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Hey everyone, welcome to afterparty. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. We have three guests and a big announcement on tonight's show. We're gonna be joined by Christopher Bedford, Sarah Bedford, and author Lionel Shriver over the course of the next hour. Plus, so thank you very much for being with us. It's, like I said, a night where we will be bringing you a little special announcement towards the end of the show. So please do stick around for that. And if you do have any questions, I will be answering them. I record the weekly edition of Happy Hour on Thursday afternoons. So if you want a question to get in this week, or if you want to get a question in this week, go ahead and email emilyevilmycare media.com roughly before tomorrow afternoon. And I'll work through those in the inbox. It's a sad night for me and I know for many of you as well. We're going to cover James vanderbeek's passing in just one moment. Pam Bondi was on Capitol Hill today for what has to be one of the wildest, wildest congressional hearings of all time. And that is a very, very high bar, of course. So we're gonna talk a bit about that. Sarah has some reporting on Fulton county to discuss with us. The Washington Post is crumbling and Lionel Shriver's new book is about immigration. So we talked to her about this fascinating debate Katie Kirk had with Senator Rand Paul and how the entire conversation needs to be reimagined and reframed for Just the sake of, you know, the, the human element that's involved in it. We talk a lot about why the media gets that wrong and why the left gets that wrong. So we are very, very excited about it. And that was pre recorded earlier in the day, which means I'm going to be in the chat. So make sure if you're watching this live, you head on over to the the YouTube chat. I will jump in when we have Lionel with us. Now, as promised, I do want to talk about James Vanderpeak who passed away today at the age of 48 after a battle battle with colore cancer. He has six children. He's leaving six children and a wife behind. The remembrances of James Vanderbeek are reflective of a man of, of great character, which is always very telling. I have a small personal remembrance of James Van Der Beek which blows my mind that I can even say that like many, many women of my generation, James Van Der Beek was the A plus list star of our teenage years. Now I'm a bit younger than the real like core Dawson's Creek era. I actually was not allowed to watch Dawson's Creek though I have a very viv a memory of when I was like 5 years old walking downstairs and seeing Dawson's Creek on the TV and being told I could not watch it go back upstairs. And that I think piqued my interest. So by the time I was, I don't know, like middle school age, the reruns had just started. TBS played a rerun every day and DVR had recently come out. So I would dvr. My parents, if they're listening to this, are going to throw a fit. But I would DVR the episodes of two shows that I was not allowed to watch, Friends and Dawson's Creek and both of which had recently ended and watch them and delete them. Before my parents got home, I had a small window between like soccer practice and my parents getting home that I would, I would watch and delete and they played them in sequence. So I got to watch both shows fully in sequence. And again, like many, many people, Dawson's Creek had a massive impact and it helped me sort of map my own thoughts about the world and, you know, where you can go after after high school and as an ambitious kind of young person, what that can look like. I just was. So again, like many people, this is not unique. Connected with the character of Dawson Leary. And even if you didn't know James Vanderbeek well or even if you didn't ever watch Dawson's Creek, or know of Dawson's Creek. There's a really important story to be told when it comes to James Vanderbeek. And my personal anecdote is that he was a huge Breaking Points fan. He was like a very dedicated Breaking Points viewer. And he. He did us a great favor of coming on the show back in 2023 to make a very prescient point. He decided to speak out and ask Joe Biden to hold a Democratic primary debate that proved to be so wise and prescient and brave. And it's obvious to many of us on the right, but to people in Hollywood world, that's not such an obvious point. And now we know that James Vanderbeek hardly had all the money in the world. His family does have a GoFundMe right now because they were doing everything they could to beat his cancer financially. You may remember he was auctioning off memorabilia from Varsity Blues at one point. It's expensive. And I think that just speaks to the fact that this guy wasn't. If you. If you know much about Dawson's Creek, you know that there were licensing problems and all of that. This guy was not, you know, rolling in residual dough like a lot of other people are from that era. And I think that, again, just speaks to the bravery of him coming out and saying, Democrats need to hold. Hold the primary debate. It was a very unpopular thing to say at the time. Very, very unpopular thing to say on the time, at the time on the left, let alone in a media. And he did it. So it was brave and it was smart and it was wise. And I think before or after the interview, Sagar and Crystal told James that I was beyond excited to have him on the show, and I was a huge fan. And he DM'd Sagar afterwards. And it just blows my mind. Like, if you think of the person who was like the biggest celebrity to you when you were a kid and then imagine them even, like, knowing a scintilla about you. He sent Sagar a DM that said, please give Emily my best and tell her to keep up the great work. Mind blowing. And he didn't have to do that. He didn't have to come on the show. He didn't have to speak out. But for me, it just is. Why this, this is the explanation of why so many people connected with James Vanderbeek is Dawson's Creek was this absolute love letter to monoculture at its most positive manifestation. Like the positive theory of monoculture, Dawson's Creek was the saccharine love story too. It was about popular art that brings everyone together. And if you remember, Dawson idolized Steven Spielberg. He famously, in his bedroom set, there are Spielberg posters, Jaws, Jurassic Park, ET all over the walls. And he saw Spielberg as somebody who pioneered this new technology to capture these very like ancient human emotions, the oldest human emotions, the most common human emotions. But he did it in these really groundbreaking ways, but for everyone. For everyone. And Dawson's Creek was a monocultural phenomenon, of course, right? This was for people in high school at the time, water cooler tv, appointment tv. You were out of the loop if you weren't watching Dawson's Creek. It connected with so many people while using in more elevated dialog. That was so ridiculous. I mean it was elevated to the point of being completely ridiculous. But I think what Vanderbeek brought to the character of Dawson was just this awe and this innocent in the most all American way where he loved his family and friends, but he wanted to project that love. He was ambitious enough to kind of project that love to everyone via the magic of a film and monocultural film. Film that was like big budget, appealed to everyone. The kind of thing that like Top Gun 2 was the only recent movie to really, really do. And as he went through life, Vanderbeek really came to realize that family and marriage would be more fulfilling to him than Hollywood or even work. And this is so funny again from the man who played Dawson, whose character was known for being ambitious and a careerist who's obsessed with making it big in Hollywood. Dawson wanted Hollywood, but eventually it seems like James Vanderbeek really just wanted family. And that's so fitting. I think that's so fitting. I think it mirrors an arc in the culture more broadly, especially for millennials and those that wide eyed wonder that he brought to Dawson Leary, I think mirrored a lot of our hopes for the American monoculture, that it would be full of Dawson Leary's who couldn't care less about really the money or the fame, but had this idealistic belief in Hollywood and film bringing people together in a way that was also beautiful and inspiring. So it did like, it mirrored a lot of our hopes for the American monoculture until it didn't. And until we realized that often great art and a great life can speak to smaller communities and that truth can get muddled sometimes on the global stage. And you can believe that Capeside, Massachusetts is a nice place and you can make a story about your first love that resonates without even trying to turn it into Jaws. Although Jaws is also really an ancient story. Emotionally. Monoculture doesn't have to be this tired. IP doesn't have to be the 25th Jurassic Park. It can be art. And we don't really have to be ashamed of that. That to me is one of the biggest big resonant messages of Dawson's Creeker was when I was younger, I saw like, I loved popular art and popular culture, and Dawson did too. And he was not ashamed of it. And he would get knocked down when he was defending his favorite films by the. The critics or people in academia who were eager to say, well, no, no, no, this French film or this is really what. What art is. And he would stand by Spielberg. I think he was completely right and completely vindicated. And that's one of the things that really resonated with me in a very meta sense, because Dawson's Creek itself was monoculture. And James Van Der Beek suffered and he embraced really the truth of humanity through his wife and his kids and through his suffering. I don't know if that would be true of Dawson, but I think it actually would. And what James Van Der Beek wanted at the end of the day is what Dawson wanted at the end of the day. It wasn't success or great movies. It was just love and fulfillment. And we saw that over and over again. So let's roll this clip here of James Van Der Beek recently on the Today show, looking like he was suffering. And we know that he was talking about God.