From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

Theorists of negotiation say that people tend to choose among clearly defined alternatives.

So if one of the alternatives is humiliation and the other is escalation, you want a third

alternative, and that's what theorists of negotiation call an off-ramp.

This is your host, Scott Bertram.

And that's Christopher Caldwell, contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and here

on Hillsdale's campus as part of our CCA lecture series on Russia,

speaking specifically on American Foreign Policy and Russia today. We'll talk more with

Christopher in just a bit. First, we're joined by Dr. David Azarad. He is assistant professor and research

fellow at Hillsdale in D.C. And also the man who guides the conversation in the newest Hillsdale online course,

The Real American Founding, A Conversation. Dr. Azurad, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. It's nice to be with you, again, Scott.

Dr. Azurad, it's called the Real American Founding. Why real? What has been or what is fake, so to speak, about the

ideas that have come beforehand? So there's, there's, it's real in two ways. One is not,

let me start with the original one, is that I find a lot of the people who get the founding, i.e. not the woke

dismissal, the founders were racist and sexist and homophones, the people who like the founding,

good scholars. I just find that they make it a bit boring. You know, they present the founding

as a bunch of guys in powdered wigs who were talking

about separation of powers, and it's all well and good. But there's something explosive,

revolutionary, philosophically bold about the founding that comes out in the conversations

with Professor West and that we recapture.

So the one way in which it's real is that it's not just the kind of tame, domesticated

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