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Rick Wilson (0:43)
Hey, everybody, it's Rick. Welcome back to the Enemies List podcast and we're doing our Q and A's. We have had a lot of questions this in the last few days and the last couple of weeks. A lot of them are about Los Angeles, and I want to get right to them. You're going to see me reading these because I can't memorize them all. Let's go to Kathy in Montana. With rising authoritarian rhetoric in the U.S. do you think the guardrails of our democracy are holding? Are we whistling past the graveyard? Well, I don't know if we're whistling, but I can see the graveyard over the next hill. We better keep fighting back. And I mean that in all sincerity. Last week was a bad, bad, bad, bad week for this republic. It's a terrible week. Deployment of active duty military forces against American citizens, the assault on a United States senator by the thugs who work for Kristi Noem. None of this is good stuff. Trump is now expanding the role of the military in other cities. He did his missile parade. He's threatened people for criticizing him more and more. All of this is accelerating into a very, very dark place. I don't want to scare you, but we're in a bad spot and it's up to all of us to keep fighting and to stay up, stay, stay focused, stay engaged, and not let them scare you into submission and silence from Todd. My wife and I are thinking about having a kid. If you were me, would you wait? No, no, no. Honestly, don't wait. I had two fabulous children. I had two beautiful children. We couldn't do more. It was what it was. If you're young and, and, and you guys wanted, are thinking about kids, have babies, and if you can do it, do it. You won't regret it and you won't get any younger. So after my divorce, I did not choose option A, which is the standard male American option, which is to go and find a woman 25 years younger than you. You know the cliche stuff, right? I know guys my age. I'm 61. I chose an absolutely fabulous woman who is the love of my life. And she's 10 years younger than me and looks 20 years younger than me. Fine. But a lot of guys my age who are on their second and some on their third marriages are having babies and they're tired. You will not be as you will. You, you, you will never have as much energy the next day as you had the day before. And look, I also think having children is a sign of hope and optimism and a commitment to going forward. Too many people are, are, I think, convinced that the darkness of this world is too so impending that they, they don't, they don't want to bring a child into it. And the only way we solve the darkness is to keep going. Don't not have kids because Donald Trump is a dick. This is from Ben in Florida. The protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere shown a generational divide on what activism itself looks like. What does that signal about where the political energy is going? Look, there's a long and old political truism and that about young voters, and it's young voters don't vote. It is still mostly true. Young voting numbers have gone up a little bit, but in part they went up because of Donald Trump getting more young voters to vote for Republicans. Look, you want, you want political energy. The idea that it's just going to be that young voters are, and young activists are going to somehow magically fix everything is ahistorical. I want them involved. But there is also a role in, in our politics and our culture for wisdom and experience and knowledge and judgment. If you combine those things with energy and engagement and activism, I think you have a powerful political movement. But that's not where we are right now. The Democratic Party has been suffering for a long time by the belief that they don't like the working class of America and Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. And a lot of these people have converted that. It all strings back to Roger Ailes, who helped create Fox News, but before that, he helped create Richard Nixon. And Ailes was a brilliant architect of working class rage because a lot of working class people in this country have been fucked over royally again and again and again and again and again. And Roger realized you could build a TV network that talked to those people and made them angrier and you could convert that anger into political power. The Democrats struggle with male voters is real. It's. It's real. A lot of people tried to in the last few weeks say things like, we need $20 million to study how men vote and behave here's how you start with getting those guys. You stop insulting them and stop calling them all monsters and rapists and sexists. Stop diminishing boys and men. We've talked about this before. Make them a part of your coalition. Don't make them an enemy because right now they feel like the enemy. And you know what people, when you tell somebody they're a villain enough times, when you tell somebody they're a bad guy enough times, you know what they do? They look for somebody else. They go and find somebody else. They go. And when they're, when the door opens somewhere else, they run to that door. And it's important to remember that young voters, men and women, Trump appealed to them in a lot of ways because the Democratic Party didn't feel like it communicated with them. Didn't feel like it communicated with what? With their needs. And Democratic Party is famous for. We're going to focus group this and we're going to come out with a poll and it's going to in 2021. My colleague Reed Galen and I were in on this call with a bunch of big Democratic donors and operatives and these big groups. This very well meaning poll. She's like, well, we've pulled it. And the only thing in 2021 people care about is prescription drug coverage. The fuck are you talking about? Capitol is on fire two weeks ago. This election's about democracy. And in 2021 and 22, younger voters got engaged because they felt like somebody was talking to them about this world screwing them over and this world being dangerous for them. And it worked. That was a combination of the high experience side and the youthful energy side. Democrats need to do a lot more of that. It's a very tough question, longer than I can answer on this Q and A and I've been a little discursive on this answer. I admit activism without strategy is just noise. And strategy without activism is this lifeless object. You need to find a way to bring those two together. We'll be right back.