Trump: A World-Historic Figure?

Hello and welcome once again to The Roundtable, your weekly publishers and editors podcast here at the American Mind. I'm your host, Spencer Clavin, associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and editor in charge of the Strait of Hormuz at the American Mind. I've been appointed overseer of that particular geopolitical region. In case you were wondering who's in charge, it's me. I'm joined this week by publisher and president Ryan Williams and managing editor Mike Sabo. I'm back home for those of us, those of you who are watching this on YouTube, which you should sign up to do if you are not already at the American Minds channel on YouTube. I've returned at last to Nashville from whence I broadcast and we are going to continue discussing the war in Iran since, of course, that's what's going on. There's not much else dominating the headlines right now, but we wanted to approach it from a particular angle. Last week we discussed the defection of some young women from the MAGA right, the supposed defection or the reported defection. We talked about to what extent that defection is real, how widespread it is. Now we want to broaden that theme a little bit and talk about the supposed civil war within MAGA generally that this war in Iran, this actual war in Iran, is supposed to have prompted. The state of affairs in the actual war is that Trump has postponed some threatened strikes on Iran's power plants, claiming that there are talks in the works that might resolve this conflict once and for all. Many things about this are murky and probably by the time you hear this new details will have emerged. As of right this moment on Tuesday morning, some Iranian officials have denied that these talks are in fact scheduled to move forward. There are reasons why they might want to do this, including because if they actually are in negotiations with America, they would want to signal that they're not because it would be viewed as a kind of betrayal to collaborate with the great Satan. But on the other hand, Trump also, it's been pointed out, by his detractors in the press might have reasons to exaggerate the fruitfulness or the hopefulness of these talks, including kind of easing up the problems that the war has created with the economy. And indeed, oil prices have dropped. The stock market is up after some difficult weeks. So this is something which, as the administration itself has signaled, we really are not going to be able to kind of adjudicate in the press. But it's part of the general froth of commentary and discussion around this war, especially in a week which kind of counts as his last week to flatten the curve, if I can use that analogy from a painful time in our national life. Trump said, I believe, at the outset that there would be four weeks to kind of make this thing work. We're in week four now. And the extension of these threats, the kind of postponement and the continuing disagreement over the Strait of Hormuz, to which I alluded, major shipping area, is giving people pause, making some people antsy that this will be a forever war, as it were. So obviously, a tense week all around and a developing situation. We wanted to pull back and talk about, as I said, this idea that the whole thing is fomenting discord within the MAGA ranks. We've touched on this in a number of ways. We've talked about the split, the potential split between J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, who represent two different strains of Trumpism, two different approaches that Trump has taken or that Trump's followers want him to take to politics and especially to global affairs. Vance, of course, being the no-new-wars isolationist type. Rubio, speaking very broadly, being his executor of more forceful, aggressive interventions overseas. Trump himself, we've noted, is a longtime Iran hawk and so isn't necessarily shifting his position, but it does seem as if maybe the center of gravity has shifted more in the Rubio and perhaps the more conventional, I guess, American conservative direction, at least since 9-11. Meanwhile, the MAGA base, and I'm now going to portray this as it's being portrayed in the press, both pro-MAGA and kind of anti-MAGA, seem to have developed this narrative that the MAGA base feels betrayed, right? This was something that they didn't vote for. And Trump's war in Iran represents a set of concerns which really align more with his own preoccupations, perhaps Benjamin Netanyahu's preoccupations in the most conspiratorial version of this. This is Netanyahu's and Israel's war altogether. And so figures like Tucker Carlson and Macon Kelly have been kind of saying that this represents a betrayal of MAGA priorities, which is being spun out into this idea that there is a MAGA civil war, that basically you've got a dividing line now between the hard MAGA types and the people who were kind of along for the ride but have now hijacked the program into a sort of neoconservative nation-building dream. On the other hand, Ryan sent us this very interesting poll from The Hill that kind of puts some numbers on this and complicates that equation. This is a poll especially focused on younger conservatives. So those are the people who would notionally at least represent the base in the background of the Tucker Carlson types. In other words, it's usually thought that young new right-wingers are more radical, are more forceful, and more isolationist, more suspicious of Israel. All of this is part of the portrait that people draw of the young kids with Z and Tucker and Megan on the one side, and then the boomers and the old cons and the con-inc types on the other, led perhaps by Ted Cruz, let's say, or Mike Huckabee. But The Hill finds in its poll of young Republicans that actually that's not the case. I'm just going to read a few of these polling numbers so that we can toss them about, and if you guys were more interested in others, you can bring them up. But I found it interesting that The Hill's firm found that although U.S. adults overall are closely divided on support for this war, 44% supporting and 41% opposing, The Hill found that 61% of young conservatives support the war. Meanwhile, young conservatives largely reject the isolationist policies championed by Carlson, so they're not necessarily aligned with Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Megyn Kelly, right? 57% of young conservatives say the U.S. should play an active role in the Middle East, whereas one-third, 32%, prefer a more isolationist approach. And then finally, and this is the one that I particularly was intrigued by, this idea that Israel is leading us by the nose here doesn't seem to have a lot of favor among those young conservatives pulled by The Hill. Now, I'm most interested in this because this is an idea. Conspiratorial fancies about Israel and, you know, kind of flirtations with anti-Semitism is very much kind of alive on the left, and there's robust polling to show that. The right also has its own problems with this stuff, so it's been discussed that maybe, you know, we're seeing kind of a left-right convergence on these sorts of ideas. But in fact, asked whose interests the U.S.-Israeli military operation is serving, two-thirds of young conservatives believe it primarily benefits both countries, that's 35%, or mostly serve American interests, that's 31%. So put together, American interests or both countries makes for two-thirds, and then just one in five says the war is mainly serving Israel. So I have a lot of thoughts about this. My first and, like, global take is sort of more general, not related to the war, and that is this just reminds us how often generational discourse is kind of fake. Like, you get a lot of takes in the media about what Gen Z thinks or what Gen Z right-wingers or Gen Z lefties think. Now, I am a capital-M Millennial, right squarely in the middle of that demographic, and so I well remember. I'm old enough to recall what it was like to read think pieces about what Millennials think or what Millennials do, capital WMD, WNT, and think, what the hell kind of world is this take coming from? You get these, like, particular people with particular points of view who become thought influencers, and they are taken to stand in for this broad youth trend. But usually, that youth trend is being pitched and sold to older and uncomprehending generations who are kind of reading from a middle-age perspective and being like, hmm, what an interesting explanation of the youth. So it's nice to get some corrective of that when it comes to Gen Z, where you often get these stories about how Gen Z is radicalizing all of this. Maybe not so much, maybe not the case and maybe indeed not true that MAGA generally is cracking up in quite the same way that we have been led to believe. But I've talked way more than enough at this point. I visited Ryan in Dallas on Friday and had a lovely time with his family, and he told me that he introduced me to his young daughter as the other guy that talks a lot on the podcast. So I'm going to shut up and let you two talk a lot in response. What do you think? Yeah. Well, we should say that the poll is not The Hills. It's a poll conducted by Doug Schoen and Carly Cooperman and their firm. And I was intrigued. So they say it's 350 young conservatives. And I looked at the full poll. What they did is poll a few thousand adults, normal size poll, opinion poll. And then they pulled out of that the 350 conservative ideology types who are under 30 or 35 or whatever. So hence the 350 number. I, like you Spencer, have been struck by a couple things about the Iran conflict and they're related, I think. It's very hard. Well, this is an artifact of social media and our media landscape in general right now. It's hard to get straight information about the war, especially if you confine yourself to X, which, you know, is probably a bad news consumption strategy if you only do that. Although X is quite useful for surveying the landscape, especially the ideological landscape of the right and the left. It remains an over-representative sample of journalist and politics type. So useful for all those reasons. But, you know, it's hard to get straight info on this Iran war. It seems like everyone, even in different ways, maybe more muted ways, the mainstream media outlets are all pushing some sort of op right and left. I mean, some sort of opinion that they want you to have. So I've been struck by that on Iran. It seems like 360 degree quasi-information ops everywhere. And if you have a certain type of algorithm on X, like we do, you would think that this is tearing the right apart. That's certainly the impression that Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly want to convey. Joe Rogan had, who did he have on? Schellenberger on, maybe last week, Michael Schellenberger. And they opened with discussion of the Iran war. And it's certainly the impression that Joe Rogan has drawn from this whole thing, that somehow this is a civil war on the right. And I would caution people to have some skepticism about that. And this little piece of polling that's reported in the opinion piece in the Hill by Schoen and Cooperman or Carlyman is illustrative of that. And so we're now in week four, as you say. It will be interesting to see how all this looks two weeks from now, given what happened this week. So I just want to caution everybody from drawing sweeping conclusions about what this is doing to a coalition. I think the jury is still out. And a lot will have to do on whether or not this is successful to pick up a theme that we've been discussing for a few weeks. And that also will have a lot to do with, I think, the future of the restrainers in this coalition. Which is, it's not to say that Trump pulling this off successfully, whatever success looks like, just take their own terms, I guess, some sort of stable resolution to this in the coming weeks. Will that destroy the restrainer view forever? No. But I think it will illustrate a third way, which in many ways is the Claremont Institute way. It's one we've been arguing in the Claremont Review books since the Iraq war, even the Afghanistan war. Which is to say, not messianic neoconism, but also not fortress America, pull up the drawbridge and sit behind an awesome nuclear deterrent and do nothing in the world. So in that sense, I think Trump is a return to a more realistic, but not a realism, that is the distinction between sort of common sense and ideology, as I'm in to convey with drawing the line between being realistic and being a realist, a return to a more realistic foreign policy. And as I said a few weeks ago, Trump decided this was a calculated risk that he had to take. He's reinforced that in the last couple of days, saying, I decided we had to go, it was a good time to go, and to wait would have been bad. The last thing, I think a somewhat new development, which surprised some people, was that Iran, there's all sorts of swirling disinformation about this too, it's hard to really parse it, but it looks like Iran does have fairly capable intermediate range ballistic missiles that they tried to launch at Diego Garcia, an island base way, way offshore from the theater of conflict. So that surprised some people and it suggests that it's a piece of the intelligence that Trump was consuming and led him to the conclusion that we'd had enough with this mercurial, belligerent, mendacious regime in Iran, and that it's a quick reactivation of its ballistic missile program and other conventional missile program was going to be unacceptable for our ally Israel, but also for us. I think those two judgments should be taken independently, although they have to be related somewhat, given Israel's proximity to Iran and our much farther distance from Iran. So I guess that's my take. Yeah, I guess, I mean, just the hall of mirrors that is the media's take on this war, with not only the inter-partisan conflict of the Democrats and the Republicans trying to get one up on each other, and especially as we head into the midterms, but also the intra-party fight on the right. I think the fight is real. I don't mean to downplay it, and we don't mean to downplay it here, but I think maybe it's being overdone and it's being manipulated and hyped by different factions within the right to get their way. And so we have like, it's a bunch of collapsing concentric circles of half misinformation and disinformation, both with ops being run inside each party and movement and with the two parties and movements against each other. And that's to leave aside, of course, the separate question, which is always part of this whole environment, which is foreign actors manipulating social media and manipulating factions within the right as well. So I think that part of this is the intelligence that I know Trump has talked about, that he's seen, that Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, that he's seen. I think Joe Kent maybe talked about it on Tucker, but I also don't think he was in the room. And one of his arguments against it was, he was sidelined along with other kind of realist voices like J.D. Vance, et cetera, which is interesting. But I think part of that is, it's the kind of Iraq war, it's Afghanistan, it's that even to Trump, even, you know, I mean, I think it's like 85% to 95, you know, 90% of the MAGA base still obviously supports Trump. This is the all-important, I just have to stress and underline, the all-important SABO theory of millennial boomerism, which we should like stress is such a good insight that we've been criticizing the boomers forever for rerunning the Cold War in every conflict. And millennials and above now do the same thing with 9-11 and the subsequent kind of disastrous interventions into the Middle East, that we think everything is that. So just to kind of highlight that, I think. Yeah, no, and I think it's just to say, look, we all have our biases, we all have our lenses through which we view this, and I think it is really important to understand it's not just, I mean, typically, you know, the boomers are the only people that are highlighted as if we're somehow immune. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, Hegel, you know, looking at, oh, you know, only I could kind of see what history is and how it's moving. It's like, okay, so you're exempt like from your own theory, like that's, you know, a bit of an issue, to say the least. You know, philosophy of history, he's the only one standing outside who can see it all. Anyway, so I think that that's a problem too, is that there is a trust that used to be there that is not. So when people hear about intelligence that other people saw, they want to see it too. I think, you know, depending on what it was, how much of it it was, I mean, I think people have a view too of, hey, at least in Iraq, you had months of arguments, you had Colin Powell, you know, in front of the UN, you know, depending on how much evidence and what that exactly showed, but you had a greater kind of push toward it and an argument toward it. So I think that that is one problem kind of for Trump and just, you know, again, and we've returned to this over and over again, kind of the comms, and just to hear how many different arguments there are and have been put forward. I think another thing too, I was actually listening to Chris Ruffo and Lómez, their podcast, and they had on Will Chamberlain, who is for the war, they had on Kurt Mills, the American conservative, who is not. And he even said, look, you know, I think Ruffo asked him, so what would you do? And he would say, pull out right now. Almost without any prudence at all. I mean, almost like how we pulled out of Afghanistan. So I think that there are some restrainers who that's what they want to do. Some, you know, very much, you know, hardcore non-interventionists pull out, you know, and I think if it's the four to five week thing, if it's a little bit more, I think once that happens, you will see some of the cracks that I agree have emerged on the right, no matter how the press has played it up. I think you'll see that tamped down somewhat and kind of go, you know, under the rocks again, and we won't see it emerge probably until, you know, maybe, you know, 2028, you know, depending on especially which Republican runs. And just really fast, I kind of actually just kind of went through like a taxonomy of, you know, kind of what this whole like Iran war has showed. You have the non-interventionists like I mentioned, and overall too, you know, it's the playing truster versus panicking thing. And there's something to that. It's too simple. You've got non-interventionists, so, you know, realists, paleocons, largely against the war. But interestingly enough, you've got guys like Paul Gottfried over at Chronicles, Walter Block, who's a libertarian economist. He actually backed the bombings of the nuclear sites last year. I'm actually not sure how he's come out on the Iran war. You've got this kind of new group that I've been kind of studying, which is really interesting. It's radical normies, I call them. So, they're kind of like right-wing and non-kind of plan trusters, guys like Mystery Grove, Captive Dreamer, Onyx, John Doyle, who is not an Anon. He works at The Blaze. They're kind of looking to, I guess, like debunk the slot being spread by populist podcasters and their view. You have another class too. You've got a wonk class. This writers who either were former neoconservatives or maybe adjacent to that crowd that have come out, you know, I would say pretty strongly against it. You've obviously got, you know, the neoconservatives and even just hawkish people in general. I think neoconservative can be used in just too much too wide of a set. And it's like, no, it's actually a very specific thing. So, this is Mike Pence, his think tank, Lindsey Graham, obviously, Mark Levin, clearly. I mean, they're totally over the moon about what Trump is doing, what more of it. You've got the populist podcasters. Yeah. Commentary podcast, another. Yeah. That's right. They're all for it. Yeah. You know, like you guys have mentioned, people like Joe Rogan, Nick Fuentes, Tucker, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, you know, people who are skeptical at best, to put it nicely, about Israel and really tends to gravitate toward, you know, worldwide schemes of the powerful. And this is where you get the absolutely maximal interpretation of Jeffrey Epstein, all that. And an interesting nugget, too, with that, you have Democrats like Ro Khanna, who are really trying to then capture what Trump did in 2024 and steal a slice of that crowd for 2026 and beyond. So, they're trying in a way to be like kind of Trump without Trump. And the interesting thing with this whole thing is like, look, Trump is the only one, I mean, you know, third way who's kind of really figured out electorally how to actually put something together. I mean, you look at a lot of these kind of coalitions, and they're just part of the whole, like, you know, like Leo Strauss used to talk about with philosophy. It's like, it's part of the whole, but it's not the whole. So, this is something that I think we still need to learn from Trump about, which is, and I think J.D. Vance and some others, you know, Marco Rubio, if he's interested in running, need to really figure out is, how do we really learn from Trump? You know, the question of Trumpism without Trump is an interesting one. I think it's a little bit more difficult than that, but I think Trump himself, the character and his personality is so much at the core of this. But at the same time, there's certainly, you know, ideas that he's gravitated towards on immigration, on foreign policy, on the border, especially on trade that are going to need to be figured out. So, I think these coalitions are real. I agree with you, Ryan. I think that they're being overstated in some important ways. You know, the press is obviously using this to their own advantage. But I think anybody who's running, you know, in the future, especially for, you know, the presidential election in 2028, really does need to look at these different coalitions, figure out how to use this really to their advantage. You guys probably know, side note, Nietzsche's great line about Hegel, that for Hegel, the apex and culmination of the world process coincided with his own existence in Berlin. It's like, there is a, yeah, there is like a quality of that to some of this stuff. Yeah. I like Sabo's implication that, I realize he was drawing an analogy, but I can just see the heads exploding when they listen to that quickly, Mike. And it seems like you're suggesting that the only one with a true and wisdom-infused view of the electoral coalitional policy hole is Donald J. Trump. He stands aloft, the great man of history. Actually, there is an incredible piece, which I mentioned in a piece of my own that is on the site today, which our listeners might also be interested in to go read called The Age of America. It's about the place of America in world history. But I cite this piece by John Judas, who's not a man of the right at all, but it's about Trump as Hegelian world historic figure. In a sense, it says Judas shorn of enlightenment optimism. And in fact, it's pretty pessimistic about what the war in Iran means and where it will take us. But his major observation is that the world historic figure in Hegel, if you think of like Napoleon and Caesar and these big larger-than-life figures who shunt the world from one era to another, they're often represented as these great masterminds. But actually, just as often, they have objectives of their own, which are distinct from the actual thing they're accomplishing. Napoleon and Caesar see that the old way, the old constitution is crumbling and corrupt, and that the old pieties have lost all their power and become cringe. So they adopt this highly adversarial and aggressively transformative way of engaging. They look disgusting to others, but really they've seen something that others can't admit. All of that is true, but that doesn't mean that their solutions or the things that they're putting into place are the ones that are going to dominate the new era. It just means that they put a pin into and finally nail the coffin down of the past. It's a pretty plausible account of where Trump stands in these eras. But as you say, Mike, those kinds of stories always depend on the author having a kind of Archimedean still point from which to observe the turning world. Well, if Napoleon was world history on horseback, according to Hegel, what is Trump? Yeah, yeah. Well, world history riding a nuclear bomb like that guy, Dr. Strauss. Right, right. Slim pickings. I hope. Yeah, world history cresting the waves. Yeah, it's fun to imagine. I mean, it's fun to imagine Trump in this exalted role to begin with. But I want to put forward a set of propositions about where Israel fits into all of this and see what you guys think of them. So I think I've said it on the podcast before, or maybe it was just late at night at Ryan's house the other day when we were chatting about this. I can't remember now, but it was this idea that a particular strain of Israel defender on the American right speaks about the nation of Israel in the way that it would be more proper to speak about Judaism in American world history. So Mike Huckabee is an extreme example because he does have this crazy theology about I don't even know exactly what we're supposed to do, like slaughter a heifer or something in Israel and bring about the end times. But just to use him as an instance, Mike Huckabee is obviously located in the modern geopolitical nation state of Israel. His feelings about the Jewish people, which as Jews themselves will tell you, are much wider, broader, more diverse cultural phenomenon than the modern nation state of Israel. And so he says things about Israel that it's like essential to American prosperity and all this stuff that like really what he means. And I think it's true in this sense. It's true that American Jews and Judaism in American history play this core role. They're not just like another random religious minority. They're kind of like Catholics in this way that they are in the minority, but they are special and kind of have a central place in the history of the West and therefore in the history of America. And so people say those true things about Judaism and they apply them to the nation state of Israel in a way that makes them sound crazy because the nation state of Israel is a country in the world that we have a relationship with and whose aims and objectives we should evaluate on those terms in the terms of hardline realist politics. However, the other thing that this does is it makes it really hard to discern the fact that in those totally separate terms of geopolitics, the nation state of Israel is also one in which America should have a special interest. They are an ally of ours. In many cases, our objectives do align with theirs, not at all. But in fact, like in this case, there's a good argument to be made that we should want to neutralize Iran's nuclear capacity for a variety of reasons, including that it will benefit our ally Israel and increase their power in the Middle East, which is something we should desire. And I think the inability to make those two arguments sort of distinct from one another is a really key driver of, and this is my next sort of question to pose to you guys, a really key driver of this supposed right-wing reaction against the boomer con veneration for Israel, which has shaded over into this overreaction, which in some cases has truly straightforwardly antisemitic strengths. A name that is not mentioned in this Hill piece is Nicholas Fuentes, which is really intriguing because there was a moment when Fuentes seemed so on the rise that he was the voice of this young, ferocious right-wing movement. Now, that may still prove to be true and Fuentes hasn't gone away or anything, but now the kind of center of attention has focused more, shifted more toward Tucker and Megan and so forth, still with the implication that like underneath all of that, there is this huge audience of young right-wing people that really are critical of Israel and maybe even of Jewishness and Judaism on the whole. And my personal experience of this, which I will put to you guys, is that mostly I encounter dudes who listen to Fuentes and Tucker and Megan and all these influencers that are now getting lumped together, mostly I encounter their audience at the gym. And so I conduct like pure anecdota polls of what do you listen to these guys for, what do you get out of them, and what I observe is that a lot of them are basically like Schrodinger's grouper. So Schrodinger's cat, right, lives in a box and there's a particle in quantum superposition which may or may not have degraded to such an extent that it kills the cat through this elaborate mechanism and the only way to know is if you observe the particle, which may in fact affect the state of the particle, meaning that the cat is both dead and alive until you observe. So Schrodinger's grouper, I propose, is both a grouper and not a grouper until you draw him into conversation about the specifics of what he believes. So in this case like a lot of these guys will say yeah I kind of follow Fuentes or I watch Tucker and I think he says a lot of points, he observes things that I see also to be true that nobody else is saying, and then you'll be like okay so what are those things specifically? And like do you actually think that the Rothschilds are harvesting like Goya's children for their adrenochrome? Like what exactly, you know if you take seriously the things that they take seriously that Tucker is kind of acknowledging, like the collapsing post-war consensus, but also kind of say you know surely this other stuff is kind of ridiculous for this this and this reason, like we surely shouldn't get conspiratorial about Judaism full stop or about like you know these crazy sort of Epstein maxing theories, like you will kind of resolve the particularities of this person's world view in a way that is much healthier than they would be if they were kind of left like vague and unresolved. Because what they're really craving is like somebody smart who sees the same things that they see, who isn't afraid to engage difficult and challenging ideas, but who nevertheless like has a sort of sane view of them that doesn't cash out in terms of like something really hideous like pogroms, right? And once you offer that like Schrodinger's griper becomes like not so much a griper, and I think a lot of the audience of these people that are being now kind of invoked as indicative of the young people's trends, like a lot of that audience actually consists of Schrodinger's gripers and so therefore is not necessarily to be taken as like a poll, a head count of gripers that exist. Anyway, does this make any sense at all? Am I completely on one? And have you guys had similar experiences or not? I do like that you've labeled this phenomenon for us, Spencer, Schrodinger's griper. All right, well that's a start. Yeah, it's a useful heuristic, I guess. It's sort of what we've been arguing for weeks and maybe even months, I mean at least since the one bright and brilliant—all I mean by brilliant is casting off a lot of light and shadow maybe of the whole Heritage, Kevin Roberts, Tucker thing back from September. I, like a lot of our young friends who have objected to how this has all been portrayed, am uncomfortable with this quick rush, especially by a certain cast of maybe 65 and older online commentator or opinion holder or voter even, that somehow these kids, young kids, should be denounced or castigated or corrected for what they listen to. I'm much more interested in what they do and how they vote, and I think the jury is still out on all that. And what I've been counseling some folks who are really worked up about this—not that there's not nothing to be worked up about on these fissures on the right—is, you know, I don't think you need to be as worked up about this as you seem to be, because my reading of American history and public opinion, especially on the right, even now on the right, given all these effusions of recent months, is that there's not really much political constituency for real hard-edged anti-Semitism in America, and I don't think there will be for some time. And to the extent that there is, it's really on the left and not on the right. But, you know, if I'm proven wrong about that and voting patterns coming up, that's a whole other problem we'll have to address in various ways in terms of policy, public opinion, and opinionating, and we will do that, I suppose. So I guess that's my long-winded way of saying, Spencer, that I have, even though I have not had a name for it, I think you're right about Schrodinger's Gruyper. I think if you really press fans of Fuentes or Tucker or even Candace Owens, I mean, does the average maha mom who's been taken in by Candace Owens really believe all of her weird theories about Judaism and blood rituals and stuff? I mean, I certainly hope not. Well, there's an important corollary to the Schrodinger's analogy, which is that if it's correct, the answer to that question is it depends what sorts of conversations you go out and have with her. So if you're concerned about this, not you personally, Ryan, but like, if one is concerned about this, one's best sort of intervention into public discourse would probably be, you know, fearlessly and openly kind of investigating these concerns and questions with people you know who are having these sorts of thoughts. Yeah, and I think I referenced it maybe last week, but everyone should go look at Eric Kaufman's. Eric has immersed himself maybe two months ago in some of the detailed polling on this, and maybe I think even conducted some of his own. Social scientist Eric Kaufman wrote an excellent book called White Shift, for those of you that don't remember. But his point was, yeah, look, it's slightly more of a problem on the right. There is this intergenerational divide on the question of Israel, but he did not find too much evidence for the three-alarm-fire approach to this problem. And he kind of has confirmed what you and I just spent a while discussing, and what you've confirmed through anecdata at the gym, which is the amount of people who have really deeply committed, hard-edged views that could be fairly characterized as anti-Semitic is not that huge, and it's not a huge problem on the right in America. But it's certainly something to keep an eye on. Yeah, I certainly agree with that. And Spencer, I feel an essay coming, another one from you on this, because I think you've really hit on something here, which is, you know, I think about church attendance, say, in the 1950s. I mean, were all those people Christians? I mean, did the United States suddenly go from like a 90% Christian nation to a 40%? No, I mean, it was cultural shifts that were huge. I mean, you know, of course, to probably even get ahead and to be on good terms with your boss, you know, you wanted to be seen there, right? So I think this is just the same thing for an updated age. I mean, I remember, you know, when I was in junior high, waking up, you know, to the dulcet tones of Howard Stern in the morning. I mean, this is just the 21st century of that. I mean, why do people listen to Fuentes? I mean, you know, again, just anecdota for my end too. It's very rarely that it's, you know, it's people talking, oh, he talks about this, the place of Israel and American foreign policy. He talks about things that are now contested, but almost never has it been, oh yeah, you know, I love him for his antisemitism and he is 100% right on that. Yeah, yeah. I've talked to maybe, you know, a couple of people who really, really, truly believe that. But for the most part, it's, he's talking about things no one else does. He's transgressive. He's funny. I've heard that more than once. He's entertaining. It's kind of like, you know, kind of, you know, the WWE in a way, you know, why do people watch that? Because they love, you know, the technical aspects to wrestling? No, because it's, you know, wrestling, but with all the drama, then, you know, interspersed. I know, I personally was enthralled by Luigi, the pizza dough wrestler that circulated on X and I thought his technique was sublime. Exquisite. Yeah. I mean, Stone Cold Steve Austin, like he was my favorite. Why did I watch him? Because he like, you know, he assaulted Vince McMahon, you know, the owner of the WWE. He went after people in Zambonis. He ran stuff with semi-trucks. I mean, that's why I watched that stuff. It was, it was entertaining. It was a soap opera and this is the same thing here. So what this means is, is just like Trump saw in 2016 and again in 2024, there is a massive opening here for somebody to come along, talk about some of these things that are, you know, somewhat controversial in some ways, of course. But just listen to these people, talk to them. I mean, the denouncing campaign, I think is just the most destructive thing that could be done. I think, you know, returning to Lincoln, it's like, how do you actually move somebody along to your opinion? You know, it's a drop of honey, not a gallon of gall. So I think people have to remember that. That's how you get to somebody's heart. And if you don't do that, you know, it can never be pierced. Like what Lincoln said, that that's what we have to do, I think, as a movement. And what we have been doing, I think at Claremont and certainly this podcast, actually talking about this and not just immediately denouncing. But that's what absolutely has to be done because I think there's such a huge percentage of these people who can certainly be gotten to a better side on this. And that's just our mission, I think, going forward. Beautifully put, Mike, that Lincoln had a way with words. And now I feel doubly gratified because the shooting the s**t with the fellas at the gym mode of heuristic inquiry remains undefeated. And I will feel way, way better going forward about spending way too much time in between sets than I should in derogating my friends. You're conducting the important social science research. Monitoring the situation at the gym. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm not dragging my feet through the workout. Thank you very much. I'm doing my job. That's all the time we have. We thought we might touch on the semi-shutdown of The Metaverse because it was an OG TAM podcast topic. But if you're interested in that, wow, I'm really log rolling today. I'm going to flog another piece that I have written. This one at The Daily Wire called The Metaverse was never inevitable. But the one that I really want to commend because it will kick off a larger conversation about America at 250 and our place in world history is again The Age of America Up. Probably yesterday when you're hearing this at TAM with more responses to come. Alright, that's it for us for now. If you are only a free subscriber, if you aren't a paid subscriber, this is all the time, alas, that we can spend together. And if, as I'm sure you are, your heart sinks to hear me say that and your poor plaintive eyes begin to well with tears, there is a solution. 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