H- How does this permanent state of emergency legally shield civilians when they committed extrajudicial torture or murder? And then also, how do you think this has affected American law overall?

So the, the permanent emergency concept, you know, I borrow this from the, from the Italian social theorist Giorgio Agamben, and others have written a great deal.

I was, I was very influenced in my own training by critical theory and social theory and so, you know, Walter Benjamin and the, the Frankfurt School and stuff like this.

So, you know, it was something that I, as a historian, as an empirical historian, you're sort of taught to shy away from, from applying theoretical labels to things.

But, you know, God, I-- it was hard to avoid this one because it just seems so obvious to me that this is how these, these folks were thinking.

So, you know, the, uh, you are absolutely right that the, the, the heart of this matter is fear, and it, this is a fear that is like a contagion for, for those who are enslavers and also their allies and perhaps their community members who may not be their best buddies but, but sort of understand the race politics at hand here.

You know, uh, uh, the, the simple version of this is if you're going to enslave people and keep them captive and separate their families and, and beat them and murder them, there's a high probability that at least one is going to want revenge.

How did the fugitive slave clause in the Article Four of the Constitution ex- seem to be an explicit reaction to that? And also, what were other reactions about it in the southern colonies? And then, you know, again, as I'd like to ask you on most of these questions, how does that affect law now?

How did this change conversations between patients and providers? And what surprised you most about how women responded when they were screened? I mean, was this the kind of thing that you see in hypertension and obesity? Was it different? Tell us about that.

Yeah, that's a great question, Dan.

So when you think about, you know, sort of the big seven or eight things that I deal with, COPD, asthma, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, depression, and osteoarthritis and low back pain, every single one of my patients has one of those or the other.

And it so happens that many of the women have urinary incontinence as well.

We haven't had the time, the motivation or approach the issue with any sort of sensitivity.

So I would say the empower is truly transformative in terms of those discussions.

So you screen and once you screen positive, of course, a woman who screens positive has some expectations.

One, is it scalable for urinary incontinence? And two, is this method of empower able to be applied to other things that aren't screened well? So the lessons that you've learned with navigators and chatbots and things,

Horrifying.

Yes.

But he basically writes letters and uses his influence within the party to secure the nomination as the Democratic Party's nominee for, for president, and he wins, which leads us into his presidency.

But I, there's one more important fact to point out here with his biographical background, which is, this is hard to address, 'cause I, you have to be very careful about playing into Some of the, the less savory parts of American kind of political commentary, right? But he has this really close friendship with a senator named William Rufus King.

And later on, I think even during his own time there, there's some, some teasing going on about how close they are, because Buchanan and King are both bachelors, and they live in the same boarding house in Washington, and they're very, very tight.

They're inseparable.

And so there are rumors that, you know, calling King Buchanan's better half, for instance.

Mm-hmm.

Can you explain why they routinely use the term insurrection?

Yeah, so I'm happy you mentioned the fear thing.

I should have mentioned that before.

This was another common theme here between police immunity then and now, which was all it takes now for, really all it takes for an officer to be immune from prosecution is to say, I was fearing for my life, therefore I had to do what I had to do.

Back then, the fear was baked into the system so that it was assumed that the enslaver or whoever, white person in public space, may have killed or hurt an enslaved person or a free black person, that there was fear involved.

So this, what is the fear of? Well, we're not sure always whether the fear was legitimate or whether it was part of a kind of Paranoia, which certainly I think was a big part of the story.

But ultimately this leads to this concept of insurrection, which becomes so widespread and becomes the charge when we see the most famous or infamous prosecutions of enslaved rebels like Nat Turner.

And second part of it, do you have anything you want to say about whether the recent recognition of broader religious rights and religious rights trumping other rights will create a situation where not just the state, but private parties expressing religious beliefs will be allowed to do some of these same things.