Terms, Conditions, and Amendments | The Roundtable Ep. 234 by The American Mind

coming up on this episode of the Round Table whenever I Beman the quality and Corruption of our modern food pyramid and all that stuff I my wife likes to make fun of me and call me a Marin housewife so it's like it's like the Marin housewife uh conservative convergence horseshoe they don't they don't expect you to eat enough protein in the nutrition fact I will definitely that on that Hill I will die go on yeah it's yeah the the you know the food pyramid this is sort of it's less a conspiracy theory now and just kind of established fact is especially as more nutritionists look at it and various political Stripes but it's basically the pyramid should be upside down you know they recommend a bunch of grains and not much fat and a little protein uh and uh it should be probably something uh at least more balanced if not the opposite and if you look into it's classic sort of libertarian capture right I mean it turns out the food pyramid was written at the behest of big Agriculture and a bunch of the the stuff they can make a lot of money off [Music] of welcome once again to the round table your weekly Publishers and editors podcast here at the American mind I'm your host for the week Spencer claven the redditor in Chief of the American mind I'm joined this week by our publisher and president Ryan Williams and back for his second of many regular performances assistant editor Mike Sabo well last week right at the end of the Pod we got into talking about RFK Jr and we were all kind of saying with some trepidation about not wanting to jinx anything that he looked like he was about to drop out and that he might endorse Trump and maybe we could be provisionally white pilled it's always a nice and for me at least a rare day when your predictions are instantly confirmed because we got I think it was shortly thereafter that RFK did in fact drop out endorse Donald Trump cited a few his kind of key stump speech issues that have been what he's running on this whole time the war in Ukraine the war on our children as he puts it and also a few of the kind of efforts by the Democrats to keep him off the ballot so in general kind of a argument about free speech and the threats that the left poses to it at the moment and for all these reasons said therefore if you were going to vote for me I'm endorsing Trump a few kind of interesting procedural points here before we get into talking about the significance if any of this development we say that RFK dropped out technically he only really intended to drop out kind of in the key swing states he left himself up in places where it's unlikely to make a huge difference so if you want to keep casting your protest vote for RFK you can do it as long as it doesn't matter all that much was kind of the Topline item of what he wanted to do he's also though after all this effort to get on the ballots and all these attempts to fight the resistance to that now he's having a hard time getting off the ballot the Wisconsin elections Commission on Tuesday voted to keep him on the ballot and this throws a wrench in his effort even to withdraw himself from the race in the way that he himself had hoped so poor RFK Jr just can't catch a break when it comes to ballot law and getting on and off ballots but I'm interested in your guys thoughts about that dimension of it because I thought that was kind of a Grace note not a lot of people were necessarily talking about but let's start maybe with just do you think this is going to matter will it help Trump will it do nothing is RFK Jr irrelevant or crazy weirdo or the savior of our nation and the head of burgeoning third party for 20 32 or whatever not the last thing I don't think no a shock no third parties are uh it's the weird thing about America not a weird just American politics but because of our first P the post system and our national composition and institutional history I mean we just third parties don't really work here but they if they rise up they quickly get absorbed if they rise up in a threatening way they get absorbed by one of or two of the parties or both in various ways this is what happened to Progressive Movement at the turn of the 20th century not for nothing did both Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft his successor both call themselves progressives in various ways but it's topic for another day but I think they meant two different things taff's much less problematic than TR so that's not a not really a thing but I think in one way JD Vance's comments on RFK dropping out show a little bit of what's been going on now for a long time which is that for lack of a better term Kennedy Democrats have been moving to the Republican Party since Nixon's election since the southern strategy and then subsequently for different reasons than the question of race and crime and and the Old South and all that so in a way that the potential for a third party has just been accommodated by both parties in different ways but I do think that he will make a difference for two reasons at least uh one from each side RFK claimed in his speech about his dropping out of the race or getting off the ballot in 10 states and endorsing Trump that his internal poll for whatever it's worth was suggesting that 57% or so of his voters would vote would defect to Trump if he was out so he thought that was enough to make a difference in especially some of the close swing States and then as you say Spencer not only Wisconsin but also M Michigan the kind of default left of center court system and litigation infrastructure of the DNC seems to think that he is consequential thus they want to keep him on the ballot now maybe you could say that they're just being overly cautious but uh I think that reveals that they're a little worried about it and then there's a I don't know if RFK said it or not but um there's just the last name thing I mean I would be surprised if this in this day and age with the memory of the kenned family and even in some ways Bobby and JFK especially for Boomers of maybe the the left and Center left or the middle and Center left the symbolic quality of him endorsing Trump has got to me mean something so I we'll see I mean we'll see how this shakes out exit polling is always a tricky thing but uh I think you'll have a decent sort of AB testing well it's not quite AB of course or not really at all but uh you you'll have a test of him not on the ballot and on the ballot in a bunch of states that I you should have some pretty good comparative statistics but I hope it redounds to Trump's benefit given the um policy prescriptions and general attitude of the modern democratic party on the top of its ticket I'd rather the other party win yeah I think a really interesting question is just looking at Kennedy looking at the pulling before the polling after like Ryan said you know his internal polling suggested that Trump was definitely going to get a boost just kind of doing just some research at ABC they actually had polling where somehow would actually help Harris slightly Kennedy's move to Trump so you just kind of Wonder you know is that just typical media bias kind of what's going on there but there was actually a New York Post survey that they cited Echelon insights that actually now shows Trump beating Harris 49 to 48% in a one-on-one matchup and when Kennedy was actually taken out Trump actually gained about three percentage points so that's major Aon Bernett on CNN the day that that happened that RFK made his announcement she mentioned in swing States you know look at some of the Swing states where Kennedy is still getting say four to six% of the vote that that could be major and it just makes kind of intuitive sense right I mean Kennedy his constituency who he was appealing to um certainly on abortion and in some other you know range I mean certainly a man of the left but he definitely breaks with kind of the regime consensus on a whole host of things you look at Health you look at um just again I I think his general just war against the regime I you saw when he endorsed Trump I mean his members of his own family came out vifly um and acted like you know know they were throwing him not only out of the democratic party but actually out of the family entirely so there's are some serious consequences you know obviously for him which is interesting because Trump obviously had some of those same serious consequences you look at what Mary Trump has been saying ever since 2016 uh for him so it's just it's a really interesting mix it shows kind of the the realignment going um you saw Tulsi gabber then come out it sounds like the Trump said that there are going to be more uh Democrats who are going to be coming out uh in favor of him but I think this just shows our ongoing realignment in politics more broadly speaking since 2016 I still think we're probably in the very early stage of stages of it but Kennedy is certainly a name like Ryan said a name that people know um and and it I think it does mean something um you look at just how the Democrats are reacting they're trying to shove them off but it it really I think um puts some momentum in Trump's case especially right after the DNC where you know usually candidates get a bump but that happened right after that ended so I think that maybe stole some of Harris's Thunder but in any event it looks like the Democrats aren't exactly happy with Kennedy and their own internal polling may suggest why that is yeah the ballot thing reminds me of my favorite children's book of all time the Phantom toll booth by Norton Jer which opens with the portrait of its main character Milo and it says whenever he was here he wanted to be there whenever he was there he wanted to be here it's like whenever he was on the ballot he wanted to be off the ballot whenever he was off the ballot he wanted to be on the ballot but both of you are raising I think perhaps the most interesting long-term question about this which is as you both say we hope and it seems feasible plausible that if he does you know in places where he is taken off the about that will be helpful for Trump Ryan you talk about the absorption of the third party movements things like the tea party and the progressives before them into one or the other of the two major parties and it strikes me that there are at least two ways that that scenario can play out one I would describe as the Tea Party model which is like the domestication or even just the neutering and the kind of evaporation of the energy in that movement might also say that happened to Occupy Wall Street so the big party machine takes in this fresh energy and the whatever is taken to the streets and then it just gets fizzled out and dissipated and ceases really to become a significant force in Party politics until some new Uprising comes along like if you think about Trump as kind of the Tea Party 2.0 in some ways it took another Outsider to to Spur that on the other version of getting absorbed into the major parties is basically winning I mean it's that old argument that if you are if people are making your arguments you effectively start to win even if you don't win a victory so the progressives would be an example perhaps of a movement that got absorbed in a positive way for them in that they shifted the Democrats in a progressive Direction I suspect BLM and the woke movement are like that they are dissipated now as like social cultural forces at least they're not as powerful as they were in 2020 but they've unquestionably spread their thought through the veins of the democratic party and moved them left and all sorts of issues and really become a dominant Force even though they didn't necessarily exactly nominate a BLM candidate the head of the democratic party you could argue Kamala is one but she doesn't come from BLM she's not part of that movement all of this to say RFK plainly represents some sort of variety of this ground swell movement and if I had to put my finger on it I would say it's this the what Mike is talking about this the the shift of the the crunchy granola Democrats that the thing that seems most Salient to me about him is this vaccine skepticism this freewheeling kind of anti-war almost hippie adjacent mentality that has changed its coding from left to right in recent years and that RFK represented Tulsi Gabbert whom you mentioned also kind of represents and my question for you is do you agree with me that that is sort of the most Salient feature of rfk's movement and if so how in in what way is it about to get absorbed will it be neutralized by being taken in or swept off the stage in the wake of the two parties or will it be effectively will it effectively win by crafting the Republican party in its own image the covid thing is real the vaccine skepticism part of it you had the the uh whenever I bemoon the quality and Corruption of our modern food pyramid and all that stuff I my wife likes to make fun of me and call me a Marin housewife so it's like it's like the Marin housewife uh conservative convergence horseshoe they don't they don't expect you to eat enough protein in the nutrition fact I will definitely that on that Hill I will die go on yeah it's uh yeah the the you know the food pyramid this is sort of it's less a conspiracy theory now and just kind of established fact as especially as more nutritionists look at it and various political Stripes but it's basically the pyramid should be upside down you know they recommend a bunch of grains and not much fat and a little protein uh and uh it should be probably something uh at least more balanced if not the opposite and if you look into it's classic sort of libertarian capture right I mean it turns out the food pyramid was written at the behest of big Agriculture and a bunch of the the stuff they can make a lot of money off of so none of that's that surprising the most annoying just as an aside the most annoying piece of it is I think I maybe I've mentioned this before in the podcast but it's been months and months at least but there's uh I know Malcolm Gladwell can be kind of insufferable but he has this great uh um podcast episode on the demise of the delicious beef Tallow fried french fry at McDonald's and the switching in a lot of the fast food places from beef Tallow to vegetable oil that is corn oil mostly was really just the product of one guy I forget the guy's name but he he kind of became a guru for eliminating the threat of heart disease and he somehow convinced a good part of the nutritional and medical establishment that sat ated animal fats were a high high contributor to heart disease and that's that's how it all happened and um there might be cost reasons now of course corn oil is a lot cheaper than beef Tallow um but it's it's one of the reasons why McDonald's french fries in the 60s and 70s were much much more delicious and healthier so it's very sad the one other thing Spencer I would say was is the uh and it Dov tales with the the switching of sides on certain issues since Trump came to office and in 2016 which is you know the Democrats of the 60s the anti-war movement and all that were great Skeptics of sort of industrial America and especially the man and the CIA and the Intel Intel Services the FBI Was Always setting up uh you know in bad ways the uh early Black Power movement and they were the bad guys and once Trump was elected this all was perfectly encapsulated by Bill Crystal tweet which is uh something along the lines of I'd rather have the the Hillary I'd rather have the Hillary deep State than the Trump state or something like that so now the Defenders of the status quo on the intelligence Community are is sort the center left and the left because they they were they saw the intelligence Community as a Bull workk against Trump's abuses and now that they've been in power for three and a half years their side can do no wrong in sort of tribal ways so that's a big part of of RFK J of um constituency 2 which is the Skeptics of um the conduct and um attitude and imperiousness of the intelligence state if you take that term kind of in the broad sense uh over the last especially the last 16 years or so but really longer than that do you think or either of you think that sentiment will be neutralized or will oh right yeah that would kind of depend on what cabinet position RFK Jr gets so you know if he I me who knows I mean what could he get confirmed for what what are the internal Dynamics what has Trump promised him or quasi promised him all hard to say I mean I'd be much more comfortable I think with him somewhere in public health uh than I would be the other thing I've read about with which is him as attorney general although everyone's salivating at the prospects of of uh Trump's apparent promise to RFK Jr that they could open up the Kennedy assassination files and he could lead a commission to unearth what really happened RFK Jr of course thinks the CIA killed his father so yeah so I guess the neutralization would depend on what kind of position he gets because then he could be a public figure and lightning rod for the desires and hopes and passions of that portion of his constituency but like I said that depends on a lot of indeterminant factors I think too with that question because that's a very good question you do typically it seems like in movements where you know one kind of minority position kind of gets eaten up you do have you know some um basic kind of agreement though uh between Trump and RFK already which kind of makes me think RFK is going to be more successful and a possible uh Trump Administration um you look at you know on War um they're both bashing neocons you look at on some other things too just the regime in general the CIA intelligence agencies um you look at censorship I think free speech is another big one where there's there's a lot of agreement on those things um obviously again disagreement on some other things but I I think that that does give me some hope that RFK will be able to survive will be able to kind of carve out his Niche bring his people along um you know whether he's at say Health and Human Services or you know um like Ryan said attorney general department of justice that that's an interesting question my guess is I would assume uh the former and not the latter um I I don't know who even Trump would have as AG that's obviously going to be a very pivotal position in his his possible Administration um especially with just seeing kind of what happened uh the last time but it it's an interesting Coalition I was even just listening to you know the long interview that RFK did with Tucker and just talking about some of the same themes that you know Democrats have talked about wealth inequality wealth is heavily tilted now though as RFK said to the Dems the Dems I think own he said if you look at the breakdown income uh between Democrats and Republicans they own like 70% of the wealth I mean it's heavily heavily tilted in that direction darl Paul uh in first things actually I think a couple years ago did a really good piece just looking at the top 10 zip codes and seeing Oh it's it's all D now um I think that was even the 2018 election so this is a real thing this is a real shift you know in RFK I mean he has some Oddities too I mean he's talking about you know kind of how the Divine shows up in the environment so that's why we need to protect the environment which is a really interesting thing kind of gets into more Christian theology about natural Revelation and the importance of that um you know and it's almost like in some ways I mean he's kind of perfect for really this medium of podcasting um I and I think that's probably one of the things you know even with the voice that he does have but I think that propels him too he's interested in talking about some issues that the Democrats especially do absolutely do not want to talk about you know he's talking about the problem of wind farms um and what they do to Birds um he's talking about a lot of the um I think like wailing and things like that and just a lot of the environmental policies the Democrats have been floating for a long time that have actually had absolutely deletar is consequences that again they just don't want to talk about so I think that that is just the shift in the Democratic party and I think it could be you know we'll see I mean it could be a possible situation where the Republicans historically it's like the wig party and something new will come of it I don't know it's still that's way too early to figure out although Trump certainly does have more of a hold of power over the current Republican party than he certainly did in 2016 but it just it remains to be seen But there are definitely signs I think of a different alignment emerging uh sooner probably rather than later I liked the uh Babylon B headline that rfk's voice was fixed when he finally took a single sip of water is very funny um yeah I mean it does it's these are these are all good points it it definitely seems as if first of all Trump is more sympathetic to the RFK position than say con Inc was to the tea party so that makes for a possible integration or at least makes one much more much more likely and then it also seems like RFK is better as kind of a wing of the new Republican party or the new right rather than as a a coherent ideology unto himself I'm still unsure whether the nature worship is is Christian ecology or paganism or or what but I don't think those are the sorts of questions you're supposed to think too deeply about when it comes to RFK just like put him in in one of these C positions and move on well we'll keep an eye on that but let's turn our attention now to this really I just think kind of wild oh I just my sorry sorry Spencer my last thing is I just want to highlight for everyone who didn't catch it you know it's pretty hard to disagree with RFK Jr's little segment of the Trump slogan which is let's make America healthy again amen MH totally agree no question the food pyramid is just the beginning we don't even have to crack that seed oil can open talk about that that's a topic for another episode for sure and before we go down that rabbit hole I'm going to turn us to this Disney case I find this it's it's a it's a sensationalist story and it has really rich and interesting implications I think raises a whole host of issues that we probably don't talk about enough so the underlying facts of the matter here is there's a case that was brought against Disney by an individual Jeffrey Piccolo who and this is a tragic story he was eating at a restaurant Raglin Road Irish pub in Orlando not in Disneyland exactly but in that kind of area outside of Disneyland It's called Disney Springs if you've been to Disneyland in or in in Florida you know exactly what I'm talking about if not this is just sort of a periphery where you can eat at all these different restaurants that are not Disney restaurants they are hosted by Disney and obviously pay rent to Disney but Jeffrey pickle is eating at this Irish pub with his wife who has some severe allergies and he alleges that both Disney and the pub made a big show of accommodating the AL the kinds of allergies that his wife had when tragically his wife went into anaphylactic shock and it was revealed that there was Dairy and and nuts in in her system so Piccolo brings this case against Disney whereupon Disney tries to take him to arbitration which if like me you're not a lawyer arbitration is basically a sort of side Court whose records are not public presided over by a retired judge and it's often something that corporations will use sometimes to the benefit of all parties to take things out of the court system and into a more closed off and limited efficient area where you can kind of have these discussions it's why it's called AR arbitration in the first place but there's also something called mandatory arbitration which is when you sign up at the outset in whatever contract you're in with say your employer or whoever that you the employer can take you to arbitration whether or not you want to and Disney after first making a few other arguments such as that this was not their restaurant that they were just the landlord of this Pub and so forth then brought another argument which is that this needed to go to arbitration because Piccolo had signed up for a pre-trial of a Disney Plus subscription and in those interminable toc's those terms and conditions that you sign up to whenever you we were all party to a million of these agreements in the modern era but in Disney's as in many others there's mandatory arbitration and so because he had Piccolo had done this not even because he had a subscription but just because he had once clicked yes I agree Disney argued they were going to take him to arbitration over this completely unrelated situation that involving the death of his wife now naturally whether or not this was a valid Le argument which I hope we'll get into and whether or not it was a wise strategy on Disney's part it was certainly a PR disaster for Disney to be forcing this man whose wife just died this widower into into arbitration and Disney in fact has backed out and said we're gonna do this in in open court instead because well because they got caught but they will say because we recognize the sensitivity of of the matter I want to know what you guys make of this whole thing in particular I'm interested in this question of terms and conditions the Supreme Court has upheld mandatory arbitration and have held in general in a number of cases been sort of favorable toward what seems to me like an obsurd situation and kind of an anti- Republican government situation that we're all party to these agreements that we nobody can read but tell me I'm wrong or tell me Disney's in the right here or what should we make all this no I I think you're exactly right um you look at and I think you hit the nail on the head with looking at you know how does this exactly cohere with Republican government you have these massive user agreements where you click yes I mean you know in 2. font you know on page 75 you could actually be giving away the mortgage of your house you just don't even know it so so that's a huge problem and it actually and especially just just doing the Lincoln fellowship and just doing some of the readings there my mind just goes back immediately to James Madison's vices of the political system and that was something that he wrote against the Articles Confederation and showing the problems with the government under the Articles and one of the main problems is is the laws it's it's the the number of the laws the mutability of the laws no one knows what actually the laws are because they're so numerous and so I think you see this problem with this where this is really a creature really probably going back to the early progressives of kind of the modern administrative state where experts so-called are kind of insulated off from the public will they're turning out um these things right and left um they're working with big corporations who then also are basically looking you know kind of over their shoulder kind of like that Meme of uh Mr Bean kind of looking at the guy next to him and they're kind of just copying what the administrate administrative state is doing because they have to in order to survive in this kind of Realm and it's just a huge complex web that binds customers and and you see the problems right in this case the lawyer for Disney actually said okay because the public outcry I think probably partially maybe totally with so much that they are actually going to take this case to court now um just because I think people couldn't believe and were stunned that Disney actually made those kinds of arguments so this is a problem again that really goes to the heart of who we are as a nation are we a Republican government are we just kind of this kind of sclorotic kind of oligarchy um lorded over by the administrative State who are we I think that's right Mike and uh it also you know if you go back to the early origins of contract law an old principle is that to have a contract be valid you have to have some meaning of the minds and more or less equal knowledge of what the terms are by both parties now the you know the other side could argue well you clicked on the terms of service and you agreed to them you could sift through that like 95-page document that's all written in legal ease uh and you should you should do that with every one of those things that you click uh and I I think from just a common sense point of view that can't be the case because ay no one has the time to do that sort of thing I mean how many terms of services do we agree to every year with all these digital products we might buy um let alone you know implicit agreement to terms of service or or the rules of a place when you buy Disney tickets I mean that was the other part Spencer they they also claimed that having purchased tickets to the I think booked travel tickets somehow they were also agreeing to these broader terms of service uh that all just at a certain point you have to fall back on the common sense of the thing uh and that's a Bedrock of Republican small R Republican government you have to have sets of rules and regulations that are um cognizable and understandable by the average American you know you you have to have that that's the true meaning of having a rational form of government not in the Progressive sense of of it being bureaucratic and uh heelan rationalistic and and at all making sense but in the sense of just normal people being able to understand what they're agreeing to um so the it g it gets at a a problem that actually was raised by I don't know if you all saw this but Trump sat down with very popular podcaster comedian Theo vau and the Theo has this great I mean one of his sticks is he's just sort of everyday dude and he's like what's up with that this seems crazy and he asked uh which is you know partly his personality and partly genuine but also he plays it up but he he asked Trump you know what's the most powerful Lobby in the federal system and Trump said a lot of people don't know this but it's the lawyers I think I think Trump met the trial attorney bar uh but it might just be a bigger more General lawyers lobby but that gets to one of these themes of the problem of the modern managerial state which is a or the rise of managerialism which is a kissing cousen with progressivism but not quite the same thing because it has spread across corporate life as well um and which is to say the complex rules that can only be understood by lawyers not only benefit the lawyers and the big corporations uh you know it's a kind of rentier system where you have this whole class of people making money off this esoteric know that uh under an older understanding of contracts and all the rest really shouldn't exist so what do you do about all that in a very complex industrial society where often through decades and Decades of precedent litigation you have to have these longer terms of service as corporations try to protect themselves from frivolous lawsuits but on the other side there's a lot of room for abuse of normal citizens and uh and you know you're you're a you're Disney and you have on staff what's the legal council's department at Disney it's probably hundreds of people they can just throw throw everything they got with their people on staff who do this all the time at normal joeo citizen uh and he'll just give up at a certain point it'll be too expensive so there's a it's a great analogue with the problem with the administrative State and Regulatory Agencies bearing um citizens in rules and then if you want to appeal them you're looking at a two-year process and hundreds of thousands of dollars so uh if we want to restore some real Republican small r republican Equity to our legal system uh we need broad reform on this front and some states are better than than others and uh there should be some some work there for congress as well yeah I mean it's been pointed out that the lawyers in this case are just doing what lawyers do corporate lawyers that are in house for media companies and lawyers generally are paid to throw literally throw the book at you so they did that it just happened that this one looked particularly bad and I actually asked uh an in-house Media Company corporate lawyer that I know like what would you have done in this situation and he said you know i' I'd have raised the possibility with an executive and then the executive would have told me that's that looks bad don't do that so obviously Disney made a mistake there just probably didn't pay enough attention but here is what I for the life of me do not understand okay so it's like yeah you can totally agree to the terms of service like just retain independent Council on hand for anytime you want to watch Hulu right like what's the problem so yes this is obviously unworkable for your average American and benefits corporations like Disney but if you've ever entered into an actual contract for example with them that where both parties involved actually want to understand what they're agreeing to and have good faith and good intentions of reaching proper terms very often the first thing that you will receive is a deal points memo with like five bullet points saying what you guys intend to agree to it's not a contract it's not binding but you first have to work out negotiate those five bullet points and sign that document then the lawyers go away and they do their lawyer thing where they write completely incomprehensible gobbley book that you would need to pay somebody hundreds of dollars an hour to read and understand for you and that's their job and then they bring you the contract and they basically say and perhaps your lawyer says like this says in legal e what that said in bullet point form and there are even some companies that will put those bullet points basically next to their terms of service voluntarily because they actually don't want to look like they're trying to Hoodwink you into some ridiculous contract to like sell your soul or your first child or whatever if they can do that and if people who are entering into contractual agreements do that literally every day why can we not make it mandatory to do I mean and if we can mandate that cial companies put nutrition facts on their boxes where you get the top line of every you know macro nutrient that you're getting in this cereal why can we not just say you have to give the deal points along with the terms of service so that ordinary people can read them and while we're at it you got to do that on a law too so that Congress people can read the thing they're voting on before they send it to the president's desk why hasn't the Supreme Court said something like that or congress tried to say something like that is that am I being too like statist somehow by insisting that that you know is that is that like government getting involved in in businesses what's the problem with that Poss well in the last 50 years there's been some attempts at that at the Congressional level with the Congressional research Service uh and then at the executive level with the Office of Management and budget and scoring legislation what you know what would it cost all that sort of stuff so yeah that's definitely been one of the um motivating factors in the goo what we used to call the goooo movement the good government movement of which to to hearken back to our last segment RFK Jr has been you know a litigator in for a long time especially on issues of false advertis Ing and and all all the rest so uh yeah it's out there the sentiment is out there I I just want to crack a no it's not really a joke but I I'll just say as usual South Park was there first uh I will not describe the details of this episode in that much because it's not fit for family programming but they had this episode probably 15 years ago now if not 20 called human centipad and it was a play on human centipede this pretty gruesome horror movie I will describe this delicately where a a nasty individual kidnapped a bunch of people and put them end to endend with their digestional tracks all connected from front to end if you know what I mean uh and it and so South Park guys instead of human centi centipede said human centipad is as an iPad and it turns out the kids had agreed in the terms of service with apple that they could be forced into such an arrangement to uh to much much sort of scatalogical and gross uh funny effect in when it's all you know cartoons and and uh all the rest so I I I stumbled across cultural reference point I uh it's just funny it's I you know I had only ever heard that phrase as a cultural reference and only just recently stumbled across the like vinyl album of the original movie soundtrack which then prompted me to read the description of this I guess cult horror classic you people are disgusting that I I cannot believe that's an actual movie that exists anyway yes okay that all it's like if it's like if Fear Factor met saw you know that's sort of what that horror movie was like I yeah I don't want to think about that anymore which means that I think we should move on to our next topic and our last topic speaking of Horrors beyond your human comprehension let's talk about abortion and the abortion debate um we touched on this last time but Mike had the good idea that we could sort of address it a little bit more and that is this developing and I think kind of Novel intr right debate about well I think there's two prongs to this actually and I'll I'll lay out this framework and then you can tell me that it's wrong or at or whatever the the first prong is about the philosophical and indeed constitutional right answer in kind of your platonic seminar room if you were sitting around and discussing what PR lifers should want and how they should go about pursuing their aims and one party to that debate namely I would say the more aggressive and and conservative party wants to use for instance the 14th Amendment and the right to life more generally to argue that this is a constitutional issue and therefore should be decided Nationwide either by act of Congress or perhaps even by Constitutional Amendments specifying that the persons who are guaranteed right to life include unborn babies and and from the moment of conception or or a a slight softer version of that would be we should at least decide sort of when life begins as a constitutional matter because it is the kind of dispute that for example slavery also raised right who's a person who gets these protections and there's a con law argument going on about whether that's correct or whether because abortion would be a matter of criminal law it it must nevertheless rest with the states to decide in the same way that for instance we allow states to write laws about murder even though they couldn't decide that murder is is legal they do decide it in their own fashion that's prong one prong two is irrespective of or or at least detached from the seminar room what is the appropriate electoral and political strategy for accomplishing pro-life AIMS in the country even if abstractly philosophically this is an absolute question that needs Nationwide decision is it smarter first to take the question to the states allow Republican politicians to refrain from taking a Hardline stance on this one way or another so that they can get elected in areas where there's a not a lot of public support for pro-life arguments make the argument personto person neighbor to neighbor state to state until gradually public opinion shifts to the extent that you could feasibly talk about Nationwide abortion bands or restrictions and so forth or final option is that whole idea of a nationwide law on this topic misguided to begin with and what we should now enter into is simply an indefinite period of time where for the rest of our nation's history it's the states that decide this based on debate and dispute within their local communities no those are uh really I think really the key questions um for really the first one so I think Josh kraic is the guy who has been making more most forcefully that 14th Amendment point the personhood that the person mentioned in the 14th amendment applies to uh babies in womb you know that argument though I I I don't know how if that's been in any kind of litigation um if that's been in any kind of like a briefing or anything like that I just don't the extent of that but I know that he is one guy out there and I think that that may speak to the problem of that argument is so early on and actually would be interesting too actually looking back uh to the 14th Amendment uh you know 1868 some of those debates to see if abortion was actually mentioned at all in any way shape or form I know that there were certainly laws on the states at the at that time about it but I think it's it's so you know new in a way and I just don't know if it's mainstreamed even among kind of the legal conservative establishment I I'm just not sure so I'd be wary of you know kind of that being you know a central argument um where enough people are kind of on board now and then going to you know the federal versus the states uh you look back in the the dobs decision and certainly the majority opinion did leave it open for federal legislation uh that it wasn't just states have the right to do this the problem is though is that currently in Congress I just don't see even you know Republicans even if they had the votes to be able to really kind of pull that off I just don't even see a vote like that even being scheduled by the current kind of establishment that we have in the Republican Party um so I think it really does depend on the states um you look at what's happened in the states thus far um really pro-life laws unfortunately have gone really 0 for seven uh there are 10 more States I think coming up here and that's going to be kind of critical to what happens uh kind of going forward you know say if somehow they go over 17 that that that is going to be really really damaging uh to the movement and I just hope that kind of the pro-life movement is is ready for what's coming um and I just think it's going to be a long-term thing I think it's really kind of a a thing outside of politics too I mean there there are a lot of things that have to change in the culture um you look at no faal divorce you look at a bunch of other just policies that we kind of take for granted today um that I think so it it's a cultural problem too and the answer might actually be um culture more than politics although laws can certainly help you look at survey after survey after survey though and this country I mean I would say a decent amount of people are supportive of abortion in the first trimester I would say you look at especially polling with Gen Z men and women uh women are getting much more liberal and abortion is much more important to them and so abortion even though you know row is obviously overturned we're kind of in still a pivotal moment now where it can really kind of fall either way but I think anyway it's going to be a long-term project I guess I'll take all three questions wrapped into one Spencer but I'll start by saying um Josh KCK who's a former John Marshall fellow of the Claremont Institute among other things Josh you know the the if you want the best case or one of the better cases of a young very intelligent practicing attorney who's passionate about the pro-life cause making The Logical argument about life rights and federal structure uh Josh makes a compelling case but then we're LED always as always back to the credential problems which Mike has laid out a lot of them and you have you can start with the current debate around the presidential race and the thing we've brought up before which is you know how much should PR lifers aren pro-lifers maybe single you pro-life voters stay home in the next race because of what they see as Donald Trump's and JD Vance's trimming on this issue uh for political crass political reasons as they see them some of us are led to the you know look if politics is about prudence and about doing more good than harm or avoiding uh the most harm possible it seems the case is pretty clear on that issue that throwing the election to the party that's much worse on that topic in a variety of ways is a bad choice so that's that's sort of the case against it in the macro sense and you know the as well and if you sort of run that down the line past just one election okay so say your National party was somehow because of electoral majorities or even a supreme court makeup able right now to impose a kind of Life Amendment through the 14th through 14th Amendment Jurish Prudence uh or through legislation uh Etc I let's leave aside the Constitutional Amendment for a second but even if you could do it most of the signs of where as Mike said where the culture and the politics are across all the states if you somehow squeaked it through you'd be faced with something I think like what happened to Obama and ObamaCare on steroids which is you would sacrifice your majorities for a lot longer than Obamacare took out his Congressional majorities you know he sacrificed some House Seats especially on this py that he'd built to get Healthcare legislation through um so you you would uh you would arguably do a lot more harm to the pro-life cause over the coming decades than if you had more of a gradualist approach so um and then the Constitutional Amendment look a life amendment should be the ultimate goal um of this movement and I would agree with it but we're so far from the point at which we could get an amendment through uh 2third of both houses of Congress then ratified by three quarters of the states on this issue as to make it basically a nonstarter politically for the time being so that points to what you were talking about Mike I mean there's just got to be a lot more persuading done there's got to be a much more robust presentation of the positive case across the 50 states experimenting with this issue and there probably has to be quite a religious revival as well a Christian Christian religious revival before you get anywhere near to doing what you really want to do on this issue and if you did it in the meantime I think the only real way to do it is to do some uh real violence to small our Republican government in America in the following sense you know I mean and the the common tie between abortion and slavery of course is uh on this question of life and rights and personhood is the Declaration of Independence and you know if all men are created equal they are endowed with certain rights and what follows from all men being created equal is government by consent in some form and if you are unable to persuade a majority or super majority of your fellow citizens that is to get their consent for this sort of big lasting change after 70 years of of uh some movement in the opposite direction uh you know you're doing something other than uh ruling with the consent of the Govern now the whole thing is the whole thing is very much Complicated by just a a common theme from our podcast since the beginning which is we are such a closely divided country and deeply divided country on questions of anthropology life rights and all the rest you know this the the best you're probably going to be able to do without complete National crackup is going to be the state strategy so while pursuing your other tracks you know while pursuing the cultural cause um the million different ways in a country this large that you could press the case to your fellow citizens that morally and constitutionally they should be against uh Limitless abortion and really against most abortions if not all abortions yes press those press that case try to change hearts and minds but um I think uh the Supreme Court handing down uh that uh that their previous ruling means that under the 14th Amendment all abortions are a violation of equal protection is a fantasy and would lead to some sort of Civic National crackup and uh for the time being getting it through Congress it's all sorts of constitutional dubiousness of pass passing National legislation I mean it's sort sorry to keep rambling but that's sort of the same argument as the 14th Amendment because people forget about section five of the 14th Amendment which is that Congress shall have power to enforce the provisions of this so those are twin issues uh and then the Constitutional Amendment side you know we're just you're nowhere not even within spitting distance of such a thing so uh yeah I'm all I'm I'm all for pressing the creative ways of of doing this I I would I would like more creative legislation along the lines of our friend Hadley aras's passion over the last over recent decades you know he was a big mover for the born alive infant protection act and he said look he sort of implicitly acknowledged all the things I just brought up the difficulties Etc he said at the very least can we just make everyone vote on the prospect that should a baby survive in a you can't then kill it and force everyone to vote on this that would be some moral progress it would at least draw lines in the sand and then we can go from there that sort of that sort of stuff and more of it uh would be good no that's that's really interesting I mean one of our ongoing complaints conservatives ongoing complaints about the court and leftist activists in other contexts is this whole thing about substantive due process which Ryan you indicated right it's Congress that's supposed to have the ability to enforce the 14th Amendment and so on and so forth and I I think like we probably just as a matter of principle want to stick to that here as well which is why the more I think about the credentialist question the political issue the more I think it's kind of a no-brainer and I'm surprised at myself because I'm very persuaded probably characterologically this is bound to happen very persuaded by the philosophical arguments that these are actually absolute questions that you have to decide one way or another but at a credential level like the whole point of the slavery analogy is that even or even or perhaps especially in cases where the matter is so passionately offensive to the moral sensibility the idea of discounting a whole class of people from personhood raises these absolute questions that stir naturally intense passions unless you are willing to go to war over those questions which is the natural other thing is this is Civil War unless you're willing to do that you need to do what Lincoln did and exhaust every other possible attempt at compromise and gradualism and it just doesn't seem as if we've done that and it seems as if the people who are clamoring to not do that aren't really Reckoning with what the actual alternative is which is some kind of if not W physical violence than some kind of like violent intervention into the our system of government all that having been said like I do think I'm a little bit more on the fence about the whether constitutional amendment is is the right thing or not I I see the force of the argument that states make murder laws and so they should make these laws too that's said I gestured in my introduction to this other thing which is like if Wisconsin legalized coldblooded Slaughter of random innocence the Supreme Court would step in so there are obviously limits National limits to what you can and can't legalize and I do think that probably you're going to need to get the Supreme Court or the or congress involved in that down the line once you've made all these other steps that you guys are talking about my the only last thing I'll throw in here and then I'll shut up is having come around to the gradualist credentialist argument myself I have one lingering thought about strategy which is that the left is often very good at a kind of strategy in which they will make the maximalist demand of what they want and maybe even a little bit more Universal basic income reparations now defund the police they're they they make these demands in big slogans that initially think seem completely bananas and then what happens is everybody says that's crazy the left is bananas but we can go like one step in that direction and they do that like 20 times and finally you suddenly arrive at the place where you have gotten within the Overton window of doing the extreme thing because they made the case so boldly and extremely to begin with and the one part of the conservative movement that has been successful in replicating that strategy ironically is the pro-life movement which for 50 years made this case that nobody thought you could make that you should overturn roie Wade and they insisted on that they were always very clear about it everybody was like that's never going to happen and then slowly slowly slowly they pushed it into the overt so I I'm saying this more as like I I wonder whether that should be a dimension even as everybody says like quiet down you cooky social conservative stop being so extremist and evangelist about this I wonder whether there isn't a place for the maximalist argument to be made even if it's not made by people running for office precisely to kind of push that idea and and to move people by half degrees toward that idea over time I think the maximalist argument I think there definitely is a place for that I think what I'm seeing now though is a problem where kind of a stand on principle like that is seen as the most moral thing that I think Ryan has said I've said already there's really no room for Prudence at all you think that you know working within our circumstances even acknowledging that is somehow a giveaway and so I think our our political Sense on the right in general I think is atrophied to a great extent and so I think we need to become way more political I mean the irony of like say looking at the Moral Majority in the 1980s of looking at say the Tea Party even of some other movements is we actually need to be more political um you look at you know say Evangelical voters they actually need to vote um in greater numbers than actually they do um the left is very good at mobilizing the left is also very good at appealing to a certain kind of sense of justice um I think that's what they're doing when they're talking about these you know things in principle and we kind of Ratchet slowly toward that well why doesn't that happen on the right because I think that's where the culture is kind of leaning all the time it's leaning toward the left so the inertia is just going that way um so I think that that's why it tends to work for the left and it doesn't work for us but I would say for us it's you know all hands on deck U make the maximalist argument uh push things um like what Hadley Arcus has argued for a long time make them defend basically I mean just absolute infanticide put that on the ballot and make the voters actually see that that's what they're are actually for um you look at even somebody like uh KLA Harris I mean she voted against uh the born alive infant protection act um you look at her record insanely radical you looked at Tim waltz's record in Minnesota very very radical um so but then you also have to look at again you have to look at reality you have to look at where we are as a people um I know this quote gets abused and just used so much but John Adams talking about you the Constitution only being fit for moral people but that's fundamentally correct act um you look at what we've become you you look at where we want to go and that's going to take again a lot of work um it's the progressives look at how long it took them to march through the institutions early progressives then the new left and it's going to take us a long time to get there but we need to be able to understand what the principle is but understand what can actually be achieved given the circumstances right now and I think um the right and and the pro-life movement I think you know need to work on that I'll say one more thing too the pro-life movement it's interesting just in their kind of chiding of trump a lot recently and and and that's completely understandable in some ways row was only o overturned because of trump somebody outside of the movement um someone who had no falty to them at all did not grow up even you know on the right as a conservative at all so I think there needs to be some more thinking done on making kind of perfection kind of the the idol in a way um understanding what Trump is trying to do he's trying to build a National Coalition given the circumstances and and I can understand push back and I can understand that that some people are are very angry over some of what's happened I think JD Vance saying that you know Trump would even VTO National Abortion uh you know legislation even if it came to his desk I get that but at the same time I think we need to put these things in perspective and say okay the other side if they get in this is going to be very bad and they're going to try to re Institute row and even more than that so I think we just need to keep all these things in mind I'll just make a pitch I still think the best book the best resource to help think through these topics of not of abortion but the the very difficult topic of the problem of political principles and morality and politics uh is remains Harry jafa's crisis of the house divided and his discussion of the Lincoln Douglas debates and there are some interludes in there that are particularly applicable to this sort of thing um basically two long Reflections on the polls of Lincoln's um young political and rhetorical skill a reflection on his speech to the men's Lum which is about the problem of tyranny and MOB Justice even in pursuit of noble ends the mob Justice in question being a lot of stuff around the the race and the slaver question and and free speech for that matter that's part of the context of his lysium address and then his speech on the temperance his Temperance address where he kind of gently chides the temperance ladies uh that uh fanatical pursuit of Purity and politics is also very dangerous uh and it's kind of it's uh it's a it's a I'll use the metaphor again it is a kissing cousin of the problem of mob Justice and if you pursue either too incautiously you tear at the Civic Fabric in a way that opens the the door for something much worse that is a real Tyrant so it remains a wonderful book and um full of wisdom and it's not about abortion at all but it is about a very similar topic as we've tried to present it today in some ways which is you know who is a person when and and um how do you protect them wow all the important issues of the day dovetailing neatly to conclude with a pitch for crisis of the house divided you won't get this kind of podcast content anywhere but the Claremont Institute and we got to wrap it up so thank you all thanks to my co- panelists thanks to all of our listeners for listening to the round table if you want to know more about all that we do at Claremont you can visit our various websites the one directly Affiliated this podcast is American mind.org where we post daily online commentary on the news of the day in relation to the founding principles we also have our Flagship quarterly The Claremont Review of Books at Claremont review of books.com and you can check out our DC based center for the American way of life at dc. Claremont org if you want to donate to support any or all of these projects we' be most grateful a little or a lot all everything helps Claremont org donate thanks to our production and Engineering crew jakeen and and Logan zier and thanks to you all or listening we will talk to you next week [Music] [Music]