All right, welcome listeners to episode 115 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host,

and I'm here as always with my great friend, Sam of the Bell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. How are you doing?

I'm good. Mets have won three in a row. Yes, it is baseball season. And, you know, this was a home run of an

episode. This episode was something, you know, we had been thinking about for a while.

I'll put it this way. It's the first in an occasional series of episodes we'll be doing about

books written by conservatives, conservative books that we think are kind of important,

that either, you know, are particularly good example of the conservative approach to certain

issues or topics that were influential, that made an impact on the right, or just something

like Russell Kirk's conservative mind or a Pat Buchanan book on immigration or maybe even

something like Charles Murray, some of his books. But we chose for

this first one. Really an excellent book, as we joke, it might be downhill from here in terms

of quality, but it's Christopher Caldwell's 2020 book, The Age of Entitlement, America, since the 60s.

It's an argument he makes about the civil rights legislation and kind of

his idea that this formed a kind of new and distinct separate constitution than the one

Americans had been living under basically since the founding. And it's a really important book

to understand, I think, kind of the right-wing critique of

what the civil rights legislation rot. And also, I think, in the past, we've described, say,

like the Claremont Institute style critique of the administrative state, you know, kind of displacing

self-government driven by the legislature, you know, for this kind of

apparatus of bureaucracies and experts and judges and courts. That's what this book is about.

The undemocratic features of the post-civil rights, American juridical environment.

It's not a completely new story, but I think he has a distinctive way of telling it.

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