Strict Scrutiny

I started the Court of Thorns and Roses too. And I obsessed with the Court of Thorns and Roses series. I think a Court of Silver Flames and a Court of Mist and Fury are definitely my favorite books in there.

So I am right now reading, I just finished reading The Hobbit and I'm now reading the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Fellowship of the Ring.

And somebody obviously got a book in the month club membership last year because not only is she not reading the Iliad she might also not be reading The Handmaid's Tale she's just like ordering these books and they're on her shelf and she just occasionally quotes them but I just want to explain to Justice Bradley that the political party that is actually associated with forced childbirth and the denigration of women is not the party of the majority in this decision like wrong party wrong book wrong horse

Ruth is the author of the terrific book Strongmen, Mussolini to the Present.

And I write in Strongman, which is the first book to put a chapter in masculinity along with corruption and violence and propaganda because of course there's many women collaborators enablers doing this too.

That's why I wrote Strongman is to show what the outcomes, how it works and what the outcomes have been.

So we thought it would be a good time to talk about your book given that the Supreme Court is weighing a challenge to some laws that were in some respects designed to facilitate disinformation on social media laws that sought to ensure social media companies weren't censoring anti vaccination posts or election denialism and at the beginning of the next sitting the court is going to be hearing a challenge to some government action that is designed to combat disinformation there the government encouraging and calling for companies to remove vaccine disinformation from websites plus with the recent immunity actions pertaining to another thread in the book disinformation threat to democracy seemed like a great time to talk about Attack from Within so first question in the book you identify some of the tactics of disinformation you know that proponents of disinformation use could you run us through a few of them

I'll share just a few of them so you know one is this idea of repetition that if you repeat something often enough people will tend to believe it so you know we heard Donald Trump talk about stop the steel just this weekend I heard Steve Bannon at the CPAC conference getting the crowd to chant trump one trump one trump one and this is a tactic that goes you know back to the dawn of human history Hitler wrote about it in mind comp the idea that you need simple repeatable statements that people hear again and again and then if they hear it not only from a single source but they start hearing it from other sources it becomes self affirming that people start hearing this thing and think it to be true so that's one another is the big lie make of lie as big as possible and certainly we've heard you know the the stolen election was trump's big lie at just as we had you know Hitler's big lie and what Hitler wrote in mind comp was the reason a big lie works better than small lies is because of human nature we all you know engage in small lies from time to time my sister might tell me yeah your hair looks fine or my husband might say no dear you know that dress isn't make you look fat but we we engage in those white lies out of a place of kindness and courtesy to other people but what Hitler wrote in mind comp is that most people could never imagine that someone would have the audacity to lie about something of such significance and for that reason in an ironic way the bigger the lie the more likely we are to believe it and then just one more I'll mention Leah and that is this idea of destroying the concept of truth and this is something that I think we are seeing I'm hearing an awful lot of from the right I did an interview today with someone who said well who's to say what's disinformation anyway you know the idea that there really is no such thing as discernible facts or evidence or data and this is something that Putin in Russia uses it is sometimes referred to as the fog of unknowability to give inconsistent statements about something to say on one day you know the rockets were shot by Russia and the next day the rockets were shot by Ukraine and the day after that the rockets were shot by NATO and people you know eventually get throughout their hands and they say I don't know what to think they're angry they become cynical and finally they become numb and then disengage from politics altogether because I don't know what to think and that is incredibly dangerous for a democracy to have people disengaged from politics so those are just some of the tactics yeah the book covers many more and I'm going to ask you about some of them because when you were giving your first answer talking about simple lies that are just like repeated again and again to reaffirm them I couldn't help but think in your description about the overly simplistic claims that some in the Republican Party or the conservative legal movement have talked about the courts right you think about originalism the idea that our Constitution is just what the original meaning of the document is it's simple right it's overly simplistic and it doesn't capture a lot of constitutional law but they keep saying it right and that has helped kind of give it traction you know in the courts and the broader you know public in some respects but okay so in the book you also talk about the causes of disinformation you know some of which are global and some of which are more particular to the United States so what are some of the causes of you know disinformation that you go over in the book

the insurrection theory of the second amendment which was a framing I loved and how the court has taken again this constitutional provision built a story around it that isn't really rooted in real history and has the potential to do real violence right and cause real problems to our system of government

I am a ardent defender of the first amendment I think the first amendment is what protects us from powerful voices and allows us to protest our government and the things we talked about when our institutions fail us and so it's a really important right but I think that because we have this right that is so cherished by the left and the right it can sometimes be used as a handy shield to call anything that in any way limits speech as censorship and of course like all rights the right to free speech can be regulated I mean you cannot engage in threats that is a crime even though it is speech you can't commit fraud that's a crime even though it all is all about speech right I tell you I want to sell you some swan planed in Florida that's speech and so that can be regulated it has to you know comply with strict scrutiny that the name of this podcast that there's a compelling governmental interest and that the limits are narrowly tailored to achieve those interests but I think you know what we're seeing now in these cases that were just argued before the Supreme Court about these laws enacted by states designed to stop what they call censorship by social media platforms in my view in fact these state laws are not preventing censorship they are violating the first-minute rights of the social media platforms whoever right to take down content that they believe violates their terms of service users sign an agreement that has certain terms of conditions that community standards that there will be moderation so that people won't be harassed and bullied and threatened when they're online and won't be exposed to disinformation about COVID vaccines or stolen elections or other things and so you know in an effort to stop those things the states of Florida and Texas have called that censorship and said that they are silencing conservative voices well yeah conservative voices that are lying and and it's not opinion certainly if somebody has a very conservative or viewpoint done something let's hear it let's debate it let's hear it out let's try to you know reach common ground and solve problems but if there are things that are factually demonstrably false you know that COVID vaccine will make you magnet it for something like that there's no place for that in our serious discourse and in addition to the causes of disinformation and the tactics of disinformation the book also gets into some solutions we are not going to canvas those in depth but I very much encourage our listeners to check out Barb's book Attack from Within how disinformation is sabotaging America in order to learn more about disinformation and what to do about how to address it

Hernan Diaz's Trust

The final Supreme Court goes to Hollywood tip for you in this quarantine time is kind of a fantasy SCOTUS tip. So I'm going to bring back this old chestnut from 1993 The Pelican Brief which is based on the John Grisham novel of the same name.

It is wildly implausible but completely fun and it features a very young Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington and the plot is fantastic.

Two Supreme Court justices are assassinated and Tulane University law student Darby Shaw who's played by Julia Roberts writes a legal brief detailing her theory on why they were killed. Spoiler alert it involves pelicans.

He is also now the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and the author of Our Unfinished March, The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote, a history, a crisis, a plan.

Grown Women Talk by Dr. Sharon Malone, also known as your wife.

The Art of the Deal or Promises to Keep?

If you're gonna actually read art of the deal, don't let anybody see you do it.

That's a Kindle read.

The Art of the Deal or Promises to Keep?

Best summer beach read-in, the art of the deal or promises to keep?

This novel, Run Do Not Walk. It is extraordinary. I think it's best read or ingested with no spoilers. So just pick it up. I actually have a couple of hard copies. I will give you one. Maybe even before June 24th. Oh, I want one. OK. This is great because I'm footloose, fancy free, graded all my exams. I have a 30-page exam memo. I'm ready to go.

Steve Lottig writes about that in his great book, which we've talked about on the show.

You describe the end of roe as a public health crisis and I very much agree that it is. And you also say it's one for which the country was profoundly unprepared.

And what was so striking to me was that for whatever reason, people in Washington who I spoke to didn't seem to be able to fully grapple with what that could mean.

I think about this in the short term and the long term. These are two points I tried to examine in the book.

The long term effect that I also think is really important is what this means for medical training. What we know is when you are in a state with an abortion ban, it is impossible to be trained in providing abortion.

I want people to really understand just how ubiquitous the impact of abortion bans can be.

The book is called Overruled, subtitled The Human Toll of Too Much Law.

Is Neil just like too much law, too many Supreme Court decisions? We're just not going to do this anymore.

It's gotten a lot of buzz. It's Adele Waldman's new book.

She wrote The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, which was a huge book some years ago in Brooklyn. It's so good.

It's about the like it's a send up of this like Brooklyn literary scene and this guy, Nathaniel P and his like escapades literary and romantic and otherwise. And this book is just like an amazing kind of workplace story set in like a big box store in Upstate New York that is really pretty incredible.

And she did a little bit of like a Barbara Ehrenreich thing where she is a novelist and moved upstate and just like worked at a retail store and wrote about her coworkers. And it's really amazing.

Terrace Story I recently read, which is a really weird and great book.

The Deluge, which is an incredibly long climate fiction book I've mentioned before on the podcast.

And it's like a thousand pages long, but I listen to it and it's excellent. And then Burnham Wood, I think I read at the end of last year. I might have even mentioned it in our favorite things episode.