It Could Happen Here · Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

It Could Happen Here Weekly 225

March 28, 2026·3 hr 54 min·5 clips

A federal judge's swearing-in ceremony was held at the mansion of the same billionaire who gave Supreme Court Justice Thomas cruises on his superyacht.

The ad copy is dead air here. Once the reporting starts, James Ho gets placed inside the legal machinery around the effort to stop the hotly contested Florida vote count and elevate George W. Bush. The ladder matters. He goes from Clarence Thomas's clerkship to Texas solicitor general, succeeding Ted Cruz, and then to the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The setting only makes it uglier. Ho's 2018 swearing-in happens at Harlan Crowe's Dallas mansion, with Clarence Thomas flown in by private jet to administer the oath. Crowe is not background scenery. The excerpt ties him to lavish gifts for Thomas, including superyacht cruises and a $119,000 Frederick Douglass Bible. Then comes the collection. Inside Edition is cited on Crowe's holdings of Hitler-signed Mein Kampf, Hitler paintings, and swastika-embroidered napkins. The joke curdles fast. The scene does not need much moral translation. It has already done the work. Later, the episode looks east. A guest frames Israel's posture toward Lebanon as bound up with its posture toward Palestinians, not as a separate strategic problem. The Palestinian question stays central. The argument is that dodging it helps shape wider violence, with Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and other countries pulled into that logic. No clean exit appears. The phrase "genocide as a tool of conflict management" becomes the bleak thesis near the end. Domination replaces politics. The guest's read is that they cannot imagine another alternative, partly because they have not had to. The episode feels grimly procedural. It follows people, courts, mansions, gifts, wars, and evasions without pretending they belong in separate boxes.

As heard by us

A sharp, unsanded weekly edition on conservative legal networks, elite proximity, and domination abroad.

It Could Happen Here Weekly 225 moves from conservative judicial power to Israel's regional violence with the show's usual bluntness. The clearest section traces James Ho through the Florida presidential vote fight, a Clarence Thomas clerkship, the Texas solicitor general's…

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You want James Ho's rise traced from Bush v. Gore to Harlan Crow's Dallas mansion.

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