Hey Michael Steele podcast listeners, Michael Steele here with another quick take from the Michael Steele podcast.

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Welcome back everybody to Michael Steele Podcast.

We are having a great conversation.

In fact, I went a little bit long in that first second because I just I would just sit there going this is so good. She's hitting all the right cords with me. It is such a pleasure to welcome Heather Cox Richardson to the podcast.

He is a professor of history at Boston College and an expert on American political and economic history.

So Heather, we kind of laid down a lot of historic and sort of contemporary tracks around the the present day manifestation of Republicanism and their distortion of conservatism,

certainly not cut out of the mold of Abraham Lincoln who aptly defined it in his Cooper Union speech.

But the the next piece of this for me is what we find and you talk about in the book related to, you know, this idea of rewriting American history and and even even as much as the Reagan

starting with the Reagan revolution and Reagan was a political figure that I found very engaging and very alluring.

I mean he spoke spoke in a way that made sense to me about a lot of things at the time and certainly growing up in the you know era of Watergate and the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War,

and you know, he was, you know, he was like,

you know, your dad was saying,

it'll be okay, it'll be okay, right? So you sort of had this sort of repositioning of a conservative slash

Republican narrative in the they were somehow less. He in fact invited them to be a part of the American experience

in many ways.

And people will debate the up and down, the good and bad of that

and the way he did it.

But at least for a 17 year old kid at the time,

it made sense to me in 1976 what he was saying.

But then you transition off of that sort of modern era in the first introduction of, for example, as you know, the abortion issue into the political space by Republicans putting it in their platform in 1980 making it a plank of the party. You fast forward 12 years to Pat Buchanan's run

for the presidency in 92, in which he talks about,

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