 During his two terms as governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey did an awful lot. He managed to pass a flat income tax with a rate of 2.5%. He reformed public sector pensions, universalized some of the most important school choice measures in the state, reformed occupational licensing rules and turned a budget deficit into a surplus. He substantially reduced the size of the state's government workforce as well. He built a makeshift border wall, though, out of shipping crates and pushed back on marijuana legalization. Then he was accused by his constituents of doing both too much and too little during COVID. Today he runs Citizens for Free Enterprise. In December, he received Reasons Savas Award for privatization, which is given annually to someone who is advancing innovative ways to improve the provision and quality of public services by engaging the private sector. When he was in town, the governor and I sat down to talk about his time in office, his worries about the future of the Republican Party, his commitment to fusionism, and why Arizona politicians are so weird. Thank you for joining us, Governor. We're excited to talk with you here at Reason today. Good to be here. Good. Thanks for having me. Let's start just right into it. Arizona politicians are kind of built different. What is it about Arizona that seems to just generate a little bit of a kind of heterodox or unorthodox politician, would you say? I don't know. I think it's a good question. I think maybe the fact that we're the youngest state in the lower 48 that we're a place where so many people came to live, so few people that are there today were actually born there, so people make that decision. And then I think there's something about the West and the spirit of Barry Goldwater where it brings an independent mindedness to it. Arizona has been red of late, but it's trending blue. What do you attribute that to? Candidates matter. I would actually push back pretty hard on where it is. I was able to win in 2014 with the wind at my back and win by a larger margin in 2018 with the wind in my face, what was really a tough year for conservatives and Republicans around the country. And I was also able to capture 44% of the Hispanic vote against an opponent named David Garcia. So if you have the right candidate who's talking about common sense kitchen table issues and actually persuading the electorate, I think the state is still a center right state. If you have somebody that wants to come and re-litigate 2020 and only speak to the base, that's a losing message. You campaigned in your first campaign on bringing taxes in Arizona as close as possible to zero and you got to 2.5% flat tax in the end. How did you do that? I feel like as long as I have been involved in kind of free market or small government politics, people have been talking about low tax, flat tax, you're going to do your taxes on a postcard, usually more talk than action. So what happened? Persistence, persistence, persistence. It was our goal every year we lowered or simplified taxes and we actually had the left overreach and came into Arizona and I think deceived the voters with an initiative saying we can put a billion dollars additional into K-12 education and it won't cost you any money, only the rich people. And they took our 4.5% tax at the highest progressive level to eight. Now 8% in Arizona would have been a cancer that would have metastasized over decades. That's Bernie Sanders, Vermont, Washington D.C. or New York State but it was popular. We worked hard to beat it. It was pulling at about 65-35. We were able to drive it down to 51% on election day but when I was a young boy there was a show on Saturday morning, Wild World of Sports and they would talk about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. We suffered about 18 months of the agony of defeat while we challenged the initiative in court, it eventually got to our Supreme Court and then we reformed taxes in the legislature in the interim. The law, the initiative was struck down and we had reduced taxes along the way. So had we been successful on election day, taxes in Arizona today would be 4.5%. But because we had a bad result, we persisted in the legislature and we had a Supreme Court that was not going to let out-of-state interest deceive the voter. Today we have the lowest flat tax in the nation. So I would say a combination of good planning, good timing and good luck. Is this something that other states can duplicate? This sounds like a lot of things coming together just right. Is there a path forward that other people could follow the Arizona tax reform plan? I believe so. I think if you make a pledge to your constituents that you're going to lower or simplify taxes every year and you win on that, then you have the permission in which to do that. If you can grow your economy, you have surplus funds so it allows you to basically buy down your tax rate and I'm a huge fan of the flat tax. I want us to be fair and equitable and I think a flat tax makes a lot of sense and it's also very hard for the left to change because people understand it. Massachusetts is not known for being a low tax state but they do have a 5% flat income tax and they've not been able to change that or raise it. Today in Arizona, like I said, we're at 2.5%. But if you get your economy growing, that's my background, Catherine. I came from the private sector, Cold Stone Creamery, the ice cream company was my business and I ran on a platform of kick starting the economy. I said I'd grown a business, now I want to shrink a government and grow an economy. I was looking at places like Texas and asking why are they so successful in comparison to other states and I was trained coming out of university at Procter & Gamble. P&G is a big fan of best practices, of something called search and reapply. If you see another good idea anywhere in the world, you bring it back to headquarters with attribution. In politics I found people find good ideas all over the country and bring them back to their state often without attribution. Texas was the model Rick Perry and governors before him had turned an oil and gas state into a cosmopolitan place with international businesses that did business around the world. I saw no reason at all why Arizona couldn't occupy that space and I also was aware of the bad decisions that California was making so I thought we were perfectly positioned and I wanted to be the chief salesperson and spokesperson to do that. When I came into office we had a billion-dollar deficit that first year and I think the first tax reform that we were able to pass was to make certain that you weren't indexed out with inflation and that was the start. We got the budget under control, the economy began to grow and we were able to ratchet that tax code down. I think sometimes particularly in the modern GOP you get a lot of emphasis on the tax cutting and a lot less on the reduction of spending or the balancing of the budget. This has always been an issue of course, tax cuts are a lot easier to sell than austerity but do you think that that issue is getting worse? Do you think that there's a way to reconnect to those two ideas in American political rhetoric or in voters' minds? Well, Catherine, I think you live here in Washington D.C. and that's what you are responding to as to how the Republicans in this town behave. You see the Democrats tax and spend, you see the Republicans in Washington D.C. cut taxes and borrow. Governors don't get to print money and there's no appetite to borrow money except in the worst of a crisis. So you really do have to find a way to shrink your government. I'm proud of the growth and attractiveness of Arizona. I think we have 400,000 additional people in Arizona versus the day that I came into office but our state government is smaller. We were actually able to shrink the footprint of our state government, the number of people inside state government, the number of buildings and real estate holdings of the state government. So I think if you look at governors around the country who take this winning game plan and execute it, there's a model that could be used in Washington D.C. but here no one really seems to want to persuade on why we need to tighten the belt or I did take a hit that first year to balance the budget. There's no constitutional obligation to balance the budget. I just came from the private sector and I had lived through several downturns before and I knew each time I had navigated through a downturn as a CEO I wished I would have acted faster with more of a sense of urgency on right sizing the business. So I don't want to lose those lessons in the largest responsibility I had in my life to date at age 50 so I said to the legislators who said we don't really have to balance the budget nothing's gonna happen that I wanted them to blame me for it that I ran on it. I wanted to do it. I thought it was possible and the economy was going to get better and we could begin to invest again next year and if the economy didn't get better we'd be happy we acted today because we wouldn't be exaggerating problems for tomorrow. It was the cut or elimination or reorganization that you enjoyed the most during that period. I'm sure it's never fun to fire anyone but there had to have been something that were a little more delightful than others. So I had a lot of people from the business community that helped me become governor none of them wanted to come work with me in government so I had to find the best people and these agencies are the best people from around the country to come work inside these agencies and in my first month you have inauguration of state of the state you present the budget and in 2015 we were hosting the Super Bowl so I was meeting with each of these agency heads and basically asking them the same question I would have asked somebody who wanted a top level position at Coldstone who are you what do you do and how do you know if you do it well and you really want to hear somebody tie something to a metric as to how they they measure things inside their agency we had a director at weights and measures who said let me tell you what I'm gonna do I'm gonna sting Uber and Lyft during the Super Bowl and shut them down obviously he wasn't paying much attention to the campaign I was able to ask my general counsel what's my authority over these agency heads he said they work at the pleasure of the governor I was able to release this gentleman into the private sector in what would be soon a growing economy but that was my way to capture the attention of the state government that I was serious about making real reforms and I think if you do have a plan we went through a strategic plan just like we would in in business I wanted every agency had to know what the mission of that agency was to have public metrics and how they could advance it to have transparency to taxpayer monies and then to memorialize what they had accomplished the past 90 days and could could accomplish in the next 90 days and make adjustments and so it basically a six sigma type thing that you can do but I'm someone I want to see us have less government but I'm not somebody on the right that thinks government is unnecessary I think government serves a purpose and when the government is responsive and it's not putting obstacles up in people and small business owners way people flock to your state businesses grow and have great success and then in this economic development competition that we have among the states we were winning the majority of them and in yesteryear was all taxes and I think you'd see today that Arizona is leading on this places like Texas continue to do well Utah is very good Florida Tennessee are all states that are really growing and they're following the same model where do you think immigration fits into the picture of attracting the best people and kind of opening up the state for enterprise you during your term as governor built a kind of makeshift border wall you know that's something I would say where you generally differ with the reason line to some extent talk about how you see those ideas connecting because to me it seems like everything you just said sounds true and we should want people from Mexico to come to Arizona too so I think people in Washington DC confuse border security with immigration they are separate and mutually exclusive issues border security is about law enforcement it's about national defense it's about public health if we had a pandemic over the last two years the border in Arizona is wide open and unprotected under President Biden it was in the same condition under President Obama and that's not how the law works this is an illegal migration so if we can secure and stabilize the border which was happening in 2019 and 2020 we can talk about immigration and I'm pro-legal immigration and we need new immigrants from the service sector to software engineers my first visit as governor internationally was to Mexico City my first international visit upon re-election was to Mexico City and my last visit as a sitting governor was to Mexico City they are our number one trading partner times four it's not even close we had an incredible relationship with them but we weren't open to people illegally migrating so if we'll solve solve the border situation which is very solvable it was already done in 2019 and 2020 then we can talk about immigration reform but border security happens in Texas New Mexico Arizona California immigration reform happens down the street here in Congress let's talk about schools we sometimes you mentioned earlier metrics we sometimes evaluate teachers these days with their value add so give me your value add on schools what was the state of play on school choice in Arizona when you came in and what did it look like when you left Arizona has always been very good on school choice and it's something that I believe in I stood on the shoulders of giants like Lisa Graham Keegan and Fife Simington at the state level we have 525 schools of choice in Arizona charter schools your your listeners will know those are our public schools with with private management if you take those schools that's the number one state in the nation for accomplishment on math reading and science so we did a lot to grow that model we have systems like the basis school system in great hearts were both founded in Arizona part of what animated my run for governor in 2014 was universal school choice the Milton Friedman idea that he shared on free to choose in his book and in his PBS series and it's something that took me all eight years of my governorship to accomplish we actually were able to pass a a limited ESA program in 2017 we have an anomaly of our Constitution where if you get enough signatures you can refer a law to the people and ESA's was referred to the people in 2017 and it was crushed it lost 65 to 35 and these are just education savings accounts so essentially vouchers well I would call them scholarships but many people who love vouchers would and Milton Friedman also said in in a crisis people will look for the ideas that are lying around and the crisis that came was COVID and parents were able to see what their kids were being taught or not taught and the level of rigor and expectation from the public schools they also saw that the charter schools opened and the Catholic schools opened and many of the largest public districts chose to stay closed for nearly two years even when the government was telling them to open so we were able to pass universal educational savings accounts and this is for every child in the state of Arizona is able to take a large portion of their tax dollars and go wherever they would like to school including home school micro school or a new school so I think we were able to move the bar to the highest rung nine other states have since followed with universal school choice taxes in Tennessee are on the one-yard line and it reminds me a bit of Roger Bannister was the first man to break the four-minute mile people thought that that was physically impossible and from the the marathon in Greece to the 1960s no one man or woman had written a broken a four-minute mile I think it was several months after Roger broke four minutes somebody else broke four minutes and it's been broken over a thousand time since I think that this universal school choice is the way to truly reform K-12 education and I think in many ways renew our country this one across party lines it was actually the African-American pastors and a lady that leads the black mother's form who wasn't very happy with the way that I handled the summer of 2020 who was my lead advocate on universal school choice not one of them a Republican and we were able to pass this with no Democrat votes I wanted those votes but they were beholden to the teachers union in Arizona in my final year we had a one-seat majority in our house a one-seat majority in our Senate we had a confluence of circumstances that happened that we were able to get that in the final days and like I said other states have since followed you were governor during COVID and I saw that you there were moves to recall you both from the Arizonans for liberty who wanted to recall you for doing too much and also from accountable Arizona wonder recall you for doing too little which of them was right I made the best decisions I could for the state of Arizona I didn't want to play politics with COVID and I didn't want to compete with other governors I was going to make the best decision in real time for what was needed in our state I did it a lot different than many of the other Western states I prioritized lives livelihoods and individual liberties I came from that private sector I was the owner of a small business those are the people that I know and I understand what they go through and there were a lot of calls from elected officials with guaranteed government paychecks people that would not miss a paycheck or a salary and we're choosing to to work from home and I wanted to keep our businesses open and I think the evidence of how Arizona came out of COVID in comparison to other states is where the proof lies and to how COVID was handled is there something you would have done differently though in retrospect I imagine there is but not in the real time of what was happening because of course I'm somebody who thinks you surround yourself with experts but I made the decisions so the experts were not on top and I aired on the side of caution until I had enough evidence that we knew where the vulnerable people were we had communicated to the vulnerable people and and then they live in a free country and it's up to them to make the decisions that they want but to get kids back in school to have our businesses open and to allow people to make responsible decisions is something I felt very passionate about advocating for. Let's talk about the current state of the Republican Party at the national level as well as kind of in the states you recently took a new gig as at the citizens for free enterprise and I think you're you're maybe even speaking with some folks about that here in town in Washington DC it's kind of kind of got a national scope my perception is that the current Republican Party to say nothing of the current Democratic Party is not too friendly to free enterprise these days what can we do about that? Well again I would separate what you're seeing in Washington DC and some of the big government Republicanism that's happening here versus what you're happening see happening in many of our states yet there are some folks out there that are bullying big businesses I think if we're going to be a majority party if we're going to win on our ideas if we're going to look to there's a lot of freedoms we could we could talk about over the course of this discussion from freedom of speech to freedom of religion and freedom of assembly all all rights that we've seen under assault in the last several years but they're all undergirded by economic freedom and it's what's allowed us to be the the mightiest military and history of the world it's also allowed us to make a lot of really stupid spending decisions and overcome that and I do think that if you go into a college classroom today and you held up a sign that said socialism and capitalism it's about a 50-50 proposition and that should scare every freedom loving individual in the country to death so I think we have some work to do not only with our youth and college classrooms but also with our electorate part of the reason citizens for free enterprise exists is because it's an evergreen issue there's going to be certain social and cultural issues that we fight about every two years and these are worthwhile discussions this is how we answer these questions but it wasn't that long ago that a blue state governor who became president was actually accused of being pretty good on the economy and under President Obama it became more of a class warfare between the haves and a have not the have nots with I think an over emphasis on an inequality while not looking at the government supplements to what we do to those in the most vulnerable positions so we want to advance the cause of free enterprise and we'd also like to drain some of the partisanship out of it but it should always be protected on the right and through what we're going to be doing people that are going to be attacking it are going to feel consequences regardless of what party they're in what consequences would those be well the consequences in politics is that you are no longer in office it's a pretty big project to convince Americans to feel better about capitalism or to like free trade or something like that it's reasons project as well in many senses where do you see the the doors that are open for that what are the openings that Americans might sort of be willing to make change on or sort of hear the at least hear the argument out well I would come at it from a different angle I think that Americans love small businesses and they love small business men and women and they love many of these entrepreneurs and local shop owners and their own cities towns and municipalities and if you go to citizens for free enterprise dot com you'll see many of their stories on our website so part of it is of course the the principles that you and I have have read and understand and want to make certain are are being communicated properly in our grade schools and our high schools and our colleges and happen in many of a place like a great hearts Academy in Arizona kids come out really understanding what makes the economy tick and and how to live within your means and why this is not only a good personal habit it's also a responsible habit of a of a business or or a government or an enterprise but I think when people can hear the story from the entrepreneur whether it's the local micro brewer or the guy who runs the four wheel shop who retrofritz the pickups it helps people understand why this is important and we have so many stories of people that have had great success and the other thing that I think it happened rather recently is we've separated the the entrepreneur and the small business owner from the employee we're actually they're interested are aligned and the more successful the the company is or the the city or town or municipality the more opportunities are there for the for the employee and they may or may not want to cast their lot in the entrepreneurial world they may just want to climb the economic ladder and be able to build personal financial security and without that opportunity to build financial security is there really freedom there I mean these are things that go hand in hand there does seem to be a bit more bipartisan agreement though that maybe we should all hate billionaires or we should all hate the very wealthy I I agree with you Americans are generally have a lot of warm fuzzies about small businesses but economic liberty requires more than just protecting small businesses right what is there you know what is there to do about this sort of oh we'll tax the rich and solve all the problems mentality well one the numbers don't work and you know that the math on that is is never going to work and that's not unusual I actually think that's playing on some of the worst of human nature to build this this envy in folks and there's all kinds of social scientists that will show you that people actually feel better if somebody's doing worse while they're doing better and we're not going to participate in any of that we're just going to to educate and advocate around free enterprise and try to bring that voter into the fold so that they can make the decision on election day on who's in support of it and it's regardless of party I think you'd find more of that right now on the right but as you mentioned there are some folks here in this town and there are some folks in state capitals that are that are beating up on businesses and I think if we continue to do that or allow that to happen we're only sharpening the knife that the left will eventually use on us who are some folks either in DC or around the country that you think are doing good work right now well I I mentioned the states Greg Abbott's doing good work in taxes right everybody's seen what Ron DeSantis has done in Florida Bill Lee and Bill Haslam before him in Tennessee Pete Ricketts just came out of Nebraska and you're lucky to have him in the United States Senate here hopefully can bring a little bit of the common sense of what governors have to deal with Eric Holcomb and Indiana and Kim Reynolds are also people that are are taking states that don't have some of the the Sun Belt attractiveness but are attracting companies and have have their their citizens very happy with what they're doing is attracting companies the right the right measure I'm thinking here in DC we're currently having a battle over where our stadium is going to be and of course with that comes a bunch of cronyism can you talk about how to make those distinctions well I think a company would be different than a stadium are always a special case for a kind of fever that comes over everyone involved absolutely and I was trained at Proctor and Gamble that any business that is one on price will be lost on price so all of the incentives that we had in Arizona were performance incentives and they were in statute so we were not able to negotiate with that business owner and listen if it was all about the numbers and all that mattered was the bottom line on that decision you would have states going to the absolute lowest cost place in which to do business but no business owner or CEO moves to where they do not want to live and they also know that that quality of life is going to attract their senior management team and their employees and that's the mix that I believe we had right in Arizona not only low tax light regulation affordable and reliable energy with excellent education but we had a great quality of life and they could have confidence that their taxes was we're not going to be hiked and that they would be able to hire people from across the country and around the globe that would want to come live in these communities. What do you think about the rise of the kind of economic variant of national conservatism again I agree with you this is to some extent a DC phenomenon and certainly a DC chattering classes phenomenon but it's manifesting in our politics for sure this idea that is increasingly coming from the right that we need to cut off trade and competition maybe just with China maybe with everyone cut off immigration generally kind of favor subsidize you know tax favor US businesses you know does does that in the end kind of hoist us on our own part are there ways to do that in a way that's more or less damaging it seems to be an ascendant orthodoxy certainly here in DC. Well the right has always been a fusion I think the right especially from from Barry Goldwater and we like to say in Arizona that he never lost that election in 1964 it just took 16 years to count the votes but that idea of what William F. Buckley and Goldwater and Ronald Reagan projected was what made the Republicans and the right a majority party and that not only had the fiscal conservatives and the tax hawks but it had the social conservatives and the people that cared about Second Amendment rights and then Tea Party folks and evangelicals and each time the party continued to grow I think you will see this Washington DC free con that con discussion one thing I wholeheartedly agree with the Natkins is countries have borders and those borders should be protected and ours is not on the southern border and I think that's that's lost on people of responsibility here including the president and vice president who have not been to the border or understand the situation that that ranchers in the small towns are going through but I think the fusion between the the folks that want to talk about national identity and our borders and what you see on the the freedom side of the equation is is where will land I am much more of a free trader and I do think that we were able to get some things right in the Trump Pence administration in finally understanding what was happening in China I know from opening ice cream stores and both Beijing and Shanghai that they were able to play by different rules no one had ever called them on it there's an immense amount of trade that happens between the two countries and I think the both countries benefits but I don't think it's unfair for us to expect that they behave by a certain set of rules if we're going to continue to do that and the other opportunity I think COVID gave us was that we don't want to be put in that position again with our supply supply chain so when when when we do have the opportunity to to reshore or repatriate or to work with our neighbors one thing I really liked about them the US MCA which was an improvement of NAFTA my focus was was first and foremost on Mexico as our top trading partner well our number two trading partner was Canada and you can say that pretty much for all 50 governors so if somebody's not going to open their business in Arizona I prefer they open it in one of the other 49 states if not one of the other 49 states I prefer Mexico or Canada and that's not only good for North American free trade it's also good for peace and prosperity and any pandemic or or global crisis this doesn't mean we decouple from China but it also doesn't mean that we allow them to steal our intellectual property and to run roughshod over any way they would like to in which to do business I mean we have we have a vote as well what do you see for the next say five to ten years in terms of the evolution of the kind of US stance with respect to the world so you know I think that we're kind of in a moment where things are trending a little more closed in many ways by both parties but at the same time you know our communications technologies and our media are you know making us more connected than ever how does that play out in our politics I mean people are gonna feel closer to we're seeing this with the Israeli Palestinian conflict we're seeing it in Ukraine people are gonna feel closer to conflicts all around the world how does that play out for US involvement either in terms of foreign policy or trade well I'm generalizing here but I think that you and I have basically come of age in a magical American moment I mean in our lifetime we've had one bad day on September 11th and it changed a lot in in this country but we were one of two superpowers around the world then we were the only superpower in 1989 and smart people were able to write books where they claimed it was the end of history and freedom and democracy and free enterprise would would spread around the globe and then we had the shock and surprise of 9-11 now this is a return to real history while I fear that we've projected weakness around the globe and these conflicts are what is more normal in in the course of time so I think us making responsible decisions at home making sure we're investing in our defense projecting strength so that we can achieve peace and then we're divided as a nation and there is an isolationist attraction right now this is not new in this nation and it's not new for the right or for the left we weren't eager to get into world war two until the morning after December 7th 1941 what we don't want is that kind of shock to our system or to the what's happening around the globe I do think of course Ukraine and Russia's aggression is something we were all talking about until October 7th and then we saw how how fragile geopolitics are right now so I think we're gonna have a real discussion this is going to happen in an election year and I'm gonna be advocating that we project strength where we're necessary and make sure that we keep our alliances you mentioned a few influences earlier very Goldwater Ronald Reagan Bill Buckley in this sort of American era that you just described what are what were some of your influences that shaped your politics well what Mitch Daniels did in Indiana I found very encouraging I always look for a model of someone that I can study and Mitch really talked and thought and wrote like a like a businessman I'm from the Midwest I grew up in Toledo Ohio and lived there till I was 18 and God bless the Big Ten but Mitch did an inherited estate where a lot of people were dreaming of retiring he did this in the traditional heartland and I thought in his book in the Republic were a lot of innovative entrepreneurial policy ideas and that really is the great thing about being a governor most people wouldn't know who a governor is in another state COVID might have changed a little bit of that because I think you were able to see a real difference between red states and blue states and how we handled it I didn't realize how many of my peers on the left were closet authoritarians but before that we were all trying to solve problems we might have solved them from a different point of view but governors are very collegial and I think and I spoke about this in my last public speech before I left the governor's office at the Reagan library of a return to federalism I simply think that our federal government here in DC tries to do too much and it does most of it poorly so why doesn't it focus on on national defense and securing the border and reforming our finances to protect a social safety net for our elderly and most vulnerable and then push everything else back to the states and let the states compete governors communicate we're collaborative but at the end of the day we we compete with each other we want to show up at a Republican governor's association meeting and talk about who's lowered the taxes the most or who's eliminated the most regulations and we know that Americans vote with their feet and there will be a time it may not be in Gavin Newsom or Andrew Cuomo or JB Pritzker's time but where these governors will be held accountable for the people that are fleeing their states to go to to better qualities of life and I think we would have better policies if we were able to do that with no strings attached because I don't know what happens when someone gets elected to Congress they can be a good conservative in the state legislature and they come here and of all of a sudden they think that you're a middle manager in their federal corporation when Mitch Daniels made a kind of earlier foray into national politics he ended up drawing a lot of fire for saying something that's always stuck with me which is essentially we don't have time to do culture wars because our economic situation is so dire and our fiscal situation is so dire we simply cannot get distracted by culture wars this was many many years ago I think it's fair to say we have in fact gotten distracted by culture wars that's certainly what this election seems like it's going to be fought and one on was he right I think it's a reality of politics is you have to meet the voter where they are I have the same sense of of concern around our finances and our debt we've not paid a price for it so so to speak and when we do it will be devastating so I think somehow you have to navigate what are the the social issues and and maybe part of the silver lining of an October 7th if there can be any is the exposure of what's happening on so many of our universities and our elite institutions that we realize it's young people aren't learning 20% of these young people don't believe the Holocaust happened and they've divided the world into oppressor and victims so I think if there's an issue right now it's the the woke stuff that you're seeing for lack of a better way to put it on the left and then some of the discussion on the right that is much more top down and driven from the newly elected king that will come to Washington DC but those are realities and it's it's going to be up to leaders to present a better more constitutional alternative. I think we'll leave it there. Thank you very much governor. Thank you.