Welcome every Welcome everyone to the American Mind Podcast, a production of the Claremont Institute.

This is Ryan Williams, President of the Claremont Institute, publisher of the Claremont Review of Books

and the American Mind.

This is a new venture for us, so we've been doing monthly interviews where I or a colleague

of mine talks in depth about ideas and politics and books with a guest.

But this is going to be a little lighter fair. We're going to do this weekly gathered here with the editors and me, the publisher of the American

mind. We'll talk a bit about the news cycle.

We'll still stick to our strength,

which is ideas and their role in politics,

but we'd like to have this weekly time

to check in with our audience and to build a rapport and

even sometimes have some fun guests here in the studio in Claremont including Charles

Kessler and others. So with that let's get started I want to introduce our normal

participants here. Matt Peterson, our Vice President of Education and the

founding editor of the American Mind, also our Salvatore fellow in the

American founding. James Pulos, executive editor of the

American Mind, Spencer Clavin, assistant editor both for the Claremont Review

books and the American Mind. And last but not least, joining us remotely from the swamp, David Barr, managing editor of the American Mind.

So, Jens, thanks for joining. So I thought we're going to do a little four-part thing today, maybe an hour, maybe a little less. We're going to talk about the present, the

past, the future, and then have some fun at the end. So let's start with the present.

What's going on in Washington right now? I really, I've been living in a cave for the last month or so is

something interesting happening. Oh impeachment that's right so we thought we'd

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