Interview with Judge Alex Kozinski
Judge Alex Kozinski is a lawyer and jurist who served as Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Chief Judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims.
Be Average. Be Mediocre.
Max Raskin: Probably a lot more so than my average guest, your everyday life is going to differ from the average person in your caste.
Alex Kozinski: My mother would have been disappointed.
MR: Why?
AK: Her advice to me was: Be Average. Be Mediocre. That was her constant advice.
MR: Why do you think that?
AK: She was a Holocaust survivor. She says the guys who stuck their heads up got them shot off.
MR: But the people who left early to go to America or Israel…they were not average and they were the safe ones.
AK: I don't know whether they were average or not. They may have had other reasons to leave. She was talking about the ones who hadn’t left yet. If you’re in a population and something bad happens, they go after the people who stand out.
“Hoping to Persuade the World of Communism”
MR: Is the Holocaust or Soviet oppression a bigger impact on your psyche?
AK: Probably communism has been a bigger deal. I lived through communism. I left when I was 11, but I remember life under communism very well. I remember everything.
Both my parents were Holocaust survivors. They had different experiences. They met after the war in Bucharest. Growing up in Romania, I met many other Holocaust survivors to whom this was a living memory.
My earliest memories when I was four or five, the Holocaust would have been 10 years away. It’s like going back to 2013 which seems like just an instant ago, and to them it was a living memory. It was a constant.
My father had lots of tales of concentration camps, and my mother had lots of tales of the ghetto, and so in that sense to me it was a living memory because I heard about it constantly from people who had lived through it. But I didn't actually live through it, whereas I did live through communism. I actually saw it operate. I felt the effects of it.
I was actually happy with it when living in Romania. I didn't know what I was missing, so that was life as I understood it, and I left Romania hoping to persuade the world of communism, having gained an inside knowledge of it and what a great system it is. I left with aspiration to live in the West where people were crushed by capitalism and teach them the beauties of communism. It didn’t last long. I got to Vienna and I found plenty of bubblegum, and chocolate, and bananas, and I became a capitalist overnight.
MR: It wasn't a book or article or lecture or anything like that?
AK: I read about lots of stuff since, but then it was just experience. In just a matter of days I realized, “Wait a minute, this is so much better a system than what I had been used to.”
MR: Do you remember the first book that politically influenced you?
AK: I remember The Fountainhead, although by that time I was pretty far-gone already based on my life experience.
MR: So you have very distinct views on Covid and you carry a gun. Do you think having those views that are contrary to your caste comes easier to you after experiencing communism?
AK: I'm not in the caste of idiots.
MR: I mean you’re in the caste of Ivy League-educated federal judges who generally hate guns. They got vaccinated and wear masks, so in some ways you're not doing what is expected of you.
AK: Yes — probably living under communism and having grown up with Holocaust stories has made me more suspicious than other people about what the government tells you is true or good for you.
I wrote a dissent from a case called Silveira. I said, they couldn't have carted off six million Jews to the death camps in cattle cars if this had been an armed population. In the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, they had maybe a dozen guns and Molotov cocktails and their determination, and they held off the German army for weeks. So an armed population is obviously a population that is dangerous to the government; it's much harder to control an armed population. Which is why governments all over the world hate private gun ownership.
MR: Have you always owned a gun?
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