. I mean, this is inexcusable. Like, these people, and what we found out is, and what the courts found out, is that there were factual findings and investigation of all this, is that the administration worked with a pro-Israel activist organization called Canary Mission, got a list of about 5,000 people to further scrutinize who had engaged in pro-Palestinian rhetoric or anti-Israel rhetoric. Whittled that down to between 100 and 200 people to target them for further investigation, again, around their political speech. So, if you're thinking about this as, wait a minute, could this happen in America? Like, what is happening? You're on the right track. But when the judge struck down these statutes, the reaction in parts of the right was just really volcanic at the very idea that non-citizens would enjoy free speech rights. Just volcanic. Some people were even, some people were even calling it, the Constitution is a suicide pact. Suicide pact because it lets graduate students write op-eds? I mean, what are we even doing here? I mean, this is- Ben Shapiro, even like in the more mainstream of the right-wing media, like, he wrote this, you put this, like, we should deport people who hate America and aren't citizens. The administration was making precisely the correct moves on this front. What the heck? And what was making this particularly pernicious is that if you actually read the text of the Constitution, if you read the Declaration, if you read the Declaration of Independence, if you read the founders, sort of the idea that American liberty is for American citizens only was totally alien to them. I mean, that's just not the way that the United States was envisioned. Well, all of them were born in a foreign country, for starters. Well, I mean, and, you know, it's so funny, Tim. One of the things, I feel like, like, this is my nerd moment. Like, this is the nerd moment. Like, I've been waiting for my whole life. I've loved to read about the debates around the founding. I've loved to read about the founding. I've loved to read about the founders my whole life. I've read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and was just waiting in a corner, Tim, to, like, pounce on the right moment in American history to be like, this is all so relevant. Because it is. You know, what's so interesting is we're refighting a lot of the fights around the founding. And it's the Trumpist right that is essentially trying to reinvent the founding of the United States to pull, you know, for all their talk and Trump won the 1776 prize. focusing on, you know, his failures diplomacy which i think is you know the main job of secretary of state as far as i can tell but he's got a lot of hats yeah yeah the uh but i left this kind of aside the immigration part of it which which is maybe where he's shown his most authoritarian impulses but the other reason i wanted to bring it up is i mentioned on the show uh the story of mariam thomas sebi and her husband and son a couple weeks ago now uh there was an article in the nation she had written from inside of dilly prison an article from the nation and i've now been emailing her a little bit and so i just want to say up front this story is so insane it's similar to the remesa ostrich thing that's like my source for this is what she is telling me right and so is it possible there's some other thing happening i guess but the administration hasn't shown us anything and now we've seen the administration's track record of doing things exactly like this so so i don't have any reason not to believe her but i do just want to say that so the story for people who missed it the last time i mentioned it um there was an online smear campaign this is kind of really similar to the ostrich story but instead of being about anti-israel it was about it was kind of the pro-shah iranian crowd mariam thomas sebi's mother-in-law so her husband's mother was a translator for the iranian hostage takers in 1979 before any of the people that are detained were even born this kind of petition went up online that they were targeted they've been detained they're from california they were sent to well mariam and her son are in dilly the husband's in a different detention center somewhere else so they've been separated the email she sent to me she says again this is her testimony our case is the first of any green card holders in the history of the country the government's taking their legal status away not because of anything that they have done but because of family relationship the government's presented zero evidence except for this rubio letter that you that you have been talking about david that rubio letter resulted in the attention of of her child a 10th grader saying that he's a potential threat to u.s foreign policy she says he's an average american teenager that's been harmed beyond belief by this the family doesn't even have a speeding ticket to its name no other crimes the government hasn't offered them a single pathway out of detention or even out of the country for 150 days talked about weeks in the ostrich case they've been in detention for 150 days unbelievable unbelievable i mean now again i will do the caveats but you know at some point this is what happened with the ostrich case is the government has to put up or shut up in other words when you go into court there's got to be evidence there and and what the what the administration's very good at doing is making sort of sweeping condemnatory statements and then not backing them up with any evidence at all like this op-ed you know one of the things you're talking about ben shapiro's statement and others about people who hate america you know stephen miller people who hate america if you read the op-ed you would see that she doesn't have a lot for israel you know very no question about that and as i said in my piece i disagree with this op-ed i'm not sitting here defending somebody who's like on my side of an argument this is somebody who i disagree strongly with the op-ed but you know this is the united states of freaking america right and if you can't debate a tufts phd student on this matter who's the snowflake here right i mean like come on and so and so here you have a once again you know you had this sort of hate america and then you hate america is not a grounds for what does that even mean who's defining that right yeah but that's not even trump hates america in some ways he's attacked our country and our history in some pretty incredible ways yeah i mean he's compared us to putin's russia i mean this is the kind of thing that he does but this sort of idea that you're going to make these big sweeping declarations and time and time again not always sometimes you know we hear one story and then when the evidence comes out we find out that that the person who's being deported did some serious things you know sometimes the facts actually align for the administration but we've seen this movie before tim big sweeping declarations when it comes to put up or shut up in court they have nothing to put up and this is something that's very important i think to emphasize we're seeing this people being detained in tough conditions detained imprisoned when they're not actually accused of a crime indefinitely indefinitely that's what she said to me in the email she's like i've been in for 150 days even if rubio's detention order was somehow constitutionally valid why is a non-criminal spending weeks in difficult conditions in detention when they're not even being accused of a crime this is this is something that i think keeps getting glossed over in a lot of our debates again and again you see the administration bragging about the brutal way that it treats immigrants you see immigrants like being led in humiliating fashion up airplane steps bound hand and feet shackled hand and feet like criminal defendants coming into a courtroom of people who you know armed robbers suspected murderers etc bound hand and feet and the people who are bound hand and feet weren't even in the country illegally some cases where if you're dealing with the tps deportees they were here legally right and now they're being deported bound hand and feet on what planet is this not barbaric i mean this this is absurd we're treating non-criminals worse in some ways than we treat certain classes of actual criminals in the united states yeah way worse it's staggering way worse it's staggering the other thing that mariam said in her email to me is like that the conditions like in these metal trailer prisons they're in are crazy in dilly and we've seen that reporting from other people right you know um folks i've seen that reporting from other people i've seen that reporting from other people i've i've had on the program um like jonathan blitzer so i it's it's horrifying i'm going to keep on this thomas evie story for people um and let folks know if there's anything they can do but you know to your point about about the way that you know the administration's now acting one thing that we've been saying recently because it's true is it was like a modest change in tone in some ways that i thought was kind of pernicious honestly from like the gnome to the mullen dhs where they were doing less of like the asmr you know immigrant cruelty porn but then yesterday they're back this is probably the picture you were just referencing mark wayne mullen posts a picture of the haitians you know going on to a deportation fight shackled and you know talking about how he's keeping the country safe it's like these people came to the country legally they came to the country through a legal process it's like okay it's fine if you're going to change the policy it's not my preferred policy but but to dehumanize them and treat them like criminals and thugs and and and like threats to the country and they're country is disgusting. And was it you, Tim, that tweeted? No, I think it was Jesse Single who tweeted out that same thing. And it was like every time and it was like bragging and showing and puffing the chest out about this dehumanizing treatment of people who are not criminals. And then in the bio, first word, Christian. And if this doesn't sum up so much of the quote unquote Christian activism of the Trump era, it's again and again and again, you will see somebody celebrating cruelty. You'll see somebody spreading lies. You'll see somebody engaging in the most vicious speech and cruel speech online. And then you go to their bio and it's like Christ is king or Christian. And I mean, this is a bit of a tangent. The long-term damage to, in particular, the evangelical church is going to be very significant. It's going to be very significant because there will come a time when people will wake up from all of this. And in their foggy hangover from all of this cruelty, we'll say, who, what led us down this path? And the number one answer is going to be the white evangelical church. That's going to be the number one answer, at least from the grassroots up standpoint. I asked you about this yesterday, an email from a reader that was like, why isn't there more focus on, you know, obviously Christians should believe in treating everybody with dignity. It's fundamental to the faith, but, but, but just kind of as a rhetorical matter, a lot of people that were being deported and that we're treating like this are Christians or we're sending them back to places. You know, I mentioned the story yesterday about the couple that got sent to Guatemala back to this, you know, kind of gang ridden part of Guatemala they were from. And the two parents get killed and the baby is left there next to a bleeding out mother. And a lot of cases like these are Christians that we're doing this to. Oh, absolutely. And what makes it even worse, Tim, there's a recent, you know, I've just gotten some information about refugee resettlement for persecuted Christians. Okay. So this is the big pro-Christian administration. So in 2024, the last full year of the Biden administration, there are 29,479 persecuted Christians, refugees permitted to resettle in the United States. That's the highest number since 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, 32,000. Persecuted Christians. 2026, Tim. Four. Zero. Zero. I even went high on my guess. You went high. Zero. Zero. And in fact, what we're seeing is persecuted Christians and sometimes being deported back to the places where it persecuted them. Yeah, we're doing the persecuting. Actually, it's negative. Zero is too nice to them, really. Because if you count as a negative one for every persecuted Christian we persecute, you know, the number is deep into the negatives. This is stunning. Stunning stuff. I mean, you know, and it really does demonstrate that just a total upside down morality right now in which so many Christians are approaching politics, just totally upside down. And to the extent to which they're cheering on an administration that has abandoned Christian brothers and sisters around the globe who are facing unimaginable persecution in some parts of the world, just unimaginable. And like the gates of the United States of America are now closed to them. What are we doing here? Like, what are we doing here? It's sick. And just maybe the prime, most kind of clownish example of this hypocrisy. I'd like to show a video. It's a gentleman that was so performative in his Catholicism, one of my people, unfortunately, in this case, that he went on to kind of a Christian broadcasting QVC to sell little totems from saints to old ladies and did a lot of performative religiosity and demonstrated just how Catholic he was. Simultaneous to that, he was tweeting about how he likes to masturbate to ICE detentions. Like, it makes him so excited. When immigrants get detained by ICE, that he masturbates to it. Unfortunately for him, he was an illegal immigrant in the country and got to experience some of that brutality. And he described it on the Piers Morgan show. I didn't really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America. The manner in which they arrest you, they put your manacles, your hands, your feet, chained together. I mean, everybody who's arrested is like an MS-13 gang member. And it hurts a lot more than it looks like. And I was weeping like an old woman for an hour. And I was like, oh, I really have got to get this out of my system. I think maybe in the past I've been a little bit blasé when people talked about their trauma. A little bit kind of cavalier when people talked about, you know, stuff kind of lingering with them. But I get it now. And I wouldn't wish it on anyone. David, it hurt more than he thought. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Tim, and part of the irony here is this guy, Milo Yiannopoulos, is one of the architects of Trumpism. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a guy who you remember, I remember this very well, 2015, 2016. He was the guy running around calling Trump daddy. He was sort of the clown prince of the alt-right at that time. His star was rising. In 2017, you know, think of him as like the Tucker Carlson-esque slash Nick Fuentes-esque style troll of Trump won. Until his star. His star came crashing to the ground in 2018. He's been trying to crawl back into prominence ever since then. He's not a good guy. This is not a good guy. And I tweeted something out that detonated like a small bomb on that Infernal website. And I was just like, this is why the attack on empathy is so evil. Because if we have to wait for person after person to actually experience the brutality of this administration before we wake up, then the. Human cost is going to be staggering. But if instead we can have a modicum of empathy, look at somebody who's being frog marched out of the country in manacles and shackled when they did not commit a crime. And we can't have any empathy for that, then we're going to guarantee just continued brutality. And when I tweeted that out, I'm not saying Milo's a good guy. Often we learn about brutality from people who are not good guys. That's who we learn about brutality. But it's a perfect lesson. This guy was one of the architects of the destruction of empathy in our culture. I mean, he's one of the chief offenders. Anytime you can tweet about masturbating to other people's misfortune, you're horrific. And then it's an old story, Tim. It happens to you. I don't get one exception in this case. I don't know what the rules are. No exceptions. Not even one time? No exceptions, Tim. Okay. Well, I haven't done it, but I just wanted to check with you. And then you get to this and you're like, this is the oldest story in the book. You know, that's that old statement. You're reaping. Ha, ha, ha. Here I go. And then you're sowing. What the heck? What is happening? Yeah. And just this is another example. So people got mad at you. It was the anti-empathy crowd that was mad at you? Who was mad at you? Anti-empathy crowd. And then some people were like, how are you giving any credence to Milo's words? He's a clown. He's an evil clown. Well, yeah. He's been an evil clown. But as I was explaining to, you know, some friends of mine who were sort of pushing back on my tweet, I was like, you know, I've spent enough time dealing with civil liberties to know that the canaries in the coal mine of brutality are the people who get detained. And a lot of the people who get detained aren't great people. But their stories, many of their stories about brutality are very true. And so you have to be able to hold two things in your mind at once. Milo Yiannopoulos, evil crown prince of MAGA for many years. Also, Milo Yiannopoulos, human being who did not commit a crime and he shouldn't have been shackled like he was. He was an armed robber. You can have those thoughts in your brain at the same time. You talked about the friends you heard from. You occupy an interesting space. Somebody, I forget who it was. Somebody put together like a list of people whose following is the most balanced. Yeah. And you were like number three or something. Yeah. So you do, you maintain a lot of my old Republican friends. You know, they lost my number. You know, I've got a handful that I still talk to. And you occupy a space where like you still talk to a lot of people that are still Republicans. And then you also have a ton of people in MAGA world that like really deeply hate you. You're hearing from both groups, I guess. Totally. In different tones. All the time. All the time. Yeah. And so even setting just like you can talk about the immigration stuff, but just kind of broadening it out to the state of play. You know, as we kind of head to Labor Day, like head to the midterms. I'm just wondering like what you're hearing anecdotally from people in your life about kind of a Trump to Trump experiment. Has it changed since last year? Oh, yeah, it has changed. I would say the 180 from. December of twenty twenty four to right now amongst sort of normie Republicans is head spinning because December twenty twenty four, I would think, is the was the absolute high point because, you know, this was the vibe shift. Kamala lost. She lost narrowly, but decisively. It could be narrow and decisive at the same time. In other words, it was an unambiguous loss. So she loses narrowly, but decisively, you know, the Republicans feel like, OK, I held my nose for Trump. But look. Look at what I've gotten. I've gotten a defeat of DEI. Woke ism is on the run. You know, it's the vibe shift. We've won a cultural battle for the first time in a long time. And then it was by, you know, mid late December that you began to see just the, you know, Trump was replacing exaggerated woke ism with idiocracy. It's kind of like the Hegseth and RFK and Tulsi appointments and then all of the richest people in the world in the first row of the inauguration. It's kind of like that period where you start. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You realize. OK, he's triumphant, but all the warning signs for his looming the looming disaster were already all there. You know, this was not bring coming in with Mattis and Tillerson, et cetera. This is coming in with Patel and Hegseth and Noem. And then as these things happen, you began to just see growing and growing and growing discomfort to the point now where nobody that I would call a normie Republican in my life is at. All trumpeting their Trump vote. They are deeply upset at things like the Ken Paxton, you know, the way in which the Ken Paxton supporters are trying to bully them into continuing to support the Republican nominee, even though he's arguably outside of Donald Trump, the most corrupt politician in America. They're tired of the endless clownery. And then MAGA, in my experience, is doubling down, except the fringes of MAGA. Like what you would have thought were some of the most extremist MAGA people, like a Marjorie Taylor Greene. They're the ones who are out. Well, because to be on the fringe, you believe some things. You might believe some kooky things, you know, but you believe some things. That's different than a cult. You know, you really have to be able to use a magnifying glass to tell the difference sometimes. But it is. But there is a difference. Look, here we are. It's September. Things can change between now and November. But I think if present trends continue. What you'll see, the anecdotal, the anecdata that is all around me, I think the way you would see that reflected is in election results in the following way. If you get a double digit or close to double digit Ossoff victory in Georgia, if you get a double digit or close to double digit Cooper victory in North Carolina, what you're going to see there is that's your very clear, tangible evidence that a lot of normie Republicans are either not Republicans anymore. If you get a double digit or close to double digit Ossoff victory in North Carolina, what you're going to see there is that's your very clear, tangible evidence that a lot of normie Republicans are either not Republicans anymore. And so that's what I'm kind of seeing. Do you have any Texas anecdata for me? Do you have any hopium for a Friday? Do you have any friends who are Republicans who are like, I'm just, I might have to do Tallarico? Oh, is that a dream? No, I know personally two to three time Trump voters who are out on Paxton completely not going to vote for him or vote for Tallarico. I know Republicans who have, you know, Texas Republicans who've never voted for Democrats who are going to vote for Tallarico. Now, that anecdata should not give people too much hopium. I'm very, I'm very leery of hopium in the state of Texas. It's Lucy with the football with Democrats for a while. But let me just put it this way. You have one candidate here who is really hustling, who is really trying, who is putting everything into the race, who is reaching out and extending olive branches to centrist Republicans. And you have another candidate who's jetting off to London or Iceland, I forget where it was, with their, you know, their paramour. On July 4th weekend, I mean, it's, it's not just that Republicans nominated a corrupt guy. They nominated a corrupt, lazy guy. You know, so here's Tallarico, who's doing everything he can do to try to win. And you've got Ken Paxton, who's treating it like he is the birthright. It's his birthright to be the senator from Texas and that winning the nomination was all he had to do. And then he's got this army of online trolls who, quite frankly, are doing him no favors by being just. Gigantic assholes online to anyone who expresses any doubts about Ken Paxton. And so, look, Tallarico is well to my left on a number of things, but I will tell you this, if character is destiny, this, there is no contest in this election. There is no contest in this election. I guess you could take this from a political or legal standpoint, like the Trump ego stuff. I'm going to be talking to Ben Terrace later today, who has a great profile. out of this deadlock at some point. And American history tells us every deadlock breaking requires substantial legal reform or you will go right back to where you were before. And so we have to be thinking about this. I mean, this is an urgent matter. The other thing, let's just imagine, what can we do about mass pardons? Well, because the pardon power is horrifically broad, nothing much. But one thing that you could do is if you did actually break the law jam in 2028, you could impeach and convict every Trump official who takes a preemptive pardon and ban them from federal office forever. You won't be able to prosecute them for federal crimes. But, you know, I think it's important to think about these things because we're going to reneed. If we want to have a healthy democracy, we're going to need a period of accountability and reform. Amen to that. One way to actually get power. Actually, I'll do some of these reforms. You have to win elections. There's that, Tim. Well, yeah. So there is the political side of that. I'm doing a lot of that next week about what the Democrats should be doing to be more successful on the political side. So let's talk about the legal fighting. There's this big Postal Service case. What's your level of alarm about that right now? My level of alarm that the actual Postal Service regulations will go into effect is low. A lot of people misunderstood the Supreme Court's ruling on this. This was a ruling, in essence, that said, OK, you brought the case too soon. That the actual executive order just was saying, hey, I'm directing you to create a regulation. Until the regulation exists, we don't know what we're adjudicating. And so now the regulation exists and it was promptly enjoined. There is actual standing to contest it. The dispute is ripe because the regulation exists. There is no impediment to actually looking at it on the merits. And this is one of those cases where, Tim, I never like to say it's impossible for the court to rule for Trump. Let me put it this way. On this point, on the merits of that, I would fall out of my chair in shock if the Supreme Court ruled for Trump on it. What other stuff are you looking at as far as midterms and shenanigans? So the main shenanigans I'm worried about are actually post-vote. Yeah, same. I do think it's within the realm of possibility that you would. I would see ICE agents being deployed to polling places, I think. But something that blatant would begin to have some real electoral blowback. It's after. And here's the way I would put it, Tim. Think of it like this way. If you were looking at the Hungarian elections, they could use extreme measures to try to reverse the outcome of an election in Hungary. But if the outcome is so. If the outcome is so lopsided, then in that circumstance, you sort of swamp the possibility of post-electoral fraud. So where I am very, very nervous is if you have a situation where, let's suppose the House stands or falls on five or six races. I think we could skip through that. I think they're going to, whatever, we'll see what happens. But the Senate is where this is. And then you end up in a state like Texas, where Republicans control the state or Iowa. And that, let's say, Tallarico wins by 40,000 votes or 20,000 votes or something. And the control of the Senate is at stake. Yeah, right. You will see. I just I'm going to issue as close to a promise as I can possibly issue that if the Senate stands or falls on James Tallarico and a point two percent, you will see massive shenanigans, massive. And here's what's particularly dangerous. When you're talking about who is entitled to sit in Congress, Congress ultimately decides who is entitled to sit. And so what that means is it gives the political branches of government an enormous amount of room to run if they're going to be intentionally corrupt. And so this is something that I'm very concerned about. I'm very concerned about the way in which the Constitution gives the final say over who sits in Congress to Congress. But what if, you know, one side of Congress is thoroughly corrupted and convinced by electoral conspiracy theories or not convinced, but carries them out? Anyway, because of a mock of pure will to power. I think that's a very significant threat for which we are not fully prepared. And I tried to alert people about this with a particular attention to the House, because in the House there are abundant opportunities for shenanigans. Right. Because all these different districts. Just abundant opportunities. I tried to point this out. I had a lot of people saying to me, oh, David, that wouldn't work because the law says A, B and C. And it's like, I know. But. But if you were alive in 2020, you know that the administration will take a law that says A, B and C and they'll say it really means D, E and F. Right. And then try to convince Republican elected officials to follow their warped interpretation of the law, like the Electoral Count Act and the pressure they put on Mike Pence. So I'm trying to highlight what are the laws that exist that are just ambiguous enough to give them room to run onto Fox News or room. So I'm trying to highlight what are the laws that exist that exist that are just ambiguous enough to give them room to run onto Newsmax and say the Federal Contested Election Act allows us to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we're off to the races. And that's what I've been trying to highlight. We do have like the most modest silver lining good news on the Fox front, which is Maria Bartiromo was fired. And the report from Dylan Byers about why that was is that she was trying to pursue a story related to China and the 2020 election voting conspiracies that Trump was pushing. And that's primetime. A couple months ago, this was obviously a sensitivity for the network, given that they had to pay $800 million, give or take in fines for their lies about the 2020 election. Fox executives sent a text to producers telling them they couldn't go to air. Bartiromo took the screenshot and sent it to the White House. She got fired. So maybe Fox behaves a little better this time, I guess. I mean, they have about 787,500,000 reasons to behave better in this election cycle. So I hope you're right. Over on the. Board takes feed me and Sam are going to go through Maria's highlights and lowlights just for kicks. OK, just rapid fire to I think there was this vote. I was just curious your take on in the House this week. It was the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act was basically amending the Higher Education Act of 1965 to make that would prevent colleges from having access to certain funds if they participated in a non-expressive commercial boycott of Israel or if they were obstructing students unreasonably. From participating in academic programs in Israel. I thought this was interesting to ask you about just a free speech guy, because as I was reading about this this week, the wording non-expressive boycott stems from this 2022 ruling about how like a boycott saying you're going to boycott his First Amendment, but actually boycotting is not. I don't know. Well, this issue is so complicated, Tim. OK, so we can't do it rapid fire. You mean it's not. So, for example, boycotting is very often expressive activity. Absolutely. At the same time, national origin discrimination can be very much unlawful. So if you're boycotting is resulting in national origin discrimination. So, for example, let's suppose you want to hold a conference in a hotel that is bound by public accommodations laws that prevent national origin discrimination. And you say no Israelis, you know, no Israelis. That's. That's a national origin discrimination. And so, you know, and be careful, guys who say, well, I want to engage in this kind of national origin discrimination because it's good national origin discrimination. But you engage it in other contexts. It's bad. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you if you want like nondiscrimination provisions that protect people from discrimination on the basis of national origin, sex, race, sexual orientation, et cetera, you can't say this discrimination good, that discrimination bad. So I think a lot. A lot of these Israel boycotts actually run afoul of nondiscrimination law because it's national origin discrimination, if you say. It's interesting because it's just kind of hard to imagine a bill like this passing if like a college was like, hey, we're going to boycott Saudi Arabia. Right. It's kind of hard to imagine Congress having a bill about that. But I am. I am. I am a I am a free speech person who also supports our nondiscrimination laws. So and I think that the free. Speech and nondiscrimination laws can and should coexist. Now, on the edges, they will. You're always going to have rough edges where they rub up. But as a general matter, think about it like this. In the 1960s, there was a guy who ran a barbecue shop, I believe is called Piggy Park. And he claimed that he had a religious liberty right, a First Amendment right to exclude black customers from barbecue and that he had First Amendment rights to exclude black customers from eating. And the Supreme Court said, this is patently frivolous. Your religious liberty rights do not extend to a right to exclude black customers from eating barbecue. Now, same facts. And you say, I want to exclude Israeli customers. National origin discrimination. Yeah, no, that's different. Yeah, sure. The coffee shop story. Like, there's some disgusting things that have your anti-Semitism. It's just the campus participation stuff. I don't know. It caught my eye this week. That's all to be continued. The I do want to end with the LSU just just war theory. You posted this yesterday. I'm about to teach my law of war. class today at Lipscomb, today's discussion topic of the SEC declares war on LSU football and invades Louisiana, what Thomas Aquinas believed the war was just. Discuss, for people who don't know, LSU is advancing a very noble pursuit, which is that there were some fifth year seniors that were unfairly discriminated against when they were not aware that the NCAA was going to change the rule and give them an additional year of eligibility. So these fifth year seniors declared for the pros, but they really weren't good enough to make it into the pros, and none of them made it onto any of the teams. But then after they declared, the NCAA changed the rules, and LSU is saying, come on back home, baby. Lane Kiffin is here. We're doing hot yoga. We're yelling really inappropriate cuss chants at the Clemson fans. We need the best defensive linemen possible to make sure that we have the best defensive linemen possible to make sure that we have all the best defensive linemen possible to make sure that we have all the best defensive linemen possible to make sure that we have all the best defensive linemen possible to make sure that we have all the best defensive linemen possible to make sure that we have all the best defensive linemen possible to make sure that we have all the best defensive linemen possible. It seems like an obvious situation to me, David. What say you? Tim, in these last 10 years, you have displayed such an admirable freedom from partisanship. You spent years being employed as a Republican, and then you're able to see with clarity who Donald Trump is, and you shed the partisan baggage, and yet you found her on the shoals of LSU-type football partisan. Come on, Tim. Tim, see this for what it is. This is like bringing in the Hessians to put down the American Revolution. That's what this is like. Mercenary NFL players coming back to try to play college football after they have left school, they have been in the pros, even for just a cup of coffee, just for a short time, Tim. And there's a good reason why the Southeastern Conference is threatening to kick out LSU. And Tim, all I'm going to say is, welcome to the Lane Kiffin experience. You are just on the first hill. On the roller coaster, my friend. I'm loving it. And so you do think that Thomas Aquinas would approve of the SEC attack? Some people responded with just jokes, but some people actually went through the Aquinas analysis. And the most interesting was, one of the rules for a just war is it has to come through the lawful sovereign. And they were saying that if the SEC invades, that's like the prince invading, not the king. The king is the NCAA. So Aquinas would say no to an SEC invasion, but yes to NCAA. Thank you to Thomas Aquinas, STTDB, to all the people who disagree with the honorable judge in Baton Rouge. David French, I appreciate you very much. Oh, I heard good news about Nancy, your wife. Yes. Medically. Yeah, she's two years from the end of her treatment, cancer-free, from a particular kind of cancer where you can't ever say like totally in the woods now and forever. But two years for this to happen, it's going to be a lot of fun. And I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. This kind of cancer is very, very, very, very important. And so getting through that two years that, you know, again, God willing, she remains cancer-free and there's never any guarantees, but the risks really start to fall off the cliff. And we're just very grateful because we think back to three years ago when we got the diagnosis to be where we are today is just miraculous. Thank God. Thank her doctors. And can I say something, Tim? Please. I'm so sick. I'm so sick of people pointing out Muslim, you know, Muslim Americans who do bad things and try to make them a stand-in for all Muslim Americans. Thank God for our doctor who is from the West Bank in Palestine, who saved my wife's life. We love that man. And the idea, the idea that men like him and women like him are not welcome in this country is an absolute anathema. So I want to give a shout out to Nancy's Palestinian West Bank doctor who gave her the most loving and excellent care you could ever receive. And there are so many countless folks, Muslim folks like that in and around America who are, who are contributing like that. And so I just want to say that because I'm so sick of the cherry picked hatred of Muslims that I'm seeing all over the online world right now. I love them. I'm so happy for your family too, David. So give Nancy our love and thanks for sharing that. And we'll see you next time. All right. Thank you, Tim. Everybody else. Have a great weekend. I'm heading up to Baton Rouge for the Lane Kiffin experience. I'll see y'all on Monday with Bill Crystal though. Go Tigers. Peace. I'm from Louisiana. I'm from Louisiana. Bitch, I'm from Louisiana. I'm from Louisiana. We call it that, boo. The Bulwark Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DiCicco.