After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Karmelo Anthony Fallout, Belfast Burns, Shock Gen Z Stat, PLUS Another Sorkin Fairytale
Episode Date: June 11, 2026Emily Jashinsky is joined by Steve Krakauer, Executive Producer of “The Megyn Kelly Show” and AM Update and author of “Uncovered.” They open with a discussion about the Karmelo Anthony verdict... and reaction to it including stunning comments from Anthony’s family and Rep Jasmine Crockett. The conversation then turns to Dana Loesch's advice on political disagreements and why they would take a different approach, they discuss why Joe Rogan resonates with audiences, the split on the right following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and James Talarico’s chances of winning a U.S. Senate seat. Then Emily is joined by Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and a “New York Times” best-selling author. They discuss the recent riots in Belfast, how censorship actually backfires, and lessons America can learn from Europe. They also dive into recent polling that shows a significant shift in how young people view speech, research on college professors, why universities can play a significant role in enforcing good behavior, and the recent story of a man who spent 37 days in jail for a Trump meme and how he just won a massive settlement. Emily rounds out the show with a look at Aaron Sorkin's new Facebook film called “The Social Reckoning,” and more… Unplugged: Switching is simple, Visit https://Unplugged.com/EMILY and order your UP phone today! Cowboy Colostrum: Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code AFTERPARTY at https://www.cowboycolostrum.com/AFTERPARTY SelectQuote: Compare top‑rated life insurance options. Visit https://SelectQuote.com/emily to get the right coverage at the right price. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to After Party. Thank you for joining us tonight. Our guests are Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Steve. We're going to get to Steve in just one moment. I pre-recorded with Greg earlier in the day. And it was a fascinating interview, kind of taking stock of where we are right now when it comes to free speech and political correctness here in the United States, about a year and a half into the Trump administration, which was, of course, elected partially on an anti-censorship, anti-suppression, anti-peace,
platform. There's a lot to get to. On that front, as you know, especially, actually, as we consider
the West more broadly, we've been looking at images all day of Belfast in Northern Ireland, basically
up in flames as people continue reacting. And in some horrifying ways, I should mention, we'll
show you that in just one moment, but in some horrifying ways to the horrifying crime committed by
a Sudanese national who tried to saw off the head, really, if you've seen the video, you
know what I'm talking about if you haven't. Don't watch it. If you probably haven't seen it at this
point, you might not want to see it. Basically trying to saw the head off of a man in the middle
of the street. Of course, as you can imagine, European censors, regulators are already chirping at the
social media company. So we will have much to discuss with Greg Kianoff. Steve is going to maybe get
himself into some trouble. We'll see. He's going to join us in just one moment. But as a reminder,
please do subscribe on YouTube. It's the best way to help the show. If you have
haven't subscribed yet. Help us by doing so. It's of course free. It's super useful in our end.
Helps us in the algorithm. Like, comment, all of that stuff is great. Thank you so much to everybody
who supported us. I've mentioned this just over the last few weeks, but we're coming up on the
one-year anniversary here of After Party, which, by the way, Steve was instrumental in helping
us get started. So it's great to have Steve here around the one-year anniversary. We're going
to get to him in a moment, as I mentioned. But just another reminder, please do subscribe,
subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We do a special edition of the show where I answer all of your emails on Fridays. And by the way, when I say answer all of your emails, I really mean like basically all of the emails that you send me. So if you subscribe on the podcast feed, that's where you can get the Friday edition of the show that we call happy hour. So we're going to have Steve on the other part on the other side of this break with some quick reaction to the Carmelo Anthony verdict, guilty verdict, Fallout that has just, you know,
just been rippling across the country, honestly, over the past 24 hours, but has really kicked
up just over the last several hours here tonight, much to discuss on that front. And I'm going to
bring you the social reckoning trailer. It's described as a companion piece to the social network,
which many of people remember very fondly. I don't know that we'll have as fond memories,
as fond of memories when it comes to this new social reckoning, which is a real sorkin production.
you are catching my drift.
So we'll be back with Steve Crackauer in just one moment on the other side of this break.
Stick around.
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slash Emily. I should say I'm taking a trip out of the country soon and I will have my up phone with me.
Welcome back to after party. Everyone, as promised, the one and only Steve Krakauer joins us.
Steve is, of course, executive producer at the Megan Kelly Show and of AM Update. And he helps out on
the MK Media Network as well, where of course the show is based. Steve, as I mentioned before the
break was really instrumental in getting the show off the ground. He is a friend, dare I say, a mentor.
the weirdest background you will ever see. Steve, thanks for being here. Emily, I am, I'm honored
to be a guest. Thank you for that intro. I've got, it's the first interview I've ever done with
a cocktail, just a beer today, and I've got my, my, this is fine. This is like my representation
meme of the internet in 2026. Just everything's on fire. No one knows what's going on,
but we're just going to try to, you know, we're just going to stay with it, have our drink,
talk through it, it'll be fine. And you see yourself as the dog in this image for the listening audience.
This is the everything is fine meme.
You see yourself as the dog with the placid expression and the bowler cap.
I could do it.
I'm fine.
This is the thing.
I'm open-minded.
We'll just talk it out.
We'll get through this.
Me and the dog.
We'll make it through everyone.
Let's all just power through.
I'll prepare the audience and I'll prepare you, Steve, as well, because we'll get to this in a minute.
We're going to start with something else first.
But Steve has become a little bit of a rabble-rouser on the internet.
He's become a target of some of probrium from our critics.
And we're going to get to that in a moment.
But because it's such breaking news, I did want to bring the audience.
And I wanted to get your reaction to this, Steve, as well,
because I see this really in some significant ways as a media story.
Wanted to get your reaction to some of the reactions we are seeing from people in the pro
Carmelo Anthony camp, just about 24 hours after a jury rendered a guilty verdict
in that case. They took about three hours. It was a pretty quick decision. And if you follow the case
closely, because you've watched After Party or the Megan Kelly show where they have covered this very,
very granularly, including some excellent legal analysis, you're not surprised by the fact that the
jury took about three hours to deliberate and rendered a guilty verdict in this case. But if you're
Jasmine Crockett, you are mystified that the self-defense case wasn't taken as seriously as it should have been
in for on behalf of Carmelo Anthony, I should say.
Also, reaction here you're going to see is going to be from Carmela Anthony's grandmother.
You're going to see Jasmine Crockett, sitting Congresswoman, and a supporter of Carmelo Anthony that was outside of the courtroom.
We chose one clip, but there were many, many, many.
And Megan played some of them as well.
Let's watch S-Zero here.
That's it.
Yeah.
They send a mess.
Yeah.
And what we saw with.
that verdict is the evidence of a broken system. Now, he ended up hitting Austin one time,
and it was about where he hit him. One time, two inches. This wasn't someone who said, hey,
let me stab you five, six, seven times. Thirty-five years for a kid who had decided to go under
a tent that was not his team's tent as it was raining and simply didn't want to be put out in
the rain by some random kid that he didn't know. He simply stabbed someone. The fact that there was
little to no mercy seen or humanity seen when this black boy said that I was scared.
So you think race played a role in the verdict.
Oh, my God.
I know Collin County.
So absolutely.
A white boy would have said that they were afraid of a black boy.
Something tells me that that jury that didn't have any black people on it, they would
have believed him in his fear.
So it started there with a grandmother saying that it was racist.
Jasmine Crockett saying that if it were, this is of course a different argument, actually, that if it were, the races were reversed in this case, people would have understood the fear that Carmelo Anthony had and perhaps rendered a different verdict. But that's actually also not an especially great argument, just that there's a double standard for him being guilty of murder in a case where, again, she said, oh, just simply, and she used the word hit, which is a real, I think, choice given that
what Metcalf, Austin Metcalf, is accused of having done, is shoving Carmel Anthony, who was under
the tent. This is just a detail if people hadn't followed the case. They were at a track meet.
Last spring, in Texas, actually probably not far from you, Steve. And Austin Metcalf got stabbed
in the chest during this confirmation, this confrontation after Carmel Anthony, went under
Metcalf's team's tent and refused to leave after multiple requests. Ultimately,
took out a knife and stabbed, not hit, but stabbed Matt Kaff in the chest.
So, Steve, this seems to me like a case where the system actually worked very well,
as opposed to the Kroket line, that it's an example of the system failing.
What say you?
Yeah, it's, it's, I wish I was more surprised by the reaction that we've gotten here.
This was an open and shut case.
This was literally, he said, you know, make me, make me.
You could say, well, did he go in there intending to pull out his knife and stab him?
I don't think so necessarily, but we don't know.
I mean, this is a case where you normally in a self-defense case, you might see the defendant go and take the stand, especially someone who is as emotional.
He's a young, he's 19 now.
He was 17 at the time, Carmelo Anthony.
Also, you know, lots of reports that he didn't come from some broken home.
He was, it was, so it's very odd.
It's very sort of surprising to see.
But what we're seeing in the reaction after seems like this conclusion that is, I guess, in search of evidence or the evidence doesn't even matter.
I mean, this is, it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to be found guilty.
There was a last minute.
Is he going to be guilty of manslaughter instead of murder?
It was murder.
It gets 35 years.
You can get out in 17 and a half.
This is the law here in Texas.
So, yes, I think it's a sad reflection of things.
But I do think it is also a symptom of the society where.
in when it comes to social media.
I think that there, Jasmine Crockett is a social media creation.
You know, Jasmine Crockett wouldn't exist in her current form if she didn't have these platforms.
She can become fame-ish in this society.
Anyone can.
You know, that guy outside of the courthouse can all of a sudden become this star on TikTok
for like five minutes.
And then I think that's why people do it.
They feed into it.
You know, there's reporting outside the courthouse from some reporters who have been
covering doing great job.
Nick Sorder was one of the videos you played.
that some of these people who are these Carmelo Anthony supporters, when the cameras go away,
they're very calm, everything is sort of calm there.
And then the cameras come back and all of a sudden it becomes this big scene again.
There's sort of this effort to play to the camera here.
And I think it's such a serious issue.
It's such a sad story for the Metcalf family.
It's really unfortunate that some of these people are trying to, I think, capitalize on this
in this social currency way.
And TMZDC did a good job of getting Crockett on the.
record there actually interestingly enough asking specifically do you think race played a role to which
she replied absolutely we should also mention based on your point steve jake lang has been whipping up
controversy from the i don't want to say like is i don't really know much about jake lang but my
understanding is that jake lang's kind of like far right influencer and has been saying that he had
quote black animals or animalistic blacks i think attacking him he's been whipping up racial tensions of
his own, which I don't think is surprising to anybody in 2026. But I have to go back to the moment
that we were all reckoning with what happened to Trayvon Martin, Steve, because I was in college.
I talked about this a lot. I just had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Like, I literally
remember where I was. I was on a bus. And I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about the
country as we all reacted to it. And that coincided with social media, algorithmic social media
ending up on everybody's phones and in our pockets,
because smartphones were loaded with social media,
if you were my age at the time or your age, Steve,
that started to become really prolific.
And the way media handled these stories,
from Trayvon Martin to George Floyd to Jacob Blake,
for fast-forwarding to more recent history,
I mean, I have to put this up on the screen.
I went and wrote a piece for Unheard this evening
about Carmel Anthony and looked at some of the media coverage.
It is actually remarkable to see how this, quote,
all-white jury
narrative spread. It is not true. And Megan has been covering this. It is, it is like just
factually incorrect. The Daily Mail, others like Marianne Martinez of the Daily Mail listed
out the jury's racial breakdown from inside of the courtroom. It included Hispanics. It included
Asians. The county itself is about 63% white, 21% Asian, 16% Hispanic and 12% black. There's some
overlap racially there. But it's crazy. It was repeated on CNN. I saw it show up in news
nation, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. It seems that like nothing is ever going to
get us back to a place where we can have, like, fact-based conversations about these that aren't
bringing out the worst in all of us. No, no, yeah, the jury makeup, you know, certainly multicultural.
Yes, there were no black jurors, but you know, there were a lot of black witnesses on the for
the prosecution side, fellow students of Austin McCaff, who were friends of his or even just
there and we're just saying what actually happened there. You know, it's interesting. You mentioned
Trayvon Martin. I think that's a great corollary. And really, I would say the starting point.
And I remember a book a couple of years ago, A Call Uncovered. I was a producer at CNN when Trayvon
Martin and the George Zimmerman case happened. And honestly, it was one of the first moments where I
thought, what is going on here? I was on a, at CNN, we used to do this 9 a.m. call where the
whole network would get on and we would talk about the, what the stories for the day. And the person
at the time who was leading the network and leading this call brought up this Trayvon Martin's story.
And I guarantee you he found this thing from Twitter.
I would think he did.
But he goes, what about if George Zimmerman punched himself in the face?
This was a big thing about him having two black eyes.
What if he had given himself two black eyes?
We should at least dig into this.
And I'm thinking to myself, where is he finding this?
Where is he getting this?
What are we trying to do here?
By the way, the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman case, much more complicated.
You know, this was a stand your ground, much more complicated than the Carmelo Anthony case,
which was very cut and dry about what happened here.
So, yeah, it was, but I think that that was the rise of social media as a performance app,
Twitter and Facebook and your signaling to your communities about your feelings about it.
It was certainly the precursor to Michael Brown and what came a couple years later in Ferguson,
which was a utter disaster by the national media.
I think really fed into a lot of these narratives that have never gone away.
It was so poorly covered. Hands up, don't shoot.
And so, yeah, I think that this is what we're left with right now.
Right. And people probably famously remember George Zimmerman being referred to as a white Hispanic.
I forget which outlet specifically used that designation.
I think there were actually a couple of them at the time.
But the other thing to talk about in that respect is polling has found in the years since this racial reckoning that started
in the Obama era over the killings of unarmed black men by police, sometimes, by the way,
black police or, you know, in the Zimmerman case, white Hispanics, he wasn't a cop, but there was,
as Steve mentioned, this complicated standard ground question. All this is to say, polling has shown
that people across the board, even Republicans, will vastly overstate when asked to estimate
how many unarmed black Americans are killed a year at the hands of police. Like, we're talking by the
hundreds, if you're on the left, same in the center, and still really high overestimations
from people who are on the right identify as Republican Steve. I'm sure you've seen this information
before. And it tells us a little bit about, like, I'm thinking right now of the, it's a weird
connection, the Thomas Massey election results, where none of the ads against him were really
talking about Israel. It was a ton of money that came pouring in to convince people that Thomas Massey
was anti-Trump. And people in his district care about the Trump agenda. They want to see the
Trump agenda passed. But it puts us in this complicated scenario where we're trying to decipher
what is real public sentiment. Like just today, Open AI, I don't know if you saw this, Open
AI trying to dismiss the data center concern. I'm going all kinds of directions, Steve. So I hope
you're here for it. Yeah, I'm into, I'm making my, you get a train. So they put out a survey that
Open AI had conducted. And let me put this up on the screen while we're talking about it.
And Politico reported on it.
The headline was Open AI says China launched influence campaign to shape U.S.
attitudes on AI data centers.
Well, if you scroll to the second to last page of the survey, it says, quote, most of the
social media posts we identified generated little or no observable engagement.
It is giving Russia collusion, Steve, like big time giving Russia collusion.
And we're here kind of trying to decipher what's real, what's really being ginned up by the media,
what's actually a product of manipulation and what's organic public
opinion. And you see, I think, in many of these cases, clear-cut examples of where the media is
really manipulating how people see the country. Oh, totally. I mean, we see so many examples of
this. And I think we see this. And it becomes more and more. I think AI is actually contributing
to this because, you know, you could watch a video. And even that video itself is no longer even
what actually happened, let alone chopped up and, you know, edited in a way that is that is actually
not, you know, giving the full context. Sure. You know, that's a, that's a story.
But no, absolutely, we're seeing, it's easier than ever to run these manipulation campaigns
to manufacture a narrative.
A lot of the times it happens on X.
You know, I, listen, I'm a huge free speech fan.
I love what Elon Musk has done with X in the sense of, you know, used to not be able to, like,
write on X a man is a woman or a man can't become a woman.
Like that was, you would get banned for, I mean, I let alone the Hunter battened laptop.
So I'm all for more speech, not less.
But what we need to understand is that within that, that, that comment.
context comes a lot of these campaigns, which are not based in facts at all. A lot of times
are based in bad faith, are trying to convince people of something and are doing so in a way
that are manipulating them. It's actually, you know, it's really sad, it's scary, and it's,
and we're seeing it more often than ever now on all sides. And I think that it's something that
people have to be aware of. And, you know, a lot of times you, I've, I've been doing
this a little bit. I mean, in the last six months, we've gotten some, certainly, of this scene
firsthand with Megan, with the show. And I've got, in a couple instances, with family, with friends,
say, okay, well, what specifically are you talking about? And then they might send an ex post and say,
okay, well, here's the full context of it. And there have been a couple times where people,
I mean, it takes a lot. Say, I watch that and you're right. Like, I don't, I don't know why this
person framed it this way or why that, but, you know, we saw this, there was a post, Emily, you
covered this of Tucker doing an interview, I'm saying essentially, I mean, this has become just the
norm now that he loves surreal law, like that he's a fan of surreal law. And that was never said,
but it went viral because of the word that were associated with a video that no one watched.
This is where we're at right now in this scenario. And it's, it requires a real discerning,
you know, I and when you're a news consumer, you know, a lot of times people are busy.
You don't have a lot of time to sift through this and try to understand who is trying to manipulate me, but that is 100% happening.
Yeah, I just had a conversation with somebody who is not like a fan of Tucker over the weekend about that exact clip you were mentioning because the quote, basically it was to paraphrase.
He was saying allegedly, Sharia law had made Middle Eastern cities much better than Western cities.
And it was put in quotation marks as though that was verbatim what Tucker Carlson had said.
You clicked on the clip.
The person I was talking to over the weekend, like we both kind of agreed, we don't necessarily agree with Tucker's argument, but how dangerous is it to start tossing verbatim quotes out there, knowing people aren't going to watch the video, knowing that algorithms prize, as we talk about here all the time, extreme emotion, whether it's a condemnation or an embrace. That gets people, that's what gets people to engage with your posts. We are all sort of being subtly reprogrammed to think in these ways because that's what the language, that's the language, that's the language.
that's rewarded on these apps that we've exported so much of our personal, professional,
political lives onto. And so it brings us to something that you actually wanted to talk
about, Steve, which was this interesting exchange at the turning point, I think it was called
this year the Women's Leadership Summit.
Not the young one. A lot of controversy about that over on the on X.
I will say, it has been the case for a while that these conferences got so big. There were
more and more older people coming to the conferences.
You could chuck that up to being a product of success.
We don't have to get into it.
But I was a little amused to see people criticizing it this time around.
So like, you could go back a few years and probably find the same thing happening.
But this was an interaction Dana Lash had, who's been very critical of Tucker, had with
a young woman who came up to the microphone.
Let's watch S2.
So I have a lot of friends that are liberal that don't share my
same political ideologies. And I can also get very passionate about politics when I talk to them.
So as someone who can also get very passionate when talking to people, do you have any advice for
not getting angry at people who you genuinely care about, who you want to preserve a friendship
with and not like ruin something over politics?
We're very passionate and because we feel for it. And it's not because,
you're trying to win an argument with someone, it's because you really do care about what happens
to this person. You care and you want to make sure that this person actually is cared for
and that they are believing things that are true and are not being robbed of a choice because
they believe lies. And that's where your passion comes from because your care is coming,
your concern is coming from such a genuine place. The biggest thing that this is what helped
me. Sometimes you're, all you can do is plant the seed and then you got to trust God to do the rest
of it. Plant the seed and then trust God to do the rest. Do not ever compromise yourself trying to
win a fight. Never compromise yourself trying to win a fight. Okay, Steve. So I really have always liked
Dana and I mean, what she did was a, it was a CNN town hall after the horrible Parkland shooting.
That's right. It was like nothing short of heroic. Frust it. One of the things that strikes me about,
that answer, some of which I agree with, is she jumped immediately to people who disagree
with you are believing lies. She said, you don't want them to be deprived of a choice to make
a fact-based determination. And that conflation, I don't know if it was intentional, I doubt it was,
but I actually thought that was kind of an interesting choice because often what I've found,
like on breaking points, for example, and actually on, like even as I've had conversations on
air with Megan and other people over the years, you don't know.
always agree with things. And you sometimes find out that you're the one that has been accepting
things uncritically or less critically. And you don't get that unless you come to a conversation
with abject humility, that someone else might know something that you don't know. And I feel
like that's actually, in contrast, one of the best ways to maintain friendships is just to be nothing
but humble. Well, of course, of course. Or maybe you have this conversation and you come away
saying, I'm right. And the other person goes away saying they're right. And that's totally fine.
too. I mean, this is what, I've watched this clip now many times. I don't know why it bothers me so much.
I used to work with Dana Lash or The Blaze. I like her as well. I don't, I don't really know what's
happening here. I don't know if this is the answer she would have given a year ago. But I have to say,
I, the question, if you listen to the question, it's not how can I convince my friend
that they are wrong because I care about them. It's, I want to maintain friendships with people that I
disagree with, how can I do that? How can I myself stay contained and not let it bother me
that they disagree with me? And the answer was try to plant seeds in them so that you can
like subtly run this campaign of eventually convincing them over time that they're wrong.
I mean, that is so counterproductive to life, to friendships, to family, to the people that we
love. You should, obviously, and I'm not saying you because obviously, Emily, you're like
the prime example of this.
I'm the best at just about everything.
Well, yes, yes.
You are the best at everything.
But including, I would say, having friendships with, you know, sometimes I will come across
a Ryan Grimm ex post.
And I'd be like, what the fuck is he talking about?
And I'm like, but you know what?
Ryan Grimm's a good guy.
You know, I disagree with him a lot very strongly.
And I know Emily does too.
But you can do it because that's a skill.
And it's so much better.
It's such a better way to live your life than to try.
to even people that have are like one tick to the left or one tick to the right of you to try to
convince them that they're wrong, that they're doing something wrong. And honestly, it made me think
about 2024 because, you know, Emily, you're, I would say more political than I am. I know you're
not a big team jersey person. I'm definitely not. I don't care who wins elections. I truly
don't. I feel like I'm a journalist. I know I have political opinions, but I really don't care
who wins whatever election is coming up. I've just suppressed that feeling in me. And I totally
feel that other people feel differently and I think that's totally fine, but I don't feel that way.
What I am into is like unity.
It's sort of corny.
I know like Barack Obama 2008, hoping change totally let me down.
But I was into that for a moment.
And then 2024, this coalition that Donald Trump put together that was Robert F. Kennedy
Jr.
And Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek, there's this Nicole Shanahan video, which is amazing, of all these
people, even J.D. Vance.
You think about J.D. Vance.
as someone who hated Donald Trump for a time, was very critical of Donald Trump and then came
around to it.
And he, I'm sure, doesn't think Donald Trump is the be-all and end-all when it comes to politics,
but they found ways of working together.
Can you just imagine if RFK comes to the room and you say, okay, we agree on, you know,
Maha and ending wars, and there was a third one that they talked about.
Oh, censorship, ending censorship.
These are the three things that Donald Trump and RFK could agree on, and that's why
RFK endorses him. What if he's like, well, what are your views on abortion or housing policy or
health care? Like, well, okay, well, then I guess the coalition's done. You know, the only reason they
were able to put that together and inspire people is by not trying to find where you differ, but by
trying to see what unites you and to galvanize around that. This is something Charlie Kirk
cared so much about. He was the person, by the way, who really helped put that together,
RFK and Trump. It was a turning point run, you know, rally when RFK came. And, you know,
out, it was this electric moment and it inspired people.
And so I hear answers like that.
I think from a personal level, that's just really sad and wrong.
But I also think from a political side, from a coalition building, again, I don't care
about the coalition, but I just sort of can step back and say, when we are trying to push
people out or narrow the boundaries of what is considered quote unquote acceptable by one
side or the other, first of all, that's a very lefty kind of mentality.
But also, it just shuts out lots of good people.
You may not agree with them on everything, but they're good people and they have good ideas.
And some of them you'll disagree with.
But that's what it's all about.
You know, your point about Ryan's tweets was so funny.
And I wanted to follow up just by saying the reason those, like, it's something that Ryan says or posts or whomever it is, that I disagree with Glenn, whoever it is, it doesn't bother me because I know the people who agree with them on most things, look at posts.
that I make and say, what the fuck is she doing?
Say, like, and I know it for a fact.
And I think it's actually really admirable,
and I have so much respect for Ryan and Crystal and Jank, Anna, Glenn,
for being willing to sit down with people who their friends are telling them
are abhorrent, are bad, and are categorically not to be
discussed with, or not to be broken bread with.
And that's really common.
I don't want any part of that because I don't think that's how you function as a country.
And Steve, this is just another point on this.
It's also kind of a misunderstanding of what people do in journalism.
And I don't know who out there considers themselves a journalist or not.
But I think the job of a journalist is just to be curious and to be curious from, you know,
if you're one of the few people who can be a neutral journalist, fine, do it.
Try to affect the voice of God, whatever.
But if you're coming from a position of opinion, which a lot of journalists are now, I think that's great.
I think it's transparent.
I think it's helpful to the audience.
Then your job is just to ask questions and to do it transparently from your set of values, your worldview, and then trust people in the audience to factor that in and make up their minds.
But your job isn't to kind of program or to treat your audience as a manipulable or malleable.
or your friends. I don't like that. I don't like that either, Steve. I think that's a,
it's a weird way. It's a, it's a weird way to, if you, if you meet people as human beings having
a conversation as opposed to minds to be changed, it's a better relationship, I think,
because there's more humility involved. Yeah, well, right. I think there's, you know, humility is,
I think, hot right now, you know, I think that that is actually something that people really respond to.
Authenticity, obviously, honesty. I think about Joe Rogan. Why is Joe Rogan, why is Joe Rogan
popular. Why does Joe Rogan resonate with people? And I would make an argument that Joe Rogan practices
humility throughout every interview he does because he's curious, like you say, and he's interested.
I don't even think Joe Rogan's a journalist, but he's someone who comes across as authentic,
as himself, and he is trying to learn more and to say what he truly believes. And if you really
wanted to go and say, I'm going to take every three-hour Joe Rogan interview and look at this,
this is what he said today. And then a month ago, he said something that was sort of different
than that. Well, okay, sure. I mean, that's the way people are. They say different things.
They're kind of going with the flow. They're responding to people they talk to.
I think that, yeah, I think that that's the first thing. The other thing I would say is so much
of journalism now is performance. And that is another one that's social media. I have a theory
that if Donald Trump never ran for office, yes, Donald Trump, you know, destroyed the media,
he broke their brains, the brain worms, and TDS, and all that is true.
But just the inclusion of social media to the way journalism works now ruined it because people
want to be liked now.
They want to get followers and fans and likes and retweets.
And that is the opposite of journalism.
Journalism, you know, I too am very curious.
That's how I always be.
I like to say, you know, I'm the person who, like, if I hear people having an interesting
conversation at dinner, like at the table next to me, you know, I'm the table next to me.
I'm like, I'm like kind of listening.
What are they?
Like, you want to be nosy.
The worst kind of person.
Yeah.
Like I, but that's the thing.
There, those kind of people are like annoying and they're, they're kind of like little gnats and
they're, they're nosy and they're prying in.
And I want to know all the gossip and the secrets.
And those are not necessarily people you love and want to follow.
And like, but that's what a journalist is.
Like that should be the goal.
That you should be the annoying person that pisses off people in power and tries to get to the truth.
And so much of that is, is closing.
ranks and trying to shut people out. And I want to say something else, you know, that kind of
relates to social media with what you were getting at before about these manipulation
campaigns. Because I do think that the intention of a lot of these campaigns is to make it seem
like things are much bigger and are, they're to convince people that come and be part of something
that is huge. Look at these 30 people that are going to either give you praise or yell at you
and then react and then change the way you think or change the way you act publicly because of that
as a reaction to it. And they're trying to do that by faking how important these sorts of campaigns
actually are and how effective they are. And it's a lie. I think that so much of this is, you know,
this is like touch grass, like real life. Some of it is certainly bleeding into that now. And I think
it actually is, unfortunately, messing with people in some ways. But I think that a lot of it is
and manipulation of even just how actually important and big these things are.
That is really interesting.
And I know you've been seeing a lot of that on social media, just like in your role.
And I always think journalists, like good, I like journalists who have more questions than answers.
And it's fine if someone's a pundit, talk radio.
I actually get that.
But if you see yourself as a journalist, it's a little bit of a different role.
And I guess, Steve, I mean, we could keep going round and round on this.
But that is, because we clearly agree with each other, like, oh, you're so brilliant, Steve.
No, Emily, you're so brilliant.
Maybe it's just great minds.
Let me find the way I disagree with you on.
Yeah, I was going to say, you got to bring it here.
Yeah, you got to fight with me.
Find something, Steve, my goodness.
But now I've lost my train of thought.
I'm sorry.
That's me being honest and authentic and transparent with the audience.
Sometimes the train leaves the station.
But listen, I think that that is, you know, Megan,
is a journalist. What we try to do with the Megan Kelly Show is journalism. And, and, and, and, and, but at the
same time, we, you know, Megan is very authentic about where she comes from, about when she endorsed
Trump in 2024, which what, it's kind of crazy to think. I mean, she was, she was speaking at a
rally by the end of 2024. But that was, that was a big deal when in April, she said, I'm, I'm voting for
Donald Trump. And, and, and, and so, you know, always been very honest about it. But the other thing that
we do is, you know, we always considered ourselves like Switzerland in, in, in the different fights that are going on.
I mean, there was a reason why if you came to the, you know, the Megan Kelly live tour, which, you know, you and I were hanging out in San Antonio with one night you got Tucker Carlson in New York and the very next night you got Ben Shapiro in Florida.
And the reason is because that's what we want to be.
We want to be a place where you can find all different sorts of perspectives.
At the time, you know, October, we're trying to essentially like broker a piece, like literally trying to do that.
It's kind of so quaint and funny to think about that now that that even felt like it was possible.
But what happens is, you know, there are certain factions of, like Tucker, who have absolutely no problem with that.
You know, it's like I'm not going to go and be friends with Ben Shapiro, but, you know, you can.
But then all of a sudden it became this thing where, well, actually, you know, one side is saying, actually, you can't.
That's what's wrong.
And it's so strange.
And I do think, obviously, you know, you think about, like, what is the cause of it?
Where did this come from?
You know, I think that, you know, certainly, like, Israel became a big issue, which is.
again, it's so strange.
Well, and Steve, you're Jewish, right?
Has this not been a bizarre experience for you to be called?
Like, some people, Emily, are, like, Jew-ish.
Like, they're like, you know, like, I'm like, I am like a bar mitzvah and I was like
kosher for 18 years and I can read Torah and Hebrew and there's two different kinds of Hebrew
and the Torah versus, I can do all that.
So you're a self-hating Jew.
Well, listen, I'm a fan of-
An anti-Semitic Jew.
Exactly, exactly.
Yes, it's anti-Semitic.
No, but that's so weird.
And I'm like I'm pro-Israel.
You know, by any definition of Zionism, I would be a Zionist.
I think, you know, Israel should exist.
But that I'm also, you know, I've written columns and it'd be critical of all sorts of sides of my own government.
I don't know why the idea that anyone would be critical of the Israeli government would be an issue.
And, and beyond that.
Nothing you've written or said would be out of place in Israeli media.
No, of course.
Of course, but it's not, again, it's not even about that.
Who cares? Like, I can, if someone is anti-Israel, like, that's fine, too. And that's what's so
interesting. It's like being Jewish has actually not a lot to do with, you know, my own
personal feelings, you know, positive feelings about Israel overall. What I always feel like it taught
me is this very deep tradition about, you know, every, like, Hanukkah and Passover, it's all
about the Jews were like very oppressed and had a very tough history. And we overcame that. There was
this resilience.
through that, you get this thick skin. And, you know, there's a lot of Jewish comics. And, you know,
you could say anything and, and it let it roll right off you. You know, we've been through so much worse,
you know, that our ancestors really went through it so that we can now not take everything so
seriously and not be so, you know, into kind of trying to to close the boundaries of what's
acceptable and this, this narrow thought. That is actually what it taught me more than anything,
is like the ability to talk to anyone and be interested and, and try.
to just have conversations because you have that kind of thick skin and you're into free speech.
That I think led me to be a journalist.
So that's what I find so ridiculous these days is this push away from that.
Frankly, it feels very lefty.
It's such a weird thing to hear like the woke right these days as like this attack because
I always think of woke as like they're trying to close the boundaries of what's acceptable.
That's kind of what's happening on the right in some instances right now.
This is actually what I was going to ask you anyway, so I'm glad we ended up on the topic.
But yeah, it's the Jewish community's like tradition of education and knowledge,
prioritizing education and knowledge.
It's, I mean, that's where this entire conversation we've had about having this curiosity about the world around you,
about the way other people see it, I just think too often, it's certainly, you've seen it from, you've seen it from,
some Christians, you've seen it from some like centrist, non-Christians, who just want to shut down a
lot of the conversation too. It's just, to ad hominem and not enough explaining, because I think a lot of
times if the case was made in an explanatory way, in a humble way, in a way that was trying to meet
people where they were, it would be so much more successful and effective, because it would actually
really, I think, be changing hearts and minds instead of trying to categorize something as necessary,
particularly bigoted, anti-Semitic, or from the less perspective,
racist, sexist, misogynistic.
Because this is a generation that obviously is turning against Israel
needs to be persuaded, needs to be convinced.
They're starting in a hole of skepticism.
And to lift them out of it, if that's your goal,
you got to do more explaining than insulting, I think.
Okay, I found a way to, you know, bother you for a second.
No, I agree with you, but I also,
you sound like Charlie Kirk.
And I know, you know, you had mixed feelings, but personally about Charlie.
But I do think that, you know, it's, it is 100% where he was coming from with this.
First of all, Charlie was.
Absolutely.
He was basically Jewish, by the way.
I mean, the guy wrote a book about, you know, how he honors the Sabbath.
And he was such a fan of Israel.
But he would talk about how, you know, last year, one of his very last appearance on the Begen Kelly show.
And he was a monthly regular.
You know, Charlie was live on, on the air the same time we were.
So he would get up and do a pre-tape every month at 9 a.m.
Eastern time, 6 a.m.
and Arizona time.
And he was like fired up ready to go every time he did it.
I mean, he was an incredible guest, incredible thinker.
And he understood this better than anyone.
You know, he, there's been a lot of conversation about the Hampton's summit.
But I think even the people that were there who say, you know, no one was trying to bully Charlie.
What they were saying, though, was that he was saying, listen, I want Israel to win.
I want Israel to have better arguments for making the point about what I believe, which is that, you know,
is the one we should be supporting and all this,
but you guys are not making good arguments.
The argument is not support Israel or you're anti-Semite.
That's going to stop convincing them.
And he knew because he spent so much time with young people
and because he was curious and he was interested.
That was his whole schick.
I wrote this down.
You know, when he sat down that day when he was assassinated,
the first thing he said was bring the best libs Utah has to offer.
That's what he wanted.
You know, he didn't want the idiots.
He didn't want people that he wanted the best because he wanted to have a conversation and he wanted to debate.
Maybe he convinced a couple people or maybe other people would listen and find it.
Conversation, discussion, that's how you win arguments, obviously.
You know, it's not just telling people that they're wrong or they're idiots or that they're dangerous or that they should, you know, no longer say the things that they actually think or believe.
It's so counterproductive.
And I do, you know, I think when Charlie was assassinated and people watch,
it and he was so integral to the movement and to the right and to the media. Some people, I think,
went a little crazy. And I do think that there was some other people in a nefarious way saw a
Charlie Kirk-sized opening that they thought they could fill in a different way than he had. And
I think that's unfortunate. And I think, you know, that's whatever it is, we're really missing
him right now. So true. And just a, yeah, I,
I think that's exactly right.
Where Charlie was going in the last year, two years was such a deep intellectual place.
And it was a bit different than an activist place.
It was really compelling.
And this is, I guess, Steve, kind of a plug, by the way, for the happy hour shows that we do.
Because I want to hear from everybody who disagrees with everything that was just said.
Emily at double my caremedia.com, we take the emails.
We do it off an algorithm.
You know, it's not on X.
It's not on Instagram.
It's where I get your emails and just spend.
an hour and a half on Thursdays, hearing what people have to say, hearing good faith criticism,
sometimes even not good faith criticism, and engaging with it because I genuinely want to know
if I'm wrong about something. I don't want to be out there talking about something I'm incorrect
about. So if I'm doing it, I want to hear from people. You do on the wrap-up show too, every day,
you know, taking callers. It's so valuable. Oh my gosh. The wrap-up show has been fascinating.
Started that in November after Megan on Sirius. And Steve, just before you run,
wanted to make this pitch from you.
I wanted to hear you make this pitch for why you are convinced as a Texan now
that James Tala Rico, also known as Six-Gender Jimmy,
not a line that Paxon has really pulled off so far,
but it's in the prompter for him should he come around to his stage persona in the near future.
But you're convinced he can do it.
You think he could take Texas.
So I wanted to roll this clip of Tala RICO recently.
again, making this sort of populist stand for himself in an interview. Here it is.
I've been bucking my own party since I got elected in 2018. You know, I flipped the
by taking Mary Madelson's money. And I did that by being independent. I already have a religion
and I already have a sports team. He is a stooge of Reebok. So I have no problem sharing hard
truth with my own party. I called out Joe Biden for failing to secure our southern border.
And I got a lot of heat in my own body for doing that.
But I remember talking with my colleagues in the legislature who represent border communities,
and they told me about the utter chaos caused by President Biden's policies.
Bro, you said it there should be a welcome, Matt.
And the Democratic Party are the ones that should be about making government work for people.
And our immigration system is a prime example of government not working for people.
And so I'm a border security Democrat.
I believe we've got to have a sane, orderly process to ensure that we know who's
into our country. But I also think we have to keep out folks who mean to do us harm. And public
safety is the most important thing the government does. More important than public education,
more important than public health. Nothing matters if we're not keeping people safe.
Steve, I have to say, I kind of know where you're going with this, right? Like he has the right,
this is different from 2017, 18 Dems. Like he actually has pretty good talking points, all things
considered. Well, that's the corollary, I would say. You know, you ask what do I see a dialogue? I've
I've lived in Texas. I've lived in Dallas since 2014, and I've seen it. It's, you know, Dallas,
if you kind of draw a circle around Dallas, it's pretty 50-50 red blue. Dallas is a little bit
more blue itself. But the surrounding towns are more red. I know in real life, IRL, James Talarico fans.
Fans, like not just like I'm a Democrat, so I'm going to vote for him, but like I love James
Tala RICO. Law and sign people. People are into it. So here's what I would say. Yes,
2018, Ted Cruz, Beto O'Rourke. Beto, Beto, Beto, Beto, Barc. Three points. Obviously, it's the exact
corollary to right now. This is two years into the Trump administration, number one. Ted
Cruz, not super popular, not terrible, but not super popular. Beto O'Rourke, you know, the hardcore
left likes him. The rest are kind of like, eh, and he gets three points away. Now you have
James, and I have Ken Paxton, who is, you know, he's MAGA, but is MAGA going to help you in
in 2026? We'll see. I mean, I'm not convinced one way or the other yet, but it might not.
And the establishment conservatives do not like Ken Baxter at all. They like, they wanted Cornyn.
And then you've got Tala Rico who, Joe Rogan again, I mean, the guy went on Rogan and did
just fine. I mean, Joe Rogan liked them. Joe Rogan may endorse Tala Rico, okay? So,
so it's going to be a very close race. I absolutely think Tala Rican,
can pull it off as crazy as that may sound.
Well, you heard it here first, folks.
Steve Crackauer says he can do it.
Steve, I wish you were on every show, to be honest.
So thanks for taking the time tonight.
You stayed at the office late.
It was so kind of you.
I was looking forward to this one.
You smuggled Corona somehow into the office.
I did.
I don't have whiskey like you, but thank you for the invite.
And you're crushing it.
You know, you, Callie, the team.
You guys are doing great.
So congrats.
Thanks, Steve.
Yeah, we do have a really great team here.
So we'll do it again soon.
All right, everyone.
We're going to be back with Greg Lukianoff.
In just one moment, going to take a quick break.
I'm going to jump in the chat.
If you're watching live, enjoy the interview with Greg.
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Well, I'm joined now by one of the most consistent and courageous men in politics.
That would be Greg Lukianoff.
He's the CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
He's also, of course, a New York Times bestselling author with some very influential books under his belt.
So, Greg, thanks so much for taking the time to stop by.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Emily.
The original plan for this conversation or the impetus for the conversation is I wanted to kind of do a fair-minded assessment of what happened when the administration that was elected,
partially on a platform to react against bad censorship and suppression came into office.
We now have a year and a half of the Trump administration in the rearview mirror.
But I actually want to start now just with what's happening in Belfast because riots actually have
the city in flames after the Sudanese National attempted to behead a man in the middle of the
street. And now what we're seeing, we could probably put some of this up on the screen, just as I'm
describing it. It can only be described really as riot. The riots, there are reports of people
going house-to-house hunting for migrants, taking law and justice into their own hands,
just really awful scenes out of Belfast, no question about it. But also some of the reporting
coming out of Europe, unsurprisingly, about offcom, an agency I'm sure you're very familiar with, Greg.
that is the Office of Communications.
We put Reuters up on the screen.
I'm just going to read from this report today.
Britain's media regulator, Offcom, on Wednesday,
warned online platforms of possible legal consequences
if their services are used to incite violence and spread hatred
linked to recent civil unrest in Belfast
following a knife attack in the city.
Technology minister, Liz Kendall,
said she had asked Offcom to, quote,
discuss urgently with Elon Musk's X
as well as other platforms,
how they would comply with Britain's Online Safety Act.
Offcom said it had told,
the online providers in a letter that some of the unrest in Belfast appeared to have been fueled online
and included racially motivated violence, arson attacks on homes and vehicles and assaults on police.
It said it had reminded them of their duties under the Act to assess and mitigate illegal content.
Now, Greg, your specialty is, of course, the United States, and they don't have a First Amendment,
but there is something about how some of the suppression and censorship can potentially make people
even more frustrated to the boiling point.
at a certain level.
So I was curious just to get your reaction off to start here about that.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I haven't been keeping up enough with what's going on in Ireland.
Weirdly, I'm an Irish dual citizen, even though my mom grew up in Britain, but whatever,
that's a long story.
Yeah, no, I mean, and that's exactly the point I was going to make, is that Europe is trying
to deal with very serious problems by just getting critics to shut up.
And that is not a sustainable model.
And one of the things that they've really made really radioactive is to say that we're having crime issues with some of the newer immigrants and some of the newer refugees saying that you're just immediately that's treated as hate speech.
And in Britain, for example, you might be one of the 12,000 people who were arrested last year for speech.
And a lot of it was people complaining about this kind of stuff to each other and even much milder stuff.
and if you actually are having problems,
that means that only the people who are already angry about it,
since they know they can get in trouble for it,
they tend to only talk to the people that they know it's safe to talk to it,
and that's people who agree with them.
That makes things much more radical.
So, like, I think Europe is turning itself into a powder keg
in a very predictable way, to be clear,
without, and then what they're trying to do is just stop the speech,
stop the flow of information,
but that's kind of one of the things that got them into this problem in the first place.
Right.
And so it reminds me of how we heard often from the left, I mean, for a long time, but after George Floyd's death, that the riot is the language of the unheard. And I just want to say, I kind of agree with that in some cases, but it doesn't justify rioting.
Absolutely.
What's an interesting contrast here, though, is that people on the pro-George Floyd side or the anti-police side in 2020, which much of that was exported culturally into the United Kingdom, they actually feel like that's an unfortunate American cultural export.
But they were not being censored at all in any way whatsoever,
whereas in this case, the people who are rioting actually have been subject to some suppression and censorship of their speech.
Again, does not justify the rioting, but it does make for an interesting contrast.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I gave a TED talk,
and one of the weirdest things I said in it was saying that free speech helps keep you safe.
And what I mean by that is that, one, it's valuable to know what people really think, full stop.
you are not, you know, as I try to say it in the opposite,
you are not safer for knowing less about what people really think.
That's insanity.
But also, it has this function where essentially if there are problems,
you talk about them before they come to a boiling point
and a society that has a culture where they can't talk about it has problems.
But when you have a law that actually means shut up,
if you disagree on this.
And immigration is an important issue in every society.
You shouldn't treat it as something radioactive to talk about
or it has the potential to blow up.
Right, right.
And so now if we turn back to the United States,
my understanding is,
and I know fire has done some work on this,
that actually there are laws being considered,
COSA is one of them,
and you can tell us what that is,
a child online safety act,
I think what it stands for,
Republicans and Democrats have been behind this bill.
But there are other pieces of legislation
under federal consideration, that actually would bring us somewhat closer to a European speech regime.
And some of these American companies are already in a certain way probably modifying their speech regulation
because they're compliant with European regulations.
So you tell us just a little bit about how the European speech regime could actually then be imported to the United States here.
Yeah, I mean, I did a talk actually just last week with Matt Taibi about the, about the like the Twitter files.
of the points that he made that I think is correct, but it really kind of brought it home,
was talking about a lot of the European censorship is achieved through sort of private agreements
with private organizations that then are given obligations to police speech. And that's the way,
if it happens here, it's going to happen. And that's one of the things the Biden administration
was trying to do, was essentially what's called jawbone, which basically just means talk the year off
or threaten social media companies to censor speech they don't like. And that, to me, is outrageous.
because that's saying that you are going to allow the government to censor indirectly what it may not censor directly.
And there's many ways to get away with this.
Now, when it comes to the Children's Online Safety Act, I feel especially strongly about that,
because I'm the co-author of Cloudling of the American Mind.
I was going to bring this up.
Yeah.
The book in which John Hight and I were like, you know,
it's like the only thing that seems to line up in terms of a lot of these problems we're seeing
is this being the first generation of kids who grew up.
with social media in their pockets.
And it seems to...
And I think John is pro-Cosa, isn't he?
Yeah, he is, and I'm not at all.
And he knows that.
I love them, but I am much more afraid of tyranny
than I am of anything else.
And I think that if we create a situation,
and so these European countries are jumping on this,
more like an opportunity to create an internet
where there is no anonymity.
Now, the amazing thing is the Europeans try to say,
oh, we're protecting your anonymity.
not from government, of course, but from corporations.
And I'm like, wow, this is the weirdest, you know, topsy-turvy place I've ever heard of.
You need to be the most afraid of government people, but they don't, you know, the ruling class of Europe,
somewhat unsurprisingly, he doesn't see it that way.
Oh, now to the Trump administration.
Yeah.
I wanted to rock with some of these fire poll results that you guys found on DEI, which were very interesting.
Yeah.
I actually showed, we could put it up on the screen.
This was of law professors, and a majority said that DEI statements should rarely or never,
or were rarely or never justifiable in hiring, and that law professors also report widespread
self-censorship and fear of speaking freely.
You guys do a ton of polling, which is super, super helpful, just giving us a window to
Oh, it's excellent.
And it gives us such a good window into kind of the mindset throughout time of, you know,
the average college student or professor and the like.
But this is one of the things that I personally don't know.
about yet right now. I mean, I think what the Trump administration has done in the case of
like Ramesa Azturk has been utterly shameful. Absolutely. And then I think what the Trump
administration has done with rolling back some of these DEI policies has genuinely been helpful
to the cause of free speech. So as we're trying to assess this, I'm looking at those poll numbers
and I'm thinking, well, is some of this how politics can be or culture can be downstream of
politics sometimes too. You have somebody who comes into office and is like, we're not doing
this anymore and people are like oh yeah i guess that was kind of bad what do you make of all of this
great well one of the interesting things about DEI is one and unfortunately that this does tend to tend to
come more from Republicans is there's conflation with the DEI sort of industry and affirmative action
and there and I wish people would clearly delineate which one they mean because affirmative action
has basically been declared unconstitutional and therefore just goes back to being regular racial
discrimination in higher ed and higher ed is not adjusted to this at all like they don't they don't get it um
But the DEI that fire worries about is more like the DEI administrative apparatus that was used,
kind of like the censorship department of higher ed for a long time.
Not for all things, but for an awful, awful lot.
And for big tech.
Yeah, and for Big Tech.
These were like the equivalent of the HR, you know, human resources officers who are also policing
speech.
And this is, this continues to be a fact.
Now, the interesting thing about DEI statements is we've been doing polling on that among
professors for a long time. Professors know they're terrible. They know their political
litmus tests and they always have. It's this small and oftentimes these are DEI administrators
who really want these specifically because they are political litmus tests so they can get more people
like them to work for them. And here's the craziest stat we got from a DEI survey we did several
years ago. We asked people if they were political litmus tests or if they were appropriate. What I wasn't
expecting was to get around 26% of people saying, sure, they're political
at misdustance and they're appropriate.
Whoa, I thought you had to choose one.
That's not good.
Well, at least there's some principle there, I guess, Craig, that they're at least.
At least they're lucid, you know?
Yeah, right.
There's a coherence to it.
Creepy coherence.
Yeah, creepy coherence.
Well, also the Trump administration, people are familiar with this, has gone after Harvard,
has gone after Yale.
certainly the most high profile example is Colombia.
And I imagine you have probably a nuanced perspective on this,
because in some cases, you look at what's happening,
and you say these schools were completely, in some cases out of control,
had been for a really long time.
And you say the solution, is it worse than the problem?
What do you think?
It's incredibly frustrating because nobody cares about higher ed reform more than I do,
and I've been doing this for 25 years.
And if you're going to do higher education reform,
you better do stuff that's actually going to work.
And certainly, if it's not constitutional
or it violates the First Amendment,
you're going to be on the wrong side of fire.
And so we ended up in this somewhat funny position
of defending Harvard a lot, you know, for example,
because Harvard finished dead last
in our campus free speech ranking totally on its own steam.
It's not a subjective thing.
It's just an algorithm that we plugged in.
And for two years in a row,
they got negative scores by our ranking.
But what the Trump administration did
it was just so many unforced errors.
So basically,
Colombia was the most vulnerable
to the claims of anti-Semitism,
so they settled quick, and that was not a surprise.
Harvard was somewhat less, but still,
potentially had stuff to worry about.
But they sent a letter to Harvard
saying that you have to,
to settle this,
you have to hand over decisions on hiring,
curriculum,
student admissions.
It's like basically, it's like,
you're saying you have to nationalize
Harvard? Then the administration said, we sent that letter by accident a couple days later,
but we stand by it? And we're like, I don't, I'm not even following this. And so it was this very
strange. And so, of course, it's like, no, you don't have the power to nationalize Harvard on
accusations you haven't proven. You never have the power to just nationalize Harvard. And then
they did crazy things. Like, Trump was in a good position to say, and it probably is a problem that,
for example, maybe there is a problem with Chinese nationals being students and some of them
reporting what they find back to the CCP.
So if Trump said basically we have to investigate this, maybe no admissions for a while from China,
he'd probably be in a pretty strong position to do that.
But instead, what he did with Harvard was he said, because of this problem that we're having
with international students, we're banning all international students to and what would have
made sense would be any school that receives a certain amount of Department of War money.
But instead he said just for Harvard.
And of course, like when a judge saw that, I'm like, okay, that's what's called a pretext.
Like that rationale doesn't make sense just applied to Harvard.
So we wasted all of this energy, all of this opportunity to make real meaningful reforms in higher ed that would benefit freedom of speech for stuff that we have to fight and we're proud to fight that's going to get laughed out of court at the same time.
And it has been so far.
Right.
And they weren't legally making the argument.
that is, I think it's a stronger, I guess, I don't know if the right term is, like, ethical argument,
that federal taxpayers spend X amount of money, subsidizing research at Harvard or grants to Harvard or whatever else.
Therefore, Harvard is nationalized and we can kind of bully you into the right curriculum, et cetera.
They're making a different argument, which is that it became such a, what was it equal rights?
It was Title VI, which is anti-Semitism.
And it's interesting because, like, one of the things about doing this job is sometimes you imagine if you were an evil consultant, you know, like trying to figure out how to do the wrong thing.
And the place where they have a lot of these schools dead to rights are on a lot of the affirmative action stuff because schools know they've been violating the law on that.
They know it cold.
And certainly since the students for fair admissions decision, it's unambiguous.
But by going through it through the title, you know, six approach, they were playing.
sort of like a weaker hand.
And meanwhile, kind of like the way you can,
the government can actually help fix this.
I mean, I feel like Jay Botichari is doing more serious thinking
about how you get your way out of this,
like within the administration,
trying to get, you know, have funds that require schools
to have academic freedom, for example,
requiring them, trying to get more people funded to do replication,
deciding how to use their money more wisely.
All of these things, getting rid of the thing
that allows colleges to charge more and more every year
while acting like a cartel is something that has to be addressed.
But I fear we have squandered a moment.
And then it raises the question of whether some of this
has created a chilled climate for professorial speech.
And I know you're in touch with many professors academics
and around the country.
And I wanted to put up this example of Karina Mullen.
This is a New York Post story.
So it's very anti-Karina Mullen right off the bat.
quote, a radical political science professor once arrested for leading anti-Israel protests that
resulted in $3 million damage to the City College of New York's Harlem campus.
She lauded Iran's, quote, phenomenal military for depleting U.S. weapons stockpiles the Middle East
as she urged support for its armed forces, saying literally, quote, this is having a huge toll
in the capacity of the U.S. Empire to impose its will.
We need to bring the empire down by any means necessary.
Mullen, the Post says, who specializes in teaching anti-colonialism, was fired by the
University of New York in 2025 after eight years on the job. The termination came after she led in
April 2024 encampment at the City College of New York. She fought the move and was reinstated this
year, though her name didn't appear on City College of New York faculty pages. It's unclear if she taught
in any classes at the spring semester. She also teaches at the new school. And all of that,
Greg, is to say, I think you and I probably have the same position on whether it's anti-US,
anti-Israel speech or anti-left speech, which often got censored and suppressed, which,
which is that there's a double standard that makes it a little bit glaring often to see the anti-U.S. rhetoric
espoused without being, or, you know, speakers get pushed back on whether they're conservative speakers and then-
Or shout it down.
Exactly, yes. And, you know, the owner's security fees, all of that type of thing.
And on the other hand, we see this.
But it's just, I think our position would be don't ban any of this speech.
It's crazy, but don't ban any of it, so then people don't have to complain about the double standards.
Yeah, no, agreed.
Don't ban any of it.
Meanwhile, one thing that has been frustrating, though, is that I get, people were rightfully angry at Columbia for the fact that there were a lot of students who broke rules, who engaged in violence, who engaged in vandalism, that Columbia refused to punish because that would have forced them to be sent back to the countries that they came from.
and I get why people were mad about that.
There's no First Amendment or free speech argument
that you have the right to vandalize or break school rules.
So even in that story,
some of the stuff they're talking about,
if she was engaged in some of the disruption of campus,
and yeah, you can be punished for that.
But when it's just extreme opinion,
we're always going to be on the side of the extreme opinion.
I do, however, think that it does show glaringly
kind of the lack of viewpoint diversity in higher ed
that things, that you end up in a situation where, you know, this is treated as totally,
can I use a term that she meant, like, totally kosher.
And speech that is, that most Americans would find much more mainstream is treated like it's
Haram.
Geez, how did that come from?
That was good, Greg.
Well, the Trump administration, meanwhile, this is from the New York Daily News.
Let's put this up on the screen.
Speaking of New York and the City University of New York, they announced yesterday that they
are investigating City University of New York over allegations of racial discrimination,
according to the DOJ.
The agency's civil rights arms said it received reports alleging that the City University
of New York's Blackmail initiative gives preference to some students over others on the basis
of race, quote, race can never play a role when deciding how to distribute educational
resources or opportunities, according to Assistant A.G. Harmeet Dillon, the Justice Department,
this Justice Department, she continued, will not tolerate universities directing educational
benefits to certain students over others based on their race.
If you're to grade that, Greg, this policy in particular, is this a fair investigation?
Yes.
But I want to say one caveat.
Fire has very sensibly since day one been like, we don't do affirmative action.
Like we're staying out of it.
But the law related to that has changed.
So if you are engaging in what might what should have been called from the beginning, kind of like an idea of positive racism coming
of a court case called Backey, the idea that you could increase diversity and that should be left
up to schools. That one exception to racial discrimination being okay is over. Like the Supreme
Court has thrown that out and schools aren't adjusting to it and it makes them very vulnerable
to all sorts of potential attacks. And I don't know if some of these schools are understanding that.
Yeah, and I guess I'm just thinking about the big picture question we started on too where you had an administration,
you know, J.D. Vance goes, what was it, Munich right away? And he kind of castigated the European
countries for EU speech codes and the like and regation. Which I was all for.
Right. It was a good speech. It was a good speech. But at the same time, you know, it's like
you shouldn't be casting stones if you're not keeping your own house clean. And I'm just worried about,
I'm worried about free speech in the U.S. I'm worried about it globally. You know,
I think that free speech is something fragile. And if we don't protect it, and that means
protecting it for the people we don't like. That, like, everybody, Hitler thought that free speech,
he liked should be protected. You know, like every bad person in history thinks that. There's nothing
exceptional there. But I worry that we're increasingly losing the ability to say, you know, I disagree
with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it, which is the heart of free speech.
Yeah, and what are you seeing show up? Because when you wrote coddling with John Haidt, there was,
I think, some good evidence already that younger people's, my generation, millennials, were becoming very
sensitive to speech they didn't like to say the least but also to this idea that speech can be
violence yeah that it can be actual tantamount actually tantamount to an act of violence that was really
popular and it became a predicate to go up and try to assault charles murray and administrators and
such um what are you seeing show up among gen z uh the scariest thing is when you look at the
well gen z we're still trying to figure out where they stand um but when it comes to their attitudes
about violence in response to speech,
about shout downs,
about blocking people from getting into talks,
the numbers are horrifying.
They're like 71% things,
at least in rare cases,
you can shout down at a speaker.
Like about a third think you can engage in violence.
And at schools like at Oberlin, it's like 50%.
And this is the kind of like dangerous sort of cost playing
that campuses should not be tolerating.
They should be sending a message down.
And by the way, they act like they're helpless to do anything about it.
The administrators at these fancy schools are like, oh, no, they're just showing up like that.
I'm like, then try to make sure that you're getting students who don't think that.
It is something that should be considered a basic minimal requirement for going to college at all,
or at least a good one, that you can actually handle the fact that there's going to be someone there speaking that you disagree with.
Otherwise, it's so funny, because I get so angry about mob censorship, because to me, it's the heart of authoritarianism.
And I always, I always, like, it's funny to watch people who call everybody else fascists so often.
I'm like, well, you know what the fascist actually did?
Right.
Well, and by the way, what you're just describing, the University of Chicago has been able to do reasonably well.
So there is a model that a lot of schools started trying to follow, and I guess, you know, what maybe.
Claremont's doing quite well.
Dartmouth is really killing it.
Daniel Dearmeier at Vanderbilt is really killing it.
My big fear there, though, is the biggest impediment, though, to reform, oftentimes of the faculty
themselves and the administrative class, they're the problem, to a large degree, at least a big chunk of
them.
And that's one of the reasons why, like, that whole administrative, you know, layer has to go for there
to be any hope for higher ed and freedom of speech.
And it's hard to feel too optimistic despite all the pressure and all the change.
Well, no, those numbers you just described as horrifying.
are easy to, well, easily engender pessimism and anybody who cares about this.
And before I let you run, I wanted to ask and ask about your leadership, particularly in this awful
Charlie Kirk case, where the Tennessee case, I mean, the Charlie Kirk case is awful enough.
Of course.
But unfortunately, I don't think either of us is surprised about what happens when people get power.
And their elected officials goes back to, you know, Voltaire and corruption and the like.
I think we all kind of understand how this goes.
But this Tennessee case, we can put it.
up on the screen. I'm eager to hear you talk about it a bit, Greg. Your headline was,
Victory, Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins $835,000 settlement after First Amendment
lawsuit. Now, if you're wondering whether you read that correctly, you did, 37 days in jail, Greg.
Tell us what happened in this case and then what it tells us about the climate for speech,
whether it's Republicans or Democrats. Yeah, I mean, I was horrified by the murder of Charlie Kirk,
and I went and spoke at UVU a month later
just in solidarity
because you have to stand up against that kind of violence.
But unfortunately, some people need administration,
some people outside of it,
took it as an opportunity to go after anybody
who said anything negative about Charlie Kirk
after he was murdered.
Now, to be clear, some of what people said was pretty horrible.
Other people said things more like me
and what I say is I disagree with him
Charlie Kirk on a lot of things.
And that's fine.
But this was even worse,
in a lot of ways, because all of the guy said,
this was a retired cop in Tennessee,
he got invited to a Charlie Kirk vigil,
and he sent in a meme that was a picture of Trump saying,
we have to get over it,
which was about a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, I think.
And basically, you know, being snarky, you know,
and saying, I'm not that interested in it,
and by the way, here's what, you know, your president said, you know, about this.
The quote's a little bit unfair, but it is accurate,
the way you quoted it.
Now, that's unquestionably protected speech.
That's not even close to the line.
But a local sheriff, and this happens sometimes in small towns,
and a local judge got together, and they made this argument.
Because that was Perry High School in Iowa,
and we're in Perry County, Tennessee, and it's about a school shooting,
this is somehow a threat to the students at Perry County High School here.
It's insane.
I'm always like, if you're looking for it to make sense, give up.
It does not.
and they kept him in jail
and they may put a $2 million bail form
and they kept him in jail for 37 days
until we were able to get enough pressure,
you know, public pressure to get him released.
That's like, particularly giving how clearly
the speech was protected and the length of the jail sense,
people disagree with this part, but, you know,
I'm doing con law math.
As far as I can tell,
you're talking, you have to go back to like the 1920s
before the First Amendment met much of anything
to see a case quite this bad.
So I'm utterly horrified by this case.
Yeah, it feels very European, much like that case.
He does.
I believe you guys also dealt with this case in Florida where the local police knocked on the guy's door after he posted something.
I think it was like anti-Israel on one of the social media platforms.
We've had a lot of cases.
People knocking on doors, I'm like, no, that will not be us.
We're putting our foot down.
Yeah, it was something, it was some anti-Israel something.
And it's just, you know, not okay in the U.S.
I mean, I don't think it's okay anywhere.
but certainly we're not going to let it happen here.
Yeah, and I hope not,
and I hope that people who are polling poorly
on their free speech sentiments in Gen Z
don't grow up to feel the same way,
and I hope they're paying attention to the work that you all do
at fire. Greg Lukianoff, thank you so much
for taking the time today to break all this down for us.
Thanks, Emily, such a pleasure.
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Such a pleasure to have Greg Lukianoff on the show. Now, I wanted to
show you this trailer, just so that you get a taste of exactly how Aaron Sorkin is preparing to
pollute our collective understanding of the Facebook file story. You'll remember that from the
Francis Hogan whistleblower series in the Wall Street Journal not long ago. And I'm just telling you
from this trailer, you can see he is preparing to pollute our collective understanding of
what happened inside of Facebook, who Francis Howgan is, how she got damaging documents into the
Wall Street Journal. This is a star-studded rendition of that story featuring Jeremy Strong, who
from the trailer appears to be doing an excellent performance as Zuckerberg. The rest of it
seems to be hallmark level directing and dialogue from Sorkin who co-wrote it and directed it.
Let me just play the trailer. We'll get into some of it on the other side.
Anxiety depression of teenage girls got worse as a result of time spent on the platform.
Senior leadership knows and is doing nothing.
I know there are easier enemies to make.
The mafia would be an easier enemy to make.
So what would you need?
To stand up the story, the internal documents.
This is a material violation of my MBA.
We're twice as big as the biggest country on earth.
We're not frightened of Congress.
We're post-government around here.
Please let me quote that.
We have 102 hours to get everything.
She's going to get.
suit as small pieces. I don't want to be made an example of by a guy with unlimited resources.
Harm, I promise you, is imminent. Enough!
People around here understand that when I say no, that's the end of the debate. I'm not two
years out of a dorm room anymore, Charlie. Look around. Okay, Bill Burr is in it. I'm excited for that
on its own. That was an excellent Zuckerberg from Jeremy Strong. Just an eerie, an eerily apt,
Zuckerberg. Fantastic acting. No surprise from Jeremy Strong. But let's toss this Breitbart element up on
the screen. They did a side-by-side of Francis Howgan and, of course, who's playing Francis Howgan
in Mikey Madsen in the film. And it already tells you they have, Aaron Sorkin has very
little interest in doing a really fair depiction of what's happening. I'm not saying anything
about Francis Hogan's looks or Madsen's looks just to say that there's a glaring mismatch
between the sort of sexualized look here that you're seeing in the film and how Hogan has since
presented herself to the media at least, unless Sorkin has some inside information, that
she was walking around presenting herself like that. I think we can already tell that the
Hollywoodized version of this is less interested in the truth of the story than the drama.
and then really smoothing the edges of the drama into a, as Sorkin has promised,
David and Goliath story.
I just want to note for the record,
Francis Hogan, when she was a whistleblower, was living off her crypto money in Puerto Rico.
She mentioned at the time, like, well, thankfully, I invested in crypto early,
and so I've just been able to have my Puerto Rico crypto tax haven lifestyle.
She didn't put it like that.
there you go. So Francis Hogan, just as a Hogan, just as a reminder, was a product manager on the civic
misinformation team of Facebook. And here you had Zuckerberg presented as a guy saying, I'm a free speech
absolutist, although, I mean, as though that makes him the dark shadowy figure in all of this. And
Francis Hogan's record hasn't been great on that, nor has Zuckerberg's for what it's worth. I thought
John Nolte also at Breitbart made an excellent point too. I wanted to pop up on the screen.
He said, I like how a lefty like Aaron Sorkin is demonizing someone for saying he's a free speech
absolutist. Zuckerberg isn't a free speech absolutist, obviously. Zuckerberg is a left-wing fascist,
but Sorkin is falsely portraying him as a free speech, true believer, so they can demonize free speech.
He says, things sure have changed in Hollywood. They surely have. Aaron McCarthy, Sorkin. That's a little bit of
by the way. I don't want to get caught up in it and go down the Stan Evans rabbit hole
doing the kind of typical conservative song and dance about how McCarthy was right. What I would say is McCarthy was writer than you think.
So find the book, by Blacklist and by history, if you want the other side of that. I needn't delve into it at this late hour. Maybe we'll do a segment on it someday, but he's so right about this depiction of Zuckerberg. And it's a great point. I went and just pull
some information on Francis Howgan's record on this.
And Howgan works with the Center for Humane Tech,
which I actually really like, and she is correct.
You'll remember she was a whistleblower
about what Facebook knew internally, particularly
on how Instagram was affecting young girls
and brought that to the Wall Street Journal,
then testified in front of Congress,
and forced Zuckerberg to confront some of these really serious allegations.
I agree with her on some of the Wall Street Journal,
on some of these points about the algorithms.
We talk about it all the time on the show.
But let's just look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
This is a, I mean, I think they would call themselves a center group.
I would call them a center-left group.
I don't think a lot of people would dispute that.
But Hagen has been supportive of the European Union's
speech censorship regime, unfortunately.
The Digital Services Act,
howgan has had a lot of nice things to say about.
And EFF has said, quote, DSA gives way too much power to government agencies to flag and remove potentially illegal content and to uncover data about anonymous speakers.
The DSA obliges very large platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks.
But there's a lot of ambiguity about how this will turn out in practice.
Well, then EFF goes, the DSA sets up rules that allow a few American tech giants.
This is as it was already in practice to control huge swaths of Europeans' online speech because they're the only one.
ones with the means to do so. Well, what does that mean for America?
Quote, within these American run walled gardens, algorithms will monitor speech and delete it
without warning and without regard to whether the speakers are bullies, engaged in harassment,
or survivors of bullying describing how they were harassed. And so what it looks like,
what it looks like right now is that Hogan is going to get the Sorkin treatment, which is a
gloss, and it smooths away the edges to produce a very simple, as he says, quote unquote,
David and Goliath story that is a companion piece to the film Everybody Remembers the Social Network,
which totally did change the way that we saw those early Facebook years. A couple of quotes from
the trailer, you have Zuckerberg saying, quote, unquote, I am a professional defendant,
in addition to, quote, I am a free speech absolutist. This is a description from the Hollywood
reporter who said, the forthcoming film is set 17 years after the events of the social network,
on, as you remember, Jesse Eisenberg's lead portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg as he created the social media platform
and was later sued by co-founder Eduardo Saperin, who was Andrew Garfield, and the Winklevoss twins, Army Hammer,
Todd Black, Peter Rice, and Stuart Besser produced the social reckoning alongside Sorkin.
And so Francis Howgan and Mark Zuckerberg have both played this really high-stakes public relations game
about who they are and what they stand for. But at the end of the day, both of them were people
with significant powers. Zuckerberg certainly much more significant than Howgan, who never really
truly were free speech absolutists, who aren't truly now in line with what we should expect from corporations
who do respect the First Amendment here in the United States. And Sorkin has gotten so tired.
Maybe it's because Americans are much more cynical now, but I actually think the Sorkin gloss has made Americans
more cynical about the fact that what happens at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not the world of
the West Wing. What happens in the newsroom isn't the world of the newsroom because Sorkin has this
deep faith in American institutions that he depicts, and I shouldn't even say that, he has this
deep faith in the centrist governance of American institutions that has done so much.
damage. First of all, you have the chasm between his Hollywood depiction and what people have come
increasingly as media has democratized to see as the reality. And then second of all, you have the
reality itself, which has poisoned a lot of people on the good of institutions that a lot of people just
used to trust as being generally, directionally, moral, and correct, that faith in institutions
is dissolved, it has plummeted, study after study shows it. So for, this is what I'm trying to
disentangle here, is it, is it my cynicism and the, the culture's cynicism that makes Sorkin's
dialogue seem utterly ridiculous? Or is it Sorkin's dialogue also devolving into hallmark quality,
or hallmark movie quality that isn't what you would expect at the Academy Awards.
I mean, even some of the acting in that trailer looked just egregious, flagrantly terrible and overwrought.
But I went back and watched West Wing, which I didn't watch growing up,
when it was originally airing. I honestly couldn't get through a few episodes.
It's a cliche here in DC to say the city is much more like Veep.
I would imagine that people in Silicon Valley would say that Silicon Valley was a pretty good
depiction of Silicon Valley, maybe more than Sorkin ever could do. But that's, I don't think it's
new that Sorkin is kind of a bad writer who was lauded because his writing resonated with
the centrists who ran the institutions. Now, West Wing was a very popular show, and I think
part of it was that it did appeal to the better angels, and it did appeal to what we wanted to
see in the country around the turn of the millennium. And, you know, it was serialized. So it was
kind of a page turner. Not in the year of Our Lord 2025 when I went back and tried to watch it.
It was just gratingly cheesy and so out of whack with reality. Maybe it's been poison because
we now have Veep. But it just, it's going to be galling to watch this.
I mean, it's one thing to praise Jeremy Strong.
It's another thing to act as though this film is correctly depicting the David and the Goliath and the heroes and the villains in the situation.
You know, it can often be true that a film features nothing but anti-heroes.
And that's fine as long as the film understands that.
And it's true to the heart of the story.
I mean, you can sex up the actors.
I don't care.
But to fully re-envision them,
I just think speaks to a re-imagination of the entire story
that we're about to see on the screen,
and then we're going to see get lapped up by people who write for the big publications
and do criticism, film criticism, and the like.
So just wanted to bring you a little bit of that hilarious trailer
and break down a bit of where I think
this is going because there are so many people who are still high up the ladder in corporate
America, the NGO space, that believe paternalistically they should have the power to tend to the
gates, to keep the gates of the information that ultimately gets to you. Some of it, yes, is profit-motivated.
They don't want their platform to get in trouble and Section 230 and all of that. But some of it is also because
they are paternalistic and they believe if they control the flow of information,
people will make decisions that are more in line with the decisions they want to see get made,
that they will be able to control attitudes and sentiments in the population by controlling the flow
of information. And in fact, they believe that they should have that power because they believe
technocratically they can hire people who will sort fact from fiction better than the public.
It's their job. How could they get it wrong? We have this wonderful
we have this wonderful rubric, we have these standards, we have our algorithms, it will all be fine,
let the experts handle the flow of information. It's not to say, of course, that there aren't
downsides to the gatekeepers being gone, but the fact that anybody still wants to appoint themselves,
the guardian of the information that gets to you, whether you're in the UK or the United States,
is depressing. And, you know, I just don't really have the appetite to see it,
depicted as valorous or whitewashed or downplayed.
So anyway, those are my thoughts on the Social Reckoning trailer.
I couldn't resist.
All right.
Thanks so much, everybody, for sticking around for today's edition of After Party.
It's been a pleasure.
As always, I answer your emails in our pre-recorded happy hour segments for podcast listeners.
That's the Friday episode of the show.
Emily at devilmaicaremedia.com is where you can reach me.
I do that around Thursday afternoon, usually 3, 4 p.m.
So if you want to be in this week's batch, hit me up before then.
Otherwise, we will see you.
I guess you will hear us on Friday's edition of the show.
And then we'll be back with more on Monday.
Have a great weekend.
God bless everyone.
