All the President’s Henchmen

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She's small, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity, she said, "I ask no favor for my sex." All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet or far next. Hello, and welcome back to Strix-Crutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. I'm your loan regular host today, Kate Shaw,

and I'm very happy to be joined by guest host, Liz Oyer, former pardon attorney of the United

“States and federal public defender and host of the new podcast. Is this really legal?”

Liz, welcome to Strix-Crutiny. Thanks so much for having me, Kate. Well, I'm delighted you're here, and listeners, Liz and I are going to run through the latest legal news, and after that, I am delighted to bring you a conversation with Julia Angwin and Amie Fieldsmeier about their new book on courage, how to be a dissident in an age of fear.

The book is incredible, so definitely don't miss that conversation.

Okay, but Liz, let's get started. I am super happy to have you with me today because there is a lot of DOJ news to cover, and I know DOJ is very much your beat. So maybe let's start with the swearing in of one Todd Blanch. Now, you testified against Blanch in his Senate confirmation hearing a last to no avail, because he ultimately was confirmed. Although it was a squeaker, right? And I do take some small comfort in the fact that I think this was the closest confirmation

of an attorney general in history, 50 to 49, at least. I haven't found any that were closer, which would have meant a tiebreaker by the vice president, which didn't have to happen here.

“But I guess it was important that there was as much opposition as there was to Blanch and Liz,”

we just tell her listeners for a minute about kind of what you emphasized in your testimony against him. Yeah, this was a real nail biter Kate. I mean, it came down to the wire. There were about two weeks of negotiations between a couple of Republican holdouts and the White House over Blanch's confirmation. But I have to say, I was really disappointed that the number of issues that got any traction with Republicans as potential reasons to oppose Blanch was actually very,

very small. There were really only two issues that broke through at all. One to a lesser extent was the Epstein matter and Blanch's mishandling of the Epstein files and his mistreatment of Jeffrey Epstein's victims. And the other was this issue with the corrupt settlement funds that was entered into between essentially Donald Trump on one side of this litigation and Donald Trump on the other side of the litigation. And that was the one that ended up really holding up the negotiations

over whether Blanch would be confirmed. This settlement agreement. But those were the only two issues. There are actually so many reasons to oppose Todd Blanch as attorney general. And that's what I focused on in my testimony. I testified about my own personal experience of being fired by

people I was part of a purge of the career workforce of the Justice Department. Lanch over saw

“hundreds of firings of people for political reasons, essentially, because of cases that they”

worked on under the previous administration. And because of their refusal to essentially rubber stamp political favors for friends of the president. In my case, I refused to rubber stamp the reinstatement of the gun ownership rights of a friend of the president who had lost his right to own a firearm because he was convicted of a very serious domestic violence crime. So Blanch is really decimated the career workforce of the Justice Department. He has eradicated expertise

from the building and replaced it with political loyalty. And that is a major concern on the part of many X DOJ employees like myself. And can I just say that DOJ is one really important part of the story and like the tip of the spirit in many ways. But I do think it's about inaugurating an entirely new, well, new today actually old, but ethos of government service in which really jobs in the federal government go to the patrons and cronies of the people at the very top, the president and

the president's top aides. And then the apparatus of government is deployed to reward the friends and to punish the enemies of those at the very top of the federal government. And we actually did

have a spoil system in federal employment for not actually the first century, but starting in

like the 1820s and 1830s. And we started to get rid of it in the late 19th century. And what they

“are trying to do is to bring it back. And I think the kind of firing federal workers at the”

Department of Justice is one part of this much larger agenda. And I'm so glad that you highlighted it both in your testimony and here. And I do think that it was an enormous missed opportunity to highlight that reason or set of reasons to vote against Blanche, not that the other two that Miss Handling Epstein and you didn't even mention here, but obviously his treatment of Gillian Maxwell, the prison transfer, this sort of wildly, I think, for real experts, inappropriate,

kind of way that the Blanche interview of Maxwell was conducted. But all of that, you know, got some traction, maybe not as much that should have, but yes, obviously the crop settlement, I'm glad that it seemed to even for Republicans be too much to swallow. But I think that that obviously wasn't enough at the end of the day to defeat his nomination and wasn't remotely the kind of full picture of his lack of qualifications for the office. Nevertheless, he squeaks by,

“he's confirmed. And I want to turn now to the swearing in, because that's happened since we last”

recorded our podcast. Now, it's actually pretty meaningful who a public official chooses to swear them into office, like at the very highest levels, like the Attorney General, I actually wrote a little piece about an aspect of this a few years back. And in that, like Essay, I told the story of being a young lawyer in the Obama presidential transition and then going into the White House council's office. And I tried, as a pretty junior lawyer in that operation, as we were talking about the

inauguration, to make the case that President Obama should have just as Stevens swear him in. And my case was that Stevens was likely to retire very soon. He was a Chicago win. Like, the president was, and it seemed like he would be just an awesome gesture. And I'm a former Stevens clerk, and so obviously, I was advocating for my boss. But I was quickly overruled, and the, you know, more senior people were like, no, it's usually the Chief Justice, and it would be

not wise to start a presidential term alienating the most powerful jurist in the country by

snubbing him. And that I'm sure was right as a matter of the politics of it. And so Roberts was invited to, and he did administer the oath to Obama, he famously flubbed the oath, like he didn't bring notes with him, and so he transposed a few words, Roberts did, and so Obama repeated the back kind of wrong. And it meant that we had to arrange for the read administration of the oath the next day, because the presidential oath is in the constitution.

And there was like 24 hours of kind of a question about whether he was the law president, having not actually said the oath, the constitution requires anyway. So that's a long detour. Well, you were right. It should have been Justice Stevens. What is all the problems? And maybe so many more. But in any event, Liz, who did our new attorney general choose to swear him into office? Yeah, this is wild Kate. So Judge Amel Bovay,

swore in Todd Blanche, and Judge Amel Bovay has been a judge for about five minutes. He was part of the original DOJ team under Trump too, and he came to that role from being one of Donald Trump's personal lawyers, sitting next to Todd Blanche in court for weeks and months, as these criminal cases against Donald Trump played out. So he and Blanche Bovay and Blanche were in the trenches together as Donald Trump's personal criminal defense team. They both went on to serve in the Justice

Department, and then Bovay got this lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge

on the third circuit as sort of a reward for his early service in the administration. He was

doing the dirtiest of dirty work during the early weeks of the administration. As they were trying

and shortly after he was rewarded with this federal appellate judge ship, and then he was brought

back into the Oval Office earlier this week to swear in Todd Blanche to the position of attorney general. It was really remarkable to see the gang back together, the Trump criminal defense team, the personal criminal defense attorneys reunited for this swearing in of the attorney general, really just kind of highlighting and underscoring the fact that Trump has surrounded himself by these lawyers who are loyal to him above everything else, and he has put them in positions of

“tremendous power in our society. Absolutely. And you said this list, the Oval Office, right?”

Traditionally attorneys general are sworn in at the Department of Justice. That is customary. That did not happen here this morning and happened at the Oval Office. Bovay, as you mentioned,

has been a judge on the third circuit for about five minutes. Now, judges,

actually typically Supreme Court justices often do swearing attorneys general, sometimes vice presidents do. It is not typically a brand new judge on the third circuit. This was clearly, I thought a signal being sent that, you know, echoes what you were saying before that kind of personal relationships and personal relationships with Donald Trump in particular, are the coin of the realm in Todd Blanch's Justice Department. And also that just kind of Donald

Trump is the star around which kind of all of these players were been, right? Like that message was, I think, crystal clear. It's just trying to think of like, is there anyone who could have been trollier to choose to swear him in, like, oh, Lena, Haba, Don, Jr., like, it was just, I mean,

because because Bovay, as you said, is not only a former Trump defense attorney before he was in,

the Justice Department and then on the federal bench, his conducts since ascending to the bench has been pretty sus, as my kids would say. He attended a Trump rally as a sitting judge. He, according to the New York Times, at least has or at least had as of July, a photo of Trump after he was shot in the ear at the Butler Pencilvania. Rally, the one where his like fist is in the ear, as the background image on his iPhone. And that's obviously to say nothing of the kind of, you know,

you sort of said sort of dirtiest of work that he did in the Justice Department. You mentioned alien enemies act right there. You know, is pretty serious evidence according to a DOJ whistleblower that the day before Judge Bozburg's order to turn the planes around of these individuals being sent to El Salvador pursuant to the Alien enemies act that Bovay allegedly said that DOJ might need to tell the courts a few in Ignore and Order. And then there's also evidence that Bovay ordered

detaining of deportees, even after Bozburg had ruled Bozburg, right in the Judge and the DC District Court has found probable cause to believe the government willfully disobeyed his order.

“I think probably that means Bovay did, although I think it's not that's not explicit. Anyway,”

that's the guy that Blanche and Trump decided to highlight because he's now on the bench and they think he and they are untouchable. Yeah, it's really pretty stunning. I mean, the fact that Bovay has Trump's picture on his phone says a lot about him. Most people on their cellphones, screen saver, it's like they're they're significant. There are kids you're catching or they're cat. Yeah. Yeah. So Trump occupies a special place in his heart and he does for Blanche too.

I mean, Blanche said on national television, I love you, sir. Directed to the presidents. They they really have this close, like inappropriately close relationship. There is no arms length objectivity, which is a really big problem here. We need people in these positions who can make objective decisions about what is in the interests of the people of this country, not how to best serve Donald Trump the man, but but Donald Trump doesn't want that sort of

arms length objectivity. He wants people who are completely 100% loyal to him. And that's who he's surrounded himself by. And I thought it was really interesting that this swearing in was close to the press, which is very unusual. I mean, Donald Trump has the press in the oval office all the time for every last little thing, but not for this. The only photos that we saw coming out of this

“swearing in ceremony were taken by people who were in the room. I believe Carolyn Levitt posted”

some of the photos of of the swearing in by Bovae, but the press was not allowed in there. So there was no opportunity to ask any questions about what the optics mean or what message was trying to be sent by having Bovae back in the oval office this sitting judge appointed by Trump swearing in his best buddy, his bro Todd Blanche. So that was a weird little quirk. So not even no questions, but also like nobody there to witness what was said or transpired. I mean, nobody like from the

press corps outside of the kind of core of the Trump operation. Okay, well, that's chilling. I hadn't even thought about that great. Another reason to be really disturbed by this whole

Justice Department just in recent days. First, the developments around the reflecting pool.

“So Melissa and guest host Ellie missed all discussed last week on our last episode, the fact that just”

over a week ago, the Justice Department announced in pretty dramatic fashion that it was dropping the clearly bogus charges of fatalism against Olympian David Hurn, DC U.S. attorney, Janine Piro filed this pretty remarkable 20 page memo basically admitting that a botched renovation, not vandalism was responsible for the problems in the reflecting pool. And Piro lays the blame basically entirely at the feet of the department of interior and the parks department, which is a component of it,

which on her telling did not supply the U.S. attorney's office with relevant evidence despite like dozens and dozens, as she says, of requests for full information. Thereby somehow compelling the office to charge an innocent man with vandalism, that part isn't totally explained, but anyway, it's obviously the fault of the interior department. I have to say the filing is a pretty funny

read in the age of the unitary executive, but yes, the bottom line is Ellie and Melissa made

Claire's at like Piro, who we've referred to in this podcast as a box of wine, should actually maybe be given some credit for having real spine here, or maybe not, did she grow a spine like, do you have theories on why she actually eight Crow the way she did and said, like, our bad, there was not a crime here, like it was quite striking. Yeah, so normally when the Justice Department moves to dismiss charges, it is a very terts short filing, like one paragraph,

they don't have to even explain themselves most at the time. So it was really notable that this was like a 20 page filing that laid out an incredible detail, all of the problems with the reflecting pool, and I think that largely the audience for that was Donald Trump. I mean, that's the only audience that most of these political appointees at DOJ really care about, is how is this going to be perceived by the president? So Piro was trying to make the case two Donald Trump that this was

not her fault, it was Doug Burgham's fault, the secretary of the interior, who dropped the ball here and misinformed her, and she didn't need to, you know, provide this elaborate justification to the court. She was doing it for Donald Trump. I think that there is a real problem here for Jeanine Piro, though, at the end of the day, which is that this filing makes it very clear that she proceeded with bringing these charges before she had done sufficient investigation to have a factual and evidentiary

basis for the charges. The Justice Department's own internal operating procedures, as well as just

“basic common sense, say that you should not proceed with bringing a case before you have fully”

investigated it, and you're sure that you have the evidence to make the charges stick. So the fact that Piro went ahead and charged a felony, which was the more serious of the two options on the table, a felony versus the misdemeanor, without doing any investigation to show that she could even prove that a hern caused the damage and b that the damage rose to the level of a felony threshold, meaning that it caused more than a thousand dollars of damage to the reflecting pool,

it's just really a reckless, irresponsible, and potentially sanctionable conduct. I mean, Piro could be disciplined by the bar, the attorneys who brought this case in her office could be disciplined by the bar for proceeding in that way. Bringing criminal charges, it's not just a matter of like a piece of paper that you file. It engers someone's liberty. It puts someone's liberty at risk. Their constitutional rights at risk. It is incredibly traumatizing to be subjected to a

criminal prosecution. So the fact that this was done so lightly and so recklessly is really

pretty appalling and her own filing makes that clear. Absolutely. And never the last, like,

decide how obvious it is that this case should never have been broad and maybe her effort to save her own skin in filing this kind of Mia Copa. It doesn't sound as though she's going to just like be allowed to let this thing go quietly because the present has made very clear that he is quite displeased with Piro, who he has accused of having, quote, folded like an umbrella,

“which I think is Trump speak for like having paid even the slightest attention to the basic”

demands of the rule of law, or maybe as he was adjusting this just sort of self-preservation. So what did we learn last week about whether the present is willing to just let this go and move on? Yeah, he does not want to let this go and it's all about saving face for him. He has put out there this theory that he invented that the reflecting pool was damaged by vandals, that there was nothing wrong with the installation job, that he had done at great expense to tax

payers. It was all about these these vandals who for some reason wanted to, you know, destroy the reflecting pool. So he has to save face and he has chosen a scapegoat to save face. And it is unfortunately for Mr. Hearn, it is David Hearn. He is the scapegoat and Donald Trump

reported by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets now that the Justice Department is exploring

“the possibility of bringing new charges against David Hearn. They're looking at possibly bringing”

a misdemeanor, which would mean that they don't have to present the case to a grand jury. So that would make it a little bit easier and they don't have to prove the monetary threshold. They don't have to prove that his damage caused exceeded $1,000. The idea that they're exploring this at all is absolutely ludicrous and it is just so wrong. I mean, they're they're persecuting this man because Donald Trump is embarrassed, which is not the way our Justice System is supposed to operate.

And I find this to be one of the scariest prosecutions that this administration has initiated, because this is just a person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I mean, he was writing his bike on the National Mall like hundreds of other citizens and he stuck his hand in the reflecting pool and now suddenly he is at the center of a nationally important matter to the president and his rights are our imperiled. He's thrust into the spotlight. It is costing time and

“energy and that could happen to any of us. And that's very scary. I think that's such a great point”

because the president and his Justice Department goons have targeted a lot of people that have displeased the president and you might be tempted to say, well, those are people who have really stood up and taken positions and so they have been targeted and like that, you know, something

that if you have the courage to stand up and like take on powerful players like sometimes then

you'll become a target, which is not a reason not to stand up. But I guess the second point is that it's also I think this episode makes clear that even if you don't stand up, you're not safe in like an aspiring authoritarian regime because literally anyone I think wrong place at the wrong time is exactly right. Like writing his bike touched the water. Like this is a public place. It's a park. Like it is our park. We can all be there and if that happens and somehow something that

you do displeases the ruler, like you could end up charged with a felony and then charged again even after it's become totally clear that there's no way to prove a felony. And so I guess at the

“end of the day, I think that the lesson here is no one is safe in this lawless administration”

and that is all the more reason to stand up, which it, you know, seems like current didn't invite this but is very much standing up to fight it. And I think that that and his legal team have been really inspiring. So we will see what develops, you know, there is a hearing next month on whether the dismissal should be with or without prejudice of this initial round of charges and I guess we'll see whether Trump manages to get his way and I don't see how Piero having filed what she did

could possibly keep, you know, file another like bring this to me in her charge and keep her job. I think you'd probably need a new as a attorney to start from scratch. But I guess we will see. Strix here needs brought to you by Smalls. Cats thrive on protein but did you know that some cat foods contain so much carbohydrate filler that they're closer to a granola bar than a prey animal? Not Smalls. Smalls fresh cat food is protein pack recipes made with preservative free 100%

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varies, see MintMobile.com. Let's move on to the OLC opinion that we saw last week on executive privilege and outside adviser. So OLC, the Office of Legal Counsel, is the DOJ component that is sometimes described as like this kind of mini Supreme Court inside the executive branch. It is historically, or at least, you know, in recent decades, kind of the final arbiter of legal and constitutional questions within the executive branch. So for the

Department of Justice and for other executive branch agencies that want a legal opinion, OLC is typically the authoritative source of that. So tell us Liz about this latest executive

“privilege opinion. What was the topic? What did it conclude and what do you make of it?”

Yeah, so on the same day that Blanche was sworn in by Amel Bove, DOJ's OLC issued this opinion on executive privilege. And it took a really expansive view of the presidency ability to withhold information from public scrutiny based on executive privilege. There's a particular part of that privilege called the presidential communications privilege, which says that the president can keep confidential certain communications with his top advisors. But that is a part of the privilege

that's been narrowly construed by the Supreme Court in the past. And the court has made clear that it's not an absolute privilege, it applies to the president's top advisors when they're giving him advice on sensitive matters. But it has to be balanced against other interests, including the need for things like criminal investigations and congressional oversight. So DOJ issued this opinion that was really sweeping that said that the privilege is actually

much broader than has ever been applied in the past. And in fact, it applies to advice given to the president and our communications, the president has with people who don't even work for him, people who work outside government in the private sector who are communicating with the president. Now, that is not only just as a legal matter, a novel and dubious interpretation of the privilege, but it is also as a practical matter and important signal about what Todd Blanche is planning and

preparing for, which is likely a slew of congressional investigations if the Democrats win the midterm elections. The purpose of this decision is to be able to insulate as much as possible from scrutiny by Congress if the Democrats start investigating the corruption and misconduct by this administration after the midterms. So DOJ wants to be able to respond to congressional subpoenas by saying we can't give you these documents or this witness cannot appear to testify

because of executive privilege. There are some people in the private sector who are playing these

“really sort of shady roles in the administration. And I think those are the people in particular”

that Blanche and Trump are worried about. There's this lawyer named Boris Epstein who has worked in as Donald Trump's personal lawyer for some years now. And now is playing Ms. Roll as sort of like a deal maker or deal broker within the administration. He was responsible for brokering these deals between the Trump administration and private law firms at the start of the administration where

these law firms agreed to perform over a billion dollars worth of pro bono legal services for the

Trump administration. He was also involved in negotiating the corrupt settlement of the IRS deal. He does not work for the government. He is not a White House employee, not a DOJ employee. He's in the private sector. Already his records have been subpoenaed in litigation over these settlements with the law firms. So he's kind of in the crosshairs right now and undoubtedly there'll be more scrutiny on the role that he is playing if the Democrats take over Congress and the midterms.

And so to get ahead of this, they have issued this very broad opinion which may or may not be upheld legally at the end of the day, but it will allow the administration to tie this up in litigation for years and try to essentially obstruct any congressional investigation.

Right. Absolutely. And I think that executive privileges complicated. First of all, some people think

arguments that there is a constitutional foundation for some kind of executive privilege,

but that it really has to be construed narrowly and that this kind of vision of executive privilege that would undermine both courts and Congress's ability to engage in any kind of sort of meaningful

“oversight of or checking of the White House is wildly dangerous. I think you're totally right”

that this is about anticipating the midterms and also the ongoing efforts to get evidence and testimony from people like Boris Abstein. And I think that this is dubious and who knows what courts would do at the end of the day. You know, obviously this Supreme Court has been quite protective of executive power. So maybe they would uphold it, but even if they didn't, the ability to point to a legal argument that allows you to delay disclosure in response to things

like congressional requests just provides another tool that will prevent access to information about

what is actually happening inside the administration and between the administration and outside advisors. So just an additional tool of delay is going to mean an advantage, like an additional significant advantage for the executive branch if there are oversight fights on the horizon as I

“think they're likely are. One thing though to say is that as expansive as this new kind of vision”

of executive privilege attaching to these communications with private actors, definitely is even on his own terms. It has some limitations and it's supposed to relate only to official presidential decision making. And so I do think that communications around things like, you know, the president's cryptocurrency activities should not even plausibly be covered by this vision of executive privilege. So there are still things that Congress could investigate that I don't think there's any even

threshold argument would be shielded by this vision of executive privilege. So just putting that out there now, because I could imagine that arising. So let's turn to another set of developments here involving Lisa Cook, the Fed Governor, who is, you know, speaking of kind of targeting by the administration, is now being targeted of fresh after winning in the Supreme Court in

her efforts to rebuff the first attempt to fire her. So recall just to kind of set the stage a little bit

that Trump, Lackey, Bill Pulti at the Federal Housing Finance Agency has concocted, concocted last year, a case against Lisa Cook, extremely accomplished economist, black woman Biden appointed the Fed to a term that doesn't buy its terms end until the 2030s. So Pulti basically put together this case against her, suggesting that a mortgage application for a second home that has some reference and some document to the home being a primary residence is somehow tantamount to mortgage

fraud based on this incredibly thin case, Trump claimed that he was firing Lisa Cook for cause last year via social media, because of course, the lower courts block that effort and then in June, the Supreme Court held that the government could not move forward immediately with removing Lisa Cook. But it did not foreclose the possibility of the administration taking another run at her and that appears to be what they are doing. She has now been asked to submit

evidence and arguments by the end of August explaining why the allegations against her are incorrect, and or why they do not constitute cause for removing her from the Federal Reserve Board. Liz, just kind of to have a sense about the administration's long game is here and if they do,

“you know, try to fire her again and she fights it again. What do you think the reaction will be?”

And here I mean, not just in the Supreme Court and the lower courts and kind of more broadly. Yeah, this is clearly a pre-textual investigation. Bill Polty has this job at this sort of obscure federal agency, the Federal Housing Finance Authority, which has mortgage records for every American with a mortgage, essentially, and he has really misused his access to that information to try to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump by digging up dirt on people that Trump considers enemies,

and Lisa Cook is one of those people. So he has found what he describes as some evidence of mortgage fraud. She disputes that there was any mortgage fraud and the Supreme Court ruled that she has to have an opportunity to respond to the allegations before she can be fired, but the ruling really doesn't require a whole lot in terms of due process. It may be that she responds and the government says, you know, okay, that's not the satisfactory explanation and we're firing you anyway,

and then there's further litigation over whether that was sufficient. And I do think it's possible based on what the Supreme Court said that her firing could be upheld by a court based on really very little evidence, not the type of evidence that you would need to actually convict her in a criminal prosecution of committing mortgage fraud. The standard is likely not to be that high. So it is possible that eventually she will be fired, and I think that this is really just an effort

on their authority. I mean, at the end of the day, her firing, I think is less important to Donald

Trump than it once was because he's now gotten his chosen director in place at the Fed, and that was a win for him. And I don't know how much he still really cares about Lisa Cook, but he definitely cares about showing that he is free to do what he plays is and is not subject to limitations by courts. So this is one of many contexts in which he is essentially

“fighting back against a Supreme Court decision that was adverse to him. And I think that is really”

the purpose of continuing to pursue and target Lisa Cook. Yeah, I think that's well said and I also think that it's an important reminder that even the kind of much touted Trump losses this

term were pretty qualified. So yes, he lost this case and this initial effort to remove Cook,

but the court left him lots of leeway and he is very much exploiting that. So at the end of the day, like this could actually be a win for Trump. And so just yet another reason that many of the kind of takes about how the Supreme Court delivered all of these reviews to Trump last term were just wildly overstated. So I'm not sure if whether the next topic is exactly consistent with that theme because here I think the court's rejection of Trump's arguments was more decisive,

but pivot to the birthright citizenship executive orders this new effort by the administration

“to kind of refuse to accept its even few losses in the Supreme Court. So as Melissa and Ellie discussed”

last week, we now have two new executive orders on the topic of birthright citizenship. And then since that episode, the team that brought and won Trump versus Barbara, the lawsuit that challenge, the day one executive order, reporting to just end birthright citizenship, has brought a challenge to this new order. And Trump actually issued two new executive orders, but the one that's the topic of this new challenge is titled continuing to protect the meaning and value of American

citizenship, it's just like a riff on the original day one executive order. And it seems pretty clear that this new executive order is very much trying to strip American citizenship from at least some people that don't fall within what the Supreme Court recognized as the narrow exceptions to the rule of birthright citizenship, like for ambassadors. So the order would, for example, among other things, strip from all the children of any embassy employees and some international

organization employees, birthright citizenship. I don't know what that overall number is, but I must number in the many thousands and those are individuals who I do not think from the Supreme Court's decision in Barbara are outside of the background legal rule of birthright citizenship to individuals born in the United States regardless of the status of their parents. So the

complaint basically says this new order violates the existing preliminary injunction against the

original executive order, because it tries to strip birthright citizenship from some people protected by that initial preliminary injunction against the first executive order. And basically says that it flouts what is in the Supreme Court opinion again in Trump versus Barbara. And I guess I'm curious Liz, so you said maybe the end of the day Trump does win in his attempt to file Lisa Cook if it's something that he chooses to pursue. I guess do you have any sense

of what the Supreme Court, if this case gets back to the court, would be likely to do with

“these executive orders? Yeah I think this is another example of what Trump is really trying to do”

is to send a message. He's trying to send a message that he about values more so than like I don't know if you're really even cares about the children of people who work in embassies becoming US citizens. I'm not aware of that as being like concern that anyone has ever raised in the past and it seems like it's relatively limited to a small number of people. So I don't know if substantively this really makes a big difference to that many people or if there's really any intent to pursue it.

But I think it is about continuing this message that like we are these this like white nationalist country that does not like immigrants. And they're just sending this this message again. They're saying, you know, we're not deterred by the Supreme Court. That is still our view, that is still our values and I think a lot of it is really about political messaging more than it is about a substantive legal theory. But if this case does come back up to the Supreme Court, I mean I do think that

it's an opportunity for the administration to try to persuade them to make a broader carve out in the initial ruling. I mean it was a little bit alarming that the ruling wasn't unanimous that it wasn't a nine zero rolling saying the constitution says for a threat citizenship, you know, and that leaves it, leaves it at that. So it does seem like maybe there's an attempt to try to

where this ultimately goes, I think that, you know, this messaging purpose is really like a big

“factor that's driving mess at the end of the day. I think that's exactly right. Okay, just a”

couple more news items to highlight and one, I'm just going to mention this briefly, but we had another installment in basically that arms race to get Trump's attention with, you know, basically bootlicking opinions from lower courts and this one and not for the first time comes from Fifth Circuit Judge Andy Oldham. So it is you here is a sweeping new Texas voting law, which the lower court had held violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. And Oldham

writing for a Fifth Circuit panel basically like had some gratuitous kind of sneers about district court injunctions. He wrote a so often happens in modern America, federal district judge,

then countermandate the legislature with sweeping facial injunctions. And then basically says,

we have to clean up those injunctions. It's also kind of, you know, sneering about the laws impact on Americans with disabilities, although the court dismissed most of the claims on standing grounds. But the most kind of pick me auditioning part of the opinion came in the very first sentence, which reads, quote, "It is long been established that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud." That is why voting by mail jeopardizes election integrity and democracy itself,

which literally just like a press release from the White House except for it's in a Fifth Circuit opinion. And the source that it sites is, you know, I guess credit where do it's not just like the White House website, but it is one district court opinion from the year 2014 and one that was at least in part refers by the Fifth Circuit, a procedural history of that one was really complicated. Anyway, it's just like, it's turtles all the way down, but it's also

reminder that you can just like, if you don't care, you can put anything in a judicial opinion, and then that can be cited in future judicial opinions, as though that's like real authority. And I'm just reminded of John Roberts just citing himself on executive power in order to justify further expansions of executive power, which is what we just saw in this slaughter opinion. Last term, where Roberts own writing and previous presidential power and presidential

“firing cases are like a key authority on which the opinion rests. And that is a segue to the”

next thing I want to talk about, which is this very weird thing that grabbed up in various feeds last week, and I don't know if others, I don't know if you saw this list, I don't know if like listeners had the same reaction I did, but if you learned last week that the Chief Justice may be developing a side hustle as a sub-stacker, like that really did happen. I saw this. I was like, oh, somebody has just penned something, and a fixed John G. Roberts Jr. to their essay,

but it actually appears that the Chief Justice of these United States wrote a sub-stack post for the in-per-suit sub-stack, which is a project of more perfect. Now, lots of other prominent figures have contributed essays. I don't actually really totally understand what the project is, but there are series of essays penned by really important former office holders, Hillary Clinton, wrote one about Eleanor Roosevelt, Michelle Obama, wrote one about Jackie Kennedy,

called Rove, wrote one about William McKinley, because of course he did, Ken Burns, wrote one about

FDR, Barack Obama, wrote one about Abraham Lincoln. So like, this is not, he, this is not the first

“installment of this series, but it's definitely the first by a sitting Chief Justice, and I think”

it must be the first on Sub-stack, and even if it's not, it's still pretty weird. And I'm also really struck by the decision he made about what to sort of use as his first foray into the genre, which is this kind of incomium to Chief Justice, William Howard Taft, the only person to have served as both President and Chief Justice. So just a couple things I will highlight and then listen, curious to get your reaction to it. So one Roberts pointed out and clearly loved pointing out

that for Taft being President really was like, just kind of the warm-up, wasn't that big a deal, it was kind of a waste station on his way to fulfilling his real dream, which was to be Chief Justice. So obviously like that's the better gig Roberts wants us all to know that. So the opinion also goes out of its way to praise Taft's opinion in Myers versus United States, which is one of these really important opinions about presidential power, which the slaughter decision about the

president's power to fire FTC commissioners cited lovingly and in great detail as like the most important opinion ever written about presidential power, Roberts praises Taft's deep reservoir of optimism and faith in the correctness of core principles and commitment to public service and devotion to the Constitution. And it's interesting he gets some digs in on outsized conceptions of presidential power. He like praises Taft for when he was president operating within

the system. So you know acting only when the president was authorized by the Constitution. And I just had the thought which was like John Roberts, if you were hoping to send a message to the White House about the importance of abiding by constitutional limits on presidential power, you have ample opportunities to do that that are not sub-stack. Like where was this energy

I'll say here is that as Negobuie and Daphna Ranan point out in their masterful new book called Supreme like Taft is largely responsible for ushering in both this really jurist to credit conception of the separation of powers that like disables Congress from regulating the president and like gives the court the final word about like when Congress can act and that kind of all of this has its roots in white supremacist lost cause post civil war post reconstruction dogma

and that the person who sort of the architect of that is who John Roberts decided to make his sub-stack debut kind of defending. So I guess just like Liz any reaction to this or like any any guesses about what John Roberts next sub-stack might be of that. Yeah, Kate, I was trying to figure out why you wrote this and it seemed like there was some element of self-pity in there. He wanted us to know that being the Chief Justice is actually a really hard job and he talked

about how Taft was this gifted administrator and all the administrative responsibilities

“that are so important that the Chief Justice bears which I think was kind of like a way of letting”

us know that he's actually really doing a lot. So for all his critics who think he's not holding it all together, you know, he's doing a lot behind the scenes that we don't know about and there was also this kind of like self-engrantizing quality. He said something about how he like he quoted Taft saying I forgot that I was ever president or something to that effect because becoming Chief Justice was so much more important than that. So it's kind of like reminding us also

that he actually has the most important job in the country even though Donald Trump has a louder

megaphone. And then there were like a couple of really odd things that I found about it like he talked a bunch about Taft's weight and his like the ups and downs of his weight and how he's weight ballooned when he was president and then he lost so he became Chief Justice and I was just like why is he so fixated on this man's weight? It was a was just truly bizarre, Kate. I really don't know what to to make of it, but I do think that Jean Roberts should probably find another

“vocation. Now first suit of sack has his right hair lately. What was it a cry for help?”

I don't know. It was really so strange, but yes, I hope that this is the kind of a one and done of his career as a poster on Substack. And just speaking of Jean Roberts, like in venues that are not Supreme Court opinions, actually was a really interesting profile in the New Yorker last week by Margaret Talbot, the delusions of Jean Roberts. You know, it definitely takes the position

as we have on this podcast many times. It Roberts has basically lost control of the court and he

comes across at points as sort of hapless. But it also ends on a note that I think is basically right, which is that like maybe Roberts is actually fine, happy even with this current state of the court and the country that yes, maybe Roberts thinks or appreciates that we there's like a madman at the helm right now, but that that's kind of a small price to pay for the proper restoration of the separation of powers, the end of a formative action,

the destruction of the administrative state, the end of the Voting Rights Act, say nothing of, you know, the parts of the ending doctrines that might limit the ability of say oil and gas companies to ravage the environment, et cetera, et cetera. One thing I did learn from the piece that I thought was pretty interesting was that in 1983, a young John Roberts, as a White House lawyer, authored a memo, basically arguing that life tenure for judges or justices may have made sense

when the Constitution was drafted and life expectancy is where much shorter. But that today, a term of 15 years might be preferable and I will just end this discussion by quoting from a young John Roberts, the federal judiciary today benefits from an insulation from political pressure, even as it you serves the roles of the political branches. A stopped clock is occasionally right. Okay, Liz, before I let you go, will you share some recommendations with our listeners of

“things you've read or watched in the past eight of the days weeks that you think they might enjoy?”

Yeah, so I was at the beach last week, which was amazing. I highly recommend the ocean if you can get near an ocean as an incredibly therapeutic place to be. And I had the chance to read two books and one of the books I read in large part because I have a rising senior in high school and so I'm consuming all things higher ed and I read this book, how to rule the world and education and power at Stanford University by Theo Baker, who is the son of two very well-known reporters and

journalists and it is really a terrifying glimpse into the machinations of sort of corporate tech America to grab up college students and throw money at them to try to record them into into big tech. I was really kind of shocked by reading this. It's also a story about how Theo Baker

broke this incredible story about the president of Stanford and ultimately got him to have to

resign. So that's sort of like the main purpose of it. But it was really just an incredible glimpse inside this elite academic institution at the underground level that was a bit terrifying,

this incredible book called The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Straout which was really just

I would say it's about adulting. It's like about all the things about being an adult that you don't think about until you're in your 40s like I am and start to have some existential angst and it really made me feel all of the emotions. So highly recommend that and then I also want to give

“a plug for what I think is the best TV show that nobody is washing which is ponies. It is an incredible”

show about two women who go to Russia during the 70s and become spies and it is like funny and dramatic and thrilling all at once. And I really want to encourage people to watch it because I'm hoping it will get renewed for a second season. I have not heard about it. Thank you for that recommendation. That is great. Okay, I have not, I was not in the beach last week all the way. We'll be next week and I'm really excited about that. But so a couple of sort of more work adjacent

recommendations just security. The website has these, has been started running the series of reinvention blueprints that are about just kind of rebuilding reinventing government. It's nice

to sort of dwell in an optimistic space sometimes in the first three installments about building

government for the next pro-democracy movement and a government that works for the people. All three of them are really excellent. So highly recommend those. There was a wrenching account from Dilly Texas by a professor, a Mario Tomacebi, who is a professor again in a green card holder with no criminal record who has been held in Dilly Texas, the immigration detention facility since April, it is appalling. John Oliver had a great segment last week on the Department of Justice at

topic of most of our conversation today and kind of cherries in the presumption of regularity. And like God bless John Oliver from making the presumption of regularity such good television. Only he could do that and he really does. So check that segment out if you have not seen it. And then the reporting that keeps coming out and getting wilder about the incident earlier this summer in which Trump returned from Turkey via the old Air Force 1 rather than the new one or at least we

thought so. But now it turns out actually he was hidden in a catering card and didn't even fly

on the old Air Force 1 but a third plane but then the White House Press Corps and some staff were

“left on the old Air Force 1 as decoys of some sort. Anyway, I think this story has like yet”

all the shoes have not yet dropped but it is wild to read about and just like a reminder, in case they're ready to out of like what this President thinks of the press and maybe his own staff. Okay, so those are my recommendations for now, Liz Oyer. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was really great to talk to you. Thank you Kate. I really enjoyed the conversation. Listeners, you can find Liz as lawyer or across Instagram and YouTube and Substack and TikTok and

X and her podcast is available wherever you stream your podcast. So thanks again. Coming up, my conversation with Julia Anglin and Ami Fields Meyer about their terrific new book on courage. But first, I want to remind our listeners that you can now listen to strict scrutiny for CLE credit. As you may know, but I'm going to tell you if you don't, we recently launched our first course for CLE credit. It is our Scotist term recap episode. It came out in the first week of July,

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That's 50% off your first order by using code strict or going to cookunity.com/strict. For this segment, I'm delighted to be joined by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields Meyer, authors of the terrific new book on Courage, how to be a dissident in an age of fear. Julia and Ami, welcome to Strict scrutiny. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. So, delighted to have you both. I'm just quickly introduced you to our listeners. Julia is a

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who has spent decades investigating abuses of power in the tech industry, especially involving big data and surveillance. Ami is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Allen Lab for Democracy, Renovation, and a former senior policy advisor in the Biden Harris White House. Their excellent new book expands on. I think maybe grows out

of an amazing and very widely read essay that they published last year in the New Yorker titled

"So You Want to Be a dissident." That piece, you know, in the early months of the Trump administration, examined how Americans were confronting heightened risks for protest and free speech and civil resistance amidst rising authoritarianism in the second Trump term. This book is a much expanded

“version of that. And I think one thing that I think is really important to say at the outset is”

the book is really clear about the intervention that it is making. So it recognizes that there are actually a lot of works in the genre of democratic resistance that are making the case that what we are witnessing is authoritarianism and that we need to fight back. And in some ways, like that's not the project convincing anyone of either of those first two kind of antecedent conditions. This book jumps in at the next step, which is on its telling for the individual who is

trying to answer the question, now that I object what do I do next? And it is both beautiful and bracing and extremely concrete and actionable. And I so appreciated all of those aspects of the book. So really truly thrilled to have you here to talk to me about it. And maybe let's start with just methods. So how did you go about trying to answer that question? The what do I do next question really beginning on inauguration day in 2025? We were really lucky, like you said, to rest on

all of the literature that's already come before us about describing the authoritarian threat and outlining what we were seeing. And so we didn't have to do that work. We really just

what the hell should I do now? Like what am I supposed to do? Do I have to go to a protest? Do I

write call my congressman? Like what is the actual thing that I can do? So we started, we started really locally. Army was at the Ash Center at Harvard County School, which is

“honestly where dissidents go when they're kicked out of their country in exile. And so we had a sort of”

already pool of people that we could tap their expertise. So we started with some of them and then we started calling people around the world. Really basically, like what do we need to know about what it's like to be in an authoritarian regime to survive one, to resist one. And what's really cool about this reporting project is that we didn't have a hypothesis going in. Like we weren't trying to prove a point like, oh, the right answer is X. We were actually really just interested in

seeing what emerged, what trends emerged. And what's cool to see that people in really desperate places

places really like with incredible, you know, physical repression and gullogs like Russia or

places like Hungary where the repression has been more subtle, although very effective. Had very similar stories to tell about what the psychological journey they went through was, and then what they did after they sort of came to the realization that they needed to act. And I do want to kind of get into these sort of themes that emerge in many of these conversations and we should say you mentioned Russia and Hungary and you're also talking to folks from Egypt and

Hong Kong and Venezuela and many, many more places and also in the United States, right, resisting from very early on. And you know, you sort of pulled together all of this collective wisdom

and one thing that you do also for setting the groundwork early in the book is you take this very

capacious view of what a dissident is. And I really appreciated that. I mean, we talk a little bit about kind of what you offer up as a definition and how the people that you talk to or at least

“some of them kind of felt about the label or how they understood themselves. Well, Americans, I think”

tend to think of a dissident as someone of another time in another place. That's a faraway term, Navalny is a dissident and Mandela is a dissident and they are. But I think that if we had written a book about those people, those people who are sort of predator naturally courageous, that would have been an interesting book. I'm not sure it would have been such a useful book for us. I mean, really people like us, normal people. And I'm not suggesting either of the two of you are normal,

but I'm just normal guy. And so I think for somebody like me and the people I know, part of what changes in as authoritarianism begins creeping into the United States is the level of risk that everyday things begin to feel like at least feel like they're taking on. And so in ordinary times, our democracy is defined by choices. We show up every two years, every four years. We call our senators, we make decisions in our civic life. Authoritarian times just feel everything begins

to feel more constricted and more risky. And so as a result, when everything starts to feel a little

“bit more fearful, when that is the mediae of the people in charge, it's really important that we”

learn the tools of how to take risk in whatever context that we're in. Not all of us are going to stand up in front of a take and many of us are going to have the opportunity to even make that choice. But all of us are going to go into an office or many of us are going to go into an office at some point. Many of us are going to have federal agents show up in our community or be the object of coercion at a university, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so we offer a more capacious, as you say,

a more generous interpretation of what it means to be a dissident and what we're doing is we're looking at people who have taken risk in their context. And sometimes that risk is in my neighborhood, like I'm going to do this and I'm going to lose my social status. I'm going to lose my community. Sometimes that's something a more concrete and physical. But it was important to us to expand the definition because the tools that we're talking about of what we call collective stubbornness,

which is a term we got from Maria Stephane, who's a great political scientist. Come from Matt risk taking. Now, I will say to your initial question, Kate, nobody who we talked to was comfortable being called a dissident. Like, and even people who were opposition leaders in other other authoritarian countries who had been jailed, people just weren't comfortable with that. More frequently, people weren't even comfortable being called courageous,

what they, what they were comfortable with is saying, I am who I am. And when it came time for me to make a difficult decision, I wasn't motivated by becoming a dissident. I was just weighing these two fears against each other. I either, I can keep my head down, but I'm going to be judged

I will be judged. There will be other consequences. So everyone is weighing those two things against

“each other. We decide to call all those people a dissident. Yeah. And in terms of the kind of weighing”

these competing imperatives against each other, you have this really useful concept in the book that you call a moral collision. So you note that the people, many of the people that you're talking

to, do find themselves in these positions of weighing powerful competing kind of fears and desires.

Right? So like there are fears of like losing a job, money, status, physical safety, freedom, things like that. And then there is another fear, which is often a deeper fear, that is the fear of, quote, living a life that doesn't feel honest or dignified or maybe abandoning core values. And you write, quote, this moral collision is where dissident life often begins with a small feeling and then a big choice. I guess, I want to ask a bunch of specific questions, but I guess

a general question now, Julia, what do you take from all of these conversations about kind of what causes that second fear of, you know, betraying values being someone you don't want to be to finally outweigh those kind of more parochial fears in the first category. And can people learn or train themselves to recognize these kinds of moral collisions and act on them in ways that align with deep values before like rationalizing their way around or out of it? Yeah, I will say that like

“one of the things that is so true about our time is that there's always a reason not to do it, right?”

And so we were really interested in the people who had chosen to do it because you can always find

a way to rationalize it. And I think one of the best anecdotes from our book that I think tells the story well is the story of Paula Sedave, who we open the book with. He is a civil rights lawyer in HUD, and his job was to defend the Fair Housing Act in the Civil Rights Office. And when the new administration came in, they basically said everyone in this office can be reassigned. And he knew what that meant is that effectively it was a dead letter law, right? That

they weren't going to enforce it, so that meant racial and age discrimination gender discrimination housing would basically be effectively legal again, right? White being out like one of the major achievements of Martin Luther King's legacy in the Civil Rights Act. So he was just like not

pretty naturally interested in being a hero. He is a Nigerian immigrant. His parents came here.

He was raised in Texas, but his family is raised to keep your head down, go to law school, get a good job. He was not interested in being courageous, but he also was like, "Look, I want to live

“in this country. I wouldn't have housing," honestly, as a black man, if these laws weren't enforced.”

And so I and I've trained my whole life to be this person. And so I don't feel like I have a choice. And that was the thing that we heard to over and over again. I don't feel like I have a choice. Because if I didn't do this, I wouldn't be who I am. We quote the great Soviet dissident Andres Yavsky, who said I thought the perfect thing. He said a dissident, his a man who does not consider himself guilty. And I think that that is really like encapsulates

the poetry of it. But the real choice that we all face, which is, are we going to stand with our values or not? Yeah, that Aussie-Dobby story is great. And there are just like so many in the book that are all unique in their own way. But there are, I think, one of the really striking things about the book is that there are these remarkable kind of common themes and lessons. And that comes through in the book and you make that point explicitly. So you observe that quote,

I'm going to quote from the book a lot because it's so good. So you take, quote, these people seem to be relying on a shared set of principles, practices, and tools in order to live out their values. We were reminded of a phenomenon in the history of science in which researchers across the world have often arrived at the same discovery, independent of one another, something comparable can be said of the dissident experience, our reporting show that

dissidents are building on a deposit of accumulated knowledge. So on that point, in order to bring out the most that we can in a pretty short time, I want to mention some of the kind of common strategies and lessons that recur throughout the book. So maybe I'll identify a theme and then maybe give you a line that captures it and let you kind of offer responses of reflection. So let me start with one which is grassroots activism, beats, legalistic, institutional strategies alone.

So you describe a study that calculates that a backsliding country, right a country, the undergoing democratic backsliding as the United States obviously is, it's odds of halting the slide are something like 7% when it relies exclusively on institutional methods, like elections and litigation and legislative action, but rises to something like a toss-up

different motive activism beyond the familiar cycles of electoral campaigns. So I mean, you know,

“what, say say more about that and kind of what those modes of non-institutionally focused activism”

look like. Well, first of all, thank you for quoting from the book and for reading the book and not to say that not every interviewer does, but we're very grateful that you have. This is the collective

stubbornness thing that I was just talking about. So there's this amazing political scientist named

Maria Stefan, who has this phrase, collective stubbornness. Americans are really good at the stubbornness part, not so good at the collective part, sometimes it freaks us out. We're really good, you're stubborn individualists, unfortunately, but it's actually a can learn. We have perfected that, that but these are the tools of boycott, the tools of strike, the tools of civil disobedience. What we learn from countries that have been able to push back, and this is what we're talking

about in that study, but also that we see all over the book that have been able to push back against authoritarianism, is that what they do is that they make it more painful to do authoritarian stuff. That's it. And the way that they do that, the way that movements do that, is that they gum up the works, that they just increase the cost of corruption, as Julia likes to say, authoritarianism is about stealing your rights and stealing your money. And the work of defeating it is getting much

better at making it harder to do that. And so that means creating friction. But the reason that we say that Americans, many Americans, need to learn the new tools is because this is not the mechanism, these are not the mechanisms that we're used to in participating in democracy. We're used to, as I said before, litigating and legislating and voting. And as we've learned from a place like Hungary, you can't stop doing those things. You've got to keep using those tools as long as we have

them and Hungary just showed us that if you are able to seize such a massive victory that sometimes

that those continue to work, even as you're descending. But it's never enough. And that's part of what

we're arguing here. Part of what we need to find, part of what all of us need to do is find a political home, engage in a political practice, and be organizing generally even starting in our neighborhoods, become used to some of these tools, study them, go to trainings, participate in civil resistance, civil disobedience. Those are the tools that once it's time for us all to get to the streets, we hear all the time about the 3.5 percent rule. We can get there. But that number 3.5 percent,

which many folks have heard about, which sort of the it's repeated regularly, only really works as a victory lap. Everybody needs to be doing the training to participate in collective stubbornness beforehand, so that when it's time to get to the streets, we can do that as well. And just for folks who aren't familiar with it, that's the Erica Chenoweth is largely credited right with that sort of finding that in a society in which you regularly have.

“I'm not sure one off. I think it needs to be regularly right have something like 3.5 percent”

of the public, basically hitting the streets in mass protests, that your signs, I guess, of escaping from authoritarianism, your chances are if not 100 percent or good, I'm probably not getting all the nuances, but that's essentially the 3.5 percent figure, at least as it's sort of the significance it's taken on in our popular discourse. Is that about right? Yeah. It's a sustained effort by 3.5 percent of the population to resist the authoritarian

and so she's found that basically in history in the past 100 years studying movements, very few like a single digits have been able to withstand a revolt that had 3.5 percent of the population in a sustained movement against them. The problem with it, just to like flush it out a little bit, it's not causal, right? She's observing. It's a sign that you built a big enough 10 and thrown enough sand in the gears, right? But it's not actually a magic number if everyone

just we have 3.5 percent on a one no-kings day that we're going to win. Yeah. Yeah. The hard work

“and like the really important work is what happens before that, exactly.”

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“So then, another theme that I think requires is this don't let the perfect be the”

enemy of the good and you write all again quote. Over and over again, they like the dissidence folks that you've talked to caution us about the dangers of waiting to act until you have the perfect plan, the perfect coalition, the perfect moment instead of dissidence argued for an approach that was rigid and principal but flexible in approach. Julia,

what is that approach look like? Well, I think that a lot of people are always asking us,

we would just come back from like five weeks of book tour and almost every place somebody will ask, well, why is it X working? I did X thing and it's not working. And they want success and the reality is that you never know what's going to work. So, for instance, standing in front of a tank did not work in tandem and square but it did work for the Nepalese students who stood in front of the tanks and overthrew their government, right? It's there's no tactic that's like the perfect

tactic. What you have to do is try all the things to throw sand in the gears of the authoritarian

“project and see what works. And so what you need to unite it around is your principles, right?”

Because you do know that like there are coalitions where it's complicated to get to a big tent. Right? This is one of the struggles that the Democratic Party is going through right now, right? Like how big is this tent? How many people are in it? And it has to be something everyone can unite around. We often talk about hungry as the success where they turn back the authoritarian tide but one thing that I think people in the US are not necessarily aware of is that the

person who won the opposition figure is basically equivalent to a Liz Cheney here. Right?

So that is a coalition that required a lot of compromises from the student radicals in the city centers who had to make coalition with the farmers out in rural areas who were defecting from essentially being loyalist to the party. And so we just have to understand that you have to pick a principle in Hungary. It was corruption. This regime is corrupt and we are not willing to stand for it and it's

“often corruption. And then you have to get enough people united around that to make it work.”

And then the tactics vary. Right? Is it going to be strikes? Is it going to be protest marches? Is it going to be usually it's all of the above, right? Yeah. And you know, you're talking about kind of coalitions and big tents and one theme, another of the themes that requires is the kind of finding your people theme. And I guess that's maybe a little bit to think because you're saying the broad tent needs to be really big and maybe will include people that you really

disagree with, maybe despise, but share some set of goals with. But you also do emphasize the importance of finding political community. And you say in the book, quote, that going without political community is comparable to opting to go without health insurance, exercise, a core group of loved ones. It leaves a massive gap in our personal safety net. And there's

of the critical foundation upon which so much else rests when we're talking about

dissidents and mobilization? When you study the Soviet dissidents, and this is a movement that we think of as enormous because it helped with the aid of geopolitical forces to bring down an empire. But when you look to that movement, it was a movement that never actually grew to be more than about a thousand active dissidents at any given time. And these are people who knew each other from daily life, from their professions and the careers. It was scientists and playwrights and

artists and intellectuals. And when you read interviews with them and when they talk about gathering often in secret in these apartments in Moscow and across the Soviet Union, what they talk about is two things that get gathering with others helped with under repression. And this is not that we

are not in the Soviet Union, but it's a principle that we can abstract to hear. The first is practical.

They say they were able to work together to figure out what to do, how to smuggle, saw me start, how to smuggle their writings out in ways that might undermine the regime in the West and elsewhere. What do we actually do? What's the next protest? What's the next next action? The other thing,

“though, I think that we try to get it this significantly in the book is actually less practical”

and more spiritual, more psychological, which is so much of authoritarianism as about lies and so much of fighting back is about piercing those lies. So when you gather with other people, authoritarianism is about saying, you thought you saw Renee Good shot in the street, now you didn't, don't believe you're lying, eyes. When you gather with other people, you can, you can turn to the others and say, are you seeing the stuff I'm seeing?

I'm seeing this too. You're seeing this too, right? And so there's something that shores up the spirit and shores up the, the soul as well. There's one other really important principle about why we spend so much time in the book, talking about finding your people, which is also a practical thing, which is when you look to many successful campaigns and movements in this space, they didn't start from scratch. They were, they were often the repurposing of networks and communities

that already existed. And so there's also something very practical about this. Again, just to turn because we're on the theme to, to the, the end of communism that the, the people who helped bring down communism in Czechoslovakia, Vatslov Havel and his crew were a group of theatre actors. These were people who knew each other from doing making art together for years and years and so when it came time in the midst of their activism, they repurposed their theatre spaces as

organizing spaces where people come together and have these civic discussions. They literally repurposed their play-bill printers into leaflet printers. And so having your people and being, and being able to, to push back, often starts with just repurposing what we already have. And then ultimately, what we hear over and over and over again, is that if your political community, your political home begins with a group of people, just big enough to house a few who share your committed values.

You're probably only going to be successful when it grows. But that embryonic moment is really,

“really, really important for emboldening people. And Julia, the growing pieces, of course, also”

critical and you emphasize that inviting people in is key to building engagement. And there's this

data that I've never seen that you offer from a study of 15,000 adults that finds that the biggest predictor of protest participation is literally whether the person has been asked to take part in the protest. It is just amazing. I mean, there's obviously data like this in campaigns as well. Like, you know, door knocking and in-person conversation is actually still really effective at you know, political, both persuasion and turnout. And so I guess it's not crazy, but I had not seen

this study. But the takeaway really is that literally there's not a factor that influences people to take on content just political activism more than social connection. So I guess Julia, how does that change how we should think about activism and effective activism? Yeah, I think we were really encouraged to see that because the whole point of this book was to be an invitation to action. And to show people that there are so many things you could do, like just pick a chapter. You feel like doing

“something legalistic, read the chapter on that. And if you want to protest, read that, and if”

want me to really do this, right? And so we wanted people to have an invitation. But the thing that was so interesting to us was how low the bar was for that invitation, right? Nathan Law, the leading Hong Kong dissident, not many of her Nobel Prize who led the umbrella revolution. He started because at his student government meeting, they asked him if he could bring water bottles to the protest line. And he was like, sure, I'll do that because I don't want to take any risk. I'm just

going to show up, bring water bottles to the other people who are taking the risk, right? And we hear

come do something very simple for the movement. And then when they see that those people are having

fun, this is one thing that people do not understand is that actually there's a huge amount of like joy that people experience by finding a group of like-minded people working together for a higher purpose. This is what humans are built for, right? And so seeing that joy, and then also often unfortunately seeing the state violence enacted on the nonviolent protesters really radicalize

“as people to get involved, right? And so it turns out that the best thing that anyone listening”

to this can do is if you're already an activist, ask someone to bring water bottles to your next thing, and if you're not, go find a thing to bring water bottles to. And not just to a protest, right, to an organizing meeting beforehand, or to a town hall, or to what or to people standing in line, to visit their loved ones at a different facility as you guys write about. And yeah, mutual aid is a big part of the kind of dissident practice, as I think another really important

through line. And look, but also since you mentioned joy, I love the chapter titles and subtitles, but you have one, I can't remember if this is a title or a subtitle, but I wrote it down the pleasure of agency and the joy. And defiance, like, yeah, there is joy and pleasure. It is not just like, this is a grind, but you should do it for like, it's kind of higher value. It's like, it's also something that feels good when you do it. And that I think is really important. And people,

“I think realize this if they're like dipping their toe in for the first time to this kind of work.”

So you said, you know, kind of wanting the book to be useful at kind of different sorts of interventions. And I actually wanted to ask a very specific question, which is that last Thursday, as part of one of our bonus episodes, like a no-year right series that we're dropping some special kind of targeted episodes around, Leah had a conversation with Brooklyn Law School's

Jocelyn Simonson about the ins and outs of cop watching, basically the practice of recording and

observing law enforcement, including federal agents like ice officers. It's I think a very useful primer for this aggressive enforcement era. And I'm curious, having spent some time, you know, looking at and talking to people about this question, do you have practical advice or best practices that you could share with our listeners who are specifically thinking about filming at protests, which is like one, you know, way you can get involved in this kind of work.

Yeah, absolutely. We have a whole section of the book on we take very seriously the threats and violence that will be enacted on you or as if you choose to stand up for your values with others. And so we we offer some specific tips. And we for filming at protests, you know, one of the things that Jocelyn very nicely described was that like the threat is not necessarily that it's illegal. It's that the cops are going to make your life very difficult, right? And so some of the

best practices that we learned from the people we spoke to who are on the front lines of thinking

about this stuff are, first of all, you turn off the facial recognition and any sort of biometrics

on your phone so that the cops can't unlock it. Because a big threat is that I'm going to take your phone from you and try to see what you have. But often, unfortunately, she did mention, they will ask you to do your pen, maybe they'll detain you for a long time, you might end up letting them have access. So don't have the video on your camera roll. So one thing to do is to film in a signal chat. So before you leave, set up a signal chat with people who are not there.

And then you're actually just you accessing the camera feature within signal. So that the footage goes directly to this group of people that you have already designated. And so they have it stored. But it's nowhere on your camera roll. So even if they get access to your phone, they can't do that. The other thing is, there's a pin number you can set up on signal and on WhatsApp so that you can't open that up without an additional level of pin access. So and you can even do

cloaking where Apple has a thing where you can change the icon for your apps to make it look at the weather app. So there's layers. We call this the Swiss cheese theory where like every layer of defense has a hole. But if you stack enough of them together, you can build somewhat of a better practice. Right? Look, this is still a who's running away faster from the bear situation. Like you're not, there's no guarantees here. But these are some things I just thought

it would be really nice to offer to readers as they're thinking about these issues. Those are terrific additional tips. So glad that our listeners are now also able to hopefully

“take note of all of that. Okay, so you strike a, I think, pretty inspiring and optimistic tone in”

the book's final pages. You write, quote, the courage of the dissidents in this book forms the basis of a much more hopeful truth amid political repression. Countless tools are available to us. Our task is people who desire a more just society is to learn how to use them. And you know, you offer some concluding commitments for readers to follow. Can you just like walk us through a little bit those parting words and what you most want your readers and our viewers and listeners to take away from

the structure of the book. And these, these are the themes. I mean, Julia's absolutely right. We did

“not have hypothesis here. And so these are the themes from talking to over 120 people on five”

continents that emerged. The first is when you hear that voice in your head that says something is

wrong here at work in your community, in your faith, organization, in your university, when you hear that a voice of objection, follow it. And so that's one. The reason we wrote this book is because that is not a natural thing to do for most people because we are all living in this Darwinian world where there are risks. And so the rest of the book is how to do that. And so that's one when you hear the voice, the moral collision, follow that voice. The second thing is the way that

most people told us that they were able to do that was to find a few other people who shared their objection. They whispered their dissent and everyone found that as they whispered, they found that more and more people in their office. Again, in their community, in their home, town, whatever it was, shared their views and they started gathering regularly. So number one, follow the voice. Number two, find other people who share that. Number three is where the

principles and the ideas that Julia just described come in, which is, and I will say it less eloquently than she did, don't do stupid shit. Just no unforced errors. I think there's this

“sense that to be a dissident or to be an activist, you have to be chest out all the time,”

you know, come what may. And that is not what we found. What we found was that really good activists, really good people who we call dissidents, are being very serious about their safety. So that means not doing things that are going to undermine the movement and oftentimes the things that underrun the movement are the things that undermine the individual. So pay your taxes, don't get parking tickets, you know, et cetera, et cetera, and in this world of digital surveillance,

that's even more important, what we do online. The fourth and final, and I think most complicated, but also hopeful part of this is we do need to commit to persuasion. We do need to make the group of people who are organizing with bigger by many, many different means. And sometimes that will be pressure. It will be saying we're trying to pressure you. We're going to bring pain to allies of the regime who don't come, you know, come join us who don't defect. But oftentimes it's going to be

bringing the water bottles and meeting people where they're at and a little bit more honey, and how be people find a place to land. We call this the Lily Pad Theory, which is that people even people who want to jump, often won't if they don't have somewhere to land and feel like they have a home to end up in. And so those are the four things that we leave you with at the end of the book and that sort of structure our invitation in on courage. That's great. Julia, you know,

after a year inside the heads of more than a hundred incidents confronting sometimes immense personal and political hardship, but sort of staying the course, like what is giving you hope, how are you staying inspired and motivated in need of genuinely challenging times?

You know, it's so funny. I joke all the time that I've become like a hope true third because I

was a great thing to be. I love it. And I want to be a hope true. It's just I think reporting and spending time with all these people who were in such difficult situations and how they stuck to their values and fought for what they believed in. And then seeing it play out in my own country, right where I didn't ever see it, think I would see this type of thing. And I haven't so impressed. I mean, I do think my expectations for America were low so that helped, but I also do feel like

“we have done really well. On one, the most important metric, honestly, that from the Erica”

Channel with data that we didn't talk about, is that movements that commit to nonviolence are twice as effective as those that use violence. And the reason for that is sort of what I'm who was just talking about, which is this is a word of persuasion, right? There are going to be people who are just committed to the regime, they're sort of unmovable. And then there's people who are

definitely dissidents and never going to be persuaded, but the vast majority of people are in the

middle. They're trying to keep their head down, they're trying to ignore it. And that's who we need to win. And so the reason nonviolence is more effective is not because it's morally better, it's because it's more persuasive to that middle group, to be with the side that is not acting immorally, right? That that's why Minneapolis was such an effective win in the more persuasion, because the activists were so disciplined in their nonviolence and the state's violence looked

so ludicrous in response. And so I think focusing on that piece of it, I have been very impressed

was contracting to do ISD portation flights after sustained pressure from many small communities that hit service. They gave up that contract, right? We have seen like the, you know, universities

“have stepped up, you know, when fingers crossed on Yale, but like honestly, many of them rejected”

the second round of pressure from the administration. So we are seeing the right things happening.

What we need is just more of those things happening. Like we just need exponentially more, but I've been very impressed that we are doing the right things. Yeah, and when, and when we see it happen, it opens up the possibility of more of it happening. So hopefully these virtuous cycles get created. All right, well, we will have to leave it there at Julia Engwin and Ami Fields Meyer.

Authors of Encourage had to be a dissident in an age of fear. Thank you for this powerful,

“an important book, and thank you so much for joining me today to share it with our listeners.”

But as you can. honored to be here. All right, that's all we have time for today. Leah will be taking the reins next week. I am going to be on vacation, but I will be back in

your ears in a couple of weeks. See you then.

Strix scrutiny is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Melody Rowl and Michael Goldsmith,

“music by Eddie Cooper. Our team includes Matt Degroat, Ben Hethko, Johanna Case,”

Kenny Muffett, Adam Lippert, and Eric Shoot. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the writer's guild of America East. The one-day podcast you know and love is shaking things up. You already know the five days a week. I, Jane Coston, bring you the need to know news and expert analysis on the big stories shaping today in tomorrow. Stories like how social media warps our perception of the world and

the strange reality of who is signing up to work for ice. All in less time that it takes to roast a chicken. And now, what are the episodes you'll be hitting your YouTube and podcast feeds in the afternoons? You'll get the breaking news even faster. Check out what today. Now dropping in the PM on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.