Welcome to Blockton reported. I'm Katie Herzog, and joining me today while Jesse is picking out his very finest cargo shorts for the inaugural ball. We have Ben Dominic. Ben is a political commentator. He writes for, among other places, the spectator world.

He also has his own very entertaining substack called The Transom. Ben, welcome to Block and

reported. It is great to be here, Katie, and I'm happy to be with 70% of my favorite podcast.

The other 25% obviously being the guests who aren't Jesse and the other 5% being

Jesse, but really only when he's complaining about pigeons and things like that.

Totally fair.

Totally fair.

Again, if I could fire the man, I would.

I'm so glad to have you here today.

We have a lot to talk about.

In the second half of the show,

you're going to lead me through some semi-recent history and explain how a dick pick led to Steve Bannon's takeover of the American right. I'm very excited to hear that. But first,

let's talk about politics. So this episode will go out to the public on inauguration day,

and you are a big C conservative.

In fact, you may be our first real conservative guests on this show, aside from our bevy of gay libertarians, but they don't really count.

And you're also a regular listener to this show.

So I'm curious, Ben, on a scale of one to John Oliver, how wrong are we about conservatives?

I actually think you get conservatives right most of the time.

I think here's quite honestly what it is.

It's that your North Carolina coding allows you to understand conservatives for really well.

I've met a few.

And I think Jesse's hyper online coding allows him to understand online conservatives,

...