After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Massie Loses, Michelle Obama Faces Reality, Dem Autopsy Chaos, & Bass’ Broken Promise, with Ruy Teixeira, PLUS Bye Bye Colbert

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

Emily Jashinsky opens the show with a look at Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie’s primary loss and argues many people are missing the bigger picture – that the race was REALLY about President Trump. Then Emily is joined by Ruy Teixeira, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-founder of the Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot. His most recent book, with John Judis, is Where Have All the Democrats Gone? They begin with recent comments from Michelle Obama about the Americans who voted for both her husband and for President Trump. Ruy argues Democrats are late to the party in recognizing what pushed voters away and how former President Obama is ultimately an ‘elite.’ The conversation turns to the unreleased DNC “autopsy” of Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss, what’s really inside, and a can’t miss interview by her “Breaking Points” co-host Ryan Grim. Then Emily and Ruy discuss Texas Democrat James Talarico’s Senate race and a funny comment about it from President Trump. They two round out their conversation with a discussion on failing Democratic leadership in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles including an incredibly out-of-touch Karen Bass. Emily wraps up the show with a hot take on Amanda Peet’s decision to avoid going under the knife, plus Emily ‘honors’ the end of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” and Chelsea Handler is very upset with comedians like Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane Gillis.   Unplugged: Switching is simple, Visit https://Unplugged.com/EMILY and order your UP phone today!   Beam: Visit https://shopbeam.com/AFTERPARTY and use code AFTERPARTY to get our exclusive discount of up to 40% off.   Cozy Earth: This Memorial Day, visit https://www.CozyEarth.com & Use code EMILY for up to 30% off. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to After Party, everybody. Tonight's guest is Roy Tachara. We are going to get into a lot of the Democratic primary scene. The DNC Autopsy, have you been hearing about it? We are going deep with Roy Tachara, who is a very interesting critic of the ideological capture of the Democratic Party on a really on a class basis is where a lot of Roy's criticism comes from. So we really had a field day. It was pre-taped earlier in the day. We had a field day with some of these races.

is Tala Rico here in Washington, D.C. I have a DSA candidate that is leading for mayor, a new poll out as of today showing some of those results. We have Karen Bass. There's just so much to get to. But first, we are going to be talking about one of the Republican primaries. Of course, you'll hear me react to the loss of Thomas Massey in his primary in just one moment. And then we'll close the show out with a conversation about Stephen Colbert.

I can't help but send Stephen Colbert off. with some warm wishes for success, actually really more with some reflections on what went so wrong for Stephen Colbert. Very interesting bit of audio from Amanda Pete, NVIDIA from Amanda Pete on plastic surgery, Botox, and what it's sort of ultimately, what it's rooted in.

She's eschewed all of it. And she's, of course, in a great show right now, your friends and neighbors has continued to have a successful career in Hollywood. But we are going to talk about that too. So please do subscribe if you haven't subscribed yet. It's basically the most helpful way to support our journalism here at After Party. Subscribe on YouTube, like, comment, all of that is incredibly helpful. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And, you know, if you want

to email me, I'm Emily at devil makecaremedia.com. As many of you know, because we email, I really do respond to just about everything that we all. or every email that I get. So it's, you know, it's a good way to stay in touch. And we do happy hour episodes every Friday where I answer your questions actually on the show. All right. Let's now talk about the Massey primary. So I think most people are getting what happened in the Massey race wrong from both directions.

And let me explain a bit about why. Thomas Massey lost his primary in Kentucky's fourth congressional district after about $30 million, plus more than $30 million was spent. Again, we're talking about in a Republican primary in Kentucky. And Massey ended up losing by about nine points is what it looked like when I last checked. I think these two headlines are really important to understanding what went on with Massey. First, this is a headline from Politico. I'm going to break down more of the spending questions in a moment.

But Massey's primary, the headline says, is the most expensive in history. Pro-Israel groups have played a huge part. Here's the second headline. This is from January 9, 2025, and it was from 538, headline, Republicans start 2025 with the smallest House majority since 1931. And I think these two facts are independently really important for, There's a couple of different reasons that I want to get into here. Let's start with the spending.

So reading from the New York Times, they wrote, quote, three PACs linked to pro-Israel donors have spent more than $15.5 million in the race. This is according to FEC data. That would include United Democracy Project. That's A PAC's election arm. A PAC of course is the American Israeli Political Action Committee. They have spent $4.1 million. RJC Victory Fund that is affiliated with the Republican Jewish Coalition came in with around $3.9 million.

And MAGA, Kentucky has been the largest spender, according to the Times, at $7.5 million. The Pax finances, the Times says, have not been made fully public, but available records show that one of the group's top funders is Paul Singer, a pro-Israel billionaire investor who has also made the largest individual donation to UDP. that's the APAC group over the past year, $2.5 million. Maga, Kentucky also received funds from Preserve America PAC, a group linked to Israeli-American mega-donor Miriam Adelson. Details of the finances of Preserve America PAC remain unclear for this election cycle, but Adelson donated $106 million to the PAC in 2024 to help elect Trump president. Now, immediately, people who supported Massey's ouster,

which happened to be more than half of the voters in Kentucky force, Kentucky's fourth district's primary last night who voted for Ed Gal Ryan agreed that Massey should have been ousted. They would look at this information that they'd say, but Thomas Massey, he had a lot of money as well. It's true. Massey, according to FEC analyses, was outspent eventually by, it looks like it's going to be in the neighborhood, the ballpark of $3 million-ish in a race that, again, exceeded $30 million. It is now the most expensive congressional primary in history. And again, we're just talking about the primary.

And so, yes, that is, that is accurate to say. Thomas Massey had a lot of money as well. A lot of the spending was from Super PACs. Now, this is also worth noting, I think. Let me put this on the screen. This is from a Kentucky conservative podcast, radio TV host, Andrew Cooper Rider, who looked at FEC data also and pointed out that the total amount donated by small dollar donors, so that's under 200 bucks a person.

for Thomas Massey was almost $2 million. For Ed Galarine, it wasn't even $200,000. It's just a massive difference in the sources of funding, of course. So that $2 million, relatively small portion, this is, by the way, I should mention FEC data for the official Galrine for Congress and Thomas Massey for Congress organizations. So that is a little bit different. that's out of a $5 million total. And like I said, most of the spending was from super PACs. But that's always an indication of somebody's connection with the grassroots.

Well, how much money was from Kentucky? Let's talk about that as well. Notice found that there was a pretty small amount of money that was actually from the district, which is always the case in a situation like this one. but that Massey had a slight edge in having money that was from the district itself. I think I wanted to say it was like 6%. Yeah. So for both candidates, notice reported less than 6% of named individual contributions came from zip codes in the district. Though Massey had more contributions from people within his district and in the state overall.

Okay. So where am I going with this? Well, I always take issue with analyses that say, oh, money just bought the voters off, right? Like money, voters have agency. And I think it's insulting, condescending, patronizing, to simply say that voters were bought by billionaires. I think there's obviously truth to the fact that money changed the game for Thomas Massey, because let's go through his previous, this timeline, I think is absolutely crucial.

Thomas Massey was called Mr. No, just about as soon as he got to Congress. He was referred to as Mr. No, because he was voting no on his own party's priorities for a very long time. This is something that really endeared him to the residents of Kentucky's fourth district. He was an eccentric, what I believe, one of those people who's sort of necessary in the political ecosystem, even when you don't agree with him, his opposition can make bills better. for example, he and Marjorie Taylor Green, though Massey went on not to vote for the final version of the one big beautiful bill used their leverage and their votes, you know, say we're going to ask, we might vote for this if you do X, Y, and Z. Well, because of that, Massey got and Marjorie Taylor Green got this handout to big tech, a moratorium on state tech regulation stripped from the one big beautiful bill. Fantastic. And he did similar things over the course of his time in Congress. That's kind of how these people who are cookie eccentric often wield their influences. And it can be really important. He is last time I saw him was wearing a homemade debt clock. You've probably seen him doing it.

He's he's done it in just about every interview over the course of this 30 plus million dollar race in the last couple of months. He is a debt hawk. So for him, the question is always, what is it worth my vote to blow up the deficit when it came to Kevin McCarthy? People have pointed out, while Massey was more compliant with McCarthy than he was with Mike Johnson. The explanation for that is a lot of hardcore conservatives were more compliant with Kevin McCarthy because McCarthy was giving more to them. And so they were willing to negotiate and bargain with Kevin McCarthy because they felt confident it would result in games to them down the road.

Now, that's a little bit of tangent, but let's look at Massey's last primaries, his most recent primaries. After he came out against Trump's COVID stimulus bill in 2020, Trump went off on Thomas Massey. Massey got a primary challenger that was popular in MAGA World. Trump was furious with Massey. He made it known that he was furious with Massey. But that time it didn't stick. They were spending of about $300,000 in that campaign against Massey. And so now we need to ask ourselves what changed. I've heard a lot of people say Massey changed. Listen, the first time that I met Massey was almost 10 years ago, I really don't think this guy has changed. I think his ideas have become more, let's say, because the media has changed, right? The democratization of media has

occurred. He's found an audience that is really significant as institutional trust crumbles, right? people are less trusting of both major political parties. And he's exactly the guy who has the worldview of someone who's less trusting in both political parties. And he's always just said whatever he thinks. He's always aligned himself, going back to before 2020, when he thought was necessary. I mean, he voted against aid to Egypt. He's voted against aid to every country that we send foreign aid to. He's against foreign aid because he's a debt and deficit hawk. And he's, when necessary, aligned himself with, from his perspective, Ro Khanna, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, squad members, going back a decade, fighting aid and when it comes to foreign policy in Syria and those sorts of things

that most Republicans weren't crossing the aisle on. That's not new. His kind of alliance with Kana, not new. None of that's particularly new. He won in 2024. He won his primary in 2024 with 76% of the vote. He won his primary in 2022 with 75% of the vote. He won his primary in 2020 right after Trump was going after him with 81% of the vote. What obviously changed is the influence of money. And the result, or I think the biggest takeaway from Massey's loss, is that nobody defines MAGA except Donald Trump. Republican voters support Donald Trump. And when you force, you nationalize an election,

and you force people to choose between Thomas Massey and Donald Trump, or Bill Cassidy and Donald Trump, they will choose Donald Trump 10 times out of 10. And that's where this gets very interesting. The money that was spent in Kentucky's four, Kentucky's four by the kind of pro-Israel groups was not spent talking about Israel. It was spent making the argument that Massey, who, according to the roll call analysis of votes, voted 77% with his party. That actually is very high, but it makes him the second low, the second least loyal to his party in the House of Representatives. The first was Brian Fitzpatrick, who Trump was talking about today.

He was at 67%. The third person was at 88%. So some real distance between Massey and the third place, double digits. But he votes with the party about 77% of the time. Enough to earn him than Mr. No nickname historically, of course. But that's where this can make. I think we're looking at all things being even to the extent that it's possible as time marches on. The big difference is the spending that came in,

really did make it a question between Massey and Trump. There was a lot of money. People saw the kind of people who support the strong alliance between the United States and Israel and who are very upset with trending public opinion against Israel in the United States are really trying to make a point. They tried to make a point in the Jamal Bowman primary that previously was the most expensive primary in the House of Representatives,

the history of the House of Representatives. I think it was south of 30 million. It's still crazy for a primary. But they don't always run. The ads aren't just about Israel. In fact, they're often not about Israel at all. In Kentucky 4, this was a referendum on MAGA. That's what these ads were about.

And when you, again, force voters to choose between Thomas Bassi and MAGA, Bill Cassidy and MAGA, nine times out of 10, probably 10, times out of 10, they will go with Donald Trump's version of MAGA. And I thought it would be worth actually putting this on the screen. It's a study that was done in the Journal of Politics, and it was in 2020, October 2020. And the author writes in the abstract, I find that spending on messages to voters has a statistically significant effect on voter support for candidates. Spending is especially effective in changing the composition of voters instead of convincing potential voters to switch their vote. All right, think about that. Spending is particularly effective in changing the composition of the

electorate, basically. Author goes on to say, not all voters are equally affected by spending, low information voters, members of a political party, and the economically dissatisfied respond strongly to candidate spending. And that's a pretty useful bit of research that tracks with what, I've seen over the course in my career that what spending really can do is change the composition of the electorate. So you can motivate people to turn out who otherwise might not and the like. And when you have an arms race and someone ends up getting outspent, it's possible that was what ended up being definitive at the end of the day. With also looking at some of this information about the youth vote. I mean, this is.

I'm just going to put this also up on the screen. I know that this is a lot, but I think, again, a lot of people are getting this wrong. This wasn't, you know, Kentucky voters saying, we don't, we have no room for, we have no tolerance for anybody who criticizes the alliance with Israel. This was Kentucky voters saying we don't want people to obstruct Donald Trump. And I think, you know, from a steel manning perspective, I disagree with it. I think Thomas Massey is, like I said, a very important part. We've had him on the show of the political ecosystem because he forces the Republican Party

to be better. Would he have voted against the one big, beautiful bill if he knew that he was the deciding vote? Ultimately, he wasn't the deciding vote. There was a four-vote margin on that bill. I don't know. He's forced to confront this very difficult question between whether it makes sense to support more money for something he supports strongly. which is border enforcement and has over the course of his career,

or if it's worth continuing to explode the debt and deficit and having a Republican Party where nobody stands up against the spending, that in retrospect, the Trump COVID stimulus, like the Biden COVID stimulus, Massey voted against both of them, yes, absolutely contributed to the inflation that some of us are still feeling right now. So I don't think this was a referendum on the Iran War. I think it was pretty clearly a referendum on MAGA, who owns MAGA.

And this poll from Quantis Insights had fascinating cross tabs about where voters went by age. Really, really interesting. By gender and age, the local spectrum affiliate wrote, Gowdine is stronger with women and Massey connects with men. The survey also found older voters prefer Gowdine and Massey is stronger with younger and middle age voters, not even close. when you look at the polling on Massey's success with younger voters. He was by far the choice of younger voters. Galerine was by far the choice of older voters. So there's an interesting tension there as well. Finally, just to circle back on this point about who owns MAGA and why this is so important. The first time that I ever interviewed Thomas Massey, it was with the Washington Examiner's editorial board.

We had an editorial board interview with Massey in 2017, March of 2017. And this is not a question in response to a question I asked Massey. It was one of my colleagues who asked this question. I was just the one who did the write-up. He was telling us about how when he campaigned with Ron and Rand Paul in 2012, he thought, wow, all of these people are so excited about libertarian values. And he found out when he saw many of those people support Donald Trump that they were just looking for, quote, the craziest son of a bitch in the race.

This quote became somewhat famous in political circles using books and such. And it's oddly poetic because it shows that voters still see Trump as the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And they love that about him. Republican voters still see Trump as the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And they don't want people obstructing his, quote, drain the swamp agenda. They don't like it. Now, I'm again giving the argument, and it's not one that I agree with. But it is just to say, I think it's important to get this correct.

That what I think really happened here to get back to the 538 headline is this is the most narrow margin a political party has had since, what, the 1930s. So Massey's obstructionism became higher stakes for Republicans, right? because the one big beautiful bill almost didn't pass. Because they had to bust their butts to win the votes of some people in their own party to pass a bill that had immigration reform in it. For example, Massey says, if nobody stands up, these bills are going to be even worse than they are when they pass. And so he needs to present a real threat. But people in Kentucky say no.

And what I think happened basically is that a lot of voters, I'm sorry. What I think happened is that big donors realized they had low hanging fruit with Massey, that he was very vulnerable because people want Trump to define MAGA, because people want the Trump agenda. Republican voters want the Trump agenda to be defined by Donald Trump. And they take it seriously and they want it to pass more than they want, you know, a debt and deficit hawk in Congress because they believe their existential crises facing the country. And they want, they want the, they want the agenda to go through. They don't want it to be obstructed. And I disagree with that argument, but big donors said that's why Thomas Massey is vulnerable. We are going to spend millions of dollars, turn this into a spending arms race, which is exactly what happened. That spending came first, and then Massey scrambled to respond. And we're going to do it by convincing these voters. It won't have anything to do with Massey voting against Israel or Epstein file disclosures or the Iran War. We are going to run.

on Massey obstructing and undermining Donald Trump. And that way we will remove, we will have successfully removed a roadblock to what they see as support for Israel coming from Congress. So the young voters, the statistics of young voters supporting Donald Trump, I'm sorry, Thomas Massey in that poll, should really be a wake-up call for folks who believe

this approach is going to persuade young voters to be pro-Israel. I think actually in some cases it's going to backfire. And that may happen with disillusioned young voters here. I don't know. But the point that I think is really important to make is that the votes were about Trump. Republican voters still side with Trump. The money understood that and understood Massie was vulnerable for that reason.

And that was sort of. of how two things are true at the same time. I could talk about this all day. It was a very, very interesting race. But we're going to be back with Roy Tachara. This is a long show. So you're going to have to stick with me tonight. There's so much good stuff to get to. We'll be back with Roy Tachara shortly to talk about the Democrats. Those are just other Republicans. But first, we have to take a quick break. Well, for years, legacy media, government, and big data companies coaxed us into surrendering our digital freedom. We talk about this on the show all the time, giving lip service the whole way to privacy while leaving their digital backdoors wide open

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unplugged.com slash Emily. As promised, here is my interview with Roy Tachara on the state of play for Democrats amidst the tug of war in that party as we see these battles playing out in primary races around the country. Well, there's been a lot of attention on Republican primaries, but there's a lot happening with the Democrats as well. So I'm happy to be joined by who I think is one of the most interesting people in Washington. That is, of course, Roy Tachara. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-founder of the Substact Newsletter, The Liberal Patriot, his most recent book with John Judas is, where have all the Democrats gone? A question that rings through many people's heads to this day, Roy. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me. Now, I, dare I say, Michelle Obama on a podcast in the last few days, sounded a bit like you, Roy Tacherichet. What? No way. Let's see. Let's see. I was somewhat surprised. I was somewhat surprised. This is May 17th. This was a podcast with Sam Fregoso. Here's what Michelle Obama had to say about Trump voters. Okay. Many of the people who voted for my husband, Twice. Twice. And I know that that's how they feel.

It's like this isn't about anything other than I'm just, we need something different. They voted for Donald Trump. Yeah. You know? It's a lot of people. So you can't just pigeonhole them and say you just don't care and you're racist or whatever you're thinking. This is an act of I don't know what else to do.

I just wish we had more leaders that were figuring out how to do. how to do more for the middle class, for the working folks, because those are the folks who are drowning in this economy. It's not me anymore, but I know those folks, and they're good people, and they don't have a way out. And that makes for bad choices. What say you, Roy? Well, I mean, Michelle Obama said a number of things over time

that sort of were more in the woke vein about some of the issues the Democrats have gotten hung up on. So here she's taking a different tack and admitting that maybe Trump voters aren't all deplorables, at least the ones who voted for her husband. So, you know, it's good. It's better than saying they're all scoundrels. But I think it's kind of weak beer at this point. I mean, the beginning, your baseline assumption should have been from the get-go in 2016. that these voters had a vector of grievances about the elites, including Democratic Party elites, that were pretty deep and pretty hard to deal with.

And, you know, obviously that would start with allowing us how they're not all awful people. But then what do you do? I mean, clearly what she's saying here is, well, they're just confused, you know. They're economically stressed. They're just confused. You know, if they could just open their eyes and we talked to those good, all working people, then they would all realize that we're on the same side. So, I mean, here it is. This is 10 years after Donald Trump first got elected. If Michelle Obama's getting around to saying,

well, you know, it's not all bad. They're not all racists. I mean, this is just the very opening bit of the opening bit of the opening bid. So I guess I'm not too impressed. But, you know, better she says that than maybe some of the things she said in the past. True. Would it be I mean, I'm curious because you had a sort of front row seat to this. Would it be too far to say that actually it was her husband's presidency that became a source of deep disillusionment for some people who previously voted Democrat? I mean, she talks in that interview about people who voted for her husband and then voted for Donald Trump two times. And it's kind of interesting to gloss over her husband's role in potentially, especially coming out of the Great Recession, Barney Frank. passed today. Dodd-Frank, another element of all of this, spying war, that left Democrats who were

promised hope and change feeling, you know, they were voting for Bernie Sanders in 2016 because they didn't feel like Hillary Clinton was a break from the Obama years. Yeah, she seemed like just, you know, the same old, same old, just another member of the Democratic Party cultural economic elite. And you know, Obama, I think he said some good things at times. I think his heart was in the right place. But I don't think he was really determined to set the party on a completely different course. He was trying to, you know, keep the party together. I mean, even under his presidency, the party was starting to drift to the left, particularly in cultural issues. And the fact of the matter is, if you look at the underlying economic situation in a lot of the areas where some people

who wound up voting for Trump did vote for him once or twice. I mean, nothing had really changed all that much in these areas. It was still the same Democratic Party that had presided over various changes in terms of trade and financial deregulation, a lot of other things, that, you know, whether they were inevitable or not, I think a lot of these voters felt left out. They felt left behind. You know, remember that Obama was the guy who said they still cling to their religion

and their guns. I mean, he was a smart elite. And he had a better feel for how to talk about certain things than a lot of other elite Democrats. But at the end of the day, he was an elite Democrat. He was, as we put it in our book, Where of All the Democrats Gone, the book I wrote with John Judas, he was in a sense the last of the new Democrats. And, you know, at that point in time, it wasn't going over well. And there were a lot of voters out there who are profoundly disenchanted with the Democrats

and profoundly disenchanted with the Republican elites who previous to Trump's arrival on the scene had pretty much stuck to the old-time religion of entitlement reform, quasi-libertarian economics, get government out of the way, reduced taxes, and that wasn't really to their liking either. So these kind of voters are deeply resentful and feel like the establishment writ large

across both parties had deserted them. And Obama was part of that problem. even though, you know, he was able, he's a very smart politician, and he was able to garner some votes, I think, another Democratic politician might not have. I mean, look, in 2012, he very astutely ran as a populist against Mitt Romney, the plutocrat equity capitalist, right? So he was quite willing to play that kind of card

when he had the chance to do so. But, again, I don't think that really remade the Democratic Party's culture, outlook, its economic strategy, or much else. It was just a smart way of conducting himself politically. And as we saw when Hillary Clinton tried to run as a candidate of the establishment, instead of challenging Bernie Sanders on a class basis, well, what have we done? What can we do for these working class people?

It was more like, you know, if we broke up the big banks with this get rid of racism, if we, you know, broke up the big banks, would that get rid of transphobia? I mean, basically, she ran to his left on every cultural issue that was currently in play. And that was an indicator of where the Democratic Party was going. That sort of Brahman left professional base exerted more and more influence on the party and its working class base less and less. So, yeah, that's part of the big, broad story of the evolution of the 21st century left and the Democratic Party in particular. And the question now is which sort of side is winning? There's a tug of war playing out.

And I think a lot of folks on the left suspect that the establishment has gone like anti-woke or unwoke. It's also the kind of hard to look at some of what's happening and say that's the case. Because so Rob Flaherty, his deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris, also for the Biden campaign. This is F1, penned a piece in the bulwark about what he told the, quote, DNC autopsy. Many people may have been hearing those two words a lot recently, DNC autopsy. There's deep frustration on the left about why Ken Martin, head of the DNC, will not release the autopsy. And Roy, you kind of did your own autopsy as the liberal patriot was closing its doors. This is F5.

It was your last post over the Liberal Patriot. It was a great piece. We could toss it up on the screen here. It was called No Learning Please. We're Democrats. Right, right. And, you know, let's take a listen to Senator Rubin Gallego today. Someone sees as someone seen as the future of the maybe moderate flank of the Democratic Party demanding release of the autopsy as well, S3.

Yeah, I think, you know, everything that, anything you hide is just never good. And I think if you did the report, you did it for a reason. And I think we should learn from it. All right. And now one more, F2, is the Fox News. round up of all of the Democrats, many of whom are not like leftists who are saying that the autopsy should be released. The quote here is, we got our butts kicked. And some of the reporting is that the autopsy was just sloppy. There was a reporter for crooked media who said it was

quote, gobbly gook and AI, and that the DNC is mostly just embarrassed by the quality of the autopsy. It doesn't have anything to do with them wanting to hide their failures. That's a bit hard to believe. Yeah, yeah, I'm skeptical. Yeah, give us your analysis that you wrote in No Learning Please, we're Democrats. And through that lens, I guess your analysis of this fight happening right now. Well, actually, one thing I'm curious about is what is Rob Flaherty's position on all this? Did he just say we should have released the autopsy or did he say anything particularly about

what was in the autopsy or just he said or he told them, he basically wrote about what he told them, which may or may not have been in the autopsy. What did he say? Well, yeah, your last point. We don't really know what's actually in the autopsy. And maybe he's comfortable saying what he's saying, knowing that it's not going to come out. That would be probably foolish because the heat is so, the pressure is so high that the odds

that'll be leaked or it'll come out seem very high themselves. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, we can say one thing. He got grilled on breaking points today by my colleague Ryan Grimm, who was pushing. on the famous they-them ad run by the Trump campaign that one study, at least one study showed, moved a significant number of votes, maybe a determinative number of votes.

So let me roll this clip, Roy, because it gets to what you were asking, S2. You said a literal rebuttal would have been a loser. I absolutely stand by this decision. Look at the 2025 elections in Virginia, where Republicans made trans issues the core of their advertising strategy. It failed because voters,

didn't find it relevant. So let me try to channel Emily, since she's not, yeah, yeah, yeah. Couldn't be here. Do your Emily impression. Brian was channeling me today. And what I think she would say is, okay, maybe that's all true, but also you are wrong on the issue.

80 to 90% of the public disagrees with you when it comes to particularly the sports question. And they don't even believe that you believe what you're saying. Often as long as you cling to your position, that is this 80, 20, 2010, Republicans are going to keep hammering you on it. So I take the point. I think that there's a couple of things. One, this ad was not the only thing that was on rotation at the same time. So the they-them ad is running against an immigration track that they're running, that is running against an economic track that they're running.

And the through line in all of that is Kamala Harris is focused on all kinds of wacky stuff and not the stuff that you actually care about. We tested. Like, we made spots that rebutted it directly. You know, it was a Trump-era policy. No, the vice president doesn't think that or whatever. But none of that worked as well in groups and testing. The Harris clip is on tape.

There's not much you can do to get rid of it. So, you know, the best thing to do is to pivot to the issue people care about. Well, this is all very, very weak tea, in my opinion. But I think it's actually fairly typical of how Democrats are currently handling an issue like that. first he said well well well yeah maybe it'd heard it maybe it didn't but blah blah but hey look you know they just ran on trans issues in virginia and you know sandberger cleaned up so how important it is they said the same thing at 2022 when when people were running against transit you know against the trans agenda and didn't do well like in the kentucky governor's race and stuff like that so i mean this

is just and i was always sort of put forward as proof the trans issue doesn't matter this is just totally ginned up by Fox News. Normal voters don't care about the fact we have a position that they think is borderline insane and they completely disagree with? No, no, it's not a problem at all. It's not a problem until it is, right? And it was a problem in the

2024 election, not only because people really disagree with that position. They really don't think, you know, undocumented immigrants should get trans surgeries. They don't even think kids should get trans surgeries. They're opposed to gender affirming, so-called gender-aferming care. They certainly don't think biological

boys. You compete in girl sports. And they certainly don't believe that, you know, trans women are women, literally in the sense that if, you know, I'm a guy and I say I'm a woman, well, then I'm a woman. People think that's just insane. So this was always going to hurt them at some point. And it hurts them particularly in a situation in which the Democrats are already viewed as being out of touch are already viewed as being culturally alien from the normie voter and already viewed as basically not caring about the views of normie voters. And this just reinforced. There was a famous question that was asked after the election, I think, by blueprint about, you know, which kind of thing swing voters thought, you know, turned them against terrorists, people who voted

for Biden but wound up voting for Trump in 24. And the leader was Democrats care more about cultural issues like trans than they care about normal people. And, you know, so it symbolized something. It was both, A, a bad issue and B, symbolize the out of touchness. of the Democratic Party. And the response of Flaherty, where he tries to act like, well, really isn't a problem because I can look at these other places

where it wasn't a problem, therefore it's not a problem. It's just a fancy way of dancing around the idea, this is a terrible position. You know, this is wrong on the merits, in my opinion. It's clearly terrible as politics. And as a rule, people will punish you for having positions that they feel are very divorced from their cultural outlook and indicate you're not one of them.

So it won't hurt you the same in every election. It certainly won't lose you every election. But the idea that, oh, we tried to reply to this because Kamala said, well, it's it Trump, you're a thing? And I'm not saying that today and all that. I mean, nobody believes that. People remember what you said. People know what the Democratic Party stands for. For example, on this particular issue, I don't think the trans issue is the only issue,

but the Democratic Party's brand on trans issues is down the line being supportive of gender ideology, gender affirming care, boys and girls sports and all that. Every once in a while some Democrat sticks their head above the parapet and says, well, I don't know, maybe, maybe some of this isn't quite right. And they get hammered. And is there any Democrat out there right now is taking a forthright different position on trans issues that is forthrightly opposed to the agenda of trans activists. I don't think there is.

Maybe Rom, possibly, a little bit, you know, if you push him. But he's about it, right? I mean, I think in most areas of the country, you can't get away with it. Because the activists in the groups will hammer you to death, and you know that so you keep your mouth shut. Well, this is fascinating because Graham Platner is a case study that I'll be very curious to watch. To his credit, he is a consistent ideological leftist on the question of gender. There's a picture of him with a sort of trans gun training or at a trans gun training that he He held up in Maine.

And he's clearly very committed to one position on this question. And he's not going to be able to convincingly be like, well, I changed my mind. I don't even think he would. And so I have a theory that I'm curious to test on you, Roy, which is that it's actually, it's such a trap because so long as you have said these things in the past, you are vulnerable to Republicans running on this constantly, making an issue of it. in Abigail Spanberger's case, Andy Bashir's case, the Republican candidates were so weak that they were able to overcome the attacks. On the other hand, if you can't escape it, you might as well just own what your position is and say, I think most people disagree with me.

And that's probably gives you a better odds of surviving your bad position on this because people believe that you believe what you're saying, as opposed to you being like, oh, yes, I still believe. Well, but as Brother Flaherty says, the best approach. And I probably, it's just pivot. Just refuse to add. answer the question. Right. You know, trans people aren't taking away your health care. Trans people aren't, you know, docking your wage. I mean, you know, this is like the classic economic populist kind of dodge to the ways in which Democrats are culturally alien to so many voters and are hurting themselves in

their party, particularly my working class voters by being so. Oh, okay, I get it. I know what these people, you know, are beloved working people, the working class of America, you know, who love the Democrats, but they just don't know it. I know what they care about. They care about, you know, billionaires. They care about their wages. They care about this, that, and the other thing.

And as long as I can pivot to talking about these kitchen table issues, right, a notorious phrase that has now been overused to death, they will forgive us. They will ignore the fact that we have all these other positions that people think are completely insane. And I just don't think that's true. I mean, I think it's like rational in the short term, right? if you're not willing to change your position,

you're certainly not going to do any better by defending it vigorously. I mean, I doubt if we'll have Graham Platner, you know, like starting his talks, you know, in the Senate race. Well, you know, I stand with my trans brothers and sisters, but he will not back down from his position. And this is a trap that Democrats are caught in today on this whole vector of cultural issues. There's a trans issue. There's the racial issue of DEI. There's, you know, how much immigration should we have?

And what do we do with undocumented immigrants? and, you know, should we have ice or not, it's very difficult for Democrats to take a realistic position that is actually in the wheelhouse of the media and voter on all of these things. And I'd actually include climate in there, too, as a cultural issue, Democrats have over-indexed on like crazy, which further hurts them because it becomes sort of incorporated

into their economic program, and it actually, most working-class people don't think it does so much good. So Democrats are really, they're kidding themselves, that if we just talk enough about affordability and the billionaire class and how, you know, kitchen table issues, then that, everyone will just forget. You know, they will just forget

what our positions on and other. What happened in the Biden administration, what the underlying positions of almost every Democrat is to this day. And I just think they're kidding themselves that that's a long-term solution. I mean, I'll grant you in the short term, though Democrats will do well in 2026, basically because Trump is very unpopular

and his management of the economy is very unpopular. So it's just, you know, opposition party 101. Talk about how the incumbent party is screwing you and we'll do better. You're going to trust us. But if you wanted to expand your coalition long term, then I think you have to take a much more aggressive position to occupy the center of American politics

on a whole wide range of issues and not just on the things you care to talk about. So, you know, I thought they had a, You know, that's one reason why the autopsy tank, back to the autopsy. They didn't want to have that conversation. They clearly made a decision. Ken Martin, who ever advises them, but lots of other Democrats are essentially in this position, have this position.

Well, Trump is president. He's doing things people don't like. People are starting not the like it. So we'll just talk about him. Just 100% opposition to Trump all day, every day, you know, 24-7, 365. That's all we need to do. And to change our underlying positions, especially since we're on the right side of history, that would be terrible. We can't do that.

But if they had really absorbed the lessons of 2024 and had really sort of untrammeled, uncensored discussion about it, it might have got them a little bit closer to the idea, some of our underlying positions are wrong. And we actually need to change them. And we need to convince people that we have changed them. But they have a funding. I can't think of one way in which Democrats have changed an underlying position that's a liability for them. I think they basically just, you know, tactical adjustments, that's it. This is making me very excited to get into some specific examples, Roy, in just one moment. I should add that Rob Flaherty basically agreed with the assessment that the autopsy was, quote, gobbly gook,

and that it amounted to as, I was just explaining a brand problem, the autopsy sort of, identifies that. But we're going to get into it in just one moment. I'm going to take a quick break. We'll be back in just a few seconds. First, if you haven't heard of Beam's dream powder, let me tell you, this one is different, not just because it can change how you sleep, but actually because of the people behind it, too. Beam is American made by real people who are focused on creating something that actually helps. How about that? I know many of you have rough nights. You're tossing and turning. Then you got to drag yourself through. the next day on caffeine. Been there. When you're running on empty, it is so hard to show up for

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If you've been meaning to fix your sleep, this is the time. Get dream their best-selling sleep powder for up to 40% off. All right, we are back now once again with Roy Tachara. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, co-founder, the Substack Newsletter, the Liberal Patriot, and his recent book was with John Judas. It was where all, where have all the Democrats gone and having a problem just speaking right now, Roy, it's a great problem to have on a podcast, but nonetheless, we are going to. I know what you mean.

No problem. Thank you so much, Roy. We are going to power through and talk now in more detail about the brand problem that some people, including the top, like, well, deputy manager, I should say, Rob Flaherty of the Connollaharris campaign are identifying. Apparently, this is part of the DNC autopsy that nobody's allowed to see about the Democrats' brand problem. And they are very excited about James Talarico, so very excited about. James Tolariko. Funny enough, the Republican president, the head of the opposition party, Donald Trump, is also very excited about James Talarico. Here's what he had to say about that Texas race today, S-4. I think he'll win. I think probably he'll win very substantially.

And I think he'll go on to defeat a very defective candidate, a candidate that believes in six genders. And he takes hits to Jesus Christ. And he's wearing a mask. Six months ago, where's a guy? Anybody wearing a mask six months ago doesn't get it. And he's a vegan. He's a vegan in Texas. And you can't get elected as a vegan in Texas. It's a vegan.

That's why we love Donald Trump. He tells it like it is. You were just telling us before the break, actually, that Democrats might not even think about this as a cultural issue, that people should also lump climate into the vector of cultural brand issues that Democrats have in addition to trans-sexual. issues, the BLM issues that Republicans can push, push, push people like James Telerico, who tried very hard in his primary to run on a populist economic issue by saying this is not,

it's coming from the top down. This isn't a bottom up problem. It's a top to bottom problem. The elites are pushing the working class down. But I think Roy, and it sounds like you probably agree with headlines like this one from The Daily Caller, F3, Democrat sweetheart, referring to Tala Rico, cozes up to anti-white lawmaker in high-stakes Texas Senate campaign written by a friend Rebecca Zalchko over at the Daily Caller who found a clip of Tala RICO with a lawmaker in Texas who has been calling white people oppressors saying that people of color minorities all share the same oppressor and it's white people. Tala RICO is on the record, as Trump alluded to, saying things like God is non-binary.

I think at one point he compared whiteness to a plague or cancer, something like that. It's a sickness. It's a sickness. A sickness. All we white people have that we must take the cure, I guess. I don't know. There you go. And the antidote, it just very conveniently happens to be supporting all of these NGOs that support Democrats.

Am I right? Is Trump right also that Talariko has an albatross around his neck? Oh, I think he does. I mean, it's not to say it's not. not possible for him to win? I mean, and the environment should be a good one for Democrats. This campaign cycle is, you know, should, if it lasts through November, anything's possible. I just don't think it's very likely. I kind of agree with the president. I think Paxton, even though he's probably not the optimizing candidate, I think Cornyn would be for the Republicans,

but, you know, I'm not running the zoo here. But I just think it's really hard for a Democrat to get elected statewide in Texas, and especially a Democrat who, despite, all the economic populist gobbledy cook is fundamentally extremely liberal culturally in all the ways that have vexed the Democrats issue nationwide. And what on earth makes them think they can escape from this? I guess he's, he's religious, you know? He's a man of God. Well, okay, but God is non-binary. I mean, he's basically comes out of Protestant denomination. They're the most liberal imaginable, right? I mean, they believe in all the crazy stuff, all Democrats, you know, many Democrats do these days and making in a sense part of their religious commitments. You know, so famously,

Tala Rica talked about how abortion is what Jesus Christ would want you to do. And all this stuff where he's trying to basically import democratic positions into the Bible and into being religious. And that's, you know, people in Texas are very religious, but they're more conservative religious. They're not, you know, part of the liberal religious youth. They're not part of, you know, some of these very liberal Protestant denominations that have influence in other parts of the country in very blue areas. They're a different type of religious person. And the idea that simply by being religious, saying you're religious, being willing to refer to God is somehow this get-out-a-jail-free card for all the rest of your things you believe and have said that people think, you know, is nuts

and against what they believe and what their values are. I just think they're kidding themselves. Again, I think this is, you know, back to the economic populist pixie dust, you sprinkle on your otherwise unsaleable positions. I think this is a classic example. People think, oh, Tala Rico, good communicators, young guys, religious. And, you know, he just, every time they ask him about question X, he'll just say that, well, you know, this is just a way of diverting the honest, you know, the honest workers and peasants of America from the true enemy, the billionaire class, right?

The insurance companies, to this, to that. So this is really brain dead, you know, very unsophisticated economic populism that, you know, they seem to regard as some sort of magic answer, magic key, magic pixie dust, like I say. But I think it's, again, back to our autopsy. It's an indication of how the Democrats haven't really had an autopsy because this is the best they've come up with. We'll talk about the billionaire class. We'll talk about affordability. We'll talk about, you know, this is all created by five. news in the right wing or whatever. But we won't change our fundamental underlying positions,

which are on the right side of history. We're not going to try to convince the median voter in a place like Texas, you know, for sure, but in a lot of other places as well. We actually do think about the world the way you do. Yeah, we said some crazy things in the past, but we've seen the error of our ways. And we don't believe that anymore. I mean, we're, yeah, but, you know, noticeably, that is not happening. And I think Tala Rico's an excitement about Tala Rico is a perfect big nebless. I was on a panel the other day. I won't

mention exactly where. I've been with the Democratic operative and I was giving a more different perspective. And she was saying, I just had lunch with Person X and we were talking about Tala RICO for president. I said, what? Are you kidding me? Are you

insane? You know, so yeah, I mean, this is just how crazy people are. They've talked themselves into believing that without fundamentally changing their brand, they're changing their brand, and they are not. Yes. Oh, that's such a good point. That's what I was going to ask you about next. It's not just that they're tolerant of Tala Rico being a vegan mask wear in Texas. They're actually excited about him. And it's every time Democrats find somebody who has a message of economic populism that might make sense. I'm going to talk now about Washington, D.C. They have the cultural

all albatross. It's like it's impossible for them to extricate economic populism from their cultural progressivism, the faculty lounge progressivism, right here in Washington, D.C. In the very fancy, gentrified Navy Yard area outside of the ballpark, this happened. We're going to talk over it, S6, at a Chipotle the other night. In local news, this is blanketing the airways. awful, awful kids hitting each other over the head with Chipotle chairs. You're going to see to the right of the screen. I mean, you're hearing screaming for customers. For the right of this screen, you're going to see a dad holding his daughter,

and his daughter looks totally distraught and like she's three years old. It's just horrible. She's clinging to him. And the teens just keep on smacking each other, beating each other. We could probably get out of the clip. Now, people, I think, were able to get the point. That was a Saturday night.

last Saturday night at 8.40 p.m. in a neighborhood that's been dealing with what is called these quote, teen takeovers over and over again for at least the last year really longer than the last year. Sometimes it is essentially a riot of, you know, this is not very far from where I live, so I've followed it very attentively Roy a couple miles. And there are sometimes hundreds and hundreds of kids. They've shot fireworks at the fancy apartment buildings and the like, Here is how the leading Democratic candidate for mayor here in D.C., huge mayor's mayoral election, Muriel Bowser has been the mayor for a very long time. Here is how Janice Lewis George, who was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America chapter here in Washington, D.C. is endorsed by them, sought that endorsement.

Here's how, but an economic populist, sort of Bernie aligned, here's how she talked about the curfews that have been implemented to prevent the teen takeovers here in D.C. at a debate this week, S5. As an executive, you have to decide which tools you use and when you use them. And right now, using the curfew as a tool for our young people is dangerous. It is dangerous because we have federal troops who are in our city, mass ice agents who are in our city. And one more bit of information here, Roy. I just want to add a poll came out today. A poll from Citicast finds she is winning this election.

It's close, but she's winning this election overall, about a five point. spread between her and Kenyon McDuffie, seen as the more establishment candidate aligned with Bowser. But Matt Iglesias was looking at the cross tabs. He found that she is winning Janice Lewis George with white people 45 and younger. Kenya McDuffie is winning with older black voters. I liked at the cross tabs. Most Janice Lewis George voters support the curfew, another interesting part of it. And she is supported overwhelmingly by newcomers to the D.C. Mcdafi is supported overwhelmingly by people who are natives to the D.C. area. This feels like your thesis illustrated in real time.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's just so crazy. Well, hey, but don't you know, don't you know, Emily, crime is down. You know, why are you worrying about a few teen takeovers? I mean, you know, kids, they get a little bit out of control. No, this is just an example of how Democrats refuse to respond to a thunderously obvious problem by doing the thunderingly obvious, which is to crack down and use whatever tools you have to crack down instead of like some mealy-mouth bologna about how, you know, it isn't quite the right

way we should treat our kids and they need something to do and, you know, we should have more teen basketball or something. I mean, this is ridiculous. When public order is breaking down, you seek to restore order. When crime is happening, you seek to stop crime. When shoplifting is happening, you toughen up and you seek to make it, you know, raise the cost for criminals to shoplift. I mean, this is like, totally normie cost-benefit analysis that every normal human understands, but that so many people in the Democratic Party do not. I mean, and interesting that the Washington DC mayor,

it's very similar to what Brandon Johnson has said about similar things in Chicago, right? And, you know, back to your point about who supports this kind of stuff. I mean, obviously there's going to be certain, you know, some certain elements of the black community are fairly radical and might support it. But the normie black community, who doesn't support it? Who really supports it? Basically the white, young, liberal, professional community. I mean, we saw that in Chicago. Brandon Johnson does not get elected without a huge swathes

of support from the more upscale, professionalized areas of Chicago that are very liberal against, you know, white candidate, but a much more conservative candidate who was closer, I think, to what the median voter wants in terms of running their city. But this is just classic, you know. We have some mayors who have tried to break the mold, like in San Francisco with Dan Lurio, but it's still very common for Democratic mayors to have all these terrible positions, to do nothing about things people think are profound problems and affect their quality of life in a big metro area, and they refuse to do it, do anything about it because, you know, that would be racist.

It's not the right tools. You know, we have to be kind or whatever. I mean, look at Karen Bass in Los Angeles. It's a total disaster. Let me stop because we've got a great clip. We have a great clip of Karen Bass. I have a feeling. I wanted to get your reaction to this next.

This is exactly where I was going. Karen Bass, Western Lensman on X, put together this compilation of what she said on homelessness and what she's accomplished on homelessness before her first election and now that she is running once again. Let's roll it. What's your goal by the end of your first term in 2026? And what lessons do you think other cities can learn from what you've done? Well, my goal would be really to end street homelessness. So when you talk to Jake Tapper in 2023, you said that your goal was to end street homelessness in L.A. by 2026.

It's now 2026. And we haven't ended it. We have not ended it and we're not close to ending it. How are you so off? Well, basically, when I said that, it was at the beginning of my term, I am very committed to achieving that goal. I didn't anticipate some of the bureaucratic barriers that I would experience, but I am prepared to take those on now. But you promise that it would go away 100%. And it's only gone down about 17.6%.

Right. So why should people trust you that you're going to be able to get to the 100%? Because let me just tell you, for the first time, we've had a decrease at all. Oh, good. Roy, what say you? Yeah, well, again, I think this is a good example of. how people don't take a lot of democratic politicians seriously in terms of dealing with these kinds of problems. Because, you know, they're not complete idiots. So they'll say if there's a problem,

homelessness, crime, whatever, we'll do something about it. Yeah, we'll do something about it. But then they don't. And they don't even act like, you know, what is her excuse? Like the bureaucracy is standing in my way? Well, but you are the bureaucracy. I mean, in that city like Los Angeles, a lot of other blue cities. I mean, the bureaucracy is basically something nourished by the by the Democrats and their NGOs and so on. And unless you're willing to stand up to that and, you know, kick ass and take names, yeah, nothing's going to happen.

But that's your fault. It's not, you can't just blame it on, you know, your comrades of the bureaucracy. I mean, you're going to like it to get something done. If you don't get it done, you can't weasel out of it by saying, oh, you know, they wouldn't let me. I mean, and this is a classic example of something that just reveals

that the underlying commitments and position of Democrats like that on fundamental issues of social order, crime, well, you know, we can bring in others things, immigration, race, climate, whatever. I mean, they haven't changed. They haven't changed. They're simply tactically adjusting to the fact people are annoyed about this stuff. So they're, they'll absolutely say they're going to do something about it, but they absolutely won't really do anything about it because they're not breaking with the fundamental paradigm of democratic governance and a lot of these issues. So, you know, it's sad, but there it is. But I mean, as long as the Karen Basses and

Brandon Johnson's of the world they're around, and we know, we don't know Azarindani's going to turn out in New York, I just think it's really hard for Democrats, you know, back to their image, back to their brand. I think it's hard for them to change their brand when so many people are so closely associated with the Democratic Party and have such power within the party and in general when they're not changing their positions, where they're not effective at what they're supposed to be doing, and they're not willing to just stand up

and say, you know, teens riding and the Chipotle, that's really bad. I'm going to stop it right now. You're like, get them teens off the street. You know? I mean, instead, it's like, well, I don't know. I mean, you know, kids like to get together and have fun and, you know, I don't know.

I mean, the curfew, what's wrong with the curfew? It's like, come. And the rest of her stuff, it was so crazy. I've forgotten half of them. of it. The ICE is around and federal tubes around. She was like, this was like throwing everything into the pot and mixing it around. All the things that Democrat, liberal Democrats are supposedly worried about. So somehow teens rioting at Chipotle, if we implement a curfew, somehow this will interact with like, you know, federal troops and with ICE agents to produce what? To produce what? I mean, where they're going to

do, like arrest everybody and put them in concentration camps? This is a sort of insane, you know, sort of completely speculative. It doesn't even make any sense, right? I mean, that's kind of what I'm getting at here. If you actually sat there and thought about it for five seconds, it doesn't make any sense what she's saying. But she says it anyway, because she can get away with it. And why can she get away with it? Because there's such a huge proportion of the Democratic electorate that believes this bullshit and was willing to listen to it, you know, and particularly people who vote in primaries, which are not the same as the median Democratic voters. So there is much there's much to be gained still by Democratic politicians

from saying all this nonsense both in terms of outright sort of standard issue voter support and also money. Don't forget money. Always follow the money. People like Graham Platner, you know, was able to raise an enormous amount of money in his main race

because he caught the ear of the online activists and the people who pay attention to this stuff and he started raking in small donations. So there's a sort of like sort of whole system now that a lot of Democrats are enveloped in

that encourages them to take crazy positions because it's maybe a crazy position and maybe like what normal people don't want. It may not be what the people want but it's what Democratic activists and small donors want. So I can definitely get ahead by doing

this. So there's all these disincentives if you're a democratic politician from taking sensible positions. and challenging the priorities and orthodoxies of the party. And I think, again, back to our, you know, why didn't they figure things out after 2024? That's part of the reason, especially once Trump got going.

And, you know, they had the anti-Trump animus to build on the ice raids and what have you. I mean, why rethink anything? I mean, we're the good guys here. Right. And, you know, maybe we're not so great on crime or, you know, illegal immigration, trans. People forget about that. because they hate Trump and we hate Trump and we're not Trump. So everything will turn out okay in the end.

I mean, I think it's enormously short-sighted, but that is not going to prevent Democrats from basically doubling and tripling down in their current approach, in my opinion. Yeah, and they get a little bit of an assist from weak Republican candidates in some of those races to, perhaps Ken Paxton, as you talked about earlier, Roy, in the Texas race. But I just want to thank you.

It's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. and think through these big races as they really start to heat up going into the summer. Thank you, Roy Tachara. I appreciate it. Okay, thanks for having me, Emily. All to be played for, I guess. We'll see how it all turns out. That's right. All right, we will be back with more in just one moment. Well, what does it feel like when your clothes actually feel good? Cozy Earth, an amazing company, is proving that what you wear at home actually matters as much as what you wear out. Now, the outfit that I have been living in, truly obsessed with this, is the brushed bamboo jogger set.

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So don't wait. That's code Emily at cozyEarth.com for up to 30% off. And if you see a post-purch survey, mention that you heard about it. about Cozy Earth right here. I used my own discount code on Mother's Day and I have a very happy mom because of it. Go ahead, cozyEarth.com. All right, let's close out the show. This is a monster show. I promised you it would be and I kept my promise so much to get to, so much in the news. But first, we're going to do some culture stuff here. We're going to talk about Amanda Pete. Then we're going to talk about Stephen Colbert. No, we're not going to talk about Stephen Colbert.

We're going to honor Stephen Colbert, his legacy of truth tell him. But let's start with Amanda Pete. Amanda Pete is now going viral for a comment she made in an interview in April. She's obviously in what I think is great show, your friends and neighbors on Apple TV right now, one of the stars of that show. And kind of famously has never done Botox. She got asked in an interview with Canadian broadcasting about this back in April. And I wanted to roll the clip because she touches on something very, very deep about

Botox that's worth pausing on. It's the root of a lot of the entire conversation about this, this high-tech youthful, these high-tech youthful procedures, procedures to restore youth. Let's go ahead and roll Amanda Pete talking about it here. I haven't had any work done yet on my face. It's not that I need to explain that, because, like, it's It's really evident. I have a lot of friends who do it and that a lot of friends who don't do it. And it's very much wrapped up in my identity. Like, who am I if I get a facelift and who am I if I don't get a facelift? And why does it matter and does it matter? I read your essay about that to get ready for this interview. It's called Amanda Pete never crossing the Botox Rubicon. You wrote it 10 years ago. It was very funny. I wish I had a fucking written it because now I actually can't cross the Rubicon.

Do you remember what you were writing about in that? It was about my fear of getting filler and Botox. It was about my fear of like doing things to my face that were more than superficial. And in a way, it feels to me like if you do it, then are you not, is that tantamount to not having acceptance about death? And if I'm trying to push it away, if I'm trying to deny it, that scares me, like in an almost like a superstitious way. I love this point and I don't want to be judgmental. It's not what I'm doing at all because there are all kinds of technologies that I think could be classified as transhumanists that we've all embraced in one way or the other. None of us is Ted Kaczynski here.

Let's not act like anyone is. And let's not act like Ted Kaczynski had the right idea either. Don't. Don't get me wrong. But he was a purist, of course. And he truly lived out his creed in his little cabin in the world. woods and none of us is that. So my point is nobody here is a purist. We've all brought technologies into our lives that could be qualified or could be categorized as transhumanist.

And what I think Amanda Pete just argued is that Botox is one such technology. She said there, if I do Botox or facelifts, am I failing to accept the reality of death? Well, human beings are constantly failing to accept the reality of death and we're constantly trying to defy death. We are constantly trying to defy our own humanity. We want to be able to fly around the world with a very low chance of death. We want to live longer without fearing imminent death when we're middle-aged as it's defined now. We're constantly striving towards longevity in one way or the other. And this has become, as hyper-novelty, the rate of change has increased so dramatically, just in the last 100 years. This has become hard to even keep track of, right?

It's like when the globe is spinning, you feel like you're standing still or you're the frog in the boiling pot. You don't know, you don't necessarily notice what you're doing until you're scalding. Your skin is burning. And that's how it has been, I think, with a lot of the technological change. You don't always pause to recognize that what you're doing is changing a very fundamental element of humanity, because technology came to be synonymous with progress and with the good. But that's, of course, not always the case. It used to be easier for us to adapt. it used to be easier for us to adapt to the good and the bad because the change was slower, right? The wheel, fire, bronze, the printing press, even, although the printing press caused very rapid change.

And there were wars that you could argue were rooted in what happened because of the printing press. But this is sort of sounds maybe beside the point, but I don't think it is at all. Botox doesn't help you live longer, but it does if it's your face. A facelift isn't for the sake of longevity, right? But it is for the sake of making you think less about your proximity to death. So I see what Amanda Pita is saying, that when you tried to look younger, which for, don't get me wrong, many women is really just about being more attractive. and being more attractive, staying, looking your best, and all of that. I don't deny that one bit.

Not at all. I get it. But if you think of it on a deeper level, why is that important? Why is it important for any of us? You could ask the same question literally about modern hair dye and makeup. up. So again, I'm not trying to act like this is unique. These are surgical interventions, so they're a little bit different. They're on another scale. But when you kind of keep peeling back and say, well, why is that important? Why is that important? Why do people dye their hair so that it

doesn't look gray? Fundamentally, I think it does have a lot to do with our discomfort with death, our deep discomfort with death. We have been separated from the reality of death, many of us in ways that our ancestors never could have imagined. And so we've gotten more and more comfortable cushioning ourselves from some of those harsh realities. And this is not to say it's it's right or wrong. It's just to say it's another one of these technologies like a facelift or injecting this chemical of Botox into your face. people have been trying to make themselves look younger forever because people have feared death forever. So it's not necessarily new, but it is accelerating.

And part of me does wonder if, you know, 10, 20 years from now, we look back on this era where there's a tug of war happening between naturalists and, you know, maybe what is diversively referred to as Mar-a-Lago face, where people have a lot, a lot, a lot of work done. a lot of injections, a lot of modifications. If we look back on the latter category as something that was very odd, maybe that's a more hopeful version of the future, but it's so exaggerated to almost be cartoonish and comical in some manifestations, not all, of course.

Some people have incredible work, incredible work, so much so that it's almost imperceptible. But the very fact that people with a lot of money think that this exaggeration in many cases looks good, I think tells us that we've acclimated ourselves to fighting, fighting the reality of death, as Amanda Pete said. Amanda Pete, by the way, still been able to be successful. People aren't horrified by the appearance of Amanda Pete on their screens. She still looks great. But I do wonder if someday we look back on this moment where many people had just outrageously exaggerated. It seems like the Donatella Versace look or the, no offense to the great Joan Rivers,

but the Joan Rivers look has become much more, much more common and actually even exaggerated. in different ways too. So that was a very perceptive moment from Amanda Pete talking about Botox of all things. And I thought it was worth calling some attention to it because when we peel back the layers of so many of our decisions, they come down to fighting death. And when we're another, perfectly natural, we want to survive and we want to survive as long as is possible. But we also are made for a very particular purpose, which is not living forever as Brian Johnson has tried to do. And we have become much more willing to just see the good in technology rather than imagining the kind of downstream negative effects of it, social media being the best example.

It was pitched during the Obama years, actually really during the late Bush years, something that was incredible, was revolutionizing human. and most of us looked on it pretty warmly as the bright future. And we see now that we weren't prepared for the negative consequences, and even the ones that we couldn't have anticipated. People are becoming more conscious of this, I think. But this is a good sort of physical illustration that I thought was worth talking about. Now, as promised, I wanted to honor the legacy of Stephen Colbert, because about 24 hours from now, he will be set up.

now. He will be signing off the late show for the last time. The late show itself, despite, I think some poor analyses, has been canceled as a franchise, right? We've talked about Stephen Colbert since literally night one of this show after party. I think it was literally the first thing I talked about on this show. Colbert is off the air on May 21st, but so is the late show. And he had David Letterman on. He said all the rest of the late night hosts on. Some of them aren't broadcasting. on his last night tomorrow because they went to honor him in their own way. And so I'm going to honor him a little bit early just by rolling this clip of perhaps Colbert's most viral moment at the height of his powers in the first Trump administration where he thought he was pretty clever with this rapid fire roast of Donald Trump that included A reference to Donald Trump's mouth as, and this is very edgy, so I just want to warn you, if you don't have a sophisticated and edgy sense of humor, you may not find this. You may not respect this joke for the poetry that it is.

But he did refer to Trump's mouth as Vladimir Putin's cockholster somewhat famously. Let's revisit this moment. Mr. Trump, your presidency, I love your presidency. I call it disgrace the nation. You're the blotus. You're the glutton with the button. You're a regular gorge Washington. You're the presidents,

but you're turning into a real prictator. You attract more skinheads than free rogain. You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a sign language gorilla who got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin's holster. Your presidential library is going to be a kid's menu and a couple of jugs magazine. The only thing smaller than your hands is your tax returns.

And you can take that any way you want. I'm speechless. It's so powerful. It's so effective. Honestly, it's so bad. It's so lazy and low grade. I would give that a C. And yet it was treated like A++ plus in the media.

If you remember when it aired, I think that clip was from 2017. Colbert was like greeted as a hero when that clip first went viral. And his show very quickly became the top-rated show in late night during Trump's first administration, probably bringing in three, three and a half million compared to the other shows. Nothing compared to what Johnny Carson did at the height of his powers around 9 million he was bringing in. some years it was probably higher than that. But the difference is, obviously, with the democratization of media, the proliferation of choice, Colbert is trying to get the biggest slice of a smaller pie, whereas with Johnny Carson, his pie was almost the entire American public, right? The people

who are sitting down in front of their television and watching late-night comedy shows, there's much more overlap between that and the public overall. And so the biggest chunk that you can possibly get of that pie, the better because you're going to sell more ads. It's just a bigger pie that's more representative of the overall public. Colbert, though, like actually a lot of news publications who still think of themselves as monocultural mass media organs, that's what the late show was. That's what late night comedy was. It was something that was seen as a kind of watering hole for a big chunk of the public during

the evenings. So it was sort of a unifying piece of monoculture. Now we're in micropulture. And the best way to win a ratings race in microculture is to cultivate a niche. In Colbert's case, it was resistance. Wine moms who wanted to feel like they were a part of something, that they had a cause during the first Trump administration, which if you didn't like Donald Trump, was probably a very frustrating time. But this cringe humor, it hits everyone else as just. painful, especially if you knew Colbert from his Stranger with Candy Days, the Colbert report,

to what the Dana Carvey show. I mean, he used to be so good, and I've said that many times, but here, it's just really nauseating to see him frame this, like, high school level insult comedy as some serious and powerful statement in support of democracy. I mean, it's just nauseating to witness. But of course, if you're looking for something to make you feel heard and seen, and like you're giving Trump the middle finger metaphorically to Colbert's show, which just brought on a parade of liberals and democratic politicians who he glazed over and over again. It was so obviously not about democracy, but about what he thinks is democracy. which happened to be the sort of elite effort to undermine Donald Trump.

Trump comes back into office. CBS gets purchased by David Ellison with help from Larry Ellison, who's, of course, a big Trump donor. David Ellison, I think, actually donated to Biden at first. But, you know, they're fairly supportive of Donald Trump. The late show itself gets canceled. And fast forward to now, after his year-long goodbye show that was being panned by critics, year-long farewell tour, that even critics who are in positions or you'd expect them to support

this beautiful farewell, found it to be gratingly narcissistic and drawn out. Let's also, though, just say, I've mentioned this many times. I don't like wealthy political actors, donors, using the public airwaves, whether they're left or right, to their advantage. I think more of it has happened from the left. I think Democrats have gotten a lot of intentional help from wealthy owners of media outlets for a very long time. And it's gone without much consternation from the left, which is now treating this cancellation of the late show, not Colbert.

They canceled the entire show, the entire franchise, treating it as though it is some grave assault on democracy when there was nothing but silence all of the other times. All that is to say, the big picture here. Colbert was hemorrhaging money for the network because exactly what we just talked about, which is the entire game is different right now. I'm putting on the screen this Poccan News article that dropped around the time of the original cancellation. where it reported, the late show has been losing more than $40 million a year. $40 million a year, quote, though that doesn't include some ancillary revenue. Well, the show still garners an average of 2.47 million viewers a night,

leads its 1135 rivals in total audience, and just this week scored its ninth consecutive Emmy nomination for Outstanding Talk Variety Series. Its ad revenue has plummeted precipitously since the 2021-2020 season. Linear ratings are down everywhere, of course. And as the Times reported, the network late night shows took in $439 million combined in ad revenue in 2018. By last year, though, that figure had dropped by 50%. It was already dropping like a rock in 2018. But that dropped by 50% over the course of six years.

So Puck goes on to say, measure that against the more than $100 million per season it costs to produce the late show. By contrast, the CBS primetime and daytime day parts are still profitable and that programming is supported by robust license fees for streaming. Another off-network viewing late show with its topical humor and celebrity interviews pegged to specific projects has struggled on Paramount Plus. So that's on streaming. And three of the network late night shows of the three, late show has by far the smallest digital footprint on YouTube and other platforms.

That is obviously true, still true right now if you go look at the numbers for Kimmel and Fallon. And so this estimated $40 million annual loss, Jimmy Kimmel said he thinks there's just absolutely no way that it's true that it was losing that much money a year, though even he conceded the format is dying. And that's where Andy Cohen, I think, said at one point, why not just negotiate with Colbert and, you know, cut the show's staff from 200 to 100, something like that. still an incredible amount of money and an incredible risk that Colbert, this figure that has a pretty

niche audience, is going to be worth all of the money and all of the effort and is going to even be able to do what he has been doing on a shoestring budget. So I don't think that explanation checks out either. I think if the network was upset with Colbert and was trying to please the administration by knocking Colbert away, they would have hired some conservative comedian or some inoffensive comedian, politically inoffensive comedian to step into his role in the first place. So do I think it was opportunistic of the new CBS ownership? Yeah, I think it's pretty clear they were going to do it anyway. You can't keep subsidizing this dinosaur forever. It gave them a good opening. They felt like they had a good opening during the second Trump

administration that you're maybe killing two birds with one stone. You're giving Trump a little something to grease his palms, make him feel better about the network because people know that he likes those things. But you're also probably going to be retiring at the right time, this insane dinosaur of a television show. And that's really what was going on. Colbert, though, has spent the last year, basically acting like this was really just about an assault on democracy and that he was a super brave truth teller. I'm going to reiterate here. This is from, actually, this is from a Cambridge fellow

who looked at some of the same numbers that Punch did and said, even acclaimed shows must make money. Running the late show was like CBS funding a tent pole blockbuster every year only without the box office returns. CBS insiders estimate the show lost $40 to $50 million annually for years. Production costs, including a staff of nearly 200, approached $100 million a year. Revenues never came close.

Ad sales fell 25% to about 70 million by 2024, and streaming added just $60 million over four years. Not a big enough audience for Cockholster Comedy to justify 200 staffers and tens of millions of dollars of annual losses, unfortunately for Stephen Colbert. Now, I also wanted to mention Chelsea Handler's recent appearance on a show where she commented on the Kevin Hart roast that Netflix aired. I think it was last week that it actually came out. It was super funny.

It was kind of funny to see Chelsea Handler there alongside people like Tony Hinchcliffe who have been this riding the Trump era vibe shift wave of anti-PC comedy that is becoming very popular. Shane Gillis as well. There was a really interesting contrast between the new and old. Chelsea Handler is more of a kind of Colbert-style comedian who has, I think, changed her brand into a sort of lazy, cliched resistance comedy. And she was fine at the roast. I thought Gillis was great at the roast. But to see the two sides of the 2024 vibe shift, the pre, where Colbert Handler were having this like renaissance and the post where a lot of the momentum was with Hinchcliff and Gillis was super interesting. But here's what Chelsea Handler said afterwards on a podcast talking about that. And I knew enough about like Tony Hinchcliff and Shane and their backgrounds.

I had girls, ex-girlfriends blowing up my DMs that had dated Shane and were telling me stuff about him. Tell us now. What's she saying? It's just everything we know that they're racist, that they're bigots, that they're sexist. I don't find those jokes to be funny, junk's about lynching black people or, like, lynching is not, if that's worse than rape. Like, you're not joking about rape, are you? Are you saying, I'm going to go rape you?

You know, you can't do that, but you can say lynching. Like, I find that to be, I don't know, you know, people are like, it's a roast, you go for it. I'm like, you can go for it without being gross. Like, I find that to be gross. I found them making fun of Cheryl Underwood's, like, dead husband who committed suicide. Like, you know, she's fine with that. If she says she's fine with that, she's fine with that.

I wasn't fine with that. I thought that was disgusting, too. But there was so much disgustingness that I knew it was going to be such a, like, gross vibe. And Kevin didn't deserve that. He deserved, like, an elevated roast. You want a non-gross roast? and with all of the things that upset you, the joke about Charlie Kirk's neck didn't make the list.

Just upset about those things. Also, I didn't have time to research it, but I feel pretty confident saying, I think Tony Hinchcliff and Shane Gillis would be just fine joking about rape and probably have in the past for what it's worth. I'm not sure that argument even makes a bit of sense whatsoever from Chelsea Handler, whatever you make of it. But it's fascinating to see Chelsea Handler wanting to go on the roast.

And this is what I mean about Colbert falling out of fashion in the microculture versus monoculture world. When the microcultures, my, microchulturistas thought that they were the monoculture, they were really cocky and confident and all of that. When they realized that they were in a microculture that was competing with other microtures, like Brogomedy, Gillis, Hinchcliffe, Roe, and the rest, they're trying to have it both ways. They're trying to go into those spaces and get the publicity for being at Kevin Hart's roast. And I know Chelsea and Kevin Hart are friends, but also at the same time, come out a couple of

days later and be like, ugh, it was too gross. It was too gross. It's like, ma'am, you signed up for a roast with Jeff Ross. You're not even upset about anything Jeff Ross said. You signed up for a roast with all of these people and you have the audacity to act like it was somehow different and on another level and that you weren't okay with it? No, what she was trying to do is save a little bit of face because there were politically inconvenient jokes made at the roast that rankle her in a way politically inconvenient jokes

at the expense of the other side don't. And that is why people find the Colbert's and the handlers to be so insufferable because it has just become performative act much more about politics than about the comedy and much more about the comedy. Make political points. I mean, I think that's the comedy often at its best. But you have to put the punchline first, and they still haven't adapted to where their audiences are. Really, if they want to chase a bigger audience,

or if they want to have a smaller audience, make less money, that's the new reality for them. We'll see how Stephen Colbert adapts. Farewell to you, sir, Stephen Colbert, onwards and upwards. Thank you in the words of David Letterman for what you have done for our country. I think I just set a record for the longest after-party episode ever.

Thank you so much for sticking around. There's just a lot to talk about tonight. Emily at devilmaycaremedia.com is where you can go to email me. We won't be here on Memorial Day, so we see it a week from today, live 9 p.m. Eastern on YouTube. But please subscribe wherever you get your podcast, subscribe on YouTube and we will see you on Friday for a new edition of Happy Hour. Have a great one, everyone.