>> hello everyone. we are here today because helen andrews has written the book of the year in my opinion, "boomers" the men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster. i have known helen for gosh about 15 years now. helen is senior editor at the american conservative editor's page previously she was editor at the "washington examiner" and

a 2018 robert novak jr. fellow. her writing has appeared everywhere worth reading "the news york times" review of books and american affairs. she lives in washington d.c. with her husband and newborn son and today we are taking on the boomers. i remember 15 years ago i was reviewing a 700 page biography of the soul singer sam cook and it gave me a chance to reflect on the power of boomers and their fascination with themselves. i remember i remarked these aren't devices to get more money out of her parents but it commemorative -- they shoved

this pleasant cusick in her hands and said this is what my generation is about. listen to this in memory of me. sometimes i wonder if we indulge them a little beowulf. talking about themselves. that didn't happen and luckily for us we can start talking about them and here to do that today is someone who i just toyed with but helen enters is born into. helen, welcome. why do you tell us a little bit about your book and we will do a back-and-forth between us and then open it to questions from everyone else. >> hi area thank you so much. i am happy to be doing this event with michael because this is a book about generational warfare. as everybody knows millenials and boomers are natural enemies so it's good to have somebody

more gen-x as a neutral adjudicator between the two sides because this book is written from the perspective of a millenials, book that looks around at the world we inherited and tried to examine what went wrong from the respective of the boomers children. however even though this is a book with that subjective respective i did my best writing it to be as objective as possible and really examine all of my millenials resentments against the boomer generation to nail down which are the boomers faults and which are not and cases where their generation got lucky and mine was unlucky. i will give free -- three examples from the book complete that millenials have against

boomers and my answered as to whether or not those complaints are fair or unfair and after those complaints we can launch into discussion. the first is obviously economics because that's the talk of every millenials list of resentments that the boomers just had it so well economically and we have had it so tough. the millenials are just a lot warmer compared to the boomers and i don't just mean we have less wealth than they do. obviously you would expect people to have more wealth than people in their 20s and 30s but millenials are lagging behind that though well that the numbers had accumulated when they were our age. we are only about 25% as they were at the same point in their careers but i always remind my

millenials friends because they are feeling unwell the more economically precarious and trapped in the gig economy that the boomers really did have it exceptionally good. they were born into the golden age of the american economy in the 20th century and to their credit or it their fault. they just happen to get really lucky. things are tougher for millenials today that things back then were about as good as they could possibly be so the fact that things are harder now is understandable. on the other hand, i do think a lot of millenials economic or cured he is the boomers faults for two reasons. the first is college debt. it was the boomers who said that everybody needs to go to college and take on as much debt as we need to to go to the best college that will have you. that was the boomers maxim that

they told the kids and the result was a lot of people in college wouldn't benefit from a college education and then to come out on the other side with six figures worth of debt that they will have a hard time paying off in the second reason is the two income trap. a lot of millenials feel trapped in dual earner households. they would love to have a middle-class lifestyle with one earner but they feel like they can afford it and the reason is the phenomenon that elizabeth warren of all people identified which is women, many boomer women rushed into the workforce thinking that was the only way. it ended up beating up the middle-class so now glenn nielsen are no better off than two income households were and now need two incomes just to

make it work. the second complaint that millenials have against the boomers is the decline of the family. the boomers are rather proud of their record on this one. they like to think of themselves as the architect of the revolution but in many ways living in the shadows of that revolution is a lot less fun than actually undergoing it as michael explains so well in his own book my father left me ireland. in this case the defense of the boomers is that there is revolution was a natural swing of the pendulum and after so many decades and centuries of oppression it was only understandable that they might air on the side of -- but now they say look at this that has. the divorce rate has gone back

down and pregnancy rates have gone back down. it does not been that the boomers forged a path and not the millenials and their children can find a happy medium. unfortunately once again the boomers defend it has the only reason the divorce rate has gone back down is that your people are getting married in the first place. it was only in the last five years that we cross the fateful threshold of a majority of adults over age 16 being unmarried and that's objectively what i see in my peers. i see a lot of people who would like to extract some commitment from their partners who would like to get launched into their adult lives by settling down but we just have a really hard time getting over the of attaining those markers of adulthood like

marriage and kids. so the boomers didn't just disrupt the nuclear family, they broke it in a way that their children are now still dealing with. the third example after which we can go to discussion his drugs and it's important. i mentioned this because i see a lot of people just how responsible the boomers are for the prevalence of drugs and all of our lives. a lot of people don't know that before the 1960s you would not have found even marijuana. the average middle-class person would be very unlikely to encounter even the softest drug as pot in their day-to-day lives. just wasn't part of the culture and it was the 60s counterculture that made it more popular paved the way that you know that the boomers were

responsible for the drug revolution is that the drugs we identify with each decade match the drugs the boomers were doing. the 60s they were young and poor and they use marijuana and when they had more money the drug of the decade is cocaine in the 80s they were buckling down focusing on their careers because they were all taking valium and finally in the 90s the drug that i identified with that decade is ritalin. this is the reason why the drug revolution was the boomers faults and i consider them morally culpable because that was something that they didn't just choose for themselves but that they inflicted on their children. the boomers likes drugs and they liked finding the answer to problems and a pill but they

adhd overdiagnosis revolution was something more of umar at shadows well. rumors are allergic to exercising authority even as parents. they love to be the cool mom and the cool dad but as anyone with a small child knows it's impossible to raise a toddler without it. the early 90s was the moment when the boomers had young children and were frustrated with the tension between wanting to be the cool parent and having little hellion in their house needing some discipline. the way that they square that circle was by filling their kids with drugs. there are a lot of millenials who were put on ritalin or adderall and given some kind of psychiatric diagnosis in their teens and they just kept taking it.

and when they reach their 30s he began to see a bit of resentment because at the adhd example shows the boomers motivation and drugging up their kids were just as selfish as their motivation toward druggies themselves in the 60s and 70s. and i will end with the quote david crosby a singer from crosby stills and nash in the consumer. even he admits the drug revolution was bad. he said we were right about the war and we were right about the environment. we were right about civil rights but we were wrong about drugs. if you read this book you will find that i dissent from many of the items on the list of the boomers got right but at least we have the common ground of agreeing on that last one. with that i will kick it to

michael. >> thank you so much for that and i want to begin by looking at the structure of this book and six profile cases of umar's. we have steve jobs al sharpton sonia sotomayor, jeffrey sachs and i think your indictment of the boomers is well aimed and comprehensive and more comprehensive than you have even outlined just here. you talk about the ethos that led to the missouri of being used in the missouri of being completely ignored. an approach to the third world that has all the real and they'll be imagined vices of imperialism with none of the

wisdom or virtue's of actual imperialism, an attitude of self-actualization and activism that amounts to little more than authoritarian bullying but two things interested me. the first is you accuse the boomers of destroying the left and i was wondering if you could expand upon that a little bit. as well as share the brief anecdote about richard richard branson. >> that is a fun one. i'm so glad that when caught your eye. as soon as i learned about it i knew i had to put it in the book. i'm not surprised that you were struck by the argument that the baby boomers kill the left because that's a very counterintuitive thing to say. the baby boomers in many ways were the most left-wing generation history and even conservative baby boomers are left-wing.

what in some ways it's equally true to say that none of the baby boomers truly fit the role and all you have to do to realize that is to look at what they call themselves. the baby boomers in the 1960s called themselves the new left and the reason to proclaim themselves as left was to declare independence from the old one. if you look at the port huron statement which tom wrote in the 1960s as the manifesto of the young new left it says extremely disparaging things. a bunch of dinosaurs who have no answer to the modern world which was ironic to coast port huron as in the port huron statement was the campground of the uaw and tom hayden has been graciously allowed to use the

united auto workers campground for their members because one of the parents were -- worked for the uaw so after enjoying the hospitality they declared the uaw stupid and obsolete. and the aftermath of the new left takeover of the democratic party really was the total alienation of what was ostensibly the liberal party from people who worked for a living. you could probably dated to the 1972 convention that nominated mcgovern. the democratic party gave over to identity politics. representing the poor and dispossessed which was what they were supposed to be for. you see the same thing happening

in all of the western democracies which is why it wasn't just a quirk of the decision to dnc made in 1971 that really something that was a consequence of the boomer generation. richard branson and the goat illustrates her but he ran records and there was a moment in the late 70s when the people at one of his record factories looked at the album cover that they were supposed to be printing and said the fascist regime, what? they saw the desecration in the music and they said well okay too far and too far. we the workers like the queen and we consider this album something close to treason so we refuse to have anything to do with the production of this sacrilegious punk artifact in

richard branson came in, stormed and instead you will make the record i tell you to make and he ended up prevailing. i read this anecdote in the look that describes it in celebratory terms like to get those workers who couldn't understand the punk revolution. this is a victory for free speech is what it is. but i look at that story and i see bosses tramping over workers and cloaking it in the language of liberation and freedom of individual rights and expression boomer-ish idealism and that really encapsulates the takeover of the left-wing parties of western democracy by the college-educated and the shoving aside of the non-college-educated.

if you are left-wing party represents the interests of the wealthy and educated and not the interest of the poor and the less powerful in society than i don't take its fair to call yourself a left-wing at all. >> how lynn, thank you for that. i want to remind the audience that they can send questions to jackson wolford at jackson. wolford at aei.org or they can tweet them at #aei boomers. meanwhile while i have you here helen, i want to talk to you about the people you chose because if somebody else is writing a book about the boomers they would almost certainly pick bill or hillary clinton or maybe pick donald trump maybe someone

like tony blair who i don't know if he qualifies but you picked steve jobs and al sharpton and camille togliatti and you have made this indictment against this generation. when you have these individuals in your hands i think you find things to admire about almost all of them and even times when they were wrong or transgress by eight either the generation before them or misunderstood by their peers. so you know, i'd like you did to talk a little bit about some of the good side of some of the boomers. you found goodness and al sharpton i think and the funniest one to me was steve jobs in a way because steve jobs

has been hailed in worship as this great innovator in great company man of his generation and then he has been abominate it partly why another subject in your book aaron sorkin as a bad dad and one of our complaints was they were bad parents and particularly bad dads but what you seem to like about steve jobs is his paternalism with both his company and its customers. can you talk a little bit -- you've given us this indictment but what are some of the virtues you find in these characters even when they stand out from your generation? >> you are absolutely right that i do see things to it higher and all of the boomers that i have profiled. i had someone tell me that seems like my admiration for that i

admire -- as the book moves forward. i don't know that's true or not but i think it's roughly accurate as the trendline. but my defense is that i admire most the things about the subject that are the least boomer-ish and steve jobs is a great example of that. if you were to put the boomers and the sentence you would say that they are institution destroyers. they hate institutions. they think they constrain individual choice and tier them down and glendale's grew up in a world without institutions which is not great at whatever else you want to say about steve jobs he wasn't institution builder. he wanted to make the company that would last after him that

would still bear the imprint of his personality and his genius even when he was gone. he has succeeded in doing that. apple is still today steve jobs company many identifiable ways. the world we live in is changed by steve jobs. that's an example of admiring things about him that their least boomer's end and steve jobs case connected to the bad dad myth but you mentioned because i never met steve jobs but i get the sense and other people who knew him got the sense that he was so driven to make a mark on the world and to leave something that he could pass on because he had no sense of inheritance himself. he looked back in his family tree and saw nothing. being adopted left him driven to

leave something for his kids or in the metaphorical case as the company. steve jobs was unusual for a boomer and having that continuity because most of it rest of the generation was content to not look a hind and i look forward but now. >> interesting what you do in that chapter in others, you don't just talk about one thing with one character. steve jobs is also part of this company that he built and he has with other boomers even as the company including tim cook and his wife. they, being more authentic rumors in some ways also have an effect on the world, mainly tim cook outsourcing to china and bahrain called job is a hyperliberal form of

philanthropy that is partly underwritten by chinese spyware. so each chapter has these virtues and before return it to other people in the audience i want to talk a little bit about al sharpton. you know you show al sharpton again with that kind of paternal connection at the beginning of the story where he has these three surrogate fathers, all of them people that we know like all that literate people no, james brown. >> jesse jackson and adam clayton powell. >> yes and the chapter is that it is a meditation on how boomers be institutionalized liberal politics and be institutionalized civil rights

and be democratized civil rights. give us a little bit of a sense that and the boomers many of them weren't actually involved in civil rights in the way that al sharpton got to be involved as he was involved as it child and a. she and was literally at the feet of civil rights heroes but you have this beautiful narration of when the southern christian leadership conference comes to chicago and confronts the daily machine and just tell us a little bit about that and how the boomers word democratizing our politics. >> i'm glad you liked mike telling of the etlc in the chicago story because i was shocked to learn when i read about that the local black

leaders in the first thing he had done when the etlc announced after selma we are coming up north to chicago was holed up press conference and to say we don't want you here. we have our own system of power here and we are doing pretty well with this daily page sheen. we don't need you here making trouble, we are all good but in terms of the boomers legacy its criminal the way that they have convinced the world that the baby boomers were responsible for the great civil rights achievements of the 60s because unless you were al sharpton and civil rights activists at the age of 10 which he was than the boomers have no credit to claim for the revolution. one of the most surprising things that i learned in the research of this book was something about the civil rights act of 1964 grade i never knew that at the same time congress

was deliberating bad at earl warren at the supreme court was preparing to issue a supreme court ruling that would have accomplished essentially the same thing. the supreme court had just heard what was known as the -- cases where the black activists came to private cafés and restaurants that had whites only policies and the owners called the police and they sued the owners of those private home saying this is a violation of the amendment on the same violation of brown fico board and the fact that you are private establishment makes no difference. if they would have ruled in favor of the civil rights activists and sitting cases which earl warren was prepared to do, that would have accomplished the same thing as the civil rights act of 1964

integrating private -- and an earl warren with all those positions because he didn't want to get a court in trouble if he didn't have to thought of congress is going to pass this act and take the political heat off me we will see what congress does then of course congress did pass the act and earl warren issued at controversial release. but that revelation that alternate path of history that could have been taken if the act were never pass and southern lunch counters were integrated that made me confront well would that have been better? on the one hand it would have come down every rather than the summer and that would have been five months of integrative lunch counters with people not having the indignity of not being able to eat next to their fellow citizen. at this late the supreme court option had that going for it and it was a factor but i think we

would have lost the opportunity to make a democratic statement against segregation as a nation. even though it took congress five months longer than a would have taken to integrate lunch counters and even though the negotiation with moderates cause them to water down the bill in some ways it was still worth it in order to have america fix its race problem democratically and that's what has been rocked under the boomer nomination. their preferred to sort out their problems and the court and we lost the transactional compromising spirit that democracy and the legislative wrangling entailed. i think that's a loss. i think we lost something by

taking civil rights completely over to these undemocratic ways. >> the chapel is -- chapters beautiful and goes along with a chapter in sonia sotomayor in many ways and that the daily machine in a way that transsexualism disgusted rumors because it was wasn't nihilistic but also because transsexualism model of politics in the city machine has accountability which boomers can't stand. and so the daily machine, if you come to the daily machine with the problem from your neighborhood from your ethnic neighborhood the daily machine is going to ask you how many votes can you deliver in who do you represent and if you represent someone significant the daily machine often finds a way to make the resources go where they are needed and go where the people want them alternately and make the

bargains between different sections of chicago. and what happens afterwards in the civil rights revolution in the boomer preference for a grand moral statement and issue an olympus and been enforced on people who are willing is the growth of public interest lawyers, the growth of civil rights advancing not a democracy but by lawsuits or the threat of a lawsuit and ultimately the shakedown. which is where we are at now. one more thing i will ask before the questions are returned to me by the audience is jeffrey sachs this is in a way i think one of your more provocative theses in the theme in your work is that

jeffrey sachs got involved in this new field of development economics and basically going to third world or the post-soviet lock and trying to get these countries back on their feet economically and integrated into the laughs. i would like you to talk about this because since jeffrey sachs has the boomer-ish distaste and hatred of imperialism i think you find it a little bit of what he practiced. >> yeah there is an anecdote about jeffrey sachs that i love that i didn't include in the book because i'm fairly convinced the sources ribeau. it's a story from stephen s. cohen and the russian scholar

who died just a few months ago actually but he said that he was on the plane was jeffrey sachs on the way to moscow and happen to be sitting next to him. so a scholar of russia asks him what books he was reading to prepare for his journey because that's what you do when you go to a foreign country. maybe you read anna karenina or whatever and jeffrey sachs apparently told steven cohen i'm not reading anything. i don't feel the need to get up to speed on russia as russia. i am an economist. everywhere i go i have finance ministers telling me oh you to understand our country is different and they are all different in exactly the same way. economics is economics. i don't need to know about russia as russia. just show me the numbers. and i love that story because i

was the answer jeffrey sachs gave because it really does reflect the attitude of all development economists and the thing that annoys me the most about it is that the actual imperialist and in the 19th century written and frenchman who they love to denigrate and were not at all like the white man's burden era that kipling would never have said that about india. he never would have said i don't know anything about it. ..

>> what he does is so obvious that is analogous that seems deeply offensive and arrogant that the imperialist a lot of people criticize jeffrey sachs. i think he could do a lot of good that way.

but to be such a hypocrite of it. >> surprise being a boomer for his good intentions anyway. i have a question i wonder what the shortcomings suggest about their own parents and members of the greatest generation for all the virtues for the worst access of their children's generation? >> that's a great question. and the short answer is no. that the greatest generation spoiled the boomers.

had grown up in the great depression and world war ii you would want your children to have the easy life that you never had. you want to give them an easy life so yes they were a little bit spoiled better parents. but more important than any of those factors the fact that the boomers were so demographically huge. there were a lot of them. so that simple demographic fact explains a lot about the boomer character. so from the moment they turn 16 the note most numerous consumers, the most numerous voters politicians have courted their votes.

through sheer demographics they can make the country is revolve around their desires leading to the awful narcissist that they are. all of that would've been true if they haven't spoiled them a little bit. and that was a much bigger factor and that the story of

the country that is the boomers changing as they get older. part of that than the financial crisis the not that the jobs the millennial's desperately needed at the time and now we even see it with covid-19 the emphasis is locking down and protecting the elderly and to hell with the economy that everyone else has to inherit. so until we get more questions. to aei boomers so i was wondering if we could talk a little bit about you use the

wife as an academic. one of the few one of the only lifetimes the academic rockstar a figure that you see in popular magazines and that is a way for it to explore the sexual revolution and what it is worth studying and with communicating to the next generation so to talk about you seem to admire her on the one hand for her in sentimentality and the willingness to the actual

education she was given and what that gives her but you falter for never being able to learn as well. so in the sense the effects which she notices don't cause a second thought or a second thinking so tell us about camille. >> i'm so glad my affection for her came through the left watching her she is a great public intellectual and there are that many great left right now but a lot of the conservatives because they are

liberal on their side and it is true with the campus feminist in the 19 nineties this was the era of take back the night marches that the campus and social crisis and then behaving recklessly by going to a frat party then going super drunk that never even mentions the things that women can do to modify the behavior that is the feminist solution and without hard-nosed realism i was much as a feminist as anybody and

the irony is that is clarified as she was looking at the feminist position camille has not been so clear eyed about her own position. she has always characterized herself as a feminist i love prostitution and pornography. but i as a conservative almost want to echo her complaints that says to liberate everybody's will be those speaking of the me to - - #metoo movement what i see as a result of what you are

proposing is sexual assault and sexual harassment what did you think this cap would happen? especially things like pornography. >> we have some more questions we will combine these it seems we were on the verge of a generation all transfer as they continue to age other positions what is a successful transition for american life look like? what can we do to correct to the accesses of the boomers and the destruction of machine politics is the genie out of

the bottle. >> it is. for an answer to the first question what is post boomer politics look like the answer is we don't know because we haven't seen it yet. they are still trapped in the boomer mindset. so the idea what is cool is based on what they power school in 1960. i was writing the conclusion over the summer with the right is going on and a lot of people asking him answer was yes.

the millennial's it wasn't those were boomers who decided there great moment was a moment of the country it was terrible nonsense and that's the only good moment in american history and that's the moment we will reenact. and then for them to have mental independence of the baby boomer generation. because even now and we still haven't seen it yet the nobel prize is still going to bob

dylan. before the renaissance would have been rediscovered was told by zealous churchmen it was ipso facto not worth rediscovering. and how the boomers feel about themselves any suggestions they may not be altogether off is immediately met with a litany who previously labored in a sad state of non- personhood before the boomers came along and broke their chains. with the primary and secondary school education.

so there was the time of slavery and world war ii slavery and hitler and then that is cleared out of the way then there is the march of history. that begins with elvis and ends with, i don't know we gave you friends on nbc. so you end up alleging the boomer generation themselves are and event of cultural destruction and disruption on par with the protestant reformation. which sounds like the overstatement to sell books

but at the end of the book i have to agree with you because they have destroyed the left by institutionalizing it. so we saw some of their handiwork last week at the capital. this is working people who lack political institutions with real leadership we have a crisis of the family with young people are not even getting married and not having all the sex the boomers told that would be great, not having children and the boomer obsession with pop culture that has destroyed our connection to pop-culture and

the failure to pass on the religion to understand it so want to turn a question that are you talking about a particular subset of the elite boomers? they fought in vietnam and voted for ronald reagan. they are not a monolith. how do they fit into the picture? >> i really wanted to write about individuals in this book. precisely for the reason that the question identified. so much writing about generations in general ends up being very vague.

i want to anchor things and there were boomers who did not share the characters of their generation. but i hope that the six that i pick will be obviously recognizable as typical boomers in some way or another. >> if i could answer for you, in some ways the boomers being who they are with the gravitational effect it means that since reagan they elicited the most boomer -ish results from the president see you could've gotten. conservatives even at the time imagined a much more conservative reagan presidency than they got.

if you can speak of them as a collective which is economic growth. >> that is what you are saying. >> instability after the seventies maybe they got too out of hand. >> i have had people ask me if this book was inspired by the christopher caldwell book last year in the answer is no. i thought his book age of entitlement was great.

probably the best book i read last year they felt like i was on the right track with the book of this was written before i read his book but he makes an argument about the sixties in america that is about the baby boomers. there really wasn't a lot of any central difference between the liberals of the sixties and conservatives of the eighties. they were about liberating the individual. but tearing down things that stood in the way of individuals. so there is something boomer -ish not a backlash but reagan in the way that he governs and i don't talk much about that in my book but there is a full chapter on it. >> even if you just look at it in the 1970s, a boomer candidate was torpedoed by abortion and reagan was a candidate who liberalized abortion in california and then passed amnesty without the promised enforcements. so you got that boomer

parental style even though he was a figure of an older generation as a paternal figure as president. the permissiveness. and you never got the promised structure that would come later. here is i.c.e. cream, eat it up, but next week he will finish your homework every night before we have i.c.e. cream again. and it was not to be. i think we're beginning to wrap up but one more time, is there anything i have missed , we didn't cover everyone in your book maybe a little thing about justice sotomayor or which i think is one of the more fun chapters in the book.

what is a boomer -ish about her? >> that is the chapter i was most apprehensive about undertaking because i am painfully aware that law is a profession there's a reason why they make you go to school for three years before you can practice it. it is a specialized field trying to talk about it. but the truth is you cannot talk about the boomer legacy without talking about the war in court and institutional law. so the more i got into that and what constitutional law has look like, the more i came to realize to talk about it and the most important thing about it that the warren court broke constitutional law. not everybody has to be in the

originalist contextual list but you just and say there are no rules but that is what the warren court did. the problem is, it's very hard to stand up and say constitutional law has lost all meaning the ever has no close because is very professionals that know it best to have to get up and go to work in the morning. you can have the revolution privately but the entire discipline has gone completely off the rails you can't argue a case on those grounds so to practice law it cannot be the back of your mind, la became a disgrace on the rare occasion somebody can state plainly just about things have gotten justice scalia's dissent is a

good example of that. he said i thought we were a democratic republic now we live in the oligarchy rule by nine ivy league graduates even justice alito has said in opinions of his that constitutional law has suffered irremediable damage at the hands of the warren court and its successors. so my position allows me to look at this important fact that people can only mention under special circumstances periodically and sotomayor or is a great example of that because she is in the successor generation. the pioneers of the warren court revolution have been

educated under the old regime and have a limited sense of how much they could treat the constitutional their personal placing somebody of sotomayor's generation does not have that. there is just no sense or no limits or sense of what she can get away with has the interpretive the constitution. that chapter is about her as a product of the revolution rather than the architect of one but in some ways being a product is more revealing. >> and one thing that it summed up and foreshadowed the fate that had befallen the millennial's themselves at the portrait of sotomayor your is when she comes up upon challenges in her life or gaps

in her knowledge or her educators, her insecurity suddenly flashes out and with that comes self-assertion at least you can fall back on personal offense and indignation. maybe that explains what we have seen in our politics in 2020 so far in 2021 and going ahead into the future. are we coming up on the final time? and waiting to hear from the boxes at aei. >> i'll take one more question. >> i don't have one so let's wrap it appear. thank you so much for this

book. this is a book i wish i had written i wish i was capable of writing. you have done your service to the jews with this book and what is great about it is it's not just full of all these great anecdotes or portraits but also a lot of fun and we haven't had a fun conservative book i think in a long time. thank you for that especially. to everyone who joined us thank you for taking time out of your day, stuck in your personal covid era prison cells. we hope to see you on the other side in real life. take care >> thank you

>> without donald trump in the white house, all bets are off. there is no way that anyone should dismiss what is happening in the party of hate, the democratic party. simply rhetoric, simply a political squabble. this is a battle for the soul of the nation. it is the battle for the direction of the nation and indeed for me will be as a people. and i don't mean that to be melodramatic in any way. is just the fact. you talk about puerto rico and dc are states? that changes who we are and what we are. because now that means the democratic party has sufficient power to pack the court and insist upon you might as well go straight to totalitarian because that is what the left wants. they don't want to be bothered with little things like law or

constitution or tha party can threaten death and destruction on the streets of america and still be regarded as a political party to me is nauseating to see what the democratic party has become. now my colleagues in media for the most part don't care to talk directly about it but i do but i believe that is what we are staring at and it's a very ugly face indeed in american politics right now. the choices are tough. they really are that we will have to make over the next several years. and we will have to be the tough leader in this president has proven to be tough and strong and smart as hell he is a never want to acknowledge how smart he is but they always has he has great instincts great judgment and a great leader. he is smart and he cares about this country. . . . .

>> will pick up your book, as you know, i expected to have much disagreement. when i find a lot of common ground and i hope that is not to your disadvantage. but i would like to start. it is a fascinating book and i would like to ask you about the