Brian Lehrer Weekend: Elie Mystal Assesses the Supreme Court Term; Are We in a 'Postliterate' Age?; Wild NYC: Insects

**Brian Lehrer** (0:00)
Hi, Brian Lehrer here. Up next, Brian Lehrer Weekend. Three of our favorite segments from the week packaged together for you to listen to on the weekend. So enjoy, and I'll see you back on the radio Monday at 10 a.m. on WNYC and wnyc.org.
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Well, one thing we can now say about President Donald Trump, he will go down in history for taking away one guy's red card and for taking away a lot of people's green cards. Despite the red card intervention, as you probably know, the US men's soccer team was eliminated from the World Cup last night by Belgium, perhaps with an assist from karma.
Then there was the Supreme Court decision two weeks ago that didn't make as much news as some more high-profile ones. The court ruled six to three that green card holders can be denied re-entry into the United States if they have merely been accused of certain crimes. They don't have to have been convicted. The immigrant in question had been accused of selling counterfeit shorts in New Jersey.
That case known as Blanche vs. Lowe is one of seven contained in an article in the Nation about important Supreme Court rulings you probably missed by Nation's justice correspondent Elie Mystal. Elie supports some of these rulings and opposes some of them, we should say. Elie, if you know his work, will certainly make his opinions clear. We'll also revisit some of the bombshell rulings you did hear about last week, like why Elie says the transgender rights case ruling goes way beyond sports. And back to the red card, green card, why he was rooting for Iran to win the World Cup. Spoiler alert, it's not because he supports the government. Elie Mystal is the nation's justice correspondent and a columnist. He is also an Alfred Nobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He's the author of two books, The New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort, A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution, and Bad Law, Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. Elie, always good to get your take on things. Welcome back to WNYC.

**Elie Mystal** (2:24)
Hi Brian, how are you? I'm busy fighting apparently all Europeans over the validity of American soccer. So that's been fun.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:32)
What do you mean, validity?

**Elie Mystal** (2:34)
Because the Europeans are just like, yeah, the US was always trash. And I was like, no, no, no. We played like trash, but the team was actually good and really could have given Belgium a better game in different circumstances.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:49)
Well, I definitely know Americans who might have been rooting hard for the US team last night. It sounds like you maybe did not fall away from that, except they lost their enthusiasm because of Trump throwing his weight around with FIFA to reinstate that player who got suspended for a red card foul. It was probably a bad call by the refs, but nonetheless, I think the sports exception to political polarization, and there does seem to be one. We certainly saw it in New York with the Knicks. It didn't matter what you thought about Trump or Mamdani or anything. Everybody was wearing the orange and blue.
That sports exception got spoiled. And what people think about Trump became a factor for many fans last night, I think. Any thought about that, or should we go right on to the Supreme Court?

**Elie Mystal** (3:34)
You know, I think it's the same thought, though. I think it's a perfect segue, because what I saw from the admittedly corrupt decision by FIFA is that maybe people in the sports context can see that just because a judge or a body or an institution rules on something doesn't make that ruling right, doesn't make that ruling fair, and doesn't absolve that ruling from corruption. And to segue it into something that I think we'll talk about later, you get so many people who are just like, oh, see, kicking trans people out of sports, that's not unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court said so. Yeah, yeah, check the source, right? Check which Supreme Court justices said that, right? And people need to, I thought it was karmically interesting that the most American way to play soccer involves suing, to object to a bad call, right?
And then getting a corrupt decision from a ruling body. That seems so very American to me in this moment.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:46)
And I did see after their win last night, the Belgian team put a two-word post on social media, overturned this.
But before we leave soccer, I do want to give you the chance to say why you were rooting for Iran, which like the United States has been eliminated. Why for their World Cup team?