The Michael Knowles Show - The Fall of Rome 2.0 | Mike Anton

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

Mike Anton joins the show to discuss the country's political future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice, from what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to know that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice. We don't know exactly how the country is going to collapse, when it will collapse, if it will collapse at all. And there's a big debate on the right right now about whether we're in late imperial Rome, late Republican Rome. maybe we're not in Rome at all. One of the clearest, most profound essays I have read on this topic came from my friend. Mike Anton, lecturer in politics and a research fellow at the Hillsdale College's Kirby Center in D.C. Mike is the author of the stakes. Mike served on the National Security Council staff under President Donald Trump. He's done lots of interesting things. And Mike is going to clarify for us, I hope, on exactly what is going to happen next in American politics. Sir, thank you for being here. Thank you. Unfortunately, the clarity that I can offer is the clarity of saying we don't know. So I am a dabbler, more than a dabbler in these historical comparisons we all have.

In fact, some of the criticisms or commentaries on the article have been, oh, there he goes again talking, you know, it's that done to death Rome comparison. But I felt it had to be summarized precisely because it is so done to death and so dominant. We had to acknowledge that, look, this is the comparison everybody wants to make. But my point isn't to say that we're going to follow that track. It was to start by saying, there's a reason people make a comparison, because there are a number of similarities. That's not the focus of this article. Focus of this article are the differences, and not just the differences between America and Rome, the differences between what the situation in the United States is today, and from what I can tell,

the differences between that and anything that's come before. There are things in which you grope to find a historical parallel, and you can't find one. Now, I will preface this. You call this false modesty or what you will. I'm not a historian. I did one of my three college majors was history. I think I'm above average in historical learning and understanding, but by no means an expert. So I've always, I know there are a lot of caveats in the articles to say, I don't think this has ever happened before.

I will state a certain phenomenon and then say, I can't think of an example of this. if there are people out there who want to say, no, no, Anton, you know, here's the point you made on page 19 or whatever, but in fact, there's a direct, you know, the Cappadocian Empire of 378 BC went through exactly this. I'm all ears. I want to hear it. But what I was trying to do was show a series of things that I think are unprecedented and that because they're unprecedented, they make predictions difficult or impossible. And they put us in a sense uncharted territory. So even even the Rome, comparison, as apt and useful as it is for many reasons, ultimately can't service as a guide. So for those who have not yet read the entire essay, and I would strongly encourage people to do so because we are awash in a sea of political commentary and most of it's crap, but this one's actually quite illuminating. What exactly is unprecedented about our situation compared to every other historical example? Well, I believe I begin with. immigration migration population change. Obviously that's happened over the years. I mean,

you know anything about history, you know that people move around and not just individuals, but families and tribes and even almost whole nations can migrate. So this is, that has happened before. What I point to in this case is the rapidity, okay, point one, the sheer numbers, point two, and they use one of the great buzzwords of our time, the diversity. point three. Now, this is before you, before you take a position on the goodness or badness, consequentiality or irrelevance of this, let's just face the facts. I, by my count, and it's, if it's a rough and dirty count, because I'm not a demographer, but I looked at all of the best sources I could find reputable sources like Pew Research Center. You count up how many people have

come legally since 1965 Immigration Act changed the U.S. policy. You do your best to estimate how many have come illegally, then you do your best to estimate, you know, their descendants and children and grandchildren. And I would say that it's about 100 million over 50 to 55 years. It could be 90, it could be 110, but it's about 100 million. In that brief of period, it has never happened before. You go back to some of the great mass migrations in history. That's just never happened before. And the other thing is the diversity. So lots of people are coming to the United States, but they're coming from literally everywhere. This has never happened before because the technology wasn't around.

So if you, in the ancient world or in the early medieval world, if you wanted to cross the Danube and go into Italy or go try to see what was left of the Western Roman Empire, you could do that. But you weren't coming from the Central Asian steps. You weren't coming from sub-Saharan Africa or the cone of South America because there was no way for you to get there. now you can come from anywhere because transportation is easy by historical standards. And so not only do we have the greatest number of people entering one country over the shortest period of time, we also have the widest variety of sources, and that includes differences in religion, language, culture, outlook, you name it. And it's just never, it's never happened before.

Now, we're told diversity is our strength. I quote, which, by the way, I have, to the best of my knowledge, found no earlier source for than a Dan Quayle, if you can imagine that, speech from 1992. Well, you know, historically and philosophically, diversity beyond a certain point has not been thought of as a strength. I quote Aristotle's politics where he says, look, ethnic conflict basically happens whenever two peoples are from a different source get together. And he's talking about differences between Greeks of so fine a shade from our distance, we wouldn't even recognize the difference, right? If we were to say to him, well, Mr. Aristotle, we can

One up you here. We've got, you know, we've got three Abrahamic faiths, and then we've got Eastern face, and then we've got people of no faith or this, that, and then we get into the linguistic stuff, which makes the Tower of Babel look like, you know, an average high school that offers Spanish and French, and that's about it. He would be astonished and say, yeah, I don't know how this is going to work out. There's a funny moment in Dante when Dante is up, going up to heaven, and he meets with his one illustrious ancestor from whom he gets his family name and this is the one guy, Kachigwida, and

Kachigwita, who is in heaven. He's saved, he's a saint. He laments how everything was better in Florence before all the immigrants came in. It's a little bit of a politically incorrect moment, but that would be the historical understanding of things.

Yeah, I mean, look, people like to quote, well, I like to quote Machiavelli, but on the specific point, you know, Machiavelli praises immigration as one of the sources of strength that made Rome great. Basically, he's pretty blunt about it. this though it was because of the manpower just needed a lot of people to put together these big armies and go around and conquer the world but if you read him a little more carefully he also says this really changed ultimately the republican character of ancient rome so there's a parallel that may be apt for us i just think you know like i said i start off with the number the speed and the diversity and i don't think that that's ever happened before um i go into the character of our ruling class which i'm i'm not a fan of. I think I've made that plain enough in various writings and podcasts and other talks.

But, you know, a rapacious elite that doesn't serve the interests of the people it governs. That's not new. I mean, that's happened before. It's the particular character of our elite that I'm not sure has ever happened before. I was just reading last night, again, because I think I'm going to do a little class on this, you know, Xenophon's Cyropodia and some of the commentaries. or and then I went through a passage in Xenipon's Hiro, where Hiro has to say, you know, no tyrant wants a healthy people. You got to kind of keep them down. You got to keep them half broken because the healthy people are the ones that are going to come and overthrow you.

But all right, yeah, that's fairly common. But, I mean, has any tyrant ever pushed, you know, transgenderism and so many of the crazy things that are being pushed on us today? And we're demanded to accept them before. This is new. I mean, popular manias, they've certainly happened. before. But the types and the speed with which these things are happening, they seem new to me and the determination. The current ruling class is going well beyond what it needs to do to keep the

people unwilling or unlikely to rise up and revolt against them and seems to want to punish them in a punitive way that I don't have a whole lot of horror historical antecedents for that I can draw on. There does seem to be a kind of masochism as well. And this is, hard to wrap one's mind around, which is that it's not merely the elite pushing all these sorts of pathologies on the plebs and on all of the, they're pushing them on themselves in a way, too. You know, when the largely white liberal ruling class pushes anti-white racism through critical race theory or whatever other phenomenon, presumably at some point this is going to come back to haunt them. When they push the radical gender theories, many of their own children,

have fallen prey to that. So what are, what are they thinking? I don't know. I've been, I puzzle over this a lot. I think I say in the article that, you know, they, and it's exactly what you say. This is kind of in a sense, it's an intra-white fight. A largely white ruling class hates a largely, or an even more mostly white middle or working class. And so in order to attack them condemns the whole white race. and then tries to exempt itself. But they don't have a coherent or convincing reason why this doesn't apply to them. You're just supposed to sort of know that if you're, if you hold the right opinions,

if you went to the right school, if you work in the right job, if you live in the right blue metro area, you're okay. You're not a bad person. But if they were to spell it out, you know, if there's this group over here that's bad and we're okay, they know that that somehow, that doesn't work rhetorically and they can't make it consistent. They can't make it sound consistent. And they also know that many of the people to whom they're,

hateful rhetoric appeals don't want to hear a distinction. They want the blanket condemnation. So they give them that red meat blanket condemnation. That's probably the wrong phrase to use. Some of these people are probably eating soy, but whatever. They give them that blanket confirmation, and then they just try to pretend that it doesn't count to us. And I say exactly what you just said, which is they're banking on a hope that this will never turn around and bite them, that this will not blow back on them in any way. And for the most part, so far it hasn't. Although you could say it kind of is, Right? I mean, these ruling class citadels are the ones suffering the most. You wouldn't want to be in Chicago right now. Right. Maybe that's not the heart of the ruling class. But Manhattan certainly is.

San Francisco certainly is. And these places are suffering badly from crime, from homelessness, from the mentally ill and the drug addicted on the streets, from antisocial behavior of all types. And precisely because they don't have a coherent way to convey this, well, we're exempt from this judgment, but you're not. they've now, they used to be better hypocrites, that is to say. It used to be that the ruling class would say, you know, yes, we need bail reform, we need criminal justice reform, we need all of this stuff, but not in Manhattan. Manhattan needs 40,000, you know, New York City needs 40,000 cops, a strong jail system, serious district attorneys, and we've got to get everything under control. Even though that was hypocritical and the logic didn't lead you there, they would say it anyway. Now they're so bought into their own arguments that they watch as their own citadels get torched, and they They go, yeah, I can't, I have nothing to say against it. I can't even be a hypocrite and oppose that. You know, it's a marvel to watch. They're not yet waking up. To what degree, you alluded to this earlier, to what degree is this a technological problem? Meaning, you couldn't have had the largest migration of people in every human history before the technology permitted it. And on the other side of that, one of the things that we hear, one of the great praises we hear of all this modern upheaval,

is, well, at least you've got your iPhones. You know, we live in this modern. We have the metaverse. We have video games. We have robots injecting you with things. We have all the wonderments of technology. So how do we grapple with that? Well, I don't, I mean, grapple with it.

The real expert on this who you should talk to is James Poulos, who I will say testified before Congress, I guess late last week, and got kudos from the members of Congress who understood him, which sadly given them. the quality of members of Congress probably wasn't as many as we would like. Nonetheless, technical or so these technology does a couple things. One is I definitely, I don't think, or at least I suspect that it would not be possible for wokeness and this kind of mental pathology to be as virulent and as widespread as it is absent social media, which is a relatively new phenomenon in human, even in our own lives. There's no social media when I'm a kid.

In fact, it's often pointed out, you know, people around my age will be the last generation to grow up entirely untouched by this. It comes around only when you're an adult and therefore it didn't really get its hooks into you. Well, everybody born after a certain point never knew a world without it. And it's completely shaped the way that they look at things. Another aspect, though, of the phone and of the screens, which I do point out in the piece, is it's an attempt by the regime, for lack of a better term, to just drug us.

It's like we, you know, inflation is really high, crime is up, you're not going to get the kind of job you want, your degree is worthless. Well, we're going to make it up to you by, with streaming and screens and scrolling. And the more you're preoccupied with that, this gets back to the point. This is sort of precedented, right? This gets back to Hiro's point. I want to put the citizen read asleep so that they don't come after me. Well, in the ancient world, you couldn't do it with screens. In the modern world, you can.

So there are aspects to the screens that I think have historical precedent. and there are aspects that don't. Well, it does make you wonder, too, if the great achievement of the age is all the streams and the tweets and the likes and sending you all sorts of weird, creepy, sexualized images. How productive is that? When I think of the technological innovation of the vacuum cleaner,

that seems to be much more productive than Twitter. That's definitely true. I intuit, I can't say I know, but I intuit that we're living through and actually a pretty non-productive age and one of the reasons why everything feels so fake and the economy has to be jerry-rigged in certain ways

and the numbers fudged and pumped up with fiat money and all of this is because there really isn't any underlying productivity going on or very little. All this prosperity kind of feels ephemeral and illusory and it's possible that the inflation that we're

now enduring and which is apparently slated to get a lot worse is a sign of that. Those kinds of things, though, have precedents. Let me get back to something you said earlier, which is this self-loathing is unprecedented. I struggled to find, I found plenty of historical examples of nations that fell or just sort of went through a long decline. This mass hatred, and it's not just in the United States, you're seeing it in Europe in certain countries or parts of certain countries. You're seeing it around the world.

I don't know that that's ever happened before. I mentioned the fertility rates at one point. When has, have not just one country, but a dozen or two dozen countries ever have fertility rates so far below replacement that demographers are talking about potential extinction. I'm not sure that's going to happen. Anything can happen and things may turn around, but it's bizarre and kind of scary to watch.

You just, you see rises and. falls depending on material considerations, external considerations, political considerations. But, you know, I don't think we've ever seen an extended period of such low rates in so many countries all at the same time like we're seeing today. But what you're describing, Mike, is a situation where the native populations of a number of countries and notably our own is declining rapidly and there is simultaneously a massive wave of migration from all over the world. But I was just recently reading the SPLC and reading MSNBC and CNN. And I am told that is a wild, racist, evil conspiracy theory called the Great Replacement. How dare you? Unless they say it.

Unless it's okay. That's true. Because they do admit it. If they say, we're replacing you because you're bad, that's great. If I say, so you're replacing me because I'm bad, they say, how dare you? Right? It's one of the things that I find, you know, propaganda has also been around forever. But the techniques that they're using now, I don't know that have precedent. Essentially, they require you to lie on their behalf, right? So, Michael, we're going to replace you. Wait, you're going to replace me?

Michael, I didn't say that. How dare you say it? Now, tell me, immediately after I say it, your response should be, you never said it. All right? Repeat after me. Michael, I'm going to replace you. Your response is, you're not going to replace me. what they expect us to do and they punish us if we don't play along. There was an article. I forget

it was in the New York Times or Washington Post. I guess there have been actually many articles to this effect. But there was one I remember in particular where the headline was, yes, we are replacing yours. No, it was, we can replace them. It's still there. And I think the Michelle Goldberg was the author. And she will be one of the first to condemn you if you, you know, quoting their own words back to them is a sin. this is a phenomena that I've looked at in other venues and tried to explain. They have a messaging problem. I'm actually writing about this right now, and I haven't finished the piece.

They have a messaging problem, which is that part of their message is to rile up their shock troops. Again, this is part of what the really virulent anti-white rhetoric is about, just rile up the shock troops. And that could include non-whites who are anti-white, but also some whites who really have taking it they've drunk the Kool-Aid and they believe whiteness is bad and if they're they're guilty of original sin by being born of this particular race they need to use that rhetoric to rile up their base but it's hard to do that in private so that others don't hear it and think wow that sounds like

anti-white hatred that sounds kind of racist so they can't not say it they just have to they have to condemn you for noticing and for saying it back so that's part of the part of the rhetorical ploy we get to say it you don't get to say it in fact we require Why are you to deny that we said it? This seems unstable, and I suppose it is unstable, and you see that breakout in the inability to control some of the riots and things that were in no small part racial last year. And actually speaking of those riots, you've mentioned George Floyd, the patron saint of contemporary leftism, as a real, as an emblem of this movement and also as unprecedented.

Well, look, I said whichever position one takes about the specific circumstances of his death and the outcome of the trial, right? And the official position, the only one, you know, this is a basically catechism for the regime at this point is he was murdered. He was an innocent lamb who was murdered. That's it. You are not allowed to have any other opinion. Okay. Even if you accept that insistence by the regime, as I think I put it in the article, one would have to say that George Floyd did not live his life in a way to make such a death, probable. That is to say, you can go back and it's in the public record as much as they try to suppress it and it can't all be suppressed. So essentially it's taboo to talk about his life. You can't mention all the convictions. You can't mention all the arrests. You can't mention many of the crimes and many of the very bad things he did because only a bad person would mention that. But they're out there. And I say if you look at all of this, even if you think he was completely innocent in the circumstance at which he did die, the ridiculous I find, response to his death. I mean, and tragic response to his death. I mean, cities burned,

lives lost, a crime wave that we're still in the midst of a year and a half later that shows, as yet no signs of slowing down. But also, if you remember, he got the equivalent of like three state funerals and drawn in horse, drawn in carriages with celebrities everywhere. With Joe Biden in attendance. Thousands of people. I mean, you know, this is like, I could sort of get it. You know, Bob Dole just died. He lied in state in the capital and then went to the National Cathedral. All right, somebody like that who served his country honorably in war was a senior station, a presidential candidate, you sort of get those levels of honors for a person like Bob Dole. For George Floyd, to whom statues have been erected around the country, murals painted around the country.

The intersection where he died has been sort of made into a holy space that, you know, I just have to say this is not a person who lived his life to be worthy of that level of admiration. and I don't recall. I can't think of another instance of a whole country, a whole civilization, elevating someone like that, even if they really were a martyr in the specific circumstance, but elevating someone like that overall to almost a kind of godhood in a way. Even the Catholic University of America just recently it was revealed had an icon up of what would have been the Madonna and the Pieta of Mary and. and Jesus after the crucifixion, except it was a black woman and a black man, and the black man,

according to the artist, is a George Floyd. This was at the Catholic University of America. So we're seeing, in some cases, explicit religious iconography. Yeah, I mean, look, this is an overquoted phrase, but I'll quote it again anyway. You know, the famous Chesterton, when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. I mean, the lack of religiosity, the lack of something genuine to look up to, it leaves in the human, I completely

believe this, it leaves in the human soul a vacuum that must be filled. And it can be filled with preposterous and even destructive enthusiasms, which is unfortunately what we're going through that. Now, that's not new. That's not unprecedented. The specific nature of what we're going through now, though, I believe is unprecedented.

Well, speaking of religion and Catholicism, before I let you go, I have to touch on this final point that you made, in the essay, which is, look, I try to avoid the near occasion of sin, okay? I try, I don't want to look lustfully on any image, but for all

of my life, especially growing up in New York, I look up at billboards and images, and it's all these hot chickies wearing not a lot of clothing, and because we are told sex sells. Yeah. And, you know, the only thing worse than that, I guess, than all those hot chickies and lingerie would be not

hot chickies wearing lingerie, which is what appears to be happening all around us. No, they're forcing, they want to say that, look, this gets to be actually a fairly profound topic, so I will try not to go on too long. But, you know, in the ancient philosophy, there's a bedrock assumption that beauty is a real metaphysical category that's immutable. It's not in the eye of the beholder, in other words, which is a phrase, everybody knows. If you look it up, it's actually from a book that's utterly forgotten. Nobody remembers the title or the author. That includes me. I have to look it up again. It's only known for this one phrase, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which, basically means all aesthetic standards are relative. Right. If we're just sticking with aesthetics. Now, if we're going to take the Greek beauty could be more than just how something looks. You know, there could be the beauty of a thought, the beauty of a concept and all that.

But let's just stick with aesthetics. Right. It's all completely relative is what that notion means. Now, that's actually not true. It's not the way people perceive the world or live their life. Most people just on a gut level can tell beauty from mediocrity or from just ordinaryness all the way down to ugliness. And what the regime is doing is in the name of pure relativism, I have the beholder,

it wants to say those who have or traits that have up to now been considered not beautiful, we're going to promote and we're going to hit you in the back of the head and we're going to say, you will consider these beautiful or else, right? We're going to, and I dare you to say that that obese woman with the piercings and all of the other stuff that, you know, conventionally would not be considered beautiful, staring down at you from eight stories up as you walk by the street. I dare you. It's to say she's not beautiful because we'll punish you for that.

Because that just shows that you're whatever at the suffix I-S-T, you're this-ist. You know, you're racist, you're sexist. You're, I don't know, fatist or thinnest. What does it mean? I mean, I guess to be against something you are that-ist. So if you're-phobic, I'm fat-fobic? Am I fat-phobic? I don't know.

I mean, I like Chesterton. I mean, he was kind of, but I don't want to see it on billboards in lingerie. I mean, look, the fact of the matter is, I mean, pick a name, you know, from the, either whether from the past, you know, Grace Kelly is prettier, was prettier than a modern lingerie. It's just the, and 99.9% of human beings, that's their gut instinct. And you can, you can bludgeon them into professing the opposite, but it's tyrannical to do so, and it's not ultimately affected. They don't, they won't believe it in their hearts. If you say, which one do you think. because, you know, which one do you rate the 10 and which one do you rate the one? They're going to make the, almost everyone's going to make the same choice every time because that's ingrained in our nature and older thinkers, both in the religious tradition and in the philosophic tradition, had this right, and that's not something that I think can be changed.

But this is true, the phenomenon and our reaction to it, is true beyond the lingerie models. This is true of architecture. There's this strange fact that in the back half of the 20th century, beautiful buildings stopped being made and buildings that formerly were beautiful were made uglier. Why? I totally agree that they're doing this and that they are forcing us to say that some hideous, brutalist building is gorgeous and, you know, just like the lingerie model. But why are they doing?

Why? Good question. I mean, my go-to books on this, which I heartily recommend to people because they're immensely entertaining and as well as learned. Now, a true critic would say, these are not serious. And this shows that Anton is a Philistine. I don't care. I'm rejecting their theories are the painted word. And from Bauhaus to our house, both by Tom Wolfe. And it was both a sense of, well, all of this other stuff has been done to death. So we got to come up with something new. But then there were very specific theories that the modernists had, you know, that come out of the philosophic tradition, or not tradition. I'm sorry, but the rejection of the philosophic tradition. and that, you know, well, it's time to shock the bourgeois Z.

It's time to transvaluate all values. It's time to undermine the bourgeois and these kinds of thing. And this gets translated into art and architecture so that it becomes almost obligatory. Look, I have to drive through downtown Washington pretty frequently. And cheek by jowl, you will see beautiful, neoclassical buildings with monstrosities. And as you say, anything built after a certain period of time, well, almost, is a monstrosity. And also, Wolf does point out the extent to which it's just a fad that the intellectual

sort of put one over on the patrons who are paying for it. And the patrons deep in their heart don't like it, but they feel like they've got to go along, go with the flow. Otherwise, they'll be thought of as rubs. I think I used to know this from memory, and I'll probably get it somewhat wrong. But the very first sentence from Bauhaus to our house goes something like, oh, beautiful, for spacious skies and amber waves of grain, has ever in the history of the world, So many wealthy people paid for so much architecture, they absolutely detested.

And he goes into like the guys like, I'm a corporate CEO or I'm the chairman of the board and I'm building my new building and I have visions of what it should be. And then the slick architects with the horn rims round glasses come in and they go, no, it's going to be a steel glass box. Take it or leave it. And I do it even though I hate it because I can't bear the shame. These guys have social status over me. They're superior to me in not in terms of money, not in terms of power, what they can do in society. but somehow their status as intellectuals and cultural arbiters is so high that I have to just eat it and do what they want. I saw this recently. I was on a subway in Manhattan and actually going back to the model description,

there was an ugly model selling some type of clothing. And the messaging, the words on this page said that this was a revolution. And if you bought this particular set of clothes, you were participating in a revolution. And you see this aesthetic revolution where beauty will be repressed and ugliness will be promoted and demanded by the regime. So in the few moments that we have left on the topic of revolution, if you were a gambling man, Mike, how does this all end here in our beloved US of A? I'm not a gambling man. And I end the article exactly on this point saying, I don't know. The closest thing to a conclusion that I'm willing to give is that going long on woke America seems like a sucker bet. I don't think this can go on for much longer.

And I've had this debate with others, you know, in particular, this is a point that Curtis Jarvin and I come back to a lot. He thinks the present situation can just basically last indefinitely. I think that's obviously wrong in part because nothing lasts indefinitely. But because it's so obviously incompetent, anti-natural, unsustainable. I mean, you know, okay, America's been through crime waves before. I lived through the 70s as a fairly young kid, to be fair. And I've certainly read about the John Lindsay era and the Insanities in the Bay Area of the 60s and 70s. I just wrote a piece about this.

It'll be out in first things, one of them soon. I've never seen anything like this, though, where rioters sack downtowns. And all of the corporate leaders in the city and the. mayor and everybody maybe the police chief is the only dissenter say you go for it you know this is you know what's the the mayor of baltimore people need space to destroy we should let them do that that's never happened before i mean how can how can that last how can a situation like this last for 10 or 20 or 50 years you never know because our situation is unprecedented something on uh unprecedented longevity for dysfunction and and psychopathy could be a feature of it but if there is nature as i

And many like me and many who have read the same books and the authors of those books, for that matter, if there is nature as we understand it, then this can't last. I don't ask me when it ends, but it can't last. That's a sort of consolation, although it's a consolation with that conservative optimist caveat that things could of course get much, much worse. But it is a consolation that it won't remain like this forever. Everyone has to go read the essay. It's terrific, unprecedented by Michael Anton in the new criterion. I look forward to the new essay coming out in first things. And Mike, thank you as always for being here. Thank you. Love to see you as ever.