What Does it Mean to Be an American?

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Welcome to Potsay of America. I'm John Favre. On today's show, my good friend and fellow speechwriter for Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes. America's 250th birthday has been on my mind a lot lately,

especially since Donald Trump seems intent on making the country's semi-quincentennial all about himself. His parties, his name on everything, his guests, and his version of the American story. But of course, there's another version of our story that resonates

with at least half of us, likely more. At the very least, Americans have been engaged in an argument about what this country is and who belongs, since we declared independence two and a half centuries ago. Ben has written an incredible, timely book about that argument.

Truly, it's fantastic. I read the whole thing in about a day, and you all know what a big reader I am these days, so that's saying something. The book is called All We Say,

a history of the United States in 15 speeches. In it, Ben traces the history of America through some of the nation's most consequential speeches from a long forgotten speech from a Native American chief and Lincoln's second inaugural to I have a dream

and speeches from Barack Obama and even Donald Trump. It's a beautiful book about the ways in which, in the words of our old boss,

this union may never be perfect,

but generation after generation shows it can always be perfected. Ben and I were psyched to have this conversation of both because we get to nerd out as former speechwriters and dig into what the two of us talk about when we're not in front of a mic,

how those of us who don't love being governed by Donald Trump can win the argument about what this country is and where it needs to go. About how we close the gap between America's best ideals and our current fairly bleak reality.

There was a great conversation and we'll get to it in a minute, but before we do, please consider becoming a crooked media subscriber if you haven't already so that you don't miss out on any of the great content or putting out for our friends at the pod. Subscribers get ad free episodes of all your favorite podcasts,

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Let's get to it. Here's Ben Roads. What's up, Ben?

“John, this is the interview I was looking forward to”

since I finished my book. I had to tell you honestly. I was gonna say I love when we have an excuse to pot together, especially this time, because you wrote a book about speeches, which is perfect for the two of us, for people who don't know,

I know a lot of you probably do, but Ben and I wrote speeches for six years together, sometimes quite literally together, like side by side with our laptops open till 3am, but this is also a book about American identity and an argument over the American story that's been

raging for 250 years, which has also become an obsession of mine as a flight. But I want to start with something you wrote about the book,

and you wrote that it's the third inattilogy that started with your memoir,

then your book about authoritarianism, and now this, and that finishing this one means you're ready to let go of your past identities as a White House staffer, foreign policy advisor, and speechwriter. Same more about that while you're letting go. I actually really thought about this, John, because I wrote my memoir,

which was a very kind of raw experience, right? It was like, I didn't digest it at all. I wrote that in a year that came in 2018. Then I very much, my last book was in my kind of foreign policy, global politics, pot save the world, if you will,

self in terms of traveling around and understanding what it happened in Russia, and China, and Hungary under Victor Avon, and I was literally, you know, using the experiences, contacts, networks I had from being in that world. And then this one is entirely, I wanted to go back into history

because I had a sense that I could find a lot there, that you could understand this argument that we're having now by tracing it back from the beginning. And frankly, my original conceit was Obama and Trump kind of encapsulate represent two different opposing stories that we've had

throughout our history and competition with each other. And I'm not an historian. And so the vehicle I knew that I would choose is speeches. And I found myself kind of returning to that core identity that guy who showed up in the Obama campaign office, when, you know, you were the

chief speechwriter, you were my boss. I remember walking in from my think tank culture in DC, and wow, my boss is going to t-shirt.

“You know, like, like, this is a different vibe, you know?”

He's wearing a t-shirt, and he doesn't know shit about foreign policy. Good thing of me. Yeah, but I, I, I see this actually seriously to you, like, because, you know, you've been through this, you kind of don't want to go through life as like John Favre or Ben Rhodes, comma former Obama X, you know? Yeah. And I kind of feel like I've,

I've mind it now. You know, like, I've done, this is not a memoir, it at all, but like, it drew deeply on all the things we did in speech writing. And, and so I felt like, but I kind of more fundamentally and

existentially, too. I think I finally came to terms with how it all

ended. You know, in the sense that Trump was this kind of rebuke of the inevitability of progress, right? Of the arc of the more universe spending towards justice, kind of on its own, if you will. And, and I think reliving all of American history, kind of allowed me to situate our experience in a continuum where it's actually not that

unusual that this happened. You know, reconstruction was followed by segregation, you know, civil rights movement was followed by backlash. So

“for all those reasons, I really did internally, like you have to”

trick your, you know, as a writer and you are a writer. You know, you, you have to kind of tell yourself a story. And my story was this is the third trilogy. It kind of completes both my various Obama identities and kind of, you know, is me coming to terms with how our chapter ended. And yeah, now I can move on. Let's see what happens next. So I read the book.

I started it Sunday night and we got back from love. It's wedding. And then I read most of it yesterday and last night, we're recording this on Tuesday. You're listening to it probably on on Sunday. First of all, I absolutely

fucking loved the book. It is incredible. Everyone should read it. I also

it did give me this sense of hope and also peace, like you said, you came to terms with it, sort of peace about like the last 10 years and where it fits. Yes. Because you read, when you, it's, the speeches you selected were specifically selected because they each tell a story about

having since the founding. And when you lay it all out like that, along with

the different characters, you really do get this sense that we have been here before and people in these moments have been able to, you know, speak and march and fight their way out of these moments. And I don't think it's, it's not polyanish at all, but it's sort of like a hard earned hope that you get from reading it, but I thought I thought it's

outstanding. You open the book with of all people, Jady Vance and his speech last summer at Claremont about American identity, which was considered to this show, and especially offline, know that I can't stop talking

“about Austin is not in his head very knowingly right now. I think you and I”

had a few conversations about this, about the Jady Vance speech, when you were thinking about opening the book with it, what made you finally decide that Vance's speech was the way into a book about 250 years of American identity. So, prologue for a book is a fascinating thing because you kind of have to telegraph your argument, you know, the book starts in real

time with Benjamin Franklin, which we can get to, but I don't want to drop people in there. You know, I wanted to give people a sense of kind of what the

argument of the book is. And I always had in mind when I was literally

selecting these speeches, which was an interesting process, and as I was writing chapter after chapter, that if you really distill it down, there are two stories of what American identity is. You know, with obviously

“their permutations, they're not all exactly the same, but I think you can”

simplify and say there's one story that is a nationality of inheritance that, you know, you can call it originalism, you can call it blood and civil nationalism. But essentially, this was a white Christian nation founded by a particular set of people with a particular set of beliefs, and now I'm, you know, literally quoting J.D. Vance. And it's the

inheritor of kind of Western civilization, sometimes that's Western supremacy, and sure, other people live here of different races and ethnicities, but they kind of have to subordinate themselves to this original identity. And American exceptionalism is just a given, like we are exceptional because we're American. We are the city on a hill. We are in some

ways, God's chosen people. We can do whatever we want to the people in this country, whether they're Native Americans or Black people or immigrants, and we can do whatever we want to other countries, right? And again, I'm casting it negatively, but I frankly think that that a core that that is a strain that runs through American history. And then the opposing story

is one of progressive nationalism that we've never lived up to the

creed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, and that American history is a story of people trying to change the country for the

“better, trying to make a more perfect union to use a phrase. And that's how you”

get the abolitionist movement and the suffrage movement and the suffrage movement and labor rights movement, all these things. J.D. Vance comes along and decides to tell the first version of the story for me. Because that speech is literally, I mean, when I knew I was going to use it, as when he said, "We are not a nation founded on a creed, and he named checks the Declaration of

Independence in the idea that all men are created equal." He says, "No, that is not American identity." We are a particular people from a particular place with a particular way of life. And he said the quiet part out loud, and we didn't say white, but you know, what particular people do we think he's talking about? And he has this kind of logic way where, well, who could argue with us being a particular place in a particular

people? Actually, I can argue with it because we were 13 states at the beginning on the northeast coast. Our geographies wildly different today. The people in this country today don't look at anything like the people in those 13 states. And the way of life, I mean, walked down the street in my neighborhood in Venice, like there's a ton of ways of life there, right? And so I actually think that J.D. did the service of framing the other story for me.

And so I literally open with it. You mentioned that, and that other people have to be subordinate to sort of this, this white Christian identity. And I've heard people say, and I've talked to people about this, that J.D. Vance, when he spouts this, like anti-immigrant xenophobic rhetoric, is full of shit and doesn't really believe it, and couldn't really believe it,

but there is another possible explanation here that you touch on, which is this obsession

Vance has, and he does it in the speech, and we've heard him do it, and he's like mocked for it in other times, in other places, with the need for everyone to show gratitude, particularly foreign, uh, foreign-American citizens, immigrants, that if you're here, and we let you come here,

“then you need to show gratitude to the people who've been here the longest or to the or to our”

ancestors or to like this, this way of life and this culture, and I do think that's how you reconcile, like, because if you ask J.D. Vance, he would say, "Well, I'm for immigration, I'm for, you know, like a diverse country, that's fine, but his problem is that if you haven't, if you don't have seven generations of ancestors buried in Kentucky," which he said at the Republican National Convention, then you don't get to complain about this country. I mean,

he basically said that about Mamdani, too. Mamdani had some like fourth of July mess,

which was like, you know, and then we got to continue to improve this nation, and something very mild about it, it perfecting or improving the nation, and J.D. Vance was like, "How could he do that? We let him in here and blah, blah, it's like really fucking crazy." Yeah, if you believe that,

“because he said that you have to show gratitude in that speech, and I posed a question in the”

parallel, I'd gratitude to whom. Yeah, who are we for what? Who are these people? Who are these people? Yeah, because actually immigration was a much bigger theme than I actually expected it would be in in this book, because you keep bumping into that. And, you know, Benjamin Franklin, his father was an immigrant. You know, he left religious persecution behind, as well as seeking economic opportunity. And then you run through the other people in this book.

You know, Louis Brandice was a Jewish immigrant who left anti-Semitism behind in Europe. Mary Lee, a populist, was a poor, came from a poor Irish family that fled the oppression of the British. You know, you know, obviously you get up to the 20th century, interestingly, Dolores Huerta comes from a family, and this is something people don't think about enough, John. A part of her family weren't immigrants that border just got redrawn and brought them into the

United States. Right. There are a lot of brown people in this country that were here before a lot of white people. And we just, you know, expanded and re-drew the border around places like, you know, New Mexico, for instance. And, and fundamentally, it comes down to the question of, do you believe that someone, Zoramundani, for example, is as American as someone whose family's been here for seven generations? Right. I genuinely do. Yeah. And that's not a virtue signal.

That's just a, how can citizenship not be equal? Like, how can some people be more American than other people? Like, we are supposed to be a nation anchored in laws, the Constitution, and agreed the Declaration of Independence, which suggests not that we should have open borders, which is how JD bands kind of short-hands it. He says, well, if everybody who believes in the Declaration of Independence is American, then we'd have billions of dollars. Don't we have to admit

them all? No, we don't. That's not what we say. We can have a border. We can seal that border at times. You know, I mean, I don't necessarily agree with that, but we can, by matter of policy, but the people who are American, are American, and they're equally American. And frankly, the thing we should be grateful for is that we're a nation that is able to have all these different people come here and enrich this country. I mean, how boring would this country be? It was just comprised

“of people like JD bands. I just, I think fundamentally, I felt myself, you know, because you kept”

encountering, you know, people didn't like the Irish when they came here. People didn't like Chinese

people when they came here. Like, some people never like black people being here, even though

they were brought here mostly against their will. Like, the people didn't like Jewish people when they came here. Like, and guess what? You've rolled the tape forward. Does anybody think that this nation is not better for having Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans and Irish Americans? No, I don't think even JD bands would make that argument. So what are we really talking about here? And it's been said many times by many people, but that is what the core of American exceptionalism

is all about, which is we can't, we can go live in Germany and live in Japan. We can't become German or become Japanese, but anyone can come to America and become American. And like, that is a very, that is a unique exceptional quality of America. And that is the experiment. I think we're

not by the indigenous people here. And I think that that does kind of create an additional legitimacy for the idea that if this is not a nation of indigenous Americans, then it is by definition a nation of people who have chosen an identity and set up a government that could be, you know, flexible enough to absorb different people. You know, a lot of the speeches that spoke about the virtue of immigration, Frederick Douglass, Louis Brandeis, they talked about the

fact that the decision to come to America is like the first step in becoming American. Like that's

a stripe. And again, there's an inherent striving in that. You know, I want a better life. I want to be a part of something different. I want to be a part of this project. I want to sign up for

“this creed. And yeah, you have to go through the process again, not the JDVencing with”

my, not everybody in. But that, that idea of striving self-improvement type people is kind of is ingrained in American identity. And it's something to defend at a time when with ice, you know, we're seeking to kind of push that out. Pods of America is brought to you by Bombis. Spring is here. The weather is warming. The days are longer. We're saying yes to more plans and finally getting outside running hiking, just moving again.

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plus free shipping and free treats for life. When you go to smalls.com/cricut, that's 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life. When you hit the smalls.com/cricut. You mentioned Benjamin Franklin, the first speech you open the book with, of all the founders, you pick Franklin, and the speech is his closing argument for the Constitution, and then you book end at the end of the book, Trump's second inaugural with Franklin's

warning about despotism. What made Franklin sort of unlock the book for you and why him among the founders? Franklin and unlock is exactly the right word because I went through a really interesting process where I must have read, I don't know, a couple hundred speeches, and how do you tell the story as you know as a speechwriter? If you know the beginning of the story and have some idea at the end of the story, it's going to make a lot easier to fit the pieces in. I came across this Franklin

speech that I had not really read before. It's a closing argument at the Constitutional Convention. Franklin is chosen because he's the old wise man, he's also the most famous American in the world, and he's kind of the de facto host of the Convention in Philadelphia, and he gives a speech

talk about anything in it. The entire speech is about the virtue of compromise itself,

“and he essentially says, when you get a bunch of people together to benefit from all their wisdom,”

you're also assembling all their different interests, all their selfish interests, all their prejudices, you're getting the good and bad. And out of that kind of assembly, you can't have some kind of perfect agreement. We have to compromise if we want a union. And to me, that, and he doesn't, he has a rhetorical trickstone that are really interesting because he basically takes on fallibility in dogma or the kind of antagonist in the speech. And he says,

and this is actually why we're not found on a religion. Each religion thinks it's got the answers.

And if we have that same mindset, then this place will never be a home for people that might not

agree with exactly that version of things. And so inherent in the Constitution is compromise and imperfection. Now, that compromise allowed the union to be made, but it also said in motion all of the conflict and competition that followed because we compromised about really big things. We essentially compromised about identity. There was still slavery. There were uncertain questions about immigration, you know, different states at different immigration policies.

Obviously, women did not have a rights of citizenship at that time. And so we kind of push those issues out. Franklin very interestingly, the last public act he did, which is one of the first things he did after the Constitution, because he didn't live very long, was petitioned Congress to abolish slavery. So he was living his own theory of the case, which is compromise set up the union and then work within the system to change it. Now, he also had this warning that I found very chilling,

which is he said this new government can only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government being incapable of any other. And that landed like a two by four today. And I followed that away and I said,

“I think I might end the book with that line and I do. And now it helped the Trump got elected”

that kind of, and that doesn't mean I think that that's happened fully. It's a more warning that if we don't arrest this direction, that's where we could end up. Yeah, I mean, that Franklin

speech basically shows that the conflict and the argument that we've been having for the last

250 years was like a function of the design of the government. Like it was, it was pre-ordained, because of course, if you're going to have a country where people of such different backgrounds come from different places to try to make a home and want to live in freedom from, you know, what they escape from in Europe, then you're going to have the only government that's going to that's going to make that work is one where different people have a voice, different people with

different opinions who are going to be at war with each other, or at least not, or be an argument with each other, right, fight with each other. And it can't be any different than that, right? And so then you look through the whole 250 years, you're like, well yeah, slavery, the Civil War, everything, like, of course, we were going to have these arguments because that was the, that was the sort of the idea behind the government that they created. It was. And so the pieces fit in, just to take the

first, I broke the book into thirds, each has five speeches for a certain period of American history.

And so the first five are, okay, we set up this Constitution, then I have read Jacket saying, wait a second, we're not in your Constitution, leave us alone, then I have a woman named Maria Stewart, who's an abolitionist, a remarkable kind of penniless woman who came out of nowhere and became a superstar speaker on the circuit in Boston, who says, we wait a second, like black people deserve equal rights. She's an abolitionist and a feminist, a women need to be empowered.

We need to be teaching black people and women the same way we teach white people and we need to claim our rights. Then I have Alexander Stevens, Vice President of the Confederacy, saying, wait a second, no, no, this equality thing, we don't believe in that. White supremacy is the cornerstone of the

“Confederacy. He said that, I'm not projecting leftism on to him, that's what he said.”

And then Lincoln resolves it all in the second inaugural and says, no, we are, we are an abolitionist nation, like we fought this war to write the wrong in our Constitution. And in the most radical sense ever spoken by an American president says, essentially, if every drop of blood drawn by the lash must be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword, essentially, so let it be done.

I mean, imagine saying that today. So that's just just in those five speeches, you see the

“tug of war and then Lincoln tries resolve it and then it starts all over again. Right. And you know,”

and we've gone through the cycle of reconstruction to segregation to FDR starts all over again. Civil rights movement to backlash to civil rights movement to Obama to Trump. And so we're just living different versions of the same argument. And I would argue in this book, speeches are actually the place where we have most prominently done that. You know, standing up in front of somebody as an activist or politician and making your argument is different than writing a book or an op-ed or something.

And because that's inherent in persuading people about who we are. I want to sort of dive into some

of that that you just mentioned, Alexander Stevens, right? So he's this, who I hadn't heard of by the way before this book, Vice President of the Confederacy, fascinating character. He's a really interesting character. Georgia politician who goes from wanting to avoid succession to then standing up in Savannah, Georgia in 1861 and delivering this speech, which like you said, is just literally a case for white supremacy that the superiority of whites over blacks is a, he says,

physical, philosophical, and moral truth. What I found fascinating about that is this is an 1861,

even at the time, slavery defenders were already learning to publicly talk in code, states,

rights, economic way of life, northern aggression. He just says the quiet part out loud.

“What did you make of that as a rhetorical and political strategy in the context of that time?”

So I found this speech and I was like, I got to do this because he says the quiet part out loud, and I think those are the best speeches. So the most interesting ones. And for each chapter, I think you'll appreciate this as a speech writer. I kept in mind what makes a speech unique and consequential. One, we had to understand the person who gave it. What is their whole life story that allowed them to give the speech? And then what is the cause or movement that they're speaking to?

Now Alexander Stevens was against the session precisely because he believed rightly that slavery was going to be more easy to protect inside the union than outside of it. Right? So it wasn't a virtuous anti-sessionism. But after, you know, Georgia, his own states of seeds, he just signs up. He says,

“"Okay, I'm going along with this." And he becomes a co-author of the Confederate Constitution,”

which is kind of a cut and paste of the American one, except it makes very clear that despite all the talk about states' rights, no state shall abolish slavery. So so, so much for states' rights. And what's so interesting about that speech is, you know, he gave the kind of normal stuff about we're going to get rid of these tariffs and these things we don't like that the North and poses on us. But then he gets to slavery and white supremacy. And he doesn't defend it as a

necessary evil. He doesn't say, "Well, we have to have this for our economy to work," or, you know, we're going to have, we'll keep this for a period of time. He turns white supremacy into like a progressive enlightenment discovery, philosophical moral truth, as you quoted. He compares the discovery of the supremacy of the white race. He literally compares that to enlightenment discoveries of, you know, free markets and, you know, the way that the astronomy works, you know. And it seems

bizarre to read now. But you see, he's trying to tell people, you're actually in nobles by believing that you're a superior to black people. He's speaking to an audience that includes a lot of poor white people who don't know enslaved, who are probably going to have to go fight for slave power. And he's has to give them something to fight for. And so what he's giving them is not just that they can feel better than somebody else. That's a huge thing that he's giving them.

But also, they're good. They're doing what's right. And he actually framed, this is good for black people, too. Like they need to learn from us, you know. And I found it so interesting because we progressives sometimes can forget that what can appear to be the most reactionary ugly ideas, those people actually think that they're in their own way, quote unquote, progressive ideas, and not in the terms of left. But in terms of like this is evolution in a positive sense.

are going to come to see the necessity of white supremacy. And I found that so interesting because

“the same technique that I admire in like FDR pivoting to four freedoms to give the nation a bigger”

purpose. Alexander Stevens could do this for white supremacy. Now, of course, after they got their ass kicked in the war, he repackaged it as states rights and lost cause and all the rest of it. And it worked. And it worked. And it worked. You know, so yeah, I know that that was the other

thing I thought about from that speech is and and reading, you close the book with Trump's second

inaugural and I forgotten he did this probably because I was like half blacked out when Trump was giving it because I didn't believe we were going through it again. But Trump was like, and today's Martin Luther King Day, and and I have a dream too and like this ability, uh, and tendency for reactionary politicians and reactionary forces to use rhetoric to repackage really unpleasant, unpopular ideas into ideas that are more broadly popular and acceptable to the rest of the country. And they sort of use American symbolism

“in American culture and and and the founding documents and principles to kind of repackage and”

hide their really odious ideas. And that has been, uh, uh, you know, that you can draw through line right from Alexander Stevens right through to Donald Trump and somehow that works. Yeah, it was interesting that Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are both in this book. And both of them have been completely kind of appropriated by conservatives in this country. Frederick Douglass did talk a lot in language that we might and by the way, Barack Obama did too.

Yeah. Frederick Douglass did talk a lot about taking responsibility and the need for block people to kind of self-empower. Now, he also talked a lot about the need to have a government that allows them to do that, that they cannot do that. If they are kept down systems of segregation or systems where they can't own property or they can't get an education, that part is left out. You know, uh, King did talk about the fact that we want to live in a nation where you're not

judged by the colors given by the content of your character. But in order to get to that kind of nation, you need a government that keeps its promissory note, as he said in the Ivaterium speech, that we're going to treat block people equally. We're going to allow them to be in a nation where they're judged by the content of their character. Obama got criticized sometimes for practicing

critical responsibility politics too when he talked about, you know, the need for the block community,

of value education. But it was always coupled with having a government that provided opportunity equally to people. And so it shows you how the two stories that talk about our competition and they draw from each other. You know, so the the more reactionary story needs to take the heroes of the progressive story and kind of pull them into their narrative. You know, Reagan loved to cite King and, you know, the content of your character, not the color of your

“skin while leaving out that those parts. And I think that that you have to keep an eye on that”

because if you go back and actually experience these people in their times, they were radicals. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were absolutely radical figures, like fringe figures at times, who've now been kind of repackaged as people that were like welcomed at the time. And that was not the case. This episode is sponsored by Better Health. Life is a lot sometimes. Regardless of what's keeping

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But also, the flip side of what Steven's did, the activists do in a way as well, and that like one thing that comes through in the rhetoric from all the activists in the book, is in you know, and you write that Frederick Douglass instead of rejecting American rhetoric, claimed it as his own. So, they don't reject the language and symbolism of the dominant culture that's oppressing them. They embrace it as a way to highlight the gap between ideals and reality.

And, you know, this is different from what you hear from some activists today about America being

“inherently racist or imperialist, and I think we both experienced this with Obama did that all the”

time, but it was happening with Frederick Douglass. In King, what the promissory note, right, is that I came here to cash because this is what the American declaration says and we need to live up to that. And I worship the American declaration, and Frederick Douglass was like that, too. And so, they are sort of radical figures in their beliefs, but their rhetoric is very much targeted to a much broader population than just activists. That's right. We progressives do the same thing

that I just said the reactionaries do. We claim the parts of the other story as well. Douglass had a big falling out with William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist who helped propel Douglass's career because Garrison rejected the Constitution, because he said that was written by a bunch of slave owners. You know, he was kind of a, you know, post 2020, like, let's just, you know, tear the whole thing down. Right. And Douglass said, no, no, no, when I look at the Constitution, I see a document

that rejects slavery. That's the part of the Constitution. I'm looking at it. And I can make that work for me. I want to stay inside of this system, and I want to make the Constitution my own. King, the promissory note was on the Declaration of Independence. You said all men are created

equal, and you've never lived up to that. And actually, frankly, almost every activist in this book.

And in fact, everyone uses the Declaration of Independence to make their case that they want to close the gap between the reality and that document. But which by the way is why it has fallen out of favor with JD Vance and some of the national conservatives today, because the Declaration is a fucking problem for them. It's a big problem. And now, what if those activists had said that document was written by a white slave owner. Right. You know. And so, like, I can't use that

rhetoric, you know. And I think there's a lesson in that for today, you know, which is if you

“want to persuade people, and if you want to advance rights in this country, you actually have to”

embrace the whole story. Like, even the parts we don't like, maybe I'm not saying you embrace Alexander Stevens's worldview. But you're embracing the fact that this country was founded by flawed people that did, in some cases, terrible things, certainly to black people in the Native Americans. But they left enough of a foundation that we can work with, you know. Like, and I mean, the title of

be true to what you said on paper. Like, that's like almost his last words, you know. And I think

that's that's important. Obama would always do that, too. And we should talk about the race speech. But

it's about just like individual people contain complexity. So does America. Nobody's perfect.

“How do you draw out the better and build a message in a story and a speech from that?”

Lincoln has the line that you quote in the chat in that chapter on the second inaugural. And the line is, if we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do. And if they were situated as we are, they should act and feel as we do. And we never ought to lose sight of this fact. And Obama does something similar in the race speech. Clearly calls out structural systemic racism. But then shows an understanding of an even an empathy towards the white resentment and backlash.

And there is this pattern of the speakers you chose in the book, both activists and politicians, probably especially the politicians of working especially hard to show that they understand and maybe empathize with their opponents because their larger project is to preserve this union in this country, which is much harder. It's much harder work than just being able to, you know, either succeed from the country or, or, you know, try to, you know, subjugate some other group.

Like trying to keep everyone together, even when the people that you're trying to win support from,

“don't believe you should have the rights that you have. That's fucking hard.”

I was stunned to find myself coming away from this admiring link and even more. Yeah, to it. Me too. But because he goes through this torturous process, trying to figure out the meaning of it all. And he goes through torturous process with slavery.

You know, first, you know, he wants to restrict its spread. Then he wants to preserve the union

without messing with it. Then he kind of out of wartime necessity turns to abolition. And it's only later in the war that he kind of fully embraces abolition as the cause of the war, not just the preservation of the union. He's moving in the direction of Douglass, the activist and abolitionist. Douglass was becoming more pragmatic, though. He was saying, he used to cast the gate link and then he was like, wait a second, I think Lincoln's moving in the right direction. I'm going to

“kind of meet in there. And so he starts talk to Lincoln. He starts to work with Lincoln. He gets up”

and Lincoln gives that second inaugural address. He's about to win the war. He does not talk about that. He doesn't say like, we won these great battlefield victories. He does not talk down the south, but he does give an absolutely unapologetic and almost religious case for abolition as the

second founding of the United States. But the way he's saying it, the way he frames it, is that is

going to be good for the south and the north. This is redemption, you know, that we're finding. We have this opportunity to start over, having cleansed ourselves of this sin. And there's this kind of -- Well, it bloams the north as well as the south, right? Like a real like we were, I know that we're fighting you right now and you're going to lose, didn't say it, but we are all complicit in what has happened over the last however many years.

He calls it repeatedly American slavery, right? Not Southern slavery, because it's really north profited off of it too, you know? And there's this great scene where that night he's at the White House and he's greeting a receiving line and Douglas tries to get a receiving line to see him and gets booted out. And someone tells Lincoln, Lincoln says, well, let Douglas in. And Douglas comes in. He stands in this line and he reaches the front and he shakes Abraham Lincoln's hand.

And Lincoln says, what did you think of the speech? And Douglas says, I'll write you a letter is like a thousand people here and he said, no, no, no, no, no. I mourned what you think of this speech in anybody else. And Douglas just looks at him and says, it was a sacred effort. And I read that and I was like, all right, whatever you think about this country, that happened before a former slave, a former slave meets with the president in the White House meets

with Abraham Lincoln and has that conversation because they both evolved. They both changed. You know, Douglas became more pragmatic. Lincoln became more radical. And Lincoln could only do that because he was able to inhabit, he could look at the world through Douglas's eyes and through a Southern eyes. And that that was Obama. I mean, we should talk about the race speech. To set it, I'll tell you,

Which is a good triumphalist, you know, pereration. And after Trump has elected, you know, me and my editor were talking, I'm like, well, that's probably not the right note down then. And so I just like, I got in with Trump. And actually, I went back to read the race speech again and it was more relevant today than it was even as an eight when he gave it. Because he is able to, he, he, he's saying, well, yeah, yeah, he's doing what you're talking about, which is inhabiting through his

grandmother and Reverend Wright and through the diagnoses of the white working class and the black working class, he's saying we all encompass these complexities. And until we can look at the world

through each other's eyes, we're never going to move forward. And that's the same thing Lincoln was saying.

Yeah, it's funny because I was reading that chapter and just reading the whole book sort of having flashbacks to the night when I first talked to Obama about the race speech and what he wanted to say in that. And he will, he laid out a lot of the thesis of your book, which is that this, these competing arguments that we've been having in this country since the founding. And at the very beginning was slavery and race that we've been having to grapple with. And, and, you know, you,

you write in the book how, you know, I ended up doing a draft and have the, have the beginning in the end and then Obama basically just does track changes and writes like an entire speech in

“the middle of the speech and sends it back because I think he had had that in his mind for a very”

long time. Like he was able to, you know, analyze and talk about the Reverend Wright controversy, but if you had lifted the Reverend Wright controversy out, all of the other themes and things that he says in that speech were definitely running through his mind for a very long time because they were themes throughout history. That's exactly right. And I, as you know, you were the speech writer on it. And by the way, I don't short-tripped. I mean, that beginning and end got him to that

middle, right? Sometimes that's the speech writer's job to get the principle to where he can have that outpouring of track changes. But I, I think what I understood better today,

both because of what's happened and from writing the book is, first of all, Reverend Wright was

a more ancient character to me today. In 2008, he was just like a pain in the ass. Like, why is this guy saying this crazy shit that's going to mess up our campaign? Yeah. But actually, having written this book and then having lived the post Obama experience, Reverend Wright emerged as out of the black church tradition of the Jeremiah, which is a speech that is intended to call out a nation's sins. So what he was doing is the same thing

that Frederick Douglass and Maria Stewart and all the people in that tradition did in this book, King, did it often too. And by the way, some of Reverend Wright said, age is pretty well, given like some of the things Trump's done. Now, that said, Obama fused the activist and politician in himself. And then when I look at the, the two

“key parts of that speech that he wrote in the middle, one is the famous part where he's like,”

I can no more to sound Reverend Wright than I can to sound my white grandmother or woman to raise me, you know, who do anything for me, but I heard her say horrible things. I'm, I'm not saying it as elegantly. He said, what he's saying there in an individual level is, hey, we all, everybody in our families is like this, like, you know, you can love somebody and think they're good person and not cancel them because, you know, they said something you disagree with,

whether it's Reverend Wright or your grandmother, who's white. And then he goes into the racial stalemate, as he calls it. And he describes black structural inequality. In ways, I don't think I'd ever heard. I mean, unfairly, but unflincially, unfairly, you know, redlining, education gap, income gap, but then he talks like about the white working class more effectively than J.D. Vance or Donald Trump. The line where he says, they don't feel particularly privileged

by their race, is an incredibly powerful line that these are people whose jobs have been shipped

overseas. These are people who had to bust their kids, which is a hassle across town because

“of some civil rights requirement, which, again, I think is worth doing, but, you know,”

it's their obligation. These are people who are told that they're worried about crime, they're racist, you know. These are his white grandmother, you know. And that ability to say, like, none of this is going to work. American identity, American politics, unless we can have that ability to look at the world through each other's eyes. I mean, that, to me, was the magic of that, that the alchemy of that speech. Pots of America is brought to by Chime. Chime is changing

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People look back now. I would never Obama comes up in the discourse. And they're like,

well, he was progressive on, you know, the left liked him because he was opposed to the word Iraq, but he was much more moderate on other policies. But the race speech to me shows the core of what he was always about and it is the thread that runs through a lot of these politicians and activists in your book, which is like he was very, he was more radical in his diagnosis of the problem, right, in saying and talking about structural inequality and racism and

history, how history has led us here and the fact that, I mean, he does a speech about his pastor that said controversial things and he opens it by talking about slavery and the constitution. Right? Like, yeah, it goes pretty deep. But to the extent that he's perceived as moderate, it's exactly what he did about white resentment, which is like, yeah, there's structural racism and inequality where black people in this country have been subjugated since it's founding.

And yet, that doesn't mean that resentment that white people have is unfounded, wrong, bad evil. I still want to correct the structural inequality and correct the racism, but also if I want to actually fix that, I have to earn the support of the people who have that resentment is opposed to just telling them they are bad. Yeah, because you don't want to become a mirror image of JD Vance, right? Like, we don't like it when JD Vance shows up and says,

“you can't have your way of life. You have to live the way I say. Showing up and telling someone”

your identity is bad because you come from this heritage or because sometimes you might have had certain thoughts. Like, you have to bring those people along. I mean, you're not talked about this a lot of the years. What Obama would say to people isn't come out with your hands up and acknowledge your racism. He would say, this country is so great that we've been able to change over time and we've been able to write wrongs and extend rights in the Vance opportunities.

And actually, the thing that's holding us back now is the way in which powerful forces and

here's where he's like Trump, there are these elites that divide us against each other. They don't want working class solidarity among black and white people because then we might actually fix the economy and have universal healthcare and things that actually make people's lives better. They're the ones, you know, kind of creating these divisions. But, you know, he tried to channel that towards progress. It was inherently incremental. You know, there's no there's no one you can

changing and this is why I think speeches are relevant and matter and need to kind of come back.

If you are telling that story and building that coalition and kind of speaking it into action,

“that's how you keep moving in the right direction. And we kind of get derailed when we”

lose, I mean, I'm using the story metaphor a lot here, when we kind of lose the plot, you know, and our politics on the left or center left becomes about either how bad they are or it becomes kind of small ball like, well, we need these ACA subsidies or we need more affordable housing, important things that I agree with. But what's the story? Like, what do we, who are we, you know, what, what is it American and how can we build a big enough coalition that we can overcome these

things that are in our way? And by the way, when he condemns Reverend Wright in that speech, he doesn't condemn the anger that Wright expresses over what he and other black Americans have been through. What he condemns is Wright's inability to see that we have the possibility to change. And like that's actually what bothers him most about what Reverend Wright said, not the actual analysis of the situation or the or the incendiary language or any of that. It's just the the

fundamental belief that or or what he expressed was that like somehow America can't change.

“And I think that is notable. It also made me think as you were just talking that I always get annoyed”

with the like these days, it's like very easy for democratic politicians to pick on the Michelle Obama when they go low, we go high. Line because they think it's Michelle Obama saying Republicans can kick the shit out of us and we have to just be nice. And that's not whatever. That's not what it meant. And what it meant is what you were just saying about like we can't we can't be like JD events and Alexander Stevens and these reactionaries who say that one group is better than

the other group. One group is good. One group is bad. It's it's a contest between good and evil. Because that's not the vision of America that the founders had in mind. And it's harder,

it's this work is harder, right, to like take a country of 330 million people of like all different

backgrounds and all different biases and and and and warring factions all through the years and say all right, let's somehow like hold it all together. Because that's the whole like that is a tougher project than the other project, which is to just tear it down and try to subjugate people. Yeah, I mean, if you're a reactionary rooted in grievance in nostalgia, you're inherently going to win the go low fight. Yes, right, because what we're trying to do is is play for something bigger.

Douglas and King. The Douglas speech, I love this speech. He gave it during reconstruction and it's a speech that's really about multiracial democracy, but it's a speech and defense of Chinese immigrants. Like probably that it probably pulled, you know, if we had a polar coaster episode in 1867, the advice would be like, please do not go there. It was what while they're in popular, but essentially these Chinese immigrants were being incredibly mistreated. They were kind of the new slaves, you know,

“even though they weren't total servitude. And Douglas is saying, if I believe in multiracial”

democracy, I had to stand up for the rights of these people, too. And he gives a beautiful going high speech about that. Now, you could say, well, Douglas failed. There's a Chinese exclusion after it was passed shortly after banning Chinese people from coming in this country for decades. Did he fail? Because look around California today, how many Chinese Americans in Asian Americans do you see? Maybe because he went high and he went big. Maybe he won in the end,

you know, King's same thing. Like King gives a speech and was interested in reliving the story that speech. He, it's pretty good speech. You did promissory note. He's got a lot of good rhetoric. He did not have the dream in there. He had lived the whole dream sequence. Well, this was like a

speechwriter nerding out thing, but I had never heard that King's staff, someone on his staff

was helping with the speech was like, don't say, don't talk about your dream, whatever you do, because it's too cliche. And then King just gives this speech and does it. So, first of all, I'm so glad we're talking about this because it was such a speechwriter thing, they had not really worked on this speech as much as they should have. Because they were super busy. Everybody thinks, you know, you have a big speech, you work on a forever. They were huddled in the

the Willard Hotel, like the night before the March. And they're literally writing the speech. And this guy's like, whatever you do, Martin, like, just don't tell them about that dream. It's cliche, you know. So they leave it out. He stays up. They finish the draft of this speech.

day, and he's, and you kind of see him in the footage. He's kind of still fiddling with the speech.

“And then he gets up there and he gives the speech and it's good. And he gets this moment and he's kind”

of stops. Kind of like Obama did before he sang amazing grace. He kind of stops and pauses.

And if I had to guess, he's sitting there thinking, I'm never going to speak to a crowd this big again.

The whole country is watching on TV. Most white people never seen a black person deliver a whole speech before. These people watching, someone will go back to the south and get their ass beat in. I need to give them something more. I need to, to give them something else. Now, the dream sequence he'd used before, by the way, was not nearly as good. It was okay. It was, it was good. But it was, it was not the evocative language that he ended up using.

And he goes so high, right? Like every image that he uses is black and white coming together, black children and white children. And a nation where you're judged not by the color of your skin and the content of your character. He's giving the nation a sense of purpose, right? And he's, you know, he's doing that because he's trying to affect John of Kennedy to have a more ambitious civil rights bill, but also intangibly in the same way that maybe Douglas changed

America over time. It's kind of hard argue with King's dream. You know, he went so big that even today Donald Trump has to be like, yeah, I had dream too. You know, like, like,

“and I think we, let's not lose that. Like, it's not about just going high. It's also about going”

big, like a big vision for this country. Well, I was thinking about that. And one thing that connects all these speeches that go big or high or whatever you want to say is this, like, deeply moral language that I, as I was reading the book or I was like, fuck, we don't have that anymore. Like, we don't hear that anymore, right? It's not like they are trying to win arguments through logic and reason alone that a lot of these speakers from King to Douglas, to Deloros Huerta, to

everyone you have in the book that is not a reactionary. And actually, the lot of the reactionaries, too, they use a moral language that is both, it's embedded in the founding documents, but even deeper than that, there's a lot of religious language and in a way that I hadn't expected, not in the way that the, like, the Christian right uses religion today, because a lot of the people who, on the progressive side who use this religious language aren't even religious themselves.

You mentioned that, you know, Abraham Lincoln wasn't a big fan of organized religion, but again,

you know, Frederick Douglas calls his second inaugural sacred and he reaches for this sort of

religious imagery and it happens all the way through King and all the way through all of these all of these figures in the book. And I wonder what you thought about that. I know you're not like a deeply religious person. I'm not a deeply like organized religious person, but it was hard to not notice that each of these speeches, especially from a left that has become, you know, fairly secular, even some of the most radical activists and abolitionists and progressive presidents

throughout history have sort of like tried to ground their argument in something in this, in this higher power. Yeah, I mean, and there's like, look, there's some interesting particularities, like, you know, churches and faiths were often party to movements, right? Right. But, but also just the languages is religious, but it's also just a moral, you know, Dolores were to her speech, she marches from Delano, California all the way to Sacramento with the farm workers and

say his or sheaves who, you know, he's obviously problematic figures. Good thing you went with Dolores were to. I went with Dolores, yeah. Did you didn't know at the time, but that was a yeah, yeah. All sensible, she's there to advocate for farm worker union rights, you know, like we wanted to have the right to collect a bargaining and we want, you know, longer breaks and we want healthcare and all these things. But the speech is like, we are here, we embody our needs

for you, you know, like it's a very visceral activist language that felt very contemporary. It was

“basically all lives matter kind of language, like our lives matter, like we are here, you have to”

see us, you know? And I think that some of it is, yes, religion is kind of in some ways the simplest way, and I heard, you know, Reverend Warnock on recently and he talks a bit about this, like religion is obviously in James Talereko's doing this now. Religion is, is a quick way to into morality. But I also think there are things you can draw from religious traditions. Like Obama used

to Obama would always say, you know, a corf is message at the beginning was I and my brother's keeper,

I'm a my sister's keeper. That's a religious idea, but it's also a secular idea, right?

has, it could be very secular. Like you don't need to believe in any specific faith to, to, to, to,

“has absolutely has secular meaning. And I think that's the language you said this joke, you know,”

I think I can tell it about kind of democratic consultant speech, you know, we wanted to put the middle class at that middle of our priorities. And the horrifying thing about living to the last decade is actually that we want to build an economy from the bottom up in the middle out, you know, there's no morality in that. There's no purpose in that. There's no sense that I want to care for my neighbor, or that I, I have a stake in this country in its success, or that I want my life

to have a meaning bigger than even what I do every day. I belong to a whole that matters, you know, the Kennedy language about ripples of hope, right, or I'm not free unless everybody's, you know, like, I think that what's been missing in democratic politics since Obama, and this isn't just like flocking for Obama, it's I think is, you know, we haven't had necessarily great speakers, or we've gotten consultants speak, or frankly, social media is kind of disincentivized,

“this kind of speaking, but I think people are ready for it now. I think like, life is pretty”

fucked in this country right now because of rampant inequality, wars, AIs coming for jobs, like your kids are on the screens and friends with chat bots or something, like they want someone to come along and say, there's something bigger that we need to be about, that we need to care for our neighbor, things, concepts of fairness and dignity, you know, that our dignity is a very religious concept that there's value in human life, which is why what I say is doing

is wrong, you know. I think that kind of language, whoever can harness that and capture that, I think that would be very useful in a 2020 presidential tendency. And I'm not saying that's like ideology is an important here, and policy is an important, but like it is. When you say, even when you say Medicare for all or abolish ice, even if you believe those things,

talking about them in that way is not the most powerful way to talk about them.

Like slogans about slogans to signal that you exist on a certain area of the political spectrum, is fine for, you know, signaling to certain in groups and other people paying close attention to politics, that that's where you are fine. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying, it is not sufficient anymore. And it is evidence that we are missing that that bigger moral story about who we are and where we need to go, that you see throughout American history that

you've chronicled in this book. And I just don't, I have not heard anyone tell that story or even attempt to, which is why I'm still like, there was an interesting moment. Do you remember Bernie

“in, I think, is last campaign? He used to do this thing in rallies. He started to do what he'd say.”

I want you to look at the person next to you and what this campaign is about is I want you to care about that person as much as you care about yourself. And Medicare for all flows from that. Right. Absolutely. So what a good politician does is absolutely the policy and ideology matters. So this is not just about giving Erie Ferry speeches, but if you ground it in something, you anchor it in a kind of moral language and a story about America and what

American identity means, it should follow naturally. Well, if you care about the person next to you is much as care about yourself, you want them to have health care too. And that's, that's, I think, the piece that's been missing to some extent. So you end the book with Trump's second inaugural. And so I think, I think you said originally it was probably going to be what Pat Buchanan's 1992 speech and then Obama Selma speech and then instead you did Obama race and then and with

Trump's second inaugural. And you know, we've talked about how in the sweep of history, you start realizing that the transition from Obama to Trump is more natural than it may have

seemed at the time because we've always had these back lashes. And that is true. I will say

after reading your whole book and then getting to Trump. His second inaugural and his presidency feel like even more of a departure, even more un-American, then even Steven's white supremacy speech or you have Mary Lisa's sort of xenophobic populism or even Pat Buchanan who you talk about, like, and I think it's the, um, because it's not just the xenophobia. It's not just like the issues of race that we're dealing with that Trump again. It is the, the dictatorial quality

of Trump's rhetoric and the actions really stand out even from all the other reactionaries in

oh, we are fucked. That is absolutely a hundred percent on point in what I would say because look,

there's some things that make a lot of sense if you look at history. The kind of populist grievance of the white working class kind of paranoid America, first isolationism, periodic spasms of xenophobia in anti-immigrant sentiment. There's a lot of currents that run in the Trump. Where he is a departure, Alexander Stevens, that was a speech they had just had a process. Obviously, Lincoln thought it was legal, but they voted to succeed. They wrote a constitution and he's giving a speech defending

the legal framework for what they did. You know, I mean, so weirdly, like the Confederacy,

“like tried to have a veneer of process. Trump in that speech says, I think the most chilling line,”

right, is I was saved by God to make America great again. And, and everything is I, everything is like,

you know, like Reagan would never have said that, you know, and I think the extremely the

departure leader in American history has said that, not even the George Wallace's, not like none of them. Nope, nope. And he basically says like your job is done, you vote for me, stories over, I won, and I'm taking custody of this country and its story. And, and you right, the the extremity is not just the, it's not the racism in the xenophobia and the, you know, unleashed capital is always things. It's the dictatorial, it's the idea that I'm not playing by Franklin's rulebook, you know,

I don't need to follow the law. I can do whatever I want. That's the departure, and that is a departure. Like that's the radicalism of Trump is not in the underlying xenophobia or populism. It's in

the putting that in service of someone who believes not in the constitutional framework

within which we have this competition of stories. Like I welcome a world of future in which J.D. Vance plays by the rules and gives versions of his comment on speeches and we debate him. Yep. Like that's healthy. That's good. Yep. Like, and I welcome other people disagreeing with me and agreeing with J.D. Vance. I don't have all the answers. Shit. I'm then nine close. What I do insist on is that we're still dealing within the compromise that Franklin and his

buddies outlined. And that, in his rhetoric and in his actions, Trump has, has departed from that.

“And I think that's why this is, is an actual emergency. Yes, it's a backlash. Just like,”

there was a backlash to reconstruction. Just like there was a backlash to the voice movement. But this, this is someone saying, even the segregationists, you know, we're processed people, you know, states rights and these laws and, well, you know, we're going to try to get people on the Supreme Court and do this. Like, Trump is just saying, none of the supplies to me. And that's the message in his rhetoric. Yeah. And, and, and, and we can leave it here. Maybe you can react to this.

And then, and I don't bring it up because I actually do think that we're fucked. But I think that if we are trying to tell a story about where we go from here and continue having this argument in a way where we actually win the argument. Like, that's what we have. We have to figure out that what Trump represents and what he's telling people. And I don't say that to be like, to refight the 2024 battle about like, oh, come, let's should call him a fascist. And we should talk

more about democracy. And because obviously, like, the words have all been wrong. Not just from common, but from everyone. Like, we have not been like, just saying that Trump is a dangerous fascist. Clearly has not worked. But what is it about him and what he's doing and this departure from the rest of American history that is still, um, uh, that is still appealing to a big part of the country. And what is the arguments to that part of the country to say that like, this is like Lincoln did

for, to the south. Like, this is bad for all of us. It's bad for you. It's bad for us. It's bad for the

“whole project. And we have to find a way out of this together. I think you see, uh, all soft doing this”

a bit. In the sense, well, it's not just about corruption. What he's saying is, if someone like Trump and his cronies, and actually I start the section on the speech on Trump with the tabloid of all those oligarchs in the stage for reason, if there are a small number of people that are just exempted entirely from the rules, you're going to get screwed. Like, not only is that fundamentally wrong and an American, it also leads to outcomes where you're fucked because they're not going to

look at, they're going to loot this country. They're not going to, you know, do anything for the common good. You know, they're not going to do anything to care for the neighbor. They're not going to care about the person next to them. Um, and, and so I, I think that that, that we have to not have this separation of the democracy message and the kind of economic message because they're connected.

well, he's probably going to build a ballroom and steal a bunch of money and set up a slosh

fun for his friends and leverage American foreign policy to make billions in crypto and launch crazy wars and people are making money off of insider trading and while you pay higher gas prices.

“You know, so I think that people that can tell a story that draws those connections between the”

radicalism of Trump and the outcomes and people's lives. Um, I, I think that's probably, you know, I don't claim to have the exact formulation, but that's the space. And you see all soft circling, you see war knocks circling it, Chris Murphy circling it, AOCs definitely circling it. Yep. Um, I think I think the, and notably younger Democrats, by the way, like, are figuring this out. Yeah, Ben, I can talk to you for another couple hours about all this, but I have all these other

questions. You, we don't have to make it a big exchange. Just curious, like, you read them. What was your favorite speech? Oh, wow. I mean, it sounds, it's like an answer that so many people

“have given in the past, but I think like you, I came to appreciate Lincoln's second inaugural.”

Totally green. In like a way that I just never, like I remember when people said that,

I would always be like, yeah, that's a pretty good speech, but I didn't really get why everyone loved it so much and your, your chapter on it and the story behind it has, has brought me around to how both radical and, and hopeful and, and, and, and, and with so much humility, um, he delivers that speech at that time. So yeah. Yeah, totally agree. And pretty crazy, right, that the most radical speech ever was in 1865. It's just going to show, you know. History moves in different directions.

Sure does. Um, everyone go by the book, seriously. I know what, or anyway, say this, we have

“people on who by books and, and bends a cricket co-host, but it is, uh, it, this book will stay with me”

for a long time, and I will go back to it, um, many times, and it was like such a bomb from reading the news. Because yeah, it really, it's like, it's just a real, like, if, if you care about the country and you care about politics and you're paying attention to politics, but you want to feel something

deeper and more hopeful than you see every day. Go read, uh, I'll always say it's a fantastic book.

Thanks, John. All right. Take care, buddy. Pause in America is a cricket media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Ferris Safari, with Reed-Chirlin, Elijah Cone, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hefko, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Carroll, Lavey, David Tolz, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is probably unionized with the writer's guild of America East.

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