Strict Scrutiny

Your new book is also prize winning even though it is very recent it has already been recognized with the Ellis Holly Prize and the Merle-Curdy Social History Award

It's been a real journey to write this book You probably saw somewhere in the opening pages that it took me 20 years to write it

It really was and I think one of the other things that probably comes across on the page is that it's very personal in many places I work in stories about my family I was inspired in many ways by them

It's a very hearty strict scrutiny welcome to you Dylan Penningroth, it's great to have you here

The book is called Before the Movement the Hidden History of Civil Rights it is available everywhere books are sold and one of our favorites bookshop.org run don't walk to check it out

this week on Offline John is joined by pioneering theorist and venture capitalist Matthew Ball to discuss his new book The Metaverse and how it will revolutionize everything

A conversation with Dahlia Lithwick about her book, Lady Justice, Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America.

How did you finally settle on the format that the book now takes, which is to chronicle the lives of these very different women, all of whom are engaged in different struggles for justice, ultimately come together over this long period of time that is actually very short period of time, the four years of the Trump administration that although just four years really felt like a lifetime.

I think what I wanted to do was a little bit of meditation on women and power and the law and the special relationship that I see there.

The book is Lady Justice Women the Law and the Battle to Save America

Nina Totenberg NPR correspondent and former strict scrutiny guest appeared on Steven Colbert show to discuss her book Dinners with Ruth and she said quote one scholar calls this the Yolo court and I appreciated that.

She has an earlier book, a very wonderful book called My Own Words that includes a lot of earlier speeches. So we didn't want to replicate that.

It was a tabloid I didn't trust her I did my own investigation and Zillow has exiled. It's clear. It's pretty I mean you know he says Thomas told him that okay. So clearly the Zillow Zillow was supplemented by a conversation that was also part of the investigation that prior had with Thomas in which Thomas told him the turning point had determined that a rogue employee had compromised the accounts of several co-workers including the young woman to make it appear that they had engaged in misconduct when they had not.

He's also the author of a number of previous books, including The Fight to Vote, which is a history of the struggle for voting rights

There was a backlash to Baker versus Carr and Reynolds v. Sims. Everett Dirksen, who was properly lauded as the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate for his role in passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act led a national effort to get a constitutional convention to overturn the one person who enfold cases.

Yeah and so Chanel Miller wrote an amazing memoir it's called Know My Name and she talks a lot about why it was so hurtful and so harmful for the judge to as she perceived it take his side and I think that some of this is about the ways in which our culture and our law orient to the pain of the powerful.

she also cites If You Give a Mouse a Cookie which is an excellent book and way better than its many sequels like if you give a pick a party and cat a cupcake and moose a muffin which really go downhill

This is Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half which is about two sisters who grow up in a black community where everyone can basically pass for white and eventually one of the sisters does pass for white and it's about how this plays out over a successive generation.

And the author of the phenomenal book, The Cruelty Is the Point, earlier an essay by the same title and really kind of a defining phrase of the Trump era.

So Ari is the National Voting Rights Correspondent at Mother Jones and also the author of the terrific book Give Us the Ballot, A Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, which was published in 2015 and which former representative John Lewis described as a must read and a primer for every American.

So we will come back to that book, but today we're going to stay focused on Ari's book Give Us the Ballot...

you refer to Corey Robbins book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas where I think Robin makes this I think quite provocative claim that Thomas is not a sort of run of the mill Berke and conservative he's not individually focused he is actually focused on the collective and the collective he is interested in is the black community

there are two constitutions there's the 1789 constitution which is like deeply rooted in preserving slavery and they are go like bad for black people clearly but then there's the second constitution that comes out of reconstruction

I'll go back to my the book right before One Person No Vote, White Rage. And with White Rage I talked about whenever you see this massive attainment of black citizenship rights is that you get this massive policy backlash to undercut those rights.

Katie Couric has a new book out and it is called Going There and Boy Does She.

She also revealed RBG's harshest comments about kneeling during the national anthem. . . according to Couric said that people were quote showing contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life, which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from. As they became older they realized that this was youthful folly and that's why education is important end quote.

Couric because she wanted to protect RBG thought the comments were unworthy of an icon of equality and justice and made the decision to keep them out.

And I'm now reading the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship Of The Ring.

And I haven't read these books in 30 years, but do you, the ring, the one ring to rule them all has anti-aging properties? I didn't remember this.

So the Fellowship starts with Bill both throwing his 11th birthday party, his 110th is his 11th party and everyone in the Shire which is where the Hobbits live has been noticing for years that he's just not aging.

The legacy of colonization is not just a problem for indigenous peoples, but a problem for our democracy.

Indigenous rights as a canary in a coal mine for other rights.

The history is why the present day matters.

...the central question presented by that case was whether or not in 2020 the Muskogee Nation still had a reservation.

...it's this question of looking at our history and why haven't we reformed our laws for these things to keep repeating.