The Daily Signal - Lights! Camera! Leftism! How Hollywood Went Woke

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

It's no secret nowadays that Hollywood stars and directors slant left. But Hollywood wasn't always so woke. Years ago, actors would star in movies celebrating America. So how did we get here? Christian Toto has the answer. Toto is founder of the conservative entertainment site HollywoodInToto.com as well as author of the new book "Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul." He says Hollywood is just another casualty in the left's dominance of American culture. "It's the same way the culture went woke and lost its soul," Toto explains. "A few studio executives make a few decisions, a few actors realize if they share some woke virtue signaling on social media, they'll get more attention, more positive press. And it goes from there." Toto joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to tell the story of Hollywood’s turn to the left and what conservatives are doing to push back. We also cover these stories: Russian President Vladimir Putin says America has ignored Russia’s concerns over the West’s position on Ukraine. Senate Democrats release legislation to amend the law governing the counting of Electoral College votes. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says National Guard troops are required to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, February 2nd. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. Lights, camera, leftism. As Hollywood has gone full woke, conservatives are beginning to respond with their own slate of films to try and counter the left influence. Christian Toto is the founder of conservative entertainment site, Hollywood and Toto.com. He's also the author of the new book Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul. Toto joins the show to tell us the story of Hollywood's turn to the left and what conservatives are doing to push back.

But before we get to Doug's conversation with Christian Toto, let's hit our top news stories of the day. Russian President Vladimir Putin says America has ignored Russia's concerns over the West position towards Ukraine. Putin gave public remarks on the situation with Ukraine for the first time this year on Tuesday. During his remarks, Putin also accused the U.S. of using the situation, with Ukraine to try to contain Russia's development. Putin made the comments to the press shortly after Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Levrov, to de-escalate the situation between Russia and Ukraine.

Blininin instructed Lavrov to withdraw Russian troops from the Ukraine border. Blinken also reminded the Russian leader that America would meet a Russian invasion of Ukraine with swift and severe consequences. Lavrov told Blinken during the phone call that Russia has no plans to invade Ukraine. The two leaders are expected to talk again in the coming days and continue discussions about the Russian troops amassed on Ukraine's border. On Tuesday, Senate Democrats released a legislative proposal to change the Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Count Act was originally passed in 1887 and determines how Congress,

counts electoral votes after a presidential election. While the law covers a multitude of aspects relating to the presidential election, recent conversations about altering the legislation surround the role of the vice president in the proceedings. Former President Donald Trump has previously claimed that former vice president Mike Pence had the power to reject electoral votes from states won by Joe Biden. Pence has argued that he lacks the constitutional authority. The proposed changes to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 were introduced by Senator Angus King, independent from Maine, Rules Committee chairwoman, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat from Minnesota, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois.

The proposal would update the act to clarify that the vice president has a purely ceremonial role in counting the electoral college votes and cannot reject a state's electors. In a joint statement released Tuesday, the trio of senators said, Experts across the political spectrum agree that the Electoral Count Act of 1887 needs to be updated to reflect the current realities and threats facing the United States and our election process. Proposals to update the 1887 law have received some bipartisan support. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says U.S. National Guard members are required to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Austin's remarks come after seven Republican governors objected to the National Guard

vaccine mandate. The governors of Texas, Alaska, Iowa, Idaho, Wyoming, Mississippi, and Nebraska, sent letters to Austin in December. They argued that they should have the right to determine whether or not the National Guard in their state are required to be vaccinated, since governors are the commander and chiefs of their state's National Guard units when they're operating under the state's orders. But Austin has responded to the governors saying that he has the authority to set medical requirements for all in the armed services, including the National Guard. Austin said in a letter that failure to be vaccinated will result in prohibition on participation in drills, training, and other duty. And added that refusing the vaccine will also jeopardize

the member's status in the National Guard. Now stay tuned for my interview with Christian Toto, as we discuss how Hollywood went woke. If you're tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger and bigger government, it's time to partner with the most impactful conservative organization in America. We're the Heritage Foundation, and we're committed to solving the issues America faces. Together, we'll fight back against the rising tide of homegrown socialism, and we'll fight for conservative solutions that are making families more free and more prosperous. us, but we can't do it without you.

Please join us at heritage.org. My guest today is Christian Toto, founder of conservative entertainment site, Hollywoodintoto.com, as well as author of the new book, Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul, Available Now, Wherever Books Are Sold. Christian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Excellent.

Let's start with the obvious question posed by the book. How did Hollywood get woke and lose its soul? Well, you know, it's funny. It's the same way the culture went woke and lost its soul in certain regards. It's happened slowly and then it's quick. It's really fascinating how things kind of get speed. But, you know, a few studio executives make a few decisions. A few actors realize if they share some woke virtue signaling on social media, they'll get more attention, more positive press. And it goes from there. So, you know, was there a single moment? No, for sure. But I think it compares to the culture at large. So this is something that's not separate from American culture. It's just a sort of microcosm of it in a different area. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you can look at what's happening in college campuses a few years ago and thinking, well, you know, it's just college campuses, you know, all the things we, the crazy stories

we hear, the free speech suppression. It's not going to bleed into our life, into the culture. And then it does. And so what happens in Hollywood also has an impact on the culture at large. It's inescapable. And I think more conservatives have. to realize that. Do we see this as a sort of self-reinforcing mechanism where the academia is woke and the wider culture at large is woke? Therefore, Hollywood sees this as what sells and gets more woke

and then people view this on TV and it just sort of creates a cycle. It is a cycle, but the one component that's not quite solid is the fact that it sells. As a matter of fact, there's the, you know, get-woke-brook philosophy, which comes in handy because there are a lot of different projects that seem like they're, you know, can't miss blockbusters, TV shows that that might, you know, draw a lot of attention. And then they fail. And it happens quite a bit from the Charlie's Angels reboot to the Terminator's sequel to shows like Party of Five. You know, it happens again and again. So I think that's the missing piece in this puzzle. And yet Hollywood, which is show business, isn't always interested or alarmed when these things don't work out financially.

And that's the curious point. And why is that? You know, I think they don't connect the dots to a certain extent. I think there are, you know, there are corporations and companies that will lose significant money when they go woke, when they start doing the virtue signaling dance. And I think, you know, people in Hollywood exist in a bubble of sorts where they don't read, you know, right of center news sources. They don't read my site. They don't listen to what I have to say. And so not that I'm so important as much as one person, but there's half the country that is not exactly in line in lockstep.

with this thinking and they're not aware that they seem to block that that information out and I think they do it to the financial peril at some point soon. Do we see the wokeness as being worse now than in previous years? Yeah, you know, I think the George Floyd situation really kind of doused kerosene on the culture at large and I think that impacted Hollywood as well because you had blackface episodes across the culture in the past and yet after Floyd's death and the protests and the riots all of a sudden they were yanked down with no debate, with no argument, and the people who made those shows like Tina Fey did so without hesitation. So I think that was a turning point. And, you know, whether,

I think that has slowed down to a certain degree for sure since then. But we're still in the thick of it. You know, we're seeing it with a Joe Rogan situation. You know, there was a reality show star who got removed from her show because she said she had some anti-BLM comments, you know, which, you you would think would be just freedom of speech and nothing terribly offensive, but, you know, there are certain groups you cannot critique at this point, and then BLM is one of them. So why don't we move on to your book? Let's talk about what the goal of the book is, and what point are you trying to get across to readers? Well, I think we can look at certain situations in the culture and kind of maybe roll her eyes or laugh. You know, an actress, a big actress,

rejects a role because it's not woke enough. She should, you know, step aside and a person with that similar background should take the role. Or we can maybe laugh when Emma Watson apologizes for being woke but not woke enough when the BLM situation rose up and she didn't have the right social media messaging. That seems silly and not really super important. But what we need and why the book exists is that you have to kind of connect all these dots. You've got to put this all together in one package and say, these aren't isolated incidents. This is a through line in Hollywood that bleeds into the culture that is significant, that is profound, that is really squelching free expression. And I think that's my biggest beef as a fan of Hollywood as someone who steered my career to cover

Hollywood professionally, is that I want the greatest stories out there. I want actors be able to tell their tales, to share their stories. I want it to be, you know, anyone who's got a great script to be able to make that script. And what the woke ideology does is a sort of short circuits a lot of that way. You have to tell certain stories. You have to share certain perspectives. You can't you can't disallow or disobey certain rules. And that does not yield a superior product. It's just the opposite. Let's take another sample case of wokeness in Hollywood because there's something that you mentioned to me that really struck me is that we hear these stories and we laugh. If Emma Watson goes up and says, I'm not woke enough. I didn't do the right, you know,

prostration dance on Twitter. You know, we all. laugh and say that's ridiculous. But there were certain cases where these incidents of wokeness versus what seems to be rational thought go awry. So let's take the example of Dave Chappelle. It seemed like even though there were quite a few normal angry Twitter people kind of par for the course who wanted him gone, there were a fair amount of people who were also supporting him and saying that he had the right to say these things. Does that indicate to you that this is something that's kind of becoming less popular? You know, I don't think it's ever been very popular. I think it's always been a minority, a small minority of people who are outraged,

offended, aghast, you know, eager to make change as they see it. I think that the culture for some reason gives them extra voice, extra power, extra influence. And, you know, it's people are afraid of the Twitter mob. It's corporations are afraid of a stinging op-ed. And yet the people who are on Dave Chappelle's side, for example, they don't have that clout. They don't have that power. If you look at the numbers on Netflix, I guarantee the closer, his last special, probably did, you know, huge numbers on that service, certainly justifying its existence. And maybe the people who were, you know, aghast at the situation were tiny in numbers. You look at the protests at, you know, Netflix headquarters. It wasn't a massive wave of people.

But they are given more clout within our society. And that's a problem. And I think it's something that we need to realize, need to address. and say, hey, wake up. This isn't a massive, you know, populist movement. It's small. It's angry. It's inconsistent. It's about power and not freedom. And it's not about making society a better place, by the way, because the woke mob will regularly, aggressively look the other way if the targeting question is someone they agree with. In case in point, is Alec Baldwin, Bet Midler, Jimmy Kimmel. They all should have been canceled aggressively, but they weren't because they were proponents of the left

and they did the left's bidding, and the people in the woke mom didn't want them gone, and they're not. Now, conservatives have been talking about this for decades. I mean, I can remember back when I was a kid, this sort of trend towards Hollywood going woke. Why does it seem like conservatives have failed to capitalize on what, as we've discussed, is very unpopular with the general population? I don't know.

It's a short answer. I know that conservatives have done a terrible job of meeting pop culture halfway, of creating art on their own terms of dissecting why popular culture is so important. So, you know, there have been few voices like Andrew Claibin, who wrote the forward to my book, who have been doing the Paul Revere and, you know, yelling and screaming and waving their hands and saying, wake up, wake up. The great late Andrew Breitbart certainly did that. Politics is downstream of culture. But people on the right, for whatever reason, have been ignorant of this issue. And thankfully, I think my fellow conservatives are waking up. They are realizing what's happening. They are.

understanding how much has been lost. And you see the Daily Wire getting into the entertainment business. You see the Federalist creating its first documentary. You see people like Christopher Rufo, not just being an activist, but making short films that showcase what's going on in the culture. And there are a lot of comedians who are not even right of center, but just free thinkers who are engaging in the culture and making very funny content that addresses the issues in play. So there is a movement here that we need to encourage, if only just for free speech. And often conservatives will rally around folks like Joe Rogan who are not conservative. They're probably liberal or left of center. You know, Ricky Jervais is a hero to many conservatives. He's a liberal who hates Donald Trump. But he speaks for free speech. He defends comedy. And that is super important in the culture right now. And I think that's why, you know, left, right, middle, it doesn't matter. You've got to go for free speech. You've got to go for free expression. You've got to attack this woke culture because it is devastating, it is toxic, and it's making us a worse society. You've mentioned a couple of different responses to woke Hollywood, including comedians who stand up for free speech a la Ricky Jervais, Bill Maher is one that I tend to watch as well.

The Daily Wire, who has begun investing resources into building up conservative studios, productions like Run, Fight, Hyde, which are explicitly conservative pieces of media. Is that the best way to handle this? We basically just support sort of conservative productions, or do we kind of generally across the board say that we should be more focused on free speech? Well, I think both. I mean, we should absolutely focus on free speech. What we should do is when possible, when feasible, support people who are being unfairly canceled.

And that's why the Gina Carrano story, which is a whole chapter in my book, is so important because she was unfairly canceled, period, full stop by a company that's playing footsie with China and you know what's happening in China. So, you know, the fact that Daily Wire swooped in gave her a movie that she could star in and produce is significant. So that's kind of a two-birth-and-one situation. You're supporting someone unfairly canceled and you're letting her blossom and bloom and do stories that wouldn't maybe fit within normal Hollywood. But yeah, I think it's up to us as conservatives and free thinkers, you know, center-left people. We love you too. You've got to support these kinds of projects because if they don't get support, if they wither and die, then they'll fade away.

A conservative, the people who are kind of pulling the purse strings seem very reticent to support right of center art. And yet liberals will just throw buckets full of money at projects that will probably fail. But you know what? That project that fails, that movie that fails will live on and on. It'll be on cable. It'll be on streaming services. And there'll be so many stories written about it, that it'll basically puncture the culture, whether it succeeds or fails. And I think people on the left realize that. They're making a J6 movie with some pretty heavy hitters in Hollywood about the capital riots. Now, do you think that's going to be fair and balanced? Do you think it's going to be a journalistic approach to the situation? Of course not. But the mainstream media will adore it.

They will promote it. They will share it. They will critique it without the usual truth, you know, sensors in place and it'll get so much attention that even if it fails, it hasn't failed. Let's take a quick look and sort of see how are these productions doing? What did the Daily Wire do with Run Fight Hide? How did that do with the box office? Well, it didn't have a box office release. It was released behind their paywall, which is both good and bad. It's good because it is another asset they have that they can draw subscribers. I am a contributor to the Daily Wire. I'm not a full-time employee so I have a little bit of insight and I'm also, you know, I want to be transparent about my connections there, but it seems like that did well. The producer of that film was very happy with

the response, but it also is not playing in theaters. So if you do want to influence the culture, there is a bit of a disconnect there. So I, listen, I think the Daily Wire is doing a good thing and I would say that with or without my connection to them. But you also want to have that kind of content available to the masses. And also what the Daily Wire is doing is, is not overtly political. That Run-Hide Fight movie was not a treatise on on any sort of political movement or ideology. There were moments here and there, you could certainly say.

And their next few projects, one is a thriller called Shut-in, another is Terror on the Prairie and Indy Western. These are not hardcore propaganda machines. These are stories. And again, they may have elements that lean to the right, but they're not trying to really kind of make it as aggressively one-sided, like a late-nighted monologue, which is comically one-sided. Now, what movies and shows do you think best encapsulate what conservatives should look for in

entertainment as a model to produce good content that can resonate with multiple Americans? Well, two films come to mind. One was Richard Jewell, which is probably about two years old now. It's a story about the security guard at the Atlanta Olympics, and he was allegedly involved with the bombing there. He was innocent. And the way that the press and the FBI, targeted him, maligned him. It was the perfect movie for our times. And yet conservatives stayed home. And the movie was an absolute flop, even though it had stars. It had Clint Eastwood behind the camera. And it was excellent. And I think that's a really clear example of people on the right failing to support projects that they need and that they want to see more of in theory. But it also point to No Safe Space as a documentary from two years ago. And that was a wonderful film.

It wasn't overly political. It really did show the free speech suppression on college campuses in a thoughtful, powerful way. It was beautifully packaged. And I think it could have reached a lot of people. I think people in the far left are too far gone at this point. They would reject it. But I think that would have kind of reached the masses. It did fairly well for a documentary of its size and scope.

But again, that was one that should have been a breakout hit. And it wasn't. Let's move on to your website, Hollywoodintoto.com. It bills itself as the right take in entertainment. What are you hoping to achieve with the site? Well, I've been a film critic for over 20 years now, and if you look around to my colleagues, most of them are left of center. Some of them are aggressively so.

And what you see in their reportage is that it is reflected in their reviews. It seems to be happening more and more. And, you know, if I went to Mother Jones and they had a film review, and the film reviewer was very left of center and it really impacted his or her review. I don't really have a problem with that. Your audience is very left of center and you're speaking to them. That's perfectly fine. The same way with, you know, National Review has the great Kyle Smith who reviews from a conservative perspective. But I think across the landscape, you have many, many critics who act as if they're reviewing for Mother Jones. In actuality, they have a mainstream audience. And I think that's

doing a disservice. So I basically offer myself as a right. of center critic for the half of the country that is mostly ignored. And I try to do so from a fair perspective. And if there's a movie with a heavy progressive theme, I don't want to, you know, say it's bad because of that reason. I want to say it's bad because the dialogue is, you know, stilted or the story doesn't flow. You know, so I try to be as fair as possible. But I'm also transparent and who I am and how I do the world. Has there been a positive response to the website? Have people reached out to you and say this is exactly what I was looking for? Yeah, you know, I get a lot of people on the right who are,

grateful for it. And you know, I also get a lot of respect from Hollywood. I get to interview a lot of actors and directors and filmmakers. I'm able to access product. They have not banned me or censored me. And I try to treat the site, which is my home base, as a very fair outlet. I'm trying to be journalistically sound. If I make a mistake, I'll go correct it. I link out aggressively to other sources when I'm making my arguments. You know, a lot of what's on the site are op-eds. And a lot of what's happening now is I'm speaking out for free speech. And I would like to think that that would be an issue where a left-leaning reader of my site would say, yeah, I agree with that or I at least appreciate that argument. Not always the case, but that's what I'm trying to do right now.

And I really think it's important. And what I've noticed is that the media in general and too many artists, and this is just shocking to me, are not in favor of free speech as we see it today. You know, Sasha Baron Cohen of Borat fame, you know, wants to censor Facebook. Many, many celebrities were cheering when Donald Trump was removed from Twitter and Facebook. That's just wrong. It's just wrong. And I'm just shocked to see it. But it is a state of people on the left.

And I embrace people who happen to be liberal and who don't have that worldview like the Ricky Jervaises of the world. God bless them. Something you just said reminded me of a story from a couple of years ago with director Mark Duplas, who went and met with Ben Shapiro, obviously, of Daily Wire, famous. as well. And he basically was saying that Ben Shapiro wasn't such a bad guy. They had a conversation. They didn't agree on much, but that he's genuine and that he's a nice guy. And the response to this tweet that he put out after meeting Ben Shapiro was incredible. It was something along the lines of like he had just talked with, you know, some horrible dictator in some third world country. Like this was that level of problem. And he had to walk back and apologize. It's so

interesting to me that you've mentioned that there have been actors in Hollywood that have talked to you about how they appreciate your site and from a right-leaning perspective. Do we see that happening more and more in this Duplos incident was sort of an outlier? Or was this sort of, they're realizing that they need to stop doing that because otherwise they're going to lose this massive part of their audience? No, I think that that response would be maybe tenfold if his tweet went out today. I was very sad to see that I've met Mark Duplas. I think he's a very talented. interesting guy. I think he was acting at a fear and I get it to a certain degree because, you know, unless you're a major movie star, you really are dependent on your peers, on the people

who work in the, you know, on the production side of things, the casting directors, the studios, you need them to like you and to be amenable to your vision. And if he goes out and he says, you know, Ben Shapiro isn't a monster, seems like a decent guy who I just disagree with, then he's putting some of his future projects in jeopardy. That's really what. it stands today. I've talked to people who will hide their credits if they're attached to a right-meaning project. I've talked to actors who will say, please don't out me as a conservative. That's where we are. There's a modern blacklist. I know this is very big differences between the one of the 50s and the one right now, but they are kissing cousins at times and it really does exist. That fear is out there. It is real.

It is getting worse. And we need people like Mark to say, hey, you know what? You can critique me all you want. But this guy's a human being. I met him. He seems like a nice fellow. And we can agree to disagree. And, you know, the more people do that, the more this problem will go away. But it takes a lot of courage. And courage is in short supply in Hollywood.

Now, there was a time when Hollywood was pro-America. There's this fascinating exhibit at the National Archives here in Washington, D.C., that shows an ad where Jimmy Stewart of, you know, it's a wonderful life fame, encourages Americans to buy war bonds during World War II, which it feels like that could never. happened today. Like it feels like that would never be a thing that a Hollywood star would go out and say, support America. Would we ever be able to get back to a point like that? I don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know. It's interesting that I'm reading a book right now about China and Hollywood. It's fascinating because China is all about messaging and propaganda and

building up the country and making sure that China looks impeccable on the silver screen. It is their main focus. They are obsessed with it. And yet, you know, during the Iraq war, You could disagree with the Iraq war, and it's certainly, in retrospect, I think most people may disagree with that situation. But what did Hollywood do in response? They put out movie after movie after movie that was critical of either the Bush policy, the war itself, or even American soldiers. And it's certainly an anti-Jimmy Stewart-like response.

And again, that is their right. This is a creative industry. They are allowed to do that. I would never say that they shouldn't do that. But the response is fascinating. Before we go, I want to ask two more questions. So the first one is we've discussed that there are, there is a severe lack of conservative voices at the table in Hollywood.

But why is it important that we be there? Why is it important that these voices should be present at the table? Well, because you're basically getting one side of the culture from Hollywood. I mentioned that J6 movie. Sundance Film Festival just had multiple movies that were pro-abortion. You know, Sundance is always speaking about diversity, diversity, diversity. They want more women, more people of color. to share their stories and good for them.

That should be. I think everyone who wants to tell their story should be able to tell it. But, you know, the culture at large is sending one message that, you know, even from the comedy perspective, that Biden is a good president, that he's doing the right thing, that anyone on the GOP side is evil and wrong and corrupt. If you're right of center, how could you not admit that that's a significant problem and that your voice isn't being heard and that this is swaying hearts and minds? And again, I don't root for propaganda.

I'd rather have stories with has maybe kind of more subtle messaging, but we are as conservatives just almost out of the conversation and we're basically forced not to even join the conversation. Look what's happening to Joe Rogan right now. He expressed views that were just contrary to the group think. And look at the attacks. The attacks will continue. They will not stop. And he's not a monster.

And he's probably far more accurate than a CNN. And yet CNN is allowed to exist and thrive and no one says they should be off the air. But plenty of people would love Joe Rogan to go away and never share another podcast. Then before we wrap up, I wanted to give you the opportunity. Is there anything else about your book or your website that you would like our listeners to know? Yeah, you know, I mean, this is a selfish request. But if my book fails, it's just another sign that people on the right aren't supporting art and free speech and things like that. And again, totally self-serving.

But I would love for my book to fail. And yet conservatives would run out and support every right-leaning project, you know, make indie crowdfunding campaign successful. We've got to take steps to, you know, empower people on our side to be part of the cultural conversation. It's really, really important. And the same goes from our website. You know, half the country doesn't have, you know, film reporters and entertainment journalists

who speak to them. And I speak to them. I reach out to them. I don't trash them. I don't insult them. And honestly, my site, I look at the, I look at Variety and, you know, the Hollywood reporter and deadline and the rap. They are in favor of.

cancel culture. They are in favor of less voices, not more voices. I'm the opposite. And I think people should support that perspective along with people at the Daily Wire and other sources who are doing good things and promoting free speech. I don't see any conservative saying, you have to cancel this voice and, you know, Alec Baldwin should never make a movie again and Bet Miller should be sent to the gulag. No, they should do what they do and say what they say. And let's have an argument. Let's have a debate. I think that's really important. And we need more outlets that are pushing that perspective. That was Christian Toto, founder of conservative entertainment site, Hollywoodin Toto.com, as well as author of the new book, Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul, Available Now, wherever books are sold. Christian, had a great time with this conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks. I appreciate it.

And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. As always, you can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks so much for listening and we're back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you

by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Virginia Allen and Kate Trinko sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visitdailySignal.com.