Many people would say that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles that ought to bring a set of ethics into our public life. But today’s political environment seems to be one where ethics are lacking. This episode of Giving Ventures explores the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank that incorporates the Judeo-Christian cultural aspect into its thinking about public policy. EPPC has been around for 50 years and has remained a prominent voice on the right as American culture and politics has continued to evolve over the past half century. How does EPPC view itself in this moment, given its focus on traditional values and the Judeo Christian principles? Ryan Anderson joins Giving Ventures to discuss that question. Ryan has been president of EPPC for the past five years and before that had a long tenure at the Heritage Foundation.
Note: This transcript was generated and cleaned by AI.
Peter Lipsett: Many people would say that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, that these ideas are infused throughout our founding documents and the founding generation broadly. These principles bring a certain set of ethics into our public life. But there are also plenty of people today who would say that ethics is just completely devoid of our political culture. It’s completely fallen by the wayside. Well, today’s episode features an organization called the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which incorporates that Judeo-Christian cultural aspect into its thinking about public policy. As the name implies, EPPC couples its work with a keen attention to culture and ethics, and that makes it stand out among DC think tanks. EPPC has been around a long time—for 50 years—and has remained a prominent voice on the right as American culture and politics have continued to evolve, shall we say, over the past half-century, even over the past few years.
In that respect, EPPC is similar to the American Institute for Economic Research, or AIER, which we featured just a couple of episodes ago in episode 109. Both institutions are well-respected, and their leaders have been thoughtful in how they position the organizations against a backdrop of a fracture on the right with the Freedom Conservatives and the National Conservative factions, and probably some other flavors in there as well, as we explored in our previous series. In episode 109, Sam Gregg described AIER’s work to promote virtue and liberty, a fusion of classical liberal ideas that best aligns with freedom conservatives. And today I want to explore how EPPC views itself in this moment, given its focus on traditional values and Judeo-Christian principles. So for that conversation, I’m very happy to have Ryan Anderson, who has been president of EPPC for the past five years and before that had a long tenure at the Heritage Foundation. He thinks and writes about all of these issues regularly and with aplomb. Ryan, so glad to have you here.
Ryan Anderson: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. I didn’t realize Sam was just on. Sam has been a friend of mine, I don’t know, maybe 20 years now. It was when I did my first seminar—he was at the Acton Institute at the time. So it was the Towards a Free and Virtuous Society seminar that they run. I want to say I did that seminar around 2006, so that would have been like 20 years ago now. And you know, Sam was like the main faculty.
Peter Lipsett: He or 20-plus years before he went over to AIER and brings a lot of that ethos and merges it. And so I think it’s a good complement to the discussion that we’re going to have. Now, EPPC was founded 50 years ago, which puts it right in that era of the Weather Underground, bombings, and the Watergate scandal had just happened. I’m just curious, how much of those political scandals, how much of that kind of violence that was in the air then in the late seventies, that cultural malaise, how much did that influence an organization called the Ethics and Public Policy Center?
Ryan Anderson: You know, my understanding of the founding was that it was initially much more focused on foreign policy concerns than some of those domestic concerns that you mentioned, although not exclusively. We just celebrated our fiftieth anniversary gala. So we don’t do an annual gala, but we’ll do one on the fortieth, we just did one on the fiftieth, and we will, God willing, do one on the sixtieth. Part of this process, we hired a historian to go through the archive. We don’t have any history of EPPC; when I was at the Heritage Foundation, every decade Lee Edwards would be writing a new updated history of Heritage, a profile of Ed Feulner, a profile of the other founders. We didn’t have any of that, so it’s not yet published, but Ernie Lefever was our founder. He was a Protestant political theologian—in essence, a theological-political thinker—and he was housed at Georgetown at the time. It’s interesting to think how much Georgetown has changed in the past 50 years. But he was largely focused on the Cold War, focused on education, and focused on the church’s engagement in the public square.
Those three were the main priority issues for EPPC at the time of founding: education, the churches in the public square, and foreign policy, particularly because this was at the height of the Cold War, this was at the height of the “blame America first” mantra. And what Ernie wanted to argue was that America and the West are worth defending because they are good, not just because they are ours. There is something about loving your fatherland because it’s yours, but it’s also true that there is something about America that is fundamentally good, fundamentally true, and fundamentally beautiful. It comes from that marriage of both a philosophical tradition and a theological tradition. I think you can see this; it will be one day short of a month from yesterday that we will celebrate the Fourth of July. We’ll recognize that there are certain truths that are self-evident: that we’re created, which implies that we’re creatures, there’s a creator, we’re created equal, and we’re endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights.
That’s the result of a philosophical and a theological tradition to get us to that moment. It was on our bicentenary year that Ernie started EPPC, and those truths were being questioned. Now we’re at the 250th anniversary of the founding, and they’re still being questioned. They’re being questioned in new and, I would say, more extreme ways. People on both the left and the right seem to have given up on the American project, and we now have all sorts of anthropological debates. It’s not just about political theology or political philosophy; it’s now about human nature itself. I think that’s something you’ll see in our 50 years—we are much more focused today on the nature of the human person. Simply because, think about it: Pope Leo just released this new encyclical. The driving question in an age of AI is: “What does it mean to be human?” And it’s not just AI; there are a whole host of other developments in the past 50 years that we could talk about. So yeah, that’s a little bit about it.
Peter Lipsett: Well, yeah. I mean, about what does it mean to be human in an era when factories close, when jobs become just service jobs that are like robots but not robots? You’re right; it is a lot bigger than just AI. I guess that kind of gets to the heart of some of the things that you talk about. You’re not really doing foreign policy so much anymore, but what are the areas where you’re really focused today?
Ryan Anderson: I would say to a certain extent, we’re focused on many of the necessary preconditions for liberty and for liberty to flourish, meaning things like the family, things like education, and things like the churches. You need all of those institutions to be really healthy and strong in order for ordered liberty to be possible. Something distinctive about the American tradition is that there needed to be a lot of non-governmental institutions. I would say the family, the church, and the school would be at the top of the list that need to be flourishing and going well in order to allow liberty to be possible. Because otherwise, think about what happens if the family falls apart. You get the government trying to step in and pick up the pieces, and you see this in the form of the welfare state and the police state. What are the welfare state and the police state doing? They are trying to replace a missing father and a missing husband. Historically, the husband and the father would have been the provider and the disciplinarian. Instead, you now have a government trying to fill the gaps.
Something similar could be said for what happens with education falling, and you just look at the results of public education—and even some of the private schools. What happens when church attendance declines? You get this form of young men who are just adrift in culture. It’s a huge problem, and it’s something we have to reckon with. So I would say those are three of the perennial issues that EPPC has been working on: family, education, and churches. Two things, maybe I’ll mention three, but two in particular that took new form during the five years that I’ve been here have been some of our work on technology. We’ve always done work on technology and bioethics. A lot of the scholars who were involved in the Leon Kass Bioethics Commission, the President’s Council on Bioethics during the George W. Bush administration, when they left office, they came to EPPC. I’m thinking of people like Yuval Levin, Eric Cohen, Adam Keiper—who helped launch the New Atlantis with Yuval and Eric. Carter Snead came to EPPC. Ed Whelan, the previous president, was very good at recruiting a bunch of Bush staffers who had served in the Bioethics Commission.
Leon Kass, well, he never came to EPPC; he was writing in the New Atlantis issue after issue. We’ve always done a lot of reflection on technology and bioethics. Today, there’s been a huge focus on digital technology—a focus on smartphones, social media, and online obscenity. Clare Morell is our main scholar doing work there and has just done wonderful work helping parents understand some of the risks of giving your child a smartphone or signing them up for a social media account prematurely. And then some of the policy solutions, which are largely about empowering parents, preventing tech companies from having a contract with your child without the parent approving it—the whole age verification and parental consent law. So that’s been one project. The other project has been engaging with the administrative state. A lot of conservatives rightly think that the administrative state either shouldn’t exist or it should be a lot smaller than it is, and because they think that, they don’t engage with it.
Our approach was, during the Obama years—and then I became president on February 1, 2021, a few weeks into the Biden administration—we saw what had happened during the Obama years. Most of the religious liberty violations at the federal level did not come from Congress; they came from the alphabet soup agencies, the administrative state—the HHS mandate, the transgender mandate, the contraception mandate. I had a donor who said to me, “What can you guys do to prevent these things that Obama did from coming back during the Biden years?” Trump got rid of them, but we knew Biden was coming. The old idiom is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In the philanthropy world, it might be something like, “A couple hundred thousand dollars of regulatory engagement is worth a couple of million dollars of litigation later on.” Because if the bad regulation goes into effect, you then need ADF, or Becket, or First Liberty, or a private law firm—even more expensive—to litigate these cases.
Peter Lipsett: Not to mention all the people who have to pay out of pocket to deal with that until it may get overturned—and it may not.
Ryan Anderson: In the meantime, yes. Even if they win, I remember one of the things I talked about a lot during the Little Sisters of the Poor case, the Hobby Lobby case, the baker, the florist, the photographer: the process is part of the punishment. Even if you win, going through a decade of litigation simply to vindicate your right to freely operate your adoption agency, your nursing home, your bakery, or your photography studio—that alone, like Jack Phillips, who is not a professional activist, he’s a cake artist—he’s spent a decade in court. Three different times he’s been sued. The Little Sisters of the Poor have gone up to the Supreme Court at least three times, and there’s another case pending. So yes, the regulatory state—our scholars there, Rachel Morrison, Eric Kniffin, Sam Lucas—they’ve created a network of allied organizations where their issue area might just be that they particularly care about a specific regulation. More or less every regulation coming out of the Biden administration—now the Trump administration—that touches on human dignity, human nature, or human identity—abortion stuff, transgender ideology, marriage and the family. We just filed a comment earlier this week on assisted suicide.
It’s important now in the Trump era that they want to get good regulations enacted, but there is a regulatory law: the Administrative Procedures Act. You have to go through the APA, which means there is a notice and comment period. We have to file comments to support the good stuff in the Trump rules. We try to meet with them beforehand so that the rules they propose are already ironed out in a good way. In a couple of cases, we’ve been able to help them improve these up front, using the right language, using the right legal mechanisms. Then we have to defend it during the notice and comment period. Blocking bad regulations during the Biden years and now helping our friends inside the Trump administration enact good regulations—these make a world of difference if you care about human flourishing, if you care about liberty, if you care about the preconditions of liberty. Those are a couple of the big buckets of what we’re engaged in right now.
Peter Lipsett: It’s so interesting you talk about the couple-hundred-thousand-dollar upfront payment and donor work that can be done to save millions of dollars on the back end. I look at EPPC, the Judeo-Christian principles, the talk of culture, and then I see you also do a bunch in science and regulatory work. At first blush, you say, “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.” But as you say, the regulatory work is, to a certain extent, living out the old Buckley aphorism of standing athort history yelling “Stop,” or at least yelling, “Hey, slow down. Let’s make sure we get it right before we just launch it.” Let’s not just march into ending something.
Ryan Anderson: Both of those things—the science and the regulatory stuff—flow because we have a certain worldview. We have a certain vision of the human person, of human identity, and of human flourishing. Where could these things go off the rails? We saw during the Obama years a radically different vision of the human person being imposed via the regulatory state. We’ve seen various biotechnologies—embryo-destructive stem cell research, cloning technology. Just last night, I saw this on my flight home from LA: Columbia University has successfully gene-edited a human embryo. We need to start thinking through designer babies; they are one step closer. Biotechnology and the regulatory state are where many natural law, Judeo-Christian ethical principles hit the road. I mentioned that phrase, “natural law,” because we try to do this in both a philosophical and a theological language to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. We can speak both confessionally to our fellow believers, but we can also speak in a purely philosophical language to anyone who is willing to entertain an argument, anyone who is willing to be rational.
Peter Lipsett: In the science and technology, it’s so intertwined with what culture is today and our policy decisions. I’m actually a big fan of the New Atlantis, which is spun out of EPPC. Or is it housed in EPPC? A little bit of both?
Ryan Anderson: A little bit of both. It started at EPPC probably over 20 years ago now, and Eric Cohen, Yuval, and Adam Keiper were all involved in that. A couple of years before I came to EPPC, it went independent as a separate 501(c)(3), but it’s still run out of our offices. They sublet an office, and the back cover of the journal has both logos just to recognize that for 20 years it was an EPPC-sponsored journal.
Peter Lipsett: If you’re not getting it, it’s weighty and thoughtful. You’ve opened it up, and there are great, thoughtful articles. It shows this intersection of how science and policy considerations work. I’m reading one on regenerative farming right now. I think it does a nice job—and this is not always evident on the conservative side—of not just saying “that’s bad,” but diving down the rabbit hole to understand what this technology is bringing, what AI is bringing, and then looking at the good and the bad and weighing it all.
Ryan Anderson: It’s a really good journal. I’ve only written for them once or twice personally, but I read every quarterly issue. It really does thoughtful work. It’s important that conservatives be doing this work. We can’t just ignore all of science and technology; we live in a technological era. If conservatives, particularly social conservatives, aren’t engaged in thinking through how technology can be utilized in ways that enhance human flourishing, enhance liberty, and enhance dignity, rather than ways that detract from it… I think that’s the central driving question of Pope Leo’s recent encyclical—it’s not just on AI, though people refer to it as the AI encyclical; it’s on Catholic social thought applied to questions of technology today. That’s the driving question for our time: What does it mean to be human? What does human flourishing look like? What does human dignity require of us?
Peter Lipsett: Let’s parlay that into the broader debates going on within the conservative movement, the right broadly defined. We talk a lot about fusionism, the libertarian side, the traditionalist side, and how they fused together to create a winning coalition for a long time. EPPC kind of embodies a lot of that. You’ve been there five years, you were at Heritage before that. Heritage has changed a lot in the last five years, and I’m sure EPPC has changed a lot under your watch. The broader landscape continues to have this push and pull. I’m curious what you have seen over the last five years and this ongoing divide between national conservatives and freedom conservatives. EPPC’s work seems to be respected by both sides. How are you walking that tightrope, or is that intentional? How do you think about all this?
Ryan Anderson: It’s a big question. I’m glad you have the observation that EPPC’s work seems to be respected by both “free-cons” and “nat-cons,” and that is our goal. We would like to produce scholarship and model legislation that represents a new fusion. To a certain extent, we’re engaged in a new fusionism at this moment. You have the free-cons, you have the nat-cons, you have various populists. Henry Olsen is our in-house political coalition poll-watcher. He has precinct-level knowledge on election night.
Peter Lipsett: One of the smartest political thinkers out there.
Ryan Anderson: For people watching the polls, he understands the various coalitions, the various factions, and the various faces of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. There was fusionism 1.0; Henry talks about fusionism 2.0, or new fusionism. I think we try to embody this both theoretically—Henry launched and currently hosts a podcast called The Crossroads of Conservatism, where he gets people on the nat-con side and the free-con side to actually discuss civilly and intelligently. They don’t just paper over their differences, but they also don’t just yell at each other. Part of Henry’s argument is that none of the factions on the center-right is powerful enough alone to win without the others. It has to be a coalition if you want our people to be in power. If you care about winning elections and governing, then whatever flavor of conservative you identify with—whether it’s foreign policy, fiscal, social, national populism—you can’t win without the others. We need to better understand where we agree and disagree, why we disagree, and how we can find common ground. That’s Henry’s project at EPPC. For our other scholars, the advice and mentorship I’ve offered is: if you think parents should be in the driver’s seat when it comes to their children’s exposure to technology, you want to convince both the free-cons and the nat-cons of that. If you think unborn babies should not be killed in the womb, you want both to embrace that. Stanley Kurtz is our education scholar; he’s focused on the fact that 85% of Americans still go to government-run schools. What can we do to make those less bad? He has model legislation that he wants both sides to embrace. It’s both at the theoretical level and on discrete policies, we want the whole fusionist spectrum to support this. I’ve been here five years, and I’ve hired a lot of new scholars. Internally, we’re a fusionist think tank; some lean nat-con, some lean free-con, but they all get along. None of them try to undermine each other. We try to find ways of writing and speaking that appeal to both sides of the divide. That is very intentional.
Peter Lipsett: Why do you think that is? What can the internal workings of EPPC teach the broader right about having a more productive dialogue?
Ryan Anderson: One thing goes back to our former colleague, Yuval Levin. He was kind of stolen from us—I don’t blame Robert Doar, who became president of AEI, for offering Yuval a very attractive job. I would love if we still had Yuval. Yuval wrote a really important book, A Time to Build. He draws a distinction: are our institutions primarily platforms, or are they molds? Too many people view their institutions as platforms on which they perform for an audience. In his most recent book on the Constitution, he says this is part of the problem with Congress: people run for office so they can go on Fox News and be a pundit. They treat the institution as a platform to build a personal brand. The alternative is that we should think of our institutions as molds that shape us and form us. We are stewards of institutions. I came into an institution that had a 45-year history. I don’t get to willy-nilly remake it. I’m a steward of the institution for those who came before me, and therefore it is supposed to shape me. George Weigel has been at EPPC for over 35 years; Ed Whelan has been at EPPC for over 20 years. People who have been shaped by the institution aren’t looking to tear someone else down to rise up. That is counter to my disposition and my nature. For many of my colleagues, that is just not in our blood. We want to do serious thinking, serious writing, and serious policy proposals. We aren’t as concerned with who gets credit; we just want to see good stuff get done. It’s a different mindset.
Peter Lipsett:
There’s a lot of skepticism around institutions these days—probably more on the national conservative side than the freedom conservative side—and a lot of “let’s just tear it down and rebuild it.” You seem to come down more pro-institution and believe in getting in there and fixing things from the inside. Is that fair?
Ryan Anderson: My wife encouraged me to take the job. Ed Whelan recruited me to be his successor, and the board put me through the process. My wife said, “Look, you’re always saying there aren’t enough people like you out there. You have an opportunity to take an institution that you’ve always said you were an EPPC-style scholar at, and you can change the business model.” EPPC was an “eat-what-you-kill” think tank where each scholar raised their own support. That was actually why I was never there—I didn’t think I could thrive on that business model. Ed convinced me to come over and not just raise my own support, but raise everyone’s support. Especially for the younger scholars, there’s a different mindset. If you’re offered a job where you’re treated like a missionary and have to raise your own salary, that’s not attractive. But if I can say, “Look, do work that really matters, and I promise you I’ll find the resources to support your work,” then you don’t need to do performative stuff to increase your Twitter following. Do work that matters, and we have internal ways of thinking about what is meaningful work.
Peter Lipsett: You think about the Heritage Foundation, which is very much a “one-voice” think tank—everyone is singing from the same songbook. AEI is intentionally the opposite—everyone is free-market, but you say what you’re going to say. Cato is somewhere in the middle. Where does EPPC fall in that spectrum?
Ryan Anderson: EPPC doesn’t have a one-voice policy in the way Heritage did. Everything I published at Heritage, my director and vice president had to read and sign off on; they were looking to ensure it adhered to the Heritage platform. At EPPC, there’s no pre-review. Scholars publish their own stuff; I largely read it afterwards. But we have agreement on fundamentals: pro-life, pro-marriage, against gender ideology, in favor of religious liberty, in favor of market economies. But when we apply these principles, we have scholars who have disagreed about aspects of pro-life policy post-Dobbs. We lost 14 out of 17 ballot initiatives; different scholars have different takes on the way forward. Disagreement is entirely appropriate for morally serious scholars who agree on the fundamental human dignity question. We have scholars who disagree about who their top pick for a judgeship might be, even though they come from the same judicial philosophy.
Regarding institutions, part of what I wanted to say was about taking institutions seriously. Stepping into a leadership role meant I couldn’t do as much of my own reading and writing, but my wife encouraged me: you have a chance to steward a meaningful institution and jumpstart the careers of five, 10, 15, 20 people. After 10 or 15 years of being president, there could be an entire generation of scholars we’ve cultivated. Four years ago, I got a phone call from the governor’s office in Florida, a staffer for Ron DeSantis: “Would you be willing to serve as a trustee of New College of Florida?” It was the first public university in Florida taken over. The proposition was: why should state universities in red states be as woke as the Ivy League? I went to Princeton—it’s not in great shape. Harvard and Yale aren’t in great shape. Public universities are accountable to the public. The governor and the board of governors appoint trustees, and the most important thing we do is hire and fire a president and grant or deny tenure. We took that very seriously. Our first meeting, we got rid of the previous president, not because she had done anything wrong, but because she couldn’t implement our vision. The board members included Matt Spalding from Hillsdale, Charles Kessler from Claremont, Chris Rufo, and Mark Bauerlein from Emory. We had a vision of what an honors college in Florida should look like. We’re four years into this, and the proof is in the pudding. The school has been turned around and is attracting professors and students who want to be there. This is a time to step into these public institutions, hold them accountable, and reform them. Robbie George is one of my mentors; he started the James Madison program at Princeton, and now there are about 20 state universities with civic centers modeled on that. Give this a generation, and the proof will be in the pudding regarding the students being produced. We sought to reform them where we could.
Peter Lipsett: Landing the plane: what is next for EPPC, the message you’re carrying forward, and what is coming down the pike?
Ryan Anderson: We need to shore up the family. Marriage rates and fertility rates continue to decline. The fertility rate is largely a reflection of the marriage rate; marital fertility is much higher than non-marital. If you got more people married and staying married, we would be at replacement-level fertility. People get married later, so they have children later, which means they have fewer children. Brad Wilcox at UVA has done so much good work here; Patrick Brown is our point person on this. We want to think about how to make family formation more achievable.
How we navigate technology—digital technology, smartphones, social media, and now artificial intelligence—is critical. I was at a Rome summit on AI and ethics last October; my free-time reading is trying to catch up to speed on this. We have scholars like Aaron Kheriaty and Clare Morell doing work there. Physician-assisted suicide is something we are not prepared for, but it’s coming as baby boomers enter retirement. This is linked to family formation. For people retiring whose families have fragmented because of divorce, or who are estranged from their adult children, or didn’t have adult children, it’s scary to think about approaching the end of life without those support systems. It’s not the government; it’s family, civil society, the church, the synagogue, children, and grandchildren. The pressures for the legalization of this are going to be very high, and we’ve already seen state after state allow it. Then there is the coercion. Sasha Raikhy, a Canadian and Israeli citizen, is doing the best work exposing the horrors of assisted suicide in Canada and why we shouldn’t be importing this to the US.
The overarching theme is that we need to do this in a fusionist way. Whether you’re a free-con or a nat-con, we shouldn’t have “markets in killing grandma.” It would corrupt our healthcare system; it would place perverse financial incentives if tools meant for healing were deployed for killing. I’m in favor of markets, but I don’t want markets in killing. Whether you’re a free-con or a nat-con, we have to agree on that bedrock. “All men are created equal, endowed by their creator with a right to life”—we have to vindicate that in our public policy and law. That is going to be our approach: trying to bridge those divides where we can.
Peter Lipsett: It seems like EPPC steps into the gray space. Maybe that’s why I’ve had trouble getting my head around everything you do—because you are willing to talk in that gray space. There is a moral imperative on the family and marriage, and yet we have to discuss the reality that some people won’t get married. The dynamics have changed, the economic situation is different. We have to have the discussion. Same on suicide: suicide is wrong, pretty clear, yet there are intimate, weird decisions that have to be made. How do you deal with that? AI changes every day. To be able to be in that gray space of facilitating those conversations and allowing the nuance to come out—nobody likes nuance anymore—if EPPC can be the “nuance generator,” that would be a huge boon to the movement and to America.
Ryan Anderson: We’re all getting caught up to speed there; none of us have wrapped our heads around it completely yet. It doesn’t sell, but I love that. It’s funny because my friends who are more MAGA think I’m a “never-Trump squish,” and my friends who are more “never-Trump” think I’m a MAGA radical. All my colleagues are in that same gray space. It’s challenging, but I just think that has to be the way forward.
Peter Lipsett: It’s the space to be in because you win eventually. The pendulum swings back and forth, so you stay grounded. Well, Ryan, this is terrific. Thank you for all the work you guys are doing at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. It was great to talk to you today.
Ryan Anderson: Cool. Well, thank you. I enjoyed it. It’s fun to catch up.
Peter Lipsett: Well, that conversation was certainly helpful for me to better understand what the Ethics and Public Policy Center is. I’ll admit it’s one of these organizations that I have known about and known existed for a long time, have heard terrific things about, I’ve even met with Ryan before, and yet had my troubles getting my head fully around the work that it does. But that conversation helped me a lot, particularly that point that of clarification that you heard me thinking in real time at the end of how they exist in this gray space and this nuanced space that is so lacking in today’s American discourse and on not just on the right but broadly everywhere.
It kind of goes back to some of the elements of the conversation I had with Sarah Cross about what they’re trying to do with Be the People and getting people to have a conversation with each other. Some of the same notes that we touched on with Sam Gregg. So you’re seeing these themes of this this need and and indeed this desire for people to be able to talk with each other without arguing, without yelling, a little bit more than they are doing now. And hopefully we can start trending in that direction. And I’m sure EPPC will be an important part of getting us there.
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