The Auron MacIntyre Show - Ghost Dancing and the Convention of States ｜ Guest： The Distributist ｜ 2⧸8⧸23

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00:01:29.980 Hey, everybody. How's it going?

00:01:34.140 Thanks for joining me this evening.

00:01:36.400 I've got a great stream with a great guest returning.

00:01:39.400 One of your favorites and one of mine, YouTuber Dave the Distributist.

00:01:43.480 Thanks for coming on, Dave.

00:01:45.020 Hey, how's it going?

00:01:46.780 Great, great.

00:01:47.380 So I've had a lot of people talking about this idea of the convention of the states.

00:01:54.540 A lot of people have been talking about this idea that, you know, if we get together and we invoke Article 5 of the Constitution, we have a way to go ahead and find solutions outside of Washington, D.C.

00:02:08.300 And we're going to be talking a lot of people.

00:02:09.300 And we're going to be talking a lot about that today because I know you've got quite a few ideas about that.

00:02:14.140 But before we get too deep, I want you to introduce people to an idea, one that you had in one of your videos that I think really helps us understand what might be the problem with this solution.

00:02:25.380 I was hoping you could tell people a little bit about the concept of ghost dancing.

00:02:30.040 Okay, so this was not my original turn of phrase.

00:02:33.260 It came from some other blog.

00:02:35.540 I think the blog was Jacobite sometime around 2016.

00:02:39.860 But I elaborated it on in a video.

00:02:42.400 And the specific meme was constitutionalism is the white man's ghost dance.

00:02:47.220 And so just for people, I know probably Yardins doesn't need a lesson in American history, but the ghost dance was a sort of phenomenon that occurred in the late 19th century, specifically with the Plains Sioux Indians and other Plains Indians tribes after they had been defeated by the United States cavalry and cleared out.

00:03:07.320 And their culture was destroyed, and a bunch of their leaders, most famously Sitting Bull, after he kind of had this weird stint in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, took up this weird practice called ghost dancing, which was this strange, what Spengler might call a second religiosity of the Sioux religion, where they believed by dancing this dance to their ancestors,

00:03:33.000 they would sort of resurrect the spirits of dead braves and retake the continental United States, and then their way of life would be fulfilled again. 0.96

00:03:44.460 And so an enormous amount of the political energy of the Sioux Indian tribes became absorbed with this ghost dance cult, including Sitting Bull himself. 0.87

00:03:55.520 And as you might imagine, this resulted in a very famous sort of catastrophe at Wounded Knee.

00:04:02.200 And later, I think there was a shootout, not really a shootout, I think a mistaken killing that killed Sitting Bull himself.

00:04:10.800 And for a while, this idea of ghost dancing was, you know, in my video, this was way back, but I've used this concept many times.

00:04:21.100 And this is something you see a lot from, you know, dispossessed people in the West, and you see this in dispossessed people in a variety of circumstances, is that they gravitate towards things that helped them in the past, that had symbolic meaning for them as a people, but that doesn't really pertain to the times they live in.

00:04:42.200 And they're convinced that by reliving these things, they're going to be able to revivify and take power again.

00:04:50.040 And of course, it never really works out the same way.

00:04:52.440 And I haven't really looked at this specific convention of states, but this and sort of the constant appeals to constitutionalism, this is kind of classic Americanism's ghost dance in many ways.

00:05:08.500 I think everyone can kind of see it now.

00:05:10.620 These are dead letters.

00:05:12.100 These are documents and concepts that no longer have any vivacity to them.

00:05:16.620 Our government doesn't work like this anymore.

00:05:18.420 And because of that, it's impossible.

00:05:21.760 You're yanking at some kind of chain that's not connected to anything.

00:05:25.780 And, you know, in my original video, I think I talked a little bit about how you can try to avoid ghost dancing by being more aware, coming to terms with what you've lost, rather than constantly doubling down on this conception of yourself as an eternal winner.

00:05:42.800 But, you know, there's also this sort of argument, this is just a stage of history we're in, and we have to kind of put up with it.

00:05:47.680 And that's kind of a weird introduction, and that's the basic concept, I guess.

00:05:51.660 Yeah, no, and I wanted to get that in there so that when we explore more of this constitutionalism and kind of the things that it offers to people, the plan that it has, we can have that so that people are reaching for that concept as we talk about a little more.

00:06:07.960 Because we'll go through the idea of the Convention of the States, and then we'll talk a little more about why constitutionalism might not be the answer people are hoping for, and what kind of some of those alternatives might be, some of the realizations they have to come to, and that kind of thing.

00:06:21.900 So let's go ahead and talk a little bit about the Convention of the States plan.

00:06:26.980 So the plan for the Convention of the States is basically you have the Article V of the Constitution, and it says that you can go ahead and get enough states together where they can have a convention outside of Washington, D.C.

00:06:38.540 And basically the idea is, well, D.C. is broken, right?

00:06:42.240 So the vast majority of constitutional amendments, of course, have been proposed by the actual U.S. legislature, right?

00:06:50.480 Only a handful have been proposed by state legislatures through the three-fourths and then passed through the two-thirds of the U.S. legislature.

00:06:59.820 Usually it's the House and Senate proposing, and then the rest get ratified through the state legislatures.

00:07:07.960 But there's a part of Article V that allows you to actually do a convention outside of Washington, D.C., and the idea is, well, if we do this, we can go ahead and limit some of the big corruption in Washington, right?

00:07:21.160 We can get around all of the deep state, or we can get around all of the swamp, and we'll be able to do things.

00:07:28.620 They have a list of different things they want to do.

00:07:31.380 They want to be able to go ahead and repeal the 16th Amendment. 0.55

00:07:34.840 They want to be able to go ahead and make it much more difficult to pass any kind of spending bills.

00:07:40.400 There's a whole bunch of different things, term limits on Congress.

00:07:44.560 There would be all these things that the states could do because they're not motivated in the way that the federal legislature is motivated, right?

00:07:52.400 The idea is that, well, of course, congressmen aren't going to pass term limits on themselves, so we'll do it from this convention of the states.

00:08:00.080 And by doing this, we can kind of circumvent all of these corruptions in Washington, D.C., and democracy will just kind of flourish once it's kind of liberated from all of this morass.

00:08:12.840 Why would that be a problem?

00:08:14.140 Why wouldn't that be a workable solution for people?

00:08:16.700 They just get out outside of Washington, D.C., and they can make these changes.

00:08:19.880 Yeah, okay, so maybe I'll use an analogy here.

00:08:22.320 I have a kid that really likes watching video games, which is probably not good for him, but sometimes we allow it.

00:08:27.840 And he likes pretending to play them by having a controller, but it's not plugged in, right?

00:08:34.940 That's more or less the problem we have with this convention of states.

00:08:38.100 This convention, this idea is predicated on this idea that somehow Washington is controlled or connected somehow vitally to this convention.

00:08:50.900 What actually connects them to this convention?

00:08:54.740 What binds them to it?

00:08:55.880 Is there an army that's going to enforce it?

00:08:57.640 Are there government officials in Washington, D.C. that these bureaucrats owe allegiance to?

00:09:04.320 Short of just, unless you're organizing a shadow government from the convention and then have individual state bodies, like individual police departments, pledge allegiance to the convention as a sovereign entity over that of D.C.,

00:09:17.880 there's no connective tissue that will link decisions made in the convention to anything that goes on via D.C., other than this article of the Constitution, which, I mean, to me, it's just so obvious that the Constitution is completely dead.

00:09:34.780 We ignore a whole swath of the Constitution, and the only thing that we have to justify that is a stack full of legal jurisprudence that sometimes is respected and sometimes isn't.

00:09:47.880 And this is, you know, so the logic here is sort of a missing step, I suppose.

00:09:58.720 The problem here, obviously, is that no one in my specific circle or in my kind of cultural circle would be kind of attracted to this idea.

00:10:09.880 I would actually wonder what a defender of this convention would say if I asked them this question.

00:10:14.660 Because behind every idea of power or of sort of government solution, there has to be a bond that connects you to the person who's actually making the decision that can actually pull power in a direction that it doesn't want to go.

00:10:31.060 And I don't see where that connected tissue is.

00:10:33.340 It's certainly not the Constitution.

00:10:34.640 Well, I think that's what they're kind of banking on, right?

00:10:38.420 They're saying Article 5 gives the power, right?

00:10:41.480 And so if you do the thing, then the people running the government have to listen because it says so in the Constitution.

00:10:48.380 But I think we kind of both know that that doesn't really get you very far.

00:10:52.720 For instance, one of the things that they want to do is rein in the Commerce Clause and return it to its original meaning, right?

00:10:59.040 But the very fact that the Commerce Clause is so elastic and basically allows for anything through our current system kind of shows that formally changing the wording wouldn't actually rein in the power, right?

00:11:12.260 Because if it did, then we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.

00:11:15.240 And I can test that.

00:11:16.540 I can test what you just said there.

00:11:18.300 Like the way you said it, you made it sound like the Commerce Clause itself.

00:11:22.560 Like the elasticity lies inside of the language or the clause itself.

00:11:27.800 Now, the elasticity was imposed upon the clause and imposed upon many parts of the Constitution by the government itself.

00:11:36.800 The Constitution does not imbue power.

00:11:39.000 The Constitution is basically a document outlining how the government is supposed to give power or basically cede power to you or not use its power.

00:11:51.240 If the government's not following the Constitution, the Constitution cannot be used as a way to bring them back in line.

00:11:57.800 This is sort of – it's a self-looking ice cream cone problem.

00:12:02.500 I'm probably mixing my metaphors here.

00:12:04.640 But it's this bizarre idea that – I don't know.

00:12:10.060 I kind of want to overuse metaphors.

00:12:11.800 But there's no way that the Constitution is going to bind a government that only exists because that clause is ignored.

00:12:20.060 A whole swath of the government would be illegitimate if the Constitution was interpreted in a literal sense.

00:12:28.780 And so the government would be posed with the prospect of abolishing itself or ignoring the convention.

00:12:34.560 And so it would be this shorter to have the convention literally declare the government to be illegitimate and start issuing orders.

00:12:45.920 Yeah.

00:12:46.120 And then you have a whole new adventure.

00:12:48.580 Yeah.

00:12:48.980 Yeah.

00:12:49.240 That would be – I mean, that would be weird.

00:12:51.980 I don't know actually.

00:12:53.620 I mean, I think that the default would be that the government would try to ignore the convention for as long as possible as well.

00:12:59.040 But at least it would be sort of an awareness of what's actually going on.

00:13:05.740 The convention has the power that the institutions that possibly would swear allegiance to it give it.

00:13:12.820 And the Constitution has the power that the institutions that surround it give it.

00:13:16.900 And all of the institutions in D.C. do not give the Constitution – they don't give the Constitution any more power than they absolutely need to or that was needed to justify their existence as a bureaucracy.

00:13:31.020 And for the most of the post-New Deal institutions, which is most of Washington, D.C., this means ignoring most of the limited government portions of the Constitution, which are most parts that Red America likes that aren't strictly procedural. 0.88

00:13:45.180 Yeah, the 10th Amendment seems a little silly at this point, right?

00:13:50.020 Yeah, of course.

00:13:51.180 So I guess to steelman this a little bit, okay?

00:13:55.360 So I think what most people who are fans of this procedure would say is, well, but we do see the law restrain the government.

00:14:04.740 We do see wins occur, right?

00:14:07.180 There are situations where the government's power is restricted by the Supreme Court rulings or by other actions.

00:14:15.280 They are forced to remit certain things at certain times.

00:14:19.500 Maybe it's not as much as we want, but the process can work if properly applied.

00:14:25.180 What would be the problem with kind of that idea?

00:14:28.420 I mean, really, it helps to think about it from the perspective of my own kind of shitlibby blue state perspective.

00:14:37.860 The Supreme Court is considered a legitimate institution, and it's been granted that legitimacy basically through the narrative that blue America tells itself about America, which runs through civil rights.

00:14:50.700 Because the Supreme Court has been granted this extreme prestige, it has a certain amount of authority that might otherwise be discounted.

00:14:59.380 If the Supreme Court had been sort of an anti-civil rights backwater or sort of a bastion of resistance against civil rights in the 70s, I think the impression of this body by a ruling class would be much different, and there would be a lot of regulations around it.

00:15:15.120 And there would be a lot of questioning of sort of the authority that it has.

00:15:21.240 The Supreme Court has the authority it does because the ruling class needs its past rulings to be legitimate against explicit public opinion.

00:15:32.380 One of them was Roe v. Wade.

00:15:33.880 There's actually a lot more important ones having to do with sort of voting rights and civil rights law and affirmative action and stuff like that, that if they're overturned or questioned, huge swaths of the legitimacy of the current government kind of fall away.

00:15:51.020 And so because of that, the Supreme Court is sort of a vulnerability for the established United States empire as it exists.

00:16:02.300 And it has to sort of obey that body as the decisions it makes comes down.

00:16:07.820 But it will increasingly try to find a way around that if it feels like it can permanently secure another branch of the government, possibly Congress, possibly the House.

00:16:18.100 That's really interesting. I hadn't thought of it exactly that way, but it's a really good point that because so much of the revolution was placed and kind of forwarded through the Supreme Court, that's why they have to pay it the amount of respect they do, even though now it might be working slightly against them.

00:16:37.880 And so there's kind of this necessity to play it carefully because you can't just immediately snuff the Supreme Court's power out or discredit it because so much of the regime is built out of past Supreme Court rulings.

00:16:50.600 People don't remember this, but like the civil rights started in the Supreme Court with Brown v. Bort.

00:16:54.460 I mean, you remember that that started because they and I always wondered about this, Aaron, you know, they what they did is they took dolls into, you know, third grade classrooms and they took the kids aside and they showed them a black doll and a white doll.

00:17:08.760 And they said, which doll is the good doll? And, you know, more kids, even black ones chose the white doll.

00:17:13.840 And the idea was, is that this negative perception of their own race was granted to them by like the segregation gave them a negative perception of their own race.

00:17:23.360 Now, the study wasn't complete because it appeared that integrated black children actually had a more negative perception of themselves based on the study.

00:17:31.660 But but the the I've always wondered at one point is Rufo going to take Christopher Rufo going to take dolls into CRT classrooms and ask third grade the exact same question.

00:17:42.640 Yeah, it might get a very different result.

00:17:44.740 And I'm wondering, like, how long would I mean, because eventually, you know, eventually you're going to have third grade kid white kids going like, oh, yeah, the white doll is the bad one. 0.82

00:17:52.660 Right. Right. 0.81

00:17:53.440 They aren't already in some areas of this country.

00:17:56.320 Yeah.

00:17:57.260 No, I think that's right.

00:17:58.620 No, sorry.

00:17:59.020 That was a digression.

00:18:00.140 I couldn't I couldn't help but kind of wonder that.

00:18:01.800 But no, the Supreme Court's where this comes from.

00:18:04.620 Yeah, absolutely.

00:18:05.480 Well, so this is a little bit of rabbit hole, but it's an interesting one.

00:18:08.480 So I think we should chase it.

00:18:09.500 So as we see, obviously, you know, we had Roe, which is a huge decision.

00:18:14.100 And there's a lot of people very confidently stating I'm not sure how true this is, but there are a lot of people very confidently stating that we're going to see affirmative action go down, that the court has their eye on it.

00:18:25.780 I believe Clarence Thomas specifically named it in, you know, his his his decision as one of the things that that could be on the chopping block.

00:18:36.500 And so I think a lot of people are under the impression that this might be something that we could see in the near future.

00:18:43.100 Now, if that happened, you know what I'm going to say, right?

00:18:47.920 Go ahead.

00:18:48.240 I mean, I what I'm from California.

00:18:50.920 This is this is already I come from the future.

00:18:54.460 It's called California.

00:18:55.560 And this happened in 1997.

00:18:58.160 We haven't had affirmative action in California for almost 30 years.

00:19:02.560 Right.

00:19:02.960 And that's why there are no racial preferences in California.

00:19:06.840 They don't disappear.

00:19:08.520 They disappeared.

00:19:09.240 No, no one does them.

00:19:10.620 They're against the law.

00:19:11.720 Don't you know?

00:19:13.240 No, of course not.

00:19:14.140 I mean, this is this is not I mean, you know, for I hate to burst people's bubbles here, but you can't command a bureaucracy that's supported by elements of the actual government and the legal system itself to do something that it doesn't want to do.

00:19:28.800 If it feels morally justified in doing the opposite and and it's not going and there's no one going to enforce this law.

00:19:35.680 You know, the the the UC Berkeley for a year or two after the decision came down to ban affirmative action and and sort of well, I mean, it was mainly state schools, but UCs qualify as kind of a hybrid system.

00:19:52.520 And.

00:19:53.080 And since their their land grant schools, a meaningless detail and for a few years, Cal actually had to sort of do a fail, a fair playing field and like they had entire classes that were almost entirely like Asian, but but then they wisened up and they realized like, hey, wait a minute, no one's enforcing this because, you know, no, like imagine if you were, you know, 0.98

00:20:18.860 if you were caught in Harvard or Berkeley passing over qualified African students in favor of white ones, I mean, what would happen to your career?

00:20:29.240 I mean, there would be a crater, right?

00:20:31.240 Not only would it be a crater, everyone who had touched you in the last, you know, two quarters of activity, their career would also be a crater.

00:20:39.900 The entire hiring, the entire admissions committee would be fired.

00:20:43.860 Uh, but all that happened was the, the, the university of California changed its policies and they continued to do preferential, uh, admissions under the table.

00:20:57.380 And now you have virtually the same system that existed in the nineties, if not sort of more egregiously biased towards the groups that, uh, that are sort of the favorite, the favorite in groups.

00:21:07.700 And, and, and CRT that the ideologies that are called CRT by a Rufo, uh, everyone knows what they are. 0.95

00:21:15.120 They're more powerful than ever and more necessary than ever to keep this going.

00:21:20.620 So you think that even if these formal restraints are removed, you're just going to see this stuff perpetuate through the system.

00:21:28.420 In any way, there's not going to be, that's not going to throw any kind of crisis, uh, into the legitimacy of the Supreme court or the need for the left to kind of distance themselves or depower, uh, it in some way.

00:21:40.240 Um, I mean, it's not as uniform as it is in California.

00:21:45.100 It's not going to make, uh, Harvard and Yale and all of the Ivy leagues and even ones that are owned by the government, uh, they don't have to, this won't even be a speed bump for them.

00:21:58.960 Like it was for Cal, uh, they, they already have the model worked out.

00:22:03.440 They can probably just take the emission policies from straight from UC Berkeley and tweak them accordingly, you know, for, for, for an Ivy league environment and just do the exact same thing and get roughly the same results.

00:22:14.280 Right.

00:22:15.160 Uh, that's, that's not going to cause them any problems.

00:22:17.560 What it will be able to do, it will create issues for state schools that are in states that have government apparatuses that look like they might take this seriously.

00:22:28.340 So think of sort of like flagship schools in the South, sort of maybe your LSUs or something like that. 0.98

00:22:35.120 I mean, that's a bad example because I've heard there's a lot of shit libs and there's a lot of shit libs in all university admissions, right. 0.97

00:22:41.200 But, but in state schools in red States with, you know, a hands-on executive branch sudden and, you know, and, and the Supreme court ruling suddenly this becomes a little bit more of a dangerous game. 0.99

00:22:55.040 And so there, there's, there's an opportunity there for, uh, you know, the, this to be, uh, a little bit more interesting.

00:23:04.000 Now, if people like Ron DeSantis are smart or, you know, governors like him are smart, uh, they'll wait until people try to violate these regulations, create a scandal, and then use it as an excuse to completely purge their administrative staff out of, uh, state schools.

00:23:20.580 And, uh, if they're smart, right.

00:23:23.900 What you don't want to do is just sort of issue commands to bureaucrats that, you know, aren't loyal to you, um, or, or hope that their fear will keep them in line because they're more permanent than the elected politicians.

00:23:35.920 They're trying to hold their feet to the fire.

00:23:38.360 They might be even more permanent than the ruling at the Supreme court itself might be granted that there could be further action in the legislator or the executive branch to put more Supreme court councils on, or to maybe lean on the existing judges that are on the bench right now to get them to make a decision in time to save.

00:23:58.100 Uh, nine, so to speak, you know, like the classic new deal, um, pressuring of the, of the Supreme court, uh, near court packing as it might be.

00:24:06.440 Uh, and so, I mean, this is, it offers an interesting opportunity, but it just, it's, it's not, nothing is automatic.

00:24:13.700 All these things are as opportunities, power vacuums that require people to actually step into the void and take specific actions to make sure that the power does not flow back to the cathedral, so to speak, flow back to the, uh, the, the unelected deep state.

00:24:31.000 And if there can be an alternative power that does this and consolidates things away from the center, then things start getting interesting again, but, but it doesn't look anything like, oh, well, no, there's this natural.

00:24:43.480 There's this natural inertia that takes us back to dead center of constitutional government that does not exist anymore.

00:24:50.100 Absolutely. Yeah. So I want to ask you a couple of things. I want to ask you about a little bit about what Chris Rufo is doing. I want to ask you a little more about the convention of the States and maybe if it has some utility in other areas, but before we move on with that, let's go ahead and talk about our sponsor for today's show real quick guys.

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00:27:20.200 All right. So we're talking about the convention of the states here. And, you know, one thing, one argument you could say is what about the utility of having this and forcing the government to just say no?

00:27:33.600 Right. That you get this convention together. You go through all the formal stuff. You have this convention through Article five. You pass an amendment or something. Right. And then the government's got to say no. Right.

00:27:47.220 Like they have to formally come out and say we ignore the Constitution or they've got to fabricate a narrative. I'm sure they'll come up with some narrative. Right.

00:27:55.180 But yeah, they'll come up with a narrative. Right. But they'll see. But could there be some value in forcing everyone to see at least that the Constitution is not being respected by the government in this way?

00:28:07.960 I mean, look, I think that there is a lot of value in doing things like this because these sort of grand political gestures, if they don't cost you a lot of money. Right.

00:28:18.840 There's always an opportunity cost. There is always sort of a cost of showing your hand on the political stage.

00:28:24.480 And, of course, if you're doing something like January 6th, there's enormous legal cost and safety cost to yourself.

00:28:32.900 So these stunts, though, that being said, they do have a political utility in teaching people just how meaningless the Constitution actually is in our present world or present order in the United States.

00:28:45.160 The question really is, who is the audience? Who needs who needs to have this grand demonstration in order to learn that the Constitution isn't in effect in the way that our founders intended it be in when it was ratified in the late 18th century?

00:29:01.900 I mean, just, you know, just today, and this is not bedpost in here because this is apparently released by an established journalist.

00:29:10.740 We learned, and I think it was the Times of London reported this.

00:29:14.820 We can confirm that the American deep state was the culprit behind the dynamiting of Nord Stream 2.

00:29:24.760 Yeah. Yeah. From what I've seen, some people are questioning the validity of that report.

00:29:29.380 I'm not an expert in this, so I can't know for sure.

00:29:31.300 But what we can't say is this person's a Pulitzer Prize winner.

00:29:34.540 Not that that qualifies anybody. We don't want to use the enemy's credentials.

00:29:38.600 But a lot of people are saying that it feels like there's something that could be very valid in this story, even though there is some pushback to it.

00:29:48.540 But the assertion is, yeah, that the CIA had some play in this, right?

00:29:52.580 Well, I mean, we suspect that, and we know at this stage that these deep state entities are interfering with Twitter, certainly.

00:30:02.500 Sure, sure, of course, yeah. I'm not saying it's anywhere beyond them at all.

00:30:05.480 Okay, but I mean, like, it's just, you know, we have essentially an entire unelected government that is going around and doing, frankly, extra legal shit, basically on a daily basis to influence political outcomes.

00:30:18.920 Basically pulling the line for one particular party of politicians and power holders in Washington.

00:30:26.500 The idea that this is part of some kind of constitutional apparatus, that this is just the wheels of good government turning, seemed to be really farcical at this stage.

00:30:37.400 I'm not so sure what the audience is that needs a convention to teach them that the Constitution doesn't work the way it was supposed to work in the late 18th century.

00:30:48.380 Certainly, increasingly in my state, people don't care about the Constitution anymore, because at the same time that they wrote that Constitutional Convention stuff, they wrote the three-fifths clause.

00:30:59.940 And, you know, don't tell them that, you know, the abolitionists wanted the three-fifths clause to be the zero clause.

00:31:05.720 The only thing that they take from that clause, they don't care.

00:31:08.900 The only thing they care about that clause is the demonstration that this is a racist document and it's original incarnation.

00:31:14.820 So, Blue America, for the most part, is not going to care that huge swaths of the original unamended document of the Constitution are being ignored.

00:31:26.260 They don't care about that.

00:31:27.500 They only care about the new civil rights constitution.

00:31:29.560 And the only value they have for the old Constitution is as a staging area and as a platform for caring for the new vision of diversity, equity, and inclusion that was born from that like a new covenant.

00:31:46.360 So, I mean, it would be really, you know, it would be like trying to convince, well, I'm really mixing my metaphors, but it's like trying to, you know, convince that there's some problem in Talmudic law, Christian.

00:32:02.000 Aren't you worried that there's this contradiction in Talmudic law of the ancient Hebrews before the second temple was constructed?

00:32:09.580 I mean, why would you care, right?

00:32:10.800 This is not, I mean, sure, it's the ancestor of your religion, right?

00:32:15.800 It's, you know, this was a religion, this might have been a religion that was important to the prophets that prophesied Jesus is coming.

00:32:22.260 But you don't follow this temple law at all.

00:32:25.380 And so contradictions or breaches of that covenant or regulation don't apply to you in any meaningful sense.

00:32:32.860 It's a curiosity.

00:32:34.080 And so, I mean, I guess the only people this would convince, I suppose, would be people in red states or people who actually think that they live under some kind of constitutional republic.

00:32:45.780 To me, I think that the problem is much more, is much larger.

00:32:51.940 The problem is not realizing that the constitution isn't in effect anymore.

00:32:56.640 The problem is realize, it should be realizing that a constitution is secondary to peoplehood, faith, conviction, and community.

00:33:06.740 And the constitution was only a representation of those forces in American life.

00:33:12.880 And that once those forces waned, the constitution was just an ephemeral form that dried up and blew away like a cicada skin when the cicada actually moves out of it.

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00:33:54.960 Yeah, no, I think that's true.

00:33:57.900 And I think you're right about the audience, right?

00:33:59.700 It's not going to convince any blue staters there in exactly kind of the situation you're talking about. 0.99

00:34:05.240 I will say there are still a large amount of, I think, kind of mainstream conservatives, people in red states who still are not aware of this.

00:34:14.040 I understand that it feels like old hat for us at this point.

00:34:17.140 We've been talking about this for a while, so it feels maybe obvious or something.

00:34:20.880 But there is still a significant portion of the population that is totally bought into the idea that, you know, at some point, the government will have to abide by the Constitution.

00:34:30.880 And then I know it feels like it should just be obvious that that's not the case by now.

00:34:35.680 But there is, I think, still value in demonstrating that to people.

00:34:41.640 Now, maybe this, you know, convention of the states isn't the proper way to do that.

00:34:46.860 But it is, I think, worthy of constantly making that case, if only because there are still a shocking number of people, again, that just have not quite grasped it yet.

00:34:56.900 But you're, of course, right.

00:34:57.800 And I've done a video, you know, going through Joseph DeMastra's, you know, gender principles of political constitutions.

00:35:04.520 And he talks about all of the things that you're talking about there, that, you know, constitutions are just the final formalization of things that already existed inside your society.

00:35:12.600 And the more you have to formalize, the more trouble you're in.

00:35:16.040 And I just saw, actually, I just tweeted out before the show, there was, I forget what state it was, but there was some, you know, lib magazine that was complaining that there's a law being passed.

00:35:26.920 And I think, you know, Milwaukee or something, where people will be able to misgender students.

00:35:33.120 It's shocking, you know.

00:35:34.460 And by that, of course, they mean students will be allowed to tell the truth, right?

00:35:38.300 And the people don't understand, like, the fact that you need to pass a piece of legislation to defend people's right to say obviously true things is a problem.

00:35:48.600 It's worse than that.

00:35:49.400 They will not be compelled to tell lies.

00:35:51.720 Right, right.

00:35:52.600 Yes.

00:35:53.380 Yes.

00:35:53.820 It's even worse than being allowed to tell the truth.

00:35:56.240 Yeah, you have to pass a piece of legislation to protect students from the legal ramifications of refusing to be compelled to lie.

00:36:06.980 To tell a lie.

00:36:07.900 Yes.

00:36:08.820 That's where we are.

00:36:10.280 Yeah.

00:36:10.540 Once you're there, once that's what the law is doing, then you're well past a problem of just what's written down on paper, right?

00:36:18.820 Yeah.

00:36:19.600 Yeah.

00:36:19.900 Yeah, that's, you know, this is, we can't even speak, we're not speaking the same language.

00:36:25.160 You know, we don't have the same motivating moral concepts or motivating moral aesthetics.

00:36:30.740 And it's worse than that because the leftist narrative is faltering and crumbling.

00:36:36.360 You know, it could crumble for another hundred years.

00:36:37.940 Like I said before, all we know is that it's reached an inflection point where it's now headed in a downward, you know, cresting direction.

00:36:46.740 Well, we don't know how long this process is going to take before it actually falls apart for real.

00:36:52.440 But as their narrative crumbles and its believability crumbles, their vindictiveness increases.

00:36:58.560 And so now not only are we speaking a different language, there needs to be constantly a scapegoat.

00:37:03.140 And that scapegoat is going to have to be Red America or specifically Red White Legacy America, as is increasingly the case. 0.77

00:37:10.620 This is sort of the tragedy because, you know, as I always say, what the Sioux Indians, what they needed to do in the 19th century would be to lobby for their increased independence and financial self-sustainability and their ability to demand things like alcohol from their communities, which was killing them.

00:37:29.060 And, you know, they were obsessed with the past when that was going on.

00:37:33.600 But what Red America needs to do more than anything else, it needs to come up with a concept of itself as a community that does not extend from some kind of loyalty to an apparatus of the United States government.

00:37:49.180 And the Constitution, as noble as it is, is an apparatus of the United States government.

00:37:56.000 So and right now, Red America, White Middle America can't even come up with a good word for itself. 0.90

00:38:03.220 And you notice more than anything else, that's what the what's trying to be suppressed more than anything else by by by by sort of the legacy press by the cathedral, by by the United States deep state.

00:38:16.060 So let me ask you, then, if we don't think this works, let me ask you about something that seems like it might be working.

00:38:24.040 You know, we've got Chris Rufo, right?

00:38:26.720 And he is down in Florida at the moment.

00:38:30.300 He's taking over basically this school in Sarasota, Florida, with the help of Ron DeSantis.

00:38:38.200 And he's trying to, you know, pass different things through the I believe they're working on an executive order that's going to ban diversity, equity, inclusion departments in universities there.

00:38:51.880 So we see like actually taking scalps, taking names.

00:38:55.960 Right.

00:38:56.240 Like so what do you think about this approach?

00:38:59.380 If you can't change things through the Constitution, if that doesn't work, what about changing the law in this manner?

00:39:06.220 Do you think that that can get the job done?

00:39:08.260 Is this work worth doing?

00:39:10.380 Is that a promising outlet?

00:39:12.000 I think it's better.

00:39:13.460 I mean, it's it's it's good.

00:39:17.540 I don't know the details of this, and I kind of want to interrogate the details.

00:39:22.240 Sure.

00:39:23.100 I'm aware of sort of two projects Rufo is doing.

00:39:25.460 Is there not two?

00:39:26.960 There's one that's the creation of a new university and another one that's sort of passing regulations on top of existing public universities.

00:39:34.760 So it's there are two projects, right?

00:39:36.480 Yeah, there's twofold.

00:39:37.340 One, he's not creating a new university, but basically he's been placed on the board and the board, the board of the new college, I believe is the name of it in Sarasota.

00:39:48.200 And basically they have voting majority.

00:39:50.340 So they more or less have have control of the board in that college.

00:39:55.460 And so I believe they got rid of the president.

00:39:58.060 They got rid of the general counsel, their cleaning house.

00:40:01.540 And then on top of that, yes, he's also working with the governor to strike these things, these diversity, equity and inclusion departments from other universities.

00:40:11.660 He just went after, for instance, the Florida State University because they had a scholarship that was only for minority students explicitly, and they've now retracted that from their website, that kind of thing.

00:40:24.000 Do you think there's serious headway that can be made there?

00:40:26.120 Or is this another form of ghost dancing, a slightly more effective one?

00:40:29.040 What do you think?

00:40:29.480 Well, I mean, it's a slightly more effective one.

00:40:31.900 It's, I mean, it's not ghost dancing because it's interfacing with reality.

00:40:37.520 Ghost dancing is, is basically a form of cope where you're preferring a comforting allusion to, I mean, the ghost dancing wasn't not like an ineffective military strategy.

00:40:48.360 It was the pantomime of a military operation that was, I mean, Wounded Knee was not really a battle, it was a massacre, right?

00:40:57.980 And, and because this was not a military strategy that was ineffective, it was just the pantomime of a past behavior that looked military enough to fire upon, basically.

00:41:08.560 And the, in Rufo's case, I think this is a lot less like ghost dancing and just like, kind of, I mean, it's headed in the right direction.

00:41:18.160 So I don't want to say it's a bad idea because it is actually, it's, it's grabbing the bags, it's grabbing the institutions, it's creating enclaves that can be used to train, you know, to basically train more elite people that are still within the value system of, I mean.

00:41:37.240 It doesn't even really matter which value system, as long as it's not progressive at this stage, not the deep state's value system that are, that are sort of isolated from that.

00:41:47.100 The problem is, is that it's still, it's still not, it needs to go further.

00:41:53.300 And the problem is, as soon as we stop kind of pushing in this direction is when the, this will start to unravel.

00:42:01.700 University systems don't exist as sort of hermetically sealed bubbles.

00:42:05.760 They hire faculty and faculty are hired on the basis of their research reputation.

00:42:12.060 The research reputation is controlled by appointment and controlled by journal publication.

00:42:17.660 And those are connected to, it's, that's a, that's a circulatory system that goes to the cathedrals universities.

00:42:24.140 Uh, so what are you doing is, is the university going to use that prestige system?

00:42:30.980 Is it going to help professors succeed in that prestige, prestige system?

00:42:36.380 Uh, because if it doesn't, then no university professor that has higher ambitions is going to want to go there.

00:42:42.720 And if it does, then it's in the process of being converted already, right?

00:42:49.080 Because prestige in that university will be governed by that prestige system of journals and appointments.

00:42:55.640 You know, if your appointments to this, these Florida universities is not a stepping stone for yourself getting appointed to Brown or Harvard or Stanford or Cal,

00:43:05.300 then it is by definition, a less important appointment.

00:43:10.120 Uh, what are you actually influencing?

00:43:12.840 The only alternative is if you're actually, and this is another danger, if you're actually, if this appointment is sort of like a way of getting into the Florida, govern, governing bureaucracy.

00:43:23.700 Right.

00:43:24.380 I mean, and that has its own dangers because you're, you're doing the exact thing that universities aren't supposed to do.

00:43:31.480 Right.

00:43:32.460 Uh, they're going to be good at being universities.

00:43:34.640 So the, the only way to eventually, uh, fix this problem is to come up with an alternative, uh, network of prestige and, and truth and language that exists completely independently from that of the current university system.

00:43:52.020 That doesn't give a, that doesn't give a, would actually a whole, if you, if Harvard hates you, that's actually a career achievement.

00:43:59.600 If Harvard hating you as a career achievement and you, you have people coming to your studying for six years just so Harvard can hate them more, then, then you've succeeded.

00:44:09.320 Uh, but, but, you know, if you're playing the Harvard likes me as career achievement game, your university is going to become corrupted by the same means.

00:44:18.360 And I, I know Rufo knows this, my, I don't know he knows this.

00:44:23.080 There have been some social media posts that indicate that may, he might not have internalized this lesson quite enough, but, um, but, but I, I suspect that he knows something of this because he, he, he, he listens to people in the Claremont circles and they certainly know this.

00:44:39.740 That this has to be the step to creating an entirely independent system of prestige that, that doesn't give a damn about what the regular university system thinks or what the experts think.

00:44:50.220 And that has its own system for testing truth and, and, and, and veracity and, and actually holds the, the old system somewhat, not entirely in contempt.

00:45:00.520 Well, wouldn't this be a good step then talking about what you were saying there where red America needs a way to secure a certain level of autonomy, find a way outside of the system. 0.92

00:45:12.900 So maybe a convention of the state sweeping in and, you know, fixing the Congress and the, and the, and the deep state and clearing out the swamp, maybe, maybe that's not the way forward.

00:45:23.440 But if you have a, if you have a plan where you can perhaps use advantageous Supreme court rulings, like striking down a firm of action, and you have strong governors who can use that as a, a tool to then wield, to generate some space between them and the authority of Washington, DC by cleaning out a lot of those, you know, that infrastructure and that kind of thing.

00:45:48.740 Is that a way that then, you know, guys like Rufo or people who are copying that strategy and other States and other governors could use to create some kind of coalition to allow for that alternative, that, that gap between that you're talking about between them and the current, you know, deep state, the current influence, the cathedral, all that stuff.

00:46:10.380 Yeah. I mean, this is, we're, we're on dangerous grounds because we're, we're starting to talking about grabbing sovereignty away from the U S government.

00:46:19.560 But if you did want to straddle this line and, you know, I think that I don't really think that the government's itching for a fight.

00:46:30.720 So maybe this is the time to do it right now.

00:46:33.220 But if, if the convention of States was to do something like issue a null constitution, you know, this would be a list of federal statutes and regulations, the, all States adhering to this null constitution would just not enforce because it recognizes being not constitutional.

00:46:49.100 So these would be regionally judicially vetoed in a, and, and, and the way to phrase this, so this wouldn't be treasonous would be, we are respecting the constitution by not enforcing these illegitimate unconstitutional measures as agreed by the valid government body, the convention of States.

00:47:08.160 And this would create a huge, and this would create a huge, uh, where huge swaths of federal law and regulation would be effectively null at the continental United States, especially if all institutions before the convention agreed to adhere or specifically not enforce, adhere to any, uh, veto, um, regulate or, or, you know,

00:47:32.980 nullification that was handed down by the convention in, in deference to the real constitution that would, that would actually have an, a huge effect on the federal bureaucracy's ability to, to enforce itself and, and gain, especially if it's taking revenue out of, uh, of these, out of these regulations.

00:47:53.240 Now, you know, what would, what would the reaction from the United States government be if you did that?

00:47:59.440 Not good.

00:48:01.220 Right.

00:48:01.820 Sure.

00:48:01.960 Um, I mean, you know, the question is how many, how many people, it would be sort of optically costly for them to do something about this, uh, and, and their default would be to ignore it, but it also would cost them money and power.

00:48:17.860 So I think that there would be kind of this conflict in, in, inside the regime about how they want to punish this or how they want to go after the, the deviant States that, that adhere to this kind of policy.

00:48:29.740 Uh, but, but, but, but this would be a way to actually contest power away from the federal government.

00:48:34.940 Yeah.

00:48:35.320 And that's true.

00:48:36.100 And, and I was even thinking again, as a, really a, a, a more, a more slow, uh, set, you know, separation of those things, you know, just power drifting away as each one of these States, you know, ignores a more and more of this stuff on their own or, or is able to create some, some separation.

00:48:53.860 But yeah, I mean, obviously a larger one would, would be far more sudden either way.

00:48:58.340 It's hard to know exactly how the government would react, but.

00:49:01.660 Well, I mean, the States sort of doing this one by one has the problem that they're easy to pick off and isolate.

00:49:08.160 Right.

00:49:08.960 And, and if, if a bunch of them do this at once, it becomes this sort of general crisis that doesn't have a single point of origin.

00:49:18.840 It just feels like a lot of people to stop doing it at once.

00:49:21.760 And if it was done right, it would be vague enough to not have a specific center.

00:49:26.020 I'm sure that the, the, the regime would try to find some sort of ringleader to blame this all on, right?

00:49:32.660 Like they have Juan DeSantis, but if it was done well enough such that it was a bunch of individual institutions and stage States, all pledging allegiance to the nullification decision that was handled procedurally.

00:49:45.740 I mean, I know this is oligarchy.

00:49:48.360 I know this is a decision by committee, but it is kind of like a hack, right?

00:49:52.120 You're, you're kind of sending, you're kind of sending an oligarchy to, you know, partially confront an oligarchy.

00:49:57.560 I'm sure Curtis Yarvin is pulling his hair out and he's telling us that this has never historically worked.

00:50:05.040 But I mean, it is, it does trigger sort of an immediate crisis that immediately calls out for resolution.

00:50:11.580 Uh, and it would have to be that, and that our current oligarchy would have a very difficult time fixing without sort of appealing to powers that would undermine their own motivating narrative.

00:50:24.900 And, you know, that's sort of where, where, you know, things are getting scary and interesting at the same time.

00:50:32.940 Yeah.

00:50:33.800 Well, interesting kind of came full circle on the convention of States there, guys.

00:50:38.420 Well, we're going to go ahead and go to our super chats here real quick.

00:50:41.780 We got a few, but before we do, Dave, can you let people, I know most people are already over at your channel and love it, but just for the few that might not know, where can they find all your great stuff?

00:50:51.420 Uh, yeah.

00:50:51.860 So I have a YouTube channel called the distributist, which is, uh, you know, a defunct early 20th century ideology.

00:50:58.540 Uh, and it, you know, I, I named my channel that in 2016 and it's stuck since I have another sub stack called fiddler's green, um, uh, letters from fiddler's green.

00:51:10.240 And I have a recent post there about monarchy.

00:51:12.280 If you want to read it or listen to the video and yeah, that's where you can find my stuff and I'll post links to all my appearances on the sub stack as well.

00:51:20.060 Yeah, I can highly suggest that latest video.

00:51:23.080 It was excellent.

00:51:23.840 So make sure you take the time to go check that out.

00:51:26.600 All right.

00:51:26.840 So creeper weirdo here for $2.

00:51:29.700 Hey guys, Dave, good to see you get over that cold.

00:51:33.980 Everybody glad to see Dave nice and healthy.

00:51:36.720 Yeah.

00:51:37.200 It was a flu, not a cold, but still, yeah, I can kind of hear it in my voice a little bit.

00:51:41.260 And then we have Tor McCabe here for $10.

00:51:45.920 I assume the convention of the States is only step one, a ghost dance of demands.

00:51:50.600 Step two has to be a mass civil protest.

00:51:52.640 Then demands are not met and is perhaps the wounded knee of this plant.

00:51:56.800 Yeah.

00:51:57.020 And, and of course, as always guys be very careful about, uh, public demonstrations as we've had this discussion many times over.

00:52:05.740 Uh, those are, those are not for you.

00:52:08.300 Those are, those are victory laps for the people in charge.

00:52:11.100 The people who are not in charge, who are not following the regime, who gathered together are just asking to get cracked down on there.

00:52:18.860 Yeah.

00:52:19.460 No pro I mean, unless it's very focused on a specific policy issue, no pro locally, no protests and nothing that looks remotely like a military engagement.

00:52:29.900 No ghost dancing and wounded knee.

00:52:32.520 I mean, you know, I, obviously people said it was just an excuse to massacre Sioux Indians, but I mean,

00:52:38.080 it looked like a military engagement from the perspective of the Cal Calvary, right?

00:52:42.020 Because that's what ghost dancing looked like.

00:52:44.040 Right.

00:52:44.760 It's it's, that's the whole mimicking.

00:52:46.660 Yeah.

00:52:47.260 Yeah.

00:52:48.240 All right, guys.

00:52:48.940 Well, I think we got everything there.

00:52:50.840 I want to say thanks to everyone.

00:52:52.860 Thanks again to Dave for coming on.

00:52:55.380 Always great to have him on.

00:52:57.000 Thank you for coming by, uh, questioners really appreciate it.

00:53:01.480 And as always guys, we'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - February 09, 2023

Ghost Dancing and the Convention of States ｜ Guest： The Distributist ｜ 2⧸8⧸23

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