After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Left’s State of the Union Freakout, Trump’s Media Strategy, A New Path to Citizenship, PLUS Don Lemon Sued, with Mark Hemingway

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

Emily Jashinsky opens the show with a look at what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is saying about immigration and a possible pathway to citizenship for roughly 11 million people. Emily argues this approach mirrors Biden-era policies that she believes fueled a migration surge and would be politically untenable today. Then Emily is joined by Mark Hemingway, Senior Writer at RealClearInvestigations, to discuss President Trump’s State of the Union address and the fallout. They analyze Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s Democratic response, arguing she is attempting to brand herself as a calm, pragmatic moderate, but she lacks charisma. Then they dive into the media meltdown from folks like Joe Scarborough, Sunny Hostin, and Joy Reid, plus the bizarre show from Rep. Maxine Dexter and frogs. Emily and Mark do a deep dive on the troubling situation in Portland, the hearing for Trump's surgeon general pick, Casey Means, plus a lawsuit filed against Don Lemon by a Minnesota parishioner alleging emotional distress after he livestreamed inside a church. Emily wraps up the show with a look at the President’s primetime address, what she’s learned about his media strategy, and why it’s similar to the new “Wuthering Heights” movie.   Cardiff: Get fast business funding without bank delays—apply in minutes with Cardiff and access up to $500,000 in same‑day funding at https://Cardiff.co/EMILY   Joi + Blokes: Go to http://joiandblokes.com/AFTERPARTY and use code AFTERPARTY for 50% off your labs and 20% off all supplements   Cowboy Colostrum: Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code AFTERPARTY at https://www.cowboycolostrum.com/AFTERPARTY Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All right, everyone. Hello, welcome to After Party. If you hear me laughing, that's because I know the live viewers are probably experiencing for the first time ever. After Party is going live late. It's 9.07 p.m. I'm traveling. I have to tell you, for the sheer volume of work travel that I do, it's shocking to me. This is the first time it happened. But the team here at After Party, guys, I'm telling you, they are total pros. They worked with it. And here we are 9.07 p.m. So grateful to them on nights like tonight. Gravel to all of you as well. Hope that you're able to subscribe on YouTube. Wherever you get your podcast, we will have a brand new edition of Happy Hour, of course, this Friday. And I am so excited if you see the guest already to bring in in just one moment. Mark Hemingway, I can't wait to have Mark here. He's got a big new investigation into Portland from his home state of Oregon. We're going to get into all of that in just one moment. The State of the Union fallout has been absolutely wild.

As we were prepping the show, producer Kelly said, I think this is the highest number of videos that we've pulled on any other after-party show. And I have to agree. So a lot of firsts happening here tonight. Before we bring Mark in, I wanted to jump, speaking of the Sydney Union, to this clip of Chuck Schumer.

And the reason I wanted to cover this, obviously, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The reason I wanted to cover this is because on After Party, just recently, you heard me say, ask yourself, what immigration policies Democrats would replace the Trump immigration policy with. They all were happy

to go along with the Biden immigration policy for years to support it and to criticize any critics of the Biden immigration policy. So, now that they have a closed border but a president who is doing an admittedly very harsh mass deportation scheme, and one that I think has

had its flaws, of course, we've covered that here many times, what What is the Democrats counter policy? What would they do if they got power? Would it be better or worse than what we're seeing now? Here's Chuck Schumer talking about the Democrats' plan to tackle illegal immigration. What would an immigration deal look like between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate?

Well, we had a good model in 2013. As you may remember, bipartisan. John McCain and I headed the gang of eight. We had four Democrats, four Republicans, including Marco Rubio, who's now gone to the other side on this. But we could come up with a bill like that. It toughens up the border. It gives a path to citizenship, a long, tough path to citizenship for 11 million people who are here. It allows high-tech people who are needed in our industries to come in.

Roger said his plan is the gang of eight bill from 2018. Sorry, my camera is freaking out. As I told, our production team tonight, everything that's gone wrong has everything that could go wrong possibly is going wrong. So just one second, folks. We're going to get it fixed in. All of you listeners are like, what is Emily talking about? Everything's fine.

But all right. So Chuck Schumer there is saying, the gang of April from 2013 that electrified the Republican base because it basically would have been a policy like we saw with the Biden administration's policy that creates myriad poll factors. People that, there we go, folks, there goes the camera one more time. We're having fun tonight. Give me one second.

So what happens when you do live shows on the road? All right. We're back. We're chill. One second. I'm going to take the camera and bump it down a little bit. All right. So Chuck Schumer is, his entire plan for the border, is to do the gang of eight. The gang of eight bill.

We recalibrate the camera here while we talk a little bit. Everyone knows my passion is live streaming. But listen, we do a very professional version of the show. just while I'm in the middle of this Chuck Schumer rant, we do a very professional version of the show, one that's more like traditional media. I can be out there doing Hassan Piker Twitch every day, lower production value.

But this type of stuff, it's water off a duck's back. All those say, though, Chuck Schumer's immigration plan openly is the 2013 gang of eight bill, which has done in the water with Republicans, it would be dead in the water with most voters right now and completely, completely predated the Biden surge. and the Biden surge was the experiment where we saw like policies

of those nature actually panned out. Like they got to experiment with gang of eight-style policies, albeit not through legislative bodies, but they got to experiment with that during the Biden administration. And it was a crisis. It was a disaster. So I wanted to cover Chuck Schumer saying that

because when Democrats are actually pushed and forced to explain what their alternative to Trump is, I think a whole lot of voters end up in this terrible cost-benefit analysis situation where they're like, well, That doesn't sound like it's much better to me. So let's actually on that note, go ahead and take a look at this Daniel Dale fact check. I'm going to pull this up for you all.

He remember him, CNN. He had this crazy post-state of the Union fact check where he said, this is media. It's right up. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale dismantled President Donald Trump's explosive claim that former President Joe Biden's open borders 11,8,880. 88 murderers using the federal government's own data and noted those numbers include people who entered the country under Trump's first administration. Okay, I guess that's a fair point about the precision of the language. But this is what Trump actually said. Under Biden and his corrupt partners

in Congress and beyond, it reached a breaking point with the green new scam, open borders for everyone. They poured in by the millions and millions from prisons from mental institutions or murderers, 11,88 murderers that came into our country, you allowed that to happen. So he actually was not just addressing that at Biden. It were being very technical. That was also addressed at Congress more broadly. And I think it's entirely fair to say Congress allowed that to happen. Congress could pass a bill.

Biden was begging Congress to pass a bill. And the bill they came up with was a super liberal Trojan horse. We've covered that here on the podcast many, many times. And so, again, Dale goes on to. say of CNN, that Trump's use of the 11,88 figure was, quote, a wild distortion of federal data. The number, he explained, according to media, it refers to non-citizens who entered the U.S. over several decades, including during Trump's first administration and not just under Biden. People who were convicted of homicide deal said at some point, usually in the U.S.

after their arrival and then were to place on what ICE calls the non-detained docket, usually because their home countries wouldn't accept them back. Many of them are actually in prison or jail right now. Okay, did you hear that fact check? The fact check is literally. really, yes, they're here, but they're in prison. Are you kidding me? That's fact check. Yes, they're here in the country, but they are in prison. You're paying for their entire life. But yes, this is a, this is his big, gotcha again.

So I wanted to cover this before we bring Mark in because we've been talking a lot on the show about, and any questioning, raising, I think, questions about the ethics of the Trump administration policy, immigration policy, and about the, process. But it's always important to remember that what Democrats are going to revert back to is going to cause so much more suffering, is going to cause another mass humanitarian crisis because of the poll factors like citizenship from the Gang of 8 Bill, if you remember all the way back to 2013, as Chuck Schumer was just talking about. So it's worth keeping all of that in mind. All right, we're going to bring the great Mark Hemingway in in just one moment. But let me first say,

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and approvals happen in minutes with same-day funding. banks try to lock out small businesses and cardiff has the key big banks may not want to approve your business loans but cardiff does if you've been in business for at least a year and they're pulling in $20,000 a month in revenue apply now for up to $500,000 in same-day business funding at cardiff.cotef.com so cardiff.c.c.mily again that's cardiff.cseo slash emily real growth real funding cardiff borrow better. All right. It's time now to bring in the great Mark Hemingway. He's, of course, a senior writer over at Real Clear Investigations. Mark, thanks so much for being here. Hey, glad to be back.

Have you enjoyed my technical difficulties? I've never had technical difficulties on my end, so I can't imagine what you're going through. I know. It's one of those things that, Mark, you just can't relate to. But, you know, I'm actually out here, I won't say where, but with your lovely wife. So that's nice. Oh, very nice. She's a nice lady. Yes, yes. I almost went with her, but, you know, life gets in the way. Wait, Mark, that means we could have been doing this live in person. Well, you know, had I known.

That's so funny. Okay, well, we have a lot to get through with the State of the Union. And actually, one part that I want to start with is Abigail Spanberger, because Mark, you're a Virginia. And I know you've been paying close attention to the Spanberger administration, although it's only what, like two months or one, like a month and a half old at this point. She gave the Democratic Party's response to the state of the union address a very, very interesting, a very interesting choice, given the way that she's chosen to govern over the last, like, month and a half, as we just mentioned.

So, Mark, I want to put your post up on the screen. This is F1, Mark, you tweeted. This Spanberger speech can basically be summed up as, I am a Democrat who is moderate and normal. Please believe I am moderate and normal. Before we take a look at the clip, give viewers just a little taste of why you point out Spamberger is utterly desperate, desperate to convince people she was moderate and normal. Well, you know, that was how she sold herself for governor.

I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, Virginia is, I think, solidly a blue state because of northern Virginia's growth. You know, the previous Republican governor was a bit of a COVID fluke, basically. But at the same time, it's not like a crazy progressive state at all. You know, people in Northern Virginia are very educated and very much concerned about their property values. You know, this isn't like some big urban, you know, environment where you can get away with being a Democratic socialist in Virginia. So she sold herself that way. But the problem is, is that, you know, even though the voters in Virginia, I think are for the most part moderate Democrats, the interest groups in the Democratic Party are such that you can't govern that way.

There's so much pressure to do radical things on immigration, on taxes, on all this other stuff. And I see no evidence whatsoever that she's trying to resist that. But she's also very ambitious, right? There's talk about her running for president, right? And this was a big high profile spot. And, you know, as we saw at Davos where Hillary Clinton and other people were saying, well, maybe the Democrats went too foreign immigration and stuff, Spanberger very much wants to be seen as a moderate, even if she's not governing that way.

and she gave her speech in a very sort of forced way trying to highlight, you know, kitchen table issues. And I don't know how convincing it is. Yeah, because I'm just trying to think like a normal human being watching Abigail Spanberger, who is calm. And by normal human being, I mean, somebody who doesn't work in journalism. She's just trying to project the sense of calm.

It was a really normal atmosphere behind her, flags, podium, and the like. But there's also some things that's just a little off about Abigail. Spamberger. She's a little bit of a charisma vacuum. Let's take a look at this clip. This is going to be S3, Abigail Spamberg. Oh, I'm sorry, not S3. This is going to be S-10, Abigail Spamberger. He's enriching himself. His family, his friends, the scale of the corruption is unprecedented. There's the cover-up of the Epstein files, the crypto-scams, cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballroom. putting his name and face on buildings all over our nation's capital. This is not what our founders envisioned, not by a long shot. So I'll ask again, is the president working for you? We all know the answer is no.

What do you think, Mark, is the president working for you? This is CIA's Abigail Spanberger. Well, if you have to answer your own question, which she did throughout this, speech. You're like, is the president working for you or is the president of this or that? And she would always answer it in the context of the speech. The answer is, and I just feel like if you're that forced in terms of, you know, writing a speech, then it doesn't come off as terribly, you know, confident or anything like that. It was weird because it was following Donald Trump, who was this, you know, whatever you want to say about the guy, you may not hate him or love him, but he's kind of this

master of stagecraft and presence and everything. And she responded by giving the most ordinary milk with toast for forgettable speech, basically like, you know, this could have been Democratic Party rhetoric from 20 years ago, which I guess she sees as an advantage because she's trying to distinguish herself as somebody who's not, you know, a radical progressive. But it's also true that you're just right about the, you know, in order to sell, you know, a speech like that that has a lot of, you know, nucleotose content, you're right. There's this charisma vacuum there. In fact, I've been interacting with Abigail, I've been interacting with Abigail, Spanberger, as a constituent, I guess, primarily through the press and reading about her and things that she's written, the things that she was, she's reading about things that she had said and things that she had done. But I had never, like, seen any sustained video of her until last night, as crazy as that sounds living in Virginia and following these things closely. And I think Abigail Spanberger has a real Hillary Clinton problem in that. She's a woman. And people hate women.

Yes, that's exactly where I was going with this. Thank you. Mark, like repeal the 19th Amendment. Yeah, no comment. But I think she has that same problem that Hillary Clinton ultimately has, which is that there's something about her that reminds people of like a junior high vice principal, you know, telling you to eat your spinach or whatever and, you know, what to do and this and that. And I just don't think that she plays. plays well in terms of charisma and, you know, I don't know.

It's, there's something about her that I find sort of very sort of off-putting and, you know, and sort of, it's like she's talking down to you, basically. Yeah, and I know we're going to get into this in the segment where we talk about your new Portland investigation, but my friend Katie Pavlach posted, as Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger claims Democrats of the party of court affordability, Democrats in her state have proposed the following taxes slash forced costs on regular Americans. dog walking and grooming tax, gun and ammunition tax, new income tax brackets, storage facility tax, dry cleaning tax, home repair tax, new personal property tax on electric leaf blowers and electric

landscaping equipment. Like if I were Hillary Clinton trying to sell an agenda like that, if I were her strategists in 2016 and I have been like, we're cooked. Like this is crazy. This agenda, the Spanberger agenda is crazy outside of Northern Virginia, which is so densely populated that she gets away with it. And then Dems want her to give the city of the union response. Well, I think maybe she's hoping that she'll appear moderate because she, you know, kill, she can maybe kill some of this craziness or whatever. You know, at least I think that's what a lot of Virginians are hoping. I mean, when you look at this, like, you know, it's a joke among Trump voters.

You know, I voted for this because, you know, the voters are so aligned on policy, you know, even some of the stuff that Democrats perceive is radical. I mean, voters are largely aligned. Trump voters are largely aligned on, say, immigration policy. Whereas with Democrats, it's like Abigail Spanberger gets elected and it's like, who's the constituency for a new tax on gym memberships? I mean, seriously. Like, that's a real proposal right now.

Like, who voted for that? You know, Virginia has this thing called a car tax. They basically tax you on the value of your car. It's been hated for years. The legislature, both under Republicans and Democrats, have talked about getting rid of it. Then Democrats under Spanberger are talking about extending the car tax to lawnmowers. I mean, it's bizarre.

Who voted for this? That's incredible. But here's the real problem for Democrats. Spanberger triggered blue sky. We could put F2 and F3 up on the screen. Some selection, I think Tim Carney pulled this from the examiner, a selection of blue sky reactions where people are complaining that Spamberger

was the colonial capital. incredible stuff. Like just, I'm trying to find a good one to read. I mean, they're all pretty good. Here's one from someone named Jack. The more I think about this choice for Democrats to rebut SOTU with Spamberger and Colonial Williamsburg, the more it reads as just an intentional kick in the face to just about everyone who has voted for Democrats in the past and a direct appeal to Magalite. It's incredibly insulting.

Mark, did you find that to be a direct appeal to Magalite? Again, it is America's 250th anniversary. Democrats are trying to appear normal. So a Democratic governor in Virginia giving a speech from Colonial Williamsburg to highlight that it's the 250th anniversary of our country, the idea that that is triggering to some significant percentage of the Democratic base. And it upsets them. It's just absolutely insane.

Look, I don't know what is going to happen in the midterms. Midterms are often just, you know, low turnout elections where you drive out your base. And maybe Republicans will get clobbered. But when you look at what Trump did at the state of the union last night, where he's highlighting, like, genuine American heroes like that Coast Guard swimmer who saved a hundred-some people in the Texas floods or the special forces helicopter pilot who, you know, completed that Venezuelan mission with four bullets in them or whatever. And you look at how, you know, Trump was out there celebrating the, like the absolute best of America, USA hockey, you know, coming down the aisles. I mean, when you get into a truly national election, like, I don't know how Democrats are. ever going to win a presidential election again, as long as they have the significant part of their coalition that absolutely hates the country and it doesn't take, you know, doesn't miss any

opportunity to let other people know that this country is rotten, and they don't like it, and they want to rebuild it completely from the ground up. I just don't see that as a winning proposition. Yeah, you know, I think the midterms are just in, that's just the politics of the midterms are different, of course, in the politics of the state of union or state of the union response. obviously both are to some extent geared at clarifying party messaging going into the cycle. But these are based turnout type of type elections. You have to convince some normie and independence, but you also really have to electrify your bays. And so that's where, you know, if you're going with Abigail Spanberger, you're not necessarily checking either box.

But she's like they're, they feel like she's the best option. I wanted to get this clip of Joe Scarborough rolling for your reaction, Mark, because here's how Scarborough reacted to the Trump State of the Union. A couple things that I thought were extraordinary that you wouldn't see in the other state of the unions, unless they were Donald Trump. The first, of course, was just the unrelenting bigotry, the lies, the attacking of one group specifically, the Somali's, Somali Americans. That's the sort of thing that, oh, you know, I'm not going to talk about fascism or Naziism. You just read history and see what type of regimes will pick one or two groups and blame all of America's ills on those groups. That's one of the things that the president did. Another thing that he did was generally talking about immigration.

Again, it's un-American. It goes against what the Republican Party has always stood for. It's gone against what Ronald Reagan stood for. And this continued lie, and it is a case. continued lie by this Republican Party, and they know they're lying when they continue to suggest that immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than those who were native-born Americans. Okay, so there is dispute on that last figure, Mark, but we don't even have to get into it to say that him characterizing the argument as bigoted is exactly why Trump succeeds.

It's exactly why Trump succeeds. You react to the state of the union where Trump is calling for in front of the entire country. It's not like he's just talking to the base on Joe Rogan or whatever, a Tucker show. He's literally making a completely common sense pitch that Democrats would have embraced 20 years ago on immigration and the fact that the opposition party oversaw a billion dollars per one estimate of fraud in the state of Minnesota perpetrated by a relatively new immigrant group.

Incredible. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is this, it's such an insane straw man that the media have erected. They keep going back to this talking point about, well, illegal immigrants, you know,

actually don't commit as much crime or crime at a rate at the same rate that, you know, regular citizens do that it's actually less. That's completely beside the point and completely misses, you know, everything that people object to, which is that anytime any illegal immigrant commits a crime, it's a crime that didn't need to happen because they shouldn't have been here

in the first place, okay? Right. And it's like such a simple thing to understand. And this applies to so many things across the board, you know, whether it's car accidents or whether it's, you know, taking up public resources, you know, all these things, you know, where people understand that, you know, illegal immigrants are not exactly an unalloyed good. In fact, you know, there's a strong argument that they take a lot more than they give to this country. You know, and further, look, nobody's against immigrants. I mean, it's totally insane.

I mean, the Trump administration is still very much, you know, allowing people to apply to immigrate to this country. It's just that there's a process. And we don't let 10 million people cross the border, which is a whole thing that, you know, people on MS now or whatever the heck they're calling it now have, you know, never bothered to atone for. It's just totally insane. What did they think was going to happen when Joe Biden led in 10 million people? It was going to – I could have told you it was going to cause a lot of problems and it was going to cause a political backlash. And here we are. and you screaming that it's bigoted to complain about this just makes you look further out of touch.

Yeah, no, that's a really good way to put it. And it's like they're stuck between the rock and the hard place of their own making. The fact that the base is characterized big people who would get upset about Abigail Spanberger, for a number of reasons, by the way. People are even like leftists are predictably mad at Gavin Newsom because, again, we're going to talk about this when we talk about Portland. But they've gone so radical because Democrats, have normalized a lot of that.

Like, that's what the trans pill was. Like, if we're using the matrix, if we're using the matrix metaphor, like that was a sort of blue pill that you can go fully postmodern. And now a lot of, like, 20, 30-somethings in the party have and they're in leadership positions. And they work in the media.

Let's rule Sonny Hosten on Trump referring to illegals, S-17. language matters the saying that people are illegal illegal aliens that really matters we haven't used that term for so long now it's back in vogue you are not illegal as a human being

just because you're undocumented and so that for me felt dehumanizing to our immigrant population and I I disagreed with you yesterday when you said you know the Democrats shouldn't go they shouldn't dignify this

type of performance. And I disagreed with you and now I agree with you because like you said, someone like Ilhan Omar who fiercely is protective of Minnesotans and Somalians, in particular, she gave him that moment that he wanted. Mark, I'm just going to roll through two more clips so people get a fulsome sense of what the response was here. Joy Reed was the MC of an alternate event. So you're saying I have to watch more of the view. you get to. Don't say you have to. You get to watch more with the view. Mark, this is a privilege. It's not going to be the view, actually. I'm going to do Joy Reid. So even better.

I know that's sort of more up your alley. There's Joy Reed at the alternate event where Democratic Congress people actually attended this alternate event. That's why you saw some empty seats. If you were watching the city union last night or saw the clips, S-14. Attention to all magotrols. And with apologies. to the pastor who gave the invocation, your bullshit is not welcome here. And to paraphrase one of my favorite actors in the world, Robert De Niro, I'm going to slightly paraphrase him.

Fuck y'all. We're here to hear the truth and to hear from impacted people not to see or hear from you. So go back and pay attention to your orange lying friend. Okay, we're back to doing the orange thing. it's 2017, we're back to dropping the F word, like it's really subversive and edgy. And finally, Mark, I'm going to make you watch because you're an Oregonian. Representative Maxine Dexter with Portland frogs, the blow-up frogs that you saw at some of the Antifa

demonstrations against ICE and against cops in recent years. S-12, let's hear Dexter. Oh, gosh. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. And I am the proud representative for Oregon's third congressional. district. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. And tonight, I defy Trump and his authoritarian project by standing in joyful resistance with the Portland Frog Brigitte. Yay. Okay. Well, Mark, this is, I think it's true of both Republicans and Democrats. I'm curious to get your take on this, that they're both thriving right now because of lesser

of two evil politics because people are going to the polls. And you have pretty steady bases, you know, the Fifth Avenue voters for Trump and the vote blue no matter who voters for Democrats. But also there's so many voters who are like, I'm going to be voting against the craziest people that I'm seeing right now. And I have no idea why so many thought it was a good idea to put Dexter and Joy Reid out there. Yeah. I don't know.

I mean, basically, at the risk. of you baiting me into more sexism. What I got from those clips is that the progressive movement really needs more imprecatory harpies just, you know, to really, really seal the deal to win over the public. Yeah, I don't even, again, nowhere to begin. I mean, like, I just, it's a whole group of people that, like, don't realize how out of touch they truly are. You know, the frog costume thing, again, if you're listening to this in the podcast and you

weren't, you know, privy to that is really just, you know, it's really just, you know, It's so ridiculous. And I don't know why they think it's fun. I don't know what their deal is. By the way, if you know anything about the real story of how the frog costume started, there's literally like a violent anarchist that wears a frog costume who has hurt people and has like a criminal record or something like that, if I recall correctly. So the idea that that would be a thing on stage with the Democratic Congresswoman is, you know,

very questionable, especially if you know anything about the fall of downtown Portland, essentially. And at the same time, This notion that it is somehow shocking or upsetting to refer to illegal aliens, which was, you know, the term of art for decades and decades before, you know, very recently, you know, I don't know, last 10 or 15 years, some news organizations decided, you know, responded to pressure from activist groups not to use it in favor of undocumented, whatever that means. And it's just, it's ridiculous. You know, you don't get to like, you know, constantly change terms just because you're losing the debate. but that seems to be sort of a democratic strategy right now, and it has been for a long time. Like, they're not offering any substantial policy. It's like, look at what they're saying here.

Like, Trump is a mean, bad person for deporting all these illegal immigrants. Well, what's their counterproposal for actually dealing with these people? They're afraid to say it out loud. You know, they know it is deeply politically and popular to say we want to naturalize 10 plus million people that are here. But at the same time, they oppose Trump. But, you know, they'll never say what they're actually standing for. And that's what all these clips are about. There's a lot of condemnation, condemnation, condemnation.

Well, what is the popular part of the Democratic agenda they're actually selling? And we're going to keep this conversation going because actually Maxine Dexter represents, like a part of the country that we're about to dive deep into that would be the Portland, the greater Portland area. So everyone stick around. But first, ladies, if you have been feeling exhausted, anxious, foggy, or like you're gaining weight no matter what. And your doctor shrugs saying, that's going to. normal for your age. You're not crazy. You're being ignored. The medical establishment has dismissed women's hormonal health for far too long. Troy was created by a woman who lived this frustration firsthand during perimenopause and decided women deserve better than generic advice and symptom

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That's J-O-I-and-Bloaks.com slash after-party, joy and blokes.com, and code after-party for 50% off your labs and 20% off all supplements. Joy and Blokes, healthcare that actually listens to women. All right, I'm joined now again by Mark Hemingway, who's a senior writer over at Real Clear InVo. investigations and has a monster investigation into the devolution of Portland that we're going to get into. But first, local news did us a huge favor in the form of a news hook, Mark, by in the last five days airing this tragic segment. It's hard to watch. I can't imagine Mark for someone like you who's from this area and I think loves this area. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it's a beautiful part of the country. This was a local news report on a C-Based.

The CDS store closing. And if you're listening to this, what you're going to miss is that not only is the CBS store closing, but you can see all of these boarded up businesses in downtown Portland. It looks like a ghost town. This is S-22. It's hard to miss the abandoned storefronts and four lease signs near Pioneer Courthouse Square. A CVS spokesperson told me March 5th will be the last day for this story. People I spoke to today who were going in and out of the store tell me they're frankly not surprised it's closing.

I'm not surprised. and everything's locked up in there. Like you want certain things. They're under locking key. You're like, oh my God. In 2023, a Target store also left this part of town, citing crime and theft as reasons why. Once you have more people just stealing from these stores,

eventually it's just going to lead to them shutting down because it's like how can you run a business in those situations? Mark has a new article over on RCI, Real Clear Investigations. It's titled Model City, Portland's journey from Sim. symbol of chic to shabby. Mark, can you tell us a little bit about your reaction to that closing CVS in the broader context of everything you went deep on in this piece? So actually, I can tell you something specifically about it.

My sister, my sister lives in Portland, got into a car accident last year, and I went out there to check on her. And when I got on to Hotels.com or whatever to book my accommodations, I noticed that every four-star hotel in downtown Portland was available. for under $100 a night. And so I thought, what the heck? I thought, what the heck? I'll just stay downtown.

And I stayed about a block from that CVS. And let me tell you, they really can't exaggerate how bad things are, you know, once you actually see it in person. I mean, basically all, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, downtown was just thriving. I mean, it was, you know,

one of the hottest cities in America. The New York Times is doing a travel piece on it. Like every other month, it seemed like, you know, people just couldn't stop talking about Portland. I'm one of the best food scenes in the country. You know, it was just, you know, doing, you know, going gangbusters. And it really was just a situation where they just voted themselves into oblivion, basically. You know, the city went from being, you know, stock liberal to radical progressive in a way that, you know, even San Francisco's sort of pulling out of its tailspin, whereas Portland is still, you know, firmly in it.

You know, just to give you some, like, you know, basic numbers here. Portland has the largest commercial real estate vacancy rate of any major city in the country right now. And they have the second highest crime rate after Memphis, Tennessee. Portland, Oregon, the widest major city in America with no history of like civil rights issues or, you know, civil rights creating an underclass or big projects or anything of that has the second highest crime rate of any city in America. If you had told anyone in Portland that that was going to happen 10 or 15 years ago, they would have said you're out of your freaking mind. But no, that is exactly what happens when you have terrible policy.

And, you know, as a result, you know, businesses are fleeing downtown Portland. And frankly, they're fleeing the whole state. You know, I don't know if you know what Dutch brothers is. It's this huge coffee chain west of, you know, in the western half of the United States. Well, I guess there's spread even further than that now. But it's a $12 billion business. It started in Grants Pass, Oregon. It's all over Portland.

The entire company left lock, stock, and barrel. you know, last year. And, you know, other major companies are are either pulling out or talking about pulling out. The CEO of Columbia Sportswear, it's one of the largest, you know, companies in Oregon, set on a stage in front of the governor a few months back that his advisors had, you know, told him to move his company out of state. I mean, like, it's pretty bleak what's going on there. And just to be clear, you know, when I talk about, you know, people pulling out of the state, What they're really pulling out of is Portland. I mean, the problem with Oregon right now is that it's a state of four million people,

and about two and a half million of them live in one metro area that, you know, is, you know, radically progressive and dragging down the entire state economy and dragging down the entire state with it. It's really quite shocking. And if you go to, if you've been to downtown Portland at any point in the recent future, recent history, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, you interviewed a man who substacks. from Portland. He has a very interesting substack. And you mentioned what David Sedaris recently wrote about Portland. And in the piece, you write Eager, this is the substackers name. What's his first name, Mark?

Jeff Eager. He's actually the former mayor of Bend, Oregon, which is my hometown. Oh, that's right. That's so interesting. Okay. So he, quote, says one key reason why the city's massive crime problem goes unaddressed is that it's largely self-inflicted and driven by ideology. Eager says, hardcore progressivism has destroyed what old school Oregon liberals built. Farmers markets, parks, walkable communities, transit, and all the good kind of Portlandia. You're a liberal lifestyle stuff. This brand of progressivism is just so against the rule of law. It's ruined all of those institutions that made Portland a cool, trendy, quirky place.

It's not really quirky anymore. It's dangerous. And so, Mark, my question is these labels are tough. But is this a case of leftists and leftism, old school? And I'm talking about like old school leftism, being hijacked by the project they gave birth to in kind of postmodern millennial progressivism? Or is it something different than that? No, I think that that's largely it. I mean, there's some other weird factors we probably don't have time to get into.

I mean, like the history of anarchism in the Pacific Northwest is a thing going back 100 some years. And I'm sure that it's some part of what's going on there. But by and large, what happened is, is you had a bunch of normal Democrats or what were liberal Republicans when I was growing up 30, 40 years ago, running the state. You know, but even the Republicans then had, you know, very socially liberal tendencies. And, you know, that has been completely hijacked by this brand of progressivism that doesn't basically believe in rule of law or public order. And I don't really know how to even like, you know, explain it. And frankly, a lot of liberals in the state, I keep hearing from people that are Democrats or liberal and people that live there tell me they hear from their liberal and Democratic friends that they're really fed up with what's going on. And they're really fed up with the current leadership.

And yet, you know, for 15, 20 years, it's just been electing nothing but not just Democrats, but hardcore progressives. and no other moderate faction can prevail in the state as long as Portland is as radical. Portland voters are as radical as they are. And it's really crazy. That said, the governor right now with air is fantastically unpopular. She committed this massive blunder by passing this deeply unpopular tax cut. I'm sorry, tax hike in the state. It amounts to the largest tax hike in the state.

And she only won her election by three and a half points statewide. So in theory, there is an opportunity for a political rebellion, but I don't know whether the national political environment, you know, the fact that Donald Trump exists and they get the campaign against him means that, you know, there's no hope of moderate Republicans triumphing in the state. But at the very least, you'd think there'd be a faction of moderate liberals that would want to take back their party because the Democrats... Or old school leftists. Right. Well, the Democrats I grew up with in the state of Oregon were hardcore environmentalists. And yet every park in Portland is full of crazy homeless people leaving piles of trash everywhere. Like, what is the liberal rationale for this stuff?

It's just absolutely crazy. You know, and some of the stuff is, like, I will admit, has been a wish list of liberals for a long time. Like, the thing that really destroyed Portland was this measure where they basically decriminalized all hard drugs. And drug legalization is something a lot of liberals have wanted to try for a long time. And I can almost see why they allowed it to happen. but the results are so obviously terrible in terms of the crime rate and everything else that, you know, it's pretty clear that you need somebody who's, you know, public order minded to take the reins again. Whether that's a Republican or a Democrat, it could be either. You know, there's the average Democrat in this country, and certainly the average Democratic mayor, almost anywhere else, wouldn't stand for any of this.

But in Portland, they get away with, you know, like everything short of literal murder in terms of policy. Well, and there's the business component of it and the cultural component of it. And that's because you can have, you and I would agree that old school leftism is going to be bad on an economic level in all likelihood. If you're doing high taxes, your businesses are going to flee and the like. On the social justice level, that's where when you combine the bad business policies with these insane, we have this clip of Maxine Dexter, Representative Maxine Dexter from the area, talking about whole milk as a dog whistle of white supremacy. Let's just roll that right now.

Please ask for the science-based regimens, not whatever RFK Jr. is getting kickbacks on or whatever whole milk, white supremacy, dog whistling that's happening right now. I'm getting a little too political, but whole milk white supremacy dog whistling you can't combine those two things mark you can't combine the cultural craziness and the business craziness again the thing about this though that drives me so crazy is there's no ideological rationale behind this brand of progressivism it is purely

reactionary which is the thing they've always accused the hardcore right wingers of they have become themselves like i grew up in oregon it was it was full of hippies liberal hippies who are all in favor of things like unfiltered whole milk straight from the cow, like arguing for those things as a matter of health. And then the moment this maha thing pops up and it becomes even a tinge right-coded, all of a sudden drinking whole milk is white supremacy. Like this is utter and absolute insanity. I just don't know what to say about it anymore. I mean, just because clearly it's not coming from a normal, rational place. And clearly it just, it can't be reasoned with. I mean, every business leader is screaming from the high heavens, you know, that something needs to change.

And they seem utterly unresponsive to this. And at the same time, I don't see Maxine Dexter, you know, losing an election anytime soon. It's just absolutely crazy. I mean, the far leftist in the city, Antifa, Antifa has, they firebomb, one of the city council members cars, who's pretty liberal, but he wasn't liberal enough for them. So the firebombing of cars, I forget her name, the woman who is the Democratic Congresswoman in southern Washington, her district goes through Vancouver, which is the Portland suburb on the other side of the Columbia River that's in Washington state. Antifa firebombed her husband's automotive business, again, because she's a Democrat, but she's not liberal enough.

I mean, it is just a purity death spiral at this point in time, and there's got to be some serious pushback from voters, if not politicians, in order to fix this. But what I find really interesting is going back to our earlier conversation about the state of the union and, like, you know, how are Democrats representing themselves nationally? The entire subtext of Ezra Klein's big abundance book last year was Democrats can't govern. Democrats can't build anything. Democrats can't run anything. and every American who's been to a city, a major blue city in the last decade, realizes this, and it's become a problem for their national reputation. As long as people are going to places like Portland or any of the major West Coast cities,

they're all disasters. L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, they're all disasters, and they're all run by crazy progressives. As long as people see those people as having influence in the party, I think it's going to have a huge, huge impact on their national political fortunes. Yeah, let's stay on this point, actually. The raw milk point is, or the whole milk versus raw milk. These are distinct things. I think she might have even meant to say raw milk, but incredible stuff.

Casey Means, who has a background that if she were affiliated with a Democratic president, which she easily could be, from my vantage point, just like politically, I have no idea what she believes on a host of issues that have nothing to do with health. she's testifying in front of the help committee today. So the Senate Health Education and Labor Pension for confirmation as Surgeon General. She dropped out of her residency, went to med school, dropped out of her residency because she thought we were treating people poorly and doing a lot of symptom management that's great for pharma and not dealing with food, for example. And so here is how that was greeted by someone who would have fit in great in the poor. of Mark's youth, Bernie Sanders, S-24.

We are the only major country on Earth that does not guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right. Dr. Means, is health care a human right? Should the United States join every other major country and say to everybody, whether you're young, or old, rich or poor, you are entitled to health care as a human right. Yes, no, maybe. My focus is on ensuring that Americans

have access to the best health care in the entire world. in the entire world, which as you talked about, as I talked about, as everyone who's spoken is talking about is pretty much the opposite of what we have right now. We spend two X every other country in the world and we have the worst. I agree, but is healthcare you might,

will you join me in fighting for a national health care program? I will be by your side trying to get Americans access to the best health care in the world. We also have Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, Republican of Oklahoma and Bernie Sanders going back and forth during the hearing. This is S-25. Yet, everybody we bring up here, you guys chastised

for trying to make changes. God forbid, we change and go after us and try to fix our broken system. Anyways, I ranted too long. Let's talk about some... Yes, you did. I'm sorry, I didn't ask your opinion on that. And if I cared about your opinion, I would ask you, but I don't care about your opinion. You're part of the system. You're part of the problem.

You've been sitting here longer than I've even been alive. This is your problem. You should have fixed this a long time ago. You've been rel on it so long. What have you been doing? I decided not to run. for Sergeant General. You're the nominee. I've decided to accept that nominee. That is definitely something we would never accept.

Oh, okay. Mark, I feel like Bernie Sanders might be a little sensitive on this because, again, he's somebody who was friendly with RFK Jr. Before RFK Jr. became pro-Trump. And I think RFK Jr.'s ideology on environmental issues and corporate power is basically anti-Republic. on everything except for health. And Bernie Sanders, I just wonder, Mark, I really, I don't see that question as being

like incredibly, deeply hostile. But overall, I also just the way he's treated R.F.K. Jr. in those hearings and now Casey means, it's a wonder to me that he's not celebrating them for being these agents of disruption, even if he doesn't agree with them across the board. This guy is a socialist. He should be cheering the tightening of the contradictions. Right. I mean, it's really kind of insane to me that Trump is the guy that has so upset liberals, right?

And to some extent, to some extent, I think it's because Trump is, you know, more liberal than almost any other conventional Republican has been in their lifetimes. And I really think that the fact that he's co-opted a lot of these issues really seems to bother them. I mean, the Maha thing is a very good example. I mean, yes, there are things about Maha that you can point to as, you know, you know, conservatives are against big centralized control of things like the food system or other things like that and would encourage localism or whatever. But it's also true that, you know, historically, you know, these kinds of, you know, health issues that exist in sort of the less scientific, more sort of natural realm, shall we say, we're definitely the domain of liberals. You know, on gay rights, Trump is far and away more liberal than almost any other national Republican politician that has come, you know, before him. Like, you know, Trump, you know, came along and Trump has a much less hawkish foreign policy. That was the indictment of the Republicans for as long as I could remember from Democrats.

And now all of a sudden they're all talking like neocons. Again, I just don't understand how Democrats allowed themselves to become so reactionary at this point in time. You know, you can say what you say what you hate about Trump, but the fact the matter is, is he has clear objectives and clear policies, you know. Build a wall is pretty easy to understand, you know, and he says them over and over again. I do not know what the national democratic agenda is on anything, really. I just don't. Well, you used the phrase earlier, you said purity death spiral. And that, I just think, is a really good way to describe how algorithms have infected our politics.

and that because we get trained, in a lot of cases, unintentionally, to perform for the algorithm, it prizes extreme emotion in one direction or the other. And even if you're not on social media, I don't think Bernie Sanders is like scrolling X or TikTok every night. Maybe I'm wrong. But even if you're not on it, it's changed the way that we approach politics completely. And I sort of think that's what this is, that if you're not a pure leftist or if you're not a pure leftist, or if you're not a pure liberal, if you're not a pure MAGA

or if you're not pure never Trump, you are just, the incentives aren't to build up or to tear down. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I don't necessarily know how to fix that issue, but that is sort of the crux of the problem. And I mentioned the Ezra Klein abundance book right now. I mean, it is, you know, this idea that, you know,

it's impossible to govern in America anymore. I mean, it's primarily a democratic problem, but it's a problem for Republicans as well. It's impossible to build anything or do anything big. And part of that is simply because we can't come together on stuff. And it's, you know, again, people should look at the fact that RFK is in the Trump cabinet and this woman with a more liberal background is nominated for Surgeon General. You know, Democrats should be looking at that as a positive step forward and figuring out how they can work with it and not necessarily arguing for the,

the most maximally insane position like, you know, completely redoing our health care system overnight and making that the Surgeon General's business when it's never been the Surgeon General's business. If we're ever going to implement a national health care scheme, I'm sorry, that's going to be the Senate and House's job. The Surgeon General, I mean, you know, why would Bernie Sanders make that an issue there other than it's just something that he alone, you know, wants to make an issue of? But, you know, everybody's, you know, shirking responsibility. And I think that goes right down to the voters. You know, we should probably be looking in the mirror a lot more as well.

If this is our leadership and we're so divided, you know, maybe we should start building bridges with each other. Oh, wow, Mark. It sounded a little poetic. Well, I had to redeem myself for being so sexist at the beginning. Women are great. They're beautiful. They're perfect.

All right. Let's end on Don Lemon, Mark. Don Lemon is now being sued. F7. Yes, on a happy note, Don Lemon is being sued over that Minnesota Church program. protest, he live streamed. Someone who says that a parishioner at the church is suing him for emotional distress because he disrupted the worship service. Obviously, he is already being tried by the Trump

administration over a face act violation. But now, Mark, I mean, the face act thing, it is a little bit harder to connect Lemon to the face act. And I know Harmate Dillon and many other people, experts in the space, Megan, legally, has been able to build that. case and I think pretty effectively. I don't particularly love the FACE Act because I think it has some constitutional speech problems exactly for that reason. But this to me seems like possibly a better way to get Lemon legally liable given that you could understand how if someone comes in and starts live streaming a church service, even as a journalist, not even as a part of the protest. You don't even necessarily say he was part of the protest. You could just say if someone does that, it would cause you

emotional distress. You're in a private place of worship. I can see how that actually might even be a better way to hold him liable. Yeah. There's a lot to be said about the FACE Act and the First Amendment implications of charging Don Lemon and whether that's a good thing. I have some pretty mixed feelings about that particular issue. What I don't have mixed feelings about is it was spectacularly terrible judgment on Lemon's fault, on Lemon's part to participate in this thing, the way that he did, to block the doorway, to shove microphones in parishioners' faces when he was uninvited. He went on a podcast, like, after the whole thing was over, and basically justified what he did by, like, slandering the whole congregation repeatedly.

Who's that, that skeletor-looking woman that's very popular? Yes. I believe it was that podcast, which, you know, speaking of imprecatory harpies, I mean, I just don't understand, like, what is the point of, you know, that kind of political discourse. I mean, she's had it, Mark. She's had it. That's the point. It's literally just like a hate fest, you know, and I don't understand. And anyway, the point, though, is, like when politics becomes a hate fest, it encourages things like Don Lemon storming into churches. And, you know, whether that's, you know, against the law, we can argue about that, but whether or not it's

incredibly destructive to the fabric of this country and incredibly destructive to our politics, like, that's not debatable. And it was a terrible thing to do. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, If I were on that jury, I would basically, you know, give that woman everything that Don Lemon owns because he really showed terrible judgment. And I think it is really, really horrible to invade churches, invade any private property, frankly, under situations like this. But a church especially. Is it just me, Mark, or is it that people, like, the secular law doesn't necessarily understand anymore what a church is to people who are there on a Sunday? That's part of this, I think. Yeah, I think that's a huge, huge part of it.

I remember, it's like they've gotten so out of touch on religion. You know, it's hilarious. They're so excited about this Talarico guy or whatever. They think that just because he can quote the Bible that all of a sudden, he'll went over. People, never mind he's, you know, completely manipulative and doesn't know what he's talking about half the time. But at least, you know, he's trying to represent himself as Christian, which is a step forward. But, you know, during the Obama years or whatever, I remember, like Obama used to just openly disparaged churches. And I was a recall, there was some attempt in the Obama administration to like start taxing churches.

You know, they like floated that as an idea. I mean, it's really, really insane. Most people have no idea what churches do for their given communities unless you're part of it. But the fact of the matter is, I guarantee you, you know, and almost anywhere you live in the United States, there is a church in your neighborhood, you know, forget the politics that is out there doing charitable works, taking care of people. never mind that all the stuff that churches do that you never hear about. You know, some guy comes home, my wife's dad just died, and he was a Lutheran pastor. And like, when, you know, I went to the funeral and the stories you hear that man did, that man did, you know, you know, 2 a.m. And, you know, some guys coming home to his wife drunk again, and the pastor gets a call, you know, is it better that a pastor shows up and deals with that?

Or is it better that we call the cops, you know? You know, there's so much that people, the churches do that people take for granted that it just makes. me, I mean, it makes me angry, ironically. It's not a very Christian response, right? But at the same time, people have to understand that these are literally sacred spaces for a reason. These are where people go to bear their souls. These are where people go to try and be better people, you know, to disrupt that space and say, no, we're going to judge you, even though we don't believe in anything you believe, and we don't believe in any sort of, you know, redemption in a secular context, we're going to judge you for trying to be better people and believing in forgiveness.

That just drives me insane. Well, also, on top of that, Lemon put them all on a national broadcast. I know he's not on CNN anymore, but he's then yanking this really personal sacred moment for a church community and then literally broadcasting it out to a national audience live. So that is a, I think the emotional distress argument may even be more compelling than the face act one because he's putting all of these people, he's taking them in a private place and making their private sacred worship public. Yeah, well, that's a whole other ball of wax, isn't it? I mean, one thing that's destroying the fabric of this country is that the moment anything happens in this country, you know, be it good, bad, and different people whip out their phones so we can all. you know, past judgment on some, you know, bar fight nationally. And it's so unhealthy.

You know, there are so many things to become viral or memes or, you know, whatever things because there's video of it online that, you know, you never, in a million years would have ever heard of, you know, 25 years ago before smartphones were a thing. Yes, I agree that people need to be very, very cautious about, you know, making, you know, local issues into national ones. And there should be some sort of, you know, judiciable, you know, remedy for that. In fact, if you actually look at the history of First Amendment jurisprudence, the biggest thing that has been, you know, legally speaking, there was a great book written by a former Tulane Law professor who's now, I think, at Yale, Amy Washneck, I'm forgetting her name, but she wrote an entire book about how the thing that

was mostly threatening the First Amendment and might, you know, cause a repeal of New York Times. versus Sullivan and a lot of journalism protections was because news news organizations had been so disrespectful of people's basic privacy it wasn't like political bias or any of these other issues we're dealing with or whatever like there's all these like the whole kogan sex tape that had no news value and it did eventually take down gawker right um you know um there been all these like news reports of like you know women on film uh wearing at marty grap you know right there are all these things where news news news organizations have decided just because someone does something in public that it is, you know, worthy of being on the news when the reality is is that people should have some

expectation of privacy, even in public or semi-public spaces, let alone churches. Mm-hmm. Brandeis was grappling with this legally when the camera came out. He was like, whoa. And we just got so numb to it so quickly. Now the same thing is happening with AI. That's another rabbit hole. But Mark Hemingway, I mean, do you have any point, any last points on that?

No, no, I don't. You're not going to become a Neo-Brandician right now. No, Brandeis is an impressive bull for you, I have to say. Sorry, impressive poll for you makes it sound like, you know, otherwise not be, yes, right, as a woman. And you know what, Mark, I can vote. And that's something we should put back on the table. Oh, man. Oh, I hope you don't get in trouble.

Mark is joking. Mark's a great guy. Mark has two daughters. Right. Oh, man. Mark, anyway, senior writer at Real Clear Investigations. I keep baiting you. I won't do it anymore, Mark. I'll let you get on with your evening. And I'm going to see if your wife is still at the bar. Do you have a bet on that? Oh, I bet she's tired.

She's probably tired. She's probably tired. All right, Mark. Thanks so much for coming back. Thank you. Bye. Oh, man. I love having Mark here. Great to have Mark here on a night, too, where I had all these technical difficulties, because if anyone's going to roll with those punches,

it's going to be the great Mark Hemingway. And, of course, our lovely audience, if you're not listening to this live, you're probably like, what's the big deal? What is everybody talking about? Or if you're catching clips, you're probably, oh, it's all fine. Don't worry. We have more to come.

I want to make a big point about media along the lines of what Mark was just saying. Yesterday I had some interesting reflections, not on the substance of the union so much as the way that it was written. So I'm going to get to that in just one moment. But first, if you want to finally fix your gut, make your hair healthier and stronger, healthier and stronger, and add some glow to your skin in 2026,

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that clocked in at 33,000 words, but he didn't deliver it verbally. So that's interesting. It was like longer than novels, but he didn't deliver it verbally that year. So Bill Clinton in 2000 had one that was 20 minutes shorter than Trump, and then Trump's joint address last year, which wasn't technically a state of the union,

was still not as long as last night's state of the union address. And as we were watching it, I was thinking it wasn't really linear, right? Like we talk about linear TV where people were sitting down and experiencing something in, for the most part, a whole chunk. If you sat down and watched the evening news, you were watching the evening news broadcast. You were consuming it in whole, for the most part. That's kind of how it went. And that's what, you know, we call it linear TV.

And there was a linear characteristic to the format. And there are all kinds of interesting analyses you can do about how streaming got rid of commercial breaks and changed the way that TV shows are made. you know, Netflix now has people repeating the plot points over and over again. You've probably heard some actors talk about this because so many of us are scrolling on our phones. Well, we should be watching the show that we intentionally put on the screen. That they found you have to. I think Ben Affleck was talking about this on Rogan recently with Matt Dane.

And like you have to keep repeating plot points. Otherwise people are completely lost. So it's Marshall McLuhan, right? like the format, the medium, changes the message itself. It's not just a different way of saying X, Y, or Z. You're actually saying something totally different. You're not saying X, Y, or Z. You're saying A, B, C.

So that with the State of the Union makes a lot of sense to me. Right now, a lot of the criticisms of Wuthering Heights, the technical criticisms of Wuthering Heights, are based on this idea that it was a movie for TikTok. If you haven't seen any of these criticisms, they're very interesting. but basically that it was a clip show strung together in our memeified imagination, you know, to play to what could become a meme or a viral clip. And then you put this, I mean, your source material is a classic novel.

And you pull from that into something that is essentially made for TikTok. And people who are used to linear cinematic storytelling, which is still almost everyone, really turned off by that. People should ask themselves whether that is the future of movies and whether that's good or bad. But I just wanted to look at this new Pew poll that came up. They did a big study on how Americans use media that has gotten very little coverage.

This was just a couple of weeks ago. And again, basically a few people have talked about it. And the most interesting part for my perspective, was how many people, I think I've mentioned this on the show before, but how many people say they seek out news and who just come across news? So it used to be that more people said

they are actively looking for news and fewer people said they just happen to come across it. So 39% of people say they just happen to come across it in 2019. 60% of people said they were actively looking for it. Now that's basically a tie. So that's 50% say they're looking for it. 49% say they happen to come across it. And even that tie, I think, is a little bit misleading.

Because if you happen to come across it on Instagram, but you followed a news outlet on Instagram, well, then you're looking for it, right? Or you followed a very political celebrity for some of their takes on Instagram. Then you're looking for it, but you also kind of happened to come across it. So both of those things are kind of true. but this is a huge difference that used to make us very distinct from each other.

There were just people who really tuned out the news. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was people that you know and love. People who had other things to do with their life. It was never interesting to them. Politics weren't particularly interesting to them. Maybe they were disillusioned about the whole system, et cetera. But if you're on social media now, you can choose not to follow the news.

The news is going to hit you anyway. And if you follow the news, it's going to hit you in your algorithm constantly because it keeps you scrolling because it makes you really mad or it makes you really excited. Maybe you're a live in Texas and you're stoked about Tala Rico. Okay, you're going to keep getting these

Tala RICO messages. Or maybe you find these conspiracy videos about MK Ultra, very, very interesting. Well, it's going to keep hitting you with those. And you're just, before you know it, your algorithm is always going to be pushing news content to you when you scroll. And especially if you're younger,

is scrolling constantly. That means news, is penetrating your day constantly. So that's something I think about because I ran the Wuthering Heights theory by somebody in Trump world. And they thought he was basically correct that the State of the Union was really long

because it was a hodgepodge of different things for different audiences that don't exactly feel cohesive in a linear format. You're watching this hour and what was a 47-minute speech on cable television or live stream, C-SPAN, whatever it is.

It might not have the exact same build. I thought it actually ended pretty abruptly, which is an interesting point too in this context. But the reason is that you can take this clip about Arena Zurizka, and you can blast that all over the Charlotte area where it's still very, very raw. You can blast it to a very specific cohort

of people on Instagram, Facebook because you can geo-target, you can target by age, you can target by sex, you can target by political affiliation, you can target by whether people are interested in crime stories. And so what you do then is create this string of different targeted material, basically, that can be spit out in different ways. And Trump is a media master. So it's no surprise to me that I think he's actually a pioneer in the space already. So I mean, that's what my big takeaway from the state of the union was, honestly, is that, yes, Trump likes to speak for a really long period of time. He'll do these monster rallies,

but this for the most part was scripted. He did a lot of ad libing. I think it was his most ad libbed state of the union type speech that I've seen him do. But I think it went so long. The text of the speech was really long itself. Not quite Carter, 32,000 words length, but it was long. And I really, again, I asked someone and was told that my theory was basically, basically correct, that what you're doing is stringing together all of these different targeted messages. And it's not going to feel exactly like what used to because it's targeted to a new media ecosystem that a lot of Washington just has not caught up with yet. You can have a conversation about whether that's good or bad. Obviously, he still had a linear audience that he played to

too, but it was just not like, it wasn't the type of state of the union that sort of builds through crescendo quite like what you saw in 1995, for example. So that's a big takeaway because the way we're consuming this information is changing and it's actually changing the information that's getting out there. If you're appealing to the broadest possible audience, you're going to have a speech that's not exactly what Trump did yesterday. I thought it was a fairly fine speech. I don't know that it's going to make a huge difference for him.

I think it revealed or it reminded us some of the problems he has. and some of the solutions he has for Republicans, his expert baiting of Democrats on 80-20 issues or 60-40 issues and the like. I mean, that's masterful. He's good at it and a lot of other Republicans aren't. But he also, I think, is really, really early and his team is really early to understand where all of this is going

and to make it work in their favor. So I'll leave it there for tonight's travel edition of After Party. If you're watching this live, thanks for hanging in there with us while we're on the road. Appreciate it. The iPhone camera, I have it on suction pump hold and tested all of it before I went to dinner and then came back in and it all fell apart. I've had one of those days where everything is going wrong. So a little bit of a lemony snicket day, but appreciate you all tuning in. I'm going to record a happy hour episode to get your questions into Emily at double-nickermedia.com.

That will pop on Friday evening around 5 p.m. just in time for happy hour. Thanks so much. Hope you all subscribe and we'll see back here on Monday of another edition of After Party.