 Steve Horwitz is the distinguished professor of free enterprise at Ball State University's economics department. He has a PhD in economics from George Mason, and his most recent book is Hayek's Modern Family, Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions. In the interest of more clearly identifying the relationship between his highly theoretical discipline and our evolving set of humane histories here on Liberty Chronicles, Professor Horwitz joins us now. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. So Steve Horwitz, you're an economist. What use have you found for reading history? Oh, I think there's there's so many and I think one of the great things, one of the great flaws in graduate education and economics these days is that that young economists don't read enough history. For me, when I think about what two things, I think one of the things economics does is to help us explain history, right? That it becomes a theoretical framework that we can use to understand the world as it has been and the world has been both in the distant past, but recently as well. I think in some sense, one of the whole purposes of economics is to be able to tell those historical stories. But I also think when we, you know, good economics or economics rightly done, recognizes that there's a small core of things that are sort of universally true that economists talk about. But we want to apply those to the world. We need to know what the institutional framework is like, what the actors were thinking at the time, right? All of those things, economics by itself, economic theory by itself, can't explain much of anything. And what economists need historians and history for is to sort of fill in those details and help us figure out how our theory applies and why the story that we want to tell and that historians want to tell might have relevance. So it's both the sort of purpose of economics, but in some sense, you can't even, you can't even tell a full economic story without all of that institutional detail, with all of that sense of what people were thinking, why they acted the way they did and so on. Even a, you know, simple example, like how much do you like chocolate ice cream versus vanilla ice cream is full of all sorts of historical baggage and details that go into decision making. Sure, right. And again, if we want to understand, you know, the economist question might be why does, you know, one flavor of ice cream cost more than the other, right? Knowing that sort of thing, right, and sort of understanding all of that history and institutional detail is what we have to bring to the party to be able to have those economic explanations. Now, I'm curious about some of the economist culture here. No, no one should be curious. Morebidly curious. In economics departments, how do they talk about historians? How do they think about that discipline in relation to their own? I think that's that's a really interesting question. I think, you know, part of the problem of having been a sort of George Mason graduate and sort of in the world of kind of Austrian Virginia political economies, I think we tend to be much more respectful about history and historians than many of our colleagues do. I think that I think the real answer is and kind of your economist off the street doesn't pay that much attention to history at all. They're busy model building and sort of trying to, you know, come up with an answer to a puzzle that often abstracts away from the questions that historians find interesting. I'll just give you one example. I had this exchange in economic journal watch with Gotti Egerton, who's a big macro economist over the Great Depression. And one of the things that was driving me bonkers in this exchange was that he had this interesting model and sort of was trying to explain why, you know, why the depression lingered and all this. And yet he was either ignorant of or ignoring important historical details that I think made that model not nearly as applicable or at least suggested that it was problematic in some significant ways that he just didn't see. But I think that so many economists go so fascinated by the model and the sort of aesthetics of that mathematical model on one end that they don't pay attention to history. On the other end, you know, you start playing with data and you start running regressions and you're, you know, the danger there, of course, is always you're just whatever comes up with the strongest correlation, the biggest R-squared, whatever you're looking for becomes the thing, right? And you're not actually paying any attention to the sort of primary sources, right? And to sort of dig in and say, what did people think? What did people say? How did they perceive this particular, you know, set of issues? At economics conferences, did they have some choice words for historians in the, you know, the open-bar setting? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's not historians that tend, you know, it's like sociologists who tend to be the target group. I think historians are sort of neutral. I don't think they're seen often as a positive nuisance. But the problem is that they're not seen as a benefit, right, as a group that we should be talking to and engaging with. And again, some of the best work in economics, I think, has been, you know, the really, really good economic historians who are willing to dig into that, whatever one thinks of the particulars. I mean, you know, McCloskey, Joel McCur, you know, keep going. Even, even, you know, Barry, I can be in more of a depression. I mean, all of these folks have done this kind of really good work. And I think among the sort of, you know, friends of mine who, you know, Bob Higgs's work, for example, is here's someone who is not afraid to go digging into history in really the ways that historians do and to just not, doesn't think that the traditional economic variables sort of speak for themselves. And I think that's the important thing to me is really going to go and dig it in. Former colleague of mine has a new book out on, has been writing on sort of the economic effects of race. And he has just dug deep into, he's an economist, right? But he's dug deep into these primary sources, you know, things like wills and legal documents and so on to sort of get at this stuff. And it's, to me, that's amazing work. And I think that's what we need more of, to telling historical stories. For people who are sort of sympathetic to markets and classical liberalism, I think one of the reasons that our ideas have struggled is that we have not been able to tell good historical stories. We've lost the battle over interpretations of history. And the best example of this is the Great Recession. Up comes the Great Recession and everyone reaches into their pocket and pulls out their old high school history Great Depression narrative, which we know from historians and economists and others is problematic. But there it was, right? All of a sudden we're back to this sort of, you know, Hoover stood by and did nothing. FDR did, you know, did all these wonderful things that were all motivated by sort of, you know, modern deficit. I mean, no. The story is much more interesting and complicated than that. And the bad guys are more evenly distributed, right? But everyone's, you know, everyone reached right into their pocket for that narrative. And I think that's a problem. And I think telling better historical stories, which is why McCloskey's work, you know, maybe it didn't take three volumes, but I'm glad she did because it's a glorious story, whatever its flaws and its details. Well, I have to say it sounds like economists feel better about historians than historians do about economists. That's probably true. I mean, you know, I notice I didn't ask what you guys say. But I suspect it's probably a fair criticism. The kinds of things are fair criticisms, right? I think it's the same kinds of criticisms that you and Austrian would have for mainstream economics. It's all top down with, you know, like you said, model making and basically imposing behavior on the past as opposed to, you know, investigating from the bottom up and building narratives of stories that way. Right. And I think for me, you know, those of us who are friends with my good friend Pete Batke sometimes referred to the good Pete and the bad Pete. And what we mean by that is that I think those of us who are Austrians and who are deep into economics, at one level, we really like those sort of rational choice stories, right? And think about Pete Lieson's work here, for example, right? Where we want to say, you know, there's a part of us that says, yes, we can reinterpret all these historical things as people just, you know, maximizing subject to constraint. And I don't think that's automatically wrong. I think it's useful to start thinking that way. But then I think one has to say, okay, is this just a sort of just so story, right? Let's really go in and look at the primary sources and see, was it really this way? And I think if you can back it up those ways, then you've got a really interesting story. And if you don't, right, then you've got something interesting as well, but it's going to be more complicated. Now, since you brought up Pete Lieson, let me say, he was on the show some while ago, a couple dozen episodes ago now. And we talked about pirates, of course. And I'm not totally sold on this point of his and maybe you can sell me on it. People are so incredibly bizarre. And the more you look into them and study them at an intense like, you know, eight hours a day sort of level for years on end, you just are swept away and they're bizarreness. They're so weird. They have strange ideas, strange notions about causality, and, you know, the nature of the universe, strange ideas about forces that transcend what we can measure and observe directly and things like that. And it just seems so bizarre the way people behave sometimes, what their motivations are. They're totally foreign to us, especially the further in the past you go. And, you know, it strikes me that we might not be able to call these people rational utility maximizers in all these cases. Some pirates had totally joined up because they had a death wish. They were driven to this point of, you know, I don't know, not quite insanity, but something very close. They're right there on the border being pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed by the world constantly. Maybe they're not trying to maximize utility anymore. So here's my view of these things. I think when you see a practice surviving for some significant period of time, I think it's not a bad sort of first cut to say there must be something to this. There must be some, you know, sort of functional type story that you can tell that this process, this institution, this behavior has survived. You think about some of the stuff in Pete Leason's new book, right? And so as a first cut saying, you know what, let's try to understand this as rational behavior and maybe we can understand it that it survived that way. I think even if you can construct a good explanation there that doesn't necessarily mean every actor involved with it is therefore behaving, the rationality is sort of built into the process, into the system, into the institution that it's solving some social problem, even if the actors themselves might be in it for the wrong reason. I mean, the wrong, you know, sort of right, the non-rational in the way that you're talking reason. So I think that's the really tricky part for good subtle economists is to kind of navigate that distinction and say, you know, this is sort of Vernon Smith's kind of ecological rationality story, right? That these practices and things have survival value to them and that it's not so much that we are rational, but that we engage in what amounts to rational problem solving because we operate within institutional frameworks that give us the information and the incentives we need to solve whatever that problem is. And so sort of moving back and forth between the perspective of the actor and that systemic perspective, which is I think what good historians do too, right, sort of becomes a way to not have to commit to everybody's calculating machine sort of story. But in any case, whatever people are doing, their experiences come from, you know, a long string that's basically built from the bottom up again. Right, right. And if you do enough digging, you know, come to understand pretty clearly why people are doing the things that they're doing. I do think it's, I think one of the things that, you know, when you understand economics and a little bit of cognitive psych and these sorts of things, you kind of recognize that, look, at some level human beings share some stuff, right? I mean, products of that same evolutionary process, we've got sort of, you know, the sort of, if you want to use these metaphors, the hardware of our brains, right, share a lot of things. But we also all go through unique life experiences and we know from how the brain operates the brain has plasticity and people change and they think differently as they move along. And I think, again, finding out where those universals are and where those, you know, call it human nature if you want, but whatever you want to call it, right, where those universals are and then where the unique pieces of human beings are and sort of using that as our way to look at the world, I think, is the way to go here. And I think a good subtle economics can handle that. I'm not sure mainstream economics has the subtlety of a sledgehammer, right, to not do that well. So then what do you think really is the relationship between our two disciplines here? I think they inform each other. I don't think, it's interesting that you asked this question, by the way, having, I'm in the process of rereading Mises' Human Action cover to cover for the first time since maybe graduate school. So I've been thinking a lot about these questions. So I think, you know, in a Misesian vein, economics, you can't, I don't think you can do good history without some understanding of economics. On the other hand, I don't think you can... Economics becomes sterile if it doesn't have history informing it and history as the sort of thing it wants to explain, right? And by history here, I include the very recent past we call policy applications and things like that, right? So I think there is this relationship and I think, you know, the division of labor here is that economists have to learn from historians and read history. I mean, if, you know, I look at, again, graduate students, I want to say, you want to do a dissertation. First thing you should do is go read a bunch of history about this thing, right? Figure out whatever this event or this thing, how it came to be, how it works. Then, as you read, think about how might the tools of economics help you tell a story about this event or this period or whatever this thing is that others haven't told or that adds something to it that others haven't told. And so I think you can't do that without the history. On the other hand, you can't do it without the economics either. So I think in a healthy, if it were a healthy relationship, right? Each side would recognize, you know, that aspect of the other. But again, you know, I speak here as someone who does unorthodox economics and I think, you know, if you sort of grab the random economists off the street, I think the answer is more, you know, yeah, I read some history on the side, but I'm not sure what it does, you know, or to them, history is simply econometrics, right? And all we do with history is we go out and we look, you know, we find this statistical data and we look for correlations and we hope we have a theory to explain them. And I think that's, you know, again, that's not valueless, but it certainly doesn't allow us to get inside and sort of understand the actor's point of view to engage in that kind of hermeneutic, that sort of interpreting and explaining behavior and its consequences, intended and unintended. Can the facts of history overturn the laws of economics? Oh, that's the big question, isn't it? And here's where I, you know, I become a kind of hardcore Austrian and say not that sort of core of propositions. And I think it's a fairly small number. I wrote about this for K to 1 Bound back in 2012 and a whole thing on praxeology and history that some of us are part of. And I think there's a small core of ideas that are really truths about how humans that are sort of either hardwired into us or truths about how humans behave in the world, that history and other sort of things can't overturn. We can't even sort of make sense of the world without them. But once you get outside that, however, right, everything becomes in some sense institutionally contingent, right? And so there, you know, we can learn things from history. We can learn things from cognitive psych. We can, I think the behavioral economics revolution has made us think about some things, right? So we can learn from other disciplines about where about, you know, sort of where that line is. And I do think, you know, it's an interesting counterfactual. I think Mises, for example, and other perhaps, you know, economists who liked his work 75 years ago, 100 years ago, would have had a broader scope of things that they thought. And certainly even today there are sort of, I would, you know, more Rothbardian Austrians who would put a lot of things into that a priori, you know, box. I think a careful reading of Mises suggests it's not as many as that, but it's not zero, right? And I think, I think, you know, we can't, we, it's a, this is what when Mises and others talk about that a priori, it's that organizing framework. We can't even begin to understand the world, not just as economists or historians, but as actors. We can't even understand the world until we have, until we recognize that there's those, those universals that are just truisms about how humans perceive and organize the world. So then if you think that you see somebody in the historical record, pursuing their less valued wants first, does that mean the economics is wrong or have we severely misinterpreted the records on that? Right, right. I think it's the latter. I think, you know, the economist's first instinct is to say, okay, something more complicated is happening there. We're missing some piece of a historical puzzle or some piece of historical information that would help us make sense of this, right? Again, I think, you know, all the, the stuff that, that Lisa's doing in the, in the new book is sort of this, you know, looking at these things that seem so irrational on first glance, right? But in fact, we can explain rationally. That's, it's fun and it's counterintuitive and all that. But, but, but I think it's important too that we at least, you know, interrogate those things that seem to not follow what we imagine, you know, what economists imagine how people behave and ask ourselves, is this really the case? And that gets us into, I think, looking closely at the details to see whether or not it is. I just, you know, I think there's a sense in which when we understand both the economics here but some of the cognitive stuff and, you know, I think reading things like high-accessory order and so on and we think about how brains work and how minds work. I've been reading Daniel Dennett these days too. This notion that we, we have these principles that organize the world for us, right? And that the sort of things that are, that are in that core of economic theory might be part of that, that simply can't be overturned because they're just built into how we perceive the world. So historians should read at least, let's say, Austrian economics. Well, yeah, everyone should. Well, sure. But yes, yeah, right, I think so. I mean, I think that would be an interesting, it would be an interesting exercise for me to sort of look, I mean, two things. I think one, for historians to read Austrian economics, but also to look at the kind of applied and historical work that Austrians have been doing for the last 30 years. You know, I mean, I think one of the, may he rest in peace, Don Lavoix, one of his great contributions was to encourage us, who were there at George Mason in the mid and late 80s, to do this kind of work. Say, you know what? You got to do history. You got to go out and get your fingers dirty in the archives or in this or in that, right? And tell better stories. And you look at the dissertations that were produced under Don, they were for the most part these kind of applied historical, we want to overturn a tale type story, type, you know, bits of economic history. And I think that was really, really valuable. You can, you know, it led to all kinds of debates about the nature of economics and so on. So you strip away those debates, some of which were, I think, a folly of youth. The core point of what economics is for is to go out and explain the world outside the window and to tell better historical narratives, right? Yes. And it's the same time that McCloskey was working on the rhetoric of economics and this whole argument that, in fact, it is all about better and worse storytelling. And you can kind of see how all that stuff was coming together, about, you know, 30 plus years ago. Yeah, I mean, if you go to, you know, IHS events or Libertarian conferences or whatever, you can barely tell the difference between a professional economist and a professional historian. They do the same things, basically. Right, right. And, you know, I just finished this book a couple of years ago on the family. And there was, I mean, the fun part for me was reading all the history, right? I mean, there was, I can, it wasn't always fun. I can think of sort of a couple of days where I spent reading these, you know, histories of 18th century families and how, you know, the sort of lives of children and how they dealt with their kids, poor families and I was like, okay, enough now. Right, right. But sort of that, to me, was the really interesting part. And the intellectual excitement of that whole project working on family stuff for me came from that ability to say, look, here's people telling stories that I think are good stories, but I can add to those stories because I have this understanding of these economic ideas or these broader things that can come to it that the historians doing this work didn't have, right? And so you're building off that story, but you're adding to it in really, for me, were intellectually exciting ways. Now, I have two sort of propositions that I want you to evaluate. Something I've gotten from studying Austrian economics is the idea of marginal value and utility here. All value is established on the margins or in the marginal units of something. And I think that in a way, all historical change happens on the margins, on the margins of society, marginal considerations that people make during their day, every time they're choosing to change their condition, they're doing so based on marginal valuations. Marginal populations usually end up making the biggest differences, the most profound revolutionary changes or what have you. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think that's right, it seems to me right, that, you know, I think this is so, so this is arguably perhaps one reason why Tyler Cowan and Alex Tabarak named their blog Marginal Revolution. My friend Tom Bell has been known to say that he's in favor of revolution and then pause at the margin, right? And I think there's a profoundly important point there that you cannot engage in wholesale social change. You can't swap out one set of institutions for another, a very Austrian point, right? That institutions evolve and that any social change that we want to push for is going to be, I think, you know, evolutionary, not revolutionary. It's true, I think, that there are sometimes crisis points, you know, where we reach a turning point and we find ideas on the shelves to use Friedman's sort of image that come in and can have a kind of turning point, but even there, you're never going to replace, I mean, we saw in the 20th century when you try to replace institutions wholesale. And I do think equally going the other way, right? I mean, if we think about moving towards a freer society, it's not as though we can just, you know, kind of rip out all the wires at once. We have to think carefully about how to get from here to there and you're not going to change people's ideas all at once, right? You know, persuading people of the value of markets and limited government and so on itself happens on the margin by multiple exposure, you know, to good stories and good ideas. So, yeah, I think that's right. I think one of the, again, sort of follies of youth is that you're impatient and you think you can make change happen quickly and I think the older I get, the more patient I am. Part of me is somewhat sad about that because I'd like to see change happen more quickly. But at the same time, I think it's just the reality of existing in a world of human beings that you can't change things overnight. Yeah, something I've been struck by in my personal research is how many revolutionaries who wanted to be were actually really regretted what they did and the cost that it put on people around them. Now, what about the idea that all of history is really a mass of individual conspiracies? Oh, so, all right. So I have a really fascinating relationship with conspiracy theories in general. Part of sort of indirectly why I'm a libertarian has to do with conspiracy theories. When I was a kid in my mid-teens, I was reading kind of anyone who had a theory, a weird wacky theory of the world. So like Bible prophecy and Eric von Daniken, Cherry to the Gods, right? I mean, I was just fascinated by all that stuff and then I got fascinated by the Kennedy assassination. And there was a period, I don't know how old I was. Before, I can tell you this, it was before I was 16 because I can remember Clear's Day coming home from school when Reagan was shot right in 1980 and coming home and hearing the news and yelling at my mom who was going to say, tell me you put the VCR on and taped us. We need to have visual evidence, right? You know, I'm thinking, suddenly I'm Zapruder, like no one else has a VCR. I mean, it was early in the VCR years, right? But I was in the middle of it then. And so I think all of that stuff, it so happened that when I began to read sort of libertarian stuff on the first books I read, was a book called Restoring the American Dream by Robert J. Ringer, which kind of, I was working at the library at the time and it came across the desk and I looked at this thing and I said, oh, here's another guy with a wacky theory, right? And it turns out it was a good one, right? And so that got me interested and it was because of that sort of fascination by all this weird stuff. So I love conspiracy theories, fascinate me. And I think, so here's why I think libertarians are attracted to conspiracy theories because it, for some, for many of us, the world is such a messed up place and it's so obvious to us how messed up it is and how much better it could be if we only did these other things. Of course someone is messing it up on purpose. Some evil actors must be frustrating the good, right? I mean, if you have any belief in the sort of good of ideas in human beings, why are things so messed up? I think, by the way, the antidote to that is sort of like public choice theory and these sorts of things would help us understand how we can get in such a bad place even if people aren't evil, right? That institutional structures guide people's behavior in those ways. But so I think at one level, right, libertarians are attracted to it because it helps explain why we haven't won. There's these evil forces and we're not even, we're not powerful enough. Our ideas are still good and we've expressed them well, just these guys, they're out. They have all these magical. On the other hand, libertarians should be the last people to believe in conspiracy theories because at some level it suggests that there's people have the ability to manipulate social outcomes according to their intentions. I mean, I wrote a piece for Phi years and years ago called Conspiracy Theory Socialism, right? Which is sort of making this point that if you really take that version of conspiracy theory, you know, socialism should work, right? The difference is you just have the bad guys with conspiracy theory. Socialism, just a good guy conspiracy theory, right? If you really believe that people can manage the outcomes and manipulate us like puppets that way. So I think there's, you know, I think that's all in there. I also think we're forced as libertarians to confront conspiracy theories because there are people attracted on the fringes for whom, right? And this has become certainly a bigger problem with the alt-right and all this sort of stuff. So we can't ever avoid it and I find them endlessly fascinating. I also find the sort of, you know, their resistance to falsifiability to be one of the most intellectually amusing things to watch, right? The lengths people will go to say, well, the evidence you think undermines it actually shows that it's, right? You know, you can think of the way people create this epistemic bubble around conspiracy theories. I think that's really important for libertarians to understand and think about, right? And sort of realize that, hey, wait a second, we don't want to do that around our own ideas, right? We want to make sure that we're making claims that are, you know, in that broad sense of the term, falsifiable, that we're backing with evidence that we don't just automatically reinterpret every piece of evidence, right? And go back to our earlier conversation, it's a problem mainstream economists have is reinterpreting every piece of history to automatically fit the neoclassical model, right? And I think we just have to be, we have to be able to step back and look at our own biases that way. No, I mean, on the one hand, we know that an actor's designs are never the same as the outcome of a situation, or at least, you know, you can't count on it. Right, and that's the important insight that we'll sometimes forget about public choice theory, right? Public choice theory is an unintended consequences story about how bad things happen that are not the intention of the actors, right? And that's different, because people would say to me, well, wait, isn't public choice just a version of conspiracy? No, it's not. Conspiracy theory seems to me to neglect unintended consequences in a way that public choice doesn't. Well, maybe it's more correct to say public choice is a story about why conspiracies go wrong. That would be another way to put it, right? Because, I mean, part of the Austrian credo here is that individuals act always to satisfy their own interests, you know, and to change their condition to one more satisfactory. So in some sense, at least, everything is a conspiracy to improve yourself, your, you know, people you value their condition or whatever. But things definitely don't always work out that way. And the notion, you know, the other problem is I call it the sort of the Rodney King problem, right? Are people incompetent? You can't think people are both incompetent and brilliant enough to hide their incompetence at the same time, right? And so, you know, conspiracy theories face that too. For people who are skeptical of the, you know, who don't even think that the government can deliver the mail, that it could hide a multi-year, you know, generational conspiracy of powerful people who are like, what? You know, they don't even deliver the mail, but you somehow you kept all this a secret, right? Yeah, right. So to me, that's another, you know, another problem here. So let's run down then a couple conspiracy theories that you think are true. Oh, okay. So I mean, the one, I mean, I'm it'll take a lot of work to convince me Oswald acted alone. I still, I still, I can't, you know, I think, I stop sometime in college. And so I'm going to, you know, people are going to hear this and start sending the email saying, well, you haven't read this book. Yeah, I haven't. All right. But but sort of the, you know, the to a young to a 14 or 15 year old, right, there were all kinds of things that just pushed all the buttons there, right? And so even even today, you know, part of me would I don't, I'm not sure I really believe that he didn't act alone, but it's like a hurdle that has to be overcome. Right. I'm not sure there's, I mean, that's the one is sort of, you know, if you want to think about that kind of traditional conspiracy theories, that's the one. And it's only because I think that I've been so, I was so primed at just the right age to think to think critically about it. I should I suppose since I've written a lot about, I should say a word about the Fed here, right? Because we do, there's plenty of people, right, who want to, you know, make that point to that this was some again, some kind of conspiracy theory. Okay. But it's a really nice example of what we were just talking about, which is it's true, there were some bad actors and who thought that they could get control of the monetary system and sort of do bad things with it. But they couldn't, their intentions didn't play out the way they thought because the creation of that beast happened through the democratic political process. And the real problem with the Fed is not that it's the creation of four guys or six guys at Jekyll Island who dreamed it up, but that it was a political compromise, right? That was this thing that's, you know, is a decentralized central bank and all the problems that have come out. So, here's an interesting case where we want, you know, there's some evidence that makes it look like the conspiracy theory story is true, yet when you dig deep enough into it, you realize, no, it's actually just really just the same old public choice, the same old public choice story, right? That about how the ultimate result doesn't bear out the intentions of those within the political process and compromise is necessary and you get these weird things that, you know, that don't work very well, right? And then, you know, the Fed does real damage, but that's not because the Rothschilds are behind it or, you know, or apparently now the Rothschilds control the weather as we've learned in the last couple weeks. No, speaking of that story, by the way, what do you think are some of the more important conspiracy theories that we should, whether true or not, that we should take seriously because enough people find importance there? Sadly, all the ones that you might just call the sort of tropes of anti-Semitism. I mean, you know, this is personal for me at one level, but I do think it's not just personal and it's getting worse again over the last really, I think, decade. This sort of, you know, whether it's just people thinking it's funny to troll with this stuff, I don't think it's just that. I think we really are seeing a return of this belief that Jews have not just, and what's interesting this time, not just manipulated like the world of finance in the ways that historically have been the case, but the new one is that Jewish ideas are responsible, right? That Marxism is a Jewish thing, socialism is a Jewish thing, the sort of the Frankfurt School is a Jewish thing, right? Globalism. Globalism, right. I'm happy to call myself a globalist and a cosmopolitan. Oh, here we go. I'm happy and people think you can't say that. No, they're not. They shouldn't be anti-semitic. We should not let those words go. But anyway, yeah, so I think this kind of stuff, again, they are conspiracy theories because the form that anti-semitism frequently takes is this kind of thing, right? Where Jews secretly manipulating control, not just again the material world, but now the world of ideas. You know, I mean there's the versions of other anti-semitic stuff like blood libel and all that, which isn't quite conspiracy theory, nasty in its own right, but I do think that's the one that I'm seeing these days. And frankly, you know, that's going to lay all the blame on the right. I think our friends on the left have to be careful here too in the stories they tell about AI, you know, AIPAC and the Jewish lobby and all this kind of stuff, the sort of whole influence of Israel thing verges into conspiracy theory of time from people who ought to know better, right? And again, it's just more complicated than that. And one of the things I tend to say to people on the left who sort of bring that stuff up is have you actually gone to a temple or a synagogue recently and asked the people there what they think of those issues? Because ask 40 people, you'll get 50 different opinions, right? It's not like there's this sort of, you know, monolithic Jewish view of Israel and of the Middle East and that whole conflict. It's very for American Jews, it's really difficult and troubling and this habit reduced down to this sort of story about money and AIPAC and whatever is, you know, it's not as nasty as the other stuff but it's in the ballpark. 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