And we are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior

elections correspondent at The Federalist, and as always, your experience Sherpa on today's

quest for knowledge. And as always, you can email the show at Radio at the Federalist.com. Follow

us on X at FDRLST. Make sure to subscribe where you download

your podcast and, of course, to the premium version of our website as well. Our guest today is

Dr. Matthew Mey and Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Government for the Van

Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College in

Washington, D.C. He joins us today to talk about his new book, a family book, and it is a deep

volume here, the American Book of Fables. Matt, thank you so much for joining us in this edition of the Federalist

Radio album. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. This is, it's a thick book. Sometimes I think

it is for kids. It is for the family, though, in general. And it is really about from the founding of this country and what makes this country so exceptional.

That's right.

Yeah, give us a little sense of how you got started and what the stories that you wanted to tell.

I mean, the country in a certain sense is in a kind of crisis of hope and optimism.

And, you know, there's certainly reasons to be tempted to go the route of the black pill.

And it seemed to me that we needed some major, you know, sort of celebratory work for our

semi-Quincentennial, our 250th birthday. And so I didn't see anybody really doing the kind of literary,

artistic celebration in, you know, in preparation. So I decided that that was what I could do since I've been doing children's books in the past.

But the book is basically a journey through the country.

It's regions, its folklore, or really its folk history and its ecology.

But it also takes up the Declaration of Independence and weaves the sentences and lines of the Declaration

with fables, nursery rhymes, primary sources, short stories, dialogues, poems written by me,

...