Episode 897: Spain's Border Breaking Point

Our friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are back with new episodes of their breakout Free the Economy podcast. If you're not already listening, Free the Economy features host Richard Morrison exploring opportunities for financial success and self-fulfillment in a world with less government control. Think of the podcast as big ideas meets real-world application to make our economy happier, healthier, healthier, check out Free the Economy wherever you listen to podcast or visit c.org slash podcast. Spain suffers an immigration crisis, and Francesca Hong dominates. In Wisconsin, we'll discuss all this more. On this edition of the editors, I'm Rich Lowry, and I'm joined, as always, by our old friend, Dan Foster, the good neighbor, Noah Rothman, and the sage of authenticity woods. Jim Garrity, you are, of course, listening to Nashville Podcast or sponsors. This episode are made in Vair and the Free the Economy podcast from CEI. More about all of them. for some reason I'm already following us on a streaming service, by the way, you can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts. And if you like what you hear here, please consider giving us a glowing five-star review wherever you listen to your podcast. If you don't like what you're here, please forget. I said anything. So Jim Garrity, many of us were not aware until a couple days ago that Spain has this enclave, the Spanish administered city. In Morocco, or close to Morocco, or however you want to put it, and really cinematic scenes, kind of scenes that when you first saw them on X, as I assume most of us did, at least I did, you kind of wonder, is this, is it real? Is it something from the past? Is this AI generated? But it was very real. Tens of thousands of migrants literally swimming to this city. About 80,000 migrants, I think, by some estimates. The population of the city is 60,000. And a lot of people took this as a lesson, having to do with Spanish misgovernance, having to do with weak border enforcement. And then there's a deeper geopolitical story here, as you, among many others, have pointed out that Morocco doesn't like Spain and seems to have deliberately fostered this influx as a way of punishing Spain. Yeah, this was a summer thunderstorm of a news story. It came on very quickly. It was very intense. And then, you know, in the last day or so, feels like it really receded from the news cycle, in part because Spain managed to get almost all of the folks who'd rush the border or swam around the fence back into Morocco. I think our coverage here at NR was really good. I think if you look at the discourse you saw on X, you probably saw about like four points, you know. If we hadn't reelected Trump, this is what America would look like. This is what you get when you elect socialists, like Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Oh, look, they're military age males. This is not migration. This is an invasion. And people saying, ah, it's just like the 1973 French novel Camp of the Saints. And I don't disagree with any of those points or, you know, I think they're all reasonable enough. But I feel like they kind of. hand waved away a fairly significant factor. I mean, yes, did Sanchez, but Andrew Stutterford has just been knocking out of the park. Think about this is like a bonus editor's pick here. Back in February, the Sanchez government in Spain said it was going to offer amnesty. They thought they'd get about a half million people applying. More than 1.3 million applied. And remember if you're in the Shinjin area, if you're a Spanish citizen, you can travel pretty much anywhere in Europe.

So, you know, Andrew pointing out this is a bad idea. It's, you know, it's, you know, but what everybody kind of overlooked was like on July 20th. Prime Minister Sanchez visited Algeria and said that, ah, you know, you're not just a neighbor. We see you as a strategic partner. Morocco and Algeria hate each other. They've really not gotten along for a very long time, broke off diplomatic ties in 2021. The border's been closed since 1994. And there's even an arms race, right? So Spain comes along and says Algeria. It was the first time a Spanish prime minister had visited Algeria in four years. Spain reaches out to Algeria. Piss us off Morocco. And Morocco's got this, hey, we've got leverage, buddy. We can make your life miserable anytime you want. And even the New York Times at its coverage of the migrants rushing into Sueta, we're pointing out that they were basically encouraged by the cops. They said the cops had told them to come to Spain. You know, you don't get tens of thousands of people all trying to cross the border at the exact same time without some sort of coordination, without some sort of, this doesn't happen randomly. So. Again, not saying any of the other points were false, but this is very clearly an effort by the Moroccans to say to Spain, hey, stop buddying up to those people we don't like. We can make your life miserable anytime we can turn this on and off whatever we want. We can cause you all kinds of headaches, and they have. And so, you know, also I thought it was very interesting the way the rest of the EU was ready to say, hey, you know, what we're willing to suspend the Xinjiang area and allowing people in from Spain if you guys can't get this under control? I think Pedro Sanchez is having a very rough month. Yeah, so Noah Sanchez, far left, Prime Minister of Spain, and he had done everything he could to kind of... cater the favor of the Arab world, and people don't like the U.S. very much with his opposition to the Iran war, his opposition to Trump, you think would play well in precincts in Europe. And what he's found is no sympathy really from anyone whatsoever. And a bunch, not all, but a majority of the EU country saying, what are you doing here, pal? Because they realize, you know, their borders are at risk too. Now, it's harder to get out of this. enclave into the rest of Europe than it would be, you know, if you got into Spain proper. And one reason the migrants left very quickly, this a lot of them is they seem to realize that fairly rapidly. But this wasn't, this isn't a 2015 Europe where it's like, okay, we're all idealistic, dewy-eyed pro-immigration leaders. They're all like, no, we don't want to repeat of that. Yeah, well, they're completely different circumstances. And it just takes a rational assessment. It's so rare to find a rational assessment of this thing. It's so bizarre. That was obviously displacement as a result of civil war.

which is a very different condition from a state that uses these individuals as a tool of coercion. It's not the first time this has happened. In 2021, 6,000 people stormed this very border from CBS News' report at the time. The Moroccan government has been angered by Spain's decision to provide medical treatment for the leader of the Western Sahara independence movement who's been seriously ill with COVID. The thing that struck out at me in the reaction to this event is how defensive. the international left-wing press was, over the degree to which all the wrong people noticed that this was happening. In the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum wrote that this so closely resembled the invasion that Maga and its European friends have long said was underway, that it was hard not to suspect that it had been orchestrated. And she, you know, obviously that's false. But, you know, they did see social media posts encouraging to swim. They did see posts where people told them how to buy wetsuits, flippers, goggles, floats, even waterproof bags, screenshots of Google Maps showing them where the police would be leased on the beach. And even that Moroccan border guards were either unwilling or unable to stop them. It was so much worse than that, Anne. And then when the photographs began to circulate, you know, those who promoted them were senior members of the Trump administration and senior leaders of the European far right. They didn't notice that the Spanish police recovered the dead and put the injured in hospitals and appeared to send everyone, almost everyone home. Is that all, as though there's nothing to see here? CNN's Issy Ronald had a similar reaction that. It was the hard right anti-immigrant politicians around the world who portrayed the incident in apocalyptic terms, therefore shaping the response of those mainstream governments you mentioned, Rich, Italy, France, Finland, Denmark, and even the EU's bureaucrats, all panicking in response, I suppose, to far-right agitation to which they're uniquely sensitive, as we all know. That piece is replete with quotes. From one official with the Madrid Office of European Council on Foreign Relations, clearly a unbiased source. Spanish society has been quite resistant to xenophobia until quite recently. Now that's starting to change in the last few years, aided by Vox, which is one of the two largest right of center parties in Spain. That's not quite right, unless you think anti-Israel agitation isn't xenophobic. And the Sanchez government has been engaged in reckless and irresponsible anti-Israel agitation to a degree that... Many in the Spanish left and right have latched onto the notion that Israel did this. Al Jazeera has a couple of pieces on this phenomenon going right into a cuibono fallacy. Because it wrote, the beneficiaries are apparent. Europe's nationalist right found fresh material to reinforce longstanding warnings about immigration and Islam.

It is said, Al Jazeera notes correctly, that the European left has become so dependent on Muslim immigration as a constituent group that Israel has noticed this, and it contends that the rise of anti-Semitic ideology in Europe, and especially pronounced in Spain, is intertwined with migration patterns. More Al Jazeera. It notes that one guy, The Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Dannen, noted with some, you know, gentle but pointed criticism that Spain, quote, never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Coetto over the crisis following its immigration policy and it sort of dings Spain for having some territorial possessions that are in dispute, to which Spain's transportation minister says, well, it's all starting to become quite clear. Al Jazeera has the following quote. There's no evidence that Morocco orchestrated, Morocco orchestrated events in Quetta, partly on behalf of Israel. Just a lot of interesting coincidences. That is a line that appears in a news report. It's shocking how many interests are arrayed against you acknowledging the evidence of your own eyes here. And it's not a hard story to tell. They all want to make it far more complicated than it is. And it makes you wonder why. Is it really the far right here that has a political agenda that it's attempting to massage all these events in order to get its narrative to fit? Or is it everybody else who's making this far more complicated than it needs to be only to obscure the fact that Morocco attempted sort of a gray zone warfare strategy against Spain and the Spanish government invited. a lot of the problems that it's experiencing with its far-left policies. It seems like a simpler story than a lot of folks are trying to tell. So, Dan, I would analogize this to Spain's experience in World War II, but Spain did not enter World War II the best decision that Franco ever made. Yeah, I don't have a ready at-hand World War II analogy, but I do think it's interesting that Spain has taken up this position as the kind of far-left standard bearer in terms of interaction with American foreign policy under the Second Trump administration and in issues like this as well. And it's an interesting historical question why that happened. I mean, part of it is just that. The rearward allies in NATO have always been less dependable than the allies along the front lines. And we're seeing that play out again in the kind of present slope simmering Eurasian crisis with Russia. And so, you know, France and Spain were always wobbly in pursuit their own. courses far more than, you know, both inside and outside of NATO famously, than the frontline countries. But it is odd because, you know, Spain, of course, under its restoration, I mean, it's a, I can't think of a country that went through a restor, a monarchical restoration later than Spain did, you know, retained a lot of the kind of intrinsically, especially culturally and religiously conservative aspects of Francoists.

Spain and yet since then it seems or called like the last 30 years it seems to have speed run the playbook that created the kind of degenerate um leftism that's plaguing so much, you know, so many other countries in Europe. And I think, you know, maybe those two things interact, the fact that they, you know, are, you know, safely, safely to the rear of, at least on the eastern front. And the fact that they're kind of, you know, are a bunch of, you know, famously, for instance, when the restoration happened and then as, as representative sort of democratic government reasserted itself in Spain in the 80s and 90s, they did have kind of a, um, They had, let's just put it this way, they had their kind of hippy, free love summer a couple decades later than the U.S. did. And there were, you know, moors and norms were tested and experimented with in various ways. So maybe, you know, that explains why they found themselves in the position they have. But, you know, to Noah and Jim's good points, you know, the real lesson here is that if you border a country. or have some kind of frontier with a country that's wildly different from your own, politically, culturally, demographically, economically. And you outsource a substantial part of your border policy to the good will and good graces of that country. You're setting yourself up exactly for something like this. I mean, there are obvious lessons so obvious for other countries in both hemispheres that I won't bother to explicate them. But that's the real vulnerability here. And yeah, I don't think. I haven't seen anything that makes the case, I should say, that Morocco centrally planned this, but allowed it to happen as much closer to plausible. And it also just shows the way in which in 2026 a combination of kind of chaotic non-state actor actions and sovereign or state-based indifference or collusion or merely incompetence. can combine through the power of social media and, you know, digital forms of communication to create these insta crises. And I think there's, you know, a lesson there because this one, you know, was, I guess you could say largely contained for a variety of mechanical reasons and practical reasons fairly quickly, but it did produce a bunch of dead people and a crisis and a test that will be a sort of test case that will probably be emulated in, in different respects by, other efforts in the future. And I think, you know, crises like these can be manufactured or emerge, I should say, very quickly and without warning and probably worse crises that were, that Europe is less prepared to deal with. I mean, this is the kind of.

you know, nightmare of people who think that we're, you know, slipping increasingly towards a more dangerous state in that, that whole area, is that these things sort of emerge without warning are kind of massively consequential unintended consequences and, and catch the countries they affect flat-footed. And we, I guess, you know, Europe should consider itself lucky that this was as contained as it was. All right. So X question to you, Jim Geherty, a lot of people pointed out this wouldn't happen on Trump's watch. So let's go to Trump's immigration record letter grade on Trump's overall immigration record to date from A to F. I've given an A minus. I think a lot of people would say this is the, you know, the shining sterling star of Trump's domestic policy in his second term. Noah. So I like the polls that break this out between Donald Trump's performance on border security and Donald Trump's performance on immigration, because it does illustrate kind of a big divide in the American public, me personally, irrespective of what they're saying. I think the border policy, border security, is an A, maybe an A minus, but definitely an A, probably, in my view. When it comes to immigration broadly, however, There's a lot to criticize in the administration's approach and the heavy-handed deportation raids, the raids on workplaces, foreign facilities, foreign-owned facilities that resulted in minor diplomatic rouse over the course of 2025. It was just a very broad dragnet. And it produced a lot of images that Americans don't like and is therefore jeopardizing the president's project because he needs public support for it, which has been waning as a result of his draconian application of his policy preferences. So I'm going to give that one a C. I even, you know what? I'll give it a C minus just to be even harsher. Overall B minus. B minus. Dan Foster, we have an A minus and a B minus on the board. I'm going to say B minus too. And I think along the same, for the exact same distinction that Noah makes, that the reason that the border security grade isn't an A plus is a, it's not really Trump's fault. It's that, and I never get tired of saying this because people need to hear it. When Joe Biden stepped into the Oval Office on day one, he decided as a matter of U.S. government policy to create a border crisis. That was official U.S. policy. And so Trump, by coming in and essentially reversing that and fixing it, you know, oversaw a massive improvement in that situation. And the only reason that's not an A plus is just because the bar was set so low for him. On the deportations, I'll just, I'll sound redundant after what Noah said. I think, you know, the only thing I would add maybe is that. you know, the inconsistency ran in lots of directions. For instance, the president also, you know, announced on truth social that he was going to spare the hospitality industry at various points because he's got lots of friends in that industry or he was going to, you know, take a different approach with farm workers. And so on the one hand, you have this kind of Stephen Miller driven.

But I'm okay with that because I think that their approach to this was honest and forthright and inclined towards good government. And even if the president is getting his way on some of this stuff, it's not the sweeping immunity deal that a lot of people were very discomfited by. And hopefully they never have to revisit this because it is so narrow that the president will never have to appeal to it. This is the compromise they've worked out and it manages to get Donald Trump a confirmed attorney general because he wasn't going to get a confirmed attorney general otherwise. He was talking about, you know, pulling this nomination as though there was going to be a world in the near future in which the Republicans would have more clout in the Senate or he would have more fealty from the GOP in the upper chamber of Congress. And if you just look at the political landscape, that's very unlikely. So, Dan, I kind of like Todd Blanche, at least I was fairly impressed with him before he was in this position. I think he does a good Sunday interviews. He makes the best case for his position in the administration's position that can often be made, even though it might involve defending things that otherwise should be indefensible. But I think his tenure here is acting AG has been terrible, not necessarily because of inequalities of Todd Blanche, but because he's doing his boss's bidding. boss wants the most ridiculous forms, expressions of lawfare that you can imagine. And the history here with Pam Bondi and, you know, maybe this will happen to Todd Blanche eventually. And now perhaps Gene Piro is people are really trying to please him and do whatever he wants, but just can't quite do enough of it. And this has come up with Piro with reports. And I guess. Trump, as has said, he doesn't know whether he supports her anymore because he dropped a case that should have been dropped against a canoeist who picked up a piece of this plastic liner that apparently was floating around in the reflecting pool, and they wanted to make the case that it was vandalism because they want to make the case, or Trump wants to make the case that this was a perfect job fixing the reflecting pool, and it's only these left-wing vandals who have ruined it, and apparently the Department of Interior withheld important information from... Piro's office. And when Piro's office got it, good for her. She said, look, we can't make this case. Yeah, good for her. I mean, there's a, there's a lot going on there. I mean, I think that it is the case that, you know, when you show up to lead one of these agencies, you cannot help but be. influenced or influenced by just sort of swimming in the institutional waters of the organization. It gets to how the calculus of, you know, serving in the Trump administration for well-meaning conservatives or even, you know, frankly, mega stalwarts who nevertheless feel some constraint of the rule of law. The calculus has changed. I mean, there was a lot of talk famously in the first term about you know, conservatives of goodwill joining the administration and in an effort to rein in its worst habits. And that was a honorable prospect for sure, for those of us who were skeptical of the president and the first administration. Why? Well, for all the familiar reasons, because.

You know, the legacy GOP was still kicking around, still was a going concern in 2017, 2018. They still had a lot of institutional control in the places where they existed. And indeed, in various ways, they did constrain the president's worst impulses when it came to the rule of law. It's obviously a much different calculus now when MAGA has more forcefully asserted itself and all of both. both the sort of public institutions, but also the private side feeder institutions, when congressional staffers, for instance, and staffers at places like state and interior and DOJ are coming from a sort of post-Maga farm system, think tanks, nonprofits, college organizations, you know, that's just a much different composition in Washington. And the question of whether joining the administration and serving in that capacity with an eye towards, again, let's say you're fully bought into the MAGA policy program. You know, there's still the question of joining the administration and trying to effectuate all of those MAGA things that you believe in while, again, still having some basic fidelity with a rule of law. and good government. And I guess, yeah, I guess, you know, cheers to Piro for dropping that case. I mean, there's only so many times you want to, you want to have, you know, grand jury indictments fail or cases get tossed out by judges, you know, before, before you get sick of getting dunked on. You know, I don't share Noah's, I don't know, comfort with, with the deal. And I can't figure out why Thom Tillis and. John Cornyn took it. I read Andy's last piece on NR about this and he's not satisfied with a deal either. He doesn't think it changes anything and I'm very happy to defer to him on that. I just honestly for the life and he can't figure out what change for those two guys. I mean, they, you know, they have every reason, you know, to do what they're doing, you know, in terms of political payback and spite and in terms of good governance. And so I'm not sure what they were promised or what happened that hasn't been reported that changes the calculus for them. Well, why is it insufficient, Dan, that they were seeking assurances in writing and got them? Well, you get assurances in writing, but something like this, the, the, the, Andy's point is that the only way to stop something like this is with legislation. And there's nothing that constrains the administration from, you know, coming back with a slightly tweaked or different, you know, program or even... you know, making less than cosmetic changes and reviving it. I was about to say that I think that the best case that can be made for those two guys is that they think it's enough to slow it down. And they might be right for the reasons you point out that, you know, come November and next January 2nd or 3rd or whatever it is, the composition of Congress will be different. And the president won't have a chance to do this stuff. Or if he does, there will be, you know, pushback. So, Dan, you know, my read on this for it's worth, I didn't follow the story extremely closely because I just assumed Todd Blanche will get through. And I assume that because I think Trump's gravitational pull is still so strong within Republican politics that even senators who hate him and have every reason to hate him and kind of obstruct him out on the way out the door, not just out of spite, but also because they're substantively in a different place. Just at the end of they can't really do it. That's my...

That's my speculation. That would be a weird kind of, that would be a weird psychological verdict on those two guys who, you know, you know, one of the criticisms of them, the old establishment is that they're kind of cynical, practical operators who aren't driven either by ideology or even by comedy. You know what I mean? That they're just, you know, sort of cynical establishmentarians. That would be a weird verdict to think that they just. felt bad about opposing, you know, the Todd Blanche nomination. I just, I can't see my way to it. Maybe I'm a more vindictive person than either of those, those two guys. But it's, you know, I, but it goes back to the very first thing I said, which is, you know, I do think it's underestimated by people who haven't worked in old, you know, institutions with strong institutional cultures and not even necessarily bureaucratic institutions, but just. institutions with long established reputations, norms, moors, and institutional cultures, like the same way that Piro is, you know, affected by the lawyers and the norms around her at DOJ, maybe that is the explanation, Rich, that just the nature of a senator is to defer after getting a couple of, you know, tiny concessions to the president from the ruling party. Maybe. So, Jim. I was supportive of the Reflecting Pool project. I was like, you know, if you make this thing look better, great. It's the kind of thing that... Trump's excelled at in the past. There was that rink he renovated in New York City. And it made sense to me that you rush it through to make it look good for the 250th, et cetera. And it did look better for like a day. But then it didn't solve the algae problem, which is my understanding. That stems from the fact that it's pulling water from the reservoir. So you're sucking in the algae rather than using. The municipal water where he wouldn't have this problem, and that's a change that happened under Obama. And just the rush job, it turns out to have been a really poor job. And this is kind of a typical kind of like crowd-sized controversy from Trump's first inaugural. He just, he insists, right, that he had bigger crowd than Obama. It didn't matter what the evidence was. Didn't matter what the facts were. He was just insist or, you know, more. Consequential example, of course, the 2020 election. He just is going to insist that he didn't lose. So he can't admit that maybe he picked the wrong firm. This is no bid contract. They did a rush job that turns out to be a botched job. So instead, he has to find scapegoats. And this canoeist and some others were filling that role. And maybe the others are guilty of sin. I'm just a little skeptical of that. Yeah, well, look, the filing that the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney Gene Puro made did not really mince words, basically throwing the Department of Interior under the bus, quote, it was not until after the return of the indictment that the Department of the Interior provided additional documents to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Indicating the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic industrial coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the American 250 celebration. And they just constantly throwing Department of Interior saying, look, These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the reflecting pool. Department of Interior provided less than fulsome information at the outset of this case. Had Department of Interior been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment. Don't play lost, Judge. We got bad information from the Department of Interior. Now, when Trump is outraging, and according to CNN yesterday, he was thinking about firing piero. Hasn't happened as of this recording, so I think probably the worst of the storm has passed, but... When Janine Piro is not loyal enough to you, that's a sign that there is no threshold of loyalty that will spare being denounced by president, both on truth social and in his comments. Not like this, you know, the Department of Justice under Trump has made it very clear. It was faulty installation. Trump still says, no, I still believe it was, everybody knows it was vandals. It was vandalism. And he's just, you know, like, you have a president who's just totally locked in on this. But as for Todd Blanche, like, I think the problem is that any attorney general under Trump. will always be a yes man. We'll never have any sense of independence. It will always do what Trump wants him to do, which is very much not going to be what, you know, even Republican senators want to see. So what's the upside of bringing him down when you're going to get someone else's head? Pretty much. Yeah, they're interchangeable at this point. Yeah, we didn't want Matt Bill Gates. We were glad we didn't get them. But then we ended up with Pam Bondi. A lot of people didn't like what she was doing. Now we've got Todd Lynch. There's not going to be a huge difference amongst them. There's no, there's no William Barr waiting in the wings to come in and do, you know, do the most competent job and occasionally stand up to Trump. All right. So Dan Foster, X question you first. And this is extreme hypothetical. Exa questions. Some of the best exa questions are extreme hypothetical. So we've established here it's not easy to work for Donald Trump. So let's say hypothetically that you wanted to serve in government. Maybe you do. We've never had this conversation. Maybe you do have this desire that you've never shared with me. And your dream government job, whatever it is, is available to you under President Donald Trump. Would you take it in this extreme hypothetical scenario?

So the Oof, I would say if I had to pick a dream government job in the executive, It would be like national security advisor, maybe. Yeah, well, we don't have one of those anymore. You got to conduct something that you want, and that's an open position in this administration. So director of the CIA, maybe. And I would take it because I've been made to understand that the CIA is engaged in a years-long effort with the rest of the deep state to undermine. the presidency of Donald Trump. So it actually would. So he couldn't touch you. Couldn't touch you with the entire consequences. It'd be a perfect fit. So yes. In that case, I would. Noah Rothman. I would serve if asked, if the president said your country needs you, I would say yes. Pedralic duty? But I wouldn't want to. It's a thankless task. It will end in disaster for you. Reputational damage is inevitable. So, yeah, it's not a pleasant condition, but I would serve. Jim Gertie. So it got instinctively, no, are you kidding me that there is no government job that I want. I love what I'm doing and I don't want to end up dealing with all the rig and roll that goes with it. But now, like, just in today's morning, Joel, I was going through all the unfilled positions in this, in this administration. You know, Trump, we're nearly two years in, Trump has not appointed an ambassador to Germany. We don't have an ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I wouldn't want to go there. But, you know, Russia, Ukraine, gutter. You know, these are some important gigs and nobody's doing them. But I think by and large, like, so somebody who was applying for a job in the Trump administration in the first term. said that in a normal Republican administration, there's like 10 people who would be good for a job. Well, with Trump, five of them were never Trump, so they're automatically eliminated. Of the remaining five, usually three of them are like, no, I'm making more money in the private sector. I don't want to work for government, particularly when the president could blow up whatever I'm working on with a jump on a tirade on Twitter or truth social or something. So then you get two. Trump meets the two and he says, I don't like the mustache on one of them. I don't know if this was a deliberate reference to John Bolton, but like with Trump, there's a much more narrow range of people who could do these sorts of jobs because they know at any given moment that Trump could like turn on you and end up denouncing you on truth social or during some White House press conference. But would you take it? If you wanted such a job and it was on offer, would you take it? I was going to say, I'm wondering if you're an ambassador, whether like you just kind of ignore, don't get much attention. And you could spend a couple of years, you know, enjoying being an ambassador and not really being on, you know, having to deal with the headache with the president. I don't think any of us were thinking about, you know, ambassadorial posts or undersecretary of labor for relations or what have you. I think all of us were thinking about cabinet level posts or something with something with enough visibility that you'd be on the president's radar and therefore a target of opportunity. Yes. Yeah, that was implied.

I think I'd take the job. I've never been interested in government service. But if I were and there were plum position that I've always wanted, you know, a career capping job, like secretary of state or secretary of the treasury or AG, yes, I would. I think it's very hard to resist this. Temptation. Yes, no is right is probably going to end poorly for you, but not necessarily. There are examples of people who have danced through the raindrops, tiptoed through the raindrops. And I think just these jobs, they come up so infrequently. There's a strong chance this would be the only opportunity to get this kind of job. And they're so consequential and meaningful. I think I would find it hard to resist as a realistic matter. With that, let's go to our second sponsor this episode, our friends at Verre. We spent a lot of time this year talking about tariffs, whether it's still actually possible to make things in America. While our sponsor today is putting that question to the test, Vera was founded in Los Angeles back in 2016 with a simple but very ambitious mission to revive the American... watch industry. Cut to today, Vera is proud to be the largest independent watch assembly in the United States, building watches in California, Arizona, Rhode Island, and Alabama, as well as manufacturing leather straps in Illinois and Florida. All of us here at the editors have been wearing our very watches for a while now. I can tell you firsthand that they are truly amazing. I'm wearing mine as we speak. If I don't have it on, I feel as though something important is missing from my life. I get comments about it all the time from listeners wondering if it's a very watch. Yes, it is a very watch. What other watch would it be? And just from random observers. including a couple weeks ago, a big watch guy who I took it off. He put it on. It got excellent grades from him as well. Vera makes some of the most durable, well-built watches on the market. They use top-grade luxury materials. They all come to waterproof warranty, and they've earned over 10,000 five-star reviews. What's more of Vera's classic analog approach of timekeeping is not only sophisticated and refined. It's also a welcome departure for people who are tired of getting pinged on their smartwatch all day. If you want to... support American craftsmanship and own a watch that's both rugged and refined check out fair you can find them at vera watches.com that's v a e r watches dot com please check it out I assure you you will not regret it so Dan Foster have this woman Francesca Hong in Wisconsin she's running in the gubernatorial primary there on the Democratic line and according to all the polling is just sweeping all before her. She's leading by, I know, 20 or 30 points, depending on the poll. The second place person who was well behind dropped out within the last.

week or so. And I think there's a case. She might be the worst of these DSA candidates so far. It's hard to top Graham Platner, a guy with the Nazi tattoo. But she is so, Graham Platner, at least you could understand, you know, kind of this gruff every man supposedly kind of appeal. This woman is so strange. She reminds me a little bit of, you know, an eccentric, socially isolated. lady who's a soft talker that you meet in when she's using the computer at the local public library. It's just not, there's nothing about her that is appealing whatsoever on a political level. And she is fully on board the most ridiculous DSA statements. Unless there's kind of a miracle, the establishment there, the Democratic establishment backing a guy, I think is currently at 7% in the polls. She's going to be the gubernatorial nominee of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin. I mean, she probably will be. The only thing I will say is that the polls I saw have huge numbers of undecided voters, like one at I think 35%. were undivided, were undecided. The Barnes, the other candidate Barnes dropping out, that's probably what's going to render that moot. You know, the establishment guy Crowley is probably not going to be able to make up all that ground with a candidate who dropped out of the race, but still a zombie on the ballot. So yeah, it's probably going to be her. And, you know, I guess the best thing that can be said for her is she's like all these other progressives walked back. They're dumbest. positions, even if she's done so superficially. I mean, here's a person who described herself as not just an ICE abolitionist, but a police abolitionist and defund and then abolish the police. Reform is not an option. Of course, now she says she didn't mean any of that. And there's a kind of special license on the left. I mean, look. All politicians do this, but there's a kind of special license on the left where you get to say crazy revolutionary socialist anarchist things and everyone kind of understands that you're only as serious as circumstances will allow you to be at any given time. So how serious you are about police abolition really depends more on what the vibe in the room is at a given point in time than your own personal convictions. So she said a lot of crazy stuff like that. She also wants to abolish Thanksgiving, which, you know, something you chuckle at. But of course, they did basically abolish Columbus Day. So it's not so, it's not, you know, beyond the realm of something that lots of progressive leaders should do. I think there's a more delicate, but also more potentially seriously concerning aspect to her biography, which is her history of mental health. I mean, she has been on the record saying. that she was diagnosed as bipolar, that she cut herself, harmed herself, that she spent a week in a psychiatric hospital. You know, she hasn't spoken to whether she's had additional breakdown since the one that she's talked about when she was a young woman. You know, she's talked about taking antidepressants, but also lithium, which is a very serious drug and has not really spoken about whether she still takes lithium or whether she's had, you know, mental health crises.

in the past. And again, look, we need to be sympathetic and human. And certainly she wouldn't be the first political leader to suffer from some sort of neuroses or even more serious mental illness. But it's something voters should know and think about before they go to the polls. Governor's real job, too, right? It's not just like a member of Congress where you can hide. That's right. It's an executive job. And it's a real job. And, you know, that cuts the other direction as you know, you can't. Even Zohran Mamdani, you know, or some of these. freak DSA candidates. You know, once they get real executive power, they have to deal with, you know, the police and police unions and all that stuff. They do change their tune a little bit. So maybe that cuts in the other direction. But you're right. It's a real job. And I would have to say, you know, the electorate in Wisconsin is not the kind of electorate at a statewide level. There are certainly areas in Wisconsin where very much is the kind of electorate that would elect Hong. But at a statewide level, you know, it's only something like 10, 15 percent describe themselves as very liberal. and of the Wisconsin electorate. The problem here is the problem of American politics and microcosm, which is that a lot of people can, I know nothing about the guy. I'm not going to pretend I do, but a lot of people in Wisconsin consider the Republican nominee to be very conservative guy. So when you have both parties not doing the Carl Rove thing, or sorry, not doing the Bill Clinton thing of trying to get, you know, trying to get to a 60% or 65% majority. party on any given issue, but instead doing the 50% plus one. or one more vote than the other guy, sort of candidate selection criteria, you end up with, you know, polarized candidates in both parties, either whom, you know, could win because one has to lose. So again, I don't know anything about this guy. I don't want to, I don't want to besmirch him by name, but, you know, it is a general problem that the only reason the Hongs of the world have a chance is because both parties have bought into this. maximalist, you know, ideological primary system where general election candidates end up not being, you know, centrist compromises or people in the mainstream of their parties, but the most rabid members of their parties. Yeah. So, Jim, we could have examples here in the Midwest of this phenomenon that seemed as though it was mostly limited to urban areas where you had DSA types winning. mayoral primaries or general elections, obviously in the case of Zohran Mamdani, or congressional primaries being one in these jurisdictions, real low turnout events and districts that have demographics perfectly suited to these kind of candidates. And by that, I mean a lot of...

white people who are, as they say, downwardly mobile and have crazy left-wing politics and have a great propensity to vote and turn out in low-primary, low turnout events. But we have the Michigan primary, Senate primary tonight. So we don't need to talk about that because whatever we say will be overtaken by events very, very quickly. But it seems like Abdul El-Sayed has a real chance of winning that. He's not formally a DSA. candidate, but is definitely of that ill. And then this woman, you know, in a serious state where she could win a Democratic primary. Yeah, and I should point out, you know, Dan mentioned that she meant, you know, at one point said we should be banning and canceling Thanksgiving. This week she did an interview with CNN. Caitlin Susan Collins asked this very basic question, do you still believe that Thanksgiving should be canceled? And Hong responds with like three minutes of word salad that Kamala Harris would say, wow, that was incoherent. So, like, at no point in that her answer does she say, no, I do not believe that Thanksgiving should be canceled. So Republicans, you have no excuses here, right? Your candidate is here. The opposition is literally undecided on whether Thanksgiving should continue to be a holiday. This should be a slam dunk. Yes, Wisconsin is, you know, as. Alice Cooper taught us. Milwaukee was the first city that had three different socialist mayors in the cinematic classic Wayne's world. But having said that, it's a purple state. You should not be seeing a socialist governor elected there. In Michigan, you should not be seeing a socialist senator there. Mike Rogers talked about how Abdul El-Sayed was the candidate he wanted to face and that this should be like, all right, God, you better live up to that. You really, you know, because if you lose, you are putting a socialist in statewide positions of power for four year and six year terms there. So I, look, she's terrible. She's obviously, this should be a target-rich environment. I do think it's kind of interesting. This has been a recurring topic both in the Jolton when I talk with Greg. Is this a story of the socialists rising and suddenly garnering this widespread support? We're recording this before the primary is done, but it certainly looks like Abdul El-Sayed's going to win. He's going to probably win by a healthy margin. Nobody's really coming close to Hong at this point. And let's remember, there's no runoff. She doesn't have to reach 100%. Right now I feel pretty confident saying Hong is extremely likely to be the nominee there. It's one of those things. Is that this or is it that the Democratic establishment has just collapsed?

that nobody really knows who they are, what they stand for, what are they actually willing to fight for? And also, like, they're also afraid to confront the socialist away. There are a couple exceptions here. I think Stevens has tried to give it to El Sayed here. But there's no fighting spirit amongst the centrist. There's no... No conviction. Yeah. There certainly is no sense that they're wishy-washy. They don't come across as someone who sees the socialist alternative as a threat to the country. They, you know... definitely want to oppose the Republicans, but they don't denounce the Republicans quite as furiously as the socialist wing does. And just finally, you know, at 2024, Democrats lose, and they're in this sense, like, oh, my God, how did Kamala Harris, who we thought? had this great, it was joy and coconut, coconut trees, and they thought she had a great convention. They thought she had, you know, won the debate against Trump. She goes, oh, for seven in the swing states. Democrats are rack. How did we blow this? And they are now in the circumstances where Bernie Sanders has effectively won this argument. Because he said to Democrats, we didn't go left enough. We did not go enough to the billionaire. Okay, actually, I'm a billionaire now. We didn't do enough against the billionaires and the big banks and all that stuff. And that was the answer that was most soothing to Democrats. It wasn't that they got stuff wrong on trans stuff. It wasn't that they botched immigration. It wasn't that the world was on fire and everything was twice as expensive as people thought it was. It was just because they weren't left enough. And that's the answer that makes them happy. I think Bernie Sanders is pretty good. It's better than your Trump, Jim, whatever it's worth. How could you say it's better than the problem? So, Noah, again, if you look at Graham Platner, you could look at his rise, initial rise, and say, okay, it's maybe a product of forced personality, a twisted and loathsome personality, as it turned out. But this woman Hong, it's not the personality at all. Apparently, it's just it's the core beliefs that are appealing to Democratic primary voters. Yeah, it's her extremism and her willingness to buck convention by which. people who say that sort of thing mean just basic civic consensus that has prevailed through the generations you know i don't think Francesca Hong has given up her past views or even conceded all that much to her critics at all everybody's talked about this thanksgiving answer which i think was pretty illustrative but thanksgiving is also a time that's incredibly painful for many in our communities by whom she means the left the far left's freakish blind albino cave dwellers for whom Thanksgiving celebrates American genocide and should be replaced with a day of solemn remembrance. That is a very fringe view, but it's articulated often on the academic far left. And that's who she represents. But in that answer, she has this turn of phrase that she appeals to now with a lot of frequency, which indicates that she hasn't revised her views at all. I wanted to make sure that people understood that there are multiple views, she said, of Thanksgiving. But views can evolve. can evolve. That's important because you said it before.

She was asked by CNN's Dana Bash, but for a conversion narrative, give us something to explain why you shifted from your view that police should be abolished along with prisons into something that's much more mainstream. And she didn't. She said that her views can evolve. And twice she has said this sentence, the governor cannot defund the police, and I will not defund the police, which is not to say that she doesn't want. to defund the police because she does want to defund the police she does want to abolish prisons and that very same answer after she says i will not defund the police she goes off on how um police violence is a scourge of society that correctional officers have the highest rates of suicide that we need to ensure that the incarcerated live lives of dignity so that we reduce recidivism rates and how we have to change these systems blah blah blah blah blah she has not evolved She is a dyed-in-the-wool DSA, or by which I mean, an outright socialist who is hostile to the American civic conception and wants to rewrite the whole premise from the ground up, blank slate. She's not whiffing on this sort of thing. The only thing she did offer as a concession last night in this interview on CNN, she was asked by Caitlin Susan Collins, what part of the DSA platform she disagreed with. And she answered, she said, abolishing the Senate was, quote, unquote, not practical. But not because the Constitution makes it all but impossible. Indeed, if you're advocating that, you're advocating for basically the dissolution of the Constitution. But only because Democrats are destined to win the chamber and therefore Democrats would be sacrificing the power that voters are willing to bequeathed them. That's all it is. It's all about amassing power for her and her cohort. and rewriting the rules of the road. So I find her to be maladroit as a politician, but admirably forthright, like many other Democratic socialists, they don't care if you know that they think 9-11 was justified. They don't care if you think, if you know that they think the Israelis deserved the October 7th massacre. They don't care if you think the Constitution is an obstacle to everything they want to do. That is what they believe. And they're asking you for an up or down vote on their beliefs. I really do hope that the American people get the opportunity to do just that and get a real close look at what people like Milakiros and Francesca Hong and half a dozen others, Chevalier, Dary Eliza Chevalier, all these people are really honest. And it's nice because it gives us the opportunity to honestly grapple with our atrocious ideas. So, Dan Foss are going to go to you first again with the EXA question. Does the current DSA, crop of candidates, activists, organizers, make you look back any differently or maybe more fondly to the likes of Michael Harrington, old school 20th century, a socialist who's a big founding figure in the DSA? I'll go first to just give you an idea of the answer I'm looking for. Not, you don't have to agree with me, but kind of take. One way or the other, I do look back at these guys a little more fondly. Michael Harrington, for instance, was an honest old school socialist. We would have had a big difference with them about how to address poverty and what should we have Medicare and what Medicare should look like. But he wasn't hostile to Western civilization. He wasn't hostile to the American system as such. He had battle-hardened experience in socialist organizing such that you realize that all these groups.

tend to be taken over by communists unless you take really stern measures to keep them from taking over your group. So the DSA had a measure, as I understand it, providing for the expulsion for anyone under the discipline of democratic centralism, as I think the way they put it, that was their way of saying, we don't mark, we don't want Marxist-Leninists in the DSA because it is actually small D. Democratic. Now, as it happened, at the same time, the DSA is trying to infiltrate and take over the Democratic. party. The communists are trying to infiltrate and take over the DSA with a lot of success, including repealing that Michael Harrington supported provision. And it's much more Hasan Piker's DSA than Michael Harrington. And I do think that's a measurable, meaningful difference. Totally. I mean, I absolutely, I have a soft spot for the old left. And I think I said on a podcast, we did a while back when you'd asked us to like name our favorite. you know, public leftist. I, you know, I would put Bernie on, on that list. There's a lot I don't like about Bernie, and I mean that even on the personal level, but, but there's some things I like about him. And one of them is that he's in many ways an old leftist. Now, he's had to make the right noises on various new left. policies and he's, you know, he's surrendered on things like immigration, for instance. But generally, I, the way to think about it is that, you know, Marx called his philosophy dialectical materialism. And the way to think about it is the old school DSAers who are much more materialists and the new school ones are much more into the dialectics. And here's what I mean by that. The material, there are any leftists who is concerned with material conditions and concrete facts about. class and income distribution and the means of production and all that old, all that old good stuff is to me, somebody I can deal with and I can talk to and debate. Like you said, I'm going to disagree with them on a lot of the conclusions, but we start from a much closer understanding of what reality is than the new DSA guys do. And what I mean by dialectics is the extent to which... The DSA is animated and all of all of sort of new leftism is animated by kind of magical thinking and this kind of linguistic language game, you know, way of thinking about things that that was that, you know, in the infamous long march through the institutions that started in the academy, you know, that has infiltrated all of left wing discourse in America where you can redefine words and thereby redefine reality. You know, that has led to all kinds of disturbing things like, you know, the popular front mentality on the left where there is no division between the most centrist Democrat and the farthest left communist when it comes, you know, when it comes down to matters where solidarity is important. I mean, I saw a sign on shop window that was making the rounds on Twitter that said, you know, Palestine never stopped being queer. Colonialism exported its homophobia. to Palestine, right? And that's the kind of thinking that's impossible if you're a hard-nosed Marxist materialist from previous generations. It's all of the language games gobbledygook and postmodernism, post-structuralism, and all the other posts that have smuggled their way into leftist thinking that is responsible for like the truly scary aspects of the DSA. Jim Garrity, and I'm sure listeners will be delighted if you do this whole answer in your Bernie Sanders' voice.

I will spare listeners that, Rich. I don't have a lot to add to what Dan just laid out in a very erudite manner. Didn't like them then, don't like them now. I guess I find the modern ones a little more annoying. There is even more history of how there is this blurry line of how you start out wanting to be socialist. And then it turns into, you know, oh, well, I'm a Marxist, but I'm not really a full communist and all these different, you know. varieties of them that they all end up in the same direction of gulags and secret police and greater state power and less individual responsibility, less individual choice. I think of all the things that have been, the political landscape is a lot of dumb statements. I think the true socialism has never been tried. Look, if every time you try to adopt your philosophy, you know, it always goes wrong. And it always ends up with Gulags and Secret Police and, you know, Tiananmen Square and North Korea. And if every country that calls itself socialist, you have to say, well, it's not real socialist. Real socialist is this ethereal thing that floats out in the cosmos that is never actually, you can never feel it, you can never quite tell what it is. Like, that just strikes me as nonsensical, look, I want my thing associated with good things and I don't want my thing associated with bad things. Ergo, socialism. and only applies when it's the good country, you know, when it's Norway, when it's someplace, which by the way is where I bite, you know, gas and oil revenues and all that kind of stuff. So it's, I don't, I find, you know, they keep finding new ways to annoy me and to find them even less appealing than the old school ones. No. I have no soft spot for the old left or the new left or any other kind of left. They're all very deeply misguided and the threat they represent as a matter of degree, not kind. During peak woke, the old Marxists hated the identitarians because they replaced the framework of class as the lens through which all events should be viewed and which determines all outcomes to the framework of race. That isn't better. It's just as myopic, just as politically deranging, civilizational destructive. The DSA marriage managed to marry both outlooks, which just renders them doubly awful. I, you know, I'm struggling to see a big distinction here. They're worse, but we're all talking about just degrees of bad. With that, let's hear from our final sponsor this episode. I want to tell you about the competitive Enterprise Institute's How the World Works podcast featuring our old friend political commentator Kevin Williamson each episode. Kevin sits down with a notable guest to discuss the jobs they've had, why work matters, and the role of work in our social lives. After all, work involves a lot more than paychecks, cash. So listen to how the world works, wherever you listen to podcasts or visit c.org slash podcast. With that, let's hit a few other things before we go. Jim Garrity, you saw the Spider-Man movie. I did. And I would point out that, like, I'm a, you know, old comic collector. I'm very much into superhero movies. I will concur that Marvel has really been meh at best since Endgame, with a handful of exceptions. A brand new day.

You know, one, it lives up to the title. It does feel a little bit different from the previous ones. Still brings back Tom Holland and Zendaya and the guy who plays Ned the Friend. Various other Marvel characters pop up in it and it's made like a billion dollars around the world in like five days. It is as good as the hype. It's a lot of fun. It's kind of been this fun spirit that's been missing from Marvel, I think, for a while now. So well done. I hope over we go see it. And, you know, if you don't. like that, there's a totally different movie at the Cineplex that features Tom Holland and John Bernthol and Sondaya. All in very similar roles, ironically. That one's called The Odyssey. There was a little bit of debate about that one. So, Dan, you are on vacation, but joined this episode. I'm very short notice because Charlie had technical problems. I did, and it's, I have to say, I enjoyed the deliciousness of Mr. Tech Genius failing to get onto the If you do it the way I do it with just two tin cans in a string, you know, you don't have any fail states that you can blame not being able to join on. No, I'm in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of Western New York. I've kind of been through here a little bit here and there, but I've never spent any amount of time here. And it's very nice with my wife and her extended family at a big old Victorian mansion that we rented out because there's like 12 of us. Through Airbnb, it's very nice. We're in a historic town, and we spent yesterday on the lake and may go back this afternoon and I'm enjoying myself. Awesome. So, Noah, you had some power allergies, big rainstorms northeast. Yeah, big rainstorms. Pretty much right over my house, we got like six to nine inches of water over the course of about 24 hours. There's a lot of water. I'm pathologically terrified of water. Every apartment that I lived in had flooding, including the... high rise that we moved into to avoid the flooding a pipe ended up bursting in our closet in that high rise so we got water from above and below and yeah just now we're on a hill so there's a lot of drainage but i spent the entire day like going back down into the basement checking the walls checking everywhere looking for the tiniest little evidence of water somewhere my my pool was comically full at the end of this thing like up to the very brim But yeah, we managed to get away without too much damage with the exception of a couple of gigantic trees that came down almost on top of somebody's house very close to me. It was just providential because the thing managed to fall right in between two giant structures and just kind of take out a car, mess up a garage door, but otherwise not destroy these structures. And we're talking about it like, it has to be a 75 year old tree. It's gigantic. But that took our power out for us for... about a day and you know went to the movies so i guess that was eventful but yeah a lot of water So speaking of movies like Jim, I saw the new Spider-Man movie and also enjoyed it. It could have been 20 to 30 minutes shorter, I think. Also, a lot of argo-bargle in it. It's a little hard to follow at times like a lot of these movies have, but very enjoyable. It moves. The action's great and you're fond of the characters. So all around, very well done. With that, it's time for our editor's picks. Jim Garrity.

That's your pick. Okay. So forgive me. I have not really enjoyed the discussion about the common good all over National Review. Whenever somebody starts invoking the common good, I flash back to the comedic classic Hot Fuzz, where it turns out that a village has been running around killing lots of its outlier, outlying members for the name of the greater good. And the cop goes into this. He finds them like, programmed automaton. It's very hard to figure out. When someone says, all right, what's the common good? It'd be kind of nice if they could explain out what they actually mean by it, because everybody has a tendency to define it the way they'd prefer. Well, our Charlie Cook, who sadly, due to technical issues, was not able to join us today. I had a corner post, okay, but what do you want to actually do? Which I think gets down to the point of like, look, because it's such a nebulous term and everybody's going to, everybody's definition of the common good also tends to overlap with their sense of what's good for them. Maybe we can kind of skip over this term. We can try to get down to, okay, but what do you actually want to do in terms of policy? Which I find a lot of the common good conservatives. Always just like to be a little more statist, a little more protectionist, a little more big government than they like to discuss in other circumstances. Anyway, good job, Charlie. Yeah. Don't often talk much about good news on this podcast, but there is some good news. And John Fund has some for us in his piece, quote, where bipartisan reform is actually working. Spoiler, it's at the state level. in Republican states, Democratic states, but states where they have prohibited collective bargaining for public sector employees, which has allowed those states to reward good public sector employees and fire bad public sector employees, kind of a novel concept. But it's one that is being revivified in places like West Virginia and North Carolina. It's good news. Go read John Fund on it. Dan Foster. I'm going to say read the whole common good exchange corner. I think most of the parties are talking past each other. I think in particular, although I agreed with most of what Michael Dardy said in his righteous, righteously angry response to Dan McLaughlin, I think. very little of it actually makes contact with what Dan was saying. And I think Charlie and others, Dave Guy Benson, have raised the real issue, which is what's the content of the common good? I mean, I will say this. There's an interesting meta thing happening there, which is, you know, I've always said whenever somebody is trying to take the founding myths or the founding documents or the founding personalities of America and remake them to their own purposes, even if they're not my purposes, that's a sign of a healthy society. In other words, if you try and remake George Washington as a as a figure of the left or as a woke figure or something like that, that's a sign of a healthy society. The sign of an unhealthy society is when you try and destroy George Washington as the founding myth, right? And the same thing is happening with the common good. When you're trying to rename or re-understand what the common good means, that's much healthier.

than saying that actually the end of government is some other thing like redistributing wealth or whatever it is. So I actually think it's part of a healthy debate that the post-liberals are trying to corral the Constitution to their purposes. I'd much rather they try and corral the Constitution to their purposes than argue for the abolition of the Constitution, which some post-liberals do, but certainly not any of those on our page. So my pick is a piece by Josh Trevino on why World War II. still matters. So, Dan, I hope you take the time to read this piece and truly take it to heart. So that's it for us. You've been listening to a Nashville podcast and your rebroadcast, retransmission, or counter this game without the express written consent of Nashville magazine is strictly prohibited. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Noah. Thanks to Maiden, Vera, and how the world works. And thanks especially to all of you for listening with the editors. We'll see you next time.