After Party with Emily Jashinsky - AOC Admits Woke 1 Was CRAZY, Zuckerberg's AI Manifesto, Spider-Man’s $1B Surge, w/ Spencer Klavan, & Dangerous WNBA

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

  Emily Jashinsky is joined by Spencer Klavan, Associate Editor for the Claremont Review of Books and author of the forthcoming book, “A Way with Words: Why Language Makes Humans Irreplaceable.” They begin with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declaring Woke 1 was “crazy,” as Emily brings the receipts on what really happened during that era and Spencer unloads on AOC’s role in dividing America. They discuss whether figures like Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong and Hasan Piker represent a new “Woke 2.0,” Tyler Austin Harper’s reckoning with DEI, and whether the left is genuinely moderating or simply evolving. Then Emily and Spencer react to a DSA leader calling to “tax the hell out of millionaires” and debate the failures of modern capitalism and socialism. They also examine Canada’s new restrictions on faith-specific prayers in the military and what they reveal about religious liberty before reacting to Mark Zuckerberg’s new vision for AI and the growing populist backlash against Big Tech, data centers, and surveillance technology. Later, Emily and Spencer discuss Hollywood’s surprisingly successful summer and whether audiences are finally hungry for more original and ambitious movies. Emily rounds out the show with former NBA players challenging the WNBA’s transgender policies and explains why Caitlin Clark’s popularity has nothing to do with her race or sexuality, and more…   PreBorn: Help save a baby go to https://PreBorn.com/Emily or dial #250 keyword BABY   Lean: Discover why LEAN is becoming the choice for real weight‑loss results—shop now at https://TAKELEAN.com use code EMILY.    Cozy Earth: Visit https://www.CozyEarth.com & Use code EMILY for up to 20% off Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to After Party, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. We are going to be joined by the one and only Spencer Claven in just one moment. But first, we have a lot to discuss on tonight's show. You know, of course, that I can't stay away from this story about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez going on ABCs this week just yesterday, Sunday, and saying, woke one was crazy. Yes, yes, it was. We're going to go through all of the many reactions to that today. And actually bring some receipts, too, on how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had agency overwoke one. Of course, she wants to say this is something that really just happened during the pandemic. But, of course, she was part of the buildup in the years before the pandemic. So much to discuss on that front. Also, Megan Romer, the DSA co-chair, went on a podcast with David Remnick of The New Yorker. And the results were less than ideal for the DSA. So we have some audio and video of that.

Mark Zuckerberg is perplexed about AI Dumerism. He released a 6,500 word. I guess he had called a manifesto. I'm seeing it getting called a manifesto in the media. But I'm excited to have Spencer actually on tonight because he's written an entire book about these sorts of things. As we've talked about with him before, he also has thoughts on Spider-Man, unfortunately. So we'll be discussing that. and an awful story out of Canada about prayer, the WNBA continues to be in crisis and all seriousness.

That situation is getting legitimately dangerous. Well, now that Nes Cantor Freedom has declared for the draft, possibly even more dangerous, we're going to break all of that down too. Thank you so much for subscribing. If you haven't subscribed, it really is the best way to help the show. Just hit subscribe on YouTube. It helps us so much with the algorithm, like, comment, all of it. of that is greatly appreciated. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We're, of course, a three-day-a-week

show on the podcast feed. That's where we do our Friday shows, where I take questions that all of you have throughout the week and you send them into Emily at double makecaremedia.com. It's my real email address. You can hit me up there as well. All right, we're going to get into it. Have to take a quick break. We'll be right back on the other side with Spencer Claven and reactions to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Well, I'm really excited and honored to pass along a heartfelt thank from my friends at Preborn, and you all know how much I love Preborn. Their president, Dan Steiner, asked me to share just how grateful they are for faithful supporters like you. And so far this year, because of generous partners, more than 50,000 babies have been saved from abortion. Think about

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Your gift of $28 can provide one life-saving ultrasound. To give dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby, that's pound 250 baby, or visit preborn.com slash Emily. That's preborn.com slash Emily. All right, everyone, before we bring Spencer and I want to set the table because there's a lot to go through just so we have all of the facts settled. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on this week with Jonathan Carl on ABC on Sunday. And this all started really because you may have already heard. She said, woke one is crazy. I mentioned that just moments ago.

But you may have already heard this all started because, of course, Francesca Hong, who is of the DSA, is poised to win the gubernatorial primary, the Democratic gubernatorial primary in my home state of Wisconsin tomorrow. That's happening tomorrow. And every poll shows it's going to be a blowout. Now, it may not end up being a blowout. The Michigan polls obviously were pretty far off when it came to figuring out the margin of Abdul al-Said's victory.

We will see. Either way, as of a very way, As of right now, polling shows that Francesca Hong is the clear favorite. We covered some of her statements on last week's show, and that's basically what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was being asked about. Francesca Hong seems to hate Thanksgiving. She seems to hate Calvers, too, which is absolutely brutal if you're running for the governorship in Wisconsin.

She was implying in a post once that Everett Colvers was racist. It seems, again, to hate just about every holiday. She wanted to ditch Thanksgiving because of what it was. meant for indigenous folks. She's talked about her proximity to whiteness because her own son is half white. So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez obviously wants to make that viable politically for Democrats who may have a huge governor election now on the table in November, but also for herself. We're going to get into that too. But let's first listen here to AOC with Jonathan Carle on Sunday. Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her election.

Yeah, she's moved away from a lot of that. Right, she's moved away from it. And I have a local city councilman that has this saying, Woke 1 was crazy. It's so funny. Oh, it's so funny. Here's more AOC about what actually, I guess, woke was. Did the movement go too far with some of those positions?

I mean, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police. Well, you know, I think that. during this time and during, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the overtime window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that had that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I I think that when we talk about crime today, it's fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right?

And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today. And I'm grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they're campaigning on in this moment. Okay. So this is where I think a lot of the press is getting and the punditocracy is getting what she said incorrect. She's also standing by woke as producing, quote, fruitful discussions. She's saying some of this is just because people were unemployed that COVID caused serious economic anxiety, which is a typical democratic socialist line. But I assure her, people were not upset about things like the 1619 project. They were not upset about starting to see more and more boys playing in girls' sports. They weren't upset. about the excesses of cancel culture because they were unemployed during COVID, or some of them were, or small businesses were facing more and more pressure.

That's not actually why people were upset about it. Probably accelerated it, but I promise within the decade, there would have been substantial backlash to all of this COVID or otherwise because the gatekeepers are losing control, and frankly, these ideas are bananas. So three points there from what she said.

One, woke was real. These are three implied points from what she said, woke was real. We often heard that was not true. She's using the term woke herself and saying implicitly, it was real. She says woke is over. That we're now done with woke one and in woke two, where perhaps, and we need to hear more from the congresswoman on this, it's a matter of rhetoric. Three, woke could be defined by its excesses. Woke 1 was crazy. That's the quote. And that is saying definitionally, definitionally, it's characterized by being crazy, by its excesses.

So let's not act also like she had no agency in any of this. Woke one was crazy. Well, she was actually a leader. She was like a woke general. She was a leader in this movement. This happened for her before the pandemic. She was part of the buildup. And we have some receipts that, again, I want to get to here.

because they're important. Here is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Trans-2-Spirit and non-binary people have always existed and will always exist. People can say mad about that if they want, or they can grow up. That's 2021, but there's more where that came from before 2020. Here's May 2018. Where my Latinx lady is at? She used Latinx all the time.

If you search her X-Feed, she used it all the time. And she openly was defending the term. She was saying, in 2020, defunding. The Defunding the Police means defunding the police because she had pre-2020 been flirting with, defund the police ideas. She was talking about the quote-to-quote mythology of whiteness. Republicans who didn't want to invoke the 25th Amendment against Trump were part of the, they were trying to defend the mythology of whiteness. Some of this is post-2020, but some of it is pre. If you go back and look at her record, again, she was supporting trans maximalism.

She was supporting anti-police efforts. it's she, I would love to know what she actually thinks should happen at the border that's not racist. Like, actually what she would walk back, what policy she would walk back. And that wouldn't qualify as racist in the lead up to 2020. Think about it. I mean, there are two levels here. There's the political level and there's the moral level. So politically, can she get away with saying woke one was crazy laughing it off and moving along?

By the way, really rich for Jonathan Carl to laugh too. I pulled this. Jonathan Carl This is 2020. Covering Trump indoor rallies is like, quote, taking your family with you

to Fallujah. That's a good one. Didn't want to let that one go. It's like, taking your family with you to Fallujah. I mean, there's so many of these.

It's hard to actually even capture. Glenn Greenwald wrote, if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has changed her mind about all the brand-new woke dogma, she vehemently defended

and sought to impose. That would be welcome. But actual regret for past mistakes means taking responsibility for them and explaining what went wrong, whether it's support for the Iraq war, the policies that caused the 2008 financial crisis, Russiagate, COVID, etc., at the very least, it requires acknowledging the damage done to people in their lives rather than minimizing it as just a benign and noble quest for justice that went a little too far. Obviously, I agree with that.

That's a moral question. It's probably a political one as well. I do think voters will want to hear that, especially independent voters will want to hear that. That's why Francesca Hong is trying to say it was just about rhetoric right now too, but because when that general election comes around, that's going to be tough. Do I think politically they can get away with it? Yeah, if the economy is really bad and Republican candidates are offering nothing better or nothing that feels like, you know, it's going to offer a better path, then yeah, absolutely. I think they can get away with laughing this off and saying woke one was crazy, especially if gas prices continue to go up and people continue to be squeezed or feel squeezed about this economy or by this economy. So I'm all

a reckoning politically and morally, if people really do change their minds. I want to hear from AOC more what she means by all of this. But look at Jason Ardei. Woke is absolutely still here. It's diminished, but it's still here. I think AOC is pretty clearly by this quote, situating herself for a presidential run. It was just about less than, I don't know, it might have been like 12 hours, 24 hours something from her going full influencer on her Instagram and sharing the process of freezing her eggs. Peter Hassan points out in 2022, she gave an interview to GQ magazine about how her longtime boyfriend, fiancé, Riley Roberts, wanted to get engaged by the end of the year. She said, well, you're going to have to woo me.

You're going to have to convince me after all this time why I should. She said her relationship with Roberts, who was white, raised its own particular questions about identity and belonging. She wasn't positive that an intercultural interracial relationship would be the right fit for her. So why not get married? Andrew Kerr over at the Washington Free Beacon suggests it might be because frankly, she can shield some of Robert's income so long as they're not married, stock trades, that sort of thing. It's possible that's part of it. Or it's possible she doesn't feel like he's the right person. But what I'm taking from all of this is that she's really serious in that ABC interview, she said she was not ruling out a run for the president.

Now, why I think this is both politically and morally difficult, especially, although politically will be easier if Republicans don't have a good answer on the economy for people. Well, let's go ahead and take a look at some more receipts. This is from Do No Harm. And when they released this, I went through the data and checked it out. This is a conservative group of physicians. Nearly 14,000 minors underwent sex change procedures in recent years, according to a new watchdog database.

They went through insurance data and found that 14,000 minor patients received gender transition treatments from January 2019 to December 2020-23. 5,747 underwent sex change surgeries and 8,579 got hormones and puberty blockers. Let's keep going. You remember the name David Dorn? David Dorn was killed on June 2nd, 2020. reading here from the Associated Press. A retired St. Louis police officer was shot and killed early Tuesday by people who had broken into a pawn shop during unrest that followed a peaceful protest over the death of George Floyd. That construction in that sentence during unrest that followed a peaceful protest over the death of George Floyd,

at what point did we decide that the unrest followed the peaceful protest? Fascinating. 77-year-old David Dorn was shot trying to defend a pawn shop from riot. At the time, the police commissioner, St. Louis police commissioner said he was killed during a looting process. David Dorn was exercising law enforcement training that he learned here. Another thing a lot of people miss. This is from The Guardian. So obviously, a center-left source.

Headline. At least 25 Americans were killed during protests and political unrest in 2020. That was based on data from the armed conflict location and event data. They raised concerns about continued violence. during after election day. 25 people. It's not funny to a lot of America. It really is not funny to a lot of America. And I welcome Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opening up about this in the future,

explaining where she got this wrong. I'd love to know if men should play in women's sports, sports, or if Seth Moulton should have to apologize for disagreeing on that, which he ended up doing Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts after Trump won in 2024. Should you have to apologize for disagreeing? What restrictions on illegal immigration are not racist or not white supremacy? What hate speech or disinformation should be censored on social media or by corporations or by the government? Let's go ahead now and bring in Spencer Claven for his take on all of this.

Spencer Claven, you have a new book out, I'm told you're, of course, associate editor over at the Claremont Review of Books and your author of the new book, way with words why language makes humans irreplaceable. And the subject of this book is very salient to the topic at hand, what actually is wokeness. So thanks for being in here, Spencer. What's your reaction to seeing this? Emily, it's so good to see you. This is still a podcast where I'm supposed to drink, right? Because I require so much gin in order to contend with AOC. You're being so much nicer to her than I'm about to be. Oh, excellent. Let's Let's get into it, please.

Oh, a martini. Wonderful. Yeah, it's a martini kind of evening, I think. I've made myself a Japanese gin martini with sesame oil and salt. So it's really just like bringing out the big guns to. I poured bourbon and diet ginger oil into a plastic cup. So you are really outshining me on my own platform here, Spencer. I see you too are a woman of taste.

Japanese general. And quality. We need to appreciate the finer things and like them. So it's very nice of you to allow AOC the opportunity to be specific about which elements of woke, she wants to walk back. I think that the. only appropriate response for a public figure in her position is to take a vow of silence, retreat into the Andalusian mountains, and hide her head under a burlap sack for the duration of her time on this earth.

I mean, as an individual, yes, of course, you're always welcome to change your mind. In fact, it's a sign of maturity to revise past opinions. As a public figure, there's no part of woke that you're, you can walk back and still show your face in public. And I think the reason for that is that implicit in what AOC is now pleased to call Woke 1, implicit in everything that that term means, is the idea that if you dissented from Woke 1 at the time, you were an unpersonable cretan who needed to be excised from public life. with all expediency, right?

And so if you were wrong about that, it's not like you left room back then for people to disagree and to argue. Part of your claim was that anyone who disagreed with you even a little bit was prima facie, by that very fact, violent and evil and needed to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. And so if you were wrong about that,

then you've already committed, a grievous public facing sin. You've already made people's lives miserable on the basis of a maximalist political philosophy. So now I recognize that AOC is not going to be retreating from public life anytime soon. And like in the real world that we actually live in, she wants to suggest with the idea of woke one

that there's a version of woe, which would actually be funny, that some of these ideas were were good and reasonable and indeed righteous, but we went too far in pursuing them. We were too zealous and dogmatic about it. So she does need to be clear in reality about what woke two looks like. And that's the sinister part of it all, is that, yeah, she's admitting that woke existed.

She's admitting that it was over the top. She's not saying in what way or at what level, but she's also saying now we're going to do woke two. This is what's happening now is we're not going to, scrap all of that. We're not going to moderate. We're just going to revise our cockamamie positions, which, as you say, lead to the mutilation of young children and to deaths in some cases and have dire consequences, right? We're just going to kind of tweak that a little bit around the edges on the messaging. And here I must, I'm afraid, take a bit of a victory lap because I almost never make

political predictions. I'm really bad at it. I did, though, when Trump won make one prediction, which was that this was going to have to happen to the Democrat Party. It's all unfolding exactly as I for gold because immediately after Trump's resounding victory, you predictably had this whole thing where, oh, now we have to figure out how to walk the Democrat Party back to the center. You know, the idea that Woke 1 was crazy is not actually a new one. It's new for AOC to be saying it. But this was the governing thesis of Trump's second victory when it happened. in much the same way as in 2016 when he won,

there was a brief flicker of recognition that's kind of passed across the eyes of the New York Times editorial board that maybe we should like send some journalists to parachute into middle America and inspect this strange creature called the working class voter and like how did we get them so wrong?

There was this sort of flash of introspection. That happened with 2024 as well and it was about how wokeness was bad, maybe we'd overstepped. The New York Times has been like quietly running pieces about how, oh, actually it was kind of a terrible idea to close schools for years on end and to deprive children of like key developmental stages and to muzzle them uselessly when they were forming their prefrontal cortex or whatever. So they've been doing a lot of, a lot of, you know, reconsideration, walking that back without really admitting any fault on the left. But because woke is inherently maximalist, because there is no moderate version of it. And because all the other kinds of moderate philosophies have already lost with the youth,

all of the abundance, liberalism, all of the as recline of it, all of the kind of let's figure out a way to be centrist, blue dog Democrats again. Like that doesn't carry water with the most energetic parts of the left space. And so the only thing left is the Hassan pikerization of the left, which is what I've been saying for a while now. And I've been trying to get my right-wing friends to watch more Hassan, even before he became popular. Because I think the piker pill is really it, you know, and Zora Mandani, of course, represents the first way. But he's now building this little machine, as you were kind of indicating of people who do represent woke 2.0. And it's much younger, much more aggressive, a lot more. economic, a lot more actively Marxist or socialist, perhaps in its economic point of view,

and much more vigorous about its identitarian propositions. They're going to drop the trans thing, I think, by and large, because they lost that one so bad. And they may bring it back if they find a good time. But like, yeah. But is it enough to, this is actually what I think is really interesting, because you just said something that is probably really critical for them to think long and hard about, which is there is no moderate version of woke. And what she was saying is fundamentally very materialist, right, that people gravitated towards cancel culture and what came to be known as wokeness because they were unemployed, even though she was gravitating towards it when she was employed when she was a congresswoman.

But many such cases, as they say, that has a lot of support from the professional managerial class and a lot of my genuine leftist friends will say it was coming from the billionaires. It wasn't just coming from the billionaires. It was coming from, in many cases. That term originally is from the left, the professional managerial class, if I'm not mistaken. And so on the one hand, it is such a fundamental, it is the house, or I'm sorry, it's the foundation that the houses of so many young Americans was built on. And you don't actually, unless you have full conversions away from materialism, it's really hard, I think, to get away from the identitarian aspect of it.

Because actually, you mentioned Piker. Let's bring Piker. And this is a clip from him last week responding to, I think Bill Maher, who brought up a Cia Weaver quote, who's in charge of housing in the Mamdani administration in New York City. Let's roll Hassan here. Mandami's aide, his top aide, Cia Weaver, said if you don't believe in the government's sacred rule, right to seize property, it's over and impoverished the white middle class. Beast mode, I love her so much. One of the things about Zoran is that the people surrounding him oftentimes are so much cooler than he is. But that's also part of the reason why I really respect what he's doing. She's awesome.

Impoverish the white middle class, the white middle class. Not the black middle class, not the Latinx middle class, the white middle class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you are right that you can't moderate woke. I also think you can shuffle the coalition around. And the priorities. You can stop talking about trans stuff, right? Yeah, you can redistribute the importance. You can redistribute the wealth among these various cases that are sort of assembled into the woke coalition. and you're seeing that very much.

That is very much an element of woke two is the transition from kind of the black trans woman occupying the top space and everything else being, you know, evaluated relative to that. And now I think it's sort of more like the Palestinian liberationist

is at the top of the woke hierarchy and everything is, everybody has to kind of scramble and shuffle and rearrange relative to that. And this, by the way, since Piker's bringing it up, I don't feel like I'm putting this on him. This is something that Marxists have always been doing. I mean, determining the order of priorities among the, you know, the Marxist classes has been. I mean, it's why it counts for the kind of waterwheel of Lenin to Trotsky to Stalin, whatever, you know, these sort of different leaders within the Soviet Union and their priorities,

either becoming the dogma or, you know, the hateful, regressive liberalism in disguise. So that happens within Soviet communism. But it also happens, I mean, a major feature of American far leftism is, the endless redefining of the proletariat, right? So the proletariat, if the proletariat is the kind of original Marxist grievance class, the disenfranchised worker, then you have, for example, like in Foucault, this very explicit, and Foucault, of course, for those listening at home, that don't know, like one of the big kind of post-structuralist, post-modernist, French theorists, you know, the insane and the criminal become the proletarian.

And so it's like these are the people that are really marginalized. And we need to sort of upend society to bring them into the center. And I definitely think that, for example, in the work of Judith Butler, who is the person behind a lot of the, is her intellectual... Is she in your new book? Is she a focus of your book? As a brilliant linguist, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

No, she is actually a very cany... I just say they, because they use their pronouns now. So we wouldn't want to misgender them. But Butler, Judith Butler uses, is actually a very cany user of words. And in a way with words, my new book out on February 2nd, as you as you meant, so kindly mentioned, there is a chapter about the politics of language. And I point out that, you know, as conservatives, we love to just quote big chunks of Judith Butler or whoever and say, look, how completely indescipherable this is, what a swamp

of meaningless jargon. but it's only indescipherable from the outside. From the inside, it's actually a very carefully calibrated political act to take people who were previously considered, you know, they were thought of as by definition, kind of exterior to normal society and to center them, as they say. I mean, one of the famous texts by Bell Hooks is called feminism from the margins to the center.

And it is that idea. of like, one of the things language does is it orientes your map of the world. And so if you take the, if you picture the origin point of the map and you put it out in the middle and you say, actually, you know, the middle of our, the center of our society is the black trans woman. Like everything else follows from that. And I do think there's like a shift going on among the woke of like where that central zero point is. And it's more now in the like France fanon, wretched of the earth kind of dispossessed. Centering colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism.

Totally. That's really interesting. And it actually reminds me, I don't know how I stumbled onto this, but I was reading, since you're from Claremont review of books. I was reading this great Nathan Pinkowski review of a book on the Spanish Civil War. And it's from a few years of time. Do you remember this one? Okay, good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is a Pinkowski classic. It's an absolute banger. I don't even know. I was reading it last night. And as you were talking, it reminded me because we did a wind up here with the receipts from how many people were genuinely harmed during the riots. And we haven't even talked about the rise in violence that came after police departments were genuinely defunded and defanged on some level. So this is Pankowski writes about the Spanish Civil War. The center and center left enabled the dissent into revolutionary politics by winking at the left's violence and punishing the rights.

And Pinkowski writes about how this actually. really was fuel for what the Spanish Civil War became, which was you had a revolution and a counter-revolution. You didn't really have a center. It was a revolution against a counter-revolution. There's nothing that's like a center when you're in a modern civil war. That feels terrifying right now, Spencer. This doesn't feel great. This piece is so scary. I mean, I urge anybody listening to read this Kinkowski article. He's always great, but this piece of his about Spanish. Spanish Civil War is exactly as you say, because he doesn't actually draw a lot of parallels to our time. He just describes what happened in the Spanish Civil War.

And then it's so obviously similar to some of the dynamics we're contending with. Yeah, I love the part of the AOC clip where she's like, well, of course, we all always could agree that we would like the crime rate to be lower. Like, no, we bloody well didn't. I very specifically recall that that was a major point of dispute. that you people brought this was your whole thing. You wanted more crime. You wanted a crime to be legal. You were like, it's racist to want crime to be illegal.

That was the whole pitch. Jacob Fry said he didn't want to fund the police and was shouted out of a rally in Minneapolis. And there were so many instances. And I mean, of course, AOC, like her job, her skill, her superpower is to be shameless. I almost don't begrudge it of her and it's pointless to point out the hypocrisy, but it's like, that is not a thing that we all could agree on.

I mean, people are still saying no human is illegal, which if you translate it out of woke ease just means I want illegal immigration to not be prosecuted. I want the border laws to be broken with impunity all across this wide land. So no, we don't all agree AOC that we want to have lower crime. A lot of people in your party, including kind of you, want more crime. That's like a thing that you desire. So then, right, we come to this interest. I mean, I don't know if you've gotten yet Emily to this piece in the Atlantic by...

Yes, Tyler Austin Harper, who's brilliant writers. Yes. Such a great writer. And this is one of his real, you know, tours to force about his experience at Bay. as a tenure-track professor and gradually realizing through the wildness of woke, or woke-wonness I guess we're now calling it, you know, through the process of COVID and the racial reckoning, he starts to understand that he has also been a beneficiary in unmeasurable ways of a frantic push for minority hires, and because he's a highly intelligent and morally sensitive individual,

he realizes that actually this has been a terrible disservice to him that is now obligating him to all kinds of tokenization and making him into like a kind of pawn in this big racial game that's being played by people. And this is a key point in the piece, right? by people who are really just trying to see why, just trying to cover their own problems, including the fact that the university is bleeding money,

the American university is bleeding money for all sorts of other reasons, right? And Occupy Wall Street and sort of the Bernie era made extravagant displays of luxury seem suspect. And so academia, which had previously been very left-coded. You know, it was generally thought, yes, we're for liberalism and we're for kind of, you know, we are on the side of free thought in academia.

But now, of course, wealth is suspect. And so you start to get this thing, well, like, what are these people doing in these ivory towers with their snuff and their Turkish delights as they lounge about and discuss ideas, right? Like, shouldn't they also be dismantled and torn down? And, like, this was a way of getting back on side, you know, woke for the academics, at least was a way of reestablishing their bona fides as leftist in good standing. And the only way to do that was by going all in on this completely deranged and demented, racial theorizing.

And what's key about the Tyler Austin Harper piece is that, you know, he speaks from a place of sympathy to the general set of ideas that produced woke. I think he would call himself a man of the left or he's left leaning and he's a leftist. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So fair. So he's a full on leftist. And he, you know, on the one hand, I think for us conservatives, there can be some frustration of like, yes, we've been telling you this the whole time, right? We all like if only somebody had been saying that woke was deranged and that affirmative action had run out of all proportion and that it would, you know, but on the other hand, it's like this has to, this is the sort of thing that has to happen. You know, the people need to hear this from within the left because in reality, when I'm not being a kind of snarky pundit, like I want there to be a robust and intellectually credible left in this country.

And I therefore want leftists with integrity and intellectual acumen to kind of put words to this for their fellow leftists. And I do think that, like, that's another way of saying the centrists here have to reclaim the mantle. I mean, I'm not sure if they really are going to count as centrists anymore in the new landscape. That might be a meaningless term. But that's definitional, right? Like, can we put this post from Rachel Jen Faza up on the screen? She says, I've been asking Gen Z voters in our focus group to define socialism and there's not a real consensus on what it actually means. I've yet to have a focus group participant tell me they're fully a democratic socialist, even if they like the policies, DSA candidates.

propose. And interestingly, Jessica Tarlov was talking about how compared with like Dorealiza Avila Chevalier, AOC is a moderate, right? Like a quote, moderate. That was the label that she used because the Overton window, I suppose, is shifting so dramatically on the left. So I guess this question of what, it's not that Tyler Austin Harper is a centrist, but he's a centrist on this question of whether we should be focusing on identity. And that's where it's just, it's kind of mind-bending to comprehend, but it's obviously a real problem. Yeah, well, you get all these memes, right, of I didn't change, but then the left moved further and further left.

And you see these are kind of boomer memes. You see them on Facebook, right? Like I stood here, and then, you know, I was in the center, and then the left ran all the way over here and suddenly I was an extremist or whatever. But there's a trend to which is these sort of relative terms of political oriental. are subject to redefinition depending on where the country is at.

And if the country has gone insane or if there's a major upheaval going on, like your previously moderate point of view becomes this radical extreme kind of far right or far left idea. And it's one of many reasons. I mean, I imagine you will agree with you about this. Emily, like that these firms kind of don't really help that much anymore to carve reality up. I think left and right still have a certain amount of meaning, but like center, moderate, even to some extent, liberal, like these have been warped out of all proportion.

Another thing I discuss in a way with words, why language makes human irreplaceable, is that, you know, George Orwell writes a very powerful essay about this also from within the left to the left. So it's like we remember Orwell now as the great critic of the Soviet Union and 1984 is sort of sending up the linguistic depredations of the Soviets. But it's equally about like the BBC and this essay, politics in the English language is very much written by somebody. I mean, he fought, speaking of the Spanish Civil War, he fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco.

I mean, the guy got a bullet in the neck for this, you know. And so it was nothing of not committed to a certain variety of European. Not Spanish. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. So, like, you know, this guy, but he then writes this essay where he's like, the word fashion doesn't mean anything anymore. You know, this is in 1954, he writes this piece.

You know, so now it's like we use the word fascist or we use communist or whatever. And yeah, I'm not surprised that these kids have no idea what that means. And that for them, DSA just means, you know, we want change. We want this big, radical change. And I think there's a degree to which, something very drastic has to change about American government and life in the next 10 years.

I think that's probably true. And I think that even good old-fashioned yuck-yup constitutionalists like me who work for the Claremont Institute and believe in the American idea and think that the Declaration of Independence is still basically how we should run the country, you know, plus the Constitution, that will itself represent a radical change. If we do, you know, there are many, many areas. This is Pinkowski's point about the revolution and the counter revolution. Yeah. Exactly. There are many, many areas. It's a revolution to want to abolish the administrative state, basically.

And the semantic question is important. Right. You see this in, like, oral arguments, if you nerd out like me on Supreme Court oral arguments. I think it was Trump v. slaughter. I think it was the case about kind of whether the president can fire, you know, deep state bureaucrats. Yeah, exactly. And Sonomaior, Sonia Sotomayor, was quizzing the lawyer for the Trump administration being like, this represents an upheaval of how we have done government for the past 50 years. Like her line of questioning was basically, how can you ask us, you know, this is just we are the government now.

This is America. Like this is the way the government now works. And in a weird way, like Sonia Sotomayor is right. You know, if you do actually restore executive power, if you do restore. congressional power, if you actually take non-delegation seriously, like, you're going to make some radical changes to the way the government works in America. And like that too, you know, there's no version of that forward that isn't like a major transformation. So I think perhaps like some of these young leftists, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt because they're young and don't know

anything. It's like they probably are sensing some of that and they think that one needs to change is that we need to all become socialists, whatever that means to that or something. I don't know. Oh, that is a super interesting point. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more of Spencer Claven and his Japanese gin martini in one moment. Everybody's talking about weight loss injections because the results are obviously so dramatic. But those work by lowering blood sugar and reducing your appetite. So what if you're looking to lose weight? But you're not interested in painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of those intense side effects. Well, that's why doctors created a weight loss supplement called lean and the results are remarkable. The studied ingredients in lean have been shown to lower your blood sugar, burn fat, by converting it into energy, and curb your appetite and cravings, so you're not as hungry.

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Megan Romer did with David Remnick of the New Yorker. The DSA has been putting its people in front of corporate press and a lot of actually popular outlets in the last couple of weeks, especially since the latest surge happened. And Romer went on, I think she's been on Fox News. Other DSA leaders have been on Fox News. They're trying to demystify the idea of the DSA is something, this is my take, that's radical and frightening. Here's how that went for Megan Romer with David Remnick,

who is, of course, a man of the left of the left of us. Do you believe there should be millionaires in this country? I'm less concerned about millionaires, more concerned about billionaires. I don't have like a hard line where it's, where you're, How much is what I'm asking is how much is too much? Yeah, I think the question is less about how much is too much and more about what are you doing to keep and maintain and get that wealth in the first place? I think most billionaires got their wealth because they exploited the working class in some very significant way, usually.

Are we exploiting people is the bigger question, as opposed to some sort of arbitrary red line of, you can have this much money or not have that much money. But we do believe in taxing the hell out of millionaires. Taxing the hell of a million. Okay, so basically the contention there is that you can't be a billionaire without being exploitive. But, and I don't know, that's kind of a separate argument. But this question of whether or not, what is enough?

This question from David Remnick is a really interesting one because it's a good one with taxation as well. How much taxation is moral? What should the government be able to take away from you? it's such an interesting question to a movement that kind of grew out of the boomer free to be you and me individualist hippie movement Spencer and I think that's probably why she struggles with it ultimately well you'll notice an interesting thing about that question that David Redneck asks which is that it involves some thinking like there's a

specific thought that he's doing he's like asking how we parse these ideas and whether we can like sharpen their clarity and zero in on exactly what their implications are. And you can tell from the look on her face that that's not a mode she's used to operating it. And I'm not trying to be unkind. I'm actually trying to pull my punches here. But like, you know, this is a philosophy and a political program that contains negative thought. in it. Like, there's not any actual ideas here. There are sentinets. Like, for example, ew billionaires, right? Uh, rich people. You know, there's a certain aesthetic and a certain visceral reaction that people are having to lug to extravagant displays as well.

Including Trump voters. And you know, right. Well, I was going to say, you know what, But like, I am by no means so doctrinaire a capitalist that I feel like it's unreasonable to be grossed out by, you know, Jeff Bezos making a gazillion dollars while people pee into bottles in Amazon factories, right? Like, I just, you know, you know, and I think we share this, like, I am somebody who thinks that capitalism is a jewel of the West that has been created. within a vast structure. It's a jewel in a crown, and the crown is like Christendom. It's a tool of Christendom. Yeah, it's a tool of liberalism.

Exactly. So it exists, therefore, importantly, within Christian and then liberal country. It's a product of this, yes, of this Western moral framework. And therefore, there's absolutely no reason to expect that it would, be appropriate or moral to trade with non-Christian, non-liberal countries in a capitalist way,

or that it would work, right? Because it doesn't take place within the set of assumptions and values that we have kind of going into capitalism. When we bought into capitalism, I guess, we were like, there are certain kind of guard rails and boundaries around us. So I understand that, like, those guard rails and boundaries have all been broken down. and therefore now capitalism is not working at the level and in the way that it's being sold as working. And this is something that I think people both on the right and on the left are reacting to. And so in some ways, I actually empathize with you, billionaires.

Like, I grasp that that is a reaction that you might have looking at the world today. Certainly me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. on the other hand, I generally try to make it a habit to adopt political positions which go beyond like, you billionaires, right? Like I try to sort of like adorn them. I try to sort of spin out my gut reactions with some thinking. With first principles and limiting principles.

Right. And I think that's what they're, I think that's why she couldn't answer that question. Exactly. The first principle is that issue. Well, it's like, it's both. It's like first and second order thinking, right? Like, the first order thinking would be, what do I actually believe that sort of leaves me to have this reaction? Second order thinking would be like, if I take steps to remedy this problem, like, what will the consequences be? Like, what will the consequences of the various steps be? And David Brerick is just asking her to consider, right? Like, so, okay, you don't like billionaires. Your response to that is going to be to what taxed amount of existence or, like, like, you know, you're going to do the Suramamongani thing where you'll name and shame them and then chase them out of your city.

It's like, what's going to happen when you do that? It's like that nobody ever asks these people to have that fault. And I think like the result is not going to be good. I also don't think, by the way, that this is necessarily a winning strategy. I know I said that this is kind of the only route forward for the Democrats. And I do think that's true. But it's very possible that that means that Democrats are kind of hamstrung in a weird way, despite all of the problems that the second Trump administration has had. I think, you know, we'll face an uphill battle on the right in 2026 and 28. But I also think that the Democrats are like boxed into some of this bad thinking. and therefore they are going to struggle to persuade a lot of people.

That's my hope, at least. Well, actually, on that point, speaking of the delineation between woke one and woke two, allegedly, I want to talk about a story on Canada that's not getting a lot of attention. I'm reading from the Catholic Register here, quote, a new Canadian Armed Forces policy that bars military chaplains from offering faith-specific prayers at official events with mandatory personnel attendance is drawing response from military faith advisors as well as calls in Ottawa for its reversal. The Canadian Armed Forces military personnel instruction, this is what it's talking about.

It's called spiritual reflections in military settings. Issue July 29th says chaplains must instead offer a spiritual reflection when prayers or religious observations are requested at official government events where CAF members are expected or required to attend. The policy includes events such as graduation parades and change of command ceremony, ship commissionings, honor ceremonies, mess dinners, and remembrance state commemorations. And Spencer, I'd actually love to hear Megan Romer's take on this. because what it's really doing is testing liberalism, is it not?

I mean, it's such a rich text. This whole decision is just like... Something nobody's ever said about Canadian audiences. Exactly, exactly. I, you know, would teach a seminar just doing a close reading of this ordinance. Like, I'm not entirely joking about that. Okay, where to begin? Like, yes, of course, the assumptions of liberalism are just baked into this whole decision,

that there could be such a thing as a spiritual reflection, which is faith non-specific, is like an amazing theological proposition that if you put it to Thomas Aquinas, I think his head would spontaneously explode like a grenade. Like, I think he would just be so appalled with that thought that, you know. So that in itself is amazing, right, and demonstrates the invisibility of liberalism, state religion, which is basically kind of depersonalized woo, right? But I think there's another thing here, which is countries like Canada love to pretend that they have this long tradition of religious liberty.

And other countries, like in Europe, also love to do this. And this is a way of getting out of saying that, like, we in Pennsylvania, the Americans kind of came up with this idea. Like, I understand that, yes, there was John Milton. Yes, there was the English Civil War. And we are kind of, like, rooted in this English common law tradition. And yes, the Enlightenment was, you know, floating these ideas before America was founded. But it's really America that sort of said, okay, this is our national creed, right?

This is the way we do things in this country, is that we actually protect worship from the government because we believe in private conscience as an inextricable ingredient of faith. It's not the only thing that is involved in faith. We're not such radical voluntarists that we think that it's the individual will alone that matters. But we do think that without personal assent, there is no love of God, right? Their love is chosen and whatever. So we're going to protect that from the state because we've seen what happens when the state takes it in hand to dictate that to people. And we think it's also just inherently counterproductive, right?

That was a radical new idea. And countries like Canada, countries like France, you know, these European nations, like, were so astounded by that and was so successful that they now feel obliged to pretend that, like, yeah, we also have always been on board with that. Absolutely freaking not. Like, the entire, may I allow me to direct your attention to the entire, history of Europe. Like, can we just sort of reference that for a second and understand that these are not countries with deep, rich histories of religious liberty? And they don't actually understand it or

know how to do it very well. And so when they undertake to quote unquote protect religious liberty, it's always a bit, how do you do fellow kids? Because, like, that's not what religious liberty is, you know, like this thing. And I recognize that, like, in America, we have also fallen under this misapprehension. You know, we do ourselves have. this history of mistaken jurisprudence that associates religious liberty with total religious neutrality in the public square, which is never what it was intended to mean. And we probably don't have time to sort of like articulate. We don't need to bring Michael Knowles into this conversation. Yeah, no, exactly. He's not here.

He's not hovering. Whenever you pour yourself a martini, Michael Knowles does appear. It's like saying Buddy Mary. Exactly. It's like saying Buddy Mary three times in the mirror. Like he just, you know, materializes when you, when you're drinking martinis. But, but, but, You know, we don't need to get into all of this, but like, basically, in America also, we've made the mistake of turning religious liberty into freedom from religion. And it's really freedom to practice your religion. And what we have is something veering toward this, the French idea of laicité, which actually is the idea of secularism in the public square, right?

Like, the best do have that idea. But it's, again, because in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were like, hmm, this whole religious Liberty thinks used to be bucking very well. Let us now also pretend that our many centuries of nation is like into that too. But they weren't, you know, like nobody was into this until we made it a thing. And so like the part where they, where they do this in Canada and they turn around, they're like, you see, like these Americans are so, they're so papist and they're so oppressive and they do all this.

It's like, no, no, no. You people are getting this all terribly wrong. And then you're turning around and you're telling us that we got this thing wrong. It's like, don't religion, don't freedom of religion explain our traditions to us, you know? And I definitely think that, I mean, if we decide, if we go for the secularist route that these European countries and Commonwealth countries like Canada are adopting, then all of the other problems that we're talking, who we've been talking about this evening are going to get worse. Because the gates that we were talking about that make capitalism work and the moral framework that might enable you to think more clearly about your reactions against billionaires and all of the ways that we would want to build like a robust anti-woke or post-woke society, they all depend on some role for religion in shaping our public life. Like, that is the bitter pill that everybody is going to have to swallow, I think, if we're going to get out of this. It's like, there are theological premises that are necessary to make America work.

And yeah, you got to have it. I was just to say, but read Dominion, folks. Read your Tom Holland. Speaking of which, we are going to get to Spider-Man in just a moment. But I had to get your reaction to Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's 6500 word piece today. Because actually you wrote a book called Light of the Mind, Light of the World, you were on the show to talk about it. And a great book.

And Zuckerberg seems to be like much of the tech world expressing a confusion over AI dumerism. And I know you have a nuanced take on this. And a lot of people have nuanced takes on this. But let's first watch a new video from Zuckerberg kind of trying to inject his perspective into what's been happening, the swirl of anti-data center, anti-tech, everything that's happened in recent months. All right. Hey, so I think that the key to building a positive future for everyone is to make sure that everyone has access to personal superintelligence. So today, I am proud to share that we are open sourcing a new class of on-device models. I know. I feel so bad for people to do Instagram lives.

We're starting a new future is for everyone. It's just as a media. It's not flattering. teachers, first responders, energy and water infrastructure, and more ways to support those communities directly. We're also working to make sure that everyone has a personal super intelligence agent that works 24-7 on your behalf to improve your health, your relationships, your career, your finances, and more. The skincare routine, Zuck. Oh, seriously. I'm going to call mine. By the way, I'm going to call mine, Spencer. I'm more fun to have a drink. You can just call me up, you know.

That's true. I can. But this is all happening amidst, I think the two big kind of populist explosions right now are data centers and flock cameras. And it's kind of interesting. So Variety said in a 6,500 word manifesto titled the futures for everyone, the meta CEO laid out the company's philosophy around AI as one rooted in, quote, individual empowerment as a source of prosperity. Arguing the introduction of artificial superintelligence will transform humanity and the general population, and that the general population, rather than select AI companies, should harness this potential and that the U.S. should not restrict access. to open source models. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future Zuckerberg wrote, the notion that AI is so dangerous that the only path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. I'm going to do a bit of a weave here, but it'll make sense. It'll make sense to you, Spencer. You got to do the weave, the weave. You got to the weave. Yep. Here's an ABC News report actually on some flock camera malfeasance in Georgia. This is from just yesterday.

Six former Savannah Police Department employees are now under criminal investigation. They were recently fired for allegedly misusing these controversial surveillance cameras made by the company flock. Totally artists. I'm disappointed. I'm pissed off about it. I also want to mention the Washington posted a report last week. They found authorities have charged are accused at least 50 law enforcement officers of using license plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent. In 26 of the cases, police investigators and prosecutors said the officers use the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their ex's partners, exes, new partners are women they wanted

to meet. Now, Charles Fane Lehman has a piece worth reading that's a defense of flock in the Atlantic. The Free Press, where you write, has defended them as well. Politico had a story finding where one local official said flock work boots and Subaru's people with work boots and Subaru's have came to protest and protest flock cameras recently. And the weave here is to say, Spencer, I'm curious for your take on all of this, but I also think what's happening is kind of healthy in that the reason we are learning about some of these abuses of the flock cameras, which Charles and others would say have solved many crimes, is that people are upset about the excesses of the surveillance state, the way that some people have abused the system,

logged in, tracked their girlfriends, and could continue to do that in the future because it's a very powerful tool in the hands of the government. Just as AI is a very powerful tool in the hands of concentrated power via corporations, Zuckerberg is trying to say, if the government implements regulations, it makes them more powerful than the corporations. The reality is that it makes them both really powerful at the same time. And so I, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm I feel like what's happening with data centers, like the reason Zuckerberg is saying he's donating all this money and others are because people have said they're pissed about the data centers. And then the tech companies have responded by infusing cash into these local communities. And so it's almost healthy in a sense.

There's an ecosystem that's kind of flourishing. We'll see if it flourishes. But the early signs are that they're getting pushed in a better direction, I suppose. I don't know. Give me your take on all of it. Well, this is like one reason why you can't just say crazy stuff. And then be like, just kidding. Like here's the same normal version of the thing I believe, right?

Like, because when you say the crazy thing, you actually discredit the same normal version of the thing. So this is where I think we see this in a lot of places. I think we see it, for example, in like, sex and gender discourse, right? Where people will be like, all sex is rape. And you're like, okay, hold on what? And then you're like, oh, wait, no, no, no, no.

We're doing a wave of feminism now where all we really need is like, don't, don't rape people, you know? Is that a judic butlerism? Do you understand why people are now more skeptical of that point of view than they would have been? If you hadn't first, all sex is raped, right? Like, you know, these things, you can't just, like, go back and control Z that stuff. You know, that's not actually how that works. And so I think with the tech also, we're having this moment where, you know, these guys came out. They were like, we're building God.

Yep. I'm a, I'm, you know, I'm a rail-thin, pasty-faced sociopath. and I've figured out how to build God and you will submit or die. You know, I'm only being a little bit facetious. Yep. And now it's like, people were sort of like, hmm, if that's the case, then we should probably destroy every computer. Like, if you actually think that, then I think the rational response is just... Or I can track my ex and play God.

Yep, it's one of the two. Exactly, exactly. Right. So it's like people were then like, okay, then full loveism. And now they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're not actually building God. We're not going to replace God. We can't even really make this thing flip a pizza effectively yet.

But like we do want it to help you write your emails. And to do that, we'd like some space to build some data centers. Right. And if we hadn't had the building God part first, then we could have been like, okay, let's talk about the data centers. You know, maybe can we make them look nice? Can we do some stuff or brown them or whatever? But you already did been building God,

and you told us that we were doomed Luddite buffoons for suggesting that that was maybe not so good. And you censored us and offered 52 genders. Yes, you were also part of that. Right, you sort of signed up for that. whole thing as well when you thought that that was where the power lies. And so now we're going to beat up a couple security cameras. You know, like, and I don't really know enough about these, these cameras to have an

informed opinion about them, be perfectly frank. Like, it's just one of the things that I've excused myself from being informed about and having to be able to. I would like to exclude myself from this narrative, Taylor Swift, Spencer Claven. Sometimes you just, you know, you have to be selected about, yeah, you give yourself a pass on like, you know, one issue per new cycle. And this is one that I've given myself a pass on. So, but I will just say it's like, let's imagine for a second that these are useful

technologies, which seems plausible to me, that they, they do helpful things and are, you know, anti-crime. The fact that people are vandalizing useful technologies is a one of the negative consequences that occurs when you lose all sense of proportion and browbeat people and go maximalist. I think this is through, I think you're right that like people are having this reaction to all tech now. And they're having it because for many, many years, those of us who objected were sort of like, do you think it might be good not to insert an internet jack into the spinal column of, an eight-year-old that just sluces porn and garbage into his brain 24-7, right?

That was basically what we're saying. We were like, maybe kids shouldn't have phones. And it was like, there's no data system to support that whatsoever. Like, children are going to have phones, whether you like it or not. And so we're putting them in every classroom. And now it turns out that was kind of a bad idea. And so people are a little bit antsy about like rolling out new tech, you know? And it's like, as you indicated, I like AI.

I'm pretty chill with Claude most of the time. You know, I use it for research sometimes. These guys that come along, they're like, you know, it's going to write all the poetry. And every writer is now out of a job. And I'm like, you look like a person who's literally never read a poem. Like, an poem has never crossed your desk. And now you're telling me it's like, this thing has written the best poem ever. It's like, you don't even know what a poem is.

And the reason I know you don't know what a poem is, because you're telling me a machine can write one. So this whole thing is like completely cuckoo bananas. And yeah, I do feel that we're in this era of backlash, and it's got its own dangers. And it creates all sorts of excesses of its own. But I do understand it. I understand my people in the accuracy.

Yeah, and point the finger at tech. They created the situation. This is their bed. They can lie in it. By the way, just for what it's worth, you could construct a full panopticon and give me all of the statistics on how much more safe it's made us. That's not exactly the argument. Good point. It's a question of priorities and value.

Yeah, yeah. And you wrote a piece, actually speaking of AI for Unheard, where we both write about Spider-Man, which I have not seen. But you wrote, this could turn out to be a pivotal summer for movies. Spider-Man, brand new day. Tom Holland's fourth feature did a different Tom Holland for what it's worth. with feature film is the fucking web slinger from Queens. Just made almost a billion dollars globally over its opening weekend. Its domestic earnings surpassed the world record set by the franchise capping Avengers Endgame in 2019. Cinema can still offer something that home entertainment cannot.

I love this line. The sense that you have left your house to encounter something worth leaving it for. Now, you were joined in positive reviews by Andrew Yang, who said, when I was a kid, it was always Spider-Man or Batman as my favorite character. I learned Spider-Man because of the teen. I think he meant to say I loved Spider-Man because of the teen angst. That's the spirit of the new movie. Back to the character's roots.

Super interesting comment here in a note from Morgan Stanley's Nick Savone that Zero Hedge posted. There's something oddly reassuring about seeing this nostalgic boom this summer. Spider-Man, Mario, and the Devil Wars prod out of name a few. They're back in the conversation decades after they first arrived. Everything old is new again. Well, that's just the plain reboot conversation. You could say that about the Odyssey.

We've been having this conversation for the last, I don't know, 10 plus years. That sounds to me like Wall Street not understanding actually what's happening with Spider-Man. Because as Andrew Yang points out, Spencer, it's kind of a departure from where the reboot world was going. Yeah. Well, I will say that piece is about, is more about the context within which Spider-Man is succeeding than about Spider-Man itself. Like, as you rightly indicate. Like, because to be honest with you, if they never made another superhero movie ever again, I would not know this.

It would be with you. Thank you. This is the problem with conservative cultural criticism. It's all dudes that want to talk about super heroes. It's a problem. One of the problem. One of them. One of them.

So that's my kind of premise going into this movie. And the fact that it made a billion. So there's two movies this summer that have made basically a billion dollars. One of them is Christopher Nolan's that, of the Odyssey and the other is Spider-Man, which made a billion dollars on its opening weekend. So even vastly more than

the Nolan movie. And what's interesting to me about this is that this has just been what the movies were for about a decade. You know, about 10 years we've had where that's what movies are. They're just these

endless reiterations of the same five characters and story art. And even the new stories are told according to the same set of thought marks. And so they had this quality of starting to feel AI generated even before there was AI. It was very clearly a sign of a dead industry and a dead culture, which are two separate but related things, right? It was like that we didn't have any new ideas as a civilization and that this business and industry had become so. attached to its ways of doing things that it was spinning in this little cul-de-sac,

like when the Waymo's, you know, it gets back to the cul-de-stack and it just started chasing each other in a circle. Like, that was kind of what Hollywood felt like. And this summer has been this really amazing, like, breakout, where the Waymo has suddenly found their way back onto the road, you know? And it was like, oh, it started with Project Hail Mary, which was a book adaptation, but was kind of unusual. and family friendly and really well done.

And then we had a month where these two indie horror movies, backrooms and obsession, were huge, and all of the kids were going to them. And at the same time, not to rejoice in others' failure, but, you know, Mandalorian and Grogu did really badly. Disclosure Day, totally underperformed, the Steven Spielberg movie. Masters of the Universe.

I mean, these are all movies, I will confess to you, that I was rooting for these movies to fail because I just don't think that it's good for us to have these movies exist. And importantly, it's because they don't cater to children. These are children's movies that don't cater to children. These are children's movies for adults, and there's something unhealthy about that.

The Disney Adult, yeah. Yeah, yeah, these are Disney Adol movies, big time. And so the fact that they were, because previously it was like, well, I hate these movies, but they make money and therefore the studios have to make them in order to support the making of movies generally. But it's like if they stop making money, that's a horse of a different color, right?

Then we are in a world where audiences are actually hungry for something new, and they're hungry for these creators whom they know and love through YouTube because they've been shut out of the studio system because the studio system is so in awe to this gazillion dollar model where they have to make these giant meaning

trash movies about superheroes, you know? And so we kind of felt like we were achieving a liftoff from that pattern. Even with the Odyssey, which love it or hate it, right, is a movie based on a Greek poem. Like, there's a real unusualness to that movie, and it was thought-provoking, and people had substantive, meaningful discussions about it.

And, like, if you think Nolan has unduly Christianized the Odyssey or if you think that he has legitimate, inserted Christian values into it, you know, that's a really sophisticated conversation for the whole country to be having, you know, like that part of it was just really good for, in my view. And so when Spider-Man made a billion dollars, I was kind of like, oh, no, like, are we going to get, are we just going to go back, you know, and we might, we might just go back to, you know, more schlock. But I will say that I haven't seen Spiders. I know Matt Walsh hates it. I know there's some people that are

upset about it. I can see why this movie made a billion dollars. You know, like, it's got Tom Holland in it, who's incredibly charming. It's got a romance at the center of it, which a lot of these movies lack. And it doesn't do any weird books. You know, it just kind of

goes through the usual story beats of a superhero movie. And so I think we're going to always live in a world where those movies make a lot of money. You know, I don't actually think that's the problem. I don't think the problem is that movies about superheroes with handsome stars in handsome, handsome young stars

and them were succeeding. The problem was that that was the only kind of movie we seemed to be able to make. And I have noticed that my tolerance for these kind of rote blockbuster summer roller coaster ride type movies has gone way, way up now that there are other movies

in the conversation that matter and are interesting. and our novel. And I sort of suspect, and this is where I landed the unheard piece, I sort of suspect that in the age of AI, you're actually going to see more of these movies because the other, like,

you're going to see more good, sort of decent, fine block clusters because the schlock stuff can be made by computer. So every movie now has to justify its existence more than it previously had to. Every human-made movie. And my hope, I don't think this is a guarantee, but my hope is that that will mean

higher-quality blockbusters and fewer blockbusters surrounded by a lot of novel, interesting creations. Like back rooms, which is tangled up in the web, yeah. Yes. I didn't mean to see the web. That makes me.

The web of the slightly web. And the worldwide web? The weave of the world. wide web and the spidey web. It's just, it's all connected. No, I mean, like, those are the movies I want to see, right? I don't want to see Spider-Man. I don't care about Spider-Man.

Like, I don't need to see it, you know? But I'm not, I'm not upset that it's succeeding. I think, like, it's fine that it's succeeding. I think, like, it makes a lot of sense. I want to see a thousand back rooms, right? I want to see, like, way more movies like that. And I think we will get a shot of having that because those movies did so well. We're probably going to see a lot of creepy pasta movies, a lot of movies that come out of this online lore universe.

But I hope we'll also see just more YouTube creators who are making, I mean, there are making these young Gen Z guys really high quality stuff. And not for nothing, but a lot of them are young white guys who got shafted by woke, you know, who got. got selected against by these criteria that meant nothing. And they went off and they generated their own careers. And I really hope we'll see them getting kind of ushered into the mainstream movie world because that would be an actual triumph. Spencer Claven, it is such a pleasure to have you here. I don't even want to stop talking.

Spencer's an associate. Claremont, one day we'll just have to do a marathon. Spencer, we'll have to set aside three hours. He's the author of the book that's going to be out in February. It's called Away with Words. language makes humans irreplaceable. Spencer, thank you so much for taking the time. Staying up late. Really appreciate it. I raise my Japanese jing blast to you, Emily. It's always a delight. And I hope we'll do it in person next time I'm in D.C. Yes, sir. I raise my plastic cup of bourbon

to you. See you. See you. We'll be right back with more after this. Cozyrith has built a massive following, myself included, of course, for their ultra luxurious sheets, which I have been using for years, and as you know, I love. People love them because they bring a premium five-star resort feeling right into the bedroom. And now that exact same level of luxury is available for the beach or by the pool. Because your premium beach towels completely change the game for summer outings. They really are like those amazing fluffy towels that you get at a fancy resort. And then you go to a store and you try to find them, but you can't, they're here. I found them. Unlike standard scratchy towels, they get stiff after a day in the sun. These are

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the league is obviously in crisis over the weekend. Sophie Cunningham, who's spoken out against men and women's sports, of course, and has defended Caitlin Clark against some of the obvious aggression that goes beyond what the rules of the game allow. It is in complete total crisis. She took a shot to the face that was called flagrant two over the weekend. But I really think this is becoming dangerous. I do think at some point, unfortunately, and sooner rather than later, it's going to become, or we're going to see an example of genuine danger visiting the players of the WMBA. Someone is going to get seriously hurt. And I hope that's not what it takes. I hope I'm wrong. And that's not what it takes for the WNBA to recover its

senses. I sort of resent having to talk about the WNBA. No offense to all of the dozens of WNBA fans out there. Listen, I played high school basketball myself, played basketball for a long time. I get it. It's a great sport. It's a great sport for women, but it's boring as hell. I hear you if you like it. You're in the minority. No problem. But here's a little bit of and as Cancer Freedom's announcement of he's declaring for the WNBA draft. After careful consideration and review in the current eligibility guidelines,

I am officially declaring myself a WMBA prospect. If simply declaring who you are is all that's required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WMBA. My team and I have carefully examined the WMB's eligibility criteria and governing framework

surrounding self-identification and inclusion. Based on the current guidelines, I can and am officially declaring my eligibility for the upcoming WMBA draft in May 27. I am definitely not here to mock, make fun of, or to suspect any community or personal choices. I am simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone. The rules that represent the very values many WMBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for. My team and I are prepared to ensure these guidelines are applied equally, consistently and without exception. and I look forward to the WMBA honoring its stated principles.

See you at training camp. See you at training camp. So again, he said, if simply declaring who you are is all that's required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA. So he's obviously revealing the absurdity of the WMBA's rules that if he's correct and those are the rules, then he should be able to compete. And let me be clear, as I was saying earlier, I actually don't want to. to see this because it would legitimately be dangerous and people would get hurt.

And Ness Cancer Freedom would be, even if he's trying as hard as he can be not to be dangerous, it would be dangerous to the women playing in the WNBA. We have seen this happen in high school sports. Men in basketball and women's basketball is a recipe for danger. And so I actually hope that it doesn't come to NES cancer freedom playing in the WNBA. But what we know now from reporting at ESPN is that some of the the top brass, the WNBA is going to be meeting to decide how to deal with this. Two former NBA players or two male basketball stars declaring for the WNBA draft is who are

willing to push this to its limits, to push this to whatever limiting principle they have or don't have is a real crisis for them. And now they have to confront it. And so good on these guys for forcing them to confront the absurdity of all of it because people are going to, honestly, people in high school sports, more people are going to get hurt. The WNBA holds itself up as an example for younger women. So if that's what they are, and if they're trying to model what competition should look like, then they should have a completely clear stance on this.

And I also just want to point out, there's a lot of finger pointing happening now towards the right. This has been going on forever, but saying, oh, conservative. just want to talk about the culture war. They're fomenting all of this chaos within the WNBA. Would you please just leave us alone? But I thought it would actually be worth going back how this most recent wave started, this most recent wave of, that's the right way to put it, controversy in the WNBA started. Of course, it came with Caitlin Clark, joining the Indiana fever coming off of that remarkable NCAA tournament when she was with Iowa. And the line soon became only

people only care about the WNBA because Caitlin Clark is a white cis straight woman people are coming to the WNBA and watching Caitlin Clark because she's a white cis straight woman and she happens to be pretty good but there have been many

black or gay players before her who haven't gotten this level of attention and the WNBA or American society at large is racist and sexist and homophobic because of all of that. Well, it's just worth revisiting why Caitlin Clark originally got pretty famous. This is from February 15, 2024. Caitlin Clark of Iowa breaks NCAA women's career scoring record with 35-foot three-pointer.

Let's then go to this piece from Bleacher Report. This is also, let me pull up the date on this one. if they have it. I hate it when they don't put the date. March 8th, 2024. Iowa's Caitlin Clark breaks Steph Curry's record for most three-pointers in WNCAA season. All right, let's go on now to the WNBA. This is from Sports Illustrated, August 28, 2024, after she joins the WNBA. Caitlin Clark stands alone in WNBA history after breaking rookie three-point record. All right, let's keep going. A headline from just this July.

Caitlin Clark makes WNBA history as fastest player to 200 career three-pointers. Why does this matter? Because three-pointers make the WNBA much more entertaining. It makes women's NCAA basketball much more entertaining. It picks up the pace of the game. It's more fun to watch. There's nothing to do with Caitlin Clark being straight white cisgender. She'd made the game much more fun to watch because she was draining buckets from 35 feet.

the people who made this a racial issue or a sexual issue were the ones that created the culture war over the WNBA. Caitlin Clark is taking major fouls, aggressiveness that Sophie Cunningham then went viral for defending her over and is now facing even more scrutiny because she said that boys shouldn't play in girl sports and that causes the canter freedom. draft move. That all started because progressive WNBA players and fans decided to racialize Caitlin Clark's success in the WNCAA and then in the WNBA. Evidence on implicit bias testing. We went over this a couple of weeks ago on the show. You can go back and watch that episode.

There are academic studies that show America has made enormous progress to almost neutralize the question of bias, racial, bias. It's actually remarkable what's happened in this country. But miserable, resentful WNBA players are trying to drag us back because one of the best three-point shooters in the history of the game, we just went through these records, fastest player to 200 career three-pointers, broke the rookie three-point record, one of the best players ever come in with a game whose skill is actually making the game more exciting, right? Like, we're not, talking about Caitlin Clark's defense, she picks up the pace of the game by draining, again,

35 point buckets. Just makes it more fun to watch. They're the ones that are dragging this back, dragging us back as a society because they're resentful. And there's just not substantial, significant evidence that has anything to do with race or sex or sexual orientation. It's because Caitlin Clark very plainly, simply makes the game more fun to watch. It's one of the best to ever do I'm not even saying she's the best to ever do it because I don't know. But when you have a player who's draining three-pointers in the WNCA, the NCAA, I keep combining mentally at WMBA and NCAA. But when you have someone who's doing that,

picks of a pace of the game makes it more fun to watch, that's it. It's good. It's good for the WNBA. But unfortunately, it's been racialized to a point where referees are now, having to litigate race relations every time they call or don't call a foul. That is dangerous. It will be dangerous. The WMBA is so committed to its ideology that they let it Ness Cancer Freedom into the game and men into the game. That will be dangerous. It's not good for women. So what I just wanted to do was zoom out 30,000 feet, look at the arc of Caitlin Clark's fame,

and pin it to one specific attribute, which is that she's an amazing three-point shooter. She's a great player, but she's an amazing three-point shooter, and that's just fun to watch. Now, before we leave tonight's show, I did want to spend a bit of time on a post James Lindsay just made on X. I had James Lindsay on back at Undercurrents and had been happy to talk to him.

I was happy to talk to him them. about the quote woke right, which has gone in a somewhat different direction. But I did want to go through this essay he just posted to X because it's about my good friend Rachel Beauvard, obviously over at the Conservative Partnership Institute, who's going to be back on the show with Anez. We love having them together next week. And Rachel, this all started because in the last few days. Rachel defended a group called American Moment here in D.C. that's been associated with, like, the MAGA right against claims from Politico and, of course, Roderer, as we've talked about here, that there's some significant number of Republican staffers in Washington, D.C., who are, quote,

Groyper's. We're not talking about Groyper adjacent. We're talking about Groyper. So Rachel wrote a piece in The Daily Wire today, breaking down how bad the sourcing was in a recent Politico piece that it clearly was coming from like bitter ex-heritage staffers and or staffer, anonymous GOP consultants who could be from any wing of the party. And some of you may remember that when Rod first came to D.C. and reported someone told him 30 to 40 percent of Republican staffers in D.C. were Groyper's. I went and called up 10 sources who were all popular. lists except for one. And I say that because I think it's important. These are not just random anonymous people. And I posted their quotes. And they all said, that's crazy. Some of them said it could be

between 5 and 10%, which is obviously intolerably high. But Gripper is a specific word with a specific meaning. And let me put Lindsay's essay up on the screen. I did really want to push back on something he wrote in particular. I'll scroll down to it here. He says, the term groiper, formally and technically correctly, refers only to this cult who supports Nick Fuentes, specifically as a cult of personality.

And Bovards, at all point, is primarily that people are smearing non-Groopers, in the technical sense, as Groyper's in order to discredit this vanguardist political effort, they're actively engaged in. Fair enough. He says, the thing is, as a big fan of linguistic discipline and academic precision with language as I am, words don't work this way. Maybe they should. Maybe we should endeavor to be more careful, who knows? But they don't. The word groyper has escaped the so-called lab and taken on a life of its own. It's now used probably far more often as an unexamined

stand-in for a wide variety of mutually contradictory views on the new right that are groyperish enough to be getting on with. Now, the last quote I'm going to read is this. The problem is bigger than this, Lindsay writes, though in the other way. We know that a wide variety of views that include many crossovers with Groyper ideas, including racism, anti-Semitism, are rampant and young, politically active conservatives now. That sentence is interchangeable, honestly, with a woke left sentence that you could hypothetically conjure from 2019. Let me just monitor. It's not to justify it. The problem is bigger than this.

And the other way, we know that a wide variety of views that include many crossovers with misogynistic, rape culture, racist ideas are rampant and young politically active conservatives now. This is definition inflation. And Lindsay is on one hand saying he laments it. Maybe we should be more careful with it. Those are his words. And on the other hand, saying, but if we inflate the definition, it's hinting at something very real.

I'm here in DC. I've been here in DC for years. Rachel is here in DC. She's been here in DC for years. Many people that I know who have been in here for years, been here in DC for years, say the 30 to 40 percent number is absolutely bonkers. That's my experience. I worked with kids during COVID. I worked with conservative students during COVID as the head of the National Journalism Center. I had about one encounter with someone who I would say was a legitimate groper. And Lindsay goes on to talk about people who are, quote, hiding their power levels, which is a groiper thing. we try to find this, where they say they're doing this covertly, right? You won't know that they're a griper because they're intentionally hiding their power level

to subvert the institution from the inside. And that's, again, why I talked to 10 people who are populist Gen Z staffers. Again, of my 10 sources, nine were definitely populists, gen Z staffers who are in that milieu. And I promise you. would know if the number was 30 to 40% of people. They would know about the people who are hiding their power levels. I promise you. That number remains bonkers.

And the reason I wanted to respond to this, I mean, Rachel is getting smeared as all kinds of things just for standing up for what she says is the truth, which according to my reporting, I'm not just saying this. I've lived this. I've talked to... I did the work of, like, shoe leather reporting here and talking about... talk to people. This is what actually the picture looks like. Picture actually resembles something that might be more like 5 or 10 percent. Again, still intolerable. High, not okay. And I do think an increase.

But for saying that, Rachel's been smeared as an anti-Semite and the like. My point is that we should not accept definition inflation at all. I don't care if the term has escaped the lab. I do not care about it. You don't give into it. You could make that same argument about racism, misogyny, bigotry, quote, escaping the lab in the 2010s into 2020, which James Lindsay, by the way, did excellent work on with Helen Pluck Rose and the studies that they got published, the nonsense studies that they got published. Definition inflation is something that is so dangerous and divisive because nothing, rightfully, is more stigmatized in the United States, where we have spilled an enormous amount of blood to come to a place of racial neutrality, a true Christian egalitarianism.

All men are created equally, equal dignity in the image of God. We have spilled so much blood to get close to that place, to make progress towards that place. Definition inflation can't just be like, oh, oops, the term escaped the lab, so I'm going to use it anyway. That's unacceptable. It makes me really mad, as you can probably tell, because what that does is lump in decent, non-bigoted human beings, some of whom, by the way, may actually be black or brown minorities themselves or have black and brown children, family, just be decent human beings who push back on genuine racism or anti-Semitism in their own ways.

It lumps them in with bigots. That causes deep resentment, deep devoutement, deep devoutes. vision and it makes the anger and division in the country much worse. So I don't accept that a term has just escaped the lab saying, oh, maybe we should be more careful about it. No, precision is always important. And it's especially important when a term has escaped the lab, because that means it's probably lumping in people who are going to be incorrectly labeled bigots or fans of Fuentes, whatever that even means at this point. New York Times just had a big story

finding that Fuentes' views had gone down or Fuentes' I don't mean his political views. I mean his literal views had gone down. So whatever that means, I think it's likely that if you are like a card-carrying griper, it probably does mean some anti-American flavors of bigotry. Lumpy people in with that is a big deal. It's not just a whoopsy. The term escaped the lab, so I'm going to use it because it's

politically useful and it has a different connotation. Not acceptable. So I just wanted to say that. I know Rachel's going to be on next week, but I saw this and it really bothered me. And it's not obviously just about Beauvard. It's about these big divides on the right, which, honestly, I think is, listen, it's important to tend to the gates. towards actual genuine bigotry. But it really does run the risk of, like, meaning it into existence or making matters worse because people are going to be more resentful and say,

well, if you're going to call me this anyway, maybe I should give in to my worst instincts and impulses because I'm going to be called racist anyway, because the term escaped the lab. All right. So all that said, it also goes into, you know, one thing I disagree with Rod on is he said that J.D. needs to condemn anti-Semitism. He has. Rachel wrote about that in the daily wire. And again, I just think we need to be precise when we say things like, well, they haven't condemned this

or they have. He has. He has. And we just have to be very careful not to make the situation worse and to remain precise with our language because imprecise language is a big political and moral mistake that the left made over the last couple of decades that would be unwise for the right to repeat. This might be the record set. for longest after-party episode ever. Thank you all so much for stay in tuned. Appreciate it. We'll be back here Wednesday with more after-party. Hope you all have a wonderful evening. Make sure to subscribe. And again, we'll see you back here on Wednesday with more.