The Eric Metaxas Show - Heather MacDonald

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

Heather MacDonald from the Manhattan Institute and author of several books, including "The Diversity Delusion" and "The War on Cops," shares her opinion on recent events involving violence.

Mattaxas show. It's the show that helps you make sense of things that would otherwise baffle you. Like, for example, why does that one shoe hide in the back of the closet like that? Is it afraid of you? Or does it just need some alone time? Or maybe it's ashamed of something. Something terrible that only a shoe would be ashamed of? The answers to these and other questions right here, right now on the Eric Mataxis show. And now your host, Eric Mataxis. Hey, folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show. This is what we call hour two. Technically, it's supposed to come after hour one. But if you listen to our to first and you listen to hour one second, we're not, we're not going to say anything,

okay? Nobody's going to knock on your door. You do what you want to do. A lot of people listen to this program on podcast. You can go to metaxis talk.com and listen to it anytime. Forget about when it happens to be on your car radio. Go to mettaxistock.com and you can listen live. And if you don't like the commercials, too bad. No, actually, if you don't like commercials, you can get metaxis super, and then there are no commercials if you prefer to do it that way. I have the privilege of speaking to a friend and now a colleague at the Falkirk Center. I'm a senior fellow of the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty, as is Jenna Ellis. She's also with the Trump campaign. Jenna, we've got a lot to talk about. You were just saying something on the break. Why don't we start

there? Yeah, so as we're looking, Eric, at what's going on in our society over the last couple of months, you know, we've all been engaging in this conversation of what's going on. How can we get back to the America that we all participated in? And, you know, it's in those times of everything going smoothly that we kind of become complacent and don't realize how important it is to participate in our civil society, to participate in our church government, to participate in our families, right? The three spheres of government that God himself ordained. We can see that in scripture. The civil government the church government and the family government and how those are supposed to interact

and what the purpose of civil government is. And so then when we get in times of crises like this, then we have the answers and we can talk about these things meaningfully. We can talk about police brutality and we can talk about criminal justice

reform. We can talk about what is the constitutionally mandated protections that governors of states are supposed to provide to citizens. And we have those answers. And And it's the same thing, Eric, as Christians, we also, you know, and if you're not a Christian listening to this program, I would encourage you to study the Christian worldview, to study what the Bible says about the reality to which we're presented and the truth of why we're here,

what our purpose is, who we are as human beings made in the image of God, so that then when we have questions about race relations and about equality, we can have an answer to those questions because it's only the Christian worldview that provides the best explanation for those answers and says that every human is made in the image of God and our immutable characteristics are God-given, but every single human deserves dignity and has inherent value because we have the image of God stamped within us. And that exact mindset, Eric, is what prompted the founding fathers to write in our Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal and endowed by God our creator with certain unalienable rights. And that's the only true measure of equality that we can ably recognize and set forth in our policy.

So I would encourage every American to take this opportunity and understand civics, understand the role of our civil government, and why the balance of a constitutional republic is to promote good, restrain evil, promote a limited, powers to government, not tyranny, but legitimate powers to government to also restrain anarchy and evil. I think, well said as usual. And, you know, I was just thinking about Benjamin Franklin. I have a wax bust of him right over there. It's very frightening. It was given to me by Chris Himes, my producer. It's a candle, a Ben Franklin candle. But I think about Franklin often. And just the other day, I guess it was on Friday, we did one of our Ask Metaxis

segments where people ask me questions. They send questions. and online. And one of them, I listened to it while I was on a run and I realized I didn't answer it sufficiently. The person asked about Benjamin Franklin's faith and at the end of his life, he seems to have, you know, he didn't really necessarily believe in the divinity of Jesus or he didn't believe in this, something. And I think we have to understand that doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. The founders didn't need all to be Christians, but they all, all nonetheless, Franklin included, understood the centrality of faith and virtue to self-government. And so when people get into this whole thing about it's about being a Christian,

it just so happens, yes, many of them were Christians and many of them were very serious Christians, but even folks like Jefferson and Franklin who theologically were not what I would consider orthodox, they nonetheless understood the one thing at the very heart of this. And I think Franklin maybe understood it better than anybody that without birth, and without the free exercise of faith, not just people worshipping in churches and then coming out of the churches and bowing to the secular authority of the state, no. But unless the entire culture is suffused with virtue and with people of faith, it's not going to work. And the reason I say this is because when I see police brutality or when I see military abusing prisoners or something, I think to myself, we're not like that. We don't do that.

we're America. In America, the people who've been given the authority and been given guns by us, it's to protect the innocent. It's to do God's work. It is not to be abusive and to act what we Christians call in the flesh. So I think anybody with a sensitive heart is infuriated and sickened when you see things like what we saw with George Floyd. But that's the whole point is that if we don't understand that, it is the American founders that created a system where we can defeat that kind of evil, where we the people demand of those we've deputized with guns to behave in a certain way. I think we have to say this over and over just because a lot of people, they really don't understand it.

Yeah, and that's such a great point, Eric. And, you know, our founding fathers, while, you know, a lot of people point to their individual lives and they say, well, you know, some of them were pro-slavery and look at Jefferson and look at all of other problems. Well, they could point to any individual Christian today, myself included, and I'm going to include you in this era too, that we're all sinners, right? We all are pursuing our relationship with God in the best possible way, but we all are going to fall short of that perfect standard. And the founding fathers didn't set themselves in their own life and their own moral virtue as the standard. What they said is that truth is a part of this reality. It's

empirically defined. We can go and see that the measurable difference between good and evil right and wrong exists. We all understand that in our common human experience. They understood that truth was an objective measurement and that truth comes from our divine lawgiver. They called the name of God the supreme judge of the universe in the Declaration of Independence. They understood the highest source of authority. And because of that, then they recognized, as Madison said, in federal list 51, that unless men are angels, we need government to restrain evil. And we all can understand that there are things that we designate as good and evil that we all agree on because of our human experience. And the Christian worldview explains that because of our shared human experience,

that's why the Word of God is written on our hearts and morality and truth and good versus evil is something that we all inherently understand because we're human beings made in the image of God. And our founders, even if all of them weren't sincere Orthodox Christians, they all understood that central truth. And they built and designed our system of government around that central premise. And they all agreed on it. We are in a postmodern society now today that doesn't agree on truth. We can't even decide if truth exists, much less whether it's objective, or it comes from God, we want to say, well, whatever reality I want to create is an individual, that's my truth for me. And that doesn't work in a society when we know that there is a measurable

difference between right and wrong and good and evil. And so we as a society, I mean, today, as we're looking at these riots, as we're looking at these governors who are tyrants, we have some constitutional laws and we have, thankfully, a system of government that our founders designed to help that. But going forward, moving forward, we as a culture have to come back to this understanding that truth is objective. It comes from God. And ultimately, as our founders recognize, we are under that truth. Just like we're under the laws of nature and of gravity and of other things that we can experience, we are also as common human beings.

We are under moral truth as well. We're going to have to go to a break. Jenna, all well said. Thank you so much. I'm proud to be your colleague at the Falkirk. Center. We look forward to talking to you again. God bless you. Thank you so much, Eric. So it begins. Hey, folks. Welcome. It's the Eric with Taxus Show. We've been talking to interesting people, but guess what? We continue to talk to interesting people. There's nothing you can do about it.

I have Heather MacDonald, author of many books, including the diversity delusion. We love to have around the program, and here she is. Heather, welcome. Thanks for wrapping me on again, Eric. It's good to be with a hello. I know, I know. I was going to say it's lamentable that we're talking now because of what's been going on in the country. At the same time, we need some clarity from some people who've done actual academic research on this. What do you see happening, Heather, because it is a kind of madness, frankly. Well, we're reactivating the phony narrative of the Obama years, which is that policing is systemically biased. That is simply not true. It's a dangerous narrative. It resulted in another additional loss of 2,000 black lives during the Obama years

when the police backed off from the necessary proactive policing in inner city neighborhoods to protect the thousands of law-abiding residents there. We're going to see that again. I called it the Ferguson effect back then. It's going to be the Minneapolis effect now. The data simply does not support this narrative, Eric, and it's depressing to me that conservatives, members are jumping on the bandwagon as well. Every academic study from left-wing sociologists

like Michael Tonnery, Robert Sampson, has been forced to conclude that the real and undeniable over-representation of blacks in prison is not due to racism in policing, in prosecution, in judging, in sentencing. It's due to the exponentially higher rates criminal offending among blacks. And the police are in inner city neighborhoods because that's where victimization is happening. And that's because where people beg them to come and protect them

from the thugs. So what do we do, you know, obviously part of the reason we're going through this difficult time is because of video, right? Everybody has video and everybody takes video of everything. and then we can create narratives, right? I don't think there's anybody that sees a video of someone being treated that way by anyone, of any color, that isn't upset. And, of course, you know, it just becomes emotional or emotionalized to coin a really ugly word. I hope no one ever uses again. But it becomes emotionalized.

And then people draw on what they see as a longstanding bias. let's let's put it this way Heather even if it's anecdotal um you can see we both can see how people can get there in other words it's it's one thing uh to look at the facts it's another thing to have certain feelings and then thirdly it's what we do what i find fascinating is that even if you do believe that there is some systemic uh racial bias looting and burning and all this kind of stuff, it strikes me that this is just another opportunity for Antifa people, for cultural Marxists to act out and to play into this narrative and in a way contribute to deepening this narrative, this deeper misunderstanding.

Well, you've made several points here. I can I'll address one by one. it is painful, of course, to go from the individual instance to data. It feels like you're ignoring the individual instance. And I stand with everybody in this country that was absolutely shocked by the way Mr. George was treated. Mr. Floyd, excuse me. But nevertheless, I'm sorry, we have to look at the data because they are making a systemic charge against policing. So bear with me for a few numbers. I know these are always hard to assimilate through a oral medium, but nevertheless,

the police kill about 1,000 people a year. That number has remained stable since 2015. That's out of about 375 million contacts with civilians a year. Blacks since 2015 have made up about. a quarter of those victims of fatal police shootings. Virtually every, but all of those 1,000 victims of police shootings were armed, violent, or resisting arrest, and otherwise dangerous. So let's look at the unarmed category, which is a very slippery category. This is in the Washington Post started putting together a database of all police killings of civilians starting in

2015. They define unarmed in a remarkably broad and generous way. One of the cases in 2019 was a guy who was fleeing from cops in Newark, New Jersey. After a car stopped, the car took off, let the police on a chase. There was a loaded semi-automatic pistol in the, in the car the the the occupant was shot fatally because of the fatal car just but having a loaded gun in your car does not necessarily mean your your unarmed but let's just accept at face value the washington post classification there were nine allegedly unarmed black males killed in 2019 how many black males were killed by criminal homicide in 2019 we don't have the the final numbers yet, but if it's the same as 2018, 7500.

So those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings is 0.1% of all homicide victims in the country. There were 19 so-called unarmed white victims of police shooting. So this narrative that this is the way black people die is simply not true. And that 25% of all fatal police shootings comprised by blacks, the 25% is far lower than what would expect when you look at the black crime rate, because blacks commit over half of all homicides in this country, about two-thirds of all robberies and assaults. And it is the chance with which a police officer is going to encounter a violent felon that predicts the use of force.

So I submit, now maybe you disagree with me, but it would be great if the police shot nobody. But that's not going to happen until crime disappears and people stop resisting arrest. because even those unarmed victims, virtually all of them were resisting arrest. That's something that it's interesting. It's one of the reasons I want to have you on because there's so much nuance here. That issue of resisting arrest, I was taught as a kid almost in a positive way, if I can put it this way, to fear cops. In other words, you do what you're supposed to do. They have guns.

they deal with criminals. So if one of them pulls you over, you're exceedingly respectful because you don't know. Maybe they're having a bad day. Maybe that morning they got in a really horrifying argument with their wife or their kids, which, of course, never happens to folks like us. Of course not. But the point is they're human beings, right? So I was always taught to be really, really respectful.

of them. So whenever I see someone resisting arrest, I'm actually fascinated. I think, are you kidding? Like, that's a cop. Do you have any idea what he might do or could do and might get away with it? Because maybe there are dirty cops. And guess what? Of course there are some dirty cops. So just in the interest of wisdom, you would think that people wouldn't resist arrest. I kind of wonder, is there any data that tells us when it became popular to resist arrest? I mean, we know in the history of, in history, there have always been people resisting arrest. But it seems to me that if you have a fundamental sense that the cops don't have any business bothering you, then you're more likely to resist arrest.

In other words, it's kind of a breakdown in the way we view the culture. Absolutely. I've got, the Chicago Police Department gave me data a few years ago that blacks are 10 times arrested for resisting arrest at 10 times the rate of whites. Now, there's many ways you can slice and dice that. The fact is, is that the crime commission is so much higher. I mean, if you're a black Chicagoan, you are 50 times, 5-0 times more likely to commit a shooting than white Chicagoans. both blacks and whites in Chicago or a little under a third of the city's population, blacks commit 80% of all shootings in Chicago, whites less than 1%.

Those crime disparities exist in every city. So the fact that blacks are arrested 10 times the rate can mean simply because they're being arrested for other crimes at 10 times the rate, it could mean that the cops are being unfair and are not arresting whites. Heather, let me hit pause in the middle of your point. Forgive me. Folks, we're going to be right back, and I will let Heather talk. I promise.

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Go ahead. Well, you were asking about what it means that resisting arrest seems to be so much more prevalent today and I gave you some doubt on it, but I also totally agree with you that when you have a constant narrative undermining the legitimacy of the police, it's far more likely that people are going to fight them. And the idea that blacks are running around scared of the cops kind of isn't what a police officer will tell you. These days, and this began after Ferguson, you know what I call the Ferguson effect. People will surround cops when they get out of their car,

shout at them, curse at them, throw bottles at them. Just earlier this month in Chicago, last week, as a matter of fact, right after the George Floyd arrest became public, people were preventing the cops from arresting gun-toting criminals, a guy that had just thrown his gun under a car, somebody who was likely to suspect in a shooting that had just shot a five-year-old girl and two teenage boys. And they will absolutely without any fear, attack cops.

So that certainly does lead to resisting arrest. I remember several years ago, after my warrant cops book came out, the U.S. Marshals invited me to address them, And a black U.S. Marshal got up and described to me trying to make a arrest of a fugitive felon. The marshals are called in when the cops can't really handle serious felons who have an arrest warrant out for them, and then they're on the run. So he found somebody up in the North Bronx on White Plains Road and was trying to make an arrest. And this black U.S. Marshal found himself surrounded by almost two dozen people who were cursing. at him and shouting at him to try to protect the felon. And somebody picked up a pike to go

at him, and he only got out of there because he called for backup, and his fellow marshal showed up. So the disrespect that goes on, and of course also is the case that a cop will tell you he could solve every inner city homicide or shooting. You know, we always are complaining that the media complaints about the low clearance rates in many urban. in police departments. Well, the reason for that is because of the no snitching ethic that says that you are a sellout if you cooperate with the police. So you'll have victims of drive-by shootings

who know perfectly well the gangbanger from the opposite gang that shot them in the torso, and the cop will come and talk to them in the hotel bed, hospital bed hotel these days could be. And the victim will absolutely refuse to cooperate. So the situation that cops are operating under is extraordinarily difficult, and it is only going to get worse with this completely tolerated breakdown of civilization that we are seeing right now. That's to me the key.

And it's something that I myself didn't understand until fairly recently, when I wrote my book, if you can keep it, one of the things that I learned in writing that book was that if we the people don't believe that we the people are the government and therefore trust the institutions of government because they represent us, they've been deputized by us, they've been elected by us. If we don't trust them, everything falls apart. And that's clearly what you see happening. That's when corruption comes in. It's why I think we have to crack down. on corruption and abuse of power, whether in the military or among cops, because it leads to cynicism. It leads, or at least it helps this narrative along. Well, I don't know about corruption. I mean, I'm sure there's corruption out there. We're very fortunate in the West, and that we don't have a clue about corruption. What goes on in the third world, it's absolutely routine.

And the nepotism, somehow there's been this triumph, especially that started in the Anglo-American with the growth of a disinterested civil service bureaucracy, that we're really, you know, it's very hard to run businesses in many third world countries because contracts are so unstable. But, you know, so where it exists, we should certainly root it out. But I think that the government over the last three months has, in fact, totally undermined its legitimacy. First, there was the absurd overreaction to this coronavirus problem with the government ordering businesses in a wholesale manner to shut down, putting people out of their livelihoods, destroying capital, destroying life, destroying hope, destroying effort based on the most arbitrary distinctions between what's an essential and what's a non-essential business.

the government should act through evidence and rules and reason. And when these shutdowns began, we already knew what the profile was of coronavirus desistence. It was by May, mid-March in Italy, we already saw it. Nevertheless, we had these wholesale shutdowns. Now the government is underreacting to a real daily terrifying threat. And it's hitting businesses again. It's letting them get looted.

It's just extraordinary. So the government, at this point, I would agree with you, Eric, has lost its legitimacy. And in the process, I think we are seeing the death knell of American cities between the fear, the irrational fear of the coronavirus and the ridiculous social distancing rules. and now the sense that government is not going to protect you in the face of the mob, we're going to see an exodus of both residents and businesses from cities.

Heather, hang on. We're going to go to another break. We'll be right back to continue this. Folks, don't go away. Heather, what you just said about, you know, flight from the cities and stuff, it's as if it's, you know, 1968 all over again. I mean, I remember living in New York City in the late 60s. in early 70s, myself, I was a kid. And there was a fear. There was a sense that, you know, if we

want to raise the kids, we better get out of the city. It's falling apart. But what I think of, in terms of the larger narrative, I think of how the elites in college administration at places like Columbia allowed students to act out, to take over, in a sense, giving them some legitimacy. And I feel like that narrative since the late 60s has continued. In other words, rather than crackdown and say, hey, hey, hey, you may have some concerns. That's fine. This is not the place to do it. You don't get to take over the president's office at the university.

You don't get to destroy the educations of all these students who have paid all this money and their parents have scrimped and say, you don't get to do that. They got to do that. And that, to me, has been a narrative that is basically still with us in the liberal. world. I can't agree more. I think that again, these last three months we have seen two absolutely virulent strains of academic ideology hitting us. First, you have the safetyism ethic that gave us the coronavirus hysteria and people out in Central Park in the middle of breezy, you know, trillions and gazillions of molecules of fresh air wearing masks, which is totally without any scientific

basis and our sense that we only tolerate zero risk and students that have been taught that they are at risk of their lives from circumambient racism and sexism on a college campus of all places, which is a ludicrous delusion. So we saw that. Now we're seeing again the activation of the racism narrative, which has also been constantly cultivated by universities that American is a place of systemic white supremacy. It's never changed since the era of slavery. The whole purpose of America is to destroy the black body, as Toneheesey Coates says in his book,

which is probably the most most read book on college campuses. And you have the faculty growing ever more left. I mean, what we're seeing now, you will recall, Eric, I think it was in 2016, perhaps, the riots in Berkeley at University of California, Berkeley, when Milo Inopolis was going to speak there, and you had Antifa from the Bay Area come out and torch the building, beat up on people. Well, there were emails sent out by the Berkeley faculty celebrating the Antifa violence and saying, well, you know, it wasn't that bad, and they were really targeted in their violence.

And they were rampaging down Shattuck and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, destroying ATMs, breaking into banks, the usual, just what we're seeing now, but not at quite so national scope. And these Berkeley faculty, it was a math professor and somebody I think in the French department were celebrating this. And you better believe they're celebrating it now. People have been sending me on several a day statements by college presidents. an incredible competition to see who can be the most nauseatingly unctuous in response to this pandemic of violence that we're seeing virtue signal. I thought that UCLA's Chancellor Block was in easily first place setting because he's reactivating the racial trauma unit at UCLA for students.

But then somebody sent me, Christina Paxton, the Browns, president's statement, which is even worse. And so we've got the diversity bureaucracy that one might have hoped in the pandemic, the coronavirus depression that's coming on, maybe would be on the chopping block because these colleges are all going to be struggling. But this, these riots and this claim of systemic racism is only going to put a absolute cordal sunny tear around the diversity bureaucracy and protect it for many future cuts. Speaking of which, this reminds me of the French Revolution, of course, that's not exactly an original observation. But, you know, where can it go? Where does this go? It's the snake swallowing its own tail. It can never go in any good direction. We know that. It'll either lead to anarchy and widespread poverty and the breakdown of civilization. You know, when you think of Mayor Daly in 1968, cracking down, you kind of think, are there any mayors willing to crack down and look unpopular?

It doesn't seem so. I wish where it would go is we could hand out the addresses of every person on MSNBC and CNN. And to a certain extent, Fox as well and say, here, go loot this house. Go loot CNN destroyed to the ground because just as with the coronavirus, everybody that was calling for business lockdowns had a job. and they were in no fear that their employer was going to go out of business, whether they were public health experts or the media or politicians. Same thing now. Everybody glorifying this violence, their business is not being threatened.

So it should go to them, and then maybe we'd see an end of it. Short of that, though, I don't know. I mean, we know from Black Lives Matter that their agendas to destroy policing completely. They actually believe that we can get rid of police departments, and things will be great. We've seen what happens when law enforcement breaks out. Anarchy comes. The lust for destruction that is the human condition comes out in full force. I don't know.

I mean, I've heard arguments that if Trump called out the military, it could too easily backfire against him if anything goes wrong. And we always have the perception problem. It's just going to look so mean. But frankly, the first obligation of government is to protect order, and yes, to protect property because property is the summation of human capital and effort. And we have to protect it because it's how human beings survive, thrive, and exchange with each other. So if it takes calling out the U.S. military, we've got to do it.

Well, I mean, it is fascinating to me living in New York City, the idea that we have a mayor who is, I mean, he's everything that's bad. He's tremendously incompetent and out of touch. And he's also, it seems to me, ideologically, you know, he makes Lindsay and Dinkins look like Reagan. And the idea that this city is at the mercy of that guy, that he is not going to send out cops to protect stores and so on and so forth. We're going to go to another break, folks. I'm talking to the author of The Diversity Delusion, Heather McDonald, Do not go away. We'll be right back.

Hey, folks, I'm talking to Heather MacDonald, the author of The Diversity Delusion. The Diversity Delusion, great title. Heather, I just have to say that you can't get away from optics and politics. In other words, at some point, you have to make decisions, right? But it does seem to me that something happened in this country about 50 years ago. When you have the death of Martin Luther King Jr., the moral authority of people who believed in, you know, what we now call racial justice, whatever it is, it went away. In other words, the idea that we would use those methods, that we would be blameless, speaking, of course, as a Christian, I would say that that's the only way that we're really permitted to be civilly. disobedient. That went away. And it seems to me that if anything, things have gotten worse.

And you just wondered that there aren't any black leaders that the media is willing to give a voice to. There are some like Bob Woodson and others that I know. But you don't have those voices. They're just not given the time. Let's put it that way. Yeah. Leaders have realized that there is enormous power in claims of victimhood. Shelby Steele and Hoover has written powerfully about this. and why give that up? You know, you don't have to compete. You can claim that the academic skills gap,

the fact that on average, blacks are less competitive for many jobs because 40% of black eighth graders don't even have math and reading skills at a basic level. They're below basic. And that gap continues into college and beyond. And that doesn't matter.

You can claim that you're a victim and get preferences. So there's power in victimhood, but as Shelby Steel has pointed out, there's also power in dispensing nobles oblige. And whites feel like they are purged of America's historical sin by not holding blacks to the same expectations that they hold whites and Asians to. Who used that term, the bigotry? of low, the soft bigotry of low expectations. Yeah, exactly true.

I don't know who said that. That was Bush. It was George Bush. Bush, too, right. And I get fed up. I mean, I just wish for once black leaders would, rather than demanding that standards be lowered to meet them, that they demand that their, you know, peers,

but we're all peers, work harder to meet the state. Well, look, you know and I know that there are plenty blacks calling for exactly that, but they do not have the political power. They don't have the power in the media. I try to have some of them on this program because, let's face it, we are not hearing from them, generally speaking. Their narrative is unwanted at this time. So I think that anytime you or I or anyone we know can give voice to them, we need to do it because there are plenty of them out there. Of course they are. my goodness, more than not, but they just don't have that pulpit.

Well, again, whites like to feel like they are morally superior to less superior whites. So the college presidents, the media, foundation heads, corporation heads, they all think that they're at the apex of a nation of bigots, and it makes them feel righteous to dispense these goodies and have the double standard of expectations. But yes, we should all just say we are colorblind, but we're very far from that. You know, again, there is massive, massive economic windfall

into playing the racial victimology card, and it's going to be hard to dial it back. I know, but we're going to keep trying. Heather, God bless you. It's just a joy to have your voice in the mix. Thanks. We hope to hear from you again. My pleasure.

I thank you. Thank you. I don't care what