American Experiment Podcast
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American Experiment Podcast
Episode 140 - MN State Fair: A Somali GANG Battleground?!
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Judges try keeping the State Fair from turning into a Somali gang battleground…
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A Liberian government official has been using group homes to make millions off taxpayers, a viral video exposing election vulnerabilities has once again made Minnesota a national embarrassment, and law enforcement leaders are trying to use a rare law to prevent gang violence at the state fair. Later, John Hinderaker talks with Byron York ahead of his trip to Minnesota for our 2026 Fall Briefing next month.
QOTW: Are you a state fair lover or hater??
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Welcome back to the American Experiment Podcast. Catherine, what do we have on the docket today? Well, this week we've got a wild story about a Liberian government official using group homes to get rich off of taxpayers, a viral video that has again embarrassed Minnesota. This keeps happening to us, and a rarely used law trying to keep state fairgoers safe from gang violence. On the back half, John Hinderocker interviews Byron York in advance of his trip to Minnesota for our fall briefing next month. Let's dive in. It's our third one, so stick around for it. But the question for the audience is how do you feel about the state fair? We go every year as an organization, and I know some people are not as into it as they should be. I love it. I think it's incredible. Um, but what do you guys think? I want to hear from the audience.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, this could be a very surprisingly polarizing topic for Minnesotans. Do you love the fair? Do you hate the fair? Do you avoid it like the plague? Um, and if you love it, you know, what are your favorite strategies? What are your foods and what are the the things you have to visit every single year? I would be very curious to hear.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yes, I would love to. I will drop my own in the comments. And I may fight with people in the comments who say they don't like it. So just a forewarning.
SPEAKER_02Well, on that note, let's dive into our first story, which is absolutely insane.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it is really crazy. This first story comes from MPR. They did a really long investigation into this guy that they lay out really well in a long form piece on their website and also in an eight-minute video that they put together. And I would recommend watching both of them because there are also some great visuals that go along with this story, and you can see the documents themselves that he used to put together this whole scheme. So let me back up. What they found is that there is a man, his name is Seiko Dukelee, who has been the owner of at least two dozen group homes, mostly in the northwestern Twin Cities, and has collected at least $36 million in taxpayer funds over the past 10 years. They seem to mostly be in the like Brooklyn Park, Brooklyn Center area, which is where there's a ton of group homes for whatever reason. But what's insane about this is Dukeley is a government official in Liberia and doesn't even live in Minnesota. So he's claiming to run these group homes that he's not even in the same country as. And in this investigation, they interviewed some people like, does this make any sense? And basically all of the experts said, no. Duh. Does not make any sense. Not sure how you would effectively run a group home if you're in another country. So, starting with like, how does a group home work? Because I didn't really know personally. Like, I didn't know that, you know, like how do you make millions on a group home? That's the other thing. Right. Basically, the state issued licenses and paid Medicaid dollars for Dukelee's businesses to provide care and supervision to Minnesotans, typically those with mental illnesses or physical disabilities. And what I found really kind of crazy about these group homes is that they are in the middle of neighborhoods. I mean, just houses, to be clear. Like someone could buy the house next to yours and turn it into a group home, and they would put potentially extremely mentally ill people into this home to live together. And then that's basically what this guy did. Okay, and then with no supervision on top of that, right? Because he's in Liberia. But on top of that fact that this man is literally living in Africa while pretending to run these group homes, the state has found group homes linked to this man's businesses or their employees neglected residence in 10 cases. It investigated suspicious maltreatment in those group homes on at least 22 occasions, four of which involved the death of a resident. Oh my gosh. Plus a fifth resident who died after he was improperly discharged. So people are literally dying in this man's group homes. One of those stories is the death of Tammy Fremgen, who was found in her bedroom at one of these group homes in Brooklyn Park. It's a horrible story. Her aunt and daughter went to collect her belongings from the group home and recall feeling horrified by the state of their loved ones' room. There were bags of trash strewn around, the window was wide open without a screen, crumpled up tin foil, a sign of drug use, lay visible on the furniture. It was horrific, Haran said. We were just standing there in shock. There's a different lawsuit that they mentioned too in this story that alleges a vulnerable woman was left unattended in the same room as a sex offender, a repeat sex offender, who the woman then claims raped her. And the stories go on. I mean, there's many um in the investigation. Police officers say they know some of these group home addresses by heart because 911 calls from the neighbors, staff, and residents come in so frequently. That's horrible. In fact, in New Hope, the city council unanimously voted to shut down two of these houses linked to DuCauli. They'd created so much neighborhood chaos that the local police said they responded to two New Hope addresses. Two. 133 times in a single year. Oh my gosh. Isn't that nuts? And again, these are just like in people's neighborhoods, okay? So the police are showing up to your neighbor's house. I mean, what's half of 133? Like that's so many times. Yeah. The De Cool the DeCoolies, he has a brother in his schemes as well. So we just always a family business. There's always a family business. They fought back against this. Um, what the what New Hope City Council tried to do, which was shut down these two group homes. They accused the city of you'll never guess it. Racism of and of discriminating against disabled residents.
SPEAKER_02No hell hot enough for these two men in my mind. Literally. This is sick. To not only put people in these deplorable conditions, but then to make millions, to make to profit so much financially off of it, is so sick. And then, of course, to turn around and accuse people of something like racism. Yep. When they rightfully try to shut these homes down.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, because neighbors, of course, went to the city council and were like, hey, we have a serious issue in our neighborhood where they're, you know, the cops are coming to these houses uh a hundred plus times.
SPEAKER_02These should clearly not be an operation.
SPEAKER_03They should clearly not be an operation. Or something needs to change. Yep. But after all of this, the last twist in this story uh is the one that really got me personally. The Tacouleis took their case to the legislature. And when Senator John Hoffman heard them out, the brother, you know, in the scheme, publicly thanked him for it in a social media post. Senator Hoffman and Representative Peter Fisher introduced a bill that strips cities of the power to shut down group homes. Oh. Something only the state can do now. Oh, yes. They made it so that New Hope can't shut down these insane problematic group homes with horrible conditions where people are dying.
SPEAKER_02Ah, yes, let's take more power away, more local control away from cities and give it back to the state.
SPEAKER_03It's just crazy. I mean, and and again, just to emphasize the point, they said that it was racist that were they were trying to shut down these group homes. I don't know how that makes any sense. Like, I'm sure the people in the group homes are of all, you know, races, all kinds of I mean, the people who have mental illnesses or addiction issues, whatever it may be, uh are never of one particular race. So what was so racist about the fact that these residents you guys were in Africa, okay? So what's so racist about the fact that you were not watching over these houses that you claim to be?
SPEAKER_02This story makes me sick. Again, no hell hot enough.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and they made $36 million off of the taxpayer.
SPEAKER_02I have no words. I I I genuinely this is this goes, I feel like this story combines so many elements of the absolute worst that goes on in Minnesota. You have people, even if this wasn't it doesn't seem like this was fraudulent, right? All of this was perfectly legal to assert as far as we know right now. I mean, they were making millions. As far as we know, that was all legal. It was Medicaid funds, so you know, there's questi there's certainly reason to be suspicious there, but as of right now, this was all legal. It wasn't fraud, and yet you have these people taking advantage of taxpayer-funded programs, making millions off of them, and then hurting vulnerable people in the process, and then turning around and accusing anyone who tries to shut them down of racism. And then you have a state government that's completely uh to a certain extent complicit in it, and saying, Yeah, let's take power away from the cities to govern these homes themselves.
SPEAKER_03That's exactly it. It was one accusation of racism, and all of a sudden there's a new law that the cities can't do anything about these houses causing issues.
SPEAKER_02Just the worst excesses of state government.
SPEAKER_03I mean, and this group home issue to me is bigger than just this one scammer-ish kind of guy. I mean, since 2020, more than 900 houses in Minnesota have been transformed into group homes. An increase of 20%. That is insane. Much of that growth has been concentrated in the northwestern suburbs of Minneapolis, including Brooklyn Center, Crystal, and New Hope. In an article earlier this year, MPR told the story of police officers showing up to a group home in Brooklyn Park after a dispatch that a man, who was likely on drugs, threatened his roommates. Arriving at the house, a group home worker told her the man had walked off after acting erratically for days. His case manager recently quit, and he was skipping his antipsychotics for street drugs, the worker explained. He'd been sleeping in the kitchen because he thought the devil was in his room. His file showed a diagnosis of paranoia, schizophrenia, and alcoholism, but there was little the officer could do. She said, quote, if he comes back, give us a call. So meanwhile, this guy is wandering the streets of a normal neighborhood and thinking the devil is after him, and little supervision, nothing the cops can do, nothing the city can do. What in the world? A danger to others and himself.
SPEAKER_02I mean, this is what's so sad about you know, this the the lack of facilities in Minnesota and the country generally for people like this who might suffer from, you know, severe mental or physical illness or disability. Right now, there's so few places that they can go besides group homes, which maybe are not, you know, well equipped to deal with them, especially if they're being run from someone in another country, for God's sake. Um, or, you know, sadly, prisons and jails if they do end up hurting themselves or others. And and that's really it. You know, the hospitals don't have enough capacity to to house and care for them on a long-term basis, and so very often they end up on the streets. Yeah. And something has to change because this state of affairs is absolutely deplorable.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, I think that's the bigger issue here is that clearly this group home uh situation is not the right answer. And so we need something better for people who are struggling with uh mental issues in particular. I mean, it's not safe for someone to be walking around um with schizophrenia, paranoid on the streets of a neighborhood. It's not safe for them or others, like you said. So what do we do about that? And people don't seem to have, our leaders don't seem to have any good issues. It's something that we've been looking into here at American Experiment, and I think we're gonna talk about a lot um come the next year. Yeah, because this is not the compassionate response.
SPEAKER_02This is not the compassionate thing to do. Not at all. No. Well, let's move on to our second story of the day. Uh, you probably saw, as Catherine mentioned earlier, over the weekend, Minnesota once again became a national embarrassment thanks to a guy with a video camera who came in and exposed the insanity that is happening here in our state. James O'Keeffe, formerly of Project Veritas, was back in Minnesota exposing this time vulnerabilities in our election system. You might remember his last visit in 2020 when he acquired video of LeBon Osman showing off a few hundred ballots on the dashboard of his van. This was like a huge deal at the time. He was on his Osman was on his way to the Hennepin County elections office to deliver ballots he had harvested in direct violation of state law. Now, what's crazy is that everything O'Keefe was documenting this time is perfectly legal. And that is maybe the scariest part to me.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. Like last video, you know, you can only have up to, I think it's three ballots technically, um, right at one time, and you can be like a carrier of ballots. Uh this guy had tons all over his dashboard and car, so they were doing something that was, he was doing something that was clearly illegal. And then bragging about it was like a Snapchat video. Was not trying to hide it at all, put it down in public. It totally was. It had one of those like Snapchat filters on it where everything looks a little, you know, like different colored. Um but yeah, no, this time, perfectly legal. They're just doing something that is totally good to go in Minnesota, which is crazy.
SPEAKER_02If you didn't see it, the new video that he came uh that he posted over this last weekend showed O'Keefe disguising himself in Muslim, traditional Muslim clothing, and then entering a polling place in Minneapolis using the name of a registered voter in that precinct. Now, currently under state law, a registered voter can vouch for up to eight other people on election day. Their votes, these eight people who are vouched for by one person, get counted immediately. There's you know, there's no question. They're not held back in any kind of way, there's no other check that happens. If you walk in on election day and you are re not registered to vote, you can have someone next to you saying, I vouch for this person that they live in my precinct and they should vote. And that, you know, that's the end of the discussion. The exact quote from the election worker in this video was quote, you can vouch for them as ID for them. You are the ID. That is insane. Up to eight people.
SPEAKER_03It's especially insane when you're watching the video because James O'Keefe is like, you know, dressed in this traditional garb and he may has this like kind of absurd voice put on, and it's like, hmm, I don't know. There are no questions raised. No questions asked, you know? Like, I don't know if he should be the ID necessarily.
SPEAKER_02Um that's the entire point. That's that, I mean, it really does showcase the absurdity of the system. And again, everything that he showed was completely legal. The vouching for people, yeah. I mean, he could have brought eight, you know, random people off the street and had them vote. Again, no questions asked. And that's what's the other piece that's been so frustrating to people is is this is a very unique system. I don't think any other state has this besides Minnesota, where okay, number one, you can vouch for up to eight people. Yeah. But then we also have same-day election uh registration, and we don't have provisional ballots. So those elements all combine together. You don't, other states that have same-day voter registration have a provisional ballot, and so when you register to vote, typically, if you're doing it in advance, you know, your your registration is checked so that when you actually go to you know vote on election day, you've been vetted by the state in some way. Um but when you have same-day registration, obviously there's not time for that to happen. And so your vote gets counted immediately. It gets put into the pool and it's never coming back out. Other states, they will have same-day registrants use a what's called a provisional ballot. And so, you know, they they cast their vote, but it's set off aside, and it's not actually added into the mix until their registration has been verified, which makes sense. It's you know, Minnesota doesn't have that.
SPEAKER_03No, which is nuts. Like, what? So then you get the results, and after the fact, they claim the Secretary of State, see Steve Simon, he claims that they check it afterward. Like, don't worry, guys. The the vote's already been counted and it's been reported to you all, and you all know what happened. The damage is done. The damage is done, and then afterward, don't worry, we go back and check. So they claim, but after the damage is done and we all see the results on the official website, I mean, are you really gonna backpedal Steve Simon and be like, eh actually, according to something we dumble check? No, there's no way.
SPEAKER_02And that's the problem, too, is even if they go back later and and check and they find that this, you know, voter shouldn't have voted, basically they weren't eligible. Their vote is not removed from the count. Again, uh once it's in the pool, it cannot be clawed back. So all they do is then mark that voter for the next election and say that this pass this person can't vote. That's it. That's the only I mean, there's no other consequence. It's absolutely insane. And of course, you know, for what it's worth, Secretary of State Steve Simon's response to this was terrible. He immediately put out a statement basically trying to discredit O'Keefe, not responding to anything that actually happened in the video, because again, it was all perfectly legal. You know, he can't say he did X, Y, or Z wrong. He basically just tried to discredit him as, you know, a far-right nut, which is exactly the same thing he did last time uh O'Keefe came to town and did this, uh, did a video like this. Um very defensive, of course, was this whole was this whole statement.
SPEAKER_03And what they said about Nick Shirley too was that he was just like a far-right conspiratorial YouTuber. He's like some like 20-year-old kid. I mean, really, seriously.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, don't believe your eyes, don't believe what you're seeing on the video, because I say that this person is is un not, you know, not credible or not credible. Um and what's also frustrating is of course then you had, you know, local media dutifully parroting the talking points and not really, you know, questioning any anything that Steve Simon told them.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, talking about the issue that um he brought up, James O'Keefe brought up in the video, which is exactly what you just said, Grace. I don't think a lot of the media points out these things. I mean, election law is difficult to understand, it's confusing. I think it's intentionally confusing. Yeah. Um, and I don't see a lot of mainstream media pointing out the flaws in the system. A lot of people on the left are defending the vouching practice by saying it's not that widely used, you know, like, okay, only not that many people do it. It wouldn't really matter. This seems to be the main thing I hear uh when people respond to this video. And so, first of all, I just wanted to say I don't really, I don't really care. Like, I don't really care how many people are using the vouching program. It's absurd. Yeah. No one should be doing it this way, no one should be voting this way because it's absurd. I don't care if it's only being used by a tiny percentage of people. A bad law is a bad law.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and any amount of fraud or election insecurity is a bad amount. You know, what amount would be acceptable in these people's eyes?
SPEAKER_03Adds, you know, discredits the whole system, adds questions to the entire system. But we wanted to look at the data and see if this really was the case. Um, first of all, the data isn't particularly easy to find. They don't just publish numbers about how many people vouch in every election. But earlier this year, America First Legal obtained some information through a records request to Steve Simon's office. They were told that in 2024, 18,898 people registered to vote on Election Day through vouching. And in 2024, 3.27 million people total voted in Minnesota. So, yeah, it's true that this is a small percentage of overall voters. But when you look at the data on a local level, a smaller number of voters can make a big difference. Right. So Scott Pressler, he's a conservative activist, he posted on X that he also did some of these data requests. And he was told that in St. Louis County, which is the home of Duluth, 737 people registered to vote through vouching. 737. So let's go back to the 2022 election really quick just to see if we can get a clear example of, okay, will that number of people vouching ever really matter? It seems like a small number. Well, in 2022, in the Cottage Grove Hastings area, Democrat Judy Seeburger won her state Senate election by 321 votes. As our listeners may remember, the Democrats held the Senate that year by one seat. This gave them the majority that gave them the trifecta that passed some of the most outrageous laws this state has ever seen. The transgender sanctuary state law, abortion up until the moment before birth, and an unprecedented amount of wasteful spending completely blowing up our state budget, an issue we'll have to deal with for years to come. So don't tell me that it's only a small number of people who are vouching a small number of people can have huge consequences on our state and how it's run.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. You have to remember when you're hearing stats like that, you know, hundreds, thousands, that is very, very frequently in in small areas. Election deciding numbers of people.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and even think about the local races that matter a lot to you. I mean, I care a lot now about my school board. I never maybe in the five years ago, maybe I didn't care about the school board, but now I look at it and think about the school board and those races, or my city council races, I care about those a lot. Those are won by really small amounts of votes. And so when they put these things into the context of, yeah, three point however many million people voted in Minnesota in that election, and only a small percentage vouched. Well, think about that locally and what it means to your life and how they're trying to discredit that. I think it's just gross. And I hope, you know, our viewers at least know that this is really an important issue. And don't let the mainstream media tell you it's something, you know, you shouldn't be worried about because it never happens. These things impact our lives.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. Well, the final story we wanted to share with you guys today, of course, pertains to the great Minnesota get together. It's mid-August already, somehow, so we are very rapidly approaching that first, those first few days of the state fair. Uh by the way, we do want to say the first Saturday of the state fair, which is August 29th, is the day American Experiment will have our booth over in Dan Patch Park, right by the grandstand. Please come by and say hi. It is, I mean, one of the best days of the year, truly.
SPEAKER_03Uh and I know the best day of the year, seriously. So fun. Right by the grandstand in the grassy area, come say hi. John Justice will be there too with us. Uh, we'd love to see you. And we have a ton of free merch to give out for people who come to visit us at the state fair. So swing by.
SPEAKER_02Yes, definitely. Mark your calendar. We're planning to swing by. I think John will be there 11 to 1, but we're gonna have a whole crew of American Experiment, uh uh staff members there, so definitely come up and say hi, spin the wheel, win some free merch. Now, unfortunately, we are not the only ones who love the state fair here in Minnesota and yeah, in recent years. Yeah, I I wish I got the fair all to myself, that's a good point. In recent years, it has uh too often become an um an opportunity for gang violence and other criminal activity. What's interesting is this is not a phenomenon related to or uh excuse me, limited to Minnesota. I think just this last weekend, there was absolute chaos erupting at the Wisconsin State Fair. Let's roll that clip, Isaac. The the clip goes on for another two minutes. I think we just played the first 20 seconds or so, but it is brutal. You're seeing people getting kicked while they're lying on the ground, and some people, after they're getting beat up, just stop moving entirely. And it is so striking to me how really like how similar that looks to what could happen here in Minnesota. You've certainly seen things like that at the fair in the past.
SPEAKER_03We've had encounters like that at the fair where people have um tried to start violent situations, and um, it's awful because the fair is for people of all ages, and all of a sudden we have all these people trying to come in, particularly at night and cause issues, violence.
SPEAKER_02Well, and this year specifically, there were actual credible threats, I suppose you would say, online from specific uh Somali gangs here in Minnesota who have been linked to multiple specific assaults during previous state fairs and more recent shootings associated with high school and college graduation ceremonies here in Minnesota. And there were posts circulating on social media from members of these gangs saying that basically they were going to continue that line of violence at the state fair this year. And thank God, you know, law enforcement perked their ears up. And so now officials in Ramsey County are working with the Minnesota Attorneys General's office to look at using a very, very rarely used law or excuse me, state statute called the Minnesota Civil Gang Nuisance Law to try and prevent that violence from happening. The law would allow officials to sue gang members and prevent them from associating, intimidating, annoying, provoking, or threatening others in and around the state fairgrounds between August 27th and September 8th, 2026. So they're asking basically a judge to issue an injunction and allow them to use this statute. Statute. If the injunction is issued, they would have the legal authority to proactively detain gang members listed in the suit who violate certain conditions, such as associating with one another at the fair. And this is brilliant because otherwise, law enforcement is only able to do something after a crime has taken place. This is something they could do on the front end to prevent it from ever happening. So interesting. Ramsey County Sheriff's Deputy Ben Seidel is a gang expert. He assembled a 17-page affidavit laying out the historical violence between these two gangs, it's the Vill and Muddy Somali gangs, to try and get this injunction through. The Minnesota State Fair Chief of Police, Ron uh, can Canfla? I hope. NAFla? NAFLA? NAFLA? Ramsey County Attorney John Choi and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison have all added their support to this effort as well. Now, the individual gang members have all been served with copies of the complaint and are awaiting the outcome of an August 13th hearing, which took place before Ramsey County District Court Chief Judge Sarah Grewing. If Grewing issues the proposed temporary injunction, the state the gang members will be prohibited from associating with one another in or around the fairgrounds for the entirety of the 2026 state fair. Any violation would result in their arrest prior to any crime or violence occurring, which is so critical.
SPEAKER_03And by partisan, shout out. Thank you guys. I mean, seriously, I think we can all agree we don't want gang violence at the Minnesota State Fair, so at least we can get on board with that. Plus, like in this age of kind of surveillance state stuff we've got going on, think like flock cameras and things like that. I mean, they're tracking us all. And so why can't they track the gang members a little more closely and make sure they stay out of the state fair? That's kind of my thought.
SPEAKER_02I would agree. You know, it's interesting too because this does only target members from those specific gangs, but it does send this incredible message of deterrence for anyone else who might be trying to create chaos at the fair.
SPEAKER_03Police officers always say the same thing. Like, we know who these people are. And so the fact that they know who these people are, and that's what they said in the affidavit. Like, we know who these people are. Now just let us make sure they stay out of the state fair where they've already threatened to cause violence, makes total sense to me. Thank you for doing it.
SPEAKER_02Now, speaking of fun and safe events to enjoy this year, if this injunction gets through, our 2026 fall briefing here at Center of the American Experiment is rapidly approaching. We'll be at the gorgeous winery at Sovereign Estate on Saturday, September 19th. Or yeah, Saturday, September 19th, getting a critical election update from Byron York. He will give us an update on the race to control the U.S. House and Senate, and we'll show how Minnesota fits into that electoral map. You can get tickets for this event, which we do expect to sell out at AmericanExperiment.org slash events. Now I hope you enjoy this next conversation between Byron York and American Experiment President John Hinderrocker. American Experiment is supported by thousands of individuals like you. To join the movement, go to www.americanexperiment.org and click the yellow donate button. From all of us here, thank you.
SPEAKER_01Byron, thanks so much for joining us.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01Byron, I want to start by talking a little bit about some of the broader political uh trends that we're that we're seeing in the United States today. What do you see as some of the main uh current uh trends in our political life?
SPEAKER_00You know, sometimes I look at things and I wonder whether both of our major political parties could have a nervous breakdown at the same time. And uh sometimes I wonder if that we might be headed toward that. Clearly, the Democratic Party has broken into serious conflict between its uh progressive slash DSA wing and the the Democrats who really used to be called moderates or centrists, but I think it's more likely it's they're more kind of traditional progressives. They're kind of all all that. And then the people further out are the are the new wing. So I think you have this big conflict going on there. And I and the Republican Party, I think you have this enormous uncertainty about what comes after Trump. Uh, I mean, it's amazing to think that it has been more than 10 years uh since Trump emerged as a really serious player uh and then the dominant player in the Republican Party. And um uh it's not gonna go on forever. Uh he's gonna be uh essentially a lame duck after the midterm elections, no matter what uh what happens. I believe he's gonna lose at least one House of Congress. But whatever happens, he's gonna be uh a lame duck. And there is, you know, it there's really no clear successor now. It's kind of crazy to say where you have a vice president who clearly wants to run, um, and you have a president who seems to be focused on him. But I think you have substantial parts of the party who would like to see the Secretary of State uh run. And you you never can really um rule out somebody else popping up. So I and and then the the bigger question then is what is the party? Because we know Donald Trump has famously said MAGA is what I say it is, and uh, how much of a role will he have, provided he's still around and healthy? What role will he himself have? Uh, and then where would the new leader, whoever he may be, take the party? So the the level of uncertainty is just through the roof in the Republican Party. So I think both parties are in really kind of unstable periods at the moment.
SPEAKER_01Let's talk a little bit about the growth of the far left in the Democratic Party. We're seeing that with a lot of victories in the primaries by uh socialists, we saw El Sayed uh just recently. Um, of course, um Mam Dani in New York City actually won the election for uh for mayor. And and it's really interesting, Byron. I mean, why now? I mean, if you had asked me in 1991, say whether we would still be talking about or again be talking about socialism in 2026, I would have I would have found the idea laughable. And yet here we are, and socialism somehow seems to be making a comeback.
SPEAKER_00Well, Barack Obama said he wanted to fundamentally transform this country. Um, and this is kind of part of that. Um, I think there are a couple of of things. There's the economic radicalism, which really came from uh from the Bernie Sanders campaign. And remember, he started making a lot of noise in 2016 where the Republic where the Democratic Party felt they needed to put uh their thumb on the scale to make sure he didn't win, otherwise, he would have. So, I mean, you you've seen this rise of sort of socialist economics in the uh Democratic Party, certainly from uh the end of Obama's second term. Um and then you have this sort of cultural foreign policy uh radicalism, which is, you know, uh in the in the far left, in the old far left, we you've always seen a uh pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli uh tilt. Um and after October 7th, and more specifically, uh not only after the Hamas attack on Israel, but then after Israel's uh counterattack, um, I I think you've seen that just spread throughout the Democratic Party, so much so that uh if you look at the polls, Democratic uh support, rank and file democratic voters support for Israel is really, really low. And you see people like um Abdullah Al-Sayed uh hanging out with Hassan Piker at a DSA pool party uh the day before the primary in which um al Hassad Elsa El Sayed won the nomination for the Senate for Michigan. Uh it's really extraordinary. So I think you have a couple of these strains that have been really going for quite a while. Bernie Sanders has been a lefty for a very long time, finally, you know, really, really picking up steam in the last few years.
SPEAKER_01I want to follow up on one thing you said there, Byron, because I think it's both very interesting and frankly kind of frightening. And that is that anti-Semitism uh seems to have become really fundamental to this left wing of the Democratic Party. And they like to call it anti-Zionism, but the reality is I think we're looking at naked um anti-Semitism. And I I here again, I never imagined 30 or 40 years ago that we would be seeing anti-Semitism as a viable political perspective here in the United States.
SPEAKER_00No, and I I think it um, you know, and and I'm I'm not a student of this, um, but it seems to me to be really divided now into a number of groups. I mean, the sort of old-fashioned central casting Klansman from Georgia anti-Semitism, I I guess is still around, but not playing a really huge role. Um, I think there is this ideological leftist um anti-Semitism, anti-uh anti-Zionism that's been going on for a long time that really caught on in college campuses. And, you know, it's it's kind of hard to discuss something that ugly as a fashion, but there may actually be some aspects of that uh on campuses. And then the last thing is that uh, you know, immigration is transforming the um country. And we do have large numbers of immigrants coming from um countries in the world, in the Middle East, that are profoundly anti-Israeli and profoundly anti-Semitic. So you put those three three things three things together, especially the last the final two, um, and you've got this this um this enormous explosion. Now it has come uh uh after October the 7th, um, in which uh there was obviously a good deal of attention to the just horrendous, horrendous nature of it. Um and you know, after an attack like that, uh Israel, I think, had a obligation and had a responsibility to retaliate uh in a very strong way. And yet, I think you you could probably make an argument they may have overdone it if you look at the uh uh videos of what has happened, what they did in Gaza. And I'm not talking about death tolls because I don't trust any of the um the figures coming out of there, but just this enormous physical destruction that has, I think, uh driven a lot of that ideological anti-Zionism and turning into anti-Semitism.
SPEAKER_01Is there um are you seeing uh uh pushback from from what we think of as the more mainstream elements of the Democratic Party? I mean, Chuck Schumer, who you would think would be highly sensitive to anti-Semitism, I think it was after El Sayed's um uh winning the primary. Uh, he talked about how we Democrats have broadly shared goals, you know, uh and others. Uh I think uh Jeffries just yesterday was talking about how the you know the socialists are part of our our big tent. And I I I don't I don't really see uh more or less progressive Democrats pushing back against uh the anti-Semitism that comes from Mandani and and um and El Sayed and others, do you?
SPEAKER_00I think you're right because you're they're afraid to. Uh obviously the majority, excuse me, the minority leader of the U.S. Senate, uh Senator Schumer, is from Brooklyn. Um and the the biggest successes uh that the DSA has had so far um were those congressional races uh in Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and parts of Manhattan. And so they were all New York centered. And of course, the mayor of New York City wants to declare Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal, wanted to arrest him, pledged to do so, and then finally said, Well, you know, actually, I don't have the authority to do that. Um so uh I think Schumer is just really kind of walking, you know, on I don't know, he's on pens and needles, he's on thin ice, he's he's really very worried uh about his voters and coming out and saying what he, I would, I would guess, Charles Schumer really thinks about this, which is he's profoundly worried about it, um, because he might, you know, uh Senator El Sayed may be his Democratic colleague next year.
SPEAKER_01On the Republican side, um, you know, you mentioned the the long shadow that Donald Trump has been casting now for the last uh decade, and the fact that in a few months uh he will be um he will be a lame duck. And uh the the the 2028 presidential campaign probably starts immediately after the uh the midterms. Um where do you see where do you see the Republican Party going? I mean, you know, the MAGA element, however you want to define that, has obviously been dominant uh here in recent years. Um where where do you where do you see the Republicans heading?
SPEAKER_00You know, I'm in the 10th year of asking myself this very question. Um it's you know, it's really fascinating. I remember in 2015 uh when Trump uh took the lead in the Republican primaries. Remember the Democrat uh excuse me, the uh Iowa caucuses was gonna happen in January of 2016. So toward the last few months of 2015, Trump was in a very dominant uh position. And uh, but nobody could really believe he's gonna win the nomination, much less be president. And so there were some Republicans thinking, well, Trump has really, really exposed uh a lot of interesting things about the Republican Party, and there's really no going back. And this was even if Trump had never won. Um and now there's really no going back. Now, on the other hand, I remember covering Nikki Haley in the 2024 race in Iowa and New Hampshire, and then she finally fell apart in her home state of South Carolina. And uh talking to the people there, people who would come to her events, they were really the the ones who were Republicans, some of them were Democrats, but the ones who were Republicans were Republicans who tended to be more comfortable with the Republican Party of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan, John McCain. And they hoped, even though Nikki Haley had you know served as UN ambassador and been a top official in the first Trump administration, they hoped that she could somehow find the way back to what's going on before. Now, I think there are a number of people, particularly in the Republican donor class, who would like to see Marco Rubio, even though he's been Secretary of State under Donald Trump. Uh Marco Rubio perhaps return the Republican Party to something resembling what it was like in those uh Bush, McCain, Romney, Ryan days. Um I just don't think that's gonna happen. Now, could you see a synthesis, a return to some sort of uh pre-Trumpian Republican Party? I don't know. Now, the one thing I do know is Donald Trump himself is absolutely and totally unique. There won't be another one. And there won't be another one who will be able to act like Trump and kind of get away with it uh in the way that that Trump can. Um just not gonna happen. So we are gonna see a president who who behaves differently uh than Donald Trump. But you know, what his core platform is gonna be, uh it's really, really hard to tell.
SPEAKER_01You know, the Trump era has obviously um shown a move toward populism in the Republican Party. And a lot of people, I think, attribute that to Trump and and his philosophy and so on. And I think there's truth to that. But at the same time, the other thing that's been happening, I think, is that the American establishment has really gone over to the Democratic Party. And I don't think that's because of Trump. I th I I've written about this, I think it's really for financial reasons, financial self-interest. But I wrote earlier today about uh something that came out. Uh, somebody analyzed the political giving of America's major law firms. And it's pretty shocking. You know, we all knew that university faculties gave 95% of their donations to the Democratic Party, but so do lawyers. Lawyers in big law firms, you know, are 95, 97, 98 percent now supporting uh Democrats. And and why is that? Well, I think it's because uh the the lawyers, I was a lawyer for many years, as you know, at some point figured out that big government, activist government is a money printing machine for lawyers. And so out of self-interest, most lawyers have now become uh become Democrats. Same thing in the healthcare industry. Uh when I was growing up, and probably when you were growing up, the um you know, doctors were generally conservative, the AMA was a right-wing organization, and that's all changed. And I think it's for reasons of economic um self-interest. But my point is that when when as a Republican you look at the landscape, the Republicans almost have to be the populist party because the the establishment, which used to be half theirs, more or less, has really gone over to the other side. What do you think about that idea?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think uh in there there have been a number of analysts who said, you know, in the past where there maybe was an ideological divide, there's now an educational divide. And we saw very early on uh in Trump's uh electoral career that he had an extraordinary appeal to voters uh without a college degree, which is still the majority of voters, even today. Um and he he seemed to connect with them in a way that they hadn't uh that no one had before. And part of it, I think, was that Republican leadership was just entirely clueless when it came to the um subject of populism. I remember covering the 2012 campaign, um Mitt Romney, and uh the a thorn in his side in 2012 was Rick Santorum, who had a really, really important role to play in that campaign, was a was an important figure in that campaign. Because he really was tapping into an incipient populism that would really get much, much bigger in the in the four years to follow. And um and uh Romney would talk all the time about his private equity firm and uh starting up a store called Staples, they had invested in Staples, the office supply company, uh, very early. And uh people who signed the uh the front of the paycheck, and you didn't start that business and all sorts of entrepreneurs. And Santorum would look at an audience and say, now, how many of you here uh make your living, support you and yourself and your family with a company that you started and you run, as opposed to people who get a paycheck from somebody else? Well, you know how it came out. I mean, it was 99% of people got a paycheck from somebody else. And Santorum realized, he he wrote a book, I think, called Blue Collar Conservatism or something like that, that Trump read and was influenced by. They were, you know, heavy in the sort of graduate school world. And he realized these there are billions of these voters across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. There's millions of them who were just waiting to vote for me, Donald J. Trump. Uh, and it worked. So there really was kind of a fundamental remaking of parties. Uh, uh is it gonna is it gonna last beyond Trump? I don't know. Um, but basically there was a period of time, um, certainly 15 years ago and even more recently, when both parties were basically giving the back of their hand to uh voters without college degrees. And uh Trump saw that and and made use of it.
SPEAKER_01Speaking of college degrees, I want to ask you one more question before we talk about the upcoming uh midterm elections, and that is there was a fascinating poll that came out of Michigan. I'm sure you saw it just a few days ago. In fact, I think you you tweeted about it. Uh the Democratic who voted for whom? And the thing that sticks out there is white women with a college degree went overwhelmingly for Abdul El Sayed. I mean, totally at odds with with other groups. What is going on with white women with a college degree?
SPEAKER_00This was from the Fox News poll. And uh one great thing about Fox News polls, uh polls is that they publish uh not just the what they call the top line results, but the crosstabs, which is the data inside the poll and how it breaks down. And uh basically it it looked at four groups. So white men without a college degree, this is Mike Rogers versus uh Abdul El-Sayed. Uh Rogers leads about 60 to 35. And then white men with a college degree, a little closer to about 55 to 32 or something like that. And then white women without a college degree, it was about 60 to 35. And then white women with a college degree, it was about 60 to 35, except for El Sayed. It was the the absolute reverse of uh of all the other groups. So you you just think to yourself, wow, I and I I had lots of kind of snarky comments and and uh on X about it from people. Um, but clearly there's there's something going on there uh amongst our college educated voters, uh, and especially uh among women, because uh among men with college degrees, um Roger's lead was less than it was among those without a degree, but it was still pretty substantial. And women were just way out there. So if if you're asking me for a theory, I I don't really have one right now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's it's a striking thing. We've seen it uh over and over again, but that was really a remarkable instance of an um let's let let's talk specifically about the uh about the midterms. You know, so far we've been seeing a lot of socialist wins, far left wins in the democratic uh primaries. I guess one basic question is uh is that going to continue into the general election, or are the democrats just uh setting themselves up for uh for a major repudiation?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I wonder about that. I mean, first of all, we did see the um in this election, there's no doubt that the DSA took a major step up. They they reached another level because, first of all, they stunned some people in New York in those congressional races, in which they knocked off two established Democratic incumbents, and then they won uh another open seat being um being vacated by a Democratic incumbent. So they win those three seats, and then they uh then they get one in um in the Denver area. And then actually the mayor of Washington, D.C. is going to be a DSA uh candidate. So we'll we'll see what happens there. So they're winning in these um in congressional districts, each of which has about 750,000, I believe, in population. And then so the next thing is, well, okay, they can win a super deep blue congressional district. But what about a whole state? I mean, that's different. What like a big state, kind of a diverse state like Michigan? Yeah, let's see them do that. Well, they did, uh, in a Democratic primary, of course. But uh in, you know, in the Democratic primary, uh El Sayyed was, you know, we can talk about the polls too, but he was, he was, the polls said he was going to win by 10. He squeaks by by one, but still he won. So a DSA candidate uh is the um is the candidate nominee for a statewide seat. And then the next week after that, of course, there uh was the Wisconsin debacle uh with Francesca uh Hong, who some of the polls had up by 20, who lost. Who lost. So then you think, okay, well, maybe the law of gravity has reasserted itself and a DSA candidate uh just couldn't uh couldn't win statewide in Wisconsin. My feeling is, you know, she was Hong was a an unusually terrible candidate. Uh banned Thanksgiving candidate. I mean, really, the yes, the banned Thanksgiving candidate. Um and that it it's entirely likely that the DSA candidate could have won. After all, and she only lost by like four tenths of one percentage point, I think. Um so I I think the DSA, the overall news, and we all made a big deal of the of the fact that uh David Crowley had quit and gotten back in and come back and had won. And that was all newsy, true. But I, you know, I think in the bigger picture, the story is a a major step up for the democratic socialists of America. Now, we should say that um Abdul Al-Sayed says he is not a member of the DSA, uh, but he hangs out, he's he's DSA adjacent, hangs out a lot uh with uh DSA members as well. So um uh so where where this goes now, can they win a statewide election? Well, we know that that they're gonna win the seats in the House. I mean, those those seats in uh New York and the one probably in in the Denver area, they're gonna be members of Congress. So the squad is gonna get bigger, um regardless of what else happens in the election. Uh whether they whether they can win a statewide seat is still unclear. I think I think um El Sayed is perfectly capable of sabotaging his own chances enough so that uh Mike Rogers, who almost won that won a seat uh a couple of years ago, could win this time.
SPEAKER_01So let's talk uh more broadly about how you see things going um this year. Do you have a forecast as to who's going to win the House and who's going to win the Senate?
SPEAKER_00No, and I always say I don't ever do those, but then I end up doing them. Uh I've said over and over again, I th you know I think Democrats are going to win control of the House. Um I think they have too many things going, uh the Republicans have too many things going against them uh to keep control of the House. The first is is President Trump's job approval rating, which is really low and is not going to get better uh unless something completely unexpected happens. Um and presidential job approval rating is a major uh predictor of the results of midterm elections. So that's really bad. Um then, of course, the President Trump's approval rating on the economy specifically, the most important issue, is even worse. Um, what's called the generic ballot, uh, the the polling question where they ask you uh if the election were today, would you vote for the Democratic candidate or the Republican candidate to be your representative in the House? Democrats are up by six or seven points. Not huge, but probably easily enough to actually win. And then there's history, which is um uh the fact that uh the the uh the party in power almost always loses seats in mid-the presence party almost always loses seats. The only time it hasn't happened in the last million years has been in 1998 and then in 2002, and both were under very um unusual circumstances. Now, on the other side, the in their favor, Republicans have their belief, strong belief, that Republic uh that Democrats are crazy and that they Republicans can convince the voters that Democrats are crazy. And then lastly, they have uh I think it made things better for themselves by their redistricting. I don't think it was a good idea to do what they did, and I think it'll have a lot of repercussions as the years go by, but they probably got themselves three, four, maybe even five more seats through this redistricting.
SPEAKER_01How about the Senate?
SPEAKER_00Well, I you know, I used to think that that there was no way that um Democrats could pick up this and they'd need four to pick up the Senate. Uh if they were, if Mike Rogers were to win and uh pick up seat in Michigan, they would need five, which just seems impossible. I don't think it's impossible. Um, you know, we can go through them, but I think I you know, I think it's possible for them to win. North Carolina looks like they're gonna win. It's possible for them to win Ohio and Iowa. And I believe it's possible for them to win Texas. Now, I've had people from Texas kind of laugh in my face saying it ain't gonna happen. Just ain't gonna happen. I think James Tallerico is a terrible candidate. Um uh, but uh I I think um uh Ken Paxton isn't is just as bad. I mean, just as bad. Very different candidate. Obviously, he's not bad in the same ways. Uh, but it's a it I think there's a real possibility that um that Democrats could win Texas. So what I'm saying is I think there's a outside, outside chance for Democrats to win the Senate, which would really be disastrous for uh the president because he needs the Senate to uh approve uh all of his major nominations, including his judicial nominations, should there, you know, all of those that you have in the normal course of affairs, and then if there were to be an opening on the Supreme Court. Um and then if he controls at least one of the, if he controls the house, if Democrats control the House, they're gonna impeach um the president. And they're also going to every single committee of of the House, and if if Democrats control the Senate, every single committee of the Senate will be devoted to investigating the president and his family and his associates. And that's what we'll see for the next couple of years.
SPEAKER_01Have you been following uh the races here in Minnesota at all?
SPEAKER_00No, not not close, not closely enough, but I will know more when I get there. How about that?
SPEAKER_01That's good. Okay. Uh Minnesota might have a more interesting election this year than a lot of people think. Uh, Republicans have got uh stronger candidates at the top of the ticket than they've had in a long time. And Amy Klobichar is not the powerhouse uh of Minnesota politics that some people uh think she is, and um and they've nominated a real flake for the United States Senate. So I don't know. I think we're gonna be having a very interesting um election season here in in Minnesota. Well, let's wrap up, Byron, by talking about uh something that we mentioned briefly earlier, which is that the day after the midterms, I suppose, is when the 2028 uh presidential election uh uh gets underway. And one of the intriguing people here, of course, is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Um uh and I got two questions about her. Number one, do you take her seriously as a presidential candidate? And number two, this this comment that she made the other day about how woke 1.0 was crazy, right? But now I guess we have woke 2.0, which seems to me to be even crazier. But what do you make of that as a as an effort to uh dodge the past?
SPEAKER_00Well, first of all, you just don't get to do that. I'm sorry, you can't laugh it off all the horrible things that were done in the in the first woke period, and just say, oh, we were all kind of crazy. You you don't get to do that. You you are held accountable uh for the things that you said. She said that in in the context of um some of the things that Francesca Hong uh had said. This was right before the election in Wisconsin. But I do think they're gonna end if you remember in the 2024 race, the Trump versus Kabala Harris race, Harris had run for president in 2020. Now, her campaign was so terrible that she didn't make it to 2020. She actually uh withdrew from the race in December of 2019. But in those few months that she was in the race, she said all sorts of really stupid things. And she was for basically all the ridiculous far-left policies that you could uh you could come up with. And uh some of those were thrown back at her. Most famously, if that uh at their only debate between Trump and Harris, which I think was in Philadelphia, and uh Trump says, yeah, and now she wants the government to pay for sex change operations for illegal immigrants who are in prison. And there were people uh on the left who thought, what in the world is this? Trump, Trump will lie about anything. He's made up this crazy thing and and and accused Harris of it. This is absolutely outrageous. Then you find out that Trump was correct, that Harris had actually come out in favor of that very thing in a questionnaire in 2019 to the ACLU. So you don't get to just run away from the stuff that you said in the fairly recent past. This is not something 35 years ago. This is this is in 19 or in 2020. So um, as far as Ocasio Cortez as an actual presidential candidate is concerned, um, you know, I I think first of all, she has shown some judgment lately in staying away from Francesca Hong, not endorsing her, staying away from um from uh uh Abdul el-Sayed, not endorsing him, uh, kind of not getting caught up in the Hassan Piker thing, which is a bad thing to be caught up in. Uh so she's actually displayed some uh some judgment there. Uh I haven't seen anything that would suggest that she's even thinking at the presidential level. Um and also, you know, this is one of these things where the historical argument is pretty good in the sense that the American people do not elect sitting members of the House president. Uh it's happened once in all of American history, and it was James A. Garfield. What year was that? 1884, maybe. Uh if I'm wrong, I'll correct. But um uh it Americans just don't elect sitting members of the House. You know, earlier I was talking about how uh members of the House represent about 750,000 people in a district. Um Americans like senators much better who represent a whole state, and governors even better who are executives in a whole state. So I, you know, I just don't see that happening, but uh but clearly in terms of energy and theme setting, I think she's one of the leaders, if not the leader of the Democratic Party right now.
SPEAKER_01Currently, uh Kamala Harris continues to be way out front in in polls of Democrats for who they want to nominate in uh 2028. Do you see any realistic possibility of Kamala Harris again being the Democrats' nominee?
SPEAKER_00Zero. Maybe less than zero. Um, no, I don't think so. You know, Democrat, Democrats are uh are pretty brutal with their um nominees who lose. Um and you know, in 2004, John Kerry lost. He was a Democratic nominee and he lost. And he he immediately started making some noises about running in 2008, at which point the Democratic Party said, no, John, no. We love you, you're the greatest. Now, you know, go do something else. Um and the and anytime uh a nominee has lost and indicated any interest in running again, no way. Now, you know, obviously the Republicans have been a little more um um understanding uh about that, but Democrats just don't do that. So, you know, I I think that if um if Kamala Harris were to make serious, and first of all, she's doing everything right now that a candidate would do. I mean, she's traveling around a lot, you know, she wrote a book, she wrote a book about what a terrible campaign she read, ran, but whatever. She wrote a book and she's traveled all over the place. And in the guise of having book events, she has campaign events. And so that's a time-honored way of doing things. So I'm not saying she's not running right now, but I think when the time comes when you really get serious and you then you have to make contact with voters and all of that, I just don't see that the Democratic Party would be up for another one of these, uh, another one of these rounds.
SPEAKER_01What I've been saying is that the Democrats um need to find someone like Bill Clinton in 1992, uh, who is maybe relatively little known as not associated with their more exotic um wing. But but I don't know who that would be. Do you have any suggestions as to who such a candidate might be?
SPEAKER_00Oh, I I have a whole thing on this. Um, well, Clinton ran in 1992, and before that time, Democrats had lost three count them, one, two, three presidential elections in a row. Two to Reagan and one to Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush. Now, uh, Democrats are getting pretty upset by losing three presidential elections in a row. And there was an enormous ugly debate going on inside the Democratic Party. And the two sides were the side that said, we're doing everything great. It's just a messaging problem. You know, we we've just our positions are the best, but we just haven't communicated them well enough. And then there was a group um uh led by Clinton, uh, the uh Democratic Leadership Committee, DLC, led by Clinton, which said things like, you know, maybe we weren't too soft on crime, you know, maybe we were soft on communism, maybe we need to change a few things so we can actually get elected president. Um this was by no means the absolute majority opinion inside the Democratic Party, but Clinton went with it, gambled on it, and won. Uh, and so the the sort of the sort of uh ideal of the centrist Democrat is born there when Clinton wins in 1992. I think it's I think it's dead now, as far as the ideal of the centrist Democrat is concerned. And so the the thing about you saying that, well, you know, maybe somebody needs to be like Clinton with the Democratic Party now. The fact is they've only lost one election. You know, they they won in 2020. Um, and uh obviously they've lost twice to Trump, and that drives them absolutely crazy. But uh they've just lost, they haven't lost three elections in a row like they had by 1992. So I don't think you're gonna see them saying we need any sort of big fundamental changes. And uh they are having they are gonna have a fight over um over you know what they believe in, but basically it's going, they're gonna end up with uh, you know, mostly open borders, mostly Medicare for all, you know, mostly, you know, a very sort of pro-criminal crime policy. I mean, they're gonna end up with the things that you wouldn't be terribly surprised at them ending up with. So I I just don't see the Democratic Party uh doing the kind of soul searching that it did in 1992 unless they lose this election and maybe the one after that.
SPEAKER_01Great. Well, let's uh leave it leave it there for now, Byron. Thank you so much for being with us, and we will look forward to seeing you in September.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, John. It was a pleasure.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much to everyone who made it all the way to the end of this week's episode of the American Experiment Podcast.
SPEAKER_03Remember to answer our weekly question in the comments of our YouTube video. What do you think of the Minnesota State Fair? I had such a fun time reading people's answers last week about the I voted stickers. I mean, I had no idea that anyone like had thoughts about the i voted stickers, and people have thoughts, which was really interesting. So please do the same this week. Head on over to our YouTube page, American Experiment, and drop a comment. Let us know your favorite hotspots at the state fair or even your hater comments. I might fight back, but you know, go ahead.
SPEAKER_02And of course, remember to swing by our booth at the state fair. We are there for one day only on Saturday, August 29th. Uh, all day. So uh come see us in Dan Patch Park, right by the grandstand, and of course, get tickets for our 2026 fall briefing at americanexperiment.org slash events. Remember to stay sane, stay safe out there, and we will see you next week.
