The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 08, 2023


Is the GOP Abandoning Pro-Lifers？ ｜ Guest： Grayson Quay ｜ 5⧸8⧸23

Topics
GOP and pro-life movement shift secular pro-lifers FACE Act repeal
Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Guests
Grayson Quay
Mentioned
Ron DeSantis Grayson Leah Labresco Sargent Amy Coney Barrett Benjamin Braddock Richard Hanania Jordan Peterson Chad Pecknell Randall Terry Kevin Stitt Greg Abbott Mike DeWine Brian Kemp McIntyre Gazette Aztecs Rocky Biden Grace Oren
The Intentional Demolition of American Identity ｜ 5⧸4⧸23 America： A Country or a Cash Register？ ｜ 5⧸10⧸23

Episode Stats


Length

42 minutes

Words per minute

175.1

Word count

7,493

Sentence count

430

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in favor of Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement has been emboldened. In this episode, I'm joined by The Daily Caller's own Grayson Quay to discuss the impact of the Dobbs v. Barrett decision, and what the future holds for the pro life movement.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:00:39.180 Thanks for joining me.
00:00:40.700 Having a great show today.
00:00:42.180 I think that you're really going to enjoy this guest.
00:00:45.660 Now, a lot of people have been looking at the pro-life movement after, of course, the Dobbs decision.
00:00:52.320 We have this landmark case.
00:00:54.300 It changes the way that people look at abortion law.
00:00:58.300 There's kind of a seismic quake.
00:00:59.940 The left feels like they've lost the power in the Supreme Court.
00:01:03.480 Kind of this huge victory that is supposed to have been this long, worn battle for the GOP is finally achieved.
00:01:11.820 And as soon as that happens, it feels like the GOP wants to jump ship.
00:01:16.300 Now, Grayson Quay wrote a great piece on this.
00:01:19.840 He's over at the Daily Caller, and I have decided to go ahead and have him on so we can talk about that.
00:01:25.560 Look at the pro-life issue, where it stands now, what the GOP is planning to do with it, and what the future could hold for those who are interested in expanding the cause of pro-life.
00:01:36.320 But, Grayson, thanks for coming on, man.
00:01:38.720 Yeah, thank you for having me, Oren.
00:01:40.620 So, like I said, you went ahead and laid out, I think, a lot of the kind of the groundwork in this piece of kind of where we're at.
00:01:48.160 But can you explain, like I said, we're in this place where there's this big victory.
00:01:52.960 Everyone should be celebrating.
00:01:54.340 Everyone should feel like, you know, be emboldened by the fact that they were able to finally secure this hard-fought battle.
00:02:01.300 And now everybody's walking away.
00:02:03.040 What's going on?
00:02:04.980 Yeah, so it was, like you said, a huge victory.
00:02:08.400 I still think that it was the greatest day of American history in my lifetime, probably.
00:02:14.020 And not to downplay that at all.
00:02:16.560 There are generations of people before you and I were even born who were fighting on this issue.
00:02:22.120 Tens of thousands of people went to jail during the Operation Rescue protests in the 80s and 90s.
00:02:26.340 That history has been largely suppressed even among the pro-life movement.
00:02:31.300 But, yeah, we got the Dobbs decision.
00:02:33.000 It was huge.
00:02:33.760 It's an effort that stretched over decades, you know, from the Clarence Thomas confirmation battle all the way up through Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
00:02:43.040 But the backlash was swift and it was harsh.
00:02:47.160 There were, I believe, six ballot measures in the 2022 midterms that had to do with abortion,
00:02:52.660 some of which were legalizing it statewide and some of which were declarations that a state's constitution provided no right to an abortion that would open up the door for more restrictions.
00:03:03.060 And there was one, I believe, in Montana that was a born-alive inference protection bill.
00:03:07.800 And all six of those failed.
00:03:11.560 The most kind of notable and terrifying of those was in Kansas, where you saw a ballot measure saying that there was no right to an abortion in the state constitution fail about 60-40,
00:03:26.100 which is the same margin by which Trump won Kansas in 2016.
00:03:30.800 So, even in deep red Kansas, the pro-life position in isolation from all other issues is not popular.
00:03:40.960 The governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, came into the Daily Caller office a while ago and was answering questions on the record.
00:03:47.060 And, you know, I think in the last five elections, every county in Oklahoma has gone red.
00:03:52.520 And even he said he was a little nervous about the possibility of facing a referendum like this in the state.
00:03:57.780 So, what do you think is it that sets this apart?
00:04:02.480 I mean, we're looking at a situation where, you know, a lot of people didn't see the red wave that they thought would come.
00:04:08.560 I think many people who were very bullish on Republican politics and the ability of kind of the momentum and the lack of popularity of the Biden administration,
00:04:19.480 how terrible job they're doing, they kind of thought that there would be a big sea change.
00:04:23.080 But like you said, it does seem very specific to this issue.
00:04:27.040 Has the Republican base simply walked away from this?
00:04:30.840 Do you think it's something where activists or polling or, you know, different economic concerns have moved it?
00:04:37.420 What do you think is impacting this?
00:04:39.180 Well, I think there is still a significant and powerful pro-life lobby in this country, which still has the ability to push politicians to embrace pro-life positions.
00:04:48.900 Like you just saw Ron DeSantis sign a six-week ban in Florida after already signing a 15-week ban.
00:04:54.820 Even though this is not particularly popular in his state, I think it's about a third of the state would support a heartbeat bill.
00:05:02.980 Although abortion polling is always tricky.
00:05:05.240 It depends on how you ask the questions.
00:05:08.900 I don't think there's necessarily a total souring on the issue.
00:05:13.240 Pro-life politicians can still win.
00:05:15.000 You saw Greg Abbott, Mike DeWine, Brian Kemp, and Ron DeSantis all win re-election very handily in 2022 after pushing the pro-life agenda forward in their terms.
00:05:27.040 But, yeah, I think that there's a good piece by Richard Hanania that came out recently where he laid out the reasons that he thinks the pro-life cause is so unpopular.
00:05:43.260 Part of it is just due to the general obsession with rights in American society and the unwillingness to give up rights or embrace restrictions on freedom.
00:05:54.820 And the pro-life movement really doesn't have a good way of framing the issue yet that can undermine the left's framing of the issue, which is just this is freedom versus oppression or freedom versus restriction.
00:06:08.020 Yeah, I mean, obviously, I think we are in a scenario where the limits of freedoms or rights-based conversation is kind of going to take you.
00:06:19.760 This is something that I think in general the right has a problem with.
00:06:23.140 When everything is existing in kind of the civil rights revolution, that language and that framework, everything has to be about a civil right.
00:06:32.500 If your issue isn't about a civil right, then it's just not an issue.
00:06:35.280 And as long as that's kind of the entire frame in which one can have discussions in America, if that's the only argument that really legitimates your political popularity of an issue, then I think not just this particular issue, but in general, the right wing and conservatism is in trouble because there has to be something else.
00:06:55.460 You know, there's a reason that I think Jordan Peterson had such traction and it's because he stopped talking to everybody about rights and he started talking to people about responsibilities.
00:07:05.460 And as much as that doesn't pull initially well somewhere, it does speak to a generation that's never really heard that before.
00:07:15.700 It doesn't understand duty, doesn't understand responsibility, doesn't understand that meaning can come from restriction and being bound to something rather than liberated from it.
00:07:26.020 And so I think that the pro-life movement, I mean, you can say, well, the child has a right to life, but while I guess you could say that's true, I think that the reason that doesn't pull the way you hope it does is it's really an attempt to use the left's language and the language of a movement you don't control to try to further a position that everyone is kind of against on that side.
00:07:49.340 And so I think there does need to be a paradigm shift in the way the right looks at its framing.
00:07:55.880 Yeah, I think that you're correct in that the right liberal case for this isn't as strong as it could be.
00:08:02.920 There are thinkers on the right who are kind of in a more post-liberal frame who I think do good work on this.
00:08:08.240 Leah Labresco Sargent does a lot of good work on the importance of interdependence and kind of the duties of care that we owe one another in society and in family.
00:08:17.200 And I think that's probably a stronger way to frame the issue in some ways.
00:08:22.740 You know, a common kind of pro-choice argument is, well, oh, if I have to, you know, donate the use of my organs to keep this child alive for nine months, like, can the state also compel me to give a blood donation to someone who needs blood?
00:08:36.740 And, you know, the answer is, no, I have my bodily autonomy and so on and so forth.
00:08:41.920 But it's just this incredibly grotesque, like, borderline autistic way of framing the issue when you're thinking of your own child that you're nurturing in your womb and thinking, ah, parasite, invader, like, stop using my organs, right? 0.64
00:08:54.780 It's like, what?
00:08:55.340 Yeah, I mean, it's what comes from this need to extend rationality beyond its bounds.
00:09:04.460 Like, anyone throughout history understood the difference between these things.
00:09:09.700 It was not something that needed to be explained to them.
00:09:11.700 They didn't need some kind of scientific or complex philosophical argument to understand why compelling someone to give blood would be different from a mother carrying their child.
00:09:21.300 But we're now at the point where everything has to be extended into just the most absurd rational argument.
00:09:27.200 And this is where I think also argument kind of breaks down.
00:09:31.800 You know, these questions aren't really questions of pure logic.
00:09:37.140 They're questions of basic morality, of moral visions.
00:09:40.880 And you can't really ration your way from one position to another.
00:09:45.980 There needs to be an emotive cause.
00:09:48.500 There needs to be a connection to things that are beyond us for people to, I think, truly understand kind of the value of this.
00:09:55.660 And so I think one of the reasons that the pro-life cause might feel like it's in a bit of a no man's land at the moment is it had a clear vision, right?
00:10:07.260 The clear vision was Roe versus Wade.
00:10:09.780 That was the white whale.
00:10:11.820 That was what bound it together.
00:10:13.760 That's kind of there's no other need to have other discussions because there was such a oppressive Supreme Court law or standard in place that nothing else could be done.
00:10:26.880 So it didn't really matter.
00:10:27.820 And that kind of gave an animating cause to the pro-life movement that bound it together.
00:10:34.360 But once it was done, you're now just kind of coasting off of, I think, a religiosity and a moral structure that was there at the beginning of the pro-life movement, but doesn't exist in many ways even on the right at this point.
00:10:49.540 And that means it's very hard to find a reason to move beyond that initial win or to buttress that win, I think, for much of the Republican base.
00:11:00.320 Yeah, this is another difficult angle moving forward with the pro-life movement is that, you know, the pro-life movement at first was kind of Catholic social teaching.
00:11:10.860 You kind of had the strong, you know, JP2 theology of the body tradition there on on bioethics and the pro-life issue.
00:11:19.180 And then you kind of had evangelicals and Protestants in this country as like the shock troops. 0.68
00:11:25.460 There isn't really much of a secular pro-life movement in this country, which sets it apart from other cultural issues.
00:11:32.340 You know, there's a there is a secular movement against transgender ideology, for instance.
00:11:36.980 You know, you do have parents who aren't particularly religious standing up in school board meetings and saying we don't want, you know, our kids being trans and we don't want pornography in the school libraries and all this stuff.
00:11:49.060 You have, you know, the the IDW type, like I left the left intellectuals who will often push back on that issue, but they're not going to touch the pro-life issue.
00:12:00.120 So that's difficult. So that's difficult. But yeah, the the demographic is just declining.
00:12:05.540 Religiosity is on the decline. If the Republican Party wants to survive as an electorally viable force in American politics, 1.00
00:12:14.060 they're probably going to have to expand their appeal to bar school, barstool conservatives who are notoriously socially libertine and uninterested in in religion.
00:12:25.120 I'm especially uninterested in restricting abortion.
00:12:30.120 So this is what my the thrust of my piece is, actually, is that I could foresee a world moving forward where the GOP just sort of declares, OK, we've achieved consensus on the issue of abortion.
00:12:43.120 Like we've carried you as far as we are going to carry you. You are now a liability for us.
00:12:48.120 You know, say out loud that you're content with a 15 week federal ban or you are going to be exiled from our our coalition like like the John Birchers before you. 0.98
00:12:59.120 Yeah, I think probably really to the John Birchers is a more apt comparison than most people understand.
00:13:06.120 It's a it's a bygone era and most people don't really great.
00:13:12.120 They don't really grasp the level of purging that has happened in the conservative movement and how far left your conservative movement has shifted over time through those different purges and a purging of the pro life movement as the same kind of quote unquote extremism that someone like the Birchers would have represented is probably an apt understanding of the 0.94
00:13:36.120 of what the next iteration of the GOP would look like, which really puts us in a weird space.
00:13:40.120 There's there's a couple of questions, a couple of directions I want to go from that.
00:13:43.120 So I guess we'll just start from the beginning here. The first thing we should probably address is, is this a reasonable concern, right?
00:13:51.120 Like for like it seems like the vote, you know, you're you're saying all of these electoral concerns are valid.
00:13:57.120 Maybe, you know, the GOP says, look, we're you know, obviously this isn't how I feel, but but I'm just making the case here.
00:14:04.120 You know, we're we're the small government party.
00:14:07.120 We don't we believe in states rights.
00:14:09.120 We've secured the states rights to regulate abortion as they see fit to do all or nothing as they choose.
00:14:15.120 And that's what this party is all about in the first place.
00:14:18.120 There's no reason to do something wildly unpopular that also violates this principle.
00:14:23.120 Why not just leave this here?
00:14:26.120 Well, yeah. So my one response would be I don't want to I don't want to give the mistaken impression that I'm opposed to the idea of making tactical decisions in the realm of electoral politics.
00:14:40.120 There are certain states where I think South Carolina is one where you've actually seen some moderate Republicans starting to even though they have strong Republican majorities, you see moderate starting to defect because they're pushing for bands with no rape and incest exceptions, for instance.
00:14:56.120 In a case like that, I'd say, OK, put the exceptions in.
00:14:59.120 You know, it's better to have a 12 week ban with exceptions than it is to have, you know, abortion legal up through viability at 22 or 24 weeks. Right.
00:15:08.120 Any any any measure that bans more abortions, I am happy with.
00:15:13.120 But there needs to be the understanding that people who are serious about the pro-life movement are not going to be satisfied with any type of half measure.
00:15:25.120 Once you've internalized the idea that this is a baby and it's being killed, you can't stop ever.
00:15:32.120 It's you know, the the nation cannot exist half baby killing and half not baby killing. 0.54
00:15:39.120 There's simply no no moral argument to make if that's what someone believes that that there's any compromise to be had on this issue.
00:15:47.120 You know, in the same way that that the kind of radical abolitionists weren't comfortable with any compromise on the issue of slavery back in the 19th century.
00:15:58.120 So, yeah, I think that it could become an albatross electorally.
00:16:04.120 I'm not I'm not here to necessarily dispense any white pills.
00:16:08.120 I the column I wrote is in a very despairing mode.
00:16:13.120 And I think that there is reason to be very frightened about the future and what's going to happen here.
00:16:19.120 But like I said, I'm willing to make tactical moves.
00:16:23.120 There just needs to be the understanding that, you know, people will say, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good as an argument for making a compromise.
00:16:34.120 What I would say flipping that around is don't let the good become a substitute for the perfect, especially when the good here is something like a 15 week ban, which outlaws something like 6% of abortions.
00:16:48.120 Like you're going to give me that and tell me, OK, you're done.
00:16:51.120 You got what you asked for.
00:16:52.120 No, I didn't.
00:16:53.120 I think you're in a very interesting situation because again, there's there's a couple places to go here first.
00:17:02.120 I think that the GOP or just conservatives, Republicans, the right in general has to kind of shift their understanding of politics as well.
00:17:15.120 Something is not popular, right?
00:17:17.120 This is the phrase we hear.
00:17:18.120 Something is not popular.
00:17:19.120 Well, as you pointed out, DeSantis passes the ban.
00:17:23.120 Being popular or not is not really a concern because DeSantis has two things working in his advantage.
00:17:29.120 One, he simply has solidified enough political control to where this is not an issue.
00:17:35.120 It doesn't matter if it's popular or not.
00:17:36.120 It happens because DeSantis says it does.
00:17:39.120 Second, he's amassed enough personal kind of gravitas and enough security in his political position where he can lead on the issue and whether it's popular or not is not anything of substance.
00:17:54.120 We see the left do this all the time, right?
00:17:56.120 Like if you told people four years ago that transing kids was popular, they would have said and four years ago, not 20 years ago, like four years ago, then they would have said you're insane.
00:18:08.120 Like that, that's never going to happen.
00:18:10.120 That's never, they're never going to make an argument for this.
00:18:13.120 It's so wildly unpopular to shove pornography in children's schools.
00:18:17.120 So wildly unpopular to say, put, you know, an eight year old on puberty blockers.
00:18:21.120 It's so wildly popular to say that we have to be able to tell a five year old that they're transitioning or something.
00:18:27.120 But popularity doesn't seem to have affected this at all, right?
00:18:30.120 This movement advanced in lieu of any popularity and not only has it advanced, it's winning on almost every front and it's normalizing things despite having never been popular.
00:18:42.120 Right. Yeah. And this is true of many different things.
00:18:45.120 This is true of everything from, you know, you know, force busing in schools, you know, to gay marriage to, to, to this.
00:18:52.120 So I think the frame of popularity, electoral popularity is a misnomer in many cases.
00:18:58.120 The GOP, the right is still chasing the idea of electoral popularity when it's crafting a platform rather than understanding what they need to do is engineer a situation in which their, their goals are popular.
00:19:13.120 They become popular because they're winning because they've been adopted by influential institutions and other things like that.
00:19:21.120 Yeah. So I think you're correct here that the left has a huge advantage on this just because they control the entire cultural apparatus and their beliefs are coded as high status.
00:19:33.120 So, yeah, you're right. They have an ability to move the Overton window and to shift discourse that the right simply doesn't have.
00:19:40.120 And the tools that are at the right's disposal to try to compensate for that disadvantage often end up feeding into the dominant left leading narratives.
00:19:50.120 So, for example, there are a few areas where Republican run states can fight back against this push for abortion ballot measures.
00:19:59.120 Uh, one of those is to raise the threshold to get something on the ballot.
00:20:05.120 Uh, so make it, you know, 10 times as many signatures before something becomes a ballot measure.
00:20:11.120 Uh, just raise it completely out of, out of reach of a, of an organization.
00:20:15.120 Um, the other one is specific to, uh, Wisconsin where their state Supreme Court just flipped, uh, to a liberal majority.
00:20:24.120 Uh, the woman who ran, uh, as the liberal and one campaigned explicitly on overturning the state's pre row abortion ban, uh, which is a highly unethical thing to do in a, in a judicial race. 0.99
00:20:37.120 Um, and she'll probably also overturn the state's, uh, state legislative electoral maps, which have essentially gerrymandered Wisconsin Republicans into a permanent super majorities in both houses, even though they routinely lose the statewide popular vote. 0.88
00:20:51.120 Um, so they could use those super majorities to impeach, uh, this new justice and probably have a fairly solid case based on her conduct on the election, uh, on the campaign trail. 1.00
00:21:05.120 Um, but again, just that and raising the threshold for a ballot measure are both inherently undemocratic, uh, moves, which is bad optics.
00:21:16.120 Uh, you know, if you want to look at the actual facts and the actual truth, then you'll see that there are a number of anti-democratic, uh, procedures built into the U S constitution.
00:21:25.120 For example, the president could serve infinite terms, uh, Congress or the Senate was not directly elected.
00:21:32.120 Um, and there wasn't really much of a place for statewide ballot measures at that time.
00:21:37.120 These are all changes that have happened over time, uh, making our form of government more democratic and more responsive to popular will.
00:21:44.120 Um, and I think that's often been a mistake.
00:21:47.120 Yeah.
00:21:48.120 You don't have to sell me on that one as you're probably aware, uh, anything we can do to make things less democratic, uh, is, is, is not a particularly unpopular thing for me.
00:21:57.120 Uh, however, um, obviously, uh, you know, changes of leadership would, would, uh, be a key factor of that.
00:22:05.120 But I guess the other thing that kind of goes side by side with that is the need for conservatives to have more power before any of this could be meaningful, right?
00:22:17.120 In many ways, focusing on any next steps in a pro-life movement is as, as you kind of point out here, pointless, unless you've secured a wider power base, not just inside, um, government though.
00:22:32.120 That's essential, but also across cultural, uh, uh, you know, cultural boundaries across the private public distinction, uh, all of these things.
00:22:41.120 And so I think that it might be wise, um, and, and again, as somebody who, who is pro-life, but I think it might be wise to heed some of these calls.
00:22:52.120 Not because I think, uh, call, you know, saying, oh, this is unpopular is, is an under, is an intelligent understanding of, of a problem.
00:22:59.120 The problem is not that it's unpopular problem is that you don't have enough power.
00:23:02.120 Um, and so you would need, you would need to acquire, uh, power in order to shift popularity in the way that the left does on a regular basis before you be able to do that.
00:23:12.120 And so I think it might behoove the pro-life movement, uh, to focus itself more on the acquisition of those levers of power across the things in the way that it did when it comes to the judiciary.
00:23:25.120 Right.
00:23:26.120 Like that's a very particular focus.
00:23:28.120 You can argue, arguably say that the most successful targeting of power by the right in, you know, many, many decades.
00:23:36.120 Uh, and so, uh, obviously the pro-life movement has the ability to do this.
00:23:41.120 They, they have the connection, they have the lobbying, they have that, but it, now that they've won a certain section of the judiciary, it might be time to turn those efforts.
00:23:49.120 Not on then chasing down, you know, every state law and every, uh, you know, every court ruling, but widening their ability to kind of hold power so that they can shift things in this direction once that's kind of where they're set.
00:24:04.120 When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?
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00:24:15.120 When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.
00:24:19.120 Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer, so download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.
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00:24:32.120 Groceries that over-deliver.
00:24:34.120 Sure.
00:24:35.120 Well, the concern, I understand what you're saying.
00:24:37.120 The concern I'd have with that would be, um, okay.
00:24:40.120 The pro-life, uh, pushing for extreme, you know, abortion restrictions is unpopular.
00:24:45.120 So, okay.
00:24:46.120 The pro-life movement steps back, lays low for, or whatever, for a few electoral cycles, right?
00:24:52.120 We, you know, you meet the, the leaders of the GOP and the leaders of the, the pro-life advocacy groups.
00:24:58.120 I'll meet in a smoke-filled room and the pro-life advocacy groups say, okay, we'll, we'll content ourselves with a 15-week federal ban or with leaving it to the states or whatever the consensus approach happens to be.
00:25:09.120 Um, doing air quotes around consensus for the audio listeners.
00:25:12.120 Um, and then they say, okay, um, you know, this will help the GOP win elections in two or three election cycles.
00:25:20.120 We'll come back and we'll push for the heartbeat bill.
00:25:23.120 Um, what's to say that the GOP at this point, uh, wouldn't simply say three election cycles from now, hey, we've kind of gotten used to winning elections.
00:25:32.120 I think we like this.
00:25:33.120 Uh, maybe we'll just, uh, have you stay out there where we put you, right?
00:25:37.120 Um, how does the, how does the pro-life movement get back in at that point and really push its, push its demands?
00:25:43.120 I mean, the, if you look, if you want an archetypal, uh, example of this, just look at the UK conservative party, which is pro choice has, has not put up any kind of fight on the abortion issue.
00:25:56.120 Really, um, in fact has been in power since 2010 and has overseen the, um, legal enforcement of a ban against thinking prayers near an abortion clinic in your head.
00:26:08.120 Uh, that's how, that's how not pro-life the UK conservative party is.
00:26:13.120 And yet, you know, they've been in power since 2010.
00:26:16.120 They've, they've gone from strength to strength.
00:26:18.120 Uh, and I, I think that there are plenty of people in the US GOP who would love to see something.
00:26:25.120 Um, because, you know, winning elections can often become an end in itself rather than a, a means to the end of good policy.
00:26:35.120 I think you're right.
00:26:36.120 You know, of course the UK just doesn't have a right wing.
00:26:39.120 I mean, it's all there is to it.
00:26:40.120 There's no conservative party in India.
00:26:43.120 They can call themselves whatever they want.
00:26:45.120 It's the leftist and the most, and the even more radical leftists in the UK.
00:26:50.120 Um, and we're much closer to that in America than most conservatives like to admit.
00:26:56.120 Um, and I think you're right that.
00:26:59.120 There is a danger of course, of just taking the back seat.
00:27:03.120 Um, that's, that's not what I was talking about.
00:27:07.120 You're right.
00:27:08.120 If you just, if you just sit down and you say, oh, okay, well, we'll just lay low and you guys do your thing.
00:27:12.120 And yeah, you're just gonna get forgotten about, especially as your constituency is actively shrinking.
00:27:18.120 Uh, and your power is waning as that happens.
00:27:21.120 But I think that's the big problem, right?
00:27:23.120 That that's the issue that the pro-life movement needs to focus on is they need to expand that constituency.
00:27:30.120 You need to expand your power base so that it can endure beyond simply having, you know, the whims of some speaker of the house or something driving your agenda.
00:27:41.120 You really need to have a focus on culture.
00:27:44.120 You need to have a focus on an outreach that, you know, an influence that changes these things on a level that's more durable than any given election cycle.
00:27:55.120 Uh, obviously that's a much larger task.
00:27:58.120 It's, it's a far harder and, you know, it's not like it wasn't a monumental enough task to get to where they did with Dobbs decision, uh, in the first place.
00:28:06.120 But I think that is kind of your only way forward because you're can, like you said, your, your influence will continue to wane.
00:28:13.120 If your base continues to wane, no matter what, like, you're not just going to hold on to all of this in perpetuity.
00:28:20.120 And if you got yourself some kind of, you know, ban down to six weeks or whatever, it would simply evaporate in a few years once whatever's left of your influence completely fades out of the conservative movement.
00:28:32.120 And it's just repealed by, you know, by the next wave of people.
00:28:36.120 So I don't think there's any, there's any, there's no point in passing a law that will simply be completely obliterated an election cycle or two later once your influence is gone.
00:28:46.120 The influence is what matters.
00:28:47.120 That's the only thing holding you in place that the law is simply a shibboleth.
00:28:51.120 Sure.
00:28:52.120 I see what you mean.
00:28:53.120 So to expand that influence, there's basically two ways that could go.
00:28:57.120 One is we have a massive, uh, religious revival in this country, which if the Holy Spirit sees fit to move in that way, I will be incredibly grateful.
00:29:05.120 Um, I don't know that we can necessarily rely on that in political terms.
00:29:09.120 Um, and the other one would be to figure out some way to appeal on mass to an increasingly secular, uh, American electorate, um, which so far has not been particularly, uh, successful.
00:29:23.120 There are secular pro-lifers.
00:29:25.120 I know several of them who work with the, uh, for example, the progressive anti-abortion uprising group, um, who, despite my, uh, despite my significant disagreements with them on, on most policy areas where X was actually the pro-life group I chose to work with when I was directly involved in pro-life activism.
00:29:45.120 Um, because they were the most aggressive, uh, about pushing for a real pro-life agenda and, and really taking direct action and moving the needle on that.
00:29:55.120 Um, so if we're able to expand in some way, our appeal as pro-lifers to secular voters and secular, uh, actors in America, I'd be for that.
00:30:08.120 I'm just generally nervous about this because I don't like the idea of just taking a more secular country as, as kind of a fait accompli, especially because there's a very ugly side to this potentially, which is, uh, you know, there's the saying, like, if you hate the religious right, wait till you see the post-religious right. 0.52
00:30:31.120 Um, where you do have, uh, kind of dissident thinkers on the right, most of them are anons at this point, but there's people who agree with them who will say, why would you fight against abortion?
00:30:45.680 Like, why would you sacrifice, um, the ability to win elections and accrue power to save, uh, Shaniqua's fetus is the term I often see.
00:30:53.700 Like if, you know, if, if black Americans have higher abortion rates and vote for Democrats at vastly disproportionate rates, aren't they doing us a favor and shouldn't we just let our political enemies destroy themselves in the womb? 0.96
00:31:06.420 Uh, which is something that I understand as a Machiavellian, uh, political proposal, but is something that as a Christian, I simply have to draw a line and say, that's, that's not something that's acceptable.
00:31:21.640 That goes against everything I believe.
00:31:23.700 Um, and, you know, if you may, if you want to make me choose between the political consequences of being consistently pro-life and, um, and abandoning that, that conviction for, to, to gain the whole world, so to speak, it's, it's not even a question for me.
00:31:42.160 It's not even a choice.
00:31:43.160 Um, sure.
00:31:45.800 And, and I'll agree with you there, but of course you understand that the way that electoral math works out is then you end up losing.
00:31:53.700 You end up losing anyway.
00:31:54.700 Right.
00:31:55.700 Because your political enemies are, there are more of them and you live in a democracy.
00:31:58.700 And so they beat you and then they just roll back the things that you cared about in the first place.
00:32:02.700 Again, I'm with you on this, but I'm just saying your, your problem is in, in the democratic mechanism here.
00:32:07.700 Not like.
00:32:08.700 Yes, of course.
00:32:09.700 I'm, I'm, I'm absolutely blaming the democratic mechanism here.
00:32:12.700 That is, we agree that that is the problem.
00:32:14.700 Yeah.
00:32:15.700 Yeah.
00:32:16.700 The, the, the very existence of the democratic mechanism ensures your defeat either way.
00:32:19.700 Um, and so that, whether, whether you're Machiavellian about it or not, you end up in the same position.
00:32:25.700 Um, so, so there, there's a huge problem there, but, uh, like I said, this is a black pill column. 0.53
00:32:30.700 Yeah.
00:32:31.700 Yeah.
00:32:32.700 Yeah.
00:32:33.700 Yeah.
00:32:34.700 Not, not the most exciting, uh, or not, not the happiest one, but though I will say, and, um, you know, I, I've of course see all of those arguments that you're talking about on, uh, you know, the more dissident, right.
00:32:43.700 And, and internet and ons and such, but I'll also say there are people making very powerful arguments the other way in the same sphere.
00:32:49.700 Benjamin Braddock, you know, uh, stepped up and, uh, you know, he said, I see a lot of people, you know, saying we need to embrace this.
00:32:56.700 We need to let our political enemies do, do away with themselves.
00:32:59.700 Uh, you know, whatever.
00:33:01.700 And he says, uh, you know, he had two arguments against it. 0.74
00:33:04.700 One, he said, uh, we should, we should burn their, we should burn their idols.
00:33:08.700 This is one of the enemy's idols.
00:33:10.700 And so the, the destruction of the idol is valuable enough in and of itself.
00:33:14.700 Uh, it is demoralizing enough for enemies in and of itself to be worth it.
00:33:18.700 And then he also, you know, he posted the video of, uh, of a father just begging, uh, the mother of his child not to go in and get an abortion and her just ignoring him and him just falling apart and crying, you know, in the, in, in the parking lot.
00:33:32.700 And he just said, I don't want to, I don't want to live in a country where this is a thing.
00:33:35.700 I don't, I don't, I don't care.
00:33:36.700 Like, I don't care what this is so evil.
00:33:38.700 It just simply cannot be allowed to exist.
00:33:40.700 And so, um, I, I hear you.
00:33:43.700 I know there are people who make those arguments.
00:33:45.700 You're right that they're, they're out there, but I just want to say there are compelling voices and influential voices in the Anon sphere, in the digital rights sphere, who also make, I think very, very compelling arguments the other direction.
00:33:57.700 So, uh, that, that is out there.
00:33:59.700 I'm very grateful for that.
00:34:00.700 Certainly.
00:34:01.700 Um, there's a, who was that French author who wrote the ancient, uh, the ancient city?
00:34:07.700 Colange reference.
00:34:08.700 Colange.
00:34:09.700 Yeah.
00:34:10.700 I, so there's a professor at Catholic university named Chad Pecknold.
00:34:13.700 Who's kind of a, a post liberal integralist type.
00:34:15.700 Uh, yeah, I've had him on the show actually.
00:34:17.700 Oh yeah.
00:34:18.700 Oh, he's wonderful.
00:34:19.700 Um, just a really kind man too, as well.
00:34:22.700 Just great person to talk to, but yeah, he gave a lecture that I went to once.
00:34:26.700 On, on Colange and the, the ancient city and talked about how the city was religious in nature was founded on its, on its altars, um, was kind of unavoidably centered around that, which it worshiped.
00:34:43.700 Um, and just thinking about that and thinking about, uh, you know, accounts of the second, uh, accounts of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage or the, um,
00:34:55.700 um, Spanish conquest of the Americas and seeing these examples of civilizations whose altars were, um, places of human sacrifice and often of infant sacrifice in the case of Carthage.
00:35:09.700 Um, and yes, it's, it's probably far more jarring to have, uh, to have to watch a baby be thrown on the scalding arms of an idol in, in open air at a religious ceremony.
00:35:22.700 Uh, that's more, uh, more jarring than to just walk past a brightly colored fluorescent lit clinic and on the sidewalk and know what's going on inside.
00:35:32.700 But you can just kind of ignore it because you don't have to see it, but it's the same thing.
00:35:37.700 I mean, if you'll allow me to get very, uh, very religious for a moment, uh, I think there were real demonic forces behind Carthage and behind the Aztecs.
00:35:47.700 And I think there are real demonic forces behind Planned Parenthood.
00:35:51.700 Um, and I don't think they crave recognition as much as they crave the destruction of human beings.
00:35:58.700 Um, they're perfectly happy to, uh, ditch the name of Moloch and, uh, allow that to be swapped out for the idea of empowerment or self-determination.
00:36:12.700 Uh, but the effect is the same.
00:36:14.700 It, the effect on the soul of the nation is the same.
00:36:17.700 So I would just urge listeners, if you walk past or drive past an abortion clinic, just in your mind, imagine that this is a, uh,
00:36:26.700 a tall bronze idol of Moloch and that you're watching babies being incinerated on this idol.
00:36:32.700 Um, and that should give you a sense of the kind of country we live in.
00:36:36.700 And I hope you'll, I actually hope you'll think twice before you say something like this is the greatest country on earth or, um,
00:36:43.700 speak as though this country has some kind of great moral authority around the world that exceeds that of other countries.
00:36:49.700 We do not.
00:36:50.700 Um, we are in many ways morally equivalent to Carthage or to Tenochtitlan.
00:36:55.700 It really is amazing how much you can convince people, uh, of when you just kind of materialize things,
00:37:03.700 when you move things into the realm of the scientific and the cold and the analytical,
00:37:07.700 you can try to diffuse many of those, uh, I think, natural, uh, spiritual, uh, recoiling, uh, or discuss mechanisms that would come in, uh, when things are otherwise observed.
00:37:18.700 But what I think has shocked so many people is watching this thing, you know, so much of this movement, I think it was advanced because they were able to materialize this and make it cold and clinical and scientific.
00:37:30.700 But now it's shifting back into the realm of spiritual.
00:37:32.700 You see people claiming this as a, as a holy rite, as a, as a, you know, as something that is, um, you know, uh, divine in some ways that you directly see, uh, you know, even the, the, you know, there's a reason that the, uh, the, uh, temple of Satan is claiming abortion and, uh, and, uh, child transition as, as religious rituals.
00:37:52.700 I know that sounds ironic, but it isn't, there's no such thing as ironic statement. It's, it's, it's just, it's just accurate. Um, but that said, uh, I guess we can go ahead and, oh, actually, I wanted to ask you one more thing before we go.
00:38:05.700 Uh, so what do you think it looks like? Because the pro-life movement has been such a critical part of conservative politics for so long. It has, while it, while its influence has waned, it has been such a massive driving force for fundraising and political activism.
00:38:22.680 And all kinds of things inside the GOP. If that influence truly is being ejected from the party, if they really are being abandoned or left behind, what does that mean? I mean, you already said they're going to have to appeal to kind of the barstool sports types, but what does that look like for kind of the internal operation of the GOP when you've removed kind of what's the last vestige and influence of what was the religious right?
00:38:45.920 Well, I think the GOP becomes more electorally successful, uh, is one thing. Um, looking at it from the other side, though, I would say it's important to remember as, as pro-lifers that the, um, sphere of electoral politics is not the only one. Um, even if we are entirely ejected from the GOP and our, the political levers are taken completely out of our hands, we can still run crisis pregnancy centers until the blue states ban them. We can,
00:39:14.920 and when they do, we can run them underground. Um, we can still donate to registries from others in need. We can still adopt unwanted children. We can still, uh, protest outside abortion clinics and do sidewalk counseling.
00:39:27.780 And one thing I think would do would go a long way towards, um, helping the pro-life movement come back as a real force kind of just on the ground, as opposed to in the halls of, of the judiciary and the legislatures is the repeal of the FACE Act. Um, the FACE Act makes it a federal crime to block access to an abortion clinic on the, on the idea that, um,
00:39:52.780 um, under Roe v. Wade, it was a federal civil right to access abortion. So it was a, it was a federal civil rights crime to block an abortion clinic.
00:40:03.260 There's a case pending right now, actually, I believe still pending that could overturn the FACE Act, uh, since, um, I'm obviously not a legal scholar, but one argument would be that with Roe overturned, uh, it's no longer protecting a civil right.
00:40:16.600 And if that's the case, you could see mass protests like the ones, uh, just for one example, that Randall Terry led in, I believe the eighties in Buffalo, New York, where some tens of thousands of people descended on Buffalo and, and simply blockaded all of the city's clinics for days.
00:40:34.200 Um, you know, imagine the, the March for life, but instead of simply walking up and down the national mall, you had thousands of people surround every single abortion clinic in DC for an entire day.
00:40:46.600 Um, and, and, and place their bodies physically between, between the, the so-called doctors who wanted to kill babies and the people coming to them for that service.
00:40:57.460 Um, that could be a possibility. Again, it could be something we could, we could fight out in the streets. And, uh, I think that would be a huge step forward as well. Uh, if, if that was, uh, if that was an option within reach.
00:41:13.360 Yeah. Um, I'm, I'm a little black pill on that as well. I think they'll just arrest you, but, uh, I don't, I don't think the act had anything to do with it. The right wing protests are illegal in the United States.
00:41:24.220 Everyone should just probably understand that. Um, there, there, there is no rule of law there. They, they, they, they don't need a reason. They'll, they'll just come for you and they'll invent it post hoc. The media will paper that for them. I'm not saying that, you know, that some things aren't worth it, but I'm just saying people need to understand the reality of that situation.
00:41:40.180 Uh, but that said, uh, now that we've just laid out all the most, uh, uplifting, uh, and, uh, and, uh, uh, positive, uh, uh, kind of prognostication that we can, uh, where can people find your work, Grace? And where should they look for your columns and other stuff that you're doing?
00:41:57.880 Yes. I'm a weekly columnist at the daily caller. Uh, you can find me there simply by Googling my name. I've been published in a number of other outlets as well. Um, everything from national review to the American minds,
00:42:09.700 to the Pittsburgh post Gazette. So if you want to just Google me, I have a website with links to most of my stuff, though. I don't update it much. And I'm on Twitter at Hemingway H E M I N G Q U A Y.
00:42:23.540 Excellent. All right, guys, we'll make sure that you check out Grayson's work. And if this is your first time here, of course, please make sure that you go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Also, if you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts, make sure that you go to your favorite podcast platform and you go ahead and subscribe to the
00:42:38.840 McIntyre show. When you do that, if you could give a rating or review, that really helps. Thanks for watching guys. And as always, we'll talk to you next time.