The End Of The American Empire

TITLE: The end of the American Empire | It’s Been a Minute CHANNEL: NPR Podcasts DATE: 2026-05-25 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Support for NPR comes from Taskrabbit, your trusted partner for home projects. Taskrabbit connects you with skilled local taskers for furniture assembly, mounting, and repairs. You can browse profiles and book help today at taskrabbit.com or on the Taskrabbit app. Hello, hello. I’m Britney Luse, and you’re listening [music] to It’s Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what’s going on in culture and why it doesn’t happen by accident. [music]

[music] There’s this meme that went around a couple years back about men and how often they think about the Roman Empire. [music] This one guy shocked his girlfriend by saying, “Once per day.” And like, I get it. The Romans were doing some freaky stuff, but if some people are thinking about the Roman Empire maybe too much, I think there’s another one where you’re not thinking about enough, the American [music] Empire. We just did an episode about how American colonialism drives the labor behind AI. So, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. [music] My colleagues over at Code Switch did this incredible episode on why we don’t really consider [music] ourselves an empire, even as we hold colonies and military bases all over the world. [music] And why President Trump might actually be the reason our empire is crumbling. [music] There’s some eye-opening stuff in here. I can’t wait for you to hear it. Here it is. What’s good, y’all? You are listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I’m Gene Demby. A while ago, there was this story I really wanted us to cover at Code Switch, you know, it never came to be, which happens sometimes, but it was [music] right up our alley over here. So, okay, there was this big conference of folks from colleges and [music] universities from all over the country. It was a convention for Asian American and Pacific Islander student associations. You know, so there was you know, conference stuff, panels, and workshops, and after parties, and kick kicking, you know, all that good stuff, right? But at one of the big sessions at this conference, this existential question was kind of introduced. And that was, should the Pacific Islander folks, that’s the PI in that AAPI initialism, even be conferencing and kick kicking at this thing? Like there were a few parts to this argument, but they all kind of hinged [music] on a larger history. And the people making it said, okay, the story of Asian Americans in the United States, very broadly, is a story of immigration. People who came to the United States. But the story of Pacific Islanders in the United States, [music] folks whose people, you know, hail from the Philippines, or native Hawaiians, or people from Samoa, that is a story of colonization, of the US coming to them very forcibly and taking over their ancestral homes and subsuming it into America. Some of the folks argued that [music] in many ways Pacific Islanders actually had more in common with Native Americans and indigenous people in the US than they did with Asian Americans. And so obviously this was like very chewy [music] and fraught and like so many conversations like these, they’ve been around before this convention and they are around after this convention, right? [music] What stuck with me most about this discourse was that it was a straight and direct [music] addressing of this thing that most of us in the US just never really talk about. The United States [music] as an empire. It’s just like not true that the United States hasn’t [music] had this colonial history. Um it’s differently shaped than that of other countries, but it’s like turns out to be a big part of its history. That’s the historian [music] Daniel Immerwahr, and he has a book called How to Hide an Empire, A History of the Greater United States. [music] And in it he writes that most people in the continental US think of empire as this thing [music] that, you know, other countries do. England and France and the Dutch. And that we don’t know and haven’t really understood or reckoned with [music] the long history and the present colonizing the United States has done. We don’t think about the millions of people all over the world [music] who are political subjects of the United States, but who can’t say vote in US elections. So, for example, at the time that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Japan, like its infamous Axis partners, [music] struck first and declared war afterwards. Hawaii was a US territory at the time, so were the Philippines and Guam and the Wake Islands. [music] What gets left out and what we don’t learn is that at the same time that Pearl Harbor was [music] being attacked, Japan also bombed US bases on all of those Pacific Islands. And this is a detail that kind of blows my mind a little bit y’all, but like Daniel says that at that specific moment in US [music] history, there were more colonial subjects of the United States [music] elsewhere in the world than there were black Americans in the United States. But even though we are generally just inclined to overlook the scale and inner workings of American empire, the news is making that head in the sand thing harder all the time. Like just over the past few years, right? The destruction wrought by Hurricane Maria. And like, not not for nothing, the rise of Bad Bunny has brought all this fresh attention, like these new eyeballs, to the US’s colonial relationship with Puerto Rico. Just in these first few months of 2026, the United States sent troops to Venezuela and President Trump threatened to take over that country’s natural resources. And now the United States is engaged in an escalating war with Iran that has involved attacks on and from permanent American military bases in places like Qatar and Bahrain and Kuwait. [music] And so, on today’s episode, we are talking about the state of American Empire. Right now, we are in an empire state of mind, you could say. Why is it that we as Americans don’t ever say the C-word? That’s colony, nasty ass, get your mind out of the gutter. And why Daniel Immerwahr says that Donald Trump, with his penchant for breaking things, [music] might be breaking our empire, too. This message comes from BetterHelp. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a reminder that you don’t have to do this life alone. From loneliness to anxiety to financial stress, right now people everywhere are struggling. But having a licensed therapist with you by video, phone, or chat can make a difference. And BetterHelp makes it easy. Sign up now and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/npr. That’s betterhelp.com/npr. This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you’re tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com/switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This message comes from Babbel. 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Daniel, I should tell you you are the author of a book that a few people on our team have kind of like Loki obsessed with for a minute. [laughter] Um so, can you tell me what how to hide an empire is about and what prompted you to write it? Yeah, so How to Hide an Empire is a history of the United States, but not as the United States as I had been conditioned to see it. So, not as the contiguous shape. Um and the reason that I was prompted to write this is that I had been a US historian, I’d been teaching US history classes, and I found myself, for reasons unrelated to this book, traveling to Manila in the Philippines. Okay. Um and look, I’m not an idiot and I, you know, a fairly like capable historian. And so, I had known that the Philippines had been colonized by the United States uh like for about 50 years. Uh but there’s something like different between knowing it and like knowing it. And it’s, you know, it’s like reading the lyrics and hearing the music. And when I got to Manila, I was like, “Oh, yeah.” Mhm. I’m looking at streets named after US presidents. I’m looking at uh like a transit system that is based on repurposed US Army jeeps. Like in so many ways, I was like, “Oh, this is a kind of place that I know with a with some interesting differences.” And to the US historian that I was, I hadn’t really thought through this, I was like, “Have I really contemplated what it means that the Philippines was part of the United States for that long?” Like, that’s not really part of my stories. That’s not how I teach. Um that’s not how a lot of my colleagues teach. It’s not how we learn. It’s not how we learn, right? So, you like maybe there’s like a chapter set in 1898 where like the United States colonized a bunch of places, and then you hear nothing more about them. Right. And you’re like, “Oh, did Puerto Rico just vanish?” Uh and and and so the second you ask these questions, the second it’s not just the Philippines, it’s you know, “What’s up with uh Hawaii and Alaska and Guam and and all hundreds of military bases that the United States has?” So, there’s all these ways in which the United States is spatially not the thing that we think it is. And it turns out that once you sort of open your mind to that, fairly indisputable fact, you get a really different kind of US history. So, when people think of a sort of classic, if you call it classic, empire, what do you think they’re imagining? Cuz I imagine that doesn’t like line up with with the with the way they envision the United States. Yeah, so I think the our classic vision is based on European empire and particularly British empire. So, you’ve got like these like mustachioed men in pith hats and jodhpurs, and they’re going out to, you know, do their horrible business. And so usually what we say is that, “Okay, the United States, whatever its flaws, didn’t do that kind of thing.” Didn’t do that thing, right. Right. And then sometimes we say, “I’m so upset with US foreign policy that it is almost like that thing. You know, this is a disguised form of empire, the new form of empire, whatever.” Um and I’m so I’m so I’m saying that in a semi-sarcastic way. I don’t mean to be dismissive. These are positions that I myself have adopted at times. Um but but that’s usually how we do it, right? So, that the United States has a kind of metaphorical relationship to empire. But man, I can tell you, those guys had mustaches, and occasionally they wore pith hats, and like they were out there. [laughter] They look good in khakis. Um so, it’s just like not true that the United States hasn’t had this colonial history. Um it’s differently shaped than that of other countries, but it’s like turns out to be a big part of its history. I mean, you write in the book about the United States government sort of self-consciously trying to brand itself as something very different, right? Than empire historically the country has seen itself as being like diametrically opposed to the British Empire and like the domination implicit in that. Like you talk about how in FDR’s famous like the day that will live in infamy speech, he talks about the Empire of Japan attacking the United States. Where does that perceived difference come from? Yeah, so I think it comes from two places. One is that the United States is founding moment is a rebellion from an empire. And that wasn’t just a strict separation, you know, we’re fine with the politics, we just want to be doing it over here not there. Uh, it was supposed to be a transformation. Uh, is that we reject the form of politics that led us to this and that we, you know, we don’t have kings and, you know, that kind of thing. And and like the name of the country, the United States of America, was meant to mean something. Um, one, it was states not colonies, that was really important. Uh, and two, it was a union not an empire that these are like a union like a marriage, like we’ve entered into this consensually. Now, it turns out to be the case that that’s like not actually correct. So, like by the time the United States has its independence from Britain, it is not just a union of states, it’s an amalgam of states and territories. It’s that on day one, it’s that today, it’s been that every day in between. But the United States has always had this story about itself that like it’s different. It’s politically different from its predecessor and you know, from bad old Europe. Um, and I think that refusal to identify as an empire has led to some real differences. Um, the British were very open about the fact that they had an empire. They were proud of it. The sun never set on the British Empire. They had a holiday called Empire Day that they like celebrated in the schools. Um, and the United States has always felt really uncomfortable with its overseas holdings and often tried to kind of squint until they just disappear or sweep them under the rug or choose your metaphor. Um and I think the effect of that has been uh sometimes quite damaging on those places themselves um because it’s quite a dangerous thing to live in the shadows. Uh and when your country kind of like mumbles in your presence about like your very existence, um that can mean a lot for the military protection you receive. That can mean a lot for the federal support you receive. There is all kinds of ways in which that might be a a queasy situation. Mhm. You have this this one detail that I think about all the time, which is like you mentioned that at the onset of World War II, you were more likely to be a colonial subject of the American empire than you were to be a black person, which is a bananas thing. Like it it shows you about the scope of how much we don’t know about this because the story of, you know, black folks sort of like struggle for self-determination in this country is like so central to the story we tell ourselves that there’s other sort of struggle struggles that are happening alongside everything that are sort of um invisibilized. And that was really inspirational for me because, you know, it used to be the case decades decades ago, um that US historians just told the history of the United States as the history of white people. And then we had this, you know, long fight in my profession. Again, this is a, you know, quite a while ago, about whether um the experience of African Americans is relevant to the large telling of the story. And boy, did we win that fight. Like that is just abs- like absolute victory. Like everyone understands that if you’re going to tell the history of the United States, like you can’t explain anything uh unless you understand the position of black people within the United States. Yet when it comes to the overseas territories, even though at various points there have been significantly more colonized people than black people in the country, um they just sort of just like slide off the edge of the map. And and the notion that, you know, you would need to think about the colonies to explain anything uh is almost foreign to us despite the fact that like World War II for the United States when Japan attacks a territory of the United States, Hawaii, and then and we hardly ever talk about this, goes on to attack many of the other US territories like the same day. Like we never even talk about the fact that the Philippines got attacked that day. And that’s just a measure of the way in which um the colonies just sort of it’s it’s not just that you have subordinate populations, it’s that you have subordinate populations who like just don’t rank in historical consciousness for most people in the United States. I mean the truth is uh that look, if by empire you mean a polity that has like different rules for different places, like a hierarchical polity in which there’s like a center where like the good rules hold and then there’s an edge where the the less good rules hold, that’s the United States. And like it’s really hard to find any other word for it. Um the words that US leaders like to use are they often get very euphemistic, so territories, holdings, possessions. Um but like I don’t really know what else to call it if you’re zooming out. Um so I I think we should just be forthright about that that the United States has always been just in the strictest sense an empire. And I don’t even mean that as a moral charge. Often when we say that, we mean like oh, the United States, it’s so naughty, it is da da da da da an empire. Um you know, and like Star Wars is about like fighting galactic empires and all that. Look, I’m no fan of imperialism as a form of government, but I think we actually just need to be more okay admitting that the United States has and continues to be in many way like just in the technical sense an empire. Um and that’s not just bad, although you know, I’m happy to welcome that moral judgment. It’s also really interesting and it’s really telling about the history of the country. So you said territories and holdings. And that like is part of this sort of very intentional effort to not call them colonies. So can you talk about the why the United States even at the like the sort of the height of colonialism in the early 20th century late late 19th century that the United States was like sort of keeping his distance, keeping that term colony at arms length. Yeah, it’s interesting because there is like a brief moment around 1898, which is when the United States starts seizing a lot of overseas territories or a lot of populous overseas territories. In that really quick moment, colony is not a bad word. And like Teddy Roosevelt uses it and like Woodrow Wilson uses it. But then like by about World War I, so like the 1910s, it’s really hard to find governing officials talking forthrightly about colonies. And occasionally you can find them saying things like, “We don’t really use the C-word around here. You know, we have other ways of saying it.” And I think that’s because it it’s hard for the United States to square the story that it tells about itself and that it uses when it is presenting itself internationally with the fact that it has colonies. Because like a lot of you know, in the 20th century, a lot of this way in which the United States sought to legitimize itself as a global power, “You can trust us. We’re different from, you know, the bad old British or the French.” is that the United States was uniquely untainted by empire. And that’s why it’s okay for it to like have the, you know, world’s most powerful military. That’s why it’s okay for it to have 750 military bases spread around the world. Um I think just empirically that’s like an incorrect claim, but it’s been a really important one for the US. Mhm. I mean, you mentioned the military bases around the world. And it is it is like a I think we take as a given as American citizens, right? Like, “Oh, we just have we just have military bases in Germany, in you know, in the UAE, right? Like that’s just normal, right? Like you know, you point out like if there was a a French military base in Texas, we’d be like, We’d be losing our minds. Oh my god. Or a Chinese base. You know, like just like well like what are the you know, and unsurprisingly that is often how other people have reacted when the United States stations its own bases in their country. Um we think of these bases as just like we in fact we don’t usually think about them in the United States. They’re just kind of there, humming in the background. Like we have Unless you know someone who’s like stationed there or something like that, right? Exactly. Yeah, like most people don’t know how many there are. In fact, we don’t know how many there are because the US military won’t tell us. So, we think it’s roughly 750. But but these bases have been enormously contentious. So, like one really good example is what was the thing that Osama bin Laden was most mad about? It was the stationing of US military troops in Saudi Arabia, the holy land that contains Mecca and Medina. Like that was his rallying cry. Um and fine I mean like you know, I’m I’m no big Osama bin Laden fan. But um that’s a really like that’s a thing that the US does a lot that tends to irritate or infuriate uh people around the world just like time and time again. There’s been two Japanese prime ministers who’ve ended up losing power over domestic arguments about dealing with US bases in Japan. Are they arguing in favor of keeping the having the bases or Well, I mean you you’re often put in this awkward position if you’re leading a country that hosts the base because you’re getting a lot of pressure and that could be economic and that could be military from the United States to open the base and you might get inducements to agree to it. But you know, then once the base is open, there’s going to be US service members and they’re going to be like driving jeeps around and every once in a while those jeeps run over someone and then like you try to try them in your courts, but the US military doesn’t want like US service members tried in Japanese courts so that they’re tried on the base and and then like everyone gets really upset. And that happens time and time and time again. So, it it becomes really hard for a lot of world leaders to square the US basing empire with what they owe to their constituents. And they have different ways of resolving it, but like those tensions just keep coming up again and again. What kind of cultures and economies like pop up around these bases like all around the world? Like what like what is the sort of relationship the people who stay in the bases have to I imagine is different depending on the place, but they have to the the who live there? Yeah, I got really interested in this. Um so, I mean, I think the the sort of general 20th century into the 21st century base experience is that you’ve got people from the United States who often have like more money and more disposable income and they have a fair amount of like legal privilege cuz they can just sort of walk into the night and be like fairly certain that they’ll be protected by the US. Um And so, they they have a kind of local power and they often are walking around with their pockets brimming with US dollars. And so, what you tend to see around the bases is like quick developments of service economies. So, sex work, music, just all kinds of ways of like separating those Yankees from their dollars. Mhm. I mean, you sort of anticipated this question, but like who is protected and exploited in these places where there are bases? Like especially when I guess those bases are near places the United States might be threatening or like in active conflict with. Yeah, so there’s two there’s two ways this goes. Like one is what is it like to be around the the base itself and that’s often a peace time economy, an unequal peace time economy where some people have more legal protections and money than others and, you know, you can imagine how that works. Um but the point of the bases is not just like for stationing. Yeah, ideally they’re for threat posturing um and potentially to be used in war and this is what allows the United States to move its troops, uh move its planes, just like quickly to any part of the planet. So, it’s not just the kind of political issues about the bases being, you know, in your country that might be difficult. Uh think about like Iran, which you know, at various times has felt surrounded by countries that host US bases uh and in some ways then feels surrounded by the US, feels threatened, and has a whole politics around the great Satan and the ways in which the United States poses unique threats to Iran and that becomes a big part of like a legitimating part of the Islamic Republic is it like it is anti-imperialist standing up to the United States and that’s why you can trust us as a government. I mean when I talk about Iran like just in the last few months the United States have removed the president of Venezuela, we’ve attacked Iran, we suggested that we might you know make moves on Cuba. Um so I was surprised to read a piece in the New Yorker recently that argues that this military action that Trump administration is undertaking is not in service of maintaining this empire. So like can you just walk us through your argument? Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t want to suggest that Trump isn’t you know violently lashing out but I see him more as cannibalizing the empire than maintaining the empire. Huh, say more about that. Yeah. I mean so like US presidents have been nervous about Iran quite nervous about Iran for decades and we know now that they have privately talked about military strikes of this scale on Iran and they’ve always held back and you ask okay well why? And we also know the answer to that. The reason they’ve held back isn’t out of you know humanitarian concern for the Iranian people or love of Iran. Mhm. It’s largely because they have a set of distributed interests around the Middle East and they’re like okay like we could bomb Iran. We certainly have the military capacity to do that but you know if we did that we might shut down the Strait of Hormuz. You know if the Iranian government collapses there’d be a refugee crisis. Iran might counterattack the Gulf states. Like there’s all kinds of things that happen which we’re finding out. Yeah, which is all these things are happening. Right. When you when you attack Iran. And so it’s not a lack of like ambition on the part of other presidents. It’s more that they are they just have like a broader sense of the chessboard and they’re like the United States has such extensive world spanning interests that you can’t just think about one country. You have to think about the whole thing because in some sense the whole world is the backyard of the United States. And what’s interesting about Trump is that he has really philosophically stood against that. He’s been very clear like for decades how much he doesn’t like the idea that the United States would be the global policeman. Um, he wants the United States just to be a competitor and a and a victorious competitor. Um, and so for him he’s he’s much more comfortable to saying, “I don’t like Iran, so I’m going to bomb it. There will be downstream consequences, but I don’t really care cuz I’m not playing chess. Like just let it happen.” Um, and in some ways this is a in weirdly it’s like it’s actually of a lot of forms of US power that Trump is doing. That just like devil may care like like who cares about the consequences. In some ways that’s like abandoning the notion that the United States has ongoing interest in controlling things in the Middle East. Hm. I was thinking about that like the United States is sort of role in the maintaining the I’m doing air quotes global order. Um, and that sort of required like some measure of restraint just like you cuz like you said there’s this giant chessboard that people at the helm of the United States of this empire have to be cognizant of. But like the United States has acted unilaterally even in the context of like this global order with like multilateral organizations, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I don’t want to romanticize the idea that the United States is like has arm supremacy over the planet. And that has absolutely led past presidents into horrible wars and and just like grievous mistakes. So like a really good example of that would be this sense that um, Dwight Eisenhower articulated that the reason that a country like Vietnam is important is it’s all connected. For him it wasn’t a global chessboard, it was dominoes, right? One domino topples, they all topple. And so suddenly the United States like really has to care about Southeast Asia even in the absence of like any direct security threat to the United States, even the absence of economic interests or direct economic interests of the United States. It has to care if Vietnam like goes a little socialist. And and a lot of presidents have been kind of like drawn into that trap. So I think there’s a way in which you know, the pursuit of hegemony can can be a too much problem and can lead to all kinds of excess and invasions and you know the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq is a really good example. With Trump we’re seeing the opposite. Trump has kind of relinquished a lot of the pursuit of hegemony which from another president could be quite welcome. Uh but with Trump it’s turned out to like remove some guardrails and has allowed him to do some things that past presidents have hesitated to do. So there’s a sense that the US empire the hegemon is on the decline, right? Yeah. That’s right. You know he’s got his tariffs, his sort of general sort of saber-rattling is bringing that closer to fruition. Like he’s speeding that up. So Trump like from the from the 1980s Trump has been a vocal critic of US hegemony and not a left-wing critic like most critics like I regard myself as a left-wing critic of US hegemony. He’s been a right-wing critic and his like left-wing critics are usually say US hegemony isn’t good for the world. Right-wing critics say it’s not good for the United States. It’s not paying out enough. Why are we spending all this money to like do a military empire that protects the people of Japan so that they don’t have to develop their own nuclear weapons like they’re free riding on us. That kind of thing. That’s always been how Trump has seen it and interestingly that’s like compelling to a lot of voters at this point. But it’s it’s interesting that that the argument is interesting because like so much of the the American economy is sort of like you know the fact that it like the American economy is so robust so broad like it’s because like of this projection, right? Like it’s not kind of can’t have American the American economy booming the way that I imagine a lot of right-wing critics of of American empire would would make it without the empire part of it, right? Maybe. [snorts] I mean so there is something that Trump is right about which is that you know the whole like global economic order in which the United States has played a central role since World War II. You know that inarguably that’s paid out for the United States. But he’s also right. He’s like oh like we’ve subsidized other countries. We’ve like tried to involve other countries in our market like dealings and we’ve tried to have like trade with them and and what are they doing? Now they’re taking our jobs. So like the beneficiaries from this whole system, it’s clear that like Asian countries like are on the upswing and I think just as like humanitarians we should be very happy about that. And it’s clear that like the global elite is doing fine like you know people was you know Trump levels in income levels. But it’s also true that a lot of people in the United States like in the middle class and the working class like haven’t seen the benefits since the 1970s of the global empire. Mhm. So you see this incredibly weird thing now where you get like these like defenders of US hegemony being like no no no Trump you don’t understand. This is all good for the United States. We claim just to be an impartial umpire but in fact like this pays off and you’re going to destroy the whole thing and we’ve been benefiting so much from this. So it’s like a weird moment when you know unsaid things are coming out. Huh. All right. So Daniel, I mean this is kind of a big question but like what would it look like for the US empire to come to an end and for us Americans and for the rest of the world? Yeah, I mean look that’s the question we’re all asking because it seems that US hegemony it seems like it was already you know on the decline before Trump got elected and this kind of looks like the death rattle of that and one scared version of the story is oh no, this is really bad because we needed one country to sort of keep everyone in order. And without that Pax Americana Yeah, Pax Americana. Yeah, and it’s what do you have in the absence of that? You have anarchy or sometimes the um you’ll hear this or worse than anarchy, you’ll get China or Russia doing the job. Do you want them to do the job? Um and and those are real concerns. I don’t I don’t I don’t I really don’t want to diminish them. Um I think a more hopeful concern and you heard this from Mark Carney the Prime Minister of Canada it’s not even a concern. It’s like he’s like, “Okay, this is a really violent and tricky period, but it’s also a period of transition. And maybe what we’re going to transition to is a time where the world order is maintained not by one country, but by like a lot of medium countries working multilaterally. Like that’s kind of what we wanted, and this might be the moment we get it. And it it is just an empirical question. Like what does the world minus US hegemony look like? Um does it look more equal and more democratic, or does it look more [music] violent, uh either chaotic or authoritarian? And we don’t know. Um so I’m I’m scared of the first, but I’m actually [music] hopeful about the second. Daniel Immerwahr is a historian at Northwestern and the author of the book How to Hide an Empire, a history [music] of the greater United States. Thank you, Daniel. Appreciate it. All right. Yeah, [music] hey, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate this. And y’all, that [music] is our show. This episode you’re listening to right now was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Lee D’Nella, and we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the Code [music] Switch massive. That’s Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez, D’ana Morton, Yolanda Sangweni, and B.A. Parker. [music] As for me, I’m Gene Demby. Be easy, y’all. This message comes from Midi Health. 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