4.3 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2025
⏱️ 84 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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VR2 - Vapid Response Wednesday returns live on video for another round of bad-faith legal takes from the American right’s leading--well, let’s just go with “minds.”
We begin with a quick check-in on the divided state of the U.S. “sovereign citizen” movement via a short explainer video in which one of its leading grifters denounces a whole new set of grifters who are promoting the concept of an “American State National.”
We then plumb new depths of dumbassery from Harvard Law school professor/crypto-theocrat Adrian Vermeule. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Vermeule has called out the true villains of the American judiciary: lower court judges who aren’t doing exactly what Adrian Vermeule imagines the Supreme Court has told them to do. Matt breaks down why this column doesn’t provide a single example of the trend it purports to be exposing, and Lydia has the details on one of MAGA’s favorite legal scholars. Who is Adrian Vermeule, what is “Catholic integralism,” and why is a man who has previously gone to so much effort to hide his true beliefs behind “common-good Constitutionalism” showing his entire ass in the pages of the NYT?
Then, we preview a *patron-only* bonus where we go into overtime to witness the spectacle of Alan Dershowitz’s lengthy but extremely unconvincing arguments as to why everyone should be required to sell him pierogi under force of law. If you want to be sure to not miss that, you'll have to go to patreon.com/law!
Watch this episode on YouTube! https://youtu.be/-GyGbd-GUbs
"What is the difference between American National and American State National?" Kelby Smith (Youtube link)
“Someone is Defying the Supreme Court, But It’s Not Trump,” The New York Times, Adrian Vermeule (7/25/25)
SCOTUS shadow docket order in Trump v. Wilcox (05/22/2025)
SCOTUS shadow docket order in Noem v. Doe (05/30/2025)
SCOTUS shadow docket order in DHS v. D.V.D. (06/23/2025)
SCOTUS shadow docket order in DHS v. D. V. D. (07/03/2025)
Harvard Students' Letter to Administration re: Vermeule (11/09/2020)
Vermeule Responds to Harvard Law Faculty's Letter to Students re: The Rule of Law under the Trump Administration (03/30/2025)
Check out the OA Linktree for all the places to go and things to do!
To support the show (and lose the ads!), please pledge at patreon.com/law!
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Hello, hello. |
0:12.2 | How's it going? |
0:13.8 | Hey, I'm Thomas. |
0:14.8 | This is opening arguments, FAPID response Wednesday, number two, twice as complicated |
0:19.2 | in the video setup. |
0:20.3 | Read them and weep. I'm Thomas. That's Matt Cameron. Real Life lawyer. How are you doing, Matt? All right. All right. I'm ready to talk about some more bad faith nonsense from a Harvard law professor, just like we did last week. Do lawyers need to keep an eye on the continents? How are the continents doing behind? Is that a, you don't have law books. Also, look at the camera. Reminder for all of us to look at the camera. Matt, you should have like a pin that you move each week and then like someone has to chime in with like a fun fact about wherever you moved it to and then maybe they'll be wrong half the time because they don't know geography. I guess an immigration attorney does need a map more than a lot of. Yeah, really. |
0:54.2 | Good to have a big wool-sized map. We'd actually, we'd talked about doing pins for every case that we won from where they're from, but there's somebody from the same place. We need like breakout maps of different countries. Yeah, just a lot of, yeah, that makes sense. A lot of Salvadorans. And of course, joining us is producer Lydia Smith. How I doing, Lydia? Hello. I am doing well. Thanks for having me back and not kicking me off. |
0:55.1 | Yeah. Yeah. I, truth be told, I couldn't find the right button. So that's well figured out eventually. No. The tech problem for another day. If you're not familiar with a show, it's a podcast, it's a lot podcast. It's a lot on politics. And now we're doing videos on Wednesdays. And this format is what happens is I do just nothing but AV tech support for 40th straight hours. And then they, Matt and Lydia, prepare content, I'm told. And I will see it for the first time today. I can't wait. Cannot wait. But this is, and this is the bare bones stuff I was able to do. |
1:45.4 | We'll get fancier as we go. |
1:46.7 | We'll iterate. |
1:47.3 | But I'm really excited. |
1:48.1 | Last week was so much fun. |
1:49.6 | And we have even, Matt, we have even more planned. |
1:51.6 | I feel like this is like we probably have too much today, honestly. |
1:54.9 | We're going deep. |
1:55.9 | We've got some good stuff. |
1:56.5 | But we got some fun stuff. |
1:57.5 | We've got some fun stuff. We've got some serious stuff, but it's all going to be fun because, you know, as you know, the format here, we're looking at bad faith idiots, and we've got plenty of them. |
2:04.7 | Love bad faith idiots. That's what we're here for. Yeah, where do we want to start today? So I got a little amused douche for you from... |
2:13.3 | Okay, that's perfect. I've been thinking of these episodes like a little meal, and it's nice to start off with something tasty and simple because we're going to be going deep, eating our vegetables and having a main course on, as I mentioned before, of course, we talked about Ellen Dershowitz, famous Harvard Law professor last week in the Wall Street Journal. |
2:30.7 | We'll be looking at another completely different Harvard Law professor in the New York |
2:34.2 | Times. |
... |
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