After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Vibe Shift Against Identity Politics, with Batya Ungar-Sargon, and How the Center-Left Failed, with David Leonhardt
Episode Date: July 1, 2025Emily Jashinsky is joined by Batya Ungar-Sargon to talk about the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the way he avoided identity politics in his campaign so far and focused on economics, his familiar battle wit...h the establishment and billionaires, whether cultural conservatism is on the rise, the "godless and morally offensive" parts of the Big Beautiful Bill, what the working class of both parties agree on, and more. Then David Leonhardt joins to discuss how the center-left failed, the decline of elite viewpoints, Mamdani's great political instincts but why the NYT has "deep qualms" about some of his policies, and more. And Emily closes it out by reflecting on the vibe shift we're experiencing in music, pop culture, and whether it's sustainable when elite millennials didn't get the memo. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
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Hey everyone, you get to watch the sunset in Aspen with me today. I won't really be able to see it because it'll be behind me. But thank you so much for tuning in. This is week two of after party and I'm on the road. I was actually surprised a couple of months ago to be named a Gwen Eiffel Journalism Fellow by the Aspen Institute, but really excited because I've been here for a few days just soaking it all in. Now, before I get into all of what I've seen in the last couple of days, I want to say on today's show, we have Bacha Unger Sargon and David Lianner.
Batcha, of course, is with the free press. You know her. And David Leonhardt is the New York Times
head of the, he sort of oversees the opinion section. I think he's like an executive director
of the New York Times opinion section and has some really interesting thoughts on populism,
on immigration. He actually moderated a panel here that was really interesting and I wanted
to get his thoughts on it between Governor Brian Kemp, a Democratic mayor and the head of the executive
director of the ACLU. So,
We will roll that shortly.
And as we're opening, we're going to be thinking a little bit here about Aspen itself.
Aspen itself has a place called billionaire mountain if you've never been to Aspen.
It's a really, really wild place.
It has the third highest per capita personal income in the U.S., according to the Aspen Times.
I think that was as of last year.
You know, I've never felt so, it's odd to be in a forest and like in the wilderness and feel
so completely disconnected from rural America. It's like a little disorienting. There's just a high
concentration of wealth here. But I always jump at the opportunity to kind of mingle with and talk
to some of the people and engage with some of the institutions that I criticize. And, you know,
there's people who are more than happy to have conversations like that here. I went to a fantastic
breakout session on free trade. That was also I found pleasantly
surprising. But it's interesting to be kind of in a rural area and see billionaires and centa
millionaires. I think that's what it's called when you're worth multiple hundreds of millions of
dollars. It's sort of trying to dress down. And they're like luxury tennis shoes, whatever that
means with their sleeves rolled up. It's an interesting mix of people and lots of corporate
sponsors. You can't like use the app without getting an advertisement for Wells Fargo or Ford,
which again is pretty normal in these types of environments. But I'm usually in very, very,
conservative cultural and political environment. So, you know, one of the big thoughts that I have,
my big takeaway, and this is going to be a throughline of tonight's show as, for example, Elon Musk
threatens to start a new political party as of right now. Like, that's happening as we're here
talking to one another. He's threatening to start a new political party because of the one big
beautiful bill that looks like it's on track to pass very soon, has been a centerpiece of the
Trump agenda and Elon Musk is unhappy with it. Bacha has some thoughts on it as a sort of Democrat
MAGA that we're going to talk to her about in a bit. But, you know, it's interesting to be surrounded by
sort of the Alexander Vindman, John Bolton, hawkish environment, but then also millennials who are
still using the pronouns and the bios and doing identity-based breakout groups. It's kind of a good
reflection on what happened in New York City with Zoran Mamdani.
We talked last week about a surprise victory in that Democratic primary for mayor.
He won by talking about affordability, not about queer liberation, which is something that
he did tweet out at one point before he became mayor, maybe more than one point.
But actually, because I'm just an intrepid researcher, I can't help myself.
I search the word queer on Zoran's Twitter, and he hadn't posted it in like two years after
having posted it many times beforehand.
Basically, affordability is all you need to win young voters right now.
And we have this.
The New York Times crunched the numbers, really fascinating numbers
and how the Mamdani campaign was able to,
both through its own outreach and honestly, like just a lot of hard work that it put in,
totally like changed the makeup of the electorate.
Lots of young people.
This is from the New York Times.
You can see the chart of voter registration going
before election day and you can see also turnout. So those are two pretty important markers
that tell you what you need to know about the Mom Donnie campaign among young people when you
are seeing spikes like that. So that's basically confirmation of what people were saying
happened in that election. And he intentionally played down the culture war that worked. My question
now sitting here, having mingled with a lot of center-left elites in the last couple of
days is how long is that sort of tenable for the country that, you know, can the millennial politician
talk just about affordability and not about how defunding the police is queer liberation,
as Mom Donny said at one point. So on that note, I want to bring in Bacha Unger Sargon. I want to
have Baja react to a clip of, a clip of Zaron from the Sunday shows that we're going to talk about,
but Baccia first, welcome. It's so great to talk to you.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. There are few things that I think your audience needs to know about you, Emily.
First of all, I don't know if your audience understands that you are the it girl of the new right.
Of course. Word to the wise. Never go to a conference or an event because you see Emily's going to be there thinking you're going to get to hang out with her. You're not.
She is surrounded by three rings of admirers.
And you literally need Krav Maga to get anywhere near her just to say hello to this woman.
She's so freaking popular.
She's so fun and brilliant.
And Emily, I don't know how you do it.
Like everybody loves you.
You are like utterly unhatable despite the fact that you take positions and you make statements.
And you are a leader and a thought leader and a person.
forging new ground in really important ways,
and yet you are utterly, utterly beloved.
It Girl Extraordinaire, and I'm so excited about this show,
and I'm so excited to be here,
and I'm just so excited to see you in so much demand
on so many platforms in so many ways, because I adore you.
And I'm sure your audience adores you as well,
but I just wanted them to get that perspective
that they may not know of what it's like
trying to get close to you just to say hi at any place where you are thronged with admirers.
Thank you so much for having me.
Okay, Baja, first of all, you've made me blush slightly.
I would say I agree with about 70% of that.
I am amazing in such high demand, throngs of fans following me wherever I go.
But in all honesty, Bacchia and I were at a, we were at an event a couple months ago,
and Bacchia was the one being surrounded.
And so we can agree that, you know, every once in a while a few people out in the wilderness want to talk to us.
The last time actually I saw about you, we were on a patio at a Holiday Inn in Charleston, downing glasses of wine.
Way too much wine for a weeknight.
It was fantastic.
But that event was hilarious because it is my understanding that we both had quite a bit to drink before we went on stage.
And there were a bunch of speakers before us, and you and I sat there, you know, just kind of sipping on our probably third glass of wine and just basically beavis and buttheading it through the other speakers, like, just like kind of the snide asides.
And it was totally delicious and utterly beneath both of us, but it was so fun.
And then I'm thinking, okay, well, Emily's going to get up there.
I don't know how she's going to get through her talk because I know what stage she's and gets up there and just gives the most incredible.
incredible, incredible,
delivery,
your wonderful,
wonderful take on the media
and how, you know,
the comparison between
Johnny Carson
and is it Colbert?
The Carson Colbert distinction
that you so beautifully present
to help people understand
what's gone wrong with our media.
And even though I have written a book
on this very topic,
I was going to say,
hearing you talk about it
even better than anything I could ever do.
You literally wrote the book on that.
I really,
I'm so excited to have you here, and I'm very excited to get your reaction to this massively viral clip of Zoran Lom Dani from, this was on NBC with Kristen Walker Sunday shows.
He's a sensation now and got an interesting question from Kristen Walker and gave a pretty interesting response about just the existence of billionaires.
So let's roll this clip and I'll ask you about it, Bacha.
You are a self-described democratic socialist.
Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist?
I don't think that we should have billionaires because frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality.
And ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.
And I look forward to work with everyone, including billionaires, to make a city that is fairer for all of them.
So, Bacch, you have a really interesting story, actually.
And I think it speaks to Zeramam Dhani's story and his own trajectory.
and kind of the trajectory of the left
in some really, I think, important ways.
So let me just start by queuing this up.
You come out of a similar movement.
Am I wrong?
Like the last 10 years,
you guys were both in sort of New York,
Democratic Socialists of America, DSA circles.
Is that right, Bacha?
I was never quite in the DSA.
I was more like on the Hillary side of things.
I used to be like very woke and very left,
but very much in that sort of like,
I think before the Me Too movement,
I really did feel that women still sort of had it pretty tough
or that there were things we had to overcome in order to succeed.
And now I really don't feel that way.
I feel that women actually have a bit of an advantage in the professional world today.
Economically, they have an advantage because they're 15 points more likely to go to college,
which is really the gatekeeper of the American dream today.
So my view has really evolved in that sense.
But, you know, I wouldn't have said that I was, like,
I've become much more of a fan of Bernie Sanders now in my MAGA lefty.
iteration than I think I was when I was like at my most left wing in the Democratic Party.
But I think this is so interesting, this Zoran Mamdani phenomenon, because like for him, it's all
performance art. This guy is like a child of privilege. His parents, I think, are millionaires.
His mother raised millions of dollars to do these independent films. She's an Oscar nominated
filmmaker or his father's a professor at Columbia. You know, he was raised very much.
in this kind of over-credentialed,
cultural and economic elite
that has come to define the left in America.
And they espouse this kind of,
the liberal patriot called it
trust fund socialism
to where their views on economics
are this kind of, you know,
raise taxes and redistribute,
you know, expand the welfare state,
have more people count as poor,
give more free stuff to more individuals,
which is not actually the economic populism
that working class Americans are drawn to.
They're much more drawn to the kind of protectionism
that Donald Trump has on offer,
which is we don't want free stuff.
What we want is an economy that protects the product of our labor
through immigration controls and through tariffs.
So it's a very different model of economic populism
that you have on the right and the left.
But obviously the one on the right is the one that's resonating
with the working class because Mamdani's,
victory was with the college educated, the multiple degreed, the wealthy. He did not get anywhere
with black voters. He didn't get very far with poor voters. He got the $50,000 to $100,000. He won those
slightly over Cuomo. He really wanted a big way people make over $100,000. But you have to remember
that a lot of these over-credentialed elites who are people who will be in the elites when they're
further down in their careers. Of course, at this stage in their careers, as young people,
they're not making a lot of money. But that doesn't mean that they're not on the trajectory
that thanks to the economy that the Democrats created will net them the American dream in a way
that working class people prior to Trump did not really have a shot at. So in a way, it's so
interesting to see this kind of co-splay of, you know, a working class revolution when it's
really much more along the lines of like gentrifiers of the world.
unite here. And I think that what's happening in the Democratic Party is, okay, so I think what you
said, Emily, to notice that he hasn't tweeted the word queer in a long time. It's a very smart
thing to notice, but you also have to understand who did he pull into this coalition with him.
He won in a big way with Asians and particularly with Southeast Asians, with Muslims.
And before October 7th, I don't know if you remember this, but there was this very interesting
coalition forming between Christian conservatives and Muslim conservative parents.
Actually, it just happened at the Supreme Court last week.
I mean, that decision of the Supreme Court was the product of Christian parents and Muslim
parents challenging curriculum in what was it, Montgomery County, Maryland.
Exactly.
Opposing a lot of the woke stuff in the gender department.
And I wonder if that is the reason that he really backed off of,
this kind of language around like queer liberation and really leaned into the free Palestine stuff.
Even when it's such an obviously losing thing to do, like in that interview with Kristen Wecker,
he refused to condemn the calls to globalize the intifada, which is a call for violence against Jews,
like just refuse to condemn it three times she asked him.
So I think maybe that might have a lot more to do with who he saw.
as his potential coalition here in New York, although, of course, I totally agree with you.
Like the Democrats, if they want to get anywhere, they need to move on from the identity politics
and the woke stuff. And they have to be embracing, you know, economic populism.
Immigration, of course, as you point out, is going to be the big question.
You wrote this in your piece for unheard.
Crime and immigration are the two areas where will he be able to actually seize that populist
energy on those two issues?
that could be the maker to break it for him.
Yeah, and so like we definitely don't agree on everything about this,
but I'm really curious what you make of that last point in particular
about the Identitarian obsession that tanked the left.
I mean, it really started with Hillary Clinton.
Joe Biden was able to sort of eke out a win for a lot of reasons in 2020.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris then again doubled and tripled down on it.
And here, Zaraamam Dani, who is way further to the left
on economic issues, certainly than Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton is,
actually was not out there, like, overwhelming his message with identity politics.
And I wonder if you think, I guess I wonder if you think the rest of the party is capable of doing what he did.
And actually, even if he is capable of taking that all the way to Election Day of November.
It's very interesting. He never once said, vote for me, I'll be the first Muslim mayor of New York.
And I heard.
I mean, it's my understanding that he never said that.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong about that.
But I think that's what you're talking about.
Like, that took a lot of restraint, right?
Because that is the, that was in the Hillary version, right?
The lingua franca of the day, it was like you call upon this historic nature of your.
And so that I think was obviously very smart.
He ran a really smart campaign.
The problem is that it seems to me that the Democrats, if you look at Mom Dani as a sort
Harbinger. What they did was they swapped out a kind of woke elite left cultural position on race and
gender that was very alienating to working class voters for a socialist redistributionist economic
agenda that it turns out is also very alienating to working class voters who really kind of want
sort of a fair shot at the American dream. And he was right in diagnosing the problem. The solutions
he gave were the solutions that appeal to the exact same top 20% of over-credentialed elites
that the Democrats were appealing to with the identity stuff. So it seems to me like that elite
has gotten the message that if they focus on race and gender, they cannot win elections
because most Americans have moved on from that. But what they swapped it out for,
is this kind of like, you know, trust fund socialism
that also seems to me to be a kind of losing agenda
when you're talking about building a mass coalition
in the way that Donald Trump did.
That's such a good point.
And one of my takeaways here at Aspen
is that the millennials that are here
are actually still kind of clinging to some of those cultural policies.
So on that note, let's talk about the rights battle
to actually represent or help the work in class
as much as it is possible.
Bacha, I've got to get your reaction to,
because you've been posting about this on the X, really interestingly,
Caroline Levitt, claiming that that one big, beautiful bill
is actually going to strengthen Medicaid.
This is S3.
So this bill strengthens Medicaid.
It will protect those benefits that hardworking Americans need,
and that's why the president wants this bill to pass.
The senator was wrong.
The president put out a truth social post addressing it,
and then the senator announced he's no longer running for office anymore.
So I think that case has been closed and that White House is continuing to focus on getting this legislation to the president's desk for his signature.
Now, if you've been around the conservative movement for a long time like I have, you would not have any problem with their argument.
You would say, of course, cutting waste, fraud and abuse and tightening up, you know, for example, work requirements, as this bill does on Medicaid, yes, that technically you can sort of stretch the definition of what, quote, unquote, strengthens Medicaid, although it's probably not how most Americans understand it.
And Elon Musk now, sort of from the right of Trump, is threatening to create a new third party.
This is F4.
We can put it on the screen.
This is playing out literally as we're speaking.
Bacha, Musk is posting.
This one says, if this insane spending bill passes the America party will be formed the next day.
Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat Republican Uniparty party so that the people actually have a voice.
And Bacha, I think he's sort of on the other side of your disagreement with this bill.
But both of those disagreements speak to the problem.
that Republicans find themselves in right now with this bill.
So let's start with what's happening in terms of like austerity
and trying to find cuts to keep Ron Johnson and Chip Roy happy,
for example, while also keeping Susan Collins and Josh Hawley happy
from the sort of moderate and populist side.
What's your takeaway from the cuts that Republicans are about to pass here?
First of all, the math doesn't add up.
They're going to be adding trillions of dollars to the deficit.
So even if you're a deficit hawk, like it's just nonsense that this bill is good for you.
But, you know, on the moral front, the idea that we are going to be kicking people off of Medicaid so that we can give the top income bracket a tax break, I think is just so anathema to the America First agenda.
they do this little slight of hand where they act like,
if we don't pass this bill,
there will be a tax increase for working class and middle class Americans,
as if you couldn't separate out the tax cuts for middle class
and working class Americans from tax cuts for the top income bracket.
I just find it godless and morally offensive to suggest that, you know,
taking away 2% of a tax cut from a billionaire,
which he will never feel and never notice,
that you should be doing that while taking away, like,
health care from people.
These people are not, like, scamming the system to get cash.
I mean, even if somebody is scamming the system to get Medicaid,
they're doing it to get health care.
And if they get dropped from the Medicaid rolls,
their family is going to end up paying those bills,
and their family is probably broke.
It's not like they can just choose not to get health care.
This isn't like spinning rims on a car, you know?
But that's how Republicans talk about it.
I don't, in theory, like philosophically have a problem with work requirements or volunteering
requirements.
I volunteer.
I think volunteering is great for the soul.
The idea that the 20 hours a week of volunteering that they're asking these people to put
in in exchange for their Medicaid is going to do something towards paying down the deficit
to the degree that.
like getting rid of those tax cuts for the rich would do.
It's just insulting to me.
So I'm on the opposite side of Elon Musk.
The problem is like, this is where the MAGA base is.
Like this is where MAGA voters are.
Like they really believe Donald Trump when he said,
I'm not going to be dropping people from Medicaid.
And you can say it's fraud and abuse till the cows come home.
Like this is health care that people need.
We need more people getting health care,
getting good health care, getting great health care, which Medicaid is.
And the last point I'll make, Emily, is that the parliamentarian just ruled that the Republicans,
without a 60-person majority, cannot deprive illegal aliens of Medicaid and health care.
So what you're telling me is that the America First Party is about to pass a bill that allows millions of illegal aliens,
aliens to have access to the Cadillac of healthcare and is dropping five million Americans from
the roles, American citizens? Like, there's no coming back from this as far as I'm concerned.
This is not an acceptable position. And I just really hope that they understand how angry this
is going to make people, and justifiably so. So actually, let's stick on this point.
I wanted to ask you about Elon, but I want to stick on this point because what you just said was so
interesting. This is not something that they can come back from. People should know some
context. You spent a good chunk of time recently talking to Trump voters and the American
working class in states all over the country. So you have a good sense of the politics.
And also, as you brought in the moral component here as well, but when you say this is,
there's no going back after this bill, which of course is also what Elon Musk is saying
from the libertarian austerity, right? But when you say it, tell us.
what you mean and tell me why then, if that's your sense, Republicans aren't panicking.
So he's totally wrong because, you know, only 3% of Americans are libertarians. Like,
that's the Joe Manchin quadrant, right? The Elon Musk quadrant, which is like, you know,
socially liberal and economically, you know, fiscally austere. This is like nobody's there.
There's very few Americans who are in that group. So his America, one, you know,
New America party is not going to be a threat to anybody.
the reason that
I think this is so
like it's political suicide
when I was reporting my book
Second Class
I traveled around the country
People should pick it up
Second class
Working class Americans from both political parties
And let me tell you Emily
There was so much consensus
Like whether people voted for Democrats
or Republicans they pretty much had the same
politics which really shocked me
So for example on abortion
Like the vast majority of the women I interviewed, whether they were Republicans or Democrats, told me, well, I would never get an abortion because I think it's murder, but I would not take that right away from that woman. So I would vote against banning it. Okay. Either party is really in that, you know, it's like Donald Trump's there, but very few other people. On LGBT issues, most people, including the Republicans that I spoke to, including the very Christian Republicans I spoke to, were very pro-gay. And even the Democrats I spoke to were.
extremely against the trans agenda.
So there's no LGBT, right?
There's like Christians who have gay friends and want them to be treated with dignity.
And then there's Democrats who are like extremely upset about trans women and women's
sports.
And on policy, on economic policy, you know, the most, not economic policy strictly,
but the most common view I heard, the most common combination was almost everyone I spoke
to wanted pretty much a full moratorium on immigration for the foreseeable future, and that
included the Democrats, and also much more access to high-quality, affordable health care,
and that included the Republicans. So this combination of, like, total moratorium on immigration,
or at least an extreme hawkishness on immigration, coupled with an extreme permissiveness
understanding that healthcare is not a luxury good. It is something people encounter in their
worst times and that working people work really hard and have the shittiest health care.
I mean, that is that combination is the winning formula. Whichever party gets there first
is going to have a ruling majority for 50 years because 70% of Americans, 75% of Americans are
there. In fact, 80% of Americans,
think we should be raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for this stuff. So this just seems to me to be
going in the exact wrong, totally opposite direction and really actually is an opening for Democrats.
Guys, all you have to do is get back to your 1990s position on immigration and you will be in
really good shape. Will they do it, Emily? They won't do it. So basically what we ended up with is
one party that talks about dropping people from Medicaid,
dropping American citizens from getting health care,
and another party that believes we should be giving health care
to the entire world and to illegal immigrants.
And it's just such a joke.
I mean, it really sucks for the average American.
I mean, I think the average American sees it that way.
That's for sure.
To sort of put a fine point on this,
I know we have some pictures of the Lauren Sanchez Bezos.
I guess we call her Lauren Sanchez Bezos.
Wedding situation.
We have the dress.
We have some pictures from the whole affair.
Yeah, there they are.
The happy couple.
He was getting absolutely torched for that tuxedo by people who know I'm not even going to dabble in tuxedo criticisms because I don't have them.
But Sanchez Bezos, as we call her now, was getting some compliments from, I don't know about you.
If you saw this.
I saw like Trad World being like, it's amazing that she had the long sleeve dress up to the neck,
that there was something surprisingly modest about it.
But also this entire affair, Bezos, as somebody who has come to stand behind Donald Trump
for reasons you and I probably agree on, and a lot of people understand why he did that.
Also, some of it, I think, is genuine fear of the mom-dani takeover of the Democratic Party by people like Bezos.
But I don't know.
I just, it all, Ivanka Trump was there.
The Kardashians were there.
Like, everyone was there.
I think the estimated cost was like between 50 and 56 million dollars, something like that.
It just all feels like so bad.
The state of the country just feels really bad.
And I don't know if that's a tangent from what you were just talking about,
but when you were mentioning the two political parties, neither one really serving the working class of America.
I mean, healthcare is one of those things.
Everywhere I go in conservative world, I tell.
them, that is your biggest blind spot. It crashes people month after month after month,
your people, month after month, your people, month after month. It is devastating. It is fear that
causes people not to go to the doctor. It's a heavyweight on the everyday person's life,
and Republicans basically have no solution to it. Democrats, on the other hand, have no capability
of producing a solution to immigration, for example. And we're left with everyone, you know,
spending millions of dollars at the Bezo-Sanchez wedding. I don't know about you. I don't feel good.
Maybe it's the altitude. Here's my thing. Here's my thing.
take. When I saw that wedding dress, I had one thought, Emily. One thought. Do you know what my thought was?
I wish I did, but you're going to have to tell me. My thought was Lauren Sanchez watched Megan Kelly's
review her outfit. Oh, good place. And she is trying to recover from the devastating impact of being the
object of Megan Kelly's scorn. That is such a good point because that really was devastating.
It was so, like, it was just so accurate. It was so good. Oh, my gosh. You're probably right about
that. I like how I asked you a really deep and serious question, and you just, you punted about you.
Listen, listen, come on, we're girls, right? I mean, like, you know, we want to talk about fashion.
I rarely want to talk about fashion, but in this case.
I'll say one serious thing, which is it's my experience that working class people don't have
class resentment against billionaires, that it's actually the top 10%, like this over-credentialed elite,
like the people who like fly first class who truly cannot stand the billionaires who have
private jets.
Like the class resentment only goes one, like one class.
cast higher. So I think a working class people have a lot of resentment against these sort of
cultural and economic professional elites who like think that they get to tell them like what to
think and what to do and how to live and so forth. But they see billionaires as jobs creators and
they're really turned off by like anti-billionaire talk. Like I think a lot of people, you know,
imagine that they could be a billionaire or they wish they could or they aspire to be like
the idea of trashing billioners I think is very like alien in.
in working class culture,
but it's very prevalent in that elite
that Mamdani comes from
where people are very used to
from the lap of, you know,
one step down privilege,
like railing against the billionaires.
You know, I always think of how, you know,
Bernie Sanders, who, you know,
I really admire, but like, you know,
he used to rail against the millionaires
and the billionaires.
And then, you know, when he realized, like,
wow, $3 million, what does it get you already?
Just three houses, you know?
He sold a book.
He did really well.
he bought his third home, suddenly it became the billionaires and the billionaires, you know?
Like it's, and I think that there's a little bit of that where like that is, you know,
you would think if you are like a credentialed elite and you've only been raised in circles
where your mom is an Oscar winner and your father's a Columbia professor, it's very natural
and normal for you to assume that like people much poorer than you hate billionaires the way that
you do.
But actually they really don't.
And it's kind of a tell for somebody in my mind who doesn't have.
a lot of connections in those communities.
Although I do think there's something that changes when you pair it,
like a bill like this,
I think when you're pairing it with austerity or the threat of taking something away.
For some reason, I think that makes a difference.
Anyway, Bacha.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, make them pay more.
Definitely.
I'm totally on board with that.
Like, there's a way to be, like, both positive towards it,
like positive towards capitalism while also saying, like,
when left to its own devices,
it leads to shipping all the good jobs to,
China and importing a slave cast to work here and like disinheriting the working class.
Like, yeah, of course.
I'm not pro like, you know, billionaires getting off the hook.
I want them here.
I want them creating jobs.
I want them paying a lot more taxes.
We call it pro-billionaire Bacha.
That's what we call it.
My, she loves billionaires.
Bacha.
Tell people where they can find your work.
Oh, God.
I'm on Twitter.
I don't find your work.
I'm there, guys.
Get Batchez, Bachel's.
books, follow her at the free press.
Yes. Thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me.
A pleasure. All right, everyone.
We are going to actually continue a very similar version of this conversation with David
Leonhardt of the New York Times.
But before we get to that, let me tell you a story about a guy named Leo Grillo.
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I'm excited now to bring everyone this interview that I was able to do with David Leonhard of the New York Times earlier today.
David is really interesting.
He's one of those people who actually sort of pops the various bubbles that he's been in, whether it's on pandemic or on the pandemic or on immigration.
He's the editorial director for the New York Times' opinion section.
He's the author of a book called Ours Was The Shining Future.
he's a very open-minded person. And so I know a lot of conservatives when they hear New York Times, obviously there's like a little radar going off. Me too. But David is always so willing to have these difficult conversations. And I really appreciated that. So we talk about Zora and Mamdani, talk a little bit about immigration and a lot about sort of the culture, whether there has been a quote-unquote vibe shift among America's elite. Because this is one of our unusual pre-tapes. I'm actually going to
jump on to the chat in YouTube.
And I'll be talking to some of you there
if you're watching this live on YouTube.
So without further ado, here is David Leonhardt
at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
We are here in the beautiful Rocky Mountains
at the Aspen Ideas Festival,
kind of on the sideline of the festival,
and I'm joined by David Leonhardt.
He's the editorial director of the New York Times'
opinion section and the author of a lovely book called
Ours Was the Shining Future.
David, thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me, Emily.
David, you work at the New York Times.
We're here at Aspen Ideas Festival
where you've moderated some very
interesting conversations, and you kind of been willing to burst bubbles in these sorts of
circles over the course of your career, whether on immigration or the pandemic, and now that
we're 10 years into Donald Trump's hostile takeover of American politics, 10 years.
10 years.
I just kind of wanted to get your thoughts on what the trajectory of populism is like,
is like in the United States now a decade into really the Trump era.
I think it's hard to know exactly what the trajectory is going to be, but I think that the past
can give us some sense of it.
And I think there's a basic foundation that explains why we live in the United States.
this populist era, and then there are some other factors as well. But the basic foundation to me
is a sense that many Americans have, that their quality of life has stagnated. And I think
they're right about that. When you look at things like income and wealth and health and life
expectancy, you see this huge divide between roughly people who have a four-year college degree
and people who don't have a four-year college degree. And the trends for people who don't have a
four-year college degree, who are the majority of Americans, are pretty dark.
income has grown very slowly, wealth has grown very slowly,
life expectancy for people without a college degree
is roughly back where it was 30 years ago,
which is a pretty bad indictment of our society and our economy,
that it is not producing increasingly long lifespans
for most of the population.
And so I think that is the kind of the background to populism,
and then you have other things on top of it.
You have the decline of participation in organizations,
whether it's labor unions or local church,
or you name it.
You do have immigration, which I think is important.
You do have the COVID pandemic.
But I think of the real backdrop as being this sense that, hey, things fundamentally aren't
working for me and for my community.
And I want to actually keep pulling at that thread because it seems to me like the Robert
Putnam, Charles Murray, David Leonhardt analysis of civic engagement.
Nothing has gotten better.
That's my perspective.
And I'm curious what you think, David, because I look around.
and I feel like, hmm, I don't think small town, Wisconsin, for example, where I'm from
is all that much better off now than it was 10 years ago.
I think that's right.
I think it is hard to see real signs for optimism in terms of the data of what's going on.
However, I do think there is more of a recognition of the problem than there was before,
and sometimes you have to recognize a problem to deal with it.
And I do really think that these computers we carry in our pockets are a big part of the alienation and the anger and the loneliness.
And so if I like to be optimistic, I try to be optimistic.
And so I think this movement that we see, and Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist, is here at this festival.
Right.
I think the movement we see where schools are saying we are going to ban phones from schools, which we see in state after state,
It's a bipartisan movement at this point.
I think Republican governors have probably a little bit more out front than Democratic governors,
but you also see Democratic governors and mayors doing it.
I think that might be some reason for some optimism that people are saying,
hey, in a basic level, something about the way we're organizing our lives isn't working.
Walking around all the time, just staring at these screens.
Instead of engaging with each other is a real problem.
And so I do find some reason for hope.
in that. Well, David, you know New York. We were just talking about this before. So, of course,
I'm going to ask you about Zaraamamani. Yes. And populism from the left context here, we just talked
about Donald Trump. I wonder if in some way Mom Donnie's shock win in the primary is a bookend
to the 10 years of Donald Trump coming down the golden escalator in Midtown. And then you have
Mom Donnie almost 10 years to the day later, surprising everybody with, you know, something that
AOC, and this is bigger than the AOC win, because it's city.
So what did you make, what does that tell us about the Democratic Party from a kind of populist
or trajectory of populist lens?
So the first thing I would say, Zorn Mandani, is a very talented politician.
And if there are people who have just heard of him, particularly people who are skeptical
of him, I would encourage them, go watch some of his videos, go look at what he's done on
Instagram, look at what he's done on other platforms.
He is engaging. He's always smiling. He is funny. And I think it's just worth remembering that a significant part of politics is that kind of performance.
Ronald Reagan was very good at it. Barack Obama is very good at it. That is part of politics. And Zoran Mamdani is very good at it.
And so I think it's important to acknowledge that. And also to say that the center left, which was really his main opposition, has two really bad candidates in this race.
right, Andrew Cuomo, who has a documented record of sexual harassment, and now Eric Adams, who has a documented record of corruption.
And against them, you had Zoran Mandani, who is this charming and engaging figure.
Now, I and my colleagues on the editorial board have deep qualms about his agenda.
We are very much worried that if you look at this style of progressive governance, that doesn't seem to take the idea of order very seriously and is deeply skeptical.
of the police and thinks that you can do rent control,
you can rent control your way to low housing prices
as opposed to actually having to increase the housing supply.
That record just hasn't looked very good.
New York is a worse place to live by most metrics
than when Bill de Blasio, another progressive became mayor.
Chicago is struggling incredibly with their current progressive mayor.
Cities on the West Coast like Seattle and San Francisco
are looking at some of their progressive policies
like we can just let people use drugs and not worry about it.
and saying that was a mistake.
And so I do really have concerns about Mamdani's agenda.
Now, he has shown some signs
that he is willing to listen to criticism and moderate.
So I don't know if he wins,
what kind of mayoralty he would have.
In terms of what it says for the Democratic Party,
I'm not sure how much it says, to be honest.
He won a Democratic primary in New York City.
There is still no evidence at all
that a candidate like Zoran Mamdani
can win tough races.
in purple states or in congressional districts.
None at all.
You look at the Democrats who won in places where Donald Trump also won.
They didn't run campaigns like Zoran Mamdani.
Ruben Gallego, Alyssa Slotkin, Jared Golden, Marcy Kaptur.
That's not what they sound like.
And so I am skeptical that he has somehow unlocked some new formula for winning races
that Democrats haven't won before.
I do think he's a reminder that political talent and excitement matter.
Although I'm also kind of curious as to, and you'll know way more about this than I do,
but the consolidation behind Andrew Cuomo after his pandemic record, not to mention, as you
pointed out, his documented record of sexual harassment, I found that to be a very curious
decision from sort of the Democratic establishment in New York.
It was almost as though there's a blind spot still about how deeply skeptical of the establishment
post-COVID, post-Biden, even Democrats are now.
I don't know.
I'm curious what you said.
I think that's fair.
And obviously, the kind of the coalescing of the establishment around Cuomo didn't help him win, right?
It's not even clear how much it benefited him.
Look, I think if you, at the end of the day, if voters are presented with a choice between a candidate whose agenda they like more, but who is a deeply flawed or even a bad person and a candidate whose agenda they don't like, I think we've seen again and again that most people are often going to be.
to choose the person whose agenda they like more.
And I think that's what we saw the kind of establishment in New York trying to do with Cuomo.
But Cuomo is just such a flawed candidate and ran a flawed campaign that it didn't end up making the difference.
I think the thing for the kind of center left to really reflect on is why have they done such a bad job
of producing compelling candidates now for roughly a decade.
And before that, the center left was great at producing compelling.
candidates. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, the most talented Democratic politicians of the last half
century are center-left figures. Right. Right. And since then, what we've had is Joe Biden running as an
obviously aging candidate who both the center-left and the left pretended wasn't aging. We've had Kamala
Harris, who was not a good candidate. In New York, we've had Andrew Cuomo in Congress. We have a
parade of people often who are in their 70s or 80s. And so it's been a while since the center
left has produced compelling candidates. Now, I think it's possible that the future is different.
I already mentioned Alyssa Slotkin. I mentioned Ruben Gallego. Another person who's spoken at this
conference is the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, who I moderated a panel on immigration with him
and Governor Kemp of Georgia. And at the end, Mayor Johnson moved a lot of the audience to tears by
telling a story about an immigrant who had enlisted in the U.S. Army to give back to this country.
that had given him so much.
So there are talented figures out there,
but at this point, they aren't yet national leaders.
And one of the things you guys have very noticeably been doing
on the Times Opinions section
is bringing in new voices, different voices.
And I think that's really, really interesting.
And I just am curious for your sense on how,
in spaces like this, the sort of center-left, upper echelon,
of media and business, are things, do you get,
how is that going?
Maybe that's the best way to put it.
How is that effort to sort of reacquaint ourselves with America in the media?
How do you think that's progressing?
Now, again, 10 years since Donald Trump kind of surprised everyone.
I'm glad to hear you say that, because our leader of New York Times opinion is Katie Kingsbury,
and that is one of the most important things to her.
This idea of making sure that Times opinion is a forum for a wider range of voices.
And I think it's fair to be critical of the establishment in general,
forums like the Aspen Ideas Festival,
and forums like the New York Times opinion pages
and say in the past, they weren't sufficiently open
to a wide enough range of perspectives.
I mean, the Times had no columnist in 2016
who was writing really positively about Bernie Sanders.
Right.
Right.
And so it wasn't just that we weren't publishing enough conservatives.
We weren't publishing enough leftists either.
It was also class, right?
It's class as well.
We weren't publishing enough heterodox voices.
Now, we were publishing a lot of interesting voices,
but we could do better,
and we can still do better, and we're trying to do better.
But just broadening out, too much of our debate has been constrained.
It has been, and it's particularly been constrained in elite circles.
You and I've talked to Emily before about immigration,
and this sort of idea that for a long time there was this consensus
among democratic elites and Republican elites,
that more immigration is better.
More and more and more is better.
And you know what?
Most voters didn't feel that way.
And the idea that elite politicians essentially decided that they were going to ignore public opinion and do what they preferred, that's a really dangerous thing to do.
And I'm not sure Donald Trump could have won the presidency if he didn't, in his own kind of animalistic way, recognize that on both trade and immigration, elites were where the public wasn't.
Ross Perrault tried that.
And if you think about it, Ross Perot does that in the 90s.
He's like, we've got too much trade and too much immigration.
And how do the parties respond to him basically discovering this, I don't know,
25% of the electorate that felt really badly served by the parties?
The two parties ignored that 25% of the electorate.
And it was sitting there waiting for Donald Trump to kind of take over the Republican Party
and then add just enough Democrats and independents to allow him to be elected president twice.
And so that co-opart was also, I think, by the time Trump comes around angrier,
because there had been an increasing, I guess, sense of sort of getting smeared by the people who were ignoring them in Perrault times.
And then eventually that moved into sort of an ugly culture war clash for, I think, some of the reasons of just our physical geographic separating.
People are less intertwined.
Our lives are less intertwined on a class basis.
And so by the time Trump comes around, you have this really ugly culture war divide.
I would say arguably
between haves and have not.
And that's where I want to ask
about the immigration panel you did.
I thought that was so interesting.
You had Brian Kemp,
the executive director of the ACLU,
Denver's Democratic mayor.
And I don't know
that that conversation could have happened
a couple of years ago, David.
That's interesting.
I think you might be right about that.
I mean, I do think that
if you think about a series of issues,
definitely immigration,
a whole bunch of COVID issues, right?
Like, should schools be?
closed, should we have mask mandates, where did the COVID virus start?
You think about other hot button issues on gender.
And I do think that we went through a period where you would have a debate and it wasn't
just, I disagree with you, but there were a set of views, particularly among elite progressives
in which it was like, if you have the view that I don't have, you're some version of
ignorant or bigoted, or in the case of COVID, you don't care about people dying.
And that's just not a good way to have political debates. And look, to be clear, the Trumpist
right, is now doing its own version of that, right? It's trying to throw people out of the country
who aren't citizens and have a certain set of views. You can disagree or agree with those views,
but I don't think being able to stay in this country should be contingent on a broad set of
political views. The Trump administration has tried to put law firms out of business who represent
Democrats. And so this really has been a problem on both the right and the left. It is not a way
that a democracy can function. People have to be able to disagree and have to be able to say,
hey, I think you're wrong about this. It's a high-stakes issue. It even might be an issue that
determines people's lives. A lot of issues are war, health care, you name it. We disagree,
but I'm not going to call you a bigoted ignorant killer
just because we disagree.
Okay, so this is then a big question,
maybe as we tie a bell in the conversation,
from your perspective, how did we slip into that
and then seemingly slip out of it so quickly?
I mean, I don't know that it's fair to say
we're actually the vibe has truly totally shifted,
but it does feel like something has.
And so we went from point A to point B, very,
It seems very gradually over decades.
And then from point B to point C,
it was like everyone woke up after election day
and things felt different.
What do you make of that?
I think I half share your optimism
and half am more concerned.
But let me take both.
And let me answer your question as you asked it.
I think part of what happened is
a big part of the Democratic Party
and the left, the so-called groups,
had this view that we are on the side of the vulnerable.
We are on the side of the disadvantaged, and we are defending them.
And then what happened in the second Trump election,
and over the course of the last decade,
is not only have we seen a big shift of working class people
toward the Republican Party,
but we've seen a big shift of people of color
toward the Republican Party.
First, Latino voters, second in magnitude Asian voters,
and although the numbers are smaller,
we have also seen a shift of black voters away
from the Democratic Party.
And that becomes then much harder
for the Democratic Party to say,
this set of issues to take immigration,
you are either for more immigration
or you're a bad person.
Well, when it turns out that actually
huge numbers of Latino voters
and Asian voters say,
no, no, no, we want less immigration
than we had under Joe Biden,
it just becomes harder to make that case, right?
That it's kind of a battle
between goodness and badness.
The place where I have more concern
is that while it is
true that I think there is more open debate now than there was five years ago. If you go to
college campuses, I've noticed this on college campuses, you can have more open debate than you
could five years ago. You really can. Yes. I do think that it's important to remember we have
a president right now who in various ways is trying to stifle debate using the power of the federal
government. He's doing it with law firms. He's doing it with universities. He's doing it in some
government agencies. And so I hope by now I've established my bona fides for criticizing the left
for left illiberalism. But there is still right illiberalism, and Donald Trump is practicing it,
and he's the president now. And I think it's important to call both out.
David Lianhart, so interesting. Thank you. And actually, even just tiny, tiny little thought
on that postscript. Mumdani is such an interesting cross-section of everything you just said the way
that he walked a little bit back from the culture war. Didn't.
talk about defunding the police.
Didn't talk. I mean, I went back and looked at his
Twitter. He didn't post the word queer
for like two years before he ran for
mayor. I mean, it's just, that at least
seems different to me. If the
left wants to really
succeed and be self-reflective,
it should acknowledge, I think, that
there is abundant evidence that it has
more room to go left on economic
issues than it does on social
issues. And you see that with all the
campaigns I mentioned, Ruben Gallego,
Alyssa Slotkin, Jared Golden,
they often, some of them sound like real economic populists.
They sound like social and cultural moderates,
and even sometimes like social and cultural conservatives.
David Leonhardt, this is actually the conclusion.
Thank you so much for sitting down with me.
Thanks, Emily.
Appreciate it.
All right, everyone.
I hope you enjoyed that conversation with David Leonhardt.
It was great to get the chance to sort of pick his brain a bit,
especially as I've been sort of taken in this interesting Aspen.
Festival over the last few days. I told David this. He is like the king of the Aspenitev's festival.
He was on like a panel every single day. So to grab a slice of his time as, you know, a lot of
these spaces including, I think very obviously, the New York Times opinion section.
You know, as he said, it's it's totally fine to continue criticizing the New York Times opinion
section. I certainly plan to. But I also do think that you see this outside their opinion
Section 2 in their coverage of, for example, transgenderism and children.
So where that ideology sort of goes into schools and medical treatments, the New York Times is,
the coverage is different.
Let's just put it that way.
And the opinion section has definitely been, I think NS Lyons was published there recently,
now in the State Department, but has been doing a pretty, has been making an effort to bring in new voices.
And so does that constitute a real vibe shift?
Is it a temporary vibe shift?
Is it fake?
We're going to get into all of those questions and with a musical flavor, too.
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Okay, so we had a chance to talk a little bit about
the 50 plus million dollar marital blowout
that the Bezos had in Venice,
this weekend, the pictures from it.
Well, why not throw them up again?
We'll put them up on the screen.
These are F8, F9.
I know we all just cannot possibly get enough
of watching billionaires get married.
There's nothing quite like it.
So, yeah, I mean, you see all of the pomp
and circumstance around it.
But Bezos and Ivanka Trump was there,
by the way, some of the Kardashians,
interesting people were there predictably.
I've been joking.
It's not been a good joke,
but over the last few days that Aspen feels empty because everybody's at the Bezos wedding.
The concentration of wealth here in Aspen is absolutely stunning.
You know, I've done, like, been to a lot of different places through my work.
And here it is just so palpable.
And in a way that's like, I've been trying to work through this because I'm writing a piece about it.
It's hard to kind of be in a place where people are so wealthy.
But they're also, you know, not they're not driving a place.
Porsche 9-11 or Ferraris, they sort of like they keep those in the Hamptons.
And here they have these like ostentatiously vintage jeeps and like legit vintage broncos.
And, you know, they're jacked up forerunners, whatever it is.
And that's just, I've never been able to wrap my head around why that bothers me.
Part of it is that, and this is, you know, the sort of city of Aspen, if you go downtown Aspen,
It's just, it feels like they are wearing the costume of people who they do not understand
and exert disproportionate levels of control over, undemocratic levels of control over.
And that is just like a sense of salt in the wound.
That feels like particularly egregious.
And how this relates to everything, I don't think it relates to Jeff Bezos in really anyway.
whatsoever. We did see Silicon Valley for a while, these billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg,
and he's still doing it to some extent, just dressing in, you know, monotone sweatsuits.
But they'd be wearing the same pair of jeans, the same t-shirt every single day in this
weird attempt to, like, relate and to take down their status. And now I want to put this on the
screen. This is a semaphore article that caught, uh,
team's attention, trad pop summer, U.S. political vibe shift hits music charts. And it's about
this, well, it's about this change, I guess. Maybe we don't know how temporary it is or whatever,
but this Alex Warren song, Ordinary, which a lot of you have probably heard, is like the number
one song in the Billboard charts right now. And it is sort of a traditionalist ode to the
simplicity of finding love, he's a man. So finding love in.
one woman. And you know, you compare that to a lot of like the fare from the rap world.
There's really no comparison. So if we're grading on the curve, since, you know, the charts
became totally, dare I say, irredeemable, that would, if you're grading on that curve,
then yes. This is definitely something really different. It reminds me a bit of what I thought when I
heard one of the genuinely saddest songs that I can remember hearing on like actually the pop
charts, which is Outskirts by Sam Hunt. And that song is just this longing, was sort of someone
who millennial was swept away from the simplicity of like small town life where they grew up
and missed out on the love of their life and got caught up in the grind, to quote Eric.
Adams. If you haven't seen the video of him leading a chorus of elderly people in a chant
that said, focus, no distractions, and grind last week. You simply must. You are missing
what I can only assume is performance art at this point. But in all seriousness, this has been
creeping into pop culture for a little while. And sonically, you've heard it in obviously the
Beyonce country record. You've heard it in like Shabuzi, who I think is still on the charts.
Morgan Wallen has like four songs in the Billboard, top ten right now.
Now, so it's both the sound and the message in and of itself.
The Amy Schumer show Life and Beth that came out during COVID on Hulu is one of the best, one of the saddest, but also one of the best examples of how I think the left has grappled with some of the sort of consequences of their own prescriptions for life.
And in this, you see, I shouldn't spoil it, but you see Amy Schumer, I don't know, people like cringe at the name Amy Schumer.
She's generally a very talented person who's had some really bad, that's just some really bad, quote-unquote comedy,
particularly after train wreck.
Some people may say it's because of her relationship with Anthony Jessel.
And it, I don't know.
I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole because I don't want to be on the record particularly in making
wild assumptions about Amy Schumer. But this is a story about a woman finding fulfillment and
purpose by actually leaving Manhattan and basically going to rural life and going back to nature
and all of those sorts of things, which sound, I guess, kind of conservative, but also it's sad to me
that those things are considered conservative. It's sad to me, like the song, Ordinary, is something
that should signal any type of vibe shift.
But I suppose, again, we have to grade ourselves on this curve.
And I don't know if this is a trend.
I will say one thing that makes me think it's not a trend is that it's been happening for a while.
A lot of people are sort of, you've seen the headlines from the UK and from the U.S.
that Catholic church attendance has been really high among young people.
Some Orthodox churches are reporting that as well.
And, you know, that to me always seemed like it was destined to happen because I wrote a poll.
I want to say it was in the Washington Post. It may not have because it was a really long time ago.
I'm just trying to go into my own thought process here that showed among young people they were actually more attracted to traditionalist worship.
And this was, again, like 10 plus years ago, so don't quote me on it.
But there's some social science to that effect.
And it made sense, right, that if you're going to put in the effort to go to church instead of, you know, brunching or sleeping in, you don't want it to feel like brunch and you don't want it to feel like you still slept in because you're one of the people that sort of got up and out.
And you went to it for a source of like, you went to it for sacraments.
You went to it to feel the presence of something sacred.
You went to it to find transcendence.
And, you know, that's sort of very obvious, I think, trend.
Again, I have to keep saying as a millennial,
which is the three worst words in the English language when you put them together.
But that's sort of where I always saw it going.
So maybe this is durable.
Maybe this is something that sticks around.
But the elite millennials, and this speaks to my experience over the last several days,
I mentioned this at the top of the show.
There's still a lot of, well, I would describe as cultural leftism.
It still feels like 2020 here in Aspen among the elite millennials.
You know, people who work in corporate America, in media jobs,
sort of my big takeaways.
And Charles Murray wrote a book in 2012 called Coming Apart
about how we were sort of geographically separating ourselves
by education and income.
It's a great book.
and that book, none of those trends,
and this is what I was trying to get at
with David and also with Batchez,
none of those trends, to me, seem as though they're reversing.
I think we are still separated geographically on those lines.
It's fascinating to see that here in Aspen,
a place that is relatively rural,
but it is such a concentration of wealth
that a lot of the people from Aspen
who work in Aspen every day,
they can't live in Aspen.
They have to live everywhere else
and the billionaires and multimillionaires live here.
And so that's the, we can say the vibe has shifted in sort of political,
among political parties.
That kind of makes sense.
We can kind of connect those two things because the party should, at least in theory,
be responsive to voters.
And businesses should, in theory, be responsive to voters.
You know, there's a big CNN piece recently about how a lot of brands were,
consumers, not voters, but how a lot of brands were downplaying pride this year.
I mean, that's one thing, but it's one thing to downplay it. It's another thing. If you sort of still as the marketing person, for, for example, Target, this is not specific, it's hypothetical. You still believe what you believe, that's going to put you at odds with the rest of the country. And it doesn't get you out of your bubble at all in any way whatsoever. It doesn't, you know, change the fact.
that you still probably are surrounded by people who have higher education and income and
live.
So the public polling, really in terms of the sort of cultural tastemakers and gatekeepers,
we can look at the opinions shifting on like quote unquote,
wokeness and free speech and all of that.
But we're talking about like the top 5%, 10%, the professional managerial class of the country.
And if that doesn't shift, then you still have this massive socioeconomic and cultural.
disconnect. And to me, that's what does I feel like it's changing. So on that note,
make sure to, if you have thoughts, feedback, I'm at Emily at devilmaycaremedia.com. I've gotten
some really great emails. I've tried to respond to all of them. It's been a lot of fun.
I actually reconnected with like a long lost friend from the email account. So maybe I'll tell
that story soon. But stay tuned. We have some really great guests coming up. I'm going to be back
in my regular studio. I appreciate everyone.
watching the sunset behind me here in Aspen and giving me the sort of grace to do this on my
laptop and my remote setup. I appreciate the team working with me on that as well. We will be back
again on Wednesday with more. We are always here 10 p.m. We are live and we are having so much fun.
So I'll see you then.
