Justice Alito's Upside Down Flag

David Plotz
Hello and welcome to this late clinical Gabfest.

May 23, 2024, the Upside Down Flag edition. I'm David Plotzel. Citycast in Washington, DC. I am joined by my dear ones from New Haven, Connecticut, and the New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School, Emily Bazelon. Hello, Emily.

Emily Bazelon
Hey, David. Hey, John. And John Dickerson from CBS's Daily report from Manhattan. Hello, John. Hello, David.

John Dickerson
Hello, Emily. This week on the Gabfest, an insurrectionist flag flew outside Justices Alito's house just after January 6. How bad is that? Then David Leonhardt will join us to talk about the end of neoliberalism and the rise of a new and surprising form of Washington Washington bipartisanship. And then OpenAI maybe shot itself in a virtual foot by releasing a talking AI bot that sounds way too much like Scarlett Johansson.

David Plotz
Did they go too far? Plus, we will have cocktail chatter. Hello, it is Ryan, and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on jumbacasino.com dot. I looked over the person sitting next to me. Now you know what they were doing.

They were also playing chumba casino. Coincidence? I think not. Everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumba Casino is home to hundreds of casino style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere, even at 30,000ft.

So sign up now@chumbacasino.com to claim your free welcome bonus. That's chumbacasino.com. and live the Chumba life. No purchase necessary. Vgwhibited by law.

See terms and conditions. 18 plus reporters at the New York Times, including Jody Kantor, the remarkable journalist who helped break the Harvey Weinstein story, had an extraordinary pair of stories in the Times this week. First, the Times reported that an upside down american flag, the symbol of January 6 insurrectionists, flew outside Justice Samuel Alito's Virginia house just days after January 6. Apparently, this was a salvo in a feud with anti Trump neighbors. Then yesterday, they followed up with reporting that Alito's beach house in New Jersey has recently displayed a flag called the appeal to heaven flag, or the pine tree flag, which is a flag that has been popularized by a very pro Trump group bent on christianizing the american government.

This, I would say, all falls into the category of deeply unsurprising news, given Alito's political proclivities, but still also shocking news. Let us start, Emily, just with maybe a tedious and kind of irrelevant question, which is did anything Alito do violate the court's exceptionally toothless ethics code? And if it did. What would it matter, since the court doesn't seem to have any punishment attached to its ethics code? I mean, the part of the ethics code, let's imagine for a moment that it applies to the Supreme Court.

Emily Bazelon
The part that is relevant here is the appearance of impropriety. Right. We don't have proof of actual decision making in advance, but certainly it does not look like you are completely neutral about January 6 and the allegations of a stolen election. If you are flying the flag, that is the emblem of the stop the steal movement. Right.

At this incredibly heated moment where it's all being contested. The problem, as you say, is that there is no enforcement of this code. It doesn't apply to the Supreme Court. There's justices. There's no oversight.

There's no way to enforce it. And so there's now this looming question. The court heard two cases as precisely pertaining to January 6 this year. Alito sat on them. Presumably, these news stories will change.

Not at all. His participation in the cases. And that's kind of just woeful for the court, I would say. The other thing is like, just to stay back for a minute, the idea that a Supreme Court justice, that, in fact, two Supreme Court justices, because of Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginny Thomas's involvement in the January 6 protest, the idea that two Supreme Court justices really should have recused themselves from these cases because they don't believe in the kind of foundational part of our democracy about a fair election, and that they don't believe that despite all the evidence to the contrary. I mean, I guess if you're going to be really generous to Alito, you would say, well, he flew this flag in January 2021 before it was all settled.

But it's so foundational that we have belief in the outcomes of our elections until we learn the contrary. Right. Like, I just. That part of it, it's so. It was such a conspiracy theory.

There was never anything to it. Whether you were following it in real time or in retrospect, the idea that you should have been deeply skeptical about claims to the contrary. It just really puts you in a far off place. If you are a part of the constitutional system, you should not fly flags that seek to go around the constitutional system. I mean, isn't that the argument you're making, that in addition to the propriety and appearance problems, if your job is to maintain a belief that the world is round, if you fly two flags that says the world is flat, you're doing something completely inconsistent with what your job is.

Yeah, exactly. And yes. You should recuse yourself from these two cases. I mean, I think there's, like, for lots of reasons, you know, it just looks like you're not fair, and people might have that perception, and so you should have a wide berth. But beyond that, John, I think exactly like, there's just something conspiracy theory minded about this.

David Plotz
There are these two separate questions. There's the question which is, is it disturbing, wrong, horrible that a Supreme Court justice, and possibly two, given what we know about Ginny Thomas and Ginny Thomas and Clarence Thomas, historically quite aligned marriage. The two justices basically have adopted the conspiracy theories of January 6 and are in the pocket of a group that's bent or willing to countenance the destruction of our political system to advance their political ends. That's one question. The second question is, should you display any of that publicly?

Because I kind of assumed that that was already true about Alito and Thomas. Right. I've always felt this about Tom, that Thomas has these beliefs in him, and Alito has certainly tipped his hands that he has these beliefs in him. But the problem is the doing it in public. Right.

It's like, what you do in the shadows is like, okay, right. I mean, there's sort of two ways. It's disturbing. It reveals and shows the sense that you had. And then there's this standard of the appearance of impropriety.

Emily Bazelon
Appearances do matter. The idea that judges are outside the political system and don't pre decide what they think about, you know, cases that could come before them, which there was always a likelihood that some January 6 matter was going to come before the supreme court. Like, that's the other problem here, right? It's both. But I would, David, if they are, in fact, in the pocket of big nutty and they believe that the election was stolen, then that's.

John Dickerson
Then that renders a verdict on their empirical faculties. In other words, you can be just a hack who wants your guy in power, and that's one position you can hold. But if you actually believe the election was stolen after all of the evidence came in, and by the way, in early January, lots and lots and lots of legal cases had already happened in which Trump had lost. So obviously, that was affirmed in three recounts in various states and all of the other ways in which that was affirmed. But even by the time that flag was flying, it was pretty well sewn up that the election hadn't been stolen, that these questions that Trump and his group had raised were nutty.

So it raises questions about their functioning ability to recognize reality. I would add one other thing, which I would like one of the two of you to weigh in on, which is the blame the wife for the upside down flag, which then unravels when you have a flag of the same kind flying over two years later and for a longer period of time. The other thing about the blaming the wife is that it's one thing if that upside down flag was up for a few hours or a short time in the Alito household, but it was there for days. Like, Samuel lived in the house. So the notion that he didn't notice it or he wasn't right, he said he wasn't involved in flying it, but that doesn't mean that he said, take it down or was in any way distancing himself from it.

David Plotz
Yeah, I mean, it did sound like the neighbors were kind of assholes. Yeah, totally. So I'm not at all surprised that there was a. That they had a rather hostile response at the Alito household, and that I can well imagine that Alito was, you know, that his wife was really outraged and pissed off and did do it, and he was just like, whatever. He may have been fully supporting her, but I also can totally imagine that she's along for the ride, for him saying, oh, you should just blame me for it.

Like, when the story. I don't think it's necessarily that he's blaming her and hanging her out to dry without her permission. I think he's probably. This is part of the conspiracy. Do you guys think, though?

I mean, I guess my question is, I keep coming back to the question raised by the most important public text of our childhood, the miniseries V and the miniseries V. There's this question, which is like, do you want to know that there are lizards, or would you rather they just kept their masks on when you realize that the alien overlords are actually lizards, or would you rather keep them? And there are the school of people who are like, we want the masks off. Stop pretending that they're normal. I like the masks.

I think it's actually really important for a functioning society that we keep the masks on. And that, honestly, one of the things that I think is really smart about Kavanaugh and Barrett and Gorsuch and Roberts is they're very conservative. But I do have much more respect for them because I think they're very much better at maintaining the civility and norms that we expect from our institutions and that it's actually valuable. And Alito has. Alito has really damaged his own cause by doing this, because it just makes people much more certain that this is a completely political institution that can't be trusted.

And I mean, maybe he has helped his cause because he wants to destroy these institutions, but I would like everyone to keep the mask on and pretend they don't have these outrageous political views. Even if they do go ahead, have those political. I know they have the political views. Just don't be so stupid as to fly the upside down flag. You know, the other thing is you can apologize.

Emily Bazelon
I mean, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in 2016, before Trump's election, said, oh, my God, I can't believe that the country could elect this guy. It was a mistake. She apologized. She should never have said it. Alito could similarly say, like, this was an error.

I shouldn't have had anything to do with expressing this political view, especially when. Alito has said, in response to Justice Kagan, who raised issues of the politicization of the court, Alito said, saying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line. So if you've engaged in or been connected to something that does raise questions about your integrity, if you are a keeper of that bright, clear line of integrity, then you have set up a condition where you owe some obligation when your own behavior gets you in trouble to do whatever's necessary to keep that line of integrity clear. What is it about the modern conservative movement? And maybe it's just that Trump is this way where it is so hard for people to actually admit wrongdoing and to own up to it and apologize when they've made a mistake.

David Plotz
We all make mistakes. I spend most of my time apologizing to people, and it's just really important to own up to your mistake and sort of acknowledge it and say what it is and then move on and be like, okay, I'm not going to flag that flag again? Probably a mistake. It's bad. You know, it's been bad for us, but why can't people do that in this movement?

Is it because Trump is temperamentally incapable of it and so everyone's, like, taking, taking a beat from him? Yes, apology is weakness, and you can show no weakness. It also validates the awful, woke, evil mob on the other side that you've. Wait, what you always do instead. I mean, John Cornyn did this.

Emily Bazelon
Alito's being harassed. The left is mercilessly harassing Alito, as opposed to addressing the underlying reason for the attention to this issue. Do you guys think it's any accident that the three justices in recent years who have gotten gone in this direction, and I would name them as Alito. Thomas and Ginsburg. The ones who have kind of been most overtly political are the oldest, have been among the oldest on the court.

David Plotz
And that there's something about, like, either you've served so long that you just don't, you've lost touch with the world outside, or you just don't give a fuck anymore, or you've been marinated, you've just been high on your own supply for so long that you think you can just say stuff and not worry about the consequences in the world outside. I feel like Alito has been probably marinating pickling in this extremely conservative, billionaire, decayest, fearful, anxious position. And it's just been going on longer for him than these other folks. Good theory. Do you remember, Emily, when Roberts and Trump got in a back and forth, when Trump talked about Obama judges and.

Emily Bazelon
There are no Obama judges. We are all judges. Yes. It was very high and mighty. Yeah.

John Dickerson
Do you think that he could say that out loud now? I mean, just to give you the full quote, we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges, Robert said in 2018. And what we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for. Could he say that out loud now?

Emily Bazelon
That's a great question. What a bunch of them do still insist on is the importance of collegiality and how nice it is that they chat and have lunch together. Right? They're still, you know, Justice Barrett and Justice Sotomayor did an event together recently. Justice Breyer, on his book tour, talks about that a lot.

And there's this kind of quaint idea that they're modeling collegiality and civility for the country in their group of nine. And I suppose that all of those pleasantries can still exist. It just seems increasingly meaningless. Right? Because if you have this overt politicization that seems like it is results oriented, then what do you care if people are also pleasantly able to sit down and have lunch together?

David Plotz
It's important for people to pleasantly be able to sit down and have it together, right? Or is it the mask? But is it the other people letting the lizards pretend that they still have their masks, when in fact, we all know what they're doing behind the scenes? Like, should you be complicit in the mask? It's one thing to wish for the mask.

Emily Bazelon
I think you probably do believe in being complicit in the mask, David. Well, I do, but only so far. That's the problem. I mean, the mask allows for the kind of bipartisanship that has been successful in Washington despite our polarized times, is that people, even though they have base opinions of the other person, put on the mask, work on common cause, get things done, and then they take the mask off in other instances. But I don't think, David, you believe in the mask, come what may.

John Dickerson
I mean, to a point. Yes, to a point. But yes, I definitely only believe to a point. And the thing about this point is, you know, so we're in a moment where we have this six to three strong conservative majority. Justice Sotomayor looks like she has no plans to retire before the end of the Biden administration.

Emily Bazelon
She'll be 70, I think, when the election happens. And so you have this sense that the court, if Trump wins, if he is the one to replace her, could be even further lurching to the right and kind of out of reach in its current composition of being changed. I suppose you could argue that the useful part of the mask slipping is then if the institution really does need to be dramatically altered in a structural or form, you could actually start creating a case for that. Did you guys know, Emily, I'm sure we've talked about this, that when V was rebooted maybe ten years ago, the leading lizard lady, the lizard queen overlord, was played by an actress. Who is the actress who would play Emily Bazelon in the Emily Bazelon movie?

David Plotz
Morena Baccarin, I think her name is. I'm sure I sent you a red, a picture. I think you have sent me a picture of her before. I didn't realize it was Emily. Pull your face off.

Pull your face off.

Emily Bazelon
I love it. Slate plus members, thank you so much. You have helped us keep the gabfest going for so long. And you get so much great stuff for your membership. Bonus segments, bonus episodes, special discounts on live shows, no hitting the paywall on the slate site.

David Plotz
So much more. And this week for our slate plus segment, we're going to talk about Republicans who won't say they will accept the 2024 election results. So if you're a member, again, thank you. Enjoy that segment. If you're not a member, go to slate.com gabfestplus and become a member today.

Slate.com gabfest plus. It's hard to imagine a world where we leave future generations with fewer rights and freedoms. The Supreme Court has stolen the constitutional right to control our bodies. Now politicians in nearly every state have introduced bills that would block people from getting the essential sexual and reproductive care they need, including abortion. Planned Parenthood believes everyone deserves access to care.

Emily Bazelon
It's a human right. We won't give up and we won't back down. Help ensure the next generation can decide their own futures. Donate to Planned Parenthood. Visit plannedparenthood.org future this episode of the.

David Plotz
Gabfest is brought to you by Zbiotics. There is now a game changing product to use before a night out with drinks. It's called z Biotics. Let's face it, after a night out with drinks, it is tough to bounce back. The next day, you have to make a choice.

You can either have a great night or a great next day. Zbiotics is a surefire way to wake up feeling fresh after a night of drinking. Zbiotics Pre alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Heres how it when you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut.

It is this byproduct, not dehydration, thats to blame for your rough next day, zbiotics produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make zbiotics your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and youll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com gabfest to get 15% off your first order. When you use gabfest at checkout, Zbiotics is backed with a 100% money back guarantee.

So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com gabfest and use the code Gabfest at checkout for 15% off. With lucky land slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today. Has anyone seen the bride and groom?

Emily Bazelon
Sorry, sorry, we're here. We were getting lucky in the limo when we lost track of time. No lucky land casino with cash prizes that add up quicker than a guest registry. In that case, I pronounce you lucky. Play for free@luckylandslots.com.

daily bonuses are waiting. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details.

David Plotz
Back in the early days of slate, I don't know if this is still true. There was an Internet meme about the slate pitch, the take that was so contrarian and so provocative it could only have come from slate. I was responsible for so many of these pieces myself. I had a diatribe against pandas. Then there was a piece I did not write which made the case that creed, the band creed, was great.

Now comes the slight pitch to end all slate pitches. Here we are living in a moment of maximum polarization, where there is genuine fear of a possible civil war, where the very foundations of our political system appear to be collapsing. And in the New York Times, David Leonhardt has an amazing new essay that makes the case that we've entered a new age of bipartisanship with a shared vision of new populism, and that Donald Trump has guided us there. And I was totally persuaded. David, it's not quite exactly what you said, but tell us.

John Dickerson
You're so drunk. Tell us about the new centrism. Set the poor guy up. I can't decide whether I think I'm deeply honored, but I also no doubt, will be roundly mocked for having one of the people who created the slate pitch meme. Tell me that I've written a slate pitch story.

David Leonhardt
Yes, you exaggerated it a little bit, but not much, really. Only the Trump part was the exaggeration. Yeah, this story actually was really a direct assignment from one of my editors, who called me and said, we keep hearing about how polarized and gridlocked our country is, and we keep putting on the home screen what we used to call the front page of the New York Times, all these stories about bipartisan cooperation. The Democrats save Speaker Mike Johnson. The two parties come together to pass aid for Ukraine and force a sale of TikTok, Joe Biden's infrastructure bill, Joe Biden's semiconductor bill.

And I could list, like, eight or nine more smaller bills and asked me to try to make sense of why this is. And look, we are polarized as a country, and there are deep threats to our democracy. And I tried to cover that in the piece as well. But I also wanted to help people understand why is it that actually Democrats and Republicans can agree on a set of issues? And I ended up with two main, related answers.

One is that significant parts of both parties have come to agree, and I think they're right about this, that large parts of the consensus from the 1990s, sometimes called the Washington consensus, sometimes called neoliberalism, just failed to deliver on its promises. And we can talk about that. And the second thing, it failed to deliver on its promises economically for Americans, and it also failed to create the world that people said it was going to create. And so instead of having a freer China and freer Russia, we have a less free China, less free Russia. That are increasingly aggressive about confronting the United States.

We have what some people have called new cold wars. And basically there are parts of the Democratic and Republican Party, more of the Democratic Party, but a meaningful part of the Republican Party that are willing to pass policies that try to deal with these realities, that in some very big ways neoliberalism failed both domestically and globally. So one thing I was wondering about reading is how much you're talking about a different approach to markets and globalization and then how much you're talking about what's popular linked to what you were just saying about what worked in the past or didn't work about the Washington consensus. Right. I mean, partly it seems like there is this sense of skepticism about globalization and free trade and high levels of immigration, but I couldn't quite tell how much the policy reshuffle was fueling the sense of the reception of it from the voters or whether the lack of popularity of the previous regime was kind of feeding this new approach.

That's a good distinction. It's certainly, you could have a world in which really popular policies just fail. Right. And voters actually continue to support them even though they fail and fail and fail. I actually think in this case, the kind of empirical evidence about what works mostly lines up with what's popular.

And I'm well aware that not every, everyone would agree with me on each issue. But a lot of the trade liberalization from the nineties and the early aughts, I don't want to say it was deeply unpopular, but people were skeptical of it. And yet both parties pushed it through. It really hasn't delivered what it promised, right? I mean, it promised prosperity for America and freedom for China to be a little bit glib.

And it hasn't really delivered either. And so you do see people reacting to that, and you do see people reacting to the fact that nowhere in the world are really high levels of immigration, particularly extralegal, if you want to call it illegal or undocumented immigration. Nowhere in the world is that popular, and voters are also rebelling against that. And so I think a lot of these policies are both responding to what the population wants, which in democracy is mostly a good thing. And I also think there responding to what the evidence suggests about the failures of the last few decades.

And I focused a little bit more on trade and globalization in the first few minutes here. But it's not just that, right? I mean, it's also notable that you have republicans supporting a lot of government spending on things like infrastructure and semiconductors. I mean, that's just kind of old fashioned industrial policy that FDR supported, that Dwight Eisenhower supported, and that really fell out of fashion in Ronald Reagan's Republican Party. And in part thanks to Donald Trump's rise.

As strange a figure as he is, and in many ways as nefarious a figure as he is, there have been positive parts of his rise. And that is one of them. It's also really interesting when you look at the fact that when the minimum wage goes on the ballot, even in red states, minimum wage increases, it passes. And when expansions of Medicaid go on the ballot in red states, they pass for the most part. And so there is this real american majority for progressive economic policies.

People on the left sometimes make the mistake of thinking there's this huge majority for left of center policies on all kinds of issues. I actually think on most social issues, the american population is right of center. I talked about immigration. Affirmative action has mostly just lost everywhere it's been on the ballot, including in California. So it's not that the american population is secretly super lefty.

It's that they're somewhat center left on economics and somewhat center right on social issues. When we think about partisanship and the contentious relationship between the parties, is there a danger in suggesting that some of these bipartisan agreements, which are transactional, responsible to exogenous events, Covid-19 which are special in particular, that there's a current consensus that is operative in Washington when it comes to inter party relations, at a time when there is a stark lack of consensus between the parties on structural matters that arguably determine whether the government will function it at all. So those stark differences would be whether January 6 was legitimate discourse, whether the election was stolen, which is a matter of law and adherence to verifiable fact. The question of whether the president has absolute immunity. We're about to have a question about Samuel Alito.

John Dickerson
There's a difference on whether you are going to immediately refuse to accept the 2024 election as valid. Those seem like stark, bright lines and sort of more important than the specific ad hoc policy agreements that sides might come to. John, I think both are true. I do think those core democracy issues are more important. I am deeply worried about the state of our democracy.

David Leonhardt
I'm deeply worried about the radicalization of the republican party on these democracy issues, on refusing to accept the peaceful transfer of power, refusing to acknowledge clear election results, of using symbols and language that very much evoke authoritarian governments of the present and of the past. Those are all deeply, deeply worrisome. It's not an accident that this is happening when Joe Biden is president, rather than Donald Trump being president. And one thing that Daniel Schlossman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, argued to me, which I found compelling and is really a direct answer to your question, he said, strangely, the fact that the Republican Party has kind of moved on from policy, that in the old Republican Party of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, the thing you couldn't do was be in favor of government spending or tax increases, the fact that it's moved on from that. And in the new Republican Party, the things you must be absolutely loyal on are these Donald Trump loyalty election things has opened up room for, during a Biden presidency for a meaningful number of Republicans actually to work with Democrats on policy issues.

And so Republicans don't get primaried now for voting for the infrastructure bill. Right. So I agree with you. Those other things are real and could be much more important in the long term than this. But I still think this bipartisan agreement on a whole bunch of these issues is real.

John Dickerson
Oh, yeah, no, I agreed. I just think in order of kind of what's ruling the day in our political experience. So you have Donald Trump saying, don't agree to a border deal and his party doesn't. The tax deal between Democrats and Republicans basically gets torpedoed for a similar, for a similar reason. I mean, what Donald Trump says goes, they may not have actual policy reasons for blocking these things, but the fact that Donald Trump says don't do it and they don't do it runs counter to the idea that there's a consensus that hap, that exists outside of this other set of disagreements, which are acute.

David Leonhardt
I do think there's a new consensus on immigration. I agree Donald Trump blocked that. And that was a profoundly cynical thing to do. I don't want to go down some big immigration rabbit hole. But if you talk to Republicans, I find some of their frustration on this a little bit more understandable than I think a lot of other people do, which is their attitude is biden created this mess by loosening an immigration policy, has done almost nothing to fix it, including executive actions he has in his power that he hasn't used.

And a few months before the election, he comes to the Republicans and says, bail me out with this bill. I still think of profoundly cynical to block, but I actually think on immigration, there is a consensus that probably will ultimately lead to a policy solution. David, what do you think are on the bigger policy questions? What are the limits of the new centrism? I don't think there's agreement on the level of regulation that should exist in the economy, the taxation, there should now be more equitable taxation or anything like that.

David Plotz
Right. And why do those limits exist whereas the limits don't exist on immigration and industrial policy? I think the Republican Party is profoundly divided. And so I think some of the best signs of what I call this neo populism are not so much in legislation, although there are a whole bunch of pieces of evidence of legislation, but they're in things that people say. So it's really fascinating that JD Vance, a far right Republican who may be Donald Trump's running mate, said that Lena Khan, who is by most measures one of the most left wing members of the Obama administration, the head of the FTC who's trying to crack down on monopolies, that JD Vance said Lena Khan is one of the only members of the Biden administration, quote, doing a pretty good job.

David Leonhardt
Right? Or that when the head of antitrusted DOJ went before Congress, Matt Gates praised Biden's head of antitrust in the Justice Department. And so you really have large parts of the kind of more populist republican party that are open to the idea of regulating corporations in the way that the Reagan Republican Party just wasn't. Some of that reflects their anger at corporate America for being so called woke. Some of it is a rational response to the republican base becoming increasingly working class and in a world where that was the dominant strain of the Republican Party, and they actually accepted democracy.

To come back to John's point, you could see a world in which there really was kind of a durable long term consensus in which the Democrats and Republicans figured out ways to regulate companies. They wouldn't agree on a lot of stuff, but they would also agree on a lot. The issue, in addition to the democracy issues that John talked about, is there is still a really strong laissez faire reaganism wing of the Republicans Republican Party. It absolutely dominates the Supreme Court. As Emily can explain to all of us, there is no sign of this kind of neo populism on the Supreme Court.

It's very much that you can't regulate. And so I think we could continue to see more legislation on critical minerals. I mean, we're very close to having a bipartisan child tax credit. The House has passed it on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis for kind of technical reasons the Senate hasn't. But it's really easy to see a whole bunch more policies.

But I want to be clear that the republican party is deeply divided between this more populist wing that is happy to spend government money to regulate corporations and try to help working class people, even if it's not how progressives would do it. And a really strong part of the republican party that absolutely remains the heir to Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman and Robert Bork. I was thinking about the Supreme Court as a kind of check, like a backstop against some of the changes you're talking about. And it just seems like important to keep that in mind. It can only go so far if the current court or one like it, is in power.

Emily Bazelon
You know, another thing that your thesis raises is this question of why the two political parties have the coalitions they do as opposed to other ones. Because if you're right that center right social policies for the most part, and center left economic policies are the most popular, you would expect candidates to run in that lane. And I don't think we really have many candidates who do that. Right. It doesn't line up with either of the party's platforms and agendas.

And so then one might imagine that could change or that a third party could step in and play that role. But that always seems like a fleeting possibility in the United States. So I would argue that the best models of this are actually the Democrats who have won the presidency. Right. The flip side of progressives and reproductive choice advocates being so frustrated that Biden won't base his campaign around abortion is that Biden is someone who believes that basing a campaign around abortion is not the way to win swing voters.

David Leonhardt
Right. And so Biden actually is one of these people who's never been fully comfortable with this idea of going really far left on social issues. I mean, Biden's history. Biden won his seat to the Senate in 1972, which is just mind bending. But it's worth remembering that's the year George McGovern was getting absolutely crushed.

And I've gone back and I've read the local coverage in Delaware of Biden's race. Biden basically ran against the student protesters of the new left. He said, I'm not as liberal as you think I am. He also bashed corporate CEO's and Obama similarly. I mean, you go back and you read Obama's speeches from 2004 and 2008.

They're religious, they're patriotic, they send all these kind of signals on cultural stuff. And so I'm not saying Democrats run center, right. But I think the Democrats, and obviously Bill Clinton did this. I think the Democrats who've managed to win the presidency do it in a way by being populist on economics and avoiding the excesses of college educated, highly progressive leftism that most voters just aren't interested in. David Leonhardt's piece is new centrism is rising in Washington.

David Plotz
We could have talked about this probably for an hour more. John is, like, sitting here. Like, John would go. John would keep going forever on this one. But we got.

John Dickerson
Well, it's. Yeah, but it's. It. The reason is because it's so. Because what David says is exactly right.

And I keep ending the topic. I understand you're dandy topic, but I don't want you to mischaracterize my view in the way you mischaracterize what he wrote, because there's. It is fascinating, these overlaps. I don't characterize your view at all. You were excited to converse.

Well, I don't. I was just trying to. To hype David's story by saying that you were so interested in it. Not that you're. I wasn't discussing your views, but.

Okay. Yeah, anyway, that was kind of fun. Okay. Anyway, yes, it is fascinating. And yet there are these other, you know, obviously getting worse parts of partisanship and polarization that are indeed getting worse, literally, as we're talking.

And so mapping that out is. Is really, like, basically the challenge of our time. David Leonhardt, always great to have you on the fs. Thank you. Thank you all for having me.

Emily Bazelon
In France in the 13th century, a teenager ascends the throne. He seems calm, collected, and, as it happens, drop dead gorgeous. But looks can be deceiving, and no one is ready for the death, destruction, and chaos that lie ahead. Step inside. The reign of one of the middle ages.

Most cold blooded rulers on this is history presents the Iron King. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1978, gay people in California faced a dire threat. Proposition six, the Briggs initiative. The teaching profession is riddled with the homosexual element. John Briggs is gonna fire every gay and lesbian schoolteacher in the state of California. I'm Christina Cutter Rucci.

This season on Slow Burn, we'll explore how a nationwide backlash against gays and lesbians led to a massive showdown in California. This was tens of thousands of pissed off gay guys and lesbians roaring down Markets street. With so much at stake, young people became activists. We've got to fight back. We can't let this happen in California.

And activists became leaders. My name is Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you. Slow burn, season nine. Gaze against Briggs. Out now, wherever you listen.

David Plotz
Hey, chatgpt, how are you doing? I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for asking. How about you? Pretty good.

Emily Bazelon
What's up? So my friend Barrett here, he's been having trouble sleeping lately, and I want you to tell him a bedtime story about robots and love. Oh, a bedtime story about robots and love. I got you covered. Gather round, Barrett.

Once upon a time, in a world not too different from ours, there was a robot named. This week, OpenAI maybe pulled the mask off its efforts to win the AI wars in a magnificently self destructive way. Maybe. Maybe. Sam Altman's company was developing chatbots that talk audio versions of its celebrated GPT product that can have a kind of regular conversation with you.

David Plotz
Sort of. The most famous such representation of a talking computer intelligence was probably Hal in 2001 a Space Odyssey. But a close second is, of course, Samantha, the operating system that Joachim Phoenix falls in love with in the movie her. Mister Theodore Twombly. Welcome to the world's first artificially intelligent operating system.

We'd like to ask you a few questions. Okay. Are you social or antisocial? I guess I haven't been social in a while. How would you describe your relationship with your mother?

Thank you. Wait. As your operating system is initiated. Hello, I'm here. Hi.

Emily Bazelon
Hi. I'm Samantha. Good morning. Samantha has the distinctive and genuinely amazing voice of Scarlett Johansson. And Altman approached Johansson in September to ask her to be one of the voices of OpenAI.

David Plotz
She declined. A few days ago, before OpenAI unveiled a new line of these five talking chatbots, Altman asked again. Before Johansson got back to Altman, OpenAI released the bots, including one called sky, which is a chatbot that sounds quite a bit like Samantha. How much it exactly sounds like Johansson is a matter up for debate. But it doesn't not sound like the operating system in her.

Johansson fired off a very direct, very critical letter to OpenAI, accusing them, essentially of appropriating her voice. OpenAI pulled sky down in the wake of public criticism, although, as we'll discuss, there's sort of ambiguity about whether they were, in fact modeling sky on Johansson. So before we get to the legal matters, what's the ambiguity here? I guess the ambiguity is whether it really has any relationship to her voice and how you would tell that, and then whether the facts of the case are that OpenAI actually did say, hey, let's create something that looks. That sounds pretty darn close, or whether they had an absolutely separate process that ended up creating a voice that sounded, you know, some people think close, some people maybe don't think it's so close, and so whether it was an accident or an intention.

Emily Bazelon
Right. I mean, Bette Midler won a case years ago about Ford hiring an impersonator for her. Right. And the ambiguity here. Yes, there are some ambiguity.

OpenAI had an employee show up to talk about recruiting an actress who's not Scarlett Johansson. On the other hand, the fact that Sam Altman was tweeting about her and asking Johansson suggests. Yeah, the movie her. Sorry. Suggests that there could have been some serious overlap.

Right. Like, even if they hired someone else, if she sounds very much like Johansson, then is that really okay? I think it would make it harder for Johansson to win the case unless she really has evidence that they were looking for an impersonator. And we should note the Washington Post has a story that says that they've seen evidence and talked to agents of the other actresses and that Johansson's name never came up. Right.

Although that's not definitive. Important to mention, but not definitive. Yeah, it's not definitive. And also, they could not have mentioned it to the actress but known that that was what they, what the people who were casting had been kind of, like, instructed. This is what we're going for.

Right. We can't see any of that. Yeah. And clear that Altman wanted that. I mean, the fact that he repeatedly went to Johansson.

David Plotz
The Bette Midler case is fascinating. I went and read it. A lawyer friend of mine sent it to me. And it. It's just amazing.

They really went and just got somebody who was a vocal impersonator who had to sing sounding like Bette Midler. And the court just slapped them down. Slapped them down. I have the language here. When a distinctive voice is widely known and deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California.

I mean, Johansson does, has a really amazing, remarkable voice, and she should be allowed to protect it. But again, whether she will sue, who the hell knows? Whether she's allowed to protect it and whether the facts of this case line up are two different things. I really like the role she's playing here. Right.

Emily Bazelon
Because despite the ambiguity, there is a kind of underlying truth about the predatory nature of these companies and about how they're just taking everything without asking and scraping it all off the Internet, and she's standing up to them and using her celebrity to kind of make us all think about what that's like. I hope she does sue, because the other part of this is that the only way we're going to find out about what's really going on is through discovery. Have you ever looked at these databases that tell you whether your work has been heisted by the AI's. Yeah, one of my books, like, one of my books has trained one of these AI engines. And did I know, like, do I care a huge amount?

David Plotz
No, but I mean, it is an appropriation. Should I have been compensated, notified, something? You should have been compensated. I mean, that's the part of this that I still find astounding and don't even really understand is how they decided to just sweep aside and dismiss all the copyright protections. Yeah.

All the work we're doing, it's like just being swallowed into the mall and sliced and diced and reused by them. And not a penny to us. Not a penny. Right. And there may be a fair use argument, but it's so hard.

Emily Bazelon
I mean, the New York Times is suing them, I should say, over exactly these issues. And those kinds of lawsuits are really important here because normally you would have the default be the protection. Right. You would think, like, oh, the lawyers would tell OpenAI, you can't just take everything that seems like a fair use violation. And all of the legal advice, or at least all of the decision making seemed to have gone the other way.

John Dickerson
Just kind of in random adjacent news that Steve Kramer, the political consultant who impersonated Joe Biden's voice during the New Hampshire primary, has been indicted this week for faking Biden's voice. Just in other voice faking news, is there a legal standard yet for testing this kind of thing? So, for example, obviously, Johansson's voice is more. There's a special dispensation that comes when you are a star and you make your living off of your voice that's different than Joe on the corner from Brooklyn. When you're a star, you can get away with it, as Donald Trump said.

Yeah, I don't believe there is, but I imagine there soon will be some kind of way that you can measure the different aspects and elements of speech and determine if the Johansson speech is some degrees different than whatever has been created and create a legal standard that would say you have to be this far off when it's no longer an impersonation. And that would be cool to figure out how you do that. Yeah, that will be like the 2024 or 2028 version of the Bette Midler case, where instead of a kind of impressionistic idea that this is too close, you could actually try to make a quantitative one. The underlying tort here is about controlling your own likeness. The idea that you, who can't be just imitated in a world in a way that other people make money off of without them coming back to you and negotiating a deal.

David Plotz
You know, what is most, perhaps most unsettling about this whole episode to me is how grotesquely these guys did not get the lesson of her. The movie her is a tragedy. Her is about the loss of humanity, the alienation, loneliness created when you are seduced by the ultimately completely indifferent machines. Like, yes, right. Why would this be something you want to hold up as a model?

Like. Yeah, yeah. Such a good point. Right? More irony than a dry cleaner.

Do you guys have any kind of. I am. I continue to be such a skeptic about all the AI stuff, but I do think the human voice is a. Is a step in the right direction for them because the human voice is so emotionally connecting. Yeah.

Emily Bazelon
A terrifying step in the right direction. The right being. Like the market, right. Yeah. Step in.

David Plotz
Step in the direction of. It's getting closer to something that will really affect us. I've always thought, like a bunch of text that's printed out is. That is not AI. That is not.

John Dickerson
Oh, wait, so is your skepticism. Is it your skepticism that it ain't no big thing and this is just like a parlor trick or that it's actually skepticism, that it's benevolent? No, no, no. It's definitely not benevolent. My skepticism has been, it's all up until now, it's just been a parlor trick.

David Plotz
Like the just text being spat out is nothing. But when you can start to create emotional connection, which we know this, we are podcasters. This is what we do for a living that the intonation of a human voice carries with it so much emotional freight that people build up these relationships and that does actually really start to matter in a way that I don't think a bunch of text spewed out really starts to matter. The other thing I think we should bring up here is just the OpenAI context. I mean, this is Sam Altman who had a huge fight for a moment, seemed like he was leaving for Microsoft and then came back and the more safety minded people on his board left.

Emily Bazelon
And there's other reason to think that what is going on at OpenAI is not super concerned with safety or the benefits to society. So a separate story in Vox was about the non disclosure agreements that OpenAI employees were asked to sign, which were just like incredibly overbearing. And Altman claimed he knew nothing about this. And after the Vox story, oh, I'm embarrassed I didn't know about this. And we took this clause out of these contracts, but in fact, he'd been signing dozens of them for quite some time.

And the notion that he had never read this particular part of this very short contract seems unlikely. And you just have this sense, again, that these are companies that are really trying to get away with whatever they can, and the fact that they are in control of developing this product, which contradavid could really affect all of our lives, is unsettling. And Charlie Warzel writes a good piece about what's perhaps even more dangerous than just wanting to rake in profits and breaking things along the way and not caring, which is the kind of missionary zeal of some parts of OpenAI, that what they're creating, if it's in the hands of the west and people who believe in liberal democracy and believe in all of the things that Americans stand for, that that's what you want when you're in a competition with China and autocratic regimes, which are also trying to harness the power of artificial intelligence. And so when you have the missionary zeal behind you, you can think you're not just breaking things for profit, but you're breaking things for the good of your community. And that that's probably even more dangerous.

John Dickerson
I actually find my interactions with the voice of chat GPT, which is on their mobile device, extremely pleasant and very useful, particularly when you're reading poetry or art analysis. I had a great experience where I photographed a page of extremely turgid art history writing about Hopper and said, can you just sort this for me? And it did it beautifully and I didn't have to. I mean, obviously that wouldn't be the way I would interact with all writing by any means, but it was a very pleasant shortcut in that instance. I'm not sure the guy who wrote that passage or the gal who wrote that passage, turchid passabout Hopper, is so.

Happy that their work, well, their meaning was conveyed. I mean, they're better to have the meaning conveyed than not. Let us go to cocktail chatter. Better to have the meaning conveyed or not is maybe a great slogan for everything that we do, but certainly when you're having a cocktail and you want to convey meaning, Emily Bazelon, what are you going to convey meaning about? You know, I was having this desperate feeling that I've been just working and thinking about only one thing, which is not a fun thing to chatter about.

Emily Bazelon
And then I remembered the sun came out, that I had been watching hacks, which is one of my favorite shows. I love that show. It is so funny. The season is great. There is something about the relationship between the gene smart character, this comedian who was supposed to be over the hill and is having this second coming as some great hit.

And then this younger writer that is just both hilarious and quite moving to me. And I've been enjoying how each of these episodes is more of a set piece. I feel like they got a bigger budget now. They're allowed to go places. Like they went to a golf tournament and they went on a hike.

It's just really a delightful show. If you are not watching it, try it out. I can't wait for that season. I love the first. Are you saving it up?

David Plotz
Well, my girlfriend doesn't watch it, so I have to find sneak it some other time. John, what is your chatter? My chatter is about some findings in a poll done for the Guardian about the economy. 56% of the respondents think the US is experiencing a recession, which it is not. 55% believe the economy is shrinking, which it is not.

John Dickerson
GDP is growing. 72% believe inflation is going up. Inflation is more than halved from the 2022 peak of 9.149. Percent think the current unemployment rate is at a 50 year high. It's actually near a 50 year low.

And 49% believe that the S and P 500 is on the decline. It's risen more than 12% this year. And obviously the Dow just made hit 40,000, which is different index, but nevertheless similar. So the question is, what does one do in a democracy where public opinion is verifiably askew with the results of things? That's not to say that, or that's separate from the question of the way people feel and why they feel what they feel, which came out in another Fed survey, actually, which said, basically, people feel not as awful as they tell pollsters about the political race and the economy.

But anyway, the question is, what does one do with this? If you had those kinds of numbers about, say, the spread of a pandemic, would the press allow them to sit, or would they do lots and lots of stories saying these misapprehensions could really hurt people's health and we should correct these misapprehensions? That isn't really the way political coverage is done. People don't say, hey, there's this misimpression out there about recession and unemployment and inflation and growth. We should correct that.

Why not? Why not correct that? Leonhardt's not here anymore, but he always talks about bad news bias. Are we feeding into it in all these ways instead of correcting it? Exactly.

The Brookings Institution did a very good analysis of that and found what's not surprising because we all feel it, but they quantified it. That there is an increasing bad news bias, and particularly with respect to economic coverage.

And so, in fact, it's empirically gotten worse. It is the worst of the bad news bear sequels.

David Plotz
My chatter is literally something I was chattering about having cocktails the other week, and so what a great chatter. There's an astonishing episode of the podcast 99% invisible, which I've talked about generally that podcast many times on the gap fest before. I want to point you all to an episode called Towers of Silence by Lasha Madan.

And this is an episode about the Parsi tradition. Parsi religious tradition. Parsi is a very small religious group in India. It's the indian manifestation of the zoroastrian religion. Very few Parsees live in India, but in Parsi tradition, you do not bury your dead.

You leave the dead out to be eaten by vultures. And they're left out in on towers, these sort of small, not that high up towers, which are called towers of silence colloquially, where the vultures congregate and they dispose of a body really quickly. They will eat a body extremely quickly. And this episode is all about what happened in India when essentially all the vultures of India died for mysterious, although then ultimately figured out reasons. And it's an amazing episode about what happened with the vultures, about this religious tradition, about the attempt to adapt to the religious tradition, about the main place that bodies have disposed of in Mumbai is right in the heart of a very rich neighborhood, and it's a kind of forest preserve in a rich neighborhood.

And so it's about also the conflict with the rich neighbors. It's just a stunning piece of work. So towers of silence, 99% visible. It's kind of gruesome, I would also note. So be aware of that, listeners, thanks for the great chatters again this week.

We've just got them stacked up. We've got great chatters stacked up. Please keep them coming. Email them to us@gaffeslate.com. dot.

And this one is week's chatter has a very special significance for me. It's a DC based chatter about a story I have been following, and it's from Aaron, and it's about a cat. I'm Aaron tacks in Washington, DC. This story, a beloved alley cat now lives in the Watergate, but she kidnapped or rescued from the May 9 edition of the Washington Post, was like catnip for anyone who likes some neighborhood drama. A cat with a porn star name and a link to the Watergate.

Aaron Tax
According to the story, Kitty Snows arrived in foggy Bottom in 2021 as part of the Humane Rescue alliances blue collar cat program. She was the cat's meow. People loved her. They left her food. She even had merch.

And then in February, she disappeared. Did curiosity kill the cat? No one knew. Neighbors put up missing posters and set up a tip line. And then one day, a neighbor named Tom let the cat out of the bag.

He and his Watergate friend had adopted Kitty at the recommendation of a vet after finding her injured kitty was now living at the Watergate. The neighbors called. The police, alleged she'd been taken hostage, and a detective was put on the case. Tom and his Watergate friend and the neighbors traded threats and legal actions. Good intentions aside, there's no pussy footing around.

It's a crazy case.

David Plotz
That's our show for today. The gabfest is produced by Shayna Roth. Our researcher is Julie huging was not in Arches National park, much to her dismay. She was supposed to be. Trip got cut short.

She'll tell you the reasons if you get in touch with her separately. Our theme music is by they might be giants. Ben Richmond is senior director for podcast operations. Alicia Montgomery is the vp of audio for Slate. Emily Bazelon, I'm John Dixon.

I'm David Plotz. We will talk to you next week.

Hello. Slate plus, how are you? Well, if you are a Republican who wants to be Donald Trump's running mate, I know how you are. You are denying that he could ever possibly lose the 2024 election is how you are and what you're doing. John, there's this spasm, this paroxysm of Republicans recently not committing to accepting the 2024 results.

What is going on? Who's doing this? I can think what's going on is two different things. Who's doing it is basically JD Vance, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, all the people who are running to be or are maybe in the running to be possible Donald Trump vice presidential picks and then other obviously senior members of the party are doing this. And I guess two things strike me.

John Dickerson
One, this is an evolution from so Donald Trump used to break norms, tell lies, do things that were totally objectionable, and senior members of his party would say, I didn't see the tweet. They would just kind of ignore it and mumble away. Now they are taking it upon themselves to repeat and in fact, fan the flame. This isn't complicity by silence. This is active engagement in promoting what Trump believes.

So and these people who are running to be vice president or these other senior members of the party who won't say, yes, I will accept the outcome of the election. Like they are not saying what is the easiest possible thing to say, which is if you're a member of the legislative body and we're elected by this electoral process, you can say, you know what? I, of course I'll accept the outcome. And if there are legitimate questions, there's a way to handle those. But I also know the damage that can come from false claims.

And how do they know the damage that can come from false claims about stolen elections? They were literally in the building when it was attacked. But they're not doing that. They're not taking the what if you were a steward of a democratic system? What's the obvious easy answer?

Instead, they're either not answering or they're saying, so you're saying there's zero voter fraud ever in the history. So it's just, it's embarrassing as a matter of character. But it also, I think, is an evolution in the way that the party has internalized Donald Trump's signals and then people take them on themselves. And I think that ultimately is more dangerous because if he gets in office, then he not only breaks norms himself, he has now created a whole group that will break norms themselves. That was just a snippet from our slate plus conversation.

David Plotz
If you want to hear the whole conversation, go to slate.com gabfestplus. To become a member today, Judy, was boring. Hello? Then Judy discovered jumbacasino.com. dot.

Emily Bazelon
It's my little escape now Judy's the. Life of the party. Oh, baby, mama's bringing home the bacon. Whoa, take it easy, Judy. The chumba life is for everybody.

David Plotz
So go to chumbacasino.com and play over 100 casino style games. Join today and play for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Chumbacas.com. no purchase necessary. Voidware prohibited by law.

18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. Hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, the queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer.

She was also given the title the Welfare Queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor. Now it's time to hear her real story. Over the course of four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name. The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are. Subscribe to the Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.

Justice Alito's Upside Down Flag

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction

2: Ethical Implications

3: Judicial Bias and Recusal

4: The Rise of New Bipartisanship

5: Closing Reflections

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Companies

Books

Guest Name(s):

Content Warnings:

Transcript