The Eric Metaxas Show - Mark Helprin (Encore)

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

Prepare to be amazed by Eric's conversation with Mark Helprin from a Socrates in the City event -- Eric considers Mark the greatest living fiction writer.

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mataxis show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m. Investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Do you like your gravy thick and rich and loaded with creamy mushrooms? If no one was looking, would you chug the whole gravy boat? Chug, chug, chug, chug. Stay tuned. Here comes Mr. Chug-a-lug-lug-lug. himself, Eric Ma, Texas. Hey, folks, in 2019, I interviewed the great Mark Helprin for Socrates in the city. This is a special encore presentation in joy.

Welcome. I am so excited to be here tonight. And it's going to, this is going to freak me out because I haven't been out here before. Now, as I'm looking out in the audience, I'm seeing people that I know, some dear, dear old friends and a number of, former friends that I don't want to be here. Thank you for coming. There are a number of special guests in the audience. This is kind of funny. I was told my friend Martha Linder is here from Lakeland, Florida, and she told me that Colonel Sussingham is going to be there. And I thought, who the heck's Colonel Sussingham? And then Mark Helperin introduced me to him. He was a test pilot for the F-16s. Is that right?

The chief test pilot for the F-16s, defining the envelope, not like those other test pilots. They hang way, way back. He actually was pushing the envelope of what it could do. So a real test pilot. But he dropped the first smart bomb, the first J-dam. And I thought, that is so cool.

And I wanted to call him out and embarrass him in front of the group. So please applaud this man. If you get a chance, not now. If you get a chance later on, you can applaud him. And then also, you know, since I'm calling out people who have done great things in the air, some of you remember eight or ten months ago a Southwest plane lost an engine. A person was killed, and a heroic woman landed that plane. Her name is Tammy Joe Schultz, and she's with us in the room.

Where are you, Tammy Joe? Don't be embarrassed. Where did she go? Where is she? She's right here. She's right here. Look, she's all embarrassed. I love it.

I love embarrassing people. They can't squirm away. They have to take the applause. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. And Tammy Joe was one of the first women fighter pilots ever. Okay? She pushed a different kind of envelope.

So you just watch it there, pal. But it's incredible. Any other aeronautic people in the room here? Anybody who's really done anything spectacular, you know, at above, say, 30,000 feet? I'm just curious. Anybody? I didn't think so. Well, this brings me to the subject of the evening. There are very few people in whose presence I am genuinely humbled and awed.

And that's true. I first encountered the fiction of Mark Helperin, lo, these 35 years ago. I was an undergraduate at Yale, and we had a writing course, and somebody handed out, you know, mimographed or stapled short stories that we had to read. And the first one was called the Schroider Spitzer. I thought it was De Schreuter Spice,

but it's the Schreuter Spitzer. And it's a story unlike any I had ever read. It's the sort of thing that if you are a fiction writer or a writer as I am, who values great writing and poetry and true literature, when you read most of what Mark Helperin has read, you understand you're in the presence of a rare genius. That's a simple fact. I don't, he prays on people lightly because there are a lot of wonderful writers of fiction, but there are very few that are genuinely great artistic talents

and geniuses. And there are so many sentences in his writing. and so many sentences in that short story alone that make you understand you're dealing with a maniac, a person who does not think the way you do. And either he's crazy or he's a genius or he's a crazy genius. And I think that genius and insanity are closely linked. But I really mean that when you read his stuff,

you understand that this is somebody who he's in the highest rank of writers. in our time. And I want to give you some basics of who he is, just so that we can relieve the tension here. He was born in 1947, but oddly enough, is only 62 years old. Now, I don't know how the heck you do that.

That's wild. That's wild. Well, I'll ask you about that. Now, whenever you, if you know anything about Mark Helping, you read these bios, and they all say the same thing. They say Mark Helpland was raised on the Hudson and in the British way. West Indies, which is nothing, if not, at least pretentious.

Who are we kidding? It says, after receiving degrees from Harvard College and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, he did postgraduate work at the University of Oxford, Kama, Princeton, comma, and Columbia. I like the Oxford, comma. Thank you. He has served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force. Now, his stories were published in The New Yorker for a long time, almost about 25 years.

And as I said earlier, they are widely recognized as some of the best short stories ever written in the English language. Now, I hate to say that with him in the room because it's embarrassing, but I'm just telling you straight up, it's a fact. He's right up there with the best of the best. And if you've ever read, for example, a collection of Faulkner's short stories, he pretty much stinks at writing short stories. and novels, if you really want to take the time to talk about it with me. A lot of the people that have been lauded as the greats are not really that great. At least they're not consistently great. Maybe Updike and Cheever leap into my head as people who have written great fiction in our time.

And of course, they're both gone. So it's just important that I say those things. it wasn't until 1986 that I got to see Mark Helperin in person I was at Yaddo which is a writer's colony in Saratoga Springs

and somebody said oh Mark Helpern speaking at Albany someplace so we went and heard Mark there and he was like a stand-up comedian it was sheer lunacy which is why he's not giving a speech tonight I'm going to interview him because we need to tamp it down we need to get somewhere in the conversation but extremely funny and a joy to listen to.

Sometime in the early 90s I was in Nantucket and I was bored and I walked into a bookstore, I picked up the Paris Review, which they've had those interviews stretching back to, you know, Hemingway in the 50s. And it was an interview with Mark Helperin, whose fiction I had loved. And I started reading it. And what struck me about the interview mostly

was that I had by that time swung politically conservative, I guess and had become very serious about my Christian faith. And as I read the interview with Mark Helperin, it stunned me that he seemed to take the concept of God seriously and seemed to be politically conservative. And if you know anything about the world of arts and letters in America at this point, you realize that those two things really never go together.

That the world of literature, if you hang out with writers, they tend to be rather monolithically, extremely politically liberal. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you're not of that ilk, it becomes uncomfortable. So I was kind of stunned, really, to read this about Mark Helper. And I thought, how has he survived in that world? And the answer is he's a hermit.

He never talks to those people. But I was just impressed then. And so it renewed afresh my interest in reading him. And I remember reading Winter's Tale and the Soldier of the Great War around that, time. And these are, again, these are works of fiction of the absolute highest order. He has routinely, he's cracked jokes about it, been compared to, you know, Tolstoy. Well, where do you go from there? Socrates in the city, obviously. So it really is a very, very great honor for me to have lived long enough to get to a point where I get to talk to Mark, just like he's a regular person. Believe

me, he's not. But as you'll soon see, but it really is a great joy. And so it's my honor to welcome you, Mark Helper, and to Socrates in the City. Please join me on this stage. Remember as a kid, your parents and grandparents making you try all the vegetables on your plate or when they coax you to eat fruit instead of sweets? That's because they knew what was good for you. And it's true today than ever before. You need to eat your fruits and veggies. There's no substitute for a healthy diet, but there is balance of nature. Their products are gluten-free and non-GMO, and they contain no added sugars or synthetics. If you're looking for something to make you feel better naturally, you should definitely try balance of nature today.

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movie. To be clear, the website is rfkmovie.com, RFKMovie.com. RFKMovie.com. This is a source. special Socrates in the city presentation with the great Mark Helprin. Am I on? Yes. You're on, sir.

That was absolutely spectacular. Thank you. And I just want to say that how many people come up here and make a joke about Socrates drinking hemlock? How many crack jokes about how I actually? I'm not going to do that. But what I'm going to say is that McCauley, you know who McCauley was, the 19th century. The historian? historian. He was the Chuck Schumer

of his day. Every word that came out of his mouth was a lie. Including if and and bu. And buh. And buh. You know what bah means, if and and bu.

But he said, the more I read Socrates, he didn't say it that way, but I'm sure that this is... Nobody living can imitate McCauley, but go ahead. The more I read Socrates, the more I understand why he was poisoned. And, of course, no one ever read Socrates because we know him only through Plato. So McCauley was just a terrible fraud.

Right. And by the way, if there are any relatives of Chuck Schumer in the audience, get out. Well, Mark, the point of Socrates in the city is, not merely to interview interesting people. It's typically to dig deeper about the big questions. Now, I don't normally push that, but when I have someone like you who has written as well and as very, very thoughtfully as you've done over the course of your life, it's very tempting to me to ask you the question, which is the question of all questions, which I've never asked at Socrates in the city, but I think I'll ask it now. And we'll ask it now. And we'll can move on from here. But my first question to you is, what is the meaning of life?

Are you serious? Fortunately for you. Very serious. You see this tie? Yes, sir. See how long it is? I did an interview in Chicago and I looked at the television recording of it and it was even longer. I mean, look how long it is. And I just don't understand that. I'm not that short, but it comes way down. I have to stop buying my ties.

But the height and the length of the tie really aren't necessarily related? Well, I don't know, but I'm going to stop buying my ties at the giraffe tie shop. Uh-huh. All right. But what is the meaning of life? I don't know. I know you don't know. But it strikes me that you've thought about it very, very much over the way.

the course of your life, and I'm wondering what you think it might be. Because your fiction is not devoid of these kinds of ruminations. So I don't ask this of most people at Socrates and City, but you strike me as somebody whom

I might ask that question. And by the way, I just did. It's a very challenging question, obviously. It's the kind that you see in a New Yorker cartoon with the guy and sitting on a mountaintop and people come with knapsacks and ice axes, and they ask him the meaning of life is and he usually cracks a joke.

Right. But I've never been asked that kind of question. I'm not surprised. But let me struggle. Let me start by saying that I knew Ray Carver, otherwise known to people as Raymond Carver, one of the founders of the minimalists. And I didn't like Ray Carver for various reasons. He's dead now, so I don't like to speak ill of the dead.

but I didn't like what he did to his family. I was around when that happened in Iowa. I just hated his writing. Yeah, I had his writing too, except that I chose one of his stories, which was actually a very beautiful story, for the Best American Short Stories of 1988, because I was the first one to ask for them

to be submitted to me blind, not even with the typeface of the New Yorker, et cetera, so that there would be no back scratching and no favors, and I just read it. I didn't know who wrote it, and it was a beautiful story about Chekhov and it was written with Ray knowing about his own death so that was anyway one good thing that he wrote

but he was ill at the time he was ill at the time he had cancer but to paraphrase him he said I would say what we talk about when we talk about dying well is living well because you can't you can't do anything when you're dead so what you have

to do in order to die well is to live well. And one should be able to die well. I've thought about that ever since I was a small child because it will come faster than you can possibly imagine. When it does happen, you look back and it's as if life passed that fast. So given that there will be eternity on that side, and we have come from eternity on this side, Winston Churchill said it's like coming up from the ocean onto a raft for a few moments and then going back into the ocean. What you want to do, really, what I would like to do is to live so that you do justice to the short time you have and so that you are comfortable returning to that eternity. To do so, in my opinion, you have to have some knowledge.

of the eternity on either side. When I was an infant, I felt that I did. I felt that I had existed before, not in another life, but in another form somehow, in a bodyless form of, let's say, just an independent soul, the Dantean idea that you are with God somehow.

You had that sense as an infant? As an infant in the crib, I knew I came from some place. You remember that? Yes, I remember that. And I loved that place, and I felt very comforted by it. The place from which you'd come, not the crib. Place from which I had come.

Yeah, not the crib. I had a very uncomfortable crib. It had spice. So here, listen to this. When I was born at the beginning of the seventh month in 1947 and not expected to survive. The hospital told my parents, kid's going to die. He's going to die. And my parents were so upset that they left for two weeks.

I'm not kidding. Wait a minute. Yeah, they did. Hold on. You were in the hospital. And your parents left for two weeks. Yes. They went to Long Island. They went to East Hampton. But which hospital? Doctors hospital, which has since been torn down, they found out that I was born there and they tore it down. It overlooked Gracie. Is that in Manhattan? It used to overlook Gracie Mansion.

Okay, so you were there. Yeah, for two weeks. And your parents left. And they left. Because they, well, I was born by accident, evidently. My godfather was Robert Kappa, the photographer. My mother always said that I was his son. But I know that I'm not his son.

and my father's son because I look like my father and many traits of my father. There's no question that I was my father's son. But she evidently was having an affair with him and my parents were about to break up. It was a very sad story. And then she was in a taxi accident, which is one reason why I was born so prematurely. But anyway, I was not wanted. And they left. And then when I came home, I was sick for a year, really, really sick.

I was born with spina bifida and also with no cilia on my bronchia. So that fans the phlegm up. So in my childhood, I had pneumonia 12 times. And many of the times I was put in ice baths and everything, and they thought, had I been Catholic, they would have called a priest. They thought I was a goner, and I was very, very close to death. And it never bothered me because each time I really told, where's the father?

There he is. each time I felt tremendous comfort as if an angel had come down and protected me and I was not disturbed by the idea of dying and I came very, very close. Once when I was on Mount Rainier, I climbed Mount Rainier and on the way back I was running across an ice field and it was all kind of flat

and I was jumping over crevasses and so I jumped over a crevasse onto what was just a piece of white, it looked like solid ground, but it was a crust over a crevasse. And I fell in the crevasse, and I put out my head, I had ski poles at that point. I put out the ski poles

and the snow went up in the air and I saw it absorbing, it was sparkling in the sunlight. And I felt the greatest kind of joy. So I've never been afraid of dying. And I've always felt that when I do,

I will be going back to the place that I feel that I knew when I was an infant. For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider. And when I say only, trust me, they're the only one. Glenn and the team have been great supporters of this show, which is why I am proud to partner with them. Patriot Mobile offers dependable nationwide coverage, giving you the ability to access all three major networks, which means you get the same coverage you've been accustomed to without

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Okay, so what do you do with the time in between when you're conscious and you are active and you can do what you can do? I think the best thing you can do is to, is to, to, embody the virtues, the classical virtues. In other words, if you are honorable, if you have courage, if you

love, if you treat people correctly, and you also seek God in whatever way you can, whether it be in art, particularly in music, because in my book

Paris in the present tense, which is not here, but I say, Jules La Cour, who is a maitre at the Sorbonne, says to his students, look, I know, I'm paraphrasing, I can never remember what I wrote. He says, look, I know that in university, this is really a very dangerous thing to say, and you probably will disagree with me, et cetera. I don't care. But what I have to tell you is that music is the voice of God.

So if you seek God while you are alive, and you become, give thought to what came before and what will come after, and you behave correctly, and you are charitable and brave, et cetera, et cetera, then you are, that's the meaning as far as I can tell. But let me just add something here. I was in Massachusetts doing another event,

and as part of it, I was explaining, it was purely literary. He was supposed to be purely literary, and I don't like this time. As part of it, I was explaining that what I called my conditions precedent for then saying what the book, which Paris and the present tense, was about. And one of them was the resurrection of virtue, which is not popular. People mock virtue, as if you talk about virtue, you're just an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy.

et cetera, et cetera. But of course, that's absolute garbage. We need it to survive, both as a country and as individuals, et cetera. And I said, look, heroism these days has been devalued along with so much else. And courage, you're supposed to be a hero if you bring cupcakes to school. And I gave various levels of what I think heroism is. I said, first, it's doing something that is noble and just. Of course, you have to define noble two, but as we carry on, you'll sort of see.

The second level on the escalation ladder is something which is noble and just and contrary to your immediate interests. The third level is doing something noble and just, and contrary to your immediate interest which leads to your death. And you have a real hero. And I would ask the audience, I always do, that's not the top. What's the top? Anyone know?

Because that's not the highest level of heroism. The highest level is doing something which is noble and just, contrary to your immediate interests, which leads to your own death and nobody knows, which is another interpretation of what you see on the tombs of the unknown soldiers throughout the world known but to God. that's what real heroism is. Now, I have to tell you that afterwards I was signing books,

and a guy came up to me... This last night. This last night. Yeah. And this was Massachusetts. Keep that in mind. He comes up to me and he says, do you think that the people who tried to kill Hitler were heroes?

And I said, yes. And he said, would you think I was a hero if I tried to kill our Hitler? What does Angela? Merkel have to do with any of this. It was Massachusetts, so I knew what he meant. And that's something which, you know, if you think about it, we have lost Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy. And there have been attempts in modern times, just in modern times,

on Roosevelt, Truman, Ford, and Reagan. and this is a serious topic. And people who talk about that, I remember when Reagan was elected, I lived in New York in 1980, and I saw in all these buildings, kill Reagan, kill Reagan, graffiti all over the place.

And then, of course, that nut who now lives in Virginia and walks around, shot him. Where do you go from there? Well, I'll tell you, it's very tempting to do an impression of William F. Buckley sitting up here sat like this, you know? Yes.

Tell me, Mark. The question. What is the... No, he was, the question becomes... When you get the blues. A little shoe shine, boy, he never gets slow down, but he's got the dirtiest job in town. You might have heard Mike Lundell and My Pillo no longer have the support of their box stores or shopping channels the way they used to. Yes, it's because of cancel culture.

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This is a special Socrates in the city presentation with the great Mark Helprin. What I want to ask you is that you're making a number of assumptions. You talk about God. You talk about morality. Your fiction, and the reason I've asked you this question is because your fiction is filled with muscular versus. virtue, morality. It's all there. Your heroes are real heroes. There's a sense of justice, injustice, in most of what you write. It's very strong. So I guess first I really want to ask you, where does that come from? Because it's one thing to say, I believe we should be virtuous.

I agree. But how do you come to that? Were you raised in a home where those things were stressed? Were you raised in a home where God was part of your upbringing? How did you come to think that way? I think two ways. One, my father was the most extraordinary man. He was a, well, it's a long story, but I'll try to compress it. He was a student at Columbia, first in his class, and his father had a food processing business. His father had the dairy part, and they combined with a cousin, and they had a meat processing, too. So my father was sent to North Africa to buy sheep innards for sausage casings.

This was in the 20s. And I have a picture of him in Patees going throughout North Africa. He bargained with the tribes. And he went through North Africa, up through the Levant, Turkey, into Soviet Central Asia. And bargaining with these nomads, and they would send caravans with sheep innards to ports and then it would be shipped back to the United States. And it took a very long time. And when he got back, he was debriefed by Army intelligence.

And that started a relationship with intelligence that he carried on for most of the rest of his life. His lawyer in business was Wild Bill Donovan, who founded the OSS and CIA. So my father went to Camp X during the war and was to be a war. trained at Camp X in Canada by the SAS. His final exercise was to be dropped, blindfolded as a plane took off, in an SS uniform, dropped by parachute into the woods of Ontario.

And they said, you have to be in New York within two weeks, and if you're caught, we don't know you. Two weeks later... He said in an SS uniform? Yep. This was during the war? During the war, yeah. 50% of the people at Camp X died during the war.

They were in cells. They couldn't talk to one another. They were taught all the weapons. My father had a photographic memory, so his job would have been, and he was set to do this, to be parachuted into Germany and be captured near where Hydrick was,

deliberately to be imprisoned, and then with his photographic memory, to remember the, you know, count the steps, know where the doors are, to read upside down and backwards, the German on people's desks and on bulletin boards, whatever, then to escape, then to recount that to get intelligence about Hydric. But I think the Czechs beat us to it.

But anyway. In killing Hyderick. Yeah, in killing Hyderick. But he, so he, two weeks later, he, with a shave and a haircut in a Salroose suit, he walked into the place where he was supposed to. After having eaten at the oyster bar. I don't know how he did it, but he could also. also smoke, even when he was very old, he would be smoking a cigar and stand on the diving board

and then jump into the pool, swim underwater, the length of the pool, come out, and the scar would be still lit. Because he could turn it upside down, back, hold it in his mouth and his teeth and do that. He was quite miraculous. But anyway, when I was little, There were a lot of bullies, of course. Boys are bullied. And now I suppose I would accuse people of bullying me and try to keep them off the Supreme Court.

But they did beat the crap out of me. And so my father said, well, I'll teach you how to defend yourself. And I said, but I can't because they're so much bigger. That's what a bully is. They're really much, much bigger. They're three or four grades higher. And he said, no, no, no, no. Let me show you how to do it.

And he did. And there were a bunch of bullies who would frequently bully me, and I just practically killed them. And that brought up in me the desire always to be able to fight. And that, in turn, made me not afraid of being bullied. So for the rest of my life, I figured, why not do what I think is right no matter what the consequences? and that has led me to all kinds of armed roles

in various armies, police forces, intelligence places, etc. Just to be clear, you're packing now. They think I'm joking. No, no. Anybody last will take you out in a second? No, but you are. You take that too. I don't want to go there yet because there's so many rabbit trails with you.

Just to make sure that we're in the Princeton Close, under federal privilege. Legally. Totally legally. Yeah, that goes without saying. What are we going to do? I was on Obama's protection detail three times. I had to decide whether I would take

a bullet for him, and I decided that I would, which was a lot different from the guy who came up to me last night and was talking about assassinating the president. I did not think, to put it mildly, that Obama was the kind of person that I would want to protect. but he was the president of the United States.

It's the office, et cetera. And by the way, in Massachusetts, that guy is considered a moderate. Yeah. That's quite true. That's quite true. And he's not kidding, really. I lived in Massachusetts for 10 years and almost killed me. Well, you still haven't really given me an understanding of how you come to the...

Or maybe you haven't thought so much about it because you know it's right. But when you talk about... I mean, anyone who has read your fiction, and I'm sure most of these people have, it's why they're here. There's a fierce moral quality to it. And I guess, so I want to ask you this kind of silly question, how do you know what's right is right? How do you know what's good is good?

You mentioned God in certain ways in your fiction. You have these moments of transcendence. Was there any, I know that you're ethnically Jewish. Were you raised with any faith as a kid, or was it mostly that kind of stuff? You were not. No, I was not. I came to it on my own.

When? I suppose, well, I mean, I came to a recognition and an experience of the divine presence when I was from the beginning. From when you were an infant? From when I was an infant. And I then in terms of, I don't really practice Judaism. It's not, I don't see it as something. Maybe you're so good. You don't need to.

to practice. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking with our new friends at Americans for Prosperity. Kent Strang is my guest. They have bought the website. This is the headline. They bought the website, Bidenomics.com. I find this hilarious

because when you go to bidinomics.com, and I hope you do, and I hope you spread this on the internet in your social media, you will find actual facts, not gaslighting, lunatic lies being pushed by the Biden administration so they can get your vote in the fall. But the actual facts of why you feel pain at the gas pump and in the grocery line, yes, you're not alone.

Here are the facts at bidonomics.com. So, Kent Strang, what are some of the other facts that we can put out there, things that people would find at bidonomics.com when they go to bidemics.com? Well, the president claims that prices are down. Well, that's not true. Prices are up 18% since he took office. Wait, you're saying. The president is lying?

Wow. He's certainly not being forward with us, right? Why would he do that? But actually, you're saying that he is saying the opposite of what you know to be true. He's saying that. Yeah, technically that's called lying. And I think most people in my audience would say that's wrong. But please keep going.

We mentioned before that Americans pay $11,400 more since President. of Biden took office. Real wages are down, even though he claims that wages are up. He talks about deficits. There's two trillion more in deficit spending. This administration and Biden's allies in Congress have spent $5.5 trillion in new spending. Debt is at a $34 trillion. And all the things we need to live and a lifestyle of just meaning of our gas, our groceries, our energy, everything is up across the board. Bidenomics has been a disaster. So tonight, when he tries to tell you about it at the state of the union address and about how great his economy is, please take a moment, visit Bidenomics.com to fact check what he's saying. Share it with your friends, share it

online. And we'd love to have you visit the site and learn more about it, the reality of Bidenomics. But I think what, again, what's funny, Kent, is that, you know, if you want evidence of how pathetic the Biden administration is the very idea that they allowed Bidenomics.com to be hanging out there open so that people who actually believe in American freedom and prosperity could go and buy that website. It says it all. These folks are not just evil.

They're incompetent. And I don't know where the lines blur between evil and incompetence because what they're doing is harming Americans. If you're an American, we've just heard it, and it's at Bidenomics.com. that your average family is spending $11,400 more under Joe Biden, that much more. It's not incremental, $11,400 more since Biden took office to stay in the same place. Where do you get that money from?

This is what most Americans are trying to figure out. And we know that, you know, what you're putting at bidonomics.com, we expected it to be filled with propaganda. but no, it was bought by people who actually believe in the truth and not lying. And so you have all of these facts there that people who are listening, when you go there, you can share these facts, share the website. What are some other metrics that we can find at bidnomics.com? Sure. It's going to go through normally his saying, growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out.

We're going to dispel that. He talks about wages. We're going to dispel that. He's going to talk about energy. We're going to dispel that. So really the website is just a fact check of Biden's rhetoric. versus what is the reality that Americans are feeling? And also there are testimonials from real Americans

who are struggling in this economy that you can watch. There are opportunities to take action and sign up and get more information from Americans for Prosperity. As we toured the country holding events to hold Biden and his allies in Congress who racked up debt and inflation, we're going to hold them accountable. And Bidenomics is part of that effort. I love it.

Kent Strang with Americans for Prosperity. Thank you. much folks check out bidinomics.com.