Welcome to the Mona Charon show. So glad you could join me. I am delighted to welcome today my friend and colleague, David French, who is, well, I say colleague. I mean, we haven't actually worked at the same place, but I think of him that way because we're both in the opinion biz. I don't know. Well, we did write for National Review at the same time. Yes, yes, we did. That's true. So there you go. It makes sense.

Yeah. We did write for National Review at the same time. Yes, yes, we did. That's true. So there you go. It makes

sense. Yeah. David, of course, is a columnist now for the New York Times. He's also a college professor.

He is also just one of those must reads in America today. And it isn't just because he has expertise in so many

relevant areas for what we're coping with, namely the law. Also, he served, I guess you were a

captain, was it in the... Yeah, I was a captain, a JAG officer when I was deployed, yeah.

Yeah, in Iraq. So you know about so many things, but also, David, what I love is that you bring

a wonderful decency in humanity to everything that you do and say. So thank you for that.

Well, thank you.

I would like, therefore, to start with just the news of the moment, but I hope to sort of

zoom out also and talk about acceleration of what had been a culture war in our society

to now, it's really becoming a hot war. And you wrote a book a few years back about a potential civil war in this country.

So let us start with what has been taking place in Minneapolis and other places, but

Minneapolis, of course, most recently and most fatally, where two Americans

were murdered by the police,

by the paramilitary ICE organization that Trump has stood up.

Talk to me, if you would, about how a culture war was permitted to

become an actual war on American cities. Well, you know, I think the answer, Mona, as to how he

migrated from yelling at each other to now throwing things at each other and

increasingly where you have state violence where armed members of this are armed officers of the

state are killing unarmed people in the streets is there's a one word answer and it's hatred. And so what we have is a very long process that really got rolling, I would argue, in the 90s

after the end of the Cold War, where you can almost measure the increase, and you can measure

...