KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – November 16, 2024

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John Jacobson here with you in beautiful Midwest USA.

We are doing the post-election analysis bringing back for their

Curtin called kudos, Kip and Sheila Murphy.

Kip and Sheila, we called this thing with precision before the election and it's time to do a victory lap.

because you were going on years of wisdom gained by experiential knowledge.

I was not following polls.

I was following those 73 million votes that had been banked on Sunday when we made that final call last week at Trump circa 300 electoral votes and winning the popular vote and winning the Senate and House.

And Sheila, how did we get it right?

when all of the pollsters were wrong again this year, especially Ann Seltzer.

Ann Seltzer, excuse me, I have a little laryngitis from excessive victory.

But, you know, we got it right and they all got it wrong because we were listening to the people and they were trying to use their positions to further a personal agenda.

And we were simply listening to the people and reflecting what we saw.

the people wanted.

Sheila and Kip, yours truly here in his middle 60s has been graced to live through 17 American presidential elections.

I remember 15 very clearly as I was watching the Nixon Humphrey Wallace returns in 68 with my father in Eastern Iowa.

And as I told my classes at the university, in my experience, it's been kind of a Seinfeldian, even Steven.

A 50-50 world.

In my 64 years, I lived 32 under a Democrat White House, 32 under a Republican White House.

And just prior to this election, I had seen eight Democratic victories, eight Republican victories.

So very, very interesting.

Sheila, I'm going to proffers something I want you to tell me if I'm right or wrong.

This is the single most significant watershed election since Ronald Reagan's 44 state sweep over Jimmy Carter in 1980, not only because of the degree of the victory, the coattails to Senate and House going up against the entire cabal, the military industrial establishment, the big pharma cabal, the media cabal, the Hollywood cabal, all of the Epstein

friends, and the P. Diddy friends, and just international forces, Soros forces, prosecutors that were going rogue, judges that were not correctly applying laws, and yet talk about a Phoenix rising from the ashes.

Donald Trump, Trump writing not just the art of the deal, but the art of the comeback.

Everybody always forgets that.

Sheila.

He improved his vote totals hugely among Jewish voters, Muslim voters, Catholic voters, incredible, the Amish voters.

The Amish came out 100,000 margin in Pennsylvania.

That helped pad his Pennsylvania margin.

The Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, the largest concentration of Muslims in the United States, come out heavily for Trump, 100,000 padding his margin in Michigan.

Catholic voters for the first time ever in the history of the Republic,

A Republican candidate carries them by over 10 points, 15 percentage points, and you and I called that Whitmer was going to kill the Catholic vote in those industrial Big Ten states.

The Jewish voters, because of the anti-Israel animus that was proffered by Harris, and Harris' stepdaughter, who was raising money for the other side, Jewish voters go more than ever toward Trump and

Black men in this country, 100% higher Republican voting, 25% of Black men voted for Trump.

How huge is this, Sheila?

I had always complained to you that the Republican Party didn't know how to put together a coalition that only one election cycle since 1988 had they won the popular vote.

Boy, they're back in the popular vote mode of five

million vote cushion.

I think it's more because many of those votes in California that will go to Harris are just outright fraudulent illegal votes.

Yes, this was this was incredibly huge, John.

I mean, you covered most spaces there.

It was significant in that it reflected to me an overall weariness.

The left

pushed everything.

All the front steps you mentioned, they pushed each and every one of them who far.

And what we saw was the people rearing up their heads and saying we've had enough of this.

We're tired.

People are tired of being pushed around.

Spoonfed improper news reports and Spoonfed their attitudes by celebrities and social media.

This was bigger than any election we've ever had because it went far beyond

politics.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Kip, I think your sister's touching on something.

This went beyond politics is touching the very cultural core of Americana.

Well, and also you've got to look at the reaction.

Some of the people on the Democratic side, they're not looking at that their policies went wrong.

They're looking at that they didn't control the news media enough.

There was no control over podcasts.

Is it unbelievable?

They're pushing this disinformation and that the government must step in to regulate podcasts.

Yeah, of course, it's because they can't debate ideologically.

They're based solely in raw emotionalism, which is irrational.

They cannot win a debate.

They know it.

They know free speech is their enemy.

They know fair elections are their enemy.

Do you realize that

In every state Trump won, there's voter ID.

In almost every single state that Trump lost, there is not voter ID.

And right now, they are stealing races to this moment in Arizona and Nevada.

The leftist machine is still that brazen.

Not to mention California, which is off the charts.

Back to you guys.

Well, I was just going to say, nationally, we're hearing that.

I mean, this is recognized that voter ID.

was the single greatest administrative factor in this victory is that the states where there is no ID, Harris won and we're hearing everybody is coming to that realization and that's only going to help us in future efforts to make the voting fair.

Sheila, I agree, I agree because they were starting to pull the stunt again.

I was in here with Sean Torres after midnight election night.

We saw big

semis without a state place that they were trying to roll into Michigan and Pennsylvania saying they were filled with ballot boxes and funny thing now that Watley and Laura Trump have this aggressive stance at the National Republican headquarters of actually fighting back and having lawyers in place they nipped a whole lot of bad stuff in the bud because there were tremendous voter suppression efforts

going on against Republican voters in those battleground states.

Pennsylvania, for instance, were literally police officers sworn to uphold the law in Pennsylvania.

We're shutting down Republican area voting precincts and illegally sending home Republican voters for early voting.

The Republicans got in and they were able to interdict that.

The courts supported the law, reopened those polling sites.

Georgia was going to be doing secret counting.

and kick out all of the Republican observers in Georgia.

They sued, they had to let them back in, and those big semis with supposedly trundled drawers full of mail-in ballots, they didn't get counted.

Isn't that amazing how it works when you have a good legal team in place and you're proactive, not reactive?

How much better of a job did the National GOP do?

I had a Democrat consultant friend scoff at our Get Out the Vota effort saying,

You can't offload those to private entities.

Well, I'd say Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk did a pretty good job of getting out the vote.

Riff on this for a little Sheila and

Kepp.

They did an excellent job getting out the vote.

But more importantly, they had people in there early on doing voter registration.

And when you get people to register, they're more likely to vote for

you.

It's very common

sense.

But also, when it's coming to counting the vote right now, I mean, it's ridiculous right now that California, Arizona, and because of that stupid right choice of voting, Alaska, still can't decide their

election.

Yeah, well, it's called election stealing because the philosophy is you keep counting votes day after day after day until you get the votes that you need to beat.

the other guys, and it's absolutely ridiculous.

Ron DeSantis in Florida had 17 million votes counted in two hours.

The only excuse not to do that is to stuff ballot boxes and to rig them.

And what's going on against our Senate candidate, Nevada, and our Senate candidate in Arizona is shocking.

And I demand a recount, and I demand an audit.

What say you guys?

Oh, absolutely.

I'm sorry to say it, but no have the ballot there to show in a recount, because they just like you say, ship them in.

And they have people coming in saying that they voted for them, and then other people saying, well, they're not, they didn't vote.

But that happened a few times I heard.

Yeah.

Well, so four years ago, Sheila and Kip, I think you remember it.

I was questioning the results.

particularly in the Rust Belt of the Biden-Trump race.

And I got some pushback from the Democrats, so I decided to publish a paper using the Benford's Law of Scientific Mathematics and the Mabani Second-Digit Test.

These are well-known anti-fraud detection types of theorems that have been proven the two up.

detect fraud in other situations and I included about 36 different charts and graphs including logarithmic formulas as well as regression lines and the conclusion I came to was that there was no way

Those numbers could be what they reported to be in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.

As many of us remember, part of the problem in Pennsylvania was, mysteriously, after midnight, they started counting late arriving illegally, per the Pennsylvania statutes, 1.2 million supposed absentee ballots, just a solito from the Supreme Court.

ordered pennsylvania not to mingle those votes and not to count them pennsylvania mingle them and counted them these were votes that arrived after the legal time after midnight on election night 1.2 million of them shazam a million plus went to biden but that's not the worst thing uh so anyway i i believe i proved mathematically that those numbers could not have appeared uh the biden numbers in

Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, looking at violations of Benford's law and the Mabani second digit test.

I think I've been further vindicated if you look at the banked early voting this year, just in Pennsylvania.

So this year, Republicans did a better job.

I think they had 400 plus thousand that voted early.

I'm not talking absentees.

Okay.

We're not talking about mailed in later.

I think absentees.

We're talking early voting.

We're talking like what Deb and I did.

We went to the courthouse and voted early, or absentee ballots that come in early and can be counted early in terms of how many have arrived.

In Pennsylvania this year, the Democrats were able to get about 583,000 or 683,000 early votes.

But guess what?

Four years ago, they had 1.4 million early votes.

Now, that means, is it possible that 750,000 people died in four years that were avid Democrat?

No, actuarially it wasn't even a fraction of that.

Did those people end up showing up on election day?

No, because we see the election day performance.

Were they the late absentees maybe even more than there were last time around?

No, they were not there.

So, whose 750,000 votes

Disappeared or was it that there never were 750,000 early votes in Pennsylvania four years ago you look at the Trajectory of the last four presidential cycles everybody even the most popular Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama You take your pick no one was above that 65 million vote level with the exception of down Jay Trump got the 70 millions how in the world does Joe Biden have

81 million votes, and Obama and Harris only at 65.

I'm going to make the categorical supposition that Donald Trump has won three consecutive general elections.

Prove me wrong.

No, we again can't prove you wrong.

You can't actually make that statement, John.

We can't go back.

And say that he was president for four years when he wasn't because well, that's unfair too much crap happened during those four years

Honestly, I'm not saying this.

I'm not saying he was president.

I'm just saying he won three elections The

most humorous thing about this is that because of

of the mathematical evidence that you produced and others now are beginning to understand there are within the Democrat Party that are telling their brethren hey don't chill back off a little if we push this too far people will start to realize what we did four years ago and it will be very bad so I think that's

I think that's hilarious actually.

I'm gonna ask you for a couple questions here.

There was some dreadful faux pas made by the Harris campaign.

We said over a month ago, we both said, all three of us said it, Gretchen Whitmer was going to kill the Catholic vote in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin because of the video she put out mocking Catholics.

and mocking Holy Communion, 40% of the electorate in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin are either Catholics or fallen away Catholics, but were baptized and confirmed Catholics.

Even those that have now joined other evangelical churches still have their Catholic sensibilities, the Catholic culture, the fear of the Lord, that reverence for Holy Communion.

And then, of course, Harris

dumps out and does not attend the charity fundraiser, the legendary Al Smith dinner, which honors Democrat Al Smith.

And then of course, Kamala, when our Lord's name is mentioned at the rally, she says to the folks in attendance, you're at the wrong rally.

Was that just a self-inflicted wound that really cost those northern battleground

states?

It was all self-inflicted, but you have to go even back further than that.

Think about when Kamala Harris was a senator.

She tore into Catholic.

She basically said that Catholics were not qualified to be in the government because they were Catholic.

Yeah, you're right because you are familiar.

You're from Nebraska.

Judge Boucher was up for confirmation and she basically thought he was disqualified because he was a member of Knights of Columbus.

Now those are those nice guys with the funny capes and swords that hand out tootsie rolls to help our intellectually disadvantaged kids and do all the charity fish fries and things like that and shoot she wouldn't let me run for office.

And Paul Disclosure Kip was a grand knight in his chapter of the Knights of Columbus so we're very familiar with it but she

She turned them to be practically terrorists.

But all the errors that you mentioned that were made only compounded an overall impression that the American public's got of Kamala Harris and that she had no religious faith.

She never talked about God.

She never talked about belief.

And when you put that backdrop there in front of things like Whitmer's actions, then she has no defense.

So it wasn't exactly an error.

It was simply the fact that she did not ever present anything about faith in God or moral beliefs.

Well, I think you're on to something.

I have a blood relative who is very near and dear to me.

She did not vote for Trump in 16 or 20, but she was so appalled at the anti-Semitism.

on the part of the Harris campaign that she couldn't wait to vote and campaign for Trump in an eastern seaboard city this election.

And of course, she was even miffed that Harris bypassed Shapiro for walls.

She thought there was an anti-Semitic attitude in refusing to pick Shapiro.

I don't know if that's true, but electorally, I think, you know, you and I were worried about Shapiro.

and Mark Kelly from Arizona.

I breathe a sigh of relief when it was walls, and I can't think of someone who is more of a drag on a ticket than Tim Walls.

Well,

I totally agree with all of that, but also I see another factor at play in that I know China had a tremendous financial stake in the Harris victory, and they definitely want walls.

He's been very involved in China for a very

long time.

He's almost the Manchurian candidate, almost.

Yeah, it was their chance to get their guy in, and of course they wanted that badly.

So whatever was the reason, Shapiro would have been dangerous.

I'm glad that her anti-Semitism and all the Chinese connections kept him out.

Well, and the irony is that Shapiro didn't go to the mats.

with any election hijinks in Pennsylvania because he doesn't have a lot of love for Harris.

He was hoping she would lose because he wants in in four years.

And the word on the street that continues to reverberate is that both Joe and Jill Biden voted for Donald Trump.

Do you believe there's any credibility to that report?

Well, we'll never know.

In America, we have a private vote, but.

It's quite humorous.

Hey, I have to step out John.

Sure.

Sure.

Kip.

Go right ahead buddy.

Thanks.

Kip Murphy for joining us.

Sheila's going to stay with us for just a few more minutes.

Go ahead Sheila.

Continue the threat.

Yeah.

I, you know, we'll never know how they voted, but I think that the Biden will always be insulted by Kamala Harris's treatment of them for this election.

I think she has never been a supported vice president.

And

Joe Biden was grinning like a Cheshire cat all of the Wednesday following the election.

And it's just it's kind of interesting.

Biden has is extended a welcome to President Trump to visit next week.

Sheila, how important was it?

I believe there were two hinge factors in this race.

Trump was down four or five points in the polls.

The second that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

endorsed Donald Trump.

The polls started bending back.

The dream team began to come together.

You can say Joe Rogan.

You can say Megan Kelly.

You can say Vivek Ramaswamy, who was always there.

You can say Tulsi Gabbard, who clearly was aligned with Bobby Kennedy.

Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy's friend who made those brilliant Trump commercials and ads all during the campaign.

Elon Musk.

How huge was it?

I mean, without Elon Musk and Twitter and X, I don't know how we get through that network sensorious nature.

You know how I've been fighting Zuckerberg for years.

I'm winning, but I've had to work hard to keep ahead of his censoring attempts of me that he's utterly failed at on Facebook.

But how huge was it, the one-two punch of Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy, and now they are part of Team Trump?

to clean out the Aegean stables.

Yes, it was huge.

I see this as a series of turning points.

I would include in those important turning points the vice presidential campaign.

I love J.B.

Vance.

Isn't he absolutely superb?

He is, and I think when we discussed this in the past that who the vice president was was very important because there was such a spotlight on age in general in this campaign.

Having a good, solid vice president was exceedingly important and JD presenting himself as he did to the public.

That changed a lot of minds that were afraid that Trump would get elected and vice president would take over and it would not be good.

But

yeah, he told me to sign the media lies about him that they had set up in that vice presidential debate.

He eviscerated

them.

He's a good communicator.

And then, of course, you mentioned the the alliance of people like Bobby Kennedy and and told to gather these these alliances.

brought over a tremendous amount of independent votes.

Right.

Very, very.

And then you get on Elon Musk balancing out the overflowing support that the Democrats have among the technological branch of corporate America.

That did a lot to balance that out.

So all these factors came into play.

And they were exceedingly important.

And I'm going to give a shout out to a young man.

He's six foot nine.

His name is Baron Trump.

He played a key role in the campaign early on this summer.

He told his dad that he needed to not worry about the traditional media.

But to get on these podcasts and recommend it to his father, Donald J. Trump, what podcasts get on?

Trump was a sensation on the podcasts.

He went on many, and Rogan in particular was a triumph.

Yes, that was a very important event.

And yes, that was great advice because America is changing.

One of the major side effects that has come out of this victory

is that the so-called major media, the network, they have lost even more credibility.

They are fading fast.

Yes, as well they should.

And the pollsters with them, I think Anne Selzer with her Iowa prediction, beclowned herself, saying that Harris was up by three, Trump trounced her by 13.

Every Iowa House of Representatives seat

remained Republican as did General Don Bacon's.

We were correct to isolate on those five races on election night because those literally decided the outcome of the U.S.

House of Representatives.

That's going to end up being about a 218 to 217 split for the GOP with some of the shenanigans going on and counting the western United States House votes.

Iowa and Nebraska, your election night.

coverage.

Sheila was brilliant online with this reporting from Iowa.

Sheila, what do you think with Sean Torres, my great engineer in here with me?

We were the first media outlet in the nation, television or radio to correctly call with precision every state, the earliest in the nation that Donald Trump would be president-elect of the United States.

Go ahead, Sheila.

I think it's fantastic in that again.

It demonstrated that even though we all, we clearly had our outcomes that we wish to happen, we were also painstakingly trying to be accurate and correct and to view the actions of the people with objectivity and many of the pollsters and things were not.

And as far as the Des Moines Register poll, I think people should not forget the important factor.

Pollsters are not trusted.

people did not believe that they could say they supported Donald Trump and have their responses guarded confidentiality.

Right.

This is a factor that must be addressed.

Yes, that's right.

This is

what nobody wanted to say that they were supporting Trump to a post or so.

Most of the results were heavily skewed against Trump because nobody wants to be

As you said, targeting.

Three cycles in a row, they underestimated the Trump support by 5%.

That's an epic fail on the part of pollsters in Sheila.

I had some Democrat journalists talk to my statistics class before the election.

All thought that Harris was in great shape.

I kept quiet, wrote my prediction down, sealed it in envelope.

The students opened it on Wednesday morning, and guess who nailed the electoral college total?

And

I didn't use polls.

I used raw data from those banked 73 million votes.

Always chase the data.

Don't chase polls.

Sheila Murphy, you're a rock star.

Thanks for making our election night coverage number one in the nation here.

And we'll have you back on again soon.

Thank you very much, John.

And Sean, it's always a pleasure to join you.

Sheila Murphy, ladies and gentlemen.

Thanks again to our sponsors, LifeRunners, LifeRunners.org, protecting life from womb to tomb.

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The next generation of this wonderful family has been such beautiful custodial stewards of bringing safe, lovely, affordable housing to so many people in eastern Iowa over the decades in their two beautiful communities.

And guys, go to their tremendous website, hamshomes.com.

We're delighted to have Clint back with us.

We in the past have talked an awful lot.

to Barbara and Curtis, but we're always delighted to have Clint back on.

And Clint, welcome to show the studio audience on their feet for you.

Listen to that crowd.

Clint, I want to talk about on your blog site, there's a great article, single wide and double wide homes.

What is the difference?

A lot of people don't understand the difference.

Can you kind of give us a thumbnail sketch on that matter, my friend?

Yes, certainly.

So, I mean, the

The biggest difference between the two is kind of how the title set, how it's stated, where a single wide is going to be basically all one piece or set on one chassis, where a double sectional is two chassis and two halves of a home put together when they're on site, and that's what makes a double wide.

Typically, your single wife is going to be 14 or 16 feet wide, and then on the double sectional, it's either going to be a 28 or 32 foot wide.

Here with Clint Hames from Hames Homes.

Guys, you want to talk about comfort and beauty and value in Eastern Iowa.

Think about this now.

For three generations, the Hames family has provided comfort, beauty, and value to our homeowners in Eastern Iowa.

Think about this.

13,000 mobile and manufactured homes sold since 1969.

Now, let's just take the American average of, let's say, two adults and two kids.

13,000 times four is over 50,000.

Now, since 1969, homes turn over every five to seven years.

Guys, that means that the Hames people have put

My goodness if you really do the math on how many times that has turned over Clint and Kurt and Barb and Kurt and Norma have put over half of a million people Into their safe affordable beautiful homes one thing that I think we'd like to talk about too is it's a concern people are having with a lot of things in the news now about

crime and what's going on in some of our urban areas in America.

I've been in your neighborhoods there.

You've got these beautiful, lovely neighborhoods at Summit View and Grand View.

You've really got some wonderful safety procedures set up to make these very safe communities for whether you're seniors or whether you're kids, really easy for parents to make the buy, isn't it?

What do you do to keep the communities safe there?

You do a whole bevy of things.

Right.

Yeah, we have a handful of measures in place.

The biggest one is going to be our background check.

We do a background check on all adults

living

in the community.

Not just the homeowner, but their children or family members who may be living with them or staying with them quite often.

We require a background check for all adults living in the community.

Between some of you in Grand Beach community has two managers and then we always have a manager on call 24-7.

This

is awesome out

to them for any kind of issues

You guys are everything is good about the free market Enterprise system in America You guys are what Adam Smith had in mind when you couple virtue with free markets And we're really proud of you guys and proud that you sponsor our show Clint Hames

Thank you so much.

We love being a part of it and love being a part of our community

Clint, tell us how they contact you by phone, by email, by website.

Give them a few shots at even driving by where you guys located so that they can get there and see for themselves.

Kind of the best way to reach us is on our website at gameshomes.com.

There we have all of our pictures and descriptions of our homes we have available, tons of information about our communities and what it's like to live out here.

and then you can reach us by phone at 319-377-4863 or if you prefer email you can reach us at salesathameshomes.com

And we're here Monday through Friday, seven days a week from nine to six during the weekdays and then on Saturdays from nine to five and Sundays, noon to four.

So what intersection are you guys at?

So we can just drive there to Southwest Cedar Rapids, not far from the airport, retail and find you guys.

Our main office is in our Grandview location, which is going to be on the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Road.

Some of you is just down the street right on Wilson Avenue.

But again, our main office is here in the Grandview, and come on out.

We've got open house format, and love to have everyone see what we have out here.

Guys, that's the great Clint Hames, part of the next generation of leadership at Hames Homes.

Clint, always great to have you on.

Give our best to Curtis and Barbara, and we'll talk to you guys next week.

Most certainly.

Have a great week.

All right, guys.

Hames Homes, the Homes people.

Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.

This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.

Welcome to our show today.

I'm Christopher Gientel, producer and graduate assistant for Gortney Institute.

Joining us today, Dr. Russ McCullough, the founder of Guarni Institute and Wayne Angel Chair of Economics, Dr. Justin Clark, the Minara Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics, Dr. Peter Jacobson, the Guarni Professor of Economic Education and Research,

Finally, the coordinates to assistant, Kevin, who got it.

All right.

Well, it seems like we don't go very far very fast without running into constitutional claims of various sorts, especially being hot into the political season and elections and whatnot.

So Justin, you want to talk specifically a little bit more about First Amendment?

Yeah.

So I've heard a lot of claims recently and they really escalated during.

COVID I think but it seems like a lot of people are campaigning on these issues now where free speech actually and the First Amendment is the number two issue according to most voters in the country.

So it's above a bunch of issues that I think like defense that usually free speech came in far lower on the issues that were important to Americans and So I think it'd be useful to kind of talk about some of the rhetoric that we hear

and talk about what the Constitution actually says about freedom of speech and why the Constitution says what it says.

And so a couple of the claims that I've heard recently are things like, well, the First Amendment doesn't protect misinformation.

They'll say, you know, you can't say fire in a crowded theater, or, you know, they say, well, free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, right?

And then they'll usually say, you know, one of the two things I just said earlier, that it doesn't protect hate speech, it doesn't protect dangerous speech, and it doesn't protect speech that's incorrect.

Yeah.

And I've heard, for instance, you know,

Tim Walts has said this numerous times on the campaign trail that the First Amendment doesn't protect misinformation and you can't yell fire in a crowded theater.

And these claims, especially the fire in a crowded theater, this is notorious in First Amendment litigation.

Getting blanketed to everything.

Yeah.

It goes back to a court case in the very early 1900s.

I think it's USV Schenck.

I know Schenck is one of the

plaintiffs there, and I think it's USV Schenck.

And then that decision in Schenck got changed by Ohio v. Brandenburg, which happened in the middle of the 20th century.

And the decision in Schenck was where the phrase, you can't shout fire in a crowded theater came from.

The Supreme Court decision said, look, the First Amendment doesn't protect anything, right?

You can't shout in the text of the decision.

It actually says you can't.

falsely shot fire in a crowded

theater, right?

And so spelling out what that metaphor means, it's that, well, if there isn't a fire and you're in a crowded theater and you yell fire, what's gonna happen?

Well, everyone's gonna stampede to the exits.

You create a panic where no panic was justified.

And presumably people are gonna die or get hurt.

And I wonder

if the, does it need to lead, if somebody does it,

and somebody dies or somebody gets harmed, then there is damages, right?

And there'd be, under the law, the right for that person to claim.

So what's really going on is if they yell fire and nobody gets hurt, they could still be brought to jail or have a

claim

against the person who yelled fire.

Is that what's...

at the heart of the fire in the theater?

Well, the shank case wasn't about shouting fire in a crowded theater,

right?

Well, I guess I wasn't even necessarily applying it to the shank.

So let's just set that aside for a second.

So

what you're saying is something like, okay, well, what is wrong?

with the shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Isn't what's wrong about falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater that people will be harmed and killed?

And don't we already have legal ways of dealing with people being harmed and killed through the even negligent acts of other people?

Yes, we do.

So maybe we don't need this kind of restriction.

Right.

Shouting fire in a crowded theater can actually be really helpful when there's a fire in the

crowded theater.

Right?

Right.

Rather than there's a real fire going on and somebody stands up and says, you can't yell that.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Excuse me, sir.

The Supreme Court has

randomly

decided that you're not allowed to yell at the Supreme Court.

Now, what was the case that the shank, what was the shank case about?

This would be important to know.

when this metaphor was originally deployed.

And the original metaphor was deployed because people objected to the draft in World War I. It was pacifists who were passing out information saying, we shouldn't have a draft.

We oppose the United States getting involved in World War I. And it was pacifists in World War I who were brought up on trial.

for acting against the interests of the United States, and the Supreme Court Justice, I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, said, look, you have freedom of speech, but you're not allowed to oppose what the US government wants to do.

That's dangerous, just like you're not allowed to yulk fire in a crowded theater.

So we can already see, even at the very beginning, this metaphor is being stretched at its seams.

I think people who are...

at least Peter's age and younger.

So I definitely remember it, Russ, you remember it.

Um, protesting the Iraq war was like a national pastime for 15 years.

And if the original broad interpretation of shouting fire in a crowded theater, if that would have been accepted as correct, every, you know, everybody on the left would have been liable to have been locked up under those rules.

Yeah.

Now, what happened when Shank was overturned was this is the case, Brandenburg v. Ohio.

where a KKK member had a march and filmed it and claimed that his being fined because of this violated his First Amendment rights.

And the court overturned Shank and said, actually, you are allowed to say really objectionable things, even things that seem like they might make people angry, even things that might eventually cause fights.

as long as you aren't trying to, you're not using speech that incites imminent criminal action.

So you have to intend for it to cause criminal action, like a riot, and you have to intend that to be imminent, right?

And if you think about why that's the case, it's that, well, if we want some speech to be restricted, maybe one way you want to restrict it is based on harm.

right?

But it seems like, gosh, it seems like a lot of speech can cause harm.

And it's unclear how we measure that.

And a lot of people also say, well, the best response to speech you don't like is speech.

So the reason I think the eminent is included there is because it's intended to only apply to speech that kind of can't be countered with other speech, right?

It's like, once you say it,

Yeah,

there's no chance to have a dialogue.

Yeah, let's go.

One, two, three.

Oh, right.

Yeah, and certainly not to get derailed on where we're at, but the imminent part, that was kind of brought up with January 6th and Trump, the accusations against Trump, right?

That what he said, it was kind of imminent.

that people were taking action or something.

I just thought that was part of the claim against him with that.

To make the claim stick, you have to, you have to do that, right?

If you want to criminalize somebody's speech after Brandenburg or according to some of the constraints on the law that Brandenburg set in place, that has to be the claim.

So this is the, I mean, this, and this seems like, well, if we actually know then this about what shouting crime.

also shouting fire in a crowded theater means.

We know that it was used to justify a really broad restriction on free speech.

That was overthrown, right?

So it's probably not the best metaphor to use.

Most constitutional scholars today realize, oh, that was the metaphor from the terrible decision that we had to overturn because it was too broad.

But

yet it's stuck.

But

yet, arguably even under the revised Brandenburg ruling,

Maybe it would be illegal to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater, provided you were doing it maliciously and you intended it to, you know, cause harm immediately or whatever, right?

But it doesn't seem like any of the cases that are usually being deployed here fit that standard.

And so, I don't know if now it's a... What are we looking at in time?

We go...

another minute.

We could break here for now too.

I guess I wanted maybe a part of the break.

I thought I went and googled it here.

So the First Amendment, because I think there's other areas that we can hit then in the second half as well, but Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of a religion.

Well then let's stop.

Okay.

No,

I don't want to hit that yet because we still haven't talked about the second part of what I was talking about, which was the misinformation and disinformation.

Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.

So the first part of it was... That's where I was going to circle it

back

to actually.

So the first part was this claim that like, well, you can't shot fire in a crowded theater because that's knowingly and maliciously inciting, right?

And the second claim that, you know, for instance, Tim Kaine made is that, I'm not Tim Kaine

at

all, right?

Look at those two guys next up.

That the First Amendment doesn't protect myths or disinformation.

That is just flatly wrong.

Oh, right.

It's 100% wrong.

You are allowed to say.

that things that are false.

You are also allowed to say things that are hateful.

The First Amendment also protects hate speech.

It protects those

two things.

explicitly.

And I think you're the one who taught me that that's the whole purpose of it, is to actually protect the stuff we don't want to hear more so than the stuff we want to hear.

Yeah, because if the First Amendment

only protected the stuff that everybody agreed on, right back where we were, first of all, you wouldn't even need it, right?

Second of all, you probably wouldn't be able to say anything

since we

don't agree on everything.

Yeah.

And the third thing, which is the big problem, is that

any attempt to put teeth into a law that says, well, we actually do want to restrict either hate speech or misinformation or disinformation.

Now we need an arbiter of any of those three things.

And it's very, very difficult

to find.

Mark Zuckerberg would be good.

The reason people say things like that is they go like, well, some things do make people angry, and so we do need to restrict hate speech.

And it's like, well, the whole reason why some things make some people angry is because people disagree on what counts as hate speech.

So it's not like, given that there is a disagreement in the first place, that's going to preclude us from ever agreeing on who is going to be the arbiter.

of what counts as hate speech or mis and disinformation.

And so that's the reason why the First Amendment has the form that it does when it's talking about speech.

And Russ, I think you're talking about, you hinted at it, it talks about religion too.

I mean, maybe we can talk about that in the second half.

But we should probably start the second half off with, okay, well, given that the First Amendment does protect these things, like,

Do we have evidence that when the state tries to do things, which the First Amendment explicitly prohibits it from doing, that they do a really bad job of it?

And I think we've got a lot of evidence of that.

Yeah.

All right.

That sounds like a good spot for a break.

We'll be back in just a bit.

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All right, so we're back at it.

My question to you would be, do you think we've made any progress maybe post COVID and maybe the reason why this free speech is moving?

Are we chipping away in the right direction as you would see it, or is it still spiraling worse?

I would say we are, and I'd say

for two reasons.

I think

that the

rise of social media really, I think, caught, I mean, listeners know I'm no huge fan of the intelligence agencies, and I tend to think that the corporate press in the US from World War II to 2008, 2010,

had a pretty strong stranglehold on sorry that the intelligence agencies had a pretty strong stranglehold on the corporate press for that 60 year period.

And so I can contrast to the Soviet Union where the government just told you what to think and would directly punish you if you didn't.

In the US we had kind of a softer form of the same kind of information management where you just couldn't

You wouldn't get a platform.

You couldn't get a platform on any of the major networks If you tried to say anything that was really critical of the US security state and then I think in you know 2008 from then onward with the explosion of social media and the ability you know any

random guy to just say whatever they want on the internet and get whatever audience they could get.

Video evidence, audio evidence, everybody's carrying around these devices.

Exactly.

Then I think that the ability of the intelligence agencies to shape

the narrative really just spiraled out of control.

And they saw COVID as a way to kind of try to put the genie back in that bottle.

But that's way more difficult to do with the internet than it was with controlling three

networks

on television.

And so since the government is also staffed by the people who staff it, they didn't do a very good job at it.

And I think that a lot of people realize like, oh, like...

these guys are wrong lying and they're incompetent and so I think they assume that they were better at doing things than they are which is usually the one of the vices of people with like a utility

Authoritarian bent is to think that you can do things that you can't do and to get

over your

skis Which is great because that means that you know they'll prompt a failure And so I think there's a there's a really big backlash and actually think that you've seen the the two parties The Republican and the Democratic Party completely rearrange themselves in the past 10 years based on this fact You know how the Cheneys campaigning for the Democratic ticket, right and you have

Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, who were running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic ticket, each in 2020 and 2024 respectively, they have now shifted.

And so you've seen this entire rearranging.

Whereas 20 years ago, it was the Republicans who were supporting the centralized intelligence state.

That's switched.

And now you have these kind of weird granola hippie Republicans.

And I like it when these kinds of shake-ups occur.

I think they're good and they're necessary.

And they kind of force at least some people out of their pre-programmed, like Manichean, the other side is always bad.

It gets people from different parties together.

you like guns and I like speech or whatever you know so so so I see it as a good news as good

yeah I agree but I would say it's very much in its infancy my my thought is that it's not integral into like the the elected officials so that the next COVID-ish event or crisis that comes along there

still going to be quick to the fix like oh we should do something to fix this we got to help out this rather than saying okay let's step back let people decide for themselves what they think is best for themselves let them know the information i don't think we're quite there from an institutional standpoint we might have the seeds of it there

yeah all those i mean all the same people who screwed it up the first time are saying uh

Not only are they saying, like, we'll get it right next time, they're saying, let's put a plan into place so that we'll guarantee that next time you won't be able to say things against me when I say things.

Right.

So, but what I do think has changed is they've lost the kind of consent of the governed in this, in this facet.

And that's what I think is the most important thing.

And I think

that's beautiful and great and wonderful.

All right.

Well, that looks like a good spot to wrap.

I'm going to spend a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.

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