 Well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Great to be back in Turkey after a break last year. That actually is not a seceding region in the United States. That's actually Bodrum, but could be. I don't know if any of you will know this book about almost 100 years ago. 1930, a law professor at Columbia in New York wrote a book about the study of law, about how to think about law in society. It's called The Bramble Bush. And it used to be assigned to just about every law student in the United States. And one of the big points that Carl Llewellyn, the author, makes in that book is that in any society, when there is no sanction, there is no law. And what he meant by that is that in any place and any time, the law is what authorities or people in power do about something. So if you're on the autobahn somewhere and the speed limit says 100 kilometers, but nobody gets pulled over until 130, then the real law is 129 kilometers. So that's his point. And the point for our discussion today is that what matters oftentimes in society is custom. That matters every bit as much as the law has written. And I think that's going to be a very important feature for secessionist movements in the United States and across the world in the next coming years. So a couple of years ago, it was actually an event hosted by Raheem. Dr. Hoppe was on a panel discussion. And he made an offhand remark that I thought was very interesting, and it hasn't been considered perhaps even by him since. He said, paraphrasing him, he said that in the 19th and 20th century, nationalist movements were largely centralizing in nature. But he said, in the 21st century, it seemed to him that nationalist movements are largely decentralist or breakaway in nature. And these movements can be represented by things like Brexit, what's happening in Catalonia, in Scotland, in Taiwan, it can even be represented by Trump because Trump represented a breakaway movement of sorts, a breakaway from DC. And the swamp, so-called. But of course, this breakaway possibility, unfortunately, went totally unfulfilled in the Trump years. But nonetheless, Dr. Hoppe's point struck me as a very important insight. Because what we think of as today's map of Europe is actually quite new. It's after World War I and World War II. It's really a bunch of countries cobbled together with unnatural boundaries from principalities and city-states and kingdoms and dukdoms. And certainly, the EU seeks, it maybe has not yet achieved, but it seeks total dominion over those European countries in the form of a supranational government. And just as in the United States, what we think of as the United States is really millions and millions of very diverse square miles and regions, which became 50 states over time, over which the federal government, I think, more so even than the EU absolutely asserts total dominion. And in both the cases of the EU and the United States, of cities became dominant in the 20th century. Politically, culturally, economically. So our topic today in the context of all this is what if the greatest political trend of the past 200 years, namely the centralization of state power in centralized capitals, manages to reverse itself in the 21st century? This strikes me as a very happy thought. What if the 21st century is not so much about ideology at all, but it's about separation and about location? Because if there's one thing empire's fear, it's losing control over the provinces. That's every emperor's worst fear. And those of us who consider ourselves on the anti-interventionist right in the United States, we tend to complain a lot about the United States government meddling overseas, particularly in the Middle East in the past couple of decades. But we forget that the United States government is every bit as much an imperial power with respect to the 50 states within the US as it is to the rest of the world. It bosses us around just as much. And so any discussion of what I like to call soft secession and its prospects in the US really begins with identifying this domestic pushback against the empire. And despite what we're told by the self-styled progressives, any political arrangement which denies its inhabitants or any inhabitants the right to walk away peacefully is by definition not liberal. So progressives have lost that. So what do we mean by soft secession versus hard secession, I suppose? It's something more, I think, than de facto versus de jure. It's a little more complicated than that because everything about American law and American political norms has been exceedingly blurred over the past century. So de facto violations of US law, particularly the Constitution, have become de jure over time. In other words, we just accept them as part of the landscape, mostly by operation of federal regulations, but also by the actions of our terrible, terrible Supreme Court. So Garrett Garrett in 1944 wrote his famous essay, The Revolution Was. Some of you have probably heard of that. And he explains what happened in the United States in the early part of the 20th century in the New Deal period as, I'm quoting him, a revolution within the form. So everything ostensibly remained the same during this time in the United States. We still have 50 states. We still have three supposed branches of government. We still have a Supreme Court. We still have all these indicia of our federal government. But the country, in fact, was overthrown. There was a palace coup 100 years ago beginning with Woodrow Wilson and presumably reaching its full form in FDR's New Deal. But there weren't any bullets involved. America's second revolution was managerial. It was a seizing of jurisdiction over every facet of American life by centralized bureaucracy in DC. And of course, that got worse and worse in the second half of the 20th century. So what we mean by soft secession is a counter-revolution against that second American revolution, a counter-revolution, but within the form. Meaning aggressive federalism, regionalism, localism, nullification, all taking place under an aggressive subsidiarity principle and all operating in de facto opposition to the federal state or at least sidestepping it wherever possible. So sometimes it takes the form of direct nullification, as I mentioned, or flouting of federal edicts or ignoring them, which it turns out, meaning federal leagues, are fairly hard to enforce without the support of local populations. And the country is far flung and as vast as the United States. So Biden's vaccine mandates, which were just announced a week or so ago, I think will be an instructive test of this. Several governors in the United States have already filed suits claiming that they're going to oppose it. We'll see. So there can be outright nullification, but soft secession can also take the form of legal gray areas, as we've seen with, for instance, some of the supposedly more liberal states and their approaches to immigration sanctuaries and their approach to medical marijuana laws over the past couple of decades. So the beautiful thing about the concept of soft secession is it allows us, at least for now, to sidestep some of the thorniest problems in any discussion of secession. In other words, what to do with federal land, what to do with federal entitlements, with the dollar, with debt, with military bases and personnel, with nuclear weapons, all of these very difficult questions. So hard secession, by contrast, is, of course, what we all think of as an outright division of the United States into two or more new political entities complete with their own boundaries, presumably their own governments and legislatures, and a surviving rump state of sorts. And this is more difficult to achieve, I think. It's certainly not possible at the current moment. It could be reasonably peaceful. We would all hope for that, or it could be quite violent. It could look like the former Yugoslavia, and the Baltics could look like the former Soviet Union. We just don't know. But this is far more difficult. And it's also, I would argue, far less likely absent some sort of outright economic or financial collapse. But that's just it. I mean, we need to understand that America today, I think we should understand that America today is far less a country than just an economic arrangement. It's not much of a country anymore. It's an arrangement. It's about land. It's about jobs and capital. It's about subsidies, like Social Security and Medicare. It's about cheap imports. It's about a good distribution system we have, and a strong US dollar relative to other currencies. And after all, this isn't all bad. I mean, an economic arrangement isn't nothing. It gives us material abundance. Calvin Coolidge famously said that the chief business of the American people is business. So it's far better than nothing, but it's held together by an increasingly shaky political arrangement. And so I think America's lost its sense of being a place with any sort of shared meaning or commonalities. So the question is, when you're just in economic arrangement, what happens if that economic arrangement fails? And that's certainly something that we all have to think about. I don't know how long America as an economic power can last. I don't know if it will last, but the point is that there's no social or cultural arrangement underpinning it or backing it up. And a friend of mine, a lot of Mercer, some of you might know her name. She says that America is Walmart with nukes. And I think that summarizes where we are as sort of a consumerist society. So then what are the prospects for this idea of soft secession, which I advocate certainly in the United States. I can't give you a number. I can't give you a percentage. I can't give you odds, but it's certainly growing. There's something very profound happening, as our friend told us earlier this morning. There's something very profound happening and it's happening in the United States as well. It's hard to describe semantically, but it's a feeling. So the prospects for soft secession, they're higher than they were two weeks ago before Biden announced this vaccine mandate. I'll tell you that much. They're higher now than when Biden was elected in entered office just earlier this year. Despite his promises of bringing the country together, they're far higher now than they were before COVID because vaccines and masks and lockdowns have been incredibly divisive issues in the United States and travel restrictions. They're certainly higher now than when Trump was elected, which in 2016 seemed at that time, which seems quaint now, but at that time that was a brutally divisive election. It's higher now than it was when we first created this idea of red versus blue states, which harkens back to the 2000 election of George W. Bush versus Al Gore, when sort of this red versus blue and this urban versus rural thinking really got started. I would argue it's much, it's higher now than it was in the very turbulent 60s and 70s. When we had social upheaval, we had civil rights movements, we had feminist movements, we had Roe versus Wade, we had birth control, we had radical social change. I would say we are more divided today than then. And I would argue that we're probably more divided than we have ever been in the United States as a country since the Civil War period in the 1860s. So that's a strong statement, but there is something happening and we might call it the great sort. People are sorting themselves out. They're engaging in soft succession, sometimes ideologically, sometimes with their feet and with their businesses and with their homes. But COVID, which none of us expected, of course, has given us a great gift. It's given us the gift of clarity because over the past 18 months we've learned, first of all, what some of our neighbors and friends and family members really are, not to mention some of our non-friends and family members, but just countrymen, so-called. But more importantly, I think we've learned that all crises are local because as the world was going globalist, especially ideologically with this kind of soft social democracy as the Western model, over the last 18 months, it actually turns out that the old analog world, the physical world, matters a lot. It mattered a lot in the past 18 months if you lived in Florida, in the United States, or if you lived in New York State. It mattered a lot for your day-to-day life. It's mattered a lot whether you lived in Sweden or Australia over the past 18 months. All crises are local because when things get ugly, you live in a corporeal world. Your physical body has to be somewhere, and wherever that somewhere is, no matter how wealthy you are, you need to have calories and energy and medical care and perhaps prescription drugs and clean running water and heat and air conditioning. You need that to come into your space wherever you are. So we've all been very happy living in this digital world in our heads, but the old analog world reasserted itself in 2020, and by doing so, it reminded us about the lessons of localism. It's when localism reasserted itself. So whether your local reality was dysfunctional or not depended quite a bit on where you lived over the past year. So in the United States, this dysfunction is making people start to wake up. The U.S. federal government can't manage COVID. It's certainly tried and failed for 20 years to manage Afghanistan. Nobody manages Afghanistan. It can't manage debt. It can't manage the dollar. It can't manage spending or entitlements. It can't even run a federal election for God's sake. Much less provide us with security or justice or social cohesion. Well, Americans are starting to figure this out. How is it going to manage a country of 330 million people? So if we think of it as the great sort, we can just imagine that if the 21st century reverses this dominant trend of the 19th and 20th, the centralization of political power, where so much local and regional power went to states, went to national governments, and even super national governments, that's been the trend. And if that reverses, I think we have the opportunity of several lifetimes in front of us. It doesn't have to be ideological. It could just be people waking up all the world, at least in the West, to the sheer inability of their national governments to manage day-to-day reality. So it's a kind of centrifugal force where people in the United States are separating themselves, again, not necessarily ideologically. It doesn't have to be that way, but they're just running away from dysfunction. And so for the past year, the strongest dysfunction has been in cities. Cities have been the most locked down. Cities have been the most oppressive places to live. And so we actually have some data. There's a big moving company in the United States called United Van Lines. And they put it on an annual survey of where all their moving vans are coming and going. And so, of course, no surprise, just as we might expect, in the United States, the yellow states are hemorrhaging and the blue states are gaining. So everyone decided, well, we're gonna leave California, we're gonna leave New York, we're gonna leave Illinois, we're gonna leave New Jersey, all these progressive states that had very harsh treatment of people during COVID, which exposed a lot of other problems with taxes and et cetera. And we're gonna move to places like Boise, Idaho, we're gonna move to places like Florida, we're gonna move to places like Alabama, believe it or not, which is where I live in the Eastern European of the US. And so they're doing these things with great haste. But it's more than just what state they're moving to. It's the reasons why they're moving. So we should cheer this. If we think about it, if just 10% of Americans are reasonable human beings in terms of their conception of property, law, government, justice, philosophy, if just 10% of Americans are reasonable human beings, that's 33 million people. That's larger than a lot of European states. It would be a perfectly fine economic state in itself. And 33 million people could absolutely coalesce as a potent political force. But it's not just that people are moving into these blue states, it's that they're moving away from cities and towards exerbs and suburbs. So there's really nothing like this in US history. The US history started on the Eastern seaboard with colonies as agriculture and ranching developed. People moved westward for land. That was where farming and cattle and agriculture were available to them. And this lasted for a very long time before the industrial period entered. And then people abandoned farms and they moved to what we call the Rust Belt cities, places like Pittsburgh and Chicago and Baltimore and Cleveland, they moved to these cities because that's where big factories were that produced stuff, physical tangible stuff in the industrial period. And then as the digital era began to take over, people started to abandon those Rust Belt cities and young people especially started to move to where the digital revolution was occurring. So the best jobs were in places like Silicon Valley and California for tech, places like Seattle, where big companies like Amazon and Microsoft who were happening, Manhattan of course, where the financial revolution was occurring. So again, this was a flight away from old industrial cities but towards new high tech cities. But they were still cities nonetheless, they were still concentrated people. What we found over the last year or so is that people are not trusting cities so much anymore when things get a little bit ugly. And the incredible factor in all of this is that broadband has improved to the point where work from home now, work from anywhere is a much more viable option for millions and millions and millions of people not just in America but in the entire world but especially in the West. So that exerts more pressure away from cities and towards suburbs and excerpts. And all of this could have really profound effects on politics in the US. We have the Electoral College, we have congressional representation. So we've never had power in the United States move away from cities. We've always had power move towards cities. So if you spread some of this people out, if you spread out some of the 10 million people in California who for better or worse voted for Trump, some of the three million people in California who just last week voted for Larry Elder. And I was hoping to have some better news for you when I came here about my home state's governor, Gavin Newsom, but he managed to survive the recall election. But what a beautiful thing to even have a recall election for these people. What a beautiful form of pushback. So COVID did us the favor of ruining cities, at least for a period. We don't know how long it'll take them to come back. So we should cheer this. We should cheer whenever Americans lose faith in the power of the centralized state, whether that's because of COVID or whether that's because of Afghanistan or whether that's because of anything else. So, contra our political elites, COVID and the disastrous reaction by Western governments to COVID may actually end up reducing their power and standing in society. And by there, I mean current elites. So that's a very happy thing. But we have to consider, of course, whether this great sort into certain states into certain areas will ultimately be liberal or not in our conception of. This is a potential map of the United States right here. This is the vaccine rebellion states. These are the red states which I mentioned earlier whose governors have made some sort of public statement that they will push back against Biden's mandate, his edict, his pronouncement that employers with 100 employees or more will be required to have vaccines. So, when people say, well, how would the United States ever break up along geographic lines? It's not like the old days with the Mason-Dixon line. You've got some things percolating. And of course, this is my favorite. You've probably seen this, but this is the 11 nations of North America. And I'm all for as many nations as we can possibly have. And again, I live in the Deep South, the Balkans in the United States. But we have all kinds of nations for all kinds of people. Cody Yankee-dom. So we would build the wall around that deepest blue part with the barbed wire on top. But the point is that people have actually taken the effort here to show sort of the cultural and linguistic divisions in the United States. So it's perhaps not as hard to divide up as we might think. So, does all this require nationalism? Is all this illiberal? Is breaking up the United States even in a soft way? Does that just create more governments and more rules and something we should oppose? Is the potential for creating more states, even if they're smaller and less sporadic than our existing ones, does that move us closer or further, say, from an idealized Hopian model? That's a good question. I would argue that the short answer to these questions is no. And the long answer is that even aggressive or illiberal or nativist nationalist movements are far less onerous than the centralized states that we have now. I mean, Western imperialism and colonialism, it didn't end in the 20th century, it just changed form, right? Political centralization, despite the false advertising of globalists, it hasn't been a liberalizing force in the world. It's been a force for the West. It's been a force for the US to impose hegemony in the guise of freedom on the rest of the world. So, centralization has always worked in favor of Western interests, never against. So, when we look at a patchwork like this, when we scratch our heads a little bit, we have to remember, Mises had a lot to say about this. He had a lot to say about this in nation-state and economy and in liberalism. In my strong opinion, both those books are actually quite misunderstood and sometimes purposely so by Mises's admirers. In other words, these two books are radically decentralized and secessionist in their main thrust. They're not universalist as often claimed. And so, coming out of the polyglot patchwork of old Europe in the 1800s, Mises was very concerned about the plight of political minorities in a society. And people who think like me in the United States, we may well consider ourselves, because we are, a political minority. So, he cared about minorities and this was regardless of whether it was due to language or ethnicity or simply smaller voting powder and a political entity. And so, he elevated what he called self-determination, the right to walk away peacefully to the level of a central principle of liberalism. And he also said, by the way, in liberalism, that the whole program of a liberal state could be condensed into a single word, in that word is property. So, this has been a very inconvenient fact about Mises for Lallberts. So, contrary to the Lallberts, you know, Mises's strong antipathy for economic or military nationalism didn't make him an opponent of the nation state per se. On the contrary, Joe Salerno at the Mises Institute has written at length about Mises's quote, liberal nationalism or peaceful nationalism by which Mises met a program of strong laissez-faire at home but free trade abroad and this prevents the need for the tendency toward autarky and outward expansion like he saw in World War II. He even went so far as to say, and I'm quoting him, he said, nationalism does not clash with cosmopolitanism for the United Nations does not want discord with neighboring peoples but peace and friendship. So, Mises's liberalism, it was rooted in the 19th century conception of the word, not the 20th. So, his two political principles were self-determination which he grants in theory, at least even down to individuals and national unity which is the idea that he quotes the organic entities supported by shared affinities. So, independent of political entities and often arbitrary state borders. So, what we have here is the potential for shared affinities. Right, Mises thought the Italians and the Greeks and the Poles and the Germans and the Syrians all deserved independence from their individual despotic rule. So, the question today for us is whether Trumpists in Alabama or Catalans in Barcelona have the same right. So, to be fair to the Lawbirds, I would say that nation, state and economy and liberalism both contain some passages from Mises which would give us pause today given the benefit, to be fair, of a century of hindsight. He praises democracy as self-rule, for example. He says the laws can be repealed or amended, office holders can be removed. If the majority of the citizens so wishes, this is the essence of democracy while the citizens in a democracy feel free. That might sound quite even silly to us today and he doubled down on it later in the 1940s in human action and he argues that democracy allows for the peaceful transfer of political power. That hasn't been entirely true in the West, it's been mostly true in the West in the almost, well, I guess the 80 years or so since he wrote that. And again, his faith in democracy might ring a little hollow for us today but we have this 100 years of hindsight. Mises would never have been able to imagine how mass democracy in large countries would just create the sort of weaponized veneer of legitimacy for every imaginable intervention. You know, it's democratic, you voted for it. And in fact, he was right in this sense, democracy is favorable and preferable to outright violence or war for political power in almost every case. That's true. He asked for this concept of cosmopolitanism which is often credited to Mises and which our friends at some place like the Kato Institute argues against this map. I think Mises unfortunately created a little confusion over cosmopolitanism in this passage in liberalism. He says this and I'm quoting him. He says, liberal thinking always has the whole of humanity in view and not just parts. It does not stop a limited groups, it does not end at the border of the village, of the province, of the nation, or of the continent. It's thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical. It takes in all men and the whole world. Liberalism is in this sense, humanism and the liberal, a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite. Now this particular passage is often thrown at the Mises Institute as an example or an argument that we don't quite get Mises properly. But here's the thing. This passage was not an argument for international or one world government. It's certainly not so when taken in the context of these radically decentralized books like liberalism. You know, Mises, as Luraco reminds us, he could take a train as a business man from Vienna to London and never show anybody a passport or never deal with any immigration officials at all. But Mises was nothing if not a proud Viennese, a vener. I mean, by cosmopolitan, what Mises meant was simply not provincial, right? To be cosmopolitan means having an interest in and a concern for the broader world around you, beyond one's own life or one's own immediate concerns or one's own town. That's what cosmopolitan means. It means not provincial. It does not mean adopting a universalist left cultural worldview to be imposed everywhere. That's not what it means at all. So it is today in the West where it's elites who personify provincialism in the sense they cannot conceive of a worldview or a life much unlike their own. That's why they insist on one set of top-down rules for New York and Texas and Florida and apparently Afghanistan too. So the idea that every polity on Earth ought to be trending inexorably towards your worldview, towards your preferred political arrangement, that strikes me as provincial, not cosmopolitan. So universalism is our Achilles' seal. None of what we find in these two books I mentioned is an argument for universalism. Universalism is hubris, it's a mirage. It's the idea that humans have perfected a form of governments, social democracy, and now it simply needs to be applied everywhere. So many things that we think are universalist world are not. Humans not only fail to believe oftentimes as we wish they would, but they stubbornly often fail to act as we hope they would. And so actions in fact tend to be reliably singular rather than universalism. And so universalism, whether we're talking about political or economic or cultural, opposes a real problem for me, says. And he identified it as collectivist, and unworkable within a praxeological worldview. And I'm quoting him in human action. He says, the philosophy of universal has from time memorial blocked access to a satisfactory grasp of praxeological problems. And contemporary universalists are utterly incapable of finding approach to them. So not only does universalism fail to account for individual human action, it also presupposes of course some overarching arbiter, whether that's a deity or the state. And our progressive friends would of course love to have an overarching global arbiter, whether that's the World Bank, the United Nations, whatever form it might take. So I'm quoting Mises again. The essential problem of all varieties of universalistic, collectivistic, and holistic social philosophy is, by what mark do I recognize the true law, the authentic apostle of God's word and the legitimate authority? For many claim that providence has sent them, and each of these prophets preaches a different gospel. For the faithful believe there cannot be any doubt, he is fully confident that he has espoused the only true doctrine. And that's the feeling I get when I see like Christine Lagarde on TV. But it's precisely the firmness of such beliefs that renders the antagonisms irreconcilable. So Mises the universalist was perhaps not so universal in his thinking. And I know what you're thinking because I've thought this myself. You think, okay, Jeff, but Mises was a utilitarian Democrat. Didn't Rothbard come along and make this normative case for laissez-faire statelessness, but also for the universal application of the non-aggression principle, everything that flows from it. And I think most of us in this room would agree that the corollaries of self-ownership, including just ownership of property, applies to all humans. I think we would all agree to that, but an awful lot of humans, an awful lot of people on this earth, perhaps the majority of people on this earth would not agree with our conception of property and self. Even if we could explain it properly to each and every soul. And I think we ought to think a little bit harder about that. Now this is a subject where Dr. Walter Block, whom I'm sure many of you know or are familiar with, he would strenuously disagree and he emails me to that effect on a regular basis. Jeff, you're all wrong. And of course we wish that Rothbard were alive to give us his thoughts on the current situation, put it mildly. But what would Rothbard object to 10,000 Liechtensteins replaced in the EU? Would he accept New York and Florida impose, excuse me, New York and California imposing authoritarian high tax controlled regimes on their people in exchange for Florida and Alabama becoming largely unyoked from DC? I think he would. So I'll conclude with this. I think this pushback we are witnessing in the United States and across the West, it's directly proportional to the ferocity and the speed which with progressives have advanced their agenda in the last five years. So the slur is to call people reactionaries. But people are reacting to something. It's not just in their heads, they're not imagining it. And so we know, especially with a little bit of hindsight, Trump had to happen, Brexit had to happen. It was never about Trump. It was never about his policies or his personal foibles or who you point to his cabinet or his tweets. It was never about Trump. Trump just happened to embody this pushback. It was about 70 million people in the United States, 70 million people being willing to go off the narrative. This deterministic progressive arc, Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president of the United States and the first female president like the sun rises in the East. And that didn't happen. And American progressives have essentially been in a state of psychological coping and vengeance ever since. Joe Biden's election was about vengeance. We have to understand that. So Trump and Brexit were proto-successionary events. I think that's how we should view them. Now look, left progressives, God bless them. I don't want to vanquish them. I don't want to vanquish the Cascadia. I don't want to vanquish the West Coast. I'm not, that just doesn't seem to me a fruitful way to spend our time and energy. But the left is always going to oppose the decentralization of political power for a couple of reasons. First of all, they are true believers in their own superiority and morality. They truly think that they are better and more enlightened. And number two is they think they're winning. Why would they let anybody walk away? We're winning. Makes a lot of sense. So they're always going to portray breakaway or separatist movements or any talk like we're having today. They're always going to portray that as nativists or racist or nationalistic. They can't help themselves. They all have what I call the white savior complex. We can't let Alabama go because think of the poor people in Alabama and how those terrible, deplorable, Trump racist rednecks will treat them. We hate Alabama and we wish you weren't part of the United States, but no, you can't leave. So the way forward for us, the way towards soft succession is to demonstrate enough resistance, hard, soft, and insufficient numbers to make them question their own doctrine of inevitability of that progressive arc. Because that's what Trump winning did. It made them question, there was no way Trump could win. It made them realize that there's more deplorables than they thought and they're hanging around longer than they thought. And the irony here is that soft succession, it gives the left an opportunity to have so much more of what they want right here, right now. The whole panoply of left progressive wish list could be theirs in states like California right here and right now. But the price they have to pay is a heavy price. It's the same price we have to pay, but it's a heavy price and it's to give up on universalism. And you know what, it's an offer they should take. It's a bargain, this is a bargain compared to real violence or real civil war. A year or two ago, Steve Bannon, who was one of the architects of the Trump victory in 2016, he was on a PBS show public television in the United States, state television, we might call it. Everyone makes fun of our TV, but we have our own RTV in the US, it's called PBS. And he said, you know, he held up his cell phone, he said, it's never been easier or cheaper or more instantaneous to get information than it is today. You know, our grandparents had to go to a library, they had to work to get information. Today it's at our fingertips, virtually costless. He said, but yet, are people changing their world views as a result of greater and easier information? Oh, he said, they're getting more dug in than they've ever been before, they're getting more stubborn in their world views. So he calls it post-persuasion America. Well, I like that term because we don't vote our way out of this. You know, we attempt to separate to and yoke ourselves politically because I hate to say it, but our old polarities of individual versus state and public versus private, these have all become blurred. They no longer provide as satisfying answers as they once did to the questions of our day. So like it or not, this soft secession even will almost certainly require some sort of organic nationhood, some sense of shared identity, probably some amount of geographic concentration to accomplish, soft secession is how we begin. So the price to be paid, as I said, by people of all ideological stripes is abandoning the naive dream of universalism because after all, what are covenant communities if not an idealized conception of private law producing less conflict and more cooperation? Thank you very much.