July 25, 2024 • 25 mins
Randy Barnett, professor of constitutional law, discusses his new book 'A Life for Liberty' and shares life lessons and career insights. He emphasizes the importance of standing up for principles and the challenges of being a contrarian. Barnett also discusses the rewriting of American history and the threats to liberty in America, particularly from left-wing ideologies. He highlights the role of the Constitution and elections in fighting back against these threats. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday & Thursday
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
I saw this viral video while I was on vacation.
Let's play the clip.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Do you know what happens after your funeral? In a
few short hours, the crying will die down and your
family will be busy making arrangements for food or drink.
Some of your relatives will start discussing current events over coffee,
and some people will call your family to tell them
that they can't make it in person because of an emergency.
(00:36):
Your employer will begin to search for your replacement. In
a few days, your children will go back to work
because their bereavement leave has run out. In a month,
your spouse will be watching a comedy on TV and
start to laugh. You'll be forgotten at an astonishing pace.
If people will forget you so easily, then who are
(00:57):
you living your life for? You spend your whole life
worrying about what people will think about you. They don't,
so live your life for you. Remember, life is too
short to be lived for others approval. Embrace your true
self and make your own happiness a priority.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
My family says, I talk about my own death too much,
But let's talk about it some more in the video.
We're supposed to be sad that our family and friends
are moving on, that they'll laugh even on the day
that they're burying you. I think this is the wrong mindset.
You should want your family and friends to move on
when you're gone. You should want them to laugh at
(01:35):
something funny and hopefully remember that you would have laughed
at that too. There's this crazy idea that we're the
center of the universe and that everyone's life has to
stop when we die. I've had Twitter friends die, people
that I knew primarily on the app, but who I
liked a lot. When people find out someone died they
(01:55):
knew online, they're sad. They may post remembrances and stories,
but minutes later they'll be retweeting the latest news and tape.
I love my online friends. They mean something to me,
but this is precisely why you have to live your
life offline. Your Twitter friends will be sad, but very
quickly move on. Your family and friends in real life
(02:18):
should move on too, but they'll carry your memory with
them in a way that your online friends really just can't.
But even still, you don't want your real life family
and friends to stop living the idea that if I die,
I want my family to grieve me NonStop in forever.
I absolutely do not. And the message in that video
(02:40):
that if people aren't tearing at their clothes and wailing
all the time because of your absence means that you
should have lived only for yourself and not for anyone else.
It's crazy. If we do this thing right, we'll be
living our lives for ourselves and for other people. When
I go, I want my kids to not only they
(03:00):
move on, I want them to thrive. I mean, of course,
remember our times together. Miss me, sure, because it would
just be weird if they didn't and I didn't raise sociopath.
But then go out there and live this big, wonderful
life that we get to have. Hopefully my kids will
have their own families, and they'll live both for their
(03:21):
children and for themselves and for their spouse and for
all the people that they love around them. The fact
that people's lives won't stop when you die is a
good thing, and you should use that information to live
a more fulfilling life, not just you know, stick two
middle fingers in the air and say nothing matters. It's
(03:41):
an opportunity to really live a full, healthy life that
you only get so much time here, and yes, not
everyone's going to carry you around with them when you go.
Coming up next and interview with Randy Barnett. Join us
after the break. Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show
(04:02):
on iHeartRadio. My guest today is Randy Barnett, Professor of
Constitutional Law at Georgetown Los Center, where he directs the
Georgetown Center for the Constitution. His new book is called
A Life for Liberty The Making of an American Originalist.
Get it now wherever you buy your books. So nice
to have you on, Randy.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Well, thanks for having me, Carol. I'm looking forward to
this a lot me too.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
So is Life of Liberty and Autobiography.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yes, it is. I started off the idea of writing
it for my grandchildren because I've done so many things
in my life that by the time they're old enough
to understand them, I might not be around to tell
them about it. So I set out to write this
story for them, and that the book is dedicated to them.
But in the course of writing it, I learned a
lot of life lessons, or I took life lessons from
(04:48):
the book that I think would appeal to a larger
audience than just my grandchildren, most particularly younger people who
are looking to make a career for themselves in advancing
ideas that they care about. In my case, it was
justice and liberty and how one can go about doing that,
even if one starts with a background that really is
(05:08):
not all that clued into how you go about doing
these things. I tell the story about what I did right,
but I also tell a lot of stories about what
I did wrong in the course of getting to where
I am today.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So what was the beginning for you? How did you
get on this path?
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Well, I mean, really it starts with my father, who
was an ultimate contrarian. He was a conservative Jew and
who was from the South Side of Chicago, a kind
of a street fighting guy who was in a gang
at some point during his youth, and he was a
tough guy.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
He was.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
My nickname for him when I was little was most Man,
because that's what he was. But he was also a
very principal conservative. I found out late in life that
he'd read Iron Ran earlier on the Fountainhead. I didn't
know that until a long time after that, and I
got my political principles from him. I also got my
(06:06):
the sort of the role model that said, you stand
up for your principles and you don't back down when challenged.
And because he did e or back down, I love that.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
He sounds amazing. That's exactly my kind of person. Rand
Paul referred to you as pioneering contrarianism in the blurb
for your book. What did he mean by that? I
mean he's pretty contrarian.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, well, it's one contrary into another. I mean, that's
that's that's why one of the reasons he likes me,
I think. And I was a senior advisor to his
presidential campaign, so I got to know him a lot
better during that campaign than I did before. My dad
was a contrarian. To give you some idea, you know
that in those days, there were Chevy families. That was
the most popular car. There were Ford families, the next
(06:51):
most popular car. Naturally, we were a Chrysler family because
my dad was an automobile mechanic and he thought Kaisler
had the best power trained in the business, although he
admitted their bodies tended to rust out in the wintertime.
There was McDonald's families because that's the most popular hamburger.
There were Burger King families, not us. We were Prince
Castle family, and I had no idea. There was an
(07:14):
obscure chain in northwest Indiana that I don't know what
happened to it, but he thought those were the best burgers,
so he would go what he thought was best by
his own lights. And that's kind of where I go.
And that took me to being a Jewish kid in
a Polish Catholic town of Caliuit City, where of the
four hundred kids in my high school graduating class, there
(07:36):
were four Jews. So I was kind of the Jewish outcast,
or not outcast. I was very successful actually socially, but
I felt like an outcast sometimes I was the Jewish
kid in the Catholic town. But then I was the
conservative kid amongst the Jews in northwest Indiana. In my synagogue,
which was across the state line, I was literally from
the wrong side of the state line as far as
(07:57):
they were concerned. But I was this conservative kid with
all these liberal Jews, and so I had to stand
up for myself there as well. So I never really
fit one hundred percent into any social group. And Murray Rothbard,
this famous libertarian, once told me that he thought that
was one of the causes of people becoming intellectuals because
(08:18):
they never fit completely within their group. They could kind
of see the group in an objective way as an
outsider that people within the group could never see. And
maybe that was part of the reason I became an intellectual, right.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah, when you have to defend your opinions, I think
that that goes a long way towards making you an
intellectual and really having to get into why you believe
what you believe. I think a lot of people think
contrarians just kind of disagree for the sake of it.
But I think a lot of the time, it's, like
you said, you end up being the only one and
it's you against the mob. It's you against the crowd,
(08:53):
and you need to kind of represent what you believe
and do it well.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Yeah, near the end of his life, I told my
dad that I thought he was a contrarian. He took
it kind of as an insult because it was sort
of like, he's just a contrary guy. But he wasn't
really a contrary guy. I'm not a contrary guy. I'm
kind of a hat a glass half full guy, kind
of a happy warrior guy. It's just that I'm prepared
to look elsewhere for answers than what the mainstream is
(09:18):
offering at any given time. And when I am in
the mainstream and it happens every once in a while,
it makes me feel a little uncomfortable, Like, what's wrong?
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Really?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Yeah, I mean, like, well, you know, I'm going with
the flow here, but I wonder if I should.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Be right the question of like I usually find all
these people to be wrong, Am I wrong this time
for being on the same side of them?
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I get that.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So a question that I ask all of my guests,
and I'd love to hear your answer, is what do
you think is our largest cultural problem?
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Well, I think we are in a culture war, and
I think our largest cultural problem is the rewriting of
American history to make America and the West, but in
the United States in particular, the bad guys in the history,
in the story of the world, when in fact we
are the good guys. Now, being the good guy doesn't
(10:09):
mean you are perfect. Some of the best heroes in
film played by John Wayne have flaws, and we have
our flaws. But every people has their flaws, every society
has their flaws, and our flaws are better than others,
and our virtues are way better. And so I think
the biggest problem we face is a concerted effort to
(10:31):
undercut the American culture and not teach it and not
transmit it to the future generations of young people. And
we can only hope that social media and alternate sources
of information will do an end run around in some
respects the establishment's desire to brainwash Americans into thinking America
(10:51):
is the bad guy and not the good guy.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
So you do think it's solvable. You think you're an optimist,
You think that we could turn this around.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
I think optimism is a little too strong. I don't
really know, but I'm hopeful, and I certainly don't think
the battle is lost. In fact, one way to look
at this is the battle for liberty is never one
because there are always going to be significant opponents of liberty.
The battle for liberty can only be lost. You can
(11:20):
lose it, completely lose it. But as long as you
haven't completely lost it, you're doing okay. You know you're
in the game, and you can never completely win it.
So it's always going to be a struggle to preserve
liberty no matter what the situation is.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Where do you see the threats to liberty in America
right now.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Well, right now, I see it from essentially left wing
or wokeism that has infected one of the two major
political parties. When when you grow up, when I grew up,
there were liberals and they were conservatives. Now I have
to say, as I talk about in my book, at
the age of twelve years old, I debated on being
half of Barry Goldwater in front of my entire ye junior,
(12:03):
high school and grade school student body. So even at
twelve years old, my twelve year in my twelve year
old heart, I thought he was right, but I was
debating against liberals. In fact, one of my mentors that
I talk about in the book, my band director Mike Landis,
who had a big influence on me after my dad.
He was my next mentor. He was on the left
(12:23):
or he was a liberal. So instead of my dad
arguing with me from the right, I had Mike Landis
arguing with me from liberals. But he was a liberal,
he was not a leftist. And what's happened is leftism,
cultural Marxism, whatever you want to call it, is displacing
liberalism as sort of the animating political force of the
Democratic Party, and that is a big problem in a
(12:45):
two party system, and so that that is really one
of our biggest threats, if not the underlying cultural problem
that I believe is a real challenge.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So I completely agree. I just think that I get
asked a lot, well, how are they challenging, like, how
are they actually challenging liberty? They're not making laws to
limit liberty, are they? And I get that argument a lot,
But are are they passing laws to limit liberty? Do
you see that happening?
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Well, I mean, right now, what we're seeing is with
respect to Jewish people, we're seeing street violence being committed
against Jewish people, including you know, but primarily in cities
that are controlled by democratic politicians. And I'm Jewish, as
I mentioned earlier, and believe in fighting back. It's one
(13:38):
of the reasons why my dad instilled in me a
belief in the importance of the right to keep and
bear arms, that Jews should never go passively or quietly
into the night. Again, that that was one of the
lessons of the Holocaust, was that we should be armed.
And I and he taught me how to use weapons
at a young age, and I you know, I'm armed today.
I have a CCW permit. I had originally one in
(14:00):
now my permits in Florida because I don't live in
DC anymore. So I do think that we have a
real threat to Jewish existence here in this country. But
it's coming, I think, from an organized group of Islamo
fascist actors that are being organized and subsidized by foreign governments.
(14:22):
We have a and here is where the domination of
the Democratic Party gets in the way. What we have
is a Democrat administration and a Department of Justice that
will not do the job it was devised to do,
which is to protect the people from terrorism. The DOJ
was founded during the Grant administration to protect the American people,
(14:43):
to protect free blacks and Republicans in the South from
organized terrorist violence. That's why we have a Department of
There was an Attorney General, but we didn't have a
Department of Justice until we had this problem. And right
now the Department of Justice is not doing the job
it needs to be doing to ferret out the sources
of this obviously organized campaign against the sactity of Jews,
(15:05):
which is not actually about Jewish people. It's really about
America and the American way of life. This is part
of jihadi cause. To underline the West, it's happening in Europe,
it's happening here. We are not immune. As the point
and where the Democratic Party is falling down is in
not standing up because they have been so undermined from
within by their left wing contingent that they are not
(15:27):
able to stand up to what is a genuine threat
to them as well as to us.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitz Show. So does the constitution
provide a way to fight back?
Speaker 3 (15:42):
Yes, it does, and it's called elections. And when the
left has essentially taken over or undermined almost all of
our major institutions, there is one avenue left and that
is political power. We just saw that in the New
York congressional race. One of the members of the Hamas
party was defeated by a Democrat. So Democrats won. Hamas
(16:06):
lost in that race because that Jews got organized and
voted in en mass to get that of a result,
having previously voted for the incumbent in the last election
over a Jewish person who was holding that seat to
begin with. So we're seeing democracy use that. We see it.
Federalism is one of the most important ways we have
(16:28):
that the Constitution has given us to fight back. I
am now a citizen or resident of the state of Florida,
although I am sitting here right now in the Central Virginia,
but I'm a resident of the state of Florida, and
I moved there from DC because I like the form
of government they had there better than the form of
government we had in the d C. And that's because
of federalism. And so we have enclaves within this country
(16:50):
that from which we can provide a base in which
we can fight back against this And if we didn't
have a federalist system, there wouldn't be those enclaves. So
that's a very important thing that the Constitution has preserved,
notwithstanding all the checks and balances that have been overridden
by Supreme Court rulings over the years.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
So I tend to ask my guests, what would you
be doing if you weren't doing this? But I kind
of can't see you doing anything but defending liberty. Would
you have a plan?
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Be Well, in twenty sixteen, when I thought that Hillary
was going to win and Trump was going to lose,
and therefore I thought the Scalia seat was going to
be filled by the Democrat, by Hillary, and it probably
wasn't going to be Merrick Arland, it would be somebody else.
I thought it was really going to be game over
for the Constitution in this country, and it wasn't going
(17:39):
to be in my interest anymore, given how old I
am to continue to fight for the original meaning of
the Constitution, which is something that I've been fighting for
for the last thirty years, as evident as I discussed
in my book. So what my plan was to go
back to teaching contract law, which is what I taught
before I taught constitutional law, and then retire and enjoy
(17:59):
the remaining years of my life. So I think maybe
I would have sort of given up the fight at
least for the Constitution. But then lo and behold, Trump won,
and we knew, yeah, we did lose the Supreme Court,
and we got a lot of great judges appointed to
the Court of Appeals, and so it was a huge victory.
And that victory was made possible not only by Trump winning,
(18:22):
but by the fact that for twenty or thirty years,
the originalism movement within JIC within legal conservatism has triumphed,
has has developed. I've been part of the parcel of
developing the theory of originalism, and that coupled with the
mandate that Trump used to get himself the nomination, which
is by pledging to appoint originalist judges and then having
(18:45):
a White House counsel don again fulfill that promise. That's
how we got to winning. And so I didn't I
didn't have to go to my plan.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
B Yeah, that's great. I mean it's funny that I
don't feel like there's enough credit given to the fact
that there was a plan and that plan was implemented.
Did It wasn't just like kind of loose ideals in
the air. It was like, this is how it's going
to go, This is how, you know, how how we're
going to get our ideas through. And Trump was such
a huge player in that. It could have if it
(19:13):
wasn't Donald Trump. You know, do you think a different
Republican would have gone along with it? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Well, I was a campaign advisor to Rand Paul and
he was one of the first candidates to take off
after Trump, although he worked with Trump very well when
Trump was president, and I would have preferred rand As
as my candidate, and I think he would have done
all the right things, especially with respect to the Constitution,
which he cares very very much about. And I talk
a lot about rand in my role in his campaign
(19:39):
in the book, as well as him inviting me in
to interview Justice Kavanaugh and interview Justice Barrett while he
was they were doing their rounds of Senate interviews. He helped.
He invited me in to participate in their interviews. I
talk about that in the book as well. So I
do think other Republicans would have done okay, and I
actually think they would. They would have been pretty They
would have had a good chance of defeating the most
one of the most unpopular Democratic nominees in our history.
(20:03):
But there's no telling whether they would have broken through
in Pennsylvania the way Trump did. It's hard to know.
We may have come out ahead. But I can really
understand in hindsight why the voters Republican voters picked Trump,
which is they thought they were tired of being lied to.
They were tired of people telling them a conservatives singing
conservative song and then after election not doing anything about it.
And they thought Trump was independent enough and maybe even
(20:25):
crazy enough to do what he promised. And it turns
out that in some respects he did do what he promised.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Right, Can you see yourself working in politics some more
in the future.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
No, I think that was kind of a one off deal.
Although I was interested in helping Governor Desanis in his
campaign had he gotten the nomination, I would have done
everything I could to help him out. He didn't invite
me into his campaign the way Ran did, But I
really he was the guy I thought combined both substance
and courage and guts and tactics. But you know, it
(20:59):
wasn't his year, and we have to make the best
of the situation, and I don't think the I think
the choice that we now face is pretty clear cut.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, I agree, But you know, we get to have
him as our governor, both of us being Floridians. I
think that's you know, there is a big plus for us,
a big upside to that because without him, those Republican
legislators are going to go back to being regular Republicans again. Right,
we can't really tell what's going to happen after him.
I hope he's laying down the foundation enough to keep
his style going after he's out.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
But you know, I do believe in the so called
great Man theory of history. That is, it matters who
the individuals are, and I think he's a special guy,
and the existence of leadership makes a big difference. I mean,
it would be nice. I think if we had a
president of the United States. Currently, our system sort of
presupposes we have a president, but the current guy who
(21:48):
holds the office is obviously not in a position to
call all the shots. We don't really know who is
and so even bad leadership is better than no leadership
at all. And that's kind of what the situation is
right now.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Right Do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 3 (22:02):
I think I've exceeded any reasonable expectations I had for myself,
which was actually not this high. I mean, I'm yes.
The answer is I have done a lot more than
I ever dreamed I would. I never had a bucket list,
but if I have had at I have a retroactive
bucket list. After I do something, I think, oh wow,
that should be on a bucket list. Like I've been
(22:22):
a criminal prosecutor. I've been a criminal prosecutor of argued
juries in criminal cases in Chicago. I've argued in the
Supreme Court of the United States. I've played a prosecutor
in a science fiction movie called An Alienable which you
can watch on YouTube that's available for free streaming. And
I've had an impact in my writings on the direction
of constitutional law in this country. If you told me
(22:44):
when I was a law student in the nineteen seventies
and I was getting turned off of constitutional law by
reading all these Supreme Court cases that forty years later
we would have a Supreme Court now who are committed
to the original meeting of the Constitution, even though they
disagree with each other about a lot. I would have
told you you were on something, and I would know
what you were smoking. We've made more progress between that
(23:05):
day and this day than I ever could have imagined.
But nevertheless, the situation in other respects, you know, is
not going so well.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
It's funny because you say you're not an optimist, but
this has been a very optimistic conversation. I feel good,
you know after talking to you.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Well, I'm a glass half full guy, which as a
opposed to half empty guy. That doesn't make you an
optimist about the future, but it does make you focus
on the blessings of the present, such as they are.
And I think we have a lot to be grateful for.
And we have a country that's worth fighting for, and
we have the means at our disposal to fight and elections,
as I say, is one of the very most important
(23:43):
ways in which we can start to push back. We
can continue to push back against the world culture that
is undermining American ideals. There is a lot of pushback
now to wokism that previous was just infecting academia where
I live. It's gone out, it's metastasized, it's in the culture.
It's got the Walt disneyfication of the entire culture. But
(24:07):
there's a tremendous amount of pushback now and that's very hopeful.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
I like that a lot, and I'm going to be
hopeful after this conversation. So I love talking to you, Randy.
You're such an interesting person. You're one of my favorite
people to follow on Twitter. And here with your best
tip for my listeners on how they could be happy warriors,
how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Live your life as though you're going to write a memoir,
because what will that be. That'll mean everything you do
are going to be things that you're going to one
day be proud to have done. So live your life.
I mean, this is what I learned from writing a memoir.
I have to admit my memoir talks a lot about
the mistakes I made along the way. Live your life
so that you can write a memoir about all the
(24:51):
right choices that you made, and I think that would
be a good guide to making choices for your future. Also,
develop mentors. I was helped along. I didn't do everything
by myself. I had key mentors along the way. And
then thank your mentors while you still can't before they
pass from the scene.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
I like that advice a lot. He is Randy Barnett.
His book is A Life for Liberty, The Making of
an American Originalist. Thank you so much for being.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
On, Randy, Thanks for having me, Carol.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
I saw this viral video while I was on vacation.
Let's play the clip.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Do you know what happens after your funeral? In a
few short hours, the crying will die down and your
family will be busy making arrangements for food or drink.
Some of your relatives will start discussing current events over coffee,
and some people will call your family to tell them
that they can't make it in person because of an emergency.
(00:36):
Your employer will begin to search for your replacement. In
a few days, your children will go back to work
because their bereavement leave has run out. In a month,
your spouse will be watching a comedy on TV and
start to laugh. You'll be forgotten at an astonishing pace.
If people will forget you so easily, then who are
(00:57):
you living your life for? You spend your whole life
worrying about what people will think about you. They don't,
so live your life for you. Remember, life is too
short to be lived for others approval. Embrace your true
self and make your own happiness a priority.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
My family says, I talk about my own death too much,
But let's talk about it some more in the video.
We're supposed to be sad that our family and friends
are moving on, that they'll laugh even on the day
that they're burying you. I think this is the wrong mindset.
You should want your family and friends to move on
when you're gone. You should want them to laugh at
(01:35):
something funny and hopefully remember that you would have laughed
at that too. There's this crazy idea that we're the
center of the universe and that everyone's life has to
stop when we die. I've had Twitter friends die, people
that I knew primarily on the app, but who I
liked a lot. When people find out someone died they
(01:55):
knew online, they're sad. They may post remembrances and stories,
but minutes later they'll be retweeting the latest news and tape.
I love my online friends. They mean something to me,
but this is precisely why you have to live your
life offline. Your Twitter friends will be sad, but very
quickly move on. Your family and friends in real life
(02:18):
should move on too, but they'll carry your memory with
them in a way that your online friends really just can't.
But even still, you don't want your real life family
and friends to stop living the idea that if I die,
I want my family to grieve me NonStop in forever.
I absolutely do not. And the message in that video
(02:40):
that if people aren't tearing at their clothes and wailing
all the time because of your absence means that you
should have lived only for yourself and not for anyone else.
It's crazy. If we do this thing right, we'll be
living our lives for ourselves and for other people. When
I go, I want my kids to not only they
(03:00):
move on, I want them to thrive. I mean, of course,
remember our times together. Miss me, sure, because it would
just be weird if they didn't and I didn't raise sociopath.
But then go out there and live this big, wonderful
life that we get to have. Hopefully my kids will
have their own families, and they'll live both for their
(03:21):
children and for themselves and for their spouse and for
all the people that they love around them. The fact
that people's lives won't stop when you die is a
good thing, and you should use that information to live
a more fulfilling life, not just you know, stick two
middle fingers in the air and say nothing matters. It's
(03:41):
an opportunity to really live a full, healthy life that
you only get so much time here, and yes, not
everyone's going to carry you around with them when you go.
Coming up next and interview with Randy Barnett. Join us
after the break. Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show
(04:02):
on iHeartRadio. My guest today is Randy Barnett, Professor of
Constitutional Law at Georgetown Los Center, where he directs the
Georgetown Center for the Constitution. His new book is called
A Life for Liberty The Making of an American Originalist.
Get it now wherever you buy your books. So nice
to have you on, Randy.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Well, thanks for having me, Carol. I'm looking forward to
this a lot me too.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
So is Life of Liberty and Autobiography.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yes, it is. I started off the idea of writing
it for my grandchildren because I've done so many things
in my life that by the time they're old enough
to understand them, I might not be around to tell
them about it. So I set out to write this
story for them, and that the book is dedicated to them.
But in the course of writing it, I learned a
lot of life lessons, or I took life lessons from
(04:48):
the book that I think would appeal to a larger
audience than just my grandchildren, most particularly younger people who
are looking to make a career for themselves in advancing
ideas that they care about. In my case, it was
justice and liberty and how one can go about doing that,
even if one starts with a background that really is
(05:08):
not all that clued into how you go about doing
these things. I tell the story about what I did right,
but I also tell a lot of stories about what
I did wrong in the course of getting to where
I am today.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So what was the beginning for you? How did you
get on this path?
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Well, I mean, really it starts with my father, who
was an ultimate contrarian. He was a conservative Jew and
who was from the South Side of Chicago, a kind
of a street fighting guy who was in a gang
at some point during his youth, and he was a
tough guy.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
He was.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
My nickname for him when I was little was most Man,
because that's what he was. But he was also a
very principal conservative. I found out late in life that
he'd read Iron Ran earlier on the Fountainhead. I didn't
know that until a long time after that, and I
got my political principles from him. I also got my
(06:06):
the sort of the role model that said, you stand
up for your principles and you don't back down when challenged.
And because he did e or back down, I love that.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
He sounds amazing. That's exactly my kind of person. Rand
Paul referred to you as pioneering contrarianism in the blurb
for your book. What did he mean by that? I
mean he's pretty contrarian.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, well, it's one contrary into another. I mean, that's
that's that's why one of the reasons he likes me,
I think. And I was a senior advisor to his
presidential campaign, so I got to know him a lot
better during that campaign than I did before. My dad
was a contrarian. To give you some idea, you know
that in those days, there were Chevy families. That was
the most popular car. There were Ford families, the next
(06:51):
most popular car. Naturally, we were a Chrysler family because
my dad was an automobile mechanic and he thought Kaisler
had the best power trained in the business, although he
admitted their bodies tended to rust out in the wintertime.
There was McDonald's families because that's the most popular hamburger.
There were Burger King families, not us. We were Prince
Castle family, and I had no idea. There was an
(07:14):
obscure chain in northwest Indiana that I don't know what
happened to it, but he thought those were the best burgers,
so he would go what he thought was best by
his own lights. And that's kind of where I go.
And that took me to being a Jewish kid in
a Polish Catholic town of Caliuit City, where of the
four hundred kids in my high school graduating class, there
(07:36):
were four Jews. So I was kind of the Jewish outcast,
or not outcast. I was very successful actually socially, but
I felt like an outcast sometimes I was the Jewish
kid in the Catholic town. But then I was the
conservative kid amongst the Jews in northwest Indiana. In my synagogue,
which was across the state line, I was literally from
the wrong side of the state line as far as
(07:57):
they were concerned. But I was this conservative kid with
all these liberal Jews, and so I had to stand
up for myself there as well. So I never really
fit one hundred percent into any social group. And Murray Rothbard,
this famous libertarian, once told me that he thought that
was one of the causes of people becoming intellectuals because
(08:18):
they never fit completely within their group. They could kind
of see the group in an objective way as an
outsider that people within the group could never see. And
maybe that was part of the reason I became an intellectual, right.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah, when you have to defend your opinions, I think
that that goes a long way towards making you an
intellectual and really having to get into why you believe
what you believe. I think a lot of people think
contrarians just kind of disagree for the sake of it.
But I think a lot of the time, it's, like
you said, you end up being the only one and
it's you against the mob. It's you against the crowd,
(08:53):
and you need to kind of represent what you believe
and do it well.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Yeah, near the end of his life, I told my
dad that I thought he was a contrarian. He took
it kind of as an insult because it was sort
of like, he's just a contrary guy. But he wasn't
really a contrary guy. I'm not a contrary guy. I'm
kind of a hat a glass half full guy, kind
of a happy warrior guy. It's just that I'm prepared
to look elsewhere for answers than what the mainstream is
(09:18):
offering at any given time. And when I am in
the mainstream and it happens every once in a while,
it makes me feel a little uncomfortable, Like, what's wrong?
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Really?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Yeah, I mean, like, well, you know, I'm going with
the flow here, but I wonder if I should.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Be right the question of like I usually find all
these people to be wrong, Am I wrong this time
for being on the same side of them?
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I get that.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So a question that I ask all of my guests,
and I'd love to hear your answer, is what do
you think is our largest cultural problem?
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Well, I think we are in a culture war, and
I think our largest cultural problem is the rewriting of
American history to make America and the West, but in
the United States in particular, the bad guys in the history,
in the story of the world, when in fact we
are the good guys. Now, being the good guy doesn't
(10:09):
mean you are perfect. Some of the best heroes in
film played by John Wayne have flaws, and we have
our flaws. But every people has their flaws, every society
has their flaws, and our flaws are better than others,
and our virtues are way better. And so I think
the biggest problem we face is a concerted effort to
(10:31):
undercut the American culture and not teach it and not
transmit it to the future generations of young people. And
we can only hope that social media and alternate sources
of information will do an end run around in some
respects the establishment's desire to brainwash Americans into thinking America
(10:51):
is the bad guy and not the good guy.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
So you do think it's solvable. You think you're an optimist,
You think that we could turn this around.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
I think optimism is a little too strong. I don't
really know, but I'm hopeful, and I certainly don't think
the battle is lost. In fact, one way to look
at this is the battle for liberty is never one
because there are always going to be significant opponents of liberty.
The battle for liberty can only be lost. You can
(11:20):
lose it, completely lose it. But as long as you
haven't completely lost it, you're doing okay. You know you're
in the game, and you can never completely win it.
So it's always going to be a struggle to preserve
liberty no matter what the situation is.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Where do you see the threats to liberty in America
right now.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Well, right now, I see it from essentially left wing
or wokeism that has infected one of the two major
political parties. When when you grow up, when I grew up,
there were liberals and they were conservatives. Now I have
to say, as I talk about in my book, at
the age of twelve years old, I debated on being
half of Barry Goldwater in front of my entire ye junior,
(12:03):
high school and grade school student body. So even at
twelve years old, my twelve year in my twelve year
old heart, I thought he was right, but I was
debating against liberals. In fact, one of my mentors that
I talk about in the book, my band director Mike Landis,
who had a big influence on me after my dad.
He was my next mentor. He was on the left
(12:23):
or he was a liberal. So instead of my dad
arguing with me from the right, I had Mike Landis
arguing with me from liberals. But he was a liberal,
he was not a leftist. And what's happened is leftism,
cultural Marxism, whatever you want to call it, is displacing
liberalism as sort of the animating political force of the
Democratic Party, and that is a big problem in a
(12:45):
two party system, and so that that is really one
of our biggest threats, if not the underlying cultural problem
that I believe is a real challenge.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So I completely agree. I just think that I get
asked a lot, well, how are they challenging, like, how
are they actually challenging liberty? They're not making laws to
limit liberty, are they? And I get that argument a lot,
But are are they passing laws to limit liberty? Do
you see that happening?
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Well, I mean, right now, what we're seeing is with
respect to Jewish people, we're seeing street violence being committed
against Jewish people, including you know, but primarily in cities
that are controlled by democratic politicians. And I'm Jewish, as
I mentioned earlier, and believe in fighting back. It's one
(13:38):
of the reasons why my dad instilled in me a
belief in the importance of the right to keep and
bear arms, that Jews should never go passively or quietly
into the night. Again, that that was one of the
lessons of the Holocaust, was that we should be armed.
And I and he taught me how to use weapons
at a young age, and I you know, I'm armed today.
I have a CCW permit. I had originally one in
(14:00):
now my permits in Florida because I don't live in
DC anymore. So I do think that we have a
real threat to Jewish existence here in this country. But
it's coming, I think, from an organized group of Islamo
fascist actors that are being organized and subsidized by foreign governments.
(14:22):
We have a and here is where the domination of
the Democratic Party gets in the way. What we have
is a Democrat administration and a Department of Justice that
will not do the job it was devised to do,
which is to protect the people from terrorism. The DOJ
was founded during the Grant administration to protect the American people,
(14:43):
to protect free blacks and Republicans in the South from
organized terrorist violence. That's why we have a Department of
There was an Attorney General, but we didn't have a
Department of Justice until we had this problem. And right
now the Department of Justice is not doing the job
it needs to be doing to ferret out the sources
of this obviously organized campaign against the sactity of Jews,
(15:05):
which is not actually about Jewish people. It's really about
America and the American way of life. This is part
of jihadi cause. To underline the West, it's happening in Europe,
it's happening here. We are not immune. As the point
and where the Democratic Party is falling down is in
not standing up because they have been so undermined from
within by their left wing contingent that they are not
(15:27):
able to stand up to what is a genuine threat
to them as well as to us.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitz Show. So does the constitution
provide a way to fight back?
Speaker 3 (15:42):
Yes, it does, and it's called elections. And when the
left has essentially taken over or undermined almost all of
our major institutions, there is one avenue left and that
is political power. We just saw that in the New
York congressional race. One of the members of the Hamas
party was defeated by a Democrat. So Democrats won. Hamas
(16:06):
lost in that race because that Jews got organized and
voted in en mass to get that of a result,
having previously voted for the incumbent in the last election
over a Jewish person who was holding that seat to
begin with. So we're seeing democracy use that. We see it.
Federalism is one of the most important ways we have
(16:28):
that the Constitution has given us to fight back. I
am now a citizen or resident of the state of Florida,
although I am sitting here right now in the Central Virginia,
but I'm a resident of the state of Florida, and
I moved there from DC because I like the form
of government they had there better than the form of
government we had in the d C. And that's because
of federalism. And so we have enclaves within this country
(16:50):
that from which we can provide a base in which
we can fight back against this And if we didn't
have a federalist system, there wouldn't be those enclaves. So
that's a very important thing that the Constitution has preserved,
notwithstanding all the checks and balances that have been overridden
by Supreme Court rulings over the years.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
So I tend to ask my guests, what would you
be doing if you weren't doing this? But I kind
of can't see you doing anything but defending liberty. Would
you have a plan?
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Be Well, in twenty sixteen, when I thought that Hillary
was going to win and Trump was going to lose,
and therefore I thought the Scalia seat was going to
be filled by the Democrat, by Hillary, and it probably
wasn't going to be Merrick Arland, it would be somebody else.
I thought it was really going to be game over
for the Constitution in this country, and it wasn't going
(17:39):
to be in my interest anymore, given how old I
am to continue to fight for the original meaning of
the Constitution, which is something that I've been fighting for
for the last thirty years, as evident as I discussed
in my book. So what my plan was to go
back to teaching contract law, which is what I taught
before I taught constitutional law, and then retire and enjoy
(17:59):
the remaining years of my life. So I think maybe
I would have sort of given up the fight at
least for the Constitution. But then lo and behold, Trump won,
and we knew, yeah, we did lose the Supreme Court,
and we got a lot of great judges appointed to
the Court of Appeals, and so it was a huge victory.
And that victory was made possible not only by Trump winning,
(18:22):
but by the fact that for twenty or thirty years,
the originalism movement within JIC within legal conservatism has triumphed,
has has developed. I've been part of the parcel of
developing the theory of originalism, and that coupled with the
mandate that Trump used to get himself the nomination, which
is by pledging to appoint originalist judges and then having
(18:45):
a White House counsel don again fulfill that promise. That's
how we got to winning. And so I didn't I
didn't have to go to my plan.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
B Yeah, that's great. I mean it's funny that I
don't feel like there's enough credit given to the fact
that there was a plan and that plan was implemented.
Did It wasn't just like kind of loose ideals in
the air. It was like, this is how it's going
to go, This is how, you know, how how we're
going to get our ideas through. And Trump was such
a huge player in that. It could have if it
(19:13):
wasn't Donald Trump. You know, do you think a different
Republican would have gone along with it? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Well, I was a campaign advisor to Rand Paul and
he was one of the first candidates to take off
after Trump, although he worked with Trump very well when
Trump was president, and I would have preferred rand As
as my candidate, and I think he would have done
all the right things, especially with respect to the Constitution,
which he cares very very much about. And I talk
a lot about rand in my role in his campaign
(19:39):
in the book, as well as him inviting me in
to interview Justice Kavanaugh and interview Justice Barrett while he
was they were doing their rounds of Senate interviews. He helped.
He invited me in to participate in their interviews. I
talk about that in the book as well. So I
do think other Republicans would have done okay, and I
actually think they would. They would have been pretty They
would have had a good chance of defeating the most
one of the most unpopular Democratic nominees in our history.
(20:03):
But there's no telling whether they would have broken through
in Pennsylvania the way Trump did. It's hard to know.
We may have come out ahead. But I can really
understand in hindsight why the voters Republican voters picked Trump,
which is they thought they were tired of being lied to.
They were tired of people telling them a conservatives singing
conservative song and then after election not doing anything about it.
And they thought Trump was independent enough and maybe even
(20:25):
crazy enough to do what he promised. And it turns
out that in some respects he did do what he promised.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Right, Can you see yourself working in politics some more
in the future.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
No, I think that was kind of a one off deal.
Although I was interested in helping Governor Desanis in his
campaign had he gotten the nomination, I would have done
everything I could to help him out. He didn't invite
me into his campaign the way Ran did, But I
really he was the guy I thought combined both substance
and courage and guts and tactics. But you know, it
(20:59):
wasn't his year, and we have to make the best
of the situation, and I don't think the I think
the choice that we now face is pretty clear cut.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, I agree, But you know, we get to have
him as our governor, both of us being Floridians. I
think that's you know, there is a big plus for us,
a big upside to that because without him, those Republican
legislators are going to go back to being regular Republicans again. Right,
we can't really tell what's going to happen after him.
I hope he's laying down the foundation enough to keep
his style going after he's out.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
But you know, I do believe in the so called
great Man theory of history. That is, it matters who
the individuals are, and I think he's a special guy,
and the existence of leadership makes a big difference. I mean,
it would be nice. I think if we had a
president of the United States. Currently, our system sort of
presupposes we have a president, but the current guy who
(21:48):
holds the office is obviously not in a position to
call all the shots. We don't really know who is
and so even bad leadership is better than no leadership
at all. And that's kind of what the situation is
right now.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Right Do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 3 (22:02):
I think I've exceeded any reasonable expectations I had for myself,
which was actually not this high. I mean, I'm yes.
The answer is I have done a lot more than
I ever dreamed I would. I never had a bucket list,
but if I have had at I have a retroactive
bucket list. After I do something, I think, oh wow,
that should be on a bucket list. Like I've been
(22:22):
a criminal prosecutor. I've been a criminal prosecutor of argued
juries in criminal cases in Chicago. I've argued in the
Supreme Court of the United States. I've played a prosecutor
in a science fiction movie called An Alienable which you
can watch on YouTube that's available for free streaming. And
I've had an impact in my writings on the direction
of constitutional law in this country. If you told me
(22:44):
when I was a law student in the nineteen seventies
and I was getting turned off of constitutional law by
reading all these Supreme Court cases that forty years later
we would have a Supreme Court now who are committed
to the original meeting of the Constitution, even though they
disagree with each other about a lot. I would have
told you you were on something, and I would know
what you were smoking. We've made more progress between that
(23:05):
day and this day than I ever could have imagined.
But nevertheless, the situation in other respects, you know, is
not going so well.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
It's funny because you say you're not an optimist, but
this has been a very optimistic conversation. I feel good,
you know after talking to you.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Well, I'm a glass half full guy, which as a
opposed to half empty guy. That doesn't make you an
optimist about the future, but it does make you focus
on the blessings of the present, such as they are.
And I think we have a lot to be grateful for.
And we have a country that's worth fighting for, and
we have the means at our disposal to fight and elections,
as I say, is one of the very most important
(23:43):
ways in which we can start to push back. We
can continue to push back against the world culture that
is undermining American ideals. There is a lot of pushback
now to wokism that previous was just infecting academia where
I live. It's gone out, it's metastasized, it's in the culture.
It's got the Walt disneyfication of the entire culture. But
(24:07):
there's a tremendous amount of pushback now and that's very hopeful.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
I like that a lot, and I'm going to be
hopeful after this conversation. So I love talking to you, Randy.
You're such an interesting person. You're one of my favorite
people to follow on Twitter. And here with your best
tip for my listeners on how they could be happy warriors,
how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Live your life as though you're going to write a memoir,
because what will that be. That'll mean everything you do
are going to be things that you're going to one
day be proud to have done. So live your life.
I mean, this is what I learned from writing a memoir.
I have to admit my memoir talks a lot about
the mistakes I made along the way. Live your life
so that you can write a memoir about all the
(24:51):
right choices that you made, and I think that would
be a good guide to making choices for your future. Also,
develop mentors. I was helped along. I didn't do everything
by myself. I had key mentors along the way. And
then thank your mentors while you still can't before they
pass from the scene.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
I like that advice a lot. He is Randy Barnett.
His book is A Life for Liberty, The Making of
an American Originalist. Thank you so much for being.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
On, Randy, Thanks for having me, Carol.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Karol Markowicz
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