Podbit · The Ben Shapiro Show
By ruling on constitutional grounds rather than statutory grounds, SCOTUS took birthright citizenship out of Congress's hands. You'd need a constitutional amendment to change it now — not a federal statute, not an executive order. Ilya Shapiro says he expected the court to take the statutory off-ramp Kavanaugh proposed.
Where this was said
At 1:25:05 · chapter starts 1:24:55
The episode's strangest section covers two rulings that sit in direct tension. The first, celebrated by Trump, overturns Humphrey's Executor and confirms the president's power to remove principal officers of independent executive agencies — the unitary executive theory that began as a Scalia dissent now becomes law. The second, decided the same week and also written by Roberts, says the Federal Reserve is different because its independence is 'key to its design' and its monetary policy function harkens back to Hamiltonian founding-era concerns rather than New Deal alphabet agencies. Shapiro finds this distinction unsustainable: pretending the Fed is apolitical is, in his view, 'really silly.' Thomas dissented sharply, noting this is the first time in 237 years SCOTUS has upheld an injunction blocking a president from removing an executive officer. Ilya Shapiro notes that Alito and Barrett suggested in dissent that the court shouldn't have ruled on the Fed question at all and should have let the Lisa Cook fact-finding continue in district court.
Fei-Fei Li went back to Stanford from Google in 2018 specifically to build a multi-stakeholder governance framework for AI. Her argument: market forces are not societal norms. Just as biology uses IRBs and cars have safety laws, AI needs layered oversight from educators, governments, and the public — not just a few industry titans.
Andrew Santino's personal MCU of political villains is collapsing. He and Bobby speculated that a circulating photo of Mitch McConnell with a Chinese official was AI-generated compositing two separate images.
Mass surveillance is here to stay. The real battle isn't stopping cameras — it's ensuring judges and laws keep that data out of family court and civil disputes, admitting it only for violent crimes and national security. The surveillance economy currently yields more upside than downside, but only if we build the legal guardrails now.
When people cite Scandinavia as proof socialism works, Galloway says they've got it backwards. Northern Europe runs highly competitive free-market economies with more competition in many sectors than the US — they just make sure taxes are actually paid and redistributed. Billionaires and universal healthcare can coexist.
Two percent adjustments to income tax and stamp duty tweaks are deck-chair rearrangements. The UK's competitiveness hinges on four structural levers: currency valuation, energy costs, regulatory burden, and tax rates. Devalue the pound, build 56 nuclear plants, slash red tape, introduce a flat tax — and the country transforms.
Lisbon had one of Europe's worst heroin crises. Then Portugal legalised drugs and redirected all enforcement money into rehabilitation and housing. Crime collapsed. Addiction fell. Then politics moved the money elsewhere, and the problem started creeping back. Chesterton's Fence: you forget why you were spending that money.
Congress passed the Boland Amendment 411 to 0, explicitly banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras. Reagan signed it — then immediately moved the operation deeper underground, essentially responding to a bipartisan prohibition by going more illegal.
The CIA planted mines in Nicaraguan commercial harbors, wrote the Contras' press releases taking credit, and promptly blew up ships from four allied nations. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, Congress erupted, and the Boland Amendments multiplied.
Oliver North was a decorated Marine and devout Catholic with zero covert operations experience. He ran the entire shadow war against Congress — planes, airstrips, arms shipments, shell companies — learning on the job. And by every operational measure, he crushed it.
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