America 250: Go Big or Go Home ft. Matthew Mehan

Well, welcome everyone once again to the round table, your publishers and editors podcast here at the American mind and vidcast, I should say, uh, at the Claremont Institute. I'm your host, Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute and publisher of the American mind and the current review of books. I'm joined by managing editor of the American mind, Mike Sabo, associate editor of the Claremont review books, Spencer Clavin, and Matthew Meehan, a distinguished guest here at Claremont Institute, an old time friend of the Claremont Institute, uh, Matt is associate professor and associate Dean at the Van Andel school of government at Hillsdale's Hillsdale colleges, Washington, DC outpost. And he has a new book out that we wanted to talk about. It's, uh, something you are not likely to encounter much in American letters. And I say that in a, in a good sense, it's called the American book of fables. And, uh, I wanted Matt to just walk us through how this book came about. I will start with a pitch, all of you parents out there. This is decidedly a family book with something for, we'll get into this, something for the littles, the middles and the bigs throughout. It's beautifully illustrated. Matt is one day into a full book launch. Uh, so first Matt, how did this book idea come about? What's what's, why did it need to be written? What, what do you want to do with this book or what's the purpose of it? So the long story short is a two 50 go big or go home. Is this sort of the easy one? Um, I really wanted to create a sort of celebratory heirloom that would last the family for a long time. That would sort of be a timeless classic to commemorate our 250th and sort of, you know, be something that children could grow up with into their adulthood, but the whole family could share. And I thought that was worth doing in and of itself. The longer story is, uh, to be perfectly honest, I have always been fascinated with the detail from Plato's Fado. This is a Claremont Institute. I think I can get away with this. This is not a common origin story for children's family books. I should think this is great. Precisely. So I'm literally, I, I, I was teaching it and, and I read it twice over in a kind of manic state at one point, trying to understand it more deeply. And I just couldn't get over the fact that here he is about to die. Socrates condemned to death to drink the hemlock. And what's he busy doing? He's writing versified Aesop's fables. He's setting Aesop's fables to birth. Now, why would he do that? Well, of course he has all these philosophical principles, but he realizes only a few people are going to really understand them at the level of sort of philosophical treatise, right? Of, of technical knowledge, but you can, in fact, and it's a kind of confidence in a democratic Republican common sense that Socrates is kind of modeling. You can actually give images that have all the right ideas in them. And obviously think Plato's Republic, bad images, bad poets that get into the city of your soul. So I felt like the fable genre was sleeping, you know, there's, there's retreads and little rehashes and retranslations, but no one had done Caxton or Lestrange or Avianis level. Like we're going to take the genre and adapt it to the modern age and address all the problems and build it up. And, and I'm like, it's an open field. No one has done it. And what better time than wedded to the eight to 50 so that it can be on the shelf of every American, the way the fables were for our founding generation, Lestrange's fables were on every shelf at the founding. It's an, it's interestingly organized too. It's a, it's in many big sections, tracking the geography of America, the great geographical regions of, of American lore, but also just hard, hard nosed, real practical American geography. So can you just take us through your trip? Now you took this trip, many trips really to research this book, um, to celebrate America. That's right. One of the things I love about it is it's, it's an American fable book, but it celebrates the, the great country that is America, the, the, from the range to the mountains, to the, to New England, to the West coast, to the deserts. Uh, can you just walk us through that whole thing? Yeah. So the 13 chapters, uh, uh, go visit 13 regions of the country. Um, and the, the, the sort of mechanism for that is, uh, yes, the regional just divisions. So we start in the Everglades and we go to the great bays, Chesapeake and Delaware, Washington and Philadelphia. Then we go to New England and bar Harbor and Plymouth rock. Then we head to the great lakes and great rivers of the interior, the great plains, the front range, the mesas and, and Canyon lands, the great deserts. Then we go back up the Missouri river to the upper Missouri and the badlands. Then we go to Yellowstone then to the West coast. And by the way, Ryan, you'll like this. The title of the West coast chapter is our West coast. Like we're, we're taking it back. Don't let it go. But, but, uh, I'm all for collects it, but I'm also like, it's still ours. And we got to get it back. But the, uh, um, and then, and at yellow glacier national park at the backbone of the earth, as it's called at the continental divide, that high, beautiful place, it goes and follows Hugh, the manatee, uh, who winds up going on a mission. He's sort of driven out by a storm, a hurricane, uh, to go and find rescuers to help him rescue everyone. If they survived the hurricane, which fits with the other part of the story, which is every chapter takes up part of the declaration of independence. And so the, the, the, the nursery rhymes, the fables, the short stories, the primary sources from both the founding and the long settlement of the country are all kind of woven like little cantos to sort of connect and explain the declaration of independence, various statements of principle and ideas and practice and tyranny. Okay. Uh, Matt, I'm going to preface the following question by reminding you that you started this. Okay. Uh, it's going to take me a sec to set up, but since you invoked the veto, I'm sure you knew that this would be like catnip to me. And I have a kind of a long winded question to ask you about it because I'm watering up. I'm ready. Yeah. Stretch, stretch out, like take your time, get your coach to kind of give you a back rub. We're going to dive in here. Um, I think this is such a cool point because children and the education of the young, obviously a fixation of Plato and by end of Plato, Socrates that veto passage is a great example. So are the books of the Republic in which we talk a lot about what kind of songs kids are going to hear. And especially I think in the laws, there's a lot of talk about nursery rhymes and nurses rocking babies, this kind of pre rational, uh, instruction that happens before kids can think for themselves or speak. And this all puts me in mind also of one of the great American speeches, the Lyceum address, which has this famous line, Abraham Lincoln about the lisping babe. And I wonder if this was kind of in your, in your mind, right? Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap. I don't know if Lincoln had Plato in mind or if this was just kind of flowing through him at the time or what, but it seems like there's a direct through line from what you're saying to what your project is here. And I wonder if you wanted to talk about that a little bit and the way in which books for families kind of contribute to the American project as well as being really fun and cool to read. Yeah. To prepare to write this, I did a lot of research on the founding imagination. I studied their rhymes, their songs, their fables, you know, their, their heroes actually is another part of the moral imagination. We forget it's like, who are your great men? Like, who are your heroes? Who do you name your children after? Um, and, and I wanted to re present a lot of these images. Um, the very much so. Uh, and in fact, in the Lyceum address, he also uses a little touch of fable, right? With the, uh, he uses animal metaphor for the tribes, right? The lion and the Eagle. Uh, so like there's, there's this, this sort of facility with these things. I actually, I don't know if people know this, but, but Abraham Lincoln was a poet. He actually wrote very beautiful poetry. And he wrote enviously of other poets to his friends. And so I actually include one of his beautiful poems about shared memory and the sense of nostalgia and loss, because I think that's actually one of the themes that we have to deal with when we are not a young Republic. I don't think we're an old Republic, but we are a grown up Republic now. And we have to sort of, you know, overcome a certain sort of nostalgia for the past and forge a new future. So with regard to the law, yes, I wanted to braid the declaration independence. I wanted to braid Republican virtues and Republican principles. I wanted them to be woven into all of the old songs. And in fact, I read a lot of the nursery rhymes are old, but revamped by me and tweaked to be more sort of conducive to teaching these things. And then I also wanted to, uh, do the same thing with Aesop's fables. So some of them are old fables retold with American animals and folklore. Others are whole cloth from me that explain the American way of life and our laws and our customs. So there were kind of obviously having a battle between, you know, is America a cradle nation? Is it actually just Anglo, uh, Protestant culture? And I know this book kind of obviously features both. What's kind of, what are your thoughts about kind of that question in light, especially in, in, in, in what you have in your book, all this material, all this great content. Yeah. It's sort of two ways of looking at it. One, uh, America's principles of equality, of Liberty, of natural rights, a rule of law. You could say that they are precious eggs, but they will just fall to the ground and crack and never come to term as, and take flight. If there isn't a strong nest of the people, their habits, their life ways, their beliefs, their faith, all of those things. Um, and so in one sense, it's both macaroni and cheese, right? It's both and question. The other way to look at it is the principles are a nest and the people and their happiness are the eggs. And if you don't have all of these principles and laws, then everybody will go crashing down and they will not come to term. They will not hatch and take flight. So part of me sort of like, uh, you know, it's politics downstream of culture, these kinds of debates. It's like, it's a stream. Well, it's, it's a circular stream, like the interior of the world in the account of Fado in the, in the Fado, right? Of the, the, the waters and the lava moving up and down and all around. So I do think that we have to get out of that apparatic, um, as useful for teaching, but really stupid for public life. Uh, and this book is a kind of answer as to how you might weave these things together much more fruitfully and less of a fight and more of a handshake to win more people over to the cause. And there's some line in CS Lewis somewhere where he talks about a certain question, faith versus works, being like asking which leg of the scissors does the cutting and your kind of circular stream or the Okeanos river around the world is totally on that, on that same track. I think, um, to bring this back to the book, just a little bit, you've ably described how this thing is beautifully laid out. It's also beautifully illustrated. And I wondered if you could tell us about, I know you had an illustrator, uh, he or she came with you on the journey across the country. What was that collaboration process? Like, had you done that before? Or tell us about John Folley is his name. He is a realist impressionist and he studied under Paul Ingridson can trace his master apprentice line through the Boston school, through to the occult of arts in Paris, all the way back master apprentice. I kid you not to Rayfield's workshop in Florence. Yes. The Rayfield is the real deal. Um, and he is, he has, he, he, one of his strengths is he plays with light. So he gives you weight and heft by making luminosity through realist and impressionist parts of a painting. Uh, one of them behind me right now, you can sort of see, uh, some beautiful imagery behind me, but, um, he made 13, uh, 13, five foot by three foot oil paintings, and then another 40 watercolors and then hundreds of pen and inks. So it's a, it's a massive work. And that's where we raised money. We got grants to really sort of, to make it a beautiful eight to 50. He and I, this is our third children's book together. We did, uh, Mr. Means mildly amusing mythical mammals and, uh, the handsome little signet. Um, but, uh, we spent a year before we started our first book doing political cartoons, just to practice getting my ideas into his pen so that the art and the words were one and, and, and worked in perfect consort. Uh, and that took a lot of time actually. Uh, and I think the, the fruit is in the, in the, the, the product it's, it's, it's every image is profoundly tailored to the themes, the ideas and as part of the discovery in a way that you don't usually find in illustrations in, uh, matching books. It's a big book, Matt. I'm still working my way through it. And I need, I don't have a review copy yet, but I know one's on the way. We just have the digital version, but, uh, uh, so forgive me for asking, uh, uh, just a, uh, technical or data question about the book. Did you work any Mark Twain in there in the West? So I have, uh, his account of the Mississippi river. That's right. Yeah. And in, in, in part four where we go to the great lakes and great rivers and there's, if you, the last story is a riverboat full of frogs. It's a historic riverboat called the great Republic rolls up to the lead character humanity. Who's just taken a Birchbark canoe from Lake Michigan. It's a long story, but, uh, he, he, uh, he meets this crowd and it's a lot of hilarious gestures and nods to the Twain, uh, Hannibal, the short story tradition, uh, Tom Sawyer, the sort of impishness of the, of the river soul that is Mark Twain. And, uh, and I, you know, I, I have, I have, uh, I consider myself a serious poet, like, sorry, I do. But so I actually sort of take up debates with the poets. Like I have a little debate going with Longfellow in a couple of places in the book. I have a couple with Twain. Uh, like I, I try to, I try to engage at the, at the order of sort of the battle of the books. And, uh, but, but I definitely, I don't ever engage somebody unless I honor them, uh, greatly. And Twain gets a big fat wet kiss from me in the Mississippi river section. If we had known you were a serious poet, we would never have invited you on this podcast long ago. I have a question about your influences. Um, this book, I also don't have a physical copy yet, so I, I can't kind of appreciate the full heft of it, but it sounds like one of these beautiful, yeah, it's gorgeous. And it reminds me, yeah, it's making me think of my own childhood and books like Dolares, big book of Greek myths. I had a poster on the wall of my bathroom as a kid of Anemalia, Graham base. It's like this illustration of the alphabet with all the animals. Um, and gosh, you know, there's so many of these books. I don't know if they're, there's many of them now, but I'm curious which ones you cherish as a kid. Yeah. Music, music to, to, to my ears. So I literally put it in the contract, the size of the books. I want it to be identical to the dimensions of Dolares cause they're so formative and I love them so much. Uh, and then, uh, my, the first version of this, I actually was me and mammals was going to be two parts and the publisher just looked at me like, you're an insane person. No. And so they cut off the second half of the book, which was an animal Raleigh attached as an addendum. And I had that title on my own. And then someone goes, do you know who Graham base is? And I'm like, no, they're like, well, I don't know if you can use that title. Cause it's already out there. I was like, Oh shoot. No way. So I was like, great minds think alike. Although I didn't read them early enough. But you know, in terms of children's books, uh, you know, uh, heller bellock, um, uh, the light in the attic. I think she'll Silverstein is, is in one sense, his artworks a little depraved. It's sort of like, you know, penthouse magazine scribbles. It's not as beautiful as you would like. Um, I don't know if you knew that, but that's what his, his day job was. I did not, but I have, I have thoughts about that ourself. Anyway, yes, please go on. But anyway, so, but it's, it's still, it's clever. It's, it's scrawly. So we have a lot of pen and ink with no color in honor of that. But what I think people underestimate a light in the attic does is a major part of my book is wit wit that's just open ended. It's not trying to moralize. It's just, you need to learn to be nimble, funny, and a droid. And then of course, and my book puts this front and center in the, in the introduction, the marriage of wit and wisdom, you have to try to put those things to two together. Uh, and this is why in the very front, I have a an image of the American Republic in this strange sketching. That's also an image of Matthew 10, 16, behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves, be wise as serpents, forked tongue, witty, clever, worldly, and innocent as the dove, right? One simple with God. And that's a real hat trick. Like that's a very hard thing to do, um, to, to be both witty and wise and have them together. Uh, and that's, that's something that I think the fable tradition does very well. And I learned a lot from people like Shel Silverstein. Yeah, that's awesome. There's, um, in the back of my mind, there is some remark maybe by Dr. Johnson about wit and wisdom, very rarely being found in the same person, kind of excel in one. And then you, you know, you quick tongue, but kind of empty headed or, or vice versa. And yeah, the unity of those two things is really beautiful. The Shel Silverstein, I too had light in the attic and then the Roald Dahl illustrations, um, in the witches, there's a scene where she rips that the evil witch rips her mask off and you see her ugly face underneath. I had that marked with a post-it note as a kid because it scared the bejeebus out of me so bad. I didn't want to turn to the page accidentally. Um, so I guess there's a place for that, for the kind of ugly line drawing too. But anyway, awesome. That's really cool. No, obviously with this being, uh, the Claremont Institute and, and us, uh, you know, the, the work of Harry Jaffa and the declaration is so kind of key and pivotal to us. You know, you said you've weaved the declaration kind of throughout. I mean, what is, what is the thing you're trying to drive at? What, what are the things you're trying to, uh, illumine for your readers about the declaration and what it teaches Americans? Yeah. I was joking with Ryan, uh, uh, off camera that this is the, the street propaganda that Jaffa finally deserve, right? Like this is, this is elegant street propaganda for, uh, for, for Harry Jaffa. Uh, I do think that, um, it, it is important to reestablish the fundamental categories that undergird it like peace and war, uh, like, uh, law and chaos, right? Law and, and, and lawlessness like nature and unnatural, like, uh, uh, active and contemplative. So I try to actually, and once it's like build like the substrate of underneath the presuppositions, that's one thing I'm really keen to do. Like why do we have a citizen in charge of the army? Like why do we have a man in a suit like this instead of a generalissimo with a fruit salad and the, the, you know, all of the, the, the armament, why? Well, it's because we have the, the, the, the, the, the constitutional order and the declaration of independence, our founding fathers had fundamental categories about war and peace and action and contemplation. So that's one. And then two, the thing itself, uh, I really try to help everyone understand what the pursuit of happiness is, right? That it is virtue. And I think Jaffa was one of the great arguers for that account, right? That the pursuit of happiness is virtue and that the pursuit of happiness means it's virtue unto a good death. And so it is a very philosophic statement. In fact, I have the chapter that is just the phrase pursuit of happiness. Other chapters are all of half of the wrongs of King George, right? That's when you go to the desert or the badlands, right? You get all the abuses, but, but when you go to the front range of the Rockies, it's just the pursuit of happiness. And it's about climbing the mountain, right? You don't have a right to all happiness on earth. You have a right to pursue happiness and have all the proper things, many of which do make you happy in a lowercase H way. So I try to push that sort of account of virtue and, and that the declaration is telec, right? It is driving towards and has an understanding of human nature and human happiness that, uh, and, and there are lots of other factors, but that one I find to be particularly absent and particularly full in Jaffa's teaching. And so I try to bring that forward. I'm interested in the, uh, among other things, the travelogue part of this, um, what was your research process? I mean, were you just driving all over the country, Matt, were you talking to locals, uh, all of the above? And do you have any, uh, wonderful anecdotes or experiences that you want to tease out for some of our possible, uh, purchasers of this book? It's a huge country and I tragically could not go anywhere. But if, uh, if anyone wants me to write the sequel happily fun to my travels around the country, but I, I, I went to Vermont and New Hampshire. I went to the Shenandoah, which was a quick drive for me. I went to the Everglades, the Florida Keys, the Biscayne national park. Uh, and I went to a glacier Yellowstone. And I mentioned earlier, Yosemite, uh, Sequoia national Monterey Bay, uh, went on a whale watch and then, uh, took Ryan your guidance and went up and down highway one and saw the Redwoods. I, everywhere I went, I bought the local fair history, the sort of like the sort of off book sort of mad cap. I talked to some guy who was the Santa Cruz surfer poet who is now a docent at an elephant seal colony. And, and I, I actually tried to weave in his poetry into one sort of sequence, but then he was worried about copyright. And so I had to kind of throw it out. I was like, doggone it, man, just let it fly. But, uh, you know, I wove a lot of these things in that way. And then I called people I knew in every other region, um, both the places I traveled, like I called you, Ryan, but, and I called people where I couldn't visit and ask them. And then I spoke to Rangers at the national parks where I couldn't visit, um, and got all kinds of tidbits about the ecology. Uh, I mean, highlights include to my mind, Glacier National is a national treasure and is the most haunting place. And I was there at the perfect time in the warmth of summer, but they'd had a drought and then they had two weeks of rain. So the waterfalls when it's warm are usually asleep and the melt is over. But when I was there, it was both warm and there were just cascades everywhere. And it was one of the most haunting and beautiful places ever I've ever seen in my life, took my breath away and I made it the end point of the whole book in the going to the sun road, uh, there. And the last story, which has a kind of denouement climax of, of, of action, uh, and moral teaching. And then the other one is just a stupid anecdote, which is, did you know that there were, uh, crocodiles, saltwater crocodiles in Florida? Huge. Yes. I think I knew gators, but I thought saltwater crocodiles, that's in Australia, right? These are, okay. So I didn't know this. They're huge. They are vicious. And I was down in the Everglades. I went to the gate of the Everglades and the ranger said, what are you doing here? And where's your mosquito net suit? It was August. And I'm like, I'm here for research. Oh, research. Okay. Go on in, but you don't want to vacation now. It was wall to wall mosquitoes. And if I went around, I had to run. And so I was running. And I went to the Marina in the dark because I was told that there's some of the biggest crocodiles were there stalking about at night. So I had a headlamp on. And I got, I got counter-stalked by a crocodile and had to run for my car. It was, it was amazing, but it was, it was really fun, you know, and I learned a lot. That in itself sounds like one of these fables somehow it's that's awesome. Um, okay. So as we're recording this, uh, the New York times is reporting that a major book about the future of truth in the age of AI was found to have fabricated AI generated quotes in it. Um, which I think frames our conversation. Interestingly, since this sounds like a real man-made object, this book that you've put together in every way, in the sense of you're having been to these places and laid eyes on the stuff you're writing about in the sense of caring and thinking about the human relationships involved, the human artists behind it. Right. So my first question for you, some of the physicians is was AI used in the making of this book in any way, can we get you on record on that? And then second of all, can you speak to kind of the, you know, is there a way in which this was on your mind at all as a kind of antidote to fakery digital fakery? So, yeah, I mean, John and I were very keen to not let the illustrations become AI. So all of it's hand-drawn and there was a discussion about whether to color the pen and inks with AI. And we decided that it was not appropriate. We wanted it to be artisanally drawn by us and everything in our control. And it wound up being the right call. Anyway, it was much more beautiful to have the more stark black and whites, as we discussed earlier. Um, there is AI in the book. Cool. There is one. Go on. So I have, uh, there, when we get, as the book journeys, it also journeys through time. So it starts with the founding or colonial pre-colonial then founding, and then the settlement. And by the time you're in California in part 12 of 13, humanity is Chinooked over the mountains and dropped into the Pacific for another part of his adventure in this ongoing episodic story throughout. And, uh, he meets a robotic AI powered bull elephant seal on the beach. And he gets humanity gets into a debate with, and I have, I set it up. I told the parameters of like, it's a debate you're playing the role of, but I had Grok voice. He named himself Rook, which is funny because he's just an instrument on the chessboard and I have a debate and it becomes actually Spencer. I want you to read it because it is wacky. It, it has a teaching that's pretty on the surface, the way you expect from a Socratic dialogue. But if you pay attention, I actually, it helped me do what I thought it should do, which is teach all of these other lessons about how we have to manage AI much more carefully because we're not seeing all of the difficulties, but it, but I let I, it's a literary first, as far as I know, I have a dialogue between a lead character and I like Grok speak as the robot. That's awesome. No, I'm super excited to read that. The only thing I can compare it to is the dialogue that Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer had with Lambda, the Google AI back. That was much, he was much more credulous than, than you are. But yeah, I forgot, I forgot to mention the humanity. Obviously this is, obviously this is on your mind because you've made your character. What is the human? I only just got that pun. It's, um, it's, you know, early in the week is my only defense, I guess. Sure. It's a, it's a, it's a hot out. It's summer. The, the careless, the careless essay essay I will write when I'm old is why dad jokes will save Western civilization. Well, apparently the dad book is dead. I don't know if you saw this in the vulture journal. So the dad joke is going to come, come to his rest. We got Albert for Christmas, the, uh, the dad joke 3000, or maybe it's the 8,000. It's just a button that you push and it tells you jet dad jokes, uh, and his favorite. And it's actually my favorite so far. I don't know if we've been through all of them, uh, is, uh, how does, how do priests make holy water? They boil the hell out of it. But don't bump. That's good. So the, the, what's the rollout plan, Matt? I know you're doing a lot of media obviously for weeks and weeks now. Um, but is there any public stuff that people should be aware of? So if you're in DC, uh, you know, we're going to have events, uh, on the mall for the entire great, uh, the national state fair, we'll have a booth in the family and, uh, culture pavilion, uh, for the whole time. I'm going to be speaking, I think on July 3rd, uh, on, at the, on the main stage about the founding imagination and, uh, the theme of optimism, which features in the book and American optimism and what that means. Um, and then I'm going to be traveling and, you know, they can, you know, if you follow me on, on Twitter, as I like to say, you'll think less of me, but more often, uh, I'm at, at MTB. And, uh, if you, if you, if you follow me there, I'll be posting, um, there's a national tour, right? So I'll be, I'm going to be in New York. I'll be in the Midwest. I'm going to Texas in the fall. Uh, I'm going to be, uh, I'm, uh, I'm trying to, uh, have a trip out to California in the fall as well. And then in the summer, I'm going to be at, uh, Yellowstone doing, uh, an event at old faithful, which features, you know, being faithful, right? Sort of like your word is your bond, very American, important virtue, uh, and glacier national. I'm going to be in salt Lake and Denver. And so I'll be bopping around. And if, if you, uh, if you follow me on Twitter, uh, that's where you'll be able to keep up with all the crazy things I'll be doing over the next six months. Your friends know this, of course, and your colleagues, Matt, but you have, you have eight children. Is that correct? Or is it nine? I do the world must be people. The Shakespeare said, or as I like to say, uh, it's not a race, but I keep winning. Doggone it. Do you, uh, do you focus group these, uh, early drafts at all with your, uh, a lovely brood of children? So the alpha test is I call it the tired mom test. Uh, I have my wife read things at like 10 at night. And she's like, are you kidding? I'm like, yes. When you're angry and tired, this is the time. Cause you, it gets thrown out if it's just too tedious and annoying. Uh, and then I beta test with my kids. Uh, yeah. And so the, those two are my first readers and, and they helped me come up with some fun ideas now and again, when I'm like, sort of, you know, I want to something a little more madcap and sort of zig where I'm going to zag and the kid's imagination is florid and hilarious. So very much. So have you by any chance seen the guy on Tik TOK who sets his toddlers dreams and stories to music? A true, true man. Perhaps my favorite account on any social media platform anywhere, uh, who has figured out how to post about his kids without it being cringe. And yeah, that sounds, it sounds somewhat similar because those stories always go crazy. That is up there with the, uh, the guys who used to do the dramatic dialogues of YouTube back and forth. Yeah. If you ever saw those, this is in that, that genre of excellence on YouTube. Totally. Yeah. It's good stuff. How old's your oldest and youngest, Matt? My eldest is, uh, a S just finished his sophomore year at Hillsdale. Um, and then my youngest is Lillian, who some of you might know, she was born with a two chambered heart and is now near miraculously fully healed. And she's our little down syndrome angel. Uh, Lillian's five years old. So we have five boys and three girls. We are a testosterone home. I'm not allowed to have nice things. Uh, my mother's like, would you like this heirloom? I'm like, no, you keep it until they're all out of the house. Like I, yeah, that's wonderful. Um, well, I will, uh, I will encourage, we're going to keep Matt on Matt, uh, you know, his, his extracurricular job, which is really an addendum to his regular job is, uh, producing these wonderful volumes for children and for the whole family, but also talks about, and thinks a lot about politics and rhetoric among other things. So we're going to keep them on for the second section here. But I just encourage everyone to buy as soon as you can hand it out to all of your friends and relatives, especially ones with children, the American book of fables by Matthew Meehan, although it's Mr. Meehan's American book of fables. It's a beautiful book. Y'all y'all who are watching this, saw a little glimpse of it, and it should be a treasure that would repay many, many readings with your kids and, uh, and beyond. So thanks for doing it, Matt. I know these things are a lot of work and it's not a small book. So, uh, America and the Claremont Institute and all of our friends and family are grateful to you for producing it. Thank you, Ryan. Yeah. Um, I should mention too, I will plug Claremont. Matt was a Publius fellow in 1999. Uh, time flies, huh? So a long time ago now. That was back when we were doing it in, uh, dorms, uh, with broken AC. Marini would like pull out a cooler of beer from the back of a car for the break. Old school. Yeah. And maybe we just really quickly, what's your educational background, Matt? Uh, private Catholic and then public school education for when I was young. And then a university of Dallas politics major. I studied with Tom West and RJ Pastrito. Uh, and I even took a class from John Grant when he was ABD, who's now that chair of the politics department at Hillsdale. Um, and then, uh, and then I went back there and got a master's in English, uh, and a PhD in the IPS program and did a kind of cross trainer politics literature, um, studying Shakespeare, uh, Thomas Moore, Seneca and Cicero on leadership education. Excellent. Uh, also, uh, everyone in DC, who's a practicing, uh, government policy person, staffer, et cetera. If you don't know about Hillsdale's master's program for working professionals, uh, you should, and, uh, Dr. Meehan could be one of your professors. So go check it out. If you don't, if you haven't looked at it yet, and it's hard to get into, but there's a reason, uh, unlike say Georgetown, which is a fleecing operation for working professionals, uh, in Washington, where they, you know, you, you get a master's degree that's mostly worthless and you pay 70 grand for it over two years. Hillsdale, if you get in, uh, it's paid for. So go check it out. Uh, that's our plug and Matt Spalding should be appreciative. That's right. We don't, we don't want to saddle people with debt because we want them to stay in service. Right. That's good. Well, we wanted to, so it's, it's kind of, it all works out with our timing today because we wanted to talk a bit about the ongoing Trump and MAGA revolution in primaries. Uh, it is Thomas Massey's primary today in Kentucky. Uh, he's facing off against Ed Galrine, who's been endorsed by Trump. Trump Massey has been a thorn in the side of these, this administration, because he's mostly just stuck to his normal guns as always and has refused to on a lot of bills to vote quote unquote the right way with the administration. So, uh, he's earned the charge of disloyalty. He's also kind of obsessed with the Epstein files. We don't need to get into all that. Uh, Massey is, I guess you'd call him an Epstein conspiracy maxer, at least in Congress. And I think some of us are a little more skeptical of, of, uh, the full reach and, uh, conspiratorialness of the Epstein thing. So if Massey's, I wasn't aware of that. I thought this was an all Epstein, all the time pocket. No, please, please proceed. He was not a good man. I will, I will definitely state that for the record. But the, the rabbit hole is maybe not as deep as some, some would hope Massey included. Now this follows, uh, we'll mention a couple, two others. Bill Cassidy came in a distant third place in his primary in Louisiana. I think it was last week, uh, or maybe Monday. It doesn't matter. Don't quote me, but it's very recently. And Cassidy is really the first in a long, long time sitting Senator to be primaried. Uh, and, and then we have Paxton versus Cornyn in Texas, uh, a state I now call home and Ken Paxton was, uh, is AG in Texas and is running against the incumbent, John Cornyn, uh, who's been a fixture in Washington for quite a long time. Uh, I say it's fortuitous that we're doing this today because Trump just today has endorsed Paxton after some rumors and noise a few weeks ago, or maybe a month and a half, two months ago of a Cornyn endorsement being imminent. So this revolution in primary politics on the Republican side continues a trend that started in the first Trump administration rolled through the, even the Biden years and is now continued, which is, uh, various parts of the older establishment GOP have either given up and retired or are getting taken out. Uh, as Trump, the, uh, obvious leader of the Republican party now for the better part of 10 years, for reasons of national electoral rhythms and politics in America is remaking the party in his, his image, or at least in the image of what looks to be Republic, the Republican policy trajectory for years to come, which is a populist, a little more comfortable with protectionism, a little more skeptical of endless foreign adventures, leaving Iran aside, of course, in recent months. Uh, and, uh, and something different, although Claremont and others have argued also in long line with the Republican party in the 20th and 21st century. So it's an interesting phenomenon to watch, but yeah. What, what do we make gentlemen of, of, uh, these three races? I mean, they're, they're very, they're different in different ways. I mean, Massey is a single house member. The other two are Senate races and Massey's always been a quirky sort of high IQ, weird Congressman famously. He has a, and he's an engineer too, which adds to the weirdness. It's my, my, uh, affectionate and warm joke to all of our engineer friends out there, but he has this debt clock that he created that tracks the national debt that sits on his lapel and has for years. Uh, he's also famously off the grid in his Kentucky home has rigged up a Tesla system. And anyway, uh, Massey's an interesting guy, but, um, uh, I guess we'll see over the next couple of days or maybe even by tonight, whether he survives his primary, but what, what do we make of, of, uh, this rolling Trumpian revolution as it's going through the party? I mean, in one sense, it's ineluctable, as you said, like he is, uh, the leader of the party. Uh, you can't get around that. The president, two time president is going to be the leader, um, and going to make calls and direct money. Um, I think there's an intergenerational side to this too, which I know you guys have discussed at different times, um, that, uh, you know, even, uh, I was talking to someone, uh, a friend of a mutual friend of ours, Cornyn sort of knows he's too old for this. Like he, he, he, he knows actually. I think, uh, and, and it's time to go. Uh, and, and, and that's, that's not, I don't even mean that. Like, let's say I, I actually like very suspicious of Paxton. I would still think that that's the correct answer for someone at that point. Uh, I do think the gerontocracy issue is real. Uh, I think Aristotle was right that old people, uh, at a certain point become insensible to the trends, uh, and their noetic powers are trapped behind a failing body and they cannot judge the times. Uh, and so I tell my wife when I turned 73, do not let me pronounce on politics anymore. I will only write about ancient and, uh, timeless things after that. Um, so I, I think, I think that's, this is just going to keep happening. Um, I think the reason why, uh, there's a push is because the hope is when Trump is dead, you know, uh, I think a lot of people are like, if that happens or when that happens, rather than we can still restore, uh, uh, the party to what it once was. And all of that seems to me to be, you know, sort of Denethor or I would have things as they were, you know, the sort of despair of the ancient days, pretty general comments. But I, I think that's real. No, I think the, uh, the Denethor comment that that's exactly kind of some of the images that I've thought up too. I mean, this is kind of the old, you know, GOP kind of establishment that's, you know, still holding on, um, in certain ways, but I think it's grip on the party is, is slowly kind of coming undone. Um, like you said, Ryan, you know, Trump, I think perhaps surprisingly, uh, did not endorse Cornyn. So that's interesting. Uh, you know, Bill Cassidy's loss. I think that does, we do need to focus on that a bit. I mean, he's a guy, I think who, he got less a percentage of the vote. I think he ended up with only 24%. That's less than Liz Cheney got, um, in her primary where she just got absolutely shellacked. So that was a huge loss. I came in third place, if I remember correctly. Um, so he was a guy who I think voted for, I think it was the first Trump impeachment. Um, you know, just a very kind of establishment guy, very also to another constituency. We should focus on, you know, Maha, I mean, very much against RFK and what he's doing in that kind of branch of the GOP. Uh, you know, the Massey thing is interesting to me. I mean, one part of me wonders it, there seems to be so much focus. I mean, you go on to say Stephen Miller's Twitter account and it's just Massey all the time in the last two days, which is interesting. So he's usually the immigration guy. He had Seth just gave a pro ad gal rain, uh, speech and anti Massey speech. You know, you just, something wonders, you know, did they blow up Massey perhaps too big of an enemy here? I mean, he's one guy. Yeah. He's quirky, kind of weird, has some views. I'm sure some of us would disagree with him, partner and whole, but so, so that's kind of one thing I do wonder, have they almost made him a martyr? Um, cause according at least to root clear politics, I mean, Gowrain is up, you know, seven points in one poll, uh, it's 50, 50 in another, but you know, the trends seem to be signaling that, that he's probably going to win. And so you just wonder, you know, what's Massey going to do? You know, when's he going to start his podcast and kind of go on the whole Tucker, you know, Candace Owen circuit and all that, and just basically be a bigger thorn in the side of, of, of Trump and MAGA and all that going forward. So that's kind of one thing to think about, but you know, certainly, I mean, 2016 was, was the beginning of a political realignment. We are still in the, I would say the early stages. I mean, you're going to get a president in 2028, uh, you know, possibly JD Vance that there could continue that, um, possibly even Marco Rubio after that, or, you know, if you're a Rubio fan, maybe Rubio in 2028, but yeah, this is still the, you know, this is not the end, but you know, only the end of the beginning. Yeah. It's interesting to pair this topic with the discussion we had last week about Spencer Pratt. We were looking at some of his campaign videos and his general demeanor and also his suite of policy proposals and saying, there's clearly something here that has caught more traction than a lot of the other bids to define the future of Trumpism after Trump. In that conversation, I floated for you guys this possible distinction between like the letter and the spirit of Trumpism and whether people get too attached to the letter. That is the particular policy proposals, the exacting set of whatever set of ideology you've chosen to project onto Trump, people take that as Trumpism and then kind of punish defectors from it as needed and reward loyalists to it as they understand. But in my estimation, that's often a very poor fit for understanding what's actually going on with Trump and for predicting his actions. The most classic example of this would be the war in Iran, right? You had all these people saying, I understood Trumpism to mean no new wars. And you know, that was really an online confection based on one person's imprint of the letter of Trumpism. Now we're really trying to get at what is the actual spirit of Trumpism. And it seems to have a lot more to do with projecting American confidence, recovering normalcy, a certain degree of common sense about borders. You know, these things are much closer to the heart of what has made Trump successful. And perhaps these primaries are about trying to further identify that part. I mean, the real data point, I think will be the midterms where we'll get a lot more information about what people want and a lot more information about how they've been reacting to this second Trump term. But in the meantime, like one thing I take from what you guys are saying is almost the de-weirdification of Trumpism, like a certain extraction of the more harebrained conspiracy theory minded note in the Trump cord. Like I wonder if there's an effort being made to quietly shoo that offstage and make room for the more JD Vance, Marco Rubio dimension. Is this also associated perhaps with like a quiet decoupling from that Tucker circuit that you're describing, Mike, if that then becomes like the place where sort of primary post Trump rejects go? I don't know. This is all, all very airy and speculative at this point, but that's kind of my sense of the shape of how this thing is, is what the shape of this thing is taking. You guys can tell me which thing. Massey will now become a, if he loses, we'll become a gentleman podcaster, right? As we, as, as, as, as must we all in our dotage, I think. Yeah. Some of us are getting a jump on it already. Yeah, exactly. Isn't part of this being accelerated by the, the, the general unwise choice that if you disagree with some part of the spirit or the letter of Trumpism, that the primary means right now of expressing it is to basically, you know, sort of stand a thwart Trumpism and cry stop when, when it strikes me as that's not how most people played ball when they didn't like what George Bush did. Right. They would, they would stand, they would stand with Bush, but they would say their thing for their constituency. They would just, they would just allow for the disjunct to stand next to each other as opposed to I have to attack Trump. Like this is really interesting. Sorry, keep going. I do think that that is the new mode, which in one sense is oddly different than the old guard used to be, right? The old guard used to, they would just announce their own principles again and again. And I feel, I feel like there's, there's a, and you know, maybe it's a survival thing. Maybe, you know, you sort of the, the spats that then get you the new found respect for people. And it's just, it's, it's their weakness of their position and they're running for cover and protection from slate and Politico and whatever. But it strikes me as much more of a Trump phenomenon, which is causing more people to get zeroed out more quickly than in other reigns of presidents. You're making me think of the moment when Ted Cruz said something like vote your conscience as Trump was rising in the 2016 primaries, which did I think establish, I mean, Cruz has since adjusted his position at the convention. Yeah. I knew I was misremembering something about that. So it was actually even more stark on the microphone, like a meme, sort of like, you know, people trying to stop it. We've entered into the era of politics where people are aware in real time that they're turning into memes and they project it for that purpose. And yeah, that's what that is really. That moment sticks out in my mind, even though I think Cruz has adjusted his position as establishing the paradigm that you're talking about, Matt, where in fact, if there's dissent, the only vehicle for expressing it is never Trump. And that also accounts for the way in which never Trump as a funnel has kind of shunted people into this parodical version of themselves. You look at what's happened to somebody like David French or Jonah Goldberg, that there was nowhere for the logic of their positions and the media ecosystem to take them except into a maximalist and caricature, version of the hashtag resistance, but from the right. And yeah, you're raising a really interesting question, whether Trumpism can find a healthier way to kind of incorporate inter coalition disagreements and differences of opinion or whether it's doomed to endless loyalty tests. I'm going to say this will be one thing to watch if it's, if it's watchable, the reception of Mike Pence's new book, which comes out in two weeks, uh, will be interesting. Uh, I don't expect it to really, uh, in Trump circles to get anything other than mockery, but I'll, the purchase of it on the maybe anti-Trump right and, or the Pence-ian quasi Trump went his wrong way, but I don't hate him, uh, segment. Uh, and this is also happening in the backdrop of a bit of an exodus from the heritage foundation to Mike Pence's new think tank, uh, after the Kevin Roberts Tucker stuff last year. So it's all, all very interesting. I'll just state for everyone, the title of Mike Pence's new book. I find it somewhat amusing. Uh, the main title is what conservatives believe. And the subtitle is rediscovering the conservative conscience, which led one of the larger accounts on Twitter to say really a conservative or conservatism appears twice in the title. I just can't believe it. Uh, but I, I, I'm going to try to talk to CRB crew into reviewing it. I Spencer will know whether we've assigned it yet. I don't think we have, but not yet. We're taking a look at them, I think, because Pence, you know, uh, uh, Pence earned the ire of, of the very, the hyper-MAGA faithful because of his quote unquote failure to do his duty, uh, with the electoral college count. Um, but, uh, he, he is a, he's probably the most prominent, uh, not least to wish because he's a former governor and a former vice president who was vice president to Trump in the first administration, but maybe the biggest stand in for the older GOP establishment. Uh, but one that's one that's not, I w I will say this about Pence from what I've observed of him. And, uh, some of our friends, uh, know him quite well. You know, he's, he was not that section of the old establishment that just loved its ways because it, uh, got them rich feathered their nests and led them to great political careers. You know, he, he genuinely believes this stuff. It seems to me. And so him writing this book, uh, it makes it worth looking at just for that reason. Although I think in many ways, uh, his time is well past and, uh, his book won't cause much of a ripple in the movement, but. I would be curious to, to see, and obviously I haven't read it yet, but I'd be curious to see whether it, it harps on what I think is the central theme of Pence's sort of coalescing of, of people, which is a kind of rebuke to Trump. Um, but the worry that without a very distinguished moral character at the head of the country, um, that you have a kind of replication or mimesis of vice downward. And so the sort of the society of Cincinnati's type, you know, link group. And, and, and I know these guys are there. They're, they're good, man. I mean, they mean well, uh, but they're, they're, they're, they're very worried about that. Uh, and that's why they feel the need to, uh, distinguish and castigate Trump publicly. Uh, but my, my, my answer to them is, is if Trump is going to a savage you, when you correct him, so be it. But if you correct him as a friend, like if there's something you don't like about Donald Trump and you have prestige and Pence has got some prestige. If he actually decided to do it in friendship, even if the hand is slapped away or he's savaged, pardon me. He's like, wouldn't that be better? Like, wouldn't that actually, then not, now you're a martyr. Now you're like a, you know, Trump can have one of those sort of Elon Musk. I'm sorry. Come back to you. Like I there's like all of the old prudence of how you actually help things go better without just pouring a can of gasoline on yourself and emulating like some Buddhist monk protesting the Vietnam war. It's like, I just, I'm not sure the old guard is the old guard anymore in that regard. Like they seem to have lost some of the actual political arts of moving the ball. This is such a big and complex topic. I feel like we're almost too close to the end of the podcast to do it justice. And I will say that something that I'm sure a lot of our, our listeners will, will hate me for, and you don't have to agree with me, but I think the thing that everyone is so mad at Pence for is actually his finest hour. And that is his behavior in the debate over the 2020 election. And yet at the same time, he is in some ways Matt a good embodiment of the dynamics that you're describing, which is that despite the fact, whatever you think about that act, the binary, either or that set him then in perpetual opposition to Trump and Trumpism has then created. Yeah. That may have seems to have made it really hard for him to speak the truth and love from within the coalition rather than kind of get on the outside, looking in. And so part of that is certainly, as you indicate the way that Trump behaves, which drives people insane and understandably so, but also eating that hurt is sometimes I would think part of the prudence that you're describing, but Trump does make it hard for people. I don't know. It's, it's delicate. And I know I keep going back to this, but Lincoln's max about, you know, a drop of honey being so, so far superior to a gallon of gall. I mean, I think, Matt, I think that point is exactly correct where, you know, friendship, I mean, look at what Aristotle wrote. I mean, being, being the highest thing to really bind a polity together. I mean, those things are so important. And I think what's happened in the Pence thing is like you said, there's just, you know, there, there's one alternative, but the problem is is that's set up by its very foundation of a complete rejection of Trump. You look at what happened to Massey, even in, in this primary where, you know, here's a guy who's calling it the Epstein administration all of a sudden in the last week is now touting, Oh, you know, I support president Trump. I vote with the Republicans 90% of the time. Okay, great. But, but so, so that's, I think where, you know, you have especially some of the online, right, who are very against Massey. I think that's where they just get off. So you've set up this binary that, you know, it is, it's hard to really, um, figure out kind of politically, you know, a really feasible way forward. Once Trump leaves the stage though, that I think is going to open up more paths in a new way, or at least I hope it does. We'll see. I mean, I, I've seen rumblings already of, you know, never Vance and just kind of the same kind of two channels going forward. But I, I, I hope it'll at least open up at least a little bit. That's well said. Yeah. It'll be interesting to watch. Um, this Paxton Cornyn fight will be over fairly soon. Early voting has started. Again, Massey's going today and Bill Cassidy already in the dust, if not the dustbin of the history of the Senate. Uh, so, well, that's our time for today. So thank you all once again for joining the round table. Thank you to Dr. Matthew Meehan for his wonderful book. One more plug, the American book of fables, go pick it up, uh, send it out to friends and family and children across the land. And if you want to learn more about our work as always go to Claremont.org to support us, Claremont.org slash donate dc.claremont.org for the latest from our center for the American way of life and the Claremont review books.com and American mind.org. Please spread the show far and wide rate us, review us. Well, send it around to your friends. And, uh, we are grateful to you. We want to thank as always the brother, G Ryan Gannon, our one man production engineering crew for the vidcast, the substack plus, uh, extra contact content. I'll plug Spencer and I are going to talk about AI a little bit, uh, on this today's episode, which will be out this week. I'm really stoked about this paid episode. This would be a good time to subscribe. This can be a good one. Sorry. And thank you all for listening and watching. We will talk to you next week.