 G'day mate, g'day mate, 40 here. I've been listening to a New Yorker essay, Justice Samuel Alito's Crusade Against a Sexual America by Margaret Talbot. And one of her critiques of Justice Alito is that he quoted from James Taylor's song Fire and Rain without understanding that the meaning of the song was about James Taylor's fight with addiction. So she's an originalist. She believes that musical lyrics can only be understood in alignment with the original intention of the writer. They can't have any further or additional meanings. So in that area, she's quite conservative. She's quite the textual originalist. But when it comes to the Constitution, in fact, she's all for the most liberal change with the times, meaning it's possible. I keep my hat on here. So let's listen to some of the New Yorker article here. I'm trying to produce a high quality production of the original. An apprentice you of the New Yorker with the headline, The Last Word. Justice Samuel Alito's Crusade Against a Secular America was laid over, written by Margaret Talbot, narrated by Kirsten Potter. Some baby boomers were permanently shaped by their participation in the counter-cultural protests and the anti-war. So I don't get tired of hanging out to the Sydney Opera House. Don't get tired of Sydney night yet anyway. Don't get tired of Sydney Harbor. Don't get tired of Manly. I think I've been having a Manly four times in the last week. I started just sitting here by the dock of the bay and get tired of live streaming. Don't get tired of critiquing New Yorker articles. The vism of the 1960s and 70s. Others were shaped by their aversion to those movements. Justice Samuel Alito belongs to the latter category. For many years, he lacked the power to do much about that profound distaste. And in any case, he had a reputation for keeping his head down. When President George W. Bush nominated Alito to the Supreme Court in 2005, many journalists portrayed him as a conservative, but not an ideologue. The Times noted that legal scholars characterized his jurisprudence as cautious and respectful of presently sketched portraits. Okay, so we're all cautious. We're all respectful when we have to be, right? But when we feel powerful and confident and strong and safe, we all tend to be less cautious and less respectful. Now, you may be shocked that Samuel Alito was cautious and respectful when he had to be, but when the situation changed and conservatives now have six votes on the U.S. Supreme Court, right? Opera House, okay, the 40 bunker, right? This is where I'm gonna bunker down if there's a Nicola Holocaust that's gonna hide under the Sydney Opera House. But yeah, we're all cautious and respectful when we have to be. And we all tend to be more rambunctious and off the hook and unhinged when it's safe to be that. But when the situation changes, we change our bell in the house, bro. So excited to have you along for the ride. It is 6.08 p.m. Wednesday evening here in Sydney. Quiet, methodical, reasonable man. On the court, even as Alito's opinions aligned consistently with the goals of the Republican Party, in particular of social conservatives, admirers praised him as pragmatic and burkian. According to a 2018 C-SPAN PSB poll, he was the conservative justice the fewest Americans could name. And for years, he was overshadowed by his more flamboyant late colleague, Antonin Scalia, by Clarence Thomas, whose notorious confirmation hearings were followed by a rivetingly long silence on the bench, even by Neil Gorsuch with his Cussan Libertarian streak. Richard Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School who has studied the court, told me that in Alito's first years as a justice, he was known primarily as Chief Justice John Roberts, right-hand man. Someone the chief could assign to write an opinion that would not be too flashy or provocative. Okay, so when I'm in jobs where I'm not secure, I tend to stay in from being flashy and provocative as well. Time brag. I'm ahead of you guys. I am living in the future. You're probably wondering right now, what is Wednesday evening gonna be like? Is it gonna be safe? Is it gonna be cool? Is it gonna be fun? Well, I can tell you what Wednesday evening is gonna be like. I am living in your future, right? When 1999 turned into 2000, and we're afraid of Y2K, all right, Australia pretty much went first and it was awesome, right? Australia ushered in the new millennium and it was awesome and it was safe. And so I'm here to report back to you from the future. Everything's gonna be A-O-K. But I'm just a vessel, right? So come on, don't you identify that we all tend to be cautious and respectful when we need to be. And then when you're first trying to impress a woman, then when you have her under your thrall, you tend to be a little more rambunctious or more off the hook. I don't think I'm the only one who changes when the situation changes. And that would keep five votes together when he couldn't trust Scalia to do it because Scalia would swing for the fences and risk losing votes. Now though, Alito is the embodiment of a conservative majority that is ambitious and extreme. It's declined to be interviewed for this article. Oh no. With the recent additions of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the court, the conservative bloc no longer needs Roberts to get results. And Alito has taken a zealous lead in reversing the progressive gains of the 60s and early 70s from overturning Roe v. Wade to stripping away voting rights. At a Yale Law School forum in 2014, he was asked to name a personality trait that had impeded his career. Alito responded that he'd held his tongue too often, that it probably would have been better if I said a bit more at various times. He's holding his tongue no longer. Indeed, Alito now seems to be saying whatever he wants in public, often with a snide pugnaciousness that suggests his past decorum was suppressing considerable resentment. Well, I think for most of us, our past decorum was as considerable resentment. I hardly made any videos between 2012 and 2015. I lacked confidence. I just didn't really want to be seen. And notice those people on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge just under the, under the, I don't think I can zoom in, but they're just under the flag. So you can, you can go up there on a walk, but too expensive. So I don't like to spend money. The only things I spend money on, gratuitously on this trip are ice creams and smoothies. So if I'm going to walk 10 miles, then 15 miles, then I deserve an ice cream. I deserve a smoothie. So I plunk down $10 for an ice cream or smoothie for Sunday, right? Just $7 American, no worries. I'll do that, but other than that, like taking the big Sydney bus, I have $50 for a day trip, for a guided tour of Sydney. No, I'm not gonna do it. But I'll take the ferry, right? You can take the ferry pretty much anywhere in the city hub or the round trip cost you less than $6 American. No worries, mate. Last term, Alito landed the reputation defining assignment of writing the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion enshrined by Roe nearly 50 years ago. In May, a draft of his opinion was leaked and from start to finish, it sounded cantankerous and dismissive. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start, Alito declared. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak and the decision has had damaging consequences. He likened Roe to Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious decision upholding segregation, approvingly cited centuries old. So also people, as they get older, it's not unusual they become more forthright. Let's careful, they don't weigh their words as much. They start speaking out more. They usually tend to feel more confident. They tend to be more agreeable in many ways, but if it's important to them, they'll just speak out. So I don't think that Samuel Alito's journey is that unusual. Old common law categorizing a woman who received an abortion after quickening as a murderess and used the inflammatory word personhood. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why is personhood so inflammatory when it is applied to the fetus? Why is that inflammatory? So here we get down to a fundamental difference between the left and the right and their understanding of the self. So for the left, the self is buffered. It is strategic, it is autonomous. And for the right, the self is porous. There isn't just a clinical state of fetus. The fetus is a human being in the process of becoming a human being, right? And so we're not just autonomous, right? It's not just a fetus. And that's all it is from a traditional perspective. The fetus is not just a separate state. The fetus is the human being in process to more full realization. And describing fetal life. It was hardly. Right, she regards it as inflammatory to ascribe personhood to the fetus, right? From a traditional perspective, or common sense perspective, we never talk about the fetus when it's going to be maintained. When we meet a pregnant woman, a friend, we don't say, how's the fetus? We say, how's the baby? We recognize that this is a human being in the process of becoming a human being, right? We don't go, how's your fetal life? Is your fetal life acting up today? Back to the New Yorker. Sam Alito's to say. Inevitable that Alito would be assigned the Dobs' opinion. Joan Biskupic, a CNN analyst and the author of a biography of Chief Justice Roberts, has reported that Roberts privately lobbied fellow conservatives to save the constitutional right to abortion down to the bitter end. Roberts wanted to validate the particular restriction at issue in Dobs, a Mississippi ban on virtually all abortions after 15 weeks, but he opposed a wholesale rejection of Roe, which, among other things, had strengthened the notion that a right to privacy was implicit in the constitution. If Roberts had successfully enlisted, say, the occasionally... Okay, so this right to privacy implicit in the constitution is absolutely bizarre. It's entirely, I said Jesus really, meaning into the text. It's not exegesis deducing a meaning from the text. There's no right to privacy in the US constitution. There's not much of a right to privacy in Torah law. There's no right to privacy in Roman Catholic law or Christian law or New Testament or church fathers or Martin Luther or John Calvin. Like, this right to privacy is a left wing consideration, right? Coming from a belief that the self is autonomous and buffered and therefore, you know, what the autonomous self does in private is none of the business of people around it, but everything we do affects us and affects other people. What you do in private affects other people. There were millennial wars in 1999. He bitterly mentioned Ford's coverage of his feelings. I think we're not likely close as to improve. Yeah, millennial war is like nice bloke, right? There's no nastiness, bitterness in millennial wars. He's not someone, you know, looking to feud, not looking to generally speaking score cheap points, but he is in a downward spiral and doesn't want to merge from his downward spiral. So he's very good at articulating his depression and he's very good at articulating his failures and at articulating his conspiratorial worldview. And there's a tremendous audience for what he has to paddle, right? So he tells young men, you know, every right to feel victimized, you know, you are victimized. It's not your fault that you're living in your parents' basement, don't have a job and your life isn't working. And there are all these, you know, conspiracies out there that are holding you down. There's an enormous audience for that, right? Much more of an audience for nonsense and for self-destruction than there is an audience for recovery. Oh, well, to be a pundit is to feed the client's needs just like a prostitute, right? That's how it becomes successful as a pundit. And to tell people what they wanna hear and people love to hear victimhood and I'm not against victimhood, right? Or in group identity as a substantial quantity of victimhood, we're just talking about how intense should your victimhood be. Generally speaking, people are not served by an intense sense of victimhood. So I'm all for walking around with a sense of victimhood on a scale of say two out of 10, possibly even three. Now, occasionally going up to five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 in extreme circumstances. But for most people, walking around with a sense of victimhood above a two or a three is maladaptive, right? Makes you more suspicious of our groups or hostile to our groups, predisposes you to a conspiratorial frame of mind, takes away, reduces your sense of agency. Now, some sense of victimhood, like at a two out of 10, right? That gives you an in group identity. It gives you purpose and meaning in life. It bonds you to your in group, but it's not so intense that it maladjusts you for dealing with wider society. So when your woe is effectively argues for and embodies a sense of victimhood that's operating at a seven out of 10, eight out of 10, nine out of 10, 10 out of 10, right? And that's excellent for developing in group identity and aspre decor and bonding with people like yourself. But it's a terrible maladjustment for dealing with a multi-racial, multi-cultural society, isn't it? If you follow that advice, it's going to make you usually a loser in life. So yeah, I noticed many people comment in my channel, oh, you know, how do we get rid of victimhood? Don't want to get rid of victimhood. It's just a matter of the intensity, right? Just operating at a one out of 10, two out of 10, occasionally dining up to three or four out of 10. There's nothing wrong with that. You can't have in group identity without a sense of victimhood. But how much do you want to stress it? How intense do you want it to be? Do you want it to be the driving force in people's lives? Nah, I think that's generally maladaptive. Audience just want more of it from him, not sure how active he is before he left his work a year ago, maybe two. Yeah, I haven't paid much attention to linear woes. It's just too easy. It's just like picking wings off a fly. So many of the people are just too easy to pick on. I just try to desist this. There's nothing new and important there. Let's get back to this New Yorker article on Samuel Alito's battle against a secular America. Pretty scary stuff, right? It's crusade and it's not over, guys. This is from the New Yorker. It was hardly inevitable that Alito would be assigned the Dobs' opinion. Joan Biskupic, a CNN analyst and the author of a biography of Chief Justice Roberts, has reported that Roberts privately lobbied fellow conservatives to save the constitutional right to abortion down to the bitter end. Roberts wanted to validate the particular restriction at issue in Dobs, a Mississippi ban on virtually all abortions after 15 weeks, but he... So I guess Ann Carter was right. Now, Justice John Roberts has been a real disappointment on the court. He changed his vote to ratify Obamacare, which was the $2 trillion transfer over the course of a decade from productive Americans to less productive Americans. Ann Carter was right, Justice John Roberts has been a great disappointment for conservatives. Luckily, we now have five authentic conservatives on the court, aside from John Roberts. Opposed a wholesale rejection of Roe, which, among other things, had strengthened the notion that a right to privacy was implicit in the Constitution. If Roberts had successfully enlisted, say, the occasionally more moderate Kavanaugh, he would have had the authority to assign the opinion, as the Chief Justice typically does when he is in the majority. Indeed, Roberts might well have written the opinion himself, producing a text that felt more conciliatory than Alito's, something less openly contemptuous of the Justices who had crafted Roe and its sequel, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and more mindful of the fact that a majority of Americans support abortion rights. But left. So when left-wing courts overturned referendums passed by the majority of the population down here, left-wing publications like the New York or Los Angeles Times or New York Times saying, oh, it's important that the court that be respectful of the majority opinion of the population. No, you crush the majority. So when the lefts in power, they want to crush majority opinion. So when the majority of Californians voted for Roe v. Wade, and devoted for Proposition 187 to deny benefits to illegal aliens, important that that be crushed when majority of Californians voted against allowing same-sex marriage, and it's important that the court absolutely crush these bigoted, hateful and educated opinions. But when the right now has power on the Supreme Court, now suddenly the left wants the court to be respectful of the opinions of the majority of Americans. It wasn't important to the left that courts be respectful of the majority of opinions when the left was in power in the court and the right was winning the popular vote. So this is an article in the New Yorker, just to see if there's anything to say. It was quite clear coming into conference after the oral argument that Robert's rationale was going to be much narrower than what the other five conservative justices wanted to say. Given this gulf, Roberts couldn't insist on writing the main opinion himself. Traditionally, when the chief justice isn't in the majority or is nominally voting with it but making a substantially different argument, the most senior justice in the winning block assigns the opinion. In this case, that was Thomas, and he chose Alito. After the draft leaked, many court observers predicted that though the opinion's substance wasn't likely to change, its tone surely would. It might at least lose a chilling reference to an insufficient domestic supply of adoptable infants, a problem that would be fixed, presumably, by forcing more Americans to carry pregnancies to term. But the final verb. Okay, how about not forcing, right? So forcing majority of Americans, they can travel to another state. It's changing incentives, right? It's incentivizing more people to carry babies to term. So if you want to adopt a white child, that basically aren't any white infants, healthy white infants, to adopt in America. You want to adopt a child in America, born in America, overwhelmingly, it has to be a black kid. Overwhelmingly, abortions are carried out for black women, women of color. Those are the overwhelming number of abortions. So almost no Jewish children available for adoption anymore. It used to be fairly common. If a Jewish couple wanted to adopt a Jewish infant, like it could be arranged. But since Roe v. Wade, nope. You can't find them in America. Back to this New Yorker article. Version was virtually unchanged, save for the addition of a sharp rebuke to the dissent. An investigation into the leak is supposedly ongoing. According to Piscubic, clerks were asked to sign affidavits and provide cell phone records. We saw an emboldened Alito this term, Lazarus said. Unlike when he first joined the court, he no longer needs to curry favor from the chief. Robert's view of Dobbs was characteristic. He has long favored narrowly tailored. And Spencer's big time, he presses ahead with his schemes as a art belt and schemes and scams. I don't think it's a scam. I think actually, because Richard Spencer's gone much smaller time, he's become more humble. He's literally become sober, right? He's largely quit drinking. He has stopped talking about building the ethno-state and absurd plans. So I think it's the very opposite of what you're saying, Art Pell. He has become more sober. His plans are much smaller. He's living much more in reality. And a sober Spencer is a much more thoughtful Spencer, much less deluded Spencer. It's a humbler Spencer. He's been humbled by life. So I didn't see any scams in what Richard Spencer's doing. There's a sub-stack for $9 a month. There's a ton of content on there. He produces courses on Plato and Nietzsche. Not a scam, right? I think these are authentic courses. You get what you pay for. So my perspective is very opposite of yours there, Art Pell. I think Richard is doing their honest, realistic value for money courses because this is a humbled and sober Richard Spencer. The Richard Spencer we saw in 2015, 2016, 2017. There's a intoxicated Richard Spencer very well under the influence of illegal drugs, but eventually every live stream he was intoxicated. Now getting a newly sober Spencer who will go several days, apparently, without taking a drink. But this is a better and more pro-social, more humble, more down-to-earth Richard Spencer. Their opinions that foster consensus among the justices and perhaps avert political chaos. He once observed, if it's not necessary to decide more to dispose of a... Okay, so we all tend to try to craft compromises when that's in our best interest. When we don't need to craft compromises, right? We don't get through that arduous work. Crafting compromises is a lot of work. Then you just want to say what you believe. When we get to a place of safety and strength and we feel like we can say what we believe, we say what we believe. Like Richard Spencer's been humbled and he's no longer saying nearly as much about what he believes. He is circumcising and circumscribing what he says to that which is socially acceptable, right? Because he's gotten in the opposite trajectory of Samuel Alito. And Samuel Alito crafted painful compromises when he had to. Now he doesn't have to. Now he can be full-throated in what he believes, which is Spencer's had to go in the opposite direction. He's had to dial back what he believes and constrain himself to what's socially acceptable. In my view, it is necessary to decide more. Thomas and Alito have adopted a more combative approach, one that finds no great value in privileging precedent, especially... Paywall is going well, he's going in empire. I'm not sure he's going in empire, but he provides a ton of compelling content. You get bang for your buck $9 a month for a sub-stack and you probably get like 15 hours a week, 15 hours a month of original content. And if there's a stuff you're interested in, yeah, it's bang for your buck. So first he was very concerned he'd be thrown off of sub-stack, but Richard's very intelligent man. He's learning to play within the rules of the game. He's kept his place on Twitter and he's maintaining his sub-stack and he's not gratuitously making enemies. And it's interesting, Michael Edison Hayden, the Antifa activist, also serves as Southern Poverty Law Center journalist, says that he knows things that the rest of us don't and that Richard has repented for his sins and that Richard's abandoned the whole racial game. So Michael Edison Hayden made some interesting tweets saying that people should lay off Richard Spencer. So why should Michael Edison Hayden, an Antifa activist, right? It's the left-wing crusader. This Southern Poverty Law Center hitman. Why is Thomas Edison Hayden, this gay guy from the Upper West Side of Manhattan? Why is he going to bat for Richard Spencer? And that's curious, these are open tweets that Michael Edison Hayden made about a month ago saying, lay off Richard Spencer. He says, Michael Edison Hayden says, I know things that you don't know. So stop criticizing Richard Spencer, stop giving Richard Spencer a hard time. So why is Antifa going to bat for Richard Spencer? Why is the Southern Poverty Law Center going to bat for Richard Spencer? Why is there activist Michael Edison Hayden saying he knows things that the rest of us don't and that Richard Spencer should not be harassed anymore? Like, what things does Michael Edison Hayden know that the rest of us don't? Curious minds wanna know these things. If the precedent emanates from the 60s when Chief Justice Earl Warren was pushing the court leftward, some justices, attentive to the immediate human risks of revoking the right to abortion, might have at least put on a show of sober humility. Well, there are risks in many different directions. It's not like there are only risks if you overturn Roe v. Wade. If you don't overturn Roe v. Wade, you're consenting to the killing of tens of thousands of babies. Is that not a risk too? How is the risk here in the operating in one direction? No matter how convinced they were that they were correct and no matter how cognizant they were of having had the last word, they might in public appearances have tried not to antagonize the many Americans. Look, when tens of thousands of lives are at stake, why would you pussyfoot around? Why would you not issue a clarion call for life? At tens of thousands of lives are at stake. Why would you be so sensitive and cautious when thousands and thousands of lives are at stake? No comprendo. Americans who think differently at a minimum they might have resisted making a gloating joke. In July, Alito, who was 72, delivered a speech at the Palazzo Colonna in Rome for a gathering hosted by the University of Notre Dame Law School's Religious Liberty Initiative, a conservative group that has filed amicus briefs before the court. Faculty affiliated with the group also filed briefs in Dobs. Legal analysts at Slate noted that the spectacle of a justice chumming it up with the same conservative lawyers who were involved in cases before the court creates the unseemly impression of judicial indifference toward basic judicial ethics rules. Alito had donned stylish, worn-rimmed glasses that he doesn't usually wear in public and he had a new, graying beard. Though the speech focused... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Linda Greenhouse, NPR correspondent, had the journalistic beat of covering the US Supreme Court. His very good friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So when the left chums it up, when left-wing justices chum it up with journalists, with fellow left-wing elites, that's not a problem. It's only a problem when a right-wing justice chums it up with some traditional group. Why isn't Linda Greenhouse's long friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg while she's covering the US Supreme Court? Why isn't that a problem? Okay, we've got an issue here. So we've got this boat going right in front of the ferry. Okay, let's see if we're gonna have a collision here. That's my sugar. Absolutely crazy. Like what on earth is that little boat thinking? That's crazy. He just caught right in front of the ferry. Here we've got the New South Wales police. They're gonna give him a ticket. No, they don't appear to be giving him a ticket. There's a little dinky speedboat cutting in front of massive, unrushing ferry, but New South Wales police not interested in giving this guy a ticket. I mean, that was pretty reckless. Come on, guys. Just on one of his favorite topics, the supposed vulnerability of religious freedom in increasingly secular societies. Where is the supposed vulnerability of religious freedom in secular societies? Of course, religious freedom is being impinged when you expand competing rights and give them precedence over religious freedom. Of course, religious freedom is being reduced when you diminish freedom of association to ever increase gay rights, transcend transsexual rights, rights of the individual to be who wants to be, say what he wants to say, saying what he wants to sing. You're reducing the rights of people to freely associate, to build their own communities. You can only have a safe space like Sydney Harbor, Sydney Opera House, by excluding people. When you reduce the ability of religious communities to exclude people, to not employ people, to not rent to people, that you are reducing religious rights. Religion isn't just something that takes place in a church, a synagogue. The primary basis for Judaism, for example, is not the synagogue, it's the home. So you reduce the rights of religious people and who they can live with, live around, associate with, employ. How they can practice in the public square. Yeah, you're reducing religious rights. So she's talking about, you know, supposed reduction in religious liberty. He couldn't resist crowing about dobs. I had the honor this term of writing, I think, the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders, Alito said. One of these was former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but he paid the price. Johnson resigned earlier this summer. The audience laughed heartily, but others are still in office. Alito continued, suppressing a smile. President Macron and Prime Minister Trudeau, I believe, are two. The laughter grew fainter, but Alito was on a roll. It was time for a dad joke about Voldemort. What really wounded me was when the Duke of Sussex addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare the decision whose name may not be spoken with the Russian attack on Ukraine. The Duke of Sussex, more commonly known as Prince Harry, had said, this has been a painful year in a painful decade, citing the pandemic, climate change, the war in Ukraine, the spread of disinformation, and the. Yeah, a reduction in civil liberties, well. Reduction of one liberty, which is the right to an abortion, that expands liberty to tens of thousands of other people, you know, they have the right to live. And so it's not like you could ever reduce rights for one group and not expand them for another, or expand them for one group and not reduce them for another. It is not like an infinite quantity of rights in the world where no one ever suffers when one group gets gets the advantage, gets an expansion, gets a sacred status. The rolling back of constitutional rights here in the United States. Alito's smile reappeared. On the bench, he's often serious, even scowling, especially when his liberal colleagues are speaking, but in Rome. All right, well, when I'm under pressure, I'm often serious. And when I'm doing hard work, sometimes I'm scowling. And when I'm dealing with things that I don't like, I get unpleasant looks on my face. Yeah, guess what, when we're happy, when we're comfortable, when we're like-minded people, we're much more likely to be positive. And when we're dealing with nasty stuff that we don't like, we're dealing with difficult things. Yeah, our face looks different. Taking shots at his critics for the amusement of a like-minded audience, he was living his best life. Alito's childhood and adolescence coincided with a social transformation for which the Warren Court provided the legal underpinnings. Warren, a Republican and an Eisenhower nominee, who turned out to be far more liberal than those affiliations implied, presided over the court from 1953 to 1969. Alito was born in 1950 in Trenton, New Jersey, in a mostly Italian-American enclave. Okay, let me just do a little fast-forwarding here. Let's get at least two, where he gets to Moscow. Then in 1968, the school didn't have a particularly rebellious student body. During the 1969 moratorium to end the war in Vietnam, the school's students for a democratic society contingent carried signs that said, even Princeton. Nevertheless, the university saw its share of sit-ins and marches during Alito's years there, and his already deeply held political allegiances put him at odds with the left-wing youth culture surrounding him. His cultural tastes made him an outlier, too. Alito once recalled spending New Year's Eve 1967 in front of the TV at home, watching a band that his parents liked, Guy Lombardo, and his Royal Canadians. One of Alito's college roommates, David Grace, told me, Sam was offended by the more extreme instances of anti-war protest. Alito has said that he could understand the opposition to the war, but felt it was very wrong to allow discontent with government leaders to be expressed as antipathy to the United States in Alito's software. So they portray Sam Alito as some square that he would watch a band on TV that his parents liked. God forbid that you carry on any cultural practices, traditional practices, religious practices, that your parents liked. God forbid. For a year, students staged an anti-war strike after President Richard Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia. 80% of the student body took part. The administration announced that students could waive their exams. By several accounts, Alito was frustrated that the strikes might disrupt his education. Oh, wow. So who wouldn't be frustrated if the administration says, you can just waive your exams? We're just gonna give up on providing you an education. You kids know better. I think you're our conscience. Go ahead with your protests against the war. We'll just cave over. We're just abandoning our responsibilities to provide you with an education. It sounds like Sam Alito, in some respects, was quite the mature young man. This is the New Yorker article, Sam Alito's Crusade Against the Secondary America. He wasn't alone. His classmate, George Carponello, was liberal and opposed to the war. But like Alito, he came from a more humble background than many Princetonians. Carponello, who was now a litigator in Albany, said, we felt so lucky to be there, and the strike seemed to us to attack what was, in our mind, such a great institution. I suspect Sam is still carrying some of that. As conservative as Alito was, he was not a campus firebrand. A Princeton classmate who has kept in touch with him told me, firebrand would be the last way you would have described Sam, more like quiet, and you barely knew he was there. Alito joined the Princeton debate team, however, as did Grace. Okay, that's why these notions that people have just haven't any here at personality, that some people are quiet, others are extroverted, some people are careful, other people are careless, some people are really into new experiences, other people are very closed off, some people are highly conscientious, other people are highly neurotic, right? This is all situation dependent. A lot of people are quiet and cautious, just quiet and cautious in some situations. I bet the situation's frequently the boss. It's not the individual's personality. So Sam Alito is a classic example, quiet and cautious in some situations when he feels confident and safe and powerful. His personality changes. Just as all of our personalities change when we're under fire, when we're under pressure, when we're struggling to form some sort of compromise, we're gonna be careful and even quiet. When we feel safe and strong and comfortable and confident, right, we become much more outgoing. So back to New Yorker article here. I hope, come on, man, trying to run a high quality production. I don't hear the article. What the heck? They drove the team's old Chevrolet to various tournaments, sometimes stopping to visit Alito's sister Rosemary at Smith College or to have dinner in Hamilton Township. So he was more into going to debate tournaments and listening to rock and roll and smoking dope and participating in free law. Alito's parents. Alito and Grace enjoyed themselves, but not exactly in the counter-cultural spirit of the era. After a debate in Ontario, a Canadian customs agent reportedly stopped the team and found bottles of port in the trunk. Princeton went co-ed in Alito's sophomore year. Alice Calichia, who became a friend of his, remembered hanging out with him around a microwave oven that had just been installed on campus, warming up chocolate chip cookies while talking about Italy and the philosopher John Rolls. Calichia, who dated one of Alito's friends, noted that Alito was always very respectful of me, adding, a lot of male classmates were not. Still, feminism was in the air. Young women were talking about new possibilities for independent and fulfilling lives, about ways they might explore sexuality without committing to marriage and family right off, about their determination to create a less misogynistic society. In 1973, the year after Alito graduated, the Supreme Court issued its Roe decision. Calichia, now a history professor at Brandeis University, told me, Sam was Trenton Italian and I was Chicago Armenian. Alito felt to her like some sort of commonality, but they had different attitudes toward the tight-knit, convention-bound, immigrant communities from which they'd emerged. She felt that she was breaking away from hers. He remained tethered to his. Alito later told an interviewer for the National... Okay, so belonging to a community always comes with a price, right? Just doing your own thing without regard to how that might affect other people and that's going to limit your ability to live in community. Some people just have an allergy to living in community because it's a challenge, it's difficult. You just can't do your own thing and not pay a price. Living in community requires self-discipline, self-admigration, self-sacrifice. No, the emotional energy and the strength, the benefits, the connection, I think are all worth it. Some people just put a much higher value on living in community than others. I can't imagine life without living in community. Italian American foundation that he couldn't relate to his peer's view that their elders had become affluent by taking advantage of other people. They had bad values, they were very materialistic. Alito went on, I thought that whole view of my parents, of the generation to which my parents belonged, was false. Perhaps it was true of some people in that generation, but certainly it wasn't true of the people that I knew. At his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, he described his New Jersey suburb as a stronghold of traditional values that felt safe. At Princeton, he said, he saw some very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of some of the people back in my own community. Alito's grandfather came to America from Italy in 1913. An unskilled laborer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he was employed irregularly during the Depression. Okay, so if you have a more traditional sense of self, you believe that we're porous and therefore we're affected by our parents, by our grandparents, by our nieces, by our neighbors, right? That you can't understand the self outside of its community, outside of its tribe. So the liberal modern conception of the self is that we're autonomous, strategic, buffet individuals that can make their own way in life by using our reason and that we're born with certain inalienable rights. That's the liberal conception of the self. The traditional conception of the self is that we're born into a family and in tribe and a community and a nation and this sense of identity, this sense of connection, this sense of family and extended family is the most important thing about us. That we're Jewish or Christian or Armenian, that, you know, Seventh-day Adventist, that we're born in a particular community and whatever rights we're afforded, those rights come from the community, the tribe, the nation. They're going to vary depending on the situation, depending on time and place and that, you know, our rights are less important than our membership in a particular family, tribe, community, nation. His wife and infant son Samuel soon joined him in Trenton. Alito's father grew up poor, but he excelled in school and became a teacher who set exacting academic standards for his own two children At night, Alito told the interviewer for the National Italian American Foundation his father sat with him and his sister, Rosemary, at the kitchen table, going over every single word of their school papers. Alito went on to start up. I don't remember when I was growing up. Other kids would, you know, have parents who would check the homework. You know, my parents never checked my homework. They had nothing to do with my homework, so did your parents work with you on your homework? Did they check off your homework every night? No, my parents were much more detached. Like my brother, I think when he was like 14 or 15, he would just hitchhike to Bathurst, which is like two hours' drive away to watch races all day and then come home at night with Nari a question or concern from my parents. From about age five, I would wander off into the bush all day, chopping down trees with a tomahawk. They checked your homework, bro? Yeah, my parents never did that. I would just wander off all day from about age five into the bush with poisonous snakes around, chopping down trees, pleasing trails, come home at lunch, get a bit of Tucker in me, then head back out into the bush. It was very painful, but I think that's how you have to learn writing. Rosemary now practices employment law in New Jersey. Their mother, Rose Fredusco Alito, whom Alito has called a very intelligent, very determined, very strong-willed person, was an elementary school teacher and a principal. In 2006, she told the Washington Post that when the first baby came, I said, Sam, our children are going to be the smartest children in Hamilton Township. Alito had big plans for himself, too. His senior year yearbook entry at Princeton shows a young man with neatly trimmed hair and a serious gaze behind bulky eyeglasses. The entry reads, Sam intends to go to law school and eventually to warm a seat on the Supreme Court. Years later, when he sat in the court, he described the line as a joke. If it was, it was a subtle one. While at Princeton, Alito was enrolled in ROTC, and he was upset when the Board of Trustees voted in 1970 to terminate the program over the course of the next two years. At his court confirmation hearings, he said the prevailing attitude on campus had been that Princeton would somehow be sullied if people in uniform were walking around. Yeah, that is kind of absurd. So all these elite primary universities that wanted nothing to do with ROTC, which is a military program, they want nothing to do with the military, which secures them, keeps them safe, protects them. And Princeton somehow would be sullied. Yeah, I think I share Samuel Alito's attitudes to how flatuous that is. The program was reinstated as an extracurricular activity in 1972, but the situation continued to irk Alito. During his confirmation hearings, Democratic senators, Joe Biden among them, pressed him to answer why on his 1985 application for the Office of Legal Counsel job, he had listed membership in an organization called the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, CAP. The group was made up of disgruntled former Princetonians who criticized various changes on campus, including coeducation and the university's efforts to recruit minorities and public school graduates. Princeton, the group's founder declared, should consist of a body of men relatively homogenous in interests and backgrounds. Right, so the more you have in common with people, the better you're going to get along, the less crime you're going to have, the more social cohesion, the more social trust, everything's going to work more smoothly. You're going to need less litigation, fewer laws, less regulation. Right, once you have a strong corporate identity, you don't have to litigate every little thing, you don't have to negotiate every little thing, you know, it's wonderful when you can be with like-minded people, people like yourself, like a normal person just feels less tension, they feel more at ease in the world, and things work better. So their advantages to diversity as well comes with tremendous prices. You get more litigation, more regulation, people feel less safe, that you have to negotiate more little things. So it's not like one approach is just inherently better than the other. So when Princeton became co-ed, there was a loss of social trust, social cohesion, a loss of bonding between people. The campus became more fragmented. When women enter the picture, when men feel less at ease, they start having to regulate their own speech and behavior much more. So it's not like, oh, we're just going to increase rights for one group, but that's not going to come at a price to anyone else. Of course it comes at a price. Men dramatically change their speech and behavior when women enter the picture, they are less comfortable. With America in extreme diversity, everybody feels ill at ease, mixing with people completely unlike themselves. Senator Patrick Leahy told Alito he was puzzled that someone with his background would want to join such an ultra-wasp club. Alito said that he didn't recall joining the group, but had likely been prompted by his objection to the downgrading of the ROTC program, which Cap also cared about, though not as much as it cared about preserving Princeton for elite white males. Another classmate of Alito's, so often when you form coalitions, when there's an issue that's oppressing importance to you, you make alliances with people who you otherwise would not feel that much in common with. So it's not terribly surprising that Senator Alito wouldn't do that. It's the Holland-America line.