Was the "insufferable left" to blame for Trump's big gains in blue cities?

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the Blue City Blues podcast. I'm David Hyde.

[00:00:15] With political consultant Sandeep Kaushik, who, I think Sandeep, last time you texted me, you hadn't slept in like 48 hours or something.

[00:00:23] Did you get any sleep?

[00:00:24] Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, yesterday I did. I had a good night's sleep. And so now I am refreshed and depressed.

[00:00:31] Rested, ready, and depressed. Okay, also with us, the writer who inspired the podcast, sex advice columnist Dan Savage. Dan, how are you feeling today?

[00:00:39] Not great. Where I am, it's early evening, so I've had a whole day to feel terrible where you guys just woke up.

[00:00:46] So I've been spiraling a lot longer today than you have.

[00:00:49] You've already started drinking. We're still drinking coffee.

[00:00:52] Exactly.

[00:00:52] Something like that. All right, so we'll see how that mixes. Stimulants and depressants.

[00:00:57] So I'm going to kick it off just by saying on election night, I heard a lot of Democrats describe themselves as feeling kind of nauseously optimistic.

[00:01:06] I never felt optimistic. I just felt anxious. I still feel anxious.

[00:01:11] And I'm hoping that Dan and Sandeep, you've got some advice for those of us living in blue cities about what the heck we're going to do over the next four years.

[00:01:19] But first, let's talk a little bit about these election results, because how could we not?

[00:01:23] And there, I just wanted to bring up a couple of things. I tuned in, as many people in blue cities do, to NPR the day after the election, looking for community and looking for insightful analysis.

[00:01:39] And you just wanted to hear someone use Latinx one more time.

[00:01:43] That was it.

[00:01:44] He was hoping for another Robin DiAngelo seminar on why he's a racist.

[00:01:50] That was it. So you laugh, but NPR, these are our kind of blue cities soundtrack, right? NPR is sort of the blue city soundtrack.

[00:01:58] And on Morning Edition, the question came up, could Kamala Harris have done anything any differently?

[00:02:04] And I was like, great. Okay, let's get into it. Let's hear what these analysts have to say.

[00:02:09] And the answer came back, nothing. Kamala Harris could not have done anything differently or any better.

[00:02:14] And this was the NPR politics reporter quoting some anonymous Democratic Party strategists.

[00:02:21] And by the way, I think she ran a great campaign, but it was just sort of interesting.

[00:02:25] In blue cities, we're just hearing this kind of thing over and over again, ever since Trump was elected, that you did nothing wrong.

[00:02:33] No need for self-reflection. Just drink your NPR hot cup of cocoa every morning and feel sort of reassured by that.

[00:02:42] Then I'll bring up one more thing, which is I tuned in to hear U.S. House Representative Pramila Jayapal on, the leader of the Progressive Caucus.

[00:02:50] So kind of the blue city's leader in D.C. in some ways.

[00:02:55] And same question, could Kamala Harris have done anything any differently?

[00:03:00] And Pramila Jayapal was like, we want to wait and see until all the data comes in.

[00:03:03] But of course, she actually ventured a couple of things, one of which was she thought that Kamala needed to separate herself from the president on the war in Gaza and on economic issues.

[00:03:13] She was concerned that Kamala Harris lost votes among Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in Michigan.

[00:03:19] And on the economy, her diagnosis was that the Biden administration essentially wasn't progressive enough.

[00:03:25] And that's why the left is losing folks who make less than $100,000 a year.

[00:03:32] So the implication being that it was a mistake to trot out Liz Cheney and try to win over independents or Republicans in this election.

[00:03:40] That is kind of as good of a blue city thesis as I've heard.

[00:03:45] And so I'm expecting that both of you as good blue city dwellers completely agree with that diagnosis.

[00:03:52] It's crazy how the election results confirm all of Pramila Jayapal's priors.

[00:03:57] Now we can conclude the show.

[00:03:59] We can run the outro music.

[00:04:01] I really don't think that the problem was Harris didn't do enough to separate herself from Biden when it comes to Gaza.

[00:04:10] I care about what's going on in Gaza.

[00:04:13] I think all decent people do.

[00:04:16] Zionists are not Zionists.

[00:04:18] All decent people care.

[00:04:19] But the American electorate writ large, the majority of it, the vast majority, do not give one single solitary shit about what's going on anywhere outside.

[00:04:29] Apparently the egg aisle of the grocery store.

[00:04:33] You know, I just, I made the mistake right before we recorded this of listening to the Ezra Klein show.

[00:04:37] And I always agree with everything Ezra has to say for at least three hours after listening to the Ezra Klein show.

[00:04:43] And he said that the trap for Harris was she could neither run as the incumbent because she wasn't or the change candidate because she was part of the incumbent administration.

[00:04:54] And it really hamstrung her.

[00:04:57] It's hard to argue with that.

[00:05:00] You know, we were all hoping that Trump would be tagged as sort of a quasi incumbent and the incumbency thing would be a wash because he was already the fucking president.

[00:05:08] But what we've seen here, everybody knows who Trump is.

[00:05:11] And there's just this rising tide of right-wing populism that is at work all over the world.

[00:05:20] And I just read a stat that in the last two years, every incumbent government has been voted out, often by much wider margins than the Biden-Harris administration was just voted out.

[00:05:31] The incumbents have lost by staggering margins.

[00:05:34] And there's this throw-the-bums-out movement that's cutting right and cutting left, like we just saw in the UK, labor get voted in after 14 years of Tory rule.

[00:05:44] It's almost like who happened to be sitting on the throne at the moment, you know, the Peasants' Revolt arrived at the door.

[00:05:53] And so there's like certain ways I would analyze the election that would confirm my priors.

[00:05:59] That would be very comforting.

[00:06:00] But I think what we need to do at this moment as lefties and blue city people is to try to set aside all our priors and let the data get crunched and live with it for a second and not rush out there to try to win the argument.

[00:06:13] First of all, I agree.

[00:06:14] Obviously, the economy and how people feel about the economy was a major factor in the election.

[00:06:20] I mean, duh, right?

[00:06:21] Like the wrong track numbers are three to one towards wrong track.

[00:06:25] And to the extent that voters blamed Biden and by extension Kamala Harris for how they're feeling about their own economic circumstances and the price of fucking eggs or bacon in the grocery store, right?

[00:06:38] They took it out on her and they voted for Trump.

[00:06:41] So there's the immediate factor stuff.

[00:06:43] But to Dan's point, there's more than that going on here.

[00:06:48] I think it's a big mistake to say, oh, yeah, this is just a one off like, you know, we got dealt a shitty political hand and there was no way for Kamala to win this race.

[00:06:59] I mean, the Democratic Party has some fundamental brand or cultural problems that we should unpack.

[00:07:06] And the thing that's jumped out at me the most about the results and what we're already learning about who voted for Trump is that the biggest movement towards Trump in across the American electorate and the American geography was one in Latino areas and two on Native American reservations.

[00:07:29] But the really big ones are in urban cities and urban suburbs move the most.

[00:07:37] Whereas I was moving to Trump across the board, but the places that move the most to Trump are cities like New York and Los Angeles and Chicago.

[00:07:45] And there's a lot to unpack there.

[00:07:48] What the fuck?

[00:07:48] That is a real surprise.

[00:07:50] That's really surprising to me.

[00:07:51] And I think it tells us something maybe it tells us something different about the urban archipelago thesis than what I assumed we were going to learn.

[00:08:00] It negates it negates the urban archipelago thesis.

[00:08:03] Dems still won the cities.

[00:08:05] We're talking about a movement.

[00:08:06] Trump didn't win New York.

[00:08:08] Trump didn't win Chicago or Los Angeles for Seattle or Portland or Dallas or Houston.

[00:08:13] But there was a large movement.

[00:08:16] And I have a theory that I'm afraid to say out loud in front of a microphone.

[00:08:19] Oh, please do.

[00:08:22] Well, it's two-pronged.

[00:08:24] Like, there's a lot of immigrant communities and communities of color that move toward Trump.

[00:08:30] And a lot of those communities are urban communities.

[00:08:34] And maybe this is confirming my priors a little bit.

[00:08:38] But there is a problem of the insufferable left.

[00:08:43] There is a problem of the scold left.

[00:08:45] And the places where the insufferable left hold the most political and cultural power are in the cities.

[00:08:52] And the people most intimately familiar with the insufferable left are urbanites.

[00:08:57] And I feel like there's, especially since 2020, a lot of insufferable left thought policing, a lot of insufferable left cancellations, a lot of insufferable left.

[00:09:12] You may not think that, argue that, question that.

[00:09:17] And I feel like, and maybe this is, again, confirming my priors because I'm calling them the insufferable left because I find them insufferable.

[00:09:24] And I'm a lefty too.

[00:09:26] These are my people that I'm handcuffed to in unfun ways at times.

[00:09:32] A lot of the insufferable left, I think there might have been a certain segment of the urban population that was really familiar with them when it was just like casting a protest vote against, you know, the kind of candidates we've seen, some of them in Seattle and even elected officials we've seen at some times in Seattle.

[00:09:52] But activists and online scolds.

[00:09:55] And we've underestimated the impact, I think, that people being assholes all the time to everybody and the narcissism of small differences playing into that.

[00:10:04] People being assholes all the time to everybody, but especially assholes to people who are basically on their side 90, 95% of the way.

[00:10:13] And just this driving down on that 5% difference as thought crimes and as hate crimes, you know, this problem the left has with casting people out, you know, that shibboleth.

[00:10:27] And I think it's really true.

[00:10:28] The right seeks converts and the left hunts heretics.

[00:10:31] And I think there was a, I got tagged with heretic element to a driving of a protest vote in these big blue cities.

[00:10:42] Plus the like the movement of Hispanics, Latinos, black men, like where do those people live for the most part?

[00:10:49] In cities, in urban areas.

[00:10:52] And that drove it too.

[00:10:53] But those results were very, very depressing.

[00:10:55] That's not the urban archipelago in my heart.

[00:10:58] But again, people are, I think, are over-interpreting what those numbers mean.

[00:11:04] I've seen people repeat, you know, the biggest movement was in the cities.

[00:11:07] And then in the next breath basically say that Trump won these cities and he didn't.

[00:11:12] He didn't.

[00:11:13] Not close.

[00:11:14] Certainly not Seattle.

[00:11:15] Two-thirds, four-fifths against Trump in the cities.

[00:11:18] It was just like as a percentage, the movement was significant and worrisome,

[00:11:23] especially if we're going to want to dig ourselves out of this hole in two years or four years.

[00:11:26] So I want to bring up another data point that people have been talking a lot about,

[00:11:32] which is why are men, but especially younger men, becoming more conservative?

[00:11:38] This is a three-dude podcast.

[00:11:39] And one of the things that we have to bring up, of course, is misogyny.

[00:11:43] All the best podcasts are three-dude podcasts.

[00:11:46] One of the issues, of course, is misogyny, right?

[00:11:50] That is a problem.

[00:11:51] It was a problem for Kamala, you know, racism and misogyny.

[00:11:54] But, you know, my son was telling me that in his dormitory in a very liberal East Coast school,

[00:12:00] this was shocking to me.

[00:12:02] That something like 75% of the boys were for Trump, which somehow he didn't realize.

[00:12:08] And I was like, what is going on?

[00:12:10] He said, it's cool now to be a Republican among a certain subset of boys.

[00:12:16] And I was like, well, what's going on?

[00:12:17] He said, you know, they're listening to Joe Rogan and other social media influencers.

[00:12:23] And I was like, what's the number one issue?

[00:12:25] And he said, actually, inflation.

[00:12:27] You know, they're upset about prices.

[00:12:31] Yeah, these kids who don't have to pay their own bills.

[00:12:33] Exactly.

[00:12:34] And his peers don't seem to understand that he was upset that he couldn't explain to anybody,

[00:12:39] look, Trump's policies are going to be much more inflationary than Kamala's.

[00:12:43] And nobody seemed to embrace that idea.

[00:12:46] Nobody gives a shit.

[00:12:47] And Biden didn't do what Trump did, which actually I think we're going to have to get used to all

[00:12:52] politicians doing from here and out, which is get out there and brag constantly about everything.

[00:12:57] Yes.

[00:12:58] Biden wrestled inflation to the ground and brought it down.

[00:13:02] And one of the things that's been incredibly frustrating is Donald Trump gets a pass on

[00:13:06] the economic damage that the COVID pandemic did because he didn't do that.

[00:13:11] It's not fair.

[00:13:11] Like, you can't hold that against him.

[00:13:13] That was a, you know, that was a meteor strike.

[00:13:16] And yet repercussions of the COVID pandemic hitting that landed on Biden, he gets no pass for.

[00:13:23] So everything that happened in the last year of Trump because of, you know, economically

[00:13:27] because of COVID can't hold him responsible for that.

[00:13:30] Not his fault.

[00:13:30] He did get voted out in 2020, you know, over COVID.

[00:13:33] He did get voted out.

[00:13:34] But I mean, the argument people made in the last two years as this campaign got underway.

[00:13:39] But, you know, I write a sex advice column.

[00:13:42] I'm like a dick joke monkey.

[00:13:44] That's my job.

[00:13:44] I hear from a lot of men and boys.

[00:13:48] And what I'm detecting in some of this kind of performative, you know, it's cool to be a

[00:13:55] Trump supporter.

[00:13:56] It's sort of anti-establishment.

[00:13:58] It's posturing.

[00:13:59] But it's also from a lot of these boys.

[00:14:03] It's about like this sense that finally settling in that the how it works between the sexes has

[00:14:13] fundamentally and irrevocably changed.

[00:14:15] And, you know, women stopped being men slaves only about 40, 50 years ago.

[00:14:20] We only stopped having a system where every shitty guy wound up with a girl or a wife to take care of him because a woman couldn't function socially, politically, economically without a husband.

[00:14:32] And so they had to pick one, even if he was awful.

[00:14:35] And that's over.

[00:14:36] And I think there's a sense in a lot of these boys who are supporting Trump that the balance has shifted to such a great degree that they're very likely to wind up with nothing.

[00:14:49] No pussy for you.

[00:14:50] And I think there's like this, these boys and young men supporting Trump, there's this like wish casting, like I wish it was 1950, which is kind of what Trump says he wants to do, right?

[00:15:01] They want to roll back the 20th century.

[00:15:03] And it was in the 20th century that women stopped in the West and stopped being men's property.

[00:15:10] And these boys encouraged by people like Joe Rogan and that Andrew Tate asshole and other and others, there is this like sense that the only way that they want to re-enslave women.

[00:15:26] I hate to be, it sounds so hyperbolic when you put it like that, but it is, I think what's at play there that they have to be better men to get women or they need Donald Trump to rescind the 20th century.

[00:15:43] And then they don't have to be any better.

[00:15:44] And we can bring back the social circumstances and conditions that delivered a woman as property to every male who wanted one or more.

[00:15:53] And it's incredibly distressing because how do you say to these young men, like, you got to take your medicine.

[00:15:59] You got to go to therapy.

[00:16:00] You got to be better.

[00:16:01] Like women are up out getting, you know, running circles around you in college, earning more degrees, graduate degrees, PhDs out earning you in the marketplace.

[00:16:12] Now they don't need you.

[00:16:14] They have vibrators and they can share a woke beta boy and pass him around and have a better life than they could marrying your scummy fucking ass.

[00:16:25] I actually asked him that.

[00:16:27] I said, I said to him, I said, well, surely they must be starting to figure out that women are going to go with guys who vote blue.

[00:16:34] Maybe they'll start changing their minds here at some point.

[00:16:36] Before Sandeep gets in, I just had one quick sort of follow-up question.

[00:16:39] I heard some framing of this along the lines that you're suggesting that was saying something I hadn't really thought of before.

[00:16:48] And I wonder what you think about it, which is that throughout our adult lifetimes, the Democratic Party has been the party of sexual liberation, cultural liberation and sexual liberation.

[00:16:57] And Trump in a really weird and perverse and kind of twisted way has sort of flipped that by being the guy who can fuck whoever he wants and say whatever he wants.

[00:17:10] Assault women, rape women.

[00:17:11] Assault women, rape women.

[00:17:12] And this is a, it's a horrible thing.

[00:17:14] But our side sounds like the scolds and he sounds like to these young men, like he's our fantasy guy or whatever.

[00:17:22] I mean, I don't mean it exactly that way.

[00:17:25] It's aspirational.

[00:17:26] They would like to be able to get away with what he's gotten away with.

[00:17:30] And that's an incredibly distressing fact to sit with.

[00:17:35] So how does the left become the party of sexual liberation again, given that sort of twisted calculus?

[00:17:43] First of all, it's not just about how do we get back to being the party of sexual liberation.

[00:17:48] I mean, we've become the uptighty whitey party, right?

[00:17:51] I mean, like, I do think that there is a, you know, whatever the phrase, Dan, that you used.

[00:17:58] We've become this kind of scoldy, censorious sort of.

[00:18:02] Insufferable left.

[00:18:03] Yeah.

[00:18:03] Yeah.

[00:18:03] You know, and that's a huge turnoff to large swaths of the American population that are, you know, that didn't go to a small liberal arts college.

[00:18:14] And like, they think Dave Chappelle is still funny, right?

[00:18:18] You know, and they don't like it when people tell them that they're bad for thinking that stuff is, you know.

[00:18:24] Or I don't know whether it's the young men want to go back to the 50s and dominate women.

[00:18:29] They just want to get laid, right?

[00:18:30] Or, you know, and they don't want to feel bad about wanting to get laid.

[00:18:34] Did you see that poll that showed that people were very, women were very unlikely by like 70, 30 margins to date somebody who voted for Trump?

[00:18:44] Yeah.

[00:18:44] Because weird, women don't want to date guys who'll vote for rapists.

[00:18:48] Yeah.

[00:18:48] Right?

[00:18:49] So what do you mean when you say get back to being the party of sexual liberation?

[00:18:52] The party of like free fire sexual assault?

[00:18:56] You can get away with that.

[00:18:57] I'm saying that given that twisted calculus, you know, if that thesis is right, then in a weird way we've become the scolds.

[00:19:06] How do we fix that?

[00:19:07] Without, of course, without, you know, embracing Trump's version of, you could hardly call it sexual liberation, but his version of freedom.

[00:19:15] I think we just need to chill the fuck out and not treat every misstep as an excuse to drive somebody, you know, to expel somebody or get somebody fired or socially, you know, tag them with social pariah status and drive them on to the left.

[00:19:35] I think of like gay land, queer land, LGBTQIA plus land.

[00:19:39] And there are these polls that showed for decades that younger people, the new generation that could be polled every year was a little less homophobic than the year before.

[00:19:50] And that has started to reverse itself just in the last four or five years.

[00:19:57] And there came a moment when, you know, getting over your like bullshit that your faith or your parents told you about gay people meant that you could like have these cool gay friends.

[00:20:07] Right.

[00:20:08] And it was actually something that would open doors for you socially.

[00:20:13] But there became a moment even for queer people, a lot of queer people feel this way, where gay land became a never ending vocabulary test, a pop quiz that you were very likely to fail.

[00:20:26] And that induces anxiety in people.

[00:20:28] It induces anxiety in me.

[00:20:30] Oh my God.

[00:20:30] I used he instead of they.

[00:20:33] Because I forgot for a moment you standing there with the beard and the muscles and the mountaintop on this that I forgot that you were non-binary and you need to get that tattooed on your forehead because there's all these secondary sex characteristics blaring at me.

[00:20:47] And it would be fine if you could screw up and people would like shrug it off.

[00:20:53] But we've now live in a culture where you screw up and somebody has all these social incentives to go to fucking pieces about it.

[00:21:01] And then they are the victim.

[00:21:02] But for them to be the victim, there has to be a perp.

[00:21:05] And we like live in a world now where people walk around just anxious about, especially in urban areas, especially in places where the insufferable left is the majority, walk around anxious all the time about doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thing, misreading a signal, asking somebody out and that being rounded up to sexual harassment.

[00:21:28] Whereas asking somebody out once is fine.

[00:21:30] Asking somebody out twice after they've told you to fuck off is like not okay, even though rom-coms have given you the message all your life that persistence is how you get there.

[00:21:41] And like three, four times, then you're getting to sexual harassment territory.

[00:21:44] And how do we dial that back when we've got all these incentives to be the, you know, the biggest, weepiest bag of slop on the internet or in the room or in the workplace?

[00:21:56] Like you maybe like, I remember this happening at the stranger and I kind of like, I never got on Slack.

[00:22:02] So I was not exposed to a lot of it, but like, I called it the single tear running down the cheek veto.

[00:22:07] Like whoever is like feeling the most feelings, obviously that person has some insight.

[00:22:16] That person is like talisman and everybody else has to defer to the person.

[00:22:20] And how does that not incentivize a culture of grievance and scorekeeping that makes...

[00:22:25] And victimhood.

[00:22:26] And victimhood.

[00:22:27] And victimhood that makes like voting for Trump as a protest vote in an urban area because fuck these people that yelled at me at that meeting or whatever.

[00:22:37] Yeah.

[00:22:37] You're in an individual's experience of it might be of their, their like intersection with the insufferable intersectional left might've looked like for them.

[00:22:44] I can see that somebody going into the voting booth.

[00:22:47] Like you saw those ads were like women in the voting booth, like voting for Harris because fuck their husbands.

[00:22:52] It's private in the voting booth.

[00:22:53] Like, I think there was like a countervailing it's private in the voting booth opportunity for a lot of people to be like, fuck this shit.

[00:23:03] From the last 10, 15 years, fuck this shit.

[00:23:06] I'm tired of it.

[00:23:07] And talk about voting against your own self-interest.

[00:23:10] A lot of those people are going to deeply regret that protest vote.

[00:23:14] Yeah.

[00:23:15] So let's, let's bring this back to the, to the urban archipelago, right?

[00:23:18] Cause I think we're, we're, we're saying something important, but let's sort of put it in that context,

[00:23:23] which is that when I thought going into this election, I thought if Trump wins, that's going to be a, you know, to some extent, an indictment of the urban archipelago idea.

[00:23:34] Like the idea that we should retreat back into the cities and create this sort of urban cultural bastions, you know, and there's these islands in a sea of red.

[00:23:42] It just doesn't work in American politics for structural reasons, you know, the electoral college and how it all plays out.

[00:23:50] And, and the, and the fact is like, like we need to, you know, and we're losing all of these people in towns and rural parts of the country.

[00:23:58] And there are just more of them.

[00:24:00] So it's a bad idea.

[00:24:01] Right.

[00:24:01] But that's not what happened here.

[00:24:02] Right.

[00:24:02] I actually don't think this was an indictment of the urban archipelago thesis.

[00:24:06] What happened was we're losing shitloads of people in blue cities that we're supposed to be getting right.

[00:24:12] Which is not an indictment of the urban archipelago.

[00:24:14] It's an indictment of whatever the dominant culture is right now in urban America.

[00:24:19] Right.

[00:24:19] We've gotten off track culturally in a way that we're losing our own people.

[00:24:24] They're rebelling against us.

[00:24:26] Right.

[00:24:26] Again, I would say Harris won in these cities that we're talking about as if Trump won them.

[00:24:32] Trump peeled some voters off in these cities and it's multi-causal.

[00:24:36] I think there's different reasons why he managed to peel some voters off in these cities.

[00:24:40] But the urban archipelago is real and still exists.

[00:24:43] And it's all we've gotten.

[00:24:44] It's all we've ever really had.

[00:24:47] Right.

[00:24:47] Cities turn states blue.

[00:24:50] There's no such thing as a blue state.

[00:24:52] There's no such precinct by precinct map of a state that's all blue.

[00:24:56] And you're like, oh, look at that.

[00:24:57] California solid blue in the way there are some solid red, red states.

[00:25:02] And so, like, yeah, the urban archipelago.

[00:25:05] Shad itself.

[00:25:07] And we need to think about why he managed to peel off, you know, black men, Hispanics, Latinos.

[00:25:14] Pardon me, the Latinx community.

[00:25:16] Yeah.

[00:25:16] Non-college educated people across the board.

[00:25:20] Yeah.

[00:25:21] Yeah.

[00:25:21] Right.

[00:25:22] Right.

[00:25:22] And we need to think about that.

[00:25:24] But we can't pretend that cities aren't still our bastion.

[00:25:28] You used that word, that they're not a bastion.

[00:25:30] They are a bastion.

[00:25:31] They are a safe space, if I may.

[00:25:34] All right, Sandeep.

[00:25:35] So what you're saying here is that, you know, look, Democrats want to expand their tent in this last election.

[00:25:42] They were trying to do it.

[00:25:42] But at the same time, we're barely keeping it together, even in blue cities, even within Dan's urban archipelago.

[00:25:50] We're losing key parts of our own urban archipelago coalition.

[00:25:54] I think that is right.

[00:25:55] And I think that is what the preliminary data we're seeing is showing.

[00:25:58] And look, let me put it to you this way, right?

[00:26:00] What was Trump's closing argument?

[00:26:03] It wasn't the economy, right?

[00:26:05] The ads that the Trump campaign were running the last three weeks of campaign, what were they?

[00:26:10] They were – I think the takeaway line from this election may end up being Kamala Harris is for they, them.

[00:26:19] President Trump is for us, right?

[00:26:21] Those ads that were running – and I thought that are being characterized as anti-trans.

[00:26:26] And I think they were very harsh and anti-trans.

[00:26:29] I think that's a fair characterization, but it's not a complete –

[00:26:31] There were also like – also hundreds of millions are spent on specifically anti-trans ads.

[00:26:38] Yeah, yeah.

[00:26:39] So in addition to like –

[00:26:40] But there was more in those ads, right?

[00:26:41] They, them is doing a lot of work in those ads, right?

[00:26:44] Because it doesn't just mean trans people.

[00:26:46] What they're saying is it's the – they, them is the traditional media.

[00:26:50] It's academia.

[00:26:52] It's the people that are telling you Dave Chappelle isn't funny.

[00:26:56] It's the – you know, it is an indictment.

[00:26:59] The way Trump uses they, they are going to do this or, you know, they're indicting cosmopolitan urban culture as it exists today.

[00:27:09] And guess what?

[00:27:10] It fucking worked with a lot of people, right?

[00:27:12] Like – and yeah, I'm fucking ambivalent about a lot of the cultural shit I see in Seattle these days.

[00:27:19] I think some of the identitarian shit is whack.

[00:27:22] I think some of the – you know, so –

[00:27:25] And you know what?

[00:27:26] And you know what?

[00:27:26] That's fine.

[00:27:27] The problem isn't that there's some identitarian shit that's whack.

[00:27:31] There's always been some identitarian shit that's whack.

[00:27:33] The problem is that you can't function politically, socially and be employed and a lefty if you – and say some of this shit is whack.

[00:27:43] You're not allowed to say it out loud.

[00:27:44] Right?

[00:27:44] It used to be you could be like – yeah, you could be on the left and think some things like some lefties were up to was stupid or counterproductive or performative or lame.

[00:27:53] And you could say that and still be in coalition with those people.

[00:27:56] And now you'd say that like –

[00:27:59] And you get canceled.

[00:28:00] And you will be – you will get canceled.

[00:28:02] You will get – you will be the subject to a pylon.

[00:28:06] You will be subject to a struggle session at work.

[00:28:11] And yeah, that's the problem.

[00:28:13] That's what the – you know, we talk about expanding the tent.

[00:28:15] What we need to expand the tent is to include the whack but also include the people who think some of that whack shit is whack but we have the same economic interests or we share other goals politically.

[00:28:25] But you're still like the censoriousness of the left.

[00:28:27] Like sometimes they have a point.

[00:28:28] You should be able to say like non-binary.

[00:28:32] Like that's the they-them thing.

[00:28:34] Right?

[00:28:35] Like –

[00:28:36] Yeah.

[00:28:36] I have friends who identify as non-binary.

[00:28:39] I use they-them pronouns.

[00:28:40] I try to be conscientious.

[00:28:41] I'm LGBTQIA plus whatever like some gay white men my age identify as queer.

[00:28:47] And I'm not in denial about where that word came from.

[00:28:49] It was gays and lesbians who reclaimed it and popularized it after 1990.

[00:28:53] It was specifically gay men and lesbians who did that.

[00:28:56] So like queer.

[00:28:57] I'm all for it.

[00:28:59] But I know people who think like the non-binary shit is insane.

[00:29:03] That it's gender essentialist.

[00:29:05] That it's actually kind of regressive.

[00:29:07] Because oh, I'm not a woman because I have masculine traits.

[00:29:10] It's as if you can't be a woman and have some masculine traits.

[00:29:14] I actually think like gender has become so oppressive for many people in their minds that they want to identify out of it.

[00:29:22] In the same way you hear people say I'm spiritual and then you ask them what they mean by that.

[00:29:25] And then well, I'm Christian but I don't want to say that because of the baggage that it comes with now.

[00:29:29] Because Christianity is so politicized in America.

[00:29:31] And I feel like there's that same kind of like I'm opting out of gender by a lot of people saying they're non-binary.

[00:29:38] Because they don't want to, you know, be subject to expectations.

[00:29:42] Which is different than like neither being a man nor a woman.

[00:29:46] And I feel awkward saying this right now.

[00:29:49] Yeah.

[00:29:49] Like I'm like who's, how's this going to get clipped?

[00:29:51] Who's going to cancel me for this, right?

[00:29:53] Right.

[00:29:54] I'm feeling the same way.

[00:29:55] We've got to like do the big disclaimer about well we're really pro-trees.

[00:29:58] You know, like we've got to say all this stuff.

[00:30:00] I know.

[00:30:00] But what I want in my party, like, you know, people who are non-binary, people who are like me, like, well, what does that actually mean?

[00:30:08] And can we like think and talk about like the gender essentialism of it?

[00:30:14] And like can you address that gender essentialist critique with me?

[00:30:18] Can we engage on that?

[00:30:18] But also in my party, like I want union members who are like this blue here they them shit is insane.

[00:30:27] And fuck it.

[00:30:28] But I'm voting democratic because-

[00:30:29] There are two genders.

[00:30:29] What the fuck are you talking about?

[00:30:31] Right, you know?

[00:30:32] Right, right, right.

[00:30:33] But I'm voting democratic with these people because Biden walked a picket line.

[00:30:38] Biden saved our pensions.

[00:30:39] Biden did this.

[00:30:40] Biden did that.

[00:30:41] And it doesn't matter to me so much that Biden like is for they them too.

[00:30:46] Which maybe should have been the Harris campaign response ad.

[00:30:49] She's for they them.

[00:30:50] She's for you too.

[00:30:52] She's for all of us.

[00:30:53] Like they could have come out with an ad engaging with the they them ad in a way that neutralized it for some to an extent.

[00:31:02] Because like the they them, she's for they them, he's for us.

[00:31:05] It's so divisive.

[00:31:07] It's so fascistic.

[00:31:09] It's really harsh.

[00:31:10] Yeah.

[00:31:11] I mean, it's fascist, right?

[00:31:12] The way that it's literally fascist, what Trump's up to there.

[00:31:16] Right.

[00:31:16] And the Dems didn't, it's just like that whole Dem posture now.

[00:31:20] Like I shouldn't have to, I shouldn't have to educate you.

[00:31:24] I shouldn't have to engage with you.

[00:31:25] I can't acknowledge this critique or argument because then I'm platforming it or validating it.

[00:31:32] And like, I actually think what I just said about the Harris campaign coming out with an ad that directly tackled that ad is a really good idea.

[00:31:39] And maybe I should have had it before the election and pushed it out there in the hopes that somebody did it.

[00:31:44] But we have to meet them on the battlefield where they're fighting and not like, well, they're like trying to make non-binary an issue.

[00:31:54] And so we're going to ignore them because then non-binary isn't an issue.

[00:31:57] Like that doesn't.

[00:31:58] There is going to be a lot more support for the concept of like trans rights, generally speaking.

[00:32:05] If we're talking about equal protections in the workplace, basic human and civil rights, there would be widespread support for that among Democrats and Republicans actually.

[00:32:17] But less support or more of a desire for conversation about things like sports.

[00:32:23] The problem with the trans girls in sports thing is like coming up with solutions.

[00:32:28] Somebody's going to lose.

[00:32:30] Yeah, somebody's going to lose.

[00:32:30] One of the ways we won the argument about marriage equality was saying that, you know, marriage licenses aren't a finite resource.

[00:32:37] The problem with trans girls in sports, places on the team are a finite resource.

[00:32:42] Scholarships are a finite resource.

[00:32:44] Trophies are a finite resource.

[00:32:45] And how do we address that?

[00:32:48] I don't want to get in trouble, but like I'm from the queer left.

[00:32:53] I just want to know like what my marching orders are and I will like make the argument.

[00:32:57] But we get two arguments when it comes to like trans women in sports, which is there's no advantage.

[00:33:04] And we get the argument that inclusion is the greater good, which kind of implicitly acknowledges the possibility that there's an advantage to people who have gone through malpuberty competing with women in sports.

[00:33:17] And like they put their kind of contradictory arguments, but both are made and both are advanced.

[00:33:21] And I think people like intuitively can sense when they're being played and people are arguing on both sides of their mouths.

[00:33:29] And that's kind of the case when it comes to trans women and girls in sport.

[00:33:34] And we've seeded this issue to the right because we can't – I feel like I'm taking a huge risk saying what I just said.

[00:33:43] And I'm going to get my queer card yanked from me.

[00:33:45] And that's allowed the right to demagogue on it and to own this issue in a way that's been really bad for trans people.

[00:33:52] Because we aren't able on the left to like engage and make this not a left-right polarized conversation or argument or issue.

[00:34:00] And it's been weaponized by the right to the detriment of trans girls whether they're in sports or not.

[00:34:08] And what I really resent about this is like I'm a theater faggot.

[00:34:11] Like I don't care about elite level athletics.

[00:34:14] And I hate that I have to have an opinion about it.

[00:34:16] Right, right, right.

[00:34:18] No, but I think – the point you were making earlier, Dan, I think it goes to something really fundamental here, which is like I know – like you, I know a number of gender-critical feminists.

[00:34:31] These are people on the left, right, that have certain concerns.

[00:34:34] Because guess what?

[00:34:35] These are kind of complicated issues on the margins about how do you make these big social and cultural changes in our society and make it work within our existing framework.

[00:34:47] And if you can't have a conversation about how do we do that and what are the trade-offs or the frictions in a kind of calm, like rational way or acknowledge that people have specific concerns and that doesn't make them bigots and let's figure out how to do this, then you're right.

[00:35:11] Then it just opens up – and the fundamental point here being I don't think the American people like hate trans people, you know, your average voter out there.

[00:35:21] I think they want to be accepting and accommodating.

[00:35:25] I mean I think there's a generosity of – generally a generosity of spirit among people.

[00:35:30] But we've queered that, so to speak, for them because we demand absolute, you know, allegiance to a set of things that –

[00:35:40] There's actually a great libertarian argument that can be made for trans rights and for gay rights that has been effective.

[00:35:46] Like when, you know, Dick Cheney of all people who supported marriage equality before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton said freedom means freedom for everyone, right?

[00:35:54] And if somebody like believes that their gender identity is in conflict with their sexed body and they want to bring their sexed body into alignment with their gender identity and live as a woman or a man depending, that they should be free to do that, to pursue happiness how they want to pursue happiness.

[00:36:14] Like there is a libertarian argument that could be – that I think has been.

[00:36:18] Like there is when you do – look at the polling on support for trans rights.

[00:36:22] It's pretty broad support for trans rights.

[00:36:25] Even among conservatives, even among Republicans because there is this intuitive sense that people should be able to do whatever the fuck they want and live how they want to live.

[00:36:34] But then you get into this nitty gritty like that case in suburban Washington where there was a trans woman in a sauna that's mostly four little immigrant old ladies and she had a penis and it was like a thing.

[00:36:50] And you're just – you're having these moments where people are going, okay, well, if supporting trans rights means I have to be okay with somebody with a dick who is a woman,

[00:37:00] alarming my grandmother who's an immigrant who doesn't speak English in a sauna where people are naked, well, then I'm off.

[00:37:06] I'm out.

[00:37:07] Yeah.

[00:37:07] And that's where you get into these like how do you balance individual rights against each other that – you know, I'm old enough and gay enough to remember when this was an argument with some purchase about just gays and lesbians.

[00:37:21] Like a gay guy in a locker room was a problem because like he might look at my dick, right?

[00:37:27] And like eventually people got used to us also being at the gym.

[00:37:31] Eventually people realized that we were the majority of guys at the gym and that became like – the salience of that issue drained away as more gay people came out.

[00:37:42] Maybe we're on the same trajectory here with this and we'll get there but we're not there yet.

[00:37:50] And the lefty thing I think of the insufferable left in urban areas is everybody must pretend we are there already or you're a bigot.

[00:37:58] And I'm there.

[00:38:00] Like I don't care.

[00:38:01] But like I can see how somebody else might not be there yet and what do we do with that person?

[00:38:06] And me acknowledging the existence of that person is not me endorsing discrimination against trans people.

[00:38:12] Right. And again, this goes to sort of what might be wrong with our urban culture right now because the people that are there tend to be educated, affluent, you know.

[00:38:25] You know, there's a class dimension to this, right?

[00:38:28] About how we are pushing the values of a kind of gentry class elite or whatever I call it, you know, my term for it.

[00:38:36] And we're trying to impose that on a bunch of like, you know, non-college educated people that have – we could try to bring them along but we're not doing that.

[00:38:45] We're just trying to dictate to them what their world is and Trump is – and the right is tapping into that and saying fuck those elites and fuck them for telling you that your qualms are wrong.

[00:38:59] And that works.

[00:39:02] It moves voters over that way.

[00:39:04] And it's a largely symbolic issue because most people are never going to encounter a trans person in their daily lives because trans people are a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the population.

[00:39:13] So it's like this hypothetical for the most part for most people in most places and yet they've been able to weaponize it in part because we've handed the issue to them because we're not allowed to discuss it with any nuance or ambiguity or acknowledge.

[00:39:30] Well, and to Sandeep's point, I mean, liberal arts colleges and universities reinforce class distinctions.

[00:39:37] You go there in part to learn how to think but you also learn how to appreciate art and part of appreciating art has to do with class distinctions.

[00:39:45] And this is like another – these things are layers upon layer of etiquette.

[00:39:50] But let me just ask this.

[00:39:52] How do you link this kind of sociological criticism, like these hunches that are based on living in the world and reading and understanding it?

[00:40:03] But this stuff is pretty squishy.

[00:40:04] If you look at the polling results from this election, it was all about inflation, immigration, democracy, right?

[00:40:12] And what we're talking about now is squishy cultural history stuff that's harder to quantify.

[00:40:18] Like where are we going to find the data, as Pramila Jayapal put it, and go back and say, oh, yeah, this is a factor.

[00:40:23] How do we link this up?

[00:40:24] Yeah, well, the first thing is there is some data, right?

[00:40:27] I talked to a Democratic operative last week who is involved in the big super PAC that formed to elect Harris Walls.

[00:40:38] They tested every single ad that ran nationally in the presidential race, right?

[00:40:44] And the top testing ad – it was tied for the top testing ad on the Trump side was that anti-trans ad, which makes sense, right?

[00:40:54] The Trump people weren't stupid.

[00:40:56] They wouldn't spend $75 million in the last three weeks running that ad unless they thought it was working.

[00:41:03] And on the Democratic side, there was data that showed that it was, in fact, working.

[00:41:07] And I do want to – to Dan's point about some of this stuff being so abstract and theoretical, I looked it up.

[00:41:14] There were exactly, I think, two transition surgeries that taxpayers paid for in the federal prison system, right?

[00:41:23] Ever.

[00:41:24] You know, it's kind of a non-issue in reality.

[00:41:29] It's not happening.

[00:41:30] There's no, like, massive taxpayer expense on, you know, giving criminals and migrants sex change operations.

[00:41:36] I mean, it was completely, like, kind of made-up thing.

[00:41:38] But nonetheless, they had this clip of Kamala Harris in 2019 giving them – I would call it a trifecta of stuff because not only is she talking about trans rights, but she's saying,

[00:41:51] I'm going to tax the shit out of you because I love criminals and migrants so much that I want to use your tax money to give all of them sex change operations, right?

[00:42:05] You know, and it flabbergasts me that we reached a point in 2019 – obviously, that's not her position now.

[00:42:11] And she sort of clearly walked away from all of that crazy shit in 2024.

[00:42:17] But they ran against 2019 Kamala.

[00:42:19] I mean, one of the things that's crazy-making about it is like, oh, she said this in 2019 and she's walking it back now.

[00:42:25] I think what she said when she was asked about it was, we should follow the law, which a lot of trans people were alarmed by because there have been laws passed in some states that are attacking trans rights and access to gender-affirming care for trans people, including trans adults.

[00:42:43] And so her saying that was really alarming.

[00:42:45] How is it that she isn't allowed to walk away from 2019, but Trump is allowed to walk away from 30 years of being pro-choice?

[00:42:54] How is that possible?

[00:42:57] And partly possible because the right is more transactional.

[00:43:01] It's just like the way Trump embraces everybody who attacked him who then bends the knee like J.D. fucking Vance, who's going to be our next vice fucking president.

[00:43:09] The left doesn't quite seem to be able to do that.

[00:43:14] And certainly the right isn't going to let Harris walk that back.

[00:43:19] They're going to tag her with that over and over again in a way that the left doesn't tag Trump over and over and over again with having been pro-choice and this clearly being a political calculation machination on his part.

[00:43:32] But I don't know, maybe there's no upside in like trying to tag Trump with that because the evangelicals are so far up his ass, they're practically his taste buds at this point.

[00:43:41] And so where's the upside?

[00:43:44] Why waste that effort?

[00:43:45] But I find it telling of the political trap the left is in, that a lefty can never walk shit back or change position.

[00:43:55] She had a hard time.

[00:43:56] She's for fracking.

[00:43:57] She's against fracking.

[00:43:57] She just needed to say, like, I got more information.

[00:44:00] I learned more about the issue, as you would hope your political leaders would do, is to keep learning and paying attention.

[00:44:05] And sometimes that means changing your position.

[00:44:07] And she couldn't say that.

[00:44:09] She couldn't say it.

[00:44:10] She couldn't say it because there are a bunch of activists on the left that would have flipped out and started movements to not vote for her.

[00:44:19] Right?

[00:44:19] To your point, the right ate it when Trump sort of softened his position on abortion and, you know, or whatever.

[00:44:26] He's allowed, he's got a lot of leeway on issues.

[00:44:30] Because they knew he was lying.

[00:44:31] They knew he's going to just keep appointing Supreme Court justices.

[00:44:33] Nobody believes anything he says anyway.

[00:44:35] Yeah.

[00:44:35] So it's like, yeah, whatever.

[00:44:37] Yeah, he's just trying to get elected.

[00:44:38] But we've supported politicians who lied to us.

[00:44:41] Right.

[00:44:41] Everybody, Barack Obama said he opposed gay marriage and we all pretended to believe him and then argue with him about it as if we didn't know that he actually was for gay marriage.

[00:44:48] The whole time we did.

[00:44:49] Yes.

[00:44:50] Oh, he evolved in 2012.

[00:44:52] But he was able to say that and get elected in 2008.

[00:44:57] He said, like after 2004, 11 anti-gay marriage amendments to state constitutions helped reelect George W. Bush.

[00:45:04] Of course, the president running in the next cycle is not going to endorse same-sex marriage.

[00:45:09] But he went further than that.

[00:45:11] He said, when a man marries a woman, God is present.

[00:45:13] Which implies that when a man wants to marry a man, the devil is present.

[00:45:17] Like somebody who's not God or God is absent from that.

[00:45:20] Right.

[00:45:21] It was not just.

[00:45:22] As appealing as that may be to some people.

[00:45:24] Yeah.

[00:45:24] Right.

[00:45:25] It was not just I don't support same-sex marriage.

[00:45:27] It was a horrible thing to say about same-sex couples.

[00:45:31] Right.

[00:45:32] And I wrote that man a big check and voted for him.

[00:45:36] Colin Allred said he didn't support trans girls in sports, I believe.

[00:45:42] And there was a lot of people online saying, well, I can't vote for him now.

[00:45:45] And it's just like, no, no, you have to vote for him.

[00:45:48] Like your choice is Ted Cruz.

[00:45:51] Like this is binary.

[00:45:53] And like he's not there yet.

[00:45:54] And you have to win like an argument to get him there.

[00:45:57] Like we had to win an argument on same-sex marriage to get not just Barack Obama, who was always with us, but pretended not to be.

[00:46:03] We had to get him there.

[00:46:04] And we kept yelling at him.

[00:46:06] There was a lot of, I staged a protest in the White House.

[00:46:09] The only Pride Month celebration of the White House I was ever invited to.

[00:46:13] I passed out.

[00:46:14] Obama said he's evolving on gay marriage.

[00:46:16] And I passed out buttons to everybody, including gave one to Joe Biden and Jill Biden that said evolve already.

[00:46:22] Yeah.

[00:46:23] Right?

[00:46:24] No wonder you got disinvited.

[00:46:27] Well, I've never been invited back to the White House.

[00:46:29] But like, I'm not saying that trans people should have looked at Colin Allred or some of this, like Dems trying to parse this or not taking the position you'd like them to take and just like not argue, not complain.

[00:46:41] But don't not vote.

[00:46:44] Don't not support the candidate who's closer to where you want to get than the candidate who's moving as fast as they can in the opposite direction is where you want to get.

[00:46:52] So almost 20 years ago, this piece, I think, ran November 11th.

[00:46:57] So we're just about on the 20th anniversary of this urban archipelago piece.

[00:47:01] What's your message today?

[00:47:03] And how does it compare, do you think, to what you were saying 20 years ago?

[00:47:07] Michelle Goldberg has a column in the New York Times last week when this airs about the dangers of turning inward.

[00:47:13] She writes,

[00:47:14] My own instinct, which conflicts with the demands of my job, is to retreat into my family, to look for solace in time with friends, in theater and in novels, to black out the humiliating truth about what my country has decided to become.

[00:47:28] And I think that instinct is understandable.

[00:47:31] Like, we're not knitting pussy hats and marching on Washington this time.

[00:47:34] He won the popular vote.

[00:47:36] We have to retire Obama's phrase, this is not who we are.

[00:47:41] This is who we are.

[00:47:42] And what do we do about that?

[00:47:45] I think there's going to be a certain amount of turning inward.

[00:47:48] I know that this week I unfollowed some politics shows I've been following for a while because I'm going to reduce my politics diet a little bit right now because there's only so much aggravation I can take.

[00:47:57] But part of that turning inward can not just be to friends, family, novels, theater, but turning inwards in our cities and building them.

[00:48:07] Because the cities, again, are the backbone of blue America and every election that a Democrat has ever won for president.

[00:48:16] It's been through the blue cities.

[00:48:18] So the more you do to make your city a welcoming, tolerant, hospitable place, the denser your city is, the more public transit your city has, the likely you are to set your country up, this nation up, for political reversals and successes for the left in the future.

[00:48:39] But I think part of what we need to do is what we've been talking about almost this entire time is cancel, cancel culture.

[00:48:47] That people who are with you on 80, 90, even 70%, 60%, 51%, 50.5% of what you want are your allies and not heretics that you need to attract attention to yourself by burning at the stake.

[00:49:04] Like we don't have the luxury anymore on the left in this country, knowing what this country has become and that we are now.

[00:49:11] And like, you know, what we told ourselves in 2016 was Hillary Clinton won by 3.5 million votes.

[00:49:17] If it weren't for the Electoral College, she would be president.

[00:49:20] We can't tell ourselves that this time.

[00:49:22] And so what do we do?

[00:49:23] We build our coalitions.

[00:49:24] We do the work.

[00:49:25] We build the cities.

[00:49:27] You know, the bigger, the bluer, the more populous.

[00:49:29] And in some ways more populist the cities are, the likelier we are to turn it back.

[00:49:37] And that's something we're going to be able to do 24 months from now if we can take back not the Senate.

[00:49:44] That's a long shot in 2026.

[00:49:47] But the House to put some block on the Trump administration unless they can unwind American democracy in the next 24 months.

[00:49:56] I think that this election actually was not a repudiation of Dan's urban archipelago thesis, which was really a call for the creation of a kind of broad-based urban identity, right?

[00:50:12] To form as a basis for unifying all sorts of diverse people and groups and constituencies together under one banner of our shared experience of urban community, right?

[00:50:28] The pluralism and the diversity and the vibrancy and the dynamism and the innovation and the, you know, cultural power, right?

[00:50:39] And energy that urban spaces create.

[00:50:43] I think that argument still has a lot of merit to it.

[00:50:48] But I think what this discussion, I think what we're saying here is that that culture has kind of gotten fucked up right now, right?

[00:50:58] Rather than being a unifying urban identity culture, it's become a kind of divisive and for a lot of people alienating and censorious culture, right?

[00:51:09] I mean, for a lot of voters, the Trump people turned Kamala Harris into a cultural alien, you know, some person who came down from the planet Transsexual Transylvania to like and pose some weird, weird, weird, you know, Tim Curry, right?

[00:51:25] You know, in an urban mansion or whatever, you know.

[00:51:28] Literally, just a couple months ago, people were like screaming and yelling about how problematic Rocky Horror Picture Show is.

[00:51:36] And there was a certain slice of the left that was trying to make people who liked Rocky Horror feel bad about liking Rocky Horror because this 50-year-old film didn't nail it.

[00:51:47] The presentism is one of the things that's driving this splitting and balkanization in the cities.

[00:51:54] One of the many things.

[00:51:55] I'm sorry to interrupt you.

[00:51:56] No, I was a movie theater projectionist when I was in college in Portland and the midnight movie was Rocky Horror, right?

[00:52:02] So I projected that movie like 75 times.

[00:52:04] I've seen that movie more than any other movie ever.

[00:52:07] And, you know, I have a deep nostalgia and fondness for Rocky Horror.

[00:52:12] It's a great movie.

[00:52:14] As do I.

[00:52:14] And the fact that we're denouncing that nowadays in urban culture is fucked up and wrong and sort of gets at sort of the heart of why we're losing people that are very gettable.

[00:52:25] Because broadly, cultural progressivism can be very appealing to people.

[00:52:31] Urban cosmopolitanism can be very appealing to people.

[00:52:35] But not if you, you know, are dicks about it.

[00:52:39] We have to let people like what they like.

[00:52:41] Yeah.

[00:52:41] We shouldn't tell people.

[00:52:42] Give people space.

[00:52:43] Oh, you're dumb and bad because you like this thing.

[00:52:46] And I have this insight into how bad this thing actually is.

[00:52:50] If you'd thought about it, you fucking idiot.

[00:52:51] Like, where does that get us?

[00:52:53] Right.

[00:52:54] We're going to have to leave it there.

[00:52:56] That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues with sex advice columnist and political analyst Dan Savage, political consultant Sandeep Kashuk.

[00:53:05] I'm David Hyde.