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You know when you're shopping online, you want to buy something and you're on a website that you already have a login to but you can't remember the password or you want to buy something. You got your credit card out but you can't remember the three digit number that you got to do at the end of your credit card number and then you got to go find your wallet and it's late and you're tired. Picture this though, late at night. You're scrolling, you see the product and you know what you see there? You see a purple pay button right there next to the product you want to buy. It has all your information saved. It makes checking out as simple as a simple tap of your screen. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like the Commentary Magazine podcast to brands just getting started. So for vendors, you got to think about how Shopify will help accelerate your efficiency, whether you're uploading new products or trying to improve existing ones, and packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines and even enhance your product photography. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. See fewer carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary shopify.com comment.
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Expect the worst Some green champagne Some die at first no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best.
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A
Expect the worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Thursday, June 4, 2026. I am Jon Peuthoricz, the editor of Commentary magazine with my two offers this week. One at commentary.org offer that is a subscription to commentary and commentary.org at the astonishingly low price of $19.95 per year for new subscribers only. You get Commentary, you get Commentary content. You get commentary.org's archive, 80 year archive of commentary, the best magazine published in America these past 80 years. 1995, an 80% savings. People have been lining up to sign up. You should be one of them too. Commentary.org offer and again, we have scheduled our 2026 commentary roast, our 17th annual roast and this year's Roastie, following people like Ben Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg and Tom Cotton and Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney and various other dignitaries who I
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B
hope you will Barry Weiss
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A
is Ron Dermer the right hand man of Bibi Netanyahu. So that is going to be November 8th here in New York City. To find out more about buying tables or seats at this annual fundraiser, you can go to commentary.orgoffer that's commentary. Excuse me, commentary.org roast. That's the roast subscription commentary.org offer. And if you come to the roast, you will meet my fellow panelists today. I mean, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel.
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B
Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
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A
And our contributing editor and host of the Breaking History podcast and columnist at the Free Press, Eli Lake. Hi, Eli.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
Guys, for the last week, I have been feeling very low and very worried and very depressed about the state of American politics, about the state of the war with Iran, about our relationship with Israel, about rising antisemitism, about the success at the polls of open anti Semites, the victory in a New Jersey primary of somebody who was actually a basically an affiliate, personal affiliate of al Qaeda. And the blind sheikh works for an Al Qaeda affiliate abroad. And then I thought, you know what? We are one month out from July 4, the 250th anniversary, the 250th birthday of the United States, commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence that incepted the United States. And I played with myself the veil of ignorance game that John Rawls came up with, which is to say, assuming you know nothing, assuming you're like a baby in heaven, you're a soul in heaven, and you are about to be born and you could choose anywhere on earth to be born at this moment, where would you choose to be born? And I cannot imagine that the veil of ignorance that pierced through while you were up in the sky looking down at the 204 countries of the United States that you would choose anywhere but the United States. I think we in the United States no longer have that surety that we live in the freest, the best, the most moral, the most successful and the most visionary country not only on earth today, but that the world has ever seen. And that was something that I think was axiomatic to Americans for a very long time. But for the last 20, 25 years or so, we have turned on the country to some extent, we have belittled it. We have not only academic disciplines but journalistic institutions contributing to a counter narrative of American history in which the American government is a bad guy and the American people are either morally or ecologically or financially depraved and stealing resources from other people and controlled by greed and all of this. And I just thought to myself, enough. And I wanted to spend an hour talking unashamedly about how great, how wonderful, how amazing the United States of America is, and how unbelievably grateful I am for everything that came before me. That led my maternal grandparents to come over from lithuania in the 1870s. That led my paternal grandmother, great grandmother, to bring my grandfather over from Poland in the early 20th century. That led my paternal grandmother and grandfather to come over from Galicia in the years surrounding World War I. All of them somehow coming together in weird places. One family in St. Paul, Minnesota, one family in Brooklyn. Issue of both those families somehow colliding together in 1946, marrying in 1956. I am born in New York in 1961. I am the luckiest person in the history of the planet Earth, as far as I'm concerned. And I'm lucky because I live here. So, gentlemen,
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D
you forgot one thing. Which is the best hockey team in the world, usa also taking over everything.
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A
Okay, well, you know, that's one of the many things that you can say from minor amusements to a document that guarantees us freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from having the government say, oh, you gotta have soldiers living in your house, whenever we say soldiers should live in your house. Freedom from self incrimination and freedom from excessive government, as the 10th Amendment promises, that the federal government, no power that the federal government has not enumerated to have, can it seize from the states. And on and on and on. So that's the big. Okay, don't everybody jump in at once. Are you not agreeing with the. With the proposition that I'm.
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C
I agree. I agree entirely to the point where it feels surreal to have been born here in this time. You know, it seems like a cosmic, like you hit some cosmic jackpot to have been born into the greatest country in history. And, you know, one of the things about the state of American culture and the rise in anti Semitism in particular, which is not only in the US but all around the world. Part of what makes it so distressing is that I've written and talked about the question of American Jews making aliyah. At what point does one. Does a Jew look around and say, it's time to get out? And what is agonizing about that question is, and I know, I've spoken to Eli about this, and I know a lot of people, I don't want to leave the United States. I desperately, desperately, desperately want to stay in the country that I love so much. It's not like the kind of decision one would make with the snap of a finger. The glories here are real, and we experience them every day, even if we take them for granted every day.
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B
Yeah, I think that's right. I'm going to say a couple things. One thing I love about America is that we may be a republic that avoids this classic trap of nations that Voltaire once expressed as wooden clogs going up the stairs and velvet slippers going down. Which is to say that every nation kind of becomes a victim of its own prosperity. Meaning that, you know, eventually. And maybe we're seeing this with American Jews, which is that without, you know, that the first generation that came here were these strivers that built a world, and then they sent their kids to universities. And then, you know, once you sort of reach the pinnacle, life becomes a little too easy and you lose that fire in the belly. And as one of the things that's remarkable in our America, and. And this is gonna maybe be uncomfortable for any of the more populist or MAGA leaning listeners of the podcast, is that because we have largely. We've fluctuated, obviously, between being a country opening our borders and then going through immigration restriction, but because we have waves of strivers coming into the country, we have been renewed. And that is something that I think has been an engine, in some ways, of America's resilience and creativity. And it's something that I think makes us exceptional. So that's one thing that I think that I want to be grateful for. Even though, of course, I would say that I don't endorse allowing people to come into this country who don't assimilate, Allowing people to come into this country who seek to undermine the country. Like that lunatic a year ago in Boulder, Colorado, who committed an atrocity against, you know, Jews marching to free the hostages. People like that, I believe, should be kept out. But that we are still this magnet for the fleeing genius of the world is one of our superpowers. And we saw that time and again. We saw that in, you know, the late 19th century and the early 20th century when many of the Jews. Your family, my family, John. Came to this country. And what did we get? We got Irving Berlin. You know, we got incredible people who added so much to the American experience. I believe that we saw this after World War II when so many of the most brilliant scientists who were fleeing Nazi Germany came to the United States. We became the home to Einstein. And I think that we will see it again. And so, in my view, that is something that we should kind of keep in mind, and I feel that, yes, we should do something about we can't have 12 million illegal immigrants in this country without a status, and that's a problem. And I largely basically think that the right got the better of these arguments. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it's also a great country, in part because we keep, we keep becoming this destination for people who are fleeing tyranny, who are going to bring their special genius. And that's why we have a Silicon Valley and that's why we have all these great things here.
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D
Can I add one point to that, which is that America is also the last America in the world. And that's part of what gives us this anxiety when we see things moving in the wrong direction. In terms of the appreciation of what America is and what it stands for, it sounds, it can sound very negative. You know, we can sound morose, as we say, and all that stuff. But, but the, the feeling behind it is this love of America, but also the appreciation that there is no other, there's no other refuge across the sea. America was and is the last one. And that to me has always been something that we have a responsibility to protect, also that, you know, there isn't going to be another place that will sprout up and do for people fleeing tyranny what America did. I mean, for the world. A country this large, a country this various, a country that has just this wide open space to open its arms and welcome you. And you combine that with the frontier mentality that has always been the American way. And you combine, you know, people searching for freedom with a very American idea of searching out and, you know, and, and exploring and discovering and all that stuff. And you create like these, these, these.
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B
Yeah, we're the masters of our, of our destiny. We can create, we can build a better world, we can build a better land. And it's one of the reasons I think anti Semitism kind of is, is. Is anti American because it's scapegoating, it's blaming. It brings out these kind of qualities. The true American spirit is, I'm so lucky to be here and I'm going to build, you know, I'm going to build my place here. I have the freedom to do that. And we don't have the kind of problems that plague Europe, which is, you know, that they are bogged down in kind of a caste system of sorts. And they still have that mentality. We don't have that here, which is great. And so, you know, it's quite possible that you can, you know, you see it all the time with kind of these families like, you know, the Kennedys, you know, in 1960 looked unstoppable. But you look at their generation, they kind of fall away. And then there are, you know, new dynasties that come up, which is, or new families. And that's something that is one of the engines of why I'm ultimately like I'm, I'm a long term optimist about America.
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A
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C
Can I add to what something Eli said there about, like, Europe? I feel so lucky to be American, and I am on some level constantly appreciative of, of what it means to be an American, that even when I go, when I travel abroad, even to modern Western democratic country, when I go to Europe, let alone Middle east or wherever else, I always get the creeps. There's the beauty, there's the culture. There's wonderful, wonderful things. On some level, being in a country, any country other than the one where you have explicitly granted personal liberties, being in a country where the state plays a somewhat larger role, where personal dreams and horizons are slightly more hemmed in. Whatever it is, I sense it. And the second I land on foreign soil, I want back here because of is a sense I carry around with me wherever I go.
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A
So once again, I'm a decade older than you guys are, two decades older than Seth. And so when I was growing up, it was still possible for Americans to believe, for example, that European countries had cultures superior to the United States, that they were more sophisticated, that they were more grounded, that we were thin and we were so populist and our strength was vulgar popular culture. And they were still producing the greatest writers, the greatest painters, poets. And at some point in the mid to late 1970s, early 1980s, it became clear that if that had ever been true, and it was, I think, largely that idea was largely a fundament or creation of people who had studied Europe and thought that it was still the same place that it had been before World War I. Kind of which is really the point at which you can mark Europe's civilizational decline as the engine of the planet's ideas and its sort of repository of human greatness, that it just wasn't true anymore. That where in the last 40, 45 years, could I say, like, somebody like Susan Sontag who would say, well, I spent half the year in Paris because the French are so much more cultured than Americans. That's just. It's not true anymore. Britain, France, Italy, what they have, what they are, are museums. They're the best museums on Earth. They are glorious museums. Going to Rome, going to Florence, going to Paris, going to Amsterdam, going to Barcelona, going to Madrid, going to everywhere you go, you get to live in history in a way that the United States does not allow you to. And to see and to feel and to see how what human greatness could produce in the past, in the past. And now we have no competitors not even culturally. We have no competitors culturally and we have no competitors politically. By which I mean, again, in the 1960s and 70s, there was a body of opinion in the United States that said that European social democracy was a system superior to the United States, that Sweden was a better country in some ways than the United States, that it dealt better, was more equal and all that. And then, of course, you had radicals who believed in things like Cuba being superior, North Vietnam being superior, though at some point it was no longer cricket to say that the Soviet Union was superior, though people had believed that in the 1930s and 1940s. Is there a single country? I'm trying to think now, being somebody who is anti American, like, trying to. I am an anti American. I want to leave America because I hate America. In the early 60s, black nationalists went to Ghana. Yeah. People went to Cuba, people went to Nicaragua. And of course, there was this weird American, you know, this tradition of very radical Americans going and living in the Soviet Union, among them, Lee Harvey Oswald. Is there a country that you want to live in outside of the United States to which you do not have, let's say, a fundamental binding like you have. Your grandparents were from there or your spouse is from there, or you really, I don't know, you love Russian literature. That you love Russian literature doesn't mean that you want to live in Moscow in 2026. Is there a country.
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B
Well, if you have a lot of money, John, you might want to live in Dubai or Lake Como. I mean, there's. If. It depends if you're, you know, if you have a gazillion dollars, then life could be nice in a lot of places.
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A
So you're talking about 5,000 people on this planet.
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B
I'm saying they don't live anywhere.
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A
They don't live anywhere. Those people.
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B
For the average American person, like a middle class person, that one of the marvels of our country is how many Americans, even after the financial crisis, even with higher interest rates, how many Americans own homes, how many Americans. It's normal for most American families to have vacations in the summer where they go to the mountains or the beach or whatever. These are things that are just not true in a lot of other places in the world. Now, yes, there is a standard of living. The state takes care of things, but the home ownership is one where. I think that's an extraordinary kind of accomplishment in America.
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A
But America, you know, we were talking about this a little on text, and this is sort of a slight detour, but America's effort to create and foster Burnish and promote the middle class and its independence through things like homeownership has in the past led to some very grievous policy errors, in part because it is a top down, top down ideas like it is good for people to own their homes. Therefore we must structure policy so that people, more people will own their homes. And the financial crisis of 2008 is the direct result of a policy consensus in the early 1990s that we should do what we can to raise the percentage of Americans who own their own homes from 61 or 62% to 67 or 68%. And that decision, which is what led to the subprime market and government supports and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac supporting all kinds of problematic loans and all of that, that decision helped cause the meltdown 15 years later. And the question you gotta ask yourself is maybe there's a reason that 40% of Americans don't own their own homes. Maybe, maybe they are not root sinkers. Maybe they are transients. Maybe there's a whole way of being and thinking that says I gotta be able to pick up and go at a moment's notice. I don't want to have to chain myself to a piece of ground. 60%'s a lot of people owning homes. 40% is people who rent. Why is renting. What is it that made from Newt Gingrich to Bill Clinton to Jack Kemp to everybody think this is better, this is worse. We are going to do what we can to nudge people into owning their own homes. Isn't the American way not to nudge people at all?
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D
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of like the. Owning the home was the American dream, but a lot of, a lot of. Right. So a lot of those bad policy ideas stem from the idea that we can, that the American dream is something you can pinpoint and then hand out like this idea that it's not nice if only some people have the American dream, feel that they fulfilled the American dream. But that's the point of calling it an American dream. A dream is not something that you go to a local office and somebody hands you. Right. The whole point of the American dream is that you worked your way into, you know, this sort of, this, this, this. The fact that we aren't structured by class. The fact that you do have this class mobility in America that you don't have in, in Europe still even, but certainly, you know, over the, over the centuries. So I think, you know, there's this idea that it's within reach, but part of the American dream is that there you, you do have to be a reacher for some time. That's part of, that's almost an initiation process in this sort of frontier minded country that there is a top of the mountain that you climb to and anybody can do it. And, and people get impatient and want to change that to, well, everybody can have it.
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C
I think also it has a little bit to do with the American understanding of the sanctity of property and property rights and what it means to have your own place that you cannot be molested in by the government or by outsiders, by anyone. Where this is, where this is your piece of land where you exercise your personal liberty. Now, of course, in theory, renters can do that, but I think there's a sort of magical tint that, that, that attaches to home ownership because of the idea of what it means to own a piece of property. I mean, it also has to do with why, you know, sort of runaway ideas about no property taxes and things like that. You know, there is this sort of obsession with one's home being the ultimate statement of personal liberty.
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A
But it also, I think it does mean, I mean, if Seth's right, that the American dream is homeownership, which I think was more a marketing ploy of the 1950s.
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D
I'm not saying the American dream is homeownership. I'm saying things get presented to people and then they try to hand them to people because it's good for elections.
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A
Look, one of the reasons that this happened is that from the 1950s onward, the government encouraged home ownership by sort of like the liberalization of mortgage policies by encouraging banks to, to do more lending, by protecting bank accounts through the fdic, all kinds of stuff that happened that meant that homeownership was viewed as a good. And that made it easier. You're talking about striving. So here we have this very problematic system, right, where you get a mortgage, you don't own your own home. Buy something, you get a mortgage, your bank owns the home, you're paying the bank. So the 30 years after you get the mortgage, you're finally going to actually own the home that is your home, right? So that's a. And that's only attractive because of this decision to say, okay, well, your mortgage interest will be tax deductible because we want to encourage you to own your home. Therefore, homes became more expensive and continue to become more expensive because the distorting effect of essentially a form of federal subsidy that also is actually unfair and unjust to renters. My point I don't want to divert into housing policy talk. All I'm saying is that in the United States, a very varied country, when we are governed by top down elite ideas about how to organize the country better, that often has unanticipated and unintentional consequences that speak to the original radical idea of the United States itself, which is that every man is a sovereign, you are sovereign over yourself. And that under those circumstances, being nudged around by the government may not be the wisest course for governments to take because it is inimical to the fundamental idea of the country itself. And people will do what they have to do. And incentives are created that may be perverse or may be damaging to them in the long run. But far from making it a striving thing, you say, no, no, I'm going to grease the skids. I'm going to make it so you should do this. Make it easier for you. Make it easier. You're not striving, you're like, you know, riding a benefit. And so, I don't know. This is a very abstract idea, but
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B
I bring it back. What I think you're getting at, John, is it's very telling that the Declaration and Jefferson's phrasing does not include the original big three from John Locke. Life, liberty and property. It's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And the pursuit of happiness is left open to individuals to define your happiness could be Sin City, New Orleans. Someone else's happiness could be One of these 19th century transcendental communes that were started, or the state of Utah or any other things. That's what makes America America. Kind of amazing is that it allows for various pursuits of happiness so long as they don't infringe on the rights of others. And that this idea of ordered liberty is at our core. But I would argue just on the housing thing that, I mean, I think there is a kind of strong argument, which is that when you own something, you will have a stake in your neighborhood, in your city. The blocks of homes where people are homeowners are often much nicer than blocks where people are renters. So all of those are kind of common goods. And it's not as these households.
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A
Look, it's absolutely true. What you say is absolutely true, but what I also say is absolutely true, which is that we sowed the seeds of our own financial self destruction.
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B
Yeah, but that some people would argue that it was also because we deregulated the securities industry. So it's the ability for the banks. Fair enough.
- [36:43]
A
I know, I know And I'm not again, like this is a John I want to add to.
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C
I'm thinking more deeply about your point. When you think about there's a natural inclination in the American spirit, let's call it, to resist these top down nudges. What is the trust crisis that we're going through now? Right. Why have all these institutions lost the public trust? Because they tried to push us in certain directions and the American people didn't buy it, didn't accept it, thought this was illegitimate. They thought the COVID regime was illegitimate. Telling us when we could go out,
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A
where we could go out, what we
- [37:38]
C
had to do, when we would go out, what would happen if we didn't get shots and so on. The media said, don't believe that story, believe this story. There was the campaign to fight misinformation, disinformation and mal information, which isn't even misinformation, just information that is inconvenient for certain officials. We resisted this, we resisted the scientific nudges, we resisted the media nudges, the governmental nudges and having narratives forced upon us. And so I think this is another example of sort of the fundamental American spirit coming out. Look, trust crisis is bad, but it is a sort of inevitable outcome of trying to institute sort of top down understanding of one's life on Americans.
- [38:51]
D
Well, and also the revolts against these things, you know, especially when they're with the revolts against government interference are, take what form? They call themselves the Tea Party, right? And it's like, it's a very American, there's an American iconography behind, you know, they're sort of like super American. Everything has its, you know, it's a name from the Revolutionary War and it's, it's, you know, it's a callback to overthrowing, you know, King George and all this stuff. That's what we name those things. You know, the pro, a protest against a health care bill. Abe. Right. That you're talking about spawns the Tea Party. And it's called the Tea Party for a reason. So even the people who do, who are involved, they have this sort of self conscious Americanism about it. And they, and they put it in terms of, you know, being American and the American tradition and all that stuff.
- [39:51]
C
Foreign.
- [39:56]
A
It's hot. It's a hot summer night and you're hot in your bed and the air conditioning isn't helping. You got your partner next to you and that partner is making you hot. You blame the thermostat, you blame the ac, you blame the person next to you. It's the sheets, man. It's the sheets. It's your bedding. Wrong. Sheets trap heat. Bowl and Branch provides you the cool side of the pillow and everywhere. Summer bedding options by Bowen Branch are breathable, lightweight, and designed to keep you cool all night long with 100% organic cotton sheets woven specifically for airflow, not just softness. I'm somebody who doesn't sleep well. Trust me when I say that these sheets make you sleep better. So sleep cooler this summer with Bowen Branch, get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bolandbranch.com commentary with code COMMENTARY that's Bowl and branch B O L L A N D B R- A N C H.com Commentary Code Commentary to unlock 15 off bolandbranch.com Commentary Code Commentary exclusions apply a quick message from today's sponsor, the ASPCA Pet Health Insurance Program. If you've ever owned a pet, you know they run on their own logic. Jump first, think later, Ask questions never. It's part of what makes them so lovable, but it's also how you end up with those surprise vet visits you didn't see coming. ASPCA Pet Health Insurance helps cover eligible vet expenses, so when those moments happen, you can focus on getting your pet the care they need without overthinking the cost or second guessing your decision. When you enroll in an ASPCA Pelt Health Insurance Plan, you could get a $25Amazon gift card. It's a little treat for you while you're doing something great for your pet. It's been around for almost 20 years and has covered nearly 1 million pets. In that time, you could tailor your plan to fit your budget, your lifestyle, and your pet's particular quirks. To Explore coverage, visit aspcapetinsurance.com Commentary that's aspcapetinsurance.Com Commentary Eligibility restrictions apply. Visit aspcapetinsurance.COM Amazon Terms for more info. This is a paid advertisement. Insurance is underwritten by either Independence American Insurance Company or United States Fire Insurance Company and produced by PTZ Insurance Agency Ltd. The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance. Arthur Kristol, an essayist of long standing, has a big has a big, long essay in the New Yorker this week about patriotism, in which he says, patriotism is no longer cool and can we live in a world without patriotism being cool? And this struck me as being very odd because I don't think for the editorial staff of The New Yorker. And for people like the editorial staff of the New Yorker, patriotism has ever been cool. I mean, one of the great satirical essays of our time by Tom Wolfe, the first essay in his book, Maud Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine, is a portrait of a writer on the Upper west side who is thinking about all of his commitments and how he has to pay off his. He has to pay for his apartment and he's got a house in the Hudson Valley. They're going to have a party. He hasn't set up the catering yet, and he's got a cocktail party to go to at 6 o'.
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D
Clock.
- [43:37]
A
And his kids have piano lessons and goes into this whole life of kind of luxury and glory and sort of like reputation, but anxiety about his position and how much money he's spending and all that. And then he decides he has to start working on what he's writing. And he rolls the piece of paper into his typewriter and he types, you know, the American Totalitarian State is the name of his essay. And that's the end. That's how the essay ends that for an entire world of the American elite. All of these things that we're talking about, you're talking about the Tea Party, you're talking about the revolt against authority and all of that, but that is not true for a very large, maybe not large in percentage terms, but extraordinarily influential class of people who live in America are the ones who have benefited the most from the United States, its freedoms, its ability to allow people who, like, are thought workers to earn salaries and live more like aristocrats than anybody else. And they look at what they've been given, they take everything for granted, and then they crap on the country and they say, we're not good enough, we're not fair enough, we're not free enough. Our history is based on injustice and racial and bigotry. And we, you know, and this cognitive dissonance is one of the reasons that we live in a world in which the idea that the United States is the greatest country on Earth is very much in question inside the United States. But as I say, it's like the oldest, most profound Jewish joke, which is someone meets a friend of his on the street, and the friend says, how's your wife? And the guy says, compared to what? So how's America? Compared to what?
- [45:56]
B
Yeah, but, John, if I push back just slightly, which is that a modified version of that sentiment of looking around and seeing injustice and trying to correct it is another one of America's Superpowers, the formulation from Martin Luther King, actually, it was originally Frederick Douglass. That the Declaration of Independence is something of a promissory note and that we have to make good on. It has been an engine for social progress and is one of the things that we should take great pride in. And one of the foundational flaws of the 1619 Project is that it sought to define America through its original sin without understanding the most American thing about us, or one of the most American things about us is that we started as a country that tolerated slavery, and then we had a civil war and we ended slavery, and then we ended Jim Crow. And this is all in some ways driven by this very American, our charter document, Declaration of Independence, which, you know. And the idea that we are striving for a more perfect union, always sort of seeing that we can think. So in some ways, that is part of an American tradition. Those thoughtworkers in Brooklyn who are constantly looking at things that are a problem. What happens is that it has curdled into a kind of systemic critique that America is just not worth saving or that America itself is endemically evil. And what we need to get back to is the idea that America is great. It's the greatest nation ever. And you have to compare it to all of the other nations. But we can still strive to become a more perfect union. And there are things that we have to fix. That used to be the Democratic Party. For a long time, it's sort of. We would have. And that is no longer a Democratic Party that elects Hammadi in New Jersey and is going to elect EL Said in Michigan and is coming up with reasons to vote for Graham Platner and thinks and takes a knee because of George Floyd and so forth. That's a political party that has lost the plot of America that no longer thinks it's worth perfecting that party.
- [48:12]
A
And those ideas are only possible in America. That's the freakish part about this. When we talk about. And to make. To broaden it out even further beyond America, we have had this fight starting out on the right. Only on the right about the Enlightenment was the Enlightenment pad. Did the Enlightenment divert Christendom into evil? And of course, the joke here is that the people who are writing this from their Aries at Notre Dame University and Harvard Law School and places like that, they're writing on computers. They're living beyond the age of 40 because of medical miracles that are entirely due to the revolution in science that the Enlightenment made possible. They drive a car that allows them to do X. They Fly on airplanes. Everything that they are, everything that we are, comes from that fundament. And to go back and say we would be better off living as we did pre Enlightenment is to say, great. You live on $3 a day for the rest of your life. See how that gets you. And it's similar politically to people in America who attack the idea of America, which is that they don't understand that if you lived in another country and you talked about your country the way that Americans sometimes talk about America, somebody might slice your head off with a scimitar or hang you from a crane or throw you in jail just to throw you in jail. If you speak a word in Thailand, which is not a country that you would think was. It's not on the list of countries that's wildly unfree until very recently, and it may still be the case, it was a crime to say anything negative about the Royal Family. It was literally a crime. You could be thrown in jail for using negative wording about the Royal Family. Think about what people write every. Think every single moment about Donald Trump or about Barack Obama or about Joe Biden. We have no compunction about speaking our minds. And the fact that that is taken for granted, maybe that's the most American thing of all somehow, is that it's become so second nature to us to live in a kind of freedom that no one ever knew before 1776, anywhere, ever in the history of mankind.
- [51:16]
D
That's the old joke, the old Soviet joke that Reagan loved to tell about the two guys arguing about freedom. And the American says, I could walk into the White House and bang my fist on Ronald Reagan's desk and say, I don't like the way you're running the country, Mr. President. And the Russian says, I could do the same thing. I could storm into Mr. Gorbachev's office, slam my fist on the table and say, oh, I don't like the way Ronald Reagan is running his country.
- [51:45]
A
Exactly.
- [51:46]
B
But can we steal my own?
- [51:47]
C
I thought the punchline was going to be, I could do the same thing once.
- [51:51]
B
Yeah, right. Can we?
- [51:53]
A
Let's.
- [51:54]
B
But I want to steal, man, the argument. Because in fairness, I think that there is a kernel of a critique, at least on the right, which is that in all of our prosperity, in all of our unregulated freedom, particularly with the Internet, it is now far easier for Americans and human beings to indulge their worst vices. We have online gambling. We have an online pornography epidemic. We have all the marijuana legalization. We have, in many ways, people have used their freedoms to become slaves to their basest appetites. And so when people talk about the Enlightenment, which is a radical critique and a wrong critique, in my view, is the reason for that, what they're really getting at is they would like to see some barriers placed either, you know, in society in some ways that would frown upon people who go through their lives only indulging their basest instincts because it ultimately leads to, you become. You're not happy. You don't really. You're not fully realized. And that there was something to be said for another era. I think it's better to sort of look back when maybe there were more barriers and that, you know, in the name of freedom of speech. I did a whole episode on this. I think everyone here would agree that it was outrageous to punish Lenny Bruce for telling dirty jokes about, you know, Jackie Kennedy. But by making Lenny Bruce the martyr, we ended up creating a culture that was incredibly profane and, you know, is. And is everywhere. And it's, it's. And so that, so I'm not arguing, I'm not arguing about. I'm not taking that line about the enlightenment that we, you know, I think I agree with you. That's, that's, that's nonsense. But to address that as a fair point is to say 2026, there's a soul sickness in America. It's too easy for listless teenagers to use their productive years just simply gratifying themselves in the basest of ways.
- [54:08]
A
Look, that's absolutely true. But now here's the question you have to ask yourself. All of the social pathologies that we see in the United States, with one possible exception, which is the level of violence, citizen on citizen violence, which does seem to be markedly higher here than it does in other democratic countries. Just more people kill more people than injure more people. Although the murder rate's going down, murder rate's going down. But I'm just saying it's still the case that we are a more violent country. We always have been a more violent country. And I'm not saying that that's not a sign of a social pathology, but it's always. That's why the. Compared to what thing comes up. Just as we have signs of social decay here that we all agree, I think are signs of social decay. The declining birth rate, various other things like that. All of these things are apparent and evident in almost every other Western society. They are undergoing the same social decay that we are, because a lot of that is the creation of things that we have not yet figured out how to control that. We're in the midst of this third industrial age that was sort of created by the computer and the linking of computers and the creation of the Internet and all of that. And just as the first 40 years of the Industrial revolution were a horror show, you know, we're a nightmarish horror show where the, you know, in Britain where the countryside emptied out, people basically ended up in factories working 18 hours a day, children working at the age of six, poisoning the atmosphere with, you know, coal dust and things like that. And until people started to get a grip on how you needed to contain this before it blew all of society up. The dark satanic mills of William Blake's imagining were a real thing. And the historians of the early Industrial revolution, many of whom were Marxists like E.P. thompson, they were describing something real that gave birth in part to Marxism, which is that early capitalism, untrammeled and uncontrolled, was. Did not protect people from the machines that were taking everything over. And we then got a grip on that over time. We have this same problem now. Are our social pathologies worse than the social pathologies of other countries? I would guess not. I don't really know in the same way, but this is sort of like the critiques of Israel stuff, where Israel gets blamed for things that everybody else does, or Israel does things that any other country would do, and then it's accused of doing terrible things when any other country would defend itself the way Israel defends itself. Similarly, we, because we are the freest country on earth, we attack ourselves for the bad things that we do and that. That we are, then that amplifies and people hear it more and more and we all share it together. But I'm not sure this is not a global, worldwide humanity problem that is going to be resolved over time. Unless of course, AI comes along and does take over and blows up the world like Helie. What's that Guy Yukinski says it's going to. But that's where I just think it's not fair to blame America, the American system, for this.
- [58:13]
B
Yeah, but specifically we can say this. We can say we went through a period, particularly with Silicon Valley and the Internet, where until about 2016 or 2017, we thought they could do no wrong. And we accepted all these kinds of products that they were doing that were making especially younger people who were becoming the digital natives miserable. And we are correcting that. That's the genius of America, is that we have this ability to correct and reform and sometimes it takes longer than it should. A lot of times it takes longer than it should. And sometimes the reform might introduce new problems. But that's the whole thing is that we do because we have this system that allows for, you know, regular elections and, you know, the rule of law and all of these kind of things that we take for granted. That gives us the ability to self correct. That is harder, I think, in other countries and even other Western countries where, you know, I mean, if I try to think sometimes if I was like living in Europe, I would be furious that so much of my daily life would be determined by EU bureaucrats.
- [59:32]
C
Right.
- [59:33]
B
How did this happen? You know what I mean? And I could have a lot of sympathy for that.
- [59:37]
A
But you might not feel that way if you were from Europe because you wouldn't have had the experience of being bathed in the society of freedom that is the United States.
- [59:49]
C
That's why I feel that way when I go to Europe. Yeah, yeah.
- [59:52]
A
But I'm saying you, although I have
- [59:53]
B
to say I was there, I was on my junior year abroad in college in Denmark when the Maastricht Accords, when they were first Denmark was going to join the eu and there were lots of. I mean, it was wild, but there were like these wild sort of street protests where they would bring out like, you know, visages of Odin and Thor and things like that to sort of say they wanted. It was an expression of we want to keep our Danishness. We don't want to just be subsumed into this Borg. So I do think that there is something that's not necessarily about the American freedom. But then getting back to what you're saying, this is the other great thing is that I would put this to the panel. I would love to hear your opinion on this, but I am sometimes of the view that if you are living in Mongolia or Iran and you believe in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, because we are a nation built on an idea, in some ways, I consider them Americans even though they don't live in America. Whereas the converse of that is, I think that if you're this new Democratic nominee for Congress and you were testifying on behalf of the blind sheikh at his criminal trial, then I don't know why you are an American.
- [61:13]
A
Totally agree. That part aside, yeah, I totally agree.
- [61:16]
C
But I don't want to lose track of. John, your point about the social pathologies here and elsewhere. If they are more pronounced here, and I don't know, it would be because we have more freedoms, because things are more lax. And it speaks to the idea that Ultimately, the best possible life for the largest number of people, not perfect, but the best possible by necessity, is a little messy. It's not prescriptive. And that means that we are going to have messiness that more regulated, more prescriptive cultures will not have. But we will also have greater glories and achievements as a byproduct of that messiness. And that's. If you can't reconcile yourself to that, then on some level then you're not fundamentally, I think, grasping what is great about this country. And on the point of these sort of anti Americans among us, something that has sort of, I don't know, calmed my despair a little bit in the moments over the past few years when I have despaired about the state of our society is to remember, and I have to remember this. And I think, John, it's something you even said to me at some point. Whatever it is that I am despairing over, it's not America. I'm having an increasingly large problem with my fellow Americans. But that is not the fault of this country's design, of its founding, and of all the liberties and checks and mechanisms for self improvement that are built into this country. That's a problem with them.
- [63:41]
A
I think this is an important point because we, we live in little polities, cities, towns, states, not just a whole country. And if you're somebody like me, most of the time the people that you vote for don't win. Just happens to be the case that I rarely vote for the person who wins. I'm completely accepting of the fact that that is the case. And I live in New York City and Zoram Mamdani is now our mayor. Something I could never have envisaged happening. But it has happened. And he has an idea about America, he has an idea about New York, he has an idea about the economy, he has ideas about how things function. And he is gonna try to enact them to the extent that he is energetic and ideologically driven and can sort of force his will on the sea. And you know, He's not getting this without a fight. He doesn't get to just. He doesn't get to take America from me. No, the people that we're talking about, Graham, Platner, Hamaoui, Al Said, the squad, all kinds of people, I'm not. They can, maybe they'll win, but you know, I'm not going down without a fight. And I kind of feel like we'll prevail in the long run, or people like us will prevail in the long run because There's a real nihilism in their approach to the United States.
- [65:35]
B
It is.
- [65:36]
A
They are trying to correct something that they actually don't really believe is correctable because they don't accept the premise of the United States as we understand it. Therefore, their fixes are band aids in their own minds to the fundamental problem that we are organized improperly under the terms of the Declaration and the Constitution and that we need to be organized differently. And that's a violation of the country's DNA and the skeletal structure of the country and all of that. And they're not going to win. They'll win on the margins. They win in various ways and shapes and forms, but nothing is static. You know, things, they'll do things and there'll be responses to the things that they do that will help discredit what they do. And that's also part of the American DNA.
- [66:44]
B
What does it look like when they lose, John? What would winning on our side look like besides the obvious voting him out of office? But I mean, when will the fever break?
- [66:59]
A
Well, I mean, I think that is. It's unknowable also because it's not really a fee. Here's the thing about. It's hard to change America politically. I mean, it's easy for people to win elections. Our system, the genius of our system, the ordered liberty that you talked about, is that we don't just bounce from policy to. It's hard to change laws, it's hard to change systems. It's deliberately built into the system that you have to go through this labyrinth just to get a street name changed. So they can't win that much necessarily, given their radicalism. But I mean, the way it works is if Zoram Mamdani wants to institute government owned. I keep using this example here. He wants to start, he's starting a government owned grocery store in East Harlem. There are 5,000 businessmen in East Harlem who are going to stand in front of that grocery store saying, you're stealing business from us. You're subsidizing this store. I've been working 14 hours a day, seven days a week in my bodega trying to make a middle class living. And you punk from Uganda, coming here with your communist ideas or coming in and you're basically using the power of government to drive my store out of business. That's not America. That's the dynamic. Until he starts acting, it's all theoretical. When it becomes practical and you start doing things like, as I say, like encroaching on the rights of others we don't take that lying down in the United States.
- [69:01]
B
See, I would argue slightly differently. I would say in many ways, even though Clinton beat Bush and Perot. In 1992, that was a victory for Reaganism in many ways because of how Clinton was running the ideas of the Democratic Leadership Council and then ultimately what he ended up doing, ending welfare as we know it and pursuing NAFTA and free trade agreements. These were conservative ideas that were resisted for generations by the Democrats and mainstream liberal progressivism. And then you finally had the consolidation or the, or the kind of ideological victory when you finally had Democrats or liberal acknowledge and say, no, no, these were the right ideas. So ultimately, even though it's not going to be us who vanquishes the squad and Mamdani, it will have to be a future New York Democrat, I think, who will have to say.
- [70:09]
A
I just don't think that's. I think your analysis is. I think your analysis is flawed here because Clinton came into office in 1993 and attempted to enact a liberal to left agenda from January 93 to November 1994, and the country revolted against him.
- [70:30]
B
Yes.
- [70:31]
A
And he, to save his ass, changed policy directions. I mean, he didn't do a lot of things.
- [70:41]
B
Hold on. You have to credit him for how he campaigned as well because he did invent himself in the 80s. But you don't think that that was significant.
- [70:50]
A
No, no. He ran by saying X, Y and Z. And then he came in and everybody that he empowered wanted to do top down health care and midnight basketball and this and that and the other thing. And he was, for the first time in 40 years, Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives because he came in thinking he had a mandate to change the country into a liberal country. And he only got 43% of the vote. And he was canny enough and cynical enough and unprincipled enough to flip his politics around. Go back to the advisor who helped him be a Democrat in Arkansas and win in a state that was going more and more conservative. And to remain the governor of Arkansas in order this would be. He had to try it and have his hat handed to him until he moderated. And that's the question about the Democratic Party. Maybe that answers your question of what breaks the fever is.
- [71:55]
B
Yeah, it's a symbiotic religion. I think you're underplaying how Clinton invented himself and became a national politician after his disastrous 88 speech. But it was even then he was representing this strain within the Democrats who felt that they could no longer be the party of the big unions and the Rainbow coalition and environmentalists and so forth. And he did present himself that way and in many ways campaign that way. And you're right, he gets in power and the Democratic Party is still the Democratic Party. And the first thing he wants to do is Hillary Kerr. And that failed. And he then reverted, if you will, back to like his old reinvention or something. But I concede that he, that he needed the push from 94 in order to fully do it. But that's, I'm just the point, the larger point is that it will take, it won't be Fetterman, it probably won't be Richie Torres. I don't know if it'll be gottheimer. And we may not even know this person. But there will have to be someone who emerges in New York who says, this is not us. And you know, if the Democrats were smart, they would come up with ways to try to keep the DSA out of their primaries. That would be nice. But it's ultimately gonna be up to them. And if we can reach them, I think a lot of them, I talk to many Democrats, I can't tell you how many Democrats who are turned off by this, who listen to the commentary podcast. And they wouldn't call themselves neoconservatives, they wouldn't call themselves Republicans, but this reaches an element of that world. And so. But I'm saying it's gotta be coming from that democratic kind of perspective.
- [73:41]
A
Well, of course. I mean, ultimately though, the point is everybody here is making the case that America has a regenerative and self repairing function. And the thing that we fear, I think, is that that's always on the verge of somehow being lost or that we will develop an immunity to the cure and be dragged down by the disease. But 250 years of the United States tells us the other story. And the one thing that we sort of didn't get to is this question of we look at this now, we say, look how terrible things are here. And I'm sorry, but if you live in the United States in 2026, things may be bad for you depending on where you are. You may be in family dissolution, you may be a porn addict, you may be a gambling ADD addict, you may not have a fulfilling joy. You're 23 and you don't know what you're going to do with your life and this and that and the other thing and freeze frame at any moment, at any historical moment in the last 250 years. And while These specific social pathologies may not have existed in previous eras. There were way many more barriers to prosperity and there were way, many more ways that you would die young. And there would be way, you know, I mean, ultimately the kinds of things that we take for granted are things like we seem to have just cured obesity, right? Because somebody in this country got the idea that we should look at the digestive system of the Gila monster and ask why the Gila monster only eats twice a year. And maybe there's an enzyme in the Gila monster's stomach that can somehow be turned into a medication that we can take that will mean that we can eat less and not crave more food. And in 10 years, nobody in America is gonna be obese. That happened here. That happened. Eli Lilly. These companies did that. There are only two or three companies in the world that develop drugs like this. Some of them, I mean, as it happens, are, I mean, and so we are sitting here that happens because of 250 years of history. Meaning, I don't know who did it. That person is probably the kid of an immigrant. The head of, you know, the head of Pfizer is a, is a, is a, is an immigrant to the United States. They came up with the MNRA virus. I know psychotic people think that's terrible and you're all crazy and you should, you should go get, you know, you should go get help if you think that it's bad. But
- [76:33]
C
that's.
- [76:34]
D
Maybe Eli Lilly could develop something for those people.
- [76:39]
A
I just think that's what we take for granted. We take for granted that almost everything that we have that we take for granted can't be taken for granted in the United States.
- [76:52]
B
Can I throw an audible at the end here? Yeah, I just want to. We've been talking about very high minded ideas and it's been a great conversation and it was a really good idea to do this in the lead up to the fourth John. But can we just name one? And I'll start a tangible thing that is American that we just love. And I'll start. The American Songbook is such a treasure. I did an episode on this that kind of talked about how Jews wrote your favorite Christmas songs. But it is a great story. The American Songbook, because it's not all Jews, obviously, but it's a lot of Jewish immigrants who compose sort of these standards that we take for granted, including God Bless America by Irving Berlin, and they're influenced by black music. And then my favorite part of the American Songbook is that then many of These standards that are first introduced in musicals become transformed into some of the great American jazz music because they are lending themselves to improvisation. That, to me, is the most American story. And I like to think of the American songbook as something that's kind of constantly evolving. So I want to put, like, some of my favorite Stevie Wonder songs in it as well. But that is a very specific thing about America, not an idea that I just love. And I would love to hear if anybody else has.
- [78:15]
A
Okay, I want to build on that. That's gonna be something I'm writing right now. Because the American. The classic American song and the classic American songbook is two and a half to three and a half minutes long. Yes, that's new. There was no such thing as, like, the short song. Right. Classical music doesn't have short pieces. And why did that happen? Technological development. The recording, the record. Right. 78s, they couldn't be longer than that. There wasn't enough space on the record. They figured out three and a half minutes, 78s and 45s. You had to be, like three and a half minutes because the groove, the number of grooves that you had to put on the record would run out. And so songs had to be compressed shorter to make them fit on the record, which turned out to be like the sonnet. The ultimate reason that this songbook is such an astonishing cultural experience. And why did that happen? Because we developed the phonograph, the Victrola. We developed a phonograph and two immigrant Jews, one an immigrant Jew, one not an immigrant Jew, named David Sarnoff, and the son of a cigar manufacturer named William Paley, both invented radio, commercial radio and radio broadcast the songs that were in the songbook and popularized them. And so you have technology interacting with culture. That's America. Technological advancement. And then the way to use it culturally, that's just sort of an astonishing.
- [80:06]
B
And I just want to say one more thing on that, which is that the European tradition of classical music is you have to play it exactly as the composer put it on the sheet, and that you are measured by how precisely you render that piece of music. The American Songbook, one of its geniuses, is that you can hear a Frank Sinatra version of a song from the American Songbook. And it is entirely different than how Mel Torme would do it or how Ella Fitzgerald would do it. And that's the other part of it, which is that even in that we have these composers, but even within those compositions, there is room for your own creative expression, which puts your own mark on it, which is another wonderfully American thing.
- [80:52]
D
Yeah, I have something that perfect to tack on to. This is. A few weeks ago, Rea Tepper, who is the editor of the Omni American Review, this publication, sent me an email and he said, we have something you're really going to love. A historian found a. The historian's name is Uri Appenzeller. He found a. An unpublished, never before published English essay by Zev Jabotinsky. And they are redoing the archives. And it was just sitting around. It's on jazz in 1926 and reading. And this is two of the things that I love, which is one, is a defense of American culture, and two, the way outsiders marvel at what America can do and produce. This combines both of.
- [81:46]
A
Of them.
- [81:46]
D
1926, jabotinsky was on a tour of America and he was having kind of a lousy time. And then someone's assistant brought him to Harlem where they went to a speakeasy and he saw jazz and he came home and he wrote this essay, which is structured as a conversation between three people, two friends in Europe and a third friend who just came back from America. And it is a wonderful. It is exactly what you're talking about. It's called America has a Rhythm by Zev Jabotinsky. And he begins with the conversation taking place between these guys. And somebody says, oh, you just came back from America. That's great. I've never been. And the guy who just came back from America contradicts him and he says, america is right here. It surrounds you. You breathe it in. And not only now, but ever since childhood. And from there they get into a long historical debate about culture, movies, music, television shows, children's programming, you know, from in Europe and in America, what America means. And they talk about the pioneer spirit, the hero. And each time the speaker has a. A retort that explains why this great revolutionary thing is really American and came from America. And it is a wonderful view of it. And at the. And. And at some point. And so he. They get to jazz and he says something that, you know, Eli, you just evoked. But he says this. The guy says, I am not musical. I don't know much about music, but since you asked me, here you are. A hundred years ago, the theory of music began with the distinction between musical and unmusical noises. The first category was extremely aristocratic, select and exclusive. Not every chord even being allowed in, only such as were euphonious, in a word, offense, within which there was a privileged clique of strictly filtered sound combinations. Then he talks about Wagner and others. You know, trying to breach it. And then he talks about the American discovery of everything and especially African American music. And he says, which he says simply pushed down all the fences. Here's what he said. He not only abolished the difference between the chord and the dissonance, but the very conception of musical noises itself. He proclaimed and proved that music accepts all form of sound. Noise, knock, squeak, well, howl, bawl, scream, roar, whistle, creak down to belching. Everything legalized. That's what you call jazz. Another gap in the fence pierced by pioneers, another extension of the frontier America.
- [84:39]
A
We should say that Zev Jabotinsky that you're talking about was one of the most remarkable men in modern Jewish history. He was the leader of what's called the revisionist Zionist movement, a sort of a democrat, where the David Ben Gurion, his great rival, was a socialist. He was a literary man of letters. He wrote novels. But he led this. He led first. He led the Jewish British Legion in World War I. And just an amazing figure in Jewish history and kind of in world history.
- [85:21]
B
And he was right.
- [85:23]
A
And he was right and he was right. And he was a brilliant writer in this.
- [85:26]
B
Absolutely right.
- [85:28]
D
That was, that was actually. Arye sent me this, this email in response. I had written a post at Commentary's website in late April called Jabotinsky was right about everything, so cheer up. And he sent me this email and he said, you're not going to believe what we have here.
- [85:42]
A
Yeah, yeah. Hey, what do you got?
- [85:46]
C
I'm going to go with a weird one. Okay. The martini cocktail. People think of it as sort of continental. They think of it as a sort of European invention. It is not. Martini is a vermouth company. That's European. But the actual invention, it's disputed. Maybe it was on the west coast, maybe it was in New York City, comes from the US and it's not only my favorite drink, but I like that. Unlike, say Scottish whiskey or Irish whiskey or French wine, all of which are sort of pure representations of their countries, we have the cocktail, which is a blend. And so it's not just martinis, by the way. It's cocktail culture generally, which actually I don't kind of love, but that our signature intoxicant is blended and adaptable and forever changing and self improving. So that's mine.
- [87:03]
B
Gin or vodka?
- [87:05]
C
Personally?
- [87:06]
A
Yeah, vodka.
- [87:09]
B
Me too. Very dry. Just show the bottle of vermouth to the vermouth.
- [87:16]
C
I like vermouth. And by the way, I like gin martinis too. I just prefer vodka.
- [87:20]
A
But I mean, that is a very good Way to end. Because this idea of the blend is sort of what Eli is talking about and is again a refutation of the blood and soil conservative idea that the United States is comparable to other countries in that, you know, Americans have been here for six generations are somehow more American than an American like Marco Rubio, who is, you know, whose parents came from abroad. America is a blend. It is a constant blend. And the songbook is a blend. I mean, you know, my. Not to sort of go on forever about this, but Harold Arlen, the composer who wrote the most African American inflected popular songs written by a white man was the son of a cantor from Buffalo, New York. He wrote Blues in the Night, he wrote Somewhere over the Rainbow. I mean, he wrote the man that Got Away. These are songs that could not exist without sort of the blues and folk traditions of African American music. They also sound cantorial. And so that alone is one of the great. Is a symbol of this constantly changing America that. Yeah, the problem with some of the current ideas on immigration are that they seem to think that we can freeze this in place and we can't, we shouldn't. We don't know what America will look like in 2100, but hopefully it will look very different, but it will be much richer because it will have everything that was in the past and new stuff coming in in the future that will blend and enrich and enliven and till the soil and cultivate new growth. And that is something again, with the exception of a country like Israel maybe, and maybe a couple of other places on Earth, that is not happening. That doesn't happen. It's not part of how the country functions. And it's a world historical achievement. And we are again, I feel like I'm the luckiest person on earth and in history just to be here right now. So we'll leave it there for Abe and Seth. And thank you, Eli, for joining us today on John Blackboards.
- [89:59]
B
What a great episode. I love this was a great, great conversation. Thank you.
- [90:04]
A
Keep the candle bur.