Mark Mansour and Brian Tanguay: A Conversation

Brian Tanguay joins Mark for a free wheeling conversation about the issues of the day. We address the shutdown, the economy, the weaponization of government and a number of other issues.

Transcript

 Welcome back to America's Fractured Politics. Today I'm happy to have with me Brian Tanguay. Brian is a longtime Substack or in addition to being a blogger at Shouts from the balcony and founder and editor at California Review of Books. Brian writes some of the most ENT literate work on Substack, and he is a must read for me.

Welcome, Brian. It's great to have you on.

Thank you, mark. It's a pleasure to be with you.

I'm glad you're here. Let's start with the shutdown. How do you think this end?

It's a great question and uh, I was reading something the other day, uh, by one of the new Repub Republic. Uh, contributing editors, uh, Meredith Scheer. And she wrote, and quote, if Congressional Democrats believe in government, they should never vote to fund this one. point she was making is that the aims of this, you know, GOP controlled government are illegitimate and un-American and that Democrats should make the Republicans own.

Total.

outcomes that are sure to happen if we stay shut down for, you know, a considerable period of time. Uh, she's not this, you know, denying the importance of healthcare a CA subsidies and so on, but she's arguing that we simply cannot normalize government by. Coercion and threats to fire thousands of employees or withhold appropriated funds. basically can't have a legitimate government when the legislative branch seeds it, its authority to the executive branch. honestly, I I, I don't know how this ends unless the constituents of Republicans get loud enough, uh, to put pressure on them to make them back off from what they're

And that doesn't seem to have happened yet. I think one of the things that she's saying, it seems like to me at least, is that, um, there is perhaps a mileage. And letting them have their way and letting them own everything they've done and let people see it. And make sure that the Democrats get the word out about what happened and why, and who and in whose hands.

only do and not only do they have to, the constituents and the people have to see it. They have to feel it

And I think they will feel it,

lives.

will feel it. Um. Another question. We're seeing more and more resistance in Chicago. Uh, people are starting to fight back and they're starting to get really creative in doing it. Do you think that's gonna spread to other cities?

I do, and I, my hope is that it will follow the example set by the protestors in Portland, who are mocking the

Yeah.

mercilessly by turning out a frog in unicorn costumes. I think satire and mockery are useful tools against humorless, authoritarians and I, but I do, you know, as a caveat, um, the challenge for demonstrators is to remain more disciplined. Than federal agents or National Guard troops. have to protest in numbers that are too big to ignore, but we cannot give the regime a pretext that it's looking for.

Regime seems really afraid of no King's Day. Um, they're getting more hysterical about it. You know, this is Hamas and Antifa and people who hate America. They're trying to paint the, uh, paint the demonstrators in a way that that Americans, both Democrat and Republican, will look at no King's day and say, these are a bunch of malcontents.

And I think that if we get a good turnout on Saturday and it shows that people are united, I think that won't, that'll fall on deaf ears. I don't see it happening. What do you think?

I tend to agree with that. I, I'd really like to see upwards of 10 million out in the streets. I think that's. That's a number that is too big to ignore. the regime's gonna continue to discount it. Um, you know, they're gonna, like you said, they're gonna lump all the demonstrators as communist, Marxist Pro Hamas, Antifa, sympathizers, and at the same time. Like I said, they could, they're looking for a pretext to crack down and I'm sure Steven Miller is gonna be whispering in Trump's ear about, you know, invoking the Insurrection Act. and I don't expect corporate media to give the demonstrations adequate coverage or context.

I agree with you. Last time that happened, they didn't get anywhere near the kind of coverage they should have gotten. There was some, but it was brief snippets. It didn't show the the totality of it, and I think that that's where they really fell down and they continue to fall down. Um.

Yeah, and I, I think too, that you, I my hope with, you know, after the 18th is that rank and file Republicans in Congress get the message that their Conti constituents are sending to them that we don't like this, that they don't like ice in the streets, that they don't like the chaos, we'll have to wait and see.

Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen anything resembling a groundswell yet because they're terrified of Trump, but I think at some point they need to be terrified of their own reelections. And I think when that tipping point is reached, we may see some change, but not until then it, it's fine to be afraid of Trump.

And if you're not gonna get reelected, what does it matter?

Right. Exactly.

Um, let's switch gears and talk about this so-called peace agreement, which seems to be unraveling already. What do you think?

Well, I. My first reaction was it's smoke and mirrors, because there was no really nothing underlying it. They didn't get to the root causes of the conflict. Of course, they, they never do. and Israel still holds all the level, levels or, and levers of authority over the Palestinians, including what comes into the, to the strip, in terms of aid, in terms of, you know, needed materials. and so. The other thing that you know

Nobody's.

talking about the five or more years and billions of dollars it's gonna take to clear the rubble alone, the unexploded munitions, the contamination of the soil. and uh, that's gotta happen before any life. infrastructure can be built.

And in the meantime, we're looking at the prospect of tens of thousands of Palestinians living for the next many years in 10 cities. I mean, the, the situation there is really dire. It's getting to be colder now and people have no shelter. so I wasn't particularly optimistic. You know, Trump, of course. You know, took it as a great victory and I'll give him some credit that they got the bombing to stop. That's, that is a good thing for all concern. as always, with Trump. He does. is done so quickly that there's never, it's like the trade

Yeah.

nothing underlying them. The de you, you're an

Yeah.

know how trade deal with another country is a complex structure that has to be It's gotta be worked out over time. Sometimes two, three years are required before it, you know, dot all the i's and cross the

And the details have to be done at a lower level.

Yes, and, and the implementation is what's so critical, and Trump doesn't get to that point because he's just, he's like a condo salesman,

He, he, he basically comes up with one deal and he trumpets it, and then he slips to the new one. I mean, he is already off Gaza, he's already off of this. So it's just, it is a one shot deal and he moves on to the next thing. Um,

Right.

it's what happens to the people in Gaza is worrying me tremendously because, as you said, with the cold coming and the lack of shelter and the fact that Gaza's uninhabitable right now, I mean, let's, let's face facts, it's inhabitable.

Um, the Israelis keep talking about sending the Gaza to Congo. Um, and this is insane. I mean, it is a tropical area. They're not used to it. They're desert dwellers. There are diseases there they've never been exposed to. I mean, this is a recipe for a catastrophe and I can't believe the world would put up with it.

But the fact that the Israelis are thinking along these lines scares me. Um, what else scares me is the fact that the West Bank isn't being dealt with. There's settler violence every day. People beating up and burning down houses and, and, and, and terrorizing, uh, uh, uh, west Bank residents. And, uh, I don't know how you have a peace agreement where that continues.

Right. And again, a weakness of what was entered into here was the, the West Bank was not even in the conversation, but at the same time, neither were the Palestinians. I mean, they're, they're constantly in a position, and I understand that some of this is, them because they don't have a unified political voice. Uh. But they're not even at the table, which is amazing. Their fate is being decided for them by others, and this happens continually,

It does. Um. So I fear for the future. Um, I, I fear for the future and I fear for the, the lives of the people of Gaza who are pretty much in exile right now and, um, are going back to a place that most normal people can't live in. Um, you know, you've written Presly sometimes years in advance from what I've seen about events that happen today.

Where do you get your insights? 'cause they're really great insights.

You know, for me it starts really with the year 2000 and the election of George W. Bush, believe it or not, because it was, in my mind, it was always an illegitimate victory. Um, it was decided by the Supreme Court and that was when I really. Started to understand that there's something very wrong in our politics, and I began to read quite a bit more widely.

And, um, I, you know, I'm very interested in the workings of power, uh, how, you know, how, how it works, who gets it, who exercises it. And like when the Patriot Act was passed after nine 11, it was clear to me. we were trading our hard won civil liberties for a false sense of security because the administration had declared war.

Not on an en, on an enemy, but on a tactic. How do you declare war on a tactic and, and ever win? Um, and nothing that happened after that changed my mind about that. And I, you know, I feared that when the, the powers that were enumerated in the Patriot Act and its successor, the USA Freedom Act, which was passed in 2015, could easily be turned against American citizens. And

been.

we are beginning. Yeah. And I think we're beginning to see that. And of course the Patriot Act, my mind, you know, it's, it's like an original sin because it gave us of Homeland Security, which I always hated that name 'cause it's creepy.

It's,

It gave us ice and it gave us mass surveillance of the public.

and we can thank George W. Bush for that. Um, but Trump has taken it to a new extreme and

he

it's frightening the fact that people are being prosecuted on flimsy bases. Is frightening. The fact that grand juries are actually giving these indictments is frightening. And as a lawyer, I find what's happened to the rule of law, just appalling.

Um, our norms have, our norms have been violated long ago, but our laws are being violated right now, and decency is being violated, and I don't know how to stop it.

Yeah. And which leads me a question I actually wanted to ask you is, I think you and I share you as a lawyer, uh, you know, have a reverence for the rule of law, which to me is the bedrock of the entire system. If you remove the rule of law. What do we have? but you're also very focused on decency and as am I, so what I want in my government, I want 'em to be decent to people, to the citizens. So when this Trump era ends and it will end, how would you go about reconstituting the Department of Justice?

Well, you'd have to rip out the roots. You'd have to take out everybody that that was put in there and you'd have to find a creative way to do that where some of them are civil servants, um, but they have to be gotten out root in branch. You then have to appoint people who really care about the rule of law, painstakingly and in large numbers, and it's gonna take a lot of volunteers to leave their law practices to go to the Justice Department to go and reconstituted.

You're going to need an attorney general who is not Merrick Garland. Who's willing and able to go and do what the, the tough things that need to be done, but at the same time, will not take any guff from the president, will not take direction on who to prosecute, but we'll do it according to, to, you know, to what they'd like to say without, uh, fear of favor.

So I think you need to, you need to clean out the people first. Um, and I think that could be done very easily because political appointees go and there are a lot of people still there that they haven't gotten rid of that could be kept on. And, um. That. That I think is the best hope for it. But you need a change in attitude there.

And that change in attitude comes with people and it comes with the president that cares about the rule of law

Yeah. Yeah. There's, there, there's certainly at this time, you know, with the Supreme Court now looks like they're poised to, to gut or do away with,

voting.

two of the Voting Rights Act, which could, that could lead us to single party minority rule.

It could.

It could. Um, but a very astute observer of the. Of the entire political situation.

If you had a magic wand, if someone handed to you and said, mark, you can use this wand to reform one or two things about our politics, what, what things would you choose?

I would reform the, um, the campaign finance system immediately, and I would reform the Supreme Court. Those are two, the two first jobs, one A and one B. For any new Congress and president, you need to get rid of Citizens United and you need to make, make it bulletproof, and you need to make it bulletproof by getting a real court in.

How do you do that? You clean out, everybody that's been in there for more than 13 years gets, gets rid of Alito and Thomas and it gets rid of a few of our people too. You then expand the court to 13 members, one for each federal district, and, um. You'll appoint people who are not hacks, who will rule fairly.

Um, and I think you have a fighting chance at that point of getting past Citizens United and coming up with a piece of legislation that the court will, it will endorse. Right now the court is essentially acting as a, um, it's acting as an arbiter of judicial review. For Congress, but not for the president.

In other words, nothing the president does is subject to judicial review, but everything Congress does is that has to change. That has to change.

Yeah. I, if someone handed me that oneand, those would be the things I would, uh, also wanna remediate Citizens United again. You know, we look at George W. Bush, if you wanna look at some of the roots. He's, who gave us, John Roberts.

He is.

gave us, you know, and he gave us Alito too. Um. And if you look at this court's history, boy, I don't know how you feel, but I think they're gonna go down as one of the most reactionary courts in the history of the United States.

will go, they will go down as one of the most reaction courts industry of the United States. We've had bad courts before, but this is a level that, that we've really seldom achieved. I mean, the courts in the 1850s were terrible. Um, we've had some courts in the 20th century that weren't very good. Um, but this is something new.

Mm-hmm.

This is out. This is outlawed, outlawed, judicial. Behavior. Um, they're basically violating the law, violating the constitution at every turn, and coming up with flimsy excuses to support their reasoning. And very frequently there is no reasoning. There's shadow docket, there are opinions that are put out without a signature, without any, um, without any details.

They're just decisions and they're done by fiat and that's just no way to run a country.

Yeah.

Um, so Mike Johnson has refused to seek Representative Ali Alva, and he won't open the house, so Arizona's suing him. What do you think the Democrats can do beyond that?

I am not sure what procedural avenues are available to them, um, to get the house open, but every day that isn't seated, they should be screaming. Democrats should be screaming about Mike Johnson's flagrant abuse of power and his total disregard for, galvas constituents who are not represented in Congress right now he won't seat her. That's outrageous. That is just an outrageous abuse of power.

It's an outrageous abuse of power, and the excuses he's using are terrible. Um, they're not, they don't pass the lap test. They are consistently, what's the word I'm looking for? Condescending. Um, he made a statement today that, that he said, bless her heart, she doesn't know she's a representative elect and doesn't know how things work here.

Oh, I didn't think she knows how things work here. Her father was in, in Congress for a long time, excuse me, for a long time. So she knows how things work and, um, she's made the statement again and again and again that she's the 218th vote for the Epstein files release. And that's what Johnson's afraid of.

And Johnson of course, will never admit that. Um, and the question is, how long can he hold out? And I don't know how long he can hold up. He can't hold out indefinitely because at some point or another there will be, there will be an outcry from the public. At least you hope there will be.

But. And it leads me to, to a question I wanted to ask you as well. So, you know, Mike Johnson gets up in front of the press and he says these things, says it with total conviction. and, and something I've been thinking about a lot in the Trump era is what happened to the concept of shame a corrective in our politics?

It seems like. Politicians, particularly on the, on the conservative side, they just don't feel shame anymore.

I think we reached a point in this country, and I think it came around the nineties, where, where a couple of things coincided. Reality television, where people became utterly shameless in their pursuit of, of, of fame. Newt Gingrich, who destroyed the dialogue in this country. Ripped it, ripped it brewed from branch and, and created an environment of malevolence and hate.

And, um, I think the combination of those two things, as well as the fact that the country became very selfish, became very self-centered, became very much focused on celebrity and power. Led to people doing things, as I said before, that were, you know, just not terribly decorous. And that's evolved and gotten worse and worse with the internet.

Um, and now, you know, we have the ability of people to hide behind, um, hide behind a screen and say anything they want no matter how represent or reprehensible and disgusting. And so with each blow, the tendency towards shame disappears. And now you have a president who's shown people that you can get away with being shameless.

And he sets an example for young people, for middle aged people. I mean, basically he made racism a Quran. Again, you can now be racist because Donald Trump's giving you permission to do it. And so you see these overt acts and statements that are racist, that are bigoted, that are ethnocentric and nobody cares.

So this has been a steady evolution over the course of several decades, but Donald Trump accelerated it tremendously. When he came into, came into the public, uh, eye in 2015 and it hasn't gotten any better. I mean, look at the, look at the tapes, um, you know, the, the grabbing tapes, um,

Yes.

you know, it, it, it barely registered.

He got elected even after that. What does that tell you about the level of, uh, level of tolerance or shame in this country? Um,

Yeah.

that's just Trump being Trump. Well, that's not acceptable. He is, he's trying to be a president of the United States. On earth, is it acceptable in any universe?

Yeah, it's, that's such an interesting thing. 'cause you know, as far as I'm concerned, uh, you know, I'm 66 years old and I remember Trump from the 1980s. Um, and although I'm not a native New Yorker, I'm a Californian, I saw Trump as Native New Yorkers did, which was as an insufferable, blowhard con artist and fraud. had no, they took, they had no. for him. And like George W. Bush, Trump was born on third base, but without the self-awareness to see his own privilege. And to me it's very, very telling that the only thing Trump has ever succeeded at on his own merits was reality tv,

That's true.

everything else he failed at. Um, now to be fair to Bush, Trump is just far more narcissistic and malevolent and clearly the sort of person who should never, ever. To be given power. Um, but I and I also have viewed, tend to view Trump through a mob boss lens. I mean, he, he had ties to Roy Cohn, Russian crime figures dating back to the late 1980s.

You know, I think illicit money was laundered through his properties. He, he loves the tough guy, you know, rhetoric. and I think the only thing he respects is money and

This gangster administration,

little

this is a gangster administration. There's no doubt about it.

I, I Ag agree. And, you know, for a long time, uh, I've, I've heard analysts describe Russia as a gangster state, it's, it's very interesting to me that, you know, of all the, um. You know, the world's dictators and authoritarians, his favorite seems to be Vladimir Putin. and Putin operates with near impunity, but he's also a kleptocrat and one of the richest men in the world. Um, I think that is very, uh, impressive to Trump.

Oh, I think it impresses him tremendously and I think he'd like to emulate Putin to the extent that he can, which is why all of these crypto games and everything else he's doing are, are, are popping up. But it's, it's just Trump being Trump and um, you know, we can't afford Trump being Trump anymore.

I'm still wondering, I, I don't know if you have, have, have this stop, but I'm still wondering what Putin and, and Trump talked about for 90 minutes in Helsinki in 2018.

I don't know. There's no record of it. Is there

Right. No record. just very, very curious about what these two, one, uh, uh, an actual strong man and one a, uh, you know, one who aspired to be, what, what did they talk

marching orders? Marching orders?

I wonder, I often wonder if, you know, Putin has been mentoring Trump.

I have a feeling he has, and I think he's been mentoring him with some very gentle persuasion because he has coma on him.

I

I really believe that. I believe he has something on him. Um, you know, regardless of what they found, um, with the steel dossier, I think elements of it are right because it just, it's, it, it fits too well.

Yeah. It's just that it's an, you know, I think that. We'll have historians and political scientists trying to figure out for the next 25, 30, maybe longer it is that the, the United States fell for this man who is, who has no character in a job, work character is really, really important. Um, and that they couldn't see that if you elect a criminal, you have to expect criminality.

Yeah. You wonder how, how and when people will wake up and realize what they've done. I, I think a lot of them will never do that because they, they share Trump's view of the world

You don't

and nothing will ever persuade them that he's wrong.

she's the young one. She has the dark hair with the baby. I feel that that's correct. I, I Part of me wishes they would, they should feel the embarrassment, the shame the. The responsibility for what they've unleashed on the country, but I don't see it

Neither do I.

like to confront, think generally speaking, they don't like to confront these kind of things about themselves.

No, they don't. Um, they basically hide behind a veneer of righteousness. I mean, this, this effort to, to make America a Christian country is, is a celebration of their view of righteousness, which is completely out of whack with reality.

just seeing the hell I read, and she had a right. And it seems to be whack with the, with the good book itself in many ca

it's,

many instances. I honestly don't understand what book they're looking at when they can paint, you know, Jesus well, he was a strong man and he, he hated the poor and he loved the rich.

I, you know, that just, don't know how they, how they've managed to do that.

I saw an interview once with a woman and she was confronted by a guy. An interviewer who kept insisting that what she was saying was completely inimical to the teachings of Jesus.

well,

And he used example after example of Jesus's gentleness turning the other cheek, um, you know, caring for the poor.

do anything

she paused and finally said, well, Jesus was a wimp.

No, no.

So that's how far they'll go. I mean, I wouldn't say all of them think that way, but I, I would believe some of them do.

most people, it's the, mean, when you overlay what we are experiencing politically with the, you know, the Christian nationalists. Yeah, we've just got our work cut out for us and we, and part of it is, the stuff I think that you're doing in almost every single day that I'm, I'm trying to do is to get people to realize and, and sort of wake up to what the reality is, um, that we are facing.

'cause it's, it's very, very serious.

One of the reasons I decided to do this podcast because it distributed, distributed beyond substack. I'm trying to give people a view of, of the other side of the story,

the

and I'm hoping that people, you know, picking up, picking this up on YouTube and on Apple and on Spotify will look at it and say, you know what?

throw

something there. Um, because I, I yearn to get beyond the confines of substack because I think that

little,

we're an echo chamber.

good about

I love it.

to Yeah.

I loved everybody on there, but we're talking to each other

we are.

and I think we've gotta get beyond that and start talking to other people, people who are not necessarily maga, but who are, um, genuinely confused about the state of this country and want some insight.

And I'm hoping that I can get guests on here like you, who can give them insight.

Well, I, I, I, I think too is that they need to realize that, you know, people like you, like me, we're not, I don't consider us radical

We're not.

we're pretty, I. We're, we're Americans, I believe still in, I believe in this country. It's been very good to me. Um, and I've had a lot of opportunity here that I'm sure I wouldn't have had, had I been born elsewhere. And I want that for other people. But I want decency and I want, I

Wonderful.

that. Pays some attention to the people, which right now it doesn't seem to do

No, it doesn't.

well.

doesn't.

so we have some, you know, we've got some serious problems in our politics, in our, in our framework, in our founding documents.

But that doesn't me to want to burn the country down or to hate half of it.

You know.

can't, we can't exist like that where, you know, where it's red against blue.

I was listening to Kennedy's inaugural address the other day, and Kennedy was by no means a perfect president. He was conservative in many respects, and, and he

wear

missed the boat on a couple of things and finally got to civil rights toward the end of his life. But Kennedy inspired people with a vision, and it was a vision that was a positive vision.

It was one that appealed to the better, the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln said. And I yearn for that America.

I wrote a piece called, I think it was from Camelot to Dracula on Substack and it was about that very thing. I mean, but comparing Kennedy and Trump in, in terms of their aspirations and, and Kennedy was challenging the nation. Like you said, he was imperfect, but he was challenging us. To seek out those better angels to, you know, to do amazing things that only this country at that time could do. and I still think we have that ability, that ability hasn't gone away, but it has to be rooted in the rule of law. gotta be rooted in honesty, um, in these old sort of things that like. You know, the, the philosophers talk about you. They're, they're bedrock to me. They're bedrock. You can't have a functioning society unless you, recognize some limits, you have morals. Um, and so we've, those things are some of the things that we've, I'm not, I don't wanna know if we, I don't know if we've lost them or we've just forgotten them.

I don't either. Um, I generally don't know whether we've lost 'em or forgotten them. Um, I'd like to think we've lost 'em a little bit or forgotten them, but they can come back with the right leadership. But it's gonna take, it's gonna take leadership that's willing to go where nobody has gone before and, and, and really appeal to people on a mass scale in a way that, that, that, that.

Skeptical Republicans can look at it and say, you know what? This was better than what we had with Trump. I don't know if that'll happen, but I'd like to see somebody get elected who, who would, you know, challenge people again and cause people to kind of throw away their prejudices and their, and their, their, their meanness in their hatred and start thinking about building a country again.



One of the things that I'm, I'm really very sad about, and it's really, to me, it's come more into, into crystal, uh, form in the last 10 years. It's just the cruelty. It's just the cruelty for, for cruelty sake as it's, and the way Trump uses it is to laugh at people, to mock to, you know, to attack them. Uh, that's, that's just beyond the pale to

Look at the people around him, brussel Vaught and Steven Miller. They're basically built on a, on a foundation of abuse and belittling.

When talking about Kennedy and Johnson, they've just, they're, they're working on dismantling everything Kennedy and Johnson did as well as what FDR did.

I mean, they're, they're trying to break it so it can never be rebuilt again. I don't believe they can succeed in doing that. I think they can be rebuilt again. By the right president and the right Congress. I really think so, but I think the backfill that's gonna have to be done and the work that's gonna have to be done to undo the damage is gonna take decades.

Uh, me

We've been set back badly.

years.

the generation's probably about right, but,

Yeah.

um, let us begin. Um, last thought. I'm reading a book right now, um, by Andrew Ross Sorgan, uh, titled 1929. It's about the origins of the Depression and it's a really damn good book. I'm, I'm part of the way through it right now, and I wanna write a book review of it next week.

He's basically, you know, issuing some cautionary notes about the bubble, about speculation and about the things that are happening right now. And I, I will tell you, I fear for the economy because of everything Trump is doing. And I fear, I fear that this, this stock market is completely overvalued and that we're gonna have a crash and it's gonna be a disaster for a lot of people in this country.

And a lot of those people support Trump.

I,

Given the people.

more. I, I, I'll be honest, I, I'd look at the stock market every day. I don't quite understand. It's ups and downs, it's migrations, but it seems, it's kind of just logically that it's overvalued. I do think you're right. I think it's gonna crash. And like I was saying earlier. people have to feel the impacts of what Trump is doing, and I think if that happens, we're gonna feel them in a bad, bad way in a depression like scale.

Tragedy that we have to come to, that it's an absolute tragedy that people's lives are gonna be upended because of Donald Trump and because nobody believed that Trump could do what he's doing, and nobody believed the consequences of what he's doing until they actually hit them in the face, and it's sad.

I, I couldn't, you know. Well, what's sad too is that the, the complete c capitulation and cowardice of the Congressional Republicans, people who take an oath, oath of office to, you know, uphold and defend the Constitution, and they put themselves and their careers and their privilege and their positions ahead of doing what is right for the country.

That is also something. Uh, when we rebuild, we've gotta rebuild that idea.

The idea.

of public service. And the, I'll tell you, a person who embodies that for me is Jack Smith.

His, his, his interview the other day was terrific,

Yeah. It's very straightforward. He does the right thing for the right reason. He follows the law. He's not afraid, you know, to do that. That's the kind of public servants that. Frankly, I expect

and they exist. They're out there.

that oath, yeah, when you take that oath, it means something. It has to be more than a suggestion.

On that note, I want to thank you for coming on. This has been an incredible pleasure. It's been a great conversation. Um, I hope people listen in because there's a lot of wisdom here.

Thank you very much, mark, and I hope you'll keep up the great

I hope you will too.