Hi, and welcome back to Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. There was a story over the weekend about the singer Macklmore saying fuck America at his show and the crowd cheering. Now, Macklmore is well known for trashing Israel and for dressing up in a Jewish costume complete with prosthetic nose. I think it's a very easy leap from jew hater, Israel hater to America hater. These things go hand in hand.
That's not what I want to talk about here. This is a man who has made riches beyond our wildest imaginations because of this country. He is among the absolute luckiest people in history because of his accident of birth. And he doesn't get it. He has no idea. Much is made of how kids don't learn civics and certainly don't have patriotism instilled in them at school. Of course
that's true. I had to push my kids Brooklyn Public School when they were little to say the Pledge of Allegiance despite it being state law to say it daily. They told me the school has a lot of immigrants and we're trying to cater to that. I informed them that both my husband and I are immigrants, and we came here to be American, not to be some side nationality that never quite adjusts and doesn't get to pledge
loyalty in this country. I think our decline in patriotism is by design, that we're pushed to pretend that we didn't all wake up on third base just by getting to be American, that America is not that great. Without getting too much into politics, Kamala Harris is trying to run a patriotic campaign because people do want that. Democrats get why this country is so great, but largely have to pretend otherwise to appease their leftist's flight. That's a problem.
Fixing it in schools only be a first step. Think about how many generations have already been through an American hating system. They've been just seeped in it. I'm not sure what to do about that. I always think a lot of important conversations start in the home. Anyway. Are you raising your kids to understand their sheer luck of being American? Are you telling them what makes this country the best country in history? Don't be embarrassed to say
that it's true, we have something special here. It's okay to say it out loud. We have to challenge the Macalmors of the world who have no problem saying their thoughts out loud. Thanks for listening. Launching tomorrow, I'm going to have a second podcast. This one is about politics, and I'll be co hosting it with my good friend Mary Catherine Ham. I'm still going to continue doing this show, which is, as you know, largely not about politics, but I needed a political outlet too, and MK and I
have very similar world views. We hope to be funny and to bring you perspectives you don't hear anywhere else. The show is called Normally. It will run on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton podcast network on iHeartRadio. It'll be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and just like this show, you can hear it anywhere you get your podcasts. You could subscribe starting today. We talk about balance a lot on this show. I think it's important to take breaks from politics, as I try to do with the Carol
Markowitz Show. But look, there's also a time to talk about important issues, the election, horse race, and so much more. We'll be doing that at the Normally podcast. Please go subscribe right now. Thank you so much. For listening, and I appreciate you all so much. Coming up next and interview with Noah Rothman. Join us after the break.
Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My guest today is Noah Rothman. Noah is a senior writer at National Review and the author of the excellent book The Rise of the New Puritans.
So nice to have you on, girl.
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
So who are the New Puritans?
Just out of curiosity, Well, the New Puritans as distinct from the old Puritans, both, by the way, the misconception of Puritanism as Victorianism, as sort of staid, blue nosed, condescending prudishness versus big p Puritans, you know, the sixteen hundred, seventeen hundreds mainline Protestant New England or Congregationalist New England. There's a lot of definitional.
Mix up here.
So the New Puritans, as I define them, are really an intellectual tradition that dates back to the old Puritanism, and its home is in progressivism. Properly understood. Progressivism arose from the ashes of the Puritan experiment in mainline New England and it was a moral crusade as as much as it was a public policy endeavor, and it had a moral element to quite quite a few of the
of the public policy preferences that this movement pursued. And it was typified by an idea that all of society's engines must be harnessed to all drive in the same direction. So there could not be anything that exists outside politics. Right, every every every facet of the social contract had to be reflective of this overarching moral desire familiar. So you couldn't have entertainment products that didn't, for example, serve a useful purpose. That everything had to have a utilitarian aspect
to it. Athletics had to have a martial dimension. You couldn't you couldn't have art for art's sake. You could have furniture makers or headstone designers, or people who were skilled at portraiture, because these were useful. You were leaving a record for posterity. Anything else was idle and illness
as a sin. And you see this throughout the modern progressive ethos, which and part of the book maintains that on the left, the sort of the licentiousness and libertinism that typified the sexual revolution, and that left leaning tradition was an aberration and a departure really from their otherwise moralistic framework when you start to see this moralistic framework arise in this progressive left. So the book breaks this down because there is a moral dimension to this is
not necessarily worth criticizing. The excesses of it are, but the remoralization of society, as Gertrude Himmelfarb would have called it, isn't necessarily something to look askance upon. So the chapters are organized in virtues, piety, prudence, austerity, temperance, harmony, and order of the fear of God. All these things are
good in their properly understood dimensions. It's when they become expanded to apply to every aspect of society, even innocuous stuff like the fashion you wear in the sports you watch in your hobb these decoration and knitting and fishing and gardening and all that stuff has become adulterated so that a particular cast of people can peel back the curtain and see the hideous hidden workings of the world that they, with their exclusive sense of propriety, can see,
but you can't. It's a very psychologically satisfying outlook, but it also leads you to madness. And this book identifies the madness and tries to identify ways in which you can mute the tendency that you, maybe as a progressive puritan yourself, feel to impose your moral framework on the world around you.
How did you get interested in this?
Like?
What was the spark?
So the origins of this book date back to early twenty twenty, and it was the height of the pandemic and I was just miserable. And so my job is consuming the headlines and trying to tease out, you know, thoughts and takes and what have you and publish them. We're in the same business, you know, And that was a really unsatisfying time to be doing that. So I'm sitting in the bath of my wife and we're just and I'm I'm commiserating because I'm miserable.
Are you sitting in the bath with your life bathtub?
Oh?
With your wife?
With my wife?
Okayy's it.
Trust me, It's not as sallacious as it sounds, because I'm just having a glass of wine and I'm miserable. And she's like, she asks me, I think you know what what would you do to make yourself happy and also drive some income in out of it so we can pay the mortgage.
It's like, well, you know, if I had my.
Brothers, I would spend a lot of my time talking to work in comics, professional stand ups, maybe screenwriters, and maybe people who make food for a living or talk about sports for a living. You know, stuff that is supposed to, you know, be outside the political arena. But no, no, no, no, you can't because nothing outside the political arena anymore. Everything is hyper politicized. Everything has a political dimension to it. So even that wouldn't be very fun. And she says, well,
that's that's the book, isn't it. Like you go out and you talk to all these all these people who you want to talk to and about the ways in which they're a political vocation has been politicized and why it's making them miserable too.
Ah, that's a good idea.
So the so I spent a lot of time talking to comics when I was researching the book. Many of them don't necessarily want to be named because they're contributing to a political product. But you know, I was talking to Nolan Dorman at the Comedy Seller, who plugged me into a lot of people, Shane Gillis, who was at the time on the Ropes and it was very dimished with his time. Yeah, very generous to me, and you know a variety of others, you know, chefs and screenwriters
and people in the business. But it was that was just the war on fund. The subtitle of the book is Fighting Back against Progressives, War on Fun, and so it was a litany of all the ways in which progressives are adulterating the things that you enjoy and making the political and sapping them of their enjoyment. It was my editor at HarperCollins, Eric Nelson, who helped identify the
intellectual tradition of Puritanism in the book. And the thing is, this is something my dad told me a long time ago that always stuck with me, is that when the universe gives you a good idea, you can assume that it's given it to fifty thousand other people and it's just a race to get it to market.
That is your job. Just get it to market as fast as possible.
And there was another book almost by the same title called The New Puritans published in the UK, I think about a month after.
I published my book You Real Happy.
Oh that's just thrilling. I haven't finished it all the way. It's a fine book, and we all touch on very similar subjects. The competition has a little more sour note to it, like this is, you know, all depressing and awful and things are going on in the wrong direction, and my book takes a slightly different approach. It's supposed to be fun, supposed to be supposed to be humorous, because that was the mood I was in. I was
the sentiment I was trying to channel for myself. This was all a very self indulgent effort to try to pick myself up out of the dulgrums of the pandemic and write about something fun and funny and make fun of these people because they are parodic.
It's funny.
So it struck a different tone and maybe didn't meet the moment in so far as people didn't really want to be happy, right, they were miserable like me and wanted to have their sense of fatalism confirmed. Perhaps. I mean that's something you and I think encounter very far.
Yes, So it's interesting. Dave Marcus, you know, also a writer. He and I disagree on lots and lots of things, but he once said this thing that I really agree with, that comedy kind of has to be outside of woke influence.
It's sort of one of the few air is that just really can't be that influenced by wokeness.
I mean they try, obviously, but you know, it's either we laugh or we don't.
So what do you think of that?
Yeah, there's another.
It dovetails with something that I once heard in I think the mid two thousands when I was working in and around comedy talk radio at the time, which is that funny and sexy can't coexist.
Really.
Yeah, like you, there's a self seriousness associated with the effort to seduce and seduction and pursuing a partner boldly, aggressively assertively that steals from you self deprecation and makes you a much more serious person. And serious isn't necessarily funny. In fact, it's generally not funny, not a stand up myself. When I write comedy, it's you know, it's for particular tastes.
So I can't say that I have an especially a finally at tuned sense of what constitutes universally you know, universally accepted humor or something that actually appeals to a mass market when it comes to humor.
But Dave's observation sounds sounds right to me.
There's an element to wokeism, and we would probably have to define our terms, but let's just assume you.
All know I feel like that.
Yeah, yeah, there's an element of that that is very severe, very harsh, and its members fancy themselves particularly moral, righteous, upstanding people, especially in contrast to the world around them, the society around them, which just does not. And this is a very puritanical outlook too big p puritan like original Puritans, is that the mark of a morally virtuous person is someone who devotes themselves holy to addressing the
ills of the world around them. If you're spending any waking moment not thinking about the ways in which other people are suffering and what you can do to alleviate that suffering, which is again in the abstract and noble philosophy, then you're indulging in a sinful almost a distance from the world around you. You've you've isolated yourself, and you've removed yourself from the existence that you should be as a as a virtuous person working to improve.
Sounds very communist.
Actually like you should be thinking about the party at all times, and how you can support the party and improve the party and spread the gospel of the party.
And everything exists within an inside inside of party politics and nothing outside of it, because anything outside of it is uncontrolled and wild and natural, and that's dangerous. And one of the chapters in the book is about comedy. It's about stand up comedy and food. There's two things you wouldn't think would go together, save for the fact that you need you need people to buy a meal and two drinks to get out.
Of the club.
But the the tethering element is that these two conditions, too to to two vocations evoke in you natural reactions that are not intellectual exercises. Right when the laugh escapes your gut, right exactly when you enjoy a meal that has been culturally appropriated from natural indigenous peoples of x y z I love you just enjoyed that meal you have, you'll release a sigh of relief because you liked it,
not because it's an intellectual exercise. In fact, the intellect has to intervene after you laugh, after you sigh, to say, oh maybe.
I maybe maybe I shouldn't have right.
And that's so, and that's why it's threatening to a particular sort of totalitarian not authoritarian totalitarian. Interesting that you know that that sort of uh, your body betrays you in those moments, and that's threatening if you intend to control people's conduct, behavior, outlook, and even what they think. Yeah, because that is that is nature intervening, right, and you.
Can't do anything about that. Yeah. So what do you worry about societally?
Like, what do you think is our largest cultural problem?
Yes?
So I've done a fair amount of thinking on this, and it's hard to narrow down, but I would say, if I had to identify one, if not the largest, but this is the largest social societal problem cultural problem, I would settle on the increase in cultural cachet that
we attribute to persecution complexes. It is and conservatives properly understood the right from the intellectual tradition from which I hail, which has been under some renovation in recent years, is the victimization has a has currency to it, and it's a sort of way in which you can paper over your individual deficiencies and prop yourself up on the backs of those who have genuinely suffered or endured something resembling persecutorial conduct that gets you over the hump, that advances
your career objectives, your interpersonal objectives, and it creates a popular front mentality or at least incentivizees ones which and that.
So you if you all have this persecution complex, and you can paper over the problems that you as an individual have because you can lay claim to some sort of persecution narrative, then you compel somebody who would otherwise engage in basic social hygiene to subordinate that impulse, to say, Okay, well, I guess you're part of the team too, because you've got that same persecution story, and we can contribute to that persecution story by shunning you or criticizing you or
correcting you. All these things steal agency both from the individual who suffers from this outlook and from the people around them who believe they have to genuflect before it and declear fealty to it. If no one is responsible for their own lots in life, then a lot of people who have made very poor decisions, who are reckless or irresponsible to created circumstances. Yeah for themselves and others. They're they're sympathetic. Now they're not they're not the authors
of their own lots in life. Things have been done to them by omniscient, unseen forces we can't even really define, but you know they're out there and they're working to steal.
That which is your due.
It's a it's superficially empowering. People feel empowered by this outlook, but it is debilitating, robs you of your capacity to mold your environment, to navigate your environment.
It's a sort of control of your destiny, really, the control of your destiny.
Absolutely, it's available. It's obvious across the political spectrum on the left. I think intersectionality has has done a lot of the leg work here because it's that intersectionality, which is just this as a thought experiment, is not actually wholly invalid, just to define the terms it. Essentially, it's an academic theory posited by Kimberly Crenshaw Williams, which posits that everybody experiences different prejudices in their life, so those
prejudices intersect and overlap if you are multiple things. So if you're a gay black woman, you will experience more prejudice in your life than a gay black man, because women experience more prejudice than men, et cetera. So it's just something that makes you think in stereotypes, so that ostensibly you can navigate those stereotypes. But in the end of that, at the end, if you're just thinking in stereotypes,
you're still a bigot. You're you're just doing it for what you believe to be noble services, which, by the way, all bigots.
Believe that, of course they do.
Yeah, and there's never been a bigot who thinks that they are bad.
Right, They're always trying to do good, they're always trying to help.
Yeah, but this is just layering a superficial academic gloss over whether it's basically ancient tribal instincts, tribal impulses.
And you see that there is.
Something similar on the Trump right, the pro Trump right, where Donald Trump who has argued that he is not a conservative, that the Republican Party is not a conservative
party straightforward in those terms I'm not even paraphrasing. Yeah, he has replaced that philosophy, a limited government philosophy which emphasizes individual agency and individual responsibility both for your circumstances and those around you, and replaced it with something of resembling a persecution complex that all these things are being done to us. There are all these forces around us that we can't really define, but you know they're there
and they need to be crushed. There needs to be some sort of vengeance, after which we will ascend to the sunlit uplands of a world in which we can finally resume control over our lives. But you'll never get there. You'll never get to that place. You've already sacrificed the agency you need.
To get there.
We're going to take a quick break and be right back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Is this solvable on either the right or the left.
Yeah, it's a new innovation relatively. I mean, it's the thing is that it's an intellectual exercise. Liberalism, classical liberalism, is an intellectual exercise. It's the you know, it's it's an effort that we engage in to subordinate what these tribal instincts in order to pursue a more galitarian social compact.
And if you're beholden to the egalitarian social compact, most postliberals, which are really preliberals, do not don't necessarily believe in universal egalitarianism, and they have they have their own problems with it. But if you do, if you do subscribe to that ideal as an ideal, then yeah, you've got
to do a lot of thinking around it. There is a robust enterprise on both sides of the aisle dedicated to giving you license to not do that intellectual exercise, to not engage in that it is a fruitless pursuit, a flawed pursuit, something that is the sort of thing that only point the eggheads would really care about, and look at the circumstances that we're in, and all these
people have delivered us to this wholly undesirable place. It is also something we're going to talk more about this because this is very There's a lot of incentives towards this line of thinking on social media, which is itself a tribal enterprise of course, but if you commit yourself to that line of thinking, you know you also risk divorcing yourself from the rest of American civilization that does not believe we have entered into the worst place we
have ever been in. People who are responding to polls are very likely to say, I'm upset with my circumstances. I'm upset with the economy. I think the country is on the wrong track. These are close to universal propositions at this point. But if you were to say, as people who get really deep into this philosophy do the post liberal philosophy do, that we are in some of the worst, most unenviable circumstances that any generation before us
has ever experienced. And you say that with a straight face, you are making a mockery of yourself.
Right.
Of course, you were demonstrating that you have no historical reference, no historical memory.
Yeah, I think the.
Times might have been worse before.
No, I mean, like I've had this argument with my parents who lived through nineteen sixty eight, were in were twenty or nineteen at the time, and this was these
sixty eight seventy seventy one. I mean, we're talking about shockingly high crime rates, riots that erupted in every major urban center in the country, a campaign of assassination that was taking out American leaders left and right, a bombing campaign, a domestic bombing campaign in which explosives were going off in private homes, maiming and killing people.
On a weekly basis. I wasn't there. I only read about it.
Yeah, But to.
Say that that circumstance compares unfavorably with our own today. Right seems to me kind of crazy, but it is, And I don't I put my folks on the line here, but there's everywhere not.
To agree completely with the Rothmans. But you know, my thing about that is, yes, times were worse, but for example crime, we got things to a much better place, and then we threw away everything that helped us get there. We decided that all the policies that fixed a place like you know, my beloved New York City were no longer needed. And so while I totally get that, we're obviously in a much better place than nineteen sixty eight, and you know, crime rates for example, and all the
different cities are lower than they were then. We got them far lower than they are now, and now we have to battle our way back to that. So it's not that it's worse. It's clearly not worse. But it concerns me in a different way because I don't think you had to talk anybody into believing crime was real in nineteen sixty eight, and now it's like acceptance is the first step and we haven't gotten there.
That is, I would totally subscribe to all that, and I would probably pause it that there is a deliberate, politically motivated unlearning of history's lessons that has contributed to
a lot of those factors. The way that let's just talk about crime briefly, the way that people talk about how to deliver American cities from the unrest that they're currently experiencing is as though it all needs to happen at once, and it all needs to happen from the top down, right, as though we just we elect the right mayor, we let the revity council, and everything changes, and it is not how it happened in New York
City exactly. Your city was a ground up thing. I mean the first of all, a lot of it is attributable to these neighborhood associations, which block by block associations. Times Square was the last thing to be affected by this process. You know, the idea here that we could clean up the streets by dealing with quality of life crimes, as represented, for example, by the existence of smut shops.
You know, that was first tried under the Queensboro Bridge and successfully before it migrated to the rest of the city. The broken windows theory promulgated by, among others, James Q. Wilson in the Manhattan Institute. Was an idea before it was adopted, before it was you know, came up from the bottom up. What we're contending with now are the fruits of ideas that have spent many years incubating in far left right campuses and intellectual salons.
Yeah, don't prosecute crime, you know, it's just it's an idea that has now become implemented.
And was popular in the nineteen sixties when we're talking about root causes and poverty, for example, as being the primary indicator of future criminality, which is utterly false and has been proven false. But it was a fashionable idea at the time. But that spent, you know, a decade and a half percolating before it doubled up to the surface and became public policy. We're talking now about ideas that were incubated in the late eighties, early nineties, implemented
in two thousands, and are coming to fruition today. These are decades long processes. If you want to get in the ground and do the work and you know, make create consensuses on the ground that can be that are replicable and that can be duplicated and put and implement
it at scale. It begins small begins small scale. It's not the sort of and it does begin with talking about it as we've been talking about it, grand ideas and grand visions, but the actual nitty gritty of implementation and creating consensuses across political coalitions to implement this sort of thing for the general good. That's a that's a laborious process and it's not why you can.
Try how quickly they undid it. Yes, you're absolutely it is a long process. But like, wow, it got undid, you know, in four years.
I mean just because it exploded really into twenty and with this fashionable moral panic in the George Floyd are around the notion that police were just slaughtering African Americans on it on the daily basis. I just weren't seeing it. That was the sort of thing that I mean, you can only call it a moral panic, it was, But it lit a fire under what were underlying ideas that had been attractive to a particular type of left wing
social reformer for a very long time. They had the plans ready to go in the drawer, It just needed the space to implement them, which is, you know, that's something I actually lived by because it's a story about Robert Moses was this New York City, a very powerful person in New York City, was responsible for love of the infrastructure there. But the story about him is that
he always had the plans ready to go. He had the legislation written, he had the plan to generate more revenue for his agency, and the construction plans.
It was all laid out.
Only needed was the political space to implement them. That's what conservative right needs to have is a framework, intellectual framework, and the really detailed policy paper to implement these philosophies when they're ready to go. And part of the reason why Democrats are doing so much to demonize project, which is like nine out of ten pages of that gigantic
document are really anodyne. They're basic accepted conservative policy preferences, and sometimes the way they talk about them is rather comical. Democrats talk about them, it's rather comical, like, oh, my gosh, Trump wants to subordinate all executive agencies to the president?
Yes, can you even imagine?
But but you know, it's it's a controversial stuff around social doctrine that really generates traction with demo cratic voters. But a lot of the stuff in there that seems kind of silly to us, I think probably sounds pretty silly to most other people, like the idea that the president should be responsible for his own executive agencies.
Of course, right, So, Noah, you come up with book ideas in the bathtub with your wife. You have a very nice perch at National Review, where you can write about, you know, most things that interest you.
Do you feel like you've made it?
So sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. The times I do are predicated on again, kind of in intellectualization of my circumstances. Because I have the family that I always wanted. That's nice, that is n the house and the community that I've always wanted. I really don't even plan on moving. Like my material circumstances are great, and I am satisfied. I have the career that I always wanted,
like my I'm fulfilled in that sense, but not professionally. Professionally, I don't feel like I've I've done everything that I want to achieve, and that would be kind of awful.
If you did, then what else we'd all be?
Like chilling on islands?
Yeah, right, No, I have some ambition. I don't think I've written enough books. I don't think I get on camera enough. I get down and depressed when the pieces that I write don't get the engagement or the shares I think they deserve.
This is genius. Why don't you all see this?
You know?
And and when the feedback you know that you get as is negative, which is very frequently, you know, sometimes it can be a bit of a downer. So do I feel like you know I've I've I've hit all my marks in life?
No?
All right, well there's a lot more.
Watch to see where you go next and what the.
Next, but there's a lot that will be I mean, but those two things are in conflict, right. I'm not sure how you navigate that or if you experience that, but if your material circumstances are pretty well set, you risk losing ambition.
Right.
I don't feel any particular age urgency to write another book. I'd like to write another book about something that needs to be written, not just to write another book. Right, So looking around for whatever that overarching topic is that doesn't can't just be truncated down into an essay and would be better as an essay, and just you know, the lack of material urgency there does limit my you know, desire to pull this.
Out of the universe.
Like I'm looking, I'm not scouring the landscape for something because I so desperately need, you know, to get an advance.
Right, absolutely, I mean I don't know. I'm a year plus past my first book, and I still say it will be the only book. I have no interest in ever doing that ever. Again, I don't know how we'll do it. Oh no, I don't know.
I don't know. I just found it really hard.
And it was hard. You didn't think it was rewarding.
Rewarding, Yeah, I mean I it was rewarding.
I don't know.
I stayed on book tour a long long time, which everybody you know says is a great positive, But I just didn't love all of that.
Yeah, it's tough, and I love meeting the way. Yeah, selling is not great.
But you know, negotiating how many books are you going to speak for?
And all of that.
But I love meeting people. I love having conversations with strangers. I'm all about that.
But you know, I do feel like I've made it and I want to be home with my family, enjoying the you know.
The things that I consider having.
That's me too, and that's just poison.
Anytime somebody asked me to get on a plane, really, is it worth it?
Is it necessary?
Now?
I'd rather be hanging out in my basement.
That's it. That's that's really what it's all about.
So well, Noah, thank you so much for coming on and here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve their lives.
So this is kind of tails with what we've been talking about previously, but really best for you to limit your social media intake to including getting rid of all your accounts if you don't need them. I have a Twitter account and need it for work. I don't have any other account, and I make a scrupulous effort to log the hell off really on the weekends and even
at night. Sometimes I have to be on that at night because I have no idea what I'm writing about in the morning, and I just need some sort of inspiration. But if you can hack it, limit your social media exposure as much as possible. That's not just that you're absorbing all this the toxicity that this environment insensivizes, but it creates an incentive structure for you to be a liar.
You lie to your audience if you want to get the kind of food pellet to drop down and give you the reward structure that you get from engagement, positive engagement, not negative engifts. So a lot of people get jazzed by negative engagement too, but those people have other psychologic.
Right have problem.
But if you start developing a brand for yourself, who it's the worst possible thing you could do a temptation to say things to maintain the brand you're you will be confronted with the temptation to say things you don't believe or not say things you do believe. Just by virtue of the you'll be committing sins of omission and commission, and you'll be therefore inauthentic. Your brand, such as it is, will not be worth very much because it's not real.
It's just it's and risking. The backlash on social media feels very real because there's you know, hundreds, if not thousands of people telling you thought, yeah, I mean, that's psychologically taxing, it's unrewarding, it's uncomfortable. Anybody would want to avoid that circumstance and get the funds part, the fun part being, you know, the engagement, the positive feedback, the reinforcement, the sense of community that develops around that. It's all fictional,
none of it's real. And if you can get out of that environment for a sustained peereriod of time a weekend for example, yeah, you get to reconnect to what is real and how and restore a sense of perspective on what these forums actually are.
So my suggestion is to log off as much as possible.
I like that he is Noah Rothman. He is a senior writer at National Review. Check him out there and pick up his book, The Rise of the New Puritans. Thank you so much for coming on, Noah.
Thank you, Kerl, thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marco which show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.