Pod Insights 5-4 United States v. 95 Barrels of Vinegar About this episode We should all want accurate food labels and strong regulations. We don't want to consume raw milk or mix dolphin in our canned tuna... well, maybe some do.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Jim and the cricket. Ooh, expired ham.
0:07 Speaker 00 No, no one will fall for-
0:08 Speaker 01 Woo-hoo, cheat meat! Ooh, this one's open.
0:15 Speaker 01 Ooh, stomach churning.
0:22 Speaker 02 Hey, everyone. This is Andrew from Prologue Projects. On this episode of Five to Four, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael discuss the case The United States v. 95 Barrels of Vinegar. It's a case from a century ago about misleading food labels. In 1924, a company selling apple cider vinegar claimed that their vinegar was made from "selected apples." The government said this was a misleading claim because the vinegar was made from dried apples, not freshly selected ones. It's a topic that also concerns food safety, and given who Trump has selected to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, it could become very relevant.
1:02 Speaker 03 Questioning vaccines and calling for the elimination of entire departments tasked with overseeing public health. That is what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been doing, not just in saying "not just this election cycle," but also for years.
1:15 Speaker 02 This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.
1:25 Peter Shamshiri? Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have left us pathetic and flailing, like Drake suing Kendrick Lamar's label.
1:34 Michael Liroff? Yes.
1:35 Peter Shamshiri? I'm Peter. I'm here with Michael.
1:38 Michael Liroff? Hey, everybody.
1:39 Peter Shamshiri? And Rhiannon.
1:40 Speaker 06 Hello.
1:41 Peter Shamshiri? What a blessing to find out about this right before recording.
1:46 Michael Liroff? It is incredible.
1:47 Peter Shamshiri? Dude, how far have rap beefs fallen?
1:50 Speaker 06 Yeah. The accusations Drake is making that the label used bots and a pay-for-play scheme to inflate the success of Kendrick's diss record.
2:05 Michael Liroff? Bro, I promise you, that's not true. Everybody loves that shit. Everybody loves that song.
2:11 Peter Shamshiri? People really did. People really did.
2:14 Michael Liroff? And nobody likes you, man. They don't. They don't.
2:17 Peter Shamshiri? Look, at this point, for Drake, you have to decide what kind of rapper are you? Are you gonna grab a gun and try to kill this dude? Or are you gonna sue? And honestly, I think he made the right choice fundamentally. Like, he was true to himself here. He's gonna sue.
2:33 Speaker 06 Yeah, exactly. Genuine guy, right? What you see is what you get with Drake, which is suing because Apple, apparently, when listeners would request Drake songs via Siri,
2:46 Speaker 06 the suggestion was not like us.
2:49 Michael Liroff? It is a Drake song.
2:52 Michael Liroff? I mean, there's a non-zero chance when somebody was like, "Give me that song about Drake."
2:58 Speaker 06 Right, right.
2:59 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, of course. All right. So today's case, United States v. 95 Barrels of Vinegar.
3:09 Peter Shamshiri? Now, you may hear that case name and think we're doing a prank of some sort. But this is a real case. It's from 1924.
3:17 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:17 Peter Shamshiri? We will explain the unusual title shortly. This case is about misleading labeling. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and made it illegal to make false or misleading statements on your branding. The company here, Douglas Packing Company, labeled barrels of apple cider vinegar, and those labels said that the vinegar was, quote, "Made from selected apples." The government said that that was misleading because this vinegar was made from dried apples, not fresh apples. And because the phrase "selected apples"
4:02 Peter Shamshiri? implies that there was a selection process, which didn't really exist. And the Supreme Court agreed.
4:09 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
4:10 Michael Liroff? Mm hmm.
4:11 Peter Shamshiri? And yeah, surprise. I think this is a good case, folks.
4:14 Michael Liroff? Yes.
4:14 Peter Shamshiri? We're doing a good case.
4:15 Speaker 06 Yeah.
4:16 Peter Shamshiri? But we are going to use it to talk about food labeling regimes and what the morons taking control of the federal government have planned for us all.
4:25 Speaker 06 Yeah, yes, the era of morons.
4:27 Michael Liroff? Mm hmm.
4:28 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, I'm trying to trademark the age of morons. That's what I've called it. I'm going to pitch it to The Times. I want to write a column that's just called "The Age of Morons."
4:36 Speaker 06 Perfect.
4:36 Michael Liroff? There you go.
4:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, you know, and this age of morons in 2024, you know, basically trying to take us back to a horrific age of morons at the turn of the 20th century, which is where this story of this case kind of starts. "The Jungle," novel published in 1906, written, of course, by the famous muckraker author Upton Sinclair. Sinclair spent several weeks in 1904 working in meatpacking plants in Chicago and basically uncovered, you know, what amounted to wage slavery for the workers, unsafe and disgusting and really dangerous working conditions, extreme poverty for factory workers at this time.
5:20 Speaker 06 And the novel doesn't directly have anything to do with food labeling or the Supreme Court. You know, Sinclair was actually writing to like advance socialism in the United States. But there was a massive public response to the book. It wasn't as Sinclair intended on behalf of those exploited workers. It was actually a fixation on food safety because the novel described, you know, widespread animal abuse, the use of diseased meat in packing and production. There were really quite visceral accounts, human body parts being ground up with the animal parts. And so there was a public uproar for food safety policies.
6:05 Michael Liroff? That's so perfect. I'm sorry. It is so perfect that you're like, I'm going to write a great story about the horrific worker conditions to rally the American people to the cause of the lowly working man. And instead they're like, man, my food is nasty.
6:20 Speaker 06 Yeah.
6:20 Michael Liroff? Let's get some better food control up in here.
6:23 Peter Shamshiri? It's like a story where people are bleeding into the food and people are like, oh, my God, my food.
6:29 Speaker 06 Right, yeah. And Sinclair like recognized this like at the time, he said that he got famous off of the jungle, quote, "Not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef."
6:45 Peter Shamshiri? Tubercular.
6:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, which it's gross. So in large part because of the jungle and the public outcry that followed, the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906. And like Peter said, this established the Bureau of Chemistry, which would later become the FDA. The Food and Drug Administration was established by this act. And this legislation ushered in a new era of government regulation of the food industry, of food quality, chiefly did that with food labeling rules and rules about the claims made on food labels. The Pure Food and Drug Act prohibited the addition of any ingredients that would actually substitute
7:32 Speaker 06 for the food. Like, you can't say that, you know, there's a substance in bread that's not actually the bread, and also prohibited the concealment of like any damage or potential health hazard, or the, you know, constituting a filthy or decomposed substance. And then it additionally said that there couldn't be false or misleading information on food labels, and additionally mandated that if there were certain dangerous ingredients in food, things like cocaine or alcohol, that food labels had to reflect that. There could be heroin in your food, and there was heroin in food, and it wasn't required
8:16 Speaker 06 that that be disclosed in labeling.
8:18 Michael Liroff? RFK said it's good for ADHD, though, so maybe.
8:22 Speaker 06 Great.
8:22 Michael Liroff? Maybe.
8:25 Peter Shamshiri? He said that heroin was good for ADHD?
8:27 Michael Liroff? Yes, he said he treated.
8:29 Peter Shamshiri? This old ADHD with heroin. Well.
8:33 Peter Shamshiri? Look, I don't believe him, but I'm willing to try.
8:38 Speaker 06 Anything at this point for Peter's ADHD. So turning to the facts of this case, you know, quick story about some folks who made vinegar and lied about it.
8:48 Peter Shamshiri? Piece of shit.
8:49 Speaker 06 Yeah, actually, no one really like accuses them of being evil or anything like that. Interesting facts here. So the Douglas Packing Company was founded in 1911 by brothers Robert and Charles Douglas. The Douglas Packing Company was located in a suburb of Rochester, New York. And they started off with mass producing pectin for jam and jelly makers, pectin being a chemical substance that's found in apple cores. But then they started branching into other apple processing business like making apple cider vinegar. And so the process they used differed based on whether like apple harvesting was in season or not.
9:28 Speaker 06 So for part of the year, when apples were in season, they would use fresh apples to process and make into vinegar. But for off season production, they started to dehydrate apples. So they would remove 80% of the water content in the apples, they would store them. And then when they were ready in the off season to make apple cider vinegar from those dehydrated apples, they would rehydrate the apples, they literally like add water. And then they would press those rehydrated apples into juice and they would turn that juice into apple cider vinegar. Importantly, let's talk about like the difference between these two processes for making apple cider vinegar.
10:07 Speaker 06 Really importantly, the process they used, which added a couple of steps that weren't used in the process to make apple cider vinegar from fresh apples. That different process did not result in noticeably different apple cider vinegar. It tasted more or less the same and the chemical makeup of the two vinegars was not really different from one another. They added one ingredient as a preservative.
10:32 Speaker 06 So the issue here is not that like actually you really get a different product. The legal issue is literally about the labeling. So Douglas Packing had the same label on all of the apple cider vinegar, whether it was made from fresh or dehydrated apples. And the label said Excelsior brand apple cider vinegar made from selected apples. So the question in this case is about whether that label misrepresents what the apple cider vinegar is, if it's made with dehydrated apples that weren't selected. Now, let's talk about like the weird name of this case and like what this is actually a lawsuit about.
11:15 Speaker 06 If this case is called United States v. 95 barrels of apple cider vinegar. This is called an in rem action. You know, this case is a lawsuit asking a court to define or clarify or name certain rights and obligations as to property rather than a person. In rem in Latin means against a thing. So, you know, the decision made by a court in an in rem action, that's binding on the property, not any like other party or a person. So actually, this case comes from some buyers of Douglas Packing's apple cider vinegar, who suspect that the labeling is misleading in some way. They basically contact the feds and the federal government does an investigation and brings this suit.
11:59 Speaker 06 And so the government isn't wanting like money from this lawsuit. They don't want money from the barrels of apple cider vinegar. They're asking the court actually to say like what rights or obligations there are as to the apple cider vinegar, what obligations there are in labeling this thing.
12:17 Peter Shamshiri? All right, so let's talk about the law here. The law says that you can't label your products in a false or misleading manner. And the question is whether it was misleading to label this product as vinegar, quote, "made from selected apples." The court makes a couple of points here. First, again, the company's process for some of these apples is to dehydrate them, rehydrate them with water, after which they go through the fermentation process that you need to create vinegar. The court says, well, if it's made from dehydrated apples.
12:52 Peter Shamshiri? It's not exactly made from apples as a normal person would understand them. Yeah. The juice in a fresh apple is the apple's natural juice, whereas the juice in these rehydrated apples is just water. And therefore, quote, "The vinegar made from dried apples was not the same as that which would have been produced from the apples without dehydration." Yeah. One interesting thing about this is that it's acknowledged by the court that the end product here is indistinguishable from a taste perspective and only has minor chemical differences. But they basically conclude that this doesn't matter. All that matters is that they are representing it as something that it's not. You said apples. When people hear that, they think apples.
13:34 Peter Shamshiri? They don't think apples that have been dehydrated and then rehydrated with water, right? You changed its character. So you were fucking lying, Douglas Packing Company. You fucking scumbags, you're busted. You fucking snake oil salesman.
13:50 Peter Shamshiri? They also point out that the labeling says "selected apples." The court says, quote, "The words 'made from selected apples' indicate that the apples used were chosen with a special regard to their fitness for the purpose of making apple cider vinegar." Yeah. In other words, the term "selected apples" implies some sort of filtering process to identify only the finest apples. But this was not happening here. Yeah. I do think that you could argue that the court was being a little bit ticky tack with this ruling, a little too stringent. But ultimately, I think they're on the right track here. The point of the law is to ensure that consumers are receiving accurate information about the products they consume.
14:32 Peter Shamshiri? And that means the words you use in describing those products should have real meaning. Yeah. You could see a modern court being like, "Well, technically..." It's made from a type of apple. Dehydrated apples are a type of apple. And technically, the apples are selected in a sense. If they use an apple, it's been selected. So this is fine. You could see that sort of just like textualist garbage happening with the modern court. But no, you know, when it comes to food labeling, there should be a standard that companies have to clearly convey what exactly the product is. And I think that's the standard that the court is using here. We should not be at the whims of rhetorical tomfoolery.
15:14 Speaker 06 Yeah.
15:14 Peter Shamshiri? Is what the court is saying.
15:15 Speaker 06 Yeah, don't editorialize too much.
15:17 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. Don't get fucking cute with me. All right, just give me my vinegar.
15:21 Speaker 06 Yeah, cut the cute.
15:23 Michael Liroff? Yeah, I mean, it's not hard to imagine the court being like, well, look, if it tastes like apple cider vinegar, that's what people are looking for. They're looking for something with a specific taste character, specific flavor profile, and they don't really care. And being very generous sort of in that respect and then being hyper pedantic with the selected stuff. I mean, like, as long as the apples aren't random, they are in some sense selected. Rotten ones are removed. That's a selection process or whatever.
15:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
15:52 Michael Liroff? Just because the modern court sucks fucking dick.
15:57 Speaker 06 Yeah, I could see a modern court being like, well, you know, like, the seeds for this apple are selected. They're intentional about planting it in a certain way. So these are selected, you know? But it's just kind of like a ring around the rosy and not actually as direct as the modern court presents its textualism. This, I think, is a pretty direct pared down, simple textualism.
16:24 Michael Liroff? Yeah.
16:25 Peter Shamshiri? Right, right. So I think we should admit that we are just using this case as an excuse to talk about what like conservatives think about this sort of thing. And what the absolute creeps in the Trump administration 2.0.
16:41 Peter Shamshiri? Might do. So I think a good way to approach this is to get our arms around the scope of these laws now, these types of laws, and then we can drill down into what conservatives think about this shit and what the world might look like if they really get their way on a lot of the like labeling and sort of regulatory state sort of things. Yeah. So there are a ton of laws and regulations concerning labeling for consumer products, right? You have major ones. There's the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of 1967, which requires that most products have labels, including basic information like their contents,
17:23 Peter Shamshiri? who manufactured them, where they were manufactured, et cetera. You also have laws requiring that labels identify common allergens, for example. Yeah. Then there are also a ton of lesser known labeling requirements. The Dolphin Protection Consumer Information Act prevents companies selling tuna from claiming that their product is dolphin safe unless it actually is. You have regulations limiting the sale of raw milk, for example. This is just, you know, just scratching the surface.
17:54 Michael Liroff? Yeah, I mean, you can see the intersection of this stuff with like health and safety.
17:59 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
18:00 Michael Liroff? Very clearly, just at the time of this recording, like in the last 24 hours, it came out that a farm that does raw milk production called Raw Farms LLC, lovely name, and their top of the line product called Cream Top, they found bird flu. They found bird flu and the animals were just like filthy with it. But like the milk had to be recalled, just disgusting. But like, raw milk is currently a big fad and you might be concerned about, for precisely these reasons, you don't want to drink raw milk, unpasteurized milk,
18:41 Michael Liroff? because you don't want to ingest harmful viral or bacterial contents and make yourself sick.
18:49 Michael Liroff? And so when you go to the store, you rely on labeling that clearly identifies whether something is pasteurized.
18:58 Speaker 06 Yeah.
18:59 Michael Liroff? That's just a normal way you interact with the world.
19:03 Speaker 06 And you rely also on a functioning administrative state with federal agencies that can effectively do things like mandate recalls on dangerous food.
19:13 Michael Liroff? Right, right. And make sure the labeling is accurate.
19:15 Speaker 06 Exactly, exactly.
19:18 Peter Shamshiri? Now, on our last episode, which was a premium episode, I referred to a video I watched on TikTok.
19:25 Speaker 07 This milk has been sitting in my refrigerator for close to six weeks and it is still perfectly safe to consume.
19:32 Peter Shamshiri? There's something about this lady just watching this milk chunk out into her cup and just not even flinching.
19:40 Michael Liroff? Yeah, I know.
19:41 Speaker 07 Because this is unpasteurized raw milk and raw milk will not spoil like conventional milk does. Let me break it down for you. Raw milk is a living superfood, very similar to human breast milk.
19:51 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, she's just sitting there pouring it and it it globs out. It globs out into the cup and she then uses like a little foamer like to, to just like
20:04 Speaker 06 Like to disintegrate the
20:06 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, to just sort of mix in the chunks and then she drinks it. And this is after explaining it has been in her fridge for six weeks. Six weeks. Lady.
20:19 Speaker 06 Ma'am.
20:20 Peter Shamshiri? I will say, I did think of a million dollar idea, which is an ad for raw milk. This like manly man steps out onto the screen and he's like, I like to hold my milk in the palm of my hand. I like, I don't drink milk like a lady. I eat my milk like a man.
20:38 Speaker 06 I want my milk to be visible on a scale in a substantive way.
20:44 Peter Shamshiri? He's just holding his milk like a fucking Cliff bar, just ripping into it.
20:52 Michael Liroff? Oh, these people are so disgusting.
20:54 Peter Shamshiri? I feel like we need that, though. There needs to be a, you need in this episode, and I apologize to our listeners, but there must be a visceral demonstration of how fucking nasty
21:06 Speaker 06 Yep.
21:06 Peter Shamshiri? the lives that these people intend to live actually are.
21:11 Michael Liroff? Yes.
21:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, and how like gross food can get really quickly without like rules, you know? And so just like talking back about like the relationship to health and safety, public wellness, and food labeling, FAIR, the Food Allergen Research and Education Organization, it's a nonprofit that does research and education around living with food allergies and food allergies in general. FAIR says that undeclared allergens are the number one reason for food recalls in the United States. There is a mandate that food labeling has to have allergens listed so that people with food allergies know to stay away from those allergens. And this remains a problem, obviously, with undeclared allergens being such a big issue
21:56 Speaker 06 in the food industry, according to FAIR. But at the same time, you do have the rule that labeling displays food allergens, and therefore you have a mechanism inside the federal government to hold food manufacturers to account when they break this rule. And again, having that functioning administrative agency that can then effectuate a recall when food is found to have undeclared allergens. There's a method for like reporting this. If you find unsafe food, if you're somebody with food allergies and you notice that there's an undeclared allergen in food, problems with labeling are reported to the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Adverse Event Reporting System.
22:41 Speaker 06 There's a safety reporting portal online. You know, when we talk about conservatives dismantling the administrative state in the name of austerity, in the name of efficiency, in the name of fucking whatever, these are the places, the agencies, the offices, the systems, and the rules that are like going to suffer from. For example, conservative budget cuts and shredding away at the federal government. And things like food allergies, which can be, obviously, like, people listening to this have food allergies or know people who have very serious food allergies. You know, these are potentially incredibly dangerous, incredibly lethal. And that's where things that sort of like health and safety for the public really starts to like unravel.
23:24 Peter Shamshiri? Before we go too far, I think it's important to think about like, what exactly conservatives might have in mind here? It's hard to know in some ways, right? They're, they're putting RFK into a position of power over much of the government's health apparatus. What is that going to look like? What's it going to mean? We don't know exactly, but we have Project 2025, for example, which remains a pretty useful guideline for what conservatives are trying to accomplish. One thing that jumped out from that document was about baby formula. I'm going to read a quote from Project 2025. "As for baby formula regulations generally, labeling regulations and regulations
24:06 Peter Shamshiri? that unnecessarily delay the manufacture and sale of baby formula should be reevaluated. During the Biden administration, there have been devastating baby formula shortages." So, anyone with a young child probably knows this. In 2022, there was a baby formula shortage, really big deal, probably driven primarily by COVID-related supply shocks. But there was another element. Abbott Labs, one of the biggest producers of baby formula in the country, had to shut down production at one of their plants after the FDA issued recalls because a whistleblower drew attention to issues in their process. And there were reports of up to nine infant deaths that were potentially traceable to that plant.
24:52 Peter Shamshiri? So, when they are talking about lifting regulations that delay the manufacture and sale of baby formula, seems like maybe they're saying that in the future, it's better to have more production, even if it means that some babies drink contaminated baby formula.
25:09 Speaker 06 And die.
25:09 Michael Liroff? Yes, absolutely.
25:11 Peter Shamshiri? And you may say that I'm a dreamer, but as rich as our country is. I just don't think that's a trade off that we have to make.
25:20 Speaker 06 Right.
25:21 Peter Shamshiri? I assure you, there is a way around that little Sophie's Choice. And this is an issue I plucked from Project, sorry for that really dark metaphor with Sophie's Choice. That's not how I meant it. This is just an issue I plucked randomly from Project 2025 after glancing through it a bit. This is the world they want to build, right?
25:42 Michael Liroff? Yeah.
25:42 Peter Shamshiri? Bacteria in your baby formula and dolphins in your tuna. So that corporations can capture a little bit more profit.
25:51 Speaker 06 Yeah.
25:51 Peter Shamshiri? They are very skeptical of government playing this sort of role at all.
25:58 Michael Liroff? Yeah, you know, another area where this might be concerning is the sort of dietary supplement market.
26:05 Speaker 06 Oh, my gosh, yeah.
26:06 Michael Liroff? Yeah, if you look at like, okay, so RFK is going to be at HHS. And he's obviously, you know, the sort of alternative medicine type. But also like you look at Trump's big backers and like his political constituencies. And it's like Infowars exists mainly to sell crap supplements, right? Fox News has crap supplements as like a lot of their major advertisers. I don't listen to Joe Rogan, but I imagine there's a lot of crap supplements being pitched there as well. And so this is a market that's already sort of rife with abuse.
26:47 Michael Liroff? That labeling only moderately can control. And so I do worry about what it would look like if the sort of reins are removed from that. Because for a lot of people, they sort of implicitly just trust what they hear someone like Joe Rogan say, or just what they see on a bottle at a Walmart as being accurate. And
27:16 Michael Liroff? And so if the government isn't like forcing these companies to accurately, or at least semi accurately represent what's in the bottles. And the bottles don't have to really represent like anything at all. Then maybe some of these shit supplements end up on the shelf at a Walmart. And maybe random people who don't even know what they're buying end up buying them.
27:43 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. What if your local pharmacy looked more like a GNC is the question that we're sort of facing here.
27:49 Michael Liroff? I did some poking around on PubMed for this and it's like already there's issues in this with like, you know, over 50% of supplements that are botanical based have plant matter. And if that's not listed on the label and things like that and like dosage levels varying widely from pill to pill. A lot of the big labels I think are much better about this and the stuff you get at like the big box stores are better about this. But even they aren't immune and the wider industry is just really, I worry about what it'll look like if the reins are taken off. And I do think this is sort of emblematic of like a bigger thing.
28:33 Michael Liroff? I don't know if there's a name for this in like the literature or not, but something I've been thinking about for, for a little while now is like sort of, grifter capitalism or scam capitalism. I'm sure all the lefties in our audience right now are being like, that's just capitalism, Michael.
28:53 Michael Liroff? Well, guess what? You don't have to make the joke because I just did. Shut the fuck up.
29:01 Michael Liroff? But, but there's like Trump and his cronies and all these people represent like a specific brand of like making money by deception and.
29:17 Michael Liroff? We control that deception in a lot of arenas because we don't think the free market is the best way to deal with this problem. And I think the baby formula is a good example of this, but you can also think of like surgeons or whatever, anywhere there's occupational licensing. You don't want to find out someone's a quack surgeon by having them accidentally remove your liver instead of your appendix. That's why you have to take the MCATs and go to med school and pass whatever fucking shit.
29:49 Peter Shamshiri? Well, the free market can fix that because if you get a transplant for the wrong organ, you can leave a bad Yelp review.
29:59 Michael Liroff? There you go. There you go.
30:01 Peter Shamshiri? And then future consumers will know, unless of course, the doctor pays $5 to Yelp.
30:10 Speaker 06 Consumers of the appendectomy.
30:12 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, right. Yeah. But then you can use another review service and the cycle goes on and on.
30:18 Michael Liroff? The bereaved loved ones of the botched surgery recipient will leave a bad review. No, so there's certain things that we just, we don't want the free market mechanism as our assurance of at least a certain baseline level of competence.
30:32 Speaker 06 Yeah.
30:32 Michael Liroff? Because that involves too big of a sacrifice. It involves dead infants or dead people or immiserated people or whatever. And that is like, almost precisely what labeling is about. It's about preventing you from ingesting something at a lethal dosage for anyone or for you in specific because of your allergies or, you know, or because you don't even know what's in it. Or just because you have religious objections to eating beef and you don't want to eat something that was cooked in beef or whatever. But that's the whole point is like, it's a liberty enhancing thing for the consumer, but it's a profit reducing thing for the scammer.
31:16 Michael Liroff? And this is a very scam friendly administration coming in. And I don't think Project 2025 gives us much to look forward to on that front.
31:26 Peter Shamshiri? We're sort of touching around the edges of like this theme in fascism, which is just the mistrust of experts. Last episode, I said I would not quote Hannah Arendt, and this time I will, because it's just too on the nose. Very famous quote from Arendt. "The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools
32:09 Peter Shamshiri? whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." Appointments like RFK and Elon Musk are just like the apotheosis of this, right? Like buffoons who think they're smarter than everybody. RFK Jr. in particular is just the end point of a type of conspiratorial thinking where modern scientists are interlopers. They are essentially interfering with God's plan, and we can right the ship by returning to nature. This is why you have these morons chugging rotten raw milk. The fact that it's verifiably dangerous isn't relevant, just like the fact that we're dying of disease
32:51 Peter Shamshiri? at insane rates a couple hundred years ago, isn't relevant to them.
32:55 Michael Liroff? Right. I mean, these are the same people who were injecting ivermectin and then shitting out their own stomach lining and being like, "I can see the disease leaving my body."
33:09 Peter Shamshiri? The thing to understand about like conspiracy theories is that people believe them because they reify some other pre-existing belief about the world that they already hold. So you might want to ask one of these people, like, "How can you believe that raw milk is safe? Do you really think that like every scientist is lying to you? How can you believe that vaccines cause autism? Do you actually think that every scientist is lying to you about this? How can you believe that climate change is fake? Do you actually think that every scientist is lying to you?" But- If you're asking those questions, you've got it backwards. Because the idea that every scientist is lying to them is their first principle.
33:49 Speaker 06 Yes.
33:49 Peter Shamshiri? These people see the scientific and academic communities as their enemies, as like the tools of evil progressives. Like progressives are working in consultation with and hand in hand with scientists who are trying to like cloud up the modern world and use it to sort of overpower the godly forces of the righteous or whatever. Like, that's the sort of shit that they believe. So when you're like, hey, that's gonna make you throw up and poop a lot, you're way out of your depths. These people are living on a different fucking planet in a different fucking universe.
34:30 Peter Shamshiri? This is like the culmination of a perspective that is completely detached from reality. It's not something that you can sort of fight tit for tat. It doesn't really work like that.
34:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, you know, and just thinking about like food labels as one example of this, as one example of, you know, the mistrust of expertise, the anti-intellectualism. It really, all of this is about like breaking down the processes by which the public gets important information so that those processes, those communication pathways, those information channels can be taken over by fascist myth-making and replaced with like fascist ideology. It's about creating disinformation and doing away with information so that disinformation can replace that. And food labels are like a really good example.
35:25 Speaker 06 Food labels are a way that the government and through agencies that are tasked with, you know, health and wellness, public safety, those kinds of things. The food labels are a way that the government communicates important information in a basic sense. And so tearing away at regulations, at mandates, at statutes that sort of, you know, require something like food labeling and there are
35:51 Speaker 06 Infinity examples in the federal government of this kind of thing. You know, doing away with that kind of thing is about making it easier to replace information and science with disinformation and fascist ideology.
36:08 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, it's like it's stripping away our shared understanding of the world.
36:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's right. And creating skepticism and mistrust in institutions so that you fall back on, you default to trusting demagogues and totalitarian leaders.
36:25 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah, I view attacks on labeling and similar regulations as like emblematic of this sort of post-truth chaos that we're all living in. It's not just that fascists will make the world worse. They also make it harder to understand. They attack reliable sources of information. They attack media outlets that criticize them.
36:46 Speaker 06 Yeah.
36:46 Peter Shamshiri? The federal government itself serves as a source of information for a lot of things. The National Institute of Health is responsible for a huge amount of scientific research. And Project 2025 is very skeptical of their role in our federal system. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is by far the best source of data about employment in this country. And they want to limit the data it collects so that, for example, it would not report on racial and ethnic data that could be used to identify disparities. Fascists need reality to bend to them. And this is part of how they do it. They push out experts, they put in hacks. And you might know that something is wrong, but you won't always be able to see it because they fog up your vision.
37:29 Speaker 06 Yeah.
37:30 Peter Shamshiri? You will bite into your tuna sandwich and you will sense that something is off, but you won't ever know for sure.
37:35 Speaker 06 Yep.
37:36 Peter Shamshiri? That's what living in fascism is like. It's not ever knowing exactly how much dolphin you're eating.
37:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah. And, you know, like, it's not to say that there aren't like problems, like, you know, even serious problems at the FDA or the USDA or problems currently with food labeling that should be improved, all of that stuff. But it's about the government resources devoted to addressing those problems and making those agencies stronger. And better and even more effective in terms of protecting public health. Or like just completely doing away with them, right?
38:09 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah.
38:09 Speaker 06 In some sense, and then, you know, just to bring it back maybe to the Supreme Court, you know, to the extent that we have this whole other fucking branch of government that could add another layer of accountability and like, maybe make sure that federal agencies are doing what they're supposed to do or something like that. You know, we have a really fucked up and a very different Supreme Court today than we clearly did in 1924, when this case came down and said, yeah, you can't mislead people in food labeling. Two really big cases, obviously, you know, decreasing the power of the administrative state, weakening the administrative state came out just last term. We've talked about Loper Bright, which overturned Chevron deference.
38:54 Speaker 06 And there's another case called Corner Post, which we haven't talked about. That case extended the period of time that a party has to file a lawsuit challenging federal agency actions. So there's a six-year statute of limitations within which if you're filing a lawsuit to challenge some action that the FDA takes, for example, you've got six years to do it. But when does that clock start running? Well, last term, the Supreme Court said that clock starts to run not when the final regulation is released by the federal agency, but whenever a plaintiff suffers an injury.
39:29 Peter Shamshiri? Right.
39:29 Speaker 06 Whenever you say you got hurt by a federal agency action, you have six years after that, not just when the regulation comes down. And so, you know, just little ways that the Supreme Court has really, really helped in chipping away at the power of the administrative state already in ways that sort of like prime it, prime all these agencies of the federal government to get like just turned upside down, torn up by Trump 2.0.
40:02 Peter Shamshiri? If anyone from the Times is listening, I, I've also called this the age of diarrhea. Age of morons, age of diarrhea. I'm just trying to get something to stick in the popular consciousness. Hit me up and we can workshop this together and then I will write the column.
40:16 Speaker 06 If someone from the Times is listening, I'm begging you to do this because Peter will not stop talking about it. Please let him write a column titled The Age of Diarrhea.
40:25 Peter Shamshiri? This is only like the second time.
40:28 Michael Liroff? Not the diarrhea stuff.
40:30 Peter Shamshiri? Okay, the anti-diarrhea, I've probably said a half dozen times.
40:40 Peter Shamshiri? But yeah, you have to admit that that one's catchy.
40:42 Michael Liroff? It is, it is. It's got that, you know, that little something, that je ne sais quoi. That's just like, it's.
40:49 Peter Shamshiri? Yeah. Similar to eating dolphins. I think that the visual of us all just eating a dolphin sandwich has a sort of visceral appeal. Point being, I just think someone should give me a column about it. And I will not settle for balls and strikes. I just can't. I can't do that to myself anymore.
41:09 Michael Liroff? I can't wait to get the text from Jay about this.
41:18 Peter Shamshiri? All right, next week, a cop episode. Going back to our roots, baby.
41:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
41:24 Peter Shamshiri? Illinois v. Wardlow, case about how it's suspicious to run from cops, which we disagree with. I believe that it should be totally okay to see a cop and just take off full sprint in other direction. It's a safety issue.
41:41 Michael Liroff? It is.
41:42 Peter Shamshiri? You got a dog. You have to. It's your obligation as an owner. All right. Follow us on social media at 54pod. Subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com/54pod, all spelled out for access to premium and ad-free episodes, special events, our Slack, all sorts of shit. We'll see you next week.
42:03 Speaker 06 Bye.
42:04 Michael Liroff? Bye.
42:13 Michael Liroff? Five to Four is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Nafok and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. If you're not a Patreon member, you're not hearing every episode. To get exclusive Patreon-only episodes, discounts on merch, access to our Slack community, and more, join at patreon.com/54pod.
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