Rebrand of Syria's al-Jolani: Does the Term "Terrorist" Mean Anything?; "Free Market" Governors Ban Lab-Grown Meats to Protect Meat Industry: With Reason Journalist Emma Camp
Western leaders embrace ex-wanted terrorist Abu Mohammad al-Jolani now that he is leading Syria after the fall of the Assad regime. Plus: Red states push to ban lab-grown meats in an effort to protect the meat industry. Reason's Emma Camp explains why these laws violate free market principles. -------------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every single Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the, quote, interim president of Syria was known until about five months ago by his war name or his terrorist name of Abu Mohammed al-Julani.
But now he has undergone a major Western transformation where he traded in his military fatigues and tunic and pants combo for Armani suits and ties.
He has even been given a new, less threatening name, Ahmed, Ahmed Hussein al-Shara, president of Syria.
As recently as December, the Justice Department on its own site branded him a wanted al-Qaeda terrorist and offered a $5 million reward for any information leading to his capture.
Even when he marched into Damascus on December 8th after driving out the Assad government, the DOJ reward remained, hey, $5 million for any information leading to his detention.
I know where he is.
He's right there.
He's ruling over Syria and Damascus.
It was only on December 20th, less than five months ago, that the DOJ removed the bounty on his head and the page on its site where it was announced.
Now, what a difference a few months make.
This monstrous al-Qaeda terrorist is now a respected world leader because the U.S., Israel, and the EU countries all decided, for whatever reasons, that they want him ruling Syria.
President Trump met with...
Jelani, the Syrian president, on Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he shook his hand, posed for pictures, and then gushed about how handsome and tough he is.
Remember, we fought a 20-year war against al-Qaeda.
All that was preceded by a state visit to France, where President Macron welcomed him by standing in front of the storied presidential palace in Paris as al-Jelani.
Pulled up in his black chauffeured car, how can someone, almost literally overnight, go from a wanted al-Qaeda terrorist monster to someone the West unifies to embrace as a world leader?
All of this leads to many important questions, starting with, does this very malleable term "terrorist" have any real or fixed meaning at all, or is it just a propaganda term that gets applied arbitrarily?
Then the Republican Governor of Montana, Greg Gianforchi, announced this week that he was imposing a ban on the ability of consumers, citizens of his state, to purchase lab-grown meat, no matter how badly they might want to use that product.
Lab-grown meat is created by taking cells from a cow or other animal and then cultivating and nurturing them to create meat.
And the benefit, of course, is that you don't have to...
Breed billions of animals.
You don't have to cut down trees to keep cows where they are.
You don't have to build factory farms and torture them.
You don't even have to create any animals or slaughter them at all.
You just use their cells to create meat substitutes.
Now, the food is approved by the FDA.
It has been demonstrated to be perfectly safe.
And indeed, when announcing this ban, the Montana governor did not even pretend.
That there were any health concerns from the food he was banning, and he couldn't, since studies show that it is at least as safe as factory farm meat.
Indeed, Governor Gianforte explicitly admitted, as have other red state governors when doing this, that he was doing it for only one reason, to protect the meat industry, which funds him and his campaigns, from having to face any competition.
We're just going to ban this product so that our meat producers can thrive.
We don't want to have any competition to them.
All that is very odd, to put it mildly, from a red state governor who says he believes in a free market.
Many other red state governors, including Governor DeSantis of Florida, have done the same thing, though it is now being challenged by the courts.
Someone who actually believes in free consumer choice is Emma Camp, who is the associate editor of Reason Magazine.
She has written extensively about this topic and will be here tonight to discuss all aspects of it.
It's just a very strange thing to watch the state.
Ban people from wanting to consume food that has been approved and that they want to eat.
You don't have to like homegrown, lab-grown meat.
The solution is just don't buy it and don't consume it, but don't try and ban other people who want to.
Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
A little confusion about what exactly it is we're doing, but I think we have figured it out.
There is this very strange phenomenon that I've actually been talking about and writing about for a long time, which is, I get myself settled on the right spot as well, which is how malleable and empty this term terrorism seems to be in terms of the way it's applied.
It's an obviously extremely central term.
In fact, we fought a war for 20 years after 9 /11 in multiple different countries in the name of stopping terrorism.
We constantly kill people or imprison them based on accusations that they're terrorists.
And yet so often, and there's that old saying that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, we take people who we like and then we don't like them.
We call them terrorists, or we take people we don't like and call them terrorists, and then when we decide that they're actually abuse to us, we say, oh, that term doesn't apply anymore.
And it obviously leads to the question of, what is the origin of this term?
Where did it come from, and does it actually mean anything?
Here from the New York Times on May 14th, which was yesterday, there's an article about how Trump met the former—okay, put this headline on the screen because I find it so interesting.
It says Trump meets former militant who now leads Syria.
Now, that word militant is a very nice word.
It's very benign.
You can be militant about anything.
I can be militant about wanting to cure cancer.
I can be militant about wanting to feed children.
It doesn't really scare anyone.
So if you were going to be accurate with this New York Times headline, you would say Trump meets former al-Qaeda terrorist who now leads Syria.
That's how the press— And our government and most Western governments have described him until five months ago.
A fugitive, monstrous Al-Qaeda terrorist.
The New York Times can't use that headline because, of course, people would be like, wait a minute.
We fought a war for 20 years against Al-Qaeda?
And now our own president meets and embraces one of their most monstrous terrorists?
But this is how language changes so quickly, so instantaneously, whenever it serves an advantage to do so.
The article reports, quote, So apparently, Bashar al-Assad was beyond the pale.
Nobody could meet him.
Nobody could.
When Tulsi Gabbard went to meet him as a member of Congress trying to understand the war there, to this very day, she's maligned over that.
That was the main attack on her, one of them in her confirmation hearing, the other being that she has long opposed warrantless eavesdropping on Americans.
But, oh, you went to Syria, you met with Assad.
And yet, now that there's an al-Qaeda terrorist running the country, one who was in Iraq, Killing American soldiers.
It's now okay to meet with him.
Hear from Reuters, also yesterday, Syrian leader Shara's path from global jihad to meeting Trump.
What a nice path.
From global jihad to meeting Trump.
Quote, Syria's Ahmed al-Shara has transformed himself.
Or maybe the West has transformed him from Al Qaeda militant to Syrian president in a dramatic political rise capped on Wednesday by meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump.
The encounter in Saudi Arabia is a milestone for a man who joined Al Qaeda in Iraq around the time of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and spent years in U.S. prisons there before returning to Syria to join the insurgency against Bashar al-Assad.
Now, you might question, so he was in a U.S. prison because he was killing...
U.S. soldiers as part of al-Qaeda, he was kept there, and then he was released.
We don't usually release people we claim are al-Qaeda terrorists.
We put them in Guantanamo, where they stay forever.
But he was released, and he then went and led the insurgency against Bashar al-Assad.
So maybe there was like a deal struck when he was in a U.S. prison, where he agreed to become an agent of the U.S. to help.
Remember, it was the U.S. policy under President Obama to wage a dirty war to get rid of.
Bashar al-Assad, and we fought alongside al-Qaeda and even ISIS to do it.
There's those famous WikiLeaks documents where Hillary Clinton says we're actually fighting on the side of al-Qaeda in Syria.
So there's a long relationship between the U.S. and Jelani, namely that he spent years in a U.S. prison in Iraq until they released him to go lead the insurgency to take down Assad.
The meeting following Trump's announcement of an end to U.S. sanctions on Syria is a huge boost for Shara as he tries to bring the fractured country under his control and revive the economy.
And Trump said he was looking forward to normalizing ties with Damascus.
This is how Trump described him after.
He's got the potential.
He's a real leader, Trump told reporters on Air Force One after meeting Shara.
whom he described as a young, attractive guy with a very strong past.
Quote, he's got a real shot at holding it together, Trump said.
Shahar took power and his Islamist fighters launched an offensive from their enclave in the Northwest in 2024 and toppled Assad, whose allies Russia and Iran were distracted by other wars.
He was long better known as Abu Mohammed Al-Ghalani.
His Noam de Gerher, his war name, as commander of the Nusra Front, an insurgent group fighting Assad, and for years was al-Qaeda's official wing in the conflict.
He cut ties with al-Qaeda in 2016, gradually recasting his group as part of the Syrian revolution rather than global jihad.
Shahar swapped combat fatigues for suits and ties after entering Damascus as Syria's de facto ruler in December 2024, promising to replace Assad's brutal police state with an inclusive and just order.
Nice little liberal democracy led by al-Qaeda.
Now, it says there that he stopped being affiliated with al-Qaeda in 2016, but all the way up until December 2024, just again.
Five months ago, not even five months ago, the U.S. had a bounty on his head for $5 million because he was an al-Qaeda terrorist.
Here from France24, this is what he did before meeting Trump on May 6, quote, Syria's new interim leader, Ahmed al-Shara, will make his first European visit in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday, the French presidency said Tuesday, in an effort to bolster the ties between the two countries despite deeply sectarian violence in Syria.
Here from the BBC, this was December 16th.
UK diplomats meet the rebel leader in Damascus.
Quote, British diplomats have held talks with the leader of the Syrian rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, following its ousting of President Bashar al-Assad more than a week ago.
That was at a time when the U.S. still had a bounty on his head for $5 million.
dollars.
Here from Euronews, talking about his transformation once he arrived in Syria, the headline is former al-Qaeda leader, al-Jolani, this was before they gave him a name change, rebrands as a pluralist amid doubts.
Ahmed al-Shara, formerly Abu Muhammad al-Jalani, has evolved from an al-Qaeda affiliate leader to a rebranded figure promoting pluralism.
As Syria's insurgency topples Assad, despite his attempts at moderation, doubts remain about his democratic intentions.
Oh, you mean somebody who was an al-Qaeda essentially their entire adult life?
May not actually mean it when he says, yes, we welcome all religions.
We love everybody.
We're going to be a DEI country.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
That's the new Syrian.
I, the al-Qaeda leader, is going to lead that.
Here's a video of how much formality and respect was given to him on his visit to Paris to meet Macron.
You see Macron out in front of the presidential palace greeting him as soon as he steps out of his chauffeured car.
They're both wearing very nice suits.
Joe Zagelani.
Macron goes to greet his card, gives him a very nice handshake.
Invites him into the presidential palace.
Puts his arm around them.
They wave to the crowd, they wave to the media.
Shake hands again.
Do you know how many countries France has bombed as well in the name of stopping Al-Qaeda?
But, you know, we've talked about this before, we've done this many times on our show, where we showed you how, essentially for a decade, from 2012 to 2022, all of the media in the West referred to the Azov Battalion in Ukraine as a neo-Nazi, fascist, white supremacist.
Militant group inside Ukraine, there were bills passed to ensure that they were sanctioned, that they couldn't get any American aid or money or American weapons.
They were considered one of the worst groups on the planet.
I mean, they worshipped members of the SS from World War II.
And they worshipped leaders who collaborated with the Germans to kill Poles, to kill Jews.
And then suddenly, once Russia mass invaded Ukraine in February 2022, And the Azov Battalion became the most effective and most well-trained leaders.
The whole discord shifted.
No longer were they referred to as neo-Nazi or extremist or fascist.
They were nationalists.
And then we saw the same newspapers that spent a decade maligning them as Nazis suddenly writing fluff pieces about their leaders, glorifying them.
Quickly, they'll just change the propaganda the minute that it suits them.
And none of these words have any meaning.
Here was the poster printed on the DOJ site of the now respected and beloved president.
Again, this was there even after he entered Damascus.
There's a picture of him looking much different, not wearing his suits or ties.
And it says, stop this terrorist.
Muhammad Al Jalani, and then it says reward for justice.
And then you say at the bottom, up to a $10 million reward.
And then there's some small print here that says Muhammad Al Jalani, also known as Abu Muhammad Al Jalani, and then several other...
Names that he uses is the senior leader of the terrorist organization, the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria.
Under Jelani's leadership, ANF has carried out multiple terrorist attacks through Syria, often targeting civilians.
The U.S. government is offering a ward of up to $10 million for information about al-Jelani.
Absolute confidentiality is assured and relocation may be available.
If you have any information, contact the DOJ.
Now, if this were 2003, I would be like, all right, maybe he got a major reform, whatever.
This was five months ago.
And obviously a big part of what happened in Syria, as Netanyahu boasted, as was official policy, is that the West, the U.S., and Israel all wanted Assad gone, and this was the person who basically led the insurgency against him.
With the help of—as soon as he took Rod and Damascus, Netanyahu boasted about how it was the IDF that enabled this to happen.
And then Israel proceeded to bomb, massively bomb all the military assets of Syria, just went in and took land that they wanted, and Jelani did nothing because part of the deal, obviously, was that he would be much more subservient to the U.S. and Israel in the West.
Using Syrian resources for the West.
Same thing we saw in Libya when they took out Gaddafi because they were concerned he was going to nationalize the oil reserves of Libya and use it not for the West's profit but for the benefit of the Libyan people.
That's one thing the West does not tolerate.
Now what's so interesting about this is that if you were to have given money to Jelani six months ago You would be guilty of a major felony of basically giving material support to terror groups.
And that's not just abstract.
Here from the New York Times in February of 2024, so basically a year ago, a Manhattan woman is convicted of using crypto to fund terror groups in Syria.
And the terror group that she was alleged to have funded was al-Nusra, Jelani's group.
So now...
The West is giving him all sorts of money, but just a year ago, if you gave money, you would go to prison for various serious felony charges.
Imagine being in prison because you gave money to Jelani's group or to Jelani, and then not even a year later, seeing the entire West unite and say, no, he's not a terrorist.
He's a very important and respected world leader who deserves our esteem and respect, and you're sitting in prison because you were convicted not even a year ago.
Of having given him money.
As I said, this is something that I've been writing about a long time.
Other people have been writing about a long time as well.
Here's an article that appeared in Salon, which is the magazine where I worked.
And this was August of 2011.
And this was actually written by my colleague who became my colleague at The Intercept as well, Murtaza Hussein.
And the title is U.S. Politicians' Favorite Terrorist Groups.
And this is what he wrote, quote, Are able at the same time to stroll the halls of Congress and exercise significant financial influence over U.S. government representatives in
order to achieve their objectives.
Make no mistake, the M.E.K.
is no less, quote, terrorist than any of the other groups for which one can go to jail for merely having contact with.
In addition to openly acknowledging to have killed thousands of Iranians, M.E.K.
is directly implicated in the deaths of American civilians and military officials in Tehran during the 1970s, killing for which no M.E.K.
member has ever been brought to justice.
US officials are now openly consorting with them and receiving funding from them.
Huge numbers of American officials were on the payroll of the MEK.
It turns out Howard Dean was and he went around ranting against the Iranian machine.
They pay US officials and prominent US political figures and media figures to go around praising them and condemning the Iranian government.
I say we need to do regime change there because they're just spreading our money around and they are a terrorist group.
The fact that U.S. officials are openly consorting with and receiving funding from a group with American blood on its hands in order to promote that group's interest is something which may escape the notice of its citizenry, but it is keenly watched by Iranians and others who are looking to gauge the level of integrity and consistency in U.S. policy.
The selective application of the label of, quote, terrorists based on who the U.S. is choosing to fight at any given point is further evidence of the bankruptcy of this term.
Terrorists, quote unquote, are those who are interred in CIA black sites subject to legally sanctioned torture and killed without public outcry.
But as the case of the MEK shows, the very definition of who is a terrorist is based not upon what individual acts or groups commit, but how favorably or unfavorably those acts are viewed in Washington.
And of course, the most notable example is that when the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, Which attracted people throughout the Middle East, including Osama bin Laden and others, were resisting the Soviet Union's invasion in the 1980s.
The U.S. loved the Mujahideen, heaped all kinds of praise on them, celebrated them as freedom fighters, and then when that group turned around and started resisting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, suddenly those very same people, motivated by the very same thing, Suddenly became evil terrorists that we put into Guantanamo simply for defending Afghanistan against the United States invasion.
I mean, how can you not see with the Azad Battalion, with the Mujahideen, with Jelani, and so many other examples, that this term terrorist means whatever the government wants it to mean at any given moment, which means essentially that it doesn't actually have any real or fixed meaning.
It's as central to our discourse, that word is, as...
It is meaningless and bereft of any real meaning.
All right, we'll be back right after this little short break from our sponsor.
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All right, so there's an issue that is going on throughout the country that has gotten very little attention, even though I think it deserves quite a lot.
And it involves the pattern of red state governors, Republican governors, who have long heralded themselves as believers in the free market.
The government doesn't intervene and tell you What you can do and what you can eat.
It's not a nanny state.
It's not there to take care of you and force you to do things that they think is healthy.
It's about an economy that allows competition, free competition in the marketplace so that consumers can decide which they want and let the best company or best product win.
And yet, because people are starting to realize how repulsive factory farming is, How morally repulsive in terms of the breeding of billions of animals, sentient animals, complex, socially complex and very smart animals who they torture for years before leading them to the slaughterhouse.
They're bred just to be factory farm animals.
They never go outside.
The only time they ever see out the outdoors is when they are put on the truck to the slaughterhouse.
And we've talked many times before about how morally reprehensible.
It is to subject these majestic animals, beautiful animals.
You know, family farming has always been about killing the animal at the end to make food, but along the way, family farms, the family farm value is you treat your animals very well.
It keeps them healthier and happier, and that has always been part of the, you don't torture your animals on a family farm.
But in industrial factory farming, that's what it's all about.
It's industrialized.
It has nothing to do with farming, actually.
We call it factory farms.
It doesn't resemble a farm at all.
And in fact, it's destroying family farms.
But this is a very powerful industry.
Very powerful.
They spread money to every governor of every red state where they exist.
And then those governors turn around and say, you know what?
We're deeply concerned that people are starting to be disgusted by factory farms.
Not just morally.
But also in terms of the health risks, these factory farms are filled with disease because of how these animals are kept.
They're pumped full of antibiotics, which can easily create an antibiotic-resistant infection or virus that can spread into a pandemic.
The dumping is extremely hazardous.
People finally are realizing how repulsive factory farms are.
But at the same time, not everyone wants to be vegan and just give up meat.
So there's this middle ground where you can now take animals and just take certain cells from their body and then replicate it in a lab.
You cultivate the cells, you replicate it, you nourish it, and then it turns into meat because it's taking the cells, the foundation of meat, but you don't have to cut down zillions of trees and deforest the planet to make room for cows or have Huge numbers of cows whose farting actually causes a great deal of environmental destruction.
And most of all, you don't have to breed billions of animals and then kill them because you're just taking their cells.
Now, you don't have to be somebody who finds that appealing.
You can buy factory farm meat.
No one's trying to prevent you from doing that, despite all the studies showing how unhealthy it is.
I think that's your choice.
If you want to eat Doritos or...
Sodas all day long, chocolate, and McDonald's and fast food, whatever.
I'm not here to make those dietary choices for you and nor should the government be.
But the same is true for people who want to eat lab-grown meat.
And there's companies that have been exploding wildly because they like the taste of it and the studies all show that it's very safe.
It's been approved by the FDA.
It's been approved by food agencies in many other countries, including Singapore and Israel, which led the way, and now places in Europe as well.
But what's so important to note here is that when these red state governors are banning the selling of or the consuming of lab-grown meat, they're not even claiming a health concern.
They're not saying we're banning it because we think it's unhealthy.
Because they can't.
There's no science to support that.
That's why it's been approved.
That's not even their claim.
If you think, oh yeah, lab-grown meat should be banned because it's unhealthy, that seems a little bit nanny-statish to me.
I mean, I could start a campaign tomorrow saying ban McDonald's or fast food because it's very unhealthy.
Studies show that.
But generally, we don't ban food that other people want to consume based on that.
But in this case, that's not even what's claimed by any of these governors.
They're admitting.
The reason they want to ban lab-grown meat is to protect the meat industry, meat producers in their state.
In other words, helping that industry, which often funds these governors and these legislatures, by banning their competition.
So yeah, an industry will thrive if you have the government making it a crime, as these bills do, for consumers to buy any competing products.
I don't know how anyone could possibly justify this.
Here's Montana Governor Greg Gianfort, who's become the newest governor of five or six different Republican states.
He announced on Twitter, quote, so-called lab-grown meat has no place in Montana.
By signing HB 401 into law, I am proud to defend our way of life and the hard-working Montana ranchers who produce the best beef in the world.
I never realized before that the Montana way of life was to have the state dictate to people what food they can and can't consume.
In fact, Montana's not just a deeply red state.
It's one of the most libertarian states.
It has that ethos of the Northwest, states like Idaho as well, that we don't want the federal government or any government coming in and telling us what we can and can't do.
Let the free market decide that.
Here's the official release of the state of Montana newsroom, the title of which was Governor GM Fort bans lab-grown meat in Montana.
And I want you to listen to what they say is the reason and what they don't say is the reason for this.
Because when I talked about this on social media, I had a zillion people coming and saying, lab-grown meat is not healthy.
I couldn't get through the message.
This is not even the claim that the governor is making when banning it.
One of the things that drives me crazy, it always has, is when citizens want to defend some politician's actions and they invent excuses or rationale to defend it that not even the politician himself is claiming.
That's not the purpose of this law, to ban unhealthy food.
They don't even claim it's unhealthy.
Governor GM Ford bans lab-grown meat in Montana.
"Montana Farm Bureau celebrates the governor signing House Bill 401." That's the Association of Meat Producers.
Sponsored by Representative Braxton Mitchell, a Republican from Columbia Falls, House Bill 401 prohibits the manufacture for sale or the distribution of cell-cultured edible products.
The bill defines cell-cultured edible products as, quote, the concept of meat, including but not limited to muscle cells, fat cells, connective tissue, blood, and other components produced via cell culture rather than from a whole slaughtered animal.
That's what they're protecting, the industry that mass slaughters animals.
Why don't they have to compete like every other industry?
Starting October 1st, any retail food establishment in Montana that manufactures, sells, or distributes cell culture edible products is subject to suspension of their license and could be found guilty of a misdemeanor and faced with fines and imprisonment if convicted.
Quote, as chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and someone whose family has been involved in Montana's meat processing industry for over 80 years, I'm proud the governor signed House Bill 401 into law.
Representative Mitchell said, quote, agriculture is our state's number one industry, and this bill takes a clear stand to protect our ranchers and food supply.
We won't let synthetic products with misleading labels undercut the hard work of Montana's farm and ranch families.
The Montana Farm Bureau Federation praised the signing of the legislation, thanking the governor and legislatures for defending and protecting the Montana way of life.
Quote, Montana ranchers grow some of the best meat in the world.
We are thrilled consumers in the Treasure State will continue to enjoy authentic meat.
Thank you to the legislature and Governor Gianfort for supporting ranchers and consumers with this new loss at Montana Farm Bureau Federation President Cindy.
So, they're admitting.
They're admitting.
That this is only done to protect the industry that funds them from having to compete with any other possible alternatives to their food.
They're saying, oh, because of this law, Montana residents will continue to enjoy high-quality meat produced the way they've always produced it by slaughtering huge numbers of animals.
Without this bill, they could enjoy that meat.
They could still buy that meat if they want it.
The difference is they could also buy alternatives to meat.
Again, that have been approved by the FDA.
That's where food approval takes place and medication approval takes place on the federal level.
And it's a very rigorous process to approve new foods.
And as I said, it's not just the United States, but many other serious countries that have approved this as well.
Here's an article from Reason in And by the way, yeah, I should also say that, as I said before, this is not the first state that's done it, but North Carolina has done this, has banned lab-grown meat, so has Alabama, and so has Florida.
And our guest tonight, who's Emma Camp, the associator of Reason, has written extensively about that, and she'll be here shortly to talk about it, just when we go through a little bit.
Here from Reason, March 2025, North Carolina is the latest state to try to restrict lab-grown meat.
Cultivated meat isn't challenging slaughtered meat anytime soon, but states keep trying to restrict competition.
That's the other thing.
If lab-grown meat is so disgusting, you think, and you think it's so horrible and nobody would want to eat it, that's all the more reason why you don't have to ban it.
If everybody really wants to eat meat through slaughtered animals, they can.
Why not let the free market decide?
Why not let people who want to buy lab-grown meat make their own choices about their diet?
Would you want the state coming in and looking at your diet?
And deciding what parts they think are unhealthy, and most Americans have a lot of unhealthy food in their diet, and saying, "This is banned.
This is banned.
This cannot be sold in any stores.
If a store sells Doritos or Coke, then it will be subject to fines and the loss of its license and even imprisonment." So now you're a citizen, an adult citizen.
You've always eaten that food.
You want to go to the store and buy it, but the state says, "Sorry, you can't eat this food in our state." People would be screaming bloody murder.
Especially conservatives who have screamed bloody murder at far less intrusive attempts than this.
But because it has become kind of an ethos in conservative politics to love meat, venerating meat, which is fine.
Venerate meat all you want.
A lot of people just reflectively reacted to this like, yeah, animal slaughtered meat is way better than lab-grown meat.
Which is fine to think that, but how you then get to this non sequitur that therefore the state should ban the food I dislike for anyone to use is just mystifying.
Here from Reason in May of 2024, one year ago, Alabama governor signs a bill banning lab-grown meat.
Lab-grown meat bans don't protect consumers, but they do protect ranchers and farmers from competition.
Exactly.
That's what this is all about.
Pure corporate corruption.
Pouring money into the coffers of state legislators and governors.
And then getting bills that ban their competition.
So they essentially have a monopoly.
The only choice you have is, if you want to eat meat, is meat from factory farms.
Here from Reason, also a year ago, May 2024, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, signs a bill banning lab-grown meat in Florida.
While the government framed the legislation as necessary to protect Floridians from the, quote, global elite, he's the real authoritarian.
And I should note, none of these governors, including DeSantis, even pretended to be banning lab-grown meat due to health concerns.
They all admitted, like the Montana governor did, as we just showed you, that the only purpose of this is to protect the meat industry from competition.
Now, there is no evidence, by the way, of health risks from eating lab-grown meat.
There's a ton of evidence about how sick red meat can make you if you consume it in excess, heart disease and Strokes and all kinds of coronary problems, diabetes, especially from other junk food as well.
But there are no studies, and the studies that exist say that lab-grown meat is safe, which is why the USDA approved it.
Here from ABC News, June of 2023, USDA approves first-ever, quote, cell-cultivated meat for two American manufacturers.
Upside will cultivate and sell chicken grown from animal cells in bioreactors.
After years of research and rigorous testing, cell-cultivated meat will officially become part of the U.S. food system.
Emeryville, California-based manufacturer Upside, which gave ABC News a look inside its facilities earlier this year, and Good Meat, a cultivated meat division of the plant-based egg-substitute food technology company Eatjust.
Are the first USDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture, approved self-cultivated chicken meat produced and has been fully approved by U.S. I'm going to get to that with Emma as well.
There's a constitutional clause called the Interstate Commerce Clause that's designed to make sure states aren't engaged in protectionism against other states.
The idea is we're supposed to have an economy where all states have the same interstate commerce.
And one state can't, say, ban all products from any other state in order to protect Florida the way the U.S. can and is doing now with tariffs.
It's a violation of the Constitution.
Just to give you one example of some of these studies from the Library of Congress, September of 2023, Cell Cultivated Meat, an overview.
First approvals on upside food and good meat on November 16, 2022, the FDA completed its first pre-market consultation with upside food for a self-cultivated meat product for human consumption.
Upside Foods submitted information to the FDA on its process to develop cold-sultivated chicken.
The FDA evaluated the company's production process, including taking cells from chickens and establishing cell banks, manufacturing control for the controlled environments, and the inputs that would be added to the controlled environment.
The FDA stated that after our careful evaluation of the data and information shared by the firm, we have no further questions at this time about the firm's safety conclusions.
On March 21st, 2023, the FDA completed its second pre-market consultations for GoodMeat.
On its process to develop self-cultivated chicken, the FDA evaluated the materials submitted by GoodMeat and determined it had no further questions about the company's safety conclusions.
But as I said, safety issues are what?
People who support these bills are now trying to raise retroactively to justify it.
None of these governors is pretending it's about health concerns.
They're not saying lab-grown meat isn't healthy.
They're saying we need to do this to make sure that this factory farm industrial meat or meat providers in our state are protected by eliminating all the competition, by making it a criminal offense to consume competition.
And the fact that it's coming from a party that has long claimed to be the party of free market, that has backlash.
When?
Michelle Obama as first lady just tried to encourage students to exercise more and to eat better.
And conservatives went berserk saying, "Who is Michelle Obama to tell us how to live our lives and what to eat and what to exercise?" And that wasn't even coercive.
That was just encouragement.
There was another time Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City just tried to put limits on the size of sodas because fast food restaurants are selling these gigantic mega sodas.
And there's few things worse for you and that also trigger addiction to it than sodas.
And conservatives said this was the nanny state.
This is paternalism.
Sean Hannity went on multiple rants against Michelle Obama and against Michael Bloomberg.
But this isn't anything close to that.
It's far worse.
It's making the criminal law punish the consumption of lab-grown meat for people who actually want to consume it to protect the meat industry.
All right.
Our guest is here.
And as I said before, she is Emma Camp, who is the associate editor at Reason Magazine, which is a magazine that exists for many reasons, but certainly one is to champion the free market, the free market which is being attacked and subverted by conservative governors.
In this case, her work has previously appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Slate, and the Free Press.
She graduated from the University of Virginia in 2022 with degrees in philosophy and English literature.
She's a fierce free speech advocate.
And has interned with fire.org, which viewers know is what the ACLU once was 30 years ago, a truly ideologically blind defender of free speech.
She has been reporting a lot on lab-grown meats and the political environment that has emerged around it to try and ban it.
In 2024, she published the following article, quote, I tried lab-grown salmon.
Here's what it tasted like.
So she's probably one of the best reporters, most knowledgeable reporters when it comes to covering this issue.
Emma, thanks so much for coming on our show tonight.
We really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
All right, so as I said at the end there, I think you were on when I covered it.
There's all kinds of studies.
I just read one or two that were part of the USDA and FDA approval process showing that lab-grown meat is actually quite healthy.
That's how it became approved.
And I want to talk about that.
In just a minute.
But as I also said, that's not even an issue when these governors and these legislatures are enacting these laws.
They're enacting these laws and they're stating what the real reason is.
It has nothing to do with health concerns.
What are the reasons that these laws are being passed?
So when I've looked at the language around these bills attempting to ban lab-grown meat in different states around the country, there are sort of two main prongs that come up for me.
The first is this sort of anti-competition stance where, you know, we need to protect Floridian meat producers.
We need to protect our agriculture industry.
You know, we don't want them being replaced with this incursion of lab-grown meat.
And then also there is, frankly, a stronger current of just straight-up culture war.
It's basically this idea that the left wants you to eat the bugs.
Like literally in the press release that Ron DeSantis sent out when he signed a bill banning lab-grown meat, he said it was something about the global elite trying to make people eat the bugs.
Like there was literally a reference to eating bugs.
And there's this idea that lab-grown meat, you know, it's hippie-ish, it's, you know, anti, you know, what red-blooded Americans want to eat, I think, especially right now, because the right is sort of like obsessed with meat and protein.
And it's just like an easy culture war dunk.
You know, I was sort of looking at the comments on X underneath your post about lab-grown meat and people had all of these responses that were framed.
Tell me about it.
You can't make me eat it.
You know, it's like, you don't have to eat it.
But this definitely should be an option.
And there's really no rational reason why this shouldn't be allowed to be produced and sold.
Yeah, I mean, it was incredible.
They were also just spitting out unsubstantiated claims that lab-grown meat is extremely unhealthy for you.
And I kept saying, like, you're inventing excuses that these politicians aren't even citing.
It was driving me crazy.
Try not to look at the comments beneath my post on social media, because it'll make you go crazy.
You know, I have to say, there are a few people who hate factory farms and industrial farming more than I do.
I don't even like to call it farming because it really doesn't bear any resemblance to it.
Reporting on it is what, in large part, made me become vegan.
But the thought has never entered my head, "Oh, the way to…" Curb the abuses of factory farms or even phase it out is by preventing people, banning people from eating meat from factory farms if they want.
Go have a party.
Go at it.
The idea was, okay, for people who don't want to go vegan, who still want to consume meat but don't want to encourage factory farms or the environmental risk that it has, science has enabled this new Alternative for consuming meat, which is lab-grown meat.
What was the impetus behind that?
Why did people feel a scientific compulsion to develop this?
I mean, I think there's probably an environmental angle to it that's a really big issue, especially because as, you know, this is good news, as people get wealthier and wealthier, there's higher demand for meat.
But factory farms take up so much land.
They take up so much energy.
They produce so many greenhouse gases.
That's a huge problem.
Also, there is the ethical issues.
If you are, you know, a cow or a chicken in an industrial farm, your life is miserable, right?
I mean, this is, we'll probably get into this more, but I sort of find it funny when people talk about how lab room meat must be full of all of these chemicals and additives.
I'm like, do you even know what it's like to be a cow in a cafo?
You spend most of your life, you know, in your own excrement.
Like it's not clean by any stretch of the imagination.
They're vile.
I've never seen places as filthy and disease-ridden as the inside of factory farms.
Yes, yes, exactly.
And so there's sort of the ethical and the environmental angle here.
And it's, you know, there's some novelty to it.
I've tried lab-grown chicken twice and lab-grown sim.
Lab-grown salmon once.
It was pretty good.
I don't think it's going to fool anybody quite yet, but I think we will get there one day.
And I think you're totally right.
I think I personally know a lot of people who, you know, they would prefer to eat less meat, but they can't like fully get themselves to cut it out.
You know, the idea of going vegan or vegetarian is really daunting.
And if they had the option to buy lab-grown meat, they would jump at it.
And it's actually entirely...
Feasible to me that in some number of years it'll be cheaper than slaughtered meat because, you know, it's a lot more efficient to, so for example, the salmon, they basically grow it in old brewing tanks.
So one of the places that does lab-grown salmon, it's in an old brewery, you know, to basically make your salmon fillets individually instead of having to deal with raising salmon, breeding them, getting rid of the waste, slaughtering them.
So it could even be cheaper one day, which I think would be...
Good for anybody who wants to buy that.
Yeah, as people probably know, I think even Burger King and McDonald's sell it.
There is such a thing as a vegan burger, which isn't even about extracting the cells from an animal.
It can be made with pea protein or beans, sometimes rice, soy, whatever.
And I would say the taste is very similar, especially if you're eating the kind of...
Hamburger that Americans eat with tomatoes and mustard and onions or whatever.
But as you say, the science is only advancing.
It's still in its incipient stages, but a lot of people have liked these products and have been consuming them a lot.
So let's talk about the health effects because, again, I can't stress enough to people because I know there are people watching reacting to this that way.
That was the major objection to my view on this was, no, but it's so unhealthy.
What have the studies shown, A, about the health effects of lab-grown meat as compared to, say, red meat from slaughtering animals, and then B, just, like, what has it shown about the health effects or the safety concerns about lab-grown meat at all?
So the FDA and the USDA have approved two different kinds of lab-grown chicken.
I think, if I recall correctly, it's from Upside Foods and Good Meat, which means it passes all of their very rigorous safety standards.
You know, maybe the libertarian in me is like, maybe it's a little too rigorous.
But at the very least, it's been approved to be sold.
And there was a limited sort of restaurant-based release of some lab-grown chicken at a couple restaurants in, I want to say, 2023.
To my knowledge, I could be wrong.
I haven't...
Been able to check super recently.
The salmon, I think, is not at like a full commercial release yet, but it is being produced and on a limited basis.
People can try it.
I'm not sure of any studies directly comparing the health effects.
Right now, I think it's just chicken and salmon, so there's not like a red meat component.
But we have no reason to think that it's going to be more or less healthy.
It's essentially the same.
And if anything, especially when you're looking at something like salmon, it's almost certainly going to be healthier because, you know, the lab-grown salmon The only salmon you can guarantee doesn't have any mercury.
It doesn't have any parasites.
It doesn't have any, you know, either industrial junk or floating around in the ocean getting...
Microplastics junk.
It's actually the cleanest.
This is something that a lot of times when you talk to people that work in lab around meat, that they emphasize is that, you know, this chicken, this salmon is the cleanest meat that you can possibly buy because it's produced under these conditions where you're not dealing with animal waste.
You're not dealing with blood and guts.
You're not dealing with, you know, having to pump these cows full or chickens full of antibiotics.
And so it's actually like, if I had to hazard a guess, my guess with that would be that it would be much healthier than typical slaughtered meat.
Yeah.
Now, you know, it is amazing to be like, sometimes I'm very surprised, but I guess it's just the efficacy and power of this industry that- Just the pandemic risk alone, there's few things more frightening than antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, because our tool against bacterial infections is antibiotics, and if they're resistant to it because these animals have been so pumped so continuously, and you do ultimately become resistant to antibiotics if you're just getting them pumped in you all the time, there's that.
Incredible health risks to humans, so to hear them justifying out of health concerns when the slaughtering animal factory farms have that, just that by itself is amazing in addition to all the sanitary issues that you raised.
But what about just like red meat?
I mean, there's a lot of studies suggesting that people are obese or have coronary problems, have heart attacks, have strokes.
Because of red meat.
Couldn't you, if you were really somebody arguing that the state should ban food that is unhealthy, you could make that case for standard factory farm meat, right?
Yeah, I mean, I, of course, prefer not to suggest that the state should ban any foods.
No, me too, me too.
I'm just saying for people- Yeah, if you're going to go down that argument, there are really only two foods that have been sort of scientifically proven to a degree you can scientifically prove anything to cause cancer, and it's processed meats and alcohol.
So those are really the foods that you would think that the Maha people would be really up in arms about, but right now the fad seems to be to eat quite a lot of processed meat because we're obsessed with...
Protein, but tofu doesn't count.
I don't know.
This is the thing that as a vegan with a protein-obsessed husband, who is also vegan, is always confusing to me because we have a lot of protein sources in our house, but none of them involve animals.
Right.
I just want to emphasize, again, for people who might be just tuning in or whatever, your preference and my preference.
No one's trying to impose- Your diet or my diet on anybody else.
Like if somebody asked, we might talk about the benefits.
I might write an article about it to try and persuade people, but not to argue that it should be banned.
And the issue here is not which food is better.
The issue is what right does the state have to ban food, especially when they're saying, admitting that the reason is to ban a free market and to protect the industries that fund their campaigns.
No, absolutely.
There is this bizarre posture taken by a lot of these governors that's essentially, we need to ban lab-grown meat so they don't force you to eat it.
When, of course, you know, you can't go out and buy lab-grown meat anywhere in the United States right now.
It's a really infant industry that, you know, I really want it to succeed, but it's entirely possible that there just isn't the demand for it.
So they're really taking this extremely aggressive approach to an industry that doesn't have the tiniest chance of actually harming this, like, behemoth animal agriculture industry right now.
Using this language of, like, well, we need to keep you from eating it so that way nobody forces you to eat it.
Yeah.
And it's like, well, you're the one that's cutting off people's choices right now.
Totally.
It's basically like a prior restraint, right?
It's for this hypothetical threat.
You're actually infringing upon people's rights, both to conduct business and to buy the food that they want to eat.
The interesting thing is there have been government attempts in the past to either cajole people, to avoid unhealthy foods, or even- Alcohol consumption, obviously drug consumption, but including with foods.
And I remember so well when Michelle Obama was the first lady.
I never paid attention to it at the time because it always seemed such a baffling controversy to me.
But you know, first ladies usually pick up a project and the idea is not to be politically polarizing because you don't want to take away from the president's political posture or whatever.
And Michelle Obama's position was, hey, I think we should be healthier.
It was basically like RFK Jr.'s.
A view of America, like Americans are too fat.
We don't exercise enough.
The food that we eat is terrible.
And I want to get to the Maha, RFK Jr. part of this as well in a second.
But, I mean, conservatives went ballistic.
Like, how dare Michelle Obama tell our kids what to eat?
How dare she try and, like, interfere in our private lives?
And she wasn't doing anything coercive.
It was just like an educational campaign.
Like, hey, it's good to move.
Good to exercise.
Like, that's healthy for you.
Let's, like, try and get your school lunches.
Like, pick the healthier food.
That was it.
And then there was also, you know, the other example I mentioned, and there's so many of them, where Michael Bloomberg, as the mayor of New York City, when fast food...
But restaurants started offering these, I don't know, what are they, 20 ounces or 28-ounce sodas, gigantic sodas just filled with sugar and all kinds of other substances.
He tried to limit how much restaurants can sell.
You can only sell 16 ounces and not more because of the health concerns.
And that was something I personally was very opposed to.
And every conservative I know was, as well, saying, "Michael Bloomberg thinks he's our father.
He's being paternalistic.
We don't want a nanny state." And now you have, you know, just like a little bit of time later, now you have Republican governors going way further than Michelle Obama went, obviously, and way further than Michael Bloomberg went, who was just trying to limit the quantity of soft drinks by saying, no, even though it's safe and proven safe, we don't want you buying this product.
And, like, I don't see any conservatives, maybe a few, but very few.
You are one, and I guess you're more a libertarian than a conservative.
I wouldn't be self-conservative.
Yeah, exactly.
So a lot of people consider libertarians conservatives on the left, but yeah, I know the difference.
But I'm just saying there, it's like, how do people, I never understand this.
I'm always baffled by it.
Like, how do people get themselves to so vehemently embrace a principle when it lets them kind of rail against the other side of the political spectrum and then turn around instantly and vehemently support?
The exact same thing they were denouncing just yesterday because now it's red state governors doing it in the name of some culture war issue.
How do you explain that?
The shift here is interesting, and I think it plays...
There's some role with the way that the right has become much more populist and like much less libertarian over the past 20 years or so, you know, language about something like personal responsibility you don't see used very often.
And so, you know, sort of the push against the nanny state, you know, trying to take away your big gulps or whatever was basically the idea that like the government shouldn't be telling people what to eat, even if what they're eating is bad for them.
And I think the shift, it's a lot of it, I think, is the language of like.
Big pharma is trying to poison you or like big food companies are trying to poison you.
It's sort of this, um, like economically, it's almost socialist where like Marxist, the idea of like the big evil capitalist company is trying to take advantage of you, uh, that I see showing up a lot more in right ring.
And so I think that might be a part of it, is that they're able to sort of demonize basically food companies and say like, you know, actually the government is the one that's going to come in and protect you.
Because, you know, the reason why you're unhealthy is because this company is trying to poison you.
Rather than, you know, sort of in the past, it's like, okay, who cares whether people are unhealthy, let them make their own choices.
The bizarre thing is I'm not even sure.
I suppose there's been a little bit of negative polarization on this where you see Democrats sort of defending like, you know, no, we shouldn't be banning, you know, whatever food additives or whatever.
But I'm not seeing a really loud opposition to it in the way that there was from Republicans during the nanny state era.
And it's one of the ways, I guess, for my small libertarian heart to see sort of both the right and the left, like, agree.
To be bad about stuff, like to sort of agree to both kind of pick the status position, it makes me sad.
Yeah, it's sort of like the Democrats have become the loudest and most vocal supporters of the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and the Pentagon, something that obviously 10 years ago would have gotten you kicked out of any, not even left-wing circle, but just like- Center-left circle, and yet that's now the new religion along with the Republican establishment as well.
All right, let's talk about RFK for a second in this very popular Make America Healthy movement that he helped inspire or led the way for.
And there are things in this movement, independent of what should be done about it, I think it is important to bring to people's attention the control and the The kind of commandeered regulatory process that's captive to the large corporate interests they're supposed to be regulating.
And of course here, the large massive capitalist entity is not this incipient lab-grown meat industry, but instead it's the factory farm industry.
But one of the things he's saying is that there's so many foods that are making Americans morbidly obese and chronically sick.
And, you know, he talks a lot about how a lot of foods, like there was one interesting thing that I remember him saying where he talked about like Doritos.
Actually, there's a New York Times article, I think, on the Maha movement about how scientists who make Doritos and other kinds of food like that purposely choose food dyes that make the color.
They do studies on what color people want to eat most, but also they purposely use chemicals that make the product addictive, that aren't necessary to produce the products.
They're making them deliberately addictive, kind of like the way social media companies have often engineered sites to keep people watching.
This is an RFK view.
I think it's been reported as well.
I mean, I think if you were going to make an argument that you want to ban food, That's toxic or unhealthy.
You would begin with these industries that just make massive amounts of money selling cupcakes and brownies and junk food that has almost no nutritional value and all sorts of toxins in it.
Now, again, I don't at all want any of this band.
I think it all should be available and let people decide.
But I guess I'm asking you like How could anybody, on the one hand, support banning lab-grown meat, and on the other, not support banning all these foods that RFK Jr. himself has been saying makes people so sick?
Yeah, it's because the lab-grown meat lobby isn't trying to, you know, lie in their pockets.
That, I think, is essentially it, right?
Animal agriculture is an incredibly powerful industry that gets so much, basically, government welfare, right?
Like, they get so much money and subsidies from the government.
Like, the whole reason why government cheese as a concept exists is because American dairy farmers couldn't sell all of the milk that they were producing.
And so, especially when you have, I mean, getting to dairy alternatives is a whole other issue, but, you know...
American farmers get so much money from the government and so they're so intertwined into the government that there are all of these special interests and bad incentives and corruption that basically incentivize a lot of states to have very large agriculture sectors like Florida, for example, to do anything possible to protect them or even just signal, "Hey, I'm the guy that you want in office because I'm going to protect you from this teeny tiny company that isn't posing any threat."
to your bottom line at this point, but maybe one day will 20 years down the road.
Yeah, I have a couple more questions, but before I just want to say, I just know there are people In the chat right now and watching this who are thinking, oh, these are vegans trying to tell us what to eat.
Don't tell us what to eat.
We don't want to be evangelized.
And it's like, please, anyone in the chat who's seen that, make it clear that we're not trying to tell anybody what to eat.
It's these Republican governors who are trying to dictate to people what they can and can't eat.
And our argument is not everyone should be vegan.
Our argument is everyone should be able to eat what they choose to eat without the state intervening and banning the food that they feel competes with the industries that fund them.
Let me ask you about the legal and constitutional issues because I know in Florida, and I believe maybe in other states, but I know for sure in Florida, after Governor DeSantis signed this bill into law that criminalizes the selling or distribution of lab-grown meat, There was a lawsuit.
My understanding is it hasn't quite been resolved, though the court allowed the lawsuit to proceed.
Tell us about that lawsuit, what arguments it entails, and what the important constitutional legal issues are.
Yeah, so there was a lawsuit challenging that law banning- Labyrinth meet in Florida.
To my knowledge, it hasn't.
It's just sort of going through the process right now.
It's allowed to go forward.
But like many lawsuits, there are still many steps remaining into actually getting a decision.
And basically, their argument is that they have a constitutional right to be able to conduct their business and their commerce and that Florida can't just single them out and say like.
You can't sell this anymore.
In the same way that they couldn't just say, like, you can't sell Doritos here anymore or you can't.
I mean, I don't even think they were selling lagroom meat in Florida at the time, actually.
You know, you can't sell blueberries in Florida, like something like that.
And, you know, I think they have a pretty good case, but also anything can happen.
You mean the people challenging the law have a good case?
Yeah, I think they have a pretty good case, but also that might be me being like, Biased in favor of them and wanting it to work out, but also anything can happen, especially because I don't know a tremendous amount about the part of law that they're sort of invoking here.
I feel like I'm mostly good for analyzing First Amendment lawsuits and everything else.
I'm sort of flying by the seat of my pants.
Yeah, just to emphasize, because people I know from experience, whenever someone cites the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution, Everybody's brain just shuts off.
It sounds like something so boring.
Like, who would be interested in that?
And in reality, it has become like a linchpin of so many laws.
In fact, the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was constitutionally justified on the grounds of interstate commerce because the idea was if we're going to be a country, you can't like— Go to North Carolina and have certain economic products banned, and then you go to South Carolina and they're available.
You can't have Idaho banning products from Texas.
You can't have California banning products from Alabama.
The whole idea is that you're supposed to have this national interstate commerce that all states have to have the same consumer opportunities.
And that's how the Civil Rights Act was justified as well, that it was about Accommodations and trading and the like.
But in this case, it's so obvious that Ron DeSantis is saying, you know, no lab-grown meat.
And you would think the argument would be, oh, well, if you're a lab-grown meat company in Florida, then that's fine.
But it's really just an attempt for individual states to ban food items that have already been approved on the federal level, which is supposed to determine this.
And I think the judge, at least on the Interstate Commerce Clause issue, was pretty I'm not willing to say he was so receptive that it's guaranteed he'll adopt it, but he was definitely receptive enough that he thought it justified allowing these cases to continue.
All right, Emma, thanks so much for, not just for talking to us tonight, but also for the great reporting you're doing on this issue.
I hope people understand why it's important.
It's not about vegan versus non-vegan food.
It's about what powers states are supposed to have in dictating your diets and other parts of your life.
So I know you've been covering this as well as anybody.
