Yarvin is too nihilistic and lacks hope and conviction. How do you eat a brontosaurus? One bite at a time!!! Same with what is occurring at NCF right now. University of North Carolina just dropped it's DEI initiatives, more dominoes will follow. The vocal minority has never been forcefully challenged and simply by doing so has shown their sheer terror and will light the path for others to fight.
What you've done at NCF is a beacon of hope and serves as a rallying cry to the others out there to fight back. There is no resignation to the "inevitable" failure of fighting the woke Borg, as with any bully, stand up and you will quickly find out how weak they truly are.
For too long we silent citizens have felt defeated, as if waiting for the leadership to rally behind and come to our defense. Please continue fighting the good fight and giving us hope!
“I still believe in the American Republic. I still believe that our democratic power as a people is meaningful. I still believe that our legislature has the capacity to govern our states and our country in the best interests of the American people.”
This is the whole ballgame. We have inherited a beautiful system of government from some of the greatest statesmen in the history of mankind—and we have to use it and make it meaningful again.
Even if you do think only a Caesar figure can wipe the slate clean to normalcy, you can bet in a country where all the institutional power is on the left, the new Caesar will be on the left too. Men of Greatness don't just pop out of thin air.
We only need to look back a few decades to see universities that were the way they should be, and still can be.
The public hugely opposes racialism. Here in California, which formally banned affirmative action in university admission in the 90s, restoring it was a ballot proposition in the 2020 presidential election. Biden beat Trump 2 to 1, but affirmative action failed, with 55% voting no. This means that 1/3 of Biden voters voted against affirmative action (assuming all Trump voters did).
Republicans need to make a campaign issue out of getting rid of DEI bureaucracies in public institutions, as well as make an issue out of gender self-ID (which all Democrats support).
I totally agree with your post, especially the last sentence! DEI and affirmative action are closely intertwined, and if the SCOTUS strikes down the latter, the former will be substantially weakened. I agree that it is imperative to get both of these problems out of our public institutions. More than that, however, I want to get them out of the private sector in which I work. As an independent contractor I have fewer protections from civil rights abuses than do employees of the companies I work with. It is imperative that legislation like Florida's Stop Woke Act be enacted to protect the civil rights of both employees and independent contractors!
I have lived in California the last twenty five years. During that time, on two occasions, there were ballot initiatives to require that if a minor seeks an abortion the parents must be informed unless a judge rules that they shouldn't be. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? But the voters of this state voted it down both times. So here's what you see and I'm speaking from first-hand knowledge of someone close to me who used to be a high school counselor. A girl is pregnant, tells the school that she is leaving school to get an abortion. By law, school has no choice but to let her go. She leaves the school, gets into a car driven it turns out by the mother of her twenty-something year old boyfriend, and is taken to get an abortion. Back home, the girl starts bleeding and crying and the parents can't figure out what is wrong. They ask the school if they know anything that might have happened but by law they aren't allowed to tell the parents anything. Now, suppose instead of an abortion the girl had a headache and asked the school nurse for an ibuprofen. No way, not without the parent's permission! When you live in a state like California, reasonableness of your fellow citizens is not an assumption to be made lightly.
Excellent! It’s time to put the most left-wing universities on notice. Their evil indoctrination of students is over. It’s time for the universities to become the facilitators of all ideas----including conservative ideas.
In the future Governor D will probably be seen as a revolutionary leader who broke the strangle hold on the Education system. The general public just went along thinking that there was nothing to be done about the crazyness passing for a rational system. It was obvious to anyone who looked closely that a major scam was underway. People acting like Communist commissars and gatekeepers to the system. Yet when confronted they seem to fade away like snow on the water. I wish you great success in your endeavors regarding the higher education system in Florida and hope it spreads to other States. These little men and woman behind the curtain are of little substance and all bluster and their media allies will soon be ignored by rational thinking people. After disassembling these horrid bureaucracies it would be good if a guide to slaying the dragon could be put together to allow others to follow suit. This had to stop somewhere and it seems Florida is the place.
"Yet when confronted they seem to fade away like snow on the water". I wish. Unfortunately, many of deeply entrenched left are very combative and not likely to slink away quietly. If they do, beware that they are likely to reorganize and reinstitute their "march thru the institutions".
The Cathedral is composed of mediocraties. The only thing that makes them formidable is their single-minded lust for power. Throw lots of different things at them and see what makes them crack. When you find a crack jump in and widen it. Keep doing what you do Mr. Rufo.
Change starts with a very small minority of elites or leaders blazing the way for change. The majority will follow. The unorganized masses follow; they don’t lead. Courageous leaders like Rufo and DiSantis will lead the way for others to follow. Don’t be afraid to use power: the left never is and that’s why they have captured the cultural institutions. It’s time
Your piece is an inspiring call to arms, Mr. Rufo, and I am committed to action!
As for Mr. Yarvin, his article mostly made me want to offer him moral support. I thought about subscribing to his Substack, just so I could leave him some encouraging words, but I found his writing quite boring. As you said, his conceptualizations are very abstract. You also describe him as arguing for us to take a "prey animal position," and I certainly agree that posture doesn't work well for humans, who are apex predators.
Yarvin's metaphor about the acorns is obviously reminiscent about the old fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant. Both the fable and Yarvin's article present us with a forced choice between the two styles of providing for a livable future. But why do we have to choose? Some people can work on change through incremental steps over a long period of time while others try to make big changes now. Both strategies work, as evidenced by the continuing survival of both grasshoppers and ants.
What I have learned from the woke cult is that the most powerful force for change is the teaching of values in families and schools over generations. The successful transformation of our culture towards the left began with a very small group of youthful radicals, who grew up and joined the Democratic Party (which they said in the Sixties they would never do), got married (which many of them also said they wouldn't do), had kids, and socialized them to embrace the original radical leftist agenda. The next generation did the same, and here we are.
Slow change over generations and fast change through violent revolutions have thus both been achieved by small groups of committed activists. A much larger percentage of the population adapts to what the activists get enacted, probably because most people don't care to be bothered with political transformations. Many Americans probably won't notice when we recapture our institutions, anymore than they noticed when the institutions were originally captured. I bet, however, that most will breathe a big sigh of relief when the DEI racket implodes!
"What I have learned from the woke cult is that the most powerful force for change is the teaching of values in families and schools over generation." Exactly, "the slow march thru institutions" as Chris would say. The question is does the current conservative right have the same passion, drive, and commitment that the leftists of the 60s had?
Yes. I believe most of us do. That is why I keep telling my kids to have 10 kids and to homeschool. Go back to the traditional way of life. If most of us do this and the left mostly stops reproducing, then we will win the long game. At least that’s my plan for now.
Well said! Those who value free speech, equality, and merit based institutions must resist this racist, socialist ideology. So wonderful to read this article. I so enjoyed discovering Christopher Rufo a few years ago.
It is a simple truth - evil happens when good people do nothing.
Well, you may both be right and both be wrong, Chris. You may be right in that the wave of woke, so to speak, may be one of those political waves of near hysteria which seems part of our American heritage going back to the Salem witch trials...like McCarthyism was. In the early to mid 1950s nobody could have looked at the political landscape, the cancel culture of McCarthyism and thought, oh, we can end this. No one would have foreseen the 60s and 70s countercultural movements. And, in fact, a good deal of the change which did come about was prompted from Supreme Court decisions of the Warren Court, and individual action in making change happen in what seemed hopeless situations like Selma, Alabama. In other words, what seemed a blanketing right wing anti-communist environment gave way in time. Who is to say that the same swinging of the political pendulum cannot happen in our time? But Yarvin may be right in another sense. Aside from the politics of the moment, there has been a steady and almost constant growth, regardless of which party is in office or which politics rules, of the imperial administration and the national security state. That growth may be historic, not political, in the sense that it results from a social dynamic which itself is fueled by causes which politics cannot undo. Regardless of whether an American "caesar" is on the way, the imperial administration is already here and is here to stay. The industry which supports it is massive, and is constantly hungry for more military adventures abroad. So if you end the war in Ukraine, you don't end that industry or its hunger or its hold on a political system where the elected representatives are dependent on money which the defense industry supplies in great amounts. That industry is also constantly hungry for more influence over the civil and domestic society. It began with the militarization of local police forces by generous Pentagond donations of material to local police forces. It continues with the plans to build a new FBI headquarters TWICE the size of the Pentagon. And the marginalization of any control over this sector by elected officials has just about been accomplished now through the security clearance and classification system. Personnel is policy, and no one can get a job in the White House or many other agencies without a security clearance issues by the intelligence community. Information is power, and a massive extensive classification system is now in place under which nationwide witch hunts deny our highest elected officials, presidents and former presidents, their LEGAL authority to handle and declassify any documents they choose, while the media and the general public look on breathlessly and completely support the right of the intelligence community to control the president's access to information rather than vice versa. I am told that only about 15% of the federal budget is discretionary. The rest is national security and/or entitlements. So, tell me, how does Congress having control of that 15% give it the power to make a dent in this imperial administration, not virtual but literal armies and industries devoted to achieving the ends of the imperial administration without regard to such niceties as how the people vote or who they vote for...? You don't need a caesar to have an imperial administration more powerful and pervasive than one. And who can deny that the American administration now is far more powerful than Caesar's empire ever was, at home and abroad?
They're already organizing fast, lying to you and legislators to buy time, and updating tactics. FOIA requests are not going to turn up as much in the future without insiders to provide context. Lots more will be verbal. Not going to get insiders w/o good protection because career is over if it's a faculty or staff member who gets doxxed. Also have to shut down the anti-tenure nutjobs if you want faculty cooperation. If your efforts get framed as anti-tenure, the only hope is the political top-down approach. And that approach is being used at exactly one university so far, which tells you the governors are hesitant about this approach and uncertain of its success.
One potential next step is building an insider network at the universities to tell the stories that FOIA do not. Students may be the best option there especially because enhancing student protections for 'student journalists exposing university corruption' is an easier frame to sell to policy makers than helping faculty. Also key for changing the climate at the university, which top down approaches often fail to do.
Thanks for the comment. We are building the relationships to make changes and a surprising number of faculty are supportive of our efforts. More to come.
If completely anonymous, I would estimate 50-75% of faculty want the DEI nonsense to go away. The classical liberal faculty hate what has happened, but lack the words and frames to push back against it. It's equal parts being *scared* of being called sexist, racist, homophobic, etc, not wanting to spend the time/energy fighting it, and wanting to be a team player. They feel helpless. Giving them words and frames helps, but most want to stay out of the fight. My guess is maybe 10% will help you, and that will be more because they hate their chair/dean/diversity hire/whoever. Chatting in person over beer or more informally will increase those numbers if you find the talkers in the department. And grad students are great at that.
I like the frame 'DEI bureaucracy' because faculty hate bureaucracy. If it can be framed as 'pro-tenure'-- prohibit a lack of DEI efforts from counting against someone's tenure/promotion, that will also help.
Another consideration might be to couple abolishing the DEI bureaucracy with spending money that is freed up by that on popular measures. Popular measures = raising graduate student salaries/stipends, raising faculty/staff salaries, or bridge/seed research grants to get preliminary data for federal grant applications. Get a financial incentive to departments for ditching DEI, and the cracks will appear.
Did you get every member of the Board of Regents at University of Texas, A&M and Texas Tech on record pro- or anti- DEI efforts? Agitating there seems like a win-win for you. If they are anti-DEI efforts, you can use that to push harder on the mission statements, culture, policies, etc at those universities. If they are pro-, you can push on Abbott to replace them. If they try playing both sides, accuse them of being pro-DEI.
A&M had the most promising statement of the three-- the other two said 'screw you', but they're all going to launder DEI through the research/teaching statements and the university mission to "serve a diverse student body".
Keep hitting them during the legislative session while they're vulnerable.
Thank you for your efforts and for this video. You probably already know them, but your courage and the position you are taking reminds me of Will Swaim (California Policy Center) and David Bahnsen (The Bahnsen Group) who together run the RADIO FREE CALIFORNIA podcast - they have been at the thankless job of trying to reform California for decades and they aren't giving up either! They also speak about personal action and comitment to first principles - winning the hearts and minds of the people rather than simply changing the marketing message. You are lighting the way with NCF - and inspiring me to get more involved in my local community however I can. Thank you for your excellent work!
Yarvin is too nihilistic and lacks hope and conviction. How do you eat a brontosaurus? One bite at a time!!! Same with what is occurring at NCF right now. University of North Carolina just dropped it's DEI initiatives, more dominoes will follow. The vocal minority has never been forcefully challenged and simply by doing so has shown their sheer terror and will light the path for others to fight.
What you've done at NCF is a beacon of hope and serves as a rallying cry to the others out there to fight back. There is no resignation to the "inevitable" failure of fighting the woke Borg, as with any bully, stand up and you will quickly find out how weak they truly are.
"How do you eat a brontosaurus? One bite at a time!"
Absolutely right, great comment!
Another way of putting it: If you stick your head in the sand your butt is a target!
Chris beautifully written and right on the mark.
For too long we silent citizens have felt defeated, as if waiting for the leadership to rally behind and come to our defense. Please continue fighting the good fight and giving us hope!
“I still believe in the American Republic. I still believe that our democratic power as a people is meaningful. I still believe that our legislature has the capacity to govern our states and our country in the best interests of the American people.”
The rallying cry of the new-right.
This is the whole ballgame. We have inherited a beautiful system of government from some of the greatest statesmen in the history of mankind—and we have to use it and make it meaningful again.
Even if you do think only a Caesar figure can wipe the slate clean to normalcy, you can bet in a country where all the institutional power is on the left, the new Caesar will be on the left too. Men of Greatness don't just pop out of thin air.
Well, then Women of Greatness will!
We only need to look back a few decades to see universities that were the way they should be, and still can be.
The public hugely opposes racialism. Here in California, which formally banned affirmative action in university admission in the 90s, restoring it was a ballot proposition in the 2020 presidential election. Biden beat Trump 2 to 1, but affirmative action failed, with 55% voting no. This means that 1/3 of Biden voters voted against affirmative action (assuming all Trump voters did).
Republicans need to make a campaign issue out of getting rid of DEI bureaucracies in public institutions, as well as make an issue out of gender self-ID (which all Democrats support).
I totally agree with your post, especially the last sentence! DEI and affirmative action are closely intertwined, and if the SCOTUS strikes down the latter, the former will be substantially weakened. I agree that it is imperative to get both of these problems out of our public institutions. More than that, however, I want to get them out of the private sector in which I work. As an independent contractor I have fewer protections from civil rights abuses than do employees of the companies I work with. It is imperative that legislation like Florida's Stop Woke Act be enacted to protect the civil rights of both employees and independent contractors!
I have lived in California the last twenty five years. During that time, on two occasions, there were ballot initiatives to require that if a minor seeks an abortion the parents must be informed unless a judge rules that they shouldn't be. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? But the voters of this state voted it down both times. So here's what you see and I'm speaking from first-hand knowledge of someone close to me who used to be a high school counselor. A girl is pregnant, tells the school that she is leaving school to get an abortion. By law, school has no choice but to let her go. She leaves the school, gets into a car driven it turns out by the mother of her twenty-something year old boyfriend, and is taken to get an abortion. Back home, the girl starts bleeding and crying and the parents can't figure out what is wrong. They ask the school if they know anything that might have happened but by law they aren't allowed to tell the parents anything. Now, suppose instead of an abortion the girl had a headache and asked the school nurse for an ibuprofen. No way, not without the parent's permission! When you live in a state like California, reasonableness of your fellow citizens is not an assumption to be made lightly.
Thank you for your courage and commitment to being a part of the change.
Excellent! It’s time to put the most left-wing universities on notice. Their evil indoctrination of students is over. It’s time for the universities to become the facilitators of all ideas----including conservative ideas.
In the future Governor D will probably be seen as a revolutionary leader who broke the strangle hold on the Education system. The general public just went along thinking that there was nothing to be done about the crazyness passing for a rational system. It was obvious to anyone who looked closely that a major scam was underway. People acting like Communist commissars and gatekeepers to the system. Yet when confronted they seem to fade away like snow on the water. I wish you great success in your endeavors regarding the higher education system in Florida and hope it spreads to other States. These little men and woman behind the curtain are of little substance and all bluster and their media allies will soon be ignored by rational thinking people. After disassembling these horrid bureaucracies it would be good if a guide to slaying the dragon could be put together to allow others to follow suit. This had to stop somewhere and it seems Florida is the place.
"Yet when confronted they seem to fade away like snow on the water". I wish. Unfortunately, many of deeply entrenched left are very combative and not likely to slink away quietly. If they do, beware that they are likely to reorganize and reinstitute their "march thru the institutions".
The Cathedral is composed of mediocraties. The only thing that makes them formidable is their single-minded lust for power. Throw lots of different things at them and see what makes them crack. When you find a crack jump in and widen it. Keep doing what you do Mr. Rufo.
Change starts with a very small minority of elites or leaders blazing the way for change. The majority will follow. The unorganized masses follow; they don’t lead. Courageous leaders like Rufo and DiSantis will lead the way for others to follow. Don’t be afraid to use power: the left never is and that’s why they have captured the cultural institutions. It’s time
the Right uses power to take them back.
Your piece is an inspiring call to arms, Mr. Rufo, and I am committed to action!
As for Mr. Yarvin, his article mostly made me want to offer him moral support. I thought about subscribing to his Substack, just so I could leave him some encouraging words, but I found his writing quite boring. As you said, his conceptualizations are very abstract. You also describe him as arguing for us to take a "prey animal position," and I certainly agree that posture doesn't work well for humans, who are apex predators.
Yarvin's metaphor about the acorns is obviously reminiscent about the old fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant. Both the fable and Yarvin's article present us with a forced choice between the two styles of providing for a livable future. But why do we have to choose? Some people can work on change through incremental steps over a long period of time while others try to make big changes now. Both strategies work, as evidenced by the continuing survival of both grasshoppers and ants.
What I have learned from the woke cult is that the most powerful force for change is the teaching of values in families and schools over generations. The successful transformation of our culture towards the left began with a very small group of youthful radicals, who grew up and joined the Democratic Party (which they said in the Sixties they would never do), got married (which many of them also said they wouldn't do), had kids, and socialized them to embrace the original radical leftist agenda. The next generation did the same, and here we are.
Slow change over generations and fast change through violent revolutions have thus both been achieved by small groups of committed activists. A much larger percentage of the population adapts to what the activists get enacted, probably because most people don't care to be bothered with political transformations. Many Americans probably won't notice when we recapture our institutions, anymore than they noticed when the institutions were originally captured. I bet, however, that most will breathe a big sigh of relief when the DEI racket implodes!
"What I have learned from the woke cult is that the most powerful force for change is the teaching of values in families and schools over generation." Exactly, "the slow march thru institutions" as Chris would say. The question is does the current conservative right have the same passion, drive, and commitment that the leftists of the 60s had?
Yes. I believe most of us do. That is why I keep telling my kids to have 10 kids and to homeschool. Go back to the traditional way of life. If most of us do this and the left mostly stops reproducing, then we will win the long game. At least that’s my plan for now.
"The Cathedral" has something in common with "The Patriarchy."
Count this disillusioned liberal as a supporter of your project.
Well said! Those who value free speech, equality, and merit based institutions must resist this racist, socialist ideology. So wonderful to read this article. I so enjoyed discovering Christopher Rufo a few years ago.
It is a simple truth - evil happens when good people do nothing.
Well, you may both be right and both be wrong, Chris. You may be right in that the wave of woke, so to speak, may be one of those political waves of near hysteria which seems part of our American heritage going back to the Salem witch trials...like McCarthyism was. In the early to mid 1950s nobody could have looked at the political landscape, the cancel culture of McCarthyism and thought, oh, we can end this. No one would have foreseen the 60s and 70s countercultural movements. And, in fact, a good deal of the change which did come about was prompted from Supreme Court decisions of the Warren Court, and individual action in making change happen in what seemed hopeless situations like Selma, Alabama. In other words, what seemed a blanketing right wing anti-communist environment gave way in time. Who is to say that the same swinging of the political pendulum cannot happen in our time? But Yarvin may be right in another sense. Aside from the politics of the moment, there has been a steady and almost constant growth, regardless of which party is in office or which politics rules, of the imperial administration and the national security state. That growth may be historic, not political, in the sense that it results from a social dynamic which itself is fueled by causes which politics cannot undo. Regardless of whether an American "caesar" is on the way, the imperial administration is already here and is here to stay. The industry which supports it is massive, and is constantly hungry for more military adventures abroad. So if you end the war in Ukraine, you don't end that industry or its hunger or its hold on a political system where the elected representatives are dependent on money which the defense industry supplies in great amounts. That industry is also constantly hungry for more influence over the civil and domestic society. It began with the militarization of local police forces by generous Pentagond donations of material to local police forces. It continues with the plans to build a new FBI headquarters TWICE the size of the Pentagon. And the marginalization of any control over this sector by elected officials has just about been accomplished now through the security clearance and classification system. Personnel is policy, and no one can get a job in the White House or many other agencies without a security clearance issues by the intelligence community. Information is power, and a massive extensive classification system is now in place under which nationwide witch hunts deny our highest elected officials, presidents and former presidents, their LEGAL authority to handle and declassify any documents they choose, while the media and the general public look on breathlessly and completely support the right of the intelligence community to control the president's access to information rather than vice versa. I am told that only about 15% of the federal budget is discretionary. The rest is national security and/or entitlements. So, tell me, how does Congress having control of that 15% give it the power to make a dent in this imperial administration, not virtual but literal armies and industries devoted to achieving the ends of the imperial administration without regard to such niceties as how the people vote or who they vote for...? You don't need a caesar to have an imperial administration more powerful and pervasive than one. And who can deny that the American administration now is far more powerful than Caesar's empire ever was, at home and abroad?
You caught them by surprise.
They're already organizing fast, lying to you and legislators to buy time, and updating tactics. FOIA requests are not going to turn up as much in the future without insiders to provide context. Lots more will be verbal. Not going to get insiders w/o good protection because career is over if it's a faculty or staff member who gets doxxed. Also have to shut down the anti-tenure nutjobs if you want faculty cooperation. If your efforts get framed as anti-tenure, the only hope is the political top-down approach. And that approach is being used at exactly one university so far, which tells you the governors are hesitant about this approach and uncertain of its success.
One potential next step is building an insider network at the universities to tell the stories that FOIA do not. Students may be the best option there especially because enhancing student protections for 'student journalists exposing university corruption' is an easier frame to sell to policy makers than helping faculty. Also key for changing the climate at the university, which top down approaches often fail to do.
Thanks for the comment. We are building the relationships to make changes and a surprising number of faculty are supportive of our efforts. More to come.
If completely anonymous, I would estimate 50-75% of faculty want the DEI nonsense to go away. The classical liberal faculty hate what has happened, but lack the words and frames to push back against it. It's equal parts being *scared* of being called sexist, racist, homophobic, etc, not wanting to spend the time/energy fighting it, and wanting to be a team player. They feel helpless. Giving them words and frames helps, but most want to stay out of the fight. My guess is maybe 10% will help you, and that will be more because they hate their chair/dean/diversity hire/whoever. Chatting in person over beer or more informally will increase those numbers if you find the talkers in the department. And grad students are great at that.
I like the frame 'DEI bureaucracy' because faculty hate bureaucracy. If it can be framed as 'pro-tenure'-- prohibit a lack of DEI efforts from counting against someone's tenure/promotion, that will also help.
Another consideration might be to couple abolishing the DEI bureaucracy with spending money that is freed up by that on popular measures. Popular measures = raising graduate student salaries/stipends, raising faculty/staff salaries, or bridge/seed research grants to get preliminary data for federal grant applications. Get a financial incentive to departments for ditching DEI, and the cracks will appear.
Did you get every member of the Board of Regents at University of Texas, A&M and Texas Tech on record pro- or anti- DEI efforts? Agitating there seems like a win-win for you. If they are anti-DEI efforts, you can use that to push harder on the mission statements, culture, policies, etc at those universities. If they are pro-, you can push on Abbott to replace them. If they try playing both sides, accuse them of being pro-DEI.
A&M had the most promising statement of the three-- the other two said 'screw you', but they're all going to launder DEI through the research/teaching statements and the university mission to "serve a diverse student body".
Keep hitting them during the legislative session while they're vulnerable.
Thank you for your efforts and for this video. You probably already know them, but your courage and the position you are taking reminds me of Will Swaim (California Policy Center) and David Bahnsen (The Bahnsen Group) who together run the RADIO FREE CALIFORNIA podcast - they have been at the thankless job of trying to reform California for decades and they aren't giving up either! They also speak about personal action and comitment to first principles - winning the hearts and minds of the people rather than simply changing the marketing message. You are lighting the way with NCF - and inspiring me to get more involved in my local community however I can. Thank you for your excellent work!
Thank you for being on the frontlines of the fight, and fighting quite well!