These truths to be self-evident, that all men are created as a member of Congress, I get to have a lot of really interesting people and the experts on what they're talking about. This is the podcast for insights into the issues. China, bioterrorism, Medicare for all in depth discussions, breaking it down into simple terms. We hold, we hold, we hold these truths.

We hold these truths with Dan Crenshaw or wherever you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn, People's History of the United States, that book of documentary. So there you heard it from Matt Damon, Matt Damon, big intellectual, of course, of our times. Well, at least he plays sort of one in good will hunting. Of course, he's good at math in that movie, not necessarily well versed in the context of history and what makes up Western civilization, which he is a part whether he likes it or not.

Turns out he grew up down the streets, I think, from Howard Zinn, which maybe might explain his obsession with him, both in character and in real life. So we wanted to explore who Howard Zinn is. Maybe some of the listeners don't even know who Howard Zinn is. But rest assured, he has a very large impact on your life. Unfortunately for you, whether you know Howard Zinn or not, what you do know is that there is a deep seated narrative prevalent among the left, mostly in America right now, that America is an inherently bad place, that America represents an oppressor of sorts both now and throughout history.

And so I want to bring on the podcast my friend, Dr. Mary Graber. Thank you so much for being on. Oh, it's my pleasure. Glad to be here. Thank you. So where are you right now? I am here in New York, right?

Yes, I'm in Clinton, New York, of about 30 at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, as our science is in the front as well.

Thank you for your work there. And you've also written a book, which is, of course, what we want to talk about today, debunking Howard Zinn, exposing the fake history that turned a generation against America. You released it earlier this year. And before that, I'll read a little bit more of your bio. Not only are you with the Alexander Hamilton Institute, you were born in the former Yugoslavia. You moved to grew up in New York before attending University of Georgia, where you earned a Ph.D. in two thousand two.

So, again, welcome. And let's get right to it. OK, so who is Howard Zinn?

I briefly talked about who he is, but maybe give us give us a little bit of background for people who've never heard of Howard Zinn was born in nineteen twenty two and he died in two thousand ten. The most important thing to remember about him was that he was a communist. So in the nineteen thirties when he was growing up in Brooklyn, he was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who did not do too well. And it was the Depression and it was the height of communist recruitment.

And Howard Zinn was swept up into that, took part in protests and was quite taken in by the Marxist ideology and became a member from about nineteen forty eight to nineteen fifty three after he had served in World War Two. And he's got an FBI file that's over four hundred pages long. And according to an analysis by Ron Redish, himself a former member of the Communist Party, what they found about Howard Zinn is true. So his FBI file is accurate.

He, as he was going to graduate school, earning his Ph.D. at Columbia, he was also teaching Marxism at the Communist Party headquarters in Brooklyn. In nineteen fifty six, he was hired to teach at Spelman College, which is a small college for black women at Christian College in Atlanta, and he stayed there until nineteen sixty three when he was fired for insubordination by the college's first male and first black president Howard Zinn pretended to be leading his students on civil rights protests.

But what he was really doing is encouraging them to defy the administration and to break the law. He was hired at Boston University in about a year, and he remained there until he retired in 1988. And he was ostensibly teaching political science and history at these two places. But most of his time was spent agitating, leading protests, taking trips to visit North Vietnam to bring back W's, you know, conducting a propaganda war against the United States, especially during the Cuban missile crisis and during the Vietnam War.

So he was known as an activist. And in 1980, his book, A People's History of the United States, came out and it took off slowly. But as of right now, it has sold. An estimated over three million copies, a record breaker, when did it start selling copies? Was it popular right away? No, actually the first press run was only four thousand. It picked up slowly. It picked up by word of mouth and teachers started sneaking it in.

And then when Goodwill Hunting of the movie, which Matt Damon wrote and performed in Matt Damon, who grew up next to the Zins in Cambridge, when he had that prominent line that it took off even more, it was building and sales. But Howard Zinn then became recognized. He was friends with Jane Fonda. He was adored by rock bands, Pearl Jam. He was a celebrity historian and history professor, a radical art that the students loved him.

Of course, these were students who really didn't care about studying because they knew they could get a guaranteed passing grade and most likely an A as long as they even showed up part of the time because he did very little teaching.

Well, in summary, the people's history of the United States is basically a counterargument to America in every way. Right. You know, it's the and I want to get some more details on that here in a second. But but but I want to briefly say it's you know, it's it's it's American history through the eyes of the Native Americans that American history, through the eyes of slaves and people who are disenfranchised. Right. It's meant to be a complete counterargument to everything.

Good. That is that is American history and provide only that context, I guess. And I want to get to the details of what's actually in it. But but first, I mean, why is it even popular? Like what is the psychology you think behind what makes a story like that popular? What is people's need to hear only a bad story of the United States? Well, yeah, we will get into this.

But the bad story is based on lies and falsified evidence. But he he appeals a lot to adolescents, know the caps, the Catcher in the Rye appeal. You're you know, you're 15 years old. Your parents don't know anything. You're cynical. You're smarter than everyone else. And what Howard Zinn does in writing his book, he pretends to let you in on a big secret of American history that no one else has ever revealed before. He knocks down the giants of history writing such as Samuel Eliot Morison and Bernard Bailen of multiple prizewinners respected professors at Ivy League universities, accurate, painstakingly researched, well written histories.

And so when the reader finishes reading Zinn's book and it's usually an adolescent or someone who really doesn't know much about history, he gets the feeling that he doesn't need to read anything else. Here's the whole story. Matt Damon says in the movie as he's looking at a multivolume history of the United States. You know, hey, why bother with those multivolume histories? Just read Howard Zinn's book, That's All You Need. He tells the whole story.

Yeah. And I agree that that's such a powerful motivation for a young person to feel like you just got let in on the big secret, on the information. I see it across many issues. You know, it's not just with this particular anti-American story. It seems to be the case just because of in politics. I'm constantly dealing with disagreement on issues. And it's very hard to to to explain to somebody that they're missing a lot of context when they feel like they have the big secret, you know, and so, you know, so it's important to know what they're where they're coming from.

It's why it's important for people to know Howard's ancestry so that you know how to debate it. Right. Because because this happens in all all across issues like somebody will come at you and some radical activists will come at you very they're fomenting of them out there. They're very passionate about something. And they'll have a nugget of information that you've never heard of. Right. And you've never heard of it because, you know, in the grand scheme of history, it's not as relevant as they're making it out to be.

But you need to know it because. Because you need to know it. Yes, that is that is true. But all of these other facts are true also. And they provide context to the argument that you're making, which is a sense, I'm assuming. Why you why you wrote this book, right? Yes.

I mean, you know, Howard Zinn presents this man. Conversion of American history, there are people who are purely evil and people who are purely good and coincidentally, the purely evil people are the patriots, the capitalists, discoverers and all the people that we traditionally revere in history. And so he doesn't provide any any kind of context. And so you've got this sort of boiled down morality tale. And he does present himself as this moral authority. Who is going to stand up for the Arawak Indians and the other Indians and women and slaves and the workers.

And so you've got this sort of moralistic tale. And and he he does that, too. Of course, there is no context of what he says about American history.

And so where does he start? It is it is it Columbus discovering the new world? Is that is that generally I know that's where your book starts. Is that basically where his account also begins? Yes. Yes. So, yes. So he that was a point of pride for him. He bragged about it quite frequently. He claimed to have revealed what nobody else knew about Christopher Columbus, this man who had been worshipped and had been taught in school as being this great hero who discovered America and so on and so forth.

But, hey, Howard Stern's going to let you in on a secret about him that basically he was a greedy capitalist in search of gold. He enslaved the native Arawak. He chopped off hands, he committed genocide. And hey, boys and girls, you haven't heard this before. But I Howard's and have discovered this. I didn't know this before either. But he says I read his diaries. I've done all this research, you know, the writings of lost causes, the priest.

And I know and I'm going to reveal this to you, but as I discovered in looking at one of his books in the bibliography, plagiarise the first five and a half pages from a book for high school students that was not written by a historian, but by a fellow socialist anti war of organiser, a friend of his by the name of Hans Coning. So it's it's all it's all fraudulent. And ever since he started his book that way, other textbooks have followed now by beginning with Columbus and basically presenting the same kind of story that he's not a hero.

He was a Mirador. You know, someone who enslaved the Indians out of his pure lust for gold and greed.

Is is part of his history just outright false or is it just lacking in context?

It is false. And that's what my book is intended to do. I mean, I have almost a thousand footnotes. I've done extensive research. And so I've looked at his sources. And what I found is that he twists words around very often. He'll have ellipses that indicate that you omitted a few words or maybe a sentence or two. And of course, when you do that, you're not supposed to change the essential meaning. While Zinn does and when he quotes Columbus's diary, where he says he could make them servants to do whatever we want them to do, what Zinn is leaving out is the context that this is not the idea of Columbus, but it's the idea of a hostile tribe and also the fact that these ellipses leave out pages, days of diary entries.

And what's in those pages are such things that as we could convert them more by love than by force, he leaves out Columbus's constant reminders to his men to treat the Indians fairly and with kindness. So he does that repeatedly. He does that in the papers that he gets from the government about Vietnam, cuts off the ends of sentences, kind of what happened with President Trump in Charlottesville. You know, he does that repeatedly and. When you read about the Viet Cong, the way Douglas Pike presented them, Douglas Pike said the Viet Cong were committing genocide and they were teaching agitprop strategies.

When you read Howard Zinn's book. He says that Douglas Pike praised the Viet Cong and said they were teaching the villagers communication strategies and political organizing. I mean, the complete opposite. Yeah, I mean, it's it's a deliberate attempt to to to counter argue every single positive narrative of America from from the discovery of the new world until now. I mean, do you think that's dangerous? I mean, I think you do. I do. I do.

You know, creating this sort of hatred of your own country. And why is that? His goal of it is to simply because of his origins as being a communist.

His goal is to inspire a violent revolution and overthrow the government, which is what we're seeing on the streets today. And you read his book, you will see repeated references to the idea that this country is irredeemable. The vote was not given to women, Indians or slaves when the Constitution was written. They were excluded. But then he goes on and he says, well, would the vote work? Would that have any positive impact? No, because there are inequalities in wealth.

So constantly he's he's reminding people setting up these false scenarios where every attempt at reform doesn't work. The workers, the slaves, you know, every ethnic group gets beaten back by the capitalists and by the politicians. And so it's hopeless. They get close to having a revolution, but they like an overthrow of the government, like a communist revolution. They never do. But he leaves the reader with this glimmer of hope. Maybe we will have that overthrow of the government and we can welcome in this communist utopia.

And that's the way he does present communism. There are local movements, you know, where people rule themselves.

You know, I always wonder because I always bring this interview up because it's so fascinating. A KGB defector in the nineteen eighty four interview talking about their strategy to overthrow America through through information operations. You know, he talks about how only only 10 or 15 percent of spy operations was the, you know, the glamorous source collection type of spying, but that the rest was really information operations. And he talks about the demoralization of the American people, basically making you hate your country.

And I always wonder, did Howard Zinn precede them or did they influence them or or was it just this, you know, happy, I guess, happy, unifying effort that just happened to coincide? Because, you know, so it's people really people need to realize this stuff's been going on a long time. It's very much in your face right now in twenty twenty, the sort of deconstructionism of the American story. But it's been going on for a while.

And I wonder I just wonder if those two things were connected or if the Soviets used him or if he was influenced by the Soviets, or was it just a a mix?

There is good evidence and I'm going on what Ron Redish says. And from my other reading in nineteen fifty six, when he he had left the Communist Party, he joined a number of front groups. And it's speculated and it's probably true that those memberships were undertaken by the orders of the Communist Party. And in nineteen fifty six when he went to Spelman to teach and dropped his membership, he was doing what a lot of communists were doing. They were told to drop their memberships, their official memberships and enter the institutions.

There was a decided effort by the Communist Party USA to have their members do that. And so Howard Zinn did what other good communists did. He went into the institutions and there were other people who I have the name of someone I think his name was Con. And he enrolled at Howard University, a black university in Washington, D.C. And he was white, but he was there in order to radicalize the students and to convert them to communism. And it was done under the cover of civil rights.

So Howard Zinn was was doing what other communists were doing. He was following the script. And, you know, and of course, he had a pretty nice, easy life doing it. It's certainly. Less dangerous than ferrying around, you know, government secrets. Yeah, so he he spread his poison through colleges to to the students. And basically what he did is his book follows the contours of a book written by William S. Foster, who was a CPUSA chairman in 1951.

And if you read Howard Zinn's book next to that book, you see that he presents the same scenarios of Columbus entering this pristine utopian sort of communist society. So his book is Communist Propaganda. Yeah. And a key a key objective of communism is, of course, the revolution that has to occur to get to communism. And no better way to instigate a revolution than to create resentment and sit at the in this time period, especially in the 60s, that communists used identity politics to do so.

Because, you know, I guess the Marxist view would be that the proletariat would rise up against the capitalists and take what's theirs. But it's difficult to do in a country where there is opportunity. But, you know, you can argue against it all you want. It may not be perfect, but it's the most perfect system for for for gaining opportunity than we've ever had. But you have a middle class that's relatively happy. It's hard to get them to want a revolution.

And so you have to create resentment through identity politics. And then states there's not a country and world history in which racism has been more important for so long a time as the United States. I mean, that's a pretty extreme statement. And again, the objective is clearly to to create that resentment so that they can use it for political power purposes. But I mean, how does he even make the argument there? You know, that he also makes the argument that the civil war was actually not about slavery, but protecting the capitalist system.

It's it's a strange argument simply because capitalism is is totally a.. Slavery, by its nature. The ability to own your own labor is is a fundamentally free market capitalist principle. To say that it's you know, the slavery aspect is completely the opposite. It goes against our deepest principles. And this is Thomas Solo, I think does a good job relating this to closer to the civil rights movement where, you know, it was it was companies that were that were pushing those businesses, pushing for desegregation because desegregation was good for their business, for for a variety of reasons.

You know, the poverty of the south compared to the north for subsequent years is directly related to the fact that the people did not own their own labor and could not move up. There's no incentive to do better because you're not rewarded for your own labors. It's just just on a philosophical level. It makes no sense that that that that the war was fought to preserve capitalism because capitalism was not existing correctly right. In the south at all. And so it's it's it's it's it's just a wrong view of history.

And I don't know, I guess that you just can't give the first Republican president any any credit for actually being anti slavery. I suppose, you know, again, the motivations are are are much worse.

You know, they're power hungry. They're not they're not he's not bent on telling the truth. Yeah, well, he there is no president and Howard Zinn's history that did any good. And that's what makes some of the progressives angry and because he gives no credit to anyone for making any kind of social progress and it's kind of strange when you're talking about the South. I mean, he has this kind of feudalistic view. And so he you know, he praises African society, which he presents as feudalistic and every every ill and every sort of injustice he traces back to capitalism.

And it's it's done deliberately because, you know, he's a communist and he wants to overthrow overthrow this country or inspire a revolution to overthrow the country. So what about things that are largely agreed upon that America did well, like World War Two and our involvement there to does it give us any credit for that?

No, no. Actually, he spends a lot of time talking about the Japanese internment camps. He says the Japanese Americans were put in prison like conditions that were similar to what the Nazis did. And this was kept a secret until about the end of the war. And if you go back and you look at the newspapers and the magazines, even the ones he quotes, you see that that's not the case. He says that the Japanese were ready to surrender, but the Americans just wanted to drop the bombs as a kind of scientific experiment.

And he concludes by saying or he asked the question, he he's very good at asking a series of leading questions. And one of his questions there as he wraps things up, he says, at the end of the war, are we defeated a so-called fascist enemy? But were we any better or were the fascist was fascism absorbed into the bones of the victors? Was racism eliminated? Was imperialism eliminated? And of course, if you read him and believed, then you say, oh, no, it wasn't.

We must have been just as bad as the Nazis, if not worse. Right, right. It's again, it's like he's letting you out and the secret and making the reader feel as though they've discovered some new truth when in reality it's it's really is is an exercise in playing off people's, you know, historic historical ignorance. And to be honest, I mean, it's to be fair to just people, it's difficult to know everything. Right. And as a society, we rely on a sort of a collective knowledge, a collective understanding of the principles by which to find truth and and pass that truth on for for generations to come.

But nobody no single person is capable of knowing at all. And so when you're presented with this sort of, you know, and a radical view but presented with it and sort of this tempting manner, it can be persuasive. Right. And you can you know, because, again, it feels that adolescent and adolescent sentiment of always looking for something to rebel against, we all felt it when we were teenagers. And then we kind of grow out of it.

We find ourselves in a moment where we're not really growing out of it, and another in that our institutions have failed us because they failed to teach the context to to our teenage populations. And and instead they've coddled it. They've coddled the misinformation. And and the students believe that their feelings are truth. And and then and then Howard Zinn provides some kind of authority to that. And so we find ourselves trying to trying to move mountains to dissuade people of these great untruths that it's it's extremely problematic.

But it's you know, it's and then then when we find them justifying things like Marxism and socialism, despite the obvious, you know, bad obviously failed history of such ideas.

Yeah, you're you're absolutely right. And the reason why one of the reasons why Howard Zinn is believed is because of the way history is taught and the loss of respect for the profession, for scholarship. You know, so, you know, I go over lesson plans. I was just looking at the Portland lesson. And they use a young people's history of the United States. So a middle school version for all their 8th grade classes. And the history standards are not, you know, that you're going to learn certain facts and you're going to understand how the government works.

But rather, you know, these personal stories. And you can hear Howard Zinn comes along and it's very simple. It's engaging. He illegitimately plays on emotions. But, you know, I you know, I have historians around me and it's painstaking work. And you you respect the work of others. You build on it. There's a conversation and you go back and forth and you respect each other. If if you are a good historian and you're honest and you're diligent, Howard Zinn does no such thing.

I mean, he's he's a propagandist. But to the uninitiated and to the young and naive, they don't know any difference. And especially given the way subjects are being taught today, his version is seen as quite legitimate. After all, he did have a PhD in history. Yeah, and I mean, do you think that the people perpetuating his eye, his ideas and his work, you know, these are these are teachers, these are professors, these other people with PhDs, do you think there's any good intention there?

Do you think they're revolutionaries also or do you think that they have this earnest need to present the counterfactuals to history just for the sake? Because there's obviously there's obviously academic, I think, utility in presenting counter counter ideas and counterarguments and saying, yes, this, but also this. And, you know, just for greater context of this, but also this. Do you think that's their goal or is it is it a mix between true believers and and well-intentioned historians?

I think it's a mix, especially for high school teachers. Now, this book has been around for 40 years and it's influenced other textbooks. And so what Howard Zinn said, which would be outrageous to a legitimate historian back in 1970, like Oscar, Hamlet is now accepted as truth. And so some of these teachers don't know any better. You know, there are teacher training, continuing education seminars funded by the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, that use Zen's book, Teachers Learning History in College and Education.

Colleges are learning Howard Zinn's history. They're using his book and so they don't know any better. And that was one of the reasons I wrote this book, is to lay it all out and and say, you know, look at what he's quoting. Look at what he claims to be saying and look at the actual evidence. So I do think it is a mixture. And, you know, a lot of these, you know, far left radicals refuse to look at the counter evidence.

Right? I mean, I'm sure you've had that experience. You know, they just won't listen. Even if you lay out the evidence for them, they're determined maybe they don't care. I think there are a lot of those, too. Well, they're having the exact same conversation. We are just flipped right there saying that all the rest of it's been propaganda. And they're saying that the entire American story, as we know it, is pure propaganda and that they have the real story.

I mean, that's like once you're convinced of that, nothing else matters. And sort of and then the post-modernist world, they they don't abide by basic standards of truth anymore. And in fact, they label those as oppressive and in amongst themselves. Right at that. I mean, you've seen this in sort of post-modernist RLF writing, which is made in academia, that that logic itself could be deemed racist because it's based on some kind of, you know, white male patriarchy or whatever.

It's it's it's difficult to follow because it makes a little sense. But that's sort of what they say. And that allows them to really move the goalposts wherever they want. You know, it just doesn't matter. And as you pointed out, like Howard Zinn's, if you just look at the if I'm getting this right. But but the standards of. The standards of historians, you know, they they don't actually fit the American Historical Association research standards, as you point out, it doesn't abide by these things at all.

I mean, we have standards, right? And if you don't live up to those that shouldn't work and as you pointed out, they use sort of a kind of like I call it, the op ed chaining, because I see it in current events all the time or some some op ed writer will will will present a link to something as if that's evidence and click on the link. And I will just be another op ed. Will have more evidence.

That's just another op ed. So eventually these opinions just become truth, which is kind of like what what has happened with Zins writing?

Yeah. I mean, you know, I have I really have no problem with a left wing history of the United States or a history of anything, you know, and I've been accused of wanting censorship. It's OK. You know, I mean, there are plenty of legitimate leftwing historians and writers, but they don't distort the evidence. They don't twist what you know, they don't go to another book or interview someone and then make it appear that that source says the opposite of what they say.

So that's the problem with Zinn. And he has to do that in order to present this country to be as evil as he presents it. If he were to even have half of it be truthful, you know, you wouldn't be able to believe all these terrible things about the United States. So it's it is a deliberate it's misinformation. It's deliberately a misinformation campaign.

In your research, what was the most glaring evidence of misinformation like? Was there something that really surprised you and maybe related to that question but separate which is which which of his historical lies has had the greatest impact on 20, 20? Well, I think I'm 20, 20. I think it would be Colombus, because all these riots started with attacking the Columbus statues and, you know, a journalist will go up to some 30 something person and ask their opinion.

And it's like they're regurgitating Howard Zinn. And I think that that has been particularly harmful because everything traces back to Columbus. And so the way Zinn presents history, it's a long line and it begins with Columbus. Columbus sort of begins the chain and it goes on and on and even worse off that way, you know, it goes to the Spanish explorers and the colonists and then on and on to the presidents. And so the discovery, the fundamental beginning of the United States in zoos presentation is illegitimate.

He even says that the idea of the United States is a pretense. He uses that word. So you go right back to the beginning and it's an illegitimate nation. We have no reason for being. That is what it says. And I think a lot of the people that we're seeing out on the streets actually feel that way, that this country was built on the backs of slaves, oppressed workers, Indians and so forth. And no justice is possible.

The system is rotten through and through. And it was that way right from the very beginning.

What about the Declaration of Independence and the principles that it exudes? Does he have anything good to say about that?

No, he he basically says that and has become typical these days. Women weren't included. They said, oh, yeah, all men are created equal. What about women? What about property men? What about Indians and slaves? No, they weren't equal. And then he asks the question, is it possible to make people equal when some people have a lot of wealth and others do not? And so he proposes this question that skirts.

I say basically it's impossible to live up to the principles unless there's communism. Yes.

Does he confront the arguments of Frederick Douglass at all? And, like, in a real way?

No. And particularly in his famous speech of What to the Slave is the Fourth of July given in eighteen fifty two in Rochester, New York, which Frederick Douglass starts off in a very angry tone and understandably so, because he says, well, what is this Fourth of July to the slave? You can celebrate. You have your freedom. We don't. But Zinn cuts it off, say the rest of the speech, which is pretty important.

Yeah, yeah. When when Douglass says, you know, he builds up the audience, gets them to sympathize with him being the great orator he was. And then he says, however, the Constitution is and this is in all capital letters, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Howard Zinn leaves that out and he doesn't make any reference to Frederick Douglass saying that or all the positions that he was appointed to in the government or that two of his sons fought in the civil war, that he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln, that he had words of praise for Abraham Lincoln.

You won't get that in a people's history of the United States. He just leaves that out. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's incredible because, I mean, obviously, Frederick Douglass is making the point that, no, we were not living up to the principles of our founding a store. A proper story of America is a struggle to live up to these ideals, these new ideals, frankly, these new principles. The reason it's so hard to live up to them is because it was so out of step with human history and its and its its Western civilization that that at least started the process.

And to try and undermine the foundations themselves because because we can look to history and say, well, we weren't perfect, not even close to it is a really strange inclination, but it's an inclination that that apparently we need we need to fight a little harder every single generation, because this gives our young people are so susceptible to this. And, you know, from your part, I can imagine what it's like to be a quote unquote dissident professor.

Right. You've got to you start an organization called the Dissident Professors where it's funny that it's even called dissident, considering what you're teaching is is a more objective and contextualized view of things. But these days that's considered dissident. So I appreciate what you do. Yeah, well, I'm not teaching anymore, I'm a resident fellow here at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. The last time I taught was at Emory and that was in twenty thirteen.

So, yeah, I started that back in 2011 and was swept up in the IRS sting operation under President Obama. And it took close to two years to get the, you know, the nonprofit status. So I know what it's like to have the government consider you to be an enemy. So back when the Tea Parties, any organization that was filing for nonprofit status with the words Tea Party in them or anything that was patriotic was sort of, you know, put through a special process, ignored or stonewalled.

You're given these long, elaborate questionnaires when they finally do get back to you. So, you know, if that was. Yeah. Part of that story, that's incredible.

It's a scandal in that administration that is just not talked about enough to other podcast on diving into the IRS scandal. I mean, it's such an abuse of power. We have to wrap it up there. I have to go vote. As listeners know, we run this from my office in D.C. and right now we're in between votes. So, Mary, thank you so much for being on.

Thank you very much. This was a pleasure. Thank you, Mary.