Should Student Protesters Be Arrested?

David Plotz
Hello and welcome to the Slate political Gabfest.

May 2, 2024. The should student protesters be arrested edition. I'm David Plotz from Citycast Crow update. There's now a cat stalking in the yard next door and the birds are extremely agitated. I haven't seen an outdoor cat in my neighborhood.

Do not like it. Pros are not picking up the things I may do for them. That happens to me all the time. Yeah, you guys don't pick up the things I leave for you either. John Dickerson from CB's Daily report.

Hello. John Dickerson thank you for using its new name, David. I feel affirmed. From the New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School and the Yale University Law School Daily Report, Emily Bazelon. Hello, Emily.

Emily Bazelon
Hi, David. Hi, John. Imagine if you had to do a daily 90 minutes show about Yale University Law School. Emily oh my God. On the other hand, you would have lots of ready people available to bang on for 90 minutes about things, wouldn't you?

David Plotz
That is absolutely true.

Emily Bazelon
Yeah. This week on the Gabfest, police arrest 1000 anti Israel protesters at campuses across the US. Columbia, Fordham, Dartmouth, NYU. Counter protesters attack an encampment at UCLA campus after campus after campus is paralyzed by student activism. Who is right?

David Plotz
Who is wrong? Is this invigorating student activism? Is it anti semitic vandalism? Is it a performative tantrum? What is it then?

Who could possibly be against judges considering history and tradition and their rulings? Emily Bazelon, that's who. We'll talk about Emily's fascinating new piece about history and tradition and judicial rulings. Then South Dakota governor Christy Noam admits to murdering her own puppy and a goat in her new memoir. Will it help her get on Trump's ticket?

Plus, we'll have cocktail chatter. Okay, round two, name something that's not boring. Laundry. Ooh, a book club. Computer.

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Emily Bazelon
Apply. See website for details. What an extraordinary week it has been on university campuses with the showdowns over the pro palestinian, anti Israel protests in Colombia. The ground zero. The cops called cops on the protesters for the second time, this time to expel and arrest students and others who took over university building.

David Plotz
There were also arrests at many, many other universities. The last figure I saw was more than 1000. There are encampments, battles over encampments on dozens of campuses. I would say we're at the never wrestle with a pig phase of these protests, where it's clear that no matter who wins, the university is going to lose. Student protesters have put university leaders in impossible positions, and university leaders have responded by doing really improbable and probably mistaken things.

So, John, you live just down the street from Columbia, practically. Should Columbia have called the cops to expel protesters from a campus building? Should you ever call the cops on student protesters? Is this an occasion when you should? Those are two great questions.

John Dickerson
I would also, I would just tweak the open just a little bit. Sorry, I'm getting out of my lane here. But, yeah, seriously, man. But it's my day job. There are some universities where things were resolved.

Yale, Johns Hopkins, Brown. And I would, I think at least in the case of Brown, which I know a little bit more, I'm not sure that the college administrators came off badly. I mean, I think they, they found a resolution. They basically agreed to have a vote in October on divestment anyway. That's obviously not the majority of cases, but it's just one little part of the story.

Should they call the cops first time? No, probably. Like, maybe. Definitely not call them the first time. Occupy a building, not leave when given plenty of fair warning.

Yeah. I mean, it's hard. You sort of want to wind the tape back, right? I mean, let's take Colombia as an example. If you go back to this moment feels a long time ago, maybe it was just like a week and a half ago, where the president of Colombia, Manouche Shafiq, was testifying in front of Congress.

Emily Bazelon
She kind of, through free speech values and individual professors under the bus in front of Congress, like she knew that the president of Harvard and the president of Pan had lost their jobs by not sounding like they cared enough about anti semitic speech on their campuses. And she wasn't going to make that mistake. So then she came back to campus to a lot of real distress about that testimony and an encampment, which the students had cleverly set up in the early dawn right before she testified. And I've been told by people at Columbia, where I've been doing some reporting, that she then felt like she had to act tough because she had basically just told Congress she was going to do that and kind of set herself up. And then things like unwind from there.

And I think you have the sense on other campuses that Columbia lit a spark, which is now traveling around the country. I was talking to a wise former administrator who was saying to me that when students are upset about something and they really are upset about the war on Gaza, you have to figure out as a university how not to become the vector for their rage. And that is absolutely not what happened at Columbia. It was the total opposite. And I think Shafiq kind of created reasons for that that were real.

But then we also have to ask whether the response from the students was wise. And to even use that word is kind of funny because I think we have this idea that we're always supposed to side with the youth or be sympathetic in some way. But on the other hand, often students are unwise as well. But what was Shafiq supposed to have done? She was in an absolutely impossible position.

David Plotz
And I feel like she made a set of choices that were probably not good. She shouldn't have called the cops, but she would have lost her job. And because she was going to be a ritual animal sacrifice under all circumstances except her cracking down on the students with cops. As little power as Congress has in so many areas that require collective action from Congress, it's amazing that in this area, following the chain of reasoning I think you were touching on, David, with which I agree, Congress hasn't enormous power. It caused this behavior.

John Dickerson
I mean, I don't think it caused this behavior. I think. Isn't the, isn't the whole deal about having morals and a code and a set of standards that when those standards come in conflict with people you think are acting in bad faith? And I think it's probably safe to assume here that Columbia administrators thought that the members of Congress who were pillorying them were acting in bad faith, that your job is to sacrifice yourself for the things you believe in, when you're in one of these jobs where you're trying to promote the belief in things you believe in and that giving into the performative aspect of this, while it might have been politically beneficial in the short term, one of the reasons you have these standards and morals is not just because they're good on their own basis, but also because in the long term they end up kicking you in the ass when you break them. Well said.

Emily Bazelon
Let's remember that federal funding is a significant fraction of the budget of these big private universities. Right. They are directly beholden to Congress, so they can't thumb their notes. But I think to take your more principled stand, John, I mean, one thing that has been missing in this testimony generally is like a full throated defense of free speech on campus of like, yes, we are going to let people yell things that other people find completely unacceptable. And that's part of our learning community.

Now, there's a limit on this, which is another, which is a federal statute called title six, which says that you can't have discriminatory or harassing speech that rises to the level of a hostile environment because it's severe or pervasive. And Shafiq, interestingly, in the last week has said that the protests have created that kind of hostile environment in Colombia, which is a sort of admission of being on the brink of liability. But I think she also said it in order to lay the groundwork for calling the cops again when the building was occupied. Anyway, there's this tension there. But, Emily, nobody can make that principle defense of free speech because there are very few university campuses where that's actually been the habit in recent years.

David Plotz
I mean, this is, I assume this is why University of Chicago is in a safe. Is the school that is like skating through this? Because University of Chicago has sort of allowed that. Yeah, there was a really interesting letter from their president. He said, look, like you're saying so Chicago has both a principle of institutional neutrality for the school itself called the Calvin principles, and these principles from 2014 that are like, very pro free speech, very not in the mode of, like, we're going to have safe spaces on campus for students.

Emily Bazelon
And we think that if students are wounded or offended by speech, including hate speech, we're going to do something about it. Chicago does not do something about it if they don't have to, which they really don't most of the time. And so this letter was about like, hey, we let pro palestinian demonstrators set up a huge exhibit on the lawn honoring, saying, like, honoring our martyrs. We let it stay up. We been given lots students, lots of opportunities for expression.

Now we have an encampment. We are not happy about that encampment because it breaks our time, place and manner rules. And we're going to explain to you that the reason we have those rules is if we let you occupy a part of the lawn permanently, that means other people can't have that same right of speech. There's like an exclusionary aspect to these encampments right now. You can say that this is like, exaggerated because there are plenty of other places on campuses to go, but it's not nothing.

That argument. And then the president said, look, in the name of respecting and honoring self expression from students, maybe we'll let the encampment stay up for some amount of time. We're not going to rush in immediately, but we're monitoring this. And also, we're just asking you to respect our rules. We have these rules for a reason.

We will make lots of spaces and lots of time and manners for you to protest, but we're asking you to limit this particular kind of protest, which is against our rules and in the end does create some disruption and can create some safety problems for schools. I don't want to overstate that stuff. Right. But it's not like it's zero. One interesting thing I'm looking for, obviously, you got now involved the mayor in New York, Eric Adams, who said there's a movement to radicalize young people, and I'm not going to allow that to happen.

John Dickerson
That seemed to be a referring to him. Yes. Yes. Well, it seemed to be referring to what he said were outside agitators. And what our correspondent Michael George, who was up there covering this for us, pointed out, which I think was really smart, is 109.

I think is the total number of those arrested at Hamilton hall at Columbia. At some point, there is going to be a number. How many of those were students? And it'll bring the lie or the truth of this question of outside agitators, which is maybe a small point, but I think is not unimportant because part of this is, I think part of the justification for the military or the police response is these weren't students, these were agitators. And there's obviously been some reporting of people who are known members of the community, not students who were agitating.

So that'll just be an interesting way to actually test this not unimportant fact. Emily, you point us to this interesting John Chait piece in New York magazine where he talks about why this has been such catnip for the right and for three reasons that Chait points out. One is that it's an issue, the issue of Israel and Gaza genuinely divides the left. So the more focus there is on it, the more division there is with the left, number one. Number two, it promotes this image of chaos that is at the heart of Trump's narrative and the sort of MaGa narrative about America, that it's chaotic, that, like the left is making our cities, our universities, into squatter encampments occupied by Palestinian radicals.

David Plotz
And third, that it's fuel for people who believe in sort of an extremist, that it drives people to extremes. And that's also helpful. So why were you struck by that? I mean, besides the fact that I just summarized it.

Emily Bazelon
I was struck by it because I think that there's this, this inevitability about the way in which these protesters are going to play in the hands of Republicans and of former President Trump running for president, it makes the university seem totally out of control for many Americans. It's very alienating. I think a lot of students are super upset about the war. The war is terrible. So many people are dying.

It is also true that students for justice in Palestine, the group that is leading a lot of these protests, has a much more radical agenda. They are rejecting any kind of two state solution. It is not just about a ceasefire. It is about eliminating Israel. That is their platform.

They are very clear about it. They are the people who rejected the Oslo peace process in the 1990s, and that is what they want. And so the students following them can be very heterogeneous in their beliefs. But that part of the protest in leadership is there. And so that is something that does not have majority american support.

And that's why it's a useful wedge issue for Republicans. And there's also a kind of irony here about targets. Right. Universities are the institution in american life that have done the most to nurture the left and develop it, right? I mean, these ideas about anti colonialism, which are so prevalent in these protests, they are coming out of the universities, and yet the universities are already the target.

And I get why. Right, like, the universities are big organizations and they have investments hidden or sometimes disclosed in all kinds of different things. And divestment is meaningful, like it did in some way probably affect the fall of apartheid in South Africa. At the same time, there are a lot of other targets, military bases, congressional offices. You could come up with a lot of other things where you would have a more direct line to actually changing policy on Gaza and on Israel and Palestine.

And so, you know, look like if you choose the universities, that is going to be very useful for the right, which already has lots of grudges against universities and feels excluded for them and is used to, like, right. Making fun of them as this kind of elite, out of touch part of american life. I wonder on that divestment question whether that analogy still holds. I'm doubting. I'm just questioning because Israel is a different place and investment is, we're in a different investment environment.

John Dickerson
Whether the corporations would, let's say, the schools leave, those companies still get. I mean, it's a symbolic victory, but would it actually affect the behavior of those companies in the market the way it is right now, I wonder. Yes, very good question. And I just myself did not mean to be making Israel equivalent to South Africa. Talking about the effect, I just want to be clear about that.

Yes, yes, yes. And I wasn't, and I wasn't suggesting you were doing that either. I was. Yeah, no, I wasn't. I was just wondering what the difference, you know, Israel's as companies would make these think this thing through.

The congress is now investigating. There are now a series of investigations in this, which is along the line, I gather, of what Chet is arguing, which I didn't read. But the driving chaos to sell order is a longstanding political tactic. Particularly, it's got a kind of a double benefit because it both riles up your own base. And then it also has a kind of a general, to the extent there are any undecided voters left in the seven states that are going to determine the election, it has a kind of middle of the road appeal to voters that Trump otherwise doesn't do so well with because he is the agent of chaos, with no, a lot of times without any solution or order, but is just total chaos.

David Plotz
Yeah. I'm now going to channel my friend Beverly Gage, who was saying to me that this is how Ronald Reagan built his career. It was opposing the student protesters. This is how he became governor of California, like, and proved himself. And it was useful to Nixon, too.

So, yeah, it was extraordinarily useful to Nixon in both 68 and 72. I mean, Nixon was like, if you think of it from a policy perspective, in 72, Nixon is not that popular. Nixon is associated with the war, and yet it's the chaos of the anti war protesters in a lot of ways that benefits him. Speaking of cast, we should all obviously remember that Democrats are going to Chicago this summer, and mischief makers and the news networks that are dying to reshow their 1968 footage is going to create its own weather. Just to close the segment out, the House passed the Anti Semitism Awareness act with majority democratic and republican support, and Senate still has to pass it.

Biden won't have to sign it, but it does classify a bunch of speech about Israel as anti semitic, sort of making, claiming the existence of the state of Israel as racist would be anti semitic, applying double standards to Israel that are not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, and drawing comparisons of contemporary israeli policy to that of nazis would be classified as officially part of the anti Semitism. What happens is that the Education department can then, if universities do not crack down on that speech on their campuses, if student holds up a sign that calls from the river to the sea, then the education department says, you're not cracking down on the speech, you're fostering this we're going to take your research grants. We're going to investigate the hell out of you for this. Wow, that is so interesting. I was at Columbia on Monday, and this was hours before the takeover of Hamilton hall.

Emily Bazelon
It was this very festive atmosphere. I actually felt like I was at a happening with dozens or even hundreds of students marching around the quad chanting, and a whole bunch of faculty kind of locking arms and protecting the encampment. And the students were chanting some things that this act of Congress would rule out. They were chanting that Israel is a racist state. They were chanting at one point, we don't want no zionists here.

And listening to it, I guess I would ask if you can think this speech is unacceptable. You can wish they wouldn't say it, but the idea of an authority figure ordering them to stop talking, is that something that universities can really do? And is that really the right way to address students? Once it becomes socially acceptable to chant things really loudly with hundreds of students, what is the best way to try to address that issue? I want to thank our slate plus listeners.

David Plotz
You have helped us keep the gabfest going for so long. And as a slate plus member, you get lots of great stuff. You get discounts on live shows, bonus segments for other slate podcasts. You get unlimited reading on the slate site, but you also get a slate plus segment from us every week. And this week we're going to talk about the overturned conviction of Harvey Weinstein.

How did it happen? Was it the right decision? So if you are a Slate plus member again, thank you. Enjoy it. If you're not a Slate plus member, go to slate.com gabfests plus to become a member today and hear that bonus segment.

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One woman has a secret and the other has a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost. FX is the veil now streaming only on Hulu, it is always a red letter day on the plot's calendar when Emily Bazelon has a new article. No different this week with I'm not being ironic. That's so nice of you. I always Emily's I read everything Emily writes.

Basically, you are the best. How history and tradition rulings are changing american law some Americans believe in history and tradition, not Emily Bazelon. Emily, what are history and tradition rulings? What is wrong with them? The tension here is about whether courts should consider history and tradition as like a relevant factor or whether they should view it as binding on them.

Emily Bazelon
And the Supreme Court in 2022, in three cases, said history and tradition is going to be how we decide whether things are constitutional in really important areas of american law. So this was, first of all, dobbs the ruling that struck down the right to abortion in Roe versus Wade. The second case is a religion case in which they found that this high school football coach, who was gathering people to pray with him at midfield after games like that, was fine. He was not allowed to be fired by his school. And the third case is about the Second Amendment and striking down a New York gun statute as being inconsistent with american history and tradition.

So this sounds a little or might be reminiscent of originalism, right? The sort of philosophy that Justice Scalia and justice Thomas believe in, which is like, you go back to the original meaning of the Constitution, the words in the text and what they meant in 1789 or 1868, if you're talking about the 14th amendment, and you just stick with what they meant then. And you don't allow those words to develop meaning over time, even if they're words like liberty and due process and equal protection that are kind of deliberately majestic, in the words of some former justice whose name I'm embarrassingly forgetting. Okay, so originalism looks. At least originalism was never consistent or perfect.

And it was also a way of kind of binding the law to the past and not allowing the constitution to evolve. However, at least on paper, it was, like, tethered to a particular moment. It had some kind of limit, right? And that was supposed to be good because it meant that the judges had to stick with that moment, and they couldn't impose their own values. They just had to go back to what the framers meant in 1789.

History and tradition is, like totally all over the place. Like, you get to pick which history and tradition. When does it begin? When does it end? And when you look at Justice Alito's approach to this in Dobbs, you see that it's just a big excuse for cherry picking.

I mean, I am sorry. Like, it just is. But because of that, I think there's just this suspicion about what the Supreme Court is doing here on the part of conservative as well as liberal scholars. And it really comes down to this idea. And this comes from Jack Balkan at Yale.

Is history a resource for judges, or is it a command? And if it's a command, and then you can pick whatever history you want. What's really happening here? It's judicial. Calvin Ball.

John Dickerson
You know what? Calvin Ball is right. You change the rules of the game while you're in the middle of the game. Either that or if you've ever seen the movie stripes, where John Candy describes to the new guy. Now, if we were in Germany, you see, I'd make your bed.

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What are you doing? No, no, get off, get off. See, you gotta make my bunk. See, we're in Italy. The guy in the top bunk, he's gotta make the guy in the bottom bunk, he's gotta make his bed all the time.

See, it's under regulation. See, we were in Germany. I would have to make yours. We're in Italy, so you gotta make mine. Well, Calvin Ball is perfect because originalism was having some problems, like for overturning abortion, for example.

Emily Bazelon
Because in fact, up until quickening which is when women feel fetal movement abortion was legal and permitted widely in colonial America. And so the originalist interpretation would have been very tricky. So, oh, lo and behold, now we have a new test that is Calvin Ball. Emily, can you actually, in getting to the sort of cherry picking problems, just talk about Amy Comey? Barrett's quite wonderful metaphor about this.

Yeah. She talks about looking over the crowd and hunting for your friends. And this actually is a phrase that judges have used in the past for other kinds of interpretive methods. Like when you are looking at legislative history, you can have the same problem. Like you pick the one member of Congress who said what you wanted, and then you decide, like, that's what Congress meant.

And Justice Barrett was talking in 2023. She was giving a talk at the law school at catholic university, and she sort of said, well, judges need to be really careful. It was a kind of warning, but she didn't really explain exactly what they were supposed to do. And she was one of the votes for Dobbs in which there was a lot of looking out over the crowd and hunting for your friends. First of all, we should just note, interpreting history is super, super hard.

John Dickerson
Like, even if you're doing it in good faith, as I've tried to. And there's, you know, the presidency has all these special traps in it because there is this thing you can fall into, which is if a past president did it, it's part of the tradition of the office, and therefore it's a good thing, but with no kind of second beat thinking. Wait a minute. Like, but if it was James Buchanan who did it, you wouldn't think that this is so great, even though it's a part of the tradition of the office. So you can fall in all these traps.

And that's why I'm no historian, and that's why real historians are, you know, beset with all of this careful, making sure that they're not bringing the present into the past, that they understand things in their context, which is like, doesn't seem to be at play in some of these issues, which is a problem. But the other thing, Emily, is can you, the whole notion of originalism maybe tell me if I'm wrong, is that you don't want to have the whims of passion and self interest and the mob in the moment overcome the rules that were considered carefully and sensibly from the beginning, or at least you want to put some scratchiness in the system, so you mitigate against all of our natural impulses, which the founders studied so intently, which is basically our ambition will overwhelm all of our reason. So let's put some stuff in place. This historical interpretation that you've written about the history and tradition is like the exact opposite, like a really inexpensive street drug for anybody who wants to basically shine up whatever their basic human impulse is. Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it.

Emily Bazelon
I mean, there's a law professor named Sharif Girgas who I talked to for this piece, who has this really interesting article called conservative traditionalism. And he basically just points out that once you have what he calls the dead grip of the middle past, you're going to have a lot of conservative outcomes. That's just how it's going to go. It's not a coincidence. Well, so, I mean, the things that are so frustrating about history and tradition, and as you describe it, Emily, is so there's the a, cherry picking.

David Plotz
So you find what you want. B, history intrinsically in the United States. Like anytime you look before, arguably, like 1965, but certainly if you look before 1900, it is a history that's written without huge groups of people having a voice in what that history should be or what the tradition should be. Because if you were black, if you're a woman, if you're part of an indian tribe, if you're a certain kind of immigrant, you don't have a voice in shaping what the history and law is. So the idea that we should return to that period is insulting and seems totally perverse.

And finally, it's clearly history in this context refers to some particular set of time, which it doesn't happen to be. History is not 1970 for these folks. It's never 1970. It might be 1870. It might be 1890.

It might be 1850. That's when history is. History is basically between 1820 and 1906. That's history. And everything else is not history at all.

Emily Bazelon
Yeah, totally. I mean, there's this great, there's a case this term, it's called United States versus Rohimi. And we'll probably get the decision at the end of June. And it's a gun rights case. And it's, I think, an amazing case.

Yeah, it's this crazy case where the facts are so bad for the gun rights side that I think it's gonna show that the Supreme Court does not really mean, that does not really intend to be literal about applying the history and tradition test. So this guy, Zaki Rahimi, he, his girlfriend accuses him of, like, yanking her out of a car and pulling her by the hair and other bad stuff. And so the judge grants her a protective order. And part of the deal with the protective order is Zachiramey is not allowed to have any guns. But then he goes on a couple shooting sprees, like, over the course of a week, he's just, like, shooting off his gun, and the cops come to his house, and they're like, oh, wait a second.

You have guns, and they're in violation of protective order. So then he gets convicted. This is under a 1994 law where that's then the reason for taking away the guns of someone under a protective order is to try to protect victims of domestic violence, most of whom are women, from getting killed. And there are studies showing that if there are guns around with someone who's a domestic violence offender, there is a much greater risk of homicide. So this all seems perfectly sensible and modern.

But then the fifth circuit, which is a very conservative appeals court, overturned Zaki Raheem conviction, essentially says, like, yes, you get to have your guns. And the reason is that this law is what the Fifth Circuit calls an historical outlier, because, oh, guess what? Back in the colonial days, we didn't take guns away from domestic violent offenders. Another thing about the colonial days is that women couldn't vote and had almost no recourse if they were victims of abuse. They also couldn't own property if they were married.

And so there's just this way in which the very standard itself yanks us back to the time that we don't want to live in anymore. That is completely at odds with keeping people safe now. And I just don't think the Supreme Court really has the stomach for giving Zack I Rahimi his guns back. So I expect them to somehow change the history and tradition test to prevent that outcome. But that will also be showing that this test.

Is this really a test at all? Except, to be fair, you can't really engage in a shooting spree without a gun. It's true. It's a problem.

David Plotz
But, of course, and I guess this is where liberal justices end up, which is that history or a lot of justice end up. History and tradition. That's a box that we want to investigate. The original intent. That's a box like what modern standards are about this issue, what the legislation actually says that we're considering.

It's a. It's a melange. It's a very complicated, nuanced stew that we're considering. It's not sort of one hunk of meat. That's how you can reach an outcome.

Emily Bazelon
Totally. And it makes sense, right? If we had never ever done something in american history before, then you might want to think about, why are we doing it now? Like, if someone passes a law about something and it's just like completely unheard of, maybe that would be a reason for judges to think that it's a bad idea. Or maybe they would say, well, we never had this eventuality before, and that's why the history is so different, right?

Like, of course history should be relevant and considered and a factor. And that is, in fact, the way the judges have always talked about history in cases. It's not like they went around ignoring it before. It's this notion that it somehow is at once supposed to be dictating the outcome and utterly malleable. That is the problem, I think, with the current, the conservative majority's current attempt to use it.

David Plotz
I'm very tempted. I printed out my favorite quote, which is the Ulysses S. Grant quote about originalism and which also bears on history and tradition. And I was like, should I read this again for the fourth time on the gabfest? And I've decided I will not.

But look up, look up the phrase. The framers were wise in their generation and wanted to do the very best possible to secure their own liberty and independence. That's the phrase. Look that up. And then read that paragraph that follows, which is the greatest paragraph ever written about America in my view.

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And live the Chumba life. No purchase necessary. Vgw 18 plus. Hey everyone, it's MSNBC's Chris Hayes. For the first time since 1892, we have an election in which both candidates have presidential records.

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Its a chance to take a hard look at what Joe Biden and Donald Trump have actually done as president on a special why is this happening? Podcast series called with Pod 2024. The stakes. Im talking to experts about the two candidates records on specific policy areas like immigration, taxes, climate and more. So you know whats at stake come November.

Search for why is this happening and follow. Christy Noum, governor of South Dakota would be Trump running mate, dipped herself into hot water this week when the Guardian got hold of her new memoir, no going back the truth, on what's wrong with politics and how we move America forward, and found that it contains a shocking, horrifying story, anecdote about how she murdered her own german wire haired pointer puppy and a billy goat that she thought were bad animals. The puppy was untrainable and wild, and the billy goat was too aggressive. We can get into the details of the story, which are just insane, but she's positioning herself as someone who does what needs to be done in this dog kill dog world. But she did horrify the dog world with this.

David Plotz
And I just want to note, I was horrified by the story for many reasons, but notably because when I asked my dog expert friend of mine what kind of dog I, David Plotz, would be if I were a dog, she thought about it for a while and she said, you, David Plotz, would be a german wire haired pointer, which is a very active, curious, bearded dog that likes physical activity too much, points at things. And so the fact that Christy Noah murdered a puppy, that is that I always feel sympathy for german white hair pointers. Anyway, John, discuss. I don't have, I can ask you a question, but just start on this. Well, the first thing that came to me would be an interesting intellectual exercise, which is provide three to five possible excuses that would be made by his supporters if Donald Trump had admitted to doing this.

John Dickerson
In other words, there is a line we have seemed to have found for behavior. And there's always, to me, an interesting question between the behavior Donald Trump himself can get away with and the behavior that those who are his acolytes can and cannot get away with, and where the lines are drawn and who draws them and so forth. If this were something Donald Trump had admitted to, there would be the normal retinue of Republicans who would defend it as being consistent with a lot of great, wonderful characteristics. Just noam got caught on the wrong end of that. But it seems to me that the performative aspect of putting it in the book, and I make tough choices is a part of that market that Donald Trump created, which I've talked about before before, which is the same kind of political market that Matt Gates participates in.

Marjorie Taylor Greene it's the performative toughness. It's not unlike the market created by the you're fired on the Apprentice, which is not the real world, but a fake world in which. So it's all it feels like, perfectly consistent in that we should talk about the vice presidential sweepstakes later after we get off the dog issue. But I would say after you go look up David Plotz's wonderful Ulysses S. Grant quote, go listen to Nixon's Checkers speech, in which checkers is the name of the dog, a.

How he deployed checkers in the speech, incredibly talented. Secondly, the whole speech itself, which is a defense of why he should stay on Eisenhower's ticket, it's a really good speech, and, boy, have things changed. But also all the norms that Richard Nixon, right, not considered by many people to be a paragon of norm maintenance, all the norms he's bowing to in that speech, which are now, you know, his party, is in a post norm period. The only thing that made sense to me about the story was the idea that because there were witnesses to the dog killing, that this story was going to come out anyway, and she was trying to get ahead of it. The rest of it just seems completely just dumb to me.

Emily Bazelon
I just can't imagine that she really thought, like, oh, this is going to be a political asset. Like, so bizarre. And just to quickly brief on the details. So she had this 14 month old puppy, wanted to be a hunting dog, took it out on a hunt with other dogs. Apparently, like all hunters say, this is not how you train a dog to be a hunting dog.

David Plotz
You never take a dog, a hunting dog, out with a group of other well trained dogs for the first time. It requires a ton of training. The dog goes out on this first hunt. It is wild. It's having the time of its life, which sounds kind of great, like the dog is having the time of its life.

It doesn't respond to its shock collar because it's having the time of its life. And then it attacks some chickens. Not great. You don't want dogs to attack chickens at a farm. And she decides from this.

The dog is untrainable. It cannot be. It is an incorrigible dog. It can never be. And shoots it on the spot or takes it to a gravel pit, actually leads it to a gravel pit and shoots it.

And the idea that you would make that conclusion after that series of events is so shocking and shows such a callousness about life is really stunning. But I agree with you. I believe that probably someone else has witnessed it and has a different version of it, and she's just trying to get ahead of it with a slightly more pleasant spin. And yet, on the other hand, given the whole hang Mike Pence thing, the idea of the punishment not fitting the crime is rather consistent with the job of the vice presidency as conceived in a Trump administration. Well, that's grim, as you intended, I think.

Emily Bazelon
But I guess the part of it that also seems mystifying to me is she's just revealed herself to be someone who should not own a dog. That's all we can conclude from this. You're so careless. You don't understand anything about how to raise and train and care for these animals. You just shouldn't be around them.

It just makes her seem so incompetent, also impulsive. And then she also is like, oh, while I'm killing my animals, I think I'll kill the goat. So she kills this male goat who's been around for a while. The goat has obviously exhibited some sort of behavior she hasn't liked for a while, but she's like, today seems like the animal killing day. I'm going to kill the goat.

David Plotz
And she doesn't even kill the goat correctly. She doesn't manage to shoot the goat in such a way that the goat dies, leaves the goat, no doubt, in agony in this gravel pit, and then goes back, gets another shell, comes back, and succeeds in killing the goat. So it's like this kind of, why would you want that sort of impulsivity and this sort of, like, cruelty that doesn't read as. I'm a thoughtful, considerate person who should have my finger on. But here's the question.

John Dickerson
What are we evaluating here, and what are the set of characteristics that make her disqualified from the job, and why are they only the kinds of characteristics that would make a vice president disqualified when, I mean, Donald Trump hasn't killed any dogs, but he has exhibited cruel behavior in public in a number of different ways. So we don't have to go relitigate the entire republican primary process. But it does seem to me that this happens in a context. Is it just that basically she has no defenders and wasn't a particularly strong candidate for the vice presidency anyway, so nobody's going to rally to her defense. So it's all one sided.

David Plotz
Is that the case, Jon? Is. I don't know. Should she have no chance to be his running mate? I don't.

John Dickerson
I mean, I mean, I suppose she has a chance. There are, you know, the state she comes from doesn't particularly help. She is, I don't know what her bridging characteristics are. I mean, obviously, she's a woman, and that's a constituency Donald Trump needs help with. But I don't know that she is the kind of woman.

And particularly now, I think, doesn't she. Seem like a really worse version of Sarah Palin? I think she doesn't necessarily have the bridge to the suburban Republic, although I don't know if she were a different, I mean, if she weren't, and that this seems to put her in the kind of Sarah Palin camp and therefore might not have the outreach to the suburban women that Donald Trump wants. And then, of course, you have to go back to the principle about vice presidents, which is that they don't really matter that much in the end anyway, so. But I don't, I don't have a beat at all on what the Donald Trump vice presidential sweepstakes are like.

I mean, Rubio and JD Vance get mentioned a fair amount, which is, which also suggests another deficiency of Christine Noem, which is that she hasn't publicly, thoroughly and savagely attacked Trump in really are. I mean, both JD Vance and Marco Rubio have minted some of the most incisive critiques of Donald Trump. Rubio's in particular. In 2016, he went on a long jag about his foreign policy expertise in understanding south american countries and the role of dictators and how they fooled the populace into supporting them. It's so powerful, you would think it's an AI creation of the present.

And JD Vance, who said that once called Trump basically cultural heroin, compared him to Hitler. And now those guys are both in the running. So perhaps nome, to have a better chance, should have been more critical of Trump. Can you actually give us a little bit on the sweepstakes, John? I mean, what do you think Trump is looking for?

David Plotz
Is there any strategic choice? Is there anyone that would actually hurt him? So what you get with Trump is that he's doing, he appears to be doing, in this case, with his vice president, what he did with a lot of other cabinet officials. And I'm not sure that he did with Mike Pence, actually. But anyway, he's having chat with lots of people, kind of testing out some names and things like that.

John Dickerson
There's a formal process, but he has his own idiosyncratic process. Rubio checks some interesting boxes. Obviously, he's bilingual. He has strong ties to the foreign policy conversation. And so I'm not sure whether that's a real asset, frankly.

How does that actually play out in terms of voters? Does somebody say, oh, because the vice president has a nuanced view of, you know, american anti terrorism policies, I'm going to vote for the guy at the top of the ticket who has a completely different set of viewpoints on foreign policy. But anyway, that's one of the things that gets mentioned in the Rubio dossier, is that he has this foreign policy experience. The problem with Rubio is, and Emily, you would know this better than I, but the Constitution says you can't have two people from the same state on a ticket.

Rubio or Trump would have to leave Florida, which actually is not that hard to do. Cheney did it with Texas. He moved back to Wyoming so that he could be on the Bush ticket. And also, like, who's going to, well, I was going to say who's really going to press the point? But obviously somebody will somewhere.

So there's some problem there. On the other hand, it really serves Trump's purposes to have Rubio in the conversation, both for the help it might give him with hispanic voters and also you want Rubio and your team. He would help with those moderate voters to the extent there are any left. And also, Rubio dangled the secretary of state in front of him. So things are looking good for Rubio.

And JD Vance gets mentioned. He's been a real warrior out there for Trump on tv, which Trump likes, even though Vance said all these things about Trump, cultural heroin called and loathsome and the rest, he seemed perfectly willing to rewrite everything he previously believed, which is, I wonder for Trump, who has a dominant, one of his strengths and attributes is that he understands dominance in power and enjoys dominance. I wonder if to be a vice president, it requires a certain amount of supplication that, in other words, he doesn't want somebody that is just going to do the job. He wants someone that is a, is a symbol of his power over the supplicant. And so these people who said these awful things about him have now bent the knee and are every day a reminder of the power of the guy at the top of the ticket.

And I think that might be actually appealing to certain voters and certainly would be appealing to what we know about Donald Trump. Let's go to cocktail chatter. I'm having some friends for cocktails tonight and thinking about bringing out the vermouth. I think it's summer time for some red vermouth. So that will be the drink that I am chattering around.

David Plotz
Emily, what are you going to be chattering about? And possibly what will you be drinking as you chatter about it? I am interested in a story this week by Gall Beckerman at the Atlantic. It's about pen America. It's called a prominent free speech group is fighting for its life, and it's about a fight at Pan America connected to the war on Gaza, about whether Pan America has been sufficiently denouncing of Israel and done enough for palestinian writers.

Emily Bazelon
And it's a fight that really threatens to pull down pan America itself. There are some members who just feel like they maybe want to not only call for new leadership, but actually just like, tear down the whole organization. And I was interested in it because I just think it's part of an attack on independent institutions on the left as well as the right that are trying to stand for an abstract principle, in this case, like speech and free expression, as opposed to having weighing in only on the side of progressive causes that are linked to speech and free expression. And I thought that Gall Beckerman just did a good job of laying out the issues. So anyway, check it out.

David Plotz
John Dickerson, what is your chatter? You'll be drinking? A gin martini. I know that I will be. And it's, well, we're in about 28 hours.

John Dickerson
Well, a little more than that. From when I will get my next one in. By the way, listeners, 28 hours puts us at noon on Friday.

David Plotz
That's when John thinks he's gonna have his first drink. Well, I was trying to do the math. 01:00 p.m. I was gonna say. I was trying to do the math to think if, you know, maybe 26 hours by the time I get to Friday, I'm so wrung out that, you know, why not in your cornflakes?

John Dickerson
As listeners of the show know, I have a fascination with, and it has a super romantic claim on me, the finding of old things that were sitting there for thousands of years waiting to be discovered. And the latest example of this is the discovery of or the property location of Plato's burial place. And it was found by, basically there was a proprietary scroll 2000 years ago written on, and it was destroyed, or they thought destroyed, mostly destroyed, in a volcanic blast of Mount Vesuvius, which extinguished, as we know, the town of Pompeii. So this charred clump of old scroll was nevertheless kept. And now, as a result of two technological advances, scanning technology, which can basically look through the charred hunk, which you can't open because it would destroy itself as you open it, but can read the ink based on the carbon, which survived the intense heat, and can figure out what is actually lettering and then AI, where you can feed information and have it turned.

The Rubik's cube billions of times, really quickly deciphered the 2000 characters and discovered that, in fact, the philosopher was interred in the gardens of Athens at his academy, where he tutored Aristotle. So now they know, and they also know that he was a slave during a certain period. But I love this kind of discovery that was sitting there waiting to be made for 2000 years and has just now been made. My chatter is a New York Times photo essay photographer named Kenny Holston. One of my favorite things in any movie, doesn't really matter what the movie is, is a scene where a submarine emerges in the Arctic and submarine comes up through the ice in the Arctic.

David Plotz
And I love any scene. You make a movie. You could make a movie. Really? Could be.

Could be a small domestic, a small domestic comedy. But eventually it emerges. Yeah. And for some reason emerges in the Arctic. I am there for it.

Horror movie. I would see a horror movie if it had a submarine emerging. But Kenny Holston went on a nuclear powered attack submarine, the Hampton. I think it was called under the Arctic Ocean, or he went to see it emerge in the Arctic Ocean, where they're training for arctic warfare with various submarines. And there's a photo essay about this, what life is like on a submarine under the Arctic.

And it sounds terrible. It sounds absolutely miserable. It sounds like a terrible place to work and live, and I definitely don't want to do it, but the photos are wonderful, and it's just super interesting. Photo essay in the Times called inside a navy navigating the Arctic. Listeners, please keep your listener chatters coming.

We're in a little bit of a chatter dearth right now. We're having like, an Italy birth situation here. We need a few more chatters, so please email them to us@gabfestlate.com. And our listener chatter this week comes from Christina in Philadelphia. Hey, political gabfests.

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This is Christina from Philadelphia. My listener chatter is a piece in Vox called Mega Drive thrus explain everything wrong with american cities by Marina Belochnikova. Marina reports on the rapid expansion of drive thrus from well known chains, fast casual brands like Sweetgreen getting into the business, and drive thru designs with two, three, or even four lanes for vehicles. Marina coins a new term to describe these changes, the mega drive thru that depressingly describes, quote, an urban landscape that is almost was paradoxically vast, yet dominated by placelessness. Her reporting also touches on the loss of small businesses, urban design that is hostile to pedestrians, and the environmental impacts of idling cars and miles of asphalt.

I also see a connection here with the growth of order online and pickup only options, and the loss of social third places. Vox's reporting on transportation planning has been stellar. I often think about the great strode peace from 2021. Talk soon.

David Plotz
That's our show for today. The Gabfest is produced by Shayna Roth, our researchers Julie Hugin. Her theme music is by they might be giants. Ben Richmond is senior director for podcast operations and Alicia Montgomery is the vp of audio for Slate. For Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson and David Plotz, thanks for listening.

We will talk to you next week.

Hi, Slate plus, how are you? We're joined by Deborah Turkheimer of the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. I think everything in Illinois is it by law. Everything has to be named after Pritzker. We have a lot of pritzker.

Deb is here to talk to us about why Harvey Weinstein's conviction was overturned by the New York Court of Appeals. So why was it overturned? Deb, there's David's artful question to start you off. Well, I mean, it would be weird if he said he's here to talk about this. And then he said, how do you make a fruit salad?

Emily Bazelon
It would be weird. Okay, so what happened in Harvey Weinstein's case is that several women who were not the victims of the charged crimes testified against him. There were three, let's call them additional women. And the court of appeals, when the case got to the court of appeals, held that that was unfair and that it violated a rule in New York, and this is a common rule that says that generally a person comes to trial and is only going to face the evidence that pertains to the specific charges and relates very closely to those charges. The court of appeals held that the rule was violated in this case, that the trial judge shouldn't have accepted the prosecution's argument and that it was so.

David Plotz
That was just a snippet from our slate plus conversation. If you want to hear the whole conversation, go to slate.com gabfestplus to become a member. Today it is Ryan here, and I. Have a question for you. What do you do when you win?

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David Plotz
BGW terms and conditions 18 plus do. You ever feel like theres nothing new in the news. You know there are urgent things happening in the world around you, but all you hear is noise. Thats why we made what next. Our goal is to tell you the stories you havent heard before, or maybe a different side to the story you thought you already knew all about.

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Im Mary Harris, the host of what next? And I love my job because it helps me cut through the noise of the news, and then I get to bring it to you. Together, we can figure out what next.

Should Student Protesters Be Arrested?

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