David Frum

How does this bear on our lives today in any way?

That's why.

No, no.

You have your finger on the pulse.

We count on your observations to tell us what's going on in America.

So what's going on in America that any of this helps us with?

Okay, so we're at a moment.

This is where I was wondering where you were going to go.

We're at a moment when agencies of government, cabinet-level departments, are, for their own amusement, tweeting out variations that are obviously intended to be variations on Nazi Party slogans.

One people, one empire, one leader.

When we have masked armed men

roaming American cities, detaining people without any right to detain them, beating up people, in some cases, killing them.

We have the most corrupt administration, not in American history, but if it were, I keep saying, if this were a Nigerian administration, it would be one of the most corrupt administrations in Nigerian history.

To your point about Bourgeois values, where the president of the United States was a close friend to and seems to be operating a cover-up on behalf of one of the most notorious child molestation rings in American history.

And how is Irving Kristol going to help us with any of this?

Many of the people that you and I knew when we were young have gone on to power and prominence.

And they started off sharing many of the ideas or at least participating in many of the ideas that you're describing.

And today we have a world in which the intellectual, the bright lights of the younger intellectual right are inspired at best, at best by the idea of abolishing the difference in church and state and letting the church run everything.

And at worst by outright fascism and at very worst by flirtations with literal Nazism.

So that's the conservative world.