Prince-No-More Andrew Pays His Epstein Price

Hello, and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest. February 19th, 2026. Prince No More Andrew pays his Epstein price edition. I'm David Plotz of CityCast in Washington, D.C. from the New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School. and New Haven, Connecticut, Emily Bazelon. Hello, Emily. Hey, David. Hey, John. And from New York City, John Dickerson, where he's launching a new presidential-themed line of energy drinks, 1600 Energy. Each can was 1600 milligrams of caffeine. John, I loved your first ad, by the way. Emily, did you see it? It was 1600 Energy. Feel the Van Buren. It was so good. Oh, my God. That was so fully realized. I'm so... I love that for some period of time, I was in your brain when you came up with that. That's just so touching. Oh, my God. And also, given the state of my occasional four-hour, you know, sub-sec posts about the election of 1800, I am feeling very close to that. I mean, feel the Van Buren could really, like, carry that forward. Feel the Van Buren. That's what did it. I was just, like, running through presidents in my head and being like, what could, oh, Van Buren's name is funny. What could that be? Yes, exactly. Also, if you look at Van Buren, he looks like a guy who's had, I mean, just because of the shrubbery on the side of his face, if nothing else. He's had an energy drink. He's had an energy drink, but not enough of an energy drink to win the election of 1840. But that's okay. All right. Get your 1600 energy wherever you listen to podcasts. This week on the Gap Fest, lots of people are getting fired, demoted, shamed, or in the case of former Prince Andrew, arrested for their role in the newly revealed Epstein files, their Epstein ties. Are the right people being punished in the right ways? Then a newly released archives reveals how former President Obama and his administration never saw Trump coming. Why? Why did they miss? Why did they miss it? And then we'll talk about the Trump administration's many efforts to stop what they call, no joke, improper ideology, anything that makes a dead white American look bad in museum exhibits, national parks and everywhere else. Plus, we will have cocktail chatter. Prince Andrew, former Prince Andrew, what was his name? Did you say it's Andrew Mountbatten Windsor? that it, Emily? Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, now just a private citizen with a name of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, was arrested on Thursday morning, I think, or maybe it was on Wednesday. It was sometime very recently for his new misdeeds revealed in the Epstein file. So these misdeeds don't have anything to do with his sexual misbehavior, which appears to have also been rampant. He is accused by one of Epstein's victims of having repeatedly raped her when she was underage. He has denied those accusations. These have to do with the charge that Prince Andrew, then Prince Andrew, used his access to certain kinds of information about what the British government might or might do around trade and pass that information on to Epstein, who was using it for something. And that was some, that's a, some form of crime in the British system. He's just one of the many people who is paying some kind of price these days for newly revealed information, the Epstein files. There's a couple of people associated with Columbia Dental School who have lost positions or lost access because of help they gave to a friend of Epstein's to get her into dental school outside the normal channels. Who else? The British and Norwegian politicians have been charged with giving Epstein access to information that he shouldn't have had and have lost jobs or been charged in the case of a former Norwegian politician. Casey Wasserman, a big Hollywood talent agent figure, has been forced to sell his agency for information that turned up in this latest batch of Epstein files. But meanwhile, Donald Trump all over the files. What were you about to say, John? Well, I was going to say the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Keir Starmer is in a kind of slow moving sludge in that he named an ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, after knowing that Mandelson had these Epstein ties. And so his chief of staff, Keir Starmer's chief of staff, has resigned for his failure in allowing Mandelson to be named. And that's still ongoing in Great Britain. And meanwhile, of course, Donald Trump all over the Epstein files in thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of instances of appearances in the Epstein files. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, Elon Musk, all appear to be skating relatively unscathed despite their connections to Epstein. So I'm feeling really ambivalent about all of this. I don't know whether you're not there, Emily, means you're also feeling ambivalent. Why are you feeling ambivalent about all of it? Well, there's this swirl of accusations. There are these very, very serious crimes at the heart of this. There are all these victims. There's this mystery, which I still don't understand, about how it's possible that all the sex trafficking could occur and only Epstein himself, who, of course, is dead, and Ghislaine Maxwell could actually have been criminally convicted in connection to it. So it seems like, sure, yes, other people should be held responsible. And yet at the same time, in this swirl of release, people are losing their positions, suffering terrible harm to their reputation for things that are pretty tangential, not serious misbehavior. And so this is what happens, right? When you release a ton of unredacted, sorry, let me take that out. When you release a ton of information, some of it's proven, some of it's not, and some of it's just kind of like damning but not criminal, then you risk this exact kind of situation where some people get in what seems or have some people suffer serious consequences for what seem like very minor involvements. involvements and other people lie about what they did or were more involved and don't have any consequences. And it's all the court of public opinion. It's really hard to know what the justice here really is. And I feel like that's the stage we're at. And this is why normally prosecutors don't release information that doesn't lead to direct indictments. Although in the Prince Andrew case there, it's not just misbehavior that is untoward and gross and morally suspect. I mean, he might have done something actually illegal. So that- I'm not, yeah. I mean, Prince Andrew, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for. And if he divulged secrets in a way that violates British law, they should prosecute him. I'm talking more about like the Casey Wassermans in the story. Yeah, let's talk about, just detail, because the Casey Wasserman one is the one that you look at and you're like, oh, this is a real stretch. This is a real A's for adultery moment here. Yeah, I mean, my understanding is that he met Ghislaine Maxwell in like 2003. So this is long before Epstein was first convicted and like was besotted with her and wrote her a bunch of embarrassing emails about how he wanted to be with her. And he was married at the time. So like, yeah, that's adulterous. But you don't normally lose your top clients and have to sell your business for sending a bunch of like stupid besotted emails many years before someone was accused of doing something bad just because you're somehow associated with her. Yeah, that's a nice way to cordon off different categories because there's, and we should note also that Peter Mandelson is also accused essentially of the similar leaking information. He's not been criminally charged, but it feels like they're coming after him if they're going after, if they're trying to, you know, put Andrew Mountbatten down the hatch. The thing is, you have the, you then have the other category, which is the Lutnick and, and Steve Bannons, who were chummy with Epstein after he was a publicly known convicted pedophile. And, and that category to me is the, is the other interesting one, because that does, that gets to the larger question we've had in the Trump administration, which is just the role that shame plays or doesn't play in public life. So, so yeah, just to recategorize. So there's the category of this is a person who potentially engaged in sex crimes, even against children, potentially, uh, in association with Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew may fall into that category. And then there's, then there's a, there's a whole group of unknowns who presumably fall into that category. We just don't know who they are. And that has not been revealed because I guess nobody was stupid enough to say, oh, I raped a 16 year old in an email. That's one category of people. So far. And I would also include, obviously, one of the allegations is it's not known because the people in power to go find out and know about it are dragging their feet. But anyway, carry on. Then there's a second category of people who are the category of people who effectively knew about what Epstein had done either early on or certainly post his conviction, who nonetheless communed with him, related to him, connected to him, used him, provided access, you know, used him for money or provided access to him for various things because he was a useful networker. And then there's the kind of people who are in en passant dealing with Epstein or with Maxwell in some way. That might be social. It might be, like, I think, who was it? Maybe Dr. Oz, who sent an invitation, seems to have sent an invitation to a party to Jeffrey Epstein at some point. Although there's no evidence that Dr. Oz had any, I think it's Dr. Oz, had anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein except having sent him an invitation to a party. But yet there's some sort of sense of consequence for that. And I think those are three different, those are the main three different groups. And that second group, I think we can all agree that the people who are sort of the totally en passant meeting, you know, of which Casey Wasserman is a kind of good example, the punishments shouldn't exist. And the people who are in the Prince Andrew category, the punishment should absolutely exist. I think the middle category is where it's totally ambiguous. And I am, I guess I'm inclined to be more merciful than I think you guys are to those groups, that group of people. Well, you have to then bolt onto that, the fact that this has become a public morality play. Well, two things. One, the victims in this case, it's clear, and Emily can fill in the details here, but it's clear that the victims were not the first overwhelming constant concern of law enforcement when they brought these issues before them. And so the idea that maybe law enforcement or people in power are covering up for those people who had these kinds of associations with Epstein and that there might be more there to evaluate through a more rigorous investigation. That seems to me there's grounds for that kind of feeling out there in the world. And then there's the morality play, which is that you have these poor victims going out and having to continually bang the drum to try to get heard because they weren't heard in the first place. And so caught up in that are the powerful people who are connected to the administration that's making it harder to hear them. And I think that mixes into this category that you're defining, and I think is also a big part of it. And finally, this is an administration that in 2017, Donald Trump said, and this is why the Steve Bannon part of it is so ripe, I think, is that Steve Bannon was the chief architect of Donald Trump's 2017 inaugural address in which he said, the power dynamic is changing in Washington. No longer will the elites and the powerful be protected by the system. We are going to drive the system towards, you know, fulfilling your goals, Mr. and Mrs. America. Well, this is a morality play. It's about the system protecting the powerful and not giving a damn about the weak. And to the extent that people see that play out when Pam Bondi says, don't ask me about Epstein, focus on the 50,000 Dow index score. That's not insignificant in the political world that's been created around this scandal. And Bannon himself is in these emails and kind of stuck with Epstein much longer than various other people had the sense to. with he created a quote unquote documentary to basically rehabilitate Epstein's reputation. Yeah. I mean, all of this, I feel like parallel to my concern about people just getting kind of tarred in this way that seems unideal is this, I think, very real sense. And it's true that there's a cabal of powerful people and they are living by their own rules. And there is this elite that's kind of hobnobbing and allowing for terrible behavior. And we can see it in these emails. I mean, you know, Woody Allen asking for help getting his kid into college and receiving it like it does have this favor trading kind of palm greasing, really gross quality to it that is hard to look away from. And it it I mean, to me, that seems like very vivid and real. Right. So it is very vivid and real and i guess this is where where you know my quality of mercy is is uh not strained or is strained or whatever which is i'm not going to say a word about woody allen but i'm thinking about these columbia dental faculty so they pull a bunch of strings these two a dean and then a and then jeffrey epstein's dentist who was a provisional faculty member or kind of a tangential faculty member at Columbia, pull a bunch of strings to help get someone who, a young woman who is somehow associated with Epstein and is in Epstein's favor, not exactly clear how, into Columbia Dental School outside of the normal channels. And this is by getting, Epstein gives a bunch of money and they do him this favor and that's now been exposed and they have been shamed and one lost her deanship and the other had his ties cut with the administration. And I concede like that is gross. It's unseemly, but it happens like over and over, over again in the world. Just not, it's just not by usually by a accused or by a pedophile, a pedophile, the worst pedophile criminal that anyone can name. That's not usually who's doing it. But I guarantee you for every example of this person, these two people doing it, there are a hundred other examples of people who got into Columbia dental school by some back channel over the past decade because powerful people are pulling the strings. And again, it doesn't mean that it's great that powerful people pull the strings, but I think it is weird for everyone to be like, oh, it's so terrible you did this for Jeffrey Epstein. The problem is that they did it for Jeffrey Epstein, not that the whole system overall does this all the time. I don't know about that because part of what you're talking about is that there's a common occurrence and it's sleazy and gross, but it's usually behind the scenes. And so we don't know about it. Then what do you do when you have publicly available evidence that it happened? That's a different question, right? I mean, this is something that prosecutors face a lot where, okay, yes, there are crimes that are commonplace that are rarely prosecuted. But when the evidence is staring you in the face, it means something different to ignore it. So in that sense, I feel like those consequences for those faculty members seem okay because of the public, the now public nature of what they did. Yes, but I'm sure that's true. But I also know that everyone who works at Columbia Dental School, I'm using Columbia Dental School, by the way, as a metaphor, as a stand in. Everyone who works at Columbia Dental School also knows that there are 10 other dentists who have an association with Columbia Dental School that have also channeled some donation to the school, which has led to somebody getting some benefit. And they all know it. But Columbia Dental School is righteously like, we're cutting ties here with these people. These people have just done wrong. But they know that it's going on over and over and over and over again. And again, I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world to have scapegoats when the scapegoats have done something which is unseemly. I just find the hypocrisy of the institutions being like, oh, I'm so shocked to discover gambling here at Columbia Dental School. Can we, I think our, but it shouldn't our attention to be spent more on the category of people who hung out with Epstein after he was, yeah, was known about him. And also because those people have the incredible power of the state behind them. In other words, they control the justice department and, um, yeah, but okay. So, all right. So, so again, I'm going to state something on, I've hung out with people who have committed crimes. I've I've hung out with people who've been in prison, people who've been behaved grotesquely and immorally. I have friends who I would say have done all of those things. And I think sometimes it is fine to do that And sometimes you don even know Like there are people who I discovered after I known them Oh did you know that so did X Right. That's not the case in evidence here. These people did know because they didn't know. Well, they knew he had a conviction. But the conviction that he had was for something that was much, much, much, much smaller than the actual crimes that he was committing. So they might not have been aware fully of what he was doing. But it was a tax evasion. Yeah, exactly. It was clear that there were minor girls involved. Right. Certainly by the second conviction, that was clear. So I don't know. And also we can judge those people. Yeah. And also, you know, Howard Ludnick, unbidden, talked about how it was easily verify, easy to verify and identify that Epstein was a scumbag. So he is in particular, and this is obviously part of its legal, part of its private morality and part of its public morality for an administration that claims that it's on the inside, on the side of the forgotten man and the, and the regular person. And it was knowable. And Lutnikos lied, or at least said he had never been to this island, had didn't like this guy. No, he said he never talked to him again after visiting him next door. And indeed what he did was go have lunch with him and his nannies, that's Lutnik's nannies, on the island as they were yachting by. Yeah. When you're yachting by, John, it's like rude not to stop. Well, that's the thing. If you yacht by a private island that your friend owns, you have to stop with your nannies. But I think that's why this is so unrelatable and also like worth calling out because that is the world these people are operating in and it is not our world. It's not most people's worlds. but okay if they weren't all rich and powerful and thus doing rich and powerful things but let's just say uh that you had a friend who you had a friend who had a sex who committed a sex crime against children and you know they had done the time they'd been punished and they came would it be okay to hang out with this person or must you someone who's done something terrible like one of the worst crimes you can do as a human being is it literally impossible for you to have a have a friendship with them well can i just first of all if they had not been rich and powerful they would all have been strung up and they'd be serving time i mean the rich and power epstein chief among them i mean his plea deal that he got um was and again emily can you know fill in the details but i mean he didn't get that plea deal because they because of his deep poverty We probably wouldn't be talking about this because lots of people would be indicted and co-conspirators would be, you know, in legal proceedings. But you're talking about it at a personal moral plane, which obviously grace is a crucial and important thing. I think the distinction here is whether a person who hangs out with a convicted, someone convicted of soliciting a prostitute and procuring a child for prostitution, procuring a child for prostitution. Again, not tax evasion and also plenty of evidence ongoing, right? He didn't have that island for, you know, to pass around coconut flavored drinks. This isn't someone in a deep state of repentance. And the question, again, in a political context, as a private moral matter, I like what you say, David. It's deeply Christian, right? But as a public matter, and also to the extent that it's influencing the behavior of the Department of Justice as it either follows or doesn't follow the mandate of a piece of legislation from Congress, and does or doesn't protect people in power going all the way up to the president, I think it adds to the feeling that something's not quite being investigated with the fulsomeness it should be. I mean, also, I feel like we haven't had enough attention on the lawyers who concocted this sweetheart deal. I mean, Alex Acosta seems to be one of the people kind of skating along here. Certainly, that really would bear some scrutiny. Remind people who he is? He was the prosecutor who agreed to the sweetheart deal, the federal prosecutor, when they took the case away from the local prosecutors. and then he was a cabinet secretary. But kind of bounced as a cabinet secretary. I mean, he- Not over this. Yeah, he was over like other things. His career has not thrived in the time since this has become public. I don't think Alex Acosta is doing great relative to where he could be had he not done this. I bet he regrets the shit out of that deal at this point. Well, I bet he regrets getting caught. Yeah. Anyway, I'm just saying, I still find that sweetheart deal, I would still like to understand how that happened in a way that we don't. You know, I guess the other thing I'd say in answer to your question, David, is that there are all kinds of, you know, deeply reckoned with circumstances in which grace for a terrible crime seems like a worthy thing to aspire to. But there isn't any evidence in these exchanges we're talking about that people, you know, really grappled with what Jeffrey Epstein did, that he showed remorse, that he had stopped and that then they decided to forgive him. You don't see that at all. You just see everyone kind of skimming along as if this hadn't happened. And one question I think Lisa Miller, my colleague at the Times, asked is when they heard the word massage in the context of what he had been convicted of, what did they think was happening? Like, what did that, could that possibly have taken on this kind of innocent, shrug it all off connotation, which it seems like everyone just like looked past that. And that is seems really deeply disturbing, honestly. Well, at a time when, at least for our growing up, the idea of a massage parlor, massages are now much more a part of the culture and everybody's going and getting massages. Back then, the connotation was much closer to a euphemism for, you know, some kind of sexual interaction. All true. I mean, the lack of remorse, repentance, any kind of change in behavior or significant change in behavior is pretty dispositive in that case. Okay. I'm sure we'll talk about this more. a surprising amount of barack obama in the news this week he was on a podcast where he made some extremely veiled criticisms of the trump administration or moderately veiled criticisms of the trump administration when asked about trump posting an extremely racist meme about him uh and also when he was asked about ice incursions in american cities he sort of sideways talked about the behavior of the Trump White House. More interestingly, the Insight Institute, which is a social science research center at Columbia University, not Columbia Dental School, as far as I know, released a huge set of interviews. They conducted more than 450 interviews, which were 1,100 hours of audio and video with people associated with the Obama administration. They did this in collaboration with the Obama Foundation. And a lot of this was released this week, David Remnick of The New Yorker also had early access to it. So, John, what did these interviews reveal about the Obama presidency's late stage encounter with Donald Trump? I mean, I just, so I didn't go through the whole oral history, although I love it that it exists. And I've always loved the ones that exist down at the University of Virginia, the Miller Center. I think there are two questions here, at least, with respect to Donald Trump and Barack Obama. We know that it's true in American presidencies that there's for a long time been a kind of a yin and a yang. So that absent the character, we know that after Carter, we get Reagan, right? And so in response in part to Carter, you get Ronald Reagan. You get Clinton in response to the Reagan-Bush years. And you get George W. Bush, who ran ending every speech by saying, when I'm president, I'll lift my hand on the Bible at my inauguration, basically making a very obvious pitch that he was an alternative to Bill Clinton's personal morality. And then you have Obama as a response to Bush, specifically with respect to Iraq and the war on terror. So it's not crazy that one presidency would be a kind of response to the other. And the reason I go through that long bit of business is that in some of the characterization of these files and in the Obama presidency in general, people say like, oh, it's a, you know, they, they really missed the idea that Donald Trump was a reaction to Obama. I don't see evidence of that. A, in the history that I just went through, everybody knows that if the other party gets elected, it's often in opposition to what the party in power did. Secondly, Barack Obama was pretty articulate going all the way back to when he was running against Hillary Clinton, about the fact that his party might be missing the struggles of the white working class, blue collar voters, rural voters. You remember his famous comment about how, you know, people are bitter and cling to their guns and their religion, which was a huge gaffe on Obama's part. But what he was churlishly and stupidly talking about was, was the frustration in a huge portion of the country. He may have been wrong about assigning people's behavior, but he knew about that frustration and talked about it repeatedly and still does. So I don't think he missed the Trump movement. What is certainly true is that they thought he was a clown and treated him as such and didn't think he would win. I think in part because they'd just gone through the birther controversy. And it was like when somebody is a straight up racist and behaves like a clown in so doing, the American people aren't going to elect them to be president. Well, they were wrong about that. But that's not insane. And I don't necessarily think it proves that they misunderstood the larger forces at play. I think that's really well put. It does seem like Obama, that that sense of resentment, despair, loss that seemed to motivate a lot of MAGA, that he did understand that. And he articulated it in much better ways than his like super unfortunate comment on a lot of other occasions. Right. It's just interesting that that one tin ear moment kind of stands for it gets so much attention and it's totally legit to bring it up. but also lots of times he spoke with empathy about people not understanding. And then I think you're right. Like Trump just seemed like a bridge too far. But I mean, hey, I completely own up to have utterly been incapable of taking Trump seriously for a long time. And I think lots of people were in that camp. And it's still a kind of vision of America that, you know, like people just didn't really think that we were going to go here. The reason it matters now, it seems, is that the Democratic Party, the American voting public, is all trying to figure out what kind of country, what kind of electorate is out there and how much have the rules changed and how much, particularly with respect to the Democratic Party, do they have to listen to Barack Obama who says and has been saying and has always said, you know, the Democratic Party needs to kind of stop scolding so much to reach voters in the middle, to reach voters. in rural areas to reach voters with which many democrats might disagree but that you need to win the swing states necessary or the battleground states necessary to win a presidency is obama a good messenger is one question and is the message important to listen to is another one and to the extent that past practice is a predictor of future performance whether obama and his team was right or wrong about the electorate gives them standing uh or or affects their standing and the ability to to make this claim going forward as the Democratic Party tries to revive itself. Why do you think that Obama, Emily, has been so reluctant to speak out and occupy that space and stand in that space that John just described? Is it is it do you think it's a screw it? I'm done. I did this. I don't have time for this. I got to go produce some podcasts. Or is it more that you think he he probably senses that if he does it, that will block other Democratic leaders from emerging the new leaders who should emerge and fill that space and then be able to lead and be serve in office and be elected in a way that he can't be and that he's still such a big voice that him him being there would block other people from emerging. I think the second thing is clearly what he tells himself. I also think that it's kind of convenient, right? Because what it leads to is Obama in abstract terms laying out this greater sense of tolerance and anti-scolding he thinks the party should have, right? He doesn't like purity tests. He's talked about, you know, making sure that people feel included as opposed to like they're saying something wrong. He's made those points in the abstract, but he never pins them to a specific issue in a way that changes like the moral compass for how Democrats talk about something that's controversial. And I'm sure, David, that he does think this isn't his jobs. Other leaders need to step in and do this. The specifics are theirs to hash out. It's also true that it allows him to rise above the fray and not get caught up in today's battles in a way that would make him controversial within the party, right? I think he just doesn't have the energy for it and doesn't feel like it's his role and just like, who needs it? I mean, it would make things much less comfortable for him if he came out and said, on this particular issue, Democrats need to change how they're talking. I've never seen him do that. John? I think there are reasons. I'm trying to think. I think there are examples. I can't, one doesn't come to mind. I think there are reasons he doesn't go after Trump or respond to Trump that some of them overlap with George W. Bush. I mean, the first is that it's not Obama's best channel. He's not good as a, he can do it through ridicule, but he tried that at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and a lot of people think that's what inspired Donald Trump to win. So it was massively, it was massively ineffective. So if he tries to do it again in a kind of jokey way, he reminds everybody how wrong he was the first time. If he does it in a kind of censorious way, which is interesting about Donald Trump, he has two problems there. One is that he gives the other team something to rally around. Republicans can get their act together again when they're all in unison against Barack Obama, whereas there is some ambivalence and uncertainty about Donald Trump among many Republicans. So Obama, by inserting himself in the case with respect to attacking Trump or outlining some of his mistakes is probably a bad idea. And that's the same is true with George W. Bush, just in terms of if you really want to hurt Donald Trump, you're not the one to say it because you give the other team ammunition. And I think if finally, if Obama has a role to play, it's on all that hope and change stuff, which has been squeezed out of politics, but which is his better channel and which if you look at the Affordable Care Act, I mean, a lot of people are about to lose their insurance, but maybe that's just the reason he talks about it. I mean, 40 some odd million people didn't have health insurance before the ACA, and now that number's down to the 20s. Again, it's getting higher as the subsidies go away and as states reassess their Medicaid. But that's an extraordinary achievement for the kinds of people that we're talking about here that need to be gettable for the next presidential race. And that's his signature accomplishment. So he really does have a personal investment in it. I really think the Democrats have missed a step in not seizing the name Obamacare and not like holding onto that name. And it has become the ACA rather than Obamacare. And I don't think that helps them. I think people forget that this is really a signature achievement of them and their party. Just to piggyback on your point, John, like I was thinking about what is the thing that Barack Obama has done in his post-presidency that has been most meaningful to me? And I don't know, most meaningful to me in the last month. Let me put it that way. So I watched and I chattered about that documentary, Crip Camp, which is about the disability rights movement, which is made, it might have been made anyway, but Higher Ground, the Obama production company, made that movie and funded that movie. And that is just an absolutely profound work of art about like a thing that changed America and made America better in a way that is inclusive and appealing to the better angels of our nature. And that was super moving in a way that I don't know that some Obama scoring a point off Trump, you know, off some Trump racist thing would have affected me in the same way or probably the thousands of other people who saw that movie in the same way. I'm not sure Obama worked on that one every day though, right? Well, but he he allows it to come into the world in a way that that might be different than if I tried to produce it. What do we what do you guys see out in the world about antipathy towards Barack Obama? I mean, this idea, this this what he is saying in this interview and has said about the Democratic Party being too scolding and not understanding the compromises necessary. I mean, I know certainly voters in the younger age cohort for whom that creates incandescent rage And like they don Barack Obama and his connection to the history of the civil rights movement and those kinds of connections that obama um as a community organizer played on when he ran are not available for a lot of those voters who were born later um and so they judge they those comments seriously piss people off i didn't read but i did see the headline in a new New York Times story. You know, they have a focus group of they have a focus group of Republican voters that they're following and focus group of Democratic voters. And I based on the headline I saw this week, which hopefully one of you read the story, it sounds like the Democratic voters are just not in the mood for pacification, compromise, moderation. Yeah, I think all the people in the New York Times panel preferred the progressive to the moderate candidate, though, of course, they were just responding to those labels, not unpacking what they actually meant. Yeah, I mean, the problem for the Democrats that the Republicans used to have when they debated, had head of a pin distinctions and debates about abortion is the tyranny of small differences and the rage-filled debates that will come over questions of tactics and language in debating how much tactics and language should be a part of the campaign. I mean, you remember the debates over single-payer health care that went down into the rabbit hole for debate after debate after debate in the 2020 race. Now imagine that on, like, some of the most sensitive cultural issues during the primaries of 2028. Let's close just briefly by talking about Jesse Jackson, who's the, I mean, the two most prominent black men in presidential politics in our lifetime, were Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson, of course, died this week after an amazing and complicated life. And I think probably you guys, like me, some of our seminal, our formative political experiences were watching his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, which were very different, very new, the Rainbow Coalition, which in one sense was the last gasp of a liberalism of the 70s and 80s, But in another sense was the crucible that formed the Democratic coalition that has existed in the last 40 years. And so it was both an ending and a beginning. And I wonder how you guys felt watching the kind of remembrances of Jackson. I mean, one thing that really impressed me about Jackson was how I think in a sense he always had his eye on poor people, on materialism, right? He was always talking about trying to make the lives of poor people better and expand the American dream to encompass more people who didn't have anything. And he talked about his own growing up without as a way of illustrating that. And, you know, he was absolutely identified with being black and representing black people and being this black leader. but he also was always talking about class in this way that could be more encompassing. And, you know, that seems like a really important lesson for right now. It seems, yeah, that's a great point. To me, it felt so long ago. I think that, I mean, the Trump years have so changed how we talk in politics. A speech in which you make a case for something and don't just assert the awfulness of your opponent is itself a rarity. I know it happens in some Senate races and House races, but the extent to which a national political dialogue is inspired by speeches that make a case for something, it seems much more rare. That connection between the civil rights era and the present era, we saw in one of the arguments, I believe I have this right, one of the arguments for why Donald Trump was able to capture more black voters and more Latino voters, but particularly more black voters. And the reason that they may be more up for grabs and no longer a part of a repeatable democratic constituency is that there are a number of black Americans who don't feel the kind of connections and family ties and cultural ties to the civil rights movement that they did in previous generations. And Jesse Jackson was right in the center of that connection to the Democratic Party. And Obama, you know, was able to tap into that too, but that there are now just a lot of Black Americans who were voters who were born after all of that history took place. And their allegiances are more free floating. So in a political science sense, it was definitely the end of something with Jesse Jackson. And I also, it was an occasion to replay his reading of Green Eggs and Ham on Saturday Night Live. Oh my God. Which was like in our childhood. How old were we when that happened? I don't know, but it was a thing. It was kind of a thing. And so that was just, it has nothing to do with politics or Jesse Jackson, but it has to do with the passage of time. I forgot that. Oh my God. Yeah, absolutely. I gotta go watch that again. Good reminder, John. Judge Cynthia Roof, a judge appointed by George W. Bush this week, ordered the National Park Service to restore a series of plaques that had been removed from the president's house, President Washington's house, effectively in Philadelphia. Ruth wrote, the government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove, and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control. Its claims in this regard echo Big Brother's domain and Orwell's 1984. The particulars in this case were that these plaques that were on the house where George Washington had lived as president in Philadelphia had, among other things, talked about the slaves of George Washington and the rather gruesome fact that Washington had rotated his slaves up from Virginia so that they would never live in Pennsylvania long enough to have a right to be free, which they would have if they were residents, permanent residents of Pennsylvania, as I understand it. The plaques were removed as part of the Trump administration's sweeping effort to cleanse federal museums, parks, monuments, even non-federal museums, parks and monuments of what they are literally calling improper ideology, which seems to mean anything that's about climate change, anything that's about slavery or cruel treatment of Native Americans or disparages, to use their word, disparages dead Americans that Trump likes, such as, say, Thomas Jefferson. So what else are they doing, Emily? Oh, I don't want to answer that question. I want to go on about Judge Roof's opinion for a moment. This is one of the things I read this week that just made me so happy. So when I started reading this, I thought, OK, maybe this is a terrible idea for the Trump administration to erase this history from this historical site. But is there really a way to stop them? Like, how do you tell the federal government they can't just go in and change what the plaques say? And lo and behold, there's a lot of law about this. There is essentially a contract, a foundation document for this park in which the National Historic Park and the city of Philadelphia made an agreement that they were not going to make changes to the kind of essential presentation of this history without agreeing on those changes. And NPS, the National Park Service, specifically identified the paradox of freedom and slavery as crucially significant to Independence National Historical Park. In other words, the fact that Washington owned slaves, that there were these nine actual humans who were enslaved, who are part of this history, was something that when they were creating this site in this way, they all talked about it and decided that it was absolutely essential to presenting the history correctly and fully. And that's what the judge was relying on here. She didn't make this up. It's like 100% there in the documents. And when they were talking about this at the hearing that preceded her opinion, the Trump administration didn't have any defense of what it was doing. It just kind of sat there. And it was Philadelphia that was able to come in and present these documents. So I just, reading this, I thought, okay, like this isn't a judge just sounding off. There really is a foundation here, literally a foundation document for the position she's taking. And also there's a foundation in the deliberations that were taking place in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention over slavery, at which point we mentioned Gouverneur Morris the nine millionth time in this podcast, which is his outrage during the debate about how you would tear humans from their homes and bring them to America and then write a constitution that was supposed to protect the life and liberty of humans. It was, and that that contradiction was a part of the conversation. So you can go right to the thing that we're all celebrating in the 250th birthday of America. You also, more broadly, what's going on, David, is that, you know, President Trump and the supporters in his cabinet and J.D. Vance, you know, have this, this kind of always winners all the time view of America, which is funny because when making excuses for Vladimir Putin being a murderer, Donald Trump famously said to Bill O'Reilly, well, you think we're, you think we're all angels or you think we're so great? So when it serves him, He'll suggest that written into the American character is the same kind of brutality that Vladimir Putin engages in. But in terms of the American story, bleach out all the bad stuff. Of course, the best and most amazing thing, and I'm so conscious of this recently because I just interviewed John Meacham, whose new book is called The American Struggle, which is basically the original American documents throughout America's history. When you read Frederick Douglass talking about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and its complexity, and you think about, as Meacham really nicely outlines, what Douglass was doing when he was embracing those documents right after the Dred Scott decision, which, if you go back and read Tanny's ruling, that Douglass could stand up and say, I still have faith in these ideals that were written in this place by these slaveholders. that he could still have that is is the most extraordinary act of historical hope um or is one of anyway the only way you can understand that is to know the details that were certainly very clear to douglas when he was writing you know what to a slave is your fourth of july it only is real it's only nourishing in the moment if you don't get rid of all that complexity It's like why you would want to water down the real and extraordinary history and just how useless that makes it. I don't know what my point is, but there I am. Well, I think the fun undergirding all of this, it seems to me, is this is a kind of belief that white Americans shouldn't feel guilty for American history, that you that you shouldn't have to feel bad about it. and you shouldn't, like it wasn't you, you know, you're going to, you're sinning. You're doing all sorts of things now that history is going to judge you for, but you do not have to feel, you do not have to feel guilty for the things, the terrible things that other people did in the past. You did not do them. You literally don't have to feel guilty. You do have to, however, grapple with them, acknowledge them, know them, know that those were your ancestors, but you don't have to, like, I think there's this inability to sort of separate the feeling that the understanding that comes from realizing that people who are your ancestors did things that are morally reprehensible and feeling that that's somehow you are to blame for. It's not. They're different things. And it's just so boring. I mean, to your point, it's so boring to tell the story without the struggle. To leave out the struggle is not only wrong historically. It's just like so much less interesting. Like who's Harriet Tubman is the most interesting person of the 19th century because it's because of the struggle that she goes through. Not because, you know, not because, you know, she was fighting slavery. She was fighting slavery. She was, you know, taking the property of white people who lived in Maryland. And and that's what she was doing. And that was like a it was an act of rebellion and violence against a grotesque state. And that struggle is interesting. And to wrestle with the struggle and the idea that the same person who could write down and therefore cause the shape of human events to change, so now I'm talking really about Jefferson, was at the same time not only a slaveholder, but also fathered children with Sally Hemings, who was enslaved under Jefferson. like you have to wrestle with that complexity the way frederick douglas did and come to some conclusion about it because as we were saying earlier and as david you were trying to stand in the place of the argument for grace in complexity um like you are constantly as humans confronted with moments of complexity in which you have to if you work through things that are seemingly totally at odds and so if you become unpracticed in it then then you can't handle the life in front of you. Secondly, okay, let's say you erase all this stuff. And then somebody learns that, you know, Washington was a slaveholder. And you think, oh, well, then everything about Washington is meaningless. So it becomes, you're unfit to handle the arrival of new complexity, all of which makes it, again, less useful in the current moment. We should also add the politics of this, obviously. So if you poke at these things, then you incite a reaction from the left, which can trend into what Obama would call censorious response. And everybody whose last memory of George Washington was the myth of the cherry tree, they'll be like, yeah, why are they being so mean about George Washington? And so you've mounted yourself on a on what you think is favorable political ground. And so, you know, there are those reasons to do to do this, too. I mean, for sure, whitewashing is really boring. Like it's literally just bleaching the life and color out of something. It also, I think, though, is an excuse to kind of continue with racism and other right other bigotry. It's it's like not just we don't want to grapple with the complexity. It's like we want to continue some of these same practices in their modern day versions. that's part of what's happening i mean the other thing i feel like is that it's so often true about the trump administration they identify a problem right and then it's the solution which is just so wholly gone awry like there is a um phenomenon on the left of completely excoriating american history not recognizing yep yep yep right yes like that's true that is there i want to find it It's not like it's super prevalent, but it is a thing that exists. You can go into like, you know, down the progressive rabbit hole and end up feeling like the entire nation is just soaked in sin and guilt and we have nothing to be proud of and our heritage is terrible. And you can forget that like as flawed as this country is, it's better than a lot of other places in the world in terms of how people are actually living their lives. And so I think that that tendency and the kind of concern that you're teaching American, you're teaching the crit version of American history before people have learned the part to be proud of. Like that doesn't work very well if you're constantly telling kids in particular, like, oh, this is all terrible without recognizing that there's another side of the coin that's full of accomplishment. The problem is that the way that you fix that is not with waywashing. It's by turning down the like utter despair and hopelessness in terms of how we think about the past. I'm so glad you said all that, Emily. That was so beautiful. I just want to add a note on top of that for land. I've always hated land acknowledgments so much for this reason because it's so performative, but also because it is premised on the idea that everything that the United States has ever done is theft. Like that the whole thing is an act of theft. And that's the first, like, in anything we do that we acknowledge the original sin of that theft. And I just think that's completely, I mean, is there an element of truth in that? Sure. But is that really what every story needs to begin with? No. The other piece I want to say is just— So your point is not with the substance. It's the prioritization and the privileging of that as the first thing. Yeah, yeah. This was not a real antidote for it. I want to go back to somebody who, like two people who were derided and mocked in their time and who I think were right. I think Bill Bennett and Lynn Cheney, like the version that Bill Bennett and Lynn Cheney wanted to tell about American history, I've always thought was like a very appealing and kind of correct thing to do. If only he believed in it still. I need to be reminded of what we're talking about. Well it was very much like teach American history but teach it as a story of virtues and stories to serve a moral purpose Not to say that they like they were stories that very much would include a Frederick Douglass or a Harriet Tubman They stories that are stories that would include the struggle it would include the wrongness but ultimately are designed to point you towards the values that at our best America has embodied Not that we always achieve it, but that at our best that we've aspired to and that various people throughout history have aspired to. And they've aspired to it in part against because the country was so failing to live up to it that a John Lewis, like, is John Lewis a triumphant figure? He's a triumphant figure because he stood up to a terrible system, right? And so acknowledging that personal bravery and standing up for a higher good in American life, but you have to acknowledge that it's because there's a terrible system that was failing to live up to that. And I think that's a really, that is very much the way I learned history as a kid, is I learned these mythic stories of people, but there are mythic stories of people designed to make, to point you to the virtues that America could stand for if we tried really hard. And that seems like a really good thing to do. And that's, that, that is a fine way to teach kids history. And it's a fine way to have museums teach history. It's a little bit whitewashy, but it is, but it is with a moral purpose behind it. It's a differing of priorities. And, and I think there's a way in which they both work together, which is the virtue you're talking about, David, is often exercised in the face of some of America's most awful behavior i mean so i was talking about frederick douglas that speech um you know what to a slave is your fourth of july is full of the word hope it's basically built around the idea of hope and wearing god's name is frederick douglas going to get hope after the dred scott decision like ain't in evidence where does he find it he finds it in the words written by and the i promises made by slave owning white men oh my and so that's so but but his ability to still hope and drive what he believed was fundamental in the face of awfulness. Okay, then fast forward to John Lewis, who you just mentioned. The word hope, Meacham's book about Lewis is about the promise of hope. Lewis talked about it endlessly. What hope did John Lewis have after he was sent to the hospital, after being at the Edmund Pettus Bridge? It was the hope that those ideals would live on, even though there was all this evidence that it wouldn't. So the American virtue we're talking about is more virtuous, this virtue of holding on to hope founded in national ideals. It gains more glory in the face of the awfulness. And then we just mentioned Jesse Jackson, keep hope alive, his famous speech, like centered again around this idea of hope. I got one more point to make about Bill Bennett. So the book of virtues, if you go look back and read it, you know what it was? It was a response to the moral panic to Bill Clinton and his personal behavior. For children to take morality seriously, wrote Bill Bennett, they must be in the presence of adults who take morality seriously. And with their own eyes, they must see adults take morality seriously. So this is no longer the case with Bill Bennett, because morality is not taken seriously with respect to the current occupant of the office. And you can come up with ways to explain that away. But to the extent that that is an act necessary to the inculcation of virtue in America so that it succeeds, that is no longer his project. Can I make two final quick points to get us out of here? One, I don't know if you guys saw the story about how Trump appointed his 26-year-old executive assistant, who has no experience with art or architecture, to be the leader of the Commission on Fine Arts, which is a commission on fine arts is a board in Washington that guides and rules on changes to the historic face of D.C. And the reason Trump did this is that he wants a rubber stamp approval of the White House ballroom we talked about so vividly last week. Build, build, build, David. Don't forget. Yeah. And this person will give him a rubber stamp. He'll get the Commission on Fine Arts to run through the process. And what it does is it just makes an absolute fucking mockery of the idea that there's anything or expertise or knowledge. It's like anti-cultural, it's anti-historical. It's saying like, they talk so much about how we have to have a true American history. We have to have an American history that isn't just all about the haters and it isn't disparaging the old timers. We have to have a real, like a history that's real. And rather than like finding a historian or somebody who like wants this ballroom built for some historical reason or for an architect who is like willing to stand up for it, It's like, no, screw it. We'll just appoint a 26-year-old who literally has no relevant experience at all to rubber stamp this. It's a kind of nihilism that is literally against the idea of knowledge and history and culture entirely embodied in that person. That's point one I wanted to make. Second point, just to the kind of boringness of when you whitewash in certain ways, is I went to this display. the Washington Monument over Christmas and into January, they lit up the Washington Monument and told the story of America in a projection on the monument. And it was these sort of vivid, I don't even know how to say, animated projections about the history of America. And then there was an audio track to go with it. And it was really cool, like visually, very, very cool, really fun experience went down there with former, actually former Gav Fest producer, Bill Smee among the people I went down there with. The only non-white and non-male person that was shown in the entire history of the United States as displayed in this was Sacagawea. The only one of like the dozens and dozens and dozens of people who embodied the story of America was Sacagawea. Like that is just crazy. Yeah. And bad. And bad. Let us go to cocktail chatter, which will not be bad or crazy. John Dickerson, when you're having a 1600 energy cocktail, which is you take 1600 energy and you pour a jigger of gin into it. It's an amazing combo. They call it the Dickertini. What will you be chattering about? I think we should play this out, by the way, the 1600 energy drink. I think there are tons of opportunities here for this to um um to be successful my chatter is it's a it's again along the lines of these our conversation about history but it turns out this week and i'm grateful to my former producer annie cohen for pointing this out to me but on this week on the 17th of february was the 220th and 20 225th anniversary of when the house of representatives after 36 votes elected Thomas Jefferson president. And we were just talking about what we can and cannot take that's from the founders that's useful. One of the things you're reminded when you go back and read the way they wrote is that they called the shot very specifically in things that are going on right now. And so among other things, they understood human nature and how it would play out when it came into contact with power. But the failure of the American Electoral College was in evidence, one of their great designs, its failure was in evidence in 1800. So Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr run on the same ticket. And because partisanship has already seized up American government, the way that presidential elections were supposed to take place is electors had two votes. And because, and they were supposed to one, you know, distribute those among the candidates, But because the Federalists and the Republicans were so split, basically everybody voted for their team. And it turns out that Burr and Jefferson were in a tie. And to break that tie, the House had to vote and make Jefferson president and Burr the vice president. What allowed the tie to be broken, so this is a failure of the system, which was then fixed in the 12th Amendment. What broke the tie was Hamilton, as those of you who are fans of musical theater remember, is that Hamilton came down on the side of Jefferson, the Federalist, arguing with his fellow Federalists to vote to make Jefferson president. Because even though Hamilton did not like Jefferson at all, he thought Burr was so without a moral compass that he would destroy America. So in the end, Hamilton and enough Federalists decided to do the right thing by the country and not by their party. And the reason this was further interesting to me, and I'll shut up in a moment, is that this is the first instance in American life and was seen as a like an extraordinary moment in human history that party had power had changed from one party to another. that the revolutionaries who had been able to break from England and write a constitution were had their act together enough that they could transfer power between factions because normally that's where it breaks down everybody takes the guns and the whole thing collapses it didn't in part because of what the Federalists and Hamilton did that this happened in human history was like a thing that everybody was thinking was quite exceptional about American the only other time in American history where one faction did not allow the other faction to proceed with the outcome of an election january 6 2021 it just keeps coming back so it's gonna be the answer there we go nice loop there ebaz what's your chatter i have two chatters the um sad one is about the end of book world the book section at the washington post there's actually going to be event at Politics and Prose this weekend, kind of looking back on it and some of its amazing accomplishments. And, you know, this is just part of a wider trend of less coverage of books in major media outlets, which just seems bad. There's an interesting essay about this called The Literary Ecosystem is Dying in the Atlantic by Adam Kirsch. And he's just talking about how there's like a vicious cycle going on, where if there's less book coverage, then people are paying less attention into books and buying fewer books. And then there's less of a market for book coverage. He also, though, points to some new publications or recent publications that he sees as antidotes. They're not publications I know well, but he's talking about the Metropolitan Review and The Point, as well as obviously the New York Review of Books and Harper's, The New Yorker and The Times and The Wall Street Journal that are still doing a lot of book coverage. So it's there. You can find it. Maybe we should all just make a point of thinking about books as, you know, really important cultural marker and conveyor that we need to be a little protective of right now. Is there any evidence that people are buying fewer books? I thought that was not the case. I think they are buying less, like, literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. That is not what I asked. Yes, I think you were. That is not the question I asked. I'm taking your question and... Reclaiming the Jones time. ...direction and answering it. But yeah, no, maybe you're right, David. It's not books writ large. It's like books, small print books, small print. Anyway, as a fan of books, I'm more in the loss of book world and care about this kind of coverage on a happier note. I wanted to recommend an exchange. I read this morning, actually in the argument between Jerusalem Dempsus, who's the founder of the argument and Leah Labresco Sergeant. The question they're asking is do abortion bans inevitably kill women? And I just thought it was a really well joined discussion of how these bands function on the ground. Leah Sargent is pro-life and she's arguing that the problem here is bad doctors not doing their jobs well when women are in crisis health situations and they don't receive treatment. And Jerusalem is saying like, sure, maybe, but when you tell doctors that there's the potential for a criminal prosecution, if they do it wrong, then you're creating a disincentive to a good kind of care in which doctors are doing the best they can and putting the patient's interest first. Your sort of Jerusalem's argument is you're, it is inevitable that in the end, some people are going to err on the side of caution in a way that actually causes death. So anyway, I recommend that exchange. I have two quick chatters. One, I was just in France this past week and there's a, the French have come up with something or maybe Europe has come up with something, which we need to steal immediately. You know, the problem with plastic bottles, when you buy a plastic bottle of a drink and you have that top and you spin off the top and then you have this detached top and you're like, what am I gonna do with this top? And then it gets hurled on the street and the world is filled with these little white plastic caps of things. The French plastic bottles, the cap stays on the way when you crack it open, there's a kind of little hinge on it that allows it to stay on. So it's sort of like sunglasses pushed to the top of the head. And so it's always there and it's just great. You never lose the cap. You always have the cap and you're not creating litter with it. So good job, Frenchies. My real chatter, however, is on a flight, I watched the Bruce Springsteen movie Deliver Me From Nowhere. I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. That movie is so terrible. It is shocking how bad that movie is. Did you see it? I agree. So boring. Oh my God. So bad. It's sad because it sort of feels like it didn't have to be so terrible and then it just took itself way too seriously. Oh God. Sludgy. so sludgy and so self-indulgent and myth-making and mythologizing in all the worst ways and it really made me not like Bruce Bingson a person who I've admired so much for so much of my life but it takes the thing that is so much most attractive about him is that he's a he's like a person who brings entertainment who brings joy into the world uses music to tell stories to bring joy and it's just like all that is missing it's so so dismal it really it really felt perverse in the way it was like we're gonna try to we're gonna try to take a person who is deeply fun deeply entertaining complicated and take all the fun parts out of it and and and just make you really hate him and they did they did a job moment in the movie is when he's singing born in the usa but the whole movie is about how he's not gonna release that because that's not the real art to the point that you're like god how did they ever like let that genie out of the bottle anyway Yeah. Oh, well. Listeners, you've got chatters. Please keep them coming to us. Tweet them. No, don't tweet them to us. That is like an old note. Oh, my God. What are you doing? Come on now. Just email them to us at gabfestatslate.com, whatever you're talking about at your cocktail party. And our listener chatter this week comes from Andrew in Melbourne, Australia. Hi, Gabfest. I'm Andrew Steer from Melbourne, Australia. A friend of mine who shares my love of the ocean recently sent me a research paper from Nature and a related video about octopus behaviour. Researchers found that reef octopuses don't always hunt alone. They actually team up with fish to form coordinated multi-species hunting parties. Each species plays a different role. Octopuses probe crevices while fish flush prey or chase escapees. Increasing success for octopuses and fish alike. But my favourite part of the research is that in order to maintain discipline among the fish, octopuses sometimes slap the fish that aren't cooperating or are freeloading, a kind of interspecies social enforcement, and a way for the octopuses to maintain their leadership. The video depicts this nicely, although sometimes the octopuses seem to slap the fish just because they can. I recall Emily, David and John had a chat about whether octopuses have arms or legs. This is a nice extension of that discussion. I also thought it would appeal to David's thinking about CEO leadership styles. I'd like to finish with an appeal for the GabFest team to consider a tour to Australia. We would love to see you down under. Thanks so much for all you do. Love the show. Love the invitation. I love the invitation. And it's true. We do have fans out there in Australia. So if Octopus are slapping, then obviously they have arms. You slap with an arm. Oh, nice. You wouldn't kick a fish. You wouldn't, if he said, oh, they kicked the fish. Yes. Yes. Or you'd slap them. Yes, he's on the big arm side of the ledger and slipped it in there. Big arm. That is all for our episode this week. We also have a bonus episode in your feed. We're going to talk about Stephen Colbert and the FCC. That's for Slate Plus members only. Slate Plus members get lots of great things for their subscription. They get bonus episodes of the Gab Fest and their Slate podcast. They get discounts to live shows. You can come hang out with us at the cocktail party like we did at the live show last week. So fun. They never hit the paywall on the Slate site. So become a member today. Subscribe to Slate Plus directly from the Political Gap Fest show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or visit slate.com slash Gap Fest Plus to get access wherever you listen. That's our show for today. The Gap Fest was produced today by Kevin Bendis. sitting in for Nina, who's, I hope, on vacation or something good. Our researcher is Emily Ditto. Our theme music is by They Might Be Giants. Ben Richmond is Senior Director for Podcast Operations. Milo Bell is Executive Producer of Slate Podcasts. And Hilary Fry is Editor-in-Chief of Slate. For Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson, I'm David Plotz. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week. You