Derek_Black_Interview

Derek Black, son of a white nationalist leader, renounced white nationalism after college. His story is detailed in the book "Rising Out of Hatred" by Eli Saslow. Raised in the white nationalist movement, Derek underwent an ideological transformation in college, influenced by interactions with diverse students and condemnation from others. Engagement and condemnation played roles in his change. His experience suggests that human connections and trust are crucial in challenging extremist ideologies. You're listening to the podcast of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm Matt Berkman. Our guest today is Derek Black, the son of a prominent white nationalist leader and at one point the heir apparent to the white nationalist movement in the United States. While at college, Black underwent an ideological transformation and renounced white nationalism. His story is covered in a recent book by journalist Eli Saslow called Rising Out of Hatred. Derek Black, welcome to the podcast. I'm Matt. Thanks for having me. So the story of how you left the white nationalist movement is covered in great detail in the book Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow, the journalist Pulitzer Prize winner. And you've written op-eds about the topic. You've done a bunch of revealing interviews. You were even on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. So your story is out there. And we're going to link to some of the other interviews you've done when this podcast is released. But, you know, for people who might not be familiar with you, I'd like to just give those listeners a brief overview of who you are, how you grew up and the circumstances that led to your ideological transformation before moving on to kind of other questions beyond what we already know. Sure. So I was born in essentially one of the leading families of the white nationalist movement in America, which is also an international movement. So being born into a family that was trying to grow and elaborate and mainstream white nationalism inherently meant seeing people who were running for office in Europe and talking to people in Australia. And I think that at the outset is important to understand, that we're not talking about people with casually racist beliefs or people who think that Hispanic immigration is too big into America. Those are the people that white nationalists are trying to target. White nationalism itself is an ideology that has 40 or 50 years of history. The people who are involved in it know that history. They know the symbols. They know the names of people who moved it forward in the 60s and 70s and the 80s and the 90s. They know the different eras. They have a sense of community that goes far beyond themselves and their family. It's connected all over the world. And it's the white nationalist movement that connects them together in this sort of drive and belief. And I grew up within that movement and advocated it, ran for public office, ran an Internet radio program, tried to come up with better messaging for it and tried to promote and grow the things that my family and everyone that they had known working on this movement for decades before I was born had tried to advance. And that was up until college when I had this multi-year experience that coming out the other end, I wrote a public letter condemning it and explaining how that had happened. And just go a little bit into your particular family's role in the movement. Right. My father was the person who founded the first white power website and white power community before the Internet, before the Web anyway, but it came online. He had a bulletin board that people would dial into in the 1980s. When the World Wide Web became popular, he turned it into a website and had the first white power website on the Internet. His best friend for decades was David Duke. Both of them worked in their separate strengths. David went on in the late 80s and early 90s to win a Louisiana state legislature seat as a white nationalist, not denying his opinion, but winning because of it, despite the fact that Ronald Reagan ran ads condemning him in the race. And then he tried to run for governor and senate in Louisiana in the years following, and he didn't win the election, but he got 60 percent of the white vote in Louisiana being a white nationalist and trying to promote that. And so that message was always really popular. And it's what I grew up with, that white nationalism is not inherently a fringe ideology, that it is beliefs that are more extreme than most people hold, but that most people, most white people anyway in America hold some sort of more casual racist beliefs, want less immigration, want immigration of white people. And in my nationalist field, that their goal, my family felt their goal was to try to reach those people and then bring them to a more explicit version of that ideology. And so, you know, the book Rising Out of Hatred is a lot about your experience going to college and your ideology transforming through your interactions with the various students on campus. You know, after your identity became known to the people on your campus, you face a lot of censure, a lot of organized opposition and condemnation by other students. But you were also befriended by some students, including, you know, Jewish students, Latino students, and your interactions with them also seem to help shift your views over time. So my question really for you is, what was the role of condemnation in moving you versus the role of engagement? You know, had you just been condemned and not engaged with, or vice versa, would things have turned out differently for you? Yeah, that's an important question because I think that the whole context of going to this college was it was a small college, had 800 people in it, which means if anybody has had a similar kind of experience that when you're there for years, everybody at least recognizes everyone else there if you don't know everyone. I was there for a semester when nobody knew my background. I had run for office the year before and won, so there was plenty of news stories, but it's just nobody googled me. And I had friends, I went to events, I just sort of lived as a normal college student that semester. And several times I'd hear people talking about how white supremacy affected them because they were coming from backgrounds that were condemned by white supremacy, whether they're students of color or Jewish or or gay, like whatever their identity was that white nationalism condemned, and that I, my family, was one of the leading proponents of. I could start hearing these stories of them being affected by it in their life, but still nobody knew my background. And then I was off campus the second semester studying abroad when an upper year posted on the student email forum and identifying me, and there was this huge discussion with thousands of posts over a few days, over weeks. And then by the time that I came back, it was just this really hot issue on campus that they did not want a proponent of white power coming back to their campus, which was really a community that focused on social justice. And so I think fairly early that broke off into people arguing, oh, maybe we can persuade him, maybe we can change his mind, and then people, probably the more dominant position, saying that we need to assert that it's a community that does not accept white supremacists, it's a community that people who are threatened by white supremacy can feel welcomed. And so I showed up to this place that I just never felt particularly comfortable, but I still kept commenting. I still, I'm still a student, I still kept going to the library, I decided I'm definitely going to finish my degree, and I'm going to be in this space. And then right after I got back, one of the guys who I had known prior to being out of, but just known a little bit, Matthew Stevenson, invited me to the Shabbat dinners, and he ran every Friday night. And so the first time I went, I kind of expected it to be a fight, and it turned out to not be a fight, because he had told everybody not to bring up that I was a white nationalist, even though everybody there knew it, at least the people who had agreed to keep coming to the dinners while I was still there. And I kept coming week after week after week. And although we never had confrontations, there was primarily people and one specific person from these dinners who I had these private conversations with over years and started engaging about what are the facts of white nationalism, what are the impacts, what are, if I say that people are misunderstanding this, what is the reality of that? Like, they're not actually misunderstanding it, white supremacy and white nationalism is a hateful ideology that means they're supposed to be expelled from the country. So how am I going to, how do you reconcile going to dinner with people who your ideology says don't belong in the country? And that's something that, you know, often white power people just don't even deal with this, but it's also, but at least in my case specifically, I wanted to be somebody who is, can be friends with anyone, and you cannot try to, like, say, what's the misunderstanding? You know, maybe if white nationalism is, like, scientifically accurate, then maybe on the individual level, you know, like, these sort of inconsistencies that may have been particular to me, and there's definitely lots of white supremacists who did not care at all if anyone's hurt by this. So what are, are there implications from your experience for how anti-racist, anti-racist movements should approach white nationalism, or is your story unique in that regard? I mean, it's, what happened is not unique. I think it is human behavior that if you find yourself in a situation where, whether it's white supremacy or just something more mild, you know, some of those more mild bigotry, but the person is outside of the community that they are from, they are in a different community, they're in a different context, and you are somebody who is trusted, I think that's the basis of almost all persuasion that happens with human beings. It is human connections and intimate trust over time, and then feeling like you are challenged by a community that you care about, and that's what happened in my case. And, and I don't want people to take from that that if we reach out to Nazis, we will change their mind, or anyone. You can't walk up to somebody who has a deeply held ideology and say, I'm going to give you facts because you're wrong, and expect that to change their mind. It's not going to, because that's not how it works. And when we're talking about white supremacy, or just like any of these violent ideologies, it seems a bit naive to suggest that, because the first question should be, is this a safe thing for you to be doing? You know, going out and reaching out to people, and so I really don't want to be heard as you host the nice dinners, and anybody will just change their mind, because it's both not true and kind of counterproductive. But that said, the idea that people can't change their perspective and their ideology, even amongst deeply held things, if challenged by other people who they care about, like, that's clearly not true. People can change, I think, at any age. It's probably important that I was in early 20s when this was happening, but I think there's any point where there's a lot of change in somebody's life, there's a real opportunity for them to be open to things that they thought they didn't believe. Do you think that it is necessary for white nationalists to be confronted forcefully the way that, like, anti-fascist groups attempt to forcefully confront them? Or, you know, how do you see those kinds of confrontations as playing into the overall expansion or contraction or dynamics of white nationalism in America? I think they're working for different goals. If you're trying to change somebody's mind, debating them or confronting them or shutting down their event is not going to change their mind, but that's also not the goal of any anti-fascist group. The point is to shut down the event, and so I had that experience of being on the other end of trying to organize white nationalist events, and it is extremely effective when anti-fascists do whatever they can to get the event revoked or to make people feel like they shouldn't show up or to think that their picture is going to get taken so they're going to be fired. Taking out all of the questions of what to think about it, it is purely effective. If you were trying to stop someone from organizing to just constantly confront them, but you're not trying to change their mind, and these are just two different things that have different results, and I'm not the person who's going to say white power people or anybody is not going to ever change their mind, but I will point out that it doesn't happen in the public forum. It doesn't happen when you are representing something and somebody is challenging you. That's not the moment where you're going to change your beliefs. You're going to then double down on the people you care about and the people who are important to you, and that's true of, I would say, any ideology. The better way to understand beliefs is to ask who is it that's important to you. Who is it that you trust and value and care about and feel like it's your duty to stand up to them and protect them for whatever beliefs you're talking about, and so if you think about an ideology that way, you can understand why people don't change it very often because it means disconnecting from the network of human beings that you consider to be important to you, and so changing your mind about something that's deeply held is exactly the same thing as changing the people who matter to you, and I think people understand it better if we say it like that and to expect that people are going to rapidly or often change the whole network of people who matter to them. They understand why that wouldn't happen. In other interviews that you've given, you've described the outsized role that anti-Semitism plays in the white nationalist ideology. My question is, how has the movement grappled with the fact that a very significant proportion of the people in its aspirational base, that is white Christians on the American right, that so many of these people are so committed to the state of Israel, has that fact led to any internal debates or conflicts within the movement over the role that anti-Semitism plays and how best to reach out to potential members? Right. There's some conflicts there. Particularly in the white nationalist opposition to the Republican Party being pro-Israel and being, at least publicly, against anti-Semitism, that the white nationalist movement is grounded in a global theory of anti-Semitic global theory that all Jewish people are promoting immigration into majority white countries because they hate white people, and this is a thing that white nationalists believe as a statement of faith, and it is what motivates people like the shooter who went into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, that this personal responsibility that Jewish people are all aware of is something that really drives white nationalism, and I think it's one of the things that's harder to get people's mind around, particularly because of what you said, that seems like in a lot of mainstream American society that we tend to understand racism, we recognize anti-immigrant feelings as being sort of common, but such rabid anti-Semitism feels more rare, and I think the thing I would say to that is that, number one, it's not actually quite as rare as we talk about. I think before 2016, my experience with people would tell me about how racism was gone and now people are all sort of like post-racial and colorblind, at least certain people would say this, and you don't hear that as much now because it's so mainstream to be rabidly anti-immigrant and to try to cause harm to immigrants and to turn the blind eye to violence against black people and against immigrants, and it's just more common, and I would argue that we have plenty of statistics that anti-Semitism is a commonly held belief in the United States and especially in Europe, and that violence and hate crimes against Jewish communities are on the rise and definitely a major part of American society, and where nationalists would point out that these sort of beliefs are the same sort of beliefs like racist beliefs, and they're trying to foster, they're looking for people who have anti-Semitic beliefs and trying to expand them into something that is more cohesive, that says there's a massive conspiracy, but it's not just something more subtle, and I think the last point I would say is that, and this is maybe similar where I have less authority to talk about it, but this sort of staunch support for Israel among some aspects of the American conservative movement that's like philo-Semitism is not incredibly removed from anti-Semitism, and I want to be a little cautious talking about this because this is something where it's not exactly in the realm of white nationalism, but white nationalists recognize this, that a lot of beliefs among American conservatives in America that seem to be incredibly pro-Jewish, centralized Jewish people as being an instrument of something, as being others, as being outside of the mainstream and outside of the community that these people are talking about, and I would just warn that that sort of advocacy easily has a place within a larger anti-Semitic belief system, and I'll just leave it at that. So after the 2016 election, there was this debate among pundits and social scientists about what was the cause of people supporting voting for Donald Trump. Was it racism, or was it what they called economic anxiety, or was it some combination of these things, and I'm not asking you here to answer that particular question, but I am wondering, you know, as somebody who knows the white nationalist movement inside and out, if you have any particular insight into the socioeconomic class profile of the people who are drawn to this movement, is there a typical white nationalist, and if so, what motivates such a person to get involved with the movement? It's interesting you frame the questions that way, because I think they are kind of a similar answer, that I don't want to go into the political science about the 2016 election, because it's not my expertise, but we do have contradictory information where people on one hand had this idea that support for the president was coming from people who had lost their jobs or had low income for a long period of time, and we have plenty of statistics that the average Trump voter had an above-average income, and that tracks well with the kind of people who participate in white nationalism, that people who advocate the white nationalist ideology and donate to it and sometimes show up to events and get its literature come from every strata of the socioeconomic ladder in the United States. They have every possible career, many of them are extremely educated, and that's more true the higher up you get in the sense of the people who are really committed to it, and I think Charlottesville is an example of this. The people who can drive across the country to go to an event and stay in a hotel and show up to things and donate money in advance and be organized by nature have some resources, and I think that's one thing we kind of miss when we're thinking about who is driven by white nationalism and then who is driven to actually be organizing and participating. If you're donating money to an organization, you have some spare income. If you're traveling across the country and taking some days off, you have a stable enough sort of job, and while it's not an incredibly wealthy movement, it is one that mirrors kind of the demographics, at least the white demographics of America. So again, as someone who knows white nationalism as an insider, can you give us an update on kind of state of the movement since the last time it really erupted into public consciousness in 2017 with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville? Has the movement grown since then? Has it gone into retreat? What do the internal factional divisions look like? Have new actors emerged? What can you tell us about that? So Charlottesville was both unusual and actually kind of typical, but rallies like that have happened consistently every few years, sometimes multiple times in a year for decades. Even there were rallies in Charlottesville by white nationalists before Charlottesville on August 11th. There have been some earlier in the summer that nobody remembers because things don't tend to go into mainstream consciousness, and so in some ways it was extremely typical. But in others it was unusual that it was slightly larger, I think. There were more factional organizations showing up to it than you had seen in most events. It wasn't just one group. It was a whole bunch of different groups, and some of them really disagreed with each other, and yet they still showed up to march together. And I think a lot of that was inspired by President Trump, that they felt like they didn't think he was on their side, but they thought that his election demonstrated that there was more explicit support for their cause than there had been just a few years earlier. They felt energized by the fact that a president was up there who espoused stuff that was much closer to white nationalism than had been advocated by other presidents or other national politicians. And then the consequence of it, I think, was quite disruptive, which maybe is surprising. I don't know that the president sort of endorsed them when they had that march. We all remember the very fine people comments, and it was shocking because it wasn't a condemnation. It's just what you always expect is a condemnation of white supremacists. It's always very easy, and the mayor and the governor and everybody who's involved always condemns these events. And then the president, at the best, you could say equivocated, but then also gouged some level of support for their cause. And so that was incredibly empowering to them to just see that he felt like he couldn't explicitly condemn them without losing some political support for something. But then the consequence of their rally being so public, I think, has been a real dismantling of organized white nationalism. There was a real national response by people who were not the president to tie everyone who was at that event up in legal battles to call out the police force because they were just standing by and allowed these things to happen, donating to anti-racist organizations in massive numbers, trying to, you see like, anti-fascist groups showing up and shutting down white nationalist rallies after that, and just making it very hard to be a public member to show up to things without getting your picture taken, without being doxxed on the internet, without losing your job. And so on the level of actual organizational stuff, I think it was very bad. I think a lot of most of the groups that showed up there have been disbanded since then. But on a morale side, I think we haven't even really seen the consequences of it. This is something that's going to resound for years and years, that you had a president who felt like he couldn't condemn them, which means that their theory that there is widespread support for their ideology was borne out in at least the fact that he didn't want to offend people who might have been supporting their ideology. And that level of morale is going to show up somewhere at some time that may be after this administration, it may be in the next term if they win one. But I think we should understand that white nationalism is something that has existed for all these decades because it can go quiet for a while, people can just have quieter meetings, people can stop showing up because things are too hot, and then rise again as a much more organized, much more vocal force when the time is right. And so you're just waiting for that moment to happen and remembering the encouragement that you got in 2017. So if Trump loses the election, which I should say, we're recording this about a week and a half before the election, so if Trump loses the election, do you think that it will have a more demobilizing effect on white nationalism? I think so. And I'm aware that it's hard to prognosticate, but we have one of the closest examples, I think, is the Reagan administration, that the Reagan administration was in a lot of ways really energizing for white nationalists in a similar way to the Trump administration. We tend to forget that he announced his candidacy in Neshoba, the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, which is an area near where civil rights marchers had been murdered, and he talked about states' rights, and there was signaling, definitely not exactly the same thing as Trump, but signaling to segregationists, signaling to people who were opposed to civil rights that he was a candidate who would align with more of their interests in ways that you can compare to Trump. And then during the Reagan administration, you have lots of talk among white nationalists, like, does this represent people coming over to our side? Is it pushback on the civil rights era? All of that sort of stuff. And we look at, while he was president, we have lots of energizing forces. And then, I don't know if I should go so far as say, after his administration ends, you get much more underground, less explicit forces of white nationalism. And so my expectation is that if he does not win, then it will be demoralizing, but I don't want to go particularly too far because it's the circumstances of how he doesn't win. If it's easy, they argue that the election was stolen, you may get real energy coming out. I think the real thing that we should look at, though, is that white nationalism is a force that responds to the energy in the country itself. If there is a rising tide of white people being mad about immigration into America or being mad about demographic change, then that energizes white nationalists because that's where they get their membership. That's where they get their money. That's where they get their personal energy to just organize events and get people to contribute to them. So whatever happens after the election is going to affect them. If there's a huge demoralization of people who supported Trump and decided that this was a real misadventure and it wasn't worth doing and it turned out poorly, then that's going to demoralize white nationalists. If he wins and people take from that that this is the salvation of America and we're fighting all this multiculturalism, then that will energize white nationalism. That's why I say I think him winning is going to be a thing that empowers them much more than him losing would. One thing that we've seen recently is the emergence of the QAnon movement or cult or whatever you would call this kind of manifestation of rational conspiracy theory on the internet. So my question is, what, if any, is the relationship here between white nationalism and the QAnon movement? I think there's definitely overlap. And I want to give the caveat that I don't study QAnon and this is a fairly recent movement. There are people who are much more expert on all its ins and outs. And so I can give a much clearer answer about how this has worked over decades, that conspiracy theories and conspiracy communities tend to overlap. That if you are in white nationalist events in the 80s or 90s or 2000s, it is very, very typical to find people who are also quite active in UFO circles or people who also believe that there are like livid people under the earth who are using telepathy to control politicians. And it's not the majority of the people. Most people are there because they don't want black people to live in their neighborhood and they've taken it to a real extreme level. But the kinds of people who join fringe movements that are way outside of the mainstream tend to circulate. And so I think I would draw that lesson that whenever you are talking about conspiracy movements that rise up in the United States, a little bit of all of them exists inside there and everybody is trying to recruit from everybody else's ranks. So, you know, we're coming to the end of the interview and I did want to mention that you are now finishing up a PhD in history at the University of Chicago. And I just wanted to ask you about your academic work and how it might have been influenced by your experience. I, my current research is looking at early modern construction of the idea of race and racist hierarchies and white supremacy in North America. And so I can, you can draw a real parallel between the fact that I grew up trying to advocate the white nationalist movement and believing it was correct. And then having this transformational experience to try to figure out ways that I can be helpful to the anti-racist movement, working on historical field that I am trained in and that I can try to offer some research that gives a little bit more examples and evidence to why we say race is a social construct. I can definitely see how I got there and that's very intentional. You know, we say race is a social construct and I can show you letters from people in the 1600s creating race and it makes it a little bit more clear. Hopefully that's useful. And I've spent a long time trying to figure out what my role should be in that. And I still haven't always figured it out. And I really started in academia trying to get out of anything controversial. I figured if I studied enough hundreds of years in the past that nobody would ask me to speak about it. And I could just go to small academic conferences. And I think part of my challenge over the last three or four years has been figuring out how to integrate those two things if I'm trained in academic history. But I also think that anti-racism is a movement that really needs people working within it and trying to build it up and speak out on its behalf and work within people who have been doing that stuff for years. But one way to integrate those two things is to do academic research that tries to contribute to anti-racism and our understanding of how our society got to be the way it is. Just kind of following up on the academic piece, when you were coming out of white nationalism during college, were there any books that were particularly influential in changing your way of thinking about the world? I actually do not have a great answer on people thinking about white supremacy in America and who believe it. I had this experience in college, which is now seven plus years ago, or eight years ago. The debates we were having where I would say that white nationalism had the solid evidence and I believed all this pseudoscientific stuff about why race was real. The counterpoint to that, that Allison, the primary person in college who had these conversations with me, would come back would be statistically based social science that articles one at a time break down that criminality is not based in race, as many racists argue that it is, if anything, correlated to poverty and education, not race. You do this one at a time for all these different things, that race is not a genetically real concept, that it is a social construct. Let's get into this. I think something that white nationalists tend to glory in actually is how complex all this is. We can break it down and say that race is a social construct, it's not a biological reality, but then when you want to start actually explaining what does it mean for genetic groups to not be identifiable by race and what are ethnicities and how do we define human beings and all this stuff, it becomes incredibly complicated and most people don't really want to engage on that level. I'm probably going to get in trouble with friends, but I still don't think that there's actually a good book that says here is what modern racists will argue is the facts for all of their ideology and this is the complicated argument for why their evidence is not real and we've disproven it over 50 or 60 or 70 years of labor. I don't think there's actually a good book because partly people don't want to waste their time trying to dismantle all the stupid arguments that white nationalists make. I think it was Angela Davis who made this statement, you know, paraphrase that racism is distraction, that a racist person says, oh, Africans had no kings and so you spend your whole life researching the history of African kingdoms to prove that Africans had kings or somebody says that black people have a different IQ than white people and so you spend your whole life proving how the IQ test is socially based and proving how there's no racial correlation between IQ and that it's based on education and so you spend your whole career proving all this and I think in some extent it is kind of a waste of time for people to do that, but the answer is largely that you end up having to read a bunch of articles, a bunch of books, and engage in a whole field of anti-racist scholarship to even pull all the stuff together and so like I said I think somebody's going to be mad at me and say like my book I feel is quite comprehensive, I feel like you should have cited it, but I don't actually think that there is a good book for this and I think that there are good reasons why there isn't a good book for this. So just in closing let me let me ask you what would you say to young people today who are alarmed by the recent resurgence of white nationalism? Would you tell them, you know, this is a moment that is going to pass and once the United States reaches a point where it's so diverse like I believe in 2045 people identified as white are projected to become less than 50% of the population. Do you see at that point once we get over this hump white nationalism is going to retreat permanently or is that actually going to make things worse and you know what advice do you give to people who are scared at the trend that we're seeing and want to you know figure out what they should be doing about it if it's serious or if it's if it's just a flash in the pan? I am pessimistic about the way I would term white supremacy being a powerful thing in America that harms the lives of most everybody who lives in America including white people. That as the United States starts defining itself as being minority white at some point I do not think that that is going to ease tensions. I think that is going to cause political parties in America to become explicitly white supremacist and start saying things like well whites are a minority so why would it be bad for me to say I only want white immigrants into America instead of saying the thing Trump says about wanting European immigrants in Norway and not from Africa you're going to have politicians who say I was elected by white people and I this country was founded by white people and now we're a minority and there's absolutely no reason why I can't say I stand up for white people and I fully predict and I hope people will call me on it that at some point in the next two decades we will have senators who say I represent white people in my state and there's nothing shameful about that and that is a road to terrible future for the United States. We have seen Trump being one of the presidents in our history a recent history who is most explicitly the advocate for white people who feel like they're losing power and imagine that but more explicit and much more broadly distributed through governors and senators and U.S. representatives it is at the best a road to dysfunction in the United States and at the worst real advocacy for decreasing voting rights for trying to keep people who are not white out of politics trying to assert authoritarian principles in parts of government to try to maintain what power they're worried they're losing and so I think it's incredibly important that we make the case that all of us make the case now that this is not it is why people do not need to feel like they are under siege or under threat. California is a comfortable country is a comfortable state not a country that has been minority white for quite a long time whatever that means like being minority white is also a demographically difficult thing to assess we talk about it like it's real but what does it mean to be minority white how do people just define themselves as white and then all of a sudden we have a majority white again but the reality of the country could be very prosperous could be very great could be very comfortable and I'm really worried that as we go forward we're going to have people who try to entrench their power and entrench their political influence to terrible ends for the country so I'm not optimistic. Well that's a depressing note to end on. I hope you're wrong but I fear that you you might be right. Derek Black thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thanks for having me.