An author staff writer, the atlantic. Tim frequently appears as a commentator on television. His previous book, american carnage on the frontlines of the republican civil war and the rise of President Trump in 2019. Tim is the son of a preacher. He grew in an Evangelical Church in this most recent book, he describes evangelical ism as both polarizing and the least understood movement. He also answers the question how do evangel come to support donald trump . Tim lives in southeast with his wife and three sons and a German Shepherd who i suppose does not quite secret service agents. So his latest book is, the kingdom the power and the glory american evangelicals in an age of extremism. Our next panelists is tina nguyen. Not to confused with the tina nguyen actress and producer who worked with recording artist michael bolton. Although maybe thats a desire. I googled all your names. Youre also sportswriter on fox in chicago. Apparently a bodybuilder. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So shes the Founding Partner in nashville, correspondent for covering the american right. Puck calls her their maga expert an insider. Previously tina has served as a White House Reporter for politico, a Staff Reporter for vanity fair. And before that, she was a journalist for a number of right wing publications like the daily caller, where she her start in journalism and in her earlier was mentored by tucker carlson. So its its okay. Shes survived. Wow. All right. She is a graduate of Claremont College and her book, the maga diaries chronicles her personal experiences within the right Wing Movement and media media enterprises. We welcome tina is the author maga diaries. My surreal inside the right wing and how i got out out. Is that except for getting out or right. Well get to that. Well get that. So our third panelist this morning is Stephen Vladeck who is the Charles Allen wright chair in federal courts at the university of texas law school, a nationally that i know. Thats okay. Okay. Texas longhorn. Well, this is going to take long time. So hes nationally recognized expert on federal courts, constitutional Law National Security law and military justice and is currently hosting a podcast on National Security law. But hidden from his public. And i talked to him this morning about, this is one of my favorite podcasts that he and his wife cohosted in loco parentis, which only ran for two seasons during the pandemic about parenting and the law and parenting comes first and you can go and look at past or listen to past sessions of this podcast. I also i asked if steve would you know reprise this podcast because their repartee in the podcast is fabulous interviewing with different people about parenting and and being lawyers and whatnot. Its just fantastic. Anyway, he lives in austin with his wife karen, and two daughters and their ten year old pug, who also has not bidden any secret service yet. Yes so he is the author of the docket how the Supreme Court uses rulings to amass power and undermine the republic. So i actually had a controversial beginning for the questions i have but im going to start a little with one of my favorite other authors besides the three of you i know yuval noah harari, the author of sapiens, the history of humankind mind and 21 lessons for the 21st century, both in his books and also in recent interviews, talks about story and how there is a difference between fact and story and that the stories are the things where we our our values and our values then are outcomes. So just briefly, for the three of you, you all brought three stories to this audience today and to all of your readers, you know, what are the values that arise from, your writing these particular stories. Wow. All right, tim, im going to start with you because youre right here. Wow. Okay. Well, thank you, rabbi tom, for the thomas fine no title. Okay. No titles for the for the totally specific and easy question to off with. Yeah. Why a story. And thank you all for being here. So you know where my mind goes when you say that. Is that maybe the primary difference in this political age, this cultural age, this american age, this moment that were living through between fact and story, is that stories are often what we tell ourselves as sort of a exercise. You know, if you go to 2016, i think there were a lot of folks who told themselves the story that donald trump could never win the republican primary. Many of the people telling themselves that story were republicans who controlled party folks in the republican national, republican members of congress, governors, donors and the like. And then once he won the nomination, i think, millions of americans told themselves we could never win the presidency. And then after he lost in 2020, and particularly after he greenlit a riot, the u. S. Capitol and sat by for hours eating cheeseburgers, watching on and was you know well was a week later and not quite removed by the senate. I think you know just about everyone said well okay now, hes hes never coming back right. And here are in spring of 2024. And im betting that an awful lot of folks in this room are telling a similar story, which is, well, sure, he still controls the Republican Party because hes created this sort of cult following and he has the base under his. But he cant possibly win a general. Right. Yeah. So, you know, i think its i would just say this part of the reason i wanted to write this book, it nothing to do with donald trump and at least when i conceived of it and set out to take on this project had very little to do with donald trump. Think trump is best understood as sort of a symptom of a much greater in this country and specifically the faith tradition that i come from. The faith tradition that i still call home. And to try to understand the ways in which so many otherwise is good and decent and caring and compassionate americans have reconciled themselves to not just voting for donald trump as the lesser of two evils, as so many said they did in 2016. Not just sort of considering this a pragmatic, prudential, political judgment that they made in a sort of binary re election, but actually giving themselves over to being disciples of donald trump to following him on unwaveringly and to almost pledging allegiance to him in ways that really have eclipsed their allegiances to other things in their. That is a question that i think many of us in this room, regardless of your faith tradition, regardless of where you come from, that you have also had to grapple with. And so ive done that in a way that attempts to in my book sort of cut through those selfsoothing exercises of the stories we tell ourselves about whats whats gone on here and really get to just the facts and try to understand it a way that is raw and unvarnished and frankly pretty uncomfortable at times. But if if youre if youre not being uncomfortable, if youre not willing to be uncomfortable at this point, then i think, you know, youre not to to really see this for what it is. Thank you. Tina. Yeah. Sorry. Oh, the story. Yeah, i like thank you for going first, because i think that put a really good framework about what im about to explain with my story and my book. So when i when donald trump became president in 2016 and throughout 2017 and 18 and 19, everyone asking me why it was i knew so much about the world that donald trump was now inhabiting and all of the new players that came in like steve bannon and zeb gorka, matt gates, all of these like random institutes and extremist figures who just suddenly had power and said, well, i kind of grew up with those guys in these activist networks as a child. And they went wait, you i mean, look, youre like a woman color. Your parents were immigrants. You grew up in boston. Like, how did you end there . And the narratives that they started putting me as a way to explain what happening just started seeming so like, wait, that that wasnt who i was. Thats not how i into that world. Thats not how i got out of that world. Was i actually really a nazi . Was i actually like a hateful bigot . The entire time i was a child and it took me a really long time to even start writing this book. I think i only fully conceived it as what . As a story of both myself and of the conservative activist movement. After january six. And i was at politico at the time and what i was doing was covering the rise of the stop the steal movement and exactly how it had connections into the white house, whether it was organic, whether was just coincidental and it came from that activist that i knew and the tenuous relationship it had with trump still made it potent. And when i saw that, i was like, oh my god, thats it. So its a link between who was as a child, why it was that this movement appealed to and what happened once a populist demagogue celebrity took control of that movement. And as dug deeper into the book and my editor kept pushing to be like, no, explain what you were feeling as a like 19 year old who got invited this party with john bolton and Andrew Breitbart. And the more i thought about this, wasnt michael bolton. It was john bolton. John bolton. John bolton. Oh, my. I wish it were michael. Maybe my life would have turned out much more differently. But the more you pushed me to remember what i was doing in those early days when i started getting wooed by right wing Interest Groups more, i was thinking, oh, wait, no. This is not necessarily a story of someone who, like, bred to be hateful. This was a person who was looking for a place in her and this world and met a whole bunch of other like 19, 20, 21 year olds who were searching for that same to and it happened be at these essentially right wing summer camps funded by conservative billionaires to breed the next generation of republican leaders. And these are groups over that i started realizing over time have their roots in the sixties and the fifties theyve created it. People like Mitch Mcconnell who was one of the first young people graduate out of the Leadership Institute in the sixties, is now old. But the group that but the people that made him just created this massive societal like infrastructure sugar industry, society, like whatever you want to call, its its the thing that kind of makes itself in more oil because it keeps investing in its youth. The youth grow up and become adults and become powerful adults. And they just remember what it was like to sit in a room being like drinking free beer and talking about civil rights at 11 p. M. At night. Its really powerful. Bond thank you. So steve, before you talk, i have to apologize and maybe cspan can edit this out. I, i use your last name as a pickle, and i, i called you vlasic of vladeck, so i apologize that maybe that can be edited out. Ive been called. So. So its interesting because when i first saw the lineup for this panel, i was trying to figure out who got hit on the head and put me on it because im the Supreme Court nerd. But it strikes me that actually theres a real sort of resonance across all books, which is that, you know, both tim and tina are, i think, doing really powerful jobs of bringing to larger audiences as stories about peace of contemporary discourse and culture that we see. But maybe dont understand. Well, just change. You know, there stuff to the us Supreme Court and youve got me. So my book is basically a similar effort, although i think with a little bit less of the of the going to parties which bolton part of it its to basically try to explain to folks exactly why everywhere we look the supreme is messing things up. And you know i think part the problem is that there is a common view that the real with the Current Court is whos on it or the real issue with the Current Court is the bottom lines of the rulings is handed down. And if you actually anything at all about the Supreme Courts history, its not exactly rife with, amazingly wonderful decisions and amazingly justices. Right. And so the question is like, you know, is that really different . The answer is no. Instead, the goal of the book is to try to explain. It came to be that the Supreme Court has occupied such place in all of our contemporary political, cultural, social divides, and to try to basically explain to everyone why thats not how it was until really that long ago. So, you know, i wrote this book really to change how talk about the Supreme Court, how we about the Supreme Court and really how we can properly understand what, in my view, is wrong with current Supreme Court. And theres some stuff. Right. By starting with the sort of the notion that youve all been the wrong things about the Supreme Court and that, you know, when we about the Supreme Court in the media, were reading the wrong things about the Supreme Court. So what do i mean by that . Right i mean, so look at sort of some of the big things that have happened with the supreme in the last couple of years. You might have noticed there have been some ethical questions about behavior. Some of the justices, many of the most sincere issues that have arisen related behavior that was in some cases, 15 or 20 years ago. Why are we only learning about it now . Because theres an entire press corps that covers the Supreme Court that never thought this was part of their job. Right. To actually look at the justices personal behavior and that it took propublica and its reporting. When we look at sort of the supreme decisions. I suspect you guys have been following some of them lately. This is a its relatively new for the court to be in the headlines every. Right. And yet is. How did that happen . Well, that actually happened because quietly. But gradually over the 20th century, Congress Gave and the court took more and more power over stuff no one cares about outside of the Supreme Court and law schools. The courts docket. Right. So it might you to learn that the us Supreme Court today is actually deciding fewer than any point since the civil war. Thats not the court youre reading in the newspapers like, you know, how can it be in the every week and doing less . But this is all a function, the same underlying disease and, the real disease based on the current supreme was really best captured by my best friend, justice alito. Who gave a quote last summer to the wall street journal, where he said, you know, this may be a controversial view. This is always a good place to start if youre a public figure. Right. This may be a controversial view, but im willing to say it. It says no provision of the constitution gives congress the power to regulate the Supreme Court period. The period is really the masterstroke. There. So, listen, i mean, hes wrong. Right. Article three section two, for those of you who have your constitutions memorized, literally gives congress the power to make regulate missions to the Supreme Courts appellate docket details. Justice alito holds the Seat Congress created in 1837. I dont think he thinks hes unconstitutional. Right. The point is not that hes wrong. The the point is that this is in the zeitgeist. But the point is that we have court today that believes it is not accountable to the other branches of government and believes it ought not to be accountable to the other branches of government and Everything Else that we see in the news flows from that. Right. The court is not worried about congress, so its perfectly to rip the heart out of statutory. Right. The court is not worried about. So the justices dont care that much about ethics. Right. I mean, theres just every single flash point for the Supreme Court. The court doesnt feel beholden to us. So they issue major rulings where they actually provide zero explanation. For in january, where you had a54 ruling allowing the Biden Administration to remove razor wire that greg abbott had placed along the usmexico border in texas. When theres nary a word from, the majority or the dissent about, why, theres no rationale. So democrats were accusing Governor Abbott of defying the ruling. Republicans were calling on him to defy the ruling and everyone was wrong because. The ruling didnt say anything. So i wrote this book to explain how we got here, which is a little bit of us. Its a story unto itself, a series of stories, one in which the real sort of hero or antihero from a tale or swift perspective, is actually William Howard taft, who you might remember as a middling president , who once apocryphal he got stuck a bathtub, but actually did much more to shape our contemporary political life. Through his reforms to the Supreme Court, he was chief justice under all of those stories, understanding how we got here is to me critical not just to understand and what is uniquely problematic about current Supreme Court, but also how we fix it and to change the from the court is right its getting cases right or the is wrong its getting cases wrong to any court that is not accountable. The other institutions of government is dangerous. No matter what the hell its doing. And thats i wrote the book. So, steve, i dont want you to rest. Youre on a roll. So one of the one of the issues in our tripartite governmental system is that even though the Supreme Court can make a ruling about the wiring in texas, enforcement falls in another branch, and you can see the struggle with the executive branch dealing with that particular issue. So its one thing for the court to rule a particular