Amanda Carpenter

No, I mean, she knew she wanted to have a kid the next couple years, though.

This is what women think about.

Yeah.

Congratulations to her.

I hope she's getting the time to really enjoy the time with her baby because there's nothing else like it.

But on the idea of like, you know, what it means to be complicit, you know, this isn't about Alyssa at all.

Let's remove that from the conversation before somebody tries to read something into that.

But I've really struggled with the Mike Pence types because we've had this debate at the bulwark.

Was he a hero that day or not?

And I've always firmly come down on the side of not because he had so many opportunities to stop it before the last minute.

It was my working thesis that people like Mike Pence and Bill Barr really didn't bolt from Trump until the responsibility landed right on their plate.

Mike Pence issued that statement at the last minute before members of Congress were taking their seats on January 6th.

If he had done that a week before, a day before, there's a chance that the mob may not have materialized because they wouldn't have thought the plan to pressure Mike Pence would have worked.

And so I just, I really struggle with that.

And I really think this is the key to explaining why people break.

They go along with it while it's good for them until they realize the consequences could blow back on them.

And I've thought so deeply about this.

I wasn't planning to talk about this, but I've actually, you know, I've written and I'm shopping around, we're trying to shop around a whole dark satire novel about complicity.

And the person that's a prototype in my head is like,

Maybe he looks like Mike Johnson, but these heritage types who go along with all of these things because of opportunism, because they think they are still protecting their family.