3686 - Why Big Tech Wants Age Verification; SCOTUS Corruption w/ Caitlin Vogus, Alex Aronson

Hey, folks. Is your dog a picky eater? That can be really stressful. You've tried mixing things in the food. You've tried different brands. You've even sat next to them and tried to make them feel calm as they're eating. You tell yourself, they'll eat when they're hungry, right? Or maybe, just maybe. Your dog knows the difference between processed brown pellets, ugh, and real food. Sundays for dogs is different. Founded by Dr. Torrey Waxman, Sundays was created... to make her high standards as a veterinarian and as a dog parent, or to meet them rather. Sunday starts with 80% plus all natural meats and then add superfood such as kale, ginger, and blueberries, no fillers, no nutritional benefits, no chemicals, just simple, complete nutrition. And I gotta say, I have cats now, but I grew up only with dogs, and I'm reading these ingredients, and Sam can speak more to how great this dog food is. That's all stuff I remember from growing up, like how to make your dogs coat better, how to make their digestion better, blueberries, kale, ginger. That's, I mean, that's the real stuff here, folks. Sundays is gently air-dried instead of using high heat. So it doesn't look or smell like dog food. It looks like high-quality, human-grade jerky. And the best part, Sundays requires no fridge, no freezer, no prep, and no mess. You get the quality of a home-cooked meal with the scoop and serve ease of kibble. It's what dog food should have been all along. And Sundays just launched a brand new fish recipe. It's made with 80% whole and mince fish, including eco-friendly, invasive carp source from American rivers for a naturally rich flavor. In fact, did you know that many dogs naturally prefer fish flavors? So Sunday's fish recipe is especially great for your picky eaters, canine friends. Plus, it's packed with omega-3 fatty acids that help support healthy skin, shiny coats, joints, and brain function. It's complete and balanced nutrition for all life stages. It really is phenomenal, and these are the kinds of ingredients that you can get for your dog to make sure that they're as healthy as possible. Make the switch to Sundays. Go right now to Sundays for dogs.com slash majority and get 50% off your first order or you can use code majority at checkout. That's 50% off your first order at Sundays for dogs.com slash majority. Sundays for dogs.com slash majority or use code majority at checkout. And now time for the show.

It is Monday. July 13th, 2026. My name is Emma Vigland in for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Caitlin Vogus, senior advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which partnered with the Intercept to publish her piece, online age verification law could kill whistleblowing. And later in the show, Alex Aronson, co-founder and executive director of court accountability, joined Sam for a conversation about the Supreme Court's endless corruption. Also on the program. Well, we were on dead Republican senator watch. The gods threw us a curveball. In what has been a bad week to be named Graham, bloodthirsty ghoul, Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly at the age of 71, and we are partying. He will be missed. Why are you lying? Because Sam's not here to raid on the parade. Every time somebody dies, he's always, I just regret that they were never held accountable for their actions. Oh, yeah, no, we can party. I mean, he died pretty young, which is awesome. Speaking of Sam, no one's accounted for his whereabouts, have they? Nope. He might be joining us in the fun half. Mitch McConnell has provided photo evidence that he's alive. Dang it! Ice kills again, this time in Maine. Just days after killing a father in Houston, this story is still developing. IDF soldiers and armed settlers detained Congressman Rocana in the West Bank over the weekend. We will also have a friend of the show, Jasper Nathaniel, on this week, to discuss the escalating violence there and a separate attack he and his reporting team faced. The U.S. and Iran continue to exchange fire in the Strait of Hormuz as oil prices rise once again. Trump says blockade back on. It's just like it feels like the same headlines just recycling him. The DOJ subpoenas several New York Times journalists for reporting on the Qatari donated Air Force One.

The New York Times also reports that Marco Rubio is effectively in control of Venezuela. One in five Texas Hispanic business owners say they've had an employee deported in the last year, and among those surveyed, James Talarico has a seven-point lead. The bipartisan housing bill automatically became law over the weekend after Trump refused to sign it. Multiple blue states are preparing to file a lawsuit to block Paramount's acquisition of Warner Brothers. And lastly, wildfires rage near Paris and at least 12 people have been killed in southern Spain. This is Europe's third extreme heat wave of the summer. All this and more on today's majority report. Welcome to the show, everybody. It is Monday, fun day, Monday. And we can actually say that with a little bit of gusto now. You may be wondering where Sam is. He's still out as a Hollywood big wig. But these upcoming days, at least this week, he's going to be able to join for some parts of the show. So he will be joining us in the fun half for a little bit in less. you know he gets scheduled to do something else you know yeah we're not take some kind of lunch meeting with the hollywood executive exactly we're too small time for him now um so we're partying senator Lindsey Graham republican of south carolina arguably the military industrial complexes favorite creature of washington and when i say creature i mean creature. He died on Saturday from a tear in his aorta. Oh. So he was chairman of the Budget Committee, former chairman of the Judiciary Committee. You might remember him spitting and fuming and getting all red in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. You know, people might not remember that Lindsey Graham despite being the most obvious closet case in America, ran for president in 2016. Yeah, he ran for president. He was one of those guys. Right. It's like, it's like remembering that Kirsten Gillibrand ran in 2020. You're like, what? That happened? Cory Booker did too. What? We'll get to Cory Booker his hagiography about Lindsey Graham in the fun half probably. But, you know, he ran for president then and he lost pretty handily. And during that period, he was going on cable news and calling Trump a bigot and a xenophob and said he represented the worst of America. He was against the Muslim ban. But it's a good reminder, I think, for people that... Any expedient rush to appear human by a senator that is this corrupted and is this okay with slaughtering children on behalf of money to interests can never be interpreted as anything more than aesthetic because as soon as Trump won that nomination, oh, Lindsey Graham bent the knee. And he was essentially Trump's biggest cheerleader for the rest of his life.

One of the biggest Zionist plants supporters in Congress, look, it was an open secret that he was a gay man, but you have to wonder, given Mossad's extensive blackmail operation, if they had anything on him, I guess it doesn't really necessarily matter because what he supported stood on its own. He was a war pig. Yep. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, North of Grumman, and more were some of the major donors to him throughout his career. And they got what they paid for, baby. His last public appearance was at a Ukrainian drone factory posing with weapons of war, like a kid on Christmas. This is such a funny way to go. I know, right? Oh, and also, like, apparently refusing medical attention because he was more interested in going on Meet the Press, which would also match his... record of loving to be on camera and television. Also, having this sort of a secret, as you alluded to earlier with Graham, that's just sitting with the Senate seat he took over from white supremacist, Strom Thurmond, who had a secret black daughter himself. So, yeah, this sort of secrets, yeah, it's, it runs in the Republican, I mean, in South Carolina. What's up with Tim Scott, the other senator from the normal guy? From South Carolina, right, the normal guy who just got engaged. Yeah, lucky lady. So, but I, you know, he was a, like, Lindsey Graham was not really interested in delivering for the people of South Carolina. His whole career is about committing wars and genocides overseas. That is his most consistent. through line in terms of ideology. He was reportedly one of the people in Trump's ear pushing for this Iran war. He supported the Iraq war vigorously. He was furious that Biden withdrew from Afghanistan. He was a maximalist on Ukraine. And one of the most vocal supporters of the genocide in Gaza, here is Lindsey Graham in an interview from earlier this year in February with Sky News Arabia. defending Israel's genocide in Gaza, just to give you a sense of how rabid this freak was. When you look at the last few years since October 7th, many people in this part of the world say what happened in Gaza does not align with Christian values, killing children, killing mothers, killing families. We're not militants. Yeah, I just, I don't buy that at all. Why? Because what did we do in World War II? Did we think one minute about starving the Germans? Did we bomb every city into smithereens? So this is a war... You compare October 7th to World War II? Yes, I am. This is an absolute existential threat to the Jewish people. What happened on October the 7th was 1,200 people were slaughtered, raped, and murdered, and filmed by radical Islamists who would kill every Jew if they could to the world. If you don't understand this is a threat to Israel's survival. And then they flattened Gaza. Just flatten it. We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo.

Were we wrong to drop an atomic bomb to end the Japanese reign of terror, were we? So my view, if I were Israel, I would probably run it the same way. Without military victory, there is no hope of breaking radicalism. We flatten Germany. We flattened Japan. How many Americans believe this? How many Americans think the way that you do? I think most Republicans think the way I do. Even young ones. You're just out of touch if you don't understand Republicans when it comes to radical Islam is on Israel's side. It's not even close. Well, in terms of the political constituency that still supports Israel, he is right that that is solely base in the Republican Party and not for nothing. This is the kind of thing that he wanted to cement ironclad support for death and destruction abroad. You know, we keep calling him a closet case, but like, we're kind of seeing in real time that perhaps people are a little less afraid of NDAs now. We can't verify any of this, but you could just look on the internet what some people are claiming. He was also a vigorous opponent of LGBTQ rights. So the hypocrisy of that is, you know, not lost on me here. And it's especially disgusting in that way because he had immense wealth and privilege and knew that he could live his life in the way that he wanted to, supporting death and destruction, while other people's rights were being stripped away from them. So, you know, and he overcompensated constantly by trying to prove his masculinity by being... in favor of as much death as humanly possible. So he's a pathetic figure in a variety, or was. He was a pathetic figure, I say, with a big smile on my face in many different ways. And so he's in death now being used exactly as he would have wanted as a... political football for two of his favorite people on the planet. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Here is Trump in the immediate aftermath. Like was Lindsey Graham even brought to the morgue at this point? How warm was his body when Trump calls in to push for the Save America Act and, you know, using Lindsey Graham as a way to do so? Anybody like him? He was so intent. I mean, he literally called me about the Save America Act. That's why he's, you know, that's where I heard. Think of it. He's traveling for many, many hours. That's a long flight. That's a long trip. And he, you know, calls me about the Save America Act. He thought we were going to get it passed. Do you remember the very... This is a big, this is a big blow to the Save America Act, let me tell you. Do you remember, Mr. President, what was the last thing he said to him? What was the last thing he said to you? I said, we'll see you soon. Come over anytime you want. He came into the White House a lot because I liked him. You can't do that with everybody.

Buddy, there's another part of this interview where he talks about Lindsay's golf game. They were frequent golf buddies and has a critique of one of his swings. Not a great striker of the ball. You know, we've got to be honest about people, even when death. This was even more brazen. Benjamin Netanyahu went on a... Fox and friends over the weekend to react to this as well. And this is how he characterizes his last conversation with Lindsey Graham. Whatever, okay. And I think once or twice he got his way. But let me tell you, the last conversation I had with him, I said, Lindsay, we've come of age. We have a robust economy. We can take care of our own financing our own weapons for the defense of Israel and defense of our common interests with America. So I'm going to phase out the support, the military support for Israel over a period of years and bring it down to zero. We can do it. And he went ballistic. He said, no way, you can't do that. Because he was so concerned with our security, which he believed was your security, that he actually fought the Prime Minister of Israel on keeping America's aid or actually increasing it. And that tells you what kind of a person this extraordinary, extraordinary friend was. You know, you can't accuse Lindsay of being a slacker or not passionate about politics because even as perhaps he felt his health ailing, he made a point to have two conversations about his political priorities, one with Trump about the Save America Act, which the Senate Majority Leader says we can't pass because we'd have to nuke the filibuster, but Lindsay was on Trump's side, says Trump. And Benjamin Netanyahu, coincidentally, They had a conversation in which he was saying, hey, we get it. We don't want any more U.S. military aid from the United States. And Lindsay said, how dare you suggest that? Endless military aid from the United States to Israel. That's how on the ball he was and how his priorities were always at the front of his mind. How un-messaged it is for people in Yahoo. This is the most important thing going on in the, at least the imperial relationship between Israel and America right now. Is this head fake of, oh, yeah, we actually want to be independent from y'all. When the exact opposite is the case, this is when responsible state grab Congress quietly moves to integrate U.S. and Israeli militaries in first step towards... shifting aid further into the shadows. The House's 2027 NDAA would all but fuse the two countries armed forces together. This is insanity. And it's, I mean, of course, like somebody like Beavid and Yahoo, wouldn't, isn't going to waste an opportunity to use the death of somebody who was his servant in life, uh, toward his own ends. Of course. And this is so controversial that in later in that interview, we'll play that probably in the fun half.

He, Benjamin Netanyahu was saying to the Fox and Friends crew that we're moving from an aid situation to a partnership, which is exactly what you're saying. So they're trying to do this head fake because Benjamin Netanyahu is quite adept understanding. American public opinion and he sees that like perhaps yeah, we've lost the Democrats and independents, but we need the Republican Party to stand firm on supporting Israel and that you have younger Republicans that have this kind of more America first bent where they don't want. all of this money going overseas. They want to, yeah, invested in their communities. And I would say that's pretty bipartisan, frankly. It's just interesting that young Republicans are in that more isolationist mind view, a worldview. So Benjamin Netanyahu is seeing that and he's trying to head it off specifically also before potentially Democrats take back control in the midterms and wants to move the ball forward. on a merging, a permanent merging of the United States with Israel's military and their technology, as opposed to the just informal one that already exists, because then there would no longer be a question about U.S. military aid to Israel. It would be automatic. It would be funding it in the same way that we have taxes that fund for payroll taxes, not funded in the same way, but like it would be in a bucket where it wouldn't need to even be essentially considered at all. And that's horrifying. So it's interesting that even Fox News had some skepticism about that. But, yeah, rest in piss Lindsey Graham. If there's a hell, he'll be there. Not for the, not, you know, for, for. wanting more than anybody in maybe the United States Senate to have as much blood on his hands as humanly possible. It's a shame he got his Iraq war. Yep, and Iran war. Actually, that's what I mean. Okay, yeah, yeah. In a moment, we are going to be speaking to Caitlin Voguez about the attempts to do this age verification stuff and why big tech wants it. But first, a word from some of our sponsors here. You know, a lot of us have these subscriptions that we just completely forget about. You've got these ridiculous ones that you discover, and you realize that, oh, crap, like, I should have been cutting back in this way. And you're often lucky to discover that, too, if you're doing it on your own. But rocket money is the place you want to go if you want to do the deep dive into some of the crazy subscriptions that you want.

to help cancel. Rocket money, I know Brian, you've been a Rocket Money user for quite a while and it helped get rid of some of the most ridiculous recurring subscriptions. Rocket money can track subscriptions and has the ability to cancel unwanted ones within the app with a few taps, saving users over $880 million in canceled subscriptions. You can set budgets and goals, get personalized insights, and regular reports, and receive real-time alerts for large transactions, upcoming bills, refunds, and low balances. Users who create a financial goal with rocket money save over $70 on average within the first 30 days. So you've got, yeah, all of these subscription services that you're automatically kind of renewing, not necessarily paying attention to. That's how they get you. Well, Rocket Money can help you save money on all of that. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join RocketMoney.com slash majority. That's rocketmoney.com slash majority. rocketmoney.com slash majority. Let rocket money help you reach your financial goals faster. Rocketmoney.com slash majority. We will put a link to that down below in the video and episode descriptions and at majority.fm. And lastly, did you know that fast growing trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over two million happy customers? They have all the plants your yard or home needs, including fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and house plants all grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. It's like your local nursery, but anywhere you live, and with more plants than you'll find anywhere else. And you don't have to say, you know, if you don't have a car like me, take it on the subway, go find the right nursery, it comes right to your door, and it helps you find options that work for your climate, space, and lifestyle. Fast-growing trees makes it easy to get your dream yard. Just click, order, grow, and get healthy thriving plants delivered to your door. I want to find, you know, a house plant. I've found a house plant through fast-growing trees, and you've got to say, like, I need this to be safe for the cats. I need this to be able to have this kind of light or low-light situation. How many times is it going to get watered? Well, fast-growing trees has all of the tools that can help you determine what plant is right for your home or for your garden. They're alive and thrive guarantee promises your plants arrive happy and healthy, no green thumb required, just quality plants that you can count on, plus get ongoing support from trained plant experts who can help you plan your landscape, choosing the right plants, and learn how to care for them every step of the way. Right now, they have great deals on planting essentials up to half off on select plants, and our audience gets 20% off your first purchase. When using the code majority at checkout, that's additional 20% off better plants and better growing at fastgrowing trees.com using the code majority at checkout fastgrowing trees.com code majority. Now is the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use majority to save today. Offer is valid for limited time terms and conditions may apply. Get 20% off your first purchase at fastgrowing trees.com slash majority. We will put a link down below in the video and episode descriptions.

And at majority.fm, quick break. And when we come back, we'll be joined by Caitlin Vogueus. We are back and we are joined now by Caitlin Vogus, senior advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and a First Amendment attorney. Caitlin is here to talk about her piece published in partnership with The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Online Age Verification Law could kill whistleblowing. Caitlin, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me, Emma. Of course. So let's just start, I guess, from a few weeks ago when the House passed the Kids Act and sent it to the Senate. Overall, what is the Kids Act? How did it pass? And what is in this bill? Sure. So the Kids Act is a package of bills that combines actually a lot of different pieces of legislation. And they're all framed around this idea of online safety and protecting kids online. And that is of course a framing that I think anyone can get behind. We all want to keep. kids safe, of course. But the issue with the bill is that buried within it, it also really strongly either incentivizes or actually requires social media platforms to engage in age verification or age gating, saying that social media platforms could be held liable if they offer certain content or certain features to kids. And the question comes up of, well, how could they do that unless they could determine which of their users are kids and which are adults? And the answer is that they can't. And so the bill would require platforms to use these kind of very invasive measures, invasive of people's privacy in order to determine their ages. And that's where our concern is coming from at Freedom of the Press Foundation where I work. So it begs the question, if they're kids, they don't have IDs. So how is age verification going to be implemented? They know that there are different, I mean, maybe when they're 16 or 15, but earlier than that, no, they don't have IDs that they can use. Like, how is this being promoted and how do they think that they're going to be able to implement this? Right. That's a great question. So one of the methods for age verification is requiring a user to produce a government ID, as you mentioned. And as you say correctly, kids below a certain age are not going to have that ID, but it's not just kids below a certain age. It also might be people who are in the country and are undocumented, or it might be people who just don't have the money in order to get a government ID, things like that. So it could impact a lot of people. If platforms are not requiring a government ID, another way that they might try to verify age is through biomex.

So they might take a scan of a user's face and then try to estimate their age based on that scan. But a problem with that is not only is that extremely privacy invasive, I don't want to have to share a If you had to go onto a social media platform, it also is not always accurate. And studies have shown that it's especially not accurate when dealing with people of color, for example. So there are different methods, but none of them are foolproof. And I think the biggest problem with all of them is that there's no way to verify someone's age, but allow them to still remain anonymous online. And that's a huge issue when it comes to free speech and our ability to speak online. I'm just also thinking about so naturally, yes, children of color might, you know, be impacted and it's not accurate for them. But I also think about, say, like, the biometric data for trans kids who are especially vulnerable right now. The idea that they would have to subject themselves to face scans as minors. presents a whole host of problems and also almost even though it says it's protecting kids this is a privacy violation and a parental rights violation Yeah, absolutely. And I think the impact on LGBTQ youth is really severe. And groups like Fight for the Future have been bringing that argument to the forefront because we know that the internet has been a place for some of those kids where they can connect with communities of other LGBTQ people to help them navigate what can be a really difficult process for them as they are in communities that might not be supportive for them. And so the impacts on that group in particular can be very problematic. People who want to maybe criticize or. speak out against the government. Their anonymity being impacted is extremely important. And from our perspective at Freedom of the Press Foundation as a press freedom organization, the impact on journalists and confidential sources who might want to speak anonymously online together is it's hugely problematic to require them to verify their ages and therefore reveal their identities in order to get online. And I want to touch on that huge element as well. But I just also wanted to put a point on the fact that this is kind of a rebranding of an argument that I remember growing up with. And that still exists today, like Texas, I know, is cracking down on the availability of online pornography. But like this is a way almost. like to say we're protecting our kids from the big scary internet this is an argument that was said all the time from a more you know right wing heritage foundation conservative evangelical corner of our politics but now it's coming through the you know big techs lobbying which is an interesting development to me

Yeah, absolutely. This is an argument that is rewarmed from the fights in the 1990s when the Communications Decency Act was passed. That was a law that was about obscenity online. The Supreme Court struck down most of that law saying it violated the First Amendment. Now we're seeing those same arguments being rehashed. And as you said, some of the big tech companies are even embracing this because they know that they might be able to comply with these requirements and they don't really care about users' privacy. And they could maybe drive their smaller competitor. out of business. So that's another reason why these bills are very problematic. If we want a free internet that's not just dominated by the big tech platforms, well, this legislation is not going to give us that. So what are the big companies that are behind this bill? Who are they? Why is it kind of being, I mean, we know why, but I just feel like the national conversation around this has not caught up to the fact that there are tech companies that are pushing this. This isn't a tech regulatory bill in the same way that, you know, in the way that it's being framed as some sort of protection from big tech. Yeah, that's a great point. The tech companies have changed their positions at various times. And so I don't want to speak incorrectly as to which ones may or may not be endorsing this particular bill because also, as I said, this legislation has a lot of different bills that have been kind of smashed into it. In the Senate, there's another version. So it is changing all the time who is supporting what. But unfortunately, we have seen some of the big tech companies come out and say that they would be okay with requirements like this, like age verification. And I think that should be. disturbing and send the signal that maybe this is not the route we should be going. So on the on the piece for journalists and you know Trump's attacks on journalists this coming within this context. I mean largely there have also been bipartisan attacks on activism particularly around Palestine where this this could be really really problematic. But like talk about the risk for journalism and for whistleblowers who would need to to be able to provide information to journalists and what these barriers would do to that. Sure. Well, there's no doubt that the Trump administration has essentially declared war on the free press. Just this past weekend, we saw that the Department of Justice subpoenaed New York Times journalists over there reporting about the Katari jet that was offered to President Trump. And they're trying to uncover the reporter's confidential sources. And this has been a repeated theme by this administration. They want to go after the confidential sources and the whistleblowers who are helping journalists hold them to account. account. And so the way that these laws could impact that is by essentially chipping away at or even destroying anonymity online. And we know that one of the ways that journalists connect with confidential sources is through online communications. And in the past, we've seen the Trump administration, but also other administrations, try to target journalists emails, for example, to see who are they emailing with, who are their confidential sources they're talking with? And so if all of a sudden you have to prove your identity to use a social

media platform, that opens up a whole new pot of data that the Trump administration or a future administration could target to try to discover who our journal is talking to on social media, send a legal demand to the tech company and make them tell us. And so that's extremely concerning when we need confidential sources and whistleblowers more than ever to know that we could be opening a whole other avenue for the government to crack down on it. So it's basically like, you know, if you are a source that's reaching out to a journalist on social media versus a, you know, secure communications platform like signal, that you could be immediately targeted by the administration for that purpose. And secondarily, my question would be, how does it impact some of the encrypted communications app like signal? Would this be difficult? for those kind of communications to continue? Well, lawmakers are usually careful to say that they don't intend the legislation to impact encrypted services, but I know the Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken a look at the Kids Act, and they say buried within the bill. There are hints that it could impact encryption as well because of the liability regime, that it could make platforms liable if they don't take action on certain content. And then the issue becomes, well, if it's encrypted, the platform's not supposed to know what content is being shared. So how could they possibly take action? on certain content. So it's complicated, but I think the answer is that there's at least the possibility it could impact encrypted communications, which is very concerning. We always recommend a Freedom of the Press Foundation that journalists use secure communication tools like Signal if they're going to talk with confidential sources. But the truth is that some sources also are not sophisticated, and so they might make their initial outreach to reporters through unencrypted platforms just on social media. the bill really comes into play again with the issue around age verification and platforms collecting people's identifying information. We have someone who wrote in and asked, more bad news says, could you ask how VPN usage fits into this? Sure. So with VPN usage, what we've seen with bills around the country. So in different states, they've passed laws that require age verification, maybe banning kids under a certain age from certain social media platforms. And as they have passed those bills, what we've seen is that people in those states have turned to VPNs because they don't want to turn over their private information to tech companies. And so they use a VPN to try to get around it. But now lawmakers are taking notice of that, and they're actually trying to maybe potentially ban VPNs. So recently Utah became one of the first. states to propose banning VPN usage in certain situations to try to crack down on this getting around of age verification.

But that's a huge can of worms to open because VPNs do a lot more than just help people evade censorship and age verification. They also help people keep themselves safe online, keep their browsing private. And so we're really headed down, I'd say, a slippery path where you start cracking down on the platforms. Lawmaker CEO, that's not working as well as we hope. Now we're going to crack down on VPNs. And what's next? I mean, more and more content could be banned and censored. So it's very concerning. Lastly, just from a big picture perspective, you mention how the, it's a very natural impulse right now for people to want their children to be protected online, right? And so that's why this bill is being framed as the kids act and protecting children. From your perspective, I know this is a little bit of the, you know, talking about whistleblowers, right? But, you know, what would be possible as a way for children to be protected from some of the worst parts of the Internet without... using systems like this. I mean, I've seen some of these studies about phone bans in schools. That seems fair to me. I know this is different, but like, you know, I don't necessarily know if there's a way or if there should be a way to obstruct children from accessing the internet and outside of, you know, parents kind of getting involved here. Well, I think one thing that Congress could do that would protect not only children, but all of us would be to pass comprehensive privacy legislation that governs online services. And what I mean by that is targeting the tech platform's collection of people's data that they then use to run their behavioral ad systems. engine that's powering all of this. Tech platforms are sucking in people's data and then using it to target advertisement. And that is going a long way towards the harms that we're seeing kids, but everybody online encounter. So instead of requiring platforms to collect more data to verify users ages, instead what I think Congress should be doing is cracking down on data collection through comprehensive privacy legislation that covers everyone, children and adults alike. Because then you would be unable to specifically target children with harmful content because there would not be the mass data collection that would allow for these tech companies to target them via all the information they've collected, essentially. Right, exactly. And not just kids, but all of us. None of us would be targeted with this terrible content. So, yes, it would go a long way to protecting kids and adults. Yes. I'm foregrounding the kids thing because there's just like, you know, this. puritanical anxiety about the certain stuff. And look, I'm not a parent yet, so I don't get it. But it is, that is what they're trying to tap into. Regardless, I really appreciate your time today. You clarified a lot about this dangerous bill. Lastly, you said that there's a Senate version. Do you know what the status is of this bill now that it's passed the House? Are they debating it in the Senate? Is it a new version they're trying to meld with this House version?

The Senate has its own version of the bill, and I think there's actually a lot of competition between the House and Senate. The Senate is dissatisfied with the House version. The House is dissatisfied with the Senate version. So so far, they have not been able to make progress on passing a version that they can both agree on, which I think goes to show how problematic the legislation is. Congress can't come together to work out the details because both bills are ultimately extremely flawed. Well, Caitlin Vogus, senior advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, First Amendment attorney. You can read her piece published in partnership with The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation called Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing. Caitlin, thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Of course. All right, folks, quick break. And when we return from our break, you will be hearing an interview. that we have a note on from our friend Matt Leck between Alex Aronson and Sam. Yeah, there's a little bit of an issue with Sam's microphone here. So we had to sort of doctor up the onboard microphone there. So it will sound like Sam's coming in over a little bit of a bad connection. But the guest, Mike sounds great. And so just... Except our apologies. Sam didn't pick the right mic in his recording. He's trying to finesse that a little bit. But yeah, I think that is basically what happened. But we, we, you can't, it is legible. So, uh, and there were good questions and even better answers. So yes, here's this. And yes, Alex Aronson, I should say, co-founder and executive director of court accountability on the Supreme Court corruption and the billionaire backed right wing takeover of the courts. Here's that interview now.

We are back, Sam Cedar, on the Majority Report. Joining me now, it's a pleasure to welcome to the program, Alex Aronson. He is the co-founder and executive director of court accountability and a contributor to Midas Touch's legal AF. Alex, welcome to the program. Thanks, Sam. Good to be with you. So we're talking literally just hours, more or less, 24, I guess, technically, from the end of the Supreme Court's term, we have seen their rulings. Of that batch, before we get into sort of like the more holistic, you know, a problem with the Supreme Court that I think hopefully this audience is pretty familiar with. What was the most disturbing? I mean, I know it's hard to sort of like pick one. But what did you find the most disturbing, I guess, from a like a broad structural problem? Yeah. It is really hard to pick one because I think almost the most disturbing thing about the end of the term is the entire end of term ritual itself. this sort of baroque and grotesque process whereby we all sit around and wait to find out which of our rights and freedoms survive the latest John Roberts decree uh it really i think shines a spotlight on just how broken the entire system is and how much power we've allowed this court to sort of take on for itself Of the actual decisions that came down, I think two really stand out. One came several weeks ago, of course, the Calais decision, the real culmination of a decades-long project to gut the Voting Rights Act that John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States, has really been at the helm of. And then of this week's decision, I think the one that we must pay extra special attention to is the decision in the FTC case about the independence of the FTC. which really was more about Congress's power to, on behalf of the American people, set up these independent agencies and insulate them from this type of of being political interference like we're seeing from Trump. And again, just like Calais, this represented the culmination of a decades-long project funded by right-wing billionaires to basically overturn the administrative state and put in place this tyrannical presidency that Congress simply can't touch. So those two cases really stand out within this broader context of a court that has become masterful at dominating the narrative. I think, creating the impression that it is a guardrail against authoritarianism when it is, in fact, authoritarianism's central driver in this country. Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk about, Clay's, and you talk about the, the FTC, I guess, Fed dual ruling, as it were, those are very, those are really structural issues. Like the 14th Amendment and the...

the birthright citizenship is almost feels like that's the project for uh that we provide for chum on some level i mean I feel like certainly the Voting Rights Act, we know John Roberts, that was his pet project in the early 1980s when he's working in the DOJ for Reagan. And of Calais is the sort of like culmination of an assault on the Voting Rights Act since 2013. It may have predated, obviously. There was a big problem the Republicans had with the Voting Rights Act years before that, of course, since 65. Then the naturally born, the birthright citizenship feels like if you had asked your typical federalist society lawyer eight years ago, 10 years ago, they would have been like, what? No. Right. Of course. Absolutely. This came out of thin air. It's egregious overreach. Normally, when the right-wing legal movement has a target like this, it takes a lot of time to develop a whole doctrinal assault on the existing precedent, right? This is the work that we did in the Senate, the work that we do at court account. ability to expose this multi-hundred billion dollar scheme to invest in the development of doctrines and fake facts and an entire apparatus to advance this stuff. And normally that's what we see. It's what we've seen in pretty much every other doctrinal context. And here, this Trump-driven attack on birthright citizenship was not similarly supported by that type of infrastructure. It was just a couple scholars at the last minute who threw this stuff out. I think you're right. On some level, it's less structural. I do think there's a structural dynamic here, right? They're trying to define what citizenship means so that they can start to really continue to shape who gets to be a person in this country and who gets to have political equality. But, you know, I think it's striking and jarring that this... frivolous theory that had no, you know, no backing even from this movement, got four votes from this court, which suggests, and I saw you had Ellie Mistel on the show yesterday. He's terrific. I'm sure he got into this, but this is not over, right? They're going to continue to hammer at this. And Samuel Alito or Thomas will retire, and they're going to re-up their majority. And these projects are far from over on citizenship, immigration, but many other issues also. I know you're steeped in how we got to this point, and we've sort of just touched on a little bit, but let's fill in some of the gaps because I think there's a tendency. First off, from the center left, I would say a real problem with fundamentally understanding how powerful the Supreme Court is and how relevant it is. I can be supportive of Medicare for all. I am.

There's no reason to believe that if the House and the Senate and the President were to pass and sign Medicare for All, that it wouldn't get struck down at least with the court as composed today, maybe even less so going forward. And that is by design. Take us back to, I guess this starts really, in many respects, the Jerome Powell memo is the sort of like the opening shot in this assault on the judiciary. What did they understand? What was what did the right at that point sort of like how clear was their agenda in terms of going forward? Yeah, it was pretty clear at the time. I think what they understood was power. They understood the structure and design of the Constitution, which parts of it were, you know, susceptible to sort of democratic progress and democratic power. that had produced a whole bunch of stuff that these interests really did not like by the time that the Jerome Powell memo was conceived in 1971, right? We had seen, and this was a bipartisan push towards broad consumer, worker rights, social and economic progress, the civil rights movement. These were all the products of mostly congressional, democratic action. And they recognize that if they could concentrate and hold power within the less democratic features of our Constitution, such as the judiciary, they would be able to choke off that progress, take us backwards, and foreclose future progress. So that was the sort of structural design of the Federalist Society right-wing legal project that did really begin in earnest with the Jerome Powell memo. But you could trace it back earlier to the reaction to Brown versus Board of Education and racial integration, right? This was actually, I think, the true origins of political originalism, which was offered as a more palatable alternative to just straight up racist nullification of Supreme Court orders as the court was ordering schools to be integrated. And so right-wing thinkers like William F. Buckley and the National Review actually started developing originalism. as a way to reach the same outcomes, but under the pretext of neutrality. And the Jerome Powell memo really brought in right-wing industrial and corporate money to infuse this into a whole movement. And it took power. And I think, you know, we have spent a lot. I'm sure your listeners are familiar with much of the story of the investment and of the organization and coordination by Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society toward the installment of these justices with folks like John Roberts and Samuel Alito in that George W. Bushet administration. But I think what we spend less time thinking about, which is just as important, perhaps more important than something we can actually do something about, is the way that the liberal left, the Democratic Party, the media treated this incursion on our Constitution, treated this.

court capture scheme, right? Because I think the main mistake we collectively have made for all of these decades is to think of the courts, first and foremost, as the place to go for democracy and justice and equal rights. And then to miss mistake what originalism was as sort of a good faith intellectual adversary across the aisle, you know, in terms of this jurisprudence to go back to original intent, we took it at face value and engaged with it directly, rather than acknowledging it as a pretextual vehicle for an authoritarian political project. And along the way, we have been unwilling to call out what has become an untenable concentration of constitutional power within the federal judiciary, and particularly at the Supreme Court. And this was the problem that Lincoln recognized with the Tani Court when they were dealing with dread, Scott, and slavery, right? And he understood, and this is a, I'm sure I'll botch it, but I'll try. Lincoln understood and said in his first inaugural address that if the policy of the whole government is to be on vital questions affecting. the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by the Supreme Court, then the people will have ceased to be their own rulers. And that's the condition we're living under now, right? Where even though 80% of America wants the same outcomes on questions like money in politics, even more than that, it's 87% that rejects Citizens United, we can't have that result because we have ceased to be our own rulers because we are living in a legal autocracy. where the Supreme Court, this tribunal with ultimate and exclusive prerogative over the meaning of the Constitution has set the terms for our lives. And until we reject their claim to that exclusive control over constitutional meaning, which is not in the Constitution, that is a norm like all of the other norms. Until we reject that, we are stuck in the system because they have the Supreme Court majority until 2065 at the earliest. And there are ways up, though. There are ways up. Yes. And I want to get to those. And the, it is fascinating to me having like been, I spent a year in law school at the beginning of the 90s. And the. the just firehose of originalism and textualism and as if these were sort of, I mean, like you say, good faith principles that were to be argued, and they were, I mean, I just, every time I hear it, I just think of like a Breyer, you know, talking about, I believe in a living constitution and trying to debate these questions. And now we hear none of that. There is like, it is, it is, it's identical to sort of like the way that the deficit was used as a, as a mechanism to cut social security. And then when it is no longer convenient to talk about the deficit, we don't. And it, it's, I'm really struck by that. Let's talk about, like, I think, you know, hopefully this audience is, is.

has some awareness of the need for a reform of the Supreme Court. And there's a lot of really interesting different ways of doing it that are not terribly radical. And obviously the first thing is to get people to engage and recognize the problem that we're dealing with and how incredibly corrupted the process has been by... by money and by a politicization. And before we get into these, one of the frustrations I have is that the legal profession itself, which I think ultimately needs to be on board with this and accept the reality of this. And I'm talking about the legal profession that are theoretically non-ideological. They still can't. I mean, and, you know, part of this is shaped by like my own dealing with my father, who's, you know, in his 80s. But, you know, time and time again, I bring to him like cases that I'm like, this is garbage. And there's still this sort of like lawyer mentality. These are very smart people. They're very accomplished. And there is a grace that is given that is sort of. otherworldly. How do you deal with that? I think it's starting to unwind a little bit. I talk to a lot of judges, former judges, a lot of folks who certainly, I think, fall into this camp of people that have looked at people like John Roberts as an institutionalist. They might disagree with his jurisprudence, but they ultimately think he's principled. I do think that in the last few years, with decisions like Trump versus United States, the immunity decision, with leaks out of the Supreme Court, like we've seen there was this explosive leak showing the... creation of the shadow docket in the context of Obama's clean power plan where John Roberts effectively said, we can't allow this to happen. It would have too negative an impact on the fossil fuel industry. He said that in internal memos that got leaked. And I think as people see these results, the line that this is still a court in any sense, that it is not simply doing the bidding of the interests that put these justices in place, is less and less tenable. But I think you're right. It's, you know, what we're working against is decades of entrenched cultural attachment to the idea that the court is above the law. And what we must do, I believe, and it's why we started at court accountability with research and investigative work to help uncover the sprawling gold mine of corruption and scandal that had been encircling this court that the mainstream media didn't want to touch, that the Democrats didn't want to touch. But it's by continuing to expose that, to show just how extreme and radical, not only the justices themselves, but the people behind them calling the shots for this agenda, really they are, that are going to start to do it. And I think the other thing that's happening, and Calais, to my mind, having done this now for over 10 years, working in this space,

Was the first thing that finally seemed to have flipped the switch with the Democrats, like the mainstream leadership of the Democratic Party that I think understands for the first time, perhaps, that there is no future for the Democratic Party unless they take this seriously. And so what that looks like in terms of a reform agenda, I think is the work of the next really like two years. But I think the realization is starting to dawn on it. Was it not Bush v. Gore? I mean, that, like, that. That was the, I mean, not just the canary in the coal mine. That was, that was like a much larger bird in the coal mine. And then John Roberts' nomination as Chief Justice, just five years later after he had been, you know, a lawyer on that case. Yeah. Wasn't he actually, I think he, if I remember correctly, and I think Brett Kavanaugh was working on that case too, frankly. But I think John Roberts or Brett Kavanaugh, they were in that mob that was the Brooks Brothers Ryan. And so I don't, for me, that was that that was the biggie. And then if you look at the way that Democrats treated John Roberts' nomination, he wasn't like a threat. He got a lot of Democratic votes. Barack Obama, I've heard from leaders who were working on that nomination at the time. Barack Obama wanted to vote for John Roberts' confirmation and was told that if he did, he would have no chance of being the party's nominee. But this was, I mean, this reflects, I think, the Democratic Party's complete miss on what they were up against when it came to judicial power and where this project was headed in terms of the permanent destruction of American democracy. I think one, I think a turn in that that I think people can see, like a material difference is the judiciary now, and we're seeing it with some executive branch appointments. asking the question, who won the 2020 election just to lay bare how non-independent these independent judicial nominees are and their failure to simply say like, yeah, it's noontime, the sun is shining, is, I think, indicative. And I think it's indicative of where the Democrats have moved that we're starting to see this on a regular basis. I think that's rather healthy. Let's talk about the reform ideas. There's a lot of them floating out there. What are the ones that you think, based upon your experience, working for Sheldon White House, who's on the Judiciary Committee, and what you've heard in talking to people, what do you think is both the most effective and sort of like crossed reference with the most doable? This is a big question, super thorny. There are so many reforms that are needed to deal with so many problems that have emerged from our courts by virtue of the Federalist Society's capture scheme. We don't have time, probably to get into all of the reforms that are needed to restore public faith and to have a court that's a court again.

I do think it's likely that if for any pro-democracy agenda, like a substantive agenda to survive, some reform will be needed, some aggressive reform to constrain this court will be needed, something like expanding the court, putting justices on the court, or deploying other less widely understood, talked about reforms like jurisdiction stripping. The Constitution gives Congress significant authority. to set the jurisdiction of the federal courts, both the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court. So it could use its powers to carve out jurisdictional exceptions to entire areas of cases where the courts would no longer have jurisdiction to meddle in democratically enacted laws. How does that work, like, insofar as, you know, we're going to pass a law that says black people can't vote? And we have now said that the Supreme Court no longer has jurisdiction over voting issues that we have passed. I mean, how does that work? Right, right. You have, I have inadvertently or maybe not inadvertently, and you have taken the invitation, but we've opened the door to the nuclear question in constitutional law and federal courts, which is the scope of Congress's power to strip the courts. out of the picture. And the concern that you raise is a very real one for a situation in where, in which a sort of an authoritarian majority might want to do something like you describe and where we would want the courts to maintain a role, right? And the 20th century is a good... proof point for the importance of having courts, particularly in the context of checking state power, right? I think we think too much about the good that the court has done in sort of the abstract. Most of the good that the court has done in the 20th century was in the context of checking state authoritarianism. And so, you know, there are real concerns about what could happen if Congress starts to use these powers to check the court. What I would argue is that it sort of let, it tends to be more democratic. There's a reason the Federalist Society and this. you know, faction of billionaires and extremists chose the unaccountable power of the courts to drive their agenda. It's because they couldn't advance it through the Congress. And so we've seen efforts from the right to actually use jurisdiction stripping to advance a national right to life, to ban gay marriage nationwide. That never took hold. And in fact, those efforts in the 2000s were snuffed out by the Federalist Society folks who said, this isn't the way. The way to ban abortion nationwide is through the courts. And so these are questions that we need to get right as we think about what we think American democracy should look like. And I think they're not easy to resolve. One last thing I'll say is that whatever reform we need to advance, we have to reckon with the fact that the broken political system this court created is still very much in play within the Democratic Party, which is deeply infected by the unlimited money in politics that Citizens United and before that Buckley v. Vallejo unleashed.

And so while we might know in our community here that something like court expansion is necessary, The chances of the next nominee sticking their neck out to advance that, I think, are very, very small. And I think we have to, rather than just get upset about that, we have to work with it. I actually think there are real reasons why the next nominee might not want to stick their neck out on something like court expansion, even if it is something that they plan on ultimately trying to advance. Because we enter this fight from way behind. Our adversaries have spent 50 years cultivating a base that understands the power of the courts, and we simply haven't. And if we start to advance the most aggressive far-reaching reforms, we're going to walk into a propaganda buzzsaw. You know, we have talked about it in this conversation, the cultural and mythological attachments that so many in the even the pro-democracy community attached to this court. And I would just simply suggest that as we prepare for what must be an ultimate contestation for power against a... corrupt and authoritarian judiciary, we should be strategic about how to enter that fight with the most legitimacy and the most durable public support behind our cause as we possibly can. And I think in a moment like this where we all know that this is not tenable and we need something like court packing, it might feel good to demand that our elected representatives come out front and start calling for things like that, but I would suggest that there are actually better ways to approach the challenge. And let's just talk one of those, because I heard an interview you did with Representative Sean Kasten from Illinois, who had some interesting ideas on this. And one of the ones that I think really struck me was, and this is part of it, you know, people talk about expanding to 13 because that's the number of pellic courts we have, or the idea of essentially having a much bigger. a rotating Supreme Court, which would include theoretically, I guess, all the appellate courts or maybe a couple of them, or where you... The practice of we're going to have somebody go in and try and buy, you know, deny a cake by a gay couple. And that's not going to be our test court case. And we're sending that out because we know we can rely on these five votes up on the court. And now's the time to do this. You'd be unable to do that if you had a rotating crew. Just briefly lay that out. Because one of the things I really like about that, is it's so processing sounding that it feels like you can't really call it radical because nobody's going to pay attention. Your average voter's just like...

You know, whatever. Like, there's an appellate court. Like, they don't know, you know, your average, it's much hard to gain traction. You know, saying court packing sounds, even though we've seen it in the behalf, I don't know, half a dozen states, we've seen it essentially under a Republican rule. But talking about a rotating nine-person Supreme Court where each justice spends six months on the court or a year on the court or whatever it is. seems to me to be something that sounds so weedy to people that it's very hard to argue. to demagogue against, I guess. Yeah. I love Representative Kasten. He, I think he's unique, not unique, but he's one of the few in the House and in the Congress generally who is willing to think creatively and to think about how to address these problems with powers that Congress has, I think, been too quick to ignore or leave collecting dust. He understands the power that Congress has to set jurisdiction limits to create different structures of courts like he has proposed. I think there's a lot of appeal in a proposal like he has laid out or like you are suggesting there. We could have 100 Supreme Court justices and random panels. I think we could make a strong good government case for that. I do have concerns that people would see through it. Again, we are up against a propaganda juggernaut and a base that really understands the importance of this. And it reminds me a bit of the pretextual justifications that FDR actually offered for his court backing threat, which were that the justices were too old and overworked and needed support, which the American people didn't buy and really was a threat that only worked because... FDR had tremendous political power on his side. He had 76 votes in the Senate. And we simply don't have that type of power. And so what I would offer is that, and we haven't done the work to advance court reforms, even sort of good government, super defensible court reforms as a. big priority for our base and for the Democratic Party. And so the way we think about it is how can we advance this agenda in a way that brings more people along and that highlights just how obscene and out of control this system has gotten. And where we think the place to start is with the corrupt, broken political system and with money in politics. Citizens United. and Buckley v. Vallejo, the 1976 case that decided that money was speech, and that really opened the door for this broken political system that we're all inhabiting. This was a very intentional design of the Federal Society project and the Chamber of Commerce's Jerome Powell memo. And we've all sort of accepted that to deal with Citizens United, we have to overturn Citizens United by amending the Constitution. Now, that is an impossibility.

They have broken the political system to foreclose our ability to do that. And we have taken it as an acceptable answer for a democratic reformer, a pro-democracy anti-corruption reformer, to say that they are against Citizens United and that they want to overturn Citizens United by amending the Constitution. But people like Hakeem Jeffries who make those promises, they know that those are promises they will never have to deliver because of the broken political system that they are now caught up in. And so what if we just stop accepting that we have to take the Supreme Court's word as final, like Lincoln did? And on a question like Citizens United, where every fact that they laid out in that case, supplanting Congress's bipartisan factual findings, with their own assertions that independent expenditures could not be corrupting. Everything about that decision is wrong. Everything about the 16 now years since it was decided has proven that to 87% of the Americans that, in fact, independent expenditures in politics are deeply corrupting and create the appearance of corruption. And so what if we try to just overturn that by statute, rejecting their... claim to final exclusive control over the meeting of the Constitution. I think we could build a coalition around that. And I think it would be pretty hard for folks to start saying to say no to a bill that just does that because it's something that 90% of the country wants that we can't have because we live in a judicial tyranny. And that provides a roadmap theoretically, both has material impact on the ability to get more reforms in the future, but also provides a roadmap of how you do it in terms of essentially jurisdiction stripping. It's fascinating stuff. If folks want more information, they can find court accountability where? We are at courtaccountability.org and don't miss our sister research organization, True North Research, led by my partner, the incomparable Lisa Graves. All right, and we will link to both of those and as well as Midas touches legal AF. Alex Aronson, I really appreciate your time today. Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Sam.

Hello. And look who it is. Oh, oh. Oh, hello, everyone. Hello. I'd like to welcome to the show. How do you pronounce it? How do you say it? It's Cedar. It's Sam Cedar, yeah. Oh, Sam? I've been saying it wrong the whole time. Yeah. Hi, folks. I am still on the road, as you can see. It will be for a couple of weeks, but I'm going to be adjoining the fun half today. I'm still trying to record some stuff remotely. Feels like it was a busy week last week. Yeah, what'd you miss? What'd you miss? All the Jalen Brown talk must have been dominant. Of course. Yeah, obviously missed a lot of stuff. I'm going to talk a little bit about that in the fun half when we got back. I just wanted to clear up some rumors about my involvement with Mitch McConnell falling. I had nothing to do with that. As far as other things that have been going on, I think it, I can't really talk about the project I'm working on now. It is a sort of a Hollywood thing, but it's going to create a lot of controversy relative. Whoa. Cut now. I'm passing away. Hollywood took you out, took your signal out for a second there. It's going to come more controversy with what did you say? With the Lindsey Graham passing away, people are going to. It's going great right now. Don't, don't say. Don't admit anymore. I'm going to have to refresh Sam. All right. All right, that's the teaser for Sam then for the fun half. All right, we'll fix this Sam. going into the fun half. Matt, what's happening on Left Reckoning and with The Jackman Show? Yeah, Ishmael Johnson is going to be talking about a piece on the cost of youth soccer and why it is actually the capitalization of these sorts of youth sports is making us less competitive relative to the rest of the world and some other great stories. So check that out coming up on tomorrow's Left Reckoning. That's it. all sports now in this country. I didn't realize baseball was like the most expensive because that was like the one that we never had to like raise money for as a kid. Yeah, it's nuts. And tomorrow I am going to be hosting the official launch of DSA's new workers deserve more program. It is going to be Tuesday the 14th. You can go to the link go.d.safusa.org slash.

uh wdm for workers deserve more dash emma but we'll also put a link down below in the video and episode descriptions it's going to be at 8 30 p.m eastern tomorrow night it's virtual over zoom so check it out folks um if you want to get more involved in dsa and know what their upcoming program is for the 2026 2027 year you can join me there all right see you in the fun half three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now. But I think around 18 months out, we're going to look back and go like, wow. What? What is that going on? It's nuts. Wait a second. Hold on for a second. Emma, welcome to the program. Hey. Fun hat. Matt Drew. Fun hack. What is up, everyone? Fun hat. No me keen. You did it. Fun hack. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon.

Bradley, you want to say hello? Sorry to disappointment. Everyone, I'm just a random guy. It's all the boys today. Fundamentally false. No, I'm sorry. Women's... Stop talking for a second. Let me finish. Where is this coming from, dude? But dude, you want to smoke this? Seven, eight. Yes. I think it is you. Who is you? No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind? Sports. We can discuss free markets, and we can discuss capitalism. I'm going to go to life. Libertarians. They're so stupid though. Common sense says, of course. Gobble de gook. We fucking. So what's 79 plus 21? Challenge met. I'm positively quivering. I believe 96, I want to say. 857, 210, 35. 35. 301. One half. Three-eighths. 9-11 for instance. $3,400, $1,900. $6.5,4, $3 trillion sold. It's a zero-sum game. Actually, you're making me think less. But let me say this. Poop. Call it satire, Sam goes satire. On top of it all, my favorite part about you is just like every day, all day, like everything you do. Without a doubt. Hey, buddy, we've seen you. All right, folks, folks, folks. It's just the week being weeded out, obviously. Yeah, sundowns out.

People just don't like to entertain ideas anymore. I have a question. Who cares? Our chat is enabled, folks. I love it. I do love that. Look, got to jump. I got to be quick. I get a jump. I'm losing it, bro. Two o'clock, we're already late, and the guy's being a dick. So screw him. Sent to a gulaw? Outrage. Like, what is wrong with you? Love you. Bye. Love you. Bye-bye.