Good morning and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. As we mentioned yesterday,

today is the Iads of March. And I'm joined by a guest who will actually get that historical

reference, Tom Nichols, Professor Emeritus of the Naval War College,

now a staff writer at the Atlantic, in the author of the Atlantic Daily Newsletter.

So good morning, Tom. Happy Iads of March. Good morning, really, as we come to

Barry Caesar on this day. We probably should start by talking about the various financial meltdowns

that are occurring. We have more banks in trouble. The Saudis pulling their funding. The fallout

is rather dramatic in the stock market. But we're going to set that aside because who knows?

You know, I mean, obviously there are woke banks in Europe as well as in California. Who knew that,

right? Because this is all about wokeness. I have been told. I've been reliably assured. It's

all wokeness. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, once bank officials start caring about things like, you

know, prejudice and racism and stuff, interest rates just go through the roof. This is a well-known

economic principle first, an unseated in the time of Adam Smith. It is interesting, you know,

listening to all of this, you know, the, you know, the Republican politicians who are, you know,

talking about, this is not about interest rates going up. It is not about deregulation. The

deregulation, by the way, which we supported. It's all about wokeness because that's what our chatbot

tells us to say. It's not about a poorly managed bank that bet exactly in the opposite direction of

the Fed. No. No human beings here could have made a mistake other than excessively woken, you know,

lefties who somehow invested in, you know, environmentally sound trout farms or something. It does

sound as if a lot of this political rhetoric that we get is generated by, you know, AI all the time.

In my newsletter today, I quote Nick Kataji over at the dispatches talking about

Rhonda Santas and saying, you know, really, what would you get if you asked to chat GPT

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