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Charles Stanton  0:18  
Good evening. This is Professor Charles Stanton, I'm a professor of Boyd School of Law,

Blanca Pena  0:23  
and my name is Blanca Pena. I am a third year law student at the Boyd School of

Charles Stanton  0:26  
Law, and this is Social Justice a conversation, a conversation. Well, good evening, everybody. Professor Charles, here was my my co host, Blanca Pena, want to welcome everybody back. Hope you had a peaceful weekend and a safe weekend, we have another huge list of things to talk about tonight, some of which you know, have happened recently, and some of which have been ongoing. I think one of the major things we have to talk about is the war in the Middle East. Now, a war that's not a war, but it is a war. It was always my it was always my belief that only the Congress to give could give a declaration of war that seems to have gone by the board somewhere. I think the other thing that's, that's that's really scary, though, in looking at this war situation, is the lack of information that's being provided to us, all of us, as to what actually the status of the war is, and the fact that the war is costing us an enormous amount of money. We are spending over a billion dollars a day fighting a war against who, who are we fighting there and what's, what's, what's been a consequence of this war is, of course, that the oil prices have gone through the roof over $100 a barrel. Why is that? It is because the Straits of Hormuz and these and these areas where the oil was being transported cannot be transported anymore at this point, because the the there's been a blockade, in addition to a lot of the oil tankers being destroyed, of course, so, so so that. So that's part of it. The other thing that's, of course, incredibly disturbing is, while we have this oil shortage, and while we have these skyrocketing prices, which will not only affect our country economically as to your gas tank being super expensive, but also the price of everything else going up, the price of goods getting delivered to you, the snacks you get from Amazon and all of the transporters, like UPS and FedEx, there's going to be a major, huge price rise. But the icing on the cake here is with all those negative things going on, Oh, I forgot to mention the massive rise in anti semitism, the terrorism, the attempted terrorism at synagogues, which obviously is age old. But even beyond that, the main beneficiary of all of this is Russia. Russia is the main beneficiary of this war. Russia is the main beneficiary, beneficiary of this war because, lo and behold, who is it? Now, that's surprising the Western world and the United States, with all the oil that they can sell, and that's Russia. And then you say, Well, why does that mean anything? Well, it means something because it's revitalizing their economy, and it's revitalizing their war against the Ukraine, because now they have money without without limit, and they can continue to pursue the war against Ukraine and pursue this policy of trying to take over their land. But an even an even bigger icing on the cake, and this was reported early last week was that the Russians are our supposed friendly enemy. Who is? Who is, who's who supposedly their leader, who was supposedly so tight with our president, right, that they were actually sharing intelligence with the Iranians about how to kill us. Wow. I one more. What more can I

Blanca Pena  4:43  
say this is, I mean, this is the first time hearing about it. I was just telling Professor Stanton I was busy at a conference. I, you know, I did. I knew things were going to happen while I was sort of offline, but I knew about the the gas prices. I mean, I saw them while I drove down. On the street, and I was like, whoa. Just the other day, my local gas station was at like, 320 right? And it jumped to five something or four something. So that's all I really knew about. But it's really interesting that you mentioned Ukraine, because I didn't. I didn't circle back to that about how in Russia benefiting, they then can continue to terrorize Ukraine even more, and it's really hard to know where this country really stands. I mean, first of all, the country has the US has their hand in pretty much every corner of the world. It feels like we recently talked about it with the killing of El mencho, and how US, the US was involved in all of that and and how the US is involved with Israel, which impacts Palestine and Gaza, right? Like the US is everywhere. And at the fact that Ukraine is now at more at risk because of Russia's growth, and how that ties back to this country, it's like this, we're going to lose allies, the the ones that we thought we we could count on for for a while. Yeah, and you mentioned the rising prices of pretty much everything, but specifically oil. What I keep thinking about is how many lives are going to be lost, right? Whether it's here, whether it's overseas, yeah, and even if you know, because this is not even including lives that are going to be lost as part of the war, but just the lives that will be impacted in such a negative way, right? Like people were already struggling to pay their bills, I would hate to see a hike in people losing their homes, and in foreclosures and in homelessness. And you know where that leads to? Because this country loves to criminalize homelessness and and drug abuse and mental illness, you're going to have a rise in people being incarcerated, and then the everything just circles in so many different ways. And I it's sad because our leadership doesn't seem to have a grasp on anything. I just saw Caroline Levitt give a give a speech to the press about how, you know the rising prices are are temporary, but we promise you that we will. You know, everything will be fixed sooner than you thought, and it's like, Why? Why are we even here in the first place? Why is it like this? And I mean, everyone up there, up in the government is just a huge mess.

Charles Stanton  7:30  
Well, it, it really is. I mean, even for profound thinkers and analysts of what's going on. It's an enormous amount to take in. In the case of the Ukraine, the President has always had anonymous for the Ukraine, because the Ukraine was its treatment of the Ukraine, and the attempt to get the Ukraine to say that Joe Biden was involved in all kinds of skullduggery was one of the reasons for the for the for the first impeachment of the president so he has no love lost for the Ukraine. One of the scary things about the war, though, is that there's no accountability. And what I mean by accountability is, in previous wars, we would get pretty much all kinds of factual information about actually, what was happening, how many people were killed, what are, what our objectives were, what our targets were, all that sort of stuff. So anyway, they have a situation where they used old intelligence. Now, of course, there's no way that you can conduct a successful military operation except by using pretty much minute to minute intelligence. So what do they do? They blow up an elementary school. They kill, I don't know, 135 150 175 children. 75 children, who are, you know, innocent, had nothing to do with nothing to do with it. But what's the delusional, the delusional idea that runs through this whole thing is that because they killed, you know, one of the mullahs, or they killed the Ayatollah, that that Muslim fundamentalism is somehow going to disappear, and because we killed this one guy, we're going to end Muslim fundamental, which is totally ludicrous. Yeah, these are the ingrained beliefs of so many people who are into those beliefs, even though we may disagree with them as much as people in our country are into Judaism, Catholicism and other religions. And the fact that we don't understand that after all this time of dealing with what's going on there is either is either naivete or just willful.

Blanca Pena  10:00  
Blindness. It's racism. That's what it is. They're brown people. Yeah, there you go. It all just comes back to that. I think, I mean, the whole religion conversation is very interesting to me, because my, one of my first questions I ask is like, how do you know your religion is the correct one, right? And regardless of who's right or who's wrong or if anybody's even correct at all. Right, your religion teaches you to accept people for who they are and to love them and to care for them and and all of those things. So the fact that there is even a distinction between Muslims and Christians boils down to straight up racism. Yeah, of course, yeah. It's, it's as simple as that, because if we boil down the religions, I mean, obviously there are very clear distinctions between the two. That's why they are two separate religions. But they all boil down to the faith of a belief, of the faith to a God who, you know, created all of this, right? Like it all just goes back to that. And whether I, you know, believe in certain things or how certain things happened, or whatever shouldn't matter. And if I'm not religious either, like we're all, it all just goes down to we're all human beings. And it's, it's, it's terrifying, what's, what's happening. And, I mean, I don't know if you saw the this one video of the reporter. He was a male. The reporter was a male, and he asked Donald Trump about, you know, the bombings in Iran. And I don't remember the exact quote, but he basically put Donald Trump on the spot and said, like, are you really gonna blame someone else for what you did? Essentially, and he and Donald Trump was just like, oh, well, you know, I just get information all the time, and I it's just my position to say it as it comes, and whatever and lack of accountability is, as you said, you know, it seems like all of these attacks are so surprising, right? Like there's never any sort of strategy behind it. That's what it looks like. It just looks like they're sporadically, kind of like in Minnesota, right? It's all happening just randomly and in waves, and you never know what's going to happen next. Why do we have to put people in those positions where they have to live in in the fear and the uncertainty and to call yourself a Christian in the same breath. Well, that's disgusting to me.

Charles Stanton  12:23  
Well, I think one of the problems that you have, which has to do not just with the President, but the people that the President hired, is you have vastly inexperienced people. Yeah, you have people in these jobs, the Secretary of Defense, the Under Secretary of Defense, the head of the FBI, the head of justice, who have no business in the world being anywhere near those offices. If you look back in history at the different cabinet positions, I mean, I mean, just take one example, although it's a little bit different, the man who's the Health Secretary, Mr.

Blanca Pena  13:05  
Kennedy, the guy who did cocaine off of dirty toilet seats, well, yeah, and has a worm in his brain.

Charles Stanton  13:10  
Has a worm, but, but, well, let's, let's, let's forget that. Let's forget the worm. Let's forget the other diseases.

Blanca Pena  13:18  
Let's talk qualification we have

Charles Stanton  13:20  
May, May, maybe may have picked up or not picked up. But if you got just an average person, just an average educated person, it doesn't have to be somebody who's a Nobel Laureate. You me anybody, and we're in the government, and we have to pick as a person to be the health secretary, at the absolute minimum, at the absolute minimum a doctor, preferably a surgeon, preferably somebody who has expertise in infectious disease, virology, all these different fields, even public policy, even public health. I mean, all those things, all those things, and that would be the minimum. That would be the minimum. And you would have, you would have, like, maybe, if you were going to do an interview process, you might have 10 or 15 people from Hopkins, from Harvard, from Columbia, wherever it was, men, women, you know, people of color, everything, and getting the widest range of people and their expertise, and you put into office a man who has absolutely no experience, but this is in all of the cabinet. This is why, when he, when he over, overhauled the military overhauled. The Defense Department made sure that he could get rid of as many people of color as possible. Made sure he could get rid of as many women as possible. Okay, so that's your agenda, that you don't believe in diversity and all this stuff. But it's destructive. It's destructive because these people. People who were the generals and the and the and the admirals and the head of the Coast Guard and all this stuff. Forget about their ethnicity. They've had the experience of 3040, 45 years. You just, you just don't, you just don't replace that. And it's such like a basic thing, particularly in the fields of defense, espionage and Secret Service and all stuff. You've got to have people who know what they're doing,

Blanca Pena  15:27  
yeah, because the consequences are real. I mean, we're living it right now. We're living the consequences of having incompetent people in office. And, you know, it's funny, you mentioned, you know, all of that, because I was thinking about it. And they are the DEI hires that they so much hate in like they are inexperienced, they don't know how to do their jobs, but they got it anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least true dei hires have the qualifications and are competent and can do what they're told. It's just so funny how the hypocrisy circles back to them, and it's all just just a big, just a big mess,

Charles Stanton  16:03  
but we see, we see a parallel. We see a parallel between what I believe, what I believe, and this is just my belief, what the real reason behind this war is, and the real reason behind this war is Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein and this scandal, which grows worse every day now, with apparently finding out a few days ago about this massive Ranch, that this man had that in 2019 when the President was in his first term, there was a huge investigation by the New Mexico State Police As to the question of how many people had died there, that they had people who were cooperating with people who worked there, as to all the things that were going on. And the federal government, the Justice Department stopped the investigation. Of course they did okay. So now we have this war and everything else, and now we discover, now we discover, just the other day, that there's another 6065, 70,000 documents that somehow appeared like Aladdin with the lamp, where he rubs the lamp and the genie comes out. Where is the accountability here, where is the accountability Beats me.

Blanca Pena  17:24  
You know? You know what's crazy when I volunteered at the conference, do you want to know how strict they were with us, and we were just low level volunteers for a conference that lasted three days, and people would just go home and forget about the volunteers and what they did, right? Like our our job duties were so minimal, right? And like, obviously, you know, we help run the whole thing, not to minimize the work, right? But like, if we make a mistake at the conference, it doesn't ruin people's lives, it doesn't get people killed, right? And the amount of, like, just the the way that they were on us all the time, about being on time, being respectful, being professional, you know, doing what is told and and being on our feet, right, and things like that. And it's like the people up at the cabinet and the President and the Vice President, they don't even have that, and the choices that they make affect everyone worldwide, and it's so disappointing because, I mean, why? Why are we expected to be the best of the best, right? They think of of immigrants, and they expect us to be perfect, right? They expect even McDonald's employees are expected to have some sort of decorum, right? But these people with these highly powerful jobs not only don't do their jobs correctly, but they're also pedophiles, yeah, can we put them somewhere? Because I I don't know, and and I think it's the fact that they are rich and white that they just keep getting away with it, and it's not going to be until people actually stand up for each other, that something will be done about it.

Charles Stanton  19:04  
Well, I think, I think that the cause of justice is always impeded by the lack of unity that you have in our country so many different fragments of society that never seem to come together. But what I do see, what I do see, and I don't know, I don't know how this would work out eventually, the numbers regarding the people's faith and the institutions of government, the presidency, the Congress and the judiciary are scarily low. They had a poll the other day about the Supreme Court, which was always considered, of all the branches of government, the most respected, even if you were even if. You were not happy with the party that was in power in the executive branch, or if you weren't happy with the power that was in the legislative branch, it was always looked upon as the Supreme Court, as the one place where people could, in some sense, find some form of justice, some form of of measured reason. And the poll that they did, it was a couple of days ago, the the believability rate in what the court will do stands at 22% now, 22% that's not even a quarter. And my concern, my concern, and I've voiced my concern a number of times on this program. I do not see this as being sustaining. And I said that a long time ago. I said that even before the war, I don't see it as being sustaining, because look at the society enormous homelessness, the cutting of food programs for the children, the removal from the roles millions of people who are not able to get their medical care, the affordability, or lack of affordability, of just having a regular life, the fact there was a big article in the journal about the almost impossibility of buying a home. Now, something's going to go something's going to give on this,

Blanca Pena  21:30  
and not even just from an economical standpoint. I keep mentioning it. But you know that list is that, that list is just the smallest, right? Like, like, what you just said, there are people getting ripped out of their homes. There are students there. There are little kids in ICE detention centers. There are millions, like, 1000s of little brown kids in Gaza dying every day from starvation or from from attacks. There are cities that are just not, not the way that they should be. And I think I mentioned this a few weeks back, but we I feel like we just had so much potential and we just steamrolled right over it, I think. But, yeah, it's definitely not sustainable, because of everything that keeps piling on and piling on. And the worst part about it is that people are too exhausted, either they're too exhausted or they don't care. And either way, it's keeping people from you unifying. Yeah, definitely both, but it's whichever one it is, it's keeping people from coming together. And, yeah, people are easily divided nowadays.

Charles Stanton  22:41  
Like, Well, I think, I think one of the things that's happened is that people had certain illusions about the government, even though maybe those illusions were not really realistic. But you thought about, you know, when, when I was going to law school, the Supreme Court that it had, it had a certain stature. I mean, yeah, yeah, they did a lot of bad things, and they made a lot of mistakes, but, but ultimately, you felt like if push came to shove, they would do the right thing, ultimately, right. But I think in a lot of ways, that's gone though. Yeah, I think people look at a lot of the decisions they've made, I mean, to show you how bad it is, to show you how bad it is, Judge katanya brown Jackson publicly repudiated the court that she's on. She goes to, she goes to a conference or a meeting or dinner, whatever it was, and she starts talking. And I'm listening to what she's saying, and she's basically saying that Supreme Court is is violative of all the things that it's supposed to stand for. You know, you have all these decisions, these, these one or two sentence decisions. Decisions are made at four o'clock in the morning. There's no oral argument. There's no consensus, no briefs, no briefs. I mean, come on here. What are we doing? What are we doing, though? Yeah, and I think the other part of it too is though, that the people have always looked toward the court the presidency, and you know the legislative branch as being, I guess, part of our history, part of our tradition, whatever it is, right? And they believed in those things, even though many times they were disappointed, but I think what's happened, and I'm going to tell all you folks next week when we have a more further discussion on this, it's yes, it's a lack of belief. Yes, it's indifference, but it's also a lack of belief and indifference. Difference, because people are coming to realize that the people that they held in such esteem have failed them so badly. And there's a huge sense, I think, in this country, not not just among a certain group of people, but but a whole group of people, a disillusionment is set in where people, you say, Well, you know, I always believed that they would, they would, they would stand up for certain things. But the answer to that is the answer to this, and I've said this before, those things that you invest in people, when you invest personally, in another person, or you invest in a party, or invest in something, the investiture of that belief is, is based on your understanding that these are people of belief, these are people of faith. These are people who have certain principles. Now we're finding out with all these scandals, that was not so those principles were never there, probably, yeah, and that's why things have gone so so far off, because, yeah, it's just people say it's and you were talking about greed. It's me. The only thing that's important is me, as long as I get what I want. Yeah, that's it. Yeah.

Blanca Pena  26:16  
I think they are also avoiding just the confrontation with reality that this is not the country that they thought it was. It reminds me of that video you had us watch for our class of America not being the greatest country in the world, yeah, because it's, it's not, and you're, you're told through years of propaganda, right? People, people love to say that Nazi Germany was propaganda. No, i The US has its own fair share of of it trying to portray itself as something that it's not. And I mean it. I think that's also why they got away with so many things, if you really think about it, the all of the money and investments and efforts that they put into to derail communism socialism, like different forms of government, and all in the name of wanting to instill Western ideologies throughout the world and being told here in the US, like, Oh, this is the best way of thinking, like the way that it is here in the US, this is how it should be everywhere else. And it's this sort of moral high ground. They get on this high horse, and they think that the US is the best ever, but it really isn't. And it's interesting talking to people from different countries, even from countries like Mexico, where my family's from, and the things that they talk about, and people living in places like New Zealand or or France or like just anywhere, anywhere else, people have, I mean, in general, at least how things are now. People have a better way of life. They're not, for example, forced to work all the time. They can pay their bills if they ever are homeless. It's not criminalized. There's no such thing as overcrowding in their prisons, right? Like this country has a fair share of its faults, and it's it's really breaking the people down, both in it and out of it, and this propaganda screen that they have up, it's like slowly shedding and it's slowly fading, I think. But people are so prideful, and that is why it's taking so long. It's their pride that's not allowing them to realize, Oh, I Voted for a POS three times, and now look at where I am. This sucks. They're not going to say that, because I think what really drives them is the whole religion thing, the whole faith thing, but also just the fact that they're so uneducated that even if they started to question what it is that they thought they stood for in the first place, they don't have the education or the information to then switch their views, and they're easily led by very misleading forms of propaganda, and it's horrible.

Charles Stanton  28:52  
But I'm going to close out on this note, though, and I'm glad that you mentioned the newsroom situation with Jeff Daniels, of course, in that, in that, in the end of his monolog at the school, he says, the first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge there is a problem. We have a very simple proposition before us, as Franklin used to say when he was in the convention hall, why don't we just start with telling the truth about what's going on, and then we can work from there. On that note, I will, I will say good night to you all.

Blanca Pena  29:37  
Good night everyone. God bless you.

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