, , , and discuss the revised travel ban, the Democratic Party’s struggles with young men, and renting vs. owning.

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Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are Daniel Di Martino, responsible for immigration things at the Manhattan Institute, Tal Fortgang, legal guy at the Manhattan Institute, and Renu Mukherjee, who works on education and politics and really everything we throw at her at the Manhattan Institute. Thank everyone as always for being on.

I’m going to take us right into the news of the day and Daniel will be on deck very shortly to tell us what the heck is actually happening because right now I’m literally working off of his tweets. Last night, the Trump administration announced a revised travel ban, nationals of Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen—and yes I did read that—have been banned from entering the country. And then there were a number of other countries where there’s a limitation on what visas can come in. This is obviously sort of a big policy dispute in the first Trump administration. It seems like they’re returning to it with gusto. So I want to get into both what this augurs and also the merits of the policy. I will note that a lot of people have connected this to the Molotov cocktail attack in Colorado last weekend, where the offender involved was an Egyptian illegal immigrant. Egypt is not on this list, but I think this is seen as being connected to the administration’s sort of broader anti-immigrant terrorism agenda. But Daniel, why don’t you, as the immigration guy on our panel, as I said earlier, break down a little bit more what’s going on here.

Yeah, which by the way, Egypt is not on the list, but they did include a provision in the proclamation saying they will study adding Egypt in like the next six months or so. So, you know, I think it’s important to know that this is obviously not a Muslim ban. This is a list of countries that simply have very high visa overstay rates and countries that just don’t share security or don’t have any records, right? So those are the countries in the full ban list.

It’s important to also know though, that this is not that it affects people who live in those countries and are from those countries. It affects citizens of those countries, even if they live elsewhere. So that’s where probably I would have an issue with. If for example, there’s a Haitian, like there are many actually Haitians who live in Chile and they happen to be professionals who don’t have Chilean citizenship. Why should they be banned from traveling to the U.S.? It doesn’t make much sense, but those are smaller cases.

And so it’s, it’s a big ban. I would say it’s bigger than the first Trump administration banning the list of countries, but it’s smaller in the sense that it doesn’t affect anyone who already has a visa to come to the U.S. In the previous ban, people who already had their visas and their travels, everything got upended. It was a lot of disorder. This is really more of a ban on issuing new visas more than anything.

So if I’m like a Haitian who’s here on temporary protected status or if I’m…

Nobody inside the US is affected today.

Nobody said the U.S. is affected? Or if I’m a refugee from the regime in Afghanistan, similarly, I’m not affected?

Yeah. If you’re already in the US, nothing is affected. The Afghan allies, even though Afghanistan is on the list, are supposed to not be affected for the Afghan special visas. So let me give you the best example. Imagine you are from, I don’t know, few of these countries even have people with tourist visas. But imagine you happen to be somebody from Congo who has a tourist visa already. You can still come to the U.S.

There is more of a question over whether if your visa expires where you are at, whether you will be allowed to get a new visa. That visas are issued for 10 years, tourist visas. There’s really no, not as many people I think as the news will tell you will be affected.

Do you think that the Democrats will be successful if they play this up as a Muslim ban and not as simply trying to cut down on the number of countries that have high rates of visa overstate? Because I imagine that’s what they’re going to do.

It’s just obviously not a Muslim ban, right? Because Burma is not a Muslim country. Congo is not a Muslim country. Equatorial Guinea, Haiti, mean Venezuela is on the partial list, Laos, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Togo, mean none of these are Muslim countries.

Burma, they’re actively repressing Muslims.

I agree, do you...

What? Sorry, Renu, go ahead.

Just really quickly, I agree with you, but I feel like there’s some powerful rhetoric there for them to focus on, for example, Afghanistan and say, you know, there’s people in addition to Afghan allies that might want refugee status, might need to get out, or, you know, there are enough Muslim countries included. So I’m just curious what you think about that.

I think the most powerful argument will be that most of these countries are totalitarian regimes, and you are really just preventing, in some cases, student visas. In all of these cases, are banned from both lists of countries. So why should you prohibit somebody escaping Eritrea or Sudan, who happens to be really smart, right? Obviously, the number of people affected is really tiny. We’re only talking about a few thousand people total, really, who are not tourists. So the numbers are small, but I do agree it’s not a good look.

I’m thinking about this as a lawyer in two different ways. One is that I just haven’t actually read the thing and I’m already prepared to to opine on this. The other is that the procedures and the logic that go into taking executive action in this way matter. If this gets to court, then that’s the kind of thing that a court will scrutinize.

Do we have any indications about what’s going on behind the scenes? Is it the kind of thing that we will have to infer from the list that we end up with? I mean, Daniel, you seem to be following this closer than any of us. Is there any indication of how this came about?

You know, you’re probably familiar with Trump v. Hawaii, right? The court case that upheld the first travel ban. In my opinion, this one is on a much more solid legal ground because it doesn’t apply to anybody who already has a visa. It’s just a suspension of issuing new visas. And the State Department of Foreign Policy, they could suspend all new visa issuances today if they wanted to. Like, they really have the legal authority to do this without question.

So I want to, want to, and this comes back to Renu’s question, but I’m really into the bigger politics of this, because I think there is this big mismatch, right? Like, you know, in Trump One, the like “Muslim ban,” which is unfortunately like what he said he was going to do, and that’s part of how they tried to nail him on it, was just a huge mess. And I think that that was something that Democrats were almost immediately able to capitalize on. People may remember 2017, the first big anti-Trump protests were about his travel ban.

The people at airports, there was a whole thing. And it seems like they have much more effectively positioned themselves this time around as part of what is ultimately remains Trump’s most popular issue, his positioning on immigration, where he’s like, a majority or close to majority of country continues to be on his side on these topics. So I wonder, to Renu’s point, is there going to be any fight picked over this? Or has Trump actually won on this issue compared to eight years ago?

Think about it, they waited until right after the terrorist attack from a visa overstay. And this is especially to countries related to this. The timing is perfect. The exemptions are sure that the most sympathetic cases, like immediate relatives of US citizens, people with other citizenships, like there’s a lot of Cubans, for example, who have Spanish citizenship. They’re still allowed to travel. Or I don’t know, people from other countries that might have obtained a second citizenship, they’re allowed to travel.

They really went through the list to ensure that only the least sympathetic cases are excluded. You don’t issue new visas. And I’m thinking about it on a more long-term standpoint. Think about what the effects on other immigration policies are of this. You will have less overstays, right? Because these are countries with very high overstay rates. And then the most important part, the permanent visas, the green cards that people from these countries, it’s not that many, but I’m sure it’s over 10,000, 20,000 a year between all of them, will go to people of other countries, probably from countries that use more employment-based visas, which actually will upskill the immigrant flow.

I think Trump will ultimately win in the court of public opinion on this. What he has to do though is, like you said at the top of the episode, Charles, he needs to connect it to instances of domestic terrorism, of support for foreign terrorist organizations that are absolutely so unequivocally egregious that just any person with, any sort of sentient person will look at this and say, well, obviously we don’t want this person, his family in our country. And it’s not just that.

This attack happened from an Egyptian national. And I know, Daniel, you said, like, Egypt isn’t on the list. It might be six months from now. But this is an individual that overstayed his visa and came, you know, on a travel visa and then applied for asylum and was rejected.

I’m like poor asylum, can you believe it? The guy who applied for asylum then committed the terrorist attack. It’s outrageous, the whole thing. We should apply for asylum against him! America needed asylum against the guy.

Yes, I can believe it, Daniel.

It’s never really been clear, and maybe this whole episode will help clarify precisely what the Democrats, not just political position, but the philosophical position behind their immigration stances, what that position is. Because sometimes it gets framed as a kind of like, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, which is kind of like, qua immigration is good. We just want more people coming from other countries. Right, it’s an engine for all kinds of good things.

But so often it’s framed as like we need to let, I guess this is the poor and downtrodden version of it. Like we need to let the least of the world into our country, especially. Like we have a special responsibility given how much we destabilize the world and how responsible we are for the world’s ills. Right.

Immigration as reparations.

Yes, colonialism.

I think there’s a strong post-colonial strain that tends to get mixed in with universalistic and idealistic rhetoric about letting people onto our shores. This is an interesting test case because it’s not really clearly in either set of principles there.

To this point though, think the administration, there’s sort of a success mode and a failure mode in terms of responding to that. The administration will be on relatively strong ground in the court of public opinion if it’s able to make the case, for lack of a word, it’s the case for immigration discrimination. Some people we want to come, and we like those people. Other people we don’t want to come, and we don’t like those people. What you’re looking at here, at least in theory, is people who are either, as Daniel alluded to, a high risk of abusing the immigration system by virtue of being visa overstays or they’re coming from countries that we just can’t trust, right? We don’t believe that they are going to share with us the relevant information to make viable judgments. That’s, you know, that is ultimately predicated on trying to make judgments about who should arrive that’s very different from, and I think part of why they got in trouble the first time just saying again as the president so inaptly put it, imposing a “Muslim ban” right? It’s like we’re going to prohibit people from a certain protected class writ large coming to the United States. Turns out, they can do that, but it’s not hugely popular to do that. People in America don’t love that. And so I think, in some senses, it’s the case that whoever is more discriminating wins on this issue, right? The criticism that Tal’s making of the democratic approach is like, we’re just going to open the gates, and in fact, we will give special privileges to the people who hate us the most. And then the Congress is on the Republican side, we’re going to close the gates to everybody and we’re just going say that we hate everybody. You don’t want that. That’s probably not, that is equally not a winner.

Right. You’re so right about the whole universalistic and really reparation-style motivation by Democrats on the open border side, that they’re defending the family of the terrorists now from getting deported. Come on, a court is now putting an injunction against deporting the family of the terrorist? If they can’t be deported, they won’t want anyone deported. Give me a break. Now, I would prefer interrogation and jail, not like letting them go free. I feel like that’s, this is too quick. Like you need way more interrogation here.

Look at the crimes!

Can we talk about this for a second because I’m...

Yeah, was going to use, let’s use this to segue into the exit so we can talk about this, but go ahead.

Sure. Yeah, I just, I have this really intuitive aversion.

And sorry, just for context, we’re talking about the family of the guy who committed the attack in Boulder is being scheduled for deportation, a lower court blocked that effort. Sorry, go ahead, Tal.

Yeah, I have a kind of visceral aversion to any indication of blood guilt. It really bothers me when, as the Bible says, when sons are held responsible for the sins of the fathers and fathers for their sons. On the other hand, Charles, as you pointed out on social media and elsewhere, deportation is not a reflection of blood guilt so much as a considered judgment that such people are likely to pose a risk to our nation’s security that we need not tolerate. So I’m really torn on this one. I was kind of hoping we could argue both sides.

I mean, to me, I think that distinction is everything, which is to say you cannot punish them for his actions. That’s not permissible. But a punishment is a deprivation of something you’re otherwise entitled to after process of law, right? My property. Yeah. But like, and again, at court, they don’t have the right to be here, right? They are visa overstayers. They are not entitled to presence in the United States. They’re entitled to process.

I mean, they have no risk of persecution in Egypt, let’s be real.

And it wasn’t the man, it was the terrorist who filed the asylum claim. The claim was disestimated because of the crime, the horrendous crime he committed, and therefore the entire claim is moot, so they are deportable. Now, I think for, maybe I’m just speaking without knowledge because I’m not in law enforcement, but maybe the law enforcement already did all their job with the family. But if they haven’t, they seem like a really important source to keep at least as long as the trial is happening and then they can deport them.

I mean, you know, I think, Tal, this is the point that I made on social media was if you buy this argument that they can’t be deported as, you know, as because there’s some nexus to his offense, the, what is being, the arguments being made here is because he committed a hate crime, they can’t be deported, which is like an obviously insane position, right? It’s like, you know, not only is it intrinsically insane, it’s also has like perverse implications. Like if you want your family to avoid deportation, go out and like fire bombs some Jews, and then you’ll be golden. I think that’s like not a situation we want.

Well, there’s some truth to this. It’s like a reverse asylum claim. If you want to ensure that you are safe in the world’s worst countries, go out and attack Jews in the United States of America. You’ll be welcomed as a hero.

It’s true. All right. All right. I want to take this out. So I want to ask folks about the trajectory of the ban. Do we think, I mean, it’s going to be stayed by the courts. That’s just going to happen. That’s what happens now. But do we think that this is going to be upheld as good law? Is this going to still be in effect at the end of Trump’s second term? Daniel, you’re the expert. What do you think? We’ll just defer to you basically. But I’ll just give it another tip.

I think it will, and I think the stays will be very brief, because now there is Supreme Court precedent. So any stay, in my opinion, will be extremely partisan judges that are trying to go around the already existing precedent of the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii. And in fact, I think the ban will just flock to it. Countries will be added, more countries will be added, and then perhaps a few will be removed.

Fair, okay. Tal?

One of the moves that the Biden administration helped pioneer with some of its executive actions on things like student loan forgiveness was tailoring policies so that very few people or institutions, if anyone, had standing to sue. And I’d be interested to see how this particular action was tailored. If it was done cleverly, there may not be plaintiffs who actually have Article 3 standing under our Constitution to challenge this. So I’m going to wait and see what the particulars of the law. Now I’m being a responsible lawyer. And that’s what I’ll say.

Yeah. Okay, Renu, what’s your projection?

I echo Daniel and Tal. I think legally this will probably stand. I don’t think this is something that I envision once going to the Supreme Court. I imagine Roberts writing the opinion and him kind of ultimately upholding this. That would be my guess. In terms of just how this will play politically, I think if the administration is able to connect this with, like I said before, just horrible instances of visa overstay and just domestic terrorism, Americans will be in favor of it, and I also think the victims that Democrats are trying to paint out of this such as the, yes, with the whole notion of just association with her terrorist dad, but I mean most Americans are not going to feel sympathetic to the daughter of this terrorist who wanted to go to medical school, in the way that they don’t feel bad that European princesses might not be able to go back to Harvard for undergrad. These are not the victims that are going to play well with the American public.

Yeah, I hesitate to agree with the entire panel because it’s never a good sign when the panel is in consensus. I’ll say, look, I probably agree. That said, I think we should not discount the possibility of a particularly protracted process in the courts because that’s what’s defined the entire administration so far. So I would not count my chickens until they hatch. That said, yeah, I think they’re likely to prevail eventually for no other reason than they’ve already had this fight, right, as you guys have alluded to.

All right. I want to turn us now to a recently released analysis from the Speaking with American Men project, which attracted a great deal of derision over on X, formerly known as Twitter. And the SAM project, as it’s known, is an effort to understand why Democrats lost so badly with men in the 2024 election and what their general gender problem is. So it’s funded by, it’s like a collaboration. Ilyse Hogue, who’s formerly of NARAL is involved, a couple other people involved, they just put out their results of their first focus groups. They found that 27 percent of young men viewed the Democratic Party positively, created 43 percent for Republicans, just 46 percent of young men voted for Harris in 2024. The losses track across every racial group and the most pronounced hemorrhaging came among Latinos and black men.

So what do we make of this trend? What’s going on here? What are they missing in their focus groups and their SAM? I mean, do we buy their analysis or what’s going on?

As the youngest man in the panel, I’ll say, I think the problem Democrats have is that the perception, which is real, is that the Democratic Party hates masculinity. They hate young men, really. They hate everything that makes men different from women. And you might say, Daniel, that’s an exaggeration. No, think about it. Their policy is on education, right? Title IX, the trans issue, gender roles, in the workplace all the scholarships, all the preferences for women over men, just the role of sexuality. There’s a lot of things in which men have been disadvantaged by Democratic policies, Democratic rhetoric, really. I mean, this is the party that invented the entire term of toxic masculinity. And now they’re mad that men dislike them. Well, there’s a reason, it’s because they disliked us.

Renu, I want to make sure that we get the political scientists into here. What’s your take on the broader project and what’s going wrong here?

I was going to say that both with respect to the politics, also as being this sort of Daniel and I are around the same age, of late twenties and being like the woman on this panel. I would say that the Democrats problem with young men, 18 to 24, 18 to 30, whatever, can also be traced to just how they view women. Women are now the center of the movement and many left leaning, ideologically liberal women have come to view, as Daniel said, any sort of traditional display of masculinity, or even, you know, men who want to lift weights at the gym, anything like that, want to listen to certain types of music, you know, are somewhat in favor of traditional gender roles as needing to be exiled from the party. I also think of...

I think of the Black Lives Matter movement that has subsumed so much of the Democratic Party. The founders of that movement back in the early 2010s were three, quote, “queer” women, and they were very explicit saying, we don’t want men to have to do anything with this. Women are leading the movement, and we’re going to shove black men aside, which have historically been leading civil rights efforts. I feel like that sort of thinking has just been internalized by the Democratic Party. And I will put the blame, maybe people won’t like me saying this, but I will put the blame a lot on women with respect to this.

I had a teacher in high school who would try to persuade everyone in his class that we should all be feminists. And the way he would try to explain it is like feminism isn’t really about women, right? It’s as much about men’s role in society as it is about women’s role in society. And really, when you think about it, it’s just about society, right? It’s just humanism. And so here we’ve replicated that dialectic, what Daniel says, it’s about their treatment of men. Renu adds, it’s about the way they think about women. So I will come to add, like actually the Democrats and the political left have embraced a vision of what our social life is meant to be and meant to look like that is demoralizing generally, in a way that I think is prone to show up, especially among men. The thing I think about in particular is that Democrats and the political left have emphasized a view of the world that is non-agentic. That is, that people do not have agency, they do not have the ability to really make their own decisions because of false consciousness, because of systemic this or that. For whatever reason, they’re not really in control of their lives. And that might be liberating to some people, but most people, particularly men who want to feel as though their life has a kind of purpose and meaning to it and don’t want to feel adrift and alienated, want to feel like their choices matter, and they will drift towards a worldview that says, you know what, I may not be a world changer, but at least I can do work that means something, earn for myself and a family and eventually come to reject the rejection of agency. I think that’s really like the broad picture of what’s going on.

So I want to be the guy on the panel who disagrees with everybody. And sometimes this is right. I think on some level, everybody’s talking on this ideological level, how Democrats see the world. There’s merit to it. But then part of me is like, so I think I included this. The rising gender split is like an across developed democracies phenomenon. There’s just polling that showed Korean men have veered far to the right. If you look at the UK, women are way out to the left. I think it’s Canada. This is another example. You see this divergence. Part of what I think is going on here is beyond the sort of like, ideology often is sort of secondary to incentives. And part of what’s going on here is if you are competing for the marginal voter, you want to select for activation, all else being equal, and women are just much more civically engaged than men on every dimension, and that’s true cross-culturally. It’s like women are the ones who go out and do stuff. And so the returns to pick the expected value of picking up the marginal female voter is higher than the expected value of picking up the marginal male voter.

Our colleague Jesse Arm, a frequent panelist, had a good piece about this in the context of why does the Democratic Party, why is it so beholden to gender ideology still? And the answer was like basically you need activists not because they’re the base, not because they get you 49 percent of the vote, but because they get you the 50th percentile. They get you the marginal vote. And I think it is plausible that a similar dynamic is obtaining here, where like, you know, there, there is some incentive to go after women just because like women are who will ultimately show up in a way that men won’t. So, I mean, that is, you know, in, some sense, I agree with the ideological arguments, but then I want to push back and be like, well, but what do we make of this international phenomenon? Are there more structural explanations that could go on here?

Charles, I’m very sympathetic to their argument because even on the Republican Party, if you see the grassroots level, it is women who organize the events. It is the Republican Women’s Club that really get the things going. But if that was true, though, as a marginal incentive, then the Republican Party should have also pulled towards feminism. And that didn’t happen. The opposite, right? And that didn’t happen in any of these developed countries. So I wonder what is the role, well, first all the leftist parties in all these developed countries have actually pulled to feminism. So there is an ideological change that is happening in South Korea, in Spain, in Germany, in Canada, everywhere, right? But maybe it’s economic. Maybe it’s about women are now empowered after all these decades. They’re more represented in education. There are overwhelming majority of people who are educated. There are all these opportunities that have popped up. There’s these trends worldwide in favor of women. Maybe it has to do with technology, right, and how it affects men and women differently. I’m just trying to brainstorm ideas here.

I think the economic point, Daniel, I think that that’s really worth hammering on. The Politico had an article and Charles, you shared this with us offline from, I think, two days ago or yesterday, looking at this trend. And in some of the especially racial minority male voters that were interviewed as being sympathetic to Trump, the argument was, you know, I’m being told that I need to focus on this, on these aspects of feminism and diversity. And frankly, I really don’t care. I just want a job. And so I think there is something to that. And I mean, we saw, we don’t know how the current state of the economy will play politically, but at least at the height of the 2024 election, that’s even amongst racial minorities, like those voters, that’s kind of really what won the day and swung them heavily toward Trump.

I think so, you know one other way to get at this is I mean I think you know part of if you’ve made fun at this I’ve made fun of this initiative is it seemed like It was so disinterested in just sort of like things that are obvious about what men as voters might want, like Renu is getting at, you know, what do black men want as voters? Well, they want jobs and they want the economy to not suck the same thing that many voters want at the margins. But I think this interesting question that I’m curious what people takes on is like what, you know, is there a way for the Democratic Party to sell itself to man? Like, I think a lot of people talked about Senator Ruben Gallego, who had some line about “every Latino man wants a big ass truck, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” And think this has become kind like a rallying cry for a certain like, the center left moderate wing of Democratic Party is like, yes, we need to be the party of big ass trucks. And I like think there’s, that’s not a terrible pitch. But so I’m curious, you know, what do you know?

That’s not a euphemism for anything, is it?

But they hate cars though. So like the entire party hates cars and that’s like a very masculine thing too, cars. What’s one of the things that all teenage boys want? A car.

But I think, like, okay, so, I mean, is there a way that is, is there a direction that they can go or they just sort of like, you know, we’re going to increasingly see this bifurcation. Like is, is it just, you know, optimal sorting means sorting on gender and we’re hosed?

Now, they need to moderate just for electoral reasons. Men will always be about half of the electorate. So they will lose elections, and then they will have to change those positions. I think it’s a matter of time.

I think, so I was very active on social media about this last night because Zohran Mamdani released an ad that was heavily targeted toward...

Friend of the pod, Zohran Mamdani.

Yeah, friend of the pod. He loves us. Heavily targeted toward the South Asian community. People think that term doesn’t mean anything. I agree to some extent. So we’re talking Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Nepalese, et cetera, in New York City, areas like Jackson Heights. That ad, and me as a major critic of Mamdani, the reason I think that ad played well is because it’s not going to… There’s really no appeal to either gender. It’s just kind of showing him with men, with women. He’s drinking mango lassi. He’s making jokes. It’s it’s showing clips to Bollywood movies. A lot of the clips he shows are heavily masculine and macho, and I think that the Democrats will be able to appeal to men if they stop eating, sort of internally, each other alive. I mean if anyone appeals to men, but if they want sort of if they don’t want to heavily cultivate men or signal to men, I think they should watch mum Donnie’s ad where there’s not really any clear indication of gender, and he’s just kind of messaging in in general, and it’s just broadly appealing I think I really do think that’s the way to do it. Who knows if they’ll listen, but I think that might be one way for them to get around it if they’re uncomfortable with you know, like big trucks

One avenue that I keep thinking about, and I’m sure the Democrats will hire some androgynous individuals to develop a new language. Democrats are always convinced that it’s just a PR problem, right? Like the policies are perfect. We just need to change the messaging and, you know, those stupid Americans will eventually figure out what’s good for them. But the truth is that there may actually be a kernel of truth here because Democrats’ language has become, I’d say feminized in a very therapeutic and frankly grating way. Someone recently brought up on social media, again, someone was talking about how often Democrats talk about “centering” and where did all this “centering” speak come from?

What is “centering” though?

You got to center your voices. It’s an Occupy Wall Street thing, among other things. It filters up. It’s like you need to… It’s a way of saying like prioritize or focus or spotlight certain people, but it’s like you need to “center this voice.”

And they need to stand for black trans women, I bet. Of course. Of course.

Correct.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s like the same way that they use, that people on the political left use “uplift” to mean “amplify,” which is not what “uplift” means, but that’s fine. And there are a bunch of these, right? And I think that this stuff stems from therapy speak and the mass, the industrial scale of therapy, a hugely, frankly, an extremely feminine profession, a profession dominated by women and often geared towards women’s way of thinking. And we’ve seen this filter into K through 12 schools in a number of ways. My point is just that, like, just eliminating that, like, incredibly annoying and alienating way of speaking can probably start, like, making some progress on behalf of Democrats.

You’re so right, but the issue with that is you have seen the stats about like the share of people by ideology with a mental illness and how approximately half of young, extremely liberal people have a diagnosed mental illness, relative to like about 10 percent of the conservatives. And that I actually don’t think they’re mentally ill. I think they have made themselves mentally ill with the over therapy, over treatment, like everything is a problem.

You know, if I have, if I get nervous one day, that means I have chronic anxiety. So, and then you give yourself chronic anxiety and then you go to the therapist.

Right, Daniel goes to the gym and lifts 500 pounds instead. That’s his therapy and that’s how he avoids a diagnosis. Good.

And I don’t need therapy, and that’s my therapy. Yes, exactly.

Talk to your friends, talk to your girlfriend, talk to your parents, go to the gym, eat well. That’s all you need.

I don’t have girlfriends. Sorry.

We’re getting, no, we’re launching a spin off podcast. It’s Daniel Di Martino life advice. It’s like “don’t be a communist, lift heavy weights, be normal.”

Wow. Charles, you should launch that pod because you have all the PR. What are you talking about? That is language.

All right, I want to take this out. So I want to actually ask a slightly different question than the one I told you I would have, but I’m going to throw this to you and tell you if you can answer it. One theme of this conversation has been Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan as like, you know, the symbol of like Trump masculinity, like getting all those people to vote for Trump. And one topic of this conversation is, is there a democratic Joe Rogan? Which is funny because Joe Rogan was a Democrat, but is there, so that, that is my question.

Is there a Democratic Joe Rogan or can there be? Is there anybody you can think of who can bail them out of this problem?

Tricky one, I know.

I mean, I don’t watch that stuff, so...

Okay.

Joe Rogan in what sense? In the sense of being able to be edgy? In the sense of being funny and fit? I mean, there’s obviously all this discussion…

In the sense of being able to project being one of the guys.

I mean, Newsom, as a political leader, I think he tries to display like the dominance portion, like I can own you and I can beat you to the Republicans and laugh at them. I do think, you know, he’s obviously liberal and he has all these things to appeal to all their interest groups and whatever, but I do think he has some of those characteristics as a politician. Now, outside of politicians, I’m not really sure because I’m like what, a podcaster?

So my answer to your my own prompt is the guy that often comes to mind is Bill Maher, who’s an effective communicator, who has had relatively little time for all the feminization that you guys were talking about. Is there anyone else in that genre?

Sure.

I have… so I also actually think class comes into this because appealing to college educated males I think will be, and the democrats already do to some degree, but I think you know If they want to appeal to college educated males who are now bankers, big law attorneys that might not be as politically engaged, I think you know the Pod Save America bros, the Obama bros have a good model, but the reason I bring class into it is because they, you watch their podcasts or even when you listen, they use the same sort of phrases that Tal is alluding to, they’re very much pretty boys. That’s not going to allude to, you know, like a Latino plumber, for example. And so I don’t have a good example with respect to that. I think we should focus on the, they could amplify the Obama bros, but unfortunately, anytime the Obama bros say anything that’s remotely helpful for the Democratic Party, they get canceled and eaten alive.

That’s true.

No, but that class role is good, Renu, because I think there is a path for the Democrats that is probably the most likely path that’s going to happen, and that is that they will choose to appeal only to college-educated men. And that may pay off, because with the fluctuations in education, with the fluctuations in the economy, whatever, Republicans don’t do very well in one election cycle, just increasing their share of college male votes, I mean, it’s credit for donations, they vote more often, it’s an increasing share of the population. It might not be a bad strategy, politically.

This is a more complex question, I think, appears at first, because there so many layers to the Rogan phenomenon. And maybe I just need another cup of coffee to think about this. But the thing that springs to mind is just that Rogan symbolizes, the whole movement symbolizes a reliance on common sense, right? Like the kinds of things that allow you to say, like, that stuff is crazy in a way that I can’t quite articulate. And I don’t feel like I really need to, because we’re just like normal people who can laugh at the crazy, know, the overeducated experts and intellectuals who work themselves up into such a such a tizzy with their ridiculous ideas. And I’m not sure that the that the left is quite ready for just like straight up, you know, every man common sense. There’s a lot of work to do before you can like just unwind all the gender stuff that has been dominating the party for several years. Forget the Democratic Party. It’s a ticket to entry in polite society to accept certain shibboleths about the nature of gender and human nature more broadly. So without a real unwinding there, that’s a tough one.

What Tal is saying is Democrats still need to do the work.

On that note, we’re going to be educated.

Educate themselves. You got to educate yourself, Charles. Do better. Be better.

So last night was the New York City mayoral debate. We’re not talking about it on this episode because we’re saving it for Monday. We have a very special all New York, all the time episode. Tune in. It’ll be great. But at the same time, New York Magazine did its regular rundown of who, which of the mayoral candidates rents, and which owns, and where they live, and what their houses are like. I learned that Curtis Sliwa has moved up from the shoebox he lived in the last time he was running for mayor, so we’re all very happy for Curtis. He has gone down from 15 cats to five cats, that’s great, good for them. Cuomo is renting, Eric Adams, nobody knows where he lives, maybe in New Jersey, it’s never been clear. But, the question for the panelists before we go, do you rent? Do you own? Which do you aspire to? I will not ask you to tell me how much you’re paying monthly, but I am curious how you think about that. Daniel, you’re in New York. You must rent.

I rent, yes. mean, I’m 26, come on. I’m 26 and unmarried. It doesn’t make sense to buy yet, but I obviously aspire to it. I’m saving for that. Yeah. Hopefully after being married, but yes.

Fair. Renu?

I rent. I live in D.C., but I will say I aspire to buy not necessarily with respect to my own homes, but with respect to properties as an investment strategy.

You’re on the John Ketcham strategy.

Exactly. That’s where I learned.

Very South Asian of you, Renu.

I’m an Indian at the end of the day.

Tal, you guys must be renting.

And I’m a Jew. Yes, and look, I live out West for the time being. You would not believe the rents we have where the air is clean and the humidity is low. I will say that we were recently considering buying a house as we look to move back to the East Coast. And I think that there’s nothing that I quite aspire to, like putting down roots in a place, buying a house and becoming part of a community. It’s a very, very profound thing. It’s also an enormous pain in the ass. So as the old man on the podcast, I’ll tell the youngins here, save up, dream big, and maybe someday you’ll be able to take out a mortgage on 12 percent interest like it’s the 1980s again.

Daniel Di Martino: Thanks, government.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, we also rent, you’re seeing my, live from my basement is where I do my podcasting. You know, some part of me shares Tal’s sort of romantic…

Tal Fortgang: Jewishness? Oh, okay.

Daniel Di Martino: It’s the American dream.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, exactly, related. I know, but on the other hand, yeah, but it’s not obvious to me that it’s economically rational at this juncture.

That.is about all the time that we have. Thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer, Isabella Redjai, listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, or even if you didn’t, please don’t forget to like, subscribe, ring the bell, do all the other things on whichever platform you listen to us, YouTube or otherwise. Don’t forget to leave us comments, questions, et cetera below. Until next time. You’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.

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