Is David Brooks a Moral Philosopher?

I am confident that if you want to know about character building you are not going to turn to New York Times columnist David Brooks.

I do not want to say that Brooks, with his jejune musings, is always wrong, but surely he has missed the point.

Being an ethical individual means following certain rules. When you follow those rules you become a functioning member of a community, someone who is trustworthy and reliable. When you fail to follow those rules, you are a miscreant or a malcontent. 

As it happens, we learn good behavior before we know why we have learned good behavior. We learn table manners before we know why we need to practice them. And, if we want to have good character, we practice good table manners… even when we are eating alone. 

Brooks, fully in touch with his feminine side, believes that it all requires a transformation of the heart, but that just shows that he sees things from an inside/out perspective. He does not know that you do not learn to follow rules by improving your heart, your compassion or your empathy. You can feel your deepest feelings, but if you do not know how to use a knife and fork, according to local custom, you are going to be considered a dolt. And you are going to be excluded from certain events.

Here is a sample of Brooks’s drivel:

Moral formation isn’t just downloading content into a bunch of brains; it involves an inner transformation of the heart. It involves helping students change their motivations so that they want to lead the kind of honorable and purposeful lives that are truly worth wanting. It’s more about inspiration than information.

It is not about changing your motivations. It’s about following rules. These are not the same thing. And it is not about having a change of heart. It’s about developing a good habit, and doing it unthinkingly.

Brooks does better when he suggests that character is developed within a group. He calls these groups institutions, but family and community are not institutions. Simply put, all human societies have table manners, but they do not all have the same table manners.

They are formed within an institution — whether it’s a school, a biker gang, a company or the Marine Corps — that has a distinct ethos, that holds up certain standards (“This is how we do things here”). In this way habits and temperament are slowly engraved upon the people in the group.

But then, Brooks goes off the rails and pretends that having good character means being a good listener, and showing proper empathy for the stories you will be hearing.

Treating people well involves practicing certain skills, which can be taught just as the skills of carpentry and tennis can be taught. First there are the skills of understanding — being good at listening and conversation, and eliciting life stories so that you can accurately see the people around you and make them feel seen.

You are not making people feel seen. You are making them feel like they belong to the group. The Brooks distortion is more like therapy than like working together.

Then there are the skills of consideration, how to treat people well in the complex circumstances of life: how to offer criticism with care; how to break up with someone without crushing the person’s heart; how to ask for and offer forgiveness; how to end a conversation or a dinner party gracefully. Many students today don’t learn these skills at school or anywhere else.

It’s all about having the right manners, following the right customs and norms. And to do so at ritualized social events.

These range from family dinners to celebratory ceremonies. You need not have the right feelings. You need not feel empathy for your fellow participants. But you do need to show up and to practice the proper manners. And to follow the dress code and the grooming code.

Obviously, Brooks’ sense of moral character development is largely off the mark:

People don’t become better versions of themselves as they acquire intellectual information; they get better as they acquire emotional knowledge — the ability to be made indignant by injustice, outraged by cruelty, to know how to gracefully do things with people, not for people. 

Of course, this catalogue of moral sentiments is deceptive. You can feel all the right feelings. You can be appalled at the right injustices. But, if you have no table manners; if you do not show up for dinner; if you do not share food with others; if you speak out of turn and ignore everyone else-- you are simply a dolt and will likely not be invited back.

We should not allow people to believe that thinking the right thoughts, feeling the right feelings and believing the right beliefs is going to gain you membership and standing in the nation.

If we were to follow Brooks, we would imagine that the right state of mind will gain us access to social groups, to family dinners and company picnics. Again, those who recommend that holding certain opinions will grant us access to the right groups are lying to us. Or else, they are simply confused.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

Failure to Govern

We should not, Joel Kotkin suggests, be surprised at the way the authorities in Los Angeles mishandled the recent fires. The portrait of ineptitude extends to all of the nation’s great blue states and cities. It is producing an exodus as people migrate from previously vital cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles… to lead their lives in places like Florida, Texas and Tennessee.

That is, in places where good management is a way of life. It’s a seismic geopolitical shift, one we should not ignore.

Los Angeles authorities’ poor preparation for and lamentable response to the wildfires now devastating the city capture a broader problem – namely, the failure of governance across America’s Democrat-controlled regions. This pattern of incompetence has accelerated the shift of American economic and political power to regions outside the long dominant north-east and West Coast.

Today’s Democratic Party seems radically incapable of governing. In truth, they do not seem to care to govern. Their agenda is more lofty and useless:

The reason for this shift lies in the clear failure of Democrats, writ large in the inferno now consuming large swathes of LA. In states like California, Democratic politicians no longer prioritise such things as public safety and key infrastructure, including roads, ports and, most importantly at the moment, water systems. Indeed, today’s ‘progressives’ generally shy away from things like building dams or maintaining water pressure in the name of protecting the environment. They are far more focussed on climate change and ‘social justice’.

The sign of this failure lies in the effort to blame the fires on climate change, or even on global warming. Kotkin considers this to be so much nonsense:

Of course, California progressives will justify this by blaming the fires on climate change, even though a leading fire expert at the US Geological Survey suggests this claim is unsupported. Fires have been a regular feature of life in southern California for at least 20million years. Moreover, given the recent extremely dry weather conditions, LA should have been prepared for a conflagration. It was not. A councilperson representing the Palisades has noted the ‘chronic underinvestment in our critical infrastructure’.

As has been noted elsewhere, the policies designed to save the climate have contributed to the destruction:

Indeed, the devastating impact of the fires is largely a result of environmental policies that discouraged such safety practices as controlled burns. California governor Gavin Newsom has cut funding for fighting wildfires by over $100million this past year, while demanding subsidies for electric cars. At the same time, California’s roads are among the worst in the US, and a planned high-speed railway continues to gobble up tens of billions of dollars.

The new political order, as Kotkin calls it, is geographical. It turns away from the coasts and enhances the value of states like Texas and Florida, Georgia, even Tennessee and the Carolinas:

Initially, the East Coast’s supremacy was challenged not so much from the South, but from the West Coast. But the Pacific states have been losing their mojo more recently. Over the past four decades, income and job growth in the southern giants, Texas and Florida, were 50 per cent higher than they were in New York or California. In the past decade, the six fastest-growing southern states – Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee – added more to national GDP than the north-east.

Business service companies are relocating to the South and Southwest:

Even the remaining pillars of the blue economy, such as business services, are under assault from Utah, the Carolinas, Texas and Florida. Austin, Salt Lake, Raleigh and Charlotte have boosted their professional sector far faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Chicago. The Dallas metroplex is now home to 24 Fortune 500 companies’ headquarters, trailing only New York and Chicago. Forty years ago, the Dallas metroplex had fewer than five.

Chicago used to be the second largest financial services locale. Now, that honor belongs to Fort Worth, Texas. And tech companies are moving out of Silicon Valley:

Most alarming of all for California has been the shift in the tech industry. According to one recent analysis, Texas and Florida are now America’s high-growth hotspots and are also attracting the most tech workers. Some tech linchpins have already moved their headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas, including HP Enterprises, Tesla and Space X.

As might be expected the great blue states are losing population while the Southern and Southwestern states are gaining. 

Young people are moving to these states. Kotkin remarks that these people are most likely to reproduce, thus providing their new home states with an increasing population.

Child-bearing is far more common in the MAGA strongholds of the South, Texas, the Great Plains and parts of the mountain states. These places will continue to add future workers faster in the future than increasingly childless blue states.

We should add that these other states cost far less than do places like New York. One of the reasons people are leaving blue states involves onerous taxation coupled with inferior services. Parents of school age children leave the blue states to escape inferior education.

And Kotkin makes a point I have made several times already:

Comparing California’s pathetic response to the LA fires with Ron DeSantis’s deft handling of hurricanes in Florida reveals a true gap in effective governance.

The blue states are in thrall to labor unions. They are crippled by excessive spending on government services and on pensions. 

So, America is undergoing a sea change. People are abandoning the large blue states and moving to red states. Political power will follow.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

Wednesday Potpourri

First, Mark Zuckerberg knows how to read the room. His most recent efforts to remove fact checkers from Facebook and Instagram show that he understands that certain leftist cultural politics have failed.

As you saw professional football players doing the Trump dance in their end zones you might have concluded that large segments of the male population had decided to embrace, not to disparage, masculinity. 

Clearly, the most recent presidential election was not merely about a man vs. a woman. It was about the ethos, and answered the question of whether the country was becoming too girlified.

At the least, that was the lesson that Zuckerberg draw, and explained to Joe Rogan, via Bloomberg:

Mark Zuckerberg lamented the rise of “culturally neutered” companies that have sought to distance themselves from “masculine energy,” adding that it’s good if a culture “celebrates the aggression a bit more.”

Second, Christopher Rufo offers some commentary on the Meta move:

Executives at Meta quickly implemented the new policy, issuing pink slips to DEI employees and moving the company’s content-moderation team from California to Texas, in order, in Zuckerberg’s words, to “help alleviate concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.”

The most important signal emanating from this decision is not about a particular shift in policy, however, but a general shift in culture. Zuckerberg has never really been an ideologue. He appears more interested in building his company and staying in the good graces of elite society. But like many successful, self-respecting men, he is also independent-minded and has clearly chafed at the cultural constraints DEI placed on his company. So he seized the moment, correctly sensing that the impending inauguration of Donald Trump reduced the risk and increased the payoff of such a change.

And Newsmax adds that Meta is firing 3600 employees for poor performance.

Third, on the office front, more and more companies are requiring staff to be in the office every day of the week. The latest directive came from Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase. 

Now we learn why. Apparently, young staff members are incapable of having conversations with their colleagues, because they are too used to communicating via text message and email.

The New York Post reports:

The art of office small talk is dying out because younger workers feel more comfortable communicating online, according to research.

A poll, of 2,000 employed adults, found 74 percent struggle to make light conversation with co-workers in the kitchen or elevator.

Nearly half of those (48 percent) admit to using WhatsApp, Teams or email because it’s more convenient – even if they are sitting near the recipient.

Overall, 27 percent say they are more comfortable communicating online than in person.

Fourth, in the therapy world, the latest news tells us that venting is not necessarily a good thing. Giving full-throated expression to all of our emotions is not necessarily therapeutic.

This is from Greater Good Magazine:

For many years, psychologists believed that dark emotions, like anger, needed to be released physically. This led to a movement to “let it all out,” with psychologists literally telling people to hit soft objects, like pillows or punching bags, to release pent-up feelings.

It turns out, however, that this type of emotional venting likely doesn’t soothe anger as much as augment it. That’s because encouraging people to act out their anger makes them relive it in their bodies, strengthening the neural pathways for anger and making it easier to get angry the next time around. Studies on venting anger (without effective feedback), whether online or verbally, have also found it to be generally unhelpful.

People who vent too much seem to be wallowing in their emotion, and to be showing no real concern for their interlocutors.

While supportive friends and family hopefully care enough to listen and sympathize with us, it can be frustrating to sit with someone who vents frequently when that person seems to be wallowing in emotion without learning from their experience. And being around someone stuck in anger, fear, or sadness cycles can be overwhelming for listeners who may end up “catching” the emotions themselves.

“Repeatedly venting over and over and over again, can create friction in social relationships,” says Kross. “There’s often a limit to how much listeners, your friends, can actually hear.”

As Aristotle put it, it is acceptable to express anger, but only as long as you do it in the right way, to the right person, under the right circumstances, in the right place.

I hope that that clarifies the issue.

Fifth, hot off the wires, columnist Jennifer Rubin has quit the Washington Post. One would like to think that the editors finally found their good sense and fired her, but surely it is good to see her go.

In another context, it would be called a cleanse.

Sixth, remember the Tiger Mom, a fan favorite in these pages. Considering the violent reaction provoked by Yale Law Professor Amy Chua’s book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, it is good to see her vindicated.

Next week she and her husband will be attending the presidential inauguration, as guests of the vice president elect, JD Vance. You see, Chua was instrumental in getting Vance to write his best seller, Hillbilly Elegy, when she was his teacher at Yale Law School. 

She was also a mentor to Vivek Ramaswamy. 

Seventh, the latest from Sweden, suffering under the weight of its overly mindless immigration policies:

Sweden now has almost 60 no go zones with gang crime out of control. The government wants to change the law so that they can revoke the citizenship of gang criminals and deport them. 

Eighth, more than a few commentators have come away from the Pete Hegseth hearings with the same reaction.

Here is one from Bonchie Red State:

I'm not sure having a bunch of deranged women scream at Pete Hegseth was a good strategic move. A lot of people are going to see the clips and immediately relate to Hegseth, not the lunatics ranting and waving their arms like inflatable tube men.

Ninth, speaking of guy culture, three of America’s wealthiest men will be attending the Trump inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk will all be present.

Michelle Obama will sit this one out. Happily for her, the nation does not fine people for petulance. 

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

The Shame Game

Psychologist Paul Bloom does not seem to know quite what to make of it, but he is correct to see humiliation as a profoundly important motivation. Someone who loses face, whether by being publicly humiliated, of by failing at a responsibility, will often become consumed by the duty to save face,

It’s so important that I wrote a book about it. Its title was Saving Face: America and the Politics of Shame.

Bloom suggests that those who lose face will go to any lengths to save face. For example, consider the moment when, at a White House correspondents dinner, President Obama ridiculed one Donald Trump. Many people have suggested that this humiliation motivated Trump to run for president. 

Perhaps that is true. Perhaps it is slightly exaggerated. As Bloom puts it, in a Substack column:

The notion that we can explain human actions by single causes is silly….

Still, it’s notable how often humiliation comes up as a motivating force for certain big decisions. I’m a pluralist when it comes to motivation. I think there are all sorts of forces working on our psyches, and I’ll show them is only one of them. But it’s an important one.

We are social animals. We care intensely about how others perceive us. It feels great to be loved and respected by those we are close to and by members of the communities we identify with. It feels terrible to be maligned and disrespected, to feel that everyone we respect is laughing at us.

Drops in status occur all the time, but they’re usually gradual. In the sorts of acts of humiliation we’ve been talking about, it’s a shock—it happens all of a sudden. Now, in my examples, those who were humiliated were powerful men with good social support; they felt the blow, but they didn’t drop too far and were well-positioned to plan their comeuppance. 

If we are following Chinese thought, there are two ways to lose face. In the one, loss of face means loss of membership in a community-- being shunned, ostracized or rejected. In the other, loss of face means loss of status in a community, being treated as lesser than one is.

The most important point is that we are social animals. We are less concerned with developing our individuality than with belonging to a group and with having status within the group. 

One understands that you save face by recovering your status within a group or by reaffirming your membership within it. The tricky part is that face, your public reputation, involves how other people see you. As long as you do not have complete control over other people’s minds, you will have difficulty in influencing them.

Regardless of how you feel about yourself, you do not save face until and unless other people see you in a more positive light.

To state the obvious, the reason that cultures have emphasized face is that people identify you by seeing your face. Moreover, you are the only person who can never see your face directly. You can see your image reflected in a mirror or you can judge how you look to others by reading their reactions to you. But you can never look yourself directly in the eye. 

Face saving is not the same as self-actualization, self-creation, or self-narration. Psychology tends to see people as self-absorbed and self-involved monads. It considers group membership to be ancillary to an inner truth. 

Again, it is not sufficient to make a public spectacle of yourself. It is not sufficient to display your all-around wondrousness. These forms of self-assertion or even self-creation tend to affirm your being outside of all groups, impervious to the judgments of others.

In other terms, histrionics do not really count. Telling the world that you are the greatest does not make you the greatest. You only save face when you do something, when you succeed at something, despite it all. And when other people recognize your achievements, and see you as a member of the group. 

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

The Los Angeles Blame Game

As Los Angeles was being consumed by fire, the politicians were out and around explaining that it is not their fault. From Governor Gavin Newsom to Mayor Karen Bass, these political lightweights have refused to accept responsibility. 

Of course, California is the bluest of blue states. It is difficult to find a Republican with any power over local governance. So the political grandees have decided to blame it all on climate change.

Or should we say, global warming.

I will make an exception for one Jen Psaki, who has claimed that it’s all Donald Trump’s fault. Once a flack, always a flack. Pathetic.

The Democratic left has preferred in most cases to blame it on the climate. Then again, how does it happen that climate change is advancing so rapidly when the rulers of California have instituted policy after policy to control it. 

True green believers would have it that climate change is not merely responsible for the Los Angeles inferno; it is also responsible for the hurricanes that appeared in Florida and North Carolina recently.

And yet, we recall Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis taking charge of the recovery situation before the hurricane hit the west coast of his state. How does that compare to the dimwitted mayor of Los Angeles who chooses, at a time when she knows that the fire situation is about to become apocalyptic, to take off on a junket to Ghana?

John Nolte offers a point-by-point ironic refutation of the attempt to blame it all on climate change.

In his words:

 Climate Change failed to clear the brush. 

Climate Change failed to do controlled burns. 

Climate Change failed to build the reservoirs voters demanded in a referendum about a decade ago. 

Climate Change cut the fire department budget. 

Climate Change forgot to ensure the hydrants would pump water. 

Climate Change didn’t create a power grid that could be shut off in emergency areas. 

Climate Change stopped the city from hiring firefighters based on merit.

So, climate activists had their way with California. The result is only too evident.

Chris Martz argues that said environmentalists are not serious people. As though you did not know that.

Climate activists … never criticize China or India for emitting CO₂ without bound. 

They don’t support nuclear power.  

The only mitigation techniques they support is the decarbonization of western economies. 

They neglect urban planning, zoning / building codes, beach nourishment, better forest management and water resource management

Climate activism is a reconstituted Romantic attack on the Industrial Revolution and free enterprise capitalism. The notion that nature is pristine and fundamentally good, or was such before human beings got their hands on it, is a reactionary attack on modern economies. 

Nowhere is this belief held more fervently than in Hollywood, the creature of an alternative reality, dedicated to producing a fictional alternative to reality? One might recall the painting of an apocalyptic fire that animates Nathaniel West’s novel, The Day of the Locust.

Finally, Leighton Woodhouse has suggested that the fire was no one’s fault. Except, that is, for the people who chose to build in a place where they should not have built:

But the fundamental engine for these disasters is the simple, physical reality of California, which prevailed before any of us were born: We built a massive civilization in a place where fire is as much a part of the natural habitat as summer rains are in the east.

Back in the day one Donald Trump advised California Governor Newsom to take charge of fire prevention. He told Newsom that he should clear the underbrush and to assure the availability of sufficient water to fight fires.

Naturally, Newsom ignored the advice. He is so smart that he would never take advice from a Republican, no less a MAGA Republican.

It’s easier to blame the weather.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for fee.

Contributing Sunday

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. 

As has become habitual, I pause on Sunday. It’s that time of the week, a time for reflection and contemplation. It also allows my readers to catch up on posts that they might have missed during the week.

I would like to think that among the topics for deep reflection is this one. Considering the time and effort it takes to write these posts, one believes that they are worthy of compensation.

Thus, in place of a tithe, I make a humble request for donations. 

I have been posting on this blog and Substack for many years now. I could not have done it without the financial support of you, my readers.

If you would like to show appreciation and to encourage me to continue, a good way would be by making a financial contribution. Gratitude is a virtue. 

If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal button on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017.

I’m counting on you. 

If you have already donated, please pass the word along to your friends, family, neighbors, associates and colleagues.

Thank  you in advance.

Saturday Miscellany

First, as for what could possibly go wrong, consider this. The three leaders of the Los Angeles Fire Department are all lesbians named Kristen. Better yet, their background is as paramedics.

Second, Once-Great Britain has surpassed Russia in jailing people for incorrect speech.

There were 98 convictions for internet speech in Russia from 2007-2018.

During the same period, the UK had 1400 convictions for internet speech. —

Keep in mind, this predates the current Labour government’s effort to shut down any and all unnice words about Islam.

Third, keep in mind, Britain’s Parliament has just voted down a proposal to investigate the gang rapes and sex trafficking of British schoolgirls by Pakistani migrants.

But, it is going to investigate Elon Musk for drawing attention to the issue.

As for popular opinion, we read this:

76% of British people want a national inquiry into the rape gangs and 77% want to deport dual nationals who are convicted of grooming children 

In a democratic nation the will of the people would be respected. Not in Once-Great Britain.

Fourth, once upon a time the world’s large banks signed up for a Net Zero admissions goal. Nothing quite like tanking your economy in the name of climate change.

Convened by the UN Environment Programme finance initiative but led by banks, the NZBA commits members to align their lending, investment and capital markets activities with net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or earlier.

Now, the winds have shifted and the world’ largest banks are abandoning the Net Zero folly:

The six biggest banks in the US have all quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group, with the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as president expected to bring political backlash against climate action.

JP Morgan is the latest to withdraw from the UN-sponsored net zero banking alliance (NZBA), following Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. All six have left since the start of December.

“A few years ago, when climate change was at the front of the political agenda, the banks were keen to boast of their commitments to act on climate. Now that the political pendulum has swung in the other direction, suddenly acting on climate does not seem so important for the Wall Street lenders.”

Fifth, now they tell us. A study conducted in Sweden has discovered that when the female member of a marriage makes more than the male member, the result is-- worse mental health for the male member. 

The New York Post reports the shocking findings:

In their study, the team analysed the incomes and mental health of heterosexual couples in Sweden. 

They found that women becoming the breadwinner resulted in a higher risk of mental health issues for both members of the couple - but especially for husbands. 

'The share of couples where the wife outearns the husband is increasing globally,' the researchers said. 

'Crossing the threshold where the wife starts earning more significantly increases the probability of receiving a mental health diagnosis. 

'In the most restrictive specification, the likelihood increases by approximately 8% for the whole sample and by 11% for men.' 

Sixth, meanwhile in Argentina, everyone’s favorite libertarian president, Javier Milei,  is doing rather well. 

Mario Nawfal reports:

ECONOMISTS WHO PREDICTED MILEI'S 'DEVASTATION' NOW AWKWARDLY QUIET AS ARGENTINA REBOUNDS Turns out the "crazy" guy with a chainsaw knew what he was doing. After experts warned Milei would destroy Argentina, his 30% spending cuts and mass bureaucrat firings led to the first budget surplus since 2008. Even more shocking? His 50% approval rating suggests Argentinians prefer smaller government and 2.4% inflation over socialism's 118% interest rates. Who knew? 

Seventh, over at Facebook there’s a veritable cultural revolution going on. It’s not just about silencing the fact checkers-- point that has seriously upset our president-- but the company has put an end to its diversity programs:

Newsmax reports:

Meta Platforms is ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, including those for hiring, training and picking suppliers, it said in a memo to employees posted on an internal company forum Friday.

The move comes in the run-up to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration, as the company attempts to mend relations with the leader who has criticized its political content policies and threatened its CEO with imprisonment.

"The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing," Janelle Gale, Vice President of Human Resources at Meta, said in the memo, which was seen by Reuters.

And that’s not all. Another report suggested that Meta is removing transgender and nonbinary themes from its Messenger chat app. 

In a final insult to Tim Walz, Meta has been removing tampons from the men’s restrooms.

A cultural revolution I call it.

Eighth, Americans are nothing if not neighborly. You don’t even have to live in the neighborhood. The New York Fire Department offered to help the LAFD with the Los Angeles fires. Mayor Karen Bass turned down the offer.

The New York Post reports:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass rebuffed an offer by the FDNY to help try to contain the area’s deadly fires — even though California officials have said they don’t have enough firefighters themselves, The Post has learned.

New York City fire Commissioner Robert Tucker made the helpful overture to the embattled Bass in recent days, as five blazes rage around Los Angeles and its suburbs, killing at least 10 people and destroying thousands of homes and businesses, sources said Friday.

JetBlue even offered to pay for the city smoke-eaters’ flights across the country from the Big Apple to Los Angeles, sources said.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.