Will the MAGA Movement Survive 2028?

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Close Read, the official Claremont Review of Books podcast. I was going to say that this is our first ever live and in-person episode until I realized that's not true. It's not true. No, but it has been a while. It's been quite some time. A couple of years, I think. That's right. That's right. We were in the Los Angeles, the Claremont Institute offices last time. We did this in just beginning the show. We used to be in person all the time. Of course, this voice that you hear if you're listening and this face that you see if you're watching is our editor, Charles Kessler. And we're also joined today by Glenn Elmers, the Salvatori Research Fellow at the Claremont Institute, a research fellow in the American founding, our top subject. Welcome, gentlemen, to a live closed read. Thank you. Thank you. This is an AI bot That we call Spencer. Spencer Clavin has already earned a new title at the Claremont Institute besides associate Editor, which is a very lofty title, certainly, in its own right. I'm certainly proud to wear it. But tell us what else, what other hat you're wearing these days. Okay, well, this is the official title that I now have at the Claremont Institute, which is Director of Publications. But we call it that because I'm involved in the two publications that we put out, the Claremont Books and the American Mind. It's really just a fancy way of saying I... I do both. I meddle in two different spheres. So internally, what we call me is the publication's colossus because I stride the narrow world. I personally prefer that. But for some reason, they won't put it on my business cards. I don't know. It's a shame. That's a mistake. It is. We've got to correct that. But no, we're here for a CRB dinner in New York at the Harvard Club, this beautiful venue. We thought we'd take the opportunity, since we're in person, to actually record together. And we have an occasion to celebrate because we're introducing our podcast audience to the Fall 2026 Claremont Review of Books. Here it is, if you're watching. The Ruling Class at Stanford by Michael Anton, an article we'll talk a lot about. Later, but it's an opportunity, I think, to look back on the issue itself, but also forward a little bit with Glenn, his article on Donald Trump's status in history. We're halfway through the second Trump administration and recording this just before the midterm election. So we'll talk, Glenn, with you in due course. about the prospects for those elections, and I think more broadly at a kind of philosophical level where we think we stand in the history of the country and perhaps even the world. But before those lofty aspirations, this is why they call me the Colossus, by the way, is that I like to bestride the world, but first we'll do our, we'll follow tradition when a new issue comes out, I think, and we'll just survey the offerings altogether, which I believe are quite rich. Charles, why don't you kick us off? Tell us about what's in this issue. Well, as you may have heard, Dolly Parton is dead. What? She passed away recently. So the issue begins with my editor's note, a kind of tribute. To Dolly Parton, who was, besides being a great country music and bluegrass singer, was a wonderful and prolific composer of country music songs and also pop songs. She, in fact. In fact, Was elected not only to the Country Hall of Fame, but to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And the last album she recorded, her 49th album called Rockstar, was an album of rock classics sung with the original artists and her in various combinations. And I would say some of the... performances are better than the original versions by, you know, the Beatles and other classic rock singers. But anyway, she was also, of course, a huge figure in American philanthropy and in American popular culture. She may be one of the few remaining popular artists that almost everyone had heard of, would recognize, was familiar with. Uh, and, and sort of beloved by almost everyone, uh, and the passing of one of the last of these sort of. Culture bespanning figures, I think, is an important moment in American popular culture and less so in American politics, necessarily, although politicians liked to be around Dolly Parton. A lot of people like to be around Dolly Parton, but they sought her endorsements. Once they tried to appear with her in various visions, Videos and so forth over the years, they were able to see her face. but she always kept her distance from political commitments and used to say repeatedly, I don't do politics. And I think that was a very wise decision from her and probably had something to do with her universal high regard. But we miss her. And in the course of this long editor's note, I quote the lyrics of some of her. Not some of her biggest hits, but some of her, I think, most interesting, revealing, autobiographical works. And the piece is called Appalachian Memories, which is the title of a very lovely song that she did, which was never a big hit, but it was one that she liked to perform in concerts and did so for decades. Yeah. First of all, I have to thank you for introducing me to this rock album, The Rock Star, which is all... on YouTube as far as I can tell yeah that recording of Let It Be is really good yeah yeah yeah i went down a rabbit hole with that but no it's true i will Possibly when this event is over, I may be flying back into Dolly Parton Memorial Airport. I don't know if they've yet, they're going to rename the Nashville airport after her. And I think that is fitting. It's sort of melancholy to contemplate the loss of this, you know, omnicultural figure. And her apolitical approach was part of that. You know, she... took that approach, I think, in part because she understood she belonged to, or her persona belonged to the country as a whole. Think of, is it Michael Jordan who said, you know, Republicans buy sneakers too? I do. You know, you used to have this notion of cultural figures who broached the divide and perhaps no longer, which is a shame. R.I.P. Dolly Parton for any number of reasons. And yeah, lovely. tribute to her from the editor's desk. I've also seen quite a bit this time around about Bill Vogley's piece, Barack of Ages. This is a retrospective on Barack Obama and his legacy or possibly lack thereof. I mean, part of one of the themes of this piece is sort of the emptiness of Obama, including or perhaps especially to those Who knew him? Obviously, this is a subject, Charles, you've written quite a bit about. How did this piece strike you? It's a terrific piece, which gets better and better as it goes along, because it goes deeper into the books and the articles that have appeared, that have poured out concerning Barack Obama and his administration ever since the end of it. And there's a lot that we now know about Obama as a human being and as a politician that we didn't quite know, you know, when he was actually in office. And so what we the additional knowledge we have does not. Shatter the mystery or penetrate the cloud of unknowing around Barack Obama, who is still strangely a controversial figure even within the Democratic Party as its emboldened current left looks back at him as a kind of failure, as a guy who tried to be a moderate and tried to Win by being nice and not by deepening the embittered disputes of our day, but transcending them. And that the left thinks was a big mistake that has set them back. Yeah, nice. And it's certainly true that it helped, I guess, to give us Joe Biden eventually, not directly, since he wasn't endorsed by Obama right after they left office. But still, you know, Biden's an interesting case because he ran as a moderate, but he didn't govern as a moderate. He governed as a fairly progressive Democrat. And whether that was out of conviction or out of fear. About the state of his own party, no one is quite sure, I think, but he seemed to believe what he was saying. Thank you. That's half the battle in politics, I suppose. All right, good. It's hard to tell, of course, with a politician, but still, you know, what is the Biden legacy? That's the question that Bill Vogeli, our senior editor, asks. And as he himself would admit, he doesn't answer it exactly, but he shows you a range of possible answers that people have arrived at over the course of the last... 10 or 15 years from the from the point of view of the right. All right. Biden was always a kind of bogeyman, you know, governing, talking a moderate line, but actually being a much more ideological Democrat at heart. So that's, I think, from my own point of view, closer to the truth. And also he was a very... You know, he was an unusually well-educated president for a modern president. You know, he had taught in law school, taught at Chicago, went to Harvard Law School, and had absorbed a lot of very current and progressive doctrines about... Uh, social science and what we can know about what is true in politics and in morality and so forth. And he was kind of almost a postmodern figure. He was verging on being a kind of postmodern interpreter of America. Uh, and it's easy, uh, and this is a, a theme of conservative commentary about him, but truly also liberal commentary about him. And one of the best books. about Obama is called Reading Obama by a Harvard, speaking of the Harvard Club, by a Harvard historian who takes him, the theme of the book really is that Obama is very evasive, and he's evasive because he's a postmodern and thinks truth is hard to find outside of passionate commitments of one sort or another. And it's a good it's a good. example of a smart liberal writer coming to similar conclusions to some smart conservative writers. Yes. In some sense, you could say almost that Obama embodies Both strains of the present American left, which speaks to the contradictions internal to himself, since both of those strains can't coexist forever, one being the kind of radical woke left, the other being the moderate, abundant, centrist Democrats. One is sort of the Obama of his own projections, at least initially, the other being the Obama of right-wingers' fears, perhaps the secret underlying fear. True Obama and also the Obama that many on the left wished would have been more present is definitely, you know, they kind of got what they wanted in that respect, if not from him, then from the subsequent Democrat Party. Well, people should have been suspicious. When he published, this was long before he was a presidential candidate, he published a kind of autobiography called Dreams from My Father, which was not wholly contrived, but largely contrived. I mean, his autobiography was not strictly speaking true because he invented characters, he changed chronology, he wrote the life he wished he had had. Or he wished people to think he had had, and it centered on his self-creation as a black liberal democrat, as a black liberal politician, which was not the way he identified himself most of his life. So, he had some explaining to do. Well, he hadn't accomplished very much by that point in his life. No, he hadn't. No, he hadn't. It's a minor. It was long before even the famous 2004 speech to the Democratic National Committee in which Obama famously said, there's not a liberal United States and a conservative. There's just the United States and so forth and so on, which was a good line. And as he would say, it worked. Thank Well, as I mentioned, we want to... What else is in this issue? There's lots of other things here. I think we shouldn't... I'm going to leave the issue without touching on Leonard Sachs' article about Freya India's book, Girls. Yes. A pretty remarkable piece in a number of ways. you. This is a book review of a book about the young woman's online experience. That's sort of its theme. Sachs uses it as an opportunity to review the book, but also to... Tell our readers who may not be, who might be blissfully unaware, shall we say, of the state of online discourse, just what it's like to be somebody coming of age and especially reaching sexual maturity online, which is quite striking. I know you wanted to maybe read some of this. Yes, I should say Leonard Sachs is a physician, an MD, and a psychologist. And, uh, he, his patients are young, include at least young men and young women. Uh, and he's written what, four books or something like that, uh, on the, on what, you know, on sort of advice to parents and to people who are in charge of younger people, so to speak. And they're very good. I mean, he's an excellent writer, clear and useful. And he, in fact, recommends several books in the course of reviewing a different one, which parents should consult who are worried about the online world's effect on their own. Children, their own daughters, and sons. And I think any parent would find those recommendations extremely helpful. Yeah. And we don't always come with such practical advice. Free recommendations, but here we have some. It's true. And you could actually take them. In fact, I know a young woman, a mother of two kids from Canada. Who has ordered them all and is slowly reading her way through them and enjoying them. Now, this is news you can use from the CRP. All right. So, shall I? Please. Yeah. Let me give you an example of why many people, when they read this piece, are shocked and outraged. At the at the at his description of the world That's just beyond what not even just beyond your doorstep. It's actually inside your house Exactly. The piece begins, the piece is titled Love Bites, B-Y-T-E-S, and it begins this way. A recent survey of American teens found that 42% of boys aged 13 to 17 are now using AI-powered apps to create their own pornography. 32% have created deep fake porn of girls their own age, that is girls presumably they know in junior high or high school, then share those images with others. In my work as a family physician and researcher, I've talked with these boys. One told me it's almost magical. He speaks his fantasy, and poof, 20 seconds later, there it is. Professional-grade pornography spun up in an app such as C-Dream or NanoBanana. I hope you've not heard of either of those, but your children may have, especially if they're boys. And this boy is 15 years old. He has never kissed a girl. A growing number of such boys describe themselves not as heterosexual, but as pornosexual. In my experience, Dr. Sachs writes, a significant minority of these young men are virgins. They say that they prefer porn to the real thing, but they have never experienced the real thing. Parents, when they discover the world into which their children have fallen, often say, as I'll quote one more sentence from the piece, they had no idea such a thing was possible. They didn't think their son was even looking at porn, much less producing and distributing it. This is something I find extraordinarily helpful in a number of ways. Of course, it's shocking and appalling, as you say, and something that, you know, I'm perhaps slightly more aware of these developments than people just a couple of generations above me. Likewise, these kids are younger than I am and they're native to this technology. I thought you meant living in Nashville. That's, no, no, no. Well, you did say I was an AI creation myself. So in fact, I'm immersed in this world. That was a compliment. I'm a creature of it, yes, exactly. No, but you know, this is, I'm not, as they say, native to this technology, but I'm aware of it. I do find that when conversations about pornography and legislation about pornography is discussed and, you know, when this stuff comes up, it's often the case that people begin to talk at cross-purposes because the very phenomenon that they think they're describing with the word pornography really is not the same as what young people are confronting. And the kind of... psychic assault that you just are immersed in if you're growing up with these devices is something altogether different from the stack of Playboys under your grandfather's bed or what have you. So I think this is probably, not to make assumptions, but yeah. So then the other question is, what are the young girls, what kind of world are they living in? And they're Their sort of use of the Internet, he shows in this review, is quite different from that of boys. Boys use it, as you would expect, as he describes, to create fantasies about people they know, in many cases. Girls use it to fantasize about... themselves, how they could be more beautiful, skinnier, taller, you know, and they can take images, pictures of themselves, or even videos of themselves, and by use of several programs or apps, which you've never heard of either, probably, such as Facetune, Beauty Plus, PrettyUp And others, they can manipulate these images, they can even change, take a video, make changes to the face, the figure of the girl involved, and then change the whole video, you know, just applying those parameters to the whole video. And the effect on girls that he describes is to make them... Increasingly trapped in a kind of interior fantasy, which makes it very difficult to actually... Be around real boys and even to be around adult women who have not had the same kind of deep experience or exposure to fantasy in the way that their daughters may have. Yeah, it's intensely demoralizing as well. And in both cases, as you say, it's a slightly different dynamic for boys and girls, but I think in both cases the net... effect is to make real life kind of pale by comparison and make the real world feel like somewhere scary or drab or disappointing, which, yeah, for a while, I think maybe the narrative about technology was that it's a neutral tool. We can use it for good or ill. And Saks makes us realize, actually, there are forces at work within the tools themselves that we need to be accounting for. So, yeah, really a worthwhile piece. But we should we should bring in our fellow panelist here, Glenn. You've been you've been sitting very patiently as we as we yap on about this issue. But you are also in this issue and you have a piece of a book review that is also a reflection on Trump's position in in history. Generally, I mentioned at the outset that we're recording this. We're just about halfway through the second Trump administration, so it's an opportune moment. Would you like to maybe introduce this article and say a little bit about what it covers? Sure, sure. So it's a review of a book by Lee Harris on Lincoln Roosevelt and Trump as potentially world historical figures. And it raises a very interesting question of what, if anything, does make these three figures world historical, which is a term that comes from the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel I'm not sure the book executes its thesis maybe as well as it might have, but certainly the question it raises is quite interesting, and that's what I really develop in the article, specifically with Trump, and ask the question, if Trump were a world historical figure in this Hegelian sense, the question that Harris raises, what would that mean? What would it look like? And I lay out some possibilities. All prefaced with if, and it's a big if, and I think since I wrote the piece some time ago, the if has gotten bigger, because, you know, Trump, and this is not surprising, he's now going into the tail end of his second term, many presidents lose steam late in the term, and I think, you know, some critics are noticing this about Trump. It's not too late. You know, there was an allusion to the French riots. It's a little early to see how that will play out. I think, and of course, it's tragic what's happening in France and Italy, but just speaking as a detached political analyst, this is something that could help Trump and the Republicans. It certainly plays into some of Trump's concerns and themes. Thank He's talked about the cultural assault. About the need to defend the West, about how Europe no longer seems interested in defending Western civilization, certainly immigration as a domestic issue, it plays to a lot of the things he's been talking about, the way he's challenged conventional wisdom, the way he's challenged you. the self-interest of the establishment as against the American people. So he could parlay this, you know, he'd have to be careful about seeming too cynical, but it's certainly something that he could use. To showcase and prove that he's been right about some things and as a warning, you know, to his fellow Americans that this is not a path that the American, that the United States wants to follow. So some of the things I lay out fall along these lines of the way he's really. broken the old establishment unit party consensus. Mm-hmm. You know, even if you don't agree with all of his agenda, I think it's fair to say, and I argue this in the piece, I don't think that old unit party consensus will ever come back again. It will never have the same legitimacy, elite opinion, the authority of the elite universities, the authority of the bureaucracy. We'll see. Dr. Fauci, for example. I don't think we will ever again have a bureaucrat who can stand up and say, I represent science and be taken seriously. And Trump deserves a lot of credit for that. So we'll have to see how things play out. But I think. But Trump has done some things that may show him to have really cracked open a fault line in American politics that will have long-term ramifications. And that does speak to this kind of, as you say, Hegelian concept of the world historic figure, which I know that… CRB's readership and the listenership of The Close Read is an exceptionally well-read group of people, but just for those of us that there's maybe been a moment since we dusted off our lectures on the philosophy of history, can you lay the table of what this means? Because it's not just very important, right? Right. So, Hegel developed this idea that history moves in a progressive fashion towards mankind's increasing rationality and the development of of the rational state, and this is the origin, although indirectly in some ways, of our modern bureaucratic administrative state, which has received a lot of attention and criticism under Trump. The idea that rational experts trained in the universities have a kind of special status And can govern. The country without really the consent of the people, because once we've reached the end of history, once we've achieved this level of rationality, all the basic questions have been answered. And all that remains is for the experts to tidy things up and run society along rational lines. And again, I think that was part of the old consensus. And Trump has really cracked that. Belief wide open. And the idea being, right, that if you were rational, you would give your consent to whatever is about to happen. So that's clearly the implication. Right, right. So for Trump then to be a world historic figure in that sense would be somebody that is. Kind of helping to catapult us into some new configuration, right? What you might say is on Hegel's terms, he would be an anti-world historical figure in the sense, no, in a sense that he's challenging the whole premise of Hegel's idea that history is progressive, that it leads to the rule of scientific experts, to the degree that Trump is directly challenging that, he's challenging the whole premise of what Hegel meant. Interesting. It's very interesting. Interesting. So the other part… Part about this that is a question in my mind is one of the interesting things about a world historic figure in Hegel's telling is that he may not actually know that he's a world historic figure. He may not. His intentions for world historic action might not be the same as how history is, quote unquote, using him, et cetera. Right. How would you, I mean, Trump, it's been much discussed that the theories of Trump proliferate far more numerously than Trump's own theories of self. Right, right. Where do you think, yeah. To give away a little joke that I make in the piece is, you know, Trump certainly has never read Hegel. If he ever heard the name, he would probably say Hegel's Bagels. That would be a great name for a deli. And he'd be right. So I certainly don't. And on Hegel's own terms, the world historical figure may not be consciously operating in that sense. I think even his critics acknowledge that he does have a kind of gut genius for politics, especially contemporary American politics. It's rough and tumble. His ability to use social media, he does have a certain gut instinct, which is certainly not intellectual or philosophical, and so I think on Hegel's terms, Trump would not be aware that he's acting as a Hegelian world historical figure. But that doesn't necessarily disprove that he might be one. Right, he sums up the spirit of the age. Right, the zeitgeist, to use the German word. It's not that he is like a classical great man or statesman. It's not that he has virtues that ordinary people don't have, or he has more of the virtues that some ordinary people have. It's that he knows his what's... ripe for development in his time, and he's going to move the world to the next stage. And it's really that, it's almost an application of force to bring the future to life sooner that the world historical figure yields. And so Lee Smith, the author of this interesting book, is making a claim for Trump that... carries political greatness with it, but not the greatest political greatness, not the greatness really of a Washington or a Lincoln. Although the book is structured to compare Trump to Lincoln and Roosevelt, that is Franklin, Delano Roosevelt. What do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, again, the book, I think, doesn't quite grasp with the seriousness and depth of Hegel's philosophy at the level it might. I mean, one thing, though, that you raise is the comparison with Washington, which would have been more interesting than Roosevelt, I think, frankly, brings up the issue of statesmanship, which is an important theme for the Claremont Institute. And it's not something that Hegel develops or highlights because statesmanship implies Moral deliberation, the ability to choose, that human beings have free agency, and that statesmen and citizens can act and make moral choices. And the automatic progressive drive of history that Hegel presupposes kind of washes out the possibility of statesmanship. And so that, in a way, also fits because Certainly the highest kind of statesmanship is washed off. I agree. It's washed off, right. And so you can even, it's oddly enough, you can defend Trump as world historical without calling him a statesman on Hegelian terms. A figure, a world historical individual. Right. In the sort of the fox and the hedgehog term, Trump gets one big thing right, which was to crack open the establishment consensus and restore the sovereignty of the American people. To see the corruption of the establishment. That's right. That's an important one big thing. Yeah. No, and that's, I mean, there is something to this description of Trump, I think, because one of the most appealing sides of him is that Liberals can't get him out of their head, you know? He fills all available space, all available time, and they think about him a lot. And it's very hard for them not to think about him because he is the... The dominant figure of the age, politically. I mean, it's sort of strange to say that, but I think it's basically true. No, no, you're absolutely right. And you see this all the time on social media. There could be an earthquake on the other side of the world, and a liberal's first instinct is to blame Trump. Thank you very much. You're welcome. And so, yeah, right, he does fill their imagination in this peculiar way. Yes, right. He's hard not to think about. I mean, even if you're not... I'm suffering from what they call Trump derangement syndrome, and everything he does is wrong, even if you have a moderate or positive view of him. You know, I was in graduate school when he was first running for president. The students I'm teaching now have barely known an American politics that wasn't dominated by his presence. And now it is quite disorienting to be thinking about... His inevitable exit from the stage. Thank you very much. Again, however you may feel about his legacy up to now, or even these next two years of his lame duck presidency or whatever, Whatever. it really will, I think, be a revealing... You said something very interesting, Glenn, which is that, you know, whatever else happens, the kind of dead consensus isn't coming back. And I wonder, first of all, Charles, what you what you make of that. And as a representative of the census, we've got you here today to speak on that. Thank you very much. No, not at all. Of course not. Speaking from the dead. Go ahead. Uh-uh. That's an Orson Scott Card book, I think. Speaker of the Dead is here for. No, no, no. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm interested to know from both of you, what comes, what you think comes next? Where where you think we go? Thank you, Bill. Glenn has been thinking about this more than I have, but I would say, of course, in a very preliminary way, what comes next is probably confusion or at least conflict. Because one of the peculiarities of Trump is that he is not very doctrinaire. I mean, say of him what you will, he is not a guy with a lot of theories or a lot of views of public policy that he insists on. He's always presented himself as a sort of improvisational figure, a common-sense conservative, as he likes to call himself. And therefore, his successors are going to have to define what Trump means, what Trump meant, and what Trumpism means. He hasn't done it. I mean, he's left it open so that... You know, two or three versions of Trumpism certainly could emerge and have to battle it out in the primaries and in the elections of 2028, because the people. Despite, you know, taking some tough votes for Trump and for other politicians, if they if they did so, the people have not solved either this problem of what what did they like about Trump? What did they want to see continued under Trump? They don't get a chance to discriminate that in the voting booth. And he has not taken advantage of his chances to make that clearer in his own speeches, I would say. He likes, I mean, there's something. To a guy who prefers communicating online and in tweets, or what we don't, he doesn't use tweet, uh, X now anymore, right, truths, uh, versus speeches, I mean, he, he's given a couple of good speeches, important speeches, but he never refers to them, I mean, he doesn't quote them, he doesn't go back to them, doesn't play them up, uh, he spends a lot more time I'm talking about what. You know, at 2 a.m. yesterday, he, you know, emitted into the social media world. Right, right. Yeah, you know, Vance or Rubio, you know. Thank Could, at the best, take the best elements of Trump, articulate it, I'm not sure doctrine is the right word, but articulate it into a set of coherent political principles, tie it back to the Constitution, tie it back to some key themes of Republican government that Trump, in a way, you. exposed and demonstrated at Oculus, but never really explained. So that would be the task of a Republican successor, if you wanted to pick up and continue. The best that Trump could offer. It's like Schrodinger's Trumpism is currently in a state of quantum indeterminacy and now it must be resolved. It's neither dead nor alive until we observe his successor. Like somebody exactly. So do you think that the speeches that Rubio and Vance have been giving periodically over the last year or two are the beginnings of this battle between them? This battle over Trumpism, who will define it, who will possess it? Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, Rubio's most recent one in Athens, I thought was quite good. But I think they're both clearly eyeing this possibility of how to capture the legacy, dispense with the unpopular parts and keep the parts that people like. I like that. Do you think that the... I mean, presumably the midterm elections will have an effect on this in some way or another. Do you have any sense of how that might be? I mean, will it nudge either Trump or either Vance or Rubio in a particular direction? Should the Democrats, you know, score a resounding victory or it's too soon to say? I don't know. I mean, you know, we could lose the House and keep the Senate, which will not change things terribly much. Thank My joke earlier on when we were chatting is my most emphatic prediction for the midterms is everyone will be unhappy with that. you Republicans or Democrats will be entirely satisfied. Universal unhappiness. very Right. And so I think probably... More stasis, more sort of semi-paralysis until we get much. to the presidential election. Well, in the meantime, with that sunny prospectus ahead of us, if you can believe it, we've barely just scratched the surface of this issue. Thank you, Glenn, for that fascinating conversation. Obviously, Glenn's piece is well worth reading in the new fall 2026 Claremont Review of Books. There's Dorothea Israel Wolfson on Tom Sawyer. We mentioned the situation in France. There's a piece by Christopher Caldwell on Charles de Gaulle that I think speaks nicely, despite having been written before the latest unrest, speaks nicely into the situation. Martha Bayliss on Nolan's Odyssey and much, much more. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining me. It's nice to see you. Thank you, Spencer and Charles. And if you are not already. If you're listening to my voice or watching us on YouTube, but you're not already a Claremont Review of Books subscriber, I need you to examine your choices and your life very seriously. I need you to think long and hard about why that might be, and then make a better choice. Go to claremontreviewofbooks.com to become a subscriber so that new issues will arrive in your mailbox and in your inbox as they appear. We can't, unfortunately, do this podcast in this beautiful setting every time, but we will be back on the airwaves. So don't forget to subscribe to The Close Read wherever you get your podcasts. Visit claremont.org slash donate. If you would like to support the work that we do at the Claremont Institute, we always greatly appreciate that. And of course, thanks to our one man production and engineering crew. the brother G, Ryan Gannon, who's actually in the room himself behind the camera, as he always is in spirit, but now really in person. And above all, thanks very much to all of you for listening. Why we do what we do, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you.