Good day, Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners, there's always thank you so much for listening.

And again, thank you. Those of you who have chosen to support the show, it means so much to both

of us. And we love getting your letters, your comments, your emails. I can tell you, I read

every one of them, sometimes to my detriment because there's a lot of them, but I enjoy them.

And I so appreciate them. I know you do too, Clay. This week, another one on one conversation,

you and David Nakandri. And it's a pretty, uh, weighty conversation. You start out talking

about Jefferson and, and his inconsistencies and particularly slavery. And of course, Jefferson

never looks good in those conversations. David, it's, it's like an explosive seed that was planted

in the 1980s when I first started looking at Jefferson and trying to make sense of him. And

slavery was this issue, but it wasn't central to Jefferson at that time. And the dispossession

of Native Americans existed. We understood this, but he was sort of given a pass on this question.

And his male chauvinism, his belief that the tender breasts of ladies were not formed for

political convulsion. Was seen as sort of quaint, almost humorous. Those things have exploded.

That seed exploded like a giant weed at the center of Jefferson studies. And now they've

overwhelmed Mr. Jefferson. And he's increasingly denounced as a hypocrite and contemptible and racist

and worse. And of course, a lot of that is simply true. He certainly was what we would call

a partitist. And he believed in racial superiority. So the question is now what, you know, now what?

And the leftists, the hard left in our academic world is discrediting the enlightenment.

Saying, see, it was really just about powerful white men doing the stuff that powerful white men

have always done and always will do and covering it with a patina of rationality and progress and

the goodness of man and so on. But they were just garden variety human beings with all the

foibles and faults of garden variety human beings. And that means the enlightenment was in some sense

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