Discussing The Total State with Auron MacIntyre

Now on the conversations that matter podcast I'm your host John Harris and we have with us someone who's actually been on the podcast before returning against our in McIntyre. How you doing? All right doing well.

Thanks for having me. Well, thank you for coming on. I know you're a busy busy guy. You're probably doing a lot of interviews for your new book, which is what we're gonna talk about called the total state.

How's that going? How are sales? How's this being received so far? It's been out what a few weeks now.

It's actually just been in its first week. But it's been going pretty well went ahead and hit number two on the censorship of politics on Amazon. So that was nice been like I said, I've been doing a lot of press.

It's been it's been pretty wild the amount of interviews you got to pack in for this thing. It's my first book. So I've never I've never done this before but it's been fun.

Well.

That's my first question for you then because I read the introduction and I've been impressed by your political commentary and your social media interaction too. You get a lot of Interaction and I had not heard of you before maybe I Must have heard about you a year ago or so and it seems like your political journey Even though you were conservative 2020 really Accelerated it and made you realize some things and I'm just impressed that this has come together for you in such a short period of time.

So so like maybe talk about that a little more with us. Did you just start reading political philosophers more? Did you already know political philosophy and dots were connected in 2020? How did you arrive at some of the conclusions in this book?

Well, I had a I had gone to college for political science and I had focused in political theory when I was there. But as you can imagine there aren't a lot of jobs in political theory. So I ended up Becoming a teacher and then a political Reporter at some point.

I spent a few years working on campaign staff for some Republicans Down in the Florida area and You know, so I was familiar with Aristotle and Plato and you know, some of the foundational, you know stuff that you would expect.

But it didn't really explain especially when we started seeing what happened in 2020. I really didn't understand Some of the things that were going on.

No.

Some of it is an Aristotle and Plato but the kind of the classic story of the founders and the Constitution the Bill of Rights and the way that we were gonna have this perfectly separated government that would be limited.

By all of these checks and balances. Yeah, I believe that as much as anybody, you know I was a good Rush Limbaugh listener all this stuff and then when we hit 2020 like a lot of people I was just blown away.

I was like, okay. Obviously, this is not working none of the stuff that I believe was gonna kick in and protect us when times of tyranny came. None of that happened and the people around me who have been telling me it would happen all the libertarians and conservatives.

All of a sudden they were making excuses for why it was okay, and it's not really a problem. And yeah, we could close the churches. It's just for not a big deal. You know. They just seem to find some kind of excuse for why we didn't have to worry about what was happening.

And so that's really when I started falling down the rabbit hole that you're talking about. I had already been starting to watch some YouTube commentators who are outside of kind of the CNN Fox News talk radio bubble.

But I started to discover this guy Curtis Yarvin and he had written a lot of what is often called neo reactionary political theory. But he most importantly he had read a lot of older philosophers that aren't usually included in kind of the conservative Edmund Burke style canon and so as I started to branch out and read many of those older books.

It started to come together for me. I started to realize oh, no, there's a whole explanation. A lot of people understood what was gonna happen here and they actually predicted it. And that's why I wanted to write the book because I felt like it was important for people to understand.

We're not just working from ground zero here. This isn't some unprecedented thing that no one ever expected there's actually a good bit of literature on how the government actually functions how power in the United States really works and Why it ended up reacting the way it did in the face of something like Cove it.

So let me ask you this. You have a large following on X formerly Twitter. Was that present before you started working at the blaze and doing political commentary? I mean, how did for just personally speaking?

How did this whole political commentary thing get started for you as a job. Basically sure.

Basically, like I said, I was watching what was going on and I was reading these books and I was like, all right. Well, I'm a teacher and a reporter. So like the one thing I do Relatively well is condense things down and explain them.

So I was like, well, why don't I try just making some books? Basically, I was just or some videos. I was just doing book reports on YouTube. Oh, I read this book. Here's what it means. Oh, I read this philosopher.

Here's what he's trying to say and how I how I think it applies. What's going on now and you know, some people were watching but people told me hey. You should really start putting your stuff on Twitter.

That's where people actually put their stuff if they want people to find it and watch and that kind of thing. And so I had never used you know Twitter's jumped on started posting and it turned out I had a lot more people start to listen to what I was saying on Twitter.

And that fed into the YouTube and then that fed eventually into the blaze and so that's how I ended up where I am now.

Gotcha. So this is all come together fairly last few years really for you which is amazing to me because some people I think one of the Recommendations for your book one of the people who is recommending it said that you were highly influential in controlling conservative discourse and Online I see that actually is true.

A lot of people start taking points you've made and putting them in their own words and analyzing situations. Which I think is is great. So we're gonna look at the book. This is for those who are just tuning in this is the book it's called the total state and You can get it on Amazon where else I don't know if that's where you want people going.

So maybe we should just that. Do you want them going to your website? Where should they go to get this?

Oh, no, Amazon's fine. It's through a major publisher. So it's at all of the major outlets you would expect Barnes Noble books a million Target you can pick it up at any of those places. They don't direct sales from the publisher.

It's all through these Larger outlets so anywhere people want to pick it up is fine. Okay, cool.

Well as we discuss this if any of you have questions or comments Leave them in the chat box and I'll be sure to get at least some of them to Aron. So are in. You titled the book the total state and I think the obvious question is what are we talking about?

I know what the modern state is. I know what the state is. What's the total state?

The Rise of the Total State

Well, I think a lot of us, you know, we think of totalitarian states, right? We conjure up the 1984 Nazi Germany boot heel on your face, you know the the Soviet gulags this is what we understand rightly as the manifestation of totalitarian government from a very militaristic and aggressive centralized state and I think part of the problem that we run into in our current system is that people only recognize Totalitarianism as such like that that is the only frame of reference they have for the totalitarian government is but what they don't realize is that slowly but surely the Western governments of liberal democracy have also created their own versions of soft tyranny.

They've assembled a totalitarian state not with guys at checkpoints and barbed wire and machine guns. But with digital banking and the ability to censor you online make sure you're canceled. You can't have a home.

You can't have a family. You can't maintain employment. You can't do business you become persona non grata. They have the ability to check where you're going and what you're doing at all times. This is really the Totalitarianism that has grown up in the United States and the way it's done.

So is by moving around creating new avenues of power from what was listed in the formal articles of the Constitution so articles 1 2 3 3 8 the three formal branches of the United States government and more and more people and this is really great are Recognizing when it comes to the deep state that's what a lot of people call the unelected bureaucracy in the executive branch that the powers of the formal government have been moved out of the elected offices and into these non elected Bureaucracies, but what they don't understand is it's not just the deep state.

This power has been moved into the media. This power has been moved into academia. This power has been moved into giant corporations has been moved into non-government organizations. Even globalist NGOs that reached out and dictate how we should respond to something like the pandemic.

Even though we're supposed to be a sovereign country. And so this state is not just the deep state. It's not just the formal state. This is the total state every Institution inside our country has bought in to this system.

They all work together. They coordinate with each other sometimes explicitly sometimes implicitly and that is due to the structures that they have taken on. It's not just that there's some guy sitting at the top of this tower, you know.

Steepling his fingers and doing a maniacal laugh and handing out the orders that everyone's gonna follow. It's that the structural way that we have we have set up our society. Creates this system enables this system and I wanted to explain how that was built up over time.

Why it's taken away so many of our freedoms and how we might possibly think about disassembling it.

The Cathedral and Shared Moral Culture

You know, I follow a lot of Church related news and I know you mentioned last time Go to a Southern Baptist Church. So the Southern Baptist Convention is gonna have their annual meeting next month and a lot of churches meet in June I think because of agrarian calendars and so forth, but the PCA is another one and These denominations seem to have the same problems at the same times and people have wondered 2020 especially why all these institutions educational missional, you know, all these Christian institutions are Somehow saying the same things at the same time and it happens to be exactly what all the other Institutions secular or otherwise are saying in our country.

And this is one of the things I think you help explain. You compare it to a religion essentially that is a secular religion and why don't you explain that for us. Because I think that would be a surprise to many people that it's a religion that's.

Holding these different institutions together and giving them the talking points. That's right.

So like we said in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, you have a wide Amount of propaganda, right? There's a large amount of propaganda. It's everywhere, but we understand where that comes from, right? There's a top-down.

There's a pull-up Bureau. There's just Joseph Goebbels. Like there's officials that are have have the actual label of like head of propaganda who actually do this. So we understand where it comes from.

But like you said in the United States, we see the same effect. But there's no official office there's no official place where this gets done and so we have to answer the question Why is this happening?

If we don't have that official centralized totalitarian mouthpiece for the government and the answer like you pointed out is actually a shared system Of value so Curtis Yarvin is a political theorist and he calls this the Cathedral some people don't like that title.

You can call it whatever you want. The key thing is to grasp the understand understand what is happening here. So really what has happened is that we have a ruling class first. You have to identify that every nation has a ruling class.

There's no such thing as Ruled by the people that's that's not a real thing that that's an illusion. There are always a set of elites who actually tell you what's gonna happen in your society and those always share some kind of culture.

So if you were living in a medieval society You wouldn't need to explain the people why you get married or why you go to church on Sunday or why you know? You should be checking, you know God's Word for how to apply the law or how to teach your children to raise them because that would all be implicit in the culture of your society everyone would go to the Cathedral and the Cathedral would share with people how they should live their lives it would Become the background the way that they spoke about everything.

It would be the the very Firmament from which your culture rose and so nobody needs to go into any kind of explicit Coordination on how you should run your society because all the elites who run your society know this is how we order things this is the ethos that we follow right and the same thing is true in the modern day all of the All of the academic institutions have the same ethos.

They all have the same morality. It's progressive secular humanism, right? And anybody who wants to be a leader anyone who wants to join the elite class in the United States and most other Western nations Must go through university in fact they usually have to go to specific universities and this means that anyone who wants to run a TV station or operate a fortune 500 company or even run a church often has to go through a Specific set of institutions that all share the same goal.

They all teach the same way to organize society. They all have the same ends in mind. And so even though you don't have some explicit Hey, by the way, the propaganda ministry just said we're all gonna have the same goals.

We're all gonna say the same things. Here's the here's the quick list sheet of things we should talk about today. Even though there's not that all of these people are plugged into these different institutions.

They all read the New York Times. They all listen to the NPR. They all do the same things and so when they go through these thought process when they apply their different managerial techniques to their Organizations they keep coming to the same natural conclusions.

And if somebody airs if somebody makes a mistake if someone is insufficiently loyal well, like any good religion. There's a lot of peer pressure that's there to pull people back onto the path correct them publicly.

So they understand the error of their ways and so in this way We see that like you said even especially large you'll notice the larger The church is the more likely they are to act this way, right and that's not a mistake.

That's because the people who are skilled in operating these large managerial bureaucracies Always have the same ends in mind, even if they're applying them to something like the shepherding of God's believers.

Foxes, Lions, and Managerial Power

Yeah, and so I had cryptos on and he talked about this same dynamic but he talked about it in terms of technique and Jacques allul and And no matter who I hear talk about this. It always seems to root back into some kind of modern conception of politics some recent development.

And I get the impression from reading you. I think it's chapter 4 maybe where you talk about foxes and lions and Do we have in the less than a system that has? Unknown I don't know if unnatural is the word but in a way that hasn't been done in previous times.

Favored the foxes the cunning operators who know how to use the deep state administration these kinds of things to Exercise their will. I know that does sound kind of top-down. I know it's not exactly but.

Is this like a modern notion? Because in times past it seemed like you had Kings and they got to war and their lions were in charge.

Absolutely, and I do love cryptos because he has that he has that background in allul. And it's really just like seeing the elephant from a different side, you know, you like I'll listen to him. It'll be like, oh that's I know exactly what he's talking about I've just heard it said a different way, but I I recognize exactly the the kind of system that he's he's describing.

Yeah, I think so. Here's the here's the thing When Vilfredo Pareto set up kind of the explanation between the foxes and the lions. He reached all the way to ancient Greece to explain this dynamic. He said that Athens was a city ruled by Foxes and Sparta was a city ruled by lions and ultimately both of them fell.

Because they favored one part one section of the ruling class over the other. So the Spartans obviously were very martial in character. They dedicated their entire lives to becoming Excellent warriors, but ultimately their inability to change and grow and create new things Ended up being their doom and for you know The Athenians they were obviously the philosophers and they wrote all the great plays and this is why we remember them So fondly and see them as the founders of American democracy.

In some ways often people will say that but he says ultimately Athens falls. Because it's it's constantly infighting. It's incapable of pulling together. It's obsession with dissecting pull of things apart novelty ends up leading it to become disunified and it falls prey to Sparta actually in one of many other places, so it's not that the Fox line dynamic is new.

However, what you are noticing I think is the level of abstraction that technique or technology allows in today's society. What we've noticed is that of course in most cases the martial caste The the Lions are the ones who rule early on in a society when it needs to protect its borders define its borders.

Cast out enemies, maybe even forge a new frontier, right? This is when they are on the ascent and then Fox's tend to take over as the society is growing and becoming more complex. It needs to solve complicated abstract problems that aren't necessarily Connected to actual warfare these kind of things.

So this is again a very natural cycle. But what we've gotten to is an extremity normally the cycle turns over at some point that the power of the Fox's has to give way to the Lions because The level of abstraction is too much.

They're not able to deal with the actual physical issues that are plaguing society they start to lose their shared identity and the furtherance of their heritage and this thing kind of just falls over onto itself until the until the Lions come back to the forefront in our case what we had is a technology and a set of techniques managerial techniques.

Especially that have allowed the Fox's to extend their rule well beyond their natural part of the life cycle. They've built large Substructures that allow them to go ahead and create a vast amount of efficiency inside the system allow them to project power and force down their manipulative understanding of the way things should be through propaganda and other means on the people and very importantly they've been able to outpace the need for brave and they can just build enough tanks or drones or missiles or planes and that really you can just maintain a very small force that That is under the sway of the Fox's and will always just rely on technological superiority.

However, we are seeing that fail, right? We know the United States military. Well, you know, I'm a big fan of many people in it and they're incredibly capable. The military has lost many wars recently.

They couldn't beat goat herders in Afghanistan and it's not because they don't have the skill and actual combat. But because our leaders are Fox's and they're terrified of any real military conflict. All of our military conflicts have to be incredibly fake managed ways to funnel money into defense contractors.

We're not actually going in to protect anything We love or care about and so you're starting to see the ability of Fox's to maintain our society fall apart. There's a reason that we seem to be unable to do things like maintain infrastructure or you know.

We're breaking down our logistics and the ability to like deliver food or medicine or other things. At critical times and the reason is that our Fox type Leaders have lost touch with the physical the things that the Lions would usually manage.

They've suppressed the lines for so long. But they've lost the ability to even really conceive of a healthy way to manage that stuff and it's having a very obvious impact on.

Society. Well, let me ask you this because you mentioned before that democracy. Well, you didn't say the word democracy, but you're saying I guess self-rule or thinking that the people rule. So I'm assuming that's what you're talking about.

That this is sort of a facade and I think that would be a surprise to many people and I'll give you an example I was listening this morning to a podcast briefly that was talking about AI generated music and what a threat this is to the music industry and of course, you can look at so many other industries and see similar things happening where automation is outpacing or replacing the traditional labor markets and relationships and so forth and You would think that the market would come in and correct this because you know people want Authentic music so they're going to reject the AI generated stuff and they're gonna start Listening to artists who are authentic.

But it doesn't seem to happen at least not in large enough numbers to make a difference. And so it I'm just looking at like on-the-ground reality. This doesn't seem to be a solution. But why is that why isn't democracy or the people choosing a way out of this mess?

Why Mass Democracy Cannot Correct the System

Because ultimately we are formed by our own experiences. We are not these rational You know completely Atomized individuals who all make their own decisions have their own taste pick and choose things before us.

We are completely programmed and manipulated by propaganda and the illusion of choice at this point. Look at some point in the past in a healthy organized society we wouldn't have been completely our own person, but we would have been parts of communities as a Pastor, you know that this is something that informs how people interact with each other when you have a community like this when you're organized Together into a shared moral vision.

You have a particular language a particular way of speaking with each other or particular Expectations in your interactions the way you should form families the way that you should conduct yourself in business.

All of these things create a organic identity, right? A lot of people are scared of the you know. Oh identity politics identity politics, right? We hear I everybody has too much identity. Actually, it's the exact opposite.

We have none. We have had all of our organic identity stripped away. We've been told that you want freedom of choice and freedom of choice. It means removing all the unchosen bonds that make humans what they are.

So, oh well I don't want to have kids because that would restrict my ability to go do stuff. Oh, I don't want to take care of my parents when they get old because that's gonna be a drain on my funds. Oh, I don't want to have to take care of my neighbor because that's a big abuse of my time and so we've been told more and more and more to unplug ourselves from these social spheres these social Responsibilities and we've handed them over to the state.

This is part of what made the total state what it is is that we've kept transferring all of these Opposing social forces like church community family and things we've taken all of the power all of this Responsibility out of the duty out of those spheres and we've handed them over to the government and in some ways that makes us feel free right because Well now I can spend all this money and all this time playing video games or traveling on Saturday.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't have to spend Sunday at church. That means I've get an extra hour to do whatever right? And so you feel in some ways liberated, but actually what you're doing is you're deracinating yourself.

You're pulling yourself out of the roots that give you an identity and when you have no identity You don't just like go build your own like you don't just actually, you know build yourself out from nothing.

What happens is you become a easy target for? Social programming you have no organic idea of who you are. And so if an advertisement or it's some kind of other propaganda pours that into you you become an easy Vessel for it and this is what CS Lewis warned about in the abolition of man that Once we went ahead and ripped out all of the things all the organs.

You know the men without chest the things that make us human once we lose that organic connection to what a human is. Then we are just at the mercy of these social organizers. These you know These social scientists who want to manipulate and turn humanity into whatever they want and that's why democracy ultimately at least in this mass version does not restrict the government because when the founders Built the Constitution they did create a mixed Constitution.

But they made a mixed Constitution with the understanding that democracy was only supposed to be one half of One third of the formula that actually selects the government. They actually didn't put that much democracy Into our Republic and that's true of many republics across history understanding that mass democracy a mass Expansion of the franchise and its ability to completely run roughshod over all other influences was super dangerous.

This is why Alexis de Tocqueville famously warned against this in democracy in America one of the founding pieces of Political science on the country. And so what I'm saying is, you know might sound radical to people's ears today.

But it wouldn't have sounded radical to the founders or to any of the people who were actually Aware of what went into the Constitution. We've been sold the Bill of Goods as I think the modern American right that you know.

The Constitution is something that it simply isn't. The founders didn't believe that this Unregulated democracy would hold all of the power in check due to the miraculous invention of the Constitution.

They had a much more traditional Understanding of what a society is and what holds government in check and it wasn't just the fact that you happen to go vote once every four years.

From the Founders to FDR

I'm glad to hear you sort of defend the founders on this and I've taken that line more myself because I know there is this poison pill theory that it really was the founders who Started all this and and I I would love to get your opinion on and Maybe you're gonna have more nuanced answer here.

But like what was the date right? Some people say 2020 That's when it all went wrong. Others say I was when we elected Obama there saves a civil rights era or the Civil War era or maybe it was actually The Constitution.

So when do you see us making this transition? Obviously, it was gradual. But what are some key points?

So, I think what's important to recognize is that countries are never static. Entities they have a morphology that your every civilization is birth. It grows it comes into fruition and it dies and that's tough for us because we want to believe that like America is the one eternal, you know Empire and you know, this this this is true of everybody.

Everyone wants to think that they're the the next reincarnation of Rome. You know this this kind of thing, but of course even Rome went through this cycle and so you have to understand that. It's it's it's easy and I will answer the question.

I'm not dodging it here, but it's easy to just say Oh, well, there's the one day that we stepped off the track and once we did that it was over. I think it's better to understand that power has a metaphysic that it follows and that and that That track is undeniable across history it looks different if you have a different form of government there are ways that you can contain it and keep your Government or your your country your civilization in kind of a better state for longer and protect it longer.

There are ways to change it's not just fatalism. But I think we have to understand that over time all governments do change and shift and America is no different even at the founding we had our founders arguing over whether America basically should become 13 small nations that work together there every once in a while to for like mutual protection and trade or whether we should comes Become some kind of mercantile European Empire.

And that battle continues to this day that that is that conflict that started with? Kind of the the Federalist and anti-federalist all the way through the you know The Civil War and up into our current our current day is still with us.

So I would say obviously the The shift during the Civil War is huge. When the when the answer to you know, you'd had the South push back in multiple situations. For instance the attempt at the nullification crisis.

And and Andrew Jackson who's often seen as a hero of the right by many conservatives but is actually the guy who pushed for both the direct election of senators and The destruction of the state's ability to refuse federal legislation.

You know, so that was not new but the Civil War is obviously a huge change. I mean Abraham Lincoln throws his opponents in jail. He shuts down newspapers. He shuts down legislatures. He imports a large amount of Irishmen to go kill his fellow countrymen in an attempt to To kind of win that war.

So obviously like that's a that's a huge shift in the 14th Amendment fund limit. Fundamentally rewrites the way that the Constitution works, but I would say that for our modern iteration it probably comes down to FDR.

FDR is Woodrow Wilson is probably the first guy to conceive of the presidency as a managerial position. He's a college professor and a guy who wants to apply a lot of these systems. But I think FDR, you know A lot of people forget that like FDR just stole all the gold in the United States.

Like we just don't talk about that. It's just like no you can't own gold anymore. You have to give it all to me. Like you have to sell it to me at a cut rate. I'm just gonna steal all your gold and we like pretend that doesn't happen because obviously that's wildly unconstitutional.

But you know It would be inconvenient for us to recognize that and so he like remakes the way the United States works through the New Deal. He sets up all these bureaucracies he builds this infrastructure that radically changes the ability of the federal government to reach into every aspect of The nation and from there.

That's how the civil rights movement and other other Iterations on the same thing I think continue that pattern and expand it until we get what we have today.

Local Power, Regional Power, and the Limits of Entryism

You know, I was I was reading the checks and balances part of your book where you're talking about the the reason that From Monoscue these were essentially adopted in our system. I was thinking about John C Calhoun.

I don't know if you mentioned him. I don't think you do in the book I haven't quite finished it. But the concurrent majority and he seemed to see some of these flaws at least early on and and thought about Ways to rectify them in order to stave off What a total democracy would do.

And we're just living out I guess in some ways. The and I don't want to produce it just to Calhoun, but you know, we did not heed his warnings. We went with Lincoln instead of Calhoun and and here we are and.

It's such a mess though. I think people now just wonder how do we even get ourselves out of it if it's not.

Through.

Popular votes. If that mechanism is already some people already are black gold on that then what is it? Is it a cesarean figure rising up like the Protestant Franco? Is it one state? We're just gonna all go to one state and then try to secede or something, which would probably be Movies.

Civil War is out. I don't think that's gonna be the way it goes, but it'll probably be bad. You know, so you give some hope though. You say like this is gonna come to an end, but there is gonna be a lot of hardship in going in getting there.

Yeah, this is gonna be an answer that like nobody likes but I think it's true. So I do my best to say it even if it's if it's gonna be unpopular I think that there is like I said I think we are at the at the outermost limits of the current way.

We organize society I think we've built the Tower of Babel and we're all very confused about why it looks like it's tipping over and so I think that as We continue to reach the outer extremities of how managerial society can order Human beings we're gonna see these failures, right?

We're gonna see the the Collapse of competence. We're gonna see the inability to deliver, you know Logistically the things that we need and organize people correctly we're gonna see a drop-off in intelligence and education and and just the ability of people to Do jobs that are essential to a very complicated network that is increasingly You know putting itself on a finer knife edge when it comes to what kind of tolerances it can take for failure.

There's very little resilience built into the system. We're we're we're we're sacrificing resilience for efficiency and Height of production at pretty much every level and then instead of taking that height of production and turning into something good We're just burning it into like political Gimme's for the kind of Democratic Party for the left And so we're just burning the system down for nothing.

And so I think eventually no, I don't I a lot of people are like well, we'll change I don't think we will I think a lot of people are gonna hold on to this thing. I mean if The the number of people who watch 2020 happen and still pretend Like well, you just get them next time guys.

Yeah a little harder. It's like Did we did we watch the same election? Are you in the same world? I am and so that that gives me a lot of doubt that we're gonna see any serious upheaval. I think the phone were likely scenario is that those things are gonna start to fail and.

Then.

People who are more competent regionally will rise. We're already seeing this with you know, my governor Ron DeSantis in Florida. A lot of people have moved here. Please stop things are too expensive and my roads are very full go away.

But a lot of people are moving here. They're using their feet to vote because they recognize that it's not enough to simply like cast your vote once every four years. In California, that's not doing you any good.

It's not gonna save the Republic. You have to actually be in a community you have to actually live next to people who share your values. You can't do it. We can't just divide ourselves across entire continents anymore entire continent anymore and pretend like that's not a problem.

And so people are shifting, you know. They're they're concentrating and I think that as you know guys like DeSantis or Greg Abbott or others. Continually tell the federal government no and nothing happens.