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Emily (5:10)

Edu all right. For this evening's after party, I'm really excited to be joined by Blake Neff. Blake is the executive. He is a producer over at the Charlie Kirk Show. Blake, I think I almost gave you a promotion just now and said that you were the executive producer.

Blake Neff (5:26)

But alas, I think I've gotten a literal promotion before because someone just referred to me by the wrong title once and then kept doing it. I think that was way back when I was at the Daily Caller. I think I just became a senior reporter and then I just asked if I could put that on a card and they said yes, so I'll take it again.

Emily (5:42)

It's funny you say that, because I was going to ask, was that at the Daily Caller? That sounds exactly like something that would happen at the Daily Caller.

Blake Neff (5:49)

The Caller was great. Like 2015, 2016 Daily Caller. That was a lot of fun.

Emily (5:53)

Oh, my gosh, it was. That was peak civilization, arguably.

Blake Neff (5:59)

It was certainly peak media. Obviously, the 2016 election, it just, anything went. We didn't know about all the things that would be disappointing, all the things that would cause a ton of problems. Cancel culture hadn't ramped up. It was just everything was full of possibilities. It was full of fun. I was still like 20, you know, 25. And so it's not. It's not jaded by developments.

Emily (6:21)

Oh, okay. Blake. Jaded Neff. That's now his middle name.

Blake Neff (6:24)

They call me Black Pill Blake at the office sometimes.

Emily (6:28)

That is such a good name. I've never. I'm, like, kicking myself for not having thought of that before. Black Pill Blake, I want to talk to you about Minneapolis because speaking of black pills, the scene in Minneapolis just keeps getting. I mean, it feels like it keeps getting more and more unsettled. It wasn't the night of the shooting that things really started to fall apart. Now it almost feels like a build, like a slow is slowly building in Minneapolis. Once again, I want to roll this clip from CNN over the weekend where people can hear the CNN reporter reacting to the lack of police presence. Let's roll this clip.

Blake Neff (7:08)

So, Laura, right now we are in downtown Minneapolis. We've been following this protest outside of a hotel where these protesters believe federal agents may be staying. And just in the last few seconds, it appears they're trying to get actually inside this hotel. While there was law enforcement little bit earlier in the evening, we have not seen any in the last 30 minutes or so to this point as they are now, clearly, it seems to have reached at least one of the doors here. But at the very least, everyone out on the street making as much noise truly as humanly possible. Okay, you're burying the lead there. You're burying the lead there.

Emily (7:47)

What's the lead? Hit us with the lead.

Blake Neff (7:50)

That's the Kenosha guy. The fiery but mostly peaceful protest at the blaze in the background. It's the same guy. Now that.

Emily (7:57)

This is why Blake is incredible, his recall. So this is Omar Jimenez, who is the fiery but mostly peaceful man from Kenosha, Wisconsin. And there he's. I mean, maybe you're surprised, Blake. I don't know. Is this the new cnn? He's like, hey, where are the cops?

Blake Neff (8:13)

Yeah, no, I think they send their guys to these scenes. But no, you're right. I think there's an interesting dimension. America is a very big country. There's 340, 350 million people in it. But there's a real power even today for one state or one city to become this focal point of national politics. It symbolizes a lot of things. And Minneapolis really has taken on that role, I would say, probably for this entire decade since George Floyd, of course, it's got that kind of perfect collision of the impacts of immigration, the decline of the blue state model of government. They have a big. They have a big. They're a big concentration of that certain type of. Let's just call it like white progressivism. The stuff you see in Portland, you also see it in Minneapolis here. And it's going to cause it to constantly be generating these stories that we've gotten used to seeing with the Somali fraud, with defund the police, with depolicing neighborhoods, so on and so forth. And I think you are right that we're going to fix it. And it does feel like it is building towards something. You'd see similar stuff in Portland, a city much like Minneapolis, where they could. They were besieging that federal courthouse for months on end in 2020, and eventually it turned into actual shootings of people in maga. And you had DHS personnel arresting people. That was one of the original cases where they were claiming guys in black vans are grabbing people. I do worry, you're right, that we're building towards something. I will say, though, I don't think it's going to be like 2020. There's a clear difference between the ice stuff and BLM. And the answer is it's not BLM. So you're much more what I would watch out for is I'm much more worried that someone is going to be radicalized into. I'll just say it. Trying to do a shooting on ice officers or trying to burn down a building, something a really.

Emily (10:10)

Well then that happened in Dallas. We've totally forgotten that happened in Dallas, what, two months ago?

Blake Neff (10:15)

Exactly. Exactly. You could see a much more extreme version. You could see repeated cases of that or a more extreme version of that. That is what they're whipping people up towards. And that's the kind of person getting radicalized by this. It's not the decentralized 10,000 people take over a neighborhood and they torch a target and they loot a footlocker. It's much more ideologically radicalized people who are open to much more violent action. The kind of people who in 2020, who burned down that police station, you might remember, that was not part of the looting of Target. That was done by much more radical white antifa types who were taking advantage of the wider riot to do an anti police action. And I would be very worried that we could see something like that as this continues.

Emily (11:00)

Well, I'm glad you went in that direction because I was gonna actually ask you. What? Why? I mean, I've read a million think pieces on it by now. I've listened to Walter Kern and very smart people who are very familiar with Minnesota. And you and I are both from the states that border Minnesota and we're both like Midwestern Christians. And when I think about that, it makes me. All of this is like an interesting part of the end of Tom Holland's dominion where he writes a little bit about how wokeness is in his perspective, like an extension. He wasn't a Christian when he wrote this, but an extension. It's sort of like radical Christianity that you constantly champion the victim to the point where there's almost a tyranny of this like social justice movement. And you know, it's. It's this like weird bastardization of the gospels. I don't know that. What do you make of that argument? Because I.

Blake Neff (11:58)

There's something to be said for that and I'm glad you mentioned we're both from the neighboring states. Is. Do people from your neck of Wisconsin, do they mostly. Are they people who move to the Twin Cities or people who move to Chicago?

Emily (12:08)

Because I would say it's even okay.

Blake Neff (12:12)

Because I certainly in my head in the Dakotas, what you'll see is that's just. That's the city. That's where you move if you're, you know, aspirational. It's the local version of the person who moves to New York or la. And it does carry with it a common ideological package. And it is that brand of really intense liberalism. And you could call it the post Christian Christianity. Christianity taken to its extremes. I was saying on our own show today, there's this element where I think Christianity itself does supply some balance for things. And when you take out God, it starts really going awry. And why did we get open borders? It's that the left sort of lost the ability to articulate valid reasons to not let someone into America, to kick someone out of America if they don't belong here. And I think you'll see a similar thing with this law enforcement engagement that they practically. They can't articulate a valid reason for a cop to arrest a criminal. And that's very dark to think about. And another thing is just they've really built up this whole pathological sympathy with people who should not be getting our sympathy where they are threats to the public. Our sympathy should lie with the victims of crime, the victims of mass immigration, with the weak people in our own society. And it's almost like they've broken their ability to have that thought process.

Emily (13:45)

Well, yeah, it's this idea that the left sort of gets to determine which victim is the sort of macro tyrant. I'm not talking about individuals, but I'm talking about like a class that is the tyrant. And that's. I'm trying to like, explain this maybe to people who haven't read Dominion, because it's a super, super thick book. And these conversations have been hot in evangelical circles. For example, you know, we've had Ali Beth on before, Ali Beth Stucky, obviously, who wrote about this, and Toxic Empathy and all of that. But let's play this clip. I think this is going to be helpful of Sarah Haines on the View reacting to new video where we see Renee Good's car kind of parked in the middle of the road. I mean, we've always seen that. But we're getting more context as the video comes in. Let's roll the clip.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (14:31)

And protocol wasn't followed.

Emily (14:33)

So the law enforcement are not supposed.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (14:35)

To step in front of a vehicle because it instantly becomes a threat of death and therefore unlikely shootings are apt to happen, which happened here.

Emily (14:42)

And a woman lost her life. But he was also holding a phone.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (14:45)

Up while he was holding his weapon.

Emily (14:48)

These are all things that they shouldn't be doing. But it is a reminder, as this is happening in our country, that we have to have peaceful protest Because I.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (14:58)

Think anytime you have someone that is.

Emily (15:01)

Obstructing or cutting people off, they she does not deserve to be dead.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (15:07)

But that is also creating this situation of a tinderbox. And this is why we're seeing more.

Emily (15:12)

Shootings right now, is these legal watchers.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (15:15)

Step back, record everything, get it all down.

Emily (15:18)

But the fact that she was cutting off the road also contributed to the heat of this situation.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (15:25)

We've got to remain peaceful. You can leave no room for error on this.

Emily (15:29)

I just want to say I don't know why she was, from my understanding, she had just dropped her kid off. Well, her videos have now revealed that.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (15:37)

Her partner and her were coming to watch these or slow up the ice. They want to notify the public the ICE officers are coming.

Emily (15:45)

So she meant to park that way. So actually an important clarification there from Sarah Hanes because as more information has come in, it's clear to people with eyeballs that Renee Goode's wife and actually Renee Goode herself were participating in obstructing deportations and ICE detentions. And this is something that's happened all over the country. It is a concerted movement and proudly so from the people on the left who do it. But before I turn it over to you, Blake, I want to put this Bill Milluchin post up on the screen. Bill Malluchin obviously has covered immigration very closely for Fox News better than many, many, many other journalists. Maluchin goes through the list of people who have been apprehended in Minnesota over and over and over again. We are talking about violent criminals. It is not to say every migrant who has settled in Minneapolis over the last five or so years is a violent criminal. It is though, that when statistically you flood the country with a non citizen population that, as David Leonhart at the New York Times has said, rivals Ellis Island. We're talking a minimum 8 million people, according to Leonhardt, in the last five or so years, really happened in about three years of the Biden administration. Statistically, you have violent criminals, many of whom Malugian points out, are convicted. And this entire part of the narrative, you've basically heard from Sarah Haynes and Bill Millucian, one voice on the View and Fox News. And it seems to me, Blake, I don't know what your experience has been, but it's sort of absent from the broader conversation.

Blake Neff (17:21)

It is absent and that's deliberate. There's something very mendacious about what they've been doing because with these obstruction exercises they've been carrying out to hinder ice, gum up ice. Slow down, ice. One of the effects of this is it is a genuinely, for lack of better term, it's a calculated way to bring about an outcome like what we just saw. Because when you are maximizing the friction with police, police who have to worry about violence already from what they're doing, they're trying to arrest illegal immigrants. Some of these people run, some of these people attack the police, some of these people open fire on the ICE agents. They're already worried about that. And now you're introducing into that volatile situation a bunch of people whose job is basically to harass ICE and get in their face. And you have people getting whipped up by the rhetoric that they're the Gestapo, that they're the ss, that they're any number of evil things. So they have to worry, oh, a lunatic from this group might also shoot us. What they're basically doing is they're taking these protesters and they're practically using them as human shields, where they're engineering a situation where someone who's nervous or afraid makes a judgment call that's very difficult to make. And they could shoot someone like this. Renee Goode and then these people are already, they were planning far in advance of this. What do we do when that happens? Go into overdrive, Continue the operation. And it's all for the sake of trying to make it so that ICE cannot enforce the nation's laws. This is a long term effort to shut down the valid functioning of U.S. laws. And that's hugely destructive, obviously to the agenda of the Trump administration, to what people voted for. But it's also incredibly destructive to the country. If you can basically develop this strategy to say in these specific cities or in these specific situations, the law will go unenforced. They're trying to make it so. ICE will have to look at a situation and say, it's not worth the heat, it's too dangerous, back off.

Emily (19:33)

Well, and this is where I want to compare it to the civil disobedience of, like, the civil rights era, for example, where there were laws intentionally being broken to call attention to the injustice of the law itself. I actually don't think, Blake, that many of these people who go out in the streets, some of them definitely do have, like, full ideological commitments to open borders and are radical. But when you have people, like, from the periphery who are hangers on to this movement, I genuinely, honest to goodness, this is something that Jesse Kelly said the other day on Meghan's show. I genuinely feel badly for some of them because I don't think that they know what Bill Mulligian posted, which is that there are laundry lists of convicted criminals, people who are going to victimize people like Lake and Riley. And just because there's this narrative about the left's chosen victim in this scenario does not mean that that is the correct, actually assessment of the situation at hand. That is the correct ethical lens to look through it, to look at it through. And because there's this monopoly on the narrative, you rarely ever hear the stories of all of these other people in mass media who are literally convicted criminals, who are. I mean, the officer in this case was, was dragged in a car while he was trying to in Minnesota, get to a convicted sex abuser, not someone who was charged with sex abuse. And it's up in the air. Not someone who was charged like a convicted sexual abuser. And it just is maddening how none of that kind of big picture framing ever gets considered in the conversation.

Blake Neff (21:17)

You're absolutely correct. And it's. I do find myself wondering, are they aware of this? Would they change their mind if they were? Sometimes I just go around to the feeling that, no, they wouldn't because there are people who know this. We have policies that make it so you can't seize an illegal immigrant who is literally in a prison cell because they committed a crime and were sentenced for it. And you can't have ICE pick those people up from a prison. Those people absolutely know what's going on. And we still have.

Emily (21:53)

That sounds crazy to people who don't follow this, but that is literally what these sanctuary laws do. It's mind boggling, but that is actually what they do.

Blake Neff (21:59)

You and I can both say one of the biggest obstacles to winning over fully Normie, people who aren't online aren't tracking the news every day. One of the biggest problems to winning people over, as you'll see in one of our future stories on that trans case, is people just, they don't believe you when you tell them how insane something they are doing is. And very much the case on immigration, that they can look exactly at what these people are doing and just say, nope, they belong here. We can't send them back. You can see really extreme examples of this in Europe. There was a recent case in the UK where a, I believe a migrant who was either a sex criminal or a murderer from Germany, a British court ruled he couldn't be sent back to Germany because despite being a German citizen, he did not know the German language and so he would not interact there. So he gets to say in the UK or they can't get sent back to another country because they could be punished for being a sex criminal. For being. For being any number of things. They're more punitive towards criminals than we are, so they stay in our society forever. It's truly outrageous what they will do. And so I just can't be optimistic at all. I think these people can look at exactly how evil it is and say, yes, more of that. And I don't know how they get to that point, but clearly thousands of people do.

Emily (23:19)

Cut to the Hulk, who arrived at the Golden Globes red carpet with other celebrities last night wearing a be good pin. Including, by the way, unfortunately, actually, I don't really care. Jean Smart, the wonderful Jean Smart of the wonderful show hacks. Again, some people care about this thing. I'm not one of those people. But let's take a listen to Mark Ruffalo, the one and only. Just getting into. He's a very political guy. Let's. Let's listen to him. Wealthy actor weighing in on the situation. Let's take a look at this clip.

Blake Neff (23:52)

So this is for her. This is for the people in the United States who are terrorized. For Renee today, I know I'm one of them. I love this country, and what I'm seeing here happening is not America. Mark, why do you feel that this platform is still useful to spread a message like this? Listen, I want to pretend like this. I want to be here to celebrate, and I am here to celebrate. And I'm proud to have a Golden Globe nomination. But also, this is not normal anymore. And so I don't know how I, how I could be quiet. And I'm feeling a little sick, so it's hard to be at right now.

Emily (24:27)

All right, Blake, we have one more clip of Mark Ruffalo that we thought was worth playing. Let's play.

Blake Neff (24:30)

Oh, thank goodness.

Emily (24:32)

Yeah, I know. I knew you would be excited about that.

Blake Neff (24:34)

What do you think we can do to. What are the solutions? Listen, I think most Americans want the same thing. They want a little sun on their face. They want to know that their kids.

Emily (24:43)

Are going to be okay.

Blake Neff (24:44)

They want to know their kids are.

Emily (24:45)

Going to be safe.

Blake Neff (24:45)

They want to be able to pay their rent. They want to be able to know they're going to send their kids to a good education. But right now, the whole. The whole Senate, the whole Congress has been taken over by corporations. So who's there fighting for us now? Nobody. But if somebody did, they got us at each other's throats. The billionaires got us at each other's throats. Right. We're out there killing each other. You know what the solution is? It's doing something for the working people. Putting all your focus on that.

Emily (25:15)

Okay. A lot to deal with there.

Blake Neff (25:17)

You could stick that rant. You could stick that rant in like a 90s movie and it would be getting shared and everyone would see how profound it was.

Emily (25:26)

It could be John Cusack. Yeah. Or maybe it would just be Mark Ruffalo. Because it's the 90s. All right. But like on that point, I mean, he's talking about we need to stand up for the working people. The billionaires are dividing us. And you and I probably hear that and are like, oh, you mean the billionaires who wanted the country to be flooded with cheap labor and who then victimized working people. The people who were, you know, hit by a bus in Springfield, Ohio. Lake and Riley, Jocelyn Nungare. We can go through all of these examples that haven't even gotten the attention that Kabla Lake and Riley and Jocelyn Noongaray that they have gotten. There's so, so many people who are just normal, not wealthy, who their checks have been different. They've been victimized by identity fraud and had to go through years of torture, basically trying to just get their identity back from one of the thousands and thousands, if not millions of migrants who have taken American workers identities. There are the people who are killed, who are sexually abused, who are hit by drunk drivers, and all of that of people who, who. Whether you think the crime rate of illegal immigrants is higher or lower, there's dispute over that. But whatever you think of it, we have our own problems with all of these crimes. These are people who should not be here. And working people, because billionaires push to flood the country are the ones who get the short shrift. And celebrities just, they only, they think. It only goes one way to the conversation we were just having. The only victims here could possibly, possibly be the migrants or.

Blake Neff (27:06)

You mentioned that. Or billionaires who. They engineered a giant censorship apparatus from 2015 through 2023, and then one billionaire blew it up. Like, you don't want to blame billionaires or exonerate billionaires. They're basically. They're people like you and I. Or maybe some of them are half Nephilim or something. But I've heard that theory from someone, but wow. Yeah, it's. I just. On the Golden Globes question, my friend says, if I'd seen Mickey 17, I would have a good dig at Mark Ruffalo. But I didn't see that. I don't think I've seen any of his movies other than he was the Hulk. Right.

Emily (27:50)

He was the Hulk.

Blake Neff (27:51)

Okay. All right. So I did see that one. And then. But besides that, it's just, I think the Romans considered actors on par with prostitutes. I think that was a good system. I think we could go back to that one.

Emily (28:05)

I'm all for that. And you know, actually knowing that Blake was so passionate about the arts and Hollywood, I lined up a whole bunch more actually of pop culture stuff to get to. So we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be back in a moment so that Blake can have his time to weigh on what he really cares about, which is Hollywood. So one second. If you finally want to fix your stomach, make your hair healthier and stronger, and add some glow to your skin in 2026, you need to add colostrum to your daily routine. Today's sponsor, Cowboy Colostrum offers the highest quality bovine. That's cow, of course, colostrum available in the U.S. cowboy colostrum is 100% made in America from 100% American grass fed cows. Unlike other Colostrum brands, Cowboy Colostrum is true first day whole colostrum rich in bioactives like immunoglobulins and growth factors. But don't worry, Cowboy Colostrum only collects the surplus colostrum after baby calves have had their fill. Cowboy Colostrum isn't processed or stripped down. Their Colostrum is whole, full fat and high in protein for ultimate nutrient density, making it the highest quality bovine colostrum you can buy. Liquid Gold as you guys always make me say, Cowboy is easy to drink and is made with delicious natural ingredients and no artificial flavors. You simply add a scoop of their chocolate, Madagascar gas card, vanilla matcha or strawberry in your coffee or smoothie and feel great the entire day. I do. Strawberry and milk. Super good. Not only will Cowboy Colostrum bring stability to your gut, the peptides and growth factors will make your skin and hair look amazing. So for a limited time, our listeners get up to 25 off their entire order. Just head to cowboycolostrum.com afterparty and use code AFTERPARTY at checkout. That's 25 off when you use code AFTERPARTY@cowboy colostrum.com Afterparty cash flow crunch on.

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Emily (30:38)

Edu we're black. We're back now with Black Pill. Blake. I almost did that. Out of order. Now that I'm calling him that, he is, of course, the producer over at the Charlie Kirk Show. Blake, thanks for being here.

Blake Neff (30:51)

Of course.

Emily (30:52)

All right, let's sell on that.

Blake Neff (30:54)

I should have. I should have pulled out my phone and gotten that, that QR code there.

Emily (30:58)

You should have. This stuff is great. I'm telling you, it also, it just tastes really good, which you feel like with health products is not normally the case, but this stuff actually does taste good. And we're not even in an ad break right now, so you know I'm telling the truth. All right, let's roll this clip of Billy Bob Thornton. He of Landman fame and of course, many others films and television appearances, mostly films Billy Bob Thornton went on Joe Rogan. And I saw this clip starting to get some traction. Wanted to get your take on it because he's discussing the award show speech. Just as we get into award show season and has some words for those who use their platform to go off on American politics. Let's roll the clip.

Blake Neff (31:41)

I don't go to the award show and talk about it when I'm getting my award. It's like, it's like Ricky Gervais said.

Emily (31:46)

In that skit of his, you know, he said, if you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a. A platform to make a political speech.

Blake Neff (31:54)

Right.

Emily (31:54)

You're in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in.

Blake Neff (32:01)

School than Greta Thunberg.

Emily (32:02)

So if you win, right, Come up.

Blake Neff (32:05)

Accept your little award, thank your agent.

Emily (32:08)

And your God, and off.

Blake Neff (32:09)

Okay, I, I think, first of all, unless you have really studied stuff and really know about a subject fully, who.

Emily (32:19)

The hell would want to listen to.

Blake Neff (32:20)

An actor or a musician talk about politics?

Emily (32:23)

You know what I mean?

Blake Neff (32:24)

It's like Are we supposed to follow this?

Emily (32:29)

So this.

Blake Neff (32:29)

Actually, I'm glad you played that clip. I'm glad you played that clip because it gave me time to look up movies that Billy Bob Thornton was in. And I've seen Friday Night Lights. So I've seen something.

Emily (32:40)

Is that it?

Blake Neff (32:41)

Let me see. He was in Armageddon. Okay. I saw Armageddon.

Emily (32:44)

Of course you saw Armageddon. Of course you saw Armageddon.

Blake Neff (32:47)

Everyone saw Armageddon.

Emily (32:48)

Armageddon. I haven't seen Armageddon.

Blake Neff (32:50)

Armageddon was a thoroughly 6 out of 10 asteroid blows up Earth movie.

Emily (32:56)

Yeah. My boyfriend makes me watch clips from Armageddon because I think to the American male, the millennial American male, I think it's just invigorating.

Blake Neff (33:06)

Is it not invigorating? Is it not invigorating to you? Are you rooting for the asteroid?

Emily (33:11)

I'm not rooting for the asteroid, but I think this is a very.

Blake Neff (33:13)

You are. You're rooting for the asteroid, aren't you? You think the asteroid's awesome.

Emily (33:18)

I always have. Listen, you got it out of me, finally. That's the truth. But there's something interesting in that clip with Billy Bob Thornton where he's looking back on Ricky Gervais. And that moment, to me was. It was pre Covid and it kind of ushered in this period of peak. Woke, starting to decline. It didn't totally go downhill at that moment, but it was one of those moments that made other people in Hollywood and tech look around and say, okay, it's starting to become all right to kind of say these things. And now to have Trump in office a second time, the vibe shift has happened, and celebrities aren't really sure what to do. I mean, Mark Ruffalo hasn't changed one bit. But like, Wanda Sykes made some lame jokes about Ricky Gervais in a very meta sense last night at the Golden Globes. It was such a weird time. And I feel like Hollywood is deeply confused about how to handle the second time around.

Blake Neff (34:17)

I think. I think we're all a little confused about how it'll go. Because the first. It's true. The first Trump administration, it was an almost Constant Ratchet from 2016 through 2017 all the way up to 2020. I think if you were observant at the time, I think a lot of people could agree something like 2020, it didn't come out of nowhere. You could feel it coming. I remember talking to friends of mine and saying, it's like there's a fever over the country. And I Don't know how it's going to break.

Emily (34:44)

Well, you were covering campus stuff. Like your beat was covering these crazy stories coming out of college campuses and nobody was paying attention. I mean, conservatives were paying attention, but other people were not.

Blake Neff (34:55)

I remember telling people in 2013, yeah, there's these guys on campuses and they tell each other their pronouns when they introduce each other. And they've got all these. They talk a lot about decolonizing this. They're really saying some strange stuff. And then we got our first taste. It would come in those waves. So you might remember that wave, not just the BLM stuff, but remember the University of Missouri started all those campus occupation protests.

Emily (35:21)

Absolutely. Yep.

Blake Neff (35:22)

2015. And then, and then in 20, I think it was either summer 17 or summer 18, we had that wave of like anti Confederate stuff. They toppled a few Strat statues and then it ebbs away again and then it just comes back. And I think the Biden years, it was, you hit the peak in 2020, 2021. And then Biden was so bad and you started getting the backlash from tech and Elon buys X. And it really, you have the very dramatic vibe shift, something a lot of us thought we'd never see. I remember in 2020, people wondering, is the woke stuff just going to be here forever? They were comparing it to the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The end of a 1000 year civilization is what people were comparing it to.

Emily (36:06)

And then 1000 years civilization.

Blake Neff (36:09)

Yeah, yeah. And then suddenly it pulls back. But now, as you say, we're in the administration again. And I'll just be frank, there's a certain aspect of President Trump when he's in power, he always commands attention, he's unpredictable. So stuff he's doing is always getting in the news. And there's this thing about it that I think gradually drives people a little batty. And I think it just gets more and more intense as it goes on. And I think we're seeing that manifest again. And it's not totally things he does, it's also the ideological environment around him. But I do feel like it's better. I do think there's, there's overall a lot less pressure to denounce this, denounce that. Our response on this ice story has been far better than I think it would have been. If this had happened in 2017. You would have seen a lot more people on the right line up to disavow everything that happened, to do these navel gazing op EDS about how did it come to this, how did we Allow this. And instead, we're much wiser to the manipulative methods that are employed in this sort of thing. And people just looked at it and said no. And they could even say it. They could even say, even if we don't think this woman should have been shot, we know that this is all an OP to prevent ICE from enforcing the law, to prevent illegals from being deported, and we can divorce those things. And I just, I don't think the psychological OP is going to work certainly on our own side. And I think us holding firm will make it not work as well on that vast middle of the public. Whereas, like I said, if this was 2017, 2018, it would be twice as famous, 10 times as bad in the media. It's just totally different environment.

Emily (37:52)

Well, this is a perfect transition to another Joe Rogan clip, because Whitney Cummings was also recently on Joe Rogan. And it reminded me, actually, in such a weird way, Blake, of Nicki Minaj talking at Amfest. Because on the one hand, you have Billy Bob Thornton being like, listen, unless you've been really deep in this, and I'm thinking, you know, maybe somebody who's made it their life's work to be in Rwanda or something like that, he's saying, nobody cares, Nobody cares. But there are times when a celebrity is not just sort of spouting off for the fashionability of it. And in a way, we're going to hear Whitney Cummings kind of talk about how she went through this evolution, going through these, like, reflexive ideological positions that she had because she was in Hollywood and everyone was taking those positions, and the group think kind of steered her into those positions. But then there are also people who are very thoughtful about it. And I think Nicki Minaj at Amfest is an example of somebody who I'm sure neither you or I would really agree with on a lot of different things. But obviously in that moment, she had something that wasn't group. Think conformity. So let's listen to Whitney Cummings on Joe Rogan just in the last couple days here. So it just started to just be like, hold on. You know, we don't believe in gender, but we need a female president. You're like, huh? And then it's like, my body, my choice. Unless it's a baby that needs a vaccine for hepatitis B, which comes from butt sex. Like, what do you. Right. And sharing needles. And sharing needles. And then, you know, we believe in climate change and sea is rising, but we live on the coast. Like, would you buy a house on the beach if you truly believe that the seas. You know, we believe in recycling, but why can't you give Andrew Yang another shot? Like, why won't you give. Where did Beto go? Remember Beto o' Rourke was a mess, but he. But any more so than any. Yeah, yeah, he's a. How? Like, worse than. No, I mean, they're all a mess. Like, when you have these blanket progressive ideas, you've attached yourself to an ideology, and that ideology you'll defend because it's your identity. It's you. It's who you are. Yeah, Blake, that's a really important point. It becomes your identity. It becomes who you are. And there's something interesting right now in the people who have realized that from inside the bubble and are reflecting on it now.

Blake Neff (40:16)

I have to Google what happened to Beto o'.

Emily (40:18)

Rourke.

Blake Neff (40:18)

What did happen to him?

Emily (40:20)

He's. He's chilling, you know, Chilling. I think he has a pack. I think he has a pack. I think he likes.

Blake Neff (40:24)

I feel like Beto is always chilling. He was like the last stand of trying to have Gen X get a president, and then they never totally was go around on his skateboard and play Sega Genesis or something. But, yeah, like, it's a good clip. Yeah, it's.

Emily (40:41)

It's.

Blake Neff (40:41)

There's a certain level of psychosis, insanity that I think we saw the last gasp of. I think Hollywood being able to enforce that. Because one thing we're also learning is just Hollywood's kind of dead. If you look at the numbers, show business still exists, but the jobs aren't in Hollywood anymore. So you don't have that nerve center where you can say, oh, you're dead in this town that's not around anymore. They show up for. They might live there if they've already made it. They might go to the award shows there. But the films aren't made in Hollywood. They're made around the world. Hollywood is not the center of the global film industry. There's competing things out there. And so just more generally in show business, they can't command that level of ideological conformity. And I don't see it easily coming back.

Emily (41:30)

Yeah, no, it's. I mean, it's a serious. Honestly, the artistry of Hollywood is going to be a loss as a cultural output and soft power output for the United States. So we'll see what happens in that respect. And this is actually a good time, I think, Blake, to talk about polymarket, because the Golden Globes decided to partner with polymarket last night and holy smokes, was it hilarious. I mean, it's kind of sad, but it was also kind of funny. I don't know if people noticed this actually. Probably nobody was watching the cooling globes because the ratings just aren't what they used to be. But if you were watching it live, you saw them putting up the Poly market odds during the broadcast. And Polymarket, I mean, this is, this is genuinely interesting. According to Be in crypto, polymarket hit 26 of 27 Golden Globes bets. And as the Be in Crypto article says, quote, reigniting insider trading concerns. But that tie in, quote, helped drive 2.5 million in wagers in three days. There are already Oscars polls that are showing the market for this is going to be significant going forward. So, Blake, it either means the Golden Globes are wildly predictable and Hollywood is wildly predictable, or it looks like maybe there's some insider trading. It could of course, be a combination of both of them. But speaking of America's soft power cultural output and the grandeur of old Hollywood being utterly diminished by financialization and ideological suppression, here we are now just betting on who had the best podcast at the Golden Globes and talking about it live.

Blake Neff (43:15)

Yeah, well, did you ever read the, have you ever read Borges? He has that short story, the Lottery in Babylon. And yeah, yeah, it's, you know, we're heading towards that reality where you can bet on everything. There's a, you know, there's a comedic post on X that says, you know, in the future you won't order, you won't order a carton of milk to be delivered on Instacart. You'll instead place a prediction con, a prediction contract on Polymarket where you bet, nobody is going to bring me a carton of milk within the next hour. And then someone will bet against you and then bring the carton of milk so they can win that trade. There is this desire, if something exists, people want to gamble on it. A lot of options markets are, there's valid reasons for options to exist, but a lot of that is just gambling. The people on Wall street bets, they just want to bet on it. A lot of crypto is just this total desire to bet on things. And I think, and sports betting, of course, is exploding because people want to bet on everything. They want to bet on whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike. And Polymarket or Kalshi, they're taking that to the final extreme, which is you can bet on literally everything. I think eventually some of the novelty of that will hopefully decline, though, who knows? Because I do feel big Picture. I'm kind of worried we're not that far out from where you'll have a big scandal like let's say Justice Alito or Justice Thomas retires this summer and President Trump is considering these different justices to replace them. And let's say there's like three favorites and then one guy who's a 1% long shot. What happens if you have someone in the White House who's actively lobbying the president to get that 1% long shot picked, not because they are a better judge.

Emily (45:04)

Right.

Blake Neff (45:04)

But just because they want. They actually bet $10,000 that they could land that 1% long shot and pull it through. And you could do that on any number of things. You could do that. You probably can't do it on the Golden Globes because at least those are voted on, to my understanding, or the Academy Awards. But something where the choke point is one person making a decision and that person can be influenced. You could eventually get the point where instead of the prediction markets are telling us what the future will be, the prediction markets and your ability to profit on them are deciding what the future actually becomes. And.

Emily (45:37)

Right.

Blake Neff (45:37)

I think that will horrify people the first time it finally happens. Or, or maybe they'll have totally gotten over it by that point. I'm not sure.

Emily (45:43)

But yeah, I mean, one I was to say one of the defenses I see of people doing this is that it gives outsiders actually this opportunity. And this is a real thing. I mean, I'm steel manning it here for sure. But it's a real thing where if you're an outsider and you start paying attention to these whales and polymarket and Kalshee, it does give you an opportunity to try to, you know, for example, you can replicate Paul Pelosi's trades on the stock market and you could do a similar thing on Polymarker Kalsi. But Blake, I mean, I mean, it is in a meta sense that means it's actually starting in Polymarket and call, she seems to suggest this is what they want to happen that actually is influencing reality. It's not just that we're betting on reality. It's that the bets are changing reality itself. And that feels very sick. It's not just kind of the cliche thing where you're capitalizing on other people's losses and real life losses. You know, we're not just talking about like a company, we're talking about in some cases, like the Maduro Polymarket bet that was made where, you know, there's regime change on the line, but that Just feels, it obviously feels sick. But is this, I mean, some conservatives have gotten behind it. Is it a serious thing? Is it a significant thing? I mean, I, firstly, I will say I do applaud the Golden Globes for implementing Potty Market because it does give the women and the gays an opportunity to get addicted to batting. But otherwise it just, I just, I'm not a young man, so I don't know exactly how severe this is.

Blake Neff (47:08)

Well, so right now, right now we're just going through the. Oh, is all of the gambling itself a problem because there are young men getting addicted to it because it's on their phones. We have some of the integrity. We're seeing the integrity of sports questions where you have pro player, like pro baseball players have sandbagged individual pitches because they're getting paid off for that. They've gotten caught doing this. We haven't gotten to the point where it's a really scandalous thing, but I don't see an obvious reason it couldn't happen. The original reason these prediction markets were actually regulated so much in the first place. I remember there was, or I don't know if it was, they might have stopped an attempt to deregulate it. It was in the early 2000s, and there was discussion, oh, could we use these prediction markets to forecast world events? And some people saw it and said, wait, are you going to make it? So there's a profit incentive to, like, conduct a terrorist attack, for example. So, oh, will there be a terrorist attack that kills more than 10 people in the United States in the next year? Suddenly there's now someone who can make a profit if there is a terrorist attack that kills more than 10 people. And as you say, I don't know that there's an obvious counterpoint to saying that does create financial incentive to bring certain realities into being. And most we can just hope it doesn't happen on anything terribly important. But I think that Supreme Court example is a really valid one because I think that's the sort of thing where a person could say, any pick, they're going to be a Republican either way. So why can't I do the one where I also make a million dollars on the side? And right now this stuff is. I don't even think it's illegal right now. It does seem that a lot of the consensus seems that insider trading on a prediction market, on an event like a nomination or the government doing something, there's nothing illegal about that. So someone might do it and then brag about doing it after it happens. Happens.

Emily (48:55)

So, on a slightly happier, more optimistic note, the Washington Post is editorializing on the Supreme Court case regarding transports that we're going to hear oral arguments in for Tuesday. I'm going to read a bit from the Washington Post's editorial here. The Supreme Court has the chance this week to save women's sports, allowing states to restore a level playing field for girls by excluding biological men and thereby correcting one of the worst, and this is the word they use, excesses of America's cultural revolution. On Tuesday, the justices will hear oral arguments and challenges to laws enacted by West Virginia and Idaho. The court is weighing whether blocking biological males who identify as women from participating in female sports violates their rights under the 14th Amendment. The answer is obviously no, and the very existence of these cases represents a failure of policy and politics. So, Blake, the rest of the coverage I did a scan before we went to air is predictably skewed towards the left. That's no surprise. I would say it's not as bad as it would have been circa 2020, but it's still obviously skewed in one direction. On the other hand, the Washington Post and Jeff Bezos here we have the editorial board using the phrase cultural revolution and calling the trans sports madness a one of the excesses of the cultural revolution. Obviously, there's been a takeover at cbs, and neither of these things, none of these outlets are run exactly as you or I would. Blake. God forbid that ever happened. But it is quite interesting to see the editorial board of the Washington Post doing what most of the. Most of the people who work at the Washington Post would have pissed their pants over if it had happened in 2020.

Blake Neff (50:38)

Well, absolutely. And of course, this is happening because Bezos did come out and say, I am going to change the editorial direction of the Post, which, it's interesting, he waited about a decade to do that. I remember there was a colleague.

Emily (50:50)

He's going directly in the other way. Intentionally directly in the other way. Yes.

Blake Neff (50:54)

And. Well, it's so interesting because I remember when I was at the Caller, we had a colleague who did a stint at the Washington Post, and I remember asking him, does Bezos weigh in on the editorial stuff? And he said at that time, this must have been about 2015, 2016. He said, I don't have full knowledge, but he doesn't think so. He said he never saw him get involved in that. And the people with editorial control at the Post would like, avoid Bezos to make sure he couldn't influence them. It was pretty funny. And I think one Thing you've seen is you see more willingness. You see more willingness since 2020 for tech to get involved in politics and to have it be variable, not to just go along with a certain lockstep on it. So that's driving part of it. I do wonder if another part of it is, we know that there's a split in the left, even if it's not always voiced. We know there's a split on the left of are we going to cut loose any of our far left planks that seem to have hurt us in the last election? Seth Moulton tried to do it right after the race where he was saying, I don't think this trans stuff is good. Gavin Newsom had my late boss Charlie on his show and he kind of started to walk back the trans thing, and they just blew up at both of them. It was. I think there's a lot of people on the left who genuinely are terrified of their base. They're probably maybe the equivalent of these kind of pro amnesty Republicans who secretly are always trying to get amnesty through. They're terrified of their base. I think they're like that where they think, okay, there's actual center left stuff I want to do and we're going to get killed in elections if we have this women's sports tumor. It's become this issue that they're losing 80, 20 and yet they can't seem to cut it loose. And also, so the visuals of it are. They're not helped by the fact the visuals of it are extremely ugly. Like it's not merely something you're unpopular on, but it's something where you can have this muscular, weird looking dude beating up on high school aged women. And it goes viral on the Internet over and over again. It's naturally ludicrous. And I think they're screaming, guys, please let us moderate on this issue. We're not going. They could probably tell them, you know, we're not going to put you guys in camps, we're not going to kill you guys, we're just gonna say, you can't play sports and then we can win elections again. And they're not letting them. It really is. It's one of the blessings we have on the right, which is the left does have a hard time moderating from its most extreme views. And on this one it does seem to be burning them pretty badly.

Emily (53:22)

Yeah. So the Post editorial board's new credo is basically supporting free markets and free people. Sound similar to the Journal and all of that. Of course, that's still you know, the rest of the competition is still not in that camp. So, you know, it's a couple of papers competing against each other, but then you also have, you know, dozens of papers competing to, like, outlive each other on the other side of that. And what's interesting is that phrase excesses of America's cultural revolution, coming from the Washington Post, where I've used that term excesses before. And I mean, I think a lot of us has, like. A lot of us have the excesses of cultural progressivism or whatever. But I wonder if in that context, Blake, to me it was like, okay, so the excesses of the cultural revolution, does that mean that there are non. Excessive parts of the cultural revolution?

Blake Neff (54:09)

Yeah, yeah. It's the consolidation. It's like when everyone's gonna roll their eyes at this analogy, but it's like Napoleon takes power in France, and he doesn't say, I am reversing the French Revolution. He says, I am completing the revolution. And that means you take and keep the good bits and you discard the bits. That went a little bit too far. And so I think there's stuff that they would say, oh, we should consolidate these other parts of the revolution. And that might be the renaming of all these things, the tearing down of all these things, the abolition of all of these things, of which there's still a lot of that. There's still stuff that hasn't even been undone today and saying, you know, we can. We'll keep these parts that are good and popular and just discard these others. And. And they'll at least try to slide that past people. I don't know if it'll work. I think a lot of the core parts of their agenda in that cultural revolution have, if not discredited. People have gotten tired of them. Like when we were discussing Minneapolis, and I said, I feel this emotional manipulation tactic they're trying with Renee Goode's death, that is an operation they ran repeatedly with tremendous success. They ran it with Trayvon Martin, they ran it with Michael Brown, they ran it with George Floyd, and they ran it in lesser cases throughout with the woman who was killed in Charlottesville, for example. And kind of each time, it got these really good returns. And I think we've hit the point where people have gotten so used to this pattern that it just. They can immediately detect it and shoot it down. And I don't want to say it's dead forever. What I will say is, America seems to go through waves with these cultural revolutions. It might be 20 years before they can really pull it off the same way again because you need a whole new generation of people to come of age who didn't live through this entire operation. And so the stuff that happened in 1968 started happening again in the early 90s, then it went away and then it happened again around 2020. It seems to come in generational cycles.

Emily (56:08)

Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

Blake Neff (56:10)

So you and I are going to have to be ready when we're both 50 year old, 55 year old curmudgeons to warn the young people that all this stuff had happened before and they'll totally ignore us and they'll just call me Black Pill Blake, but I'll be right again.

Emily (56:25)

I mean I'm going to start a bet on Polymarket right now as to what year this reoccurs. Play the long game and we'll see if Polymarket still around by then. Actually, on that note, let's get to the story out of Amherst College. I'm reading from the great Aaron Sabarium here in the Washington Free Beacon, who writes Amherst College is pressing the Washington Free Beacon to blur out the faces of students who performed mock sex acts in the college's main chapel during an official orientation event. The $93,000 a year college claims that the Free Beacon's publication of videos of the performance led to, quote, serious doxing and harassment. Amherst, which funds the event, has declined to say whether it was will revise the program going forward. Several days after the Free Beacon published a report on the performance in mid December and well after the racy photographs and videos had rocketed across the Internet, including in a New York Post article that described the sexual ceremony as, quote, disgusting. Amherst asked the Free Beacon to blur the faces of the students involved and let's just pause right there, Blake, because you've been covering campus stories for well over a decade and you still obviously cover them closely in your pressure the Charlie Kirk Show. Now that would never ever happen to conservative students at Amherst College, which is obviously very left. But any, basically any non Hillsdale type college, would they ever. If especially not if the students were so egregiously in the wrong as they are in this case. But am I crazy or would that literally never happen?

Blake Neff (57:53)

Not, not in a million years? There have been so many. I'm just thinking back on Greatest Hits. I remember I once there was someone who harassed somebody or did some stunt at Dartmouth, my alma mater, and they gave their name to the local campus paper. And so I was aggregating that day. So I basically just Reblogged the article like, oh, this dumb lib thing happened at Dartmouth. You're the people who did it. And then I got barraged by calls the entire afternoon from Dartmouth students who said I had placed a this student's life in danger because I had printed her name that she had already given to the local campus paper. But if you want another example of the double standard, I can think of absolutely unhinged, fanatical reaction to any number of things that have happened on the campus. When I was at Dartmouth in this would have been spring of 2013, we did a pro life demonstration on campus. We call it Cemetery of the Innocence. And we put up a bunch of American flags and each flag represented, I think 100,000 abortions.

Emily (58:55)

Since I did that in college too.

Blake Neff (58:56)

Roe v. Wade.

Emily (58:57)

Yeah.

Blake Neff (58:57)

And someone ran it over with a car in front of us. They just drove off the road and like ran over the whole thing. And I think the person got arrested by the local police. But if I remember right, I don't even think school authorities commented on it or if they did, it was a one off email to say, you know, this happened. Don't attack students, you know, displays. Now compare that to these incredibly overwrought campus statements on national political issues that they've done where they've canceled exams because people are grieving, something that happened on the far side of the world, what they've expelled people over. And just this stunt that happened to us where nothing came to pass. There's always been a double standard on campuses for this sort of thing. We can at least be happy that the Trump administration has taken those initial baby steps towards putting the fear of God into them. They've gone after Columbia Brown, or do they go after Columbia Upenn, a few others for how they handled this protest related to Gaza. But I think you need, honestly, I know they want to abolish the Department of Education. I would double, triple, quadruple, heck two the size of the civil rights office at the Department of Education. Fill it up with lawyers and you have thousands of universities. Essentially 98% of universities in this country are basically a gigantic NGO nonprofit for left wing causes with a ton of money. And they have a huge amount of power. They have the power to credential people as professionals in this country. They have the power to produce the research, they produce the experts we're supposed to listen to. They have huge amounts of power and they routinely discriminate based on politics, they discriminate based on sex, they discriminate based on race, they Discriminate based on religion, put the fear of God into them. The Supreme Court is practically screaming at the administration that it's willing to let them do this. And I think we would be making a huge mistake if we did not seize that opportunity the next three years. Because even if we lose the White House in the future, that fear of God will leave a legacy for years afterwards.

Emily (61:09)

Well, and policy wise, actually, I know what they're trying to move is, what they're trying to do is move the Office of Civil Rights from the Department of Education over to the Department of Justice. And that point is so interesting. You could quadruple the number of lawyers who are working on campus cases if you move it over to DOJ and Harmeet Dhillon or someone is overseeing it. And I don't know if that's even like in the cards, but that's something that right now is obviously like you were saying, the administrators at these universities, at least like 50% of them are dedicated to keeping this infrastructure of what people came to recognize as DEI intact and as part of the kind of funnel that they're putting students through. And that means it's very, very difficult to dismantle.

Blake Neff (61:55)

It's not even oh that they need to maintain the apparatus for the professors. It's that since they have all these universities, that's the, they're like holding tanks for, just put it this way, like liberal kind of failures. Liberals who aren't, who are kind of struggling to launch, go get a job at your university in the admissions department, in this or that department, and you can basically be a full time activist or a 80% of the time activist and you still have your nice middle class, $80,000 a year job and a lot of time off. And the existence of that is hugely helpful to the left. That's one reason it's so much easier to basically, basically be a full time leftist. Because there are hundreds of thousands of jobs out there where you can make a middle class income while being a full time leftist. And you have to break that, especially at schools that are publicly funded, that are public entities or frankly they're all publicly funded. We have a huge amount of pressure and leverage. We can exercise them, we can exercise on them and we should. And maybe it's just that way. Too. Many of my friends are lawyers because I lived in D.C. for so long, but there's a lot of conservative lawyers out there. We're good at identifying them because the federal society has been around a long time. We know they're out there. I know we want to dosh. I know we want to cut the federal government, and we should, but we could radically expand the number of lawyers that we have doing that. Put the fear of God into the left. And it's not just on schools. Let's go. Let's take it all the way back in the great circle and go back to Minneapolis. All those frauds, Somali daycares, Medicaid services, transportation companies. I've talked to people in Minnesota who've been covering this, and they point out the U.S. attorney's office for that area. He says, I cannot charge the number of people who are almost certainly guilty in this. There's just the. My manpower is the limit. The manpower is the limit for how many cases I can bring, how many people I can convict. So we shouldn't just be sending ICE agents to surge there. We shouldn't just be sending reporters to cover this. What the Trump administration should do is they should surge 40 lawyers into this guy's office and say, indict everyone. You think someone's guilty in the feeding our future scandal or in the Somali daycare thing, Indict every single one of them. Don't make this be 50 people. Have it be 500 people, 1000 people. Make people have to confront the actual, genuine scale of this and have it be all super well documented. And it's just going to be one win after another. I don't think it will ever get old to say, oh, we found another $5 million scam in Minneapolis. You have to make it so that this city is just infamous for decades. We have to build our own legend. It's the same way the left will as an example, like the way they've turned elder Hiss. Yeah, Elger Hiss. Or even like the Emmett Till case. The Emmett Till case. There's a real atrocity that happened, and it was one murder that happened at this point 70 years ago, and you're still hearing about it in school. It's still a proverbial thing that they use to make a political point. We could do that with Minneapolis. You want people to be able to say 20 years from now, oh, Minneapolis, that's like that Democrat city where they just let every single immigrant group steal from the public coffer. And anyone who had a daycare, anyone who had a Medicaid company, anyone who had a medical transport company, anyone who did this or this or that, anyone who was feeding food to kids during COVID all of these things. And by the way, they tried to abolish the police and they burned down a police station. And they did any number of things. You can make it so that Minneapolis is the thing people think of for this is why Democrat governance, why the left's governance is a disaster. And you just make it that example that go to. And you don't need 50 different examples across the country. You need one really good example that people will remember.

Emily (65:44)

Yeah, I mean, I think of the 78 people who have been charged, roughly some like 80% have either pleaded guilty or been found guilty. So some serious. Those are some serious numbers. Having so much fun and going a little bit long, Blake. But I do want to get your take on these new numbers out of Gallup, which found a record high, quote, 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independence in 2025, which surpassed the 43% from 2020, 2014. So up a little bit and equal shares of U.S. adults, 27% identified as other Democrats or Republicans. Now, more importantly for your purposes, Blake, they also found the recent increase in independent identification is partly attributable to younger generations of Americans. So Millennials and Gen X continuing to identify as as independents at relatively high rates as they have gotten older. Generation Z, they say, like previous generations before them when they were young, identified disparities disproportionately as political independent. So we're looking at 17% Republican according to Gallup, and 56% Independent, 27% Democrat among generation Z. Like we keep hearing that there's a revival, which I think is true. We keep hearing that there's something happening with Generation Z, which I also think is true. Are some of, some of that actually showing up as independent in your experience, rather than Republican or Democrat?

Blake Neff (67:06)

I think it is. This has been a trend for a super long time and you can even see there Millennials, it's like Democrats barely identify at a higher rate than Republicans. Yet we know Millennials were this extremely liberal generation during the Obama years. I think what we're really seeing is we're seeing the decline, frankly of a lot of identification variables in American life. So people are increasingly likely to say they're no religion, even if their overall religious practice didn't change that much. People are increasingly unlikely to be affiliated with any number of things. So even people who have political takes online, even if they're actually quite conservative or quite left wing, they're just more likely to say they're independent. It makes them feel independent minded. It makes them feel not controlled by anyone. So you could be a very left wing person and you say I'm not a Democrat cuz I don't think the party is strong enough on Gaza, they're not strong enough on police, they're not strong enough on Democratic socialism. On the right, you can say, oh, well, I'm not a Trump toady. I'm more libertarian on social issues. I'm not a Christian nationalist you can come up with, or I am a Christian nationalist and the GOP is not enough.

Emily (68:18)

Right.

Blake Neff (68:18)

Any number of things. You're just seeing people, they're less attached to being a part of a larger organism, so to speak. And so they, they don't feel as attached. They don't get as much meaning from identifying as, oh, I am a Republican person, I am a Democrat person. And I suspect you see that across the board and how people identify in any number of things. You know what they should pull, what Gallup should pull is they should say, are you a Pepsi person or a Coke person? And I wonder if that's declined over time, because I feel like there was a lot stronger identification even on that when I was a kid, like in the 90s. That was a, oh, Pepsi versus Coke. I feel like I don't hear about that anymore.

Emily (68:57)

Well, look, if you're, if you, if you look at this chart of the boomers, they're almost exactly each split into thirds. So a third about 34% Republican, 33% independent, and 32% Democrat. When you're accounting for the margin of error, they're literally almost perfectly into red, blue and purple camps. So what felt like, I mean, there are a million think pieces on, on the amplification of tribalism and escalating tribal tension. And I guess kind of what you're saying, Blake, is that people don't want to be in political tribes anymore. Maybe they want to be in soda tribes, I don't know. But there's something like really distasteful about kind of organizing politically like the boomers did into these thirds.

Blake Neff (69:40)

But that's, that's the interesting thing is they were more organized on political lines. They were more likely to identify with a party. Yet today, all the signs are there's a lot more actual real life tribalism. People are a lot more likely to say, I won't date someone who disagrees with me on politics. I won't marry someone who disagrees with me, with me on politics. They are more likely to live in a place that is 80 plus percent their party. If you're in a rural area, it probably is overwhelmingly Republican. If you're in a Democrat area, it's going to be 80 plus percent Democrat and reduce that down to your neighborhood, it's probably even more extreme. And those things are all real. And yet it does coexist with reduced desire to actually affiliate with a specific thing. It's the increased tribalism, but of actual issues. And what issues you actually follow there aren't party labels attached to them, even though there are. It's an interesting paradox.

Emily (70:36)

Yeah, that is super interesting. I hadn't thought about it in that way. Blake Neff is the producer of the Charlie Kirk Show. Blake, thank you so much for taking the time to stay up and hang out with us tonight.

Blake Neff (70:48)

Thank you for having me. And I want to shout out chat, especially the one guy who said he liked my crap, who liked my extremely dirty island. So thank you for that and thank you for.

Emily (71:00)

This is Blake. This is Blake following the chat. Were you really following the chat?

Blake Neff (71:05)

I am a chat on our show. You got to read it. You got to. You got to see what the people say.

Emily (71:11)

I'm going to make an admission I was following the chat too.

Blake Neff (71:15)

All righty. Well, thank you to all of them. Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. And next time, I swear I'll totally clean up my island.

Emily (71:23)

No, leave the island now. The island is legend. All right, thank you so much. We'll see you again soon. All right, everyone, I have a little bit left, so don't go anywhere. First though, as you're looking into 20, 26. 6. It's a new year. I know that. I'm focused on making some of those practical changes. Nothing too extreme, of course. I'm not a big resolution person. But one easy way to get a win is to replace those processed snacks with masa chips. It's clean eating that does not feel restrictive. It's so good. Masa keeps it real. Just organic corn, sea salt and 100% grass fed beef tallow. No seed oils or additives. And they taste incredible. Way, way better than standard chips and leave you feeling light and energetic, never heavy or crashed out. And because they're made with real ingredients, they actually satisfy hunger so there's no endless grazing. My favorite is lime. I've decided this. You know, if you listen to me a lot, I'm always going back and forth, but I really, I decided in the last couple days, I think it's fair to just say it's lime. And because you'll love Masa, I promise. You're also definitely going to want to check out Vandy crisps from the sister company. They are amazing. Three ingredient potato chips. I love the smokehouse barbecue. I love them all. Original Smokehouse Barbecue and there are other great flavors. But I'm telling you, I love chips and these are the best chips I've ever had. So if you're ready to give Masa a try, go to masachips.com afterparty and use code AFTERPARTY for 25 off your first order. Or simply click the link in the video description or scan the QR code to claim this delicious offer. If you don't feel like ordering online, Masa is now available nationwide at your at your local Sprout supermarket, so stop by and pick up a couple of bags before they're gone.

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Emily (74:05)

End the show tonight by talking about Bowen Yang, who you may know from Saturday Night Live, or you may just not know him at all. He's a pretty popular guy. His podcast has become very popular in recent years, so much so Las Coltritas, that is, if you like.

Blake Neff (74:22)

Bravo.

Emily (74:23)

You definitely know about Las Costaritas Call to rest us so much so that it seems like he may have left Saturday Night Live because the opportunities that were coming from the podcast itself, which is now very popular, were powerful enough to pull him away from snl, which is the top gig in comedy. Now. I don't know what happened behind the scenes. Maybe there was more to that story, but arguably, last Call to Ristas was becoming a rival institution to Saturday Night Live, which we've seen happen all over the media. But that's not what we're talking about today. I'm going to Read here from a Deadline article about about Bowen Yang and his co host Matt Rogers, walking back some comments they made. I am of course going to show you the comments, but the headline here is Matt Rogers, comma Bowen Yang promised to be, quote, more thoughtful after Jasmine Crockett comments Following backlash Deadline writes over their comments about Representative Jasmine Crockett, Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers having have broken their silence. Good Lord. On Saturday, the Las Coltaristas podcast host walked back their criticism of the Texas Democrat after this week's I Don't Think so Honey segment in which they also took aim at Gavin Newsom's potential presidential bid. Hey everybody, I hear the response. I'm taking every bit of it to heart, I promise, wrote Rogers on his Instagram story. Transparency and candor matter to me, especially on the podcast. I'm a very progressive person who cares dear deeply about winning these elections, but my phrasing was not right. I will be more thoughtful. I really do promise. I have great respect and admiration for Representative Crockett and I regret that my words suggested otherwise. I just want us to win and be better at finding ways to help. Yang shared that statement as well. Writing should not have cursorily weighed in on this understanding the platform and will use it more responsibly. Okay, so after all of that, now I want you to take a look at the clip for which they were issuing these publicist drafted highly scripted, insincere apologies.

Blake Neff (76:26)

Don't waste your money sending to Jasmine Crockett. Do not do it. I must agree. Don't do it.

Emily (76:33)

Don't.

Blake Neff (76:33)

You're going to waste your money.

Emily (76:35)

Take it from someone who sent Sarah.

Blake Neff (76:36)

Gideon like a ton of money in Maine. Just don't do it. Don't waste your money. Don't do it. It's hard enough to come by.

Emily (76:48)

Those are genuinely funny, engaging remarks because, to borrow a word from Bowen Yang, they were, quote, cursorily weighing in on the politics and in new media. That's what makes your platform entertaining and engaging, is that you are not a celebrity who is so powerful and influential that every time you decide to open your mouth and get into a conversation like this one, because you have a podcast where your job is to speak off the cuff. Well, hopefully off the cuff. Cuff off the cuff. I mean, maybe that's a phrase, maybe I'll start the phrase. But off the cuff for hours a week, if that's what you're doing, if that's what you're getting paid to do, the last thing you should ever do is issue an apology like that, for making comments that will resonate with everyone except for a very, very, very tiny, tiny section of very loud people, to be fair, very loud people on the Internet who decide to tell you that you don't know enough about Jasmine Crockett, who of course is running for Senate in Texas and against James Tallarico in the Democratic primary, and then going up against potentially John Cornyn or Ken Paxton. We will see. This is one of the most watched races in the country. But what Matt Rogers was doing was actually reflecting a pretty sophisticated grasp of Democratic Party politics by invoking Sarah Gideon, for example, and this trend of candidates, candidates who are fire on social media but fail in the general election because on the state level, these campaigns that are aimed at animating the exact same tiny slice of the public that is now complaining to Bowen, Yang and Matt Rogers for going after Jasmine Crockett, who is not. I mean, this woman could not win a nationwide election. Likely she couldn't win a statewide election. That's what a lot of Democrats, Democrats in Texas who are lining up behind Talarico are concerned about. And for good reason. Jasmine Crockett will have a hard enough time running statewide. I don't think the odds of Jasmine Crockett winning a nationwide election unless you had a truly horrible candidate on the Republican side, which is obviously not impossible. But the woman is not in line with like the median American voter, let's put it that way. And her new effort to kind of become someone that has a better chance in a statewide election because she speaks more measured, but she's kind of trying to do that and have her legs on both sides of the fence. Right? Like the one leg in the blonde beach, bad built, butch body side of the fence where she's being super pugilistic and throwing off the norms. But now she's running against Talarico, who is Timo Richie Cunningham and Cunningham, and only wants the norms to come back, trying to do both of those things. And so the odds that Matt Rogers is correct, that Jasmine Crockett would be a Sarah Gideon who slurps up all of this small dollar cash or even, you know, from famous podcasters like Matt Rogers, some, some big checks, and then ultimately fizzles out because the Texas Senate race is in all likelihood going to stay with John Cornyn. Now, we mentioned Beto o' Rourke earlier in the show. He made that a pretty close race, but he did not win. With all of that money and energy, he did not win. So again, the odds of Democrats winning Texas, not great. The odds of Them winning with Jasmine Crockett even lower. They made that obvious point in a way that was almost begrudging from particularly Bong, who also issued the this apology. But that word that Bowen Yang used that he quote cursorily weighed in really stands out to me because the reason people like these platforms is that they involve, you know, I'm a journalist, so I don't think this applies to me. But if you're somebody who is just chatting, it is more cursory. You know, I try not to be ever cursory with reporting your facts, but with commentary. That is something that's more authentic. Right. I'm not running it by a million different editors or producers. There's no script for this show and there's no script for their show. And that's in this low institutional trust environment. People want to feel like they're part of the process. It's engaging and I'm just talking about myself as a viewer. It brings you and it feels more trustworthy. Right. Because you can see somebody's thought process working itself out in real time, especially when you're one on one with another person. And again, you don't know what they're going to say. And those two are friends, so they have a level of comfort together. And so this idea that you can't. He's apologizing for making cursory comments that, by the way, are directionally correct and resonant with a whole lot of people on the left because a tiny minority. Slice. Push back on it. Just a great example. I mean, like maybe they're worried about sponsors. Maybe they heard from sponsors. Whatever it was, it's just a good example of not getting it, to use that word, cursory. I mean, it's such a perfect example of how. In fact, I think they don't get it. Even though they do get it. They're people who are doing it. Even if you don't like it. They're kind of having these like authentic conversations, but they're still so married to this slice, this disproportionately loud slice of the far left. And it's not even like the radical leftists. It's like the center left cultural progressives who are defending Jasmine Crockett, who is a run of the mill corporate Democrat. Ryan Grimm was on our shoulders show explaining that with no populist bona fides other than eschewing norms in a rather Trumpian fashion. That is what she tries to. That's her packaging. Right. She is centrism in progressive packaging and kind of smuggling corporate centrism in this just centrist packaging and maybe. Or in this populist packaging and I don't know what Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers politics, how far left they go. Something tells me that centrist dem, corporate dem politics probably aren't too offensive to them. But isn't that interesting? These two popular podcasters whose entire shtick is speaking off the cuff apologized for speaking off the cuff because other people with disproportionately amplified platform platforms were a little upset with them. Funny stuff. Had to talk about that one. All right, thanks for sticking with me on tonight's remote show. We're on the road here. First was Aspen, now I'm in Palm Beach. Apparently all I do is hang out in the enclaves of British people. It's actually not true. I have to go to these conferences once or twice a year for work and it was. Listen, it was a tough 70 degrees here in Palm beach today, so I don't think that I have it all figured out and I'm just living a comfortable life. 70 degrees. That's tough. January in Florida really should be warmer. Thanks so much everyone. Make sure to subscribe. I'm so bad about telling you all to subscribe, but it means a lot and it helps us a lot. You can shoot me an email@emilyevilmaycaremedia.com that's where you can reach me. Also for Happy hour, where I answer your emails every Friday on a special podcast only edition. Which is an another reminder. Go and subscribe on podcast feeds. Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast, subscribe on YouTube and I am excited to see you back on Wednesday. The More Appetite.

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