Join Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, John Ketcham, and Renu Mukherjee as they dissect the week’s seismic Supreme Court rulings—nationwide injunctions gutted, free speech battles won, and the ideological fault lines now splitting the bench wide open.
They take on Trump’s bold executive swipe at TikTok, expose the social media platforms society could ditch, and throw down their picks for Mount Rushmore—where only true American grit belongs.
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Audio Transcript
Ilya Shapiro: These cases that we’re talking about today, these last high-profile ones, they do, those are the ones that tend to be split. Those are the politically salient things. But overall, you can’t paint a picture that this is some sort of skewed or crazy or off the wall sort of “MAGA court” as Biden has called it.
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on a very special, mostly Supreme Court episode today are Ilya Shapiro, John Ketcham, Renu Mukherjee, Supreme Court watchers all, some of them longer than others, but all here to educate me and you, our listeners, about what the heck went down last week at the Supreme Court, which we’re going to jump right into as I think it’ll take up a lot of the episode. We’ll hit on a couple of minor things later.
But on Friday, the Supreme Court dropped like basically every single case we’d been waiting for this term, right?
Ilya Shapiro: Other than Skrmetti, which we talked about the previous week, yes, it was a very, I mean, we always talk about how the decisions are backloaded and, you know, the end of June is when they come, but this was especially so. Overall there weren’t as many blockbusters as in past years with abortion, affirmative action, guns, Obamacare, what have you, but all of the term’s biggest cases came like in the last 10 days.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, that was part of, I was sort of sitting on my thumbs waiting for, I had a piece on Paxton v. Free Speech Coalition, which we’ll get to in a minute.
Ilya Shapiro: I read that. This is in The Dispatch about banning obscenity, right? I recommend that piece to everyone.
Charles Fain Lehman: Correct. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. We’ll see if anyone bites on it. I had a friend text me who was like, if I’m ever a U.S. attorney, I’ll take you up on this plan. I was like, good, OK. We’ll get there. No, so let’s, you know, I want to hop into this. Ilya and John, you guys are our legal experts on the panel. Although, I know, Renu, you’re also a Supreme Court fan, so I want to hear your thoughts too. But give us a rundown of what we saw on Friday. What are the highlights?
Ilya Shapiro: Well, the headline is Trump v. CASA. know, everyone talking about birthright citizenship, nationwide injunctions. They did not rule on birthright citizenship at all. That’s, you know, stay tuned for next term for that. But the headline was Trump wins. They throw out nationwide injunctions except asterisk. What Justice Barrett, who was assigned to write this opinion, that’s a bit of a curiosity, did Roberts do that purposely to rehabilitate her reputation? She was being attacked for going left, what have you. But anyway, she said that…
Charles Fain Lehman: That was, I think, that was, you know, one of the big takeaways is the way in which, you know, this was not a soft liberal opinion from Justice Barrett.
Ilya Shapiro: It wasn’t, but it left, as Justice Alito said in his concurrence, it left a lot to be further litigated so that there cannot be nationwide and universal injunctions as they’re called. The injunctions are to be limited to what’s necessary to provide the suing party relief. But hey, some of the suing parties are states and they say that people move interstate, so we need nationwide relief. So we’re back where we started. Plus the challengers have already filed a class action, which is another avenue that the court left open.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, so I want to stick on this case just a little bit, because I think it’s a complicated issue. I think there have been a lot of people who haven’t really wrapped their heads around it. I wonder if you could tell us just a little bit more about why this case matters. It seems like a relatively arcane topic, and yet it is of enormous importance based on my understanding.
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don’t want to dominate the whole conversation. So, John, please, you were in law school more recently. You’re more conversant with what the kids are discussing in civil procedure these days. But the point is we’ve had an increase and an explosion in district judges issuing nationwide injunctions against executive actions. As we’ve seen an increase in executive lawmaking, if you will, you know, going back to George W. Bush and every President Obama’s pen and phone and, you know, Congress won’t pass any legislation. So the president essentially governs. And so courts are… Challengers are running to favorable courts. They’re engaging in forum shopping, picking favorable judges in Texas if it’s against Biden in Massachusetts or Washington or DC if it’s against Trump, and they’re getting these nationwide injunctions. And the government has to win everywhere, and the challengers only have to win once. It’s frustrating. Trump has now faced more nationwide injunctions than by some measures all previous presidencies combined. So it’s not a good way to run a popsicle stand, even if we recognize that, you know, you can’t have a state of affairs where, say, immigration rules are different depending on whether you enter the country illegally across the southern border, illegally at JFK or LAX or something like, you So the court needed to clean this up. And again, the ruling was that one district judge can’t just pause the whole nation unless there’s a class action, unless there’s something else. Anyway, this is going to be litigated. The court has not seen the end of guiding the lower courts and how they’re supposed to deal with challenges to this executive action.
John Ketcham: I think it’s really worth noting that, Charles, you’re right in your characterization of Justice Barrett’s opinion, but it’s also an affirmation of her approach to the law, which is a very scholarly approach. The technical legal question before the court was whether the federal courts under the Judiciary Act of 1789 had equitable powers under the Court of Chancery in England that were analogous to anything like a universal injunction. And so the court did this extensive historical analysis of whether the Courts of Chancery had anything remotely resembling this nationwide injunction or universal injunction and they concluded no. That in fact this is a relatively recent innovation in American law up until 1963 there really were no universal injunctions, right? So we were able to function as a nation for nearly two centuries and it seems to me that that severely undercuts the argument on the other side that this ruling poses an existential threat to our democracy or empowers the executive in a way that is unbecoming of our constitutional order. So it was both muscular in its conservatism, but also scholarly in its approach, and I think really the best of Justice Barrett.
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, and she also, in her opinion, pulled no punches in slapping down the dissent of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. At one point saying… We don’t need to dwell on Justice Jackson’s dissent. It defies two centuries of history and precedent just all over the place. Nuking it from orbit as the memes went. And nobody joined Jackson’s dissent. That was not the principal dissent. Sotomayor wrote the principal dissent, which was also joined by Kagan. But they’re all saying the sky is falling, the executive can’t be checked now. I think Sotomayor, in announcing the opinion, Sotomayor said, well, the other shoe has dropped after the presidential immunity. This is the two-step to give us a king, essentially. A little overwrought, I think.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, but it seems like that’s not actually, you know, the actual substance of change is not that great, right? It’s just like after sort of putting up with so many lower court injunctions for so long, the court is finally being like, finally putting his foot down a little bit, but not a tremendous amount in terms of its actual ability, the actual ability of plaintiffs to get relief. It seems like there are lots of avenues out there. There has been some back and forth that I found interesting, where everyone is just sort of speculating if everything will now become a class action suit and it seems like the answer is maybe, but it’s not obviously clear to me.
Ilya Shapiro: As well as third party standing, especially states. That is, states saying that our citizens are harmed, the administration of our legal system is affected, and, by the way, for national policies, given people travel interstate and there’s economic effects interstate, we’re going to need that nationwide injunction anyway as a state. Again, I was listening to Advisory Opinions, this other podcast, and Sarah Isgur was saying that, well, they’re going to be back at the court within a month as the lower courts continue resisting Trump and providing standing and saying that, well, to give complete relief to all the parties, the injunction has to be essentially universal again.
John Ketcham: I think, just quick, it’s worth pointing out this is really a bipartisan issue. This is a structural defect in our nation’s legal system. And the Biden administration lamented some of the Republican challenges to things like student debt relief, right? So Republicans could just go to the Northern District of Texas and Democrats could go to a relatively progressive district in California. They basically know they’re going to engineer the results like that. So this is long overdue, and it’s something that I know that the Biden administration had really found vexing during its term.
Renu Mukherjee: And Barrett noted that in her opinion, when she cited a study which went through cases in which, since ‘63, like you mentioned, John, the rise in the use of this legal mechanism and noted that this has been used extensively against the Obama administration by Republicans. It’s been used extensively against the Biden administration by Republicans, so Democrats are crying that the sky is falling now, but who knows what happens in 2028. And this might become a savior for them.
Charles Fain Lehman: I do want to, so I want to zoom us out to the other cases, because there were maybe four decisions on Friday that MI filed amicus briefs in, or was it three?
Ilya Shapiro: I think it was three.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, it’s Paxton and Mahmood and Consumer Research.
Ilya Shapiro: No, four. Four. You’re right. You’re right. Paxton, the free speech case, the porn verification.
Mahmood and then
Charles Fain Lehman: What’s the fourth one?
Ilya Shapiro: Two administrative law cases, Braidwood Management about the appointment of a task force and whether they’re inferior or superior officers and readers eyes are already glazing over, their ears are glazing over or whatever, however that is. But it’s an important case in terms of control of the administrative state by the executive, and we along with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch were on the wrong side of that. And the Consumer Research versus FCC case, probably even more important about the non-delegation doctrine. Can Congress delegate its taxing authority to the FCC, which by the way then further delegated it to a private entity to assess these universal service fees. And again, we are on the short side of along with Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch. Gorsuch’s dissent there might be my favorite writing of any of the justices all term. And we’ll see where the justices, the court as a whole did not slam the door on nondelegation, that is in enforcing the idea that only Congress can legislate and they can’t just say, okay, Executive Branch, you write the law here. There has to be what’s called an intelligible principle. And that’s coming up very quickly in the Trump tariff cases, which will be argued before the en banc federal circuit. And then soon after that, no doubt, the Supreme Court.
Charles Fain Lehman: So those are the two where we were on the right side, the losing side. And I think often there was some court watcher who wrote something about amicus briefs being filed at the court and noted the sudden uptick in MI amicus briefs, which he referred to as the Shapiro effect, once Ilya started running our amicus program. So I was thinking about the Shapiro effects having its impact.
But then the other two cases, which I was very going to call, but I think we talked about Mahmood on the show a while back about this, the case of LGBTQ themes in school, in children’s curricula in Montgomery County and parents who want to opt out for religious reasons. And there’s also Paxton v. Free Speech Coalition. John, I wonder if you can sort of run down of those two.
John Ketcham: Sure, well, I can do Paxton. Paxton was about Texas law HB 1181, which forced pornographic websites to verify users’ ages before granting access to those websites in order to protect kids from sexually explicit materials that are harmful to them. So the plaintiffs were a consortium of pornography companies. They sued Texas on the grounds that this was an infringement of their First Amendment rights and was subject to strict scrutiny under a 2004 precedent called Ashcroft, which also dealt with age verification technologies. And then Texas argued that this was analogous to in-person age verification, like going to the store and presenting an ID to buy a pornographic magazine. And the court ruled in an old case in 1968 called Ginsburg that that was only subject to rational basis review. So the court rejected both approaches. They went down the middle and decided to select intermediate scrutiny as the applicable standard of review. But they also were very helpful in providing the analysis of whether HB 1181 survives that heightened standard of review. And it did so handily.
The court found that it did advance an important, indeed a compelling, government interest in protecting children from online sexual content that was harmful to them, and it was not impermissibly burdensome on adult access. That’s right. That’s, yes, so was incidental.
Ilya Shapiro: The burden was incidental, I think the court put it, on adult speech. And, you know, our brief, you know, I might have been much more sympathetic to the challenger’s side had I not learned what I did from the brief that you and I did, John, about the technological development. And, you know, there’s this perception that to age verify, you have to upload your driver’s license or submit your credit card information, which then gets leaked or hacked or whatever, total privacy, know, burdening, whatever. But no, there’s all this technology that, you know, doesn’t transfer the information, doesn’t retain it, and just says a yay or nay, are you 18 or not? It’s really remarkable. Technology has solved this problem. It’s not a kind of a new legal solution.
John Ketcham: That’s exactly right. And that’s what we wanted to have the court understand and have that resource at their fingertips. You can have a scan of a person’s hand that verifies ages. I mean, there are so many different methods. are many different providers of this service, and at this point, it’s never been easier, cheaper, faster, more convenient to verify a user’s age. So as Ilya said, the court found that the burden on adult access was only incidental and therefore survived intermediate scrutiny. And so we have 21 laws that will stand because of this, 21 states laws on similar prohibitions that will stand about because of this case.
Charles Fain Lehman: John’s going to have a piece that will go up probably around the time this episode drops, a little before on City Journal’s website about this case, and part of the point he makes in that piece is this is opening a door to not just dealing with material that is obscene for children, but also states’ efforts to regulate social media, where if you can articulate a compelling state interest in getting kids off of social media, age gaining becomes much easier there. There’s a similar line, I think the court has sort of given a yellow light or even a green light to that. And then I also think it’s really interesting as a case, you, John, alluded to back in 2004, they decided this other version, they decided Ashcroft, which is another case that basically said requiring the, essentially requiring, age verification by porn sites failed the strictest standard, the highest standard for constitutional review because there’s a less restrictive means. At the time, several of the dissents or concurrences basically were like, well, this is true right now, but the technology can and will change and we’re going to need to revisit this at some point.
And I think that there’s an appetite on the court to start revisiting some of these questions and go like, well, when we decided these questions 30 years ago, everyone was on dial-up. I think they talk about this, and Thomas talks about this in his majority opinion. He’s like, we were dealing with like everyone was on AOL, and you had to download things really slowly, and it’s just a different world now. It’s just that rare case where they’re forced to deal with new technological questions.
Ilya Shapiro: I think they’re happy to have that out.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to talk about the bigger political implications here. We also talked about very briefly about Mahmoud, but I want to make sure Renu is in the conversation too. So what do we, what do we take away from the court holistically here? Like this is a big series of decisions, the court finished a term. I mean, what should our average listener take away here in terms of their opinions or perspective on the Supreme Court? Is it just like they’re generically right-wing? What are they prioritizing? What sticks out as a bigger theme?
Renu Mukherjee: Well, I’m sure.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, I’m curious to hear from Renu because, you know, I have my, you know, court watcher J.D., you know, perspective, but someone who’s a very smart consumer of public policy, but not a lawyer. I’m very curious, Renu.
Renu Mukherjee: Well, I was just going to say I’m curious to hear what Ilya always has at the end of each term, all his statistics about this is how many times the court voted 9-0, this is how many times certain conservative leading justices joined with the liberal leading justices, and I’m eager to get this year’s take on that. I think in what…
Ilya Shapiro: Before I get to that though, what is your vibe? What is your perception as a savvy consumer of public policy, but not a lawyer? What is your perception?
Renu Mukherjee: So the 30,000 foot view of all of this, Charles, we didn’t get into the intricacies of the Mahmoud decision. But I think that actually that that case involving, the presence of LGBTQ storybook school books in K through, you know, 12 elementary schools, I think is interesting because it highlights a lot of the politics here that I think, you know, Republicans are always dealing with when you have the 6-3 majority leaning certain ways that are perceived as favorable to President Trump, that, you know, the court has become ideologically conservative and obviously, seeing backlash with respect to that right now. But that case is quite interesting because you have Muslim plaintiffs, for example. And this is something that I don’t think that the left, the Democratic Party, has necessarily contended with, with respect to some of these other decisions as well.
It reveals some sort of, you know, coalitional fractures, for example. That case has gotten a lot of flack, especially, you know, dropping during, of course, it’s June, the decisions are dropping now, but the background of Pride Month, you know. But again, at the end of the day, these aren’t Christian conservative parents that are bringing this case. These are Muslim parents. They are also really uncomfortable with a lot of these materials. So I think you’re always going to have the critics on the left, the naysayers saying that this is a conservative Trump-made before even reporting on the CASA decision today, listening to other podcasts, podcasts from New York Times, for example, referring to these justices as all Trump appointees making these decisions. But at the end of the day, this is going to help Democratic politicians when they’re in office, and, you know, Muslims, as we’ve seen in recent local elections, such as New York City, are part of the Democratic base and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of Democratic policies. So I think it’s…
This term has revealed a lot of, you know, coalitional fractures on both sides, but I think it will be interesting to see how they play out.
Ilya Shapiro: So the numbers, the statistics also belie the vibe that this is some sort of Trumpy court or ultra conservative court or something. Half of the decision, think 43 percent were unanimous. And then when you add in the eight to ones, that brings you to 50 percent. So half of them are just completely unopposed effectively. Only four of, sorry, only six of the cases of the 56 argued cases decided with an authored opinion. Only six had the six Republican appointees versus the three Democratic appointees. Only four had the three so-called “most conservative” ones, Thomas Alito Gorsuch as the sole dissenters. So that’s, 9 percent and 6 percent respectively. So this is not a hopelessly polarized, politicized court. Now, these cases that we’re talking about today, these last high profile ones, they do, those are the ones that tend to be split. Those are the politically salient things. But overall, you can’t paint a picture that this is some sort of skewed or crazy or off the wall sort of “MAGA court” as Biden has called it.
John Ketcham: And to Renu’s point, if you contrast the Mahmoud case with the case to which the court referred repeatedly and found that it was really controlling the Yoder case, which was about Amish people, you have a very small minority of highly motivated religious people in that case. And now you have a much broader coalition of people who are, you know, in a very similar position of wanting to direct their children’s upbringing both educationally and religiously. So that really underscores how our nation is becoming much more diverse and pluralistic, but at the same time, we do have these undercurrents that are joining them together and they are cross-cutting. They are bipartisan. In terms of some of the bigger-picture implications of the court, I see the Paxton and Skrmetti cases as wins for the states. know, Paxton will allow states to have a good deal of flexibility in regulating technology for children, especially when it comes to obscene content. And look, the court could have gone the route that Justice Kagan suggested, which was, let’s just subject this to strict scrutiny and then say HB 1181 survives it.
But what that would have done was invite a lot of litigation, and courts would have to be constantly assessing whether one regime runs afoul of it and one regime doesn’t. Intermediate scrutiny provides states with the flexibility necessary to stay on top of the latest technological trends. And in fact, they do not need to use the least restrictive means of
Charles Fain Lehman: Telling parents that they should maybe consider using filtering software, which is what they concluded in Ashcroft, which is insane.
John Ketcham: Yeah, basically they only allowed for filtering software in Ashcroft. That proved to be woefully inadequate. And now they seem to realize that was a mistake and they’re going to allow the states more flexibility. And then Skrmetti too allows states to take decisions on pediatric gender medicine that comport with the sensibilities of a majority of its population. And that will allow Americans to sort themselves out in ways that, you know, they might find appropriate. So you’ll have more conservative-minded people on this issue moving to more conservative states and vice versa. So I do see this as a win for federalism and for state authority.
Ilya Shapiro: Although to undermine that narrative, the biggest case shaping up so far for next term combines gender care and the First Amendment, a case called Chiles v. Salazar, in which we filed earlier this month about Colorado’s prohibition on talk therapy for gender dysphoria. And there we argued, and I think the bet is that the court will strike down, set aside the Colorado law because it infringes on therapists and patients rights to resolve, to have treatment that’s based on speech. So that kind of counter cuts that, but yes, there is federalism protection in the cases you discussed,
Charles Fain Lehman: You know, I think to John’s point, one of the through lines here with those cases and the CASA case is just the court sort of trying to say fewer things are our power than we have previously irrigated to ourselves. You know, I think we’re about 10 years from Obergefell, but there’s a bunch of retrospective coverage of that a couple of weeks ago, last week. And I think a lot about, with some frequency about, I’m sorry, Scalia’s descent in Obergefell, the substance of which is basically I don’t care very much who decides to marry whom. I care great deal about who rules me. And his argument is what the court has done is override the democratic process of states deciding what they are and are not going to do. And this question to say nine un-elected judges are going to make all of our decisions. And he thought that this was deeply objectionable. And in some senses, what the court has done in a number of these cases is said it is not for us to, you know, wave yes or no, contrary to Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent. It’s not for us to say yes or no on every little decision the government makes. We’re not actually a juristocracy. We’re actually a democracy. And the judges should decide cases and controversies and not like be an unelected legislature, which I think is a good principle personally. I want to…
Ilya Shapiro: Another aspect of that dissent from Scalia was the pretty sharp attacks on Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, saying that he’d put his… “pure applesauce” “jiggery-pokery,” he’d put his head in a paper bag, you know, much sharper than Justice Barrett’s kind of very precise stiletto-like, you know, surgical, nuanced slapdowns of Justice Jackson.
Charles Fain Lehman: “Pure applesauce”
Ilya Shapiro: “pure applesauce” “jiggery-pokery,” he’d put his head in a paper bag, you know, much sharper than Justice Barrett’s kind of very precise stiletto-like, you know, surgical, nuanced slapdowns of Justice Jackson.
Charles Fain Lehman: No one could do it.
Renu Mukherjee: I will say though, as the female on this podcast panel today, that I saw a lot of women on X commenting on Justice Jackson’s opinion saying, this is just like classic verbal girl fighting. It’s all very passive aggressive. And I do think that to what Ilya just said, that is in fact true if you compare it to what Scalia’s dissent was in Obergefell.
Charles Fain Lehman: So I want to take this out. We’ll touch on the next topic real fast. First, I want to ask one sentence answer. What do you see as the biggest win this term? We’ll start with Renu.
Renu Mukherjee: Biggest win this term. I’ll probably say in terms of just importance, I’d say Skrmetti.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, fair enough.
John Ketcham: I agree with Renu.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay. And Ilya?
Ilya Shapiro: I also agree, but I want to, on that question, but I want to say one more thing about the court’s term, and that’s the average person, not, you know, think-tankers who aren’t lawyers, but the average person who just consumes news hears about Supreme Court decisions. In this past year, a lot of that was on the emergency docket. That’s why Justice Barrett got a lot of her attacks from the right. Interim relief, emergency stays of applications for stay of injunctions, all of this mind-numbing procedural stuff.
But in high profile areas of Trump’s executive orders, that’s what the Supreme Court was in the news for mostly. The cases that, the Skrmetti is the number one case that’ll be remembered for and Free Speech Coalition, think, for speech regulation on the internet, those will have lasting effect.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I’m, you know, I’m… Skrmetti is probably the right answer, but I’d also say Free Speech Coalition just because I think there’s a whole universe of work that needs to be done there as I’ve written about. All right, I want to touch very briefly because we ran a little bit…
Ilya Shapiro: How does Free Speech Coalition affect your crusade to prosecute Pornhub?
Charles Fain Lehman: You know, I think there are going to be additional, like not a… it’s not obvious yet, right? Like I think it’s sort of opening the door. It’s the court signaling, “We would like to go back and revisit some of these questions.” And my argument for prosecuting PornHub very briefly, it’s just like, they’re just distributing obscenity, which is not protected under the first amendment. Like stuff that is unambiguously obscenity under Miller.
Ilya Shapiro: And to be clear, you’re not being paid by one of their competitors, right?
Charles Fain Lehman: I’m not. I’d prosecute their competitors too.
All right. Very briefly, because we ran a little over the SCOTUS question, let’s talk about an announcement yesterday. The president indicated that he may have buyers for TikTok. This is after his announcing a second, probably illegal extension of the deadline imposed by Congress to shut it down. Is this a good development? Should we be excited about this? How do people feel about TikTok and the president’s actions on it?
Ilya Shapiro: Well, I’ll go again. I think the most lawless thing that Trump has been doing has not been in birthright citizenship or DOGE or any of these things. It’s been in not enforcing the bipartisan, not ban, but requirement that TikTok’s parent Chinese parent company divest itself of TikTok or not operate in the U.S. And so I think TikTok is a bad thing. Trump likes it now. He didn’t used to like it, but then he was shown that it helped his campaign. So now he likes it and that’s how he communicates with the youth. And it’s, there’s no, there’s no authority to keep delaying the enforcement of this action. So if indeed there’s a buyer, if indeed there’s a divestiture, that would end this sorry moment, I think.
John Ketcham: Yeah, the problem I have with the president’s move is that it seems like there’s a conflict of interest here. I mean, he is the chief executive. He ought to be faithfully taking care that the law is enforced. But he benefits from TikTok, right? He’s got something like 15 million followers. It’s an important avenue for him to communicate with youth. He also has donors who are invested in TikTok, and he doesn’t want to upset that apple cart. And he also wants to preserve TikTok as a negotiating tool with the Chinese government. Be that as it may, Congress passed a law, and it ought to be executed.
Renu Mukherjee: I agree with that. I think in terms of just the policy, I understand the trepidation that Trump might have if what this is going to do to the, for example, 18- to 34-year-old demographic that is moving very quickly to the right, particularly among young men. That’s where he has a lot of reach at the same time, I think among sort of more old-school conservatives, could be, if this happens, this sale happens, this could in fact be viewed as a huge win for Trump. I mean, this is the, yes, he has however many millions of followers that John just mentioned, but at the same time, because TikTok has that kind of reach, that’s the sort of reach that is not necessary, that’s, I guess this sounds dramatic, but for lack of a more poignant or better way to say it, it is in fact poisoning a lot of young people’s minds in this country. That’s why you have, there seems to be, for example, a sort of direct line between a lot of the campus encampments, a lot of the, you know, skyrocketing anti-Semitism throughout the U.S. and what the Chinese algorithm promotes on TikTok amongst U.S. youth. And so I think this would be and could be used by the administration as a major win if it in fact goes through. And I’m sure, you know, Trump, through avenues such as Trump War Room on X and I know Instagram is, you know, at least my Gen Z sister makes fun of me for using Instagram recreationally because only, you know, old Millennials use Instagram now. But I do think Trump would still be able to reach an audience through those means as well.
Ilya Shapiro: I don’t use Instagram at all. I’m all about the Facebook. So there you go. Young Gen X-er here. But the TikTok gives me an idea. Maybe because it’s so influential, MI needs a TikTok channel. We could have the interns, right? The college associates do like dance moves according to, you know, interpreting public policy. Can we workshop this?
Charles Fain Lehman: We have an Instagram. I know we have an Instagram. I don’t know if we have a TikTok. Maybe we do. Yeah, I mean, that’s, you know, that angle of it is sort of the most interesting one to me. And you, John, have done some work on sort of the spread of smartphones among youth and the problem with youth use of social media. And obviously this is a, you know, it’s not just TikTok where it’s a problem, although TikTok sticks out. But I think that, you know, my, there’s this concern about foreign ownership, but then there’s just the concern about who’s getting exposed to material on what that is alarming to me.
John Ketcham: Since 2012, major depression among teens saw a 145 percent increase for girls, 161 percent increase for boys, roughly two and a half times more prevalent now than it was in 2012. And that’s for all races and social classes. And this comes from Jonathan Haidt’s book, Anxious Generation. So yeah, mean, TikTok is certainly causing societal harms, along with the rest of social media so far as children are consuming too much of it, consuming it too young. And while the TikTok ban is mostly predicated on national security concerns, I do think that there are strong public policy considerations in protecting youth mental health to severely constrain, if not ban it outright. And look, the American people are the most dynamic, flexible people in the world. If we don’t have TikTok, the sky is not going to fall. We are going to adapt. We are, you have the greatest tech sector in the world by a mile in this country. We will find, you know, a way to replace TikTok, perhaps with a healthier alternative, I would hope. But in fact, American companies, I bet, would be chomping at the bit to take over that space.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, my kids are Gen Alpha and I imagine they will eventually make fun of the Gen Z olds for their lame TikToks.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, all right, on that note, I want to ask everybody before we go out what the other social media network, know, Ilya said he’s on Facebook, some of us are on X, but which social media network would you get rid of if you could choose one to get rid of? I’ll keep that to John, our in-house social media curmudgeon first.
John Ketcham: So I’m going to say DeepSeek, which is slight pivot. I know, but DeepSeek is something really important because it’s feeding Americans information to China Mobile purportedly. It’s actively assisting the Chinese military. It’s as direct a threat as TikTok would be, I think. And it’s certainly going to be critical in the AI race.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, buy that. Ilya? You’re on Facebook
Ilya Shapiro: Well, Myspace, clearly no. I’m kidding.
Charles Fain Lehman: You’re old. You’re old.
Ilya Shapiro: I’m kidding. I’m kidding. No, it has to be TikTok for national security reasons, political polarization reasons, for the depression and mental health reasons that John discussed. Maybe before Elon’s takeover, I would have gone with Twitter, because I think it was a really harmful source of discourse. Now it’s the best social media site, I think, unless you want to look at your friend’s baby pictures on Facebook. But yeah, I think TikTok currently is the most harmful.
Charles Fain Lehman: Renu.
Renu Mukherjee: I’m going to go Tumblr. And the reason for that, strictly related to…
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s still around?
Renu Mukherjee: Yeah, female mental health, sort of was at its peak, I think, in the 2010s. But a lot of really harmful ideas, I think about like beauty standards, et cetera, were propagated to young women on that site. And it seems to, from what I’ve been seeing online, sort of making a comeback. And so I would probably go Tumblr.
John Ketcham: Renu’s going to give it the coup de gras.
Charles Fain Lehman: I’m going to, I’m going to dissent from Ilya, I’m going to say Twitter, which I have finally taken off my phone. We’ll see if that sticks, but it just consumes too much of my life. So I would personally like it if Donald Trump could get rid of that. That would be fine with me.
Ilya Shapiro: You live by the X, you die by the X.
Charles Fain Lehman: I know, I know. All right, before we go, a recent New York Times article asks if Donald Trump should or could be added to Mount Rushmore, which prompts me to ask the group, which president would you add to that great national monument if you had the chance? Let’s start with Ilya.
Ilya Shapiro: Um, well, do you have to take off one of the existing ones or is it just adding?
Charles Fain Lehman: No, can just add one on. You can just add one on. Don’t ask me how.
Ilya Shapiro: You just add one on. Um, gosh, we probably need a modern president, right? So we’re probably thinking 20th century, 21st century. I’d, you know, I would disqualify living presidents, that’s two of the recency bias. Trump might get his own mountain for himself to just chisel in, but I’d add Reagan, think. Movie star looks and all.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s a respectable answer. Renu?
Renu Mukherjee: I’d probably go if Ilya took Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower.
Charles Fain Lehman: Ike, Ike, again, solid answer. John?
John Ketcham: I like Ike too. This is someone who had greatness thrust upon him in World War II. He was a major living in Manila for a long time before that, but he stepped up and assumed the role magnificently. He led the Allies to victory. And then as the president, he basically constructed the nation’s interstate highway system. We really couldn’t understand life without that system in place. And I think it’d be totally impossible to build it in the same rapid, cost-effective way today, given the myriad barriers to development that we have. So he really did remake the nation, and he has this stature that everyone respected, even if they disagreed with. I don’t think we have those characters in American society today, and that’s a problem. So I would try to put up Eisenhower’s face as a model for the future.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, I am going to side with friend of MI, Amity Shlaes and pick Calvin Coolidge as the respectable conservative president who has not yet been claimed by this panel, but all good choices. On that note, that’s about all the time that we have. Thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, or even if you didn’t, don’t forget to like, subscribe, ring the bell, click the other three buttons that you have to click on YouTube and all other platforms that you can indicate to them that you like us, so will be served more frequently in the algorithm. Leave us comments and questions down below. Maybe someday we’ll even answer some of them. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
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