S1E5: Ben Hepburn (4/28/25)

So welcome, Ben.

It's great to talk to you again.

I want to talk about what feels to me like the most obvious example of of the sort of thing that I can't believe we actually could possibly, in any sense, disagree about.

And so if we do have a disagreement, I want to find out what that could be, but I want to map this out so you can see exactly why I don't think there could be any disagreement.

But to set this up, I just want to set up a hypothetical here.

I mean, you sell... meat from your farm.

So imagine you were talking to some distributor that you had, and you said to the distributor, look, I think the prices that you're buying my meat for are too low.

So unless you raise the prices by 10%, I'm going to go somewhere else.

So that's one example of a threat in the context of economic transaction that we all understand is completely legitimate.

There's no reason why the seller of something can't say, look, if you don't actually meet my price, I'm going to go sell my product somewhere else.

But imagine a second scenario where the seller doesn't say, I'm going to take my meat somewhere else if you don't raise your price.

Instead he says, you know, if you don't raise your price, you're going to find the tires on your distributor trucks all of a sudden have holes in them because they will have been slashed.

I'm not saying I know who will slash them.

I'm just saying I'm pretty sure they're going to be slashed.

Now, obviously, the point about the second example is that the threat there is illegitimate.

Nobody has the right to slash another person's tires.

So using an illegitimate threat, an illegal threat, in order to get what you want in your deal with your distributor is called extortion.

So the difference between a legitimate deal and extortion is the framework I want to use in order to talk about the issues that are particularly troubling to me now about what's going on in this current administration.

So let's think about two contexts.

One, the law firm.

So the president has threatened a number of law firms and threatened to withhold their access to government buildings, threatened to punish companies that continue to deal with those law firms, threaten to withdraw security clearances from those law firms.

And so when you ask what is it that unites all the law firms he is threatening, the only thing that unites them is that there are lawyers in those law firms who had litigated against Donald Trump.

So Covington and Burling had a threat from the president that the security clearances for the lawyers in the firm were going to be withdrawn because they helped Jack Smith, the prosecutor in the J6 prosecutions, and also because Peter Kosky had worked for the firm.

He had litigated the election obstruction and classified documents cases against the president.

Or Paul Weiss had a threat made against them because they had employed Robert Mueller.