615: The Beginning of Now

Ira Glass

Reid Cherlin was writing a story for Rolling Stone back then, about this not-so-well-known-at-the-time bomb-throwing right-wing news website, Breitbart News. And he was at the Odeon to interview one of the guys who ran it, Steve Bannon. Bannon's now the chief strategist for the President of the United States. So what's he like?

Ira Glass

At the time, Bannon and Breitbart News were outsiders, waging an insurgent war against the Republican establishment, the mainstream media, President Obama. And Bannon gushed enthusiastically about the stories they were breaking, some of which did not seem true at all. Illegal immigrants sick with the Ebola virus crossing the border into Texas. An ISIS plot to kill the Pope. 10 counties in Texas that are controlled by the Mexican drug cartels.

Ira Glass

By the way, it is true that some cartel families live in McAllen. But this idea that they've declared some big truce or that law enforcement gives them a pass? That's embellishment. Reid wrote about all this recently in an article he did for VICE News. This is where he works these days. But his original story, the one he was writing for Rolling Stone back in 2014, never got published. He couldn't convince his editors to run it. The whole world of it-- Steve Bannon, Breitbart News-- it all seemed too fringy. Not important. These right-wing agitators with their far-out ideas.

And listen to what seemed completely irrelevant 2 and 1/2 years ago. For the story, Reid went to a party at Breitbart headquarters, a townhouse in Washington, DC, that Bannon called the Breitbart Embassy.

Ira Glass

Jeff Sessions, of course, an early Trump supporter, now Attorney General of the United States.

Ira Glass

In fact, he and Bannon, and his staff and the Breitbart staff knew each other. Reid asked Sessions a question or two for his story just to be polite, and Sessions answered. Praised Breitbart. Said how influential it was with his constituents, which Reid assumed was just a courtesy to his host. Reid headed out to the backyard.

Ira Glass

At dinner, Reid was sitting next to a fellow named Sebastian Gorka, who seemed full of big ideas, but nice enough. Today, he's a deputy assistant to the president.

Ira Glass

Back in the beginning of this year, when Reid went through his old notes again about the party and the Odeon and wrote up a story for VICE, Gorka did not seem significant. He didn't include him in the story.

Ira Glass

Stephen Miller, former Sessions staffer, now senior adviser in charge of domestic policy for the president, who co-wrote President Trump's inaugural address with Steve Bannon.

Ira Glass

How did we get to now, with a president who proudly sees himself as a disruptive force, who's out to undo decades of bipartisan policy? Well, part of the story really starts with the people at that party, who were championing economic nationalism, who wanted to curtail illegal and legal immigration, renegotiate trade deals. The beginning of now happened in 2014 with them.

Today on our program, we have the story of the people at that party at the Breitbart Embassy and how, before Donald Trump even announced his candidacy, they took their ideas out for a test run with the voters in a congressional race in Virginia. What they learned and how it got us to today. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, The Brat Pack.

So obviously, one of the main issues that Donald Trump campaigned on and won on was immigration. Fewer immigrants, essentially, was the idea, as well as a crackdown on anybody who's in the country illegally. But it's interesting to remember that, back in 2014, just two years before Trump became president, the Republican Party was heading in the exact opposite direction. And you can hear it in the way this particular congressman, Congressman Mulvaney of South Carolina, opened this Republican breakfast meeting in his district back then. Mulvaney rode the Tea Party wave into office in 2010. Super conservative Tea Partier. Didn't support John Boehner for the speakership because Boehner worked too closely with Obama. Very conservative guy.

Ira Glass

A cantaloupe. Mick Mulvaney got a cantaloupe on his desk right after another member of the Republican Party, Trey Gowdy, had been talking about the children of undocumented immigrants. Dreamers who, he said, sometimes are really successful. Valedictorians of their classes.

Ira Glass

These came from activists who wanted the Dreamers to stay in the United States. They left a cantaloupe on the desk of most congressional Republicans to send a message about how out of touch their party was around the issue of immigration. This audio, by the way, is from a documentary on Frontline called Immigration Battle.

Ira Glass

In 2014, Mick Mulvaney supported an immigration reform deal, including a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants. And at the time, which you can tell from that quote, it seemed like good politics. If you remember right after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 campaign, the Republican Party, led by party chairman at the time Reince Priebus, commissioned this autopsy report. What did we do wrong? How do we start winning elections again?

And one of the big take-homes of that report was this sentence-- "If Hispanic-Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States, they will not pay attention to our next sentence."

Things have changed in two years, huh? Today, both Mick Mulvaney and Reince Priebus work for this guy.

Ira Glass

So how did the Republican Party reverse itself so fully so quickly on immigration? And why? Well, that is the thing we want to talk about today. That's the thing that happened in 2014, before Trump started running back at the beginning of now-- around the same time as that Breitbart Embassy party. People at that very party made immigration an issue in this one congressional race that we want to tell you about, and it demonstrated the power of that issue of immigration and showed how somebody might use it to win the presidency.

And interestingly, this particular congressional race started off not having much to do with immigration. Zoe Chace explains.

Zoe Chace

You could pick a few places to begin the story of this congressional race, but I'm going to start off on the top of this mountain in Virginia. Ron Maxwell lives up here. He's a movie director.

Zoe Chace

Hey. I'm Zoe.

Zoe Chace

He did the movie Gettysburg 25 years ago. He's a Hollywood guy in the middle of the woods. One of those conservatives who knows a ton of other conservatives-- money people, media people. He's a connector. Good-natured, loud-mouth guy. Has lots of opinions, lots of history books in his study. He's an America First guy, like since way before now. He writes editorials railing at the government, has written a lot about his fear that Mexicans will reconquer the Southwest. But back in 2013, he was focused on something else.

Zoe Chace

Ron was focused on keeping the US out of another war. That's a huge part of the America First idea, as you probably know-- staying out of international conflict. In the summer of 2013, President Assad had used chemical weapons on his people. The administration was calling on Congress to give him military authorization. Obama met with the two most important people in the House to get that done-- the Speaker of the House John Boehner, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who was from Ron's state, Virginia. Ron was watching the news.

Zoe Chace

This was a really crazy idea. Like, yeah, this is a democracy. Technically, you should be able to vote reps you don't like out of office. But not Eric Cantor. Not the House majority leader. He's got all the money in the world to run an election with. He's got the entire Republican Party behind him. He's an incumbent, obviously. In fact, it had never been done. Actually, in the history of the republic no one had voted out an incumbent House majority leader, a little-known but common-sense statistic.

Zoe Chace

Larry Nordvig had just become executive director of the Richmond Tea Party. Trim mustache, all business, looks like an airline pilot, which is what he was before he got political. Larry told Ron that, at their Tea Party meetings, he'd sensed some dissatisfaction with Eric Cantor.

Zoe Chace

Not about immigration. Not then.

Zoe Chace

Eric Cantor was taking them for granted, paying more attention to donors rather than voters, Larry says. And people just hated him. Again, Larry.

Zoe Chace

And they found a guy. A guy named Dave Brat. At first, he seemed only marginally better than a hat rack. Brat was an economics professor from a small liberal arts college, not a politician.

Pros-- corn-fed, Midwestern, handsome, fan of Ayn Rand, practicing Christian, known within the Tea Party, friendly, not afraid of crowds the way Cantor seemed to be. He wanted to run, actually had been spurned by Cantor over a political post he wanted.

Cons-- very little campaign experience, no Beltway connections, few people knew who he was, no money whatsoever. Oh, and he talks like an economics professor.

So these three guys-- Larry with the mustache, Ron the movie guy, Brat the professor-- met at a Greek restaurant in Charlottesville to hash out their plan. It was emotionally real, Ron tells me. Intense male bonding. They felt very David and Goliath-y.

Zoe Chace

By the end, they had a deal. Dave Brat would be better than a hat rack. Larry would organize the grassroots. And Ron would call donors and his fellow populists in the media.

Zoe Chace

Ron didn't call his people right away. First, they wanted to get Brat off the ground. One of the first media appearances was local, and it was a good local story. Wonky random Virginian taking on one of the most powerful guys in Congress.

Zoe Chace

Economics. It's not the most electrifying pitch. It's not "Mexican rapists are swarming the border."

Zoe Chace

To add to Brat's potential problems, Larry found a campaign manager with very little experience, just out of college, Zach Werrell, 22 years old. Zach, Larry, and Dave Brat met up at a Panera Bread for 45 minutes, and then Zach was hired.

Zoe Chace

I talked to Zach on his parents' porch in this small riverside Maryland town. He remembers it was hard for the campaign to get attention.

Zoe Chace

By the way, Dave Brat and Eric Cantor both turned down my requests to interview them for this story.

Brat's speeches always started the same way. He'd introduce himself, give some biography, then he'd go through something called the "Virginia Republican Creed," which has six principles. And he'd explain how Eric Cantor was not living up to each one of them.

Zoe Chace

Debt, Obamacare, and eventually he gets to immigration. And his big line about it involves crossing his arms to imitate supply and demand curves for labor and wages.

Zoe Chace

Larry Nordvig, Tea Party guy, says that changed. And he remembers when. They were asking this big donor to give money to the campaign. They laid out three talking points they wanted to build the campaign around under the theme Washington, DC, is broken.

Zoe Chace

The magic word was amnesty. It cast a spell when you said it. Eric Cantor had said he supported a path to citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants. Remember, some kind of immigration reform bill was the party priority. The Reince Priebus report, the cantaloupe speech from Mulvaney. Cantor was on the same team. He was a party guy. To get Hispanic votes, Republicans needed to pass a bill. Kids shouldn't have to pay for the mistakes of their parents, he'd said. In other words, amnesty.

Zoe Chace

So they started to hit it, the little team working behind Brat. They started to notice every time they talked about amnesty, they'd get a reaction.

As the campaign got rolling, the Hollywood connector Ron Maxwell decided to call Steve Bannon, who was running Breitbart News. They met at a film festival when Bannon had introduced a showing of Ron's movie. Ron talked to Steve Bannon, and shortly after that, Tea Party guy Larry ran into Bannon at a Tea Party celebration in DC.

Zoe Chace

That was a style Bannon had. You could hear it on this weekly radio show he hosted for Breitbart. He's a good flack. A good publicist. He'll bring on politicians he agrees with and tell them on the air, anything you need, we're here for you. And he took up the Brat-Cantor race as one of Breitbart's crusades, with a very specific goal. He explained it to Reid Cherlin, actually, during that dinner interview you heard at the beginning of the show.

Zoe Chace

"We did not think Eric Cantor was going to be beaten," he says, but he thought they could get to at least 40% of the vote for Dave Brat.

Zoe Chace

Our thesis was, anything with a 4 in it-- any percentage in the 40s-- amnesty's dead in this session of Congress, he says. Amnesty was Breitbart's word for any immigration reform deal making its way through Congress. His hope was, any chance for a bill would die because other Republicans in Congress would realize the House majority leader almost got ousted because of his support for immigration reform. So that was the goal. Scare Cantor and kill any potential bill.

Breitbart hammers Cantor and amnesty for months. Here are some headlines. "Cantor's 'Pledge' at Center of Secretive Immigration Push, Chairman Says," "Cantor Officially Backs Amnesty for DREAMers Who Enlist."

Matthew Boyle was one of the people writing these stories. I met up with him in DC. He's a total Washington type-- competitive politics reporter in a suit. I asked him, why go so hard on immigration? But he disagreed with the premise of the question. He said they were reading the electorate, calling the shots like they saw them.

Zoe Chace

Party leaders kept saying an immigration reform bill would save the Republican Party, but hating the bill was incredibly galvanizing for lots of the conservative media. Laura Ingraham, for example, hugely popular talk radio host-- also at that Breitbart party with Steve Bannon, by the way. She was constantly making the opposite argument from Republican leaders. She believed if undocumented immigrants got amnesty and then citizenship, they'd all become Democrats, dooming the Republican Party.

Zoe Chace

Immigration was a good ground-game issue, too. Zach, the campaign manager, was collecting signatures to get Brat on the ballot. He'd hit the gun shows in Virginia.

Zoe Chace

The campaign and the national conservative media were starting to get on the same page. But they weren't really connected yet, besides a few articles in Breitbart and The Daily Caller. It was hard to get out the name of somebody nobody knew, which was Dave Brat.

One night, Zach and a couple volunteers were working late at the campaign office. They were listening to The Mark Levin Show, part of the same Rush/Laura Ingraham genre. He was yelling about amnesty. Here's Zach.

Zoe Chace

A Mark Levin fan told me that Mark's always called Eric Cantor Forrest Gump because of the way he talks.

Zoe Chace

The campaign really needed this kind of attention because they had so little money to pay for advertising. Brat started showing up on the radio much more. Laura Ingraham framed his campaign very clearly.

Zoe Chace

Laura Ingraham straight-up endorsed Brat. She did a fundraiser for him. Ron Maxwell, Hollywood superconnector rich guy, had called Laura Ingraham early on. And he tells me he noticed when the Brat campaign really started to pick up speed-- end of May, 2014, when there was that increase of young kids coming across the border, fleeing gangs in El Salvador and Guatemala.

Zoe Chace

Rape trees were something Breitbart Texas was writing about a lot in 2014. Trees ominously hung with girls' underwear apparently found along the border. It was not Brat's style to talk about rape trees. He talked about the crisis at the border in his own dense, numbery way.

Zoe Chace

At this point, things were heating up in Congress around an immigration reform bill, which included a path to legal status. Democratic Representative Luis Gutierrez was doing this countdown until the July 4 recess on the floor of the House every day. You've got 20 days to introduce immigration reform, et cetera. He and some Republicans were working together behind closed doors, trying to get enough votes to pass it. This was the bill that Steve Bannon had said Breitbart was expressly trying to kill.

Eric Cantor, at this point, had seemingly pulled to the right. He opposed a bill that offered citizenship to undocumented immigrants who enlisted in the military and then sent out these mailers to constituents like, I killed amnesty for illegal aliens. Gutierrez then planned a rally in Richmond about a week before the primary election to pressure Cantor to lead the house towards a vote on an immigration bill. Then radio host Laura Ingraham's people called the Brat campaign, said, you'd better be there, too. So Dave Brat showed up to hammer Cantor on amnesty.

Zoe Chace

Zach, the campaign manager, remembers that Laura Ingraham's producer wrote the speech that Dave's reading here.

Zoe Chace

That explains a lot, because the way he sounds when he's reading it is maybe the way that she might talk instead of the way that he would talk.

Zoe Chace

I find it remarkable that Ingraham's people were helping out to this degree. She's a radio host. But her producer, Julia Hahn, was really intense about the issue of immigration. Her name came up whenever I asked about media on the Brat campaign. Zach says he thinks it was Julia who wrote the speech. I couldn't confirm that with Julia.

A year later, she was hired by Breitbart to write about immigration. She still works for Steve Bannon, in the White House now.

At this point, it shouldn't be a surprise to you what happened on election night. But at the time, it surprised a lot of people.

Zoe Chace

Cantor lost by double digits. He'd spent $5 and 1/2 million. Brat had spent $200,000. You now know-- because of that whole Hillary Clinton thing-- but seriously, money does not buy election results. John Boehner cried, it was widely reported.

When the results came in early, like by 7:45 that night, that Cantor was out and Dave Brat had won, Zach hadn't figured out what to say to the press when they actually won.

Zoe Chace

The conservative media professionals, though, they knew exactly how to explain it. Here's Laura Ingraham with Megyn Kelly on Fox.

Zoe Chace

As Breitbart said the next day, "Eric Cantor loses referendum on amnesty." Dave Brat won because of immigration. The rest of the media, the networks, and the big newspapers hadn't been reporting on the race very much before this. They didn't see Brat as a serious threat to Eric Cantor. But now that Brat won in a huge upset, they picked up on the conservative media's explanation for why it happened. That it was all about immigration, ignoring all the other issues, starting with Syria, the national debt, people personally offended by Cantor, people feeling ignored by Cantor. Here's ABC.

Zoe Chace

CNN.

Zoe Chace

That was the story. And as a result of this race and the coverage of this race, any immigration reform bill was doomed. Here's the Washington Post's Robert Costa on CBS.

Zoe Chace

Back in Virginia, the Tea Party organizers resented the idea that it was immigration that had put Cantor out. Brat's campaign manager, Zach, says what the race was really about was that Cantor was ignoring his own district.

Zoe Chace

There were no exit polls. There was a poll, though, a week before the election of registered Republican primary voters in this district. Illegal immigration was fourth on the list of important issues to these voters, way below Obamacare.

There was also a poll a week after the election after all the media coverage, where half the voters said immigration was a significant reason for their vote, and half said it wasn't. Only 12% said immigration was the main reason they voted for him.

When the immigration deal eventually died, the glow of this victory at Breitbart is hard to overstate. At that party you heard about at the beginning of the show at the Breitbart headquarters in Washington, Jeff Sessions told the reporter who was there, Reid Cherlin, that one of the reasons he was such a fan of Breitbart News was that he believed they were the ones who had killed the immigration deal in Congress.

And then later, at that dinner at the Odeon, pens on his collar, didn't take off his coat, Bannon himself was taking credit for killing the leadership's dreams of immigration reform.

Zoe Chace

He's saying illegal immigration was 12th on a list of issues the American people cared about, according to a Gallup poll. And yet, he says, within a few months, we've stopped the President of the United States, meaning stopped President Obama's hope for an immigration deal.

To Bannon and populists around the world, this was hugely empowering. It felt like the first domino knocking down the globalists. A few months later, Bannon was speaking to this far-right conference at the Vatican, and he was asked by an attendee in Vatican City about Eric Cantor's defeat in the 7th district of Virginia.

Zoe Chace

If they could crush Eric Cantor, what couldn't they do? And it meant, when Donald Trump announced he was running for president, Steve Bannon and everyone else who felt vindicated by the Brat race thought he could win. They had already seen it in miniature. Like, here's filmmaker Ron Maxwell, who started this whole thing over Syria. He remembers when Trump announced his candidacy.

Zoe Chace

So he opened the Rolodex and started calling his people, his fellow populists in the media.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace is one of the producers of our program. Coming up, he calls himself homeboy, but actually, I think the more accurate term is OG. Pat Buchanan in a minute from WBEZ Chicago when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Beginning of Now, the story of how the people who put Donald Trump into the White House kicked into action in 2014. Meeting at parties, fomenting change, testing their political ideals in the congressional election to defeat Eric Cantor.

Though, some of the ideas that came to the fore in 2014 were uncannily familiar. And that's what we're talking about in this act.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Who Tells Your Story?

Of everybody all over the world who watched the presidential campaign of Donald Trump last year, I think it's possible that the person who had the eeriest experience of it was Pat Buchanan, because he watched Trump sweep into office championing the same set of ideas that Buchanan ran for president with, and lost with, three different times-- 1992, '96, and 2000. Buchanan is probably best known for a speech that he gave at the 1992 Republican Convention that defined the party and him for a while, decrying that our country was in the middle of a cultural war with homosexuals, abortion, pornography, and radical feminism on one side, and Judeo-Christian values and Republicans on the other.

But his presidential campaigns were about more than that. Here he is in 1996.

Ira Glass

He's got Trump's whole agenda. Buchanan wanted to quit trade deals like NAFTA, stop companies from relocating factories overseas, get tough on immigration, phase out foreign aid, make our European allies pay for their own defense, build a wall on the Mexico border, stay out of foreign wars, recapture Washington from the moneyed political class and make it serve the forgotten middle class. And his slogan? You ready for this? America First.

Ira Glass

It was his first presidential announcement in '92 in Concord. Producer Zoe Chace and I talked to him in his home in McLean, Virginia-- right next to the CIA, he told us. And it was pretty close. A house with white columns and a living room full of political souvenirs.

Ira Glass

A red, white, and blue stained glass windowpane was on the coffee table in the living room with his old slogan on it.

Ira Glass

A painting of Buchanan on the campaign bus in Iowa was above the fireplace. Photos of him traveling with Richard Nixon to China, when he was one of Nixon's closest advisers and strategists. A photo of him in a huddle with Ronald Reagan, back when he was in the inner circle of that White House. He was communications director. In the picture, they're going through a speech that he'd hastily rewritten after the Reykjavik arms talks ended badly.

Ira Glass

Back when Ronald Reagan became president, it was widely acknowledged that the ideas that he had run on had been championed by Barry Goldwater when he ran and lost 16 years before that.

Donald Trump ran 16 years after Buchanan's final campaign. And for months now, Zoe and I have wondered why, except for an article here or there, Buchanan wasn't getting more credit. He told us, yeah, of course he noticed. It was his old platform right from the first day Trump announced.

Ira Glass

So it's partly the issues. When he ran, Buchanan said the issues hadn't matured. But he readily acknowledged that Donald Trump was a special candidate and had all kinds of assets as a candidate that he hadn't had. Lots of money. He was better known. Buchanan mentioned Trump's plane a few times. Apparently, when you run for president, having your own airplane is very, very helpful.

Buchanan is an accomplished speechwriter and has written some famous presidential addresses that are careful and substantive and reach for grand themes. And I thought maybe Trump's off-the-cuff, not-deeply-informed-on-the-issues speaking style would be repellent to him, but he said no. He admires the spontaneity. The catchphrases.

Ira Glass

When Buchanan says it's the last chance for these ideas, what he means is the country's problems have gotten so bad. So many jobs have gone overseas. So many factories have closed. And so many immigrants have already arrived. He's against that. In a number of books, he's written with alarm about America becoming a less white, more diverse country. "We are so divided already," he says, "and this divides us more."

There's another one of his ideas that's come back in the age of Trump, championed by Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions and a world of radio talk shows and websites and Breitbart News. This idea that immigrants are destroying our country's Judeo-Christian values because they don't assimilate because of multiculturalism.

Davos-- that's the place in Switzerland where millionaire elites meet once a year supposedly to plot their globalist, free trade, one world, no borders, George Soros, Bono agenda. In this living room, that is a big diss.

The other problem from Buchanan's perspective, with the country becoming less white, is political. Buchanan's been a serious student of political demographics. He's one of the people who rose from the ashes of Goldwater's defeat in 1964 and figured out a new combination of demographic groups that could propel Richard Nixon into the White House in 1968.

And when he looks at the demographics today, he considers the possibility of more Latinos and other immigrants becoming part of the electorate. He agrees with the Republicans that you've heard this hour who believe that that does not look good for their party.

Ira Glass

There's another way that Trump represents the last chance for Buchanan's ideas. If the Republican Party does not attract more nonwhite voters, it's hard to see how they're going to continue to win the White House. And this is something really interesting about where Republicans are right now, even in this moment of triumph they're having, where they have the White House and both houses of Congress and so many state houses and governor's mansions around the country.

When they look at the future, they're still looking down the barrel of the same dilemma they had in 2014, back at the beginning of now. The party is still wrestling with the same issue that got Eric Cantor knocked out of office. They have to choose between two policies, neither of which seems like it solves their national political problems. If they stay tough on immigration, they think they'll kiss off most of the Latino vote, which will doom them. Though, if they provide a path to citizenship, they believe those new Latino voters mostly will be Democrats, and that'll doom them.

Ira Glass

To be clear, he's saying, do everything you can to keep jobs in the US. Quit trade deals like NAFTA. Impose tariffs on imported goods. And if that boosts the economy, it's going to help everybody and appeal not just to white people, but voters of all races who might decide then to vote Republican. It's not white nationalism, he says.

Ira Glass

If that works, it's basically more Trumpism, more Buchananism going forward into the future. Though, Buchanan, he's the first to admit, is a pessimist. This really might not work, he says. The demographic problems the party's facing are so profound. And if this doesn't work, the now that we're in right now-- the whole "Donald Trump, America first, reject the rest of the world, wall up the borders" America-- that will not be the future, for the country or the party. It'll just be a blip.

Pat Buchanan's newest book, by the way, is history that he participated in himself. It's called Nixon's White House Wars-- The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. It comes out in a week.

Let's close out today with one last clip. This is the night before the 1996 Republican Convention in San Diego. The candidate's telling the crowd that, even though he didn't win the Republican nomination, his ideas about America first, they still had a future.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by our senior producer, Brian Reed. Our staff includes Susan Burton, Zoe Chace, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Whitney Dangerfield, Neil Drumming, Kimberly Henderson, Stephanie Foo, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Research help today from Christopher Swetala and Benjamin Phelan. Music help today from Damien Graef.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he came with me to synagogue for Passover this year. He did not enjoy it.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.