Dave the Distributist joins me to talk about the idea of a Constitutional Convention of the States, and why it might be the best solution to the problems we re all trying to solve. We also discuss the concept of constitutionalism as "white man's ghost dance," and how it can be applied to modern America.
00:01:47.380So I've had a lot of people talking about this idea of the convention of the states.
00:01:54.540A 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.
00:02:08.300And we're going to be talking a lot of people.
00:02:09.300And we're going to be talking a lot about that today because I know you've got quite a few ideas about that.
00:02:14.140But 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.
00:02:25.380I was hoping you could tell people a little bit about the concept of ghost dancing.
00:02:30.040Okay, so this was not my original turn of phrase.
00:02:42.400And the specific meme was constitutionalism is the white man's ghost dance.
00:02:47.220And 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.
00:03:07.320And 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,
00:03:33.000they 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.
00:03:44.460And so an enormous amount of the political energy of the Sioux Indian tribes became absorbed with this ghost dance cult, including Sitting Bull himself.
00:03:55.520And as you might imagine, this resulted in a very famous sort of catastrophe at Wounded Knee.
00:04:02.200And later, I think there was a shootout, not really a shootout, I think a mistaken killing that killed Sitting Bull himself.
00:04:10.800And 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.
00:04:21.100And 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.
00:04:42.200And they're convinced that by reliving these things, they're going to be able to revivify and take power again.
00:04:50.040And of course, it never really works out the same way.
00:04:52.440And 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.
00:05:08.500I think everyone can kind of see it now.
00:05:21.760You're yanking at some kind of chain that's not connected to anything.
00:05:25.780And, 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.
00:05:42.800But, 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.
00:05:47.680And that's kind of a weird introduction, and that's the basic concept, I guess.
00:05:51.660Yeah, 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.
00:06:07.960Because 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.
00:06:21.900So let's go ahead and talk a little bit about the Convention of the States plan.
00:06:26.980So 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.
00:06:38.540And basically the idea is, well, D.C. is broken, right?
00:06:42.240So the vast majority of constitutional amendments, of course, have been proposed by the actual U.S. legislature, right?
00:06:50.480Only a handful have been proposed by state legislatures through the three-fourths and then passed through the two-thirds of the U.S. legislature.
00:06:59.820Usually it's the House and Senate proposing, and then the rest get ratified through the state legislatures.
00:07:07.960But 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?
00:07:21.160We 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.
00:07:28.620They have a list of different things they want to do.
00:07:31.380They want to be able to go ahead and repeal the 16th Amendment.
00:07:34.840They want to be able to go ahead and make it much more difficult to pass any kind of spending bills.
00:07:40.400There's a whole bunch of different things, term limits on Congress.
00:07:44.560There 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?
00:07:52.400The 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.
00:08:00.080And 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.
00:08:14.140Why wouldn't that be a workable solution for people?
00:08:16.700They just get out outside of Washington, D.C., and they can make these changes.
00:08:19.880Yeah, okay, so maybe I'll use an analogy here.
00:08:22.320I have a kid that really likes watching video games, which is probably not good for him, but sometimes we allow it.
00:08:27.840And he likes pretending to play them by having a controller, but it's not plugged in, right?
00:08:34.940That's more or less the problem we have with this convention of states.
00:08:38.100This convention, this idea is predicated on this idea that somehow Washington is controlled or connected somehow vitally to this convention.
00:08:50.900What actually connects them to this convention?
00:08:55.880Is there an army that's going to enforce it?
00:08:57.640Are there government officials in Washington, D.C. that these bureaucrats owe allegiance to?
00:09:04.320Short 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.,
00:09:17.880there'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.
00:09:34.780We 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.
00:09:47.880And this is, you know, so the logic here is sort of a missing step, I suppose.
00:09:58.720The 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.
00:10:09.880I would actually wonder what a defender of this convention would say if I asked them this question.
00:10:14.660Because 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.
00:10:31.060And I don't see where that connected tissue is.
00:10:34.640Well, I think that's what they're kind of banking on, right?
00:10:38.420They're saying Article 5 gives the power, right?
00:10:41.480And so if you do the thing, then the people running the government have to listen because it says so in the Constitution.
00:10:48.380But I think we kind of both know that that doesn't really get you very far.
00:10:52.720For instance, one of the things that they want to do is rein in the Commerce Clause and return it to its original meaning, right?
00:10:59.040But 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?
00:11:12.260Because if it did, then we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
00:11:18.300Like the way you said it, you made it sound like the Commerce Clause itself.
00:11:22.560Like the elasticity lies inside of the language or the clause itself.
00:11:27.800Now, the elasticity was imposed upon the clause and imposed upon many parts of the Constitution by the government itself.
00:11:36.800The Constitution does not imbue power.
00:11:39.000The 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.
00:11:51.240If the government's not following the Constitution, the Constitution cannot be used as a way to bring them back in line.
00:11:57.800This is sort of – it's a self-looking ice cream cone problem.
00:12:02.500I'm probably mixing my metaphors here.
00:12:04.640But it's this bizarre idea that – I don't know.
00:12:53.620I mean, I think that the default would be that the government would try to ignore the convention for as long as possible as well.
00:12:59.040But at least it would be sort of an awareness of what's actually going on.
00:13:05.740The convention has the power that the institutions that possibly would swear allegiance to it give it.
00:13:12.820And the Constitution has the power that the institutions that surround it give it.
00:13:16.900And 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.
00:13:31.020And 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.
00:13:45.180Yeah, the 10th Amendment seems a little silly at this point, right?
00:14:07.180There are situations where the government's power is restricted by the Supreme Court rulings or by other actions.
00:14:15.280They are forced to remit certain things at certain times.
00:14:19.500Maybe it's not as much as we want, but the process can work if properly applied.
00:14:25.180What would be the problem with kind of that idea?
00:14:28.420I mean, really, it helps to think about it from the perspective of my own kind of shitlibby blue state perspective.
00:14:37.860The 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.
00:14:50.700Because the Supreme Court has been granted this extreme prestige, it has a certain amount of authority that might otherwise be discounted.
00:14:59.380If 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.
00:15:15.120And there would be a lot of questioning of sort of the authority that it has.
00:15:21.240The Supreme Court has the authority it does because the ruling class needs its past rulings to be legitimate against explicit public opinion.
00:15:33.880There'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.
00:15:51.020And so because of that, the Supreme Court is sort of a vulnerability for the established United States empire as it exists.
00:16:02.300And it has to sort of obey that body as the decisions it makes comes down.
00:16:07.820But 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.
00:16:18.100That'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.
00:16:37.880And 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.
00:16:50.600People don't remember this, but like the civil rights started in the Supreme Court with Brown v. Bort.
00:16:54.460I 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.
00:17:08.760And they said, which doll is the good doll? And, you know, more kids, even black ones chose the white doll.
00:17:13.840And 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.
00:17:23.360Now, the study wasn't complete because it appeared that integrated black children actually had a more negative perception of themselves based on the study.
00:17:31.660But 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.
00:17:42.640Yeah, it might get a very different result.
00:17:44.740And 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.
00:18:09.500So as we see, obviously, you know, we had Roe, which is a huge decision.
00:18:14.100And 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.
00:18:25.780I 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.
00:18:36.500And so I think a lot of people are under the impression that this might be something that we could see in the near future.
00:18:43.100Now, if that happened, you know what I'm going to say, right?
00:19:14.140I 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.
00:19:28.800If it feels morally justified in doing the opposite and and it's not going and there's no one going to enforce this law.
00:19:35.680You 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.
00:19:53.080And 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,
00:20:18.860if 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?
00:20:29.240I mean, there would be a crater, right?
00:20:31.240Not 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.
00:20:39.900The entire hiring, the entire admissions committee would be fired.
00:20:43.860Uh, 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.
00:20:57.380And 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.
00:21:07.700And, and, and CRT that the ideologies that are called CRT by a Rufo, uh, everyone knows what they are.
00:21:15.120They're more powerful than ever and more necessary than ever to keep this going.
00:21:20.620So you think that even if these formal restraints are removed, you're just going to see this stuff perpetuate through the system.
00:21:28.420In 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.
00:21:40.240Um, I mean, it's not as uniform as it is in California.
00:21:45.100It'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.
00:21:58.960Like it was for Cal, uh, they, they already have the model worked out.
00:22:03.440They 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.
00:22:15.160Uh, that's, that's not going to cause them any problems.
00:22:17.560What 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.
00:22:28.340So think of sort of like flagship schools in the South, sort of maybe your LSUs or something like that.
00:22:35.120I 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.
00:22:41.200But, 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.
00:22:55.040And so there, there's, there's an opportunity there for, uh, you know, the, this to be, uh, a little bit more interesting.
00:23:04.000Now, 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.
00:23:23.900What 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.
00:23:35.920They're trying to hold their feet to the fire.
00:23:38.360They 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.
00:23:58.100Uh, 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.
00:24:06.440Uh, and so, I mean, this is, it offers an interesting opportunity, but it just, it's, it's not, nothing is automatic.
00:24:13.700All 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.
00:24:31.000And 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.
00:24:43.480There's this natural inertia that takes us back to dead center of constitutional government that does not exist anymore.
00:24:50.100Absolutely. 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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00:27:20.200All 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?
00:27:33.600Right. 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.
00:27:47.220Like 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.
00:27:55.180But 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?
00:28:07.960I 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.
00:28:18.840There's always an opportunity cost. There is always sort of a cost of showing your hand on the political stage.
00:28:24.480And, of course, if you're doing something like January 6th, there's enormous legal cost and safety cost to yourself.
00:28:32.900So 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.
00:28:45.160The 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?
00:29:01.900I mean, just, you know, just today, and this is not bedpost in here because this is apparently released by an established journalist.
00:29:10.740We learned, and I think it was the Times of London reported this.
00:29:14.820We can confirm that the American deep state was the culprit behind the dynamiting of Nord Stream 2.
00:29:24.760Yeah. Yeah. From what I've seen, some people are questioning the validity of that report.
00:29:29.380I'm not an expert in this, so I can't know for sure.
00:29:31.300But what we can't say is this person's a Pulitzer Prize winner.
00:29:34.540Not that that qualifies anybody. We don't want to use the enemy's credentials.
00:29:38.600But 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.
00:29:48.540But the assertion is, yeah, that the CIA had some play in this, right?
00:29:52.580Well, I mean, we suspect that, and we know at this stage that these deep state entities are interfering with Twitter, certainly.
00:30:02.500Sure, sure, of course, yeah. I'm not saying it's anywhere beyond them at all.
00:30:05.480Okay, 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.
00:30:18.920Basically pulling the line for one particular party of politicians and power holders in Washington.
00:30:26.500The 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.
00:30:37.400I'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.
00:30:48.380Certainly, 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.
00:30:59.940And, you know, don't tell them that, you know, the abolitionists wanted the three-fifths clause to be the zero clause.
00:31:05.720The only thing that they take from that clause, they don't care.
00:31:08.900The only thing they care about that clause is the demonstration that this is a racist document and it's original incarnation.
00:31:14.820So, 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.
00:31:27.500They only care about the new civil rights constitution.
00:31:29.560And 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.
00:31:46.360So, 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.
00:32:02.000Aren't you worried that there's this contradiction in Talmudic law of the ancient Hebrews before the second temple was constructed?
00:32:34.080And 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.
00:32:45.780To me, I think that the problem is much more, is much larger.
00:32:51.940The problem is not realizing that the constitution isn't in effect anymore.
00:32:56.640The problem is realize, it should be realizing that a constitution is secondary to peoplehood, faith, conviction, and community.
00:33:06.740And the constitution was only a representation of those forces in American life.
00:33:12.880And 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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00:33:57.900And I think you're right about the audience, right?
00:33:59.700It's not going to convince any blue staters there in exactly kind of the situation you're talking about.
00:34:05.240I 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.
00:34:14.040I understand that it feels like old hat for us at this point.
00:34:17.140We've been talking about this for a while, so it feels maybe obvious or something.
00:34:20.880But 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.
00:34:30.880And then I know it feels like it should just be obvious that that's not the case by now.
00:34:35.680But there is, I think, still value in demonstrating that to people.
00:34:41.640Now, maybe this, you know, convention of the states isn't the proper way to do that.
00:34:46.860But 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.
00:34:57.800And I've done a video, you know, going through Joseph DeMastra's, you know, gender principles of political constitutions.
00:35:04.520And 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.
00:35:12.600And the more you have to formalize, the more trouble you're in.
00:35:16.040And 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.
00:35:26.920And I think, you know, Milwaukee or something, where people will be able to misgender students.
00:35:34.460And by that, of course, they mean students will be allowed to tell the truth, right?
00:35:38.300And 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.
00:36:19.900Yeah, that's, you know, this is, we can't even speak, we're not speaking the same language.
00:36:25.160You know, we don't have the same motivating moral concepts or motivating moral aesthetics.
00:36:30.740And it's worse than that because the leftist narrative is faltering and crumbling.
00:36:36.360You know, it could crumble for another hundred years.
00:36:37.940Like 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.
00:36:46.740Well, we don't know how long this process is going to take before it actually falls apart for real.
00:36:52.440But as their narrative crumbles and its believability crumbles, their vindictiveness increases.
00:36:58.560And so now not only are we speaking a different language, there needs to be constantly a scapegoat.
00:37:03.140And that scapegoat is going to have to be Red America or specifically Red White Legacy America, as is increasingly the case.
00:37:10.620This 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.
00:37:29.060And, you know, they were obsessed with the past when that was going on.
00:37:33.600But 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.
00:37:49.180And the Constitution, as noble as it is, is an apparatus of the United States government.
00:37:56.000So and right now, Red America, White Middle America can't even come up with a good word for itself.
00:38:03.220And 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.
00:38:16.060So 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.
00:38:24.040You know, we've got Chris Rufo, right?
00:38:26.720And he is down in Florida at the moment.
00:38:30.300He's taking over basically this school in Sarasota, Florida, with the help of Ron DeSantis.
00:38:38.200And 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.
00:38:51.880So we see like actually taking scalps, taking names.
00:39:26.960There'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.
00:39:34.760So it's there are two projects, right?
00:39:37.340One, 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.
00:39:48.200And basically they have voting majority.
00:39:50.340So they more or less have have control of the board in that college.
00:39:55.460And so I believe they got rid of the president.
00:39:58.060They got rid of the general counsel, their cleaning house.
00:40:01.540And 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.
00:40:11.660He 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.
00:40:24.000Do you think there's serious headway that can be made there?
00:40:26.120Or is this another form of ghost dancing, a slightly more effective one?
00:40:29.480Well, I mean, it's a slightly more effective one.
00:40:31.900It's, I mean, it's not ghost dancing because it's interfacing with reality.
00:40:37.520Ghost 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.
00:40:48.360It was the pantomime of a military operation that was, I mean, Wounded Knee was not really a battle, it was a massacre, right?
00:40:57.980And, 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.
00:41:08.560And 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.
00:41:18.160So 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.
00:41:37.240It 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.
00:41:47.100The problem is, is that it's still, it's still not, it needs to go further.
00:41:53.300And the problem is, as soon as we stop kind of pushing in this direction is when the, this will start to unravel.
00:42:01.700University systems don't exist as sort of hermetically sealed bubbles.
00:42:05.760They hire faculty and faculty are hired on the basis of their research reputation.
00:42:12.060The research reputation is controlled by appointment and controlled by journal publication.
00:42:17.660And those are connected to, it's, that's a, that's a circulatory system that goes to the cathedrals universities.
00:42:24.140Uh, so what are you doing is, is the university going to use that prestige system?
00:42:30.980Is it going to help professors succeed in that prestige, prestige system?
00:42:36.380Uh, because if it doesn't, then no university professor that has higher ambitions is going to want to go there.
00:42:42.720And if it does, then it's in the process of being converted already, right?
00:42:49.080Because prestige in that university will be governed by that prestige system of journals and appointments.
00:42:55.640You 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,
00:43:05.300then it is by definition, a less important appointment.
00:43:10.120Uh, what are you actually influencing?
00:43:12.840The 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.
00:43:32.460Uh, they're going to be good at being universities.
00:43:34.640So 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.
00:43:52.020That 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.
00:43:59.600If 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.
00:44:09.320Uh, 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.
00:44:18.360And I, I know Rufo knows this, my, I don't know he knows this.
00:44:23.080There 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.
00:44:39.740That 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.
00:44:50.220And 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.
00:45:00.520Well, 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.
00:45:12.900So 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.
00:45:23.440But 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.
00:45:48.740Is 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.
00:46:10.380Yeah. 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.
00:46:19.560But 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.
00:46:30.720So maybe this is the time to do it right now.
00:46:33.220But 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.
00:46:49.100So 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.
00:47:08.160And 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,
00:47:32.980nullification 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.
00:47:53.240Now, you know, what would, what would the reaction from the United States government be if you did that?
00:48:01.960Um, 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.
00:48:17.860So 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.
00:48:29.740Uh, but, but, but, but this would be a way to actually contest power away from the federal government.
00:48:36.100And, 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.
00:48:53.860But yeah, I mean, obviously a larger one would, would be far more sudden either way.
00:48:58.340It's hard to know exactly how the government would react, but.
00:49:01.660Well, I mean, the States sort of doing this one by one has the problem that they're easy to pick off and isolate.
00:49:08.960And, 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.
00:49:18.840It just feels like a lot of people to stop doing it at once.
00:49:21.760And if it was done right, it would be vague enough to not have a specific center.
00:49:26.020I'm sure that the, the, the regime would try to find some sort of ringleader to blame this all on, right?
00:49:32.660Like 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.
00:49:48.360I know this is a decision by committee, but it is kind of like a hack, right?
00:49:52.120You're, you're kind of sending, you're kind of sending an oligarchy to, you know, partially confront an oligarchy.
00:49:57.560I'm sure Curtis Yarvin is pulling his hair out and he's telling us that this has never historically worked.
00:50:05.040But I mean, it is, it does trigger sort of an immediate crisis that immediately calls out for resolution.
00:50:11.580Uh, 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.
00:50:24.900And, you know, that's sort of where, where, you know, things are getting scary and interesting at the same time.
00:50:33.800Well, interesting kind of came full circle on the convention of States there, guys.
00:50:38.420Well, we're going to go ahead and go to our super chats here real quick.
00:50:41.780We 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?
00:50:51.860So I have a YouTube channel called the distributist, which is, uh, you know, a defunct early 20th century ideology.
00:50:58.540Uh, 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.
00:51:10.240And I have a recent post there about monarchy.
00:51:12.280If 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.
00:51:20.060Yeah, I can highly suggest that latest video.
00:52:19.460No 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.