The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Debate Podcast: Elon Musk embraces the far-right and Trump ends DEI

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

On the first episode of our new series on politics and culture, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle and Vox senior correspondent Zack Beachamp debate Elon Musk's embrace of far-right political parties, Trump's totalitarian impulses, and the end to DEI in government agencies.   The host of this Munk Dialogue is Rudyard Griffiths To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is how authoritarian power grabs start in other places have historically started these kinds of actions. And given Trump's inclinations, I'm skeptical. I think we have to understand the entire DEI apparatus as being a massive authoritarian power grab from the get-go. Hi, Monk listeners. Today is the first episode in our new series on politics and culture, featuring two thoughtful and informed guests with very different points of view. It's what we do best here at the Monk Debates, offering competing viewpoints on the big issues of the day, hopefully to bring more balance and nuance to our highly polarized debates. Our guest today are Megan McArdle and Zach B-Cham. Megan is a calmist at The Washington Post, whose work focuses on the intersection of business, economics, and public policy.

Zach is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, along with right-war. populism and the bigger world of ideas. Megan, Zach, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thanks for having me. Hey, thanks for having me. Great to be in conversation with you both today. So much news for us to get through. A lot of it juicy and maybe we'll have a few debates along the way. The first topic I want to have us weigh in on is the ongoing kind of saga of Elon Musk. and his seeming, I don't know what it is, his inability, his penchant, his proclivity for constantly not only being in our social feeds and in the news, but picking issues that elicit incite controversy. And especially in the last week, there's some allegations that have been raised that from his somewhat bizarre hand gestures on the day of the inauguration to this most recent Zoom in speech at a major AFD conference in Germany,

That's the right-wing party that has had in the past criticisms around it for fratinizing with neo-Nazi members and some ideas. All of this has kind of caused a surge of scrutiny and focus on Elon. Is he an anti-Semite is what many people are asking themselves? So, Megan, to come to you first, how are we to interpret this behavior? Is there something sinister here beneath the surface? I would say a few things. First of all, I always err on the side of looking for the most charitable explanation. It is very easy to take stuff out of context, as anyone has seen, from the numerous photographs of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama giving Nazi salutes to their followers, which, of course, they were not doing.

they were raising their hands to wave at a crowd. I will say that in the column that I wrote about this, I was at a wedding where I will not name names, but there were a number of very well-known progressive journalists at this wedding. We all ended up in a crowd that if there was a photograph of it, you would have thought we were at a Nazi rally because we were asked by the minister

to raise our right hands in benediction as he gave the blessing over the couple, and I think the minister had not thought this through. So as I am in the middle of raising my hand, I realize what this looks like. I look around, it's clear that everyone else realizes what this looks like. And we still did it because we weren't Nazis. We were giving a blessing at a wedding. And I think, so I bring that interpretation to, you know, Elon Musk made a dumb gesture and then he repeated it because it's not clear to me that he realized what he'd done. And I know that it sounds crazy, how could he not know

that gesture? Well, the same way that the people who were waving in the crowd did not necessarily in the moment think, ooh, wait, I just gave a Nazi salute. I'd better stop doing that. We are context-driven animals. We look at things in the context that we're thinking about

when we're doing them, which is how a journalist of my acquaintance ended up accidentally dressing up as a Klansman for Halloween because he was making a ghost costume. And it did not occur to him that when the sheet was too short, and he decided to add the pillowcase in what that was going to look like to people who were not thinking ghost. And so I'm inclined to cut Elon Musk's slack on the gesture. I don't love his flirtation

with AFD, which I don't think it's a Nazi party, but I do think they're absolutely too friendly, too willing to sort of countenance contact with Nazis. And I think that some Nazis belong to the party. Zach, you know, people do dumb things, either intentionally or not, but they're dumb. They're not malicious. They're not motivated by hate or by, you know, a darker agenda. Should we be giving Elon more of a more of a break here? He is a kind of odd guy.

There's a lot of odd people out there. Odd people do odd things. Are we reading way too much into this? Absolutely not. I am very confident that what he is. Elon Musk did was a Nazi salute. His reasons for doing that are up for debate. The nature of the gesture, I think, was astonishingly straightforward. And I'm glad that Megan brought up those comparisons between, say, Barack Obama and some other candidates who have had their arms up, because those are all depicted in the terms of still footage. Right. And if you saw the video of what Megan was doing at that wedding, you know, that she just talked about, you wouldn't see anyone doing a Nazi salute because you would hear the priest say raise your arm in benediction. You'd see the whole thing. it'll be in context, right? What Elon Musk did was a straightforward, if anyone has seen a Nazi gesture,

the Hitler-Gruz, as it's referred to in German, and as German, you know, there was one really notable headline in a German paper, ein Hitler-Gus, ein-Hittler-Gus, est ein-Hitler-Gus, because they know what it looks like, right? And you can look at exact footage of a scene from American History Acts, which is a very famous movie about neo-Nazis, and the gesture that they do in the movie, which popularized this, the typical version of the salute doesn't have the hand on the heart thing, right, is the hand on the heart and then straightforward. It's become popularized in years since among neo-Nazi movements. The specificity of it is uncanny. And I think it's important to trust the evidence of your eyes on situations like this. And more to the point, I think Elon Musk doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. It's not just that Musk did this one thing. And it's not just that he has sort of lent support to AFP. it's that he went there and he said Germany is too hung up in the Holocaust.

Before that, he had replied to a tweet that was saying, you know, Jews are pushing cultural poison to the United States because we're supporting immigrants and told this white nationalist tweeter that you have said the actual truth. When he got in trouble for that, right,

he went to, he sort of apologized and then went to Auschwitz, except then we saw, I think it was about yesterday, a long time acquaintance of his said, of his said he was profoundly resentful about having to do that. He doesn't like having to apologize for his gestures, which feeds into my sort of grand theory of Elon, which is consistent with just the many, many, many years of public

interaction with neo-Nazi and extreme right figures on the internet and support for many of their causes, including mainstreaming some of their ideas, like the Great Replacement, which is that not just, not only does Elon have sincere far-right politics, but he has a love of provocation. You know, when I wrote about this, I called him, human South Park, which in retrospect might have been a little unfair to South Park. But he likes transgressing, right? He likes, especially against sort of liberal pieties and norms.

And there are very, very few things that are more of a transgression than doing an open Nazi gesture and being able to get away with it, knowing that you can just say, that's not what I meant, and nobody can do anything to you for it. So I think there was a joy in that for him. Let me bring Megan back in it because we've debated the gesture, and I think that is value added for our audience. But let's make it move to the remarks that he made or just the poll quotes that came out of his address to this alternative for Deutscheland Convention Conference, whatever it was over the weekend. Because it does touch on a very sensitive issue just days before National Holocaust Day that in a sense he was encouraging, invoking that Germans had spent too much time thinking about their history. and that they should disencumber themselves of their past.

Yes, that's a point of view, but it's a point of view in a country, frankly, that's done a really good job at remembering its past, at maintaining a historical consciousness, at being aware of the moral stain, the deep moral stain that the Holocaust caused German society, German culture and the German nation. So, Megan, why shouldn't we take those words as just, yeah, incredibly irresponsible, hurtful? And again, maybe something more, something political, deliberate, cynical, and harmful. I think it was a bad speech. I think I would, I do not endorse what he said. It was a bad thing to say. That said, I think that the political analysis of it is that you have to, I think that you really have to read those words as being less about

Germany than America, which is where Musk's primary focus always is. And a sense, which I think is not wrong, that the kind of excesses of everyone's a Nazi. And I think that this is why, look, if you want to argue that he's a secret Nazi, I can't say he isn't. I think some of his behavior, such as supporting Israel in the war in Gaza, is a little strange for Nazis, but I've never met the guy. I don't know that much about him other than what I've read. So I can't say whether he's a Nazi or not, or whether he thinks it's funny to make Nazi gestures in the way that a disturbing number of people in the online right do. I can't say that. I will say that part of the reason that whole strain of the online right has gained influence, and I

watched it happen in real time with young conservatives, is that the left started calling everyone a Nazi. Everything was fascism. Everything was white supremacy, right? Not like, well, that was a little awkward thing you said. You shouldn't say that. White supremacy. You need to examine your own internalized white supremacy

because you ask someone where they're from, right? And that element of it, as I argued at the time over and over again, What people were trying to do was take the valid, absolutely morally necessary stigma that we have against white supremacy and Nazis and extend it to stuff that was a lot less morally serious. And I understand why they wanted to do that. They thought it was a strategic move that would help them eradicate racism, et cetera. What I think it actually did was devalue the stigma on Nazism and white supremacy, because you cannot apply those words. as broadly as they were, and then expect people to take the thing you are describing as seriously as you want people to take Nazism and white supremacy.

And so I think that we eroded that stigma, and it was really bad. And that I got yelled at for writing this, I think in 2015, 2016, like, stop calling everything white supremacy. You are not helping. You are hurting. But I think that that has absolutely been vindicated. that what we needed was a few narrow stigmas on the most extreme beliefs. And what we instead tried to do was apply those stigmas to things like,

I would like my country to be mostly German people and not people from other countries. Well, if that's white supremacy, then people are going to sign on to white supremacy. And I think that that is a big part of the AFD's appeal. Let's give Zach the last word on this, Zach. We'll be brief because we want to fit in a couple more topics on today's show. But Megan's making, to me, a compelling point here. You know, the Overtin window was blown open well before Elon Musk. So why are we focusing on him when, frankly, he's just living in this new universe that many of us were participants in helping create?

Well, because there's nothing about, you know, the essential nature of politics, nor is there any, like, you know, law of nature that says that if, you know, there are a few activists on the left who are overzealous about using the allegations of the word Nazis, you have to support a political party that is the political vehicle for much of, or at least certainly the heirs to Nazism inside Germany. Nobody is making Elon Musk do this. No one said you have two choices, right, to go support the AFD or, you know, become a gender studies professor at Oberlin, right? You have another option, right? And Musk has deliberately, you have lots of other options, in fact. And Musk has deliberately, through his own volition and his own behavior, not because of anything the evil libs did, taking a position, positions that have become increasingly radical, positions that should be stigmatized by any reasonable definition of those terms. You know,

he's argued that the Democratic Party is engaged in a great, great replacement, right, a term that was the venue in the province of white supremacists, right? And it's one that has become increasingly mainstreaming the conservative movement, not because liberals made them or in response to that because of a deliberate effort beginning with Tucker Carlson. No one forced, no one forced to do that. The emerging democratic majority was great replacement theory. No, it wasn't. It's like it's a positive version.

No, no, Megan, Megan, that's not important. Zach, let me get a word in here and then I'll come back to you. Look, look, do you know how many times I was told that demographic change from immigration was going to make it impossible. for Republicans to ever win another election? Proudly by Democrats who were excited that this was happening. That was, in fact, like, look, I think that that's fine. I didn't have it.

I was never paranoid about this. I'm not endorsing the great replacement people and the freaks marching through Charlottesville. What I'm saying is Democrats were saying a lot, and it was not just like a couple of left-wing people. It was all of the major newspapers and the universities, and people could get kicked out of university for not signing on to do a lot of this stuff.

There was serious push by a lot of institutions and saying, well, you know, it's just a couple of women's studies professors at Oprah. That was not the experience of people in those institutions or who had power exercised over them by institutions. That doesn't excuse endorsing Nazis, obviously. But it also, if you are trying to do political action, This is the impact of your political action, and you should factor that in rather than saying, well, it's all just, you know, that's because they're bad people.

Okay, well, now you live in a country running by bad people. Yeah, well, good job. A few things I want to say. First, it's ludicrous to equate the argument that demographic shifts are changing American politics to the argument that there is a deliberate plot spearheaded by a shadowy cabal of the elite, including American Jews, to change the American. demographic such that to replace American voters with undocumented migrants and others that are going to be pliable and respectful and subservient Democratic voters. That is the great replacement theory. It is substantively a hundred percent different from the thesis of a book like the emerging Democratic majority. And the idea that the argument that demographic change is changing the United States, right,

in and of itself, forced people, forced people, or in any way, like it's sort of defensively. as a natural response, negates the agency of the people who are responding to those things. You can argue that there's some kind of relationship there. I think that's not the causal relationship. I think the causal relationship has to do

with fear of that change itself, not what Democrats said about it, but the fact that there was demographic change happening. And people, many people on the right, did not like that. And they didn't like it, not because the New York Times said it was good. They didn't like it

because they are attached to the idea of the country looking a particular way. They have views about what traditions are valuable, what the United States should be, be in who true American citizens are. We can debate whether or not it's reasonable to call those views racist. I think at times it is, often is.

But that's not the point here. The point is you're confusing a sort of second order conversation with what is really a first order issue, right? And saying that the people who are responding to this first order issue, their sense of discontact, were somehow absolved moral responsibility or otherwise can be treated as passive responses to a swath of cultural aggression by the left is to entirely negate not only their own agency, but a sort of wide set of structural changes that are observable in countries throughout the world.

Excellent, Zach. That was a wholesome debate. I love it. I'm sitting here in the background, enjoying a terrific throw in learning a lot along the way. Let's go on to our second topic today, which is this slew of executive orders coming out of President Trump's administration, specifically the orders related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. They've been controversial, I think, for two reasons.

One, just the specific targeting of so-called DEI programs. And then a second kind of missive by the new administration, encouraging federal employees to report out and on fellow workers who might be trying to hide DEI programs under new acronyms. I guess there's a hotline. I don't know. I haven't seen the number. but it all does sound, Megan, doesn't it, a little bit like a witch hunt, like a bit of a moral panic or hysteria that's captured the Trump administration in its early days around DEI? I don't think it's a moral panic. I think they have very strong opinions about the direction that DEI turned. First of all, that's the legitimacy of affirmative action in general. And we should say that there has been a lot of fairly blatantly illegal behavior. in a lot of private firms and especially in universities where like it was never legal in the United States.

I know it's different in Canada, but in the United States, it was never at any point legal to say, we only want women of color for this position. That was not a legal thing to do. There are very narrow exceptions for things like acting. You do not have to offer Channing Tatum, the opportunity to read for Harriet Tubman. But in general, you can never do that. And I would, especially talking to academics, but I also heard it a lot from journalists. I heard it from like, you know, we're really only looking for a woman of color for this job.

Or we really only want queer people. And like, that's not legal. It was never legal. You couldn't do it. And a ton of it was going on. And it was the government had minority in women owned set aside contracting setasides. There were all sorts of like, and look, we can argue the wisdom of them. I am not as people on the right go.

particularly hostile to affirmative action. My hot take on it is that it was a clue G, less than ideal, but workable solution to the problem of 1965, and it has just become completely untenable in a country that's not 90-10 black-white or white-black, but rather is, you know, trending plurality white with a just bunch of different other groups, some of whom overperform, that this has just become an untenable situation. it was not politically going to go on forever, and now it hasn't. The public doesn't really support it and hasn't for some time. But I think that what they are trying to do is shock therapy.

And I think for not crazy reasons, so one thing that has happened over and over again is courts have said, you cannot do this thing. And universities especially, which is where we have the most visibility into what's happening, have just gone and found ways to do the thing they're not supposed to be doing while claiming they're not doing it. right? So if test scores are showing that I am giving people, like, that I'm creating quotas, and I keep getting a suspiciously consistent percentage of Asian, black, Latino, and white students every single year. And if test scores show how I have to kind of jury rig the applications to get those numbers, then I do away with the test scores because, like, those are, right, I make it harder and harder to see what is going on inside the office. And what they are trying to do is fight against that.

You can't rename it. You can't figure out some other way to do the thing that you're not supposed to be doing. You just can't do it. And that is why they have gone this heart against it. Whether that was good policy, moral, that's a different question. But I think they know what they're doing. And they've actually been very effective at doing it. Zach, let's have your take on this.

Is there balancing here, a correction? It may not be being handled here with a fine touch or with the kind of grace that one might like. But these policies, these priorities, you know, were a big part of the election. He won. He has a mandate, arguably, to do this. And isn't that, in a sense, what we're seeing here, his execution of that mandate in the early days of this presidency? Yeah. I have a lot of doubts about that.

mandate narrative specifically. I don't think that winning a plurality of a vote in a national election, at least it's not a minority this time, but it's a plurality, gives you, and a very, very, very, very narrow margin in Congress gives you a mandate that is to say democratic authorization for doing whatever you want, if it violates or contravenes core principles of liberal democracy. And so then the question is, are there red lines being crossed here? And I think to the extent that this were just an sort of an attempt to root out affirmative action practices, I would disagree with it on the merits, right? That's not, that would definitely not be what I am doing, or wouldn't I, if I were elected president, which I never will be, or nor would want to be. But in that weird hypothetical world, I would not be going around trying to uproot affirmative action programs.

I think they're still good on the merits. But I worry a lot more about this as being part of a much broader Trump administration policy embodied in the totality of different executive orders and actions, including a recent OMB order to pause funding totally unlawfully for federal agencies as, or sorry, for federal grants, excuse me, as being efforts to seize control along two acts. sees, right? One is remaking the nature of the federal bureaucracy, so using lawful pretexts to get lawful, or sometimes not even necessarily lawful, but pretexts, to get

people who are career civil servants out and replace with political cronies, or ideological allies, and the second axis is asserting a level of presidential power that totally upends the balance, the separation of powers as constitutionally envisioned. And I

worry that attempts to go through, and some these orders are really sweeping, and also include, I guess, maybe a third category, which is coercion of private sector actors to bend to the government's ideological line, some of which is happening directly in the DEI order. Those are the stuffs of real—this is how authoritarian power grabs start in other places have historically started, these kinds of actions. And given Trump's inclinations, I'm skeptical, right? I'm skeptical. And there's this important thing, and I struggle with myself about this, right? You don't want to say that everything Trump is doing is authoritarian, right?

Because that's not only wrong, it's misleading. And it's sort of morally wrong to deceive people if you don't think it is. But sometimes it can be very difficult to tell what's on the line between an effort to implement a legitimate policy goal and what's a dangerous power grab. And, you know, but when it comes to the DEI thing, I'm really on the fence as to which slot to put it in. So let's hear you that on this point, Megan, this is, you know, has to be seen in a broader context. It's the beginnings in Zach's words of a authoritarian power grab.

So as much as maybe some of us are skeptical about the merits of DEI programs as, you know, affected by different departments and agencies of the state, this is part of something, again, that's worrying and bigger than just going after these programs. It's about unbridled presidential power being exercised. in ways that are contrary to the best traditions of the Republic. I think we have to understand the entire DEI apparatus as being a massive authoritarian power grab from the get-go. I mean, right, so we start with an executive order from Lyndon B. Johnson on affirmative action in 1965, which is intended and does to coerce private companies as well as the government into doing.

And I think you have seen, especially from the practice of the offices of civil rights, right, is there is a tremendous amount, has always been a tremendous amount of extreme vagueness in what any of these terms mean. And so the onus is on the company to prove that they're not doing it. And so if you have sat through a useless diversity training, as I think most of us have, in the United States, where I once followed along one of these trainings and decided on a kick to see how many. of the studies they mentioned had replicated, the number was zero. And I think, look, these trainings don't exist because they help. They exist because they provide regulatory safe harbor. When the regulator comes to you, you can say, I did a training. They provide employment for the people who do them. They make the employees, on average, angrier and more resentful, rather than promoting racial harmony, if anything, they hurt it, but they give you regulatory

safe harbor. So another example is Catherine Lehman at the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Education. Famously in 2011, issues this dear colleague letter because she thinks campus rape is a big problem. And the campuses are not doing enough to crack down and make it easy to prosecute. I'm going to say boys, theoretically it's gender neutral. It's not gender neutral. These rules were 100% always entirely applied against boys, not girls. Or at least if they were ever applied against a girl. I have not been able to find that case. And so it basically said gut due process, they don't have the right to confront their accuser. They don't have the right to make it possible to get more convictions. You need more convictions and we want to see more

convictions. And if you don't, we're going to be really mad. This isn't even a formal rule. It's just a letter saying like, this is what we want to see. But everyone gets the message. And they all start putting these boys through kangaroo trials that are designed to get one result. many of those boys, I'm sure, were guilty of doing something bad. But of course, you have handed massive power to any girl who is angry at a boy and who wants to abuse this, and some of them do. You have created a situation where administrations are taking really complicated situations in which two people were drinking.

No one has good memories and are turning this into a rape conviction. Now, not in a court of law. But here's the thing. Like, that's on his record. He can't go to college somewhere else. now once you've kicked him out. His life's effectively over in a lot of ways, right? And this was all done with this vague. Now, why was this done? Because this was a giveaway to some of the president's powerful interest groups who really wanted that office. So they put Catherine Lehman there. And what was the

first? So the Trump administration comes in, rewrites these rules so that you have to give the boys due process. And what is the first thing Joe Biden does when he gets into office? Literally, like, in the first few days of his administration, he starts the process of unwriting those rules and reinstalls Catherine Lehman at the Office of Civil Rights. So, look, this has been going on for a really long time in this area. And I'm not in love with it when Trump does it, but I wasn't in love with it when Democrats were doing it either. So, Zach, last word to you. Look, it's, again, this is not how if you or I were in the Oval Office, we would decide to institute a major policy change.

But as Megan said, this has happened before. The moon waxes and wanes. Who knows what will happen in four years, eight years from now. In other words, this is all in some ways just par for the course. And maybe there's a side of us, in fact, that should welcome the pendulum swing towards a different direction than the one that it was in because the one that it was in before was actually quite extreme. Maybe we just wasn't fully debated and discussed and litigated until the most recent election. Yeah. The problem is this hasn't happened before, right? What's what we're seeing in terms of the uprooting of career civil servants going through and trying to get anyone who has diversity in their title fired, essentially, or stripping them of their jobs, the effort to purge the government. This is not normal, right? This isn't what happens in traditional turnover between administrations. Normal is the push and pull in something like the Mexico City policy, which is about funding of reproductive rights. services overseas, right, abortion-related services. Democrats will get rid of it. Republicans

will reinstate it. Happens every time there's an administration turnover. I have my views on which side is right in that dispute, but that's normal, right? And calling that a power grab by either side would be crazy. But going through the government and trying to find people that you think are ideologically disloyal or servants of an agenda that you dislike, rooting through, and this is not just in this area. It's in all sorts of different areas, by the way, I've heard of people. purges at the Department of Justice, where they're going through, you know, litigants and attorneys to try to see whether or not they're willing to implement the MAGA agenda. Like, political tests are being applied in various different things.

Even OMB, right, which is, you know, the personnel management of the federal government. You're hearing reports about purges of staff members of the Trump whose policies the Trump administration doesn't like. And this, this is what separates this. Oh, sorry. Oh, forgive me. I'm sorry. I said, I said, oh, and B, but I meant OPM.

Excuse me. Sorry, Office of Personnel Management. Yes. For those who are not deep in Washington law. You're right. Thank you, Megan. Thank you, Megan. I misspoke there.

Yeah. And so it's, to me, it's, it's breaking the normal pattern, right, of what happens, what administrations turn over in ways that. threaten very fundamental elements of the rule of law, political continuity, ensuring that regulations are implemented in a nonpartisan and transparent manner, and that the diversity purge is part and parcel of this. Right now, there are, again, elements of this. I don't actually have very strong opinions on the Title IX regulations.

I've just not informed enough to have a really strong opinion on it. So, Megan, you could be totally right about how this played out in college campuses. I don't know. And maybe it would be good to reverse that specific rule. But there's a difference between reversing specific rules and attempting to remake the federal government in line with a kind of personalist authoritarian, unitary executive type view of what it means to wield presidential power. And that's what Trump is doing overall. If you look at the sort of broad swath of executive orders, and it's difficult for me to separate out my assessment of this one particular executive order from the role that it's playing in a much broader policy agenda. Yeah.

Well, Zach, Megan, what a terrific show. I think we should do this again. I've enjoyed the lively back and forth that you've both offered our community. And I know on behalf of the Monk debate membership, thank you so much for coming on the Monk debates today. And unpacking these two big, juicy issues for us with lots of verve and vigor. Let's do it again soon. Thanks for having us. Yeah, we had a great time. The Monk debates are a project of the Oriya and Peter and Melanie Monk. charitable foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.