May it Displease the Court
Mary: Welcome back everyone to another episode of May it Displease the Court
Lee: a podcast about how deeply and totally SCREWED UP the court system has always been
Mary: but especially under the Trump administration. Since law school I have been taught that the force of the judicial system is the butting of heads between liberal and conservative viewpoints. The winner swings back and forth, sometimes it gets gridlocked. But lately it’s really gone off the rails in favor of conservatism. It has become increasingly visible that courts are no longer a “clash of ideals.” It’s now a patina of ideals, a veneer.
Lee: Absolutely! But Let’s back up. Introduce yourself.
Mary
- I’ve been a practicing attorney for about 17 years
- vast majority of that work for indigent clients,
- which means that I am appointed by courts to represent people who cannot financially afford to hire their own attorney, because the court is required to provide defense for you if you are too poor to hire an attorney.
- Now I only handle court appointed appellate work and I have been a public defender, but now I am independent, I don't work out of a particular public defender's office.
- KIDS!!!
Lee: And I’m an academic and a rhetorician, I study rhetoric, and you’ll learn more about what I do in this episode because it’s all about academia.
Mary: In this episode we’re going to pick up a train of thought from episode one. Episode one was all about the myth of Judges as unbiased beings who make their judgements from a place of wisdom and pure independence, meaning they are not in anyone’s pockets. When, in fact, judges are deeply biased and, worse, there’s a lot of evidence that they are increasingly in the pockets of big money corporations and far-Right politicians hell bent on roll backing civil liberties.
Lee: Yes, we are sticking with that theme of money infiltrating cornerstone institutions of American democracy. But this episode is going to focus on academics, but not like my people...academics who have sold their research to the highest bidder.
The collective mythology of academics, at least in this country, I think, is kind of this crazy liberal professor who sits in their ivory tower with a bad wardrobe and just churns out books. And, yes, people mostly think academics are totally out of touch with the real world but nonetheless there’s a sense that they know what they’re doing. That their research is evidence-based, rigorously judged...you know, fucking academic. And, more importantly, that their research can be trusted.
Mary: Except now big money has infiltrated academia--public universities, private universities, law schools--using their “charitable donations” (can you hear my air quotes) to create an agenda for what research gets done and what the research says.
We know that the Koch brothers have paid for a whole host of anti-climate change “science” (more air quotes). We know that the tobacco industry paid for studies that smoking didn’t harm people. We know that Volkswagon paid for studies to say that their emissions were not polluting.
Lee: And it’s not just paying for research. They use their donations to determine who gets promoted, who gets tenure, even whether or not someone can get a book published. If we know that academics and judges and lawyers are being bought and paid for by corporations with horrifying motivations then we simply can’t trust these myths that wearing a robe or having a PhD makes you any better or worse than any other politician in the pocket of the highest bidder.
Mary: What is really awful is that the vast majority of people have no idea this is going out because average people have no connection to these big corporate money ideas.
For most people, life is a clash of ideas. In your family over the dinner table. On Facebook. So the reactionary anti-democratic Right get away with this shit. Even in the Supreme Court the liberal justices say “this is a clash of ideals” but it’s not. Because one side is trying to clash ideals and the other side isn’t.
Lee: Right, they’re not interested in democracy. They want fascism. They don’t want a clash of ideas they want a monopoly on the marketplace of ideas just like they want corporate monopolies.
Mary: there’s been a secret breach of trust. Most people are operating as if there hasn’t been this huge betrayal of what it means to be an academic or a lawyer or a judge or anyone else who is supposed to be participating in this clash of ideals in good faith, to say things they ACTUALLY believe because they have read the laws or gotten the education or done the research not promoting ideas that are bought and paid for. We think a judge is judging; we think a researcher is researching; we don’t think they are propaganda machines.
I had this friend in law school. Really brilliant. My closest really conservative friend. Genuine friends. We were in constitutional law together and had this huge 24 hours exam (of which i took 23 hours to finish)
I wrote it out, turned it in. We met up afterward and he liked to go over the tests. I was such a law nerd. So we went over our questions.
And I realized we answered every question the exact opposite.
I write the lib exam
He writes conservative exam
We both cited appropriate case law
And came out with exactly opposite results
I was in tears, I thought that I failed because we argued completely opposite exams. Mind you that in law school these exams are 100% of your grade and you could have multiple 24 hour exams one day after another.
Turns out we both Got As. We had just written completely opposed exams.
So I was like, “oh, we’re just on ideologically opposite sides.” This guy from law school and I were just on opposite sides of a belief system, butting heads, clashing about interpretation of facts--it’s exactly the way that the law has always been imagined to work throughout history.
For me, he was the epitome the ideologically other side. He was that, I think, for a LOT of people in a law school.
Because later, as Trump was running, he was very anti-Trump at the beginning. But at some point, maybe after Trump won, my law school friend switched to a Trump supporter! He would post these other things on Facebook and I would see these other people from law school jump in and say, “this guy violates all of the principles you’ve ever espoused.” Pointing out these hypocrisies hoping to bring him back.
Lee: And I think it is a really important point that you weren’t trying to bring him back to LIBERALISM you were trying to bring him back to a consistent set of conservative arguments. Sort of like what the never trumpers have been doing--which is the group of real republicans with actual conservative values who keep trying to tell people, “this trump dude is NOT a republican he is NOT a conservative.”
Mary: So many people were trying to convince him “how can you feel this way” and get him to come around. And he just doubled down on all of these pro-trump taglines that were completely opposed to things he had always said he believed.
And then I think we all just kind of gave up. Although I still check every once in a while to see if he still supports Trump. Spoiler alert: he does.
This is a person I know to be analytical, logical, and able to argue for this stuff at a very high level. So it’s confusing to me--confounding really.
I’m not saying this guy is paid to change his mind. I’m saying that his ability to hold support for Trump and be as smart as he is about conservative ideology, TRUE conservative ideology, shows how effective this group of Koch donors and anti-democratic far-Right politicians have been at changing what it means to be a conservative
The money is used to legitimize the change of ideals. Coming in and having academics say these different things legitimizes these horrifying and obviously flawed policies. Their goal is to change the way America thinks--redefining what liberty means, what freedom means, using academics and PR people and politicians and the media to legitimize pro-corporate ideas that are pretending to be what “the founding fathers” intended or whatever.
What “conservative” meant in the 60s, what it meant on this exam in law school, they’ve changed now what it means. And that change didn’t happen through a clash of ideals where the best idea won; it happened because they paid for it.
And this guy from law school has bought it. He tracks what the party does. He believes what the party believes. Even if it’s contradictory to his conservative values.
We have to stop acting as if this is a clash of ideas. You have a Dark Money funded Right--especially this academic cohort being paid to pedal the money-based agenda of the Right as if it IS an ideal--it’s dishonest. It’s a propaganda campaign to push forward what is a perpetually MINORity position of the propertied, elite class.
Healthcare is a great example. You have Obamacare come in, they call it Obamacare, they try to make it this terrible thing. People are all “fuck Obamacare” but then it’s like, oh, I can’t because I have cancer and I need treatment.
Lee: Trump was campaigning/was first in office there was a flurry of activity about “repeal Obamacare” no I have the Affordable Care Act.
Mary: They’re not going to create a better life for you. They’re going to make it MUCH worse and they’re going to lie to you to get you on board. They’re just trying to stuff as much money in the hands of the fewest people.
These academics and judges and politicians are their surrogate liars. It’s unclear whether these people know that they are surrogate liars or if they are parasites that Koch has invaded to do their bidding and take over their mind.
“I’m funding your research so therefore you research ABC.” They’re literally being bribed.
Lee: So Mary and I had a great interview with Nancy MacLean, professor at Duke University, about her book DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: A DEEP HISTORY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT’S STEALTH PLAN FOR AMERICA.
MacLean documents forty years of the capitalist radical right working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. At the heart of this stealth plan is political economist James McGill Buchanan who basically decided after Brown v. Board of Education gave rights to Black people that he was going to spend the rest of his life putting together corporate donors and their right-wing foundations, especially Charles Koch, to teach others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.”
Mary: Right, and key to all of this are these right-wing academics who are being bought and paid for by corporate donors to use their “research” to legitimize these horrible anti-democratic theories.
Lee: Here’s Nancy talking about the Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy and Social Philosophy, which is a prime example of the kind of corporate-sponsored right-wing academic initiative that helps breed academics whose research will transform the constitution to suppress civil rights and support pro-corporate policies.
[INSERT MACLEAN]
Mary: That was decades ago. Now you’ve got these bought and paid for “academic” institutions springing up in plain sight across the country: Chapman University--there was controversy about a donation getting there and how it buys a say in tenure and promotion. These English professors got hired in these random departments that don’t make sense. LIberty University in Virginia. Now private universities, okay, whatever
Do you want to go to Ayn Rand university? Okay. but they’re trying to get their hooks into public universities. basically all of George Mason law school, which has been taken over by the Koch brothers--most of the university.
Molly McCluskey of the Atlantic writes about “At the University of California, Davis, researchers are regularly invited to attend on-campus meet-and-greets with potential corporate funders to discuss possible sponsorship opportunities. Handshakes and business cards are routinely exchanged—so are nondisclosure agreements.”
Mary: Florida State University--students want Koch corporate influences off campus protesting corporate money. That’s from Inside Higher Ed
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/11/04/students-want-koch-corporate-influence-campus
Lee: We had an organization come to our campus, FIRE, which stands for Foundation Individual Rights in Education. Their catchphrase is Experienced. Nonpartisan. Defending YourRights.”
But what they are is a far-Right donor funded organization that looks for free speech controversies on college campuses so that they can go in and use it to rally the disenfranchised libertarian/conservative students and faculty on campus to their cause. In the process they tie up possible action against people who are use hate slurs, putting swastikas on blackboards, or, in the case of the New York state campuses, writing things like “i’m gonna lynch some n-words tonight” on their snapchat
So our case was a little more benign. Essentially these students hopped on snapchat wearing black shit on their face throwing what look to be gang signs and their captions were “blackface and bae” and then the immediate next photograph was “just kidding these are face masks” like those charcoal face masks you buy at the CVS.
No sooner was this image circulating on campus than this FIRE organization was already posting that they had written cease and desist letters to the college dean because any action taken against these students would be a violation of their rights. https://www.thefire.org/suny-geneseo-we-never-considered-discipline-in-snapchat-photo-investigation/
Notably, the article they posted was full of wrong information: incorrect name of the lawyer, quoting responses from the administration that never happened. But of course the administration can’t do anything or respond because all of their actions are tied up in what i presume to be this person’s parents haven’t lawyered up immediately. So FIRE never gets any response because it’s a confidentiality violation of the student’s rights and they make up all this shit and then i’m hearing conservative students and faculty talking about how, my favorite, “no one can say anything anymore” and just moving further and further into the clutch of the far right.
All the while of course, the irony is that the campus is working SO hard to protect this student in the blackface. Hundreds of minoritized students on that campus knew that woman’s name and NEVER told anyone--not the media, not the super angry liberal white students, nobody. Meanwhile it’s FIRE who is creating this atmosphere where even to try to talk about why what happened is a problem, we’re violating this woman’s free speech.
And so you’ve got these organizations that are far-right funded, you’ve got corporate purchased academic centers and academics themselves. BThe biggest problem is academic publishing that legitimizes economic or political or social theories about how the world and human nature work, and they’re entirely funded by anti-democratic corporate interests.
MacLean offers a really important example about the economic theory of individual choice or rational choice economics. Instead of a theory of economics that looks at power and the role of corporate interest and how important collective ethics and equality are--so how economics has been approached at several points in American history include in the 30s during the new deal and that late 50s and early 60s during civil rights--Buchanan and now a bunch of Koch-funded academics are saying: no the market is rational, whatever people want to buy is natural and good, and oh if this benefits the few over the many then, well, that’s how economics works. You can’t argue with economics. Here’s Nancy again.
[INSERT MACLEAN]
Mary: Given what we know about the influence of big money donors on academia and the judiciary. I want disclaimers. Don’t tell me what the 2nd Circuit decided, say in a 2-1 decision Trump Judges sided with corporate interest. And journalists reporting on studies need to say this research is funded by Koch. I want academic journals to disclose if the professor submitting the paper is privately funded. We need transparency in order to determine whether we are being fed bought and paid for propaganda that is dressed up to look like the judgement of independent actors. The way it looks now the funding is hidden from the public and the conclusions just happen to always favor the big donors.
All of this is confusing for regular people who believed in the clash of ideals. It was designed to be confusing. The money behind all of this wants to stay hidden to make you believe that smart people genuinely support their agenda, when really almost no one who isn’t paid by big money supports their plan to rig the system so they always win and get to keep almost all the money.
Vote Biden. You got to.
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