Progressivism Misunderstood

[MUSIC] Ladies and gentlemen, could I please have your attention? [MUSIC] Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media. It has been a whirlwind of a week, a whirl of wind. I can't get into everything because it's some of it's just like internal dispatched stuff. The big things are happening and I'm really excited and bullish about the future and by no for effect, you'll be hearing a lot about all of that forthwith, but it's just been crazy stressful week. And with the moving and the packing and yesterday I had to feel free to fast forward. I don't know, a minute and a half or however long it takes me to do this because I'm just trying to get up to speed. Yesterday I had to get rid of some motor oil. So my old car, car got rid of seven years ago, had some sort of factory defect that eventually was part of a recall kind of thing. We're at leaked oil. I just leaked oil. And so it was like every six months I would have to, it wasn't so much of the leaked oil, it was that the oil dripped out of the thing and the pain and the smoke and blah. Anyway, it leaked oil. And so like every six months I'd have to put more oil on it, which was just weird for a car. It was an Audi to need that much oil. I've had cars where I don't think I ever put oil on them. And so at one point I just bought and bulk a bunch of this oil, because it was just a pain in the ass. Then I got rid of the car, forgot about it. And it's been sitting in my garage for 10 years, give or take. And you know, I'm not a super green guy, but I don't want to pour oil down into the sewer system. It's illegal. It's wrong. It's gross. But the rules for disposing of oil are crazy in the district of Columbia. And the only official way to do it, if you're going through the city, is to make an appointment for the toxic chemical removal team meet up in the parking lot of RFK stadium on X-date. And there are limited number of spots where you can hand over your oil or your other weird chemicals. And I just, you know, I wasn't going to be in town, the next available date, whatever. But AutoZone collects oil. We'll take oil. And so I boxed up, you know, like 10 bottles of this never used motor oil, which I don't think you can still use because there's like an expiration date of five years. Maybe that's BS. You know, Scott Lensacom thinks all expiration dates are kind of BS. But I'm and I had to drive out to this AutoZone all the other side of DC. And I could just tell when I was talking to the guy and I told him that it wasn't used oil. It was never used oil. And it's still in the original packaging and all that kind of stuff. You could just see the wheels in his head turning about, huh? So you're saying you're giving me about a hundred bucks worth of motor oil that still has sealed caps on it that I can sell as new and bucket the money or whatever. And anyway, I don't know that he's going to do that. You seem like very nice guy. It was just, I hope someone doesn't get some like fermented motor oil for their car. Anyway, that was a crazy hassle to get it all across town because DC's traffic. I don't know what the hell's going on. Some bus blew up yesterday and the ninth half of the tunnel. But what should have been like a 40 minute drive was like an hour and 40 minute drive and then the chuds came out of the sewers. But I don't need to get all that. I don't even know why that story was interesting. My dad used to call this the talk below small talk nano talk. So maybe that was just a talk and we can kind of I don't know whatever. I guess we can start by just talking about where we are with Iran. It's kind of funny. I listen to a you know, I listen to a bunch of podcasts and people will acknowledge it. Right? Like we got nothing new to say. It's the exact, it's the status quo for like 10 days, you know, two weeks. There's no new points to make like on commentary podcast or in our podcast. There's lots of as we've talked about many times or as we've said before, did the same thing on the dispatch podcast yesterday. And that's because the whole thing is just sort of in a holding pattern. And I think that's sort of the way Trump kind of wants it for the time being at least. I don't think he wants to start bombing again. I don't think the Iranians want us be bombed again. But it's in their interest to not give in and not negotiate and drag this thing out. And you know, Trump has this thing about telling you what he's worried about by saying he's not worried about it. You know, so he's saying, I have all the time in the world. I don't care. I'm not under any time pressure. You know, because he's under time pressure and he feels like he's under time pressure. People are saying he's under time pressure. And the time pressure is simply that, you know, I mean, when Trump is right when he talks about how this is very early for war. I don't think he necessarily helps himself when he says, look, how long did Vietnam last? Vietnam lasted so much longer. How is that encouraging for anybody? Like, oh, now I feel better about this thing. It also raises all sorts of political issues for him. Like if you just keep calling it a war, you keep comparing it to World War II and the Korean war and the Vietnam war. The case that this is just a military operation gets weaker and weaker by the day. Of course, he's backstopped or he's helped by the fact that the congressional Republicans have absolutely no desire to actually make this point that this we're not supposed to be at war without their approval because they don't want any responsibility in improving anything. But still, the morgue goes on to pretend this legal fiction is a thing is kind of nonsense. And I was joking the other day with Steve and a colleague from AI we were talking and I was joking the other day is like, you know, one of the biggest burdens of this particular moment in American politics is carrying the load of being right about so many things. And I was joking, but I'm kind of serious in so far as like, you know, everything I ever said about Trump's character is coming, you know, on full display and we're getting all of these people like suddenly realizing the problems with Trump's character as if like nobody knew right you got Tucker Carlson doing his BS apology for help and get Trump elected as if like this, you know, the Trump we're seeing now is somehow materially different or a surprise. I don't know three weeks ago, I wrote in a G file that we were heading towards something like a JCPOA plus kind of settlement of this thing and now it's sort of conventional wisdom that that's what they're going for. I think the first column I wrote about the Iran war was about how Iran had an asymmetric advantage because of the Strait of Hormuz and like that's conventional wisdom now. I mean, again, none of these are like, scintillating insights or anything like that. It's just that like it feels like there's nothing new to say about this war that I didn't say in some of my colleagues at this bench didn't say in the first week of it, you know, that he wanted this to be a replay of Venezuela. What is going to really annoy me is that whenever the Strait of Hormuz actually does get truly open because of some sort of deal, we saw a glimpse of this last week, I guess when Trump had declared that the Strait was fully open, all of these sort of mega types talking about what a genius Trump was to get the Strait of Hormuz open this vital waterway only Trump could be this smart and it's like getting the Strait of Hormuz open wasn't the strategic goal of this war because it was already open when the war started fixing a quote unquote fixing a problem that you created and then wanting all this credit for how brilliant you were to be able to do it. It's just such a familiar pattern and we're going to hear so much more of it when this thing is finally settled. I think that the reason time is more on a wrong side geostrategically right or I should put this way the reason I think it is more likely that time is on a wrong side because we don't know really what's happening internally with the regime. There are signs of fracturing just because Trump says that we don't know who to deal with because the regime is coming apart doesn't mean it's not true and as you know I talked about with Eli Lake and Ken Pollock long ago the only way you actually get real regime change is by members of the elite turning on each other. And so we could very suddenly see something that looks actually like a kind of regime change doesn't mean that the regime is going to get necessarily materially better but it could but I just don't think I don't think we're there. And so barring that the reason why I think it's on a wrong times on a wrong side is that the closing of the partial. mostly closing, right? There are some ships getting out of the Hormuz Strait, but also, you know, just the tightening of the supply that goes through there isn't really just about oil. Like a third of, I think it's, you know, just to say, I know people criticize me for using the word directionally, right? Let's just say it's in the ballpark, but something like a third of the world's helium supply goes through the straight of Hormuz from Oman or one of those countries. And the computer chip industry massively depends on helium to make chips, to make transistors or whatever, microchips, including the ones with a hint of lime, no forgetting. And we're already finally hearing, getting real coverage about the problem with the fertilizer stuff. And, you know, the increased costs, the shortages, the economic problems with having traffic curtailed or throttled through the straight of Hormuz, they accumulate, right? Trump is kind of hoping that this thing kind of goes on a back burner and people stop paying attention to it. And that's why I keep saying, you know, I don't care about the straight of Hormuz, we don't use it, we don't need it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the world economy needs it and we are at the center of the world economy. And so like having just 10 or 12 or five chips a day coming out of the straight of Hormuz is just a huge tax on industry, on consumers and also its ways. And those taxes are gonna accumulate, they're cumulative. And if Trump wants to like get the economic consequences of this thing behind him and get the price of gas down, just putting in essentially a semi-permanent ceasefire and saying, we'll get back to this when you guys can talk. It helps the Iranian regime more than it helps Trump. And, you know, now we're hearing these estimates from the Pentagon, there'll be six months before they can fully demine the straight of Hormuz, which I think is kind of weird. But six months of gas getting more expensive and also doing this stuff about the blockade, I think the blockade is actually smart. And I think the Trump administration was right to do it. I love listening to people, including the Iranians, you know, saying, this blockade is an act of war. Yeah, yeah, it's an act of war. So bombing your capital and killing your Supreme Leader. And, you know, like it's weird how they sound more angry and outraged about a blockade than they did about, you know, the blowing up of the IRGC barracks and the killing of the Supreme Leader and all the rest. But it's absolutely true, blockades are an act of war. This does not bother me conceptually at all. And it's funny to listen to people who're talking about how, like some of the, I've heard some of the commentary on cable and on NPR or whatever, you know, people, they throw in this blockade is an act of war thing as if like it's escalatory or categorically different than what we've been doing for the last 60 days when, you know, it's just not. It's a blockade's part of war. In fact, I wrote a column a couple months ago about this about how, you know, think about it, how it's, I think it's kind of funny how Trump likes to, it's been like release, has been lifting sanctions and restraints on Russian and even an early part of the war are Iranian oil to get it to market, to keep prices down. And what's sort of funny about that is that, you know, there's this famous Henry George quote about protectionism, that protectionism teaches us to do in times of peace, what we usually only do in times of war against our enemies. When we're in war, Trump wants to lift sanctions and tariffs essentially on foreign goods, but at peace he wants to raise them. It's a really kind of weird scenario. Anyway, I think the blockade is a good idea. I think what it does is it puts more time pressure on the regime because they need the petr dollars that come out of selling oil to China and whatnot. But the thing is, is like the blockade, it squeezes Iran, it also squeezes us because even though Iran sells 90% of its oil to China, or 80% or something like that, oil is a global commodity market. So if the price goes up anywhere, it goes up everywhere. It's not like China's not gonna buy oil from someplace else if they can't get it from Iran, which means there's gonna be more demand for oil from someplace else, which means prices are gonna go up. And so again, I think militarily the blockade, and strategically the blockade makes a lot of sense, but it's going to make the economic squeeze of all of this on American consumers worse. And if they're really talking about even under the best of circumstances, the straight-of-war moves not operating properly for six months. Well, six months from now is what, October 24th? That's like, in other words, 10 days before the midterms. That's not great for Trump or the Republicans, not that I'm oozing with sympathy or anything like that. So I'm also on some weird medication, I'm taking some steroids, and they're making me a little loopy. Not fun steroids, I'm not getting jabbed or anything like that. Where to go. I wanna talk about the Clarence Thomas thing. I think I'm gonna write about it today, but I know once I start that, I'm not gonna be able to stop for a while. And so if you're interested in that, just stay tuned and we'll get to it. Well, when I always start with this Hassan Piker thing, it's weird. Like I don't, you know, I wrote about Hassan Piker like a week ago. And as I admitted the thing, I don't follow a guide. I don't know much about him. I know that there's a lot of the left is having this debate about whether or not they should welcome Hassan Piker to their ranks. I think the lefties who think they should are making a catastrophic mistake because the guy is, I mean, I think the guy's a complete friggin' fraud. And, you know, grew up rich, says he hates capitalism. There's this interview or, you know, round table discussion in the New York Times this week that everyone's freaking out about where all of these hardcore lefty types are talking about how it's okay to steal and do some a little domestic terrorism for the right thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, and the social contraction applied to them. And there's this New Yorker writer who talks about how she steals from Whole Foods. And, you know, it's okay. They're talking about it because Jeff Bezos has so much money. And screw all of them. Shame on them. It's great. There was someone confronted this New Yorker writer who lives in a $2 million brownstone, which I know sounds like a lot, but like in New York, it just means she lives in a nice brownstone. It's not like it's a super mansion or anything. Still, she lives in affluent lifestyle. She writes to the New Yorker and someone approached her about her comments about being in favor of theft. And she blew her stack about how outrageous it was to confront her. And I was like, "Screw you, lady." Like, you can't, it was Josh Barrow said, you know, funny how people all of a sudden believe in the social contract when rejecting it and convening this as them. I'm not for harassing anybody or anything like that, but I have just such contempt for these people, for these arguments. They're so stupid. You know, first of all, it was cavalier attitude towards crime. I don't know how many times I have to make this point. Crime is a regressive tax on poor people. It is worse for poor people. It creates more problems for poor people. It makes life just difficult. And I'm not even just talking about as victims of crime, although poor people are disproportionately victims of crime. I mean that like in high crime areas, everything is more expensive. That's why there are food deserts, right? Or it's a big part of the reason why there are food deserts. You know, the little stores that, you know, if you ever go into like a bodega or as Trump recently learned the term corner store, I don't know if I talked about this before, but like that's just so weird to me that he didn't know the term corner store. Not because everybody uses it and it's a household name or anything. You also remember, he hadn't heard the word, he kept talking about how groceries was a forgotten word during the campaign. It's like, never hear about groceries, but I use that term, groceries, you know. People, people use the term groceries. Anyway, people use the term corner store, but the reason why it's really weird to do it in another term corner store is just that he's a real estate guy from New York, but he has real estate stuff all over the country. And the idea that nobody in a meeting or a proposal or like when he was doing eminent domain to kick that grandma out of her home in Atlantic City, no one ever said, okay, yeah, and we got the rights at this corner store. I just find it really, really weird. And maybe he's just getting hold and read it with money and his brain wasn't working. But anyway, where was I? If you go to these corner stores or badegas or whatever and you try to buy staples of flour, crackers, whatever, they're just much more expensive than they are at the crogr or the bigly wiggly, you know, out in the suburbs because the transportation costs are higher, the insurance costs are higher, the rents are higher, the need for, you know, higher profit margins to operate and sketchy neighborhoods is a real thing. And the people who buy their groceries and those kinds of stores are poor because they can't afford to go anywhere else. They don't have cars, right? Or if they do have cars, it's expensive to go. And just like on every side. I mean, I think this woman who used to work for us as a nanny, and I used to drive her home all the time, and I've been to our neighborhood and all that, and it's like just the existence of crime made her life much harder than it needed to be. Like, to get to it, you know, there are fewer pharmacies, all these kinds of things, because of crime. And then you add in the fact, like, "Haha, I stole avocados from Whole Foods, so Jeff Bezos eat it." Well, you know, what about the truck driver who brought the avocados to Whole Foods? What about the farmer who grew the avocados? Stealing stuff is just, well, for example, stealing stuff is just wrong, but it's this cartoonish attitude that somehow there are no externalities. There are no, you know, unintended consequences to theft, and it's just a political act. It's so soft, moroc. I'm just so unbelievably contemptuous, are believably contemptuous of these people. And I really resent the fact that the newer times and other people, these very, very fricking old ideas, I mean, talk about not being a new idea, the idea that somehow, you know, theft is a rebellious act, and you're sticking it to the man. I mean, that is just an ancient friggin' cliche, and the idea that we're going to imbue it with radical seriousness from these poser morons, it just infuriates me. And, you know, it's funny, because of the Clarence Thomas speech, lots of people have been emailing me about my book, Liberal Fascism. I got to say, like, and I'll get to the Clarence Thomas thing in a second, but like, suicide of the West keeps popping into my mind all the time. And I'm not trying to move books here. And there's a lot of stuff I'd write about in suicide West in Clarence Thomas's speech, but just the fundamental ingratitude of these people who live these bespoke first world lifestyles. You know, Sunpiker grew up a spoiled rich kid, and he is just as a fashion statement, adopting all of this Maoist nonsense. I honestly, maybe he has like raw cognitive intelligence or something like that, but I just, I find all of it so incredibly stupid. And I really do resent, you know, it's not envy, it's not jealousy, it's kind of like an intellectual vandalism, it's just wasteful and ugly, and it's kind of like a, you know, a basiat broken window fallacy, because the amount of time, time is, you know, time is a kind of currency when it comes to intellectual life and political life. The time and energy people are investing in just these really stupid, intrinsically boring and juvenile ideas. I find it personally insulting in a way that it's very hard for me to fully articulate. But anyway, so like the, you know, the reason why Suzi OS comes to mind is, you know, I've talked about this a bunch here, I know, but Joseph Schumpeter, some people say Schumpeter, some people say Schumpeter. I like Schumpeter, but I hear people say Schumpeter, and I just don't know which A sound it is. But anyway, Schumpeter in capitalism, socialism, and democracy, pretty sure that's what it's in. He's pretty pessimistic about the future of capitalism, precisely because it creates such wealth that it makes it possible for, you know, it makes it possible for the children or grandchildren, a capitalist, you know, dynasties or whatever, Robert Barron, I hate the term Robert Barron, but self-made, you know, carnogies and melons, by the time you get to the grandchildren, they're all, you know, spoken word, poet, puppets for blind people kind of artists or foundation weirdos. Not exactly the term Schumpeter uses, but you get the point. And, you know, basically what happens is that you get the, you know, that rich kids or at least prosperous kids, they get this romantic thing about shocking the bourgeoisie, about biting the hand that feeds them, about taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox that they're standing on, they have this, they adopt all of this language about anomy and radicalization and alienation and how the system is corrupt and some of it has to do with sort of, I don't know, weird Freudian paternal crap. Some of it has to do with elite success strategies and various forms of resentment, you know, a big chunk of what Schumpeter was getting at is borrowing conceptually from Nietzsche. Again, I know I've talked about a bunch of this, I wrote a book about this, but you know, Nietzsche has this idea of resentment, resent the more, you know, they always e-spells it in the French and it just means resentment. But he's in a specific context and so far as you take with the elites value most, the principles, their ideals and you flip it on ahead and you may, you turn virtues and devices and vices into virtues, you know, and this is Nietzsche's big critique of Christianity because it took the nightly virtues of strength and will and making your own morality and flipped it on its head and said, no, no, no, no, no, neckness and gentility and turning the other cheek and universal morality were the new hotness. And Schumpeter takes sort of that dynamic and applies it to a kind of economic sociological analysis of capitalism. And he says, you know, the problem with capitalism is that it kind of, and he's right about this, right? There's part of the creative destruction of capitalism isn't just about inefficient monopolies and stuff. It does go after norms, morals, values, anything that capitalism sort of ceases, the market ceases inefficient and an obstacle to profit maximization. You need to maintain or it's going to wear down, right? That's part of the reason why I get into all this stuff about, you know, about entropy, you know, the stuff that's really valuable in life, it's not just enough to leave it alone and respect it, you have to maintain and restore it. Anyone who's ever had a boat knows that if you don't take care of a boat, you're not going to have a boat for very long. We're certainly not going to have a valuable boat for very long. And the same thing goes with friendships and family, you know, you have to maintain those things or they decay. And so anyway, what the hell does that do with people like Hassan Piker and frankly Tucker Carlson is that it doesn't take long for very rich people who no longer think that, you know, who take for granted their own economic prosperity and comfort to start minimizing the importance of economic growth and of prosperity for other people and start elevating this idea that somehow capitalism is theft and the system is corrupt and it's exploitative and they get this super romantic notion about how society works and that they're calling BS on it. And it's very personalized and so far as like, you know, any middlemen there are between Jeff Bezos and Avocado that you steal from Whole Foods a lot. But the moral prism of it is to reduce everything down to like the malafactors of great wealth and yourself. And in some ways it's a way of buying status on the cheap, right? It's a way of making, of elevating yourself to say, well, I'm sticking it to Jeff Bezos because if you say, hey, you know, I'm sticking it to the produce manager, the Whole Foods on 48th Street just doesn't sound as impressive. And anyway, Schubert points out, Deirdre McCloskey's very gun on this. Lots of people pointed this out over the years. Paul Johnson, I think in modern times, has a riff on this. Certainly Tom Sould has an intellectuals. You know, very few of the heroes of radical politics, of, you know, Marxist and Leninist inspired politics, very, very few of them actually come from the ranks of the real poor. Almost all of them come from fairly prosperous bourgeois lifestyle. You know, Lenin was not of grinding poverty. Fidel Castro was not from grinding poverty. I don't remember Mao's background, but I think he was on, you know, he wasn't among the poorest of peasants, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, the point is, is like, it's, it, a lot of this crap is just what Rob Henderson would call luxury beliefs. And it is just inherently ungrateful for our system. And for the good that it is provided. And it'd be one thing if I thought these people were smart or serious or had real ideas. But I just think it's all, it's all intellectual costume jewelry. You know, it's flashy but cheap and just not very impressive. Anyway, I'm rambling about this. I just, I try very hard, you know, these days to not indulge my anger, my temper and my contempt for people because I just, yeah, I feel like I've checked that box in my life. And, but wow, I just, just so contemptuous of these people. And, anyway, there you have it. All right, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be back soon with more from the Remnant Podcast. Oh, I just, so I'm not gonna get a big long thing about this, but last night I saw on Twitter that Bill Crystal tweeted out excerpt from an article by Jonathan Last over at the Bullwork, making the case that, you know, the redistricting thing in Florida, and Jerry Mandarin to help Democrats is conceptually basically no different than court packing. And therefore the next step should be to pack the court. And I just think that is just a monstrously bad idea. JVL is not a dumb guy, Bill's certainly not a dumb guy, but it's a really dumb idea. And it's not just a dumb idea, it's a dumb argument, right? This idea that there's no difference between the Jerry Mandarin stuff and court packing. I'm completely and wholly unpersuited by it. Jerry Mandarin from the beginning has always been, from the very first Jerry Mandarin, which was done for Elbridge Gary, in what I think 1790. This has always been a political thing. I think the Republicans were incredibly stupid to launch this mid decade thing in Texas. I think Democrats have been incredibly hypocritical, claiming that they don't like Jerry Mandarin. Of course they like Jerry Mandarin. And in fact, Democrats, one of the reasons why they don't like the idea of revisiting this stuff is because they have these baked in advantages already. So, a pox on them for their hypocrisy. And all the rest, so I got, you know, Katoji had a good piece about how this is just like the ultimate both sides thing. Kevin had a good piece about how he's been writing about how Jerry Mandarin works for 30 years. But court packing is different. Court packing was wildly controversial. When FDR tried to do it for a reason, it's a completely different form of norm breaking. And when you say you want to do it in order to advance the interests of Democrats, you are fundamentally undermining the integrity of the court. And, you know, I'm not here to plug last branch standing, which debuted in number five on the New York Times best server list. But I do think Sarah is absolutely right that like the court has actually been working pretty well. And, you know, this all is talk about how the Supreme Court has just been a bunch of, you know, the conservatives on the court have been at just a bunch of rubber stamps for Trump. It's just factually not true. Doesn't mean I agree with everything. I'm with David. I did not like the Supreme Court immunity decision. I think it's really flawed. And it's solidified my thinking that we need to, you know, I am not an amend the Constitution guy, but I think we need to amend the Constitution to revise, reform, or remove the president's pardon power because so long as impeachment is a dead letter politically, the only check on abusing pardon power, particularly now with the Supreme Court stuff, is impeachment. And if impeachment is politically impossible, then the abuses of pardon power are just wildly dangerous. And I think both Trump and Biden have committed, are committed impeachable offenses with their uses of the pardon. You know, James, I think it's James Madison that the Virginia ratifying convention talks about how, you know, having people do criminal things on your behalf in any way, and then with the promise of that they'll be pardoned for it, would be considered an impeachable act. I think Trump has done that more than once. I think you can make the case that Biden did it. I certainly think the preemptive pardons were outrageous. Pardoning as son was outrageous. Regardless, like that stuff's not reviewable. So I would, you know, I would, I'm not forgetting rid of pardons. I think pardons are good for the system, but I would have something like a congressional veto of pardons, like Congress would have to approve pardons by the president or some commission or something. I'm open to a lot of different things, but the breakdown and how pardons are done is just outrageous. But I didn't start this by wanting to talk about pardons. Oh, it's court packing. Oh, it's, yeah. So I, I didn't like the immunity decision, all that. But this is really in court has just simply not been a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. And the claim that we need to pack the court to correct its trumpification is based on just a completely false premise. And I just think it would be essentially, it would be constitutional vandalism to try and do it. And I don't think it would remedy any of the problems that we have. And I just, I don't know why Bill of all people would endorse this idea. I just don't get it. All right, Clantz Thomas, let's do this. So Clantz Thomas gave this really remarkable speech at University of Texas at the Syvitas Institute, Fultus Glowjure. I got friends at the Syvitas Institute. You know, Will Bowden is, I don't know what the, you see the provost or the president. He's like a big muckety muck at UT and a really good guy. He's been on the, on this podcast before. He's just a really solid guy. And he actually used to teach a class with Ben Sass, their old buddies from I think, at least grad school or something. And my friend Ryan Streeter is like the director of the Syvitas Institute and used to be a colleague of mine at AI. And as I've often said about him, he has really important hair. But none of that really matters to this. So Thomas gave this speech. And I've been pretty fascinated by it. For example, I think Thomas's personal story is remarkable and admirable. And you know, just so people understand that I'm not like just sort of fanboying here and all that. I think Jenny Thomas, his wife's behavior, particularly leading up to the January 6th stuff, has been very, very bad. And I think it's been embarrassing for the country that a Supreme Court justice is married to someone who's made really bad decisions. I'm not gonna get inside their marriage or anything. I've known Jenny Thomas, she's a very nice lady. I have friends who are very close to her. But you know, that wasn't good. Well, just, you know, I don't think it'll shock anybody when I say that. Realist, but I think Thomas's story is amazing. I think it is a sign of how politics is so deep into the groundwater in American life that he is so reviled and misunderstood and vilified by people on the left, whereas if you had the exact same life story but he were a progressive justice, he would have a cult of personality and pop culture greater than, you know, than, you know, notorious RBGs. He would be a rock star. And any criticism of him would get you attacked by, you know, MS Now crowd it will get you attacked by late night, you know, liberal comics and the Daily Show crowd, but because he's a right-winger or conservative, it's fine to essentially be racist towards Clarence Thomas. And I think that's gross and unfortunate and unfair. And if you wanna know why that guy is not gonna retire from the Supreme Court until they carry him out, it's because he wants to say, I have a few to a lot of those people and whether you like that or not. But, you know, the story of his upbringing, you know, the people who call him, you know, this defender of this Uncle Tom kind of guy, if you even, you know, if you could read that speech or listen to that speech with open years and an open mind, you know, open mind, like I've heard Clarence Thomas talk about segregation and growing up under segregation a million times, or not a million times, a bunch of times. And like the idea that he's a defender of any of that, like they used to give him crap up because he had, you know, I remember there was, so it's supposed to be this huge kind of like daily beast generated, I don't know if it was daily beast, but it was that kind of story. Scandal because he allegedly had a Confederate flag in his office, in the state flag of South Carolina, which has like some stars and bars kind of, you know, pattern in it or something like that. And people try to turn him into like this, you know, headbuttler of the slave mansion kind of guy. And that's grotesque and it's slanderous and it's just, it's profoundly unserious. Anyway, I admire the guy a lot. And I think the speech was on the whole grade and not just because it tracks with so many of the things. I mean, he even equals the Calvin Coolidge on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration stuff, which, you know, I've done on this podcast 10 times, it's a big part of my book. I use it in closing speech, to close out speeches all the time. I love that stuff. But and we'll get to the intellectual import of that in just a second. But, you know, this is sort of the whole speeches in many ways my, he's singing from my playbook. I should say he's singing from the same playbook. I songbook that I sing from, ideologically on all of this stuff. I would say philosophically, I am probably in some ways closer to Clarence Thomas than I am to anybody else. on the court, but not necessarily jurisprudentially. There are times where I kind of disagree with him about how he rules on things, but philosophically, I'm very sympathetic to Clarence Thomas, because he kind of understands that the state isn't there to be your parent and isn't there to necessarily endorse your preferred sense of morality, but it doesn't mean his conception of the state doesn't have a morality to it. And anyway, so the freak out about it from the left, I find very, very annoying. I think Kevin is right when he summarizes it as, "Wow, don't you know progressives do nice things?" And you've heard me talk about this a million times, where so progressives is one of these words that has just simply positive connotations to it, who's against progress, right? It's sort of like in Parks and Recreation, the crazy cult that believes in the eventual return of some volcano mouth giant lizard that will destroy the planet, they call themselves the reasonable Terrians, because they want to be able to say anybody who criticizes them is against reasonableness. Progressivism has one of these vernacular meanings that sounds very difficult to disagree with. Progressive rock is cool, aggressive coffee is hip, progressive values are what you're supposed to want and all that kind of thing. And it's no shock that people who are ideologically progressive happen to believe that cultural line as well, because it's the story they tell themselves about themselves. And so for them, progressive just means good, but progressiveism as a philosophy is a different thing and as a historical matter, it was a specific thing. So he says in a speech, let me read the whole two paragraphs. This is Clarence Thomas' speech. The Constitution is the means of government. It is the declaration that announces the ends of government. The Constitution achieves its purpose by protecting our natural rights and liberties from concentrated power and excessive democracy. Our Constitution creates a separation of powers and federalism, truly for the first time in modern history, to prevent the government from becoming so strong that it threatens our natural rights. Federalist number 10 proposed the idea that the great threat to our rights comes from majority faction. Human history teaches us alas that numerical majorities frequently seek to control government and use the state to violate the rights of the minority because man is fallen and the desire for power was as J. Madison described it, sewn into the nature of man, government had to be limited. For as Madison said, quote, if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary, unquote. But men are not angels. The slaveholders use the power of government to deny the fundamental natural rights of the slaves. The segregationists use the state to oppress the freed men and women, including my ancestors. As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The pronunciance of this new set of principles, most prominently among them, the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressiveism. Since Wilson's presidency, progressiveism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever. Okay, so this is where I have some disagreements, but let's just finish this typo on the progressiveism, quaw, progressiveism thing. Think about it this way. I think longtime readers and listeners know that I really don't like philosophical pragmatism, American pragmatism. Doesn't mean everything the pragmatist said was wrong and doesn't mean the pragmatist were bad people. William James was a wonderful guy and really smart and there's stuff in principles of psychology that I think is just absolutely brilliant. John Dewey, I have less favorable things to say about, but whatever. The thing is, is like pragmatism is another one of these words that when you say you're against capital P pragmatism, people scratch their head and don't know what you're talking about. Because pragmatism just sounds like, it's reasonable, right? It's practical. Who is, you know, Americans are practical people. Who's against being practical? But pragmatism has actually a pretty coherent, deep, philosophical school or project that has some very basic metaphysical assumptions baked into it that I dislike. It doesn't mean I'm against using the right screwdriver to remove a screw or something like that, right? That's not what I'm saying. And similarly with progressivism, progressivism was an actual real philosophy of government, right? I think Thomas is right to ding Wilson. Lord knows I'd never criticize anybody for dinging Wilson. But like, I think he did that in part because people know who Wilson was and Wilson was an important, you know, a progenitor of progressivism to be sure. But I don't think he called, you know, he said, you know, would you know Wilson called it progressivism? That, Wilson wasn't the guy who coined the phrase. He didn't quie the label progressivism to progressivism. But he was, you know, a champion of the ideas that were in the water then. And, you know, and Thomas is absolutely right to say that progressivism came, was a foreign idea. It blossomed in America, but it was part, you know, a lot of this stuff came from Germany. I mean, virtually everything Thomas says about facts of this stuff, I think is right. It's, I have more sort of nuanced disagreements, but you know, I had it open because I was looking up something and I was thinking about writing about this. So I wrote a piece for National Review, I don't know, 15 years ago about Richard Ellie, or I always pronounce it Eli, but then people correct me. That's another one of these things. Who was the, he was the foremost progressive economist in America, he was the head of the American Economic Association. He was the founder and Godfather of the Wisconsin idea, which was basically this proto-think tank at the University of Wisconsin, where almost all of the 20th century ideas about American progressive welfare state stuff and the New Deal, all that stuff, basically you can trace back to there from everything from like concept of living wage to the minimum wage to all the labor laws. And I've told people this a million times, but when I would speak at the University of Wisconsin, it would be fun to like point out the names of various rooms or buildings or whatever and say, oh yeah, that guy was a racist eugenicist. Oh, that guy was a racist eugenicist. That guy was a racist eugenicist, 'cause a lot of these ideas about the minimum wage, like you can be in favor of the minimum wage, I guess I'm in favor of a minimum wage conceivably, but you can't, the problem is, you really can't deny that the people pushing and really working out and essentially creating the concept of a minimum wage and the progressive era, big chunk of the reason why people like E.A. Ross and these other people were doing it was for eugenic purposes. But I think it's Ross who has this line where he says, the coolie referring to basically Chinese workers cannot outwork the white man, but he can underlive him. And the point was if you paid a white man's wage, of course employers would only hire white men, they wouldn't hire black people, Asian people, other immigrants or minorities, Irish barely qualified for a lot of, a lot parts of the country is white people. And the point was is that if you create a barrier to entry in the wage and the labor market, you won't get these super poor people who live under terrible conditions to compete for this work by taking lower wages. You'll freeze them out of the marketplace. And the eugenic kind of ideas embedded in all of us, they were part of the feature of the, a lot of some of the union legislation in the New Deal was the way to like freeze blacks out of the labor force who had been moving to the northern cities. All right, hold on one minute, we gotta pay the light bill, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly. But anyway, Richard Eli, Ali was, one of these guys trained in Prussia and Germany, got, I think got his, I can't remember if he got his PhD there. Anyway, let me read you from this piece about, 'cause I think it's just sort of relevant. I talk about, so I've mentioned this here before, Hilary Clinton in 2007 when she was running for president was asked during a primary debate if she was a liberal and she said, well, liberalism used to mean standing up for the little guy against big power, but now it means something else. So I don't call myself a liberal. I prefer the word progressive, which is a real American meaning going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century. century. She's absolutely right. The rest of does have a real American meaning. So by the way, it is the word Confederate. That's not necessarily a, you know, by itself, a defense of it. But it's important to understand that like, like I used to write about the intellectual pursuit of Europeanizing American politics all the time. The American progressives saw themselves as part of a worldwide movement. So it is from the piece. The irony here is that the supposedly more authentically American tradition of reform also has a heavily European lineage. Indeed, American progressives saw themselves as the US franchisees of an international effort. Quote, we were parts of one another in the United States and Europe proclaimed William Allen White. Something was welding us into one social and economic hole with local political variations. It was stubs in Kansas, Juarez and Paris, the social Democrats in Germany, the socialists in Belgium. And I should say the whole people in Holland fighting a common cause. When Jane Adams second and Teddy Roosevelt's nomination, the Progressive Party Convention in 1912, she declared, quote, the new party has become the American exponent of a worldwide movement towards just her social conditions, a movement which the United States lagging behind other great nations has been unaccountably slow to embody in political action. One more paragraph. If America was lagging behind, Germany was leading the pack. Bismarck's top down socialism was in the words of liberal historian Eric Goldman, a catalytic of American progressive thought. A young Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's pressure was quote, the most admirable system, the most studied and most nearly perfected in the world. That's a quote that Thomas used in his thing. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of its first of the first six officers had studied in Germany. At least 20 of its first 26 presidents had as well. In 1906, a professor at Yale pulled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year. And I go on about all this stuff. But so Thomas is right when he talks about how this was the progressivism in some ways as a European import or at least an American attempt to be more like Europe, particularly Germany. And where I kind of disagree with him, let me get back to his speech as I said, I disagreed with something. He says, since Wilson's presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life. It has co-existed uneasily with the principles of the declaration because it is opposed to those principles. It is not possible for the two to co-exist forever. And here I just, I just, this is where I agree with him philosophically to a great degree. But politically, I just don't think that's necessarily right. There is no like ticking time bomb that says one of them has to ultimately go. They could like a bad piece of DNA or a virus that sticks around in your body. We can have aspects of progressivism in our politics for the rest of our lives and our grandchildren's lives. I'm all in favor of having the arguments and all of that. But I just don't think that he's necessarily right. It's sort of this implying that there's this countdown clock to a confrontation between the champions of American principles of the declaration and sort of Walter Littmann man case or something like that. And I just, I don't think that's true. The progressive era was over a century ago. America has done pretty well over the last century. I give more credits of the principles of the founding and the declaration than I do to progressivism. But like, my thinking on this is like evolved. But like for all to talk about how it's a European imporant and we were trying to copy Bismarck's pressure and all of that is true. At the same time, the stuff that the progressives were trying to do, not all of which was bad. Look, I mean like food safety standards and clean drinking water and all of these things. These are things that you know, you can be a pure Hamiltonian and think there's a role for government to do that stuff. But it could be entirely homegrown American political movement with no reference to foreign intrusion of any kind. And it would still be the kind of approach to politics that the founders anticipated because of that stuff that Thomas was talking about in terms of man's fallen nature. Right? Because the other day, a lot of the stuff that progressives did was just simply about power. And it wasn't necessarily about high-minded philosophical stuff. I mean, I've made this, this argument a million times before about how, if you want a short history of American progressive political priorities, you'll find that the champion, whichever branch or institution of government allows them to carry the ball down the field. So when Woodrow Wilson was young, and I think it's in his book, Congressional Government, don't hold me to the titles of these things that I haven't read up on in almost 20 years. But when Wilson was young, he was a huge champion of congressional supremacy and sort of the parliamentary approach to politics. In part because he envisioned himself as like the next Henry Clay or something. He thought he was going to be, you know, a speaker of the House type. And so that was the formal government. And then when he realized, in part because of like Teddy Roosevelt, that power could be concentrated in the executive, he became obsessed with the you know, power of the executive. Woodrow Wilson was, I think it's the story in Richard Gamble, but it's one of his major, one of these major historians said that at the end of the day, the thing that most explains Woodrow Wilson was just a obsession with power. He loved power for its own thing. You think he thought power was self-justifying. You know, remember, this is the guy who said that what Lincoln did with power was awesome and great and inspired envy in him. But he hated the reasons why Lincoln did it, right? So Wilson is one of these guys who loved the means of Lincoln, but hated the ends because Wilson thought it was a tragedy that the the South had lost the Civil War. He thought slavery was fine. And so, but he so he liked the the necessary evil of Lincoln's tyrannical use of power and his conception of it because he liked the unalloyed wielding of power. He just wish he hadn't used that power to free the black, you know, to free black people because he thought slavery was fine and he thought the South should have won. It's bad, dude. But anyway, I'm not saying all progressives were racist like Wilson, though let me be really, really, really clear. American progressivism was shot through with a lot of racism. You know, it's it's it's just it's that again, it doesn't mean that there weren't people who absolutely abhorred racism who were progressives as well. But, you know, like a lot of the progressives from the South, just just just heifist Daniels as a sort of a famous one were extremely progressive about economic stuff and just just unbelievably racist at the same time. And this is one of the reasons why the people who fetishize the term progressive to this mean you're in favor of good things should either, you know, abandon that idea or stop taking offense when you point out that the progressives were racist because a lot of the progressives were crazy racist. And, you know, the some of the responses from people to Thomas's speech want to have it sort of both ways and that they want to say that Thomas was attacking anybody who calls himself a progressive today and that it was a partisan speech. It wasn't, but that, you know, to insult the progressives of the progressive era is to insult progressives today is a really problematic argument for a progressive of today to make. Does that mean I'm not allowed to point out that so many of them were racist eugenicists, you know, does that cause you to how dare you point out that about, you know, like either own the label into whole or don't. But if you own it in the whole be aware of that some of the worst racists of the 20th century were progressives. Anyway, my point about these things can be in tension and endure is just simply that they have been for not the racism stuff. I mean, just simply progressive ideals have been, you know, have it endured for over a century. And maybe the way to think about it is that these competing impulses, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't give you my history of progressivism in political progressivism in the 20th century because I got distracted by Wilson because I hate him so much. The progressives generally speaking were in favor of any approach to politics that allowed them to carry the ball down the field. So when the executive was the most powerful agent of social change, they were all in for the imperial presidency of FDR, of LBJ, of any president that could carry the ball for them. But when that no longer worked, right, you had a backlash, you got it, you get Nixon, I'm on other things. Then all of the sudden, progressives are in favor of the Supreme Court carrying the ball. They loved, they loved, you know, expanding the franchise when expanding the franchise was to their benefit and they hated expanding the franchise when it wasn't. You know, it's like, it's a lot like this gerrymandering crap right now. The arguments used to defend various sort of political reforms were basically pretextual to the desire to advance political power. Progressive had a lot of political power in the 20th century. They did a lot of things I disagree with and don't like, including under the rubric of Republican policy as much as Democratic policy at various times. Nixon was the last new dealer, president, and the things he did were perfectly consistent with being a progressive Republican from the 1950s, which he basically was. Right now, we're still waiting for the Humphries Executive Decision about the Federal Reserve, which I'm very sympathetic to the intellectual argument, constitutional argument, that the Federal Reserve is really problematic in our constitutional framework, because if all the executive power resides in the president, the president has the ability to fire people in the executive branch, then saying that it doesn't have the ability to fire the head of the Federal Reserve is just kind of iffy. And the Federal Reserve is a classically progressive kind of institution, where it's just like, let's put experts in charge to run the banking system in this, you know, technocratic kind of way at the same time. I'm for it. Right? It's if I could amend the Constitution with the snap of my fingers, I would create some provision for keeping the Federal Reserve working basically the way it works. And because it's been good for America. And but so the constitutional argument is like really problematic for me because I'm pretty sympathetic to it. But the one is is that, you know, our system has made allowances for some of these sorts of things in the past without abandoning the idea that we're all equal in the eyes of God and government and that we're all endowed with innate dignity and, you know, because we're all human beings, you know, endowed by our creator and all that kind of stuff like like the Federal Reserve does not trample on that. And so one way to think about it, instead of this idea that, you know, there is this coming, health or skeletal conflict between these two philosophies is that these things wax in Wayne and American history. And there were times in American history where, you know, Congress was exceeding its authority or the courts were exceeding their authority. Right? It's like it's it's a muddling through thing where the institutions try to claw back their proper functions and they make these arguments about the Constitution. And I like arguments about the Constitution. But it does not seem obvious to me that these things are in danger that we're in danger of some collision where everyone has to accept one or the other. I think that framing is just a it's a it's a little it's a little too jaffaite, right? And and let's just for some context, you know, I said last week it sounded like, you know, Thomas read my book since then I've heard from two people that Thomas has in fact read my book. But I was also very careful to say I didn't think he got any of this from my book necessarily because he has been sort of schooled in this stuff much longer than I've been writing about it. His two of the guys who worked for him at the EEOC, this guy, guy you speak pretty friendly with Ken Musugi and another guy, John Marini, both sort of Claremonsters, they've been talking to him and, and I don't want to say indoctrinating him because they revere Thomas, right? This is not like they're not manipulating Thomas. Everybody I know has ever worked for Thomas just loves the guy with a passion and and they all think he's brilliant and all that. But they brought a lot of these ideas with him. Musugi was the co author of a great book about the I think it's called the progressive revolution of American politics, which I have a dog-eared copy of. I read the whole thing and and quoted a lot in my book. And Thomas has always been part has been part and those guys were students of Jaffa and they're from the Claremont Institute and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we don't have to get into all the big hats. But one of the problems, you know, we had that that episode about this stuff when we didn't we talked about the book, "Furious Minds." There is a strain of Jaffa thought that is catastrophist that puts that I think reifies ideas and makes them more sort of tangible and like agalian or something than they need to be. And you know and Jaffa writes about in the clock crisis of the house divided. It's sort of a Jaffa argument that you know the and it's an argument that I share often you know it's like this is part of my point in suicide west about the ideas of the declaration. You know the hypocrisy they expose in America is one of the things that ended slavery. It's because we were falling short of our ideals. And you know when Lincoln does his Gettysburg address stuff by basically relaunching a refounding America based on the preamble of the declaration. What he's doing is is saying hey we've strayed from our mission statement and this war was because we strayed from it in the inherent contradiction of our ideals versus the institution of slavery is what caused the war in the first place in this resolution gives us an opportunity for a new birth of freedom and and we're going to recommit to the founding you know mission statement in the declaration. I get that argument about and I agree with it to a huge extent about the ideas inherent in in the declaration and how they should govern discreedal nation you know which is what we are. The problem I have with with the way Thomas sounds at times in in this is that living with some progressive ideas in our politics which are like just normal political governance and basically in all of Europe is not like the house divided between slave and not slave right between free and unfree like the thing that drove the civil war was the fact on the ground of actual slavery the fact that we have some technocratic progressive institutions and assumptions about how government should work is not the kind of contradiction with our founding ideals that can for that that will force a final reckoning where only one will survive. I just think that framing is wrong and I think it's I think it's interesting that it's in there in Thomas and that leads me to this other you know disagreement that I have which is that the way he talks about the the final statement that the of the declaration about you know we with a firm reliance in the protection of divine providence let us mutually pledge to each other our lies our fortunes and our sacred honor. Thomas thinks that's like the most the second most important line in the declaration because of the radical commitment to our founding principles it it underscored and I get it I just think that that misses an important point that you make those kinds of pledges to each other when your revolutionaries try to overthrow an empire in a violent revolution. I think people can relax a little bit when all you're trying to do is have arguments about what the constitution means and how we should run our politics and look I'm not I'm no way saying that Thomas is calling for violence or anything like that he's not he's a wise and decent man but the radical rhetorical analogy to say you should have the same fierce commitment to your principles in politics which I think people know I have a pretty strong commitment to my principles like the our revolutionary founders did I just think is a bit of a stretch because the stakes in a free society arguing about politics with other members of a free society are just simply different than the stakes where if you lose the actual physical fighting you'll be hung as a trader it's just different and this just has a little bit too much of a whiff of flight 93 ism to it for me but if it's purely metaphorically about stickin he has a lot of great advice for people who kind of sell out to be popular a lot of it really resonates with me people who you know hide in the tall grass with big words while compromising their principles there's a lot of stuff in there that I agree with that I think speaks to his jurisprudence you know he's he's the guy who doesn't really care about precedent he thinks that you know if you have a if something is unconstitutional it's unconstitutional and the fact that there are a lot of precedents on top of it supporting this unconstitutionalist is not a reason to let it stand it's a reason to stop compounding the error right and so some of this stuff has to do with his approach to jurisprudence and to constitutional interpretation and I think it's all often correct and almost always admirable. I thought it's a decision on the tariff take case was not good. But the point is I think saying that we should try in our daily lives to be like as committed to our principles as the founding fathers were to winning the revolution, I think is it misses a couple key ingredients to be persuasive to me. The thing I find remarkable, and I'll just close on this because I do think I want to write about this. The thing that's absolutely remarkable is how all these progressive outlets took the bait, freaked out, said it was an outrageous tirade and a screed and it wasn't, it's a very thoughtful, very interesting speech. But you know who's been just like remarkably silent? All of these post-liberals, all the nationalists, all of the, you know, neo-Marnakists, all of these people who have been waging intellectual and rhetorical war on the philosophical assumptions of the American founding that Thomas is celebrating here, right? I mean, Thomas talks about how the Europeans don't have the, you know, these locky, and he uses the word lockian, right? And John Locke is like the boogie man for, you know, Yoram Hazoni and Denine and Vermeule and all of these people. And here's Thomas saying, you know, how awesome it is that we have these locky and safeguards in our constitutional order that they don't in Europe and that because the lack of them in Europe led to things like Nazism and Communism. And meanwhile, like, where are all the people saying, oh, you stupid cucks, you know, you still think lock is good, you know, they're just silent. I went looking to see if any of them had a problem with the speech. And it's almost like when someone as as popular as Clarence Thomas makes on the right, makes these arguments, all of a sudden, these guys who hate all of these enlightenment principles and liberal principles and checks and balances and all this kind of stuff, the people who mock this stuff, the organists who think this is all outmoded, outdated stuff that we can move on from, they get kind of quiet, you know, like, no, they don't want to do any horseshoe theory work with the daily beast or with Jacobin. I think it's pretty cowardly. Now, why is an Adrian Vermeule, you know, big Harvard law school guy calling out Clarence Thomas for an idiotic speech because if I make these arguments, he'll call me an idiot, you know, you know, Bosone and Denine will call me a fool, you know, not maybe those words, but in that's the idea. If I make the case that that Thomas is making here, if David French makes the case that Thomas is making here, they'll, you know, they'll leap to Twitter and roast think pumps. Where's the American conservative denouncing the speech? Where's first things denouncing the speech? I think it's really, really telling. And I don't know how much Thomas thought he was trolling the new right guys. I would have liked it if he kind of like, turned it up a little bit on this point. I don't know if this point was if he's sort of, you know, sub-tweeting, if he's doing it, you know, passive aggressively or if it just didn't occur to him because he doesn't pay attention to these fights on the right. These days, I don't know. But all of the red Caesar dudes who've, you know, circled the Claremont orbit, you know, or the neo-monarchist, you know, Curtis Yarving dudes, like, Thomas's speech here, particularly this stuff from Calvin Coolidge is kryptonite to them, you know? And they're just ignoring it. And I think that's a shame because it would have been a much more interesting like debate or argument than, you don't understand, progressive means good to hear the people who've been making these arguments on the new right actually have to contend with Claremont's Thomas' patriotism and his love of the declaration. That would have been interesting to see, but I guess we're not going to. All right, we've gone long enough. I feel like I failed you guys again. I never know if I'm doing this thing right. If you've seen clips of me on like YouTube or anything while we've been I'm packing up, I apologize for the hideousness of the shot. I know our AV team is scandalized by it. It looks like, you know, I'm doing this from a Soviet grocery store or something during a shortage, which is these empty shells behind me. That'll change. I'm probably going to be doing it from, I actually have a physical office again at AI and I'll probably be doing a lot of these from there for a while because we're moving into a one bedroom apartment or regular podcast. Probably not going to be too easy to do from there. Hey, you know, just fair warning to you guys. If you listen regularly to this podcast or AO or the dispatch pod and you're not a subscriber to the dispatch, we're going to start hitting you up more because we really need to grow and the best way to grow. You know, we introduced a test of advertising in the morning dispatch and we got very little, I'm glad to say, but we got some pushback from people on how this violated the manifesto in our mission statement. And I'm sorry, it just doesn't. We've never said that we would never advertise at all. I would like to never advertise. If we have 100,000, 200,000 paid subscribers, we would be less inclined to do a lot of advertising. But what we said was we're never going to screw with our people with pop-up windows and auto play things. And we're never going to make the user experience super crappy. And internally from the beginning, and we've talked about this on the state of the dispatch podcast, so it means to you many, many, many times, you know, we've always talked internally about tasteful sponsorships and that kind of thing. And the simple fact is we need to grow. We have big headcounts at the dispatch. We're trying to do all sorts of exciting things. We just launched dispatch markets, which we're really excited about. We just did a redesign on SCOTUS blog. And we want to do all these Hunto events. And we just, the way you pay for this stuff is with subscribers. And I know for a fact, there are a bunch of people who listen to this podcast who aren't subscribers. Because there's reasons to believe that we have more listeners of this podcast than we do subscribers. Right? And one of my colleagues was at a meetup thing in North Carolina, I think it was, and Metaguy who was like a remnant and dispatch superfan. And he said, "Yeah, yeah, but I don't subscribe." Because he gets enough from the free stuff we put out and the generous paywall stuff and the podcasts that he still was willing, he's psyched to come to a meetup. But he just didn't feel the need to actually subscribe. We are in the process of figuring out ways to tweak our digital marketing and our payroll stuff, not payroll, paywall stuff. And all the rest to get you know, in a sense, I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, but to get the free writers to sign up. Because as they say, it's animals, we need to do. And we just can't, like it's a sort of a come to Jesus for us about this. We need more subscribers. And we can no longer just ignore the possibility of the revenue from tasteful sponsorships and the like. And it's not a crisis or anything like that, but like we're fed up with the lack of growth. And we really believe in what we're doing and it's important. And we got, you know, we got payroll to keep with people with families and working incredibly hard. And we think this is sort of our moment. You know, we founded this thing when Steven and I were going around pitching this thing. We talked all the time about how we saw the dispatch as a post trump rather than a anti-Trump thing. And you know, the post Trump era is not here yet. And it's taken longer to arrive than any of us would have liked. But it's coming. You can see it. It's shaping up. And we think we're better positioned than almost anybody else or well, better positioned in some ways than anybody else. Less well resourced than some places to be the go to place to understand politics and what's happening on the right. And all sorts of other things in the rapidly approaching post Trump world. And we're also the place to be as the wheels come off the Trumpian world. You know, we're now at the cabinet secretaries are like spinal tap drummers phase of this presidency. And I don't think it's going to it's it's not going to get more stable as time goes by. And we think we just do a fantastic job of providing incredibly high quality stuff. And there are substacts out there that people pay, you know, they pay more for one person's stuff than we're asking people to pay for the entire suite of things from, you know, me, Kevin Williamson, Nick Catogeo occasionally when Steve, you know, sides to right, you know, Megan is doing stuff with us these days. Scott Linsicum, you know, is just sort of invaluable. And I'm so psyched for some of the people who've joined for dispatch markets. My friend Marion Tupi is just phenomenal. Linsicum is going to do more stuff for us on that. And you just subscribe. Help us help you. Anyway, we are taking seriously nothing is off the table about ways to sort of feel growth, feel revenue, and you've been warned. So that's all I can say for right now, many meetings ahead. But I am deeply grateful you guys for listening and from the support that you do give. And I'll talk to you next time. [Music]