Central Air - No Rules, Just Fight (w/ Sean Trende)

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

On this week's show: Sean Trende joins us to discuss the continued devolvement of the gerrymandering wars. Sean is an election analyst for Real Clear Politics and lecturer in political science at The Ohio State University. With this week’s Supreme Court decision in Callais, even more opportunities to seek partisan advantage will arise. We talk with Sean about how to define and measure ‘fairness,’ and about the ways the gerrymandering debate remains stuck in the 2010s.Also this week, we talk about food inflation. Sean had a viral tweet in 2023 bemoaning how a family-size DoorDash order from Outback Steakhouse had climbed to $125. Well, today that same order would be $190, in part due to the spiraling cost of lobster tails. This sounds trivial, but it gets at a key fact about politics — inflation bothers everyone, from those scraping by to those who simply notice that the things they like to buy cost more than they used to.Plus, Ben, Megan and Josh talk about the assassination attempt on President Trump, and the low-intensity public response to it — why is it no longer even that interesting when someone tries to kill the president?Sign up for updates from Central Air at www.centralairpodcast.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post, and Ben Dreyfus, who writes the substack newsletter, Calm Down. Ben, we got some feedback last week. Apparently, you mispronounced Tillamook. It's Tillamook. It's not Tillamook. There's a lot of ways that people like to pronounce things. Right. Correct ways and incorrect ways. You know, I didn't know you're going to bring this up, but I have actually spent quite a bit of time in the last. few days reading about the etymology of this term. Right.

This, by the way, this is a brand of dairy products from the Pacific Northwest. It turns out that this is a town. It's a county in Oregon. And this whole thing, it's based on an Indian terminology from the past, which the United States government doesn't even recognize. I'm not saying I agree with it. I think that it's racist, to be quite honest with you. All I'm saying is it in America, in English, this is how you say it.

Are you saying the name of the ice cream is tantamount to a land acknowledgement and you're objecting to that? Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. And I'm impressed with how quick and smart, you're such a witty guy. Thank you, Ben. We didn't flap this at all. And you did just nail it. So I discovered that Tillamook is carried at my local grocery store on Fire Island, 2,500 miles away from Oregon. And I picked up like a half gallon of their vanilla ice cream, but then I put it back in the freezer case because it's only 210 calories for a two-third cup serving as compared to Hagen-Daz, which is 320 calories.

And when you're buying ice cream, you want the ice cream with the highest fat content possible because that's what makes it a premium ice cream. Maybe you could just whip up a stick of butter with some sugar and freeze it. Josh, cut the shit. What type of vanilla did you do? try to buy it. It was just, I don't know, it was regular vanilla. Well, they have five different vanillaes, Attila muk. Well, they only carry one of them at the Pines pantry. I don't know which, which one it is, but it's... Was it French vanilla? Whatever it is, they whip too much air into it. And so you're paying for a pint of air or half gallon of air. So I bought the Hagenas, like I normally buy. I'd made this... So you're the racist against the Indians. Is that, is that,

is that right? Yeah, I like the fake, the fake Danish from the Unilever Corporation or whoever it is that owns hog and does. Megan, do you have views on the correct fat content for ice cream? I, when I eat, this is not always true. I do buy ice cream in the winter. In the summer, I make my own ice cream. Oh, sorry. Well, I mean, it's better. No telemark for Megan. It's better. And I make it, I make the custard variety of ice cream with egg yolks and delicious heavy cream and vanilla. Like, it's, it's, it's. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, about half and half milk and heavy cream. So it's a pretty high fat content.

One of my favorite things that ever happened with Josh on the internet was when Josh was like, everyone loves, people say that they love chocolate or whatever, but actually, vanilla is the most popular. Everyone buys vanilla. Yeah, because it's the best flavor. Yeah. There's a reason it's the best selling. Vanilla's fucking delicious. I love vanilla ice cream.

But I think that the reason it's the best selling is that it's the most generic. Ben, the vanilla. The vanilla pod comes from an orchid that blooms where you can only collect the vanilla pods like once a year. It is trucked to you from exotic locales such as Madagascar or Tahiti. They can't truck things to us from Madagascar. It is shipped to you. And then it is turned into a delectable concoction. Vanilla is the last thing to a generic flavor.

It is, in fact, the most exotic. But do you think that vanilla ice cream actually tastes like vanilla? Or is it vanilla bean properly? Well, I don't know if Tillamook vanilla tastes like anything other than air that's been whipped into milk. But I don't know,

I made a strawberry cobbler. It was delicious. The rich vanilla ice cream went very nicely with it. I was very happy. I did not get to try Ben's favorite brand, though. We're actually, we're going to have more talk later in the show about the high cost of groceries and of food this week because we're going to be joined by Sean Trendy, who's an expert on outback

steakhouse pricing and also redistricting. Sean drew the court-ordered Virginia map that voters in that state just replaced with a new map that is designed to favor Democrats. We're going to talk with him about whether there's any way to define and then impose fair maps across the whole country instead of doing this escalating redistricting war that's been dominating the news for the last few months. So I guess we should start with the news this week. someone tried to kill the president again.

Cole Thomas Allen was arrested when he tried to charge the ballroom at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. That's where President Trump and many other prominent media and political and business figures were gathered for the White House Correspondence Dinner. Alan had a manifesto that he sent around to his family that was basically a collection of Normie Lib objections to Trump. The thing that has most struck me about this story in its aftermath is how low the apparent level of public interest has been in this event. like two years ago when Trump got his ear shut off, it felt like the country could speak of little else. It was very shocking. This time, it's like another news story. And, you know, it's already washed out of the news cycle for the most part, even as we taped this on Wednesday.

It's just, I don't know, it's strange to me how this basically become part of the wallpaper. Yeah, it is not, I mean, it is shocking, obviously, that someone tried to do this, but it is shocking how little attention anyone else is paying to it. And that is, I don't know what to make of this. that. I don't know if it's because the Trump administration is so exhausting or because we've just normalized political violence, but either way, it's pretty disturbing. I, on the day, I had, I had, I've been like off Twitter for a while and I, on, on Saturday, heard someone say, oh, well, I guess, you know, they really ate Trump. And I said, what are you talking about? And they said, the shooting.

They would have been shootings. And then they splendid me. And I was like, well, I don't think we should be blaming the victim one in like the way that they described it. Where they were like, yeah, you know, everyone hates him. But I think that some of it is, one, the guy didn't successfully shoot anyone. Like, so that that leads to some of it. It's less like the thing in where the bullet buzzed by Trump's head and is more like the one in the golf course, you know. we're like no one paying any hedge side, which isn't good.

But the bigger problem for me is the normalization of it. What's interesting to me is I feel like the muted reaction isn't even just from, you know, people from Democrats or for people who don't care very much for Trump. The outrage from his side has felt a little exhausted. I mean, you know, like when Charlie Kirk was murdered, there was this effort to basically create a cult of personality. around Charlie Kirk and all these people trying to get people fired for making distasteful comments about the murder and that sort of thing. And this time, David Frum had an interesting piece for The Atlantic about this. The way the president is quote unquote capitalizing on the fact that someone tried to kill him again is trying to get his ballroom built. Like the talking point that they went with and they pushed out to all the conservative influencers who all tweet the same things when the White House sends updates to them about what they should say was this is why we need the ballroom.

And so, first of all, it doesn't even make sense because if you have a ballroom at the White House, you can't use it for outside events. It's not like you can book your wedding at the White House Ballroom and the White House Correspondents Association. Yet. It's dinner at a government facility. The ballroom also is only going to seat a thousand people, so it's not even big enough for the White House correspondence dinner. So it wouldn't solve the problem at hand here. But like the, you know, this rising, you know, environment of political violence around the country that has, you know, led to certain deaths, including Charlie Kru. and that has put the president at risk repeatedly.

Like the first thing to his mind is this, you know, this building that he wants built. It just feels very small ball. I will just say that, like, this podcast has supported that building and also came against the White House correspondent center. So I just want to let everyone know that I wasn't in D.C. on Saturday. I have nothing to do. None of us, none of us, none of us did it. Well, I mean, only one of us was in Washington on Saturday, which was Megan. No, I was in Arizona.

Oh, okay. I missed the dinner because I was in Arizona. We're all clear. Yes. Yeah. There has been the usual round of like, well, you know, people should watch what they say and that, you know, overheated rhetoric leads to this sort of thing and people keep calling trumpet tyrant. And, you know, if you keep calling him that, someone's going to try to shoot him.

And I think that that line of thinking has been enhanced by the fact that on a relatively, basis, the rantings from this shooter are less crazy than from some prior shooters. He seems to have a fairly ordinary set of political complaints about the president rather than, you know, a certifiably insane set of complaints about the president. And I've just been very unimpressed with that in that, you know, there is no person who is more personally responsible for the environment of greater division and nastiness and, frankly, violent rhetoric in this country than the president himself. I mean, this is a guy who sicked a mob of his supporters on the Capitol building to riot and storm it to try to steal the 2020 election. And they wanted to hang his vice president and that sort of thing. Just a few months ago, he was saying that Democrats who implicitly accused him of issuing illegal orders to the military that they should be executed. His sons were laughing about the fact that Paul Pelosi got attacked in his home and bludgeoned with a hammer. So, you know, it's like Nobody deserves to be a victim of political violence, but it's sort of, you know, the president has done the set of things that you would do if you were trying to foment this kind of environment.

And so it's not, you know, it's not entirely surprising to me that he ends up being, you know, being a target of it. And it seems that if, you know, if we're going to talk about who should try to turn the temperature down, we should start with him. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I'll give you that. Like, like, sure, Trump is an asshole. But the simple fact is, that doesn't matter. The reason why I don't want, the reason why when I read that was that I was upset wasn't because I thought, you know, Democrats were truly to blame. I thought that it was because it doesn't help the Democratic cause to have this happen. Oh, of course not. It is, it is not just morally bad. It is also politically unwise.

I wanted when I heard it. I was like, please God, please God let them be trying to kill the journalists. Like, please God let this be a Republican who tried to kill the journalists. because it doesn't matter what, why they did it. These people, of course, I agree with you, 100%. Of course, they're mentally ill. Of course, they're crazy. I don't think they truly have any blame for it.

But in reality, what we've seen is that the left loons do seem to be creating problems here. And, and like it makes it hard for us to, even us on this podcast, to do our project. Does it? I don't feel impeded. So. Go ahead, Megan. I don't think he's crazy. I think, like, Luigi Mangione seems to be crazy, right?

His manifesto doesn't make sense. His theory of how this is all going to work doesn't make sense. No, this guy's theory doesn't work either. But his theory is just basically, like, I want to do this. I don't know what's going on in his personal life that made him feel that way. But his theory is not like, I'm going to kill Trump and then the Illuminati will be forced to renounce their hold over our nation's critical canned corn industry, which, is the kind of typical profile of the really insane shooters. And that really worries me. I don't think that political rhetoric is what drives this exactly. I don't think it's good.

And I think it does run the risk of egging people on. But I think the bigger issue is that political violence is contagious, both because people see the other side committing political violence and decide that they need to try it, but also merely because these things inspire other people to try. So like school shootings, for example, American didn't really have a school shooting problem until Columbine. And if you remember the era before that, where we used to talk about mass shootings, it was postal workers. Going postal was a phrase, right? And then Columbine happens, and the publicity around it inspires a bunch of other disaffected kids to try this. The profile of the shooters who are not just literally insane and think that, you know, have some sort of paranoid

I believe is that they are disaffected people who feel unsuccessful and thwarted in their lives in a bunch of ways, and they decide that the way to become famous and or to have power is to do something like this, this seems to fit more of that profile. And people who are feeling like that look at other people. Tyler Robinson actually also seems to be in this. He doesn't seem to have been crazy. He just seems to have been dumb and looking for a measure of personal importance that he was not going get any other way also possibly trying to impress his trans girlfriend. And he was angry. Yeah, he was angry.

That kind of political violence, to me, is more dangerous because there are more angry and disaffected people than there are people having psychotic breaks. And I think the big issue is simply that when it happens, other people decide to do this. The butler shooting, it's not even clear that guy had a political motive, right? it was more like, you know, he also Googled where Biden was going to be. It seems like he may just have been a kind of sad sack who wanted to go down in history. We'll never really know because he was shot. But I do think that the rising tide of political violence is a real risk.

I don't think it's really mostly about rhetoric. I think it is mostly about the fact that every attack that happens makes the next attack more likely. And in fact, interestingly, with Columbine, there was a big spade of school shootings, and you know what stopped it? 9-11. basically school shootings plummet because 9-11 drove it out of the news distracted people and therefore it stopped inspiring people. Unfortunately, after 9-11, we had the internet and that allowed these kind of cascades to keep feeding themselves even when the TV news was distracted by their things. It's probably a good thing then that this guy was a pathetic failure, right? Like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris inspired copycats in part because they did what they set out to do.

Yeah. This loser got, you know, gunned down at the checkpoint. It's not even clear whether he got even a single shot off. It's the most insulting thing about the University of California system. They couldn't even succeed. He didn't even get gunned down. He just got tackled. None of the shots they fired hit him?

No, not as far as I know. My understanding is that, yes, they just grabbed him. I think our key takeaway here is Cole Thomas Allen, what a loser. Let's get that out there into the ether. Fuck you, Cole Thomas Allen. Let's take a quick break. And then we're going to come back with Sean Trendy. And again, go to centralairpodcast.com, sign up, get our email updates, join our comments section.

Tell us what you think the proper fat content is for ice cream. We'd love to hear from you. We are back with Sean Trendy. Sean is senior elections analyst for Real Clear Politics and a lecturer in political science at the Ohio State University. He's an expert on redistricting, so expert in fact that he was tapped in 2021 to be the co-special master drawing the court-ordered Virginia congressional map that was in force until earlier this month when Virginia voters approved. a referendum that will replace it with a Democratic gerrymander pending some final legal action in that state's Supreme Court. But, Sean, thank you for joining us to talk about not just Outback Steakhouse, which we'll get to a little bit later, but about redistricting. It's good to have you here. Thanks for having me.

I'm psyched. So can you first give us some of the backstory about what led to you drawing the congressional map in Virginia in 2021? Yeah. So I was appointed along with Bernie Groffman. He's a professor out at UC Irvine. He's been an expert in tons of redistricting cases. After the Virginia, Virginia has an independent commission that's made up of politicians, and they basically deadlocked.

They couldn't produce a map that was acceptable to both sides. And the Virginia Constitution throws the decision then to the Supreme Court of Virginia. The Supreme Court asked the political parties to each nominate a slate of of candidates and Bernie and I were the two that were selected. After the first Republican slate got thrown out by the Supreme Court because they said we don't want a bunch of partisans drawing the map. So and so that was our, it was, it was crazy. We were appointed in like mid-November and we had to draw, we had to draw the House, Senate, and congressional maps, submit them for public comment, work through the 5,000 public comments.

that got added and then set up another revision of them, do public hearings at the Supreme Court in like six weeks. So it was a monumental task, but I was pleased with what we ended up with. Are you a little bit sad? So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, for most people, you know, this is an abstract, but like, I don't know, this is, you know, you worked on this. Yeah, we worked on it. And I think they were genuinely good maps.

You know, the way that they ended up, and this is something that we had hoped to achieve, you know, it was basically a 6-5 map. Virginia is a, you know, 53, 54% Democratic state. But if things got really bad for Republicans, Democrats could pick up a 7th district, which they were probably on schedule to do this election. And things got really bad for Democrats. The Republicans could make it a 6-5 district. We had drawn these maps kind of in the shadow of Glenn Youngkin's gubernatorial win, and so we thought it would be good if it was a good Republican year that the congressional delegation might reflect that. So yeah, you put a lot of work into producing a product that most people had really liked, and it goes away. On the other hand, I mean, this wasn't legislators just tossing it aside. It was vote of the people, and at a certain level, I respect that. You know, when people like myself normally think about these, they They don't think about it on the granular level that you have had to build them yourself on. And when we then think about, like, you know, what is it like in any state to have it done?

If they were going to actually, you know, pass some sort of fantasy law that said there was no gerrymandering allowed in any place and that they always had to be able like this. What's the level of, like, difficulty? It is to just do what you did in every single part of the country. So I think there's kind of two parts to that. Just from a mechanical perspective, it's pretty hard because the first round was tricky because you're trying to balance all these neutral considerations. Then gets really hard is you get the public comments and there's just a mass of them. And you have to start trying to figure out like what's legit and what's people just gaining the system. So the Elias law firm, it might have been Perkins Coeys still at the time, but the Democratic group, the night before one of the hearings dropped this map. And the next day, like seven hours after this map dropped, all these citizen, these kind of good government citizen people like, I want to see the Farcas map adopted.

And it's like, none of you have even seen this thing. This is the map from Mark Elias, the Democratic Aligned. Yeah. And so it's kind of obvious what's going on. On the other hand, like, there are people who made really good comments like, hey, you just split my subdivision down the middle. Can you fix this? Okay. Like, that that's a good suggestion. The other thing, though, is that I don't think what made this work is that Bernie and I just happened to get along and we tended to see these things the same way. You know, and so we, I mean, he's on my Christmas card list. Well, we really liked each other, and I think that made the kind of compromises and give and take a lot easier. I can think of a number of other people who do this that I think would get along much less well, and it would have been much less of a smooth process. But so in terms of the idea that, you know, you work together to try to consider these, you know, these comments and balance considerations and produce a map that's fair. First, first you have to define what even is to be fair, right? And there are different, you know, there are different, you know, there are different. objectives that you can have in drawing a map. You can want, you know, geographically compact districts. You can try to draw together communities of interest, whether that means a subdivision like that, or then there's all this controversy about, you know, whether you should consider racial and ethnic communities when defining what is a community of interest. People want maps that produce proportional outcomes where, you know, if you get 30% of the votes, you get 30% of the seats. But if you have, if you're electing just one member per district, that's often not what a normal looking map will produce. You know, like, I mean, if you have a state like Massachusetts that's relatively homogenous, Democrats win almost everywhere. So it's hard to, you know, draw a map of districts that actually produces the number

of Republican seats that matches their vote share. My understanding, though, is that you could draw a map in Massachusetts that would produce one or two Republican districts and would look actually more normal than the map we have. And Massachusetts Democrats have chosen not to draw that map. No, you could draw a map in Massachusetts that would have one slightly Republican-leaning swing district that would look quite normal. And if you got fairly aggressive, you could draw two Republican-leaning districts. I don't think there's any way to draw a map with three Republican districts. No, I think that's correct. Their share of the vote. But so, I mean, I guess Sean, a lot of people would like a way out of this arms race, would like to have some national uniform standard and some process where, you know, we get to. maps that are drawn in approximately the same way in all 50 states that meet a certain, quote unquote, fair set of objectives. But, you know, are we even close to a consensus on what it would mean for the map to be fair in the first place before we even get into, how do you then take

those principles of fairness and turn that into a national law and a number of bodies at the state level that actually produce those maps? Like, what does it even mean for the maps be fair? That's a good question. And the good news is that so Virginia partly answered that by specifying the considerations, right? You had to be minimized splits and have your districts be compact and, and, you know, this list of things. And partisan fairness was one of them. And partisan fairness means proportionality? So it wasn't specified. There's kind of two parts this. Maybe I should have on the second part first. But basically what Bernie and I decided, because we didn't have a lot of time, was we're just going to go through and we're going to draw blind to race and politics. And

hopefully we get it right the first time, just by luck. And we did. Virginia's political geography was such that if you just draw compact districts that don't split politics, you end up with maps that have quite a few minority, majority districts or ability to elect districts. Naturally, you end up with a lot of Republican and Democratic districts. So it actually worked out really well. Not all states are like that, though. Like you said, Massachusetts. You can draw one or two Republican districts, but that's where it gets trickier. And this is where I think there's a real tension, just in the very even the definition of what a gerrymander is.

Like, is a fair map one where you don't pay attention to politics and you're really just trying to do, I mean, single, that point of view will say if you want proportional representation, there's a system of government that does that. It's called proportional representation. And if you're really concerned about the partisan makeup, that's what states should adopt. That's where you vote for a party. And then, you know, if the party gets 15% of the votes, it gets 15% of the seats. Exactly.

What you will say on that view, though, is that, you know, we have single member districts for a reason. It's because there's aspects of representation besides party. It's how you tend to a specific area or the wants and needs of the specific needs of Appalachia versus downtown Columbus. So that's what districting should. be about. On the other hand, you have the partisan fairness people who say, well, yeah, but let's be realistic. In the United States today, we have very polarized parties, regardless of what people may say, they're mostly voting for parties. Joe Manchin, I mean, well, he's no longer in Congress. Susan Collins is the exception, not the rule. And so why should we ignore what the most salient

factor in voting for most people is? So, yeah, let's pay some attention to compactness and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, what we really want our maps to kind of reflect in some way to be determined, the political makeup of the state. Can I ask like a hot take question? Is it possible that we're going to gerrymender our way to more representative politics in that, like my understanding is that in order to do a gerrymender that's really aggressive, like the one in Virginia, like the one in Texas? You got to spread your own voters more thinly. so that in a year that's bad for the majority party, those districts are going to swing the other way. And you could see how doing that might actually create fewer of these districts

where they're really geographically sorted. The seat is quite safe. And so all of the electoral action is in the primary. Now, like in the District of Columbia where I live or in Manhattan, that's always going to be the case. But statewide in a lot of places, does this actually are going to, arguably possibly make the system a little less sclerotically unit party and more like more competitive, I guess is the way to put it? Or is that a galaxy brain take that I should I should withdraw?

Yeah. So like one thing that people are overlooking in this California, Mander, is that Gavin Newsom lost 20 of those districts. And let's say Democrats win the presidency in 2028 and 2030 is a Republican wave. You could end up with Republicans getting almost half the delegation. Like, the map does just what you said. I'm sorry, Gavin Newsom lost 20 of the districts in which election? When he ran for governor in 2022. To Republicans?

Yeah. Oh. Yeah, that map. I thought you were going to be like he lost them. He lost them to the Communist Party of Moscow. No, that that map really does spread Democratic. Democrats thin, especially in a Republican. And the same was true, the Virginia map in a Republican year that would not have been a 10-1 Democratic gerrymander. So when you get into the super-Republican and

super-democratic states, though, where they pull their punches a little bit. So like that Texas map will more or less hold because Republicans didn't go for a 34-4 map, right? They went for a whatever 30-8 map. And so those Republican districts are still very Republican. The other kind of thing is what happens if you end up with a year like 2010? And this is what keeps me awake at night, where like one party has a massive wave in the redistricting years. So there's no counter-bailing, you know, where Republicans draw a bunch of seats and Democrats draw a bunch of seats and they fall through kind of offsetting in wave years the other way. What happens if one party has almost complete control of redistricting and just decides to not spread themselves too thin, but all these

maps get drawn to 80% Republican or 80% Democrat. I think that has serious, not just kind of democratic concerns, but legitimacy concerns because you can end up with a situation where, you know, every now and again, the Republicans will lose the popular vote by like a half point, but keep the House and people grumble. But like, if Republicans were to lose the popular vote by like eight points and keep the House, suddenly those grumbles have genuine grounding. Am I right in my sense that the way that political geography has changed over the last decade ought on some level to make it easier to have a national deal on redistricting? Because my sense had been that Democrats are really skeptical of compactness as a criterion for drawing congressional

districts because they believe that the geography is fundamentally unfavorable to Democratic Party if you do that. That you have democratic areas where, you know, it's like Madison, Wisconsin, and Democrats win 80 plus percent of the vote. If you draw a compact district around Wisconsin, a compact district around Milwaukee, you get two Democrats and six Republicans, even in a year where the vote splits about evenly in Wisconsin. And that's still roughly true in Wisconsin. But my sense is that some of the other shifts in the political coalitions mean that on a national

level, Democrats would not be screwed by a map that was, you know, purely, you know, sort of in the way that you described your initial approach in the first past the Virginia map, that if you looked at it without any of the electoral data and just tried to draw compact districts, that that would actually produce a more balanced outcome now than it might have 10 or 15 years ago. Yeah, that's absolutely right. This redistricting debate is in a lot of ways stuck in 2012, where Republicans control redistricting and have a huge geographic advantage. Neither of those are true right now. Like, the party's had a much more balanced distribution of seats this time.

The other thing, though, is that in 2022 and 2024, Republicans' share of seats actually ran behind their share of the popular vote for the first time since the 90s. Maybe 2008 that happened, but it was rare. And what happened was that Republicans now put up vote shares in the rural areas similar to what Democrats are putting up in the cities. as Republicans make inroads with minorities, they improve their vote share in the cities in some of these old VRA districts, but not enough to flip them. A lot of those Hispanic majority districts in California were like 55 to 58 percent for Democrats in the last couple elections, so they don't flip. And then the suburbs have become more purple. And so you no longer have this like captive Democratic vote in these islands and cities. there's now like a purple ring surrounding them that you can more readily draw

Democratic districts kind of by accident. So yeah, the political geography story has really shifted over the past few cycles. It's funny, like I live in Idaho where everyone is or roughly in stuff for five. Not in Sun Valley. Well, exactly. So like there for quite a long time, in the state districts, it was compact. It was done, you know, we did have a state senator who was a Democratic. And it was one out of 30 or whatever it was.

And it was, you know, they didn't pass anything, but they were, they could run and whatever they wanted. And then a few years ago, they did exactly what you're describing, which is they moved us into this district with Twin Falls, which is a city, a real city and has, so no more Democrats get sent to Boise. and everyone here had a nervous breakdown about it, about how un-nice it was to no longer was there allowed to be a Democrat sent to Boise. But when you really thought about it, you know, this is a state. It's not a very democratic argument for there even to be Democrats, sent it all to Boise. And I do think that as like, as I hear what you're described, it's complicated.

It's complicated to see sort of like, where is the democratic virtue? Right? Like, does it make sense for Idaho to subsidize there to be blue counties that are allowed to do it? Or does it make sense for them to be next to the town next to them that has 100,000 Republicans? Yeah, I think that's right. And there's other debates wound up in that. Like, if you split Sun, how is Sun Valley best represented? Is it best represented in its own district? Or is it best represented, it's represented split in half where there's two people that get sent? to Boise that are at least somewhat responsive and dependent on votes in Sun Valley. I think there's a clear answer to that question. In the case of Idaho, there is. But people flip back and forth, honestly, people in this debate flip back and forth on that as it suits them, right? If there were enough Democrats or voters in Sun Valley to elect two members, if it were split in half, the argument would become

Justice demands that we split Sun Valley in half so that we can influence two districts instead of just one. Well, and also, I think what is the benefit of having a Democrat in the state legislature, right? They have no horse trading power. They have no, there's no party connection there. Like, I suppose it's nice that this person gets up and makes speeches about Sun Valley. But I think it is probably actually net better for Sun Valley to have a Republican who kind of cares about getting their votes than to have a Democrat. who cares a lot about getting their votes, but none of their colleagues in the state legislature care at all. But that's a question for the voters. And, you know, frankly, that's a question that voters, in certain circumstances, answer in different ways. You used to here in New York have a perpetually Republican-controlled state senate,

and you had a lot of voters in heavily Democratic districts who voted Republican only in state Senate races for exactly that reason of representation and power. But it doesn't strike me as, very democratic to impose that result on the, you know, you could have a Sun Valley district. And if the people of Sun Valley felt that it was really important to elect a Republican, to have their voice better represented, they could make that choice in an election. But it seems like it's sometimes hard to define what a fair map is. But I think this stuff where you break Nashville into four parts to

ensure that the Democratic voters of Nashville are represented by four Republicans. Well, I think that's actually different, though. Well, I mean, let me, let me agree. Let me agree with that 100 percent to what you just said, but also, like, I ultimately agree with Megan. But let me say that, like, if you then did the thing, you know, if you did come back, the other argument would be that Boise, the main part of Idaho, right? The main city where everyone lives is quite blue. It's like Portland. But it's so if it was actually, like, redistrict entirely just around a square, they would have

a communist. They would have a communist doing it. But it's then overwhelmed by the rest of the people in the, the people in the, other two districts. So what you then get, though, is that it's coming either way. It's a little complicated. It's not so clear. You either end up with someone like Walt Minnick or you end up with, you know, the fact that this is a state with two million Republicans. This is the Democrat who very briefly represented Idaho after the 2008 election result that produced some surprising outcomes. Actually, I think that's a good opportunity to turn with Sean and look ahead a little bit to

the upcoming congressional election. We've had another remap just got done in Florida, or is in the process of getting done in Florida, where it's an attempt by Republicans to draw a map with four Democratic districts and 24 Republican districts. But to your point about different years produce different outcomes, this is a map that looks to me like it has a number of districts that are, some that are actually pretty swinging in South Florida and some that in a bad year for Republicans could even get picked up farther north in the state. Are the maps generally going to produce the outcomes that they were intended to in this November's upcoming election? Yeah, I don't know about the Florida map because in Florida, a lot of those numbers from 2024 are dependent on really, really strong Republican showings among Hispanic voters.

And one thing we see in the polls, one thing we've seen in kind of precinct analyses of heavily Hispanic precincts is that there's been a real drop in Republican performance. There's been a pretty hard mean reversion. So you would expect that to be disproportionately felt in a state like Florida. So I don't know. There seems to be some disagreement in the Twitterverse about just how strong these maps are and what looks to be a pretty rough Republican year. Looming over all of this redistricting fighting has been this question of the Voting Rights Act and how much of it is going to survive. And just as we sat down to tape today, we got a Supreme Court decision in the Calais case about Louisiana, but it's going to have effects nationally. Can you summarize for us what the impact is of this case on minority, majority districts

and the requirement to have them around the country? Yeah, you know, like you said, this just came down, and I think everyone is still kind of digesting it. The court did not officially strike down Section 2 is applied to redistricting. That's what people, the kind of the worst case scenario for Voting Rights Act advocates. What it did do, though, was it kind of heightened the burden on people bringing these lawsuits, on plaintiffs bringing these lawsuits to the point where it's really, really tough to cross the threshold. You have to prove, for example, that the state could have met all of its legitimate considerations, including political considerations, before it's required to draw a Voting Rights Act district.

So, for example, in Louisiana, if the, if Louisiana said, well, we want to elect six Republicans, you'd have had to show that there was a way to draw a six Republican map where black voters could still somehow elect their candidate of choice. And I don't think you can probably do that. So it really does make it really hard to succeed on a Voting Rights Act challenge. Now, in primaries, it might be a different story in states where you aren't. allowed to consider politics because of these redistricting limitations, possibly a different story. Wait, I'm sorry, I don't follow that last part. So the original scenario for the Voting Rights Act was not about Republican versus Democrat because the South was Democratic and black voters were Democratic. What it was about was carving out a space for black Democrats to clear the primary, because if he cleared the primary, you won the general election at the time. And so that can still be a challenge brought. So, for example, you couldn't wipe out black representation in Chicago because it's all Democrats there.

There's no political justification for it. Maybe in a congressional where you can bake and mandor out to the city. But the idea is that within a specific political outcome, you can bring the challenge. I'm not being entirely clear on this because I'm still trying to formulate it and work through it in my head. at the end of the day, that's what the court said. If you can match the political outcome that the state said it wanted between Republicans and Democrats, but could also draw an ability to elect district, then you can win. What does this mean at a headline level? I mean, I assume most states are not going to redraw for this cycle, although a couple of them may actually, you know, Louisiana, Alabama may actually withdraw their districts almost immediately. In the longer run, the most obvious upshot, of this is that you can draw more Republican districts in red states in the south because you do not need to draw black majority districts in urban areas or in a couple of cases in rural areas.

But in the in the north, it seems like this also might allow you to draw more democratic maps because basically you've been that you've had to draw these big vote sinks in, you know, Chicago, New York, etc. and heavily minority districts that you could spread some of those voters out and and maybe draw more effective democratic gerrymanders in the north. How big a, a long-run advantage is it for Republicans if this decision makes it much harder to challenge these maps? Yeah, I think there's probably eight or nine additional Republican districts you can draw in the South long term or medium term. We're late enough in the cycle that like Mississippi has already had its primary. So that's not going to change this cycle. The question of the North is

trickier because the Supreme Court ruled in the tens or the teens, I guess, you don't have actually have to draw a minority majority district. If it can be 35% black and still elect the black candidate of choice, that's enough. And so that, this cycle, the northern states did a lot of that. They drew districts that were not necessarily minority majority districts, but that would still elect the black candidate of choice. Now, where I think the other thing that not many people have talked about, but it's something that I've learned from operating in this space for a while. There's going to be tremendous coalitional pressure in the Democratic Party to still draw districts. If the Democratic Party of Illinois draws congressional lines and it elects all white Democrats, there will be a revolt, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

Like, there's going to be a lot of pressure from incumbents to try to find ways not to do what you're suggesting. You know, to just maximize your strength against Republicans, sure, but to make sure there's still some type of representation. going on. And that type of incumbent co-oitional group wrangling is very real and it gets glossed over and kind of election Twitter a lot. Just running through the states I'm familiar with in my head, the fact that Democrats are doing so well in the suburbs now seems like it would make it harder to crack those minority, majority

districts, even if you wanted to, because you have to reach so, like in Western New York, you could probably do it, right? You could crack parts of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, push and, like, pull in Republican voters because there are, like, real rural areas around there. But where are you going to, you're going to crack Chicago and pull in what, Waneca? It's, I mean, there's not a lot of Republicans. They actually already do that. Yeah, no, I mean, there's not a lot of Republican districts left in the greater Chicago area that you could pull in. You'd have to reach pretty far downstate to get them, and that would create other problems. And sort of why bother, right? You've already got a

really, really well-derrymandered congressional delegation. It wouldn't give you much to do that. I think the obvious example in New York is that you would take Long Island and you would draw fingers from four Long Island districts farther into New York City, picking up heavily Democratic-Democratic, largely minority neighborhoods in order to turn those four competitive Republican-leaning districts into Democratic-leaning districts. That's something that I would think would be attractive to New York Democrats if they're hands. hands are freed up by the VRA and if they're able to get through those coalitional politics issues. I think you would run into real coalitional problems in Queens, but like it would cause you issues.

Can I ask before we move on from this entirely one sort of silly question, which is I've been reading you for decades now from Republican waves and blue waves and all of this. And every one thing that happens is that right before the Democrats have a wave or the Republicans have a wave, someone says they'll never have a wave. in the house again. You know, like that, that's the, that's the thing that goes on. And, and, and then they inevitably, every other time, blame sort of, um, redistricting or, or gerrymandering, I mean.

Um, and so I guess like, in a world where people are 50-50, if, if everyone in a house election did 50-50, do Republicans have the advantage in that at the moment or like, like, like, what, where is the gerrymander in the house? It's actually not nearly as extreme as it's been in the past. And this is where I said, like, people are stuck in the 2010s because Republicans won, I think, they won the House by three. So 51.5% of the two-party vote. And they got like 51% of the seats. And it was similar in 2024.

We've actually had pretty good balanced maps this cycle. You know, so I don't think gerrymandering is, is, and it looks like this latest round is ultimately going to more or less wash out. We'll see what happens with Calais in 20, 28 and 30. But on that other point, like, yeah, you're absolutely right. Like after every wave election, people are, people say like, oh, this is it. Like, we've got it. History's over. And I think myself, my entire career has been a failure. Well, I think that's also part of people being stuck in the 2010. that, you know, how it is the Republicans chose to launch this redistricting war. I think Republicans believe that they have an inherent advantage in map drawing, that, you know, it is the structure of American politics and the fact that, you know, the blue voters are concentrated in a few large blue states, that if you get maximum political control over the map drawing, that it should produce a Republican advantage, that, you know, votes should translate into a disproportionate number of seats.

And so they believe that if you go total war and redistricting, they'll win it. So I have a theory about this, actually. So Yvall Levin has this great point that he makes that for 50 years, American politics has been defined by whatever the boomers happen to be going through. Right. So our politics are dictated by the issues that the boomers were very concerned about in their youth. And then, like, the 80s are optimistic because they're forming families and they're starting to make some money. And then, you know, they enter senescence and we all get depressed.

And I think the millennials are having. the same problem because they're the next big generation. Gen X always gets shortchanged. We're, you know, we'll just, we built you guys the internet, and then you just go and wreck it. At least Gen X gets to be leaders in whining. It is true. Reality fights, dude. Anyway, the millennials are frigging stuck in the 2010s because that's when they came of age.

And so they've anchored on all of these issues, they've anchored on jurymandering. This is true on both sides of the aisle, by the way. This is not just Democrats, but you see it more in Democrats because those are the people I happen to know in Washington. But like they all got stuck on the idea that we were under, that we weren't borrowing enough money to spend on stimulus. And they still think that like 20 years later, or 10 years later, they get stuck on all of these issues. They get stuck on the, they're all stuck on the idea that urban demand is infinite. And it doesn't matter what policies you have because demand for like demand for urban housing. will always be strong so you can wreck your tax base and all the rest of it because people will just keep moving in. They're all stuck on the things that happened when they were in their late 20s and early 30s. And that is how they think that those things are realities about the world rather than highly contingent situational facts of the post of the post financial crisis world. And I think that that is sort of driving a tremendous amount of dumb politics right now in both parties. At least online, I think there's truth to that. I mean, election Twitter is like the group that their first elections were the Obama elections and then Trump Clinton. And I do think that their politics and the way that they view redistricting reflects that. The stuff you learn when you're in your teens and 20s becomes the foundation for what you build on. I think there's some truth to that.

Let's take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk about Outback Steakhouse. This is Central Air. I want to talk about cost of living. Inflation is still elevated. The war has not been helping with gasoline prices. But really, it's been the same theme in our politics since COVID. Nobody is satisfied with what at anything costs, even when it seems like maybe they should be. And the latest version of this is there's an article in the New York Times this week about couples who don't feel they can afford to have children. And the lead example is a childless couple in Utah living in a 2,000 square foot house who say they don't think that house is big enough for even one child.

And they can't afford to buy a bigger house so they can't have kids. The husband's also concerned that if he has a kid, it'll be harder for him to afford to golf, which, you know, I don't have kids. So I'm not going to tell anyone that they're obligated to have kids, but I do think you can raise a child in 2,000 square feet. Let's not be, let's not be too polite here. We both have done the math on this. This is a ridiculous opinion. I'm sorry. Now, like, I don't think what they've spent on the house is crazy. Their mortgage payment, which we think includes their property tax and their insurance is a little over $3,000 a month. He's a firefighter. She's a nail technician. If they're not making $100,000 between them, they probably will in a few years as he gets more seniority as a firefighter. So their housing payment is not unduly burdensome. It's just that, you know, they can't afford a bigger house than this.

But again, you know, lots of people raise a kid in 2,000 square feet. My guess is, you know, it's Utah. These people probably will have a kid in a few years, even if they're telling a New York Times reporter now that they can't afford it. Okay. I did more, I did more. I'm also more brave than apparently Josh is. I did looked up the housing costs in this town and looked up all of it. They're just outside Provo, south of Salt Lake City.

They put $20,000 down, and they're paying $3,200 a month in a mortgage, which equals out to a $440,000 thing, the house that they bought in this place. They are effectively, once you put in the mortgage insurance that they're doing with this FHA loan, that they are only the. building $400 in equity every month. Okay. And the same house that they could rent there is $2,100. So effectively, these people are wasting $1,100 a month in this scenario. No, they're wasting $700 a month because $400 of that is equity building. Well, right. But what I mean is that if you have $1, $1,100 more in cash, you can put it into a money market account and invest in the S&P index funds. And essentially, when you then run through all of these numbers, these people only will make sense on this insane decision to have bought this house, which they should not have done,

if they own it for over eight and a half years, which they are not going to do since they have just told the New York Times they are not going to have children. Children are the only time you stay together that long. If you don't have them, then you're going to be leaving. Well, sorry, Megan. Then I've been with my husband for 15 years now. 16 this June, we have no plans to divorce that I am aware of. And I'm just going to fact check false here. I guess that was right. I should have thought about this.

All right, but you're the reason why the median. The median is why we need to go off. You know, but basically, if these people had just, The reason why these people can't have kids is not because he likes golf. And maybe they can't have kids. But it's because they never should have bought his house at all. This was not a same decision whether you have children or not. I've had this conversation with a lot of people who are like, well, I bought the house thinking that interest rates will fall.

And I was like, oh, should have talked to me first, that people assumed that interest rates were going to go back to where they were between 2008 and 2020. and I don't think that's ever going to happen. And so they have made an unwise decision on a very common assumption. But I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I grew up in Manhattan. I grew up in an apartment considerably smaller than 2,000 square feet with my sister and my parents. It is more than, and it was hugely spacious for a Manhattan apartment. We had overflowing room.

We had a foyer. And, like, yes, you can raise a child in 2,000 square feet. You people are insane. And Megan walked uphill to school, Bill Queens. No, that's what I'm saying. It was lovely. Yeah. So you say that Gen X is the leaders in whining.

I don't remember the exact quote. But I'm starting to think that, like, Gen Z might be making a run for it. Because, you know, my dad, my mom was a stay-at-home mom, and then she started working as a teacher's aide. My dad was a military officer, so we weren't rolling in it. I don't, I don't think we ever had a house that was larger than 2,000 square feet. And you had how many siblings? One sibling. Okay. So there are two of us. Yeah. We were fine. Like, I honestly never felt like we were cramped in our house or that we were neglected or, you know, we didn't go on big vacations. My dad didn't golf. Like, those are expensive. But like, if, if, I'll say this,

Like, if forced to choose between kids and golf, I'm thinking golf, like, then you're making the right decision go with the golf. Like, if you cannot say I'm prioritizing the kids above my golf game. I guess that's like, that's obviously true, right? Like, if you, of course, want to have children, then you, you should, you should have them instead of whining about the 2,000 square foot house. But I guess, like, in the marginal community of the people who are like, you know, Well, I wasn't, I was going to have them until condoms were invented.

And then I thought maybe I wouldn't wear condoms once in a while until I found out I couldn't golf. Like, as stupid as that is, it does turn out that there's apparently quite a lot of people like that. What I'm most surprised about is that those people exist in Utah. But that's the thing. These people are 25. I mean, I don't know why they're talking to the New York Times about their life choices. But I, you know, a 25-year-old who thinks he mostly wants to golf and doesn't feel like having kids may feel. differently in three years.

And, you know, may still be in this 2,000 square foot house. Which is why he's not going to make money when they try to sell that house and they have to pay 6% to their real estate forever. But, Sean, partly why I want to discuss this with you is that in terms of Gen X whining, I think your most viral tweet is not actually about elections and redistricting, but was in in 2023 in the discourse about, you know, inflation and what it costs to eat these days, You had a tweet about how Outback delivery had gotten more expensive. And I was at the time surprised by how far $125 went at Outback Steakhouse for a family of four. That two blooming onions, a steak salad, lobster tails, a filet, a chicken sandwich, and a sirling with tip and tax was $125.

And that that seemed like a lot, which, I don't know, that seems like a lot. a sign of how abundant America is that someone will bring lobster tails and three steaks and a chicken sandwich to your house and two bloomin onions for 125 bucks. So it is. That also was not the point of the tweet. So the point, my original tweet said, remember we had this big fight about the vibe session. Like, things aren't really so bad. If the press would stop talking about inflation, people wouldn't care as much.

And the point I made is that inflation is uniquely pernicious. no matter what your price point is, it hits you. If your idea of a good day out is going to McDonald's, you're going to pay more for the happy meal. If you go to a high-end steakhouse, you're going to be paying more for steak there. We're somewhere in the middle. My oldest son has autism, so we can't really go to restaurants. And the rest of the family loves Outback, and so does he. So we will occasionally DoorDash Outback Steakhouse, and the price had gone up from like $100 to $125 now.

I will concede that is an embarrassment of riches in many ways, but you notice it. Like, you notice the increase, just like when we decide to, we're on the road and we go to McDonald's, I notice that it's not like a $5 or $6 extra value meal anymore. But as we have recently researched, things have gotten much worse. Yeah, I asked Sean to reprice that $125 door dash meal from 2023. What's the current price for? By the way, how many lobster tails is it? So it's two lobster tails. I got to say they're disgusting.

Yeah, I don't really love. They're like microwave them, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I guess that was part of my like adjustment in how to think about the outback. I, you know, I'm a snobby Manhattan night. They actually closed our outback. There used to be an outback in Chelsea, but there isn't one anymore. You know, you can buy frozen lobster tails at Costco and you just stick them under the broiler. Frozen?

I mean, they're going to be better than Outback. Right? Like, you could just, when you're ordering Outback, just take a few of them out of the, you know, thaw a few of them. You don't have overnight delivery from Seattle? Oh, my God. But so. Look, we, we have Costco memberships. Like, this is a treat. They like Outback Steakhouse. So what's, what's the current price for this, the Steakhouse order for a family of four? The three steak salad, two steaks, chicken sandwich, two lobster tails and two bluebon onions today in Ohio. How much you pay that? Minor tweak, in my defense, it's a family five. We have three boys. Oh, yeah. Sorry. But it is now $190.190. It's up from 125 to 190 in three years. Yeah. The lobster tails, the two tiny microwave lobster tails are almost $50. Just saying, Costco, you order the rest of the meal. You just pop those lobster tails right in the broiler. They'll be done at the same time when it gets there. But wait, so how does, how does, so 125 to 190? So how does this. compared to normal inflation for food over the last few years. It's above trend.

Are they gouging you? I think my tweet went viral and must have like jacked up demand for Outback Lobster or something. I'm going, oh, my God, I can have this delivered. No, the thing that jumped out to me is like almost 50 bucks for Outback Lobster now. And yes, I understand that it's cheaper if you get it in the restaurant. And this isn't that there's like, I hope it isn't that there's tariffs on Lobster Tales, because from what I understand, you want those things pretty fresh. But they're Iranian lobsters.

I mean, many of them do come from Canada now, actually. Because of global warming, the main fisheries are not doing as well as they used to. And so, in fact, we are now importing a lot of lobster from Nova Scotia. Fun fact. Maybe it's... But so I think that, you know, this sort of price trend is one of the key reasons that Republicans are in such rough shape in this particular election. And so, you know, if inflation was gotten under control and if the president didn't, you know, recreationally cause an oil price shock, Republicans might do

better this time. But there's also this sort of longer run trend, I think, of greater dissatisfaction with economic conditions that seems to, you know, persist through the Republican Democratic administrations that I'm not sure is going to go away if we merely get inflation down to the 2% target. And I think that's been manifesting in what I find to be a really unpleasant policy trend, which is that in this environment where everyone feels that they deserve more than the economy is able to deliver to them, there's this effort to find carve-outs so that, you know, you personally will be, you know, relieved of the obligation to pay for certain things because you deserve better than what, you know, what's being delivered for you. So you see Republican and Democratic proposals to exempt various

categories of income or professions from income tax. Most famously, no tax on tips, but then you have Marie Glucent Camp Perez, who I ordinarily like quite a bit, the congresswoman from Southern Washington State, proposing that law enforcement officers shouldn't pay federal tax on their first $100,000 of income. No tax for veterans is a proposal from a Republican candidate for governor in California, no income tax for teachers in Georgia. Just the list goes on, basically, you know, because you're not getting what you deserve, you personally shouldn't have to pay. And we see this with property tax, too.

And then we also see it, I think, in, you know, these very stupid recent, articles about shoplifting, one in New York Magazine and then a conversation that the New York Times opinion page hosted with Giotolentino and Hassan Piker talking about shoplifting as quote-unquote micro-looting an act of resistance against capitalism. But I think a lot of this is downstream of the idea that basically, you know, that I individually personally deserve more than the economy can deliver to me. And therefore, either the government should do something about that or I am exempt from the social contract. So, Sean, first of all, I appreciate you indulging this in response to the price increases at Outback, which just robbing the Outback?

Or I don't know. Maybe you are shoplifting lobster tails. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I agree with all of it. Like, I am generally favorably inclined towards lowering taxes where we can, but it's like we do have to fund government at some point. We have massive structural deficits and entitlements that are really going to cause problems in the next five to ten years if we don't do something. And yet here we are. I think, did Cory Booker want to exempt like the first $75,000 of income or something like that? A hundred thousand. 100. And that's for everyone. That's not just for, that's not just for teachers or law enforcement or veterans or anything. Yeah. I mean, and like there is, I think there is a laffer curve,

but it has a left side. And I think it's pretty clear we're on it. So these things aren't going to like magically create money for us. It's just, I feel like a cranky old man, but it's like, no, you got to pay for things at some point. And as far as the shoplifting, it's not like Costco is not going to just take it in the chin. Like they're going to pass that cost onto other people. Most companies have like a shoplifting budget built in. Like they account for that some stuff is going to get stolen. and put that into their price mechanism.

So it's really just like wanton selfish behavior. Microlooting is where I lost it reading that article. Like the thing that you just call it micro looting. Like I, it sounds just, it sounds quite bad even if you call it that. Well, I mean, the other thing is like there's been all this discourse about Hassan Piker and how Democrats should relate to him and is he too extreme. And there's just not enough focus on the fact that he is a vacuous moron who doesn't even really have a politics.

You know where they don't love looting is Hamas. But so, like, one thing in this New York Times chat with him and Giatolentino is they're talking about, would you steal from the library? And they're like, absolutely not, because, you know, the library's sacred social institution. But would you steal from the Louvre? And then they say stealing from the Louvre is cool, even though the Louvre is the French government. It is like a library.

It is a government institution that exists to cultivate knowledge and valid. valuable, you know, artifacts for all of us. And so it's the, and Tolentino also, by the way, like, you might remember like a year ago there was this coalition letter from Gaza activists saying that the New York Times has been awful and biased towards Israel. And we're not going to contribute to the New York Times opinion page until the Times changes its ways and retracts some news articles and runs a staff editorial calling for an arms of bargo on Israel. And the Times didn't do any of these things. But then just months later, there's Tolentino. like laughing like an idiot about how great shoplifting is for the New York Times opinion section,

which I think just again goes to show that she doesn't really have a politics. She'll go out there and she'll express a strong moralistic view and then not even abide by it. You said vacuous. I think of it as vapid. It's just fundamentally adolescent. It's wanting to have really strong opinions about things without bothering to think them through because thinking them through would require effort. It would require acknowledging tradeoffs. It would not make for good posturing for your little friends. And look, we all went through this in high school.

I was in a scavenger hunt where a friend shoplifted. I did not narc her out and stop it. Also, I was 14. And now I am not 14, and I do not have a politics that suggest that I have the same morality as I did when I was 14. And it is really irate. It's not, and I'm not saying that, like, leftist politics or progressive politics is adolescent. But this particular strain of it is, you're not radical. You're not a revolutionary.

You're bored. And your audience is bored. And you're acting like morons because you can't think of anything better to do. All right. Let me just make a qualified defense here. Okay. Go ahead. as a person who also is the is an idiot I would just say that a lot of what you're describing you're talking about people who have thought about this at all and a lot of people most people don't think about it at all that they quite literally have never thought about politics in their entire life and that they are saying they're smiling and nodding and going yeah when other people do and that they're

That's honestly a happy life. I wish them the best. But it's, what is going on is that Gia Tolentino. These are bloggers. These are people, you know, these are people who. She's a staff writer at the New Yorker. Right. Well, that's.

America's most storied and prestigious magazine. I am also a former blogger, Ben. It's not, it's not actually mandatory. But in reality, these are, these are American Apparel fans who fucking, ended up blogging a lot and then got it ended up in these jobs they are they they don't they've never thought they didn't they didn't take public policy classes they don't know a lot about this they just have they just have some feelings about it they think that the single payers now would be nice like that which is fine it's just that once you work at the new yorker you

should probably think about it more i think i'll just throw in like at the end of the the the show like a little bit of a nuclear weapon but oh please Yeah. So there is a long, serious, storied history of critical theory, postmodernism, cultural studies. A lot of it is very carefully thought out and brilliant and nuanced and difficult to grapple with. But I think a lot of people go through college and pluck the headlines out. Like they're like, okay, postmodernism, LLL, nothing matters. I don't really want to deal with reading Foucault. And, you know, they look at cultural. studies, and they're like, I don't want to read Hoggard, Richard Hoggard. You know, I'm just going to say, like, oppressed people should be right. And I think there's a way, if I can come up with a way that I'm oppressed, that I'm right. None of the intellectual traditions are that simplistic. But as it suits people, that's kind of what a certain class of, of quote-unquote thinker has taken. Yeah, the settler colonialism narrative suffers from that, right? Or the idea is that you're going to, that Israel is the metropole is it needs to go back to the metropole and like what is the what is the what is the metropole of israel right this it's actually no they they don't have one it's not it's not

an extension of some other country to which these people can return um and like yes i i 100 agree with this shot is there is there in fact wisdom underlying foucault i've always assumed that the the completely impenetrable prose of the critical theorists was just there to conceal sloppy, vacuous thinking. I've never seen, I don't know, maybe I'm just not smart enough to understand it. I've never seen a digest that made any sense. I actually organized a seminar

where we read the penopticon essay and actually found it quite useful, although a number of people in it yelled at me for making them read Foucault. Yeah. Were they like, I love prisons, these penopticons? It's what I need.

Yeah, I mean, there are, I think, like, if you've ever had like a disagreement with your significant other over a text message where you, like they say, can you pick something up and you're like, okay. And they're like, why are you snippy? And I'm like, I wasn't snippy. Like that's a useful postmodernist insight. All they had to go off of was the text. And like a fight about what you really intended is almost pointless because no one really has access to that knowledge except you. With a lot of stuff about like defining criminality and deviancy as a means of control. I think you can look at how, like, sexual minorities have been defined as deviant, mostly, or insane. When there's nothing insane, it was just a way for you to put language for something that you disliked. I think those insights are useful, but it takes something that has a grain of truth to it can be useful in situations. It tries to make a philosophy of life out of it. And then no one reads it. They're just like, I like this, therefore it must be the way I see it because, L.O.L.

Nothing matters, Fouca. Okay, can I tell my favorite, my favorite Derrida anecdote? Please, go ahead. So he is invited to speak at, I believe, Harvard, hacked room, wrapped audience, and he gets up and he delivers a speech on cows. And everyone is very puzzled and also, like, nodding, frantically trying to figure out why he's talking about cows. And he sits down and the next speaker gets up. And then he goes back to the microphone and he says, I'm sorry.

I'm told that in English it's pronounced chaos. I think we can leave that there on this critical theory note and surprising, urging from Sean Trendy for us to take a look at Foucault, which I will consider. Sean, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm going to go have a lobster tale. I don't know about the two of you. But thank you, Ben, Megan, as always. Thank you. Thank you. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Faye. We're a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddock mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening. And stay cool out there.