Will Trump's Conviction Help Biden?

David Plotz
Hello and welcome to the slate political gabfest.

June 6, 2024. The will Trump's conviction help Biden edition. I'm David Plotz of Citycast. Happy 80th anniversary of D Day. Happy operation overlord day.

From CBS's daily report, it's D Day for him every day, storming the beaches of streaming media. John Dickerson, hello. Hi. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to all the ships at sea. And from the New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law school, she probably on D Day, would have been doing some keen legal analysis about whether this invasion was legal.

Emily Bazelon, was it legal, Emily? Huh? Yeah, I think so. Also, I think the laws of war were different then, but now I'm trying to remember. Oh, you asked me an actual question for my intro.

That seems like, I'm sure it was obviously, definitely it was legal. They had authorization from the Free French, who I think were considered the legitimate government of France. So, yeah, for sure. How much has the international law of war changed since then? That was the part that I asked myself and then stumped myself.

This week on the Gabfest, we will not be talking about operation overlord. We will be talking about what the consequences will be of Trump's conviction, which happened just after we taped last week. Will it sway enough voters to keep Biden in the White House? Then? Why is Hunter Biden on trial?

Should he be? What does that spectacle of a trial tell us about something, something or another? Then is campus free speech possible? We are going to talk to Emily and her New York Times colleague Charlie Homans about a piece they did this week about whether universities can get free speech issues right. What is the state of free speech or speech on campus?

Plus, we'll have cocktail chatter. Anatomy of an ad subconsciously trigger emotions through music. Perfect. Define an opportunity. Imagine talking to millions of people across the US like I am now.

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John Dickerson
I'm being flipped. But basically, most of the early polls that came out after the verdict showed that the majority of the country thinks it's a bad idea and that he's guilty. But they thought that going in, so the numbers didn't change dramatically one way or the other. The Times poll, they redid their poll with Siena College and found that Trump's three point edge over Joe Biden before the verdict shrank to a single point when they were, when the same group was asked after the decision. But my skepticism about that really meaning anything is that's a small movement, and we're right.

After the verdict, will that dissipate and be, will people's minds be captured by something else in the interim between now and when voting starts, and therefore will the criminal trial? Can we draw anything from that movement? I'm not so sure. I still, though, do hold on to a larger view, which is that the trial and what it puts in motion is more destabilizing, including the reactions that it's drawing from Republicans, does have some possible opportunity to, to hurt Trump. So I'm not closing the door entirely on it being awash, but there are a lot of signals that it is.

Emily
So, don, can you tell us more about that? What are the Republicans doing that make you think that? And what should the Democrats do? I think we can all agree that it is a perfectly reasonable stance to have the position that Mitch McConnell had, which is to say the charges should never have been brought and the conviction should be overturned on appeal. That's not only a reasonable thing to say out loud, it's in keeping with the judicial system.

John Dickerson
So that's fine. But then you get people like Senator Tim Scott who say, this is a Biden operation. So that's just insane. A, and b, it's destabilizing to the legal system. And so if Republicans keep saying things like that and keep saying things like that, it adds more to Biden's overall argument about the destabilization of a democracy, which he has had some success with.

On the anniversary of the D day landing, he will make a speech in which he talks about the dangers of threatening democracy from home and abroad. And I think to the extent that republican lawmakers play into that, they already play into it by promoting the lie that the last election was overthrown. Now they're promoting lies about the legal system, which go beyond what a reasonable person and even a reasonable politician. We're into a third category. There's the reasonable person's response, the reasonable politicians response, and now this insanity.

David Plotz
I feel like you're underplaying what some of the Republicans are doing. I mean, you have Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, who admittedly they're not elected officials, they're Trump apparatchiks, more or less, who were explicitly calling on prosecutors to republican elected prosecutors to target democratic office holders right now and to harry them with criminal charges. It's not just like, oh, this is a Biden. This is just, this is a Biden pinup. It's, we're gonna now turn law into war.

John Dickerson
I didn't mean to underplay it. I guess my point was that what I was saying might still hurt Republicans politically as a result of this verdict is those behaviors. Tim Scott was where I was at the moment. But you're exactly right. The argument is basically from those Republicans you mentioned.

That sort of also includes other lawmakers who are basically saying, they did it to us. Now it's our turn to do it with them, which, of course, undermines the original claims they're making, which is that this is a breach of the system and the way the law is supposed to work. What they're saying is, they broke the law. Let us break it better. That actually is an argument for Trump.

Of course, we've talked about this before, which is when you run down the system and say, everybody's a cheater, then you want the best cheater in the world. So it removes the campaign from the category of standards and moves it into, like, this is a, you know, a fight in the street, and so we want our guy. I think it's also, there's an act of self care going on here, too, for some Republicans. And by that, I mean, if you define the Democrats as awful and engaged in, as Marco Rubio does in some of his most flowery language, which presumably is a part of trying to be on the Trump ticket when he says our current president is demented, is a demented man propped up by wicked and deranged people willing to destroy our country to remain in power, it's time to fight fire with fire. That, to me, feels like an act of self care, which is, I'm supporting Donald Trump, who is antithetical to all these things that I used to believe in.

I am arguably the person most on record for precisely naming all of Donald Trump's character deficiencies. And to get over that hump, I will define what the other side is doing as so objectionable, so awful that there's no pang of conscience for supporting Donald Trump because he's fighting these awful people. And the only way you can fight an awful person is with an awful person. That's well said. And will replace in my mind images of self care that are like the spa with nice smelling bath salts.

Emily
I'm interested in what the Democrats should or shouldn't be doing right now. So Biden gave a campaign speech. He talked about Trump as a felon. He said, this is unprecedented. What I don't hear so far and seems kind of obvious to me is this guy tried to steal the 2020 election, see January 6, and now a jury has convicted him of trying to influence the 2016 election.

Hey, Americans, I didn't do those things. Like, it's not like I find just the repetition of convicted felon. I mean, first of all, it sort of offends me because that language is like defining someone as their crime. And even though we are talking about Donald Trump, I still think that is, like, bad. But also, it just doesn't seem like enough.

It seems like what you need to say. I'm sorry. I loved it. That was like a wonderfully Emily Bazelon lived by your principles moment there. But also, I just feel like you have to say, why?

Like, what kind of felony? Why does this matter? Why is this bad for being president? It doesn't seem to me hard, but I feel like they are not connecting the dots. Am I missing that, John?

David Plotz
I feel the same way, Emily, which is that people know that Trump is transgressive. Like they already, that is, that's like baked in and saying convicted felon does not get to why this is a, this is different somehow than all these other ways that he has transgressed. And if they're going to make hay out of this, I feel like they've got to somehow define it differently, make it a different category, or at least make it explicable to people in a way that convicted felon is supposed to be a shorthand. But sometimes you don't need the shorthand. You need the explanation.

John Dickerson
One of the things that struck me about looking at the case in New York and about all of these cases against Donald Trump, and I've made this point before, but I think it bears repeating. And I could imagine democrats making it as well, which is you don't have to believe in the conviction necessarily. Like, in other words, you can argue on the law that this was too novel and so forth and so on, but the jury did believe a set of facts about the republican nominee that are twelve people heard evidence and they believed some things, which is that he lied, that he did not play by the rules, that he engaged in the system in this arrangement with the National Enquirer to spread lies about his opponents and then took advantage of those lies. Like, you get a window into his character. And character matters.

And that's true, of course, in all those other cases as well. And character matters because in the presidency, you're given enormous power and enormous temptation. And a lot of times, your character is the only thing that the rest of the country can rely on, because your decisions have enormous stakes that can affect their lives. And so when it comes down to the job, character matters. And this is a window into his behaviors and that you don't have to agree on the law for.

You just have to believe that that was what was displayed and the twelve people believed it. And by the way, it's consistent with his behavior throughout his entire life. I mean, there's not that much different than the agreement with David Pecker to spread lies about your opponents and birtherism. Like, this is the way he operates, and that's inconsistent with the job he wants. I want to make two points, one sort of a side point.

David Plotz
I weirdly have found myself surprised at how little the Trump conviction has been in the news since it happened. That it happened. There was this absolute spasm, but now it feels like it's almost, it's already in the way that news cycles move so quickly and we get so past all these things. It's already in the rearview mirror in a way that I find odd. I assume that a sentencing will change that, and a sentencing that involved jail time would certainly change that in some fashion.

But that's just an observation. Why do you think that is, though? I think that's a good observation. But why do you think that is? I mean, just, I guess media attention spans are very brief these days in general.

And this had been covered. I mean, it had been so covered for weeks and weeks and weeks. And so then it's done, and now it's like, let's go on vacation. It's done. We have the result.

Emily
I think it also matters that there's no audio or video. Like, if there were those clues, clips would be replaying endlessly. It is going to be a major problem for this country if there is a huge decline in trust in the criminal justice system. I expect this to happen, given the way that trust in so many other institutions have eroded recently. But there's a dynamic which I just, I'm trying to articulate, but it's that trust itself has become partisan.

David Plotz
To trust anything now is somehow liberal. It's somehow democratic. Almost every institution in this country now is coded as if you put faith in it. You're coded as liberal, which is so. Weird because conservatives are the one who usually preserve institutions.

Right? This is why I've always felt myself to be fundamentally conservative. Like I'm an institutional person. I believe in institutions, and it's a really unstable and dangerous dynamic to have to have that division. It's not surprising that there are lots of people who don't trust systems and institutions in this country because the spoils are divided up so unfairly, and some people are benefiting so disproportionately.

So it's not surprising that there's people who don't trust. What is dangerous is that the people who don't trust now are clustered in one political group and the people who do trust are clustered in the other. And that seems to me incredibly unstable dynamic. And I worry about it. We need trust.

We need like a shared trust in some collective institutions that is not partisan. Trust is for suckers. But wait. But liberals aren't feeling too trustful about the Supreme Court these days. That is another part of this.

Emily
I've been thinking about whether to try to write about this in some way. And how do you separate the legitimate complaints and fears and concerns people have? Often it's quite tricky to find where that line is. Slate plus listeners, thank you to you. You've supported us for so long, kept the gabfest going, and you get a lot of good stuff.

David Plotz
Bonus segments on every episode of the Gabfest. You get bonus episodes of other Slate podcasts. No hitting the paywall on the slate site this week, our slate plus segment is going to be about the turmoil at the Washington Post and what it means for the state of american journalism. If you are a member, thank you. Please enjoy that conversation.

If you are not a member, go to slate.com gabfestplus and become a member today. That's slate.com gabfestplus. This episode of the Gabfest is sponsored by Aura Frames. You might have the same dilemma every year. What do you get the dad who already has everything?

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Download the latest episode and follow@schwab.com washingtonwise or wherever you listen. Hunter Biden is on trial, the first presidential child to face criminal prosecution. I believe the Hunter Biden case is very strange. Briefly. Good luck.

The troubled surviving son of Joe Biden has struggled for years with addiction to alcohol and to drugs. He's also had some pretty seedy business relationships in which he was clearly trying to cash in on his family connections. An investigation of Hunter Biden by a republican federal prosecutor appointed by Merrick Garland but originally appointed by Donald Trump, had twisted along for years. It almost reached a plea deal that would have had him plead guilty to some misdemeanor tax charges. That deal blew up when it turned out that it didn't come with enough immunity for Biden.

He felt like that he was going to plead guilty, but then they were going to go after him on a whole bunch of other things. And so he decided to walk away from that deal, or everyone decided to walk away from that deal. Now a case has come to trial, the first of these cases relating to Biden. Hunter Biden has come to trial. It involves a handgun that he owned for eleven days in 2018 that was never loaded and sat only in a locked case in his truck until his ex wife threw it away.

Biden is charged with breaking federal law by lying on a key form, that he was not a drug addict or using illegal drugs at the time. And kind of the question the case seems to hinge on is whether he thought he was lying at the time, whether he was using cocaine at the time he bought the gun. And the whole trial is a really sad, sad, sad spectacle because you have all these Hunter Biden relatives, including his ex wife and girlfriends and daughter, testifying about this person who's had a really quite ruinous and tragic life.

It's awful. And I guess the question, Emily, I'll start with is, is this a run of the mill case, or is this an unusual case? It's an unusual case. Only a tiny percentage, I think 3% of cases that involve this charge of illegally buying a gun. Only in a tiny percentage do you have this as the top charge.

Emily
In other words, prosecutors bring this charge usually when someone has committed another crime, often with the gun. Right. So it's like, I did something bad with the gun, or the gun fell into bad hands. And, oh, by the way, someone brought, someone purchased it illegally. And so we're gonna add that to the charges.

You know, eleven days with the gun you bought illegally that you never loaded, and that, I mean, the other thing is, like, his wife threw it in the trash, and someone who was collecting cans found it and turned it in. Like, it's a real parade of misfortune to have this land in federal court. And it's very strange that it didn't plead out. But you're right, David. I mean, it was part of this plea deal that fell apart.

That was also surprising. And it's falling apart, although basically what happened was the judge kind of poked at it, and it turned out that the prosecutors and the defense had a different idea of what the words in the plea deal meant. And once they actually had to confront that, there wasn't a deal anymore. And I don't really get it, except that Biden and his defense lawyers, who are, like, very skilled, include Abby Lowell, prominent defense lawyer. They must have decided that they're better off.

There's some chance that they'll be able to poke holes in this idea that Biden knew that he had a drug addiction at the exact moment he purchased the gun, and that if he's found guilty, he'll be better off or not worse off in the hands of the judge. In terms of sentencing, that seems to be the play here. And then I. What I don't understand is how they imagine that this is going to affect the further trial or set of charges involving Biden's taxes that is yet to come. One might hope for Biden's sake at least, that, like this is going to, and that as well, but there's absolutely no guarantee of it.

So it's puzzling to me, why have. They not been able to get that second trial put? Trump has gotten every, all these other trials pushed back. Why hasn't Hunter Biden gotten his tax trial pushed back, which is supposed to happen in September? I was reading this for a moment with the overlay of the Trump response to the legal system, and Emily just mentioned that when the us district court judge, Norika was it, who is a Trump appointee, poked at the deal and it fell apart.

John Dickerson
It fell apart as far as we know, exactly for the reasons Emily said, which is that they basically, it was Hunter Biden thought he was done with the plea deal, and the prosecutor said, no, we can still come after you for other things. And that's part of why it fell apart. But I mean, if this were in the Trump world, Noriko would have been vilified endlessly as a Trump appointed judge who was, you know, bad in all these tens of thousands of different ways. And that hasn't happened. So the right wing media is depicting this as kind of a righteous trial, critically important, revealing all kinds of wickedness and depravity in Hunter Biden and by analogy, in the Biden family, hence, and Joe Biden.

David Plotz
And this is obviously a correct prosecution. It's a mirror image, of course, of how they covered the Trump trial. So question, is the left doing the same thing? Is the left hypocritically saying, this is a bullshit charge and it should never have been brought? And a, are they doing that?

And b, is it hypocritical to do it? Are we all in the mirror? I guess is the question, are lots. Of people saying it's a bullshit? I don't know.

I'm asking. Mostly people are looking away from it. It's easier to just be like, I'm not going to talk about this. Then take on, should this have happened at all? If you're a partisan, you think, why the hell did Merrick Garland appoint a republican prosecutor to look into this?

Emily
Knows that once you kind of, he wasn't exactly a special prosecutor, but he had a lot of discretion. And so I think, like, if you're a partisan, you're like, what the hell? Merrick Garland, was this really necessary? I'm not making that argument myself. I do think that this question about Biden's finances and taxes seems like a more routine avenue of inquiry than this, like, very specific, particular gun charge.

John Dickerson
I mean, it is, you can ask the question if his name was Hunter Jones and there was no larger crime the gun was associated with, whether this would have been pled out or, like, just dealt with in some way. You know, he was in the throes of an addiction and he's cleaned himself up and he's a, you know, whatever. I mean, you can imagine a person of privilege without a famous political name in a political moment, finding a way to get out of this using all of the benefits that a privileged person has in the legal system. But I don't know that that's a, I mean, that's just sort of an observation. I don't, I mean, that's why I was talking about how the Trump team would respond to this.

If this were all happening in Trump world, there would be many more attacks on the system itself. And it is amusing to think that Merrick Garland was in front of a joint or two House Republican committees this week being charged with the politicization of the Justice Department when his Justice Department is trying to put the president's son in jail, is prosecuting a democratic senator and a democratic congressman. Which is why, you know, things like what Tim Scott said, which is that the us justice system hunts Republicans while protecting Democrats. It just, you know, that doesn't wash, but that doesn't, that's not like a defense of Hunter Biden, really, so much as it is raising the point. You are, David, which is the unequal assessment of the law.

It is a little rich for anybody to claim, though, that Hunter, in his business practices, was not taking advantage of his father's name. That's one place where I could imagine this actually hurting the president more than the rest of this, which I think people might look at and see actually the messiness of their own lives and families. But to pretend that Hunter Biden wasn't trying to make bank off his dad is. It goes too far. Yeah.

Emily
And then there's a question of whether that was criminal, what kind of criminal activity that engendered as opposed to just like, that's kind of also the, I. Mean, there's a kind of like the bitter for Democrats. Irony of this, of course, is that Trump's children and son in law have profited wildly from their profligate and brazen use of his name and power to get business benefits while he was in office and since then. And it's just sad that Hunter Biden, who is incompetent and addled and couldn't manage to sleaze his way to a few million dollars without getting caught, and that he's going to get racked and pinioned for his bad, mediocre small dollar deals. Well, the Trump empire and the Trump children, built on tax evasion and nepotism and corrupt deals, is just like a fine business that everyone continues to live in lavish apartments, as far as I.

John Dickerson
Can tell, including opening and running a hotel through which lobbyists and people who wanted to find favor in the Trump administration paraded themselves and dropped their bales of cash. Yeah, it's so funny, I never even thought about this. We literally have a hotel lobby where you can come. We're reinventing the lobby. Come to the lobby and lobby.

Emily
You know, what you want for the rule of law is you want a straight down the middle decision about whether to bring charges where you don't bring the charges because of the person's name, and you don't decline to bring the charges because of the person's name. You kind of make the decision independent of that person's status. And that's just a really hard thing to know whether it's happening every single time because prosecutors have enormous discretion and then because we're talking about Hunter Biden and all of the many criminal charges, more serious, obviously, that Donald Trump faces, and then the specter of, like, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, et cetera, et cetera, you also try to add in some notion of, like, evenhandedness, and it's just tough. It's tough to get there, and it's tough to imagine that we're going to have a shared understanding of what fairness and rule of law could mean, given all those variables. There is some part of this that we can fully condemn, though, which was the ghoulish delight in which enemies of Joe Biden or supporters of President Trump took in parading the obvious descent into madness and addiction that Hunter Biden was going through to make fun of and posting the pictures and all of that, which is distinct from business dealings, which is distinct from the question of influence, which is basically just the sorrow of this person and this family, which, you know, I mean, which has been through a lot in life, the kind of smacking of the chops at the delight of all of this is ghoulish and really awful and also reminds you sort of of the early glee when Paul Pelosi was attacked and his attacker now, of course, is off for many, many years into, to go head into prison.

John Dickerson
I think that is a safe space that we can all agree is is an awful part of this. We're gonna take a short break. We'll be right back. Anatomy of an ad. Subconsciously trigger emotions through music.

Speaker E
Perfect. Define an opportunity. Imagine talking to millions of people across the US like I am now. Identify a problem. Creating an audio ad is time consuming.

Speaker F
Offer a solution. Utilize cutting edge AI. Imagine creating all that in under 30 seconds. Well, we did to create this ad. To learn more about AI in the audio industry, download the whitepaper from Audiostack AI.

Christina Cuterucci
Hey, slate listeners. I'm Christina Cutterucci, the host of Slow Burn. Gaze against Briggs. I want to tell you about a special event we're doing at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on June 13. To celebrate this new season of Slow Burn and Pride Monthly.

We're hosting an exclusive live taping of the show with special guests including civil rights activist and Black Lives matter organizer Deray McKesson, comedian and singer Esther Falleck, Eric Marcus, the host of making Gay History, and Sam Feder, director of the Netflix documentary disclosure, about the depiction of trans people in film and television. We'll dive deeper into this season and talk about the lasting impact of the Briggs initiative and the continued fight over LGBTQ rights and schools. It'll be the perfect way to celebrate Pride month this June with LGBTQ stories and voices across generations. Again, that's June 13 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. You can get tickets now@tribecafilm.com.

slowburn. Hope to see you there.

Emily Bazelon
It's opinion Palooza season here at Slate. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, the host of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. As this Supreme Court term hurtles towards its close, the justices are handing down decisions that will shape our politics and our lives for years and decades to come. My team and I are putting out analysis of the biggest cases just as quickly as we can, bound to our closets and fire up our laptops to speak to you. From presidential immunity to social media content regulation to domestic abusers gun rights, we will be here unpacking the news for you.

Listen to Amicus wherever you get your podcasts.

David Plotz
Emily and her Times colleague Charlie Holmans have a reported essay. The battle over college speech will outlive the encampments in which they dig into the question of where college free speech will go now, now that presidents have been dumped, students suspended, Congress delighted itself with its righteousness, and graduations have been moderately disrupted. Emily, tell us where college speech is going to go. Will it outlive the encampments? The battle over campus free speech is definitely going to outlive the encampments.

Emily
So we were interested in the tension between principles of broadly protecting free speech, which colleges widely espouse, and then the reality of a conflict on campus, which is pitting two sizable constituencies of students against each other in a way that has not been the case for generations of protests. So if you think of, like, the South Africa divestment movement or fossil fuels or the Iraq war and maybe even Vietnam, you don't really have two groups on campus that are, like, really opposed to each other. Usually you have a mostly liberal university kind of against the world in some way. And also the language that was at the heart of the pro palestinian movement on campus is very deliberately chosen to change the discourse about Israel and to try to make Zionism seem equivalent to racism, to really, like, demonize Israel and also talk about eliminating a jewish state of Israel. And so that language for some jewish students and other people watching is.

Feels like a kind of attack on a core part of their identity. Right. The idea that there's no moral space for believing in any kind of jewish homeland. And obviously, there's a fight over what Zionism means and how much of this is antisemitic. And I'm trying to sort of put that to the side and just talk about the centrality of the language and the deep feelings on both sides.

And that is a tough issue for campuses to confront, especially given that in the last generation, students have gotten accustomed to the idea that if they say that they're upset by language, if they say that words make them unsafe, that their sensibilities as the listener get deferred to on campus. We've had a lot of instances of that with speech involving race and LGBTQ rights. And so now we're not seeing the same kind of deference at all. And that can be because of a deep commitment to free speech on campus. But the campuses have not really articulated that so well, I would argue.

And then you have the encampments and even building occupations, which are not protected by the First Amendment were expressive and, of course, caused enormous amounts of disruption and then backlash as a lot of campuses wound up calling the police. So that was the kind of stew we were interested in looking at and then kind of thinking forward, like, what happens next? You guys had, I think, the first interview, maybe the only interview that Colombia's very high profile President Minou Shafiq has given. Did she say anything interesting, Charlie? You know, I think she said a lot of the stuff that Emily just said in a, you know, I think, as you'd imagine, quite cautious way.

Speaker F
I mean, she acknowledged that this was a, you know, a political issue that sort of uncommonly cut through the middle of campus in a way that others had not. And I would argue, as Emily sort of alluded to, that I think that's less true of Vietnam than people tend to remember it having been. But it is true that if you're looking at the Iraq war or south african divestment, these were not issues where you had large constituencies representing different power centers on campus arrayed against each other. She acknowledged that was a tough thing to deal with, and she talked about, going forward, how does the campus rebuild a sense of community and identity as a community, but really spoke of that in very general terms that I think reflects how tough it is to really get into the specifics of that without running up against the very hard aspects of this particular issue, which is so much about who gets to set the terms of what is acceptable language on campus and what is sort of what are the boundaries of that discourse. I wonder if it's not even more complicated than that, and in which case, this makes this kind of an awful episode for trying to define carefully the boundaries for the right kind of speech and the spaces for having them, because it seems like there are two other things that are special.

John Dickerson
Is one is it's not just that you have two conflicting sides inhabiting the same physical space, or maybe it is, but there's a safety aspect here which the university is committed to, maybe even a little bit more than the time, place and manner rules, which presumably are about safety, too. I mean, we're talking about actual conflicts here and a time where people are taking things into their own hands. So it seems like the safety obligation of the university is heightened sufficiently in this to cloud the usual tension in free speech conversations between what do we allow and where do we allow it? And then you have these exterior forces, which are quite extraordinary, which is not only the federal government really putting pressure and destabilizing the careful line drawing, but then you also have the funders and the boards of directors and the high profile rushing to social media people who donate to these schools, which I don't remember being a part of those other previous debates as well. Those two things really seem to make this a wobbly moment.

Speaker F
I think that's right. I almost disagree with your guys characterizing it as a conflict between. To me, it's not that there's a conflict between two groups of students. There's a conflict between one group of students and then some students and then a lot of funders and very powerful members of Congress. And that in a way, if it were just, if the students were fighting, this would not be nearly as fraud an issue for university presidents.

David Plotz
They would have just, it wouldn't be nearly as bad. They're worried about, a, losing their jobs, b, losing their federal funding, and c, losing, like, all their donations from primarily, in this case, jewish donors for the most part. I think you have to look, though, at the faculty piece of it also, because I think the faculty, many of whom vocally supported the pro palestinian demonstrators, are part of the picture. And it gets back to the notion of there being these very competing and very different kinds of power that are all kind of unassailable in their own way on campus. And this goes back to the speech issue because there are so many protections around faculty speech and student speech going back to the sixties.

Speaker F
And that has sort of created a space where some administrators certainly see their funding imperiled by the actions and words of this cohort that their hands are tied in really addressing in any way, rightly or wrongly. I think that is a view that, that factored into this. And it gets back to the just blurriness of who actually has power in a university. I think. Yeah, I mean, to get back to your safety point, John, I mean, I think that once the encampment started, that was a different set of questions.

Emily
And on a lot of campuses in the beginning, there was a sense, and this was certainly true among faculty I knew at Yale, a lot of people being like, well, let's just leave them alone. It'll be fine. I mean, I felt this way for a while, and then the police were called, and that feels like this sudden, abrupt kind of rupture in the university culture. On the other hand, the kind of point of a protest like that is that the cops are going to get called and they're going to be arrests because that's how you get attention, and that's what civil disobedience is. And then the other thing is, as, I mean, Charlie and I put this in the piece, like, as we were watching this play out at lots of different campuses, it started to feel like it was hard to say, with a few exceptions, that any school was really getting it right and that, in fact, some of the schools where they let the protesters stay, and obviously, this is the most true.

At UCLA, then you have time for counter protesters to gather, and that ended in this violent escalation, which was awful. That's what I meant by the safety piece, not the cops. Right. And you could argue that safety was a pretext for calling the cops and maybe that wasn't a legitimate actual concern, but because this is a situation in which the two identities are so riven in this conversation, or identities are so much a part of this conversation, there's the chance for altercations in a way there might not have been in those others between students, not between, obviously, Kent State. So.

John Dickerson
And that creates a student on student safety issue that would be different from, say, south african protests or the Iraq war or any of these other kinds of protests where it wouldn't be insane for an administrator to say, hey, if we let this kind of just exist, there's a chance that there's going to be violence and people are going to say the chemical compounds were right in front of you for an explosion and you did nothing. And then just. If I can piggyback on that, why wasn't, say, the brown outcome a fine outcome here, which is the administration moves off of its position, they agree to meet later, they're allowed to have their encampments. That seems like a pretty both sides at Brown probably kind of thought, well, we did about as well as you can do in this situation. I think that's true.

Speaker F
I also think there are certainly people on both sides at Columbia who looked at what happened at Brown and saw it as sort of the administration running out the clock and that this was really going to be something that they were going to have to address down the road without conditions being radically different than they were now. Other than that, the kids will have gone home for the summer and that was sort of a gamble and it might have been a strategically clever gamble, but I think that was sort of how that was viewed certainly by people on all sides of this at Columbia. But isn't that a fine resolution? Well, right. I mean, you punt down the road.

Emily
Actually, they do go home and sometimes when they come back in the fall, they're not similarly agitated. In this case, I think a lot is going to depend on what's happening in the war. On Gaza this week, a bunch of people occupied the president's office at Stanford and got arrested. So it's like in some places a little bit continuing. But, yeah, I mean, John, it may be that the brown resolution is the best one can hope for.

On the other hand, it was like punting. They didn't divest, but I mean, you're. Never going to solve it's the best way. Wait, but, John, don't you mean it's like the best one can hope for if you're a university president? Like the brown president didn't lose their job.

David Plotz
They. I mean, I'm not sure it's. If you're a student protester at Brown, I'm not sure. You're like, we won. We didn't.

By not getting arrested, by not getting national attention, by not taking over a building, we've won. That seems to me like they've, they've lost on all the ways that you want to win in a, in a campus protest, which is by getting arrested and by getting, you know, the cops to beat you up briefly. I think that's an important point. Depends what your objective is. I mean, having some familiarity with some of the protesters at Brown, I think right now they probably thought, hey, we didn't get what we wanted.

John Dickerson
But at the time they were pretty happy also, like, they're not going to solve the war in Gaza. I mean, what does success look like, everybody saying, like, we've resolved all of our views on this. I mean, it's an incredibly contentious thing. Isn't the success basically building a system to manage these essentially irreconcilable differences and not having them turn to either violence or calling the police? I mean, you got to define what success is before you say they're a failure.

David Plotz
Right. I mean, one thing I think has kind of been weirdly lost in a lot of the conversation around these is just sort of the basic tactical thinking behind any kind of outside politics, which is that it's often not about the short term aims. It's about finding short term aims that enable you to create a narrative around your political movement for a long time. And I think that by any measure, that, like the demonstrations on campuses this spring, were successful in using the divestment issue to do that. I mean, they put this issue in the news for quite a long time and whether or not they actually got divestment out of it at the end of the day, I'm sure all the organizers would love to have had that, but there was this sort of ancillary aim to all of it that was quite clearly there and in some ways benefited from the difficulty of actually meeting the aims of these demonstrations.

Speaker F
And that was, I mean, I think one of the fair criticisms of Shafiq from a lot of people was that she kind of, there's a certain real politic. If you're the administrator in these situations, it's not necessarily you do need to bring the community back into some sort of sense of a whole. But at some point, not everybody here is looking for resolution, and you have to kind of work within that paradigm and sort of keep things from falling apart. Just to close, I noted that Harvard seems to have come out for institutional neutrality in the last week or so. It also rebranded importantly, but yes, they.

David Plotz
Also removed a requirement that faculty supply evidence that they're working to improve DEI to get jobs. I was less clear on that. Is it as simple as, yes, all universities should behave like University of Chicago and allow a lot more speech, though even Chicago had to clear its campus or cleared its encampments. But is that just where all these biggie universities need to go? Two separate issues.

Emily
Institutional neutrality, or this idea that the university only speaks out with a voice of advocacy on issues that directly affect it. That's the policy that you're associating with Chicago and that Harvard adopted. That is a, I think, excellent route for schools to go in terms of their own speech. And, you know, this kind of pressure on them to speak out every time there's an injustice, then which ones do you pick? What about the civil war in Sudan, et cetera?

But that doesn't solve this problem of what about the people on the campus and what their messages should be? And yes, the University of Chicago also is known for having very broadly defined principles for protecting free speech. It was interesting to watch when the encampment started at Chicago. The first message from the president of the university was like, okay, look, we have really tried to give you lots of space for protest. We let you have a.

We let the pro palestinian protesters have an honor, your martyrs like exhibit in a central place on campus that, you know, some people were really offended and troubled by. We let it stay up for a very long time. But we do have some rules about time, place, and manner. For the sake of bending over backwards to protect free speech. We are going to try to let this encampment stay up in the short term, but no promises in the longer term.

And then some number of days later, the president called the police, like many other presidents in the country, because they felt like the encampments had become really too disruptive for students going back and forth to class, for the just tempo of life on the university. And I think that that shows that there's just, like a limit that you can get to where you cross over from speech and expression to forms of conduct that, however expressive they are, just have a different feeling on a campus. And we'll see how much the schools have to confront that issue again, as opposed to these issues about language and rhetoric. And like, when is language itself discriminatory or harassment, which I think that you can more easily answer from a kind of broad free speech vantage point. And one last point.

You know, I think in a lot of ways this conflict or set of clashing values and language on campus is not a problem that law can really solve. The students have to address this themselves. And we kind of ended the piece on some. We thought, like, you know, smart and kind of moving, thinking about how that could happen. It can seem like it's impossible in the moment, but actually, like, the students have to live together on campus.

And even if you have the right to say something, you can still look around you and think about the impact you're having on other people and try to figure out how to cross divides. There was very little of that I saw on campus this year. And as someone who does think the community of the campus is important, I hope that we'll see more of that next year. Emily Bazelon of the Gabfest and her Times colleague Charlie homans wrote, the battle over college speech will outlive the encampment. Charlie, thanks for joining us.

Speaker F
Hey, thanks for having me. Let us go to cocktail chatter. When you're sitting at the edge of the campus, Emily, trying to have free speech, what are you going to freely speak about over drinks? I was interested this week that Senate Democrats decided to put forward a bill to protect access to contraception across the country. This is a messaging bill.

Emily
They knew they didn't have the votes because of the filibuster, even though they did have two republicans cross over. And basically they're trying to hang a lantern on the idea that they're the ones protecting birth control and that Republicans are not interested in taking this step. And, of course, the Republicans said, a, nothing to see here, we don't need to worry about this. And b, some of them made the argument that protecting birth control means protecting what they call abortion drugs. And this is actually like a really important disagreement on the facts where birth control begins or ends, I should say, and where abortion begins.

There is not agreement among, you know, partisan agreement about that and access to things like the morning after pill, but also other, some kinds of hormonal birth control, like IUD's that have hormones in them, et cetera, is actually at issue here and is going to continue to be at issue in the courts. And so this is both a good issue for Democrats in terms of how it polls, but there is actually something real here. And it connects also to the Comstock act. This 1873 law that's zombie like, could rise again in a future republican administration. And when it was passed, it was this big obscenity statute.

It was absolutely about, like, sex is bad, incredibly conservative, religious backdrop. The guy who passed it, I've been doing some research on him, Anthony Konsak, the guy who pushed for it, he was doing things when he was growing up, pouring out all the beer from the saloon in the small Connecticut town where he lived. So he really is the original morality police, and this law is still on the books. And another thing Democrats could try to do is to try to repeal the Comstock act while they're in power. But of course, they don't have the votes to do that either.

Anyway, watch the space. I love that he was the head of the New York Society for the suppression of vice, and he was the head of a couple of other things that had these antiquated names, but which feel very familiar to our modern ears. He didn't turn out to be riven with vice in his private life, did he? Because that would feel like the other thing of be quite modern. That would be quite modern.

No, I don't think so. But he did go around bragging at the end of his life that, like, he had put, you know, 40 trainloads of people in prison, mostly just for, like, having, you know, playing cards that had racy images on them, or even, like, art books with nude images were fodder for Anthony Comstock during his long career, when he was deputized by Congress to ride the trains for free and just go all over the country like, yeah, finding people to prosecute, snooping on people. Jon, what is your chatter? My chatter is on a great piece of work done by Emily's New York Times called what Ukraine has lost. And it's an analysis of every building across Ukraine that's been damaged or destroyed since the russian invasion.

John Dickerson
And it's graphically quite, just amazingly striking. You know, it makes you sit with carnage and devastation as a part of that invasion. But what really struck me is that when you total up what's knowable, I guess several things struck me, but what's knowable is that basically the equivalent of all the buildings in Manhattan. Imagine them being destroyed four times over. That includes 106 hospitals, 109 churches, and 708 schools, all of which are supposed to be protected under the Geneva Convention.

You can imagine the times will ultimately do this someday with Gaza, and the numbers will be extraordinary as well. But it was just a great piece of journalism and beautifully uses the pictures and the maps and the data to highlight the cost of war. And basically, I hope they do this with every conflict that we see in the world. That reminds me, I mean, this wasn't going to be my chatter, but I'll add it to my chatter, which is there's another similar kind of piece in the times in the where do you pay attention? Category about the sudanese civil war, which is a reminder.

David Plotz
I mean, we've mentioned it before, but it's the worst conflict in the world right now and has created the greatest refugee crisis in the world. I think the number was 9 million Sudanese who are refugees in a war that is really chaotic and shows no sign of abating and also doesn't capturing international attention in a way that is likely to help resolve it. So it was a really grim, sad story, and it has witnessed the destruction of one of the great cities of the world. Khartoum has been destroyed almost down to the studs during this fight. My chatter is about a different New York Times piece that really gripped me this week.

The thing that I have talked about incessantly, why the pandemic probably started in a lab by alina chan. And it's just a fascinating marshaling of the evidence about why it seems likely that the lab in Wuhan was the source and why it seems unlikely that the Wuhan market was the source. I really commend you to the piece, but some of the major points were that the virus that emerges is exactly the kind of virus that the Wuhan lab was proposing to create and do research on and create. There were very lax safety protocols in that lab. There's been incredible amounts of chinese squirrel enos about the data that might indicate whether it had emerged from the lab.

They just have not made the relevant data available and hidden other stuff. There's very strong evidence that the cases from the market, which were supposed to be the original cases, were from a COVID variant that had already mutated in humans. So it had already come out in humans before it had gotten to the market, which strongly suggests that it was just a location of an outbreak, but that it was not the originating place. There's no chain of animal transmission that you'd have expected to see if it had come from animals. I found it massively persuasive.

So anyway, check it out in the times. Listeners, thanks for your chatters. Please keep them coming. Please email them to us@gabfestlate.com. comma, something you are chattering about with your beloved and our listener chatter this week.

Comes from Kevin Cassidy. I urge your listeners to Google DaVinci Bridge and build a model of DaVinci's design using matchsticks or dowel. The bridge stands by using opposing gravitational forces, and while it's sturdy in weight bearing, it won't work. If any element is misapplied, I see a metaphor for the democratic process. Assembled correctly, the bridge can support half a ton.

Kevin Cassidy
But with even a single element out of place, the structure collapses. Building stimulates dexterity and gives a visceral experience of the invisible forces that affect and support us all the time. Each stick works with invisible forces. Each vote contributes the structure of democracy. Be sure to vote this November and bring your friends.

David Plotz
That's our show for today. The Gabfest is produced by Shayna Roth. Our researcher is Julie Hugin. Our theme music is made they might be giants. Ben Richmond, senior director for podcast ops, and Alicia Montgomery, VP of audio for Slate.

For Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson, I'm David Plotz. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.

Hello. Slate plus, how are you? Better than Sally Busby, that's for sure. Although, Sally, if you're listening, what a hard week you've had. The executive editor of the Washington Post, Busby had that job for three years.

She was defenestrated this weekend by the new CEO Will Lewis. He's having a worse week. He's having a pretty bad week. I don't know. He's still got his job.

Emily
Yeah. And he got to hire his friends. Yeah. He was brought in by owner Jeff Bezos to stanch the huge losses. The post is experiencing money losses.

David Plotz
Money losses after a golden age of expansion during the Trump years and growth during the Trump years. Post's revenues and audience have collapsed in the last few years. So Lewis had a retrenching restructuring plan that involved a demotion of Busby. She kind of rejected it. He was like, get out.

And hes now brought in the former Wall Street Journal editor Matt Murray. And hes bringing his second editor from the UK Telegraph named Robert Wynnette. And hes going to create two newsrooms where there was one. Theres going to be the traditional Post newsroom, which will be run by Wynnette. And then therell be a new newsroom focused on social media and kind of more saleable subscription products that will lots of video, and theres going to be more lifestyle stuff.

And it's a radical shakeup in the newsroom. I have so many thoughts on this. But overhanging all this, by the way, is a story that also came out in the New York Times today that one of the conflicts between Busby and Louis was that Busby told Louis that as editor, she went to Louis and said, we're about to run a story about the phone hacking scandal in the UK that Lewis was involved in, and he told her she shouldn't run it. It was a bad story to cover. And the conversation ended abruptly.

The post did end up doing a story, and Louis has been involved in, or implicated, brought into some lawsuits in the UK involving this phone hacking story. And so there was this question of is the CEO interfering journalistically in the operations of the paper? So there's a lot happening. We don't need to get too much into the internal politics of the post. But I do think it's a good time to talk about sort of the state of the state of this icon of american journalism and whether 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. Anatomy of an ad subconsciously trigger emotions through music. Perfect. Define an opportunity. Imagine talking to millions of people across the the US like I am now.

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Identify a problem. Creating an audio ad is time consuming. Offer a solution. Utilize cutting edge AI. Imagine creating all that in under 30 seconds.

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Well, we did to create this ad. To learn more about AI in the audio industry, download the white paper from audiostack AI 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.

David Plotz
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.

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