Edwin Meese

He, he, he didn't show up for his hearing on whether or not he can remove his Fulton County case to federal court, which is bad for him, by the way, because the burden is on him to prove his case, and if he doesn't show up, it's real fucking hard to do that.

Uh, the judge also wouldn't accept Edwin Meese's full declaration.

[laughs] So no decision yet, but we're gonna keep you posted on that little hot hit.

It's not looking good, and it never did.

And you're going to sketch them out for people.

It is Ed Meese, Joe Kors, Bob Bork and Paul Weirich and how these four guys basically built a machine that 40 years later gives us the Roberts Court and the court that just invents total immunity for the President of the United States and comes within one vote of doing away with birthright citizenship and a whole host of other shit.

And All of this stuff is like straight line and understanding the history is so interesting because another thing you will find out when you read this book, it's like half of the characters from Trump season two are, are in this thing.

Like, they're there.

I think it makes most sense to start with Ed Beeson.

Yeah.

Ed Meese is, in a way, it's hard to make a main character out of Ed Meese, but somehow I did.

Ed Meese is this kind of disheveled...

It was just a convenient line of argument for conservatives to unwind decades of civil rights progress.

Anyway, the book gets into the history of all that through four main characters: Ed Meese, Reagan's attorney general, Paul Weyrich, who's a visionary mastermind madman who creates The Heritage Foundation, among other places, Robert Bork, who mainstreams the idea of originalism and has a terrible beard that ultimately is the result of hi- that ultimately causes [laughs] his Supreme Court nomination to fail.

Looks a little bit like Colonel Sanders.

W- the colonel has a much fuller beard, let's just be-

Exactly.

except what about what about this the feds don't run elections at the state level is unclear to you it's in the constitution the 14th amendment birthright citizenship it's in the constitution the idea of originalism gets mainstreamed into conservative uh worlds in the 1980s thanks to robert bork in large part and ed meese and they see it as like the explanation they can offer in order to rewind voting rights, civil rights.

They even have pie-in-the-sky ideas about contraception and no-fault divorce, all of which has been mainstreamed in today's conservative agenda.

What struck me is, I don't know, stunning in all of this is the goals they set out in 1980 were insane.

Now, when this later came out and Oliver North and Poindexters and other people had to be held accountable, and it caused a lot of reputations to go south, Nothing happened to Reagan.

Nothing happened to Edwin Meese, his attorney general.

Nothing happened to his kitchen cabinet.

And then, of course, we had the follow-up with the same, similar situations happening in Europe, where a major, the major arms trader for the Saudi Arabia government He was very powerful, very wealthy.