972: Can Democrats Win Without Identity Politics?

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Music. Instead

Brian Nichols  0:07  
of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, hey there, folks. Brian Nichols here on another fun filled episode of The Brian Nichols Show, I am, as always, your humble host joining you from our lovely cardio miracle Studios here in sunny Eastern Indiana. The Brian Nichols Show is powered by, yes, the best heart health supplement in the world. So if you want to learn how to lower your resting heart rate, lower your blood pressure while improving your pump at the gym. Stick around. We're gonna talk about more of cardio miracle in today's episode. But first, oh, you poor Democrats, you are suffering right now in the the court of public opinion. And with that, you see all the the leading Democratic voices trying, begging the pub, the public to give them a second, a third, a fifth, a 35th chance. I don't know, but right now, you have folks like Gavin Newsom, who's going out doing podcasts, trying to recruit folks on the right side of the aisle to enter into conversations. You have folks like AOC going across the country saying, Hey, if you voted for Trump, I want to know why, you have folks like Stephen A Smith, who he's saying, Hey, I'm just the dude. And I think the Democrats have gone off, off the deep end, and maybe I'm going to be a voice of some sanity and some common sense when it comes to the 2026 and then 2028 presidential election. So right now, the Democratic Party, they're definitely between a rock and a hard place, and let's talk about not only why that is, but what course of action might actually help bring some of the Democratic establishment back towards I don't know what do we want to call it, like sanity. That might be the right word, but let's discuss that. Joining here today on The Brian Nichols Show from young voices, is Joey McFadden, Joey, welcome to The Brian Nichols Show how you

Speaker 1  2:01  
doing? I'm simply fabulous. As my father would say, How are you doing?

Brian Nichols  2:05  
Quite well. Quite well. My friend, looking forward to today's conversation, Joey, let's, let's do this before we dig into the Democrats and the goofball this that's happening behind the scenes there. Introduce yourself here to The Brian Nichols Show audience, and give us a little bit of context in your world, in this, this world of politics and kind of what your perspective and approach is.

Speaker 1  2:22  
Well, I am a I was a contributor with young voices. Now they've accepted me to stay with them the long term as a writer and commentator. I also am the managing editor for the sub stack of the New York City Alliance of braver angels, which is an organization devoted to political depolarization. I'm an assistant at upward news, and I'm a freelance art critic. I've written for journals like fair observer and modern age and with contributor queer majority, so I've got a lot of intellectual stuff going on. And back in March, I wrote this article about Gavin Newsom's new podcast where, you know, I talk about how he's kind of shifting with the times to adopt a more, let's talk across the aisle, sort of, uh, approach. And, you know, he's sort of unawakening himself. I don't think he's actually, quite literally, changing his policy positions that much, but he's trying to appeal to people's sensibilities a little bit more, recognizing that people are not big fans of, you know, far left progressive identity politics. And his podcast has embraced people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. I was just looking at, I haven't been keeping up with it too much, but I was just looking at some of his more recent guests. And, you know, he's also had people on there like Scott Galloway and rah Manuel and Ezra Klein Tim Wall. So, I mean, it's not just right wing people that he's talking to, but, you know, I think he's decided to try to embrace the new media environment in a context where you're, you know, you're not just going to exclude the right I mean, even progressive podcasts like pod save America have moved in a direction where they're trying to have more conservatives on their show. I mean, this is something that one of their hosts, and I remember which one I talked to, Bill Maher, about a few months ago, where he said, you know, like with Bill, you know, he realized that he wanted to actually have his show be a space where you're having discussions with conservatives instead of just shutting them out. So, but I that's, that's sort of the time right now is that's what people want to do, is talk across the aisle. You see, I think there's a great hunger for that right now among the public. And I think that people would rather have that kind of depolarization attitude than a sort of extreme left identitarian attitude be kind of culturally hegemonic, which, frankly, I think wokeness is no longer culturally hegemonic, and I think that's a good thing. Is

Brian Nichols  4:44  
that why you think there was such a desire back, and I would say over the past 1015 years, to isolate, right? To say we're not going to talk to that type of person, right? Is that kind of where this mentality manifested? And obviously it. Really reared its ugly head in 2024 when the Democrats got a big slap in the face of the reality. But is that kind of the mentality that's been in the more Democratic Progressive left wing politics over the past few decades?

Speaker 1  5:13  
Well, I think, I think that the average, I mean, so the average Democrat is more likely than the average Republican to not want to talk across the aisle, to why is that? You know it, it's difficult to know exactly. I don't fully understand the reason why. I mean there, I'm speculating here. There is data that people on the left tend to be less happy. I maybe that has something to do with it. It's I, you know, sort of anecdotally, like when I talk to people in journalism or other fields that have a political divide after Trump was elected, you did see that the Democrats were the ones who kind of decided to leave conservative spaces. So it, you know, like, scientifically, I don't know the reason for that, but, you know, Democrats do. More Democrats don't want to talk to the other side than Republicans, statistically speaking. But if you look at the percentages, there's still pretty small minorities that maybe 10 or 20% most people, most average regular people, do want to have discussions with the other side. It's like the exhausted middle is like 80% of the population. But I do think that for a long time, there was a lack of understanding and appreciation of conservative thought across most of the Democratic Party, which is just unwilling or unable to even comprehend conservative ideas and just call them racist or something without appreciating the meaning behind what many people were saying, but most people were not. I think that close minded. I think it was mostly people in elite spaces, and maybe some people who were really, really politicized.

Brian Nichols  6:57  
I wouldn't even say closed minded necessarily, as dismissive, right? And I, I'll use a real example. So my buddy, Jeremiah, he hosts a show here in Indiana called the Boss Hog of liberty. And there his his studio is right there. I can actually see his his microphone from where I'm sitting. And every now and then, I'll be a guest on the show. And the last time I was on a guest was back during the election, and I was on the show, and the producer for the show, Zach, he added some commentary during one of our conversations about, you know, why, why certain Trump supporters were supporting Trump? And he's like, Well, I don't know. It's because they probably think that they're gonna get X, Y and Z. I said, Hold on time out. Don't dismiss, don't dismiss their concerns, right? Because this is where your average person says, Fine, you're just gonna, like, put me into a box. You're gonna dismiss my concerns as, oh, black person only has this concern because they're an ism, right? They're exhibiting racism or anti semitism or name the thing, sexism, instead of just saying maybe, just maybe, there are very real issues that they are looking at and trying to figure out real, tangible solutions. And when we look at the more left side of the aisle for the past few decades, especially, it has been you're not allowed to present a solution that doesn't toe the line of this, this hoity toity, high falutin type of mentality that a lot of the elites had, especially on the coasts. If you were in California or if you were in New York, right during the pandemic, you saw this on full display. Oh, we can't, we can't, we can't have the the lessers around us. Oh, they could give us the ick, right? We, we need to separate who's essential and who's non essential, right? And while those non essential workers were being, you know, quarantined, pun intended, right, all of a sudden you're seeing businesses close. I had a good friend who had a great restaurant in Philadelphia within weeks closed, because, guess what, when you have 10s of 1000s of dollars worth of of ingredients in your your freezer or in your refrigerators, don't those, don't just stick around and maintain the freshness for weeks, for months, for quarters, for years, right? Like you all of a sudden, are very much between a rock and a hard place of reality and the left, I would just generalize, was so isolated and so in this bubble that they they never really took the concerns of this average person and put it on the same footing as the I'm not going to call it make believe concerns, but the lesser concerns that were elevated for some type of social, social awareness or cultural awareness, right? And we really saw this manifest during the the Black Lives Matter riots across the country where literal cities were burned to the ground. I was in Philadelphia, and just a short, you know, short walk down the road, there were cars being flipped over and lit on. Fire, right? And, and just for people to say, Oh, well, this is just how people who are so oppressed and and just so underrepresented that they're expressing themselves, you don't think that on the flip side of that goofball mentality, there are people very much concerned about the safety and security, not just of their communities and their immediate neighborhoods, but also the livelihoods of their families, darn right, right? And yet you weren't allowed to have a voice that could counter that, that very much accepted narrative of the day. And I don't know Joseph like my my gut is telling me that like it is. It is this mentality of the left in general that has permeated far deeper than just the folks who were, you know, in their ivory towers and castles and had started to drift down more towards the average foot soldier for the Democratic Party. That's kind of my analysis. Am I on on point? Am I off base? What are your thoughts?

Speaker 1  10:54  
Well, I think you did a good job stringing together a whole bunch of different things that happened over the last maybe decade, I definitely agree with you that there's this kind of snobby progressivism, you know, kind of reminds me of like Victorian snobbishness. You know, I don't think I'm necessarily equipped for a discussion about COVID. The more I read about COVID, the more I realize I don't know much about it. But I remember during Black Lives Matter. You know, I was a dissenter. I had previously been an open dissenter against diversity and inclusion offices and yeah, there. It was very difficult to challenge these things. But one of the things that I found really frustrating, I really agree with you about is the sense that there are these very niche concerns that matter to the educated class and people who are very well off, and they, you know, they talk about like there was this controversy at my university when I was a student there, the fence was racist. There was a fence around the school and it was supposedly racist. Well, you know, the black people who lived in the neighborhood are probably not thinking about any of this. You know people regular jobs, the security guards, you know, the janitors, or probably even the black professors, were probably just unconcerned with the fact that there was a fence around the school, which was erected because the school used to be in a very dangerous neighborhood. In the neighborhood gentrified, but the student activists were like the fences racist and the spokes were they were separate spaces apart from each other on different sides of the school because the fence was built at different times. Maybe the city gave them some extra fence at one point, and they thought that this was a signal to the part of the neighborhood that was darker in color, that they were not wanted. And you know, it's very, very silly, these very silly niche concerns. And when the Democratic Party embraced this, rhetorically, it was very alienating to people. I was just at a Democrat event. I am still a registered Democrat. And you know, you'd be amazed how many of us are not radical blue hair people. And this is a stereotype that I think we've earned, but I also think it's very far from the truth, which is that where these radical blue haired, you know, screaming activists from Barnard, but I was just at a Democrat event in Manhattan recently, and of course, you go there and you meet many centuries, a lot of Jews who realize they're not far left after October 7, you know, they'll be like, Yes, I thought I was on the far left, and then I realized I was Jewish, and I'm not Jewish. What I'm saying, I hear things like this, and they realize that they're centrist now, and they love Richie Torres, but I'm listening to these different local Democratic politicians speak and, you know, the radicals, and there still is this fear of questioning them, which I just don't care about. And the radicals will will scream about intersectionality or being a black male queer or whatever, and then the centrists will say something like, and we have to stop doing the things that don't work and start doing the things that do. I'm like, oh my god, say something substantive.

Brian Nichols  14:02  
Wait, you're telling me that putting a black square in your Facebook profile picture didn't end racism? What? Oh,

Speaker 1  14:08  
I never did any of that. I found that very I've never really liked performative stuff, you know, like, I mean, after October 7, I became very supportive of Israel, but I don't put the the star, you know, David on anything. I just, you

Brian Nichols  14:27  
didn't have Ukrainian flag next to your profile.

Speaker 1  14:30  
You know, reason to do this. You know, it is something I've never liked. I've never enjoyed virtue signaling, though I am a very colorful person. I i was in DC last summer, and I was invited to the bar after natcon National conservatism Conference, which is very, very, very far right? You go, you go, go there. And it's like, oh, they want to be back in the 50s. They're all wearing black and gray suits and and it's, it's like the 50s, but with more Jews. And I know, right, very funny. And I. And I show up in rainbow pants. And, you know, it's interesting how, how they're not particularly judgmental. I mean, one of the dynamics that I've noticed is that conservatives, you know, I'm a centrist Democrat, so I can function in conservative spaces, have been so accepting of me in a way that I feel like the far left hasn't been. I mean, interesting things the far left has done to me. The only reason I haven't been pushed into the Republican Party is because I'm so revolted by Donald Trump and because I believe in, like, social programs and stuff. But the far left has done very mean things to me. They tried to get me fired from my job. They screamed at me in public. They kicked me out of my house once. I mean, I was living with these two. Woke east as and I explained my politics to them, and they were like, it's fine, but then I honked at a black person, how dare you he parked his car in front of my driveway, and so I honked at him. This was unacceptable. And they were like, all upset. And they were like, oh my goodness, you haunted a black person. The community is so offended, and all they do is think about how white we are. And so that didn't work out, and they basically kicked me out of the apartment over it. And yet, the conservatives, who I think are totally wrong about so many things, nevertheless have been have never done anything like that to me. So I know I'm very like, I see we're both people who can string together the many topics into one very long tangent. So I think it's a good thing about your show.

Brian Nichols  16:29  
Likewise, agree. You know, there's been a very big eye opening kind of life thing for me, that's a really messy way to say I've moved around a little bit. I was up in upstate New York. It's where I was born and raised. I lived in the southern interior of New York for a little bit. I went to college, then I moved out to Philadelphia for just shy of a decade for work, and then, during COVID, moved out here to Indiana to escape the insanity, right? And to to go from one area to the next. It has been very eye opening to see the way that people interact with those they disagree with. Right um in the northeast, specifically, especially in those very blue cities, it was very noticeable of how like, how quick to judge the folks on the left were, which ironically, are the exact same folks who are saying, Don't you dare judge right. But on the flip side, the stereotype of this regressive, you know, 1950s mentality of the Republicans, or these rural Americans as I move out to Indiana, it's actually the exact opposite. I'm seeing more like more community, more like true neighborliness, right in this area, because of the fact, and I think it's the very nature that when you look at the more conservative ethics and politics, it is rooted fundamentally in the idea of a strong community, right? Not saying a, you know, a society in a city where you're spending over half your income and property taxes to help better the community, right? But an actual like, I'm going to do actions personally to help better my community, right? I see that, and I don't know, let me ask you this, Joey, because is it a matter of this, this do good mentality from the left, where they're like, Listen, I'm going to vote for these politicians who are going to do all these wonderful high falutin things versus I'm actually going to go out and put in the sweat equity to make my community better? Is that maybe one of these, these, you know, big issues that people just don't pay attention to.

Speaker 1  18:49  
Well, I mean, I'm I, my, my, my co partisans do do a lot of good for, you know, for each other and for their cities and towns. I mean, you know, Democrats are pretty good at organizing, and we, you know, there's, there are good people everywhere who want to help people. So I think that the primary reason that big cities are places where you don't have as much community is people move a lot. There are so many people, and it's very difficult when you have a lot of transplants to have cohesive community, but like, if you look at the people who've been here forever and whose families have lived in the same neighborhoods forever, like in New York, the local black population, they have a very strong sense of community because they've been in the same place for 100 years, and people stay close to each Other.

Brian Nichols  19:40  
I mean Joey, I mean interrupt, but literally, my neighbor in Philadelphia, but my neighbors, it was a 91 year old and a 96 year old couple who'd been living in their home for 70 years. Like that's the exact type of use case you're identifying here.

Speaker 1  19:56  
And so I think that big cities tend to. Be places where there's a lot of churning and there are tons of people, so it's, I think that's part of the reason why you don't have a strong a sense of community. You know, I also definitely agree with you that conservative values tend to focus on community and a kind of communitarian sense, sense of the social order. So I think that I really would not dismiss a sincere belief in social justice among many Democrats, you know, people who are very involved in organizations. I mean, during the progressive era, when we were sort of recovering from the harm caused by the Gilded Age. You know horrible inequality. You know, horrible mass urban poverty, corruption. There were many civic organizations that were founded that really revivified our society, and many of them were very focused on social justice, and they were led by liberals and so and progressives and so, I would not be dismissive progressive care and concern for other people. I think the reason big cities are places where you don't have as much community is because there are so many people. So I wouldn't, I do not want to pathologize progressivism when it does not deserve to be pathologized.

Brian Nichols  21:10  
Hey, really quick. Can we? Can we just laser focus on that? Because I'm wondering, because what you just said, Actually, I feel it kind of reaffirms my point. Is that conservatives, by and large, tend to want to address the things that they can actually make an impact on. Whereas it feels like, you know, you mentioned the big cities, right, I feel that I can't have as much of an impact. Therefore my impact is my vote for those who, in my theory, can do the most good despite the actual outcomes showing the opposite. Does that make sense? Can you hear me out? Hear me out. So, like, I lived in Philadelphia for, like I said, just shy of a decade, and I spent oodles in income tax there, right? Philadelphia is one of the few cities who actually has their own city income tax, I knew when I was spending that money, or I had that money taken from my paycheck, that it was not going to go and benefit me. But the argument was, it's going to benefit our schools, it's going to benefit our communities, it's going to make things better. It's more safe, right? And yet, during my time, especially during the last bits in Philadelphia, I saw an uptick in gang violence and shootings and just, you know, community violence. I saw an uptick in the the surrounding areas just becoming in disrepair. We saw an uptick, not just in kids having a lesser education, in some instances due to COVID, having no education, right, because the schools were shut down. So there was this argument of, we're gonna do good with the money that we're collecting, but then from the outcomes, it's almost the exact opposite, in many instances, causing more harm than good, because the incentive structures don't align. Do you hear what I'm saying there?

Speaker 1  22:54  
Yeah. So in that particular situation, I can understand what you're saying, because you're talking about a fairly exceptional period in time where bad ideas or emergencies were hindering the normal functioning of a city or of an entire society. I don't think it's a reason not to have taxes or to necessarily lower the taxes. I mean, I don't know anything about Philadelphia tax system, or how wasteful it is. But I mean, I'm generally someone who thinks that taxes are a good thing, that they should be used responsibly, and that we should have, like, better quality of life, and that they should be put toward improving things like public transportation and public schools. So I don't, I don't think that liberal interest and kind of like, like, like, investing in public systems is a bad thing. I just think that terrible ideas about how to do that are bad. Like, defund the police was a terrible idea. It's a public service that's absolutely necessary, and we should not have really quick, let's

Brian Nichols  23:59  
go back to the public transportation piece, because I hear you right. We should have that money go towards improving our infrastructure. Hey, Philadelphia, because it's fun to pick on feelings I live there, like, let's use that money to make our subway systems more efficient and actually safer, and actually make it so it's not a slum in the underground that you're going in and like holding your breath when, because it literally smells like piss, right? When they took the money to do it was a bus update. When I was in Philadelphia. It wasn't make the busses more safe or more efficient. It was to make the busses more eco friendly, like and that's the thing, is that there is the there is the I want to do good with this money. And then what actually happens with this money? So if they were like, Hey, let's go ahead and actually, you know, create more efficient busses and open up more bus routes, or, you know, let's start to invest more in our infrastructure to make it better. No, we're going to do the do that, the feel good thing of spend our money on busses that are going. Have less emissions. But there is no fundamental one to one correlation of we are taking this money from you to do good, and then a direct outcome that equals that good promise. It turns into something entirely different that was never even on the purview.

Speaker 1  25:16  
Well, I mean, I don't know how that decision was made. I mean, is that something really? Is that something that blue Philadelphia, you know, would want, who made the decision was the bureaucracy? Was it the was it the local council? I mean, does that

Brian Nichols  25:30  
matter? Well,

Speaker 1  25:32  
I mean, you know, if, if the local people are very pro environment and they want lower emission busses, then I think that that's a decision they should be able to make. I mean, I personally think it's probably a good thing to do that. I think that there's value in doing that. I don't know. I mean, now we're getting to a conversation about climate change, and we're getting so far away from talking about election strategy, since we have about five minutes left, do you do you want to go back into like, like election strategy? Because,

Brian Nichols  25:59  
yeah, let's go back because, yeah, you're right. And I'm sorry, I started not often I get a common sense Democrat in the show.

Speaker 1  26:06  
We're very we're very ramp, we're both very rambly people, I can tell. But no, let's

Brian Nichols  26:10  
go back to so we're talking about Newsom I mentioned before we hit record. You know, the likes of a Stephen A Smith or an AOC right there. There's very much this. Call it the come to Jesus moment on the left. And I'm just gonna generalize for today's conversation, the left of what we did during 2024 fundamentally, didn't work. Not only did it not work, it blew up in our face, and it was a complete reversion away from what we were hoping for, and said gave us all the things we didn't want right from from a left standpoint. So you look at folks like Gavin Newsom and his strategic unavoke winning, as you outline in your article here, like there's that perspective. There's a Stephen A Smith going on on different shows saying, oh, America's gone too far this direction. We need to bring it back towards some common sense and centrism, right? And then AOC going across the country saying, Listen, if you support me, but you vote for Donald Trump, I want to know why, right? There is at least it feels like an admission from folks in the left that this didn't work. So let's talk about strategy. What can the left actually do? And by the way, I actually think that everything does come together, because we talk about the busses and stuff, right? There was this mentality of, we should promote these, feel good, do good types of things, but people want real, tangible results that immediately make their lives, their neighborhoods, better. And I guess my question to you is, who out there in the Democratic Party can actually build something like that, build some bridges, and at the same point in time, from a Democrat standpoint, kind of maintain the narrative.

Speaker 1  27:42  
Well, I personally love Richie Torres from the Bronx, you know, I don't think he's quite ready to run for president yet. Ruben Gallego, from Arizona, is also a centrist, you know, he talks about how the Democratic Party needs to stop telling people that being rich is bad, like, you know, he has a lot of Latino voters. He's Latino, and he says, Look, you want to go get your truck. It does, which is like, truck and get rich. That's what a lot of Latino guys want to do. They want to go get the truck, Quito and go get rich. Probably become contractor or something. Go, go, do that. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. And this idea that we should be ashamed of money or ashamed of our culture or that we should have. This is the discourse that, frankly, most working class people are unconcerned with wokeness. They don't care about identity politics. They care about their lives, and they sort of see it on TV or on social media. They're kind of like, it's alienating. It's not something they're invested in, and so it's not interesting to people. So what the Democratic Party needs to do is, I think get away from all of that. I think they do need to stand their ground and standing up for their values, but their values should be standing up for what average people want in their daily lives. And I think that the Democratic Party still probably can do that. You know, I'm trying to think, Who is this other? I think Pete Buttigieg could probably do this. I mean, just a good communicator people like him, you know, he's not a drag queen. He's just a gay guy, yeah.

Brian Nichols  29:12  
And he's been going on those different podcasts, you know, actually reaching different voters who aren't just already seen from the same sheet of music. Yes,

Speaker 1  29:19  
exactly. So, you know. And I think I think I would like to see Richie Torres run for president at some point. He's a really good example of someone who moved from the far left to the center, and I think he's a really good communicator. He's very charismatic. And I think that what we need is people who can communicate. You know, you might have people who are great politicians behind the scenes, but are terrible at public communication. And this is a charisma era, and you need charismatic people. I don't want Kevin recently the president. He's too slimy. And I don't know if you could win against JD Vance, but I think that we just need communicators to talk about quality of life issues.

Brian Nichols  29:53  
Joey, this has been one of my favorite conversations, and frankly, I'll tell you why. I don't get i know i. Exclaimed it, but I don't get many, like Democrats who have common sense, who are willing to engage in a conversation like this, because they're very much still, is this like red team, Blue team mentality that has permeated a lot of a lot of folks on all sides of the aisle, mind you, right? Like, I think it's much more prevalent on the left of like, saying we shouldn't talk to certain people, but that's starting to go away. And I think it's going away back to the crux of the conversation that we started here today, because strategically speaking, what that mentality has bred in the past has been electoral failures, right? And if the Democratic Party, not just from an electoral standpoint, but from a just overarching approval standpoint, I mean, the ratings are in the low 30s. I think right now, for your average american supporting the Democratic Party, like, that's that's a big red flag, because that number back during the Obama administration, was like, in the high 40s, low 50% I think it was so you're seeing that more and more people are not buying what the Democratic Party is selling. And, you know, this show, we built this show around the ideas of, how do we sell our ideas, by meeting people where they're at, specifically on the issues they care about. And with that, how do we line up our messaging, our communication to to make sure that we're presenting things in a way that is most receptive to that average person? And it feels like and the data, I believe, shows that the Democratic Party, by and large, has neglected that over the past few decades, and in pursuit of going after who they want to to sing their song to right it is the person who looks and thinks and speaks just like me. So when you're sitting in your driveway just upset that somebody is trying to park their car in front of your driveway, right? Like, that's just a normal reaction. But the the wokes that you were with were like, oh, no, how dare you, Joey, because it was a black man that parked his car in front of you. Now you

Unknown Speaker  31:54  
are, doesn't care who doesn't care, and goes exactly, and

Brian Nichols  31:57  
now you're the enemy, right? And that that like, if it's Anakin Skywalker, right? And Revenge of the Sith, if you're not with me, you're my enemy, which I know is obviously a play of a George Bush. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists, right? Like that. That was where that came from. But this, this whole, you know, only Sith deal in absolutes. I'm sorry, the left has become the Sith of the American political experiment, because they, they all deal in absolutes. Oh, you don't, you don't carry the LGBTQ flag. You must hate, you must hate gay people. Oh, you don't. You don't say you want open borders. You must hate immigrants. Oh, you don't want you know. Or you say you want you know. Just name, name the issue. It's always going back to oh, well, it's because you hate this other person. It has become the Cathy humanism of politics, and it is exhausting. So what you're saying is No, what I'm saying is the exact thing I'm saying, I don't want somebody parking in front of my driveway not letting me get out. I don't want, you know, people shooting each other down the street, because you know that that's just, you know, well, that's just how they are. No, what the what the hell are we doing here? Right? Like, let's be able to objectively look at issues and say this is objectively good and this is objectively bad. And I think that's where the Democratic Party has really lost so many average people. Because if you're not able to say the obvious things out loud that are true, how can I trust you as a voter to say the things that I need to hear that are true when it's uncomfortable, right? When it's not convenient, and that's where I think your average person, especially going back to this past election cycle, we're like, Yep, I'm done, but I'll get off my soapbox here, Joey, I know we're over time, and I appreciate you sticking with me. Hit us with it. Where can folks go ahead if they want to continue this conversation with you and also learn more, right? And by the way, just I'm going to say this right now, Joe, you you will be back on the show, because I don't get any folks who are going to engage in these conversations. And please invite me back when I'm back. And we just had tip of the iceberg here today. So floor is yours. All right? Nice, nice camera

Speaker 1  33:54  
quality in the future. But you can listen to some i The in response podcast, if you just look up in response. Joey T, McFadden, you can get go on my sub stack. It's also an apple podcast. It should be on Spotify soon, if it isn't already, I've had on guests like Nick Gillespie, Brett Stevens, Heather McDonald. You can also look up Joey T, McFadden, fair observer to read my art criticism. You can follow me on Instagram at Joey T dot McFadden, and my x handle is, I don't remember it off the top of my head, so let's wait for X to load. And my x handle is Joseph T, mcfad, two. So that's my last name without the n instead, it's the number two, but that's where you can find me. That's where you can follow me. Please go ahead and take a listen to my show. Good

Brian Nichols  34:48  
stuff, Joey, and I really, again, I really appreciate you coming the show today. I love these conversations. They get me fired up. And also, like just elephant the room. We've we've done 900 75 episodes of The Brian Nichols Show. And I would say two thirds, three fourths of those shows have all been people saying, like, Yeah, I agree. I agree. Like, I like to have the discourse, because this is how we actually make things better, and we find common ground. We can, you know, we can move things forward, but also we can look at things in the past and objectively agree like this worked. This didn't work, and it starts with being able to have these conversations in good faith. So Joey, I I'm so thankful you joined the show today. I am really looking forward to future conversations. I will include all those links to your social media here in our show notes. So folks, if you want to continue the conversation with Joey, please go ahead and do so. And by the way, if you want to go ahead and find me, you can find me on X, Facebook and Instagram, at B Nichols liberty, as for The Brian Nichols Show, we are a podcast but also a video show. So head over to your favorite podcasting platforms like Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube music, search The Brian Nichols Show, of course, hit subscribe, also The Brian Nichols Show over on YouTube, Rumble, Facebook and x, and we are live streaming the show on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays at 9pm Eastern. We changed the date from Wednesday to Thursdays for that middle show because that middle show is now on the Lions of liberty feed. I am officially part of the Lions of liberty network, so we're doing an exclusive episode there on our Thursday shows. So if you wanna go ahead and check out that show. It'll be over on the lines of liberty podcast feed. And as for The Brian Nichols Show in general, though, I'm still doing this show Mondays and Fridays on our original feed here for The Brian Nichols Show. So of course, hit subscribe for both zooms a single time we go live. Joey, thank you for joining us here on the show. Any final thoughts as you wrap things up today?

Speaker 1  36:38  
Maybe, maybe next time we can fight about Trump,

Brian Nichols  36:41  
let's do that. That'll be a good time with that being said, Brian Nichols signing off here on The Brian Nichols Show for Joey McFadden, we'll see you next time bye, bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai