The more we use the word taboo and talk about it, it just brings up for me so strongly how modern western society, but particularly very specifically modern American society, has really strong, strong taboos all of a sudden it seems like that have developed in just a couple years or like a decade, but these are divided into two separate communities with two completely separate systems of taboo.

Absolutely. No, no, I mean, because of the way in which the kind of complexity that we've been risking here, and you know, we triggered some people or maybe we said some stuff that from another angle isn't exactly maybe appropriate. I don't know. It's hard to say. We've been risking complexity in this conversation, but that is obviously not the dominant tone certainly on social media, certainly around a lot of moral and political and identity oriented issues. But it's really important to think about again, the function of taboo and the way that taboo both has a power and can have an excessive power that is worth kind of deconstructing and they're kind of both part of the picture. Because if you think, for example, the way that a lot of socially progressive issues that's, you know, I will use the word woke just because we all know what it means. I'm not being pejorative about it, that a lot of those positions take the form of you can't talk about this. You can't talk about that. You can't talk about this. If you suggest this, you are showing that you're not sensitive and aware of the complexity, etc, etc. There are actually forbidden words. Yeah, right. They're literally forbidden words and that these have real effects in say university environments and that people can get in trouble for bringing up topics that in my generation would have been seen as fascinating rich opportunities for complex wrestling with the difficult complexities of human life can be seen now as actively unsafe or hurtful and be castigated or prevented. And so obviously things are a lot more complicated than that. But this part of our political moment is important because then these things become taboos that become absolutely delicious to, you know, profane or transgress by people on the right and particularly these sort of sarcastic, cynical, manipulative, meme spewing trolls on the right. You give the trolls food by having very clearly defined taboos that you hold to in a very serious way. And so they support one another. And I'm not saying that means to not have some form of these ethical demands, but it becomes a complicated feedback loop that actually gives people on the right a certain kind of power. And I think especially a lot of young men who get attracted, young white men in most cases who get attracted to aspects of the alt-right or the hard-right, they get there initially because it's just sort of fun and freedom and craziness and, you know, saying, fuck you to society. And it's because those structures are there that it produces the attraction of the other. And then that might just be an initial move. And then a lot of other things are going on. It's much more complicated than this. But that part of it is really key to pay attention to every time you set up a new taboo, you've given an enemy the capacity to demonstrate their freedom or their correctness over that possibility. And it becomes very difficult to do in a complicated situation like we're in right now in terms of how do you make demands that don't just set up other opportunities for that kind of politics. Eric, thank

you so much.