YouSaid · the spoken record

David French

lines on the record
65
first
2023-10-12
most recent
2023-10-12
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “No, hissing and booing, you can't do that in a courtroom You know, if you're opposing counsel says something you don't like, you can't sort of pound the table or hiss or boo. But yeah, I mean, you would have, we had cancel culture before people knew what cancel culture was, where people would call conservatives the judges that conservatives were going to be clerking for and try to bully the judge into revoking the clerkship. I formed a pro-life, pro-religious liberty group there in 1992. And we knew we were in the minority. I mean, we had no illusions. But the first thing that I sent out was a letter saying that Harvard Law School had a policy where its student health fee covered elective abortions. But if you had a conscientious objection to abortion, you could get a refund of that very small part of your fee that covered that. It was a good policy that Harvard had. And we made our classmates aware of it. And I'll never forget going to my inbox.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Huge. It was good and terrible at the same time. It was good in the sense that I had a great education, met friends that I retained to this day, really opened my eyes and my horizons to a lot of ideas I'd never heard before. All of that was good. The terrible was that I arrived at a time when the law school was in the grips of just an enormous wave of intolerance. And so you would have things like if I spoke up and was articulating a pretty normal conservative point of view, you would have hissing and shouting down and booing and class. Not all the time, but enough to really kind of, you know, knock, to make you pay a social cost for your views.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And so for me, what I saw happen in 2016 was extremely grievous. And what it did is it put to you a really, it made you ask yourself a big question, which was, why am I a Republican? Is it am I a Republican because of certain ideologies and values, or is it I'm a Republican because this is my community and my home? you know, my relationships. And at the end of the day, I was a Republican because I believed in conservative ideas and very critically because I also believed in character, especially if you're going to have a movement that advocates for smaller government, for less governmental intervention. You really need to also.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Because half the comments are about, oh, I love talking politics with you, you know. So, yeah, I was very conservative, very much a Reagan-Bush conservative. I remained Republican all the way through to 2016. I was a Romney delegate in 2012 to the Republican National Convention.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And in my young self latched on to the Reagan approach. And so I came of age with Reagan Bush conservatism, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush. And so that's my history. And I was very, you know, gosh, one thing that's really humbling to do is if you ever find your old high school yearbook and you open it and you read the comments that your classmates leave. A couple of years ago, I found it when we were moving to Franklin and I looked at it and I thought. I must have been the biggest political nerd.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That you it's funny, my parents were McGovern Democrats. Really? Yeah. So, yeah, that my parents were Democrats. I came of age in the Reagan presidency and I was kind of a Cold War kid. The most important issue to me at that time was how do you confront the Soviet Union?”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Know that I'm not going to completely trust any given human institution. But then you have this sort of right-wing media enterprise that takes every real flaw and magnifies it and blows it up. And then also just manufactures flaws. Just manufactures mistrust out of a whole cloth. And a perfect example of that would be the election challenge in 2020, that when you dug down into it, It wasn't that there was launched from a kernel of truth. It was like an orchard of lies launched from a few seeds of lies. There was never the kernel of truth. And so what we are now in the grip of.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, that's boy, that's a big question. I like to parse it out in a couple of ways and draw a distinction between earned mistrust and manufactured mistrust. So it is the case that major American institutions have made mistakes. All of them do. They're comprised of human beings, right? So you will be able to look at, say, shifting CDC guidance, for example, and say, well, You could defend it by saying, well, we were learning on the fly, right? But you can look to shifting, say, CDC guidance or this institution that had a scandal, and that institution that had a scandal, and you can say the healthy response to that isn't outright cynicism, but a healthy skepticism.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I was literally just texting with a colleague about how there's a political race in my town in Franklin, Tennessee, where my sister-in-law is the campaign manager for the incumbent Republican mayor. And she and my brother-in-law under fire from the challenger. Why? Because my brother-in-law works for Pfizer. And Pfizer, of course, developed one of the key vaccines. And that's become a huge part of the campaign in Williamson County in Franklin, Tennessee, where I live is this fight over the vaccine in the Franklin, Tennessee mayoral race. But there's a large number of Republicans who are just mystified by what is going on, but a ferocious and also large number of Republicans who to this day, the vaccine and COVID issues might make them angrier than almost anything else.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You know, it's interesting, I was never brought up with any concept of a conflict between faith and science, which might sound kind of strange to people that I grew up with a mathematician father who was also an elder in the church. And so I had the living example of how a person reconciles faith and politics. And so when I got older and it wasn't until really I got into law school and I saw kind of how much conflict there was centered around faith and science that I was kind of aware of how special my upbringing was.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Oh man, you know, our family goes way, way back. So my grandmother on my dad's side was a member of the Mayflower Society. And so family came over originally, especially on my dad's side way back and then migrated. Down south a long, long time ago. My parents now live in a farm that's been in our family since 1840. Wow.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yes. So my dad's side of the family is from northern Mississippi near Memphis, and my mom's side of the family is from Middle Tennessee near Nashville”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, my grandfather was a middle school principal on one side and my grandmother on that same side was a middle school teacher. My grandmother on my dad's side was a high school history teacher and my grandfather, who sadly I never got to meet because he died before I was born was the superintendent of the schools for a while.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “My mom's a teacher also. I came from super educated family. I think the average of graduate degrees between the two parents is 2.0 graduate degrees. So my mom, she was an elementary school teacher. My dad was a college professor.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yes, yeah. My dad is a math longtime. He's now retired, math professor. He's brilliant. He got his PhD in Auburn in 10 months. And so he's just brilliant, lights out brilliant. And he taught for years and years and years at a small Baptist college in Georgetown, Kentucky, which is where I was mostly raised.”

    2023-10-12 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 552 — David French · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source