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Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily podcast today is Thursday, May 26, 2022.

I'm John Pothor, it's the editor of Commentary Magazine.

Christine Rosen is a way today joining me as always executive editor,

A Greenwald Hy-A. Hi, John. Associate editor, Gnore Rothman Hy-Noah.

Hi, John. And joining us today, one of our favorite guests,

A.I. Senior Fellow Editor of National Affairs, you Val live in.

How you Val? How are you? Hello, John. Good, how are you?

Good. I mean, I'm good. The question is, what is the state and condition of the country that we

live in and love? And we, this is obviously a question on everybody's mind because

of the central dilemma facing us in the wake of these three mass shootings in the last two weeks,

Buffalo, the Korean church, excuse me, the Taiwanese church.

And, and obviously, you Val de Texas, which is what, what do these say anything about the United

States as a collective, as a society? What in what way are we, the four of us here, everybody listening,

people who have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any of these acts in terms of

committing them, planning them, knowing about them, anything like that? What in what way are we

implicated in them as members of the society, as citizens of the United States? And

how are we, therefore, to judge American society through the lens of these events? Because there

are two ways of looking at it, one of which is no civilized society can allow these things to

happen. And if they're happening, they are an indictment of society as a whole. And the other is

that there are 330 million people in the United States, and that every year, 20 of them commit,

it now seems around 20 of them commit crimes of violence, horrifying crimes of violence against

...