The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class Paperback by Thom Hartmann

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class Paperback by Thom Hartmann Thomhartmann.com Thom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times bestselling author, looks at the history of the battle against oligarchy in America--and how we can win the latest round. Billionaire oligarchs want to own our republic, and they're nearly there thanks to legislation and Supreme Court decisions that they have essentially bought. They put Trump and his political allies into office and support a vast network of think tanks, publications, and social media that every day push our nation closer and closer to police-state tyranny. The United States was born in a struggle against the oligarchs of the British aristocracy, and ever since then the history of America has been one of dynamic tension between democracy and oligarchy. And much like the shock of the 1929 crash woke America up to glaring inequality and the ongoing theft of democracy by that generation's oligarchs, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has laid bare how extensively oligarchs have looted our nation's economic system, gutted governmental institutions, and stolen the wealth of the former middle class. Thom Hartmann traces the history of this struggle against oligarchy from America's founding to the United States' war with the feudal Confederacy to President Franklin Roosevelt's struggle against "economic royalists," who wanted to block the New Deal. In each of those cases, the oligarchs lost the battle. But with increasing right-wing control of the media, unlimited campaign contributions, and a conservative takeover of the judicial system, we're at a crisis point. Now is the time for action, before we flip into tyranny. We've beaten the oligarchs before, and we can do it again. Hartmann lays out practical measures we can take to break up media monopolies, limit the influence of money in politics, reclaim the wealth stolen over decades by the oligarchy, and build a movement that will return control of America to We the People. About Thom Hartmann Thom Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of 25 books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents. Hartmann is also an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. The co-founder (with his wife, Louise) and former Executive Director of The New England Salem Children's Village (1978) and The Hunter School (1997), he has led national innovations in the areas of residential treatment for abused children and private/public education for learning-disabled children. He has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, and the United States through the German-based Salem International program. Formerly rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of The Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP Trainer by Richard Bandler (who wrote the foreword to one of Thom's books), he was the originator of the revolutionary "Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis" to understand the psychiatric condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). A guest faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, he also synthesized the "Younger/Older Culture model" for describing the underpinnings - and possible solutions - to the world's ecological and socio-political crises, suggesting that many of our problems are grounded in cultural "stories" which go back thousands of years. Leonardo DiCaprio was inspired by Thom's book "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" to make the movie "The 11th Hour" (in which Thom appears), and a series of environmental videos narrated by Hartmann and DiCaprio, available at Green World Rising. Talkers Magazine named Thom Hartmann as the most important p...

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Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. Today we have an amazing author. This gentleman is in radio, and he's written an incredible, incredible book that we have before us, and he's the author of many. The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class. He's a Nework times bestseller tom hartman i'll go ahead and hold up the book the advanced press copy that we have here

tom hartman is a progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host talkers magazine named him america's most important progressive host and has named his show one of the top 10 radio shows in the country every year for over a decade. A four-time recipient of the Project Censored Award, Hartman is also a New York Times bestseller, author of 26 books, counting people, 26 books translated into multiple languages. Welcome to the show, Tom. How are you, my friend? Hey, Chris. It's great to be back with you. It's awesome to have you on the show. I've been watching your YouTube channel with all your radio shows, and I'm a fan, and I love it.

Thank you. There you go. Can you give the audience your plugs so they can find you on the interwebs and know where to order a great book here? TomHarvin.com, however you spell it, will get you there. And the book is available wherever you can buy a book. It's nationally distributed through whatever. There you go. Pick it up at your local bookseller, support them,

or pick it up at the big Amazon. It will be available on February 2nd, so you can preorder that book now and be one of the first people to read it and get it out of the gate. So, Tom, what motivated you to want to write this book? This book is the pair, the other half of the book that preceded it, which was The Hidden History of Monopoly. Basically, you know, how big businesses screwed the American dream. And monopoly is when you concentrate economic power, marketplace power, to such an extent that basically the competition ceases to exist.

And that's where we're at in the United States. We're a highly monopolized economy. Oligarchy is when you consolidate political power to the point that it's very difficult to compete with, or that basically you have, you know, one ruling class, as it were. Oligarchy is sometimes referred to as rule by the rich, and monopoly as, you know, domination of the marketplace by a handful of huge actors. So this is applying to politics the same analysis that I apply to the economy in the last book. And it's particularly timely because our modern tilt toward oligarchy, which started in a big way in the mid-70s and really kind of exploded onto the American scene in 1981 with the Reagan administration, has been just a straight line from Reagan to Trump and doesn't show any

signs of stopping in the near future. The right-wing billionaires are still very active and still very much in control of a lot of the political, particularly in the states now, even though they've lost federal power, they still have, you know, it's just by a whisker. And so this hasn't gone away. So is that a good overview of the book? Or what would you give us an overview of the book? Well, in general, in the book, first of all, I cover the history of oligarchy in the United States.

We fought a war against oligarchy, against the British East India Company. The Boston Tea Party was the kickoff point for that war, where the East India Company basically controlled almost all the commerce, certainly all the international commerce in the colonies. And there were a whole bunch of things that it was just illegal for people to do. You know, it was illegal to manufacture fine clothing, for example, in the United States. It had to be made in England. You know, complex machinery had to be made in England. Certain types of furniture had to be made in England. And all the tea in the United States had to be brought in from England. Certain types of furniture had to be made in England. And all the tea in the United States had to be brought in from England. And this, of course, was the way that the British

government was protecting their economy. And this, by the way, was not just something that was inflicted on the United States in 1773 when the Boston Tea Party happened. This is why Mahatma Gandhi's logo was a spinning wheel. He'd sit and spin at his wheel when he'd do interviews and things, because at that time, India was a British colony, and it was still illegal to make clothing in India. It had to be made in the United Kingdom. You could pick cotton in India, but you had to ship it to England to be turned into clothing and then ship that back down to India. So this is a, you know, this had been a policy,

an oligarchic policy and a monopolistic policy that had kept England rich for hundreds of years. So I started at that point where when the British Parliament gave a massive tax cut to the East India Company so that they could come into the American tea market and blow out of the water their competition, which was mostly smuggled tea uh and that so pissed off the colonists that they said enough of this and they did the tea party we go from that uh america was birthed in a fight against oligarchy to uh in the 1830s or really in the the cotton gin eli whitney invented the cotton gin in like 1797, as I recall. But it really didn't hit the marketplace until around 1810. And it really didn't get widespread in the South until around 1820.

And one, the big bottleneck in cotton production was cleaning the cotton. Cotton, little bowls, they're called, kind of a wad of cotton that replaces the flower. It has all these seeds inside it that are just almost impossible to get the seeds away from the cotton. And so cleaning cotton was just a huge, huge problem. The cotton gin was a big barrel with kind of a screen and little hooks that went in, and the hooks would pull the cotton through and the seeds would have to stay inside the screen. And one cotton gin could do the work of 50 enslaved people. So what happened was the large wealthy plantations bought cotton gins. They were able to use those to produce literally 50 times more cotton than their smaller competitors. They wiped out their small competitors, put them out of business, bought their land, turned them into sharecroppers, and, you know,

became basically an oligarchy. The entire South was controlled by a few thousand families, and these massive plantations, and the entire political class of the South now by 1830s with the rise of John C. Calhoun was pure oligarchy. I mean, right out of a textbook oligarchy. And 20 years later, 30 years later, they said to the United States of America, we don't like this idea of democracy. We don't like this idea of representative government. We want to be the oligarchs who run the entire continent. And they declared war on us. So that was the second big experiment with oligarchy in the United States. Of course, they crashed and burned, and the South got occupied by the Union Army.

The third was in the 1930s. Each one of these, weirdly enough, are about 80 years apart. The third was in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt became president. And, you know, another oligarchy had emerged as a result of the Industrial Revolution starting around 1890, 1880, 1890. And you had these billionaires like John Rockefeller, and the DuPonts, and the Astors, and the Morgans, and whatnot. And Franklin Roosevelt declared war on them. They crashed the economy in 1929. They created the Great Depression. And he said, they hate me and I welcome their hatred. And he fought a 10-year war against the oligarchs in the United States before he took on the oligarchs in Germany and beat them back. And then in the 70s, they started rising again

as a result of a couple of Supreme Court decisions, the Buckley and Belotti decisions in 76 and 78, that for the first time in the history of the United States, said that if a billionaire wants to own a politician so completely that they're that politician's principal source of income, and that politician does pretty much whatever that billionaire oligarch wants. That used to be called corruption or bribery. The Supreme Court in 1976 officially said, no, no, it's not. It's First Amendment free speech because money is speech, didn't you know? And then two years later in the First National Bank versus Bilotti case, Supreme Court case, which was written by Lewis Powell, who laid this whole scenario out in 71 with his memo a year before Richard Nixon put him on the

Supreme Court. That Bellotti case said that logic that we just applied to billionaires, we're going to apply that to corporations as well. They're people, they can also own politicians. And then in 2010, the Supreme Court doubled down on that and said, not only can they own politicians, they can own hundreds of politicians, they can own entire political parties, both billionaires and corporations. And then there was one small restriction that basically limited them to around 130 politicians that an individual billionaire could own. And in the McCutcheon decision in 2013, they blew out that limit. So, you know, basically, ever since 1981, with that, with those rulings in 76 and 78, what happened was the Republican Party was like, oh, we can take money from billionaires, we can take money from corporations, cool, our hands are out. And they and just a flood of money poured into the GOP that brought Ronald Reagan to power. The Democratic Party at that point in time was so well funded by the unions, the unions were washing cash so much so that, you know, some unscrupulous union leaders like Jimmy Hoffa were stealing it.

So but the Democratic Party in 80 was saying, yeah, we're good. You know, we got money from the unions, which is why the first thing that Reagan did was destroy the unions. When he came into power in 1981, about a third of America had good union jobs. By the time the Bush Reagan Bush 12 years was done, that was down to around 12 percent. It's 6 percent right now of the private workforce in the United States are unionized. And by gutting the unions, what Reagan did was gutted the financial base for the Democratic Party, which in 1992 caused Bill Clinton and a guy named Al Fromm to start this thing called the Democratic Leadership Council, the DLC, specifically to take money from billionaires and corporations.

Their caveat was, we'll leave the dirty corporations, you know, the oil companies and the weapons industry. We'll leave that to the Republican Party. We're going to take money from the clean industries, you know, insurance and banking. And so Clinton got into bed with these people. And, you know, that that did enormous damage to the Democratic Party. But now with the Obama election and with Bernie's two primaries, the Democratic Party has figured out that they don't need corporations and billionaires. They can crowdsource campaigns. And so now about half of the Democratic Party is once again solidly progressive. The Progressive Caucus is about 100 members out of the 224, I think, in the House. And so I think we're seeing a revival of the Democratic Party, which is a good thing, because that's the anti-oligarch party. So, you know, I realize you asked me what time it was, and I told you how to build a watch, but that's the overview of the book. Oh, and then the last

part of the book is what happens when oligarchy, when the people stand up against oligarchy, typically the oligarchs fight back with a police state and that's called tyranny. And so what happens when the, when the nation turns into a police state, as we to some extent have, and how do you fight a police state? How do you fight oligarchy that has become cancerous, has become tyranny? And that's the last part of the book is how to put the country back together. Yeah, I was watching through the book and then watching your videos talking about this. You're talking about William Barr and all the different things we see. In fact, I believe the one video I saw was like a year ago.

And I was watching and I'm like, holy crap, like he's predicted everything that was going to go down. It wasn't hard to predict. It's an old playbook. I mean, you know, it was Dillard's playbook. It was Mussolini's playbook. It was Franco's playbook. You know, it was down in Chile. It was, what's his name, Pinochet's playbook.

You know, it's what is happening in the Philippines right now with Duterte. It's what Bolsonaro is doing in Brazil. It's an old playbook. It's fairly predictable. It's, you know, it's happened in Russia. It's happened in a lot of the stand countries. It's been, it's going on right now in Turkey. So what Trump was doing and what the Republicans were and are continuing to do is not unique. It's just the American version of it. It just speaks English and uses an accent like you and I have. Definitely. The fascist playbook. And what's funny is Trump is friends with a lot of these guys, version of it it just speaks english and uses an accent like you and i have definitely uh the fascist playbook and what's funny is trump is friends with a lot of these guys you know oh yeah

yeah um yeah and i i really think he's been preparing us this whole way i mean the violence everything that that comes from you know that slow degradation of of truth lies uh uh violence you know everything he tried to do was all from the fascist playbook uh getting the getting politicians cow toad him i think what's extraordinary to now is to watch is that how much power he still has even though he's out of power and i'm concerned that he could become another sylvia broscoloni who who you know gets removed from power and then comes back. But, you know, I was reading today that Mike Pence has actually been having to keep his locations confidential.

Sleeping on people's couches. Yeah. For fear of, you know, literally don't own a house. Cause he's afraid that, that, that the, that these armed militia guys are going to come and kill him. And I think he's going to have to spend the rest of his life kind of looking over his shoulder. Yeah. I think think so i think you're right and but he still supports them very unfortunate i mean you you have uh you have these politicians that were cowering under a desk screaming for donald trump to send the troops to save him and now they're fully backing him and if you know i'm really concerned what's going to happen the next two

to four years because i don't want to see another Sylvia or Bo Scaloni. You talk in the first chapters of the book about Trump and Trump's playbook. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Well, I think I just did. The process is not a mystery. And it comes out of basically a philosophical difference. And I lay this out in the book as well. Our modern idea of democracy is not what the Greeks had or what the Roman Republic was.

Our modern idea of democracy is kind of a hybrid of a whole bunch of things, including the Iroquois Confederacy that the founders and framers put together in the 1770s, but it has its roots in the 1630s or the 1650s. I believe it was 1651 that Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, published a book called Leviathan. And this was the first major published book. I mean, keep in mind, it was just 100 years after Gutenberg. So the world was changing very rapidly and books were getting out there. But this was the first major published book by a British subject that was arguing that people didn't need kings. Hobbes made two basic arguments in Leviathan. The first was that people are capable of self governance. And the second was that people are fundamentally evil and so even when doing so and and that the natural state of man the famous quote you know life would be nasty short and brutish or nasty brutish and short um you know if man were to revert back to his original state uh you know lose civilization because that's our core and and therefore you you need the Leviathan, the giant monster. He referred to it

as the iron fist of church or state to control this evil nature of mankind. So that became the cornerstone of today's modern conservative philosophy, that people are evil evil and so you need a strong you know a government a strong you know strong law and order in order to keep them down um 50 years later about actually about 30 years later john lock and in in the uh 17 in the i'm sorry this was 1651 we're now at 1673 or 74 i think john lock was writing his second treatise on government. And Locke came out and said, Hobbes is wrong. He's right that we can govern ourselves, but he's wrong that we're evil. The fundamental nature of humans is actually good. And therefore, we can actually trust the majority. So we can have self-governance, but it doesn't have to be, we don't have to figure out some weird way to bring it about.

See, with Hobbes' theory that people were evil, we could govern ourselves, but it was really tricky. That led to John Calvin, who was a Dutch evangelist, coming out and saying, okay, well, here's the problem. If we're going to govern ourselves without a king, and we're all evil because we're born out of women's wombs, and the Bible tells us that we're all infected with original sin because we all came from women, then how do we figure out who God wants to lead us? And Calvin, actually, it wasn't so much Calvin himself in his writings, it was his followers, but it's the basis of modern day Calvinism, the religion that Betsy Voss is a member of. The theory was that, well, you look around for God's blessing. And wherever you see people who are obviously blessed by God, those must be the people that God wants to run the show,

and which is the rich people. And so thus oligarchy ruled by the rich is at the core of Calvinism or neo-Calvinism. And so anyhow, Locke came along and said, no, you know, you don't need to do that. You don't need to follow John Calvin. You can simply have a democracy. You can govern yourselves. And then Jean-Jacques Rousseau, you know, a French philosopher, jumped in and natural historian jumped in on this because that was around the time. Again, this was in the late 1600s, that was around the time when the European countries were starting to seriously explore both northern Africa and the west coast of Africa, and the east coast of the American continent, and the northern parts of South and Central America. And what they were

finding, and Rousseau was outspoken about this in the late 1600s, what they were finding were people who lived in peace, people who got along with each other, nations that had existed, as Ben Franklin said when he introduced these 34 members of the Iroquois Confederacy on the first day, the opening day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, he said, you know, it would be a strange thing if five nations of ignorant savages have been able to forge a bond that has endured in peace for millennia, and 13 colonies of educated Englishmen can't do the same. You know, and ignorant savages was, he meant that actually as a compliment. So, you know, we, and so Locke and Rousseau are at the foundation of the modern progressive or liberal or you might call democratic, not with a big D, but with a small d. I mean, Dwight Eisenhower was a fan of this idea of governing.

That is that what the majority of the people want is probably the right thing. So we go with that. And respecting people's rights, obviously there are limits. And the modern-day conservative philosophy is largely inherited from Hobbes. Although the modern conservative movement, and I'm pretty sure I get into that in the oligarchy book, it might be, some of it might be in the monopoly book as well. But But the modern day, no, it's in the oligarchy book now that I think of it. The modern day conservative movement was kicked off in 1951 by a fellow by the name of Russell Kirk. He wrote a book called The Conservative Mind. out by talking about Hobbes and talking about how, you know, people are evil and, you know, quack, quack, quack. And then in his book, he basically says, now keep in mind, this is 1951. He says, you know, the middle class is growing. And, you know, which at the moment seems like a good thing. And America was becoming prosperous and, you know, all that kind of thing. He said,

but if the middle class gets wealthy enough that they're no longer frightened, if working people are no longer afraid of losing their jobs, if young people are no longer afraid of getting kicked out of college or no longer respectful of their elders, if women don't submit, refuse to submit to their husbands, and if minorities start challenging the power of white people, if those things happen, and they will, Kirk said in 1951, and they will, if America becomes too prosperous, then all hell's going to break loose. And you're going to have anarchy, and you're going to have the breakdown of American society, and it'll be the end of the American experiment. Now, Kirk was viewed as kind of a crackpot in the early 50s. Barry Goldwater was totally on board. William F. Buckley thought he was brilliant. But those are the only three years, it was widespread across the United States. Women could control their reproductive systems now. And they started saying, hey, wait a minute, we should have equality with men in the workplace. You don't have to worry about, I'm not going to get pregnant. And so you had that and the sexual revolution that accompanied it. So women were starting to speak out. You had a civil rights movement that was being led at that time by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther

King that was shaking the foundations of American business and white power. You had students who were saying in the mid to late 60s that they had no interest in going off to a war in Vietnam that Lyndon Johnson had lied us into. Hell no, we won't go. And they were, you know, setting campuses on fire. And you had African Americans who were protesting in the streets with the civil rights movement. And by the early 70s, you had cities on fire. And so the early followers of Russell Kirk, and, you know, by extension, Thomas Hobbes, were looking around going, holy crap, it's true. Kirk was right back in 1951. He wasn't crazy after all.

And American society is falling apart. And we've got to strip the middle class back down to where they were in 1951. We've got to stop this prosperity. And that was the rationale that that founded and animated Reaganism's all out war on labor unions. That and let's gut the, you know, gut the funding for the Democratic Party. The the, you know, Rush Limbaugh and his feminazi thing, you know, the whole growth of anti-woman misogyny and the pushback against the women's movement, all of the hysteria around the various Black movements throughout, you know, the last 60 years, from Kings to Malcolm X to Black Lives Matter and whatnot. And, you know, there have always been proxies for that, you know, before they were

going after Colin Kaepernick, they were going after Muhammad Ali. And for the war on drugs, cracking down on young people on the campuses and raising the cost of a college education. I went to college in 1967 and 68. And I paid my, at both Lansing Community College and Michigan State University, I didn't graduate from either one, a short period of time. But I was able to pay my tuition by working in a gas station and Bob's big boy as a dishwasher. I mean, you could do that back then. And so what Reaganism has done is has transferred somewhere between 10 and $50 trillion of wealth out of the pockets of the middle class working people no longer take two weeks of vacation a year buy a new car every two years buy their own you know

start buying their own home in their late 20s which was the norm in the 1980s um and now it's in the early 40s um or late 30s um you know all that stuff that used to be called the american dream and the american middle class it's gone and you've got an entire you've got two generations now of young people who are hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, student debt. I think the average is around $40,000 per person. You got one and a half trillion dollars in student debt. Just by coincidence, the exact same amount as the tax cut for billionaires that Trump pushed through in 2017. You've got so you've got young people who are paralyzed. You've got a women's movement that has been vilified and co-opted, although it's still, that's one of the things that has survived. You've got a civil rights movement that's constantly

under attack. And you've got a middle class that's been gutted. That is exactly what the Republicans wanted, the conservatives wanted. And they wanted it for arguably the best of reasons, because they thought that it would restore social stability to the country and make America a nice place to live again. They were wrong, and they brought the very worst people along with them, the racists and the misogynists and the greedy corporations who wanted to strip unions to make more profits. But that's the story. Yeah. You know, you mentioned some really interesting things. There's with the Calvinism and the Betsy DeVos, the Council of National Policy and the umbrella

and all the other evil things that are underneath there and how they try and take us down that road of becoming a theocracy and all the details of that. I love it. You know, I just read today, I think that the Mercers were also helping fund the coup. Yeah. And we've seen some of the diagrams of what's going on there. And so a lot of the stuff in your book really speaks to that.

And did you see that on December 6th of almost the come to fruition of those fasc fascist moments of seizing power you're talking about january 6th uh january 6th yeah yes yeah i mean this was uh well you know there's a a joke going around now what do you call a failed coup chris what a rehearsal yeah scary yeah yeah um so that's that's where we're at and you've got 45 republican senators who yesterday said Yeah. Scary. that said that the GOP senators are going to pass a law that three coup strikes and you're out. That's when they're going to. I thought that was pretty good. So awesome, Suss. Anything else we need to know about the book before we go out?

It's a nice, quick, easy read, but I love how you get right into the simple details, the simple language, and someone can read it and go, I get this. Yeah. Yeah. I, I would just, you know, when, when I pitched this series to, to, to Barak Kola, the publisher of this book, this is the fifth of the hidden history series. We did one on guns. We did one on in the second amendment. We did one on the, on the Supreme court. We did one on the war on voting, the monopoly book, and now oligarchy. And the next one will be healthcare, which is off to the editor right now. And then the one after that is going to be about privacy.

But my pitch to them was people don't have time to read big books anymore. And writers used to have to try to hit that 250 to 300 page, what is a book, right? And I said, I'd like to publish a small book, a 25,000 word book instead of a 100,000 word book. I've written a lot of 100,000 word books. It's not easy. It takes a year or two, but nobody's reading them anymore. People don't have the time. So how about a book that a person can literally read on a Saturday? They could start 10 o'clock Saturday morning and be done by dinnertime, or they could, you know, pick it up and read it every night before they go to bed and finish it in a week. That is just boiled down, it's just the essence that hits all the points that's got a good in depth index in the back or, you know, end notes,

so that if they want more information, they can find everything I say is backed up and findable on the internet. And they were like, cool, let's try it and see what happens. And so far it's worked really well and it's been really successful. And I think that's the main thing that I'd want people to know is,

so often you hear an author and you think, oh, it sounds like a great book, but I just don't have time to slog through 300 pages. No, this is a little pocketbook, and it's about 150 pages of text, and it's very readable. And I love it. It's also how you deliver the show, too. I love how on the show you get right to the facts, man,

and you don't embellish them, And you connect all the dots too, like you did today, where you can see the arc of history and how they connect. So I appreciate you coming on and spending some time with us today. Thank you very much, Tom. It's my pleasure, Chris. And, you know, I hope we can do it again when the next book comes out. I'd love to have you on anytime you want to come on, sir. So check out the book, guys.

It's called The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, Reclaiming Our Democracy from the ruling class. As Tom mentioned, that was just a rehearsal. And there will be more to come, I'm sure. Order of the book. It'll be coming out February 2nd, 2021. So you'll be able to grab a copy and all that good stuff. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com

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