The Eric Metaxas Show - Michael Lind

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Michael Lind, author of "Land of Promise," wonders if democracy can be saved from the "managerial elite," and points to ideas found in the recently-released, "The New Class War."

show. I shouldn't tell you this, but Eric hired someone who sounds just like him to host today's show. But since I'm the announcer, they told me. So I am telling you, don't be fooled. The real Eric's in jail. And welcome. Thank you, Todd. Thank you very much. Hey, folks, this is a serious program. Ignore the announcer, because we talk about serious issues on this program, sometimes with some levity, nonetheless, serious issues. For example, today, I get to have a conversation. You get to listen in with the author. of a brand new book, I immediately spotted this book as vital and important. It is titled The New Class War, Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, the author Michael

Linda's with me. He is the author of many, many books, even books of poetry. He's a free contributor to the New York Times, financial times, national interest, foreign policy. He's taught at Harvard. What? Johns Hopkins. He's been an editor, staff writer for the New Yorker.

Harper's The New Republic, The National Interest. sounds like somebody I'd love to get in the studio. Michael, would you come into the studio sometime? I'm here. Really? Well, then fascinating. How convenient. When I read the review of your book, I just thought this is something I'm so interested in.

So for people tuning in, please tell my audience, what do you mean when you say the new class war, saving democracy from the managerial elite? What do you mean? Well, I argue that a number of seemingly unrelated phenomena, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the Brexit vote. and all of the turmoil that caused in Britain, the revolt of the yellow jackets in France, and a lot of what are called populist rebellions on both sides of the Atlantic represent backlash

by the mostly but not disproportionately, not entirely white and native working class in these Western democracies against a previous period in which the managerial elite defined as mostly college credentialed managers and professionals and executives have just accumulated much more power in the three realms of politics and the culture and the economy than they did 40 or 50 years ago.

And I try to trace this. The book is a long essay, but it's a historical overview to a cross-class compromise after World War II in the U.S. and Europe, where the working class was empowered by trade unions, by very powerful religious organizations by strong local political machines when the parties were still very much federations of local units. And as those institutions have atrophied, you've got this kind of alienated anomic working class, which either drops out of politics or now and then it is drawn towards protest candidates like Donald Trump and to some degree Bernie Sanders. It's interesting because it does seem to me that this has happened roughly

in our lifetimes that we have seen somehow there has been this, both of us were at Yale at the same time, the kind of ascendance of cultural elites. So when you talk about managerial elites, to me, it's about worldview. There are people that they all go to the same schools, they all kind of think the same way. They're definitely not working class. If they were working class, most of them have fled those working class roots and are hanging out. with people who think typically in the way they do have the same worldview, typically secular worldview. And it's interesting because you mentioned Brexit, all these parallels.

It does seem to me that the European Union itself typifies this. You have a number of leaders of the European Union. I don't know if it's more than most of them. It's almost all of them don't have kids. It's really fascinating because most people in the world have a lot of kids or have several kids, but you have these cultural elites who are governing everybody else who has this different view. And they can't possibly understand the working classes. And I guess maybe my question is, do you get the idea that these cultural elites have either contempt for the people that they are

ruling, we can use that term a little bit, or maybe just a condescension toward them, a kind of a paternalism toward those groups that, you know, in the past, you would have said colonialist leaders have that kind of paternalism toward the people they're governing, whether it's in India or someplace else? Yeah, I think it's condescension. It's well-meaning paternalism in many cases. I think in some ways it's worse than what preceded it. For example, as I point out in the book, if you go back, even to when you and I were in college or before that, the corporate executives, they lived in a different subculture than the university professors who are often their own kind of bohemian world. And the government officials were kind of, a lot of them were small town rural politicians.

You flash forward to 2020, it doesn't matter whether there's government, whether it's the mass media, whether it's the corporate sector, overwhelmingly Ivy League, first-rate state universities, similar tastes in food and fashion and views of sex and. tradition. So you've had what were actually several elites have kind of fused and amalgamated into what I call the overclass, the managerial overclass. And one of the big differences is they want to improve everyone else. So as I say in the new class war, the boss in the factory back in 1950s would go off to the country club. And if the worker went off and smoked and drank and had a stake at, you know, the bowling alley, a boss didn't care. Now you have them trying to reform

everyone's diet. You know, they're policing their speech. It's a much more arrogant and meddlesome elite than the one we had in the past. See, that's what's interesting. In other words, if you care about your employees, of course, you'd want to affect their lives. But at the heart of that has to be respecting their freedom. Right. And it seems that that's the difference between a kind of a blue-nosed, puritanical, moralistic leadership versus a leadership that says, I have these views, but I want to, I want to help you help yourself, as opposed to kind of impose my views on you. But so how did this happen? My guess is that it happened with the rise of the media culture. In other words, there was no way all of these people could kind of

come together if it hadn't been for over the last half century, the rise of the media culture, so that we can all be sort of on the same page or taking cues from the same voices? Yeah, I think that's right. And if you look at the media culture, the working class had its own censors. They had people who had a negative on what appeared. If you look at the U.S. Catholic Legion of Decency,

they got the right in the 1930s and 40s to have Hollywood submit their scripts past them. And, you know, some of it was kind of silly censorship. There was this wonderful movie by the show. Cohen brothers, Hail Caesar, where there's a scene where the studio executive is running the biblical epic script past the rabbi and the priest and the minister. But the working class had vetoes. They weren't able to formulate policy, and they didn't write their own movie scripts,

but the threat of a strike by a trade union was a veto. The threat of a boycott by the Legion of Decency was a veto. It ensured that Hollywood would not offend the sensibilities of most of these working class people. And as that is broken down, we say we have a market in the culture, but essentially those who make decisions in these kind of monopolistic, oligopolistic media institutions, they can impose what programming they want. And you can't go start your own movie studio. Okay. So that, what we're talking about here, boy, this is big and important stuff. So I'm just thrilled we have you here in the studio. In your book, The New Class War, you touch on all of this

stuff. But it is interesting that if you believe in freedom and you believe in the free market, that doesn't mean that the free market will always inevitably deliver more freedom and create wealth and bless everybody. There are times, you know, when the free market does stuff like create Google and Amazon and Facebook, and suddenly you have this odd situation which works against freedom. And so at that point, ideally, you have some kind of a corrective, right? That's absolutely right. All neoclassical economics recognizes the existence of market power where you have

concentrations, whether it's natural or artificial monopolies and oligopolis. And the firms there, they can make their own prices. They can choose their own products. And competition doesn't work. And where you have those sorts of industries, and you particularly find them in the media where you have network effects, for example, search engines like Google, where you have, you know, simply the scale is important. I want to cut you off.

We're going to go to a break. But when we come back, I want to talk about that because it is about the scale, about search engines. Things have changed. And that's why we need to figure out what's happening and where we stand on it. We'll be right back with Michael Lind, the author of the New Class War. It's knowing that your door is always open and your path is. free to walk. That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag rolled up and stashed behind your couch.

Hey there, folks. One thing you know about the managerial elites whom we're discussing is that they're not big Glenn Campbell fans, just guessing. I'm talking to Michael Lind, the author of The New Class War. You were just touching on a big piece of this here is places like Google. There is a power that they have, which. It seems to me the founders could not have foreseen. It's a strange new development, and that has either exacerbated or accelerated or both some of the things we're talking about.

So the question is, when you have suddenly folks at Amazon, at Google, at Facebook, and on and on, having this kind of power, how can we legitimately do something about it? Or can we? Well, we faced this issue 100 years ago with a different set of industries, with broadcasting and with electricity and water and sewage, which were natural monopolies or oligopolis. There were several answers at the time. One was antitrust, break them into smaller units, to the extent that the scale is inherent to the industry, that's just self-defeating. They will grow big again unless you smash them every 10 years.

the two alternative ways of checking their power of the radio broadcasters and TV broadcasters a century ago, and arguably social media now, was either direct government regulation, which can be kind of dangerous. But the alternative was countervailing power. That is a phrase used by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. It means that you have citizens groups, you have organized labor, you have organized consumers, and they balance the power. of concentrated private monopolies. And those are kind of the two options. I guess I'm just thinking about this, practically speaking, when you talk about government intervention, right, in other words, let's say the government says, okay,

Google, okay, Amazon, you know, we need to step in. Free market people right away say, wait a minute, wait a minute, you might make it worse, right? Because the government, I would say, is often populated by the very same managerial cultural elites who have the same worldview. In a funny way, what you want to do, right, is help freedom, right? And so then the question is, how do you do that? Well, that's the role of countervailing power.

That is, I think you're right. If you try to regulate social media, then the people who regulate it are going to be people who want to be on the board of the same companies after they get out of Congress or they're best friend in college, you know, is the CEO or something like that. Right. So it's not actually going to be effective. On the other hand, ordinary people lack financial resources. They lack influence based on expertise.

The only thing they have is their numbers. And whether it's a consumer association or a civic federation or organized labor in some cases, unless they can pool their numbers in some kind of organization that can negotiate with these entities. Right. But that's the alternative to direct government regulation. Okay.

So in the past, the church had something like that kind of power. And you were referring to the Catholic Church. Was it the Hays Code? I can't remember

if that was a separate kind of code. That was direct regulation. Yeah. But the Legion of Decency negotiated with Hollywood. There was a self-adopted comic books Code adopted in the 1950s that lasted all the way up to the 70s and 80s under pressure

from these civic groups. So those are two different models. Well, I mean, ultimately what we're talking about is the culture, right? In other words, if there's cultural pressure to do something, typically people will do it. And we know that in the past, if you acted like, you know, a pig, all you wanted was profits and you were willing to sell your soul to do anything, people would look at you differently. They would say, no, no, no, no, you need to care about the community. You need to care about our children. It seems to me that something happened in the revolution of the 60s where we've given carte blanche to people in the market,

especially in entertainment now in social media, to do things that are harmful, to let's just say kids, to families. And there isn't really a way in the culture. for people to object. As you've just said, you have these managerial elites everywhere. They all have this kind of view of things that if it's not secular, it's, I guess, I look at it as kind of hypocritical in the idea that like we're, we're all for rebellion and transgression. Oh, we don't want our kids to be ruined. But at the same time, you know, we don't think that it's bad to have, you know, really violent sexual programming. You know, we don't want to be, we don't want to be associated with the of people who oppose that. Those those, you know, clucking church ladies of the past, that to me is the difference between today and even the 70s or in the 80s.

I think that's right. And I think the key factor here was the expansion of higher education after World War II because you had had this transgressive culture. It was the Bohemian culture. Right. From the 1840s and 50s onwards in Britain and France, in Greenwich Village in the United States. these were, it was a counterculture. These were rebels against convention, both sexual and artistic and economic. Usually they were the downwardly mobile children of affluent bourgeois parents, whom they were rebelling against.

And this was kind of a small part of the population. It was important in intellectual circles. With this massive expansion with the GI Bill in the United States and the equivalent in Europe after World War II, what had been a kind of marginal anti-establishment counterculture, anti-traditional culture became what they read in college and still read. See, this is really, this is so key and this is why your book is so important because to identify that, to realize that people say, what happened, this is a big piece of what happened.

You're exactly right. And even this idea that, oh, everyone should go to college, that itself is a new idea. I mean, the idea that everyone should go to college, where does that idea come from? And is it right? I can think of tons of people whose lives are not at all improved by college. We both went to Yale and other elite institutions. And when you go to those places, you know, there's a worldview that comes attached to these institutions. And people's lives are, in many cases, ruined by that worldview.

But we tend not to talk about it. It's not part of the cultural narrative. We make it sound like, oh, everybody's got to go to college. But we don't say why. Well, if you look at the statistics, there's, you know, somewhere 10, 15 percent of the jobs being done by people with college diplomas do not require any education beyond high school. And it's those folks in particular, I think, form much of the base for, let's say, the Democratic Socialists, for the left. There's this gap between the status which they expect as a result of having a VA and the actual jobs out there.

If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the 10 most numerous jobs being created in the U.S. they're in the three fields of leisure and hospitality, retail, and health care. Only one requires any education beyond high school and on-the-job training that's registered nurse. So this myth that the jobs of the future require everyone to go to college is simply not true. And there's a real danger that you will create more and more bitter and alienated people if you give them these degrees and they end up with champagne tastes on beer budgets. Yeah, well, it's, and debt, of course. And debt is a terrible crippling thing.

Which now we're pretending we can just erase it. No problem. It's a bizarre thing. We were talking earlier about, you know, the advent of social media and Amazon and Google and these kinds of things. It still strikes me that in some ways this aggregation of power is unprecedented. Like you can't really compare the trust busting. You know, it's different because it's not just money and that kind of, and a certain kind of power. It's a different kind of power.

It's a power with direct influence. Well, it's addictive power. My friend J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Agents, Elogy, has made the point that many of the brightest people in Silicon Valley are dedicated to hooking people on their iPhones and on social media. using all of the arts of psychology to get people to repeatedly return and return and return. It's kind of like the gambling industry in Las Vegas, where everything in Vegas is designed to steer you back to a slot machine.

And this really is different from the TV and radio of the 50s and 60s, which we remember, it was sufficiently boring that you could go outside play if you were a kid, right? You would have conversation with your friends. But it is kind of like drugs in the sense that they're trying to rewire the brain, so you keep going back for hits.

Yeah. Well, and they are doing that. I mean, our brains are plastic, and they can be rewired with repeated, you know, dopamine hits, and that's what's happening. We have a generation, at least, addicted to their phones. You know, many times they're on the phone doing good things, but that's a larger conversation.

We'll be right back, folks. I'm talking to Michael Lind, L-I-N-D. The book is The New Class World. or saving democracy from the managerial elite. Don't go away. Christian bestselling author and speaker, Richard E. Simmons, does not shy away from the big questions of life. His latest book is called Reflections on the Existence of God, and it tackles the biggest question of all, does God exist? I've read this book and I got to tell you, I'm a little biased, but you can imagine that I like it a lot because Simmons offers insights for those grappling with

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I like the way of sparkling earrings lay against your skin so bright. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to Michael Lind. He's the author of a brand new book, The New Class War, Saving Democracy from the managerial Elite. Michael, how long has this thesis been on your mind? because the manifestation of it in the election of Trump and in Brexit and these kinds of things is fairly recent, but these trends have been developing over a long time. Yeah, I first wrote about this in my first book, The Next American Nation, in 1995.

And that's where I first introduced the term overclass, which had been floating around, but I gave it this meaning of managerial and professional elite. And at the time, you know, this was the heyday of enthusiasm about globalization and everyone was going to get rich in the future and be a tech worker. And so I was kind of ignored, frankly. And over the last quarter century, I think a lot of developments have vindicated. It's kind of creepy to hear the time since 95 described as the last quarter century. What a sick idea. We can't be that old. But seriously, this has been happening.

and it only has really exploded with, you know, whether it's Boris Johnson or, I mean, we've really seen a clear backlash against this and the love that you see that people have for Donald Trump. You think, what is that? Where is that coming from? Who is he to them? What does he represent? And even if you can articulate it, you can sense that it is what you're talking about, what you're articulating in your book, that there's something very deep here. Yeah, populists, by their nature, tend to be popular. That is, they tap into genuinely popular moods, grievances.

They represent legitimate interests. The problem with populism historically is they are incapable of building a new system. They can attack the old one, but partly because the entire establishment is against them, all the experts, the money, and so on, is very difficult for them to reform the system. So populism tends to be a series of kind of abortive rebellions by outsiders. And then they're often defeated or co-opted by the existing power structure. Do you see that happening with Trump and Boris Johnson and Brexit? And do you think that these things are designed to exist just for a short time?

Well, in the U.S., I think Trump already in many ways has abandoned any challenge to orthodox. Republican governance, whether it's the tax cuts, you know, a lot of the foreign policy. He gave up infrastructure and, you know, some of his other promises. He's forged his own distinct path in trade, I think, sticking to his own principles and to some degree in a more cautious foreign policy. However, you know, if he has a second term, I think he'll show his weakness compared to the Republican Congress. Now, what would you mean?

because I'm not following exactly. Well, he ran as a real break with the orthodoxy of the Republican Party. He said, I'm not going to cut your social security. I'm not going to cut your Medicare. I'm going to bring back manufacturing. And the Iraq war was a mistake, he said. Right. And he was the only one of 13, 14 candidates who said that and got the nomination.

And then the presidency. But if you're an outsider candidate like that, you don't come in with thousands of people whom you can appoint, who are Trumpists in this case. So you're already weak because most of the people you have to point to positions in your own administration are Bush and Romney people, essentially. And this is true for other outsider candidates like governors, like his friend Jesse Ventura, when he was governor of Minnesota, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The outsider candidate either plays the two parties against each other or just ultimately signs up with his own side. certainly see that with Schwarzenegger and Ventura, but with Trump, it looks different to me. In other

it does seem to me that he has begun to deal with this issue, that he has to, you know, to use the term drain the swamp, that he has to find people that are on the same pages. He is, I mean, I guess I would argue that it's, it has to take time. In other words, that there have been, you can see how, because he came in having to turn to a lot of these people who were, you know, entrenched parts of what we now call the deep state that it was hard for him to reform. But I guess I get the impression that he's kind of on to that and he's trying. Well, here's how I would put it. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, you had the Heritage Foundation, you had the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage had a mandate for leadership. It had a list of tens of thousands

of names, people to appoint agencies, specific things to do. If Reagan had been elected president in 1968, none of that infrastructure would have been in place. It would have been premature. So in that sense, I think Trump kind of came before his political infrastructure. He's got to John the Baptist, not Jesus. It goes later. That's interesting. I still, I guess I still see that he is able, just because of the kind of a personality that he has, that he seems to me able to, to, to work with the problem. In other words, I guess I feel that he has turned a number of previously, at least more feckless Republicans into a less feckless direction that he's given them some backbone.

So I guess I have hope for a lot of the folks that they were not like Trump. They've become a little bit more like Trump. Well, whether he's reelected or not will make a difference. If he's defeated, then his rivals in the Republican Party can say, see, we told you so. I cannot imagine that he won't be reelected. But earlier, you said that if he were reelected, it would show his weaknesses. In domestic policy, not foreign policy, I think a second-term president tends to be fairly weak in domestic policy or a lame duck. Okay.

I want to the beginning. I want to follow up on that when we come back. Folks, I'm talking to Michael Lind. The book is The New Class War. Hey there, folks. It's here from Taxis Show. and I am talking to the author of a brand new book, The New Class War, Saving Democracy from the managerial elite, Michael Lind.

I have to ask you, Michael, even your subtitle, Saving Democracy, you really make the case clearly that it is democracy itself itself that is being threatened. That's everything, as far as I'm concerned. And so what are your, you know, if you have to guess which way this might go, what is your sense of what the directions this class war can go? Well, I use the term democracy rather than liberal democracy, which is being used by establishment opponents of a lot of populism. Yeah. To essentially define any deviation from establishment centrist viewpoints as illegitimate.

So democracy in my definition means actually responding to the interests and values of most citizens. And that requires not just free elections now and then, but it requires institutions that are accountable to those citizens. And we've mentioned a few of them unions and churches and local political organizations. My concern is if we continue on this path, we will see a restoration of what I call technocratic neoliberalism, that is of the sort of centristism that was shared by the Clinton and Obama administrations. with the Bush administration to some degree, where they essentially agree on most things. They don't want to be bothered by rebellions, you know, from the working class in their own parties. And they will use the excuse of defending liberal democracy from resurgent fascism, which is a completely exaggerated threat, in my opinion, as a way to censor people, as a way to cancel them.

Well, look, it's worse than an exaggerated threat. it's a foul thing to call a genuine, legitimate, popular uprising fascism. That's in effect to say, shut up, you're stupid, you don't get a voice here. And that really is, I think, what has fueled a lot of the anger that the Trump voters have and others, they say, listen, if you're telling me that you used to disagree with me, that's one thing, but you're effectively telling me I'm stupid and I better shut up. That's, I think, what people pick up from some of these cultural elites. Well, either you're evil or you're ignorant or you're mentally and emotionally disturbed.

As I point out in the book, there's this medicalization of dissent so that if you disagree with centrist liberal positions on all sorts of issues, you're phobic in one way or another. Fobia, that's a term from therapy. That's a term from psychoanalysis. It means we don't need to debate you because you need therapy. You need treatment. Right. Well, I guess what's really creepy about this is that it mirrors a lot of what we read in books like 1984. You see this happening in China.

The power that the state has and the power that we have kind of in this unified globalist culture, they just didn't exist before. We were talking earlier about the aggregation of power at places like Google. But in a way, what you're talking about in the book is that, the rise of this elite that really it has a cultural power that can now be translated through technology into actual oppression and that if you disagree with somebody, they have the power in the culture to say, you're a bigot, you're racist. Senator Warren, just the other day, dramatically preposterously claimed that Trump's

judicial appointments are racist, homophobic, anti-women. And I thought to myself, wow, she can't even talk about this intelligently so that people understand. She just knows she hates them and she has the freedom in this new culture to label them without being challenged as racist, for example. I mean, that to me is just, it's a new level of actual fascism on the parts of the people who decry fascism in their opponents? Well, the review of my book in the New York Times said I wasn't sufficiently sensitive to race and gender, which is a way of calling me a bigot. If the proposals in my book, which are completely race and gender neutral, were carried out, if you were a non-white home health aid, a female home health aid, your economic bargaining

power would be higher. You would have more cultural influence and you would have more political influence. But that's the thing. I mean, if you disagree with the consensus establishment of wisdom, you're essentially either Bull Connor or Adolf Hitler. The only history, and as a sometime historian, this amuses me no end, the only history most of our elites seem to know is Weimar, Germany, between 1919 and Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 and the south in the Civil Rights Revolution in the 1950s. Right. So everything is either the Nazis are coming to power again, or Bull Connor is back.

Well, the irony, I've written a large book on the, you know, Germany and the rise of Hitler. And to me, the great irony is that they have profoundly or they have utterly misread it. In other words, if there is any threat of fascism in this day, it does come from the people in charge of the algorithms you know, not from the the people who go to the Trump rallies. And there's this great irony because they do use this over and over and over again. They imply that Trump is Hitler 2.0.

If you actually understand that history, you just say that that's preposterous. Yeah, I point that out in my book, The New Class War, that Hitler and Mussolini were strongly supported by military elites, by bureaucratic elites, by intellectual elites. They had a lot of support among academic. epidemics, Hitler in particular, the Nazis did very poorly among working class voters and also among

religious people. I would never have thought of that about working class voters that the Nazis said. The working class voted mostly for the social Democrats, were in some places the communists. So even though the Nazis had national socialist workers party in their name, it was largely, they were disproportionately educated. We are, that's, that's news to me, important to realize that. We are this hour done talking to Michael Lynn, but we're going to lock the doors and keep him here. It's the Eric Mattaxas show.

The book is The New Class War. Welcome back. Now I've got a question for you, folks. I'm going to get very, very personal. Albin, this is, yes, yes, yes. It's not directed at you. This is, this is to my listeners, to anyone listening or watching me now on YouTube. this is a very specific question, and there's only one right answer.

Okay, and the question is, now if you get the answer right, you will be entered in a drawing to win innumerable signed books. Half the books in the room behind me, if you're watching on video, will be signed and sent to you. You get to visit us in the studio at the Eric Mattaxas show when we go back to the studio, which will be shortly by the grace of God. So if you get the answer right, you will be entered in the drawing. If you get the answer wrong, you will not be entered in the drawing.

And there will be no chance for you to win all of the signed books and have a visit to the studio. And by the way, if you can't come to the studio in New York, you can send someone in your stead. You can send a group of people. You can contact a friend who lives near New York and say, hey, you're going to the Yorkman-Taxis show to meet Albin and Eric and to have sandwiches. Okay, so here's the question. Are you ready? You ready? Here it is. Have you gone to metaxis talk.com and donated anything to the Prison Fellowship Angel Tree cause that we're doing right now? If you said, yes, I did. You got it right. You are entered in the drawing and all of these things might be sent to you. Now, by the way, if you got it wrong, this is good news, Albin, you know what, there's good news. I know. I wanted there to be an escape hatch for the people who got it wrong.

If you said no, which is the wrong answer, eh, if you got it wrong, if you got it wrong, here's what you can do. You can go to metaxustalk.com like now or in a moment. And when you go there, listen carefully, folks, when you go to metaxis talk.com and you click on the banner

and give, that will be, basically as though you had already given before I asked the question. We're going to let you have it till the end of the day today. If you give, if you go to metaxis talk.com and give, we will, you know, we'll accord it to you as righteousness or something biblical like that. We will let it go. We're not, listen, we're not here to shame you.

We're only here to shame those of you who need shaming. Albin, am I right? Yeah, shame on you. Only the people who haven't gotten to Metaxistock.com. Honestly, folks, we joke, but it is such a wonderful, wonderful organization doing God's work. I really do want to say that when you give to the children of prisoners, that is just, it's an investment in the whole future of the country and the culture and the civilization because these kids, they are, they're marked. You know, they are, they're going, they're having a tough life and the odds against them are tough. When you reach out to these kids with the love of God and you let them know somebody cares about them,

I'm just telling you, that's like a major, major investment. And, you know, God commands us to care for the prisoners. So before we go, Albin, we're leaping into the weekend here. If anybody needs masks, by the way, I happen to know if you go to givingmasks.com, giving masks.com forward slash Eric. Some of the best masks you can buy. People today are going crazy. What's the right one?

Givingmasks.com forward slash Eric. Givingmasks.com forward slash Eric. And they have said, that's why they're called giving masks.com, that whatever you buy from them, you know, you need masks, right? Whatever you buy, whatever number of masks you buy, they will donate the same amount of masks to people on the front lines in hospitals. we've chosen New York Presbyterian Hospital, but whatever. So go to Givingmasks.com forward slash Eric.

And before midnight tonight, go to metaxis talk.com, click on the banner. And you will, we'll give it to you. We'll get 100 on the test. Have a blessed weekend. God bless you.