Podcasting Through It with Heather Cox Richardson

Ferrero, Kinder Oosterhase.

5 and 50 grams for no. 9 and 90 cents. Or Golden Sea Food Reucher, Lux XXL, 220 grams for no. 3, 0.9 and 70. Aldi. Good for all. Hey everybody, welcome to the weekly show podcast.

My name is John Thurdy, it is March 31st. We are on the lamb side of March moving into April and other than that, though. I would say, I'm having a feeling of, I don't know what it's like to be on a Bob's

“lead course or on a lose, but that's what it feels like right now in this country.”

We appear to be co-reening towards something and you're not quite sure if we are going to stay on the track or fly off and explode in midair and when I have feelings like this when the complexities of the world and the velocity of world events seem to be speeding towards a frightening conclusion. I reach to those as Mr. Rogers would say, I reach for the helpers, I reach for the helpers,

those that can help put this in perspective and our guest today is just one of my favorites who I just love or sub-stack, I love everything that she does, but her ability to sort of create frameworks around all these things that are so difficult for all of us to process is what makes her such a valuable voice in this current moment. So I'm just going to get on in and bring on our guest, the fabulous Heather Cox Richardson.

“So ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure and honor to welcome back once again”

the great Heather Cox Richardson professor of history at Boston College Heather, thank you so much for being here. Always a pleasure, John. Heather. John.

First of all, let me apologize to you that in times of trouble, I hate to treat you like a Sav that I reach for in times of need, a bottle of valium, your experience and your knowledge

of the arch of history and the narratives of history always bring me a comfort in that

the things that we're experiencing are not necessarily unprecedented and that there are historical analogs which we don't want to use as a crunch necessarily, but Heather, I'm wondering in this moment, I wanted to reach out to you because it feels there is a toxicity that seems to be building to some kind of volcanic eruption and I can't shake that feeling of impending catastrophic.

So I wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit about how you're processing this moment knowing how well you're able to see the landscapes of the past and lay them into the present. So let's start with the place it's always important to start and that's that the future is unwritten, like we are writing this story and we are doing it and one of the reasons

“that I think people like you and me reach for the people around us is because ultimately”

this is an extraordinarily human process, the people in the past did the same thing. Yes, though, I feel as if you seem to feel that we are heading toward some kind of a cataclysm in the next soon and that I think we should maybe unpack a little bit about what's going on there, but again to reach back into history, we are not the first people who are approaching a catastrophe without really being able to understand what is going to happen or what it looks

like and I always think of the fact that years ago I went to write a piece on the Great

Crash of 29 and I thought, you know, everybody's done the economics and everybody's done this and everyone's done that. What am I going to do? So I went back to a newspaper from the time and read the night before to see what it looked like on the verge of it and it's really interesting, so it was the opening night

of the opera in New York City and so you had all these stories about the people in there, beautiful coaches and the guys with the uniforms and the people wearing diamonds and going in and going to see the opera and there was a really small note about a man who had died by suicide that night because his business had gone under and he was distraught and he couldn't face the fact that he was the only failure in this entire city country world

saying to the little piece of paper dude hang on hang on 12 more hours because if you hang on 12 more hours there's going to be a whole lot of people who are there with you and who might like to hear your perspective on things. So every time it feels to me like oh man I'm not sure what we're facing in the morning.

“I think of that poor man who if he had just managed to hang on for 12 more hours would”

have realized that he was not a failure that the system had failed and that together they could rebuild it. That's a beautiful way of putting it and there's also something within that kind of tab

blow that seems really appropriate which is the cataclysm always seems to occur the night

before cataclysm eve if you will always seems to be draped in finery you know you sort of you almost get that sense of using the Titanic is that's you know and what's happening the band is playing in the grand ballroom and people are draped in there and they're they're riding in luxury on what appears to be a kind of portend for this glorious and a future of riches and then there's one dude who's like hey what's that what's the shadow of an iceberg

that's over there and it feels that way a little bit here and I'll tell you why this moment for me is it is the world faces those challenges and potential cataclysms and all those things and navigating these difficult waters the difference for me now is the captain of our ship seems utterly disinterested in where the icebergs seem to be in when the crash may happen he just wants to get out he wants to stand on his plane with a giant poster board of his ballroom

“it's the lack of interest in the consequences of his powerful actions is I think what's got”

me on such shaky ground I don't think I feel like we've never been at the you know at the

peril of a leader so disinterested in the damage of his own actions you're far more charitable than I am I think the dude is coco coco pops I mean you know so so you know I'm going to push that further to me the the elephant not only just in the room but in the whole house and in the whole mansion you know whatever is that he is not mentally okay and you know we have captain A have in the charge of the ship of state which you know would be a lovely thing to dive into

it's some other conversation yes but he um no I think it's more than he doesn't care because certainly we have had presidents in the past who had an ideology in their head and acted according to that ideology even as the country began to burn down around them I mean just don't even start me on Benjamin Harrison but we could get into Calvin Coolidge for example but in this case

the man does not know if he's a footer horseback and so you know things are changing every second

and the more destruction he causes the more he is inclined to lash out and cause more destruction so watching that you know and what that has gotten us into with the destruction of world trade and with the destruction of our security alliances and with the destruction of our allies and with the support you know those the the fact we're supporting oligarchs especially petrol oligarchs around the world I mean what he has done is he has really slashed into ribbons the post world who are

to order that has brought his peace and prosperity for eighty-freak in years so that is entirely new and and certainly there are parallels in the past where the American people have stepped up and said to those individuals who were advancing ideologies hey dude this doesn't work we got to try something

“else but what that has also done is it has opened a window I think into possibilities for”

moving the the world forward in the ways that it will need to in the twenty-first century to do things like address climate change and to address the the migration that's going to come from to climate change and to address the fact that in that post world war two order you really had more even than the vestiges I think of colonialism but the kind of colonialist ideas that said that you know Africa doesn't get a seat at the G20 until until President Joe Biden isn't office I mean

so one of the things I think about steering that Titanic past the the iceberg or maybe at least guaranteeing that people get in the lifeboats is people keeping a steady hand on I'm sorry to really push that metaphor but the ship of state to try and make sure that it can at least keep a float

yeah the the problem of the seems to be that Trump is destroying it faster than we can react to it that the squandering it really is like you know this 80 year world order that you speak of was designed and maintained by the United States we created this stable world that's where our

“leverage in power is coming from and to see him piss it away with such velocity I think it's”

is our system up for being able to grab the wheel or we all just still trying to to gain our bearings well I think at the at the beginning we were trying to gain our bearings because things were happening so incredibly quickly and and the idea of pushing back against him through the courts for example takes time that you know that takes a time to play out but one of the things again I now we're going to be polyana to you here no worries one of the things that does seem to be developing

is a number of people in other countries who at first had their jaws on their chests watching

what was happening in the United States are now sort of standing up and saying well actually we don't want to go down the route of going back to the 1890s the way Donald Trump wants to because let's think about what that did oh I know world wars so you know in places like Italy for example Italy this morning said that it would not permit US planes to land at in to land in Italy on their way to Iran well what does that say about the importance in the ways in which the Trump

administration and the way it's behaving is hurting the far right in Italy you know they don't want us they don't want to be aligned with him and take a look at what happened to the rising right wing parties in Canada and the emergence of Mark Carney the Prime Minister of Canada is I mean he's incredibly smart man anyway but his reworking of that international order in order to make sure that when he calls the middle countries the middle in countries are able to maintain some kind of global

stability you know what what's happened to the United States is heart wrenching over the last 40

years at least maybe in part because we have been so powerful it's enabled us to get away with

all kinds of crap because you know we didn't have to pay taxes we could simply borrow we didn't have to worry about our safety because we were the United States what we are seeing happened to us

“and our role in the world is heart wrenching for those of us who remember a period in which we were”

really a force for good or at least tried to be but maybe what we will see coming on at this is a fairer order around the world thanks to people in other countries little hard to be thrown into the backwater yourselves but you know we did it to ourselves right it's so interesting to think of that way as Trump as almost a vaccination against far right populism that they they see how it operates but maybe that's the difficulty we have in processing him because we look at it you know you

mentioned Benjamin Harrison you mentioned Calvin Coolid and we process him through our own system of constitutional republic right but he's kind of thrown our lot in with a different form of government it's hard to compare him to American presidents it's almost easier to compare him to strongmen I mean I don't know if you saw they unveiled the Trump library but it's not a library it's the freedom tower as if the only tenant was Kim Jong-un like it's twice the size of a height

of any building in Miami and then in it are just gold statues of Donald Trump and his plane so how do we how do we process an American president that has so much more in common with

“the illiberal strongmen of today in the past? Well so first of all I think it's important to”

realize that he was not just breaking the law in his first year in office he was acting not acting

unconstitutionally although it was that too both of those things he was acting as if there wasn't a constitution which is one of the things sort of extra constitutionally which is one of the things is being hard to chase down because you know normally if somebody breaks the law you say okay I'm going to bring in lawyers I'm going to sue you and we're going to get to the bottom of this but think about the Department of Government efficiency for example we still don't know who was in charge

of the government of government efficiency like how do you sue anybody if you literally do not know who was in charge of it so there are many ways in which the way he undertook to undermine the constitution in fact puts him in line with those autocrats who operate without an insect by the

how to fight back against it and we can talk more about that but that library I think is really interesting along with the arch and along with you know the arc to triumph yeah yeah I mean and you know when they build it they're going to drop the eye and it's just kind of the the arc to trump but you just said something there yeah when they build it yes so one of the things that I find fascinating and would love to hear you talk about this because this is your medium and not mine is

the degree to which what trump is doing is sort of the idea of virtual technology that Russian concept of convincing people in the political realm of something that does not exist that exists only in their minds and in the technology of television and radio and the internet to to base their

lives on that the degree to which we are looking at you know basically trump running the country

“like a television show no question and an an ADHD I think what you find now is and the only”

thing I can think about it is I'm trying to again be charitable is if you don't think of him as a dictator but you think of him as all right he believes the United States is really just a subsidiary of the trump organization and so he's running it if you don't think of it in terms of you know Putin you think of it in terms of a business man running a company that's not public so all the decision making that occurs he is in essence it's monarchy but through a capitalist monarchy

you know that's would be the charitable definition of it and I think what you see is he's able to move using those processes much faster than we're able to contain it he I think his first term struck me as he was testing the limits of our constitution where the holes where the weaknesses the second term he's just exploiting them and he's doing it at such a pace I mean I think the real analog to that is what happened to the east wing where I'm going to build a ballroom

but I'm never going to touch the east wing and then it's just gone and rather than face the consequences

he is a he's not you know they always say like it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission the thing about trump is he doesn't even ask fucking forgiveness he just moves on he's erect it's he is a wrecking ball that operates simultaneously with a sort of reality distortion field and he convinces his accolites like you say through the power of narrative he's one of the

“better narrative storytellers but it's budding up against actual reality and that's what's”

so fascinating about the Iran situation it's the first time I've seen him not be able to just move on well so that's really interesting thinking about the United States of America as a subsidiary of the trump oligarchy or not even it's a personalized you know company and thinking

of it as a media subsidiary basically the United States is a media subsidiary that is you just

have to tell a good story and we know there's a lot of stories coming out of the White House about how you know White House chief of staff Suzie Wiles is running a daily TV show that trump has to win at the end of every night you know the degree to which he is manipulating reality through his posts on truth social and through the things he's saying which change by the hour but but

“there is it seems like the way you set that up it does seem like there has to be a way to think”

through this that enables people to create their own reality out of things that are actually based in reality like you say like the Iran war and I you know like you I have said for years that once people woke up and realized what was going to happen if in fact we put this kind of a presidency in place that's when we would get our democracy back and I do think that is happening but I also think you just identified that it's not happening as quickly as it needs to as

Congress is on break until April 13th and trump is in the White House contemplating sending our men and women into a ground war in Iran which is already a disaster and that when we we started up I talk I was a little uncomfortable using the word cataclysm at first but boy did these next two weeks look like they're going to be sort of make it or break it

you know last time that we talked about this next sponsor I mentioned an idea that I had which by the way has taken off like like a wildfire like hotcakes like other things that you say about things that are taking off like a rocket ship I told you about my invention the crumple the crumple it is a topographical blanket for dogs and have I started this business yet

I have not and I'm going to tell you why it's too hard it's never I don't know how to do this

it's daunting but you know you have Shopify here makes it easy for people you can get started with they got a design studio hundreds of templates help you build an online store it can match your style maybe nobody knows your brand yet you know they can help you find customers with easy to use email or social media campaigns they can you know all important tasks to do this one place inventory payments analytics it's all centralized this would I mean I don't want to say it's a four

sample of fire for the crumple but there is no question that with Shopify I can turn the crumple into a reality and dominate the dog comfort industry if that is an industry which I am not sure that it is but if it were I would dominate it's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com/tws go to Shopify.com/tws that's Shopify.com/tWS so let's say if we're putting this in terms of fail saves right so like

you know if you think of it as like a circuit box and what's the first fuse to pop that you

would go down and reboot that would be Congress I'm laughing like you and I we've do we've done

“boats we've done TV we're just like here's the thing reality's too screwy we have to find”

analogous situations Congress is that first you would think fuse to pop that could reset and rain this in in your vast expanse of history can you recall a Congress this feckless or one that didn't appear I don't even know if they agree with them but they're so cowardly as to not want to take a chance of even a whiff of resistance. Okay so the cowardice in this Congress is I think new in part because of the ways in which the primary system has been a jigged so that the people who in

are in Congress the Republicans not the Democrats but the Republicans that were in Congress have almost been selected to be weenies when it came to Trump right but this is not the first

Congress not to do its job and they're you know we always point to the truth but the Congress

“under Truman that he called the do nothing Congress but of more interest I think in this moment”

is the one in the early 1920s in which the Republicans take over from a period of time in which the Democrats have really dominated the early 20th century under Woodrow Wilson and they've done all kinds of stuff that a lot of Republicans really hate like the income tax and you know progressive legislation and so on and of course all the racial stuff all the you know the racist stuff too but the Republicans complain a lot less about that but when they get in control of Congress in the

early 1920s they really can't get their feet under them they have been an opposition party for so long that they basically don't know how to take the reins and run anything so they start to squabble amongst themselves especially between the old guard the Henry Cabot lodges for example and the younger people like fighting Bob LaFalla out of Wisconsin you know they just can't really get their feet under them so what happens in that case is that the power of the federal government

slides into the cabinet and the people who really begin to run the government are Andrew Mellon at Treasury and are Herbert Hoover at Commerce. Who is president at this time? In the in 20 that's

“20 to 23 I think it is going to be harding 20 to 20 right so they take over and then harding”

dies of a heart attack in California and Calvin Coolidge takes over but he does he keeps some and power and the reason I mentioned those names is most people if they haven't heard of them certainly you've heard of Hoover when he was president if you go and look at buildings in your town from the 1920s they're going to have the name of Andrew Mellon on them because he was pretty big about send you know making sure his name was on everything and what they did is they took the mechanics

organizations of the progressive era and they stock them all with businessmen and this is when we you get the era that and this is not actually what he said but the idea that the business of America is business and they rewrite Jesus Christ and the apostles to be you know Jesus to be a business man who took ten nobody is in terms of the business man exactly so in that case you

“one of the things points I think I made actually with you a year or so ago is that”

power isn't vested anywhere in the United States really accept among the people but when it

flows into Washington it's sloshes around and sometimes you get a really powerful present who just

scoops it all up sometimes you get a really powerful congress who scoops it all up sometimes you get a supreme court sometimes you get the cabinet but in a moment when you have a president who is not able to manage the country in a coherent fashion and there I'm being delicate you do have the opportunity to grab that power and you know I thought the Republicans in the Senate were going to do it I thought that they at least I hope they were going to take their power

and use it to stabilize the country and they didn't they punted the House of Representatives under the Republicans has been laughable it is so badly organized the supreme court has been

“grabbing for a ton of power for a while now so that's out there but one of the things that I think”

we are seeing is the American people waking up and saying well hey if you guys aren't going to be using your power for us we kind of like it back and that's the thing that's where the opportunity

when you talked about the sort of optimistic vision because you think of it you know what we always

kind of rest on on the laurels of the system of checks and balances that were designed in the founding fathers grand wisdom they found ways that it was going to be a battle between the executive and the legislative and the judicial not sort of foreseen that political parties might abdicate all responsibility of power just to hold on to power that there'd be no principle behind it and I wonder if Trump saw the weakness of that system he saw the cowardice in that system of

people not wanting to because for so long our government has displayed a grand cowardice in terms of bold programs designed to address the needs of the American people. I mean I think you know you talked about these last 40 years I think there's been a real erosion between peoples the connection of people to the problems that they face every day and their connection to a government that seems to be designed in no way that the money that you

pay in doesn't come back to you in any way that you feel like has a value and he saw that and exploited that weakness and does that mean there's an opportunity now on the side of the people to seize that and exploit that weakness and I hesitate to even put it out there but not a

strongman but a powerful leader to wield that on behalf of people's needs as opposed to their own

gratification to wield that that governmental power that hasn't been used. Right. Oh yeah I think so and I think you're seeing it one of the things it's fun is watching the Democratic governors around the country and and perhaps even some Republican governors who are very deliberately saying hey let's take this uh this government out for a spin and see it we can do with heat do for people right and and I'm Zorin Mamdoni in New York City

again same thing now that's not to say you necessarily agree with their policies or whatever but this idea that the government is designed for the people is very much back on the table but I go back a step and say that this is not just Trump I actually don't think Trump saw something and exploited it I think he's a really simple character he is not a politician he's a salesman and he recognized that 40 years of Republican rhetoric had created a population that he could

“exploit because that's what he does he exploits people and he did that and he did it very effectively”

but it's not just that the government sort of amorphously stopped doing things for people I actually think that was a deliberate decision on the part of certain Republican politicians who took over the party in the in the 1990s especially but certainly we're behind Reagan's election in the 80s in 1980 and they they set up the system in such a way that the American people would no longer have a saying it so things like tax cuts you know people said they love tax cuts what that

really did was it managed to create real deficits that made it harder for the government to do

being behind their government at the same time that we began to do everything based on extraordinary

“deficits so the money coming into the government actually didn't have a lot to do with tax dollars”

it had to do with how much the government could borrow now the more the American people ended up not liking what was the government was doing the more that the Republicans in charge of the systems stripped those systems down so that the people had less and less and less to say so by 1986 you are already hearing from the Republicans on to Reagan the idea of ballot integrity the idea you had to go into the roles and clean them up because they were not legitimate so what do we get we

get Florida does that in 1998 and in the process of cleaning up the voter roles knocks about 100,000 people off the voting roles in Florida in 1999 you know something happened in Florida in 2000 I can't remember what that was but then you think all the way through you get citizens united which is you know makes money pouring to the system well who does that benefit people who have a ton of money you get the gerrymandering extraordinary gerrymandering that makes it almost impossible

for Democrats to win so you've got in certain states you get the Chevron decision which removes agency for agencies right so so one of the things that that is done is it skewed the system in a

“certain direction but it's also I think encouraged Americans to feel like they don't have agency”

in their government and one of the things that you have seen since Trump's was elected the second

time was people saying hey wait if we turn up at Tesla parking lots Tesla dealerships we can actually hurt the Tesla brand and you know when Jimmy Kim got knocked off the air you had people saying okay then we're not going to buy your product and all the sudden he's back on the air and people are learning that they do have agency and that muscle is strengthening in a way that it did in the 1890s for example in a very similar period that led to the progressive era for the 1930s.

Now what were how were those muscles developed in the 1890s because if I was looking for an analogous period to this and I think you make a great point about that this is a multi-faceted assault on reducing the power of people and the consent of the govern what it's sort of doing is it's raising the bar of consent so that you almost can't reach it that consent is really now formulated at the corporate board level that their speech is being far more valued than what the individuals

are right so they're designing that system and it feels more like a gilded age scenario when those titans like Morgan and those guys the government really did have to go to them and go hey man can you bail us out and we'll do whatever you want so how did they regain the power or does gaining that power necessarily have to have something catastrophic like the depression you know will we only regain our agency in the most dire of circumstances or is there a path to that

that is less tragic and more productive well once again futures on written we can make whatever

“decisions we want going forward I think it's a it's a multifaceted answer that I'm going to give you”

one is that even in the darkest periods one of the things that carries us through is art and music and the community you know the community is that those things create so we tend to forget that in that period of the robber barons in the 1880s in the 1890s it's also a period of extraordinary innovation in terms of you know technology for example but also in terms of art and music and you know you think about the the new kinds of literature the new kinds of music coming out of this

American south and so on in that period in the artwork in that period so those kinds of nurturing of the human spirit really matter and that's one of the things I don't think we necessarily pay enough attention to but one of the ways that political change happens is you know

and I thought a lot about this is you know if everything's going fine basically no one's

paying much attention to politics and then there are few people who are complaining but they're kind of voices crying in the wilderness and you're like yeah whatever you know have a cheeto you know but then this people get more and more upset more and more people are like hey did you hear what that person has to say and they start to make a community of people who are upset about

thing that had me thinking for a long time is where is the relationship literally the relationship

between people on the ground and leadership that is you know there's a lot of people to think leaders just tell people at the bottom who to think and there's people who think that it's the other way around but where for me was the connection and where I came to think the connection lies is in the more people recognize that there's a problem with their government the more they start to formulate a way to think about that and if you are trying to get elected either are elected

“or trying to get elected as a leader you need to be able to speak to those people so the connection”

between those two things are the storytellers the ones who take that in coate frustration and say this is not our society a storytellers like Abraham Lincoln for example who say this is not the way our society should be but now there's another piece to that I think and that is obviously somebody like Lincoln and but we could pick on many other people as well is able to articulate what the frustrated Americans would like their society to look like but one of the things that they

have to do is they have to be able to reach a lot of people and in Lincoln's era you got the rise of a new kind of newspaper people forget this but the New York Daily Tribune the New York Times the Chicago Tribune the Philadelphia and choir was actually older but it switches its orientation in this period you start to see the the new media amplifying that sort of story and so if you jump ahead to the 1890s once again you're seeing people like Theodore Roosevelt articulating a new kind

“of way to contextualize and imagine a new government but crucial to him is the rise of the new”

newspapers in the populist period for example most of which don't exist anymore they've all the copies were destroyed but they grew up across the American planes and in the American South like mushrooms after the rain and the idea of being able to to make sure more people get access to that narrative becomes incredibly important so if you flash forward to this moment one of the huge changes that you have seen really since and it was before there too but really since Trump was elected

the second time is this proliferation of podcasts and new local newspapers and you know right in you know writing campaigns that look like the committee's of correspondence from the the American Revolution you are seeing the the population of our intellectual space in this country with a new slash old narrative that says the government should work for us it should not be holding to kings for example and we need to take that back so that was a really long answer to say

there's a lot of different things that happen these things are all crucial and in each of the

periods we have identified there was in fact a major economic crash that made people say okay I can't identify with J.D. Rockefeller any longer because I am literally having to walk from South Dakota to Missouri to find work and when that that was in the after the panic of 1893 from 1893 to about 1897 so when that final thing happens where people say I can't live this way any longer more and more people jump on that narrative and we rewrite the country and when you see

those moments and I love the way you paint that because what it does is it gives a framework to each of these periods that you know a kind of governmental or world, cataclysm or failure combined with a new way of storytelling combined with a storyteller who was able to harness those

“and push us into what will be the next iteration and I think in our minds the person that is”

always the hero in that story is the progressive Teddy Roosevelt jumps in in those moments of

the rubber bands and he decides speaks softly characteristic and trust bust and we're not going to have monopolies anymore and we're going to do that and then you talk about the 20s and the degradation of the power of people's voices and then FDR ceases that moment and he brings in social programs that ease the pain and the lives of of all these different people and as you were telling it it what was what was coming up in my head was 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq war

and social media and these are the three ingredients but the progressive hero didn't seize

ceasing that form of communication mastering the attention economy but before that was Obama

and and are we in a situation where Obama was it was it a slightly missed opportunity to seize upon those conditions that could have really created that modern progressive revolution that ended up maybe dissipating because it wasn't bold enough it is that possible

“it's certainly possible sure the but but again one of the things you need to see there is”

the enough people unhappy enough that they would not for example embrace the reaction to Obama that powered you know the Tea Party movement and all those sort of reframing of our country to be against somebody like Obama and that by the way looks a great deal more like the long-term rise of something like the elite southern and slayvers who managed to get a whole bunch of people to stay behind them even though that economic system was grinding

them into the ground you know grinding poor white farmers into the ground so yes it's possible and certainly you know there were many people who were frustrated by the fact Obama was not as aggressive as he could have been about embracing sort of those old traditional let's take on big money and so on but I'm not entirely sure that one is productive to look back to that but two one of the things about Lincoln and about Theodore Roosevelt and about FDR is that the people really

created them you know in each one of those cases those were people who met the moment not because they were somehow especially anointed by God they were certainly very bright people right but the

“American people were ready for them and I think in some ways maybe you could say the American”

people were ready for Donald Trump because he was embracing and articulating what a lot of people on the radical right had been conditioned to believe for 40 years. A look longer I mean he's singing an old song Heather I mean that the song he's singing about there is a real America and a real American and they're the ones being screwed by like that's a pretty old song that even goes back to what you were talking about in the south. So yes it is I mean it goes all the way

back to our founding and but so does the other song and I guess that's the point that I'm always

trying to make is that when we sing that other song a number of things happen one the economy is better and when the economy is better people I mean this is a this is a connection few people recognize when the economy is better race and gender relations get better you know those two things do go hand in hand but we think about our heroes that we look to in our country we don't look to the neo-Nazis we don't look to the confederates you know we look to Fannie Lou Hammer and the people that

really have shown to expand the principles of the Declaration of Independence to include more people with every iteration and an expansion of rights and an expansion of fairness and an expansion

of of justice. So what I would love to see is first of all the embracing of those liberal principles

but also one of the other patterns we have in the United States that kind of makes historians bonkers is that you know I assume I can say the shit hits the fan on this podcast you know Heather it might be the the nicest thing anybody said on this podcast you know we turn everything over to the rich guys the shit hits the fan everybody steps up and says oh gee we really need some regulation we put the regulations around it everything stabilizes and then somebody goes I'm not

making enough money and so all of a sudden we turn it back over to the rich guys the shit hits the fan and and you know our example of that in American history is the cattle industry believe it or not which you know is this boom and bust industry and every time things go really bad the cattle ranchers say hey you know we really need some regulation over here the federal government steps in and then everything stabilizes and they go hey I'm you know Clif and Bundy get out of my life right

so if we can figure out how to stop that constant swing back and forth because every time we do

“that swing it hurts people a lot and it hurts the environment a lot when I think about the 21st”

century I want to get back to a country that does expand the rights of the declaration of independence and that puts us on the same plane that we've been in our better moments but I would also really

the strongest economy in the world you know let's do let's screw with it you know or we have the safest

world we've ever lived in I've got a great idea turn it over let's go to war against Iran you know has is is part of it because it it strikes me this is a a great discussion to have about

“it's how you convince people because I think the cattle rancher thing is a great historical”

president and you can look at it today with the farmers what I find is if the government does something that for someone that you yourself don't need well that's an entitlement and you resent it but if the government does something that you need well that's just and that's just them giving

you back your money you know and they always make this case by the way like why are we putting tariffs on

well because certain policies that were put into place hurt the rust spell and hurt manufacturing and made it so those people's lives would be lives more of despair and we must we must repair the damage that's been done by those policies but if you say the same thing about redlining or racially exclusive policies we need to create ways to repair that damage what that's an entitlement

“their free riders they don't view it as investment how do you convince people like the immigration”

situation right now in this country's a great it's its resource guarding how do you reshape the narrative so that we're able to invest once again in our people and not have those investments be so resented by anybody that might not need it how do you broaden people's perspective in that way well what you just identified there was missing one big and that's race you know that that literally that language literally comes out of the 1870s and the idea that the federal government was

going to try to level the economic especially but also the the I won't say social because they weren't related but they were trying to make sure that black Americans weren't killed by their white neighbors which seems like not a very high bar right that's when you get the language in 1871 saying hey we don't have a problem with race we have a problem with poor people voting you know you've got to pay $10 to go to the polls and you've got to do it right all of that stuff that

comes straight out of the 1870s but and again we could spend a long time on that but crucially we know what language works to get rid of that and that is the language of community and that is the idea that we are all working together to achieve something as a country and you know again one of the things the radical right did really brilliantly after 1960 there's a famous article that comes out in 1960 addressed to politicians saying stop talking about democracy and stop talking about

you know the values of community and making sure everybody's got a shot at the American dream and all that because we all agree about that republicans and democrats agree about that so stop with that it's a waste of your time and money instead work in putting together coalitions so

basically the traditional republicans and the traditional democrats listen to that and start

it to just try to nail together coalitions you know we'll give you a bridge and we'll give you I don't know a new hospital or whatever pure transaction transaction yes it was the radical right who said we are going to defend individuals to make them able to take on the empire able to you know tying into all those tropes of literature and and sort of mythology that said you're going to matter to us your vote matters for something way bigger than you are something that is the

you know the United States of America sometimes something that is God you matter and one of the

“things that that I try and do and that I think we all should be trying to do more is recognizing”

that the values of humanity the idea of self-determination and the idea that you get to create a government that allows you to have the freedom and by freedom I don't mean a lack of government so much as government protections to enable you to get an education and have health care and so on so you can become whoever you want is actually a profoundly moral and a profoundly principled thing to do and you think about all around the world where people are in the streets fighting for the right

to vote for example or the right to have a say in their government and then in the United States people saying I'm not going to bother we need to get more of that this matters not just because I want

and a government that reflects that not only in my own government but around the world matter

“morally and and for society that kind of language is what gave us the attempts in the 1950s to”

level the playing field for people of color for example and in the 1970s including women as well that language really works but we have to stop thinking oh it's a done deal we don't have to worry

about it anymore right well they always say the arc of you know the moral universe

bends towards justice but they don't explain like yeah but not by itself and and there's a bunch of people on the other side trying to bend it back the other way and I wonder when we talk about the moral argument do we have to connect it to more earthly values for people because it feels like that's the backlash that we're facing that if if the right was going to draw a line like what you and I might do is draw a line at the depression right and we might draw a line at FDR coming in

and creating a government that is more designed for the benefit of the people it reports to represent they would draw a line at nineteen sixty four and nineteen sixty five they would draw a line at the civil rights act and they would draw a line at the immigration act which led in people from countries that they didn't quite have ignoring the fact that they hated the Irish and they hated the Italian and they hated the Jews back when they came but now you're bringing

people and so their perspective on that is now our country is being given away to people who don't have shit they even use the phrase the heritage Americans are more important than the other Americans that there are somehow the scotch Irish that were here in the eighteen fifties were somehow better Americans than the ones that came in in the sixties and seventies so in some ways what's happened over that time is the backlash right they've all been convinced that

their country's been given away to those that don't deserve it do we need to make the argument for them will they ever be convinced on the morality of it or do they have to also be convinced that it's actually a more prosperous union that it makes it a safer and more prosperous

“place oh I think those two have to go hand in hand yeah but they do they do go hand in hand”

so it's a really easy sell in the nineteen fifties because people had watched what happened under fascism in Europe and not just the horrors that we tend to think about when we think about that those regimes but also the fact that when the Europeans and the allies and the Americans came in they were feeding those people because they literally couldn't eat or if you looked at what happened in the Soviet Union and in China when there was an attempt to impose an ideology

over the agricultural systems you know you had these horrific periods when you know tens of thousands hundreds of thousands and even millions of people died but the one of the key things that you

are identifying I think is first of all yes I mean I think we need to talk a lot more about the

American dream and that is not you know having a car in your garage or whatever it means that you are able to work hard and rise whatever that looks like for you so that your kids are going to have a better life than you did again whatever that looks like for you I do think we need to to keep that as part of our language but they're in and the reality of it but there's also something key to what

“you said and that I think is something that is fascinating that when you listen to people nowadays”

talking about their desire to shut the door for other immigrants because their country is being stolen or whatever and again I'm not putting aside I'm not going to talk here at all about the reality that to the degree our country is being taken over it's actually being taken over a corporations including foreign corporations right so this idea that some family from Ecuador is taking something from me is just a pure fantasy but that world that they are describing is a world where

there is there are limited resources that there's only the pie is only this big and by God you gotta get your peace but in fact the elites are stealing it from you well but the the reality of the way that people like me think about the world is that in fact the pie is expanding and I again don't necessarily just mean the the economic pie although certainly if you look at the last

80 years around the world more than a billion people have been raised out of poverty which is a good

thing you know they're not dying of starvation and lack of clean water and so on others still are

half or whatever basically says that we are trying to limit the ability of individuals to grow and

“improve this world because only by keeping it small can we monopolize it whereas if you”

say hey as Abraham Lincoln did sorry but also theater Roosevelt whereas if you say hey we want you here because we want your ideas and we want your labor and we want you know your view of the world what you are saying is we don't have limits and and again I'm not saying we don't have economic limits I'm very concerned about climate change but but there are ways to address that if we have those new ideas and those new people and that idea of looking at the world as a world of possibilities

rather than limitations seems to me to be what the United States of America has always done particularly

well and these people are saying no no no no forget our past we just have to hang on to what we had in the 1920s because that was the best and you know that was a cramped world that excluded most of us so let's not go back to the 1920s and that's that angle of are we looking for an expansive economy and expansive world and expansive intellectual understanding of the 21st century or are we going to go back to the even a back if if Trump talks one more time about William McKinley

my head's going to explode because it wasn't a great time you know we were the richest we ever were we were the richest country well McKinley and his people were but you know talked to the little girls

“who were working in the in the factories but that's what they've gone back to what's so interesting to”

me other is everything that you allow is so factually evident through the prism of history and what they've done is say no what we need to do is close our doors and go back to a more imperialistic exploitative model of of economics which is we don't build our own strength up to make ourselves through education and science and innovation and all these other things inevitable what we do is we close our borders and we use our military might to extract the resources that we need

at the most exploitative manner of price that we can colonialism which works so well for everybody it's a stunning display of self-imulation folks look you know come on here we do a podcast we talk about world events but I you know I don't like to I like to brag I like to my own horn I am influential in a variety of spheres

“and one of the spheres that I think gets short-tripped is obviously fashion”

am I and a win tour do I drive the trends am I ferradamo is that a person that does this I don't really know I I don't know but the point is people look to me for wardrobe choices not just color but like if their pants should fit and especially this time of year as the seasons are changing you have got to refresh quince is what's going to help you refresh your wardrobe and bring out the spring in your person out they they've got all the essentials and by the

way we're talking about a hundred percent European linen this is high quality premium material stuff

built to last the prices are like 50 to 60 percent less than similar brands and I'm going to tell

you how they work directly with ethical factories they cut out the middleman you're paying for quality not just brand markup refresh your wardrobe with quince go to quince dot com slash t w s for free shipping and 365 day returns it's now available in Canada to go to q u i n c e dot com slash t w s for free shipping and 365 day returns quince dot com slash t w s I was talking with another historian the other day and we were mutually expressing extraordinary

frustration because you know in fact one of the things it's cool about history is that it's you can't look at tomorrow and know what's going to happen you know you can kind of read the tea leaves and we know a lot about what has happened but not about the future but one of the things that we can all say with great clarity is we know exactly how this turns out when a group of people try to monopolize resources

surf spacesals right you know we we don't know if it's going to happen tomorrow or in five years or

“in ten years or in forty years but it always always always ends up the same way and and to sit”

there and watch us playing this out step by step by step you know a lot of us are like can we just go to that last scene because we all know what that last scene's going to be now if we do the other thing where we empower individuals to you know to innovate and to you know to move and to do the things that they do best we don't know how that's going to turn out we know it's going to create a world that you and I can't even imagine and given those two options man why on earth would you choose

you know sorry that the pitch for some piano wire and the crazy part is that the ultimate paradox or contradiction is exactly what you're describing is the story of America's founding that it was a rejection of that particular system that an exploitative system where the voices of the government were ignored because of the resources that they could extract out of the population and

“that's why we began that's what birth does that fight was our fight and so to see us become the”

very thing that we rejected is so hard to process especially when you think about how that movement Trump's movement wraps themselves in the iconography of our founding how many buses have you seen there were that we the people and don't tread on me and all those sorts of the totems of our revolution while creating a system that's antithetical to the entirety of the purpose of that revolution and I don't know if they I certainly don't think that they in any way

see that contradiction no but you know that's one of the things that makes the United States so cool

is that in many ways we act out humanity you know you're always gonna have those people who want

to control others you just are because humans are gonna human but it's gotta be a bumper sticker other there you go it's my next career humans are gonna human yeah but you also have human beings trying to do what is right not just for other people but also for themselves and when you think about this moment and it's parallels to the American founding or to the other periods in which there have been those trying to literally get rid of human equality in the case of the elite and slavers

who put together the confederacy or the the robberbearance in the 1890s or those looking to create an international business system in the 1920s that created you know large pools of labor when you think about that and you think about Americans kind of looking at each other and going hey you know I disagree with you about finances or immigration or internal improvements or whatever

but I can agree with you that we need to control our own destinies in the past that is always one

and come out stronger for these moments so you know first frustrating as this moment is in so many ways and as depressing as it is in so many ways you know one of the things that you can take to the bank is the idea that it might make a stronger again to and renew our faith in those American principles that lead those colonists to throw off the greatest empire at the time in the world assimingly impossible task that they did and then to sit down young men all by the way we talk about

it was a founding fathers they were barely old enough to be fathers to write a system that worked and has worked for almost 250 years kind of cool to be part of that whole history and that trajectory through our past so that at least is a way to look forward to these next really rough weeks and the next rough years and think you know maybe we're given the opportunity to do our own part but I love what you're saying with that Heather and it reminds me you know

“to wrap it around you know you said sort of early on one thing that I think is has to be a top”

of mind which is you don't know the future it hasn't been written and as we watch these sorts of almost slow motion car crash happening the fact of the matter is we can in our frustration overturn those injustices and we can in our frustration regain and have a more we can reaffirm

necessarily over an epoch but it can happen in a moment it really can you know and again now

I'm the Polyana but I do think that in the way that we've been caught off guard by these last 10-12 years or maybe even the slow erosion of it through the last 40 there exists great opportunity and I guess I want to ask you sort of as we we wrap it up do you see that opportunity do you think of it in terms of well we can overturn citizens united we can do these things or do you think it's going to be a bolder form of change that's going to come through

now that the executive has been supercharged use use that to our benefit which way would you

“like to see it go knowing that we can't know oh I think it's got to be big yeah and and you know”

I certainly would agree with overturning citizens united and all the pieces that you are talking

about but those are only mechanics for a reworking of a government and a country really that has been dramatically degraded since the 1970s in part because of that myth that the radical right promulgated that you and I talked about before you know you look at where the United States of America is in the 21st century compared to other countries and it's frankly embarrassing are you know a number of the the ways in which we are not keeping pace with the rest of the world

there are in this era you know one of the things that you and I are dancing around in the need to to deal with our political system is the fact that climate change is very real must simply must be addressed and you know who's doing it the Chinese our greatest rival is already electrified they're great well which again another question why is Trump deliberately and desperately trying to get us back to 19th century technology what I mean which is

that's a whole other conversation right but but this is not you know I guess if you think of it in terms of you know health and the health of the body politic we have let a disease run ramp for a long time and it's coming very close to killing us and you can't just say okay okay I really am now going to you know maybe clean out the wound like at this point we have to rethink the way democracy interfaces with a global economy a global world and and that where everybody

has instantaneous ability to communicate with each other and just support each other or tear each other down what that looks like I don't know I know I'm watching Mark Carney very closely

“in Canada because I think he's coming up with a lot of new ideas but this is not going to be a case”

of saying hey maybe we can pick up a few voters over here this is a case of saying we need to rethink this and you know in the past again this is you look at Lincoln you look at FDR you think you look

at the it or us about these things worked at the time but crucial to it is going to have to

be the voices and the support of the American people we do not want a dictator even one who comes in and says hey I'm going to do everything right we need to have somebody who is actually reflecting the real will of the people expressed through free and fair elections getting rid of the partisan jerry manning the money in elections and so on so yeah I think it's time for a bold vision and I think crucially as well to go back to nursing before we are creating that we are telling

“politicians who want to be elected that this is what we want and that's how we will create”

somebody who can rise to meet the moment and when you see that the enthusiasm and almost the joy of the populace is self-evident and I don't know that I can recall a moment in my life and that's all you know speaking through watergate and Vietnam and the oil shocks and all the different sorts of you know difficult spikes and ebbs and things that we've all lived through where the people feel more ready for that vision to be laid out coherently and and I mean honestly

like I think somebody who ran on sane policy you know confidently executed could win 60% like I don't think we're as divided as the social media would in monetarily and incentivize us to be and I do think and you know power of wars of vacuum right like there is a moment right now

that it's it's going to be harnessed you just feel it because that's it you know you can feel us

“creeping towards an iceberg maybe but you also feel something else there's also another vibration”

that exists that feels optimistic and hopeful and man and people are so much thirstier for it than than the antithesis of it we're going to make you a historian John I wish I love it Heather Cox Richardson I gotta tell you I could talk to you forever just it's so wonderful to hear your perspective on things and it so helps me to you know it is and I don't mean to put this on your book you help me organize my anxiety if that makes sense like you give me a

framework and once I have a framework I feel like I can I can work through it it doesn't change what may happen as you said or give me the answer but boy does it give me some organizing principles by which to you know to play things on I can't thank enough for being on well I'm glad to hear that and you know all we're trying to do is make sure we're standing on solid ground and that's all I do I helped to I helped to show people where the ground is you you do it better than anyone

Heather Cox Richardson a wonderful professor history of Boston College and and in author and you know just check out everything that she does she's a one-man band that just is fantastic so thank

you once again for being with us always a pleasure man she's so fucking good she's so good so

smart and I feel terrible because it really like you do feel a little bit like because she's also so prolific and it's like hey could you just take like a couple hours out of your day of making all this great stuff to give me some organizing principles by which I can somehow hang my anxiety buckets on to a little bit of historical perspective can you carve out a few hours to be my therapist yes all of her substack posts take all of the disparate news of the day and give it order

“it's very helpful and I think in the same way this podcast was helpful for you of just organizing”

as you said you're anxiety so you know how to process it instead of being overwhelmed by it I guess and she synthesizes it she brings it you know I think that's it's a gift you know a lot of people can under you know they understand facts but they don't necessarily know how to synthesize it

through different eras and bring it forward to hear and I still think the most powerful

things she kept saying was we don't know what is next yeah but we know that we can have a role in shaping it hmm good I feel like tourists as well had something like that too yes and it is really nice to be reminded of that people who know our world best right who see it yeah yeah you could wake up tomorrow to a good New York Times alert if there's ever been such a thing a good New York Times killer anything's possible I don't remember the last time I know it's an accranistic it almost doesn't

make sense off the tongue did you see so the New York Times wrote an article about you know they they examined some of Trump's architectural plans for the ball and so they wrote an article saying like hey there's a couple of things you might want to look at like there's no doors or these these stairs don't go anywhere or at these views blocked by endless columns it's a trap house

“it's locked and like I'm I think you might need a toilet like just little like and the idea that”

he is more aggressive defending his plan for the ballroom than for the war and a wrong or that he is he presented a more thorough case with visual aids about that ballroom then he has in the entirety of this war the man has priorities and it is throwing a party like it's starting to feel like sort of next level senial it really I feel like we've like it's different then Trump won for sure I'm not sure I've been watching

I mean I don't know what's going on with that man's help but something I have been picking up on is okay we've seen all these think pieces about the Iran war breaking up the magas fear find whatever but you also see people really going to bat for him and writing the narrative for him right it's not his fault you're like can you imagine them saying that about Biden oh Biden just got convinced and we really need to blame the people who convinced him of course the man who has the

greatest agency that has ever been promoted from the oval office suddenly is at a whim of

like we're all pointing to well he got convinced or maybe his mental acuity this is who he's been

“from the fucking ghetto like when people say like well you know I'm upset with him now and I”

regret my vote because he lied he lied the minute he came down the escalator you know through like oh it's the largest inauguration that's ever been seen through history like there is nothing fundamentally different about his decision making process or about the manner in which his ADD pushes him from uh lurching from one endeavor to another it's like when we said he's a movie trailer president he doesn't have the stamina to sit through the whole movie he's just the

trailers and right now the Iran war hey the trailer's done now what do I do so now I just got to

eat like it's so it's so it's so frustrates me that all these people on the writer like oh this boy

this really pushed me over the edge and like this is the same fucking thing we've been dealing with

“for 12 years or four like yeah 80 a hundred he's always yeah I was just thinking about how Iran”

now speaks to him too in trailers like everyone kind of sees it they make these fake Lego propaganda videos to get attention yeah it is so weird that like he'll say to them through truth social like I will bomb you if you don't do this you know like why are you telling us tell them if you're like what is the point of posting and and apparently they create trailers that they show to him of like bombs going off intercut with like the guys from top gun playing volleyball

she should go boom two minute highlights and that's it yeah I'm Heather brought this up in one of her recent substacks that people are starting to get concerned because he doesn't know a lot and about the war what is perpetrating and if his briefings are two minute blow-up sequences like make some sense when you can learn you know that's a good point and but anytime you get the sense that somebody is sparks noting their way through a war like that's the part that you know

we've all been asked to sacrifice for his vision of America's greatness whether it's through his inflationary tariffs or whether it's through higher gas prices or whether it's through a removal of some of our civil rights protections but we keep being told like you've just got to be put you know this guy's got a vision and you but he doesn't have to ever change anything he can still in the middle of a war do fucking five minutes on Sharpie pens and we're all supposed to

just be like hey Trump's gonna trump like when is he the one who is gonna have to own up and take accountability and responsibility why is it on us or I was coming off of the Heather conversation very grounded and so you wanted all the good get her get Heather back on the line all right Brittany what do we got from the people okay first up John do you think all of the government buildings Trump renamed after himself will revert back to their original names once he leaves office

here's my hope here's what I think happens I think RFK junior gets elected president

and then he renames it the Kennedy Trump Kennedy said I was gonna say luckily his name's already on shit yes so what we do is whoever gets elected next I think we just use Trump is our maiden name so we leave it in there just hyphenate yeah that's right we got it from now on we'll just hyphenate everything according to the new president and then by the end of whatever how long the this country gets to go we just have a super long a candy with the Trump but everybody's name was there

Dallas Kennedy yeah why did you see by the did you see the rendering of his library yes

“was it a rendering or was it just like an AI that's what I think yeah yeah and Eric Trump was like”

I've been working so hard on this I'm so proud of it and you're like really because it looks like you could just plug in like make a skyscraper in Miami look like Vegas and then the interior of it is literally just gold statues of Trump and I'm like what wait I think somebody actually said that the flag had like 54 stars or something like it literally was just it was so AI well that's including Canada Greenland Venezuela Iran or ticket here it's an aspirational flag it's the

future just in like a practical sense though it is going to get confusing if too many things are named Trump like I'm going from Trump station to Trump station you know it's like a Washington DC where you have four eighth streets but they don't intersect or like Penn Station New York Penn

like when you live in with the Smurfs where everything is just smurf that the language is it's Trumpity Trump Trump you know all right what else what what what what what else they want to know John do you ever miss the simpler days of Q and on oh they're still they're still there they're

“just trying to figure out look they I think they've had a rough ride because imagine if like”

your hero the guy who was going to bring the storm turns out to be the guy who's like storm what storm what do you there's no storm here what they're like no I think we have the storm I think it's right there if you could just bring it out here like I don't know what you're talking about you know they they cast someone as a hero who not only turned out not to be the hero turned out to maybe be working in league with the villain yeah I think they're having difficulty coming to terms

with that is that now I assume it lost some steam wasn't that was more first semester

Trump wasn't it yeah and then when the storm never came it felt like that movement sort of

dissipated I don't think I think they're interest in and to give the movement credit beyond the conspiracy theories of it the idea of protecting children from sex trafficking is a pretty good one sure can support that yeah where are they now yeah I honestly now if it wasn't if it didn't fill it fit into their sort of more partisan mindset maybe they dropped it I honestly don't know it felt like the Epstein case was at least a good tent post that they could work off of

but it feels like it's dissipated yeah they're mean bad guys not even really around like was Biden there was was Biden there bad guy I guess yeah but I'll be honest like Brandon is still all over Long Island oh yeah like the signs were there it's on the back of trucks like oh yeah what do they think he's up to now they just don't take the bumper stickers on I see it I mean it's like

“they have old cars like I don't it's hard to get bumper stickers off you guys like you have to get”

the vinegar you gotta get the nail polish remover you have no idea how many fuck Biden cars

I drive behind yeah and I always just think like is like is the emotion still there like are you

still fiery or you literally just don't have a scraper like I just don't it it's hard even understand it but a lot of the accoutrement the the the the festivist Trump decorations are still up I can't wait for the summer to see if the flags are still on the water oh that'll be interesting because Trump no matter what you think of his popularity he does rule the sea he has our motto for sure yeah our last one John is your wife is funny is you she's funny or than I am and nicer

than I am and sweeter than I am and better look in than I am and I'm I'm actually as I'm getting older

“I think she might even be taller than I am it's so that was not that was not our relationship”

when I first met her but there's certain times I'll be standing in the kitchen be like are you are you you're not even in heels what's what's going on I think you know as they say with cereal contents may have settled during shipping I have a feeling that I'm slowly compacting but no that's everybody thinks that she's just the funniest and and her laugh is like sunshine it's just a little it's a little ridiculous she's just one of those people that whoa I

sit up that's so sweet yeah yeah she's all right that chick she's all right but very cool Brittany how can they how can they keep in touch with us twitter we are weekly show pod instagram threads tiktok blue sky we are weekly show pod cast and you can like subscribe and comment on our youtube channel the weekly show with John Stewart sweet we're off next week back uh April 15th uh and I don't know what we're going to be talking about because you know the

world is static so we'll prime you know we'll plant something out for those for those two weeks oh what are we doing bend McKenzie oh is that he's coming up for the crypto book yes yes oh what a perfect that'll be a perfect tax day uh law for those there but that's

again and is and is and is crypto book about corruption and all those things uh and uh as always

I hope you guys have a great week off and uh thank you once again for the boy this this episode is just one of my favorites just uh put together so nicely by everybody lead producer Lauren Walker producer Brittany mementivic producer Gillian Spear video editor and engineer Robotola audio editor

guys so much we'll see you next time. Bye boy.

“The weekly show with John Stuart is a comedy central podcast is produced by Paramount audio”

and bus boy productions

Simon asked you by the story or this school flashback

“just a little bit of a rat and then the whole thing is stupid. Paul no garney. This story is so my safe space. Mm you might as well do you know what? Yeah, exactly.”

This story is so deep story app that I just understand. Egalobstudium job or um to.

Stim. Cras. Furt. I don't know how to stay on. Stoyer. I love it. Save. With Viso. Stoyer.