November 30, 2023 • 15 mins
Timothy Sandefur joined Armstrong & Getty to talk about administrative hearings and international issues including the war with Hamas.
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Please welcome to the Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
The Fabulous Tim Sanderfer, Tim Lawyer, vice president for Litigation
with the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Tim, how are you, sir?
Speaker 3 (00:09):
I'm great? How are you guys?
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Excellent?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I felt a little jiv and pretentious the other day
I texted Tim about coming on the show, and I
just said, Hey, would you like to come chat about
sec versus A v.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Jercasy? And I'm not an attorney.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I don't throw around cases without a description of what
they were. I just hope you didn't think I was
trying to come off as too big for my britches.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Well, okay, I'll be honest. I immediately ran for Scotus
blog to figure out what the heck you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
That's fine, that's perfect. No.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
I mean, I'm glad that you guys are paying attention
to this case and to similar cases, because this is
one of a group of cases that's going to be
addressing the limits of the so called administrative state, of
these regulatory agencies that exercise power to write the law
in the gate a leged infractions of the law and
(01:03):
then hold hearings to determine whether you violated the rule.
And the combining executive, judicial, and legislative powers all in one.
And then it's entirely overseen by bureaucrats instead of elected representatives.
So you even the idea that you can somehow vote
the bums out or something is inapplicable. And that's an
issue that is of increasing importance. And that's what's that
(01:25):
issue with this case and in these other cases.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
What really grabbed me about the case was the Wall
Street Journals headline in their opinion section, the Supreme Court
considers the right to trial by jury.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
That's a legit headline.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Yeah, that's exactly what's going on. So what happens here
is so everybody knows that if you're accused of fraud,
which is a crime, and the government charges you with
that crime, you get a trial where you get a
jury of your peers to determine whether you're guilty or
not guilty. But instead, what happened here was that this bureaucracy,
this agency, the SEC, they promulgated this rule that says, well,
(02:02):
you're not allowed to trade dishonestly by misleading people. And
what they're doing is rephrasing the ordinary rule of fraud.
But they're rephrasing it in bureaucrats speak. And then they say,
and because this is a bureaucratic thing, this is an
administrative thing, we don't have to follow the rules that
apply in courts. We can just use our administrative process.
(02:24):
And that's what they were arguing in the Supreme Court.
They were saying, well, it's basically up to us to
choose whether to go to an ordinary court and give
you a trial by jury, or whether to proceed in
our administrative court, which is overseen by a judge who
is being paid by the prosecutor. Honestly, in these agencies, right,
so you're not going to win there, and you don't
get a jury trial, and it's up to us, the
(02:45):
government to decide whether or not to let you have
this jury because we've decided to rephrase this as an
administrative thing.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
Go ahead, Jack, Sorry, I was going to say, I
feel like at some point in this conversation maybe you
should redo your famous to me, no bad things speecious
so everybody fully understands how this whole agency thing works.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
All right, let me let.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Me interject a question real quickly, and then we'll it's
a Christmas tradition, but getting back to the idea that
the government has decided whether I get a jury trial
or just this administrative hearing. What are my rights? How
do my rights as a defendant differ? Is that even
the right word? What are the rules of evidence? I mean,
(03:29):
what's the story with these hearings?
Speaker 3 (03:31):
These hearings follow something similar. It looks very much like
an ordinary trial. But that is not always the case,
and particularly at the state level, because you know, we
always talk at these federal bureaucracies and forget that states
have their own bureaucraphies. Also in state bureaucracies, they very
often do what they call a quote informal hearing end quote,
and they try to make it sound like this is
(03:51):
a good thing for you. Oh, we're just going to
have an informal hearing. We just get together to talk.
You don't have to bring your lawyer, which of course
should immediately set off the alarms alarm bells in your head,
because it means that they don't follow the rules of evidence,
and they don't follow the rules of procedure. They can
use hearsay against you, They can use all sorts of
evidence that would be barred from a real court in
these administrative hearings, and then when you appeal from that
(04:14):
into a real court, the judge in the real court
is not allowed to consider any other evidence except what
was used against you in the administrative hearing. That's how
a lot of these hearings work. It's totally unfair and
in my view, totally unconstitution I'm.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Glad you made the point that yes, states have jails
and the ability to find and confiscate too, so it's
not just at the federal level. So in case people
don't fully understand how we even got here, give us
the Tim Sander for famous No Bad Things speech about
how agencies can work.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
So let's say I'm running for Congress, right, and I'm
my platform is I'm against bad things, And of course
everybody's going to vote for me because you're also against
bad things. I know you guys are against bad things.
There's very f people who are, oh staunchly. So I
get elected to office, right, and on my first day
in office, sure enough, I'm true to my word. I
fulfill my campaign promise. I sit down and I write
(05:06):
a bill and No Bad Things Act of twenty twenty three,
and it's two sentences long. It says one there shall
be no more bad things.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Two two.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
There shall now be a Federal Bad Things Agency, which
shall define what is a bad thing, investigate alleged bad things,
hold hearings about bad things, and then punish bad things.
And then I see I've done it. My bill got passed.
I can go home and I can tell all my
constituents I look at what I did. I have banned
bad things, and I can move on to the next thing. Meanwhile,
(05:37):
the bureaucrats get to work. And not only do these
bureaucrats operate without you have no control as a voter.
You have no control over these bureaucrats. If they go
and do something that is outrageous and it ends up
in the newspaper and people get angry about it. I
can now hold a hearing and drag the Secretary of
Bad Things in front of me and say, shame on you.
(05:58):
That's not what I meant when I passed my law. Well,
and I again, I look like a good guy. It's
a scheme where the actual law making gets done by
these hired bureaucrats, and I, the elected official, can wash
my hands of the responsibility but still take all of
the credit.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Yeah, and it's so hard to fight against.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Because of that.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
So are both parties involved in the growing power of
agencies like this.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
They absolutely are. It's you mean we often complain about
these agencies like the EPA. The EPA was created by
Richard Nixon. I mean, this is a Republican as much
as a democratic problem. Now, the good thing is from
this Jacrasy case that we're talking about in the oral argument,
it looked like most of the justices had a real
problem with this idea of prosecuting people in an administrative
(06:44):
courts without a jury by just pretending that it's something
other than a crime. But Justice Kagan seemed to be
fine with it, but the rest of the justices had
real problems with it. Justice Kagan, she's got this mindset that,
you know, government should be run by experts and the
ext of course are the brilliant geniuses who run these
administrative agencies, and we should just let them do all
(07:06):
the governing and then you know, obey them when they
when they tell us what to do. That's a that's
a mindset that is very deeply rooted in Washington, d c.
And it's a real problem.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Did she arrive via time machine from the nineteen thirties
or something like that.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Well lot out of your your wonderful book Freedom's Theories,
which everybody should read.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
And a lot of these precedents, these legal precedents do
date back to the thirties when these giant administrative agencies
were adopted. Now, another case that's coming up very in January,
that will be arguing in January is this case called
Low or Bright that involves deference to administrative agencies. And
difference is this rule that says when an agency interprets
its own authority, like you know, the EPA has the
(07:48):
authority to prohibit pollution. Now it's okay, So now they're
going to define what is a pollutant. Right when they
do that, the judges are supposed to defer to them,
just rubber stamp what they say. And that's called Chevron deference.
And this is a terrible problem because of course, the
bureaucrats interpret their authority as broadly as possible to expand
their power, and that means that the ball is always
(08:10):
moving in the direction of more and more government control.
And it's pretty clear the writing is on the wall
that the Supreme Court doesn't like this anymore. And this
this case, this low or bright case is very likely
to scale back or pay perhaps even eliminate at least
that part of this of this problem.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So a request for one more bit of illumination of
the bigger problem we're talking about. I'm trying to remember
the name of the case. Those folks who are just
trying to build on their little subdivision lot and the
EPA claim that they're a wetland.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Can you give folks the uh?
Speaker 4 (08:41):
I'll the case of right versus Wrong is.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
This goes back to the case of finders versus keepers.
This is you're talking about a case called Sacket versus EPA,
which has been in the courts for over a decade now.
And this is a case where these people wanted to
build a house on their on their dry land in
a neighborhood in Idaho, and the Feds showed up and said,
guess what, it's a wetland and what is a wetland? Well,
(09:09):
it doesn't have to be wet and it doesn't have
to be land. It can be basically whatever the bureaucrat
says it is. And you can be fined seventy five
thousand dollars a day for doing anything that pollutes this
alleged wetland, and they said, we don't think it's a wetland.
We'd like to have a hearing where we can prove
it's not a wetland. And the EPA said, no, you're
not entitled to that, and that went up to the
(09:29):
Supreme Court ten years ago and the Supreme Court said no,
they get a right to have a hearing, and it
went back and it took another decade for them to
get back to the Supreme Court on the question of
what the definition of a wetland even is. Now I'm
glad to say that my friends at the Pacific Legal
Foundation won that case in this this past Supreme Court term,
(09:50):
and the Supreme Court unanimously said that the bureaucrats were
interpreting the term wetland far too broadly. But it's a
real indication of how hard it it is to fight
the administrative agency that it took a decade of litigation
to get to the point where every Supreme Court justice
said the bureaucrats were wrong. That's amazing And they could
(10:11):
not have been done except that our friends at Pacific
Legal Foundation represented them for free.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
And it would be so frustrating if you were involved
in one of these things fighting it and you know
you're fined or whatever, your life ruined or whatever. On
hold you'd think, Am I in America or not? I
meant to be frustrating.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
In fact, very question was asked at the Supreme Court.
Justice Alito interrupted at one point in the hearing and said,
how could this possibly occur in the United States?
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Hey, before we let you go. And I don't know
how much you want to talk about this or not.
Although I follow your Twitter feed, which is also public,
you seem to be a pretty big believer that Ukraine
losing to Russia or Israel having to hold on to
a ceasefire against some massa is a pretty big event
in world history.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
I do indeed, and I hope the good guys win
both of those wars.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, yeah, it is a big deal.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
We have repeatedly in the past five or six years especially,
been backing away from defending freedom, and we do it
under this ridiculous slogan of oh, we can't fight endless wars.
The phrase endless wars is an idiot slogan. All wars
are endless until you win them. Life is an endless
(11:22):
war against death. Freedom is an endless war against tyranny,
and it's about about time we woke up to that.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
That's really good.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Well, bullies, as we know from personal experience, bullies will
continue pushing until you push back. And Americans have become
increasingly reticent to defend the principles that protect their other
countries as well as ourselves, on this notion that, well,
we shouldn't be the world's policeman. Well, if you're not
(11:51):
going to be the world's policeman, somebody else is going
to be. It's not like if we stop doing it,
nobody's going to do it. It's if we stop doing it,
Vladimir Putin going to do it. If we stop doing it,
the Isaola is going to do it, and particularly the Iatola.
The Iran has been at war with the United States
since nineteen seventy nine. And we like to try and
(12:11):
pretend otherwise, and we come up with all sorts of
ingenious schemes for pretending otherwise on the theory that, as
President Obama liked to say, we can end a war. Well,
once again, wars are never ended. There is no such
thing as ending a war. You either win a war,
or you lose a war, or you postpone a war.
(12:31):
Those are the only three options. Ending a war typically means,
as we saw in Afghanistan, typically means literally surrendering to
the Taliban, which is what the Trump administration did and
which the Biden administration followed through on. And there is
no question that that emboldened our enemies and taught them
that Americans are not willing to stand up for ourselves
(12:52):
or for Western civilization. And that's why Western civilization has
frankly been on the retreat in the past several years,
and it's going to continue until people finally insist on
putting a stock to it. Thank Heavens, Israel is finally
insisting on putting a stop to it, and we need
to let them win victory over Hamas. Anybody out there
who is concerned about the safety of innocent Palestinians, their
(13:14):
number one demand should be that Hamas surrender immediately. Hamas
is responsible for every single civilian death that occurs in
this war, and it's because they refuse to surrender and
insist on shielding themselves behind civilians. And moral clarity on
this point is absolutely essential, not only for Israel, but
(13:37):
for Western civilization as a whole. This isn't going to
defend itself. We've not been given any guarantees that Rome
and Egypt were not given in their day. And unless
we are willing to defend our principles of individual freedom, democracy,
human rights, the rights of women, those rights are going
to vanish under the fists of the strongest bully out
(13:59):
there for.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
A thousand years.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
And I think that's the exception of maybe, well, certainly
Ukraine and Poland, in a couple of other countries. I
think we've as a civilization forgotten that sometimes you have
to defend yourself to the death. We imagine that we're
living in a world that is post all of that ugliness.
Thirty seconds your summary, sir well.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
I say thank god for the Baltic States when it
comes to Eastern Europe. Thank goodness for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia,
who are clear eyed about this because they suffered from
the world refusing to come to their defense. And we
should be willing and ready to defend them and the
rest of Europe against against Putin's aggression, and to defend
the innocent people of Israel against the aggression of Hamas
(14:43):
and their Iranian bosses.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Tim sand for Tim, we appreciate the thoughts in the
time very much, and certainly we agree and also are
very very interested in countering the young progressive moral relatives
life lunatics running around on campuses these days.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Well, then then get people to watch my videos and
that'll solve that problem.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I tweet them out every time you make them. We'll
have the links at armstrong ee getty dot com, Armstrong
and Getty
Please welcome to the Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
The Fabulous Tim Sanderfer, Tim Lawyer, vice president for Litigation
with the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Tim, how are you, sir?
Speaker 3 (00:09):
I'm great? How are you guys?
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Excellent?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I felt a little jiv and pretentious the other day
I texted Tim about coming on the show, and I
just said, Hey, would you like to come chat about
sec versus A v.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Jercasy? And I'm not an attorney.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I don't throw around cases without a description of what
they were. I just hope you didn't think I was
trying to come off as too big for my britches.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Well, okay, I'll be honest. I immediately ran for Scotus
blog to figure out what the heck you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
That's fine, that's perfect. No.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
I mean, I'm glad that you guys are paying attention
to this case and to similar cases, because this is
one of a group of cases that's going to be
addressing the limits of the so called administrative state, of
these regulatory agencies that exercise power to write the law
in the gate a leged infractions of the law and
(01:03):
then hold hearings to determine whether you violated the rule.
And the combining executive, judicial, and legislative powers all in one.
And then it's entirely overseen by bureaucrats instead of elected representatives.
So you even the idea that you can somehow vote
the bums out or something is inapplicable. And that's an
issue that is of increasing importance. And that's what's that
(01:25):
issue with this case and in these other cases.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
What really grabbed me about the case was the Wall
Street Journals headline in their opinion section, the Supreme Court
considers the right to trial by jury.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
That's a legit headline.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Yeah, that's exactly what's going on. So what happens here
is so everybody knows that if you're accused of fraud,
which is a crime, and the government charges you with
that crime, you get a trial where you get a
jury of your peers to determine whether you're guilty or
not guilty. But instead, what happened here was that this bureaucracy,
this agency, the SEC, they promulgated this rule that says, well,
(02:02):
you're not allowed to trade dishonestly by misleading people. And
what they're doing is rephrasing the ordinary rule of fraud.
But they're rephrasing it in bureaucrats speak. And then they say,
and because this is a bureaucratic thing, this is an
administrative thing, we don't have to follow the rules that
apply in courts. We can just use our administrative process.
(02:24):
And that's what they were arguing in the Supreme Court.
They were saying, well, it's basically up to us to
choose whether to go to an ordinary court and give
you a trial by jury, or whether to proceed in
our administrative court, which is overseen by a judge who
is being paid by the prosecutor. Honestly, in these agencies, right,
so you're not going to win there, and you don't
get a jury trial, and it's up to us, the
(02:45):
government to decide whether or not to let you have
this jury because we've decided to rephrase this as an
administrative thing.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
Go ahead, Jack, Sorry, I was going to say, I
feel like at some point in this conversation maybe you
should redo your famous to me, no bad things speecious
so everybody fully understands how this whole agency thing works.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
All right, let me let.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Me interject a question real quickly, and then we'll it's
a Christmas tradition, but getting back to the idea that
the government has decided whether I get a jury trial
or just this administrative hearing. What are my rights? How
do my rights as a defendant differ? Is that even
the right word? What are the rules of evidence? I mean,
(03:29):
what's the story with these hearings?
Speaker 3 (03:31):
These hearings follow something similar. It looks very much like
an ordinary trial. But that is not always the case,
and particularly at the state level, because you know, we
always talk at these federal bureaucracies and forget that states
have their own bureaucraphies. Also in state bureaucracies, they very
often do what they call a quote informal hearing end quote,
and they try to make it sound like this is
(03:51):
a good thing for you. Oh, we're just going to
have an informal hearing. We just get together to talk.
You don't have to bring your lawyer, which of course
should immediately set off the alarms alarm bells in your head,
because it means that they don't follow the rules of evidence,
and they don't follow the rules of procedure. They can
use hearsay against you, They can use all sorts of
evidence that would be barred from a real court in
these administrative hearings, and then when you appeal from that
(04:14):
into a real court, the judge in the real court
is not allowed to consider any other evidence except what
was used against you in the administrative hearing. That's how
a lot of these hearings work. It's totally unfair and
in my view, totally unconstitution I'm.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Glad you made the point that yes, states have jails
and the ability to find and confiscate too, so it's
not just at the federal level. So in case people
don't fully understand how we even got here, give us
the Tim Sander for famous No Bad Things speech about
how agencies can work.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
So let's say I'm running for Congress, right, and I'm
my platform is I'm against bad things, And of course
everybody's going to vote for me because you're also against
bad things. I know you guys are against bad things.
There's very f people who are, oh staunchly. So I
get elected to office, right, and on my first day
in office, sure enough, I'm true to my word. I
fulfill my campaign promise. I sit down and I write
(05:06):
a bill and No Bad Things Act of twenty twenty three,
and it's two sentences long. It says one there shall
be no more bad things.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Two two.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
There shall now be a Federal Bad Things Agency, which
shall define what is a bad thing, investigate alleged bad things,
hold hearings about bad things, and then punish bad things.
And then I see I've done it. My bill got passed.
I can go home and I can tell all my
constituents I look at what I did. I have banned
bad things, and I can move on to the next thing. Meanwhile,
(05:37):
the bureaucrats get to work. And not only do these
bureaucrats operate without you have no control as a voter.
You have no control over these bureaucrats. If they go
and do something that is outrageous and it ends up
in the newspaper and people get angry about it. I
can now hold a hearing and drag the Secretary of
Bad Things in front of me and say, shame on you.
(05:58):
That's not what I meant when I passed my law. Well,
and I again, I look like a good guy. It's
a scheme where the actual law making gets done by
these hired bureaucrats, and I, the elected official, can wash
my hands of the responsibility but still take all of
the credit.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Yeah, and it's so hard to fight against.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Because of that.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
So are both parties involved in the growing power of
agencies like this.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
They absolutely are. It's you mean we often complain about
these agencies like the EPA. The EPA was created by
Richard Nixon. I mean, this is a Republican as much
as a democratic problem. Now, the good thing is from
this Jacrasy case that we're talking about in the oral argument,
it looked like most of the justices had a real
problem with this idea of prosecuting people in an administrative
(06:44):
courts without a jury by just pretending that it's something
other than a crime. But Justice Kagan seemed to be
fine with it, but the rest of the justices had
real problems with it. Justice Kagan, she's got this mindset that,
you know, government should be run by experts and the
ext of course are the brilliant geniuses who run these
administrative agencies, and we should just let them do all
(07:06):
the governing and then you know, obey them when they
when they tell us what to do. That's a that's
a mindset that is very deeply rooted in Washington, d c.
And it's a real problem.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Did she arrive via time machine from the nineteen thirties
or something like that.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Well lot out of your your wonderful book Freedom's Theories,
which everybody should read.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
And a lot of these precedents, these legal precedents do
date back to the thirties when these giant administrative agencies
were adopted. Now, another case that's coming up very in January,
that will be arguing in January is this case called
Low or Bright that involves deference to administrative agencies. And
difference is this rule that says when an agency interprets
its own authority, like you know, the EPA has the
(07:48):
authority to prohibit pollution. Now it's okay, So now they're
going to define what is a pollutant. Right when they
do that, the judges are supposed to defer to them,
just rubber stamp what they say. And that's called Chevron deference.
And this is a terrible problem because of course, the
bureaucrats interpret their authority as broadly as possible to expand
their power, and that means that the ball is always
(08:10):
moving in the direction of more and more government control.
And it's pretty clear the writing is on the wall
that the Supreme Court doesn't like this anymore. And this
this case, this low or bright case is very likely
to scale back or pay perhaps even eliminate at least
that part of this of this problem.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So a request for one more bit of illumination of
the bigger problem we're talking about. I'm trying to remember
the name of the case. Those folks who are just
trying to build on their little subdivision lot and the
EPA claim that they're a wetland.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Can you give folks the uh?
Speaker 4 (08:41):
I'll the case of right versus Wrong is.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
This goes back to the case of finders versus keepers.
This is you're talking about a case called Sacket versus EPA,
which has been in the courts for over a decade now.
And this is a case where these people wanted to
build a house on their on their dry land in
a neighborhood in Idaho, and the Feds showed up and said,
guess what, it's a wetland and what is a wetland? Well,
(09:09):
it doesn't have to be wet and it doesn't have
to be land. It can be basically whatever the bureaucrat
says it is. And you can be fined seventy five
thousand dollars a day for doing anything that pollutes this
alleged wetland, and they said, we don't think it's a wetland.
We'd like to have a hearing where we can prove
it's not a wetland. And the EPA said, no, you're
not entitled to that, and that went up to the
(09:29):
Supreme Court ten years ago and the Supreme Court said no,
they get a right to have a hearing, and it
went back and it took another decade for them to
get back to the Supreme Court on the question of
what the definition of a wetland even is. Now I'm
glad to say that my friends at the Pacific Legal
Foundation won that case in this this past Supreme Court term,
(09:50):
and the Supreme Court unanimously said that the bureaucrats were
interpreting the term wetland far too broadly. But it's a
real indication of how hard it it is to fight
the administrative agency that it took a decade of litigation
to get to the point where every Supreme Court justice
said the bureaucrats were wrong. That's amazing And they could
(10:11):
not have been done except that our friends at Pacific
Legal Foundation represented them for free.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
And it would be so frustrating if you were involved
in one of these things fighting it and you know
you're fined or whatever, your life ruined or whatever. On
hold you'd think, Am I in America or not? I
meant to be frustrating.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
In fact, very question was asked at the Supreme Court.
Justice Alito interrupted at one point in the hearing and said,
how could this possibly occur in the United States?
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Hey, before we let you go. And I don't know
how much you want to talk about this or not.
Although I follow your Twitter feed, which is also public,
you seem to be a pretty big believer that Ukraine
losing to Russia or Israel having to hold on to
a ceasefire against some massa is a pretty big event
in world history.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
I do indeed, and I hope the good guys win
both of those wars.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, yeah, it is a big deal.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
We have repeatedly in the past five or six years especially,
been backing away from defending freedom, and we do it
under this ridiculous slogan of oh, we can't fight endless wars.
The phrase endless wars is an idiot slogan. All wars
are endless until you win them. Life is an endless
(11:22):
war against death. Freedom is an endless war against tyranny,
and it's about about time we woke up to that.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
That's really good.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Well, bullies, as we know from personal experience, bullies will
continue pushing until you push back. And Americans have become
increasingly reticent to defend the principles that protect their other
countries as well as ourselves, on this notion that, well,
we shouldn't be the world's policeman. Well, if you're not
(11:51):
going to be the world's policeman, somebody else is going
to be. It's not like if we stop doing it,
nobody's going to do it. It's if we stop doing it,
Vladimir Putin going to do it. If we stop doing it,
the Isaola is going to do it, and particularly the Iatola.
The Iran has been at war with the United States
since nineteen seventy nine. And we like to try and
(12:11):
pretend otherwise, and we come up with all sorts of
ingenious schemes for pretending otherwise on the theory that, as
President Obama liked to say, we can end a war. Well,
once again, wars are never ended. There is no such
thing as ending a war. You either win a war,
or you lose a war, or you postpone a war.
(12:31):
Those are the only three options. Ending a war typically means,
as we saw in Afghanistan, typically means literally surrendering to
the Taliban, which is what the Trump administration did and
which the Biden administration followed through on. And there is
no question that that emboldened our enemies and taught them
that Americans are not willing to stand up for ourselves
(12:52):
or for Western civilization. And that's why Western civilization has
frankly been on the retreat in the past several years,
and it's going to continue until people finally insist on
putting a stock to it. Thank Heavens, Israel is finally
insisting on putting a stop to it, and we need
to let them win victory over Hamas. Anybody out there
who is concerned about the safety of innocent Palestinians, their
(13:14):
number one demand should be that Hamas surrender immediately. Hamas
is responsible for every single civilian death that occurs in
this war, and it's because they refuse to surrender and
insist on shielding themselves behind civilians. And moral clarity on
this point is absolutely essential, not only for Israel, but
(13:37):
for Western civilization as a whole. This isn't going to
defend itself. We've not been given any guarantees that Rome
and Egypt were not given in their day. And unless
we are willing to defend our principles of individual freedom, democracy,
human rights, the rights of women, those rights are going
to vanish under the fists of the strongest bully out
(13:59):
there for.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
A thousand years.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
And I think that's the exception of maybe, well, certainly
Ukraine and Poland, in a couple of other countries. I
think we've as a civilization forgotten that sometimes you have
to defend yourself to the death. We imagine that we're
living in a world that is post all of that ugliness.
Thirty seconds your summary, sir well.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
I say thank god for the Baltic States when it
comes to Eastern Europe. Thank goodness for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia,
who are clear eyed about this because they suffered from
the world refusing to come to their defense. And we
should be willing and ready to defend them and the
rest of Europe against against Putin's aggression, and to defend
the innocent people of Israel against the aggression of Hamas
(14:43):
and their Iranian bosses.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Tim sand for Tim, we appreciate the thoughts in the
time very much, and certainly we agree and also are
very very interested in countering the young progressive moral relatives
life lunatics running around on campuses these days.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Well, then then get people to watch my videos and
that'll solve that problem.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I tweet them out every time you make them. We'll
have the links at armstrong ee getty dot com, Armstrong
and Getty
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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