Dr. Spencer Case and Henry Olsen on the Future of Progressivism
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Welcome to Broken Potholes. I'm your host, Sam Stone, with my co-host, Chuck Warren, in the studio with us today, as always, the irrepressible Kylie Kipper. And on the line, a guest I'm very excited to talk to, Spencer Case, for those of you who don't know him. This guy is the opposite of a musty, dusty, library-bound scholar in philosophy, and yet he is an astounding mind. A bit about his background here.

Born in Portland, Oregon, spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve, has done two deployments to Iraq with the 207th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment and to Afghanistan with the 304th Public Affairs Detachment.

traveled all over the world and has some very, very interesting things to say, very courageous things in this environment about what is going on in our country, about the push to create a ideological orthodoxy. And I'm very excited to welcome our guest, Spencer Case. Thank you for having me. Spencer, pleasure to have you on the show today.

You've been talking and, frankly, taking some risks on social media that perhaps a lot of other people are afraid to, given our current environment, which, frankly, is starting to bear a lot of resemblance to the witch hunts of a few hundred years past. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've been talking about, some of those issues that you're seeing come up that are really a pretty dramatic change in the nature of our country and our interactions? Right.

Well, one of the things that troubles me is the injection of politics into everything. Like, we have no way of escaping from it, and people are losing the sense that there are institutions that have non-political objectives to fulfill. And not only that, it's not clear that the kinds of things we're arguing about could be settled. It's not as if you could imagine

like the woke types, some piece of legislation gets passed and we're not a white supremacy anymore or something like that. It's like the trajectory is just to keep intensifying the trends we're already on. And it's a little alarming. It's a little alarming. So that was the theme of my talk.

partly the theme of my most recent piece in Arc Digital that you contacted me about. You know, when I read that piece, Spencer, I really saw a lot of parallels to a trip I took in 1986, actually, to the Soviet Union. Because when you talk to the people who were there for a couple of weeks, we got to tour around, meet a lot of folks.

When you got to talk to them, when you got past the shell of fear, quite frankly, that they were, you know, in talking to us, worried about stepping over a line and having the government come down on them. It was that inconsistency that scared them the most. The rules kept changing, and that is what the left and the sort of woke movement are doing right now. And it's really tough for people to be comfortable in their place, to be confident, to

if they don't know what the rules are from day to day and you're constantly walking on eggshells. Yeah, I think there's something to that. And I think there's a kind of response to concerns about cancel culture I hear that I'm sure you've heard as well, which is that, oh, well, people being canceled, that's just other people expressing their First Amendment rights.

But I think what's cheap about that is freedom of speech is more than just First Amendment rights. There's the need for a culture of free speech and open inquiry, and that can be compromised without any legal incursions into our legal right of free speech. And even in authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, where there are

legal restrictions from saying certain things. It's not enforced purely through the government, purely through secret police. It's enforced through your neighbor and social norms. And so you could have a highly repressive society where the state isn't involved at all. And it's just people policing each other, quote unquote, through other mechanisms. And it would still be very, very repressive. Dr. Case, this is Chuck Warren.

To that point, you make an interesting point. How much has social media played a factor in this now? I mean, you notice things that all of a sudden there's a logo or there's a symbol and every Tom, Dick and Harry or Barbara and Jane feel like, well, I need to post this to show I am against racism or I'm against racism.

Baby seals dying. I mean, it seems like this is almost the point you're making that if you don't post something like that, there are some people feel like, well, me not posting anything shows that I don't care about baby seals. Right. Do you find that to be a factor that's encouraging this even more now?

I have a hard time assessing how much of this is due to social media. It's clearly playing a role, but I think it's overstated is my sense. I think it accelerates the trends we're already on, but I don't think that like the whole wokeness problem was caused by social media. I think that if you just go back and read some of the culture war books of the eighties and nineties, and you'll see that some of this stuff was already brewing.

Like, read Glenn Lowry's 1993 or 94 essay on political correctness, where he describes an environment in academia where people are afraid to speak about the apartheid government in South Africa and efforts to resist it in anything other than very narrow doctrinaire terms, like if you were opposed to sanctions.

against the regime there, people would assume, well, you're really a supporter and that kind of thing, even if you thought that sanctions weren't actually undermining the regime. So you go back and look at the culture wars of the 80s and 90s, and there's a lot there to make you think that we were already headed in this direction and could very well be here without social media. At the same time, there's certain sorts of spectacles that it is hard to imagine without

social media. I mean, the kind of mobbing that you have on Twitter, like the YA, the young adult fiction is some of the most nasty, nasty cancel culture out there. It's really hard to see

that kind of thing happening in a world without social media. But as far as just the general politicization of our institutions, I think we were headed for that, is my sense. Dr. Kazak. You're with Broken. Go ahead, Sam. I'm sorry. I fully agree with that. I think you look at where this has come from academia, and these norms were being enforced in many universities and colleges for a long time. They were being enforced within certain political circles, and

I think social media has broken them out into the broader society. I noticed maybe six years ago now, if you have a bad experience with a company and you write them a letter, you make a phone call, whatever it is, they'll completely ignore it. You put up a tweet, all of a sudden you have the deputy head of corporate compliance calling you desperate to find a way to solve your problem. I think there is a...

serious scare that has translated from social media to the corporate world that ties all this stuff together. That could be. That could be. Dr. Case, let me ask you this. How does one decide to become a PhD in philosophy?

focusing on the issues you focused on? Is it based upon your experience in the military? Through your travels? Is it something that's always interested you? What brings you to do this and then take on a topic like this? I think I took the philosophy like a fish to the sea, basically. I always was asking really critical questions. If you want to hear my prehistory or my backstory, please read the article,

bearing witness about leaving the Mormon Church. I was the only one in my family to do it. My reasons had to do with just not feeling that I had the kind of intellectual justification that I thought was required. So I had sort of been of my own mind before I knew what philosophy even was.

And then, you know, I learned about philosophy doing debate in high school, started studying it when I was in college. And there was a point when I was speaking with my undergraduate mentor, Jim Skidmore, where he's like, yep, you've got the bug. You've got the bug. You're going to stick with this. And I did.

- How has it been, just so we may hear Sam, how has it been being in Wuhan during the current COVID pandemic the world's experiencing? - Oh, well, I was there at the beginning. I had an article in National Review about experiencing the evacuation. So I was there when it first started and it was really spooky. I mean, now you're used to seeing people wear the surgical masks, but when you have a week

like a one week period where at the beginning of the week, like you're starting to see a few people wear them. And then at the end of the week, everybody's wearing one. You're like, wow, what is going on here? And then, and then you wake up and you hear that the city is on lockdown and you can't leave your house. That was terrifying. I mean, that was really spooky. Yeah, that was spooky. So I was evacuated to the U S and I,

Had to be quarantined there. I wanted to return to Wuhan because my girlfriend is here and I eventually did make it back back in November. Had to be quarantined again at a Hampton Hilton. I'm never going to stay in one of those places ever again. I've seen all the Hampton Hilton that I ever want to see, you know, for the rest of my life. They wouldn't let me leave my hotel room for two weeks.

If they're going to stick in a hotel room for two weeks, it at least ought to be a one with a good mattress. That is terrible. I don't have any complaints about the mattress. The room was small. Dr. Casey, you wrote a piece, You Have the Right to Remain Politically Silent on ARC Digital Media. I thought this was a really good piece because

It's talking quite a bit about how people are being forced into the speech like we were talking earlier, and it's becoming a corporate test. And we have just a minute here before we go to break. But when we come back, I wanted you to talk a little bit about how that pressure is playing out in society and with all these corporations.

And what the effect is if we start conscripting people into political speech, because I think that's critical. And also, I do want to touch on the piece you wrote for Medium. Do the oppressed really know best? Because that's, I think, really critical to some of the debates that are raging in our inner cities today. So really want to dig a little bit into those broken potholes. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Broken Potholes. This is Chuck Bourne with my co-host Sam Stone. Today with us we have Dr. Spencer Case. We are discussing a great article he wrote called You Have the Right to Remain Silent. Stop Compelling Political Speech. Dr. Case, you made an interesting lining here which really struck me. You said one objection I'll surely hear is that there's no such thing as political neutrality.

So-called neutrality is really an endorsement of the status quo. I find that really interesting. I came across a poll done by the New York Times a couple of years ago where 80% of voters don't even pay attention to politics. But now we're expecting everybody to have an opinion on everything. Could you expand upon that a little bit more? Well, people aren't expecting everyone. They're expecting everyone to have a opinion about everything. One opinion, right. Theirs, yes. Yeah, so...

There's this idea that political neutrality is a myth and you can't have, there's no such thing as objective journalism because you can't, you know, be new. There's no neutrality on a moving train is one of the ways it's put. And what that tends to do is to excuse any kind of bias, excuse any kind of changing of the standards based on whether, say, the politician being evaluated by the journalist is

on the right side or not. The problem I see with that reasoning, as I say in the article, is that it relies on an equivocation. So there's a sense in which it's true. Everything is somewhat political. Everything has some bearing on political ends that we do in society. I think that's right. But some things are more political than others, right? Like I think voter registration drives are more political than bowling

club meetups. It's one example that I give. So some things are more political than others. And so corporations, universities, various other things I can name, they can become more political. And this can be a bad thing. I think it is a bad thing in part because the more institutions are explicitly created or directed toward

political ends, the less we have any kind of space to step back and think about it and decide what it is we want to say about these things. There's no space for us to do that. Dr. One other point I guess I would ask if you see in this is that where did we get to the point or how did we get to the point where the status quo is considered so awful? I mean, frankly, I think if you look around and you take the politics out of it,

And probably right now you have to kind of erase a lot of the last year. But in the last few years, this is not a bad country to live in. This is not a bad place to live in. The economy has been good. People have been improving their lives. Even the lowest income earners have been making big gains. There's lots of things to be happy with in the status quo. Why is it

that we all are now being conscripted to fight that status quo, which frankly, most people seem pretty happy with. It's a good question. It's a good question. And I've wondered this a lot. I mean, there's all of this progress against racism that we've seen over the last hundred years. And people are ready to say, you know, down with the system, you know, we're rotten to the core. I mean, we're seeing like with the reaction to Tim Scott,

that like, just say that, yes, there are some racist people in this country and yes, there are some problems. That just gets you scorned if you don't add, we are, you know, racist to the core. I mean, it's kind of perverse, I think. Partly, I think as a society gets closer to its own achieving its goals, the more unbearable the remaining flaws seem to be to people. And I think that's partly true.

the explanation. I think part of the explanation is that the left has sort of consolidated their, their notion of identity around, like personally around opposing racism. And so if your whole identity is opposing racism, you want to see it to oppose, you know, you want to be

the one who brings it down or something. I think there's an element of that in the psychology here, but I agree there is something perverse about it. We're with Dr. Spencer Case, author of the recent article, "You Have the Right to Remain Politically Silent." He is joining us from Wuhan, China. You mentioned in your article about a professor friend or colleague who was being asked to sign a petition.

Could you share that story a little bit? And is that something that you feel there's a lot of other people in the academic community that feel the same way he does, but yet they feel like, well, if I don't sign in, I'm obviously opposed to whatever the topic may be?

I don't know how often it happens and I don't want to speculate. I don't think it's a rare occurrence, a terribly rare occurrence. I already heard from another friend, I asked her to draft like, oh yeah, something similar had happened to me. And so I imagine if I went out and asked other people, I'd get more examples. But yeah, so he's asked to sign this petition

in support of anti-racist pedagogy. He's tenured, so he says, no, I don't want to do it and doesn't sign it because he knows that, well, the anti-racist pedagogy he thinks is actually racist in a normal understanding of racism. But a junior colleague did sign it and he thinks the reason is that he was afraid to reveal what his real opinion was.

And so this is the bind that you're in is that if you sign it, you've revealed your views. And if you don't sign it, you've also revealed your views because there's a default expectation that you're going to signal the expected message, which means that anything you do is going to signal what your views are. So you don't have the ability to remain silent. Even if you say nothing, you've said something.

You know, I was reading a case of another professor who ran into the same sort of thing. They were having or at some point a discussion came up surrounding his class and in sort of this new anti-racism pedagogy. And the demand that was being made of him was that he adjust grades for minority students to give them higher grades than they had necessarily earned to overcome the stigma of racism.

And he made the comment kind of offhand that in his 20 plus years of experience, there were exactly and only two things that really determined success in his class. That's how often they came to the lecture and how much of the syllabus they completed. And his take was that, you know, anyone who had made that commitment had done very well and anyone who didn't hadn't. And I mean, luckily for him, just as with the example you cited, he had tenure.

But he was hounded throughout his university by numerous student groups, by faculty, by the administration over it. And how do we take that philosophy and get it out of these institutions, I guess, is kind of the important question going forward. I'm beginning to be of the mind that we should try to consider creating alternative institutions. I don't think we can reclaim them.

It's my pessimistic but honest opinion, you know. And one a lot of people are coming to. Dr. Case, thank you so much for joining us on Broken Potholes. We have to head to a break here in just a moment. And when we come back, we're going to have Henry Olson from The Washington Post. Broken Potholes coming right back. It's the new year and time for the new you. You've thought about running for political office but don't know where to start.

Before you start any planning, you need to secure your name online with a yourname.vote web domain. This means your constituents will know they are learning about the real you when they surf the web. Secure your domain from GoDaddy.com today.

Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. Just finished a fantastic interview. If you didn't catch the first part of the show, be sure to go back and do that. Dr. Spencer Case from Wuhan, China. Very, very insightful comments there. But now someone I'm particularly excited to talk to today, Henry Olson, who is a columnist and senior fellow, columnist for the Washington Post, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and

And, Henry, you have two pieces out that I think we really, really want to touch on today. The first one was the 2020 census is bad news for progressives. I think there's actually some pretty bad news or some sort of embarrassing news for for some Republicans in there. And another piece that you just put out, Republicans are right to oppose Biden's bloated spending plans, but they need their own blueprint. And can before we get any further, can I say amen to that?

Where are the ideas? So, Chuck, I know you wanted to get in on this, but when it comes to the census, what we just saw, I think, was maybe one of the worst census efforts in history. Some states like Arizona, you know, to say that Arizona went somehow and lost 300,000 people in the last decade belies every bit of experience of every person who lives here and is driven in our traffic. That's just nonsensical. And yet that's what that shows. But...

If you're a conservative, there's some good news in the electoral map that's coming out of this. And if you're a progressive, maybe not so good news. Henry, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sure. I mean, even though the changes were below expectations, that is recently as last year, it was expected that many more states would gain seats, including Arizona, and many more seats would shift. In the end, what happened was seven seats shifted, and it was a net shift of three seats from Biden's state to Trump's state. So on the margin, that means that

The Republican nominee is likelier to start with three additional electoral college votes. As we know, in a 50-50 race, that could be all that matters as far as who goes to the White House. And it affects Congress pretty dramatically, too, because right now there is only a six vote margin, right?

That's right. And there are estimates. Of course, redistricting will prove to be more important than reapportionment. But the expectation is that because seats are shifting to states where Republicans draw the line and they are shifting away from states where Democrats or commissions draw the line, that Republicans will gain two to four seats simply from reapportionment. And that's almost enough to...

you get them into the majority status regardless of what happens in the election next year.

I think you bring up a really good point about redistricting, because, for instance, here in Arizona, last time around, you frankly had the we use an independent redistricting commission to Republicans, to Democrats and independent. The key is who controls the independent. I mean, realistically, last time the independent was a longtime Democrat operative who was registered as an independent. This time it's someone who appears to lean right. So that may have a pretty dramatic effect for people here in Arizona.

And in other states with Republicans in control or Democrats in control, those seats are going to be shifted. I've heard talk about New York Democrats trying to figure out how to get rid of one of the few remaining New York congressional Republicans this way. So...

I think that's a critical thing that's coming up that not many people are paying attention to, are they? The political geek universe of which I'm a card-carrying member is following it rather closely. But as you mentioned, Arizona is a perfect example of that, that you had Arizona as a

could elect five or six Republicans if it got a Republican-leaning map and could have a strong 5-4 Democratic map if it were their Democratic gerrymander. If you have a slight Republican lean in your state's map, you should expect one to two extra Republicans to come, even if the votes don't change from what they were in 2020.

And that could change things dramatically for this upcoming election. Obviously, if Democrats lose the House in 2022, it pretty much puts Biden's agenda on ice until at least 2024, right?

Well, Biden will do what presidents increasingly try to do, which is govern through executive order, which means all these things get challenged in the courts, which means that the Democrats will have backing the Supreme Court as an issue. But as a practical matter, you can't get

anything long-ranging or transformative done in this country without consent of both chambers of Congress. And that means if Democrats lose the House, they can make changes at the edges, but they can't transform the country. - Dr. Olson, Chuck Warren, how are you doing? - I'm doing great. How about you, Chuck? - I'm doing good, my friend.

Do you think Republicans bear bear some of the burden? And we can do this back from the break. But do you think they bear some of the burden for them not picking up more seats in Arizona, Texas and Florida because they didn't push it because that may have repressed some votes? Great question. And we're going to get the duck. We're going to get Henry's answer right when we come back. Broken potholes coming back.

The 2020 political field was intense, so don't get left behind in 2021. If you're running for political office, the first thing on your to-do list needs to be securing your name on the web with a yourname.vote domain from GoDaddy. Get yours now.

Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. On the line with us right now, Henry Olson of the Washington Post. Henry, when we went to break, we were talking a little bit about the census and the effect it's going to have. The fact that, frankly, there were not as many seats that transferred as people thought. And looking at it, one of the things Chuck and I have talked about is that Democrat states took it very seriously. They put resources behind it.

Republicans didn't. So here in Arizona, the state didn't put any real resources behind it. In California and Minnesota and New York, they did. That made a difference. The other one is that it appears to undercount Hispanics, quite possibly due to Trump's attempts, at least, to not have it count non-citizens. And a lot of folks just wanting to stay under the radar then. How big were those effects and

How big is that going to be going forward politically for, you know, for Joe Biden, for the White House and for Republicans in Congress?

It's certainly true that Democrats and progressives, they've always feared undercounts in minority communities. And so in the last few censuses, they put resources into trying to get those voters and those residents, whether or not citizens, but are here legally to respond. They contend that that's something that helps voters.

increase those areas' ability to receive larger amounts of federal money. Republicans almost never do that. So to the extent that Republicans didn't do that and Democrats in red states didn't have the opportunity to do that, that could very well have led to an undercount of minorities, particularly Latinos in Texas and in Arizona, which would have cost Republicans the chance for two more congressional seats.

With the House so finely balanced, those two seats could very well be the difference between Democrat or Republican control. It tells you how important these things are, even when most people aren't paying attention to them. I want to touch on something else. You wrote a recent column. Another thing that, frankly, I don't think a lot of people are paying attention to is what's going on with some of these spending plans the Biden administration has put out.

You wrote a piece, Republicans are right to oppose Biden's bloated spending plans, but they need their own blueprint. This touches on something Chuck and I have talked about numerous times over the years, that Republicans are really good at opposing things and really bad at coming up with ideas and plans and moving them forward. The last time they did, the compact with America was incredibly successful.

What do you see going on with this? Is there a chance that Republicans will start pulling something together? Actually have an idea.

There are many individual Republican members who are doing this. The question is whether it will be an individual effort or whether it will become a conference or caucus effort. People like Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley are all proposing various ideas of what to do, and many of them have been introduced in the last Congress and, had they been passed, would have changed.

taken the steam out of a Biden proposal. Family Lee being an excellent example where

Rubio and Lee and Ernst all had bills to do a smaller, more targeted plan that met the need. And because that wasn't enacted, Biden has declaimed the moral legitimacy to argue for a one-size-fits-all government program that will create a new entitlement. So I think Republicans need to decide, is big government here to stay in some fashion? And there's still

a large part of Republicans that are conflicted about that. They say no in theory, but yes in practice. And that means they're powerless.

to engage in counter-messaging and counter-programming that would result in a smaller government than would happen if Democrats get controlled. You can see the wages of that sin, so to speak, in what the Democrats are pushing. Almost everything they're pushing could have had a smaller, more targeted program pushed by Republicans when they controlled Congress.

to take away the need, but that wasn't done. The Democrats have the more legitimacy to push for $4 trillion in spending over 10 years.

- Henry, Sam, just let me ask a question here. Henry, let me ask you this question here. If you were in charge of the RNC for the day, you have pushed that the Republican Party needs to become a working person party. What are the three things that the Republican Party should be pushing in communicating with voters that keeps them the working party, but keeps some sense of sanity about government growth and spending?

What they need to be doing is a revamp of the safety net that targets aid to people who need it and removes it from people who don't. As an example, Social Security is going to go through a financial crisis at the end of the decade. What is the Republican response? The Republican response needs to be to channel the aid to the people who have relied on it. Why?

while not channeling additional benefits to people with millions of dollars in their 401ks who, frankly, don't need the Social Security. That can be applied to every entitlement program and will both save the entitlement programs and do so at a much lower cost to the Democrats. Secondly, they need to be talking about the dignity of work and the dignity of communities.

The dignity of work means that we need to be pushing for a tight labor market, which means aggressively pushing against investment in China or in areas near China. So that's also got a foreign policy component to it. And it means restricting immigration so that we don't have so many people pouring to the country that wages for people who are less skilled are kept down as a result.

With respect to dignity for the community, it means not having contentious social issues solved by administrative fiat or court decision in Washington, but letting communities pick and choose and live the way they want to. Not everyone has to live like San Francisco, and not everyone has to live like rural Alabama. There's a lot of ways that communities and families can choose their own ways of life. Progressive activists don't want that. Conservatives need to be in favor of that.

Henry, I think that's a fantastic point. I think one of the things that is essentially most important right now is for people to understand that this push for conformity is evidently and self-evidently tearing this country apart because people are not alike and giving people the room to live as they choose, which has always been a core part of the American tradition, is

should be a talking point for Republicans right now, shouldn't it, Chuck? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Henry, a little bit more about your piece. One of the things that I have seen over and over with Republicans is, frankly, we have a messaging deficit. So when you have someone like Tim Scott, who had a very good plan for criminal justice reform last year that languished and died,

That message isn't getting out. There are a lot of these policies that are being proposed, as you said, by individual Republicans. But those policies are not reaching the broader mainstream. How do Washington Republicans band together and get that message out that there are some of these ideas out there?

You know, I think the first thing is Washington Republicans need to decide if they are willing to be for something. You know, it's hard to get a message out when it's an individual senator pushing something as opposed to a Republican priority. Secondly, even if it's an individual senator, what it means is aggressively bypassing the gatekeepers who are ideologically predisposed to keep Republican solutions away from public consciousness.

You know, the fact is many leading news entities are not going to tell their voters about the attractive or interesting Republican alternative, or even that there's a debate between Republicans and Democratic alternatives. They simply don't want to do that. And that means aggressively using social media. It means podcasts. It means local radio. It means aggressively getting outside of

of the New York, L.A., Washington gatekeeper bubble and getting to normal America. That can mean also using conservative platforms like Fox and OAN and Newsmax, but it needs to be an aggressive push and not rely on the gatekeepers who are never going to want to put your story before the public to change their stripes in the interest of fairness. They won't do it, so you should plan to go around it.

Henry, what is one thing that's happened in the trajectory of this nation or politically the last four to six years that has surprised you, which you thought either has come upon us much sooner than you would have imagined or just come out of right field and you didn't see it coming? What has surprised you about today's climate and how we're going forward?

You know, I have to honestly say I was surprised at the rapidity and speed to which we have reached extreme political polarization. I thought that the populist waves that were coming would be destabilizing, but I didn't see the out-and-out drive for conformity on the left becoming so powerful so quickly. So I think that surprised me.

By 2018, 2019, I adjusted my thinking, but I would say I did not see that coming. If you had asked me in 2015, I would not have seen that coming. Is there any way we can go back to 2015, 2014 regarding that type of division, the loud division? Or do you think that ship has sailed? Well, the ship has sailed, but it doesn't mean the ship has sunk.

I think that you can't undo the path. The only way to get to the old destination is through a new course. And I think that what conservatives need to do is speak about an American future

that rests on the core principle of human dignity, and that that is an overarching principle to both liberty and security, and in fact explains why we have balances between them. Sometimes they want a little more liberty, sometimes they want a little more security. Well, it's always balancing those values against what we really want, which is human dignity and autonomy. And

And if we can do that, what we'll do is start peeling away people from the moderate side. The moderate side will start to identify themselves as Republicans because they'll see a place for all viewpoints in the Republican vision, and they'll see exactly how much the Democratic progressive drive for conformity suppresses normal and minority viewpoints in the name for supposed justice, but in fact, injustice.

Henry, I think that's a great point. Our previous guest, Dr. Spencer Case, had some very good articles. He was talking about how that type of speech from the left is now being enforced by.

And demanded of various corporations, all the people that work for them, all these different institutions are having this orthodoxy. If you work there or you go to school there or any of these things, you're having this orthodoxy pushed onto you. And if you don't go along with it, even if you just say, I'm not political, this isn't my interest.

You're banded or branded as the bad guy. And I think there's a huge opportunity for Republicans to to reach out and just say, hey, wait a minute. Most people don't want to be this obsessed about politics. Most people want to live a happy life and be left alone. I mean, you may, Chuck, we're political geeks. We're obsessed with this stuff, but we're not normal. No, no, we're not.

or not no i mean everyone has their particular fascinations you know some people just can't wait to get enough of the home and garden network other people know everything that you want to know about tennis or golf or or darts or something and we happen to be political uh people and i when i got start my start i was once a political consultant i want to be political consultant and

My mentor said that the people who are actively involved in politics in one way or another are 11%.

And so he always preached the need to go beyond the 11% to get to the 50%. And the drive for conformity politicizes not just the 50%, but the 100%. And Americans don't want that. But we need to fight back in a way so that people who aren't conservatives see themselves as the possible victims of that. Too often we talk about our own concerns and

And don't broaden them in a way so that people who don't feel immediately threatened or feel mildly threatened don't see us as defending them. They see us as defending us. And we need to speak in different ways to draw a wider net.

to bring in more people. I personally favor amending the Civil Rights Act to include protection for political affiliation and viewpoint. I think that would solve a lot of the corporate problem overnight. Amazing that that is what we have come to. Broken Potholes, thank you so much, Henry. Fantastic discussion, as always. We look forward to having you back on the show again. Broken Potholes will be back next week.

address the events