After Party with Emily Jashinsky - "Happy Hour": Christianity Without Christ?, JFK Conspiracies, and America’s Aging Leadership: Emily Answers YOUR Questions

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

On this week’s edition of “Happy Hour,” Emily Jashinsky opens with reflections on her recent trip back to Wisconsin to celebrate her late grandfather’s life. She also shares stories about the state’s famous supper clubs, accents, and thoughts about the disappearing quirks of regional American culture. Emily then dives into a wide-ranging discussion about Christianity, whether it’s possible to separate Christian values from belief in Christ, and how the woke movement has borrowed from Christian ideals. She also discusses the current state of journalism, why primary sources remain essential in the age of AI, and skepticism of the official account of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Later, Emily weighs in on Washington’s aging political class, immigration and assimilation, the criticism surrounding Justice Amy Coney Barrett, why the media is so fascinated by Zohran Mamdani, whether artificial intelligence could one day help lawmakers better represent their constituents, and more… Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, hello, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Happy Hour, which is, of course, itself, a special edition we do of After Party every Friday here on the podcast feed. Thank you so much for subscribing. If you're listening to this, it means you're probably subscribed on Apple or Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. So thank you for doing that. If you haven't subscribed over on the YouTube yet, that's probably one of the best ways to help us support our independent journalism that we're doing on After Party. So head over there, like, comment, all that stuff, leaving reviews on the podcast apps. It means a lot to us. Thank you. Now, just as a quick explainer, if you're new to Happy Hour, what I do is take your emails

all week at Emily at devilmaicaremedia.com. I flag them in my inbox and then I answer them live to tape here because it's just more entertaining and fun to do it that way. Plus, I love having these conversations with all of you through the emails to begin with. And just a quick thought, actually, on that. I think there's something about corresponding over email and then just being able to read the message and talk about it here on the show, that's almost, I don't know, what's the best way to put it? To me, I think it's a really constructive form of dialogue, not to sound kind of cheesy, but it just kind of gives you guys the opportunity to write out all of your thoughts. And then it gives me the space to just kind of be here in a room in my studio,

alone with my thoughts and alone with your emails. So I really like it, and I find it to be, I find it to be really helpful. So I'm glad many of you do as well. Let's now get to it. Abe sends a link here to Wisconsin Supper Clubs. It's a YouTube video headlined why Wisconsin Supper Clubs are different. And let me just say I got back from, I'm looking here at everything that's included in the video as we go. I just got back from Wisconsin.

I was there for a couple days this week. and it's just it was so good to be back, so good to be back. And the supper clubs, Chris Bedford and I, if you've followed me since the Federalist days, Bedford and I used to do these cooking videos. And the reason that I had any involvement with this whatsoever is that Bedford loves to cook, but he has no idea how to use cameras. And he's over at the Blaze now, but you can still go to the Federalist YouTube and find some of these videos. He would make these incredible meals, have his friends over.

And he did one on supper club. Wisconsin Supper Clubs, because he'd never experienced one. I still don't think he actually has. But he's such a good cook that I think he made one of the best versions of a Wisconsin Supper Club meal was Prime Rib, if I remember incorrectly, that I'd ever had in or out of Wisconsin. So if you haven't been to Wisconsin and hit up a supper club, you are missing out. There's some really great ones, especially some really great ones up north.

So highly recommend that if you find yourself in Wisconsin. Thanks for the reminder, Abe. Here's another Wisconsin-related email. This is from Christine who says, Emily, I love your Wisconsin accent. As a 58-year-old lifelong Philadelphia, and I always get comments about my accent. I deny having one completely when I was still in the police department and went through the FBI National Academy. The other law enforcement professionals from around the world apparently found my accent and the accent of a Boston classmate and a New York classmate highly entertaining. Also, as a very fast talker. I love how fast you talk. You talk. I have to put most podcasts on 1.8 speed or 2.0. And I have to go back down to 1.5 on yours. Keep up the good work. I really look forward to this every Friday. Thank you, Christine. That's so funny. You're the first person who's ever written in about the speed that you listen to

after party on, which is fascinating to me because I have different speeds for different shows as well. I listen to Megan mostly on a normal speed. I could probably do 1.5 with her. Sean Ryan, I can do two. I can do 2.5 on Sean Ryan. Tucker, I can do it too. I usually do it more at like 1.75.

I don't know. I find this weirdly interesting. I just got into it. I used to think people who did it were crazy. But you just, after a certain amount of time, you can get used to it. And for my job, I have to consume so many podcasts that I've gotten, I forced myself to get used to it. Now, if I'm, like, legeriating in a podcast that I'm really, excited for and I'm, you know, doing the dishes or something like that, I will keep it at one

because as a person in the podcast world, I have to say there is something about listening to the conversation in its raw form where it's, you have the pacing that's kind of meant to be there. It is, there's something about it, but that just might be me. The accent's part of this. Christine, I actually think the Boston accent is the most energetic. acclaiming accent to me. I am intrigued by the Boston accent, delighted by the Boston accent, and I always love hearing it any time I'm up in New England, because it's not just in Boston, you hear like variations of it if you're in New Hampshire or Maine. And it's fascinating. And it's such a, to me, it also seems like it's such a small pool of the country that still

legitimately has that accent. I love it. There was a somewhat sad piece, I think it was in the Washington Post a few years back about how younger people in Georgia in the Atlanta area in particular, this probably also applies to Dallas, don't really have a Georgia accent anymore because they're just raised around so many people. I mean, Atlanta has become a metropolis. And it's just so many people from all over the world that when you're in school and sports and all of that, it's just being kind of phased out because people who come in don't develop an accent and then their kids don't develop an accent. So I don't know. I mean, Kenny gets into Tower of Babel territory, but I don't know if accents are long for this world,

at least these like hyper-regionalized ones. So it's more interesting of a conversation than I think people give it credit for. All right. Here is Natalie, who writes in and says, Hi, Emily. In this week's Happy Hour, a listener wrote in about J.D. Vance's theology of happy, happy, well-adjusted people. They referenced Jesus' statements about the meek and poor in spirit and suggested a Christian preference for the sanctity of the beaten down. This reminded me of a recent book release that has been much discussed on Christian X. Michael Clary wrote Loser Theology to address a modern church attitude that Christians should happily losing culture and politics and feel all the more spiritual for doing so.

As someone interested in the intersection of religion, culture, politics, I think you would enjoy the book, and I recommend it to your listeners. A brief quote from Clary, quote, loser theology is the theology that promotes losing as the most faithful path. Scripture teaches we may sometimes lose, but we should not seek to lose. lose. Thanks for all the excellent content. Natalie, thank you for this recommendation. This is so interesting. I am clicking on the book right now. And just from your description of it, I can say, I find this to be perhaps the most underappreciated or underdust. I haven't, I hadn't been

queued into this conversation, honestly, one of the most underdisscussed tensions right now on the political right, in that as Christians, we want to evangelize for the most part, and we want people to enjoy what we believe, right? We want people to be saved. We want people to enjoy what we believe is the best path for fulfillment and the most just path for fulfillment. We believe that will also be the most fulfilling way to live your life here on this earth and then, of course, beyond.

And this is a bit riffing on last week's show where someone wrote in about Vance's new book Communion and how he noticed people around him who were living the most fulfilling happy lives seemed to be Christian. And that undercut his new atheist tendencies to say it's all hogwash, basically. And it's interesting because on the one hand, I really like how Aaron Wren describes the negative world. I like Rod Dreher's formulation in the Benedict option, that essentially we should focus on creating communities around us that are sort of successful Christian communities where people are thriving and change the culture before we have maybe certain political expectations that used to exist when more people went to church regularly and identified as faithful Bible-believing Christians. And that's where Aaron Wren comes in and says, we're in the negative world now.

This is not, I've done this on Happy Hour before. I've pulled up the description, his exact description for the negative world. But you could go read it. He has a great, great substack. I love his substack. But he talks about how we're just not in a country where the norms, the norms, are influenced primarily by Christianity, culturally. And that changed, right? That's changed over the last, I don't know, a generation or two.

Tom Holland, if you haven't read Dominion yet, you must, would maybe point out he believes that actually wokeness, as it came to be called, is an extension. Some people would maybe argue a bastardization, but as an extension of Christianity that the reason people on the left, even though they don't realize it, believe in protecting the vulnerable, is really because Christian norms shaped the West to care about those things. And pre-modern societies did not have the same concern for the vulnerable, the marginalized, the beaten down, so to speak. And that's been debated by Tom everywhere. If you just plug him into YouTube, you can see some excellent debates that he's had on this topic.

I think he comes on top of just about all of them. But, yeah, I'm in the camp that would say the quote-unquote woke movement was a bastardization. of an outgrowth of a mutation of these Christian norms in the West because it often did mean protecting, defending the vulnerable at the expense of other vulnerable and marginalized people. And so it sort of kind of pitted people against each other in that way. And that's where I would say it's probably fair to call it a perversion or a bastardization. But his point is that it's the Western concern for the vulnerable. I mean, think about the people in Minneapolis.

who brought in the greater Minnesota area a lot of places in the country, who were mostly working as Christians in Christian charity groups to facilitate mass migration or refugee resettlement in the case of the Somalians. That's coming from Christian groups in many cases, some left-leaning Christian groups, of course, although there were some right-leaning Christian groups who facilitated, for example, safe passage through the Darien Gap during the Biden immigration surge and before and after of course as well. A lot of that has come from Christian communities. And so this is a long-winded way of getting to my point, which is that I'm paying pretty close attention to this debate. I do think

it raises attention. On the other hand, I think for a while Christian conservatives in particular have over-emphasized the benefits of political victory at the expense then. of under-emphasizing some really important cultural priorities. And again, in a way that you can, I don't know, I mean, this comes up a lot, and Vance talks about this a lot. This comes up a lot in the conversations about, like, welfare. And that's not to say, I mean, I have a huge problem with the way unemployment is run, disability is run.

And I do agree with some of the arguments about self-sufficient. and how it's actually predatory for the state to facilitate dependency. I totally agree with a lot of those arguments. On the other hand, I think because the right got caught in making those arguments, it has sometimes come at the expense of understanding there are really vulnerable populations that are being preyed upon by big business, big pharma in the opioid case. For example, we were way too late as a country to see. what was happening there. And I think some of it on the right is just that became a blind spot.

We were very focused on the state and not focused enough on big business and the cultural wreckage that was coming from big business. So anyway, I do think this is interesting. And I am going to check out Michael Clary. So thank you, Natalie. Let's see. Hank says Trigonometry just had a good episode with the historian James Holland on how the Nazis came to power. That does sound very interesting. I am a trigonometry listener. I have seen some good podcasts with James Holland, who, by the way, is the brother of Tom Holland, who we just talked about, the author of Dominion. So Tom obviously hosts the rest of his history, which is a great podcast.

It's like the most popular podcasts in the world or one of them. So many of you probably already listen to it. Nick sends along a link to an academic. It looks like, oh, actually this is in New York. Times story on the historian Carrie K. Greenwich, who lost her professorship at Tufts after scholars began scrutinizing her 22 book, The Grimkees, which is no longer listed on the publisher's website. I do have to check this out because I had not read this article or tuned into this story. And Nick says it's jaw-dropping. So if you all want to look this up, the headline is a

related historian's research comes under fire. I have just added it to my reading list as well. Let's see, what else do we have here? Another question from Hank, do you have any go-to methods for verifying info information on social media X, Facebook, Instagram, or publications? You know, it's always more difficult to go find the primary source. So in a lot of cases, there aren't primary sources. So you have to then read the article. Oftentimes, I'll have to go read back the article and pay attention to the sourcing itself. So is this a background source, a named source, an unnamed source with no affiliation or no direct quote? So if there's no primary source information, you can check out, like, raw data from the city. And even when you pull raw data from the city,

you have to go check, like in D.C., a lot of journalists did step one. And they checked out the data from the city that was showing this drop in crime. But they didn't do step two to check out whether people had been questioning the city's data, which the D.C. Police Union absolutely had been doing, saying the books were being cooked, which we now know from internal investigations were. The books were being cooked. We know that that was happening. So you have to do a little bit of that. So if you can find a primary source, go watch the full interview, go find the data. That has gotten a bit easier with AI, they can kind of find that primary source better than, or just quicker these days than scrolling through all the Google results, and Google is getting so bad because of AI.

If you just put something into Google, everything is getting optimized in different ways. So AI does make that easier in some respects, but you still have to check the source, then check the source is on the source. So there's a little bit of that involved as well. Here's Matt, who says many of my non-religious friends say they think Christianity provides a good moral framework for society, even though they don't accept Jesus' divinity. However, St. Paul says that if Jesus is not resurrected, then all his preaching is in vain. Likewise, C.S. Lewis wrote that Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord. There's no in-between. To what extent, if any, do you

think it's possible to take the in-between position and accept Jesus' teachings and Christian morals while rejecting the resurrection? To frame it in another way, are there any Christian teachings that become nonsensical? If you don't accept that Jesus rose from the dead, thank you for answering all my questions. You got it, Matt. Thank you for writing in. This is the Trilemma. It's in mere Christianity, the liar, lunatic, or lord trilemma. And it's a great formulation to think about what we believe in the West, to think about how much of it is rooted in the teachings of Jesus, which came to inform our society over time. So if you really liked the society that was built on, I think, a faithful representation of that, striving towards a more perfect,

Union, we're never going to have a kind of utopian world here on planet Earth, but we can, you know, strive towards it. And that's what I like about our own founding documents. So if you, if you like that world, does it validate? Does it give credibility to the story of the resurrection's historiosity? This is something that people like Tom Holland to bring him up again, and IAN Hirsi Ali and Richard Dawkins have been grappling with. Dawkins calls himself, of course, a cultural Christian. Jordan Peterson grapples with this. This has been a hot topic, if you follow these debates closely, especially in like YouTube podcast world. And I think it's a great topic. I love Lewis's Trilema, as I just mentioned. And this is what Nietzsche's problem

with Christianity was. We've talked about this here before on Happy Hour. It's like, Like, it does become ridiculous to many people. And I see the point that if Jesus Christ did not die and rise from the dead, then why go out of your way to venerate powerlessness? Right? Doesn't it all come down to then raw power that can be fun? to your vision of the good. And it's a provocative question. I get where the Dawkins and previously Ian, Here Sialli and Tom Holland had come down on this, which is that you can have Christianity without Christ. I get their argument. But I still think the more you ask, okay, why? And then you get

someone's answer to that question, you ask, okay, why, why, why? Ryan Holiday and the Stoics, that's where a lot of people end up. I still think that doesn't work. That's a really long conversation in those debates that I listen to pretty closely on YouTube and other places to kind of be attuned to the counterargument. Because I love hearing, like many of you do, the counter argument to these questions. So, yeah, I mean, I think it is, you know, the Sermon on the Mount is a great way to organize. as a society, but it's historically an aberration. And there's some questions to be asked about what that looks like in a kind of post-modern

world. And if you keep asking why, why, why, why? I mean, for me, the answer is because this man literally died and literally rose again, which sounds insane. This is part of J.D. Vance's book about Christopher Hitchin. and the new atheist movement, Dawkins, the new atheist movement, that does sound insane to the modern ear. Of course it sounds insane to the modern ear.

But I think that's real. I think there's historical proof for that. Sufficient historical proof for that. I think you have the book of acts circulating. You have the gospel circulating. And the movement picking up momentum, eyewitnesses to the ascension, these types of things, I think that's really powerful. I think case for Christ, Lee Strobel,

did a great job with us and others have weighed in on this as well. On this topic, Glenn Scrivener wrote a great book. I bought it from my mom recently. It's called the air we breathe. It's a almost a shorter version of Dominion, but it's about how the air we breathe is inextricably intertwined with the figure of Jesus Christ. So that's a great resource. I think to, if you're interested in these questions or these provocations to take a look at. at. So great question from Matt, and maybe we should have someone on to talk about this. Lewis asks, is recycling real? Great question. It's a question that I have myself. I've seen conflicting points on whether

recycling is real, which also takes us back to Hank's question about, Hank's question about how we verify facts. This one hasn't been a top priority for me. So I should probably do some more research into whether recycling is ultimately real. But like many of you, I've seen the stories on how it ends up, like, floating in the middle of the ocean, like on trash mounds in the middle of the ocean. So, Lewis, I'm not going to hold myself to a yes or no on this right now. I'm going to look into it because I've actually been meaning to this. That's one of the things on my list recently.

I don't even know why, but I have been thinking about that recently. So funny that you asked the question. Hank has a lot of questions. Says, did I hear you say an after party that J.FK's assassination was a conspiracy? Hell yeah, you did, Hank. The real conspiracy is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and killed President Kennedy. I don't mean to laugh and make light about it, but the official story to me is utterly insane on the Kennedy assassination. I'm not hardcore in the multiple shooters camp. I do think the amount of medical staff at Parkland Hospital in Dallas that say they saw different wounds

that would just conflict with the official Warren Commission story is extremely compelling. CBS did a great little film about those documentary conversation with some of those medical staff recently that everyone should look up. But I'm not super wedded to the idea that Oswald himself didn't fire that. the shot, but the evidence of a CIA conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination is overwhelming. I mean, it's not even close from my perspective. Lee Harvey Oswald defects to the Soviet Union, then travels back into the United States. The CIA has files on him.

They're watching him. He happens to be in Dallas on that day. It makes absolutely no sense. Nixon, as Roger Stone said here on Afterparty, told him that it was. Linda Baines Johnson. Now, is Roger Stone the most reliable narrator? Probably not, but Howard Hunt said on his deathbed that the CIA was involved in Howard Hunt was CIA, of course. So to me, the evidence is just utterly overwhelming. It's totally improbable that Oswald, who was being monitored by the CIA, who was a Marine, defected to Russia, was able to come back into the United States,

became friends with a CIA asset, DeMorin Schilt. It's just, to me, improbable that there's anything other than conspiracy going on here. Lots of good stuff to follow on that. Jeff Morley's work over at the JFK Fax substack is a great place to begin. I love devil's chess board. It's a left-of-center Cold War history of the CIA, but it is fantastic. All right. Had along back and forth with Justin this week, who says he used to work at a bagel company called Baggles Forever. Now, you've said bagel three times. You pronounce it the same way as me, and I love it. Okay, thank you, Justin. Let me pause. That is very. vindicating because someone you may remember emailed in last week to say that I pronounced flagrant

incorrectly. Yeah, I think it was flagrant or flamboyant or one of those words incorrectly. And I said, it's probably not the correct pronunciation, but it is how I pronounce every word that has that sound in it. Bagel, flag, it's infamous among my broader friend group. So appreciate that, Justin. I don't know if it's a, it's got to be an accent thing. But anyway, Justin says, I don't see why you're worried about Elon becoming the Uberminch. Oh, we're going back to Nietzsche here. Or maybe that idea in general. The whole Uberminch idea is about overcoming yourself. Honestly, would prefer more people reading Nietzsche and trying to be an Uberminch than reading Marx and joining DSA. Nietzsche's expanded critique was that Christianity went on to produce softer,

more egalitarian, life-denying societies in contrast to the previous traditionalist societies, which were stronger, more aristocratic, and life-affirming. I'm just going to pause also and say that's a perfect compliment to the question we were talking about earlier about Christianity without Christ. Justin goes on to say Christianity was great for social cohesion, but it came with some serious tradeoffs, especially with regards to the family unit. Fustel de Coulanger talks about the pagan or Christian value shift, by the way. My instinct is to say pagan, but because I just got called out on baggles, I'll say pagan

to Christian value shift in his book, The Ancient City. I think Nietzsche had maybe the strongest critique of Christianity. I don't know if Elon becoming the Uberminch is the worst thing. I think the society where self-overcoming and achievement are discouraged is worse. The society where egalitarianism is idealized, reality facing is punished, socialism is flirted with. The society where everyone is a therapist and their therapist as a therapist. Why does that sound oddly like the modern blue city? Really interesting stuff to unpack here, Justin.

I would say I probably disagree. On the one hand, I think socialism is a mutation of Christianity. I know Christian socialists, so I don't. We actually had one right into the show last week. I'm not saying it's ridiculous or irrational. I personally think it's dangerous, but I disagree that that's worse than the Nietzsche and UberMensch society. And I think just in your description of Nietzsche is more accurate than the bastardized version that a lot of people in this space recite. But I think it's more dangerous, to be honest, to center the self.

I actually think that leads, leads in some ways, to more therapeutic culture. Christopher Lash is pretty good on that. But, yeah, my perspective is that I would rather defend the weak than venerate the strong. So it's a deep and important question, but that's my answer. But it would be good to have kind of a conversation on that and to put more sort of back and forth into it because it's not a simple question. Howard writes in, you're firing on all cylinders. And it's always amazing to watch. This is last week I was in San Diego.

Looks like this is on Mitch McConnell. Oh, a little bit on Lindsey Graham here. there are good ways and horrible ways, and Lindsay did it right, oh, this is on how we die. He went quickly without suffering and was doing what he loved right to the end. Can't ask for better than that. That's probably a fair point, Howard. You know, on the other hand, Lindsay, if he had, my understanding so far, based on the preliminary medical examination, is that if maybe more attention had been paid, and this is a maybe,

I don't know this for sure, I just paying attention to some of the discourse, but if more attention had been paid to the underlying condition, he actually might have been able to get more years out of this life. And certainly he seemed like he would have been capable of that. But yes, that point is well taken. Let's see, Mitch McConnell. You don't sound like a fan. My main memory of McConnell said it was personally responsible for keeping that idiot, Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court for that alone. The nation should be grateful. Thank you, Mitch. Diane Feinstein, Strom Thurham, and Robert Burr, that's a list of people who have, of clung on past their expiration date. And Howard says, don't forget that lunatic, Maxine Waters,

who was worthless long before she got old. That was funny. I mean, Maxine is hanging in there and still clinging to power. I think she's trying to take over. What is it? Financial Services. It's a very important committee. I think she might even be minority leader on the committee or ranking, the ranking member on the committee right now. And poised to take it over. If, if, Dems retake the house, which is utterly crazy. Yeah, utterly crazy. So Howard ends. I think Washington is a place where you could throw a rock in any direction, never hit an honest man. Well said. Well said on that one. Let's see what else we have here. Shannon says, I've been thinking about something since the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham and would be really interested in your perspective, particularly someone originally from Wisconsin. Graham was 71, the same age as Senator Ron Johnson, given John.

Johnson's age, his lack of clarity about whether he plans to run again in 2028, and the fact that he originally committed to serving only two terms but could now potentially seek a fourth, do you think he should be doing more to help develop or prepare a succession plan for Republicans? It seems like Wisconsin Republicans could find themselves in a difficult position if Johnson waits too long to make his intentions clear. I'm curious whether you think there's a responsibility for a long-serving senator to help cultivate the next generation of statewide leadership rather than leave the party scrambling for an open seat. I would love to hear your thoughts or see you comment on us sometimes. Side note, love the show and enjoy both your guests and individual

lately. Episodes lately. How can you top BDAH? Love that one. Thank you. Shannon, this is, this is super interesting because I didn't realize Graham and Johnson were the same age. I just never thought about that before. And it does bring into some stark relief the comparison between Trump and Biden, who are pretty close in age. And Trump is just, there's clearly a vigor there that is very different than Biden. And some of the problems with these potential, I don't know, mental acuity tests or cognitive tests that populists, myself included, have flirted with implementing. It's that you could end up, you know, getting rid of, if you're on the left, a Bernie Sanders or age limits, right? You could end up getting rid of a Bernie Sanders who has

a vast institutional knowledge and still seems to be firing on most all cylinders. as you're trying to prevent a Biden or a Feinstein or, oh my gosh, who was the Mississippi? Oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm blanking on his name now. But anyway, some of you might know who I'm talking about Republican. Yeah, so I struggle with that too. It is an interesting question of how you would even go about it. And then if you did age limits, what would that look like? what do you lose versus what you gain? Sometimes the institutional knowledge is a good thing because

it helps, like, McConnell and to Howard's point, McConnell and Merrick Garland is a good point that, like, he had institutional knowledge to kind of navigate that in a way that for his party and his broader cause was successful. Harry Reid, for Democrats as well, would be an example. on the other hand, that brings with it all of the institutional baggage of the, oh, there I did again, baggage, baggage, I don't know, on, for example, lobbying, like special interests. You have decades of relationships with lobbyists and special interests at that point, and it's hard to extricate that from your professional conduct. So, yeah, I'm of two minds on this, but actually I think Shannon posits

an idea that could, I don't know, be something of a, something of an antidote, which is pushing, the public should push and the media should push our older representatives to be creating a farm team of, spend more time creating a farm team of younger people who will come in actually stay for one term. I've asked Ron Johnson about this. I think it was on undercurrents, like a year and a half ago. Somewhere on there. Asked Chuck Grassley about it on undercurrents a year ago as well about the age question.

And Ron Johnson asked him about the term limit question because he did come in. I think he said one or two terms, if I'm remembering correctly, push them to say, well, okay, you're older. Biden was older. I mean, Biden is just a helpful example here to push some of these representatives on and say you were really critical. of him. And, you know, you say you believe Washington has all these problems of organized money, entrenchment, those sorts of things. So why not? Who do you have in the bench? Who are you working on in the bench that might be able to come in serve a term? Maybe they're in their 50s, maybe they're in their 60s, let alone 30s and 40s, but come in, serve a term, and then be able to cultivate somebody

who would fill their shoes in six years or four years or even 12 years. Like, are you working on that? Is that, you know, a good, maybe if it's not like, maybe it might not be a formal responsibility for you, but, you know, what are you doing to make sure that happens? So, Shannon, I don't have a perfect answer on this, but I think you, you, in your email, identifying the problem also suggested a good solution that I really like. This is from David, who says, FYI, Israel's Arab Christian ambassador to the Christian world, a new post, talking about Tucker Carlson's attempt to alienate American Christians from Israel and a culture of blame as response to societal failure shared by the far left, the far right, and Islamism. He talks

about classic anti-Semitism, which are meant to hit a nerve with Jews. I'm clicking on the link here. Oh, okay. So this is an episode of Ask Haviv Anything with Haviv Redig-Gir, which I listen to a lot of, to be honest, and almost always disagree with Haviv on these questions. He's someone who I think is more nuanced than a lot of folks on his side. And he's, he's. takes great pains to be more nuanced, but this is an interview with Ambassador George Deke. I will save this on my watch later playlist. I push myself to listen to a lot of Ask Kaviv anything because it's usually different on some of these questions. I just listened to him with Ross Doutha and listened to him with Sorab Amari. My editor over at Unheard, I would really

recommend the So Rob conversation. I think it fleshed out some of these different and Sorob's Catholic. But I think it fleshed out some of these differences or brought out some of these differences in a really helpful way. I will probably disagree with the ambassador in this one. Although I do think the culture of blame, I haven't listened to the interview,

so don't get me wrong. As a response to societal failure, as David writes in, that's something that I certainly worry about. I think that's something Rod Dreher writes about as he works on Weimar America. I had a chance to see Rod last week and talked to him a bit about this in person, which was something I valued enormously. He's one of the most fascinating people. His subsec is indispensable to me. I really, really enjoy it. You probably picked up on that because I cited a lot.

But, you know, it's certainly something he worries about. Scapegoating, when you have a sort of feeble and corrupt political establishment and the downstream consequence of that is people feel left out of the process. they're struggling. Let me actually recommend another essay that I thought was really helpful on this point. It's by Johann Kurtz. And actually, a friend of the show, Innes Stepman, flagged it for me today. The headline here, it's on X, but you can Google it. The headline is, young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise. And what Johan identifies is, I think he says a measurement crisis. I'm trying to find the exact phrase here, but it shows how a lot of our measurements about success, financial success, and the American dream. Yeah, he says that this is, we are in the midst of a, quote, tremendous measurement failure. So read that article. And I think if you combine it with what David is saying, I agree that the particular, particularly the victim ideology and what I mean by the is ideologies that over-emphasize victimhood versus agency, make people less happy and make our politics less constructive.

I'm primarily concerned about how they make people more miserable, because I think that's real. And it's real, like, whatever cohort you're talking about, the less we see ourselves as agents and more we see ourselves as victims, there's social science research that that's not helpful. And it's hard in politics because a lot of times people actually are victims, and there are political gains and moral gains to be one from identifying that. By the other hand, by identifying it, you have to be careful not to take away people's agency,

because the more we see ourselves as having agency, the more we are sort of motivated to deal with our problems with the agency that we have, as opposed to you're just being mired in the glass-half-empty framework. So I do think that can lead to bad scapegoating. It is something that I'm worried about. I think if we were to see a financial crash right now, you are looking at potential Y-Marg conditions. But anyway, that's a long way to saying. I agree with that part of it. But there's more to be said. I'll take a list to the podcast. Bob says, sorry, for your loss, your grandfather sounds like a very special guy. He must have been very proud of you as well. Well, thank you, Bob. I appreciate that. I was on Monday, I pre-tape the show because I headed back to

Wisconsin for a, you know, it's weird to say a great funeral, but it was really a great funeral for my grandfather who passed away at the age of 94, a couple of weeks back. Marine, seven kids, never missed mass, raised all those seven kids on an electrician salary, loved hunting, loved fishing, loved it all. And in fact, his deer mount, one of his deer mounts was in the, in the, at the visitation. I should say, along with a deck and I think a turkey, a turkey mount too. So that was honestly so heart-warming. I love that. And yeah, just appreciate, appreciate that Bob. I was married to my grandmother for 71 years. She's going to be, I think, 94 this month. So amazing, amazing long life, a real testament, I think, to the best of this country. So appreciate that, Bob. And it was great to

celebrate his life over the weekend or over the earlier part of this week. Mary writes in and says, while visiting my family over the fourth, I noticed something disturbing about my high school and college-aged nieces and nephews. None of them work. I have relatives who are in the top 10%, if not 2% of wealth, and relatives on every different welfare or every welfare entire amount offered in both cases the kids are not working. The parents in the 2% expressed concern their children will never be able to afford a house like theirs. I didn't talk about the economy with the parents on welfare, but I assumed they figured their kid will go to college for free and get a job as a lawyer and start living the good life. I think this is the problem we are seeing is that once you establish a society

and economy that circulates around government entitlements, everyone in the economic spectrum begins to feel entitled, who are the DSA members, mostly spoiled rich kids. Let's see this is a little bit of a long email, but says, I don't know the messaging to combat these people, but the fact is there was way more inflation in the 70s and people didn't turn a socialism or communism as the answer, probably because they weren't fully used to expecting the government to solve their problems. The fact of the matter is where people have seen the prices become the most unaffordable are in the most critical parts of their lives, where the government interjected to make them more, quote, unquote,

affordable healthcare, housing, education. Mary, a lot of thoughts on this. So I'll say, first of all, just that Johan essay that I recommended deals with the measurement questions between Johann Kurt's essay. His substack, by the way, is becoming noble.substack.com. But I think it deals with some of these questions about differences between the 70s, 80s, and today. I would also add that you're in the Cold War period, 70s and 80s. So there's less of a pull probably towards communism because that was the nuclear warfare was even newer at that time, definitely within the living memories of people who were voting and raising kids.

And that loomed very, very large. So the lack of real Cold War memory, I think, has changed the game. in ways politicians aren't super accustomed to. Of course, though, I do think, kind of it's a mixture of everything. I think there is some, certainly some entitlement culture. I definitely believe there's some of that. I do also think there are some structural problems,

including exactly what Mary says. So I think both of these things are actually true, that because we've injected so many, any subsidies into things like higher education. And in New York City, cost per pupil, I think I saw this in city journal. It's like over $40,000. It's like gone up. It's a huge amount of spending and their outcomes have gotten worse.

So you'll have to check that fact for yourself. That's something I came across casually recently in response to, I believe it was Mayor Mom Donnie. But we've seen that in other place. I mean, it's the same thing in higher education right now. And there's a famous AEI chart. showing what's gotten cheaper over the last, like, 50 years and what's gotten more expensive, and largely what's gotten more expensive are some of these necessities, and they're the ones

that have been flooded with subsidies. And on the other hand, then, you have things that are not subsidized that are becoming way cheaper, like TVs, but that aren't necessary for your life. TVs, toys, clothes, those sorts of things. And it puts us in a weird position where you have to either fix the entire system or leave people. in and leave people in the lurch, right? You don't want to do that. If you're trying to fix the entire system and like extricate subsidies from housing, for example, you don't want to put people who have, who have real need for this in the lurch. And you don't want to underfund programs in some areas of the country where people might need it most. Like it's a, this is what makes me

sort of cynical, pessimistic, is that it's an adjustment process. And like with tariffs, there was an adjustment that was absolutely 100% needed. I don't think the implementation of the tariffs and I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater or let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But the way the tariffs were implemented, now that we have some time to assess them, it's not all the president's fault, but some of it was really uneven and in ways that I don't think have facilitated a helpful adjustment process. That's my perspective on it. You know, I think you had to couple some of the tariffs with some smart, targeted temporary subsidies and incentives. There have been some incentives. There were huge incentives for reshoring in the Big Beautiful Bill, and some of that's just going to take time.

I don't think it's an acceptable answer. I think I heard Kevin Hassett in the White House say this to argue, well, this is a 10-year process. And that's exactly what I mean. Like, it's difficult to do the readjustment and not leave people in the lurch, but you have to find a way to do both of those things at the same time. It's not going to be perfect, but I just think there was more that could have been done. So interesting email, Mary, thank you for the question. Patrick has so many questions. Let's see.

What do we got here? You've worked in both traditional media and independent media. How did you establish credibility with sources and audiences earlier in your career? And what would you tell someone starting today? Ah, hmm. You, I honestly, I have some experience in traditional media, but not too much. Like, I never worked at, I worked for a bit at the Hill, but on Rising. And I worked at the Washington Examiner, but I was on the commentary desk.

So traditional media, yes, but not quite. quite like working in a, I don't know, like totally legacy media newsroom, a little bit different. So I would say to start today, just make your focus on prioritizing something that's not being said somewhere or just straight up reporting, but with an emphasis on things that aren't being reported out. So if that makes sense, that's kind of, I think right now you still have the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, doing the almost like wire reporting and covering basic topics. I would say covering basic topics in a way that's the post, for example, often biased. But then that leaves a real opening for people to do reporting and investigations that aren't, there's just selection

bias in corporate media. So that gives you an opportunity to come in and do reporting. in a way that's different. And I think for me, that was what was helpful. I had a great editor, Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner, who came from the Bob Novak School of Journalism and just emphasize that if you're in an opinion role, you still need to be a competent reporter and you need to emphasize bringing new information to the forefront.

And so that's what I would say is it helps you build credibility to report out stories, to emphasize reporting out stories, instead of just kind of spouting off, which I have seen a generation of journalists who are a bit younger than me do. And I don't know that you're building enough credibility in that case to last in the long term. All right. George says, I was curious about the breakdown of Democrats voting block. In my experience, most of our cultural institutions lean left. I've assumed that many people vote for Democrats because everyone they know votes for Democrats.

It's just what you do, but that seems condescending. How many people do you think vote for Democrats because they've thought through the issues and fallen the left side of the issue? and how many vote for Democrats? Because we're fish and Democrats' views are in the water. We all swim in. Interesting question. I would say there are people that do the same for Republicans, George. I don't know what the breakdown is and, you know,

how many are like just natural Republican voters versus natural Democrat voters who put it in and just go damn all the way down the ticket, even if they don't know those races versus Republican all the way down on the ticket, even if they don't know those races. Yeah, I'm not sure, to be honest. some of our attachments to political parties, particularly to the Democratic Party, used to be based on these institutions that are really ailing. So institutions of like civil society, unions, for example, that are ailing churches on the Republican side that are really ailing and aren't as strong as they once were.

And so I think some of that is honestly going away. If you live in a region where a lot of union members voted Democrat, like in the Rust Belt, that's just not the same as it used to be. It used to be kind of like a reflex. You vote Democrat because Democrats stand up for the little guy or you vote Republican because Republicans care about, I don't know, I was going to say they care about God, but I just think fewer people are going to church now. So it's less like you're getting this through your small group

or your church basketball league. or those types of things. So I think that just happens less in general, honestly. Like, for example, we've seen changes in the black vote. I don't know how much those stick around after Trump. That might be one of the Jewish vote I'm curious about, too, just as we get to this new DSA-a-fied Democratic Party. I'm curious to see what happens with that. We've seen big changes in the Hispanic vote. So I think we're in a period where some of that is changing, to be honest. question, George. Hank asked about some of the online criticism of Amy Coney Barrett. Yeah, I think some of it's unfair. I didn't love her testimony to Congress about the safety

problems. I just think that's kind of like I think the media, I totally agree with her on the media downplaying. Like we had Mark Hemingway on recently. We had Molly Hemingway on to talk about her Alito book and we touched on some of this. The media is totally turning a blind eye to the, I shouldn't say turning a blind eye, but is under-emphasizing the security concerns that people like Amy Coney-Barratt and Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, of course, have faced. So I actually totally agree with that point. I think the heat is just so high politically right now that this is getting much worse and it is a serious problem. I thought it was a little, I don't know, I was going to say, undignified for Supreme Court justice to testify in front of Congress.

about this, I didn't love it. On the other hand, I do think some of the criticism of Amy Coney-Barritt is a bit much, I don't know. It's complicated. Rachel Bovard wrote a great piece in the Federalist about this, what, today, on how, really why conservatives are upset about Barrett and the birthright citizenship decision is that once the filibuster was nuked for Supreme Court, court justices and you only have to get 51 votes, Republicans were like, okay, now what the party should do is put forward people who are textualists, originalists, but who are not you're going to be, you don't need to do the thing where you're pulling in the more mealy-mouthed folks who will be John Roberts-ish on some of these questions where they're just deferential to the institution

rather than the political questions at hand, which Rachel argues Democrats always did. But now that you don't need to get 60 votes in the Senate, like Lindsey Graham voted to confirm Sotomayor and Kagan, and you saw when the Katanghi Brown-Jackson vote came, he was a no. He was really that bridge figure between old and new Senate, old and new Washington.

And that because the expectations have been changed, that's why people are particularly disappointed. So I get that argument. Yeah, at the same time, I personally thought they were real originalist constitutional questions about the birthright citizenship case. So I'm of two minds on that one a bit. Bob says, when in modern history, modern world history does a significant country, quote unquote,

cry uncle and give the other side in a war what they wanted without being overrun on the ground by the other side, leaving aside Japan after Hiroshima, Nagasaki where the emperor proved that he actually cared about his people. I say that because it would appear to me that we are on the verge of another forever war in Iran when that in sharp contrast to other wars is likely to drive the world economy into a serious recession if not a depression. This is a very important question. It is a question that relates to Israel's war in Gaza.

It's definitely a question that relates to war in Iran. And it's a real dilemma for countries that consider themselves modern, consider themselves to be beacons of international law. The United States has a complicated history on that question. the extent to which we've embraced and challenged the sort of international legal community, United Nations, other bodies. And my perspective,

I can talk about this for hours, I think it's very interesting. I think Tucker, I wrote a piece for unheard about how I think Tucker is actually grappling with this as a Christian and an American. My perspective is that after World War II, the horrors of both World War I and World War II were so fresh.

Nuclear technology is brand new. Right now we're seeing the shrinking of the globe even further with drone warfare and AI technology, bio-warfare, which was behind things like MK Ultra. Stephen Kinzer has testified in Congress about recently. It was like a sincere concern. However wrong, you think the program went, and I think it went horribly wrong.

the concern was sincere and credible, by the way, about how our enemies might be using chemical warfare and those sorts of things to undermine the United States. So if you come out of that war, you create these international bodies and agree that we're going to try our hardest to avoid in this new world where warfare can be even more horrific than it ever was before because of technologies,

then you really have to find ways to play by those rules. And so it's historically unusual, for example, to expect Israel to feed civilian populations in the country that it's warring with or the territory that's warring with. Yes, I hear that. Here, yep. But if you want to kind of play

in that sandbox of a modern democratic country, then we have to hold ourselves to those standards. If we say those standards are good, we have to hold ourselves to them. And I don't think all those standards are good, to be clear. I think some of them are. Some of them are important because the destruction of civilians that we saw in World War II, I have also a very controversial opinion. I am not pro Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The destruction of the destruction. of Hiroshima and Nakasaki, I should say. I think it's complicated. I think it's an interesting debate.

I'm glad I didn't have to make the decision. That's where I tend to fall in the question, the more I think about it. So I think some of the standards are good, some of them are bad. But I do think we have to sort of consistently uphold the ones that as democratic nations, we say we're holding ourselves too. So that's my perspective on it. And I think that's a really big problem for Israel. It's an interesting dilemma for the United States. And right now, bridges, right, like dual-use infrastructure in Iran, asking what's a legitimate military target is a good question. And my real, I shouldn't say real, but one of my primary concerns in the Iran war is how much of this is actually, how much of the military intervention is making

the situation better versus worse? Obviously, that's a kind of. concerned born of our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of ISIS. So it's a good question, Bob. I appreciate it. Damien says, firstly, I wanted to say that I know this is very late. I was still away catching up on after Friday, but I would like to express my sincere contolences to your family. Oh, thank you. About your grandfather's passing. Sound like a man who lived a very full life, and I'm sure he was and is very proud of you. Thank you, Damien. I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot. Damien says, I recently watched Citizen Vigilante, and although I do think it was a particularly great, I do not think it was a particularly great film. I did appreciate that it was

unafraid to provide a critique of immigration and how in Europe the multiculturalism experiment has failed. Damien says one scene that particularly stood out to me, and I do not think this will spoil the film, is where the lead character confronts a migrant family who will try to defend their actions by referring to their different cultural and religious values in the so long email. So it ends by saying, I guess my question is, do you think the challenges the U.S. is facing when it comes to mass migration are almost exclusively one of numbers and the subsequent impact on the American economy, public. services in the job market. Do you think culture is also an issue or could be in the future,

best wishes from London? Great question, Damien. And I still haven't seen the movie. I keep trying to watch the movie and getting sidetracked, but I'm going to, I promise you, and I will give you my thoughts when I do. But the take that it's not particularly good, but maybe has some polemically interesting provocations is what I've heard from people who have seen it. And it sounds like yourself included, Damien. I think the bigger picture question here about, you know, numbers, economy, public services, jobs versus culture, I actually think those are all part of the same package, meaning I think if you have those concerns front and center, and you also have this question of like assimilation front and center, speaking the language of the

country that you're immigrating to, they being able to communicate with your fellow countrymen, your neighbors, and things like commercial driver's licenses is also a safety question in addition to just being an assimilation question. But you see how those two things overlap in the CDL issue, which, of course, we've covered here at After Party closely. So I think about these things as kind of all part of the same thing. You know, are you coming here to send remittances or to send well, basically to send a bunch of money back home and then leave in five years, are you coming here to start a family for generations to plant roots? And in that case, you would be so excited to learn the language.

And you'd be working overtime to learn the language and to give back to community to join a church. And part of it is problems with American culture that don't incentivize assimilation. And that's coupled with the problems with the culture of some recent immigrant population. Somalis in Minnesota, I think, are genuinely a very good example of this. So I see those things as all part of the same package. There has to be, if you're coming here, you have to want to contribute to what's good, to contribute to the good. And that has to be part of the culture. And that helps. It helps when you do it more slowly, right? When you have a system that's smarter and more targeted. immigration system, I would say that's more smarter, more targeted. So you have some worthy refugee populations, genuinely escaping violence, sometimes violence that is rooted in bad foreign policy decisions in America's past. Totally get that. Haitians, for example, in Springfield, Ohio,

they say those Haitians are working really hard. It's something that I've heard around the country, too, is that Haitian immigrant populations do work really hard. But if you do it very quickly, it's easy to create small enclaves that are insulated so much so that people don't have to learn to speak English, so much so that there's really high welfare use. Like Somali community is a good example of that in the Minnesota area. And so if you do it really fast, then it doesn't lend itself to assimilation. And there's all of those other problems. So I think it's a little bit of both. Let's see here.

Brian says your guest today briefly touched on Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago, grew up in Illinois, and lived in the city for some time. The guy is categorically nuts. Why doesn't he get as much attention as Mom Donnie, Bass, or the new one in Seattle? The things he says are absurd on a daily basis, and the Democrats in Chicago recently raised taxes that saw in some cases 70% and up property tax increases in some of the poorest blackest parts of the city that he claims to fight for the most. I never hear exposés on him in the national media. He checks all the boxes, to fund the police while having full details at all hours, build the city for his wife's office furniture, then claimed racism when asked about it, that kind of stuff.

I did not see that last part. But, Brian, this is a really interesting question because Mom D.Dani gets so much attention, in my opinion, because most of the media is based in New York City and Washington, D.C., and L.A. to some extent. But that's where most of the national media is based. And just because less of it is based in Chicago, you get less coverage. It's like when there's a snowstorm in New York City, this is one of the examples I love to use to explain media bias to students.

When there's a snowstorm in New York City, the media is obsessed with snowstorms, right? Like, it becomes the biggest topic. It's like, you're doing this because all of the morning shows and the nightly news shows, you're all based in New York, so I have to hear about this over and over again. And so I think there's a lot of that going on. I think there's a good bit of media that's in L.A., too, so we hear about Passmore. We should be hearing more about Seattle. In addition, by the way, New York is one of the biggest cities in the country.

So that's why we get more coverage of it. But I'd also say cities like Houston are huge. You know, there are other really big cities that have bad leadership that just don't get as much attention. Mamdani is a very interesting political figure, too. So I don't necessarily know that it's been totally out of whack. But there should be way more coverage of Brandon Johnson. I completely agree. Completely agree.

So I think the best explanation, though, is it's just where the media is based. here is Hank, oh, who actually passes along that Rachel Beauvard article in the Federalist that I just mentioned. Let's see what else. I think we have one other question here. This one was from Instagram. If I am remembering correctly, got to find it up here. Tom says, listening to talk about Spencer Pratt got me thinking about AI and social media. candidate for the House used AI and an app to let the people in their district help decide how they should vote. Do you think people would get behind a representative who created an app that

only verified residents of their district could join? The app could show each bill that's coming up for a vote, explain the representative's opinion, provide a place for discussion, and then let people vote on how they want their representative to vote. The representative's job was simply be to vote the way the majority of their district chose. I don't know. It was just a thought. I'm curious what you think. Really interesting question, Tom. So many interesting questions today. I keep saying that, but it's true. Very creative idea on AI, and I feel like we've seen a lack of constructive creativity in the political space about how AI could be implemented. There's a question here of direct democracy, right, which is if your constituents think X, Y, and Z, because you're their representative,

you should vote X, Y, and Z. I think with an app, a problem would be having a true representative sample of what your constituents think. You know, yes, you're only letting people join, but there's a kind of participation bias involved in sampling people who have made the affirmative decision to join the app. So there's just a problem of making sure that would truly be representative, although it would incentivize people probably to get involved. Yeah, at least doing it in a way that helps inform their thoughts, right? Like having focus groups that allow them to take the temperature of people who are verified

members of their district, kind of like next door does, but you could probably be more stringent. And then chicken with the community. I mean, I think they use social media that way, but not in a way that's kind of dedicated and to the district. So there's something there. I don't think that's crazy at all, Tom. And then the director of democracy question, that's basically how California rules by referendum. And I don't know that that's proven successful. I think that's one of the, I don't know. I think it's a lesson in what direct democracy produces, meaning you're a representative and you have to balance the will of your voters with, of course, then also what's genuinely best. And I think way too often politicians believe they know what's best and their voters are idiots, like especially on the Senate side, which is great that the House has two-year terms and the Senate has six-year terms. and the Senate has six-year terms. The Senate should still be representative to their voting block, but they don't have to worry constantly about money and elections because they have the six-year term.

So they're a little bit more distance, and that's intentionally they're supposed to, that's intentional in our design. They're supposed to be the cooling saucer, right, as it was described during the founding. I think that's like, I think that's a founding air quote. Correct me if I'm wrong. I want to say this from the Federalist Papers. But anyway, it could be wrong on that. Either way, that's the, that's an accurate sentiment or accurate reflection of the sentiment of the framers and the purpose of the Senate, the differences between the House and the Senate. So I can see it on the House side, maybe being a bit more constructive. But then at the same time, you wouldn't also want someone to just be wedded to what some chunk of the electorate that's

participating in the process is demanding, right? Because that's also, you're not just representing the voters, technically. You're representing taxpayers. You're representing the entire district and a lot of people in districts don't vote. And so you also want to be broadly representative of everybody's interests and referendums are a problem for that reason, especially when you have money involved in politics. And I know this cuts all of that out. This idea hypothetically cuts all of that out. I think it's interesting. Don't get me wrong. But I also don't fully agree that just because public opinion says X, decision Y is always the right way to vote. I just don't think the system is intentionally set up that way. It should be closer

on the House of Representative sides. Don't get me wrong. But this is a, I think this is a very compelling, Tom, a very compelling suggestion. I could see it where you wouldn't necessarily agree to be wedded to the votes. But what you would have is a constructive focus group, basically all day, where people aren't necessarily voting, but they're leaving their comments. I think X, Y, and Z on this topic, that topic and another topic. And you're able to sort of see, have more contact with people who are verified in your district and what they're telling you. Super interesting. So thanks so much for that email. Or actually, that wasn't an email. That was from Instagram. So appreciate it, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to the

show. Thank you for subscribing. We've got some good guests coming up in the future. Looking forward to that. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend. As a reminder, my email is Emily at devilmaicaremedia.com. God bless you all. We'll see you back here with more after-party soon.