America’s Political Violence Problem, Spencer Pratt’s Surge, and the Joe Rogan Backlash

>> Welcome back to Afterparty Everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on this Monday evening. Tonight's guest is someone that I would say needs no introduction, celebrated in many different ways, many different people award winning. It's me.

And so I thought I would start off on a note of humility about what that all means for you, to be graced by my presence tonight, actually I am the guest on tonight's show. No guests, no guests. With that to be fun to kind of try it like that, with my mic as crooked. It's already reacting.

It's like why don't we have a guest who's weeping silently. But I thought it would be fun to do a show where I just get to talk. It doesn't everybody think that would be fun. But actually, I have a good rundown of topics to get to.

“And I think we're going to have a lot of fun.”

I'm going to get to actually some of your emails. Normally we do that on a podcast episode of the show only on Fridays. And thinking about maybe incorporating a bit more of that into the Monday and Wednesday show itself, nothing's changing with happy I don't worry about it. But we're going to use so many emails now that I thought maybe it would be fun to add some of them

into the main show itself. So Emily at DevilMaker Media.com, we're going to go through some of those emails.

Who is the end of today's show, but you can always send me your questions, concerns,

feedback. I'm sure you're all going to be very upset about the guest today. And I'll probably get emails about that as well. But on all seriousness, fallout reaction to the White House correspondent's dinner continues. And the debate rages on actually about who is the source of political violence in the country right now. If it is one side or the other, who is it?

We're going to get into that. We have some clips from Shalom in the God and Jonathan Capehart on PBS that we're going to dive into Grand Platner pushed in establishment Democrat candidate out of the primary. In one of that, most hotly contested Senate races in the country. That's going to be regarding Maine, of course, Spencer Pratt's bid for Mayor of Los Angeles.

Seems to actually be going very, very well. And Michael Reveker has some thoughts on Joe Brogan. But I found to be where the of a little bit of time in all of this.

So let's go ahead and first, I want to just say, we're going to start with the White House

correspondent center fallout.

“I think it's really one of the hottest topics in the country right now is the source of the”

New York Times daily today. And all of that, we're going to break it down in just one moment. So stay with us. But first, this spring, if you want real results, real results. We're talking about here once that actually matter.

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You just got a head on over to CowboyColoshrim.com/afterparty. And use code afterparty at checkout. That is 25% off. When you use code Emily at CowboyColoshrim.com/afterparty. All right, let's get into the continued debate right now. Over what happened at the White House correspondent center.

And actually what's really happened in the country over the last year or so, two years. This is what Professor Robert Paye who's thoughts on the Warren Iran. You may have been following closely, but he refers to it as an age of populist violence. He was just on the New York Times the Daily. Today, one of the most popular podcasts in the country.

Fleshing out his theory and his research that suggests we really have entered a period of populist violence comparable to other times in American history. But he said what differentiates from other moments in American history is that you're starting

and the political right.

Well, as this conversation has gone on in the media since last week's third major attempt

to take Donald Trump's life at the White House correspondent's dinner. We are getting more surveillance video trying to understand exactly what happened with secret service. You've seen the video of the dog picking up on something where the shooter goes down a hallway just in front of the barricades that are being taken down, which seconds later, this shooter would storm, this attempted shooter would storm, or want to be shooter with storm.

We're still also trying to figure out who fired what shots and who injured secret service. There is a lot unsettled at this time period, but what we can say is that it does seem as though high profile episodes of political violence are increasing.

“And this became a subject of conversation on PBS. This was on Friday, I believe, it's the show where”

David Brooks and Johnathan K-part talk through the news of the week. Let's start with how Johnathan K-part responded to this raging question right now of who's more to blame. And if you look at who thinks violence is justified, it tends to be younger people by a lot. Most progressives and most conservatives are pose violence, but you get two and a half times as many progressive say it's justified, then not. Excuse me, I'm not going to just let the comment

that, you know, progressives, you know, more than folks in the far right are, you know, think that violence is justified. And to me, the bigger issue here is gun violence, that why was I not surprised that this had happened. And I've been to that dinner, at least a dozen times since 2000. And so, yeah, there's an issue of, you know, people feeling that political violence is the way to go and that we are in a highly charged atmosphere, but what's been sort of a specter over all

of us for even longer is the scourge of gun violence.

Okay, a couple of things there. First Jonathan Capehart is saying, I'm not just going to let it go,

that this is progressives. And then tries to change the conversation to one about gun violence. I will also add the alleged attempted assassin in this case was also carrying two knives. So something worth noting in the context of that point, Capehart attempted to make. Now show them

“in the God in Andrew Schultz on their show, got into this a little bit as well. And you'll remember”

we talked last week on the show about Hassan Piker just several days before the event on a New York Times podcast discussing social murder invoking angles to talk about the assassination of Brian Thompson and the kind of valorization of Luigi Manjoni, which is, again, this happened just three days before the attempted assassination. And has been a big part of the conversation.

And let's first, before we revisit any of that, listen to how Schala Man and Schultz discussed

that part of the debate. We have a thing, Chris, do we think about Doge and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that got rid of last year. All of these federal workers still haven't found work. People have lost houses. People have had loved ones that have died because they don't have health care. And you know when you think about, you know, am I a person I believe they need to be more security or a hundred percent court? Think about their brutality. Of course, how snowman is,

but the court of policies have gone down. Of course, of course, but the question is, are you saying that it's justified because of it? No, I'm not. So it's like, so you, so that's how it's going to be consumed. Like, I don't think you're justifying it. But if I was someone who doesn't know you, I would go, oh, he's saying that he deserved this and he made people get this radicalized

“to this thing. I think you have to deal with the reality that somebody's policies have hurt”

people so much that some folks are willing to risk it all. Well, now, now you're justifying it. That's just the reality. It's just the reality that you have to deal with. This is really, really interesting. And I think what they're coming up on is how fine the line is. It's basically what we were talking about, read Hassan Piker last week, because there is between an excuse, and an explanation of fairly important distinction. And it is possible to do both at the same

time. It is possible to try to explain why we seem to be seeing more of this and also excuse it. And to do so intentionally, there's an unintentional excuse, like it'd be part of the explanation,

on the left, and maybe some on the, like, sort of the fringes of the right, try to justify and

“excuse it as a kind of trollish meme. And that's not me excusing that. That's, I think, a”

descriptor of where some of those excuses have come from that, you know, it's, hey, everything is, what a Trump's say, everything is computer, everything's just a meme now, everything's just a meme. And so it's all, you know, for the, it's all for the lulls, however you want to say it, but this is really, like, the fact that that's where the conversation went is really interesting, because I'm putting this up on this screen. This is a transcript of The Daily from today, from Monday, which was an

interview with Robert Pape, obviously professor at the University of Chicago, who studied not just

Iran, but also political violence in the context of threats to the American homeland, basically,

for a long time has a new book coming out on it. And it did not really, to be honest, this was part of Professor Pape's portfolio, but here we are. This is the part that really caught my eye.

“It gets exactly to what both of those clips, the heart of both of those clips. So the host,”

Natalie Ketrov says, if I understand what you're saying, it's not just the violent people who are implicated in this. It's the broader social acceptance that they're finding in a significant portion of American society. So it's not just them. It's many of the rest of us. In a way, this acceptance you're saying fuels the violence itself. He says that's exactly right. We've conducted 20 nationally representative surveys of Americans over the last five years. We conduct them at the

University of Chicago project on security and threats. And we started doing it in the summer of 2021. And then the most recent one was in the end of January this year. So we understand quite a bit about the attitudes of Americans on political violence. He says, from 2021 to the end of the Biden administration, our surveys found 10% of the body politics supported political violence to restore Donald Trump to the presidency. Then we did focus groups. And we did for their survey

research, what do people think they mean by the use of force? And what we found is 55% of the people who say the use of force is justifies think that means think that the use of force means assassination. So the host says, what does that percentage now? He says, it's roughly double. It's now between 14 and 21%. So what you saw is almost immediately after the election of President Trump is that doubled and it stayed that high. It is not going down. He says another example of

this is we asked a key question in September 2025. Do you find it acceptable that Charlie Kirk

“was assassinated? Do you find it acceptable that Nancy Pelosi had the attempted assassination?”

It was 10% for each, 10% for each, which means 20 million American adults found that acceptable

on each side. Okay. So the other part of this is, he says, the most important fact about political

violence in America today is this, tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle, see political violence as acceptable. And once you have tens of millions of Americans, not a fringe, not a few militia groups who see violence as acceptable, this changes everything about the risks of attack. Okay. You see now why that's important to both of the clips we just talked about. First of all, what David Brooks in that conversation with Jonathan K. Part was referencing,

I believe, is a poll that we talked about last week from the Economist in Uganda. This is a reputable poll from September 12th to 15th of 2025. These are started the hours in the hours after Charlie Kirk was assassinated and then went for a couple of days after it found by far in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's killing by far. People who were young and self identified on the left were much more likely to say that political violence is sometimes justified. It was not even close in

any other demographic cohort. What Robert Pap is saying is that when you measure this over time and not just that that one particular poll has been replicated, there are other findings of it. But what he's saying is that their survey, when they've repeated it several times in recent years,

has found equal numbers, basically of people saying, within the left or the right, that political

violence is justifiable. And listen, people can doubt the survey research. I do think it stands out enormously that that Economist, the hours after Charlie Kirk's death saw most people, or I'm sorry, said, saw a huge jump among people who were young and on the left, say that political violence can sometimes be justified, but actually don't doubt what Pap is saying overall, which is that Americans more and more are starting to see an existential element to politics. And what's very

interesting about his results and I'm just going to sort here, I'm going to find this, make sure we get this. Okay, so he says he's asked by the host, what you're really talking about is a shift in

future prospects change in a sense that they're losing power. He says, another way to put it is,

“we often think of the support for political violence among the losers of society, those marginal”

people that have little to lose, so they take a fling at political violence somehow. He says, this is not the case. That's exactly what you heard from Charlie Mane in the clip, right, is that people are getting more and more desperate, economically, precarious, economically, Pap says, no, he says in our surveys what you're seeing is large numbers of educated people, large numbers of middle-class people, large numbers of upper middle-class, on both sides,

are supporting political violence because they're the halves. And they're worried they're going to lose even more in the future. Now, that is an interesting description of Luigi Manjiani, who didn't seem to have any economic precarity other than a real problem with the health care system their own, his own experience with the health care system appears to have been terrible, but also upper middle-class by any definition, successful upper middle-class plagued by chronic pain.

But that would be a potential category. You slot Manjiani into, and potentially this attempted assassin would be assassin from the White House Correspondence Dinner as well. So it's interesting that Pap says those fit the profile, actually even more than the sort of weirdo, French person who has nothing to lose. And I just want to pause on that because it's very easy to say people who take matters into their own hands are going to be the ones that are economically

precarious. I might have given the set of version of that at some point, people who are drowning in student loan debt are utterly desperate to pay their health care bills. They can't afford houses. Well, that's actually, in many cases, people who might fit as upper middle-class or middle-class, certainly as middle-class right now, people who got college degrees, they have some debt, they're making over six figures, and you know, they live outside of a major

metropolitan area where they can't afford to buy a house. They can't afford to pay off their student loan debts because the cost of living and rent is already so high. So it doesn't necessarily preclude people from economic precarity that they're now in the middle-class or the upper middle-class. But what's also interesting about that is the more that you start to see the existential question as what's on the line in American politics. I think the more likely more, the more likely it

is that more people are going to start saying, hey, political violence could be justified because you're heading off a cliff that's going to hurt people, right? It's almost preemptive. It's what we talked about on last week's show is poll after poll. Finding Americans are no longer, they had no longer have the belief in their own agency in the political process. That has

“actually changed over time. And this is what I think is so important, and it's actually what”

paper is saying, you're seeing show up in some of the research here, is that people don't feel

as powerful, they don't feel like they have agency, they don't feel like politics without violence.

Well, they're more likely to say, politics without violence is no recourse, that peace is no recourse. And again, this is why, on last week's show, people can go back and watch it. I did like a long dive into Martin Luther King in the theory of non-violence as political action, because I don't think it's obvious to people anymore, that that is a noble route. And King argued that it was both a moral and efficacious route to political victories. That non-violence is precisely

powerful because it forces the predator, the perpetrator, the wrongdoer, to confront the innocence

“of the victim in any given case. So you go back and watch that if you want to, but I made”

that argument specifically because I do not think it is any more, I don't think it is obvious

to people anymore, that non-violence as political recourse is both powerful and moral,

because we all feel more and more existentially threatened in this political system. And there are a lot of people at the top who are to blame for thrusting us into a society where we do feel more and more precarious. We do feel less empowered, like we have less agency. And that doesn't excuse any of us, saying that we are going to take our lack of agency or perceived decline in individuals agency as licensed to commit violence because you believe that, for example, Brian Thompson

best made in a court of law. That is what makes successful in healthy policies. And yes, it feels

difficult to advance the question of Brian Thompson's guilt in a horrible blood-soaked system to the court of law, but it is just because the slope gets very slippery as soon as you stop doing it. And this is the argument that needs to be made, but it's the argument that's extremely difficult to make because so few people in charge of the system itself have empathy, true, real empathy for those who are suffering because of the system they built. Why? Because it implicates them.

“They are implicated in that suffering. And that's why, frankly, they don't particularly want to”

grapple with it. They don't want to confront their own failures. If you look right now what's

happening in Iran, for example, oil executives are making a lot of money. Lobius and DC are making a lot of money. If you're someone who benefits in the short term from stock markets, going up, which Donald Trump keeps trying very hard to ensure happens overall. It was the same thing with tariffs. If you're someone who benefits from that, and it's not just a matter of your 401k, then you're probably not too troubled. And everyone else sees that. It's like,

maybe I'm doing fine, right? Maybe I can afford rent, maybe I have an okay job, but it's not fair. Right? It's not fair. And everybody knows that life isn't fair. But when you keep getting

slapped in the face over and over again and told that the problem is you,

five of the people who are rigging the system and saying that it's not rigged and it's all great. You feel gas-lit, you feel angry, and what Professor Papers are doing by some of his own research is that essentially this is creating a bigger pool of people so aggrieved that they think political violence is sometimes justified. And the bigger that pool is, the more likely it is that some people just snap. And this is the period as he would describe it of populist violence

“that we find ourselves in right now. So, those insights, I think he talks about two major structural”

changes that are happening that are driving some of this. He says income inequality since the 1980s, the increase of income inequality since the 1980s, and he says the transition from America as a white majority country to a white minority country is the other part of that that he highlights. And he's not even talking about either of those two things in partisan terms. He's talking about what that does when a population kind of undergoes two big changes. Again, not he's not making

ideological partisan point. He's just saying that those are two huge trends that can really spark this sense of existential people finding themselves at existential breaking points, right? That if we do not do something now, it is all gone forever. And so the the pool of that type of person increasing is bad for all of us. And what worries me, paper says he thinks this could be the most violent midterm cycle in modern history in living memory. What worries me is that everything is

still so ticky tacky when we hear about political solutions from politicians. The Republicans don't even want to talk about the health care system. Democrats don't really have an answer to what they would do if they got immigration policy back in their hands. You can understand why people feel like nothing's going to change. The answer to that is not to start us co-reaning down the slippery slope of sporadic political violence,

“which actually is on piker. I think we were one of only shows that pointed this out last week.”

Went on to argue is not actually even as as wrong as I think he is uncertain things. He was arguing that look to his oron mom Donnie. If you're a leftist and you feel like you're at what's end and you want to take political violence into your own hand or political change in your own hand to do violence. Look to his oron mom Donnie and say it is possible there is a better way and to just go back to Martin Luther King. That way is the way of nonviolence is both more

it whatsoever. Let's talk about Spencer Pratt since we were just talking about Zoramam Donnie. I want to talk about Spencer Pratt. Spencer Pratt is obviously running against Karen Bass for mayor of Los Angeles and just in the last several days. Pratt has unleashed a chain of mega viral videos

“that have started to I think really shift the tone of the conversation online and you're starting”

to see that trickle into media coverage as well. It's already started to show up a bit in polling. So let's go ahead and listen to this latest video where Spencer Pratt actually talks about NGO grifting in California that is spreading right now rapidly on social media. We just finished doing a tour of the site with the Bureau of Engineering, the Bureau of Projected Administration and our contractors to check out the installation of the 16 new modular homes

that will include 64 interim housing fed. Northeast New Beginning was only possible because my team and I worked to get a grant from the state 16 million dollars built 64 new beds in council district one of interim housing. I'm sorry what? 16 million dollars for 64 beds? 16 million dollars

“built 64 new beds. That's 250 thousand dollars per bed. Why not just give them the money?”

I'll tell you why because these corrupt DSA politicians can't steal it if they just give it

as direct aid. Just like the fire rate scam. They'll never give an individual direct financial

assistance. It always has to be laundered through one of Austin millers or nithia romans and peos. So their friends can do god knows what with it. It goblins like yannice are gobbling up all your tax dollars and they're coming for more. This is how socialism starts vague platitudes that feel nice and soft in the language. The real problems never get addressed. It's the velvet glove for the iron fist. These are just people experiencing homelessness. People experiencing homelessness?

Why do they always talk like this? Why can't they just talk like a normal person? Well, I'm reading right now from a newsweek headline. This one says you can see it on the screen. Karen Bass has chances of beating Spencer Pratt as Conla Harris endorses her. This was just published as I'm coming to you now. Let's read the lead here. Karen Bass received the endorsement of Conla Harris as Poles show Bass in a potentially tight race in her reelection bid. Bass

a Democrat is facing a challenge from Spencer Pratt, a Republican reality television star, as well as several other candidates from her own party. Harris announced her support for Bass on Monday. Poles show Bass with less than the required 50% support to avoid a runoff with a significant portion of the electorate remaining undecided. So Harris's endorsement could carry weight among undecided Democrats. Okay. So Karen Bass gets Conla Harris's endorsement says

that she is quote deeply honored to have the endorsement of Karen Bass of Conla Harris. And all of this is happening while she's pulling around that a number that is here's let me just read it from a newsweek. They say the most recent public poll of the race showed Bass leading with 25% support followed by Pratt at 11% progressive city council member at Nithia Raman pulling at 9% and then Ray Wong and entrepreneur out of Miller each at 3%. 40% of respondents said they were undecided.

40% of respondents said they were undecided for I just need to put that 40% undecided with what's time, what time there is left in this race. And Conla Harris is coming in thinking that's going to support or that's going to boost. Who Spencer Pratt is referring to as Karen Basura,

Karen Trash basically in this race. Now if you don't know who Spencer Pratt is, you're not my age

and all likelihood Spencer Pratt was on the hills. I forget what their Spencer was ever on Laguna Beach. But Spencer Pratt was a reality star on the hills back in the early odds, which was kind of like a reality version of the OC, which was massively successful on prime time television. It was on Fox

“I believe actually in the early odds as well. And on the OC, I'm sorry, on the hills, it was this like”

very striking example of scripted reality, which has been transitioned out in the industry to some extent, the level of scripting that happened on the hills was insane. But Spencer Pratt was the villain. Spencer and Heidi Spidey cover of every tabloid villain villain. Nobody saw them otherwise

basically. They were like the people you loved to hate if you watched the show. And Spencer Pratt's

presence geared towards this kind of was eccentric. And I think it was like clever. He's having

played a villain on reality television. You kind of get the experience of your smart enough to see what sticks, what makes people tick is a better way to put it. Because you experience that just in your everyday interactions with people, well, you're going through the airport. I imagine when you're out in the street, I imagine like you get these very visceral reactions from people, yeah, it happens online, obviously, of course, too. But you get some of it in person. And you're

hearing it from the network probably who's pushing you in certain directions. And you start to understand

“again what makes people tick. I think Spencer Pratt has realized that Karen Bass can easily be turned”

into a villain. He watched how people produced him. And now he's producing Karen Bass. If you watch reality TV, you know that's become a little bit of an insider critique. Sometimes it's often uses a compliment to of how people are producing themselves. So they're trying to produce other people because you can usually tell it's mostly pejorative, right? It's like people are getting in the way of the plot by producing it. But you can see I think Spencer Pratt is producing Karen Bass

as a villain. Because he knows he has control of the media narrative because he's very good at social media. Karen Bass is a normal politician who is terrible at social media and continues to make terrible excuses for where she was when the fire broke out for her Pittsburgh reaction and the states Pittsburgh reaction state Democrats horrible reaction after the fire and why people like Spencer Pratt

“are I think he's like living in an air stream trailer now, which those are pretty nice these days,”

but why they don't have their homes back, why they haven't been able to rebuild. He's figured out that he can totally go around the media and start to drive a narrative and I think we have this article about Pratt that we can put up on the screen. It's a headline about how it's in yeah this isn't the Hollywood reporter I think today. Headline, why Spencer Pratt's grievance politics are more LA than you think. This is what I mean by how his total authority over new media is

starting to trickle into like traditional media like the Hollywood reporter and a little bit into polling because he's keeping bass from that 50% level and honestly just people skepticism of her is keeping them away from that 50% level. Spencer Pratt could run a terrible campaign where he didn't

have command of new media and still Karen Bass could be in real trouble, but it's it's amazing to

watch this happen in real time. I'm seeing people who aren't certainly aren't traditional Republicans or conservatives start to kind of nod at Spencer Pratt and give them some adaboys being like man you like didn't think you had it didn't think you had it but here you go like that video we played earlier of him being very specific and actually also very entertaining and attention grabbing in explaining exactly how some of these NGO griffs happen how

democratic opponents have allowed them to happen. I mean here's we could let's put this up of them. This is a Fox News headline about Rashida Thalib's big new plan Rashida Thalib's big new plan a new quote unhoused bill of rights to protect homeless camping. This is the big new plan from a star of the left to deal with the the real scourge and tragedy of homelessness that is overtaken many of America's cities. Now from my read of what that legislation wants to do,

it is create a million Karen Basses right let a million Karen Basses bloom in every state in America.

I mean that's basically already happening in in blue states and blue cities but to take the same approach that is failing over and over and over again. My understanding is that there's some

“new stuff in it but if you want to protect just take in an example if you want to protect camping”

what that does is create a huge vacuum for some of these grifty non-profits to step into. Some of which are populated by people with good intentions you can see it on the street of blue cities people out in the cold trying to make sure they're handing up blankets and the like but the non-profits I remember once in DC it was freezing cold there was a massive encampment under a bridge right next to where I used to live. It was tragic and it was dangerous dozens of people in really close

quarters with open fires open air drug market it was horrible but one of the homeless nonprofits in DC I remember talking to Michael Schillenberger about this at the time was actually

being the compassionate answer to the problem that happens when you protect the camping you get into

“the problem of your compassion leading to the least compassionate solutions imaginable”

which is rather than trying everything you can to get people into shelters to get people treatment and help you let them literally freeze to death on the streets in the name of compassion. This is what is going to create Spencer Prats and by the way grand platners not particularly on the homelessness issue or the non-profits issue set that aside and just mean people who are taking down these legacy establishment candidates who are really really they're looked

kindly upon in Washington DC that will be the toast of a happy hour held in their honor in Washington DC but I mean Janet Mills had to drop out of that race we're going to get to in this second Janet Mills had to drop out of that race basically so it's because there's just a total lack of curiosity a total lack of understanding of how bad the situation is and an unwillingness

to change course because they're implicated in that and it's going to be really powerful for Spencer

Prat who we talked about it here weeks ago I think is actually has a real shot because of his command of new media where he's seizing control seizing total narrative control with all of these like very clever attention grabbing videos that unveil corruption with the system in a very persuasive way provide people new information which is the currency of new media it's new information it's not just and I think that's where a lot of legacy politicians get it wrong too

“you have to move the ball forward otherwise nobody cares like you're silly little ads nobody cares”

about them if they're these like typical political ads these are not moving the ball forward you're not sharing new information so they might work to some extent salon TV and maybe if they're playing before a YouTube video they'll raise ways raise name identification but that's kind of it all right let's talk about grand planner uh since I brought him up I'm going to take a quick break but uh we're going to be back with more on a grand planner in just one moment because uh I do

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get their best selling dream powder for just $39 if you've been meaning to fix your sleep this is the time get dream they're best selling sleep powder for up to 40% off all right let's talk about Graham Plattener Graham Plattener is the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine who is now likely the party's official nominee to take on Susan Collins in a very hotly contested race for control of the Senate which as Mark Halpern has said is now very much on the table in November now Susan

Collins is notoriously difficult for Democrats to to unseat even in a even in a good year let's say for Democrats that's it's it's just tough to take on Susan Collins is a very good retail politician so it's it's not gonna be easy not gonna be easy but Graham Plattener is now the presumptive

that nomination actually dropped out of the race and Janet Mills is the sitting governor the sitting

governor of the state of Maine and man Janet Mills that is brutal Janet Mills by the way has been

“horrible and I think this is going to be sneakily I think this is going to be one of the most”

important issues of the race I'll tell you why in just one moment but she's been sneakily bad on men and women sports if you're on the right you probably know that but this is going to be a real question in real issue now that it is Plattener versus Susan Collins so let's start here I just want to take a look put it up on the screen at what we're looking at in some of these Senate polls see if RCP has their map okay so in key Senate races you can see Ohio look at that 48 to 45

so Republican 48.3 Democrat shared brown he may remember a 45.7 North Carolina you have Michael Wattley the Republican candidate 42.2% to 49% for boy Cooper this is North Carolina Georgia I was looking like us off hangs on there but they're still run off to get through Texas I actually really don't think is on the table but the other one I would watch closely there hasn't been a lot of polling in it yet is Nebraska so the big ones right now on my map are to really watch

“or Nebraska and Ohio I think it's going to be tough to unseat Susan Collins but if anyone is going”

to do it it was not going to be Janet Mills Janet Mills sitting governor establishment favorite

and Janet Mills had so much money and support that it was basically thought to be a joke that

Graham Plattener a combat veteran with all kinds of weird reddit posts in his past and that Nazi tattoo which by the way Graham Plattener has conceded was a Nazi tattoo because Graham Plattener covered it up that he got well on break during a deployment I think in Eastern Europe like some of Croatia somewhere like that after a drunken night out not there's some debate over whether Graham Plattener is telling the truth about when he knew that it was a Nazi tattoo and was he joking

about it to people when he was tending bar here in DC at the at the tune in he is now an oisterman

“is it's background populist that's up for debate as well as it's background really kind of hard”

scrabble his grandfather was a very famous architect his dad was basically like a country lawyer

and so conservatives the line of attacks so far has been he's a fake populist and he's a Nazi so there are two layers here we'll talk about the left we'll talk about the right I want to start with the left we can put this article that I wrote for unheard not long ago up on the screen this is Graham Plattener my first reaction was Graham Pat Plattener is forcing democratic leadership into retreat the question then is whether they are conquering the populists

like Plattener and Mamdoni or whether the populists like Plattener and Mamdoni are conquering them right are they going to push the democratic establishment more in their direction or are the centrists going to push the populists more in their direction now people debate this in the figure of aoc just alone like a she in example of somebody who successfully brought the party further left or has the center of the party co-opted aoc we might not have the exact answer to

that question yet but we do know that Graham Plattener was just trouncing mills in the polls despite everybody on the democratic center side saying that he was a Nazi he was a misogynist Janet Mills ran an ad about how women hate a Graham Plattener all of that and it didn't work he was still drawing lots of people the town halls he was wildly outpolling her and we all know that's true now even though doubt was being cast on the polling in the like because Mills dropped out which tells

you her own internal polling was probably a disaster and so how did Plattener do it well people might not agree with him across the board on some of these things democratic voters but the guy just goes in front of a microphone we've had on breaking points and talks like a normal human being he was being asked by David Sarota on the lever just in the last like 24 hours about whether he would go on Tucker Carlson's show because Tucker told the New York Times and the big podcast

everyone's been discussing that he's hoping to connect with Plattener and that's I mean Plattener

an answer to that right now he's like I've been wrestling with it and he just says that he didn't

“have a talking point ready to go and he openly didn't have a talking point ready to go and he brought”

the audience at you the voters in on his process now again I just want to put any ideological debates that you would have a Graham Plattener aside I would have many we get to that in just one moment but that is what voters want that is how you beat the party establishment it's how Trump beat the party establishment you didn't have talking points or one liners ready to go it's how he'd be the Republican establishment again in 2024 because people still hadn't picked up on that

he's literally if you look at this road a clip just sitting there talking to him the band a man normal underhurst and openly bringing people on his process as he thinks through the question whether or not to go on one of the biggest podcasts in the country and his thoughts were interesting you can see him wrestling with it in an interesting way that's an actual argument so now on the other hand the people of Maine are going to have some questions about cultural issues

“which Graham Plattener has accurately called a distraction he said that in the past we played the clip”

on the show a couple of weeks ago and it's it's right that there are elites at the top of the system this is what he talks about this is what Dan Osborne who's an independent with backing from some prominent people in the left who this is what he talks about in Nebraska it's what James Talarico tries to talk about kind of but that it's it's really not about left and right it's about top first bottom that's the Talarico line they're all coming to get you right and so

that's you know that you are being as we talked about earlier in the show that this system is being rigged you shouldn't say they're all coming to get you but that this system is being rigged by people who are profiting off of it and while they make it harder for you to succeed in ways

that are unfair that is really really powerful we're going to start seeing successful Republican

candidates talk like that but you also have to package it in the new media format which is what Plattener is doing successfully how is he going to talk about immigration how is he going to talk about again women sports which has been a really hot topic um title nine has been a really hot topic in Maine because Janet Mills has been in a protracted battle with the Trump administration over it so it would have been a problem for her as she defends the far left position about it

but it's going to be a problem with Plattener as I've said many times the litmus test is basically one of the big litmus test and politics right now is if you believe that a boy a child can become a girl should become a girl it's another element of that and if a man can become a woman we should become a woman and if you answer that yes someone can legitimately change who they are because the biology of it isn't that important so they can actually change because you can you know

fool the biology with hormones whatever else that you will fill that litmus test with voters if you say yes and you don't seem like you actually believe it which is for most people going to be where they fall Plattener might be one of those people who's actually as far left enough he really does believe that the biological imperatives are they they are so secondary tertiary

that it can basically be changed to the point where it's almost meaningless high-reborn if he says

that he really believes it it's going to be more successful for him than if he tries to say something that he doesn't really believe in and that's where it will be interesting to see who's co-opting whom right is he controlling and democratize that they controlling him but that's where

“I think yes it's true that it leads to use the culture whereas of distraction sometimes absolutely”

but where I disagree with that vehemently is that the left has constantly forced these cultural conversations where literally nobody was talking about changing Title IX to mean gender identity in addition to sex then the Obama administration just did it and expected schools K-12 get federal funding around the country just change and you were causing a distraction if you were a let's say a lesbian feminist who didn't like that or you were a Christian conservative who didn't like that

or you were just an independent parent who didn't like that you were told that you were a distraction no you weren't distracting anything that was a distraction from the left so it absolutely goes both ways it is baked into the definition of progressive that as you change things of course people are as you quote progress people are going to react when they don't like that direction of progress which is not categorically progress is not categorically a good thing and so sometimes

people are going to be unhappy with it and you can't say that they're creating a distraction by reacting even say some people are overreacting but you can't say that they're manufacturing distractions to peel attention away from these structural economic questions so I think that'll

huge huge wake-up calls for legacy politicians right now who are looking around and wondering

“how does Janet Mills drop out before you even get to the primary that's how all right”

I'm going to take one more quick break and then we're going to play a clip of Michael Rappaport

reacting to Joe Rogan I'm going to react to Rappaport reacting to Rogan why not but first happy

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truly so I hope that you will get involved and to get involved simply dial pound 250 and see they say the keyword baby that's pound 250 baby or visit preborn dot com slash Emily that's preborn dot com slash Emily okay let's go here with a Michael Rappaport getting very mad about Joe

“Rogan now they've fallen different sides of the Israel divide that's basically what you need to know”

about this conversation so Rappaport posted a montage well actually posted a clip that was circulating from a new what do they call it protect our parks episode of Rogan and it's like yellow is a Norman and here's the here's the clip you'll see it and then we'll bring in Rappaport slots America does it yeah we we're like not the best people to handle stuff and we're like still like we should handle it you know what else does it whoo Israel let me everything on Israel

I'm not blaming everything yeah they're they're part of it it is amazing how many high profile

Jewish people just they have a opinion about everything but when you get to this like there is a void that or come up with some random way to justify annihilating an entire city yeah it's just funny to me when Americans are like hey this other country's overstepping yeah we bump into us yeah we were pretty close second Afghanistan it really come with you twice second one was just going to check this out Russia yeah I guess so but yeah whatever well that was a

long time ago that's true everybody did that's dead but based on today we we we we we we we like Lebanon bro they're doing a Lebanon right now it's crazy well they look for Hezbollah they've got to look under rubble hmm okay so Rappaport let's put his reaction up on the screen here this is how he responded talking shit and gallows humor doesn't make you racist or hurtful

“I guarantee a Joe Rogan makes jokes about gay's black Asians I think he says latins and everything”

also on camera but big bad Joe Rogan only makes jokes about Jewish people on camera he's totally comfortable doing it weekly on camera and it has pigs like Tim Dylan et cetera it's had her joined him doing it only Jewish people why it's because the last form except we'll hate and one of the reasons it's so acceptable is because gay's black Asians latins and everyone else hasn't said anything about it all right so the point that Rogan was making there and and

Rappaport by the way if you don't know Rapport's also kind of comes from a comedy background he's an actor but Rogan is talking about the the Jewish state and so it's not irrelevant in that case to make an argument that he believes which I actually don't think is true but like I like Joe Rogan I don't have a problem with making this argument I just don't think it's true that a lot of like high profile Jewish people don't have anything to say about the situation now I think what he

actually meant is about atrocities and what's happened over the course of the war and that that actually is a different position so just trying to be charitable with how Rappaport was interpreted what he heard from Rogan but I want to respond to this because it is so insane is such a crazy point

about sexual orientation the same goes with Tim Dylan I would actually expect Rappaport to know this

because he is in that space if you don't watch Joe Rogan if you don't listen to Tim Dylan if you only

“encounter some of these comedians Shane Gillis from clips you should probably not talk about them”

period unless you preface everything you say with quote I only watched the clips then you have license go ahead then you have license fire away say whatever the hell you want because everyone then knows your exposure to these comedians is just from clips but it's not at all like what Rappaport is saying is not at all true and anybody who remembers Rogan's history this is why Bernie Sanders was so bad for thinking about going on Rogan couldn't do it damn candidates couldn't go on

Rogan Kamala Harris couldn't go on Rogan because it was so politically incorrect nobody wanted it to happen actually wanted it to happen so that is just a really I think a really uncalled for smear I thought this on Megan show earlier today however people disagree on these issues just on a human level think before you smear people you should use your social media platforms if you're like getting an arguments to engage and not rage and I'm not just saying that because it rhymes persuade and not

rage like otherwise what is the point is is the point that you are getting likes and retweets because your likes and retweets don't translate into a better country i'm sorry they don't so if you are posting on x uh because not because you're trying to persuade or engage or somebody in good faith but do something else right are you just trying to make a a point you're trying to I don't apply this to like jokes necessarily because they're jokes but if you're I'm talking about people who

are trying to make political arguments on x if you're doing it to to rage instead of persuade not as good of a rhyme a little bit more off rhyme there don't forget about my degree in poetry but that is not making the country better and often because algorithms incentivize extremes it polarizes the country further into these extreme camps meaning I hate this or I love this I

endorse this or I condemn this and it ends up with ad hominim so often and it's also not always

“accurate because you're racing to get likes and retweets I don't know if that's what rap”

part was doing here but again like if you had stopped and just thought about this for I don't 30 minutes 10 minutes uh you could find information to the counter on google like literally in a minute and rap a part should know this maybe rap a part does know this and he's acting in good faith but even if he is and he's acting in bad faith but even if he is acting in good faith just don't have to do this like on a human level smearing people in this way numbs us to bigotry it numbs us to bigotry

and it's making people crazy it's driving people insane it's making them very angry and sometimes that anger turns into uh something even less constructive and can go in really dark directions people check entirely out of society or they are attracted to more fringe stuff because again they feel disempowered and like they like agency because no matter how many times they try to make an

argument you have people not my go overboard he's just an example of powerful people to do this

who are going to smear them as one thing or another that they're not and so that can be a gateway drug all right i'll stop ranting on this and take one happy hour question here this is from Nate uh who emailed Emily at devilmaker media.com to say are we in a state of permacrisis or does it just feel like it Nate I can go on this question for a couple of hours probably we are in a state of

“permacrisis and I believe that is directly downstream of nuclear proliferation of nuclear technology”

which basically erased borders much of our technology has done this uh from the internet to smartphones to social media loaded with the internet in our pockets it's just put us all in in closer more media proximity on a daily basis and so uh that that state of permacrisis humans thrust into close proximity I don't know if people know done barx number but with more human beings that you could ever conceive of knowing the names of being able to talk to let alone instant

tanniously that is a recipe for permacrisis there is no shire at all which actually goes with another question I was going to respond to from Gregory who says Emily just a quick note I haven't been able to read the Lord of the Rings either because I said on a happy hour episode which is the podcast version of the show that we do on Fridays and the podcast feeds so subscribe there if you're not a podcast sub you get it in your inbox every Friday I'll probably start taking a

couple of them on these shows uh more and more in the future because they're fun but Gregory says

he said I haven't been able to read Lord of the Rings either and I also adore the Hobbit CS Lewis etc same goes for Chester 10 now I'm in my early 50s one child and another possibly in the works and perhaps it's just a season for some but I'm believing I can do it now I crack the books read

some Chester 10 a bit of Lord of the Rings and thought I'm ready for this finally I'll report back

successful if or if diluted Gregory I'll go out to hear it I do look forward to hearing back

“from you on that point because I do think I think about the Shire a lot as somebody who”

loved the Hobbit but couldn't quite get in the Lord of the Rings I mentioned on last week's

happy hour that there's this line from Frodo to Gandalf basically I'm paraphrasing it but saying like

why did this have to happen in our time in my time and Gandalf says I can't control that but we can control what we do with the time that we have and I feel like that's the the misery of the

“permacrisis but also the upside and the glass half-full view from Gandalf of course that no you can't”

control what happens in your time you can't control that you would born into a world that was

trying to adapt to the catastrophe of erased borders and I don't mean that in just a political sense I just mean that people with from all kinds of different places who live different lives with different religions and backgrounds are now thrust into a constant state of political conflict because of nuclear weapons and obviously also because of social media or ability to hear speak talk to each other see each other that quickly of course we're going to be in what feels like a state of

permacrisis but we can't control that we can control what we do in the state of permacrisis so again that could be a two-hour discussion but want to thank you all for listening to this Emily only addition of afterparty love it hate it Emily at double my care media dot com let me know we'll be back here on Wednesday got some big guest lined up for the near future so make sure you

“stay tuned please please please subscribe if you haven't yet that is the best way to help us on”

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