Transcript of Deliver Us from MAGA

This episode of I've Had It is brought to you by Booking. Com. Since 2010, they've helped over 1. 8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. That's billion with a B. Head over to Booking. Com and start your listing today. Get seen, get booked on Booking. Com. So are we supposed to start the podcast? Patriots, gay triets, they triets, black triets, and brown triets. Welcome to I've Had It, America's Top DEI podcast. We are a beaver down. Pumps, my glorious co-host is off in Maine, and Josh, my husband, is subbing for her. Hello, hello, hello. We have a very special guest, Emma Vigiland, from the Majority Report. You guys, I want to start a rumor about Pumps. I've always told pups should be a good lesbian. She's off to Maine for a Girls Weekend. Oh, fun. The rumor I'm starting is that she's in Maine doing lesbian things.

I'm happy to further that rumor. I've heard similar rumblings. Yeah.

Have you heard that, Josh?

I've heard it for a couple of days now. For a couple of days. I think there's some truth to it.

Many people are saying, Isn't that what Trump would say?

Everybody's talking about it.

She's going to be in her J. Cruise sweater on the beach holding hands with another woman.

Maine is the place to do it. I feel like there's a lot of flannels There are a lot of Subus. I'm not trying to be too stereotypical here, but it's also absolutely beautiful up there. Hopefully, Graham Platner is the next senator from Maine.

No, I hope so, too.

From Maine. Maine is one of the more beautiful states in the country. It should get talked about a little bit more. You got Portland. It's a great coastline. I'm an East Coast person, so I'm a big fan.

Yeah, we've got to get rid of Susan Collins.

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's no reason that she should still be in office. The problem is that we keep putting up these corporate Democrats. They keep losing and not connecting in Maine because it's a very specific area, as you know, coming from a red state. It's a different dynamic, obviously. It's more rural and it's Northeastern, but you have to be of the community to be the Republican like her.

All right, let's everybody go around the table and share their grievances for today. I'll start. Sure. Okay. I've had it with people abusing your cell phone number. Let me give you an example. My real job, I'm an interior designer, not a podcaster. I've been doing that for over 25 years, and now we've all shifted from landlines to cell phones. So my clients have my phone number. And oftentimes, I wake up and I get up really early at 5: 00, and I'm in the zone. I'm doing Wordle, I'm doing Connections, I'm doing the crossword puzzle. I'm very busy doing things, right? Yes. Drinking Espresso. And then I get these 911 panic text at 6: 01 AM from clients, and I love my interior design clients, I do love you, about their paint colors, the fabric choices, molding choices, cabinetry styles at 6: 01. And I'm thinking to myself, I did not go to law school. I did not go to medical school. I'm an interior designer. We should not have crises at 6: 00 AM. And yet, because we've shifted from the landline to the cell phone, you get abused because everybody's got away right to your number.

And I just think there should be a rule. If it's before business hours or after business hours, and it's business-related, you don't text, you email.

Yes. You're preaching to the choir. I think it's because everybody's dopamine receptors are so messed up from the cell phones that if they don't get an immediate alleviation of their anxiety, like they're having anxiety about your design or their renovation or whatever, I'm not not sure what the situation is, they have to get it immediately, and they expect an immediate response. And then it makes everybody more anxious. Part of what we're experiencing right now is this mass psychosis a little bit, anxiety, people constantly on edge. And I feel like that's a part of it, where it's just constant response or whatever you need right there in front of you.

Everything is so much more accessible. Everybody is accessible. You think that when you get off Facebook, that you're really going to eliminate yourself from people? It doesn't happen like that. Then your cell phone, spam, all this stuff just hits you day in, day out. It makes you want to put your cell phone down, throw it away until you start yearning again for what's on my cell phone. It's a cycle.

Look, and I feel like I'm my generation. I'm 31. I'm probably one of the last people that remembers a period before having a cell phone. I think I got my first... My first smartphone wasn't until at least midway through high school. We I had flip phones, but it wasn't like I could go on social media all the time. The Internet was just starting to become a thing. I remember having a secret Facebook page when I was in middle school, so my mom wouldn't get mad at me. My mom loves your show. Shout out to my mom, Lynn, if she's watching or listening. But yeah, no, I feel like it's just become way too quotidian, that it's a part of everybody's life like this. It's a little ridiculous.

But you're right. When Facebook first started, it was the red dot. When you saw the red dot, somebody had liked something that you had posted, or it was this instant.

What about the poke? Oh my gosh. That was creepy. Do you remember the poke? Yes. Then you get some like... I remember when it first started, I'm like, Why is my friend's husband poking me on Facebook? It was so sexual, I thought the poke.

I think it was. I think that it was meant to be a flirtatious thing, but poking is not flirtatious. Poking is annoying. It's creepy, too. Yes.

All right, Josh, what have you had it with?

Well, I've had it with, and I just experienced It's just on the way here. I've had it with to-go drinks with insecure lids on top of it. It's the demise of my existence. It doesn't matter if it's coffee in the morning, you've got a suit on, and I'm trying to carry this in a file, and so you're trying to put the drink right here, and then you realize it just ends up here. But in my situation today, we were working out at the gym. I got a protein smoothie. I'm on the phone with my law partner. I'm doing all these things. I get in the Uber with Jennifer, and the smoothie just literally collapses in my lap, and the lid comes off of it. And it's just these flimsy little lids that just fit on top that never work, never. And so I've got this thing, and I have to go back in the gym and I say, Hey, can I have a towel? And I'm not going to give you this towel back. It's got to go with me.

I'm going to owe you a towel. It might be ruined anyway.

And then I'm cleaning this down, and the Uber guy is just looking at me like, Who the fuck is this guy?

Do you remember the Curb your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David is so mad because they're not securing the takeout orders? And he goes back in, and he's talking about securing the containers and how insecure they are. And it's like a whole episode. That's a very real thing. No, it is. To secure the carry out takeaway items. They need to be secured. We can't be wearing this shit.

I know. It's crazy. We need more cup holders in every area, by the way, to add on to your point. It's an addendum. We need cup holders to help us out in this situation. Is this a one A? Yes, exactly.

I'm adding to it. Okay, Emma, what have you had it with?

Okay, I have had it with people who are habitual bad reviewers of restaurants or people who go out of their way to give one star to an Uber driver or to a Lyft driver or something like that, repeatedly. Look, people are struggling enough right now. You don't need to go out of your way. If it's a horrible circumstance in an Uber or something like that, and you were in an unsafe situation, or Or if the restaurant was really, really horrible, a one-off, a two off, I'm not going to be all upset about that. But if you're the person that's going into restaurants and like, I'm going to give a three star here, or there's no need to bring that negativity for these businesses. They're already struggling so much because corporations are buying up everything and consolidating everything. I don't understand the impulse of people to be such hall monitors when you're just paying for a lunch. Relax. I have Unless it's an extenuating circumstance, I'm not one-star in Uber drivers. I either five-star or I don't rate at all. That's my go-to. Unless, I'm saying, if it's an unsafe situation, go for it.

If the Uber driver is masturbating, you'll go in with a one-star. Of course.

But people don't need to be that nitpicky in their day-to-day life. I agree. People that are working gig jobs, they have it as hard as it is.

I completely agree with you. There's this whole thing that's happening that we need to talk about because it's where pop culture meets with politics. Right now, the consumer feels so aggrieved because the corporations are not paying their employees a livable wage, and so we're having to tip on everything. Here's an example.

I saw your rants about this. It was great. Yeah.

I went just yesterday to get a bottle of water at the gym, and I opened up the refrigerator. I got the bottle of water. I walked to the thing. I did the checkout, and then I scanned my item, and she scanned turned it around, and then there was a tip option, and I'm thinking, I'm a tipper. I waited tables in college. I understand the grind. I understand the hustle. This doesn't warrant the tip. This is not a tippable purchase. It just simply is not. So I think all of that has been an incubator for this consumer rage, combined with Facebook culture and keyboard warriors. And then you introduce Cank's, Cankles McTaco Tits, on top of it. We got Kanks out there who just makes everybody mad on both sides. If you're for Kanks, he gets you mad at the people he's mad at. And if you're against Kanks, you're wound up like a cheap clock all day long. That's how I feel. I'm like, God damn it, this fucking guy. I feel like we're all in an incubator right now with all this shit.

Yeah, we're all on edge. I think it's in part because the economy is so precarious, and there's an affordability crisis, not just here in New York City, it's across across the country. And corporations are putting the onus on regular people to supplement them, not providing living wages for their workers. And that's how they pit us against one another. The way Kanks is pitting Americans who maybe have We're born here against folks who became citizens or who are undocumented, it's very beneficial for very wealthy people to divide folks who are either working class or just in their community, because the more divided that we are, the easier we are to oppose.

A couple... Go ahead. I want to circle back to your had it and say that who... Because sometimes you see paragraphs that are written on these reviews. I'm just thinking to myself, because I recently went to a neurologist, and I read the reviews.

He's a hypochondriat.

A complete hypochondriat. There's nothing wrong with me. Totally get it. But I took my MRI, my disk, and nothing wrong with me. Did not need the MRI. Took it there. Anyway, I read the reviews of the doctor, and these people had written three, four paragraphs bitching about the service, or they weren't nice to this person.

I'm just thinking- These are your hypochondriac peers.

I know. I'm thinking, who the fuck has time, though? In my day, if I thought, okay, I went to get a cheeseburger and this guy was a dick to me at the checkout line, who would think I'm going to go write a fucking paragraph about that, about what an asshole he was. I've got other shit I've got to do. I've got to try to get people out of prison, other stuff.

You've got MRIs to take.

Mris? I've got to read reviews for my- Self-ordered MRIs. I've got to read reviews for my new neurologist. I've got all this stuff to do. But I literally would not sit down and type just a hate-filled message about someone being an asshole.

It's about what do you give your energy to? I try to imagine that most people, if you've had a bad experience, the front desk of a doctor's office, that they just had a really bad day. They are often dealing with crazy people or they're overworked or whatever. That's usually what I try to make an assumption about, although perhaps that's a bit naive, I don't know. But not naive enough to to make me take back my habit. People should still not be going over the top with this crap.

To the point about corporate exploitation, there are two things that really piss me off. There's a lot, but two that are relatable to everyone. Number one is the fact that Walmart, the heirs are so wealthy that they all still make the Forbes 400 list after the wealth is divided. Then the people that work at Walmart because they pay their employees such a shitty wage, they have to go get supplemental income from the government or food stamps, Snap, et cetera. We are subsidizing the Walton family, and these people are rich as shit. They have an airplane hangar full of PJs. They haven't flown commercial in ages. Then the very people that work at Walmart go and vote against the people that can help them and for the billionaires that are fleecing them. That pisses me off. But here's something that's really pissing me off, and it's Jeff Bezos. That motherfucker uses more infrastructure than anybody on the planet: roads, airspace, et cetera. The infrastructure that Amazon uses is off the chart. He should be paying an infrastructure tax because he doesn't have retail stores, and he uses so much more infrastructure than any other business on the globe.

And so all of these roads and highways ways that service all of his cars, we are paying for. And it's insane how many people that make 50, $60,000 a year go fight for Jeff Bezos and the Walton family. It makes me crazy, Emma.

I think my argument on that would be that I think we could get a better education for some of those folks if we had an opposition party to the Republicans that were more focused on class. There's a lack of class consciousness in this country where very different in Europe. I mean, I don't know if you've seen some of these strikes, like in Italy in protest of sending weaponry to Israel. They shut it down, millions of people in the streets because they have a long tradition of labor solidarity and of working class people coming together, and then they also get great vacation time, too. But the United States is so backwards in that area. But I totally agree with you about Especially the Walmart point. We give them tax breaks already because they're so big and they're able to buy off our politicians. And then we are supplementing them being horrible to their workers by, I think Walmart, some of their employees might be the top recipients of things like Medicaid and Snap. They're at the very least in the top three, if my memory serves me correctly. And that is because they have double-dipped. They have bought off the government in terms of tax breaks.

And then they have allowed, because our health care, for some reason, is provided via our employer, they have given bare minimum health care, if that, for upper-level employees. But if you're just somebody that's working there, and you're not guaranteed health care. We don't force employers even to guarantee health care in all of these circumstances either. It's insane.

Go ahead. It's amazing. I always think about, you see these people that have all this money. They've acquired this fortune. Then I sometimes thought about Elon Musk or whoever. They spend all their fucking time on some social media outlet, and they want to prevent other people from doing better. If I had that much money? Wouldn't you want to just spread some goodness in the world? Wouldn't you want to just maybe help somebody instead of being some vile fucking asshole who's tweeting mean shit to people?

But that's because you could never be Elon Musk. The reason he's there is because he was okay with it. You can't make billions of dollars and not be okay with exploiting people. It's just not possible. You can't get to that point. I mean, perhaps if you inherited it, but then it's incumbent upon you to give it away, in my view. I mean, it Bill Gates' ex-wife is trying to do that to a degree. I don't think that you can be a billionaire under capitalism and not be inherently exploitative. And then it gets to a point where, okay, say you meant well. I mean, you made all this money. But when you're a billionaire, you're so sectioned off from the rest of people that it becomes its own psychosis, almost, where you don't have a connection to a shared humanity that creates a snowball effect where you don't see other people as regular people. We talk about aliens coming down from other planets. The aliens, to me, are the billionaires that are just there to extract and then have other people serve them, but not really understand what it's like to be a human being in society.

And they demean. They extract and demean. But you are so right about Europe. The last few times we've been in France, the French are always on strike. One time we're there with the kids, and the trash is piled up everywhere. So you see the Louver and the Place de la Concorde, and there's just heaps of trash everywhere. And they are so fucking mad, the French people, because they didn't give the trash collectors a raise. So the whole country just went on strike, and they're like, We're not picking up the trash. Another time we were there, and it was like the yellow vest. I can't remember what they were mad about. One time, it was the retirement age. They really have a lot of pride. We have some really close French friends, and they have a lot of pride in their health care, and they have a lot of pride in maternity leave, and they have a lot of pride in paternity leave, and that the government helps sponsor and facilitate these things. We don't have any pride in any government assistance or government-mandated things that government can do for us, because the Republican Party has done such a good job propagandizing that if you need anything from the government, you're a lazy piece of shit and you're a moocher, when really the parasites and the parasitic people in the country are the billionaires.

I think your analysis that they get into a psychosis is so spot on, because the more you open up your eyes to it and the more you see the way they're behaving, like Josh was saying, can you imagine being a billionaire? And you would think, okay, remember what I would think, okay, what am I going to do if I win the lottery? What would I do? You think freedom is what you think, right? Yeah. So when I watch these billionaires go to a Kanks' Dementia Hours show and tell, where we all have to sit around in the circle jerk and tell him how great he is, I think they aren't free at all. They have to go make up awards like Tim Cook brought some trophy, humiliated himself, and they have to engage in this humiliation rituals for this man that is not even remotely likable. I hear that I haven't been around him in person, but I hear that he stinks. I mean, a lot of credible sources in courtrooms say that he wears a diaper and that he's shitting his pants. Can you imagine that you have all of this financial freedom in a bank account that could choke a bull, and you have to go make up some trophy and give it to that fleabag of a human being.

It just blows my mind.

Well, it becomes a dick measuring contest between billionaires, to put it crudely. And then it's also incentivized by capitalism bills itself as being able to be a system that can support endless growth. And we know that there can't be endless growth. There has to be an endpoint to a degree. Some of these social media companies, the reason that they are, I think, trying to monopolize your time in the way we were talking about earlier is because they need your time on your phone. They need you on your phone all the time. Because if they want to come back to shareholders and show them that we're growing, even though this company could not possibly be bigger, everybody's on Facebook, everybody's on Instagram, but we've got to show more growth, more time, more stuff that we can show to advertisers, it creates more and more toxic business incentives and things that are hurting, say, kids or people's attention span or their ability to have critical thought. I mean, the Trump administration in this era is a little bit of a part of that, where it's about a dopamine response or the way he makes people feel more than it is about the facts.

And I think the tech companies, despite having this green branding in the Obama era, have become a deeply toxic force in that. The focus on cities, too, I mean, you're here in New York. I don't think it's the healthscape it's been described as, right? I think it's really important to understanding it, too, where they're putting all this very heavily racialized content to the very top of people's feeds and making it feel like this is the most unsafe place on the planet. Because multiculturalism and a bunch of different people of different walks of life living amongst one another in a densely populated area like this is a genuine threat to fascism. Because your neighbor, maybe somebody city that the Republican Party tells you you're supposed to hate, but you know your neighbor and you like them, or you learn more about their culture or why they came here. Say they're from Venezuela. They were fleeing a US sanctions regime that was a part of emmiserating them, or they are from a different country where there's been political unrest. You'll understand that more and maybe have empathy for them in a way that I think is a real threat to what the Republicans are trying to do.

And so they focus on cities for that very reason. This is where art and culture happens because is of that mixing of people. And it's a beautiful thing. It might be that's what's American to me.

It's almost like they don't want people to get along or like each other.

Yeah.

And the cooperation it takes to live in a city like this is also a threat to fascism. You have to cooperate with everybody to cross the street, get on the subway. That type of cooperation with people that you're supposed to hate is difficult because in order to walk down the street in New York, it takes a lot of cooperation among people. But I have been so disappointed, and we can revert back to middle school, about the three co-equal branches of government. We have seen little Moses, Mike Grinder Johnson, who has been neutered and whose balls are in Kinks' desk in the oval office. We have also seen the Supreme Court completely abdicate their co-equal branch of power. Listener, a lot of you know Josh, new listeners. He is a criminal defense attorney, and he's going to talk to us about this very dangerous shadow docket and what Kanks' plans are with the Insurrection Act, which Josh pointed out to me on our way here. He was like, The irony of him using the Insurrection Act.

And booking Trump and booking the Insurrection Act. Unbelievable. It just seems like, where the fuck are we living? What is going on here? Because I remember sitting like everybody else and watching One Six, and you just like, wow. It's like, how do I process this? The Shadow Docket is It's pretty scary, let me just say, in the legal community, for people who are somewhat scholars. The reason why it's important is because for those of you that are non-lawyers, case law is precedent. There's a history of cases that helps other courts and other judges make decisions as to how they reason and why they decide what they decide. And what the shadow docket does is it takes a case from an appellate court, and the Supreme Court is able to issue a one or two, sometimes one sentence decision, and not provide any rationale or reason for why they're issuing that decision. And more importantly, in the way that it impacts judges, is it throws a whole line of cases in flux and tells the lower courts nothing about their decisions and why they decide this. And so you have all these district court federal judges and appellate judges that are all just about not ready to pull their hair out.

I think the New York Times had a piece on interviewing maybe 80 judges, half of which were Republican, half of which were Democrats. To get that many federal judges, number one, to even give an interview and talk about something like this is rare, but that shows the gravity of this situation because it throws everything in the chaos in the lower courts. And ultimately, what it's doing is diminishing the rule of law. Nothing means nothing. You used to have certain principles and fundamental things that stood for something. Now you don't because the Supreme Court, and for those of you that don't know, the shadow docket is just like an emergency docket where you can go to the Supreme Court, and if they decide to accept your case, both sides don't brief it, both sides don't give argument. They present very limited information to the court, and if the court thinks that an emergency exists, they can issue a ruling or opinion. And literally, if you read an opinion on the shadow docket, it can be two or three sentences, and it provides no guidance. And for example, one of the significant things they ruled recently was that you could take someone's racial, ethnic background and factor that in to whether or not you can detain that person under the Fourth Amendment.

You can decide that just because that person is Hispanic, you've got a right to seize him temporarily and ask him for his identification. There's decades of case law that talks about how that's unconstitutional. Just It's within one or two sentences on the shadow docket, they've undone years, decades of precedent to talk about that. So that's the danger of it. People don't realize that that's what's going on in the legal system.

Well, if you were to have to write an opinion, you would have to have a variety of different footnotes that would explain the case law that you're describing, that the precedent would inform the decision that they're making. But because they're making it the fuck up, basically, they rely on these shadow docket. It's really a major problem, I would think, for the legal system going forward, when hopefully we get out of this era of fascism. But is this whole era going to basically be a black hole for precedent? I mean, maybe that's a good thing, given the nature of the decisions, but it's definitely not a good thing for the legal profession and for judges in this country.

It's not. And it diminishes... Most people have a respect for the rule of law, whether you agree or disagree. You know certain things about it. That's what it does here. It diminishes. We have a son who's a first-year law student, and we're so proud he's going to go be a lawyer. But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking everything that Trump and this administration and the Supreme Court and others are doing What I'm hearing is diminishing the value of all of those things. In some ways, it also enhances the need to have good litigators. But at the same time, how can everybody be complicit in this? How can you have nine justices, six of which have decided excited that they're going to bankrupt their souls and vote in favor of Donald Trump.

I also want to point out to a lot of listeners that have groups of friends and relatives that say the following, I am fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. Where we live, that statement provides a lot of people cover to go vote Republican because they care about their own personal tax spend. And then they can say, But I'm socially liberal, so that they can go to their gay hairdresser and feel like they're multicultural and that they're not just crusty old white fuckers, right? So here's the problem with the erosion of the court system for the fiscal Conservatives. Fiscal Conservatives is all about business. Laissez-faire business, let it rip, let's go. When you don't have a court system to take a contract in, then the economy starts eroding, and it starts eroding, and it starts eroding, and you can look no further than Russia to see what has happened here. You have inflation out the wazoo. You have all of these oligarchs that went and bent the need of Vladimir Putin. And then Vladimir Putin decides, I want that company. And then this billionaire that bent the need of Vladimir Putin is knocked out of a window.

And here's the thing, you guys, it is not hyperbolic at all at this point to say that, look at the phones. Trump, Kids, Dumb & Dumber, Eric and Don Jr, of course, dumb and dumb are like, We're going to have Trump phones. Look at this. We have Trump phones, Trump phones. You see Tim Cook go bend the knee, give him the trophy presentation, humiliating, especially considering the fact that Tim Cook is gay. But that's another podcast entirely when we dive into the psychology behind internalized homophobia. But at some point, if he keeps getting all of this unchecked power, Kanks is going to be like, You know what? I really like Apple. Why don't we just take that and call it Trump? Why don't we just rebrand that whole thing? That's what he does. It's not like he comes up with any new ideas. I mean, he's building a ballroom, for God's sakes, and he can't even dance. He does that double jerk off old man dance thing all the time. And the centerpiece of this administration, the thing that his own press secretary says that his top priority is, is building a $300 million ballroom.

And he can't even dance.

No, he Yeah, he can't even dance. But it's modeled a little bit off the Russian ballroom. I don't know if you've seen some of those images because Vladimir Putin is a good example of what he's trying to emulate, where it's casino capitalism. He is trying not to change our economic system in any egalitarian way. He's trying to use the power of the presidency to enrich himself in very direct ways. But also the merging of corporations and the is the definition of fascism. You see right now this headline that was just so horrifying to me, that there's this injection of private money into the United States military, and they're seeking out further private equity investments. We already have enough financial incentives to go to war. There's this thing called the military-industrial complex, but the United States military should be inculcated from that thing. Statutorially, I would imagine it is, but given what we're talking about with in the legal system, it's very difficult to see how some of these challenges all make their way through. It's really horrifying. Then you just step back and you ask the question, how did so many people take our democracy for granted?

And how did democracy... Why was democracy not enough for people not to bring Donald Trump back into office after January sixth? His approval rating leaving office was horrific. It's only beaten now by his minus 18 net approval rating that we're seeing right now. It's the lowest it's been, I think, when he was in office. It might have been lower after January sixth when he left office. But putting that aside for just a second. The problem is that people weren't sold on the idea of democracy because, one, I don't think the Democratic Party is practicing it internally. They're not listening enough to voices like yourself who are talking about APAC money. I mean, only 8% of Democrats in the poll in August, per Gallup, support Israel's military action in Gaza. An overwhelming majority, I think something like 70%, say that Israel is committing genocide, and yet a great majority of the Democratic Party is still supportive of Israel. Is that democracy between your voters and your core constituency and the party, or is that corruption? And then you even have the Joe Biden issue. A majority of Democratic voters didn't think he should run again. They took him at his word on that front, and he didn't listen.

The party mechanism kept going and going. We could have had a debate where that would have been the performance of democracy, where people could have heard, What do Democrats stand for? Or we could have hashed out those issues in the primary, and people could have voted for somebody based on their viewpoint that would have been more representative of it, of them. It would have given that candidate more legitimacy than, unfortunately, Harris wasn't able to pull through in that way, even though I do think, in part... Not in part, she was handed a horrible hand by Joe Biden. But how do you sell people on the idea of small D democracy if you don't practice it yourself? Then it gets to the overarching question of, what is people's experience with democracy? And when you don't have democracy in your workplace, or you don't feel like you have the freedom to spend money or to build a life or to buy a home or work towards goals because you're in a cycle of debt or your wage isn't increasing or the prices of everything keep going up and up, there has to be some egalitarian democracy for the economy as well, where people feel like they can move up or that they can have a chance.

I do think that the Democrats lost on just selling the political democracy of showing up on election day, where they're not showing the requisite democratic responsiveness that would be an opposition party, an effective opposition party to a fascist like Trump. They're getting there, hopefully, but not this leadership. It's got to be something different.

I mean, you said something that resonated with me, but when we're We're talking about one-six. Then we talk about how did we end up here. I mean, in a nutshell, I would say the Democrats. I hate to be that blunt about it, but from where we live and where we sit in a red state in Oklahoma City, having an understanding of that environment and the rural upbringing that I had, the Democrats played it horribly bad.

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And I don't mean to keep returning to the Democrats, but the point is, what you're saying, how can we make change, right? And we are not in the constituency of the Republican Party. They don't care what I have to say about their failings. And the Republicans have been the villains my entire life. It's just, how are you an effective opposition party? How can you sell people on your vision? And We can talk till we're blue in the face about how the facts are on our side. We get it. But what you've been so good on, Jennifer, and it's just like pushing this forward, we've got to get the money out. We've got to, because it hamstrings the opposition. They're not able to say what they should say because they're corrupted.

We've got to get the money out. Democrats have got to quit doing focus groups and being disciplined about their answers. After I got into it with Cory Booker, I told Josh about it, and Josh's response was, This is why they suck. Do you think Trump would blink? Do you think he'd hesitate for two seconds if you asked him a yes or no question? He'd fucking answer it. And then if one of his aides correct him in the next day, then he'd just change his mind again. But this whole word salad, I'm so disciplined, I'm not giving people a straight answer. It gives this elitism that I think I know better. I'm up here, and all of the electorate is down here. Josh was raised in Hugo, Oklahoma, which is a town of 5,000 people, and I guarantee you, Trump won that county by 50 percentage points or something. The thing with people in rural areas, and I found this statistic so fascinating. When you look at Oklahoma, so red, not one county has gone blue like the last five election cycles. They're real proud of that.

There are 77 counties. They've all gone Republican.

Yeah, all gone Republican. If you ask people individually, do You want marijuana to be legal? They did that five or seven years ago, and the electorate voted to legalize marijuana. If you ask them, Are you for a choice? Up to a point, the majority of Oklahoma say yes. If They say, Are you for the rich paying their fair share in taxes? They say, Yes. If you ask everybody on an individual thing, even in deep red, religious Bible-thumping Oklahoma, progressive single-line item issues win. But the Republicans have done an incredible job propagandizing in red states via churches. I remember growing up, and there are mega churches fucking everywhere, and I was on top of all of the prayer lists and all of those mega churches, but that's another podcast as well.

Oh, you told me about that story. It was a great story about your background in that area and how Trump is like a evangelical preacher.

But the marquise on this church, I remember seeing this a long time ago. It'd be vote George Bush today, and this is at the church. If you think about this portion of the electorate and how much this portion of the electorate, I'm not talking about Christian-like people. Don't freak out. I'm not talking about Catholics. I'm talking about white evangelicals. They are the people who have fucked us so hard because they started this shit decades ago, long before Kanks ascended. And they are the people who leave us vulnerable. Where does Where does Vladimir Putin enter the United States? Through the prayer breakfast. Where does the NRA go? Through the prayer breakfast. Project 2025. All this shit is rooted in white evangelicalism, and the Democratic Party has not answered the Republican Party crazy Christian component of this because they think, Oh, separation of church and state, we're not going to talk about it. You fucked up because these crazy Christians that have their roots in the KKK have made this a political issue, and you have to answer it. That's why somebody like James Talariko in Texas is very important. Now, for me, if it's a Muslim, if it's a Jewish person, if it's a Christian politician, they start talking about their faith.

I'm an atheist. It's nauseating to me. However, this is a very religious first-world country. I think it's going to take some politicians like Andy Berchier and James Talariko to go run as progressive Christians in these red and take the same message the Zoron has, exact same.

You got to focus on class, though. They can't just do- Yes.

Teller Rico has a very great line. He says, and he won't throw the trans population under the bus, he said, Everybody's worried about less than one % of the population. They're worried about the wrong one %. That's a great line. We need to focus on the other one %. And then he talks about his faith in Jesus, blah, blah, blah, blah, for Democrats to move forward. And it pissed me off to no end when Esra Klein suggested that the Democrats should run pro-life candidates in red states. They've done it, and they all lose. Pro-life Democrats fucking get their ass beat because rural people aren't as dumb as you think. They just cannot stand people that are inauthentic. We all know Kanks is not authentic, but he reads to people as being authentic because he came out in 2016. And I remember Josh and I liked it at first. He was like, Lying Ted. Oh, it was funny. I was like, Finally, somebody's fucking calling out these sleez bags.

Yeah. And he was also saying things like, Marjorie Taylor-Greens is doing this right now, where there are existing fractures in the MAGA base, where she's saying stuff that other Republicans aren't saying, like criticizing Israel or even criticizing some of Trump's tariff policies because she's trying to set herself up for 2028.

That's my- She sees a post-Maga world. Exactly. Because the strong man is frail, and that's when autocracies and dictators crumble, because this dementia world tour in Asia that we have all seen is very alarming. I mean, he had the Prime Minister of Japan babysitting. Him and still got lost.

Yeah. I mean, it feels like it happens at the end of every month long cycle. I mean, this is just hypothesizing, but that hand thing, there's some Alzheimer's drugs. Jack is madderal, yeah. You know, you got to do it, refresh every single month. But But I think what you're hitting on is actually really important. So the Esra Klein thing, that pissed me off to no end, too, because how many different people are we going to throw under the bus to avoid talking about class? Part of the elitism you're talking about is What Cory Booker, he couldn't get away with on your show, he gets away with in every room that has donors in it, because he will talk about his identity. He will talk about being a Black man. He'll talk about where he lives. I'm from New Jersey, in Jersey. I think that representation is important, but it can't be the only thing. But he'll rely on that because wealthy white people that want to think of themselves as antiracist and donate to the Democrats, they want to hear that when they're in a room, and it flatters them, and then they get money.

But for regular people, they're like, What the hell are you talking about? You're being asked a direct question. Can you answer it? It's this in authenticity. And then with Esra, the impetus to be like, What can we throw under the bus? What can we abandon in order to win these people. Right. Yeah. Women. People who can get pregnant. It was trans people.

Now it's-Victims of incest in red states. Fuck you.

Yeah, exactly. Except that you don't need to do that. We have seen that if you just lean into people want their material conditions to be met. You can have a candidate like Dan Osborne in Nebraska who doesn't have all of my social beliefs, but is focused, he's supported by unions, and he's running as an independent because a D next to your name is a little bit of an issue in that state. But you can have other candidates that run similarly with an economic populace platform in other states that are more representative, say, of my full politics. You don't have to abandon people. You can avoid certain topics, but just emphasize that you're going to change people's material conditions is really important. The problem is that there's a consultant class that you mentioned earlier that gets paid millions millions of millions of dollars a year just to avoid that question. There is a whole rotten infrastructure in the Democratic Party that needs to be done away with because they are avoiding the simple answers in favor of donor money. I go back to 2016 when Chuck Schumer said this openly. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, but for every person we lose in rural America, or maybe it wasn't rural America, it was, For every ex-person we lose, we will gain a suburban Republican voter.

I'm paraphrasing a lot. I remember that. It was about basically reorienting the party more towards disaffected suburban Republicans. How has that worked out? How has that worked out? It is about microtargeting a small sliver of the population with ads, which makes consultants very rich. They get fees on TV ads. You know what doesn't get fees? Canvassing like Zora did. Turning out people and volunteers. That doesn't pay consultants their fees. That's just good politics. But the Democratic Party has a whole infrastructure in place to avoid doing that thing. Obama was better at that. And look at what happened in 2008. It's not just about the politics of it, which I'm trying to focus on this as somebody who's a Democratic socialist, but it's also about the infrastructure that is rotten as well.

Well, and let me make two quick points for me from my perspective. Number one, people do appreciate candidates that have conviction, regardless US. Sometimes you disagree with their policies, but if they have conviction, for the most part, that's going to gain you a lot. Number two, where we sit, where I sit now in Oklahoma, we were so upset with Democrats, not necessarily just the candidates, but the way that they message to people that live and rule red states, there's no chance that they're going to watch and listen and vote for that particular candidate. It's just if you don't understand rural America, then I would urge anybody running for any national office to go spend time, go to a church, go to a rodeo, go do the things they do. It's completely different. If you just don't get it, you don't get it.

Here's the problem that's happening right now, and you brought it up with Marjorie Taylor-Green. Josh can attest to all of this. In flyover states where we live, people don't think about Israel and Palestine at all. They don't. There's barely any Jewish population, barely any Muslim population, and it seems like a very far off place. When you get in major political circles, APAC money, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and genocide, it's a very pressing issue. But for swaths and millions of people all across across the United States, they don't know. Recently, Josh was like, So what exactly is a Zionist? I'm explaining it to him. He's an attorney.

I'm a lawyer, and it's just not something- My nephews that are attorneys.

One's a federal marshal. They're both Democrats. We're like, Yeah, that whole Palestine thing fucked up. I don't really understand what's going on there. Here's where Marjorie Taylor-Green, and I'll be goddamn if she's this smart, her saying the following things is going to hit very hard with rural voters that don't pay attention or suburban voters that don't pay attention when she says the following, MAGA and the Democrats are not America first. They are Israel first. People in Israel have health care, and they get to go to college for free, and you pay for it, and you're going medically bankrupt. Now, Marjorie Taylor-Greene is an anti-Semite. She's a bigot. She's a homophobe. She's a grifter. She's an opportunist. Yack, yack, blah, blah. But Josh, who lived in a town of 5,000 people, that is a simple message that the Democrats should be owning, screaming, brow beating, instead of nuanced conversations. It's so simple to say it, but everybody feels like they've been checkmated like, Oh, I have these Jewish friends, and I don't want to hurt their feelings. The situation is the Democrats should take leadership on this and say, What we're talking about is different than you supporting your Jewish friends.

It's completely different. We're talking about a regime that deserves to be criticized in the same way that you hope as an American right now that people criticize Donald Trump. I don't see any criticism of Donald Trump, a criticism of my being an American. Actually, the Patriot in me, which I rarely use that word, welcomes that criticism. I wish that our allies would act more like President She did with him. I wish that they would quit bending the knee and kissing his ass like the oligarchs do. I think that is one of the more pro-American things you can do. We're in a very dangerous situation where you have a large majority of the electorate that doesn't understand or know about this foreign policy issue, number one. Number two, and this is going to hurt a lot of people, but a lot of them don't give a fuck because they're going to the doctor and the doctor says, You need an MRI, and I'm so sorry, your insurance isn't going to pay for it. And we think it's cancer, but there's nothing we can do.

But Marjorie Telegreen is connecting those two issues disingenuously, as you say. I really am scared about that because she is actually anti-Semitic. You are seeing the rise in anti-Jewish hatred on the right, in particular, with figures like Candice Owens. Tucker Carlson just had nick Fuentes on who is a neo-Nazi.

I think Tucker is going to run.

Oh, I think that's a good hypothesis. I think Marjorie Taylor Greene has got her eye on that, too, but she's got the whole woman thing. That might be a little bit of a problem with Republican voters, but I digress. I think that simple message, it's isolationist, where you're saying, as if, I don't know, we couldn't also have health care here as well. We could tax billionaires and keep funding Israel. I don't think it's a binary choice, although I do not think we should be definitely funding a country that's committing a genocide. But you hear the way Marjorie Taylor-Green frames it, right? It's very simple. It makes about people's material reality. When you dig a little deeper, she's a Christian capitalist, and she She is like, anti-Jewish in the way where she tweeted back at APAC something about, I'm not going to take your shekels or something. It's like, whoa.

She's a rapture prepper. Right. Josh said to me when this whole Israel thing really started steaming up during the last election, Josh goes, Why is it that all the politicians I hate, like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, they're the biggest Israel thampers?

Because it's about being bought by the military-industrial complex. Because the reason that this issue is so important isn't just because it's the fundamental human rights issue of this current time. It's also because it's a stand-in for, are you bought by corporate interests or are you not? Can you be brave on this issue or can you not be? People trust you if you can be brave on it because it's a shorthand. Okay, that person's not bought by X amount of money. They're going to say how they feel. I think that's part of what the Democrats are slow to catch up to about.

Well, and that's unfortunate because you then have politicians that can't speak their mind and give honest opinions and answers like Cory Booker on your show. You're just handicapped.

You've heard the credibility of the party.

But there's also, and This isn't to minimize this issue, but most of the people in rural America don't care about this issue. They don't care.

I hear you on that. I just get on my sofa.

No, I agree, but I do, and so does Jennifer. We care greatly about it.

I think the Democrats need to message, and Zora talks about this, universal human rights. Exactly. They can message it, but they take advantage of the fact these rural voters and suburban voters, people that live in very homogenous neighborhoods, whether that's urban, suburban, or rural, like white areas. They take for granted these voters because they know they're already in their silos. The Democratic Democratic Party is looking to flip these elusive independents, and they're always looking for this elusive voter. I think the reason that this podcast is so popular is because of the optics of us. Southern middle-aged white women. It's like, Oh, shit. They're progressive. I thought they would be, we look Fox News, coded, et cetera.

But it's so condescending. I'm sorry. It just is.

I also think it's sad. The reason we're novel, I think, is also somewhat sad, but I think that there is a movement forming, and I think there are fissures in the MAGA movement, and I think there are fissures in the Democratic Party right now. These fissures are really, really getting traction. On the right, you have the Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the Tucker Carlson, that they are seeing that the strong man is frail, and that's what ultimately crumbles these forms of strong men. When he's frail, dementia, all of the stuff. They're seeing curtains Moses Mike Johnson is re-arranging the deck chairs on Titanic. He's going down with kinks. And then on the right, you have these fissures forming. And Hakeem Jeffrey's Chuckles, Cory Booker's, they're going to have a hard time surviving. Yeah, because- Hopefully. The Democratic base is really, really pissed. And what I think about it, and Josh was so mad about this before me, that Biden didn't drop out sooner. He was so fucking mad, and he was like, I'm so fucking mad at the Democrats. It pisses me off. I can't believe they didn't do anything about January sixth. He was so fucking mad.

And it's unfortunate that the burden always falls on our side to do the right thing. But look how depraved the right is.

Yeah.

They are so morally depraved, and they have no problem passing the big heoping pile of dog shit bill and telling people that somehow, like Mike Johnson and Ted Cruz, they Christian signal, they use their faith to make it sound like, Oh, we're doing everything that Jesus wants us to do. It's really abhorrent. But I have seen so many white women who have a lot of money lately, whose husbands are now calling them communists, because that's how far left they've gone. That's anecdotal, but the more and more I talk to people, the more I realize one of two things happened to you with Trump. You either became worse of a human being. If you triple Trumped with each time that you did that, you became worse and worse and worse. You could look no further than Marco Rubio and his Lost Soul to see how damaging it is to do that. Or you've become more and more progressive. I used to be a good MSNBC Democrat. I was really good at it. No disrespect to MSNBC. A lot of people on there do a lot of good work. But I really started digging deeper. Why are they so robotic?

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I think that you're right about the fight between the Republican base might end up being more fracturous than what I see unifying momentum right now, at least within the democratic base. The politicians, that's the disconnect, is the democratic representatives and our leadership are not stepping up here. But I do see that the base is understanding the billionaires are the problem here. We can tax the hell out of them and provide incredible services for a population, and that's deradicalizing in and of itself. There's academic papers on when people's material conditions are worse, things like domestic violence increase because men feel like they have no agency in their professional life, and they take it out on their spouse. And there's different other kinds of crime that that leads to, or violence, because the way to make a safer society is to make sure that people's basic material needs are met. And that's been something that's been really radicalizing. And at my old gig, I was going to basically one Trump rally a week, and it would be in Eastern Tennessee or in Northern Florida or whatever. So I'm I'm not saying I've lived in the south for a while, but I did do that for a little while early on in my career.

And what you notice is that it's a perverse sense of community, but when you go to these MAGA rallies, it's people that feel like they have some sense of community. And we're so atomized, and we're in our cars, and going to work, and 9: 00 to 5: 00, and you come home, or maybe you have to do another job as an Uber driver because you can't support your family, and People feel like they're on a razor's edge economically. And so they retreat to something like that, whether it's the mega church or it's the Trump rally, where they feel like they have a common purpose. And what I hope can come out of this is that the liberals and the left base can come together with a common purpose of building a durable opposition to fascism. Because when you talk about not prosecuting January sixth, everything that Biden did, it's just wiped out. I mean, there's no durability because they didn't provide a movement.

It's easy just not to want to just be mad about that every second of every day. I try my best not to be. But another thing, and I pose this to Jennifer on the way over here, if you're in an argument or if I'm in a jury trial against opposing counsel, and they're lying or they're cutting below the belt, and I stand up and I am full of integrity, and I am going to do the right thing, and then I am going to get my ass kicked every single fucking time. Now, it doesn't mean I have to be a liar, but I have to be able to recognize that and call it out. And the Democrats, if they don't get a solution for that, if they don't have some fundamental understanding that they play this game and we're playing this game, if there's no appreciation for that as just a premise, then they will lose every single time because you're dealing with people that are pathological fucking liars that spread propaganda. And you want to truth your out of that. You want to integrity your way out of that. You want to do this, and you're going to get your ass fucking kicked every time.

This is why I'm a proponent of Fuck you, politics, brought to you by progressives. I just think we have Right now, Glenn Beck and Fox News, and what's his name? Temple are really mad at me, and I'm going viral. I only am on Instagram. It's the only social media that I do. And then she just watched tennis videos and French Bulldog. That's a good idea. Then just watch tennis videos and French Bulldogs So I got on my Instagram, and it's like, Die, bitch. You're a tranny. All of these horrible, horrible things. So I text a producer of our show, and I'm like, Kylie, am I going viral right now? And she goes, Yes, you are. Fox News, Glenn Beck, Temple. And I'm like, What's this about this time? And they said, They say that you want to kill Conservatives. I'm like, What? Did I ever say what? It was that clip of this wine mom, older than me even, at No Kings. And this Christian commentator is like, Are you sad that Charlie Kirk's dead? And the lady was like, No, I'm really not. He was not a good person. I don't like the guns, but I'm not sad.

She's like, Would you be sad if I died? And the lady's like, Well, I'd have to think about that. So after that clip, I say to our podcast audience, This is where the Democrats are right now. It's more of a, Fuck your feelings. So of course, they're melting down. Stage five meltdown by once self-proclaimed Alpha Mel Temple, who clearly is a titibaby.

You should go back and check out my debate with him if you want some fun content. He had a complete meltdown.

Okay, Emma, let's have a little bit of fun. Sure. We're going to play our world famous game, Had It I'm going to hit it. And Josh, you can do this, too, since you're our guest co-host.

I get to participate.

You get to participate in this. Oh, thank you. Oh, my God. Welcome to Had It or Hit It. I would hit it. Had It. Had It. I hit it every day, sometimes twice a day. Had it or Hit It. Ice.

Had it with ICE. I mean, this Gestapo that's terrorizing communities is absolutely out of control. These fat asses that have no training. They are disgusting thugs that should be treated like pigs on our streets. They are horrible, horrible people. And AOC in 2018 was being called a radical for saying, Abolish ICE. Ice didn't exist before 9/11. We can abolish ICE. It came out of the war on terror, and it does not need to exist. We can have a much more humane immigration system than what we're seeing right now.

I do want to add to this. There are two ICE agents in Illinois that refuse to participate. They walked off I hit those guys.

You'll hit those agents. Those two guys.

Okay, that's a good- But the rest of them, I've had.

Had it. There we go. Okay.

You guys had it or hit it, Katie Miller.

Oh, had it.

Josh, Katie Miller is the wife of Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller is the little forefoot troll.

I didn't know who she was.

I'm sorry. She just did a whole... She started a podcast, and now she's been on... She was on Piers Morgan, had a stage five meltdown, and got in a fight with, I guess, your former boss.

Cenk, yeah. I saw that, and it was amazing. She accused it. It was like an anti-Semitism accusation because I forget what he said.

She was raising Jewish children. She said, and he goes, Nobody's talking about your kids or you being Jewish.

I mean, I've had it with her and her Nazi-ass husband.

Okay. Had it or hit it, centrisme.

Had it.

I would have to say had it. It goes against- Pick aside. Having any balls and standing for something. There's no way everybody's going to agree with you, but have some balls, stand up for something, have some conviction. People respect that more than they do people that will lie and speak out of both sides of their mouth and say whatever. Right.

I agree. I think centrism is like the pick me of politicians. They don't want to make anybody dislike them. Therefore, they are forgettable.

It's also why we're here. Exactly. You can't make milktoast centrist cases. You have to make your argument. Don't be afraid of making your argument. And that is how you build a political brand. I don't know if we're doing lightning round, but this is just one point I wanted to push in there. It's just like, after 2012, the Republican Party sent out a memo saying, We need to rehaul all of our immigration because they lost a battle with Latino voters. We need to rethink immigration. We need to be more friendly to immigrants. That was what the Republican internal memo was saying. 2016, next election cycle, or presidential election cycle, Trump comes in. It's vicious, disgusting to immigrants. The metrics didn't reflect that, but he has indelibly changed for the worse, the immigration debate forever because he just made his argument.

Yeah, I agree. Okay. Had it or hit it, Reilly Gaines.

Had it. Do you know who she is?

I don't. Okay.

Sorry. Josh is so- Mediocre swimmer tied for fifth place.

She is woman that tied for fifth place against a trans female swimmer, and she has made a career off of tying for fifth place. Here's the thing.

They're still trotting that narrative out.

If the trans person hadn't swam in that race, she still would have gotten fifth.

She's just had to die. She had to die.

She was mad.

Tied. Now she's a conservative influencer about it. There's nothing more that right wingers get mad about than white cis women like you or me defending trans women because they like to think of themselves as the savior of white women because trans women, they say, are either rapists or threats or going to ruin our sports. They didn't care about women's sports until they got to crap on trans women. They were making fun I've had the WMBA my whole life. Totally. But because we look like the women that white supremacists like to hold up as the ones that they're saving from the racist Black and Brown and trans and LGBTQ hordes, they get really triggered when you stand up for trans people. That's my experience.

Let me add it. I want the Democrats to be as diabolical as Republicans are on this issue of trans athletes. I would like a Democrat, with all of these issues that we have in our favor, to take one of those and then just get twisted and fucking diabolical. And not just get twisted, but just nail it. I've got it right here.

The DL demon queen problem that exists in MAGA. I don't know if it's true or not, but I think there's a lot of evidence, and I get major gay darpings from, as you know, Moses Mike Grinder Johnson, Josh Holly, failed drag queen, smokey-eye sociopath, JD Vance, who we refer to as Little Smoky, Marco Rubio. Lindsay Graham. Lindsay Graham. Tim Scott. Tim Scott. I think that here's the problem with a lot of these MAGA men, and I think we should just go. Number one, I read a report that the number one consumers of trans porns are red cities. The epicenter of all consumption of trans porn watching is Lawn, Oklahoma. Oh, my God. Lawn, Oklahoma. And then you just sweep through the Bible Belt. And so I think the Democrats need to be this fucking diabolical. Why are you picking on trans people during the day, and then behind your wife's back, you're beaten off to trans porn, Lindsay? What's going on there? Moses, Mike Grinder, Johnson, what's going with your Grinder account? Why do you have this roommate that is an evangelical preacher that answers his door in his panties, per your neighbor's, when you come home from work as speaker of the house?

Good question. And I think they should pound it and pound it right into the heart of their faux masculinity, because at the end of the day, a lot of these MAGA men have been watching porn, and here's what's happened. They saw an erect penis, and maybe that was when it happened.

Or they came and then felt a lot of shame, and then trained I mean, that's what it is, right?

And then they think, Oh, my God, that was gay. And then they go crazy, and it's like, I'm anti-trans, I'm anti-gay. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares.

Also, if you are insecure about your masculinity, you need to really, really define what is women and female, well, it's female and male. These are men that they overcompensate because they're so insecure about their masculinity that they create really rigid rules, and it burns you up inside.

But I think it's there for the taking. The Democrats I just have these issues that would resonate with people if they can just simply get them out there. But with these Republicans, you're going to have to have some fucking crazy in you. You're going to have to be diabolical. You're going to have to get mud on your face. You're going to have to get You're going to have to get down in the mud with them. I'm sorry, but you can't go low here.

How would Hugo, Oklahoma, like that? If somebody just came out, started just, Moses Mike Johnson is clearly on Grinder, and he's lying to you.

All of that stuff would resonate, and we can't I'm going to underestimate this. What resonated about Trump in '16 was that he was unorthodox and would say what came to his mind. I'm not saying it's authentic. I'm not saying I agreed with it, but it resonated he was a different type of politician. Whether you agree or disagree, he was different. That resonated.

Last one. This is a tricky one. Had it or hit it, the United States of America.

Hit it. It's testing me right now, but at the end of the day, why I do I do. It's definitely not for the money. It's because I love the country. I do believe in humanity overall. We're in a really dark period right now, but I do think that the country can be better. I think that we can provide more things for people. We're the wealthiest nation in the world. There's no reason that we should currently have a record of credit card debt that people are experiencing, that month over month, that people are defaulting more and more on their car payments. We're getting in this amazingly economic precarious situation, or that we have thugs deployed by the federal government, breaking up families because they tried to come to this country for a better life. I grew up with the idea that we are a nation of immigrants, and that was a value that was instilled in me. I think we can do that again. It's just that we're in a very dark period right now, and we need an opposition party that can make that case and make it with their chest, and don't equivocate and don't hide from it.

You've been doing such great work, Jennifer, seriously on making it so that it's My wing of the party was not listened to that much over the past eight years, and our support for Bernie Sanders and people like the squad. But I think the base is starting to see that those are the real fighters, and those are the people that are equipped to fight. Because they're not bought.

I would say hit it for some of the same reasons that Emma said, but for the main reason that when I go to court in, for example, Paws Valley, Oklahoma, or when I go to court in Mangum, Oklahoma. Most people that I talk to, if you get out of this political spectrum of being on social media, all the interactions I have with people, they're pretty kind. They're pretty nice. People are inherently good in general. And if you can remove all of this bullshit, all this toxic bullshit that's in our life every day, you see that. Whether it's for a long time, I had to go visit with this one prosecutor to try to work out a really nasty case.

You remember that one?

No.

He's got the picture of Trump being shot on his door. He's a prosecutor, and he's a good friend. But I would walk in and we would talk. I'm from a small town, so I know the drill. I get it.

I have Republican friends.

But he and I were friends. I could literally, if something happened, I could call him at any point in time. He would do anything. But people, just in general, I I lost my wallet that was attached to my phone at the mall. And someone pulled it up and found my driver's license in it and had a credit card and drove it straight to my house and put it in my mailbox. And it's just little things like that. When you see people, they're inherently good. Most people are. And don't lose sight of that when you're reading through all this toxic shit that gets on our feed every single day. Don't lose sight of that. Regardless of what party they identify with, most people have a good heart.

I will just... One more thing. Michael Brooks was the co-host of my show before he passed, before I joined, actually, tragically. And he used to say, I'm paraphrasing again, but be kind to be people, but ruthless to systems and institutions. I think that's a pretty good guiding light. That is so good.

That's 100 %. And don't be silent or complicit. But at the same time, yeah, that's good. That is so good.

All right, listen, thank you, Emma. Thank you. Thank you for joining. I was on Emma's podcast, and we met virtually, and this is our first time to meet in real life. Josh, thank you for co-hosting. Listener Pumps will be back from her lesbian sexcapade next week.

Oh, wow. Give her my best.

Yeah, and maybe she'll pull up to the podcast in a U-haul. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that would be really exciting.

Could she help me move something to my new apartment? I need some help.

All right. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next Tuesday and Thursday. I'll tell you what I've had it with. Let's hear it. I've had it with that. Listen up, patriots, gay-triots, and matriots. We have a new podcast that has dropped. It's called iHip News. It's Monday through Friday, every day, 15 to 20 minutes hot takes on the political landscape of the United States of America always served with a side of petty grievances. We are on all the available platforms, Apple, Spotify, Google, whatever. You get your podcast and YouTube. Please go rate, subscribe, and review so that we will chart upwards with America's greatest legal mind. Pumps, what does an angel say? Caca. A little bit more enthusiasm. Caca. That's it. That's the patriotism that this country means right there.