Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpod, where On Point news analyst Jack Beattie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Meghna. We're at episode 64. What's your headline for today? Get out. Get out. Who and from where? Tell me more.
Immigrants, and they're being ordered to get out by the President of the United States. In one of the executive orders he issued in his first day as president, President Trump decreed, quote, an invasion across the southern border of
and instructed his cabinet, quote, to take appropriate action to repel, repatriate, or remove any aliens engaged in the invasion. Of course, there is no invasion. He's using that word because there may be an 18th century law that allows him to
short-circuit removals of immigrants, if he uses that language. And it fits the militarization of the border that has been one of the most dramatic moves he's taken. He sent 1,500 troops to the border. They may be the entering wedge of as many as 10,000, some people, some administration sources have said.
possibly, and their task is going to be, well, it's not entirely clear, but one part of it will be to fly, use military planes to fly the aliens who are caught up in Trump's dragnet, to fly them out of the country. And that will be a down payment on what Trump promises will be the largest mass deportation in American history.
That's underway right now with the White House showing images of aliens being rounded up and they claim they have arrested 500 people in raids all over the United States. At this moment, it's a time really to look back and say, okay, Trump has cited as precedent
Eisenhower's program, Operation Wetback, which was 1954, which was
Until now, the largest deportation program. But there was one before that, Operation Repatriation in 1930. So I think it might be a good moment to look quickly at these two episodes in the 20th century. Yeah. I really appreciate this because the Eisenhower era one I had some familiarity with. But I had no idea that in the 1930s there was a mass deportation program.
plan enacted in the United States. So shall we start there? Let's do it. And, you know, when you look at these things, you see, you hear echoes, you sense lessons. But the big thing is the legacies of shame. These programs can't be recalled to historical retrospect without a feeling of
of shame. Operation Repatriation 1930. What was the background? The background was the roaring 20s encouraging all kinds of immigration from the southern hemisphere which quotas didn't, the quota system set up in 1924 didn't affect Mexico and farmers wanted labor. Lots of them came north and
Then the Depression hit, and there grew up the sense that, my God, our jobs, every job mattered when that happened. And in The Grapes of Wrath, the Jode family goes from Oklahoma to California to pick crops. That was work that American, quote-unquote, natives needed to do.
And there began a, under President Hoover, Operation Repatriation, which was an effort really to frighten and to scare migrants from Mexico to self-deport, to use a term that Mitt Romney introduced.
when he ran for president in 2012, scare them out of the country. And in addition, they would be, if they didn't leave by that method, they'd be rounded up and sent out. And this was whipped up by a moral panic in the Hearst newspapers. There were 28 of them with 5 million people.
This was the Fox News of its day. And the immigrant, the alien, the stealer of your job, that became a figure in the Hearst press. And to get a flavor of it, here's a passage from the San Antonio Light, a Hearst paper. The farmer rids his house of rats, his henhouse of weasels.
Good housekeepers wage a ceaseless war against vermin. Uncle Sam should clear his house of all undesirables. We hear the echo right there. President Trump has used language like that about undesirables.
And whipped up by this kind of public fear and also just simply the desire of Americans to work, and the phrase of one historian, "alien hunting" became a gladiatorial spectacle.
in which immigration agents raided homes, bars, pool halls, even churches, and sometimes, indeed often, without warrants. By the way, Trump's program, he says the gloves are off. They're going to raid churches too. And schools. And schools, yes, yes. And some historians, in fact, in a book called The Great Betrayal,
They claim that as many as half of the million people who were left the United States either because they were rounded up and forced out or because they self-deported in the decade of the 30s, that perhaps as many as half of them
were American citizens. That is, birthright citizens, citizens of immigrants who were in the country, who were born here, and who were under the Constitution citizens. They were rounded up and sent out of the country. That was the picture of...
of the Depression-era program. And it catches—there's a photograph I saw of a bus in a Texas border town, and migrants—aliens in Trump's terms—are coming off the bus, and they're going by a sign, and the sign says, "Mexicans, keep on going. We can't take care of our own."
So that was a sense of Americans' jobs are on the line. You're taking them. Get out. So, Jack, before we get to the 1950s—
I mean, to your point that this 1930 Operation Repatriation was accelerated by moral panic and the Depression, right? The fact of the Depression. The idea, I'm presuming, was that the deportation of all of these migrant workers, even in the 1930s, would free up jobs for Americans who were out of work during the Depression. I mean—
Was that idea ever actually realized? I mean, what was the impact on Americans of this mass deportation plan? Hard to say because, as I say, we have a classic picture in the Grapes of Wrath of the Jode family, which, you know, they went out to California to pick fruit, I think it was, and to be happy doing it or happy, you know, settle for it because at least they could eat food.
So I have a feeling many jobs were open and that Americans were desperate enough to take jobs that hitherto they would not have taken because, you know, there's an image that one historian of the Depression used. He calls it the great knife of the Depression. It cut the
the life you had before off from the life you have now. And in that new life, people like the Jodes who had been sharecroppers but proud ones had to take what they could get. Mm-hmm.
I mean, so that does make some sense in that context. But of course, I just, I don't know what the numbers are, but I can't imagine that they're vast if Americans now would be willing, even at higher wages than migrant workers get in American farms, would be willing to, you know, flood back into the fields and the meat processing plants of this country to do that work. But...
We'll get back to that later. So take us to the 1950s and Eisenhower, which is only, what, a quarter century later. There's another mass deportation panic?
Yes, there is. And the context of this is the change in American policy in the Second World War. So we had gone from banishing immigrants to now, well, the soldiers have left their jobs in the farms and so on. They're overseas. We need people to replace them.
Under what was called the Bracero Program, which is Spanish for strong laborer, strong arm, guest workers were brought up in their hundreds of thousands from Mexico. Under the Bracero Program, they worked, essentially picked the crops that fed Americans during the war and fed the army. Did very, very important work.
And parallel with the Bracero program, which was drawing people in, there was illegal immigration as well. And this was promoted in part by Texas cotton farmers who did not want to pay the $3 a day wage that the Bracero program required them.
And they could get away with paying $1.25 a day and still get lots of workers. Why? Because those workers in Mexico earned only 20 cents a day. So they could do a sort of arbitrage on the numbers and drawing in. So here you have lots of people coming in legally.
And some of them seasonally, to be sure, but some of the seasons last. You know, people go from place to place, season to season. And you have a strong wave of illegal immigration to all of this mounting up.
And then in 1954, again, there was this moral panic plus the sense of, my gosh, why aren't the veterans of the Korean War getting jobs? How come they're not being hired in the numbers that we want?
And, of course, there's always someone to blame, and the somebody was the Mexican migrant. An immigration report from the period speaks of the influx of aliens appears like an oncoming tide, always reaching further inland with each wave. And again,
There was moral panic. You have Life magazine, big pieces talking about migrants swimming across the Rio Grande. You have, you know, being called a patient invasion force.
You have headlines about Mexican migrants in this country are a fifth column of the communists. There's a communist element to this, Cold War element. Got to get them out. And then you have people sending the Attorney General Brownell number letters like this one saying, why don't you flood Mexico with contraceptives?
So there will not be so many wetbacks coming into the country. A not untypical suggestion from a citizen. Anyway, in this context, Herbert Brownell, who was the attorney general, launched in June 1954 Operation Wetback. And that slur was, in fact, the title of the official name.
Brownell suggested that one way to discourage more of these aliens coming into the country would be to have the Border Patrol shoot some of them and publicize that. That was the attorney general of the United States making that suggestion. President Eisenhower showed how important the program was to him.
by putting his former West Point classmate, General Joseph Swing, in charge of it.
and Swing went at it with a vengeance. And the Border Patrol, which was the instrument of this military style, but not military, expulsion program, was led by a man named Harlan Carter, and he was a convicted murderer who, as a teenager, had shot a Latino on his farm and somehow had got off from it. So you had some ferocious characters leading it,
And what happened just in that hot summer was hundreds of thousands, maybe by the end of it as many as a million people, were rounded up in raids in Los Angeles starting, but then also in Chicago starting.
all over the country. And what spurred it on was they weren't even looking at costly detention. You could avoid that either by immediately deporting people, and that was done,
or by scaring the hell out of them and they had self-deport. And so that was part of the, it was what they called mass deportation on the cheap. And there were terrible violations of human rights. Again, many American citizens who just happened to have brown skins and be Spanish of Mexican origin were rounded up and driven out of the country.
And in one episode, there was a ship that carried migrants down the Texas coast in the Gulf to Veracruz,
And a congressional inquest, you know, likened that to an 18th century slave ship. The conditions were so horrible and there were multiple drownings of migrants who were on this ship, whether they were thrown overboard or not, we don't know. In another incident in a Texas border town, 88 braceros, Mexican laborers, died of sunstroke.
while they were waiting for the border patrol to figure out what to do to them. It was a shameful episode, and the anecdotes of it, of the time, are hard to read even, and they're going to be repeated. One that sticks in my mind is,
is a woman in Edinburgh, Texas, who had a home, who had five kids. The kids went to school one day. They came back. She was gone. She was pulled off the field where she worked and put in a bus and sent south, and they never saw her again, their mother. And that story was repeated again and again. Jack, I...
We're in different locations right now, so you can't see me. I'm literally here gobsmacked. This is a horrible history. But again, I'm feeling my own sense of shame because I knew very, very little of everything that you just outlined. And I'm thinking about the legacy that you're talking about, the legacy of shame. Yeah.
that these two previous operations, you know, leave us today with. I completely understand that. I mean, these are shameful moments in U.S. history. But in terms of the corrective power that ideally shame can have, you have to know that history to begin with to feel that sense of shame. And I just don't think that
Well, even for people in the Trump administration who do know it, they're just going to ignore it. But I think most people do not know. And the legacy of shame, while it exists, it isn't having much of an impact now.
No, and that's such a good point. I mean, it's, you know, before there can be any moral indignation, there has to be some recognition of something wrong, something that a wrong. And we're quick to see the Japanese internment as a horrifying, shameful moment. And by the way, in fairness, the state of California has since passed an official apology to the migrants who were driven out of
out of there in Operation Wetback. So there have been some efforts to recognize it, but you're quite right. The episode has simply disappeared and such that Donald Trump running for president in 2015 could go on about Operation Wetback. It was done by Ike. Everybody liked Ike. We're going to do something like that again.
The shame has not caught up with Donald Trump, that's for sure. But it's not caught up with the public either. I think you're absolutely right. Even as to the point that you began with, this mass deportation plan under Trump is currently unfolding, right? I mean, we're already seeing certain actions that absolutely mirror the two previous operations that you just described to us.
Oh, yes. Trump's operation is not yet named. It'll have one soon, I'm sure. But what does it come to? What do all the... He signed a raft of executive orders, you know, on immigration that first night. What does it come down to? Well, on CNN just now, there was a former chief counsel to Homeland Security under President Obama. He said...
What it comes down to is, quote, Trump has declared war on immigrants. And he had put in charge of this his border czar, Tom Homan, who says we're going to take the gloves off. One didn't know the gloves were on. We're going to take the gloves off. We're going to have shock and awe.
And shock and awe has set in in cities. We read about panic. Here's a headline from the Boston Globe. Hysteria engulfs Massachusetts immigrant communities. Quoting a barber in East Boston, which is a center of an immigrant neighborhood, everyone here is panicked.
And then people saying, people are looking to spread fear. And they quote a man in the barbershop said, ICE wants you to believe they are everywhere. Yes, pay attention.
panic is one of the instruments ICE uses. It used it in the past. It uses it now. And here's the kind of, it isn't a, this isn't Hearst Press, but this is an instrument of moral panic right now. Let's listen to a CBS reporter from Newark yesterday.
Surveillance video and photos show federal immigration agents surrounding the Ocean Seafood Depot in Newark Thursday. According to the business owner, a dozen ICE agents came in unannounced, asked to check his employees' identification, and ended up taking three people into custody. He told CBS News New York's Ali Bauman over the phone his manager tried to show his veterans card, but agents did not accept it.
Just one example, right, Jack, of many we'll probably be hearing about. Yes, and we're hearing already about citrus growers in California say that, you know, half their workforce didn't turn out the other day because they were afraid. We're hearing about kids afraid in Worcester, Mass. There was a rumor that you couldn't wait for the school bus because the immigration agent would come along and snatch you.
This panic is just beginning. This fear is just beginning. And, you know, will the Democrats, will the opposition party oppose this? We don't know. But they read the election returns as well. Some people hope that if these raids really take hold and they dig out people who've been living there a long time and there are terrible pictures of kids being snatched off the streets and so on,
Sure, that maybe the Democrats will mobilize. But, of course, there's nothing they can do legislatively to stop it. And the ACLU warns that once Trump gets funding from Congress—
Then it's, you know, somebody says, Katie, bar the door, because he'll have money to send more agents to more places. And this will become, along with detention camps, this will become a feature of American life. You know, what taxes the mind is.
is that none of this does anything to address the founding reasons why both now—
and back in 1930 and 1954, immigrants were used as a scapegoat, right? Because there's still the pull of labor in this country. That pull, the Trump administration isn't doing anything about that. And, you know, also in terms of the economic hardships that many Americans are facing, which may have driven them to or inspired them to vote for Donald Trump, it doesn't
actually have that much of a direct impact on their lives. So I just...
This is what deeply frustrates me about how we collectively as a country think about immigration. Because, you know, you're talking about Democrats seeing the polls. I was just looking at long-term Gallup polling on immigration in the United States. And just last year, 55% of U.S. adults that Gallup polled said they would like to see immigration to the U.S. decreased.
And that's actually the highest it's been since October of 2001, which, of course, was just after 9-11. But this is an interesting question, though, because it's should the reduction of people of the number of people coming into the United States happen, which is very, very different than a question that asks, should we mass deport people who are already here and working?
And I think the oversimplification of what immigration is in this country is one of the things that's allowing these very draconian policies to pass without much scrutiny, Jack. Oh, yes, yes. And, you know, once you ask Americans, there was a poll in Axios the other day, you know, what about, OK, nine in 10 Republicans deport illegal, even five in 10 Democrats, but only 38%.
favor using active duty troops to find and detain them. And only one in three endorse, even Republicans, family separation, which is Tom Holman, the head of the border czar, says that's on the table. That's going to happen. And one of the executive orders the president signed was he canceled the Biden program that was trying to reunite families that Trump had
had broken in his first term. He broke about 5,000 families, just took the children away. And 1,000 of those children are still sundered from their families. This Biden program was trying to find them. And you had to go to Guatemala and
Honduras and remote places to find the parents and then find the kids up here. But there's still a thousand kids up there who haven't been united in five years with their families. And Trump canceled the program that was trying to find them. One more thing, Jack, before we... I want to hear what your last thoughts are on the legacy of shame. But
But, I mean, I will do some bipartisan finger pointing at the inability of lawmakers in Washington, D.C., across multiple administrations to really enact any meaningful immigration reform, which there is vast agreement across this country that reforms need to happen.
But I also recall that the last time we came even remotely close was under the first Trump administration, right, where there were meetings between top ranking Democrats and Republicans, Lindsey Graham, who were trying to actually pass comprehensive immigration reform in
not just border protection, but comprehensive immigration reform. And it was President Donald Trump who scuppered the whole effort. So there's no seriousness. There's a lack of seriousness in Washington to really do something about this genuine issue in this country. And it is profoundly frustrating. Well, it's because they want the issue.
They want to demagogue the issue. It preys on American sense of some threatening world breaking into our Elysian fields.
Somebody's to blame for my discontents, and Trump has managed to draw the attention to the alien. That's the problem. Get rid of him and everything will be fine. So they want the issue to demagogue and to whip up hate.
I mean, that's how Trump was elected. I mean, you know, the irony, of course, is the price of eggs. If you want to keep low prices, you better keep laborers in the fields. If you want Americans to pick the, you know, the citrus, you're going to have to pay them, you know, and that's going to be reflected in the food bill. But
That's just a detail. You know, there are moments when presidents hear the truth about what they're doing. They're put on the moral, under the moral spotlight. And one such moment came this week. Many people have heard it, but it's worth repeating again. This was from the Canterbury Pulpit.
at the National Cathedral with President Trump sitting in the front row, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Marion Butt, she pleaded for mercy toward the migrants and others that Trump vows to drive out. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country. We're scared now. There are
gay, lesbian, and transgender children in democratic, republican, and independent families. Some who fear for their lives. And the people. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation.
But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, wadara, and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away.
I want to note that Bishop Budd spoke those words at President Trump's inaugural prayer service, right? That's right. That's right. And we're not surprised to learn that she's the author of a book called How We Learned to Be Brave. Mm-hmm.
We're also not surprised that there was the expected 24-hour paroxysm of political outrage in response to what she said. But hopefully that wave has also predictably passed for now. But, Jack, so there is a moment of speaking truth to power.
about the stain that these legacies of shame leave upon us all, right? Not just the president who enacts them, but all of us as American. I mean, does that give you any hope that perhaps we won't actually completely fall into the same cycle that you described to us from the two previous operations in 1930 and 1954?
Well, I don't know. I see people saying...
you know, that once Jimmy is pulled out of class and, you know, and taken away and all over the country, that people will say, hey, wait a minute, this isn't right. These people are making a contribution here. And that that will start up a kind of reaction. But I don't know. I mean, I think Trump has, you know, he has looked into himself and he has found something interesting
of us in him. A fear, a resentment, a readiness to blame others, a precarious feeling that Americans have that everything, nothing is secure. And that southern border throughout our history has been a kind of, you know, place of dread. What's coming next? You know, what's down there? And even though, of course, Mexican people
people born in Mexico are barely half of the 11 million estimated. And the rest are from all over. And many of them are, in fact, visa overstays. That is, they came into the country legally, students from all over, workers from all over, and just stayed. And
Of course, on those people, we hear nothing about them. Why? Well, there was an interview with a Korean family in Palo Alto who had made a living there as, you know, making contributions to the local economy. And they quoted the man saying, well, you're not here legally, right? He said, no, we didn't fit the stereotype. People looked at us as just, well, those are hardworking people. We're not going to bother them. They didn't fit the stereotype of Latin. Yeah.
Well, folks, keeping in mind Jack's very powerful identification of the legacies of shame from Operation Repatriation and Operation Wetback, and as Jack noted, that was the name of the operation. We don't use that slur casually. What do you think the legacy of shame
President Trump's current mass deportation plan could be for this country, will be for this country.
That's what we want to know, and we want to hear from all of you, whether you are a repeat jackpot contributor or a first-time jackpot contributor. We always want to welcome many, many more people into the family of compassionate and intelligent listeners that make up the jackpot universe. So here's what you do. You go to your smartphone and get the OnPoint VoxPop app. You go to wherever you get your apps and look for OnPoint VoxPop.
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And we're back. And Jack, last week you talked about, I guess I'm calling him the other Jack now, special counsel Jack Smith's report on the federal charges against President Trump for interfering in the 2020 election, including fomenting his
Thank you.
In terms of this country's experience of what happened in 2020. So let's listen to John Irvin. He's in Los Angeles and he says he doesn't think that America's hearts or Americans hearts have changed. But the media ecosystem that we live in has. And he adds something else.
There's also a growing movement of people who see any challenge to the established order as a good thing and who would like to tear down the system. What they don't realize is that when you tear everything down, you have to replace it with something that addresses all the issues that the old system covered.
And that's not something that is easy to do. You can't replace something with nothing. So I fear for our future, but I have no choice but to be present. And I wish us all luck. Jack, what do you think? I wish us luck too, John. We're going to need every bit of it. Yes, he's talking about people who want to tear it all down. Well, look what's happened just in the week since yesterday.
Trump has issued blanket pardons and commutations to the 1,500 people jailed or charged with the insurrection on the Capitol. And the head of the Proud Boys is out. The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have been— I think the head of the Oath Keepers, who was sentenced to, I believe, 18 years, something like that,
He was up on Capitol Hill, actually. This time not rioting.
But, you know, talking to a Republican congressman and this talk that some of these insurgents or now pardoned insurgents are going to run for office. So, you know, what does Orwell say in 1984? The party, you know, changing the past was the key to changing the future. You can change the past.
You can do anything you want with the future. And Winston Smith's job, in fact, is to edit the past to keep it consistent with what the party wants to do. Well, Trump is now editing. You know, it's January 6th, Day of Love. The January 6th hooligans, rioters, beaters, heroes. In fact, he's talking about maybe having them at the White House.
We are in an inverted moral world. Yeah. And the rule of law is out the door. The 1984 analogies are too potent, Jack, because Winston worked at the Ministry of Truth. Oh, my gosh. Which, of course, was very deliberately named the Ministry of Truth because all it peddled in was lies. And speaking of love...
At the end of 1984, where is Winston tortured until he believes in Big Brother? The Ministry of Love. Oh, I'd forgotten that. I do remember what his torture was, and I won't even repeat it. It's so awful. Oh, gosh. Let's move on to Joe Shadler, who's in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And Joe shares with us that he's worried about what's changed since Trump first took office in 2017.
I am highly concerned about the Supreme Court ruling that United States presidents have absolute immunity for all official acts. My extra concern is that it could be used to allow presidents to mobilize large military regiments to incarcerate in mass and to mass execute
multitudes of Americans who displease them personally. Yes. So, Joe, they're reminding us of Trump v. the United States, that SCOTUS ruling. So here is Miles Allison in Austin, Texas. He has concerns along the same lines. He's worried about how President Trump and others around him may feel empowered to do more of what they want, regardless of the law.
Donald Trump's behavior reminds me of what happens in a grade school classroom when the children find out that the teacher is no longer able to discipline them for misbehaving.
And when they figure that out, their behavior gets progressively worse and worse. The same thing happens for politicians. If the U.S. continues to allow the rich and powerful to be above the law, which everybody knows they are, then their behavior is just going to get worse and worse and worse. Jack, your response?
It's hard not to be cynical about that when you see, you know, how Trump himself has used his money and his celebrity to essentially get off scot-free virtually. But, you know, I'm also thinking something else. Just in the past couple of days, there have been, I think, three different federal judges who
who've spoken out on various aspects of Trump's or what Trump has done. On the January 6th pardons, there have been just scalding comments. One from a district court judge who had tried such cases and knew many, many of the defendants had sentenced them. And she said, you can say what you want, Mr. President. We know the truth.
The receipts are there. The evidence is there for the eye. And people who want it, that evidence will be there forever. And you can't rub that out. You can have the Justice Department, you know, say we're not going to prosecute these people. You can give them pardons. Their crimes remain. They're indelible on tape.
Well, we have one more. This is from Morgan Foster. And Morgan points out something which is, I think, I believe is also true, that like it or not, the president of the United States, by virtue of being president of the people of the United States, embodies...
not just through his leadership, but through his personality, you know, what we want in a leader, what we aspire to be. So Morgan wants to hear from you, Jack, about what you think about how President Trump's morality may dictate or influence the American people's moral compass going forward. And he also has another question.
What does Elon Musk really represent? Is he the real threat behind Trump? Or is, you know, how is that going to play out? I think I think Musk is going to be a far greater danger 10 years from now. Jack, go ahead. Well, yeah, he's he's young enough to be around 10 years from now, which Trump is unlikely to be. And he has more money than Trump.
And really, when you look at the two of them, they look like two bears in the same den. I mean, there's got to be, there have already been points of friction. There'll be more of them. And yes, he does, he represents what President Biden, going out the door, warned about that
oligarchy of people who control the algorithms of American consciousness. And to think that these people, he was just, Musk was just joking about the Holocaust on X today, just joking about the name Goebbels and Himmler. I mean, to think that this
a man of that shallowness, let's be fair, has this position. And of course he's going to get money and he's going to get government contracts. Anyway, the corruption is—he may be the power behind the throne, he certainly is going to be a power into the future. Yeah, to your point, Jack, about I think what we have new here this time around.
is now this wedding of political power and information power, right? I think you call them the captains of American consciousness, right? And so, look, even if Elon Musk never holds any kind of office—
I would argue it doesn't matter because of the power that he has by virtue of his wealth and being the owner of, you know, what is still, whether people may like it or not, an influential social media platform. So, yeah, 10 years from now, definitely he'll still be on the scene. Well, Jack, with that thought, I'm still going to say my American optimism will not die.
It might occasionally gasp for breath, but it is not my optimism's last breath, okay? I'm glad to hear it. That's the thought I'll leave you with. And thank you as always, Jack. Thank you so much. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpot from On Point.