How Bad Is It?: Why an Antifascism Scholar Fled the Country

27:25It's a phrase that suggests that I do sincerely think now, as I did back then, that we need to organize against fascism. As far as the role of speech and liberalism, you know, I think that Americans assume that the whole world has this American liberal interpretation of speech. Just in the interest of a counterpoint, you know, continental European perspectives on speech are different. Different countries have laws against hate speech or organizing a Nazi or fascist party. And so while I don't entirely agree with that, the way I talk about it in a campus context, which is most pertinent to my job, is that a kind of procedural way of thinking about free speech is everyone gets to say whatever they want, whenever they want.

28:08But I think that that overlooks the results of certain kinds of speech that dehumanize other people. So in the book, you also write that anti-fascism is in a liberal politic of social revolutionism applied to fighting the far right, not just literal fascists. So what is social revolutionism and who would you consider to be a member of the far right? Yeah, sure. So there are all sorts of people that participate in Antifa groups, but most of them are radicals or revolutionaries of some sort or another, socialists, communists, anarchists, or other sort of versions of those things. And so in that sense, there are people that happen to be frequently revolutionaries, but also the fact that militant antifascism rejects turning to the police or the courts or the state or having faith in the supposed free market of ideas means that there is a kind of challenge to the sovereignty of the state embedded within the politics of militant antifascism.

29:09insofar as it says we, the anti-fascists, the people that are part of these groups, will take up solving this problem and therefore kind of challenge one little piece of state sovereignty. So that's what that means. Now, as far as who is the far right, who are fascists and so forth, that's a difficult question, in part because historically fascism has rejected rational consistency. This becomes particularly tricky after World War II, when many fascists and like-minded people stop calling themselves Nazis or fascists because it's become taboo, have, particularly from the 70s onward, you can see this in a lot of Western European countries, developed different forms of right-wing politics that aim to be more appealing to the general electorate.

29:56You can see the transition with the Rassemblement Nacional in France, which used to be, was really founded by pretty explicit fascists decades ago, but have adjusted their rhetoric and style to be much more of a palatable parliamentary option. But in short, I think that there are still important reference in thinking about fascism for far-right politics today around opposition to democracy, promotion of violence as an end in and of itself, conspiratorial thinking around And anti-Semitism is still rather prevalent. Strong sexism. I think that in the U.S. today, maybe one of the handful of the most central points is this rejection of feminism, rejection of transgender and what they would call gender ideology and attempt to return to some sort of natural masculinity, even though, of course, it's all kind of a historical imagination.

30:51So in that sense, you know, part of the debate back in 2017, which is I think it's interesting that it really hasn't come up in the interviews I've done now, is like this question of if militant anti-fascists are organizing against a group that maybe is like hit 75 or 80 percent of things you would put on a fascist checklist, is it still legitimate for them to organize against them? Obviously, that's for them to decide. But the points that they make, which I've conveyed in the book based on my interviews, is that because these things mutate so much, you know, you have to situate it in that context.

31:25I mean, we should we should get into what Antifa is or isn't, because, you know, I think obviously when you have the Trump administration calling everything a terror group and saying, I mean, that presidential memorandum, I think, says anyone who's anti-family or anti-Christian, that speech might be considered a predicate to terrorism. Right. So it's very easy to to see it all as just kind of a caricature because they're kind of making it a caricature. That said, I mean, I do want to just take seriously this line between civil discourse and other tactics, including potentially violent tactics that have come up.

32:05I mean, as I say, we have read the book, but I mean, even just on the back cover of the book, you have Murray, the sort of pseudonym for an Antifa organizer, saying you fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don't have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists. You don't have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives. You don't have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don't have to fight them with tanks. So I'm not saying that you are saying this. This is you quoting someone. But I guess, does it seem ridiculous then to worry about violence coming from Antifa, given that violent means of protests are being explicitly discussed here?

32:45Well, I mean, I think we can take an empirical view here. And let's look at the U.S. over the last 10 years or so since this has become something in the news, right? During the same time, there have been far more deadly far-right attacks. But, of course, that's a kind of a whataboutism, which is not the point that I'm making, but I think is worth mentioning. The conflicts that we've seen, like let's look at Charlottesville. There have been some high-profile conflicts between Antifa groups and their allies and far-right elements in Berkeley, in Portland, I think in Washington state. And what has really come out of that?

33:21These are conflicts that have involved punches, that have involved pepper spray. The one person in all of that that was killed was killed by a fascist, Heather Heyer, in Charlottesville. And then, despite the fact that Trump tried to claim that the social upheaval of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protest was all because of Antifa, that really, even by law enforcement admission, was no truth in any of that. And they'd been really out of the spotlight for six years. So I think that it would be a slightly different conversation if there had been all of these events happening over the last year or two.

33:56But the fact that they're having and that this executive order was concocted right after Charlie Kirk was killed, which, again, is a kind of horrific expansion of an already nebulous term. and that that was applied to examples like tyler robinson who killed charlie kirk to luigi jone who again had elements of left and right in his politics and killed the the ceo shows to me that it whatever there is to be concerned about with violence is not actually what this is about uh it's just a bogeyman well yes and i take your point about you know the trump administration always being able to overplay whatever hand and make it as over the top as possible.

34:41I guess just to give a sort of steel man version of the argument, I mean, to take your sort of what you call the whataboutism example, you know, if we were to take someone who was advocating for a far right position who was saying, well, I'm not saying that you should run people over with your car. I'm just saying that I'm making an unabashedly partisan call to arms to stick up for Confederate statues and for white nationalism. And, you know, just arguing that this is a reasonable, historically informed response to do militant white nationalism. Yeah. Well, then what would you think if you were the president of Rutgers or what would you think if you were?

35:22I mean, how should we think about whether that kind of avowedly illiberal rhetoric should be allowed within polite society within the university. Yeah, well, so that's where, to me, I think part of the conversation needs to be. What we say and why we say it, what we do and why we do it, has to have reference to the values and politics informing it to the repercussions that come out of it. And so if you want to take the most violent historical examples of fascism and put them up against the most violent historical examples of anti-fascism, what you end up with is World War II. And I think most listeners know which side of World War II they would be on.

36:01But I think that, you know, we have to situate it within the values and politics of what's going on. And I think that's what sometimes gets lost in a kind of abstract liberalism that aims to play referee and see only actions without their political or historical reference. And I just refuse to do that. I want to talk more about doxing because this is something that you write about at length in your book, you know, sort of talking about how it is something that has played a central role both in fascist playbooks and in anti-fascist playbooks. In the book, you talk about Remus Preston, I think that's his name, a Danish anti-fascist filmmaker who's been on both sides of the doxing issue.

36:41And first of all, I think it's interesting that he talks about his own experiences being doxed. And he says that, you know, it's important not to be afraid and to show that the face of anti-fascism is not a black hooded mask person, but the politics of real human beings who have feelings and are humans in every way. And so I guess like how does hearing someone like him talk about doxing kind of, I guess, like, has your experience being doxed made you think about it a little bit differently? Like, I mean, you spent some time kind of writing about how doxing can be seen as a legitimate tool to use against political opponents.

37:13And so how do you sort of reconcile that with your own experience of being doxed and how terrible it's been? Well, let's just unpack a little bit more of the kind of context of how this is often being used by anti-fascists. Anti-fascist doxing often targets far-right figures who are anonymous and who run, for example, like Stormfront message boards or are the leaders of like neo-Nazi terror cells and are completely below ground. And so in that sense, the doxing is a way of saying, hey, there's a real person that's doing this. He has a job or he's a student at a university and the community around him need to know that they're living next to a person doing this.

37:56Now, granted, there would be plenty of far-right people who would say, oh, well, you know, Mark Bray's community should know that this professor who wrote the Antifa handbook is living amongst them. But recognize that those aren't the same kinds of claims. And so I think a big part of doxing for anti-fascists is saying, hey, if you're going to write these things, then you should be able to be publicly accountable for them. I have not hidden from anything that I've written. I've done the opposite. Those are completely different efforts. And so I don't begrudge the question at all, but those contexts matter a great deal.

38:33Well, can you say more about why they're completely different? I mean, as part of the case you're making for a kind of illiberal or post-liberal way of viewing the world or a revolutionist way of viewing the world, Seems like often these questions come down to who has power, who has political power, who has the upper hand. So if making it costly to have far right views, how is that not then equivalent to your political enemies making it more costly for you to have your views? Well, because my views are better than theirs. And I know that that sounds like I am running afoul of the liberal playbook.

39:10And I am. I will quote unquote die on the hill of anti-racism is better than racism. Feminism is better than sexism. I could go on and on. But in that sense, I have no problem saying that when a Nazi doxes a professor because they didn't like the book they wrote about feminism, that that is infinitely worse and not the same thing as an anti-fascist doxing a Nazi. so that his university knows that he's a Nazi, so that his community knows that he's a Nazi. The politics matter a great deal. You make this point several times in the book that you don't do the kind of formalism of, or the kind of equivalence of all views being equal, regardless of their content.

39:58You know, this is from near the end of the book. Everyday antifascism applies an antifascist outlook to any kind of interaction with fascists, everyday or otherwise. It refuses to accept the dangerous notion that homophobia is just someone's opinion to which they are entitled. It refuses to accept opposition to the basic proposal that Black Lives Matter is a simple political disagreement. An anti-fascist outlook has no tolerance for, quote, intolerance. It will not agree to disagree. And so, I mean, this is a version of an argument you make throughout the book. And I guess just to put a kind of fine point on it, like, is there some sense in which by giving up your claim to kind of liberal formalism, you then have to give up your appeal to things like protections from academic freedom, right?

40:41If you're going to, you know, try to blow apart the kind of First Amendment framework for its downsides, is it in some sense then hypocritical to kind of appeal to it for your own protection? Well, I'm not actually criticizing or calling for a change to the First Amendment. I'm not calling for any kind of changes in the laws. And so none of that, none of my argumentation around speech pertains to that. What I am calling for is essentially akin to what actually many universities claimed to be doing up until this era of Trump, which is to say, we can have just about any kind of discourse except that which aims to dehumanize members of our community.

41:22And that's like actually like the norm of how to see speech in continental Europe, for example. So I don't view it as a huge departure from how things are, but I recognize that like speech at its most racist is bad. And I'm not calling for anyone to be shot because of that. But I do think that it should be taboo to be racist or taboo to be transphobic. And I aim in my personal everyday experience to try and promote the opposite values. And I'm not going to just look the other way if someone is promoting dehumanization of my peers. Well, there's another way to draw that line. There's, you know, we should promote all speech as long as it doesn't dehumanize anyone, which obviously people have all kinds of disputes about how to define that or draw that line.

42:12And then there's also the view of Dartmouth where you used to teach where, you know, the president there said, we condemn anything but civil discourse. The endorsement of violence in any form is contrary to Dartmouth values. So that's another way to draw that line, which is if you're calling for any any kind of tolerance for violence, that's over the line. So what do you think about drawing the line there? Yeah, so basically, the interview subjects that I spoke to in the book look at the past 100 years of fascism and more than 100 years of colonialism and white supremacy and say that, like, you know, when you are under attack from these movements, self-defense is necessary.

42:50And we've seen even in recent decades that far-right groups that target immigrants or queer and trans people have necessitated self-defense groups among marginalized people. And so, like, the violence of those people defending themselves is not on the same ethical or moral or historical category as the violence of those people who are trying to kill them. You talk about self-defense in the face of fascism, and, you know, you're giving examples of, you know, white supremacists and violent racists. But you have said, I think, in the past that MAGA is a fascist movement. And so, I mean, does it follow then that any follower of MAGA should be subject to, you know, the kind of Antifa activism or self-defense tactics that the sources you speak to in the book endorse?

43:38Or, I mean, what do you make of the fact that, like, I guess technically 50 percent of the country is MAGA? And, I mean, do you really see all of them as being fascist or like just the ones who, you know, are kind of the most diehards? Well, I think probably Trump's base is less than 50 percent, but that's a little bit similar. So I'm not saying that the way that militant anti-fascists do things is the way that people should necessarily do things in all times and places. And also, let's look at a little bit of the historical context of where militant anti-fascism came from. When it consolidated itself as a specific tendency after World War II, it was in the context of opposing small and medium-sized far-right groups that were on the margins of politics in countries like the UK or France or Italy.

44:23And in that sense, it was largely subcultural, rarely a mass movement. And so in that sense, it's a kind of a formula for opposing the far-right in certain circumstances, which today are definitely not the circumstances, right? Today, you have a far-right political force in the White House. Obviously, there are some very marginal and small fascists and Nazi groups that don't like Trump or whatever, but that's a little beside the point. So in that sense, it's not the historical context that these ideas came up from. When I wrote the book in 2017, there seemed to be more of a historical parallel.

44:59Even though Trump was in the White House, you know, it's unclear that he knew that he would win. He didn't come up with the same kind of plan as Project 2025. He had more traditional conservative politicians in his administration like Pence, who ultimately thwarted January 6th. So I'm actually, I wasn't saying like, oh, everyone should do this even back in 2017. But it's even less the context today than it was back then. Yeah, I mean that leads me exactly into where I wanted to go to to close us out which is the context now I mean again just you know, I appreciate you going through the ideas in your book This is something that we can still do because we still have enough Freedom of speech to at least talk to each other from different countries And so I think it's worth using it and just about the historical context and where we are on that timeline You know you could say that that this quote about, you know, we fight them with knives so we don't have to fight them with guns.

45:52We fight them with guns so we don't have to fight them with tanks. There's a way of reading that that says it's almost too late in the sequence for some of these Antifa tactics to work. If your read is that MAGA is a fascist movement, MAGA has taken over and they're now sitting in the seat of power, you could read that historically as saying, at least for now, the fight is kind of over. So, I mean, what would you say to someone who says the fascists have won, they're driving out their enemies, and, you know, what would you tell them they can do about that now? Well, I mean, first of all, I have said, and I do believe that MAGA is a fascist movement.

46:30I do think that if they were a big, big, beautiful button sitting in front of Donald Trump that would get rid of all dissent, he would press the button, right? But that having been said, we don't have fascism in a full sense. We still have a Democratic Party on the No Kings Day. people did protest. So not all is lost in that regard. I mean, even if it were, though, right, I mean, historical fascist regimes lost. But no, so no, I'm not trying to be pessimistic. I do think people should get out there and protest and resist in their communities and their societies. I would love to see a general strike.

47:04I'd love to see just broad civil disobedience, direct action, and non-participation in the regime. I don't know what will come of this. I had students before I left the country asked me, oh, Professor Bray, like, are we in fascism? Where are we going? The kind of analogy I would make is like, I would imagine kind of like a graph with a line ascending from the bottom left up to the top right and say, okay, we only have this much data. We only have these many points. It's on a trajectory heading up to the right. If the line continues at this trajectory, sure, we end up at fascism, but we don't know what will happen.

47:36The future is unwritten and our resistance and our action can make the line go down. So I don't know what will end up with it. Certainly some people read my take on MAGA being a fascist movement and my concern about the direction of authoritarianism as being a bit alarmist. I disagree, but I would love to be proven wrong. And I really do want to see people out in the streets taking action. I don't think that there's ever only one form of action or one form of resistance. And my only takeaway is that I think anti-fascism writ large as an opposition to fascism with a set of values that also promotes a vision for a better world and a vision for justice on an interpersonal level is necessary.

48:19And that's what I'd like to see. And I hope to return to the country next year feeling a lot more optimistic about where things are going. Well, we also hope you can return. I think it bears repeating that no one should have to be marginalized or put in fear in this way for their ideas. and we appreciate you going through all this and we look forward to hearing how the rest of your year goes. Yeah, thank you so much, Mark. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. We'll have more of the political scene from The New Yorker in just a moment.

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49:55All right, Andrew. So after talking to Mark and Yesenia, I guess I'm wondering, you know, the eternal question. How bad is it? Is this the beginning of a wave of academics who are being pushed out of the country, exiled voluntarily, involuntarily for their speech? Yeah, I think it's very worrisome whenever people can't make arguments or speak freely without worrying about having to leave the country to be safe. That's obviously worrisome for all the obvious reasons. I think academic freedom, broadly speaking, seems more imperiled than it's been in a generation. So, yeah, all those things are very, very worrisome.

50:33I think what makes this case particularly thorny and challenging, right, is that Mark is not pretending to be a shrinking violet, right? He's not saying, like, I have no idea where this came from. And, you know, he's making these very provocative arguments. Again, you should not be punished for your provocative arguments. And I think we should get into just how broad these anti-dissent, anti-speech crackdowns are by the government. But as he himself says, you know, he was not picked up by the state and forced to leave. He decided to leave. So I think we're in a kind of early formation of this.

51:11Like, I don't know if there will be a wave of 50 more professors who flee the country or if this is kind of an isolated case or it's just hard to tell. Yeah, I mean, not only was he not picked up by the state and forced to leave, but I wonder if we're kind of conflating a few different things here. I mean, obviously, this is all happening in the context of the Trump administration's crackdown on academic freedom, activism in general. And of course, there was this executive order establishing Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. But the thing that actually drove them out was this Turning Point USA watch list and the fact that they were receiving death threats as a result of having been on that watch list.

51:54And so that I mean, there's obviously a the administration has not tried to distance itself from TPUSA at all. I mean, it seems like it's easy to kind of think of them as the same thing, given Trump's close relationship to Charlie Kirk. Yeah, and that they were having this Antifa task force with, you know, Jack Posobiec on like, I think, the same day that he was leaving the country. I mean, I can see why he feels like a target. And so I think it's just a challenge to the sort of classic instinct to be content neutral. there's often this sort of formalistic instinct to just say people should not be punished for their speech kind of without even referring to what the content of the speech is and i think mark's book and the way he talks about his book like forces us to pay attention to what the content is i mean he his argument hinges on my provocative legitimizing of violence is more inherently valuable than my opponents when they do the same right and so um it doesn't allow us to be content neutral and the Trump administration clearly has no interest in being content neutral.

53:00So it kind of lays bare the way I think radicals, left and right radicals, have always thought about this, which is a kind of Schmittian, you know, competition for power. Like it's not about these nice little formal systems. It's not about these nice, you know, John Stuart Mill debate club tactics. It's about power and who has it. And I think it's pretty clear that Mark Bray's enemies are in power, and he felt very threatened by that. So I have sympathy for the critique that this kind of framework about how free speech should work in theory in a vacuum, that that's not attentive to the, you know, sort of messiness and jaggedness of how these things play out in life.

53:39The thing, though, once you depart from the kind of classic liberal norms and you start invoking a new set of rules or trying to kind of carve out, make up your own set of rules that are not the Enlightenment rules, what he himself calls in a liberal form of revolutionary politics, then you are not going to get agreement about where these lines are. Right. So I think what he would say is my ideas are better than a white supremacist's ideas. He did say that. So I should be allowed to teach my ideas and they should not be allowed to teach their ideas. Fine. You can have that argument. But then when you're talking about doxing, when you're talking about making it untenable or unsafe for somebody to live in their community without their neighbors turning against them.

54:24Right. The closer you come to like actual either violence or the threat of violence, the more I start to be unsure about where do we stop before we get to actual violence. You know what I mean? Like, it's one thing to say I should be given tenure and a white supremacist shouldn't. I get that argument. But then is it like the white supremacist should be doxed, but I shouldn't? That's where I start to go, you know, not just that it's a slippery slope or whatever, but just like, how are people supposed to decide how to live around each other? I don't think you have to be a total content neutral, complacent, both sides person to be troubled by the idea that like you do have to find a way to live around people whose views you find odious.

55:13Right. I mean, that's just a practical reality. I don't know how you live without doing that. I think some of us have to do it less than others based on where we live. Right. So, I mean, his basic claim in the book is sort of polite liberal debate society ways of stopping fascism have not always worked. And that's true. I think it's also true, and he reckons with this in the book, that going out in the streets and engaging in hand-to-hand combat doesn't always stop fascists either. And so if we're now in a timeline when, you know, we've had the kind of Trump 1.0 round of battles that he was writing about in this book, the people having, you know, trying to get Milo Yiannopoulos not to speak at UC Berkeley and stuff.

55:59and where we've ended up, where all that has kind of shaken out is Trump 2.0, where the force of the state is being brought to bear on criminalizing all these forms of speech. Is that not an indictment of like, is that not another example where the Antifa street brawling didn't stop the thing that it was trying to stop? Right. Yeah. So then where does that leave us? I mean, I totally take his critique that like liberal politesse didn't stop it, But I don't think the street brawling tactics stopped it either. I do think that this conversation would be entirely different if the exclusive reason or like the primary reason why Mark and Yesenia left the United States was because of the executive order from Trump.

56:44You know, this thing that establishing that Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization and he had been targeted for that, you know, versions of that where it's like people are facing charges. Maybe they're actually Antifa. Maybe they are, you know, activists slash historians who write about Antifa, although that's also kind of a blurry line. I mean, he brought up the term boogeyman, and I think that is a good way to put it. I mean, we can sort of debate all day whether it—some people say Antifa doesn't exist. Some people say it's this centralized thing with all this, you know, sort of infrastructure.

57:17I think pretty clearly the truth lies somewhere in between those. But I think the boogeyman point is a good one, which is like, I don't think anyone sincerely believes that the greatest threat to the average American's security is a thing called Antifa. So there clearly is a scapegoating thing going on here. And it's terrifying when the full force of the biggest military and biggest government in the world is turning its attention on, you know, these like street punks and academics. And I don't know who else. I mean, we'll see. But the plain language of that presidential memorandum is terrifying.

58:01Like, I mean, it just literally it's it directs federal agencies to, quote, investigate, disrupt and dismantle all illegal operations conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa. Defines it as a militarist anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government. I mean, this is kind of classic sort of strongman scapegoating rhetoric. And then it lists ideological indicators that these government agencies should clamp down on, like anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, or extremism on race, gender, or migration, or hostility toward traditional views of family, religion, and morality.

58:46So if you take those words seriously, they could kind of just go after almost anyone and call them a terrorist. Like, I don't know that they will do that, but they are giving themselves permission, if you take this language seriously, to, I mean, what is extremism on race, gender, or migration? What is hostility toward traditional views of family? Like, I can think of a million things that that could mean, most of which would apply to almost everyone I know, right? Like, hostility toward traditional views of family. Like, I don't know. I don't like Leave it to Beaver's view of what a family should be.

59:23Am I a terrorist? Are you going to come after me? So I totally think this is being used as a boogeyman, as a kind of tip of the spear thing. Yeah, I mean, I guess like anywhere in that definition, does it ever specify violence or is it really just in, or is it all about ideas? It says an enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government using illegal means including violence and terrorism. So it includes violence, but not exclusively. And it includes terrorism and it includes the overthrow of the United States government. Right. So again, like. So like you can be anti-family, but as long as you're not trying to use that as your agenda for overthrowing the government.

1:00:05Right. Because otherwise, this is written in a way that can treat anyone as a terrorist at any time. Yeah, which is obviously not good. I mean, it's interesting because on one hand, it's incredibly vague and the vagueness is what makes it scary. And on the other, you know, we also have conversations on this podcast all the time about this terrible epidemic of political violence that we're in on both the left and the right. And I guess I wonder if what we're seeing is like if this were a different administration, you could see this as an attempt to stop political violence, at least coming from, you know, the side that they're more worried about.

1:00:43But it doesn't actually seem like it's going specifically after political violence. It's this other thing. Well, this this thing is way broader than that. But I also think this is part of what's so interesting about talking to someone like Mark Bray specifically and about his book specifically is that I think it would be much easier for us at this moment if he were making a less radical argument. If he were saying, oh, no, I decry all kinds of violence and violence is never acceptable. And he's not saying that. He's not really backing down from that. He's saying some speech is better than other speech.

1:01:15We have to stamp out some forms of fascist speech because they inherently lead to violence. and also when we use some forms of violence to stamp out fascist speech, that may be okay or at least legitimate or worth historical consideration. That's a much more challenging argument. Now, obviously, as we've said a million times, radical arguments are not things that you should be thrown out of the country for or that should be criminalized. But it makes it a little harder for us to end on a kumbaya note of like, let's all come together and agree there should be no more violence because radicals like this are often making the challenging point that, no, there's already violence baked into the status quo.

1:01:52There's already violence baked into the system, and I don't have to accept it. I will continue resisting it.

1:02:01Thank you so much, Andrew, as always.

1:02:07This has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggett. This episode was produced by John LeMay, with mixing by Mike Kutchman, and engineering by James Yost. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's head of Global Audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll be back next Wednesday.

1:02:41Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne Tha God, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. From PRX.