If Diversity Matters... Why Doesn't the Left Practice It? | Wacky Wednesday

We hear constantly that representation matters.

But who gets represented—and who decides?

In this episode, Chad examines the growing gap between the rhetoric of diversity and the reality of political decision-making. Using Portland, congressional districts, party primaries, and several recent political examples, he explores whether modern identity politics is driven by principle or by power.

The conversation also tackles:

• Portland's unique political culture

• The difference between representing voters versus demographic groups

• Why legislative maps have become political battlegrounds

• The Winsome Sears debate

• Internal party gatekeeping

• California as a case study in selective representation

• Why consistency matters more than slogans

Whether you agree or disagree, the goal remains the same:

Read the fine print. Think critically. Verify everything.

Chapters

00:00 The Promise of Protection: A Tragic Reality

01:22 The Political Landscape: A Personal Reflection

02:48 The Big Tent: A Call for Common Sense

07:12 Portland: The Cathedral of Diversity

11:44 The Contradiction of Diversity in Portland

15:52 The Celebration Machine: A Political Analysis

22:05 Winsome Sears: A Case of Selective Representation

27:30 Defining Representation: A Complex Concept

29:06 The Representation War: Maps and Boundaries

32:03 Candidates vs. Districts: The Real Choice

34:53 Internal Party Dynamics: Who Gets Chosen?

39:41 The Promise of Protection: A Case Study in California

43:12 Double Standards in Political Representation

49:24 The Hypocrisy of Diversity: A Call for Authenticity

54:58 Trust but Verify: The True Measure of Diversity

If you enjoy thoughtful political analysis that challenges assumptions from every direction, please follow the show and share the episode.

Transcript

Chadq: Make me feel that la la la. Mm-hmm. My best friend's mom could not stop telling us kids not to smoke. Relentless. Smoking will kill you, smoking will wreck you. Don't you ever start, she'd say, lighting the next one off the last one. And for 30 years I thought that was just a funny story about a lady and her cigarettes. Then I realized she's not one lady anymore. She's an entire political party. Same lecture, same full ashtray. Diversity matters. Representation matters. This is who we are. Cigarette lit the whole time. She wasn't even wrong about smoking. Nobody could hear her. You can't lecture people from inside a cloud. That's the whole episode. Now go watch it. Here's a four-second experiment. Do it in your head. Take Winsom Sears. Immigrant kid came here following a dad with a buck 75 in his pocket. United States Marine, first black woman to win statewide office in the history of Virginia, the old capital of the Confederacy. That resume usually gets a documentary, a postage stamp, a parade. She got crickets. The representation crowd went quiet. So change one letter. Take the R off her name, put a D there, don't touch anything else. And you tell me there's not an HBO miniseries green lit by Friday. Same woman, same Marine, same history, one letter. That's not a parade machine that's broken, it's a parade machine with a guest list. Full episodes live, go see the rest. Portland is the most diversity-obsessed city in America. Equity office, equity goals. The Parks Department has a diversity committee with bylaws. The swings have bylaws. And last year the Fed said: trim some of this or we'll pull your funding. The number on the table? Around $4 million. So watch what happened. The mayor goes, we will say those words proudly. The words free, unlimited, never going anywhere. And then they quietly went and adjusted the actual programs to keep the money. The Port of Portland revoked its equity policy outright. Those words were non-negotiable. The programs turned out to be extremely negotiable at a knowable price. Most honest thing that ever happened in Portland, and nobody meant it to be. Portland is the most diversity obsessed city in America. Equity office, equity goals. The Parks Department has a diversity committee with bylaws. The swings have bylaws. And last year the Fed said, trim some of this or we pull your funding. The number on the table? $4 million. So watch what happened. The mayor goes, we still say those words proudly. The words free, unlimited, never going anywhere. And then quietly went and adjusted the actual programs to keep the money. The Port of Portland revoked its equity policy outright. The words were non-negotiable. The programs turned out to be extremely negotiable at a knowable price. Most honest thing that ever happened in Portland, and nobody meant for it to be. There's a whole hour of this, it's live. Go check it out. The Democratic Party held an election. Inside the building, just them picking their own leadership. Total control, nobody else to blame. Two guys win, including a black, openly gay legislator, brochure stuff. And then a complaint comes in saying the process shortchanged the women of color candidates. So the party looks at it and votes by a landslide to throw out the result and run it again. The party of diversity held a diversity election and cannot get it diverse enough to satisfy itself. They sent it back to the kitchen. This is the group that wants to grab your hiring practices. This is the group that wants to grade your hiring practices. Full episode links right there. Watch the words change the second real power shows up. When it's a symbolic seat, a committee, a city council, the word is representation. Representation, representation, who's in the room. But the minute the chair's got real power on it, suddenly the words are electability, experience, who can actually win? Diversity's the priority on the appetizer, merit shows up on the second entree. Diversity's the priority on the appetizer. Merit shows up on the second the entree has money on it. Watch the words change the second real power shows up. When it's a symbolic seat, a committee, a city council, the word is representation. Representation, representation. Who's in the room? But the minute the chair's got real power on it, suddenly the words are electability, experience, who can actually win. Diversity is the priority on the appetizer. Merit shows up the second the entree has money on it. Texas this year, Democrats finally smell a winnable Senate seat. Jasmine Crockett, Congresswoman, Civil Rights Attorney, National Star, versus a thirty-six-year-old who goes viral on Rogan. And the money, the momentum, this one is the one you can win, gathered around the new guy and he won. Texas this year, Democrats finally smell a winnable Senate seat. Jasmine Crockett, Congresswoman, Civil Rights Attorney, National Star, versus a 36-year-old who goes viral on Rogan. And the money, the momentum, the this is the one who can win gathered around the new guy who won. Voters chose fair and square. I'm just asking you to notice the instinct. When the chips are down, what does the gut reach for? It ain't the brochure. Whole story's in the episode. Go make sure to watch. They'll flee an entire state over lines on a map. Charter the planes, the whole drama, all to fight about who's in which district. Here's the sentence that's been rattling around my head. Districts reflect voters. Candidates reflect parties. A district is just where people already live. Shove the lines around, you're rearranging furniture. But who you run, that's a choice. In a conference room, nobody draws it for you. So, if minority representation is the great moral cause, why is all the passion aimed at the map? The thing you don't control and almost none at the candidate? Why is all the passion aimed at the map, the thing you don't control, and almost none at the candidate, the thing you control completely? I never see that chartered plane. Episodes live linked below. Notice the problem never gets solved. It gets discussed forever, beautifully, in the right font. But here's the uncomfortable little secret. When a whole industry grows around talking about a problem, the offices, the committees, the consultants with the 40-slide deck, that industry develops one permanent interest, and it is not solving the problem. Because if you solve it, the office closes, the committee's done, the consultants out of work. You don't throw a retirement party for the thing that signs your checks. A problem solved is a budget line gone. A problem discussed forever is a career, a building, a lanyard for life. Full breakdowns in the episode. Check the link below. Every one of these institutions has a test. Is your company diverse enough? Is your school inclusive enough? Did you say the right words at the right meeting? They'll test your bakery, they'll test your book club. And the one outfit that never seems to sit for the exam is the one handing it out. It's an open book test for everyone else and a hall pass for themselves. The rule is for thee, the exception is for me. And I don't think Americans are turning against diversity. I think they're turning against hypocrisy with a diversity labeled slapped on it. That's the episode. It's called diversity for thee, not for me. Go watch the whole thing, the link's right here. This one's not a joke, so I'm not gonna tell it like one. The most progressive governed state in America. Its whole identity is built on protecting the vulnerable. That's the promise. January of last year, the Eton fire hits Altadena. Nineteen people died. 18 of them lived in one neighborhood, West Altadena. A historically black community, the average age of the people who died was 77. And by the county's own review, The evacuation orders didn't reach that neighborhood the way they reached the rest of town. For hours. I'm not telling you it was malice. It's under investigation by the state's own Democrat Attorney General. I'm asking the only question that matters. The promise was we protect the vulnerable. Did the outcome match the promise? The full episode lays it all out. Watch it, the link is right below. My best friend's mom growing up could not tell My best friend's mom growing up could not stop telling us kids not to smoke. She was a wonderful woman, passionate, relentless. Smoking'll kill ya, smoking will wreck ya. Don't you boys ever start, she'd say, lighting the next one off the last one. And for 30 years I thought that was just a funny little story about a lady in her cigarettes. Then a couple months ago I'm standing in a parking lot in Portland of all places and it hits me. I am looking at the exact same woman. Except she's not one lady anymore. She's an entire political party. Same lecture, same full ashtray, and I started pulling on the thread. And believe me, I'd wish. Folks, my best friend's mom growing up could not stop telling us kids not to smoke. She was a wonderful woman, passionate, relentless. Smoking will kill ya. Smoking will wreck ya. Don't you boys ever start, she'd say, lighting one with the next one. And for 30 years, I thought that was just a funny little story about my friend's mom, a lady, and her cigarettes. Then a couple of months ago, I'm standing in a parking lot in Portland, of all places, and it hits me. I'm looking at the exact same woman. Except she's not one lady anymore. She's an entire political party. Same lecture, same full ashtray. And so I started pulling on the thread. And boy do I wish I just left it at home. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, common sense extremist living in radical reality, spreading truth to the American household. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality, the walking contradiction your professors all warned you about, broadcasting truth in the American household on the only rainbow that matters: the red, white, and blue rainbow, and my attempt to restore common sense in the American household one conversation at a time. And America, this is common sense. The show where we read the fine print so you don't have to, where we bring all the receipts so you don't have to ruin another Thanksgiving dinner. The show for the other 80% of Americans. People busy raising families, building businesses. Paying taxes, coaching Little League, and serving their communities. And wondering when common sense became controversial. While cable news, political consultants, professional activists, and social media outrage merchants spend all day arguing about the loudest 20% of the population, we focus on the people who actually keep America running. This is the big tent, the shelter for the politically homeless. The politically exhausted, the politically independent, and the common sense conservatives, tired of being told they have to choose between two bad ideas. And here, reality gets a vote, results matter, truth matters, and common sense matters. Welcome home. When I was a kid, my best friend's mom, I'm gonna call her Terry because that was her name. Terry was the most anti smoking woman in North America, a crusader, a warrior. Like I mentioned earlier, when I was a kid, my best friend's mom, I'm gonna call her Terry because that was her name. Terry was the most anti-smoking woman in America. A crusader, a warrior. If cigarettes had a most wanted poster, Terry drew it herself by hand with a little skull on it. I mean, we'd be sitting at the kitchen table, nine years old, eating those orange crackers with the fake peanut butter that scraped the roof of your mouth. You know the ones. And Terry would lean in, real serious, real loving, and she'd say, Boys. Look at me. Don't you ever stop smok boys, look at me. Don't you ever start smoking. It'll kill you. It rots your lungs. It yellows your teeth. It puts you in an early grave. And she'd deliver this entire sermon with a lit cigarette in her hand. A long one. One of those real commitment cigarettes. There was an ashtray on the table the size of a hubcap. There's a pack sitting next to the napkin holder like a centerpiece. There's a haze in that kitchen you could hang a picture in. And somewhere inside the fog is Terry waving her Marlboro around like a little orange laser pointer, warning us about the dangers of the Marlboro. And here's the thing you have to understand. As a kid, you want to take it seriously. You're looking up at this woman. She's clearly worried about you. She loves you. She's got real conviction in her voice. And your little nine-year-old brain is trying so hard to file the warning under important. But your eyes keep wandering to the cigarette and the ashtray and the second cigarette she lights off the first one, which by the way is a move. That's a professional move. You don't get that, you don't get to that level by accident. She'd cough, this deep rattling percussion section cough right in the middle of the word lungs. She would cough on the word lungs and then take another drag, and we'd just nod, yes, ma'am, no smoking, got it. We didn't believe any word of it. Not because she was wrong. That's the part that took me 30 years to figure out. She was completely right. Everything Terry said about smoking was true. Every single word, the lungs, the teeth, the early grave. Medically, she was battle medically, she was batting a thousand. But nobody in that kitchen could hear her because the message was coming out of a cloud of smoke. And that's the lesson I want you to hang on to for the next hour because it's the whole show. People don't believe what you say. People believe what you do. You can have the best advice on planet Earth, and if you're not living it, it just becomes noise. Fog, orange laser pointer in a smoky kitchen. The warning was never the problem. The credibility was the problem. We trust examples. The warning was never the problem, the credibility was the problem. We trust examples, we do not trust lectures. Now, hold on to that thought. Keep Terry right there in your mind, cigarette and all, because for about 10 years now, this country had has had its own Terry, a whole chorus of Terry's. And they've been leaning across the kitchen table, telling us, real serious, real loving, what matters. And what matters, we've been told, is diversity. Representation matters. Minority leadership matters. Minority voices matter. Historic firsts matter. Identity matters. Demographics matter. Who's in the room matters? Who's at the table matters? Who's holding the microphone matters. Okay. And I want to be careful here because this is wacky Wednesday, and I'm not in the business of telling you anything that's wrong. I'm genuinely not. Maybe it's all true. Maybe representation does matter. I'm not here to argue the cigarette is good for you. I've got exactly one question, one. And it's not a gotcha, it's not a trap, it's the most reasonable question in the world. If it's such a great idea, why does the party that never ever stops talking about it seem strangely allergic to applying it to itself? That's it. That's the whole question. If diversity is the medicine and they keep telling us it's the medicine, They've built an entire pharmacy around it. Then how come the people writing the prescription keep finding reasons not to take it? I mean, let me give you the first thing that put the bee in my bonnet, because I didn't come to this from some think tank. I came to it from my own driveway. So I live out in Oregon part of the year, beautiful state. Trees, rivers, a goat named Margaret Thatcher. Long story, it's a different episode. And every so often I roll into Portland. And you have to understand what Portland is. Portland is the headquarters. Portland is the Vatican. If diversity, equity, and inclusion were a religion, and I'm not totally sure it isn't, Portland is where they keep the relics. Every office has a DEI officer. Every nonprofit has a DEI statement. Every coffee shop has a DEI mission, which is impressive for a building that sells four things. Every HR department, every university, every city bureau, and Portland has bureaus the way other cities have potholes. They just keep generating them. All of it. DEI, equity, inclusion, belonging, all day, every day on every wall, on every email signature, on the little laminated card by the registers. You can't buy a muffin in Portland without affirming somebody's lived experience. And I'm standing there one day, taking it all in, this absolute cathedral of diversity talk. Something starts nagging at me because I look around and I keep looking around and I'm noticing something that nobody in the cathedral seems to want to say out loud. Portland is and has been for years one of the WHITEST big cities in the entire United States of America. Now, I'm not going to hammer that right now. I'm going to give you the census tables and we'll get there. But I just want you to sit in the contradiction for one second. way I sat in that parking lot. The single most diversity-obsessed city in America is the least diverse. The kitchen is full of smoke, and everyone at that table is telling you now how dangerous smoking is. Huh. And that was the moment, honestly, that this whole thing started for me. Because once you see it once, once you catch that gap between the lecture and the ashtray, you can't unsee it. It's everywhere. It started showing up for me like one of those optical illusions. You blink, and suddenly the whole picture is the gap. So that's what we're gonna do tonight. We're gonna take a little walk. I'm gonna hold the examples, just examples, real ones with dates and names, nothing made up. I'm gonna show you a woman who was a genuine history-making first, the kind that usually gets a magazine cover and a postage stamp. I'm gonna tell you why the celebration never quite showed up. I'm gonna show you what I'm gonna show you a fight about who gets represented, where somehow the conversation is always, always about drawing the maps and almost never about who decided to run. I'm gonna show you a party that built its whole brand on who's next, who's rising, who reflects the future, and then show you who they are. And then show you who they actually seem to want at the top. I'm gonna show you a candidate by every rule that party spent a decade teaching us should have been disqualified on a Tuesday and instead was leading by Thursday. And then near the end, I'm gonna show you a town, a real town, where the promises and the outcomes did not match, and the gap between them was measured in something a lot more serious than my parking lot irony. Here's what I'm not gonna do. I'm not gonna stand here and tell you what to think. I'm not gonna call anyone a name. I'm not gonna prove to you that anyone's a villain because I don't think this is a villain story. I think it's a Terry story. I think a lot of these people are like Terry. I think they probably mean it. I think that they when they say diversity matters, somewhere in there, they believe it. The cigarette isn't proof that Terry hated kids. The cigarette is proof that the message and the messenger weren't in the same room. So all I'm gonna do is keep holding up examples. And somewhere along the way, I don't know exactly when, it's different for everyone, a pattern's gonna show up. And when it does, you won't need me to point at it. You'll just see it, like the smoke in the kitchen. Because in the end, this was never really a show about diversity. Terry's lecture was really never about cigarettes, it was about a much simpler thing. The simplest thing there is. We trust people who live what they say, and we tune out people who don't. Every kid in that kitchen knew it at nine years old. We just got too polite to say it out loud as adults. So here's the question for the hour, and I want you to carry it with you, exhibit to exhibit, and just keep checking it against what you see. If diversity is such a great idea, why doesn't the Democratic Party seem the least bit eager to apply it to itself? Diversity for thee, not for me. So I told you Portland was the Vatican. Let me show you what I mean fast because you'll get it quick. In Portland, diversity, equity, and inclusion isn't a department. It's the water, it's the air, it's in the drywall. The city has an actual office of equity and human rights, a whole office with a director, staff, budget. Back in 2015, the city council unanimously adopted a thing called the Citywide Racial Equity Goals. Every bureau files equity plans. The Parks Department, the people who run the swing sets, have a diversity and equity committee with bylaws, with certified bias awareness training. I have been to a city where the playground has a governance structure and the slide had to take a workshop. And it's not just City Hall, it's the universities, the nonprofits, and Portland grows nonprofits like a sourdough starter. You leave it on the counter, come back, there's three more. The corporations, the consultants. There are people in that city whose entire full-time job, salary, dental, the whole thing is making sure the other people are thinking correctly about diversity. There's a training to get you ready for the training. Somewhere in Portland right now, a person is being trained to train the trainers, and every single turtle in that stack is wearing a lanyard. So I'm establishing one thing for the record. If there's a city in America that has gone all in, Every chip on the table, bet the boat on DEI as the whole organizing principle of public life. It's Portland. And Portland would tell you that proudly. The mayor said it out loud last year. The city believes in diversity, believes in equity, believes in inclusion. Quote, we say those words proudly, Hermit the Frog. Good. So you'd expect the work to show, right? Very proudly. Here's where it gets a little awkward, ladies and gentlemen. Because for all that, the office, the goals, the bylaws on the swing set, Portland is and has been, for a better part of a generation, the WHITEST city in America. For years it was the WHITEST major metro in America. Number one in the country. Not only just barely got nudged out of the top spot a couple years back, and not because Portland changed, because another city changed faster. Still sits there about two-thirds white, a number that over decades has crawled, not moved. So sit in that with me. The capital of diversity, the headquarters of the Vatican, the single most equity saturated city government in the country, presiding over one of the least diverse big cities in America. That's just a weird sentence. You read it back and your gut goes, wait, run that by me again? Now. I'm not going to be cheap about this. There's real history underneath this. Oregon's got an ugly past here. This was a state that wrote exclusion right into the law books of its early days. That's not a punchline, and I'm not making it one. That history is real, and it's part of why the numbers look the way they look today. But that raises the honest question, and it's the opposite of gotcha. If anyone on earth should have a before and after photo, a six-store sex If anyone on earth should have a before and after photo, a success story, a look how far we've come, it's Portland. Because Portland's the one place that took the full prescription at the highest dose, every pill for years and years and years. So where's the result? Let me ask it the way I'd ask it at my own kitchen table. If this stuff works, like they say it works, if DEI is the medicine, then why isn't Portland the cure? Why isn't Portland the city everyone points to? Why aren't the brochures from other towns going, we want to be like Portland? Why is the place that talks about it the most not the place that shows it off the most? Why is the rhetoric the biggest thing in the room and the result the smallest thing in the room? Now I'm not handing you the answer. I want you turning it over because there's really only two doors here, and neither one is comfortable for the people running the cathedral. Door number one: the medicine doesn't actually do what they say it does. That's a rough thing to consider when you've built your entire career, your whole identity, your email signature around that medicine. Door number two, and this is the one I keep landing on, and it works fine, and Portland just isn't talking it. Door number two, and and this is the one I keep landing on, it works fine. And Portland just isn't taking it. They're talking about taking it. They're reading the label out loud at every meeting. They're holding up the bottle up to the light and admiring it. They've got a committee for the bottle. The pills are still inside. And I think we all know that kitchen. I think we've all sat at that table. Because this is Terry. Terry could give the lecture about smoking. She knew the material: the cold, the lungs, early grave, total command of the facts. But the cigarette was lit the whole time. And the thing I finally understand about Terry is that she wasn't lying. She'd just gotten so good at saying the thing that she'd quietly stop doing the thing. And at some point, those two drift so far apart that the saying becomes the whole activity. The lecture replaces the result. The talking is the doing now. That's the city. Place that's got so fluent in the language of diversity that the language became the achievement. And once you see that, you start to see the engine underneath it. Because here's the uncomfortable little secret of any operation this size. When a whole industry grows up around talking about a problem, the salaries, the offices, the committees, the guy whose job is training the trainers, that industry quietly develops one permanent interest and it's not solving the problem. Think about it. If you actually solve it, If Portland wakes up tomorrow, the numbers all even out, the goal is met, mission accomplished, what happens to the office? What happens to the committee? What happens to the consultants with the forty slide deck? You don't throw a retirement party for the thing that signs your checks, obviously. So the incentive is to never finish. The incentive is to keep going, keep talking, keep the meeting on the calendar, keep the goal just out of reach, keep it noble and ongoing forever. Problem solved is a budget line gone, but a problem discussed beautifully, eternally, in the correct font is a career. That's a building. That's a lanyard for life. And if you want the cleanest little window into how deep this conviction actually runs, watch what happens when somebody finally puts a number on it. Last year, the federal government leaned on cities like Portland. Trim some of this machinery, or we start pulling dollars. And for Portland, the number on the table was around $400 million. $400 million. And here's what I find fascinating, not outrageous, fascinating. The mayor came right out and reassured everyone that Portland remains committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Still says the words proudly. Words free of charge, unlimited supply, never going anywhere. And then the city quietly went to work adjusting the actual programs to stay on the right side of the rules and keep the money. Down the road, the Port of Portland, the folks who run the airport, the shipping, just went ahead and revoked their equity policy outright because the financial risk was too big. A neighboring county had already shut its equity offices down completely back in January. So follow the bouncing ball with me. The words non-negotiable, proud, permanent. The programs turned out to be extremely negotiable at a knowable price. And the price was knowable the second somebody finally named it out loud. It's the most honest thing that ever happened in Portland, and nobody meant for it to be. But that's always the tell. You don't find out what somebody truly believes when it's free to believe it. It's free at every meeting, free in the email signature, free on the laminated card by the register. You find out when there's a bill, when the cigarette finally shows up on the doctor's invoice. That's the moment you see which convictions were load-bearing and which ones were just purely decoration. Like all over City Hall in Portland. And look, I live out there. I roll into that city. I've stood in the meetings. I've read the signage. I've had the barista walk me through the value statement on a four-item menu. And I want to be clear about what I'm saying and what I'm not. Because this is Wacky Wednesday, not a struggle session. I'm not saying the people of Portland are bad people. I like them, a lot of them. I'm not even saying caring about fairness is wrong. Caring about fairness is great. Sign me up, put me on the committee. I'll bring a casserole with lay's potato chips sprinkled on top. What I'm noticing, just noticing from a guy in a parking lot, is that something strange happens to a movement when it gets more committed to talking about a value than producing it. Then the talk starts crowding out the result, and then slowly it replaces it. You announce the goal so beautifully with such feeling and such a well-designed font that announcing it starts to feel like achieving it. The press release becomes the accomplishment. You take a bow for the trailer of the movie nobody ever makes. All of the credit, none of the cost, and the best part of the deal, you never once have to be inconvenienced by the thing you say you believe. Now, here's where I have to be honest with you. Maybe it's just Portland. Maybe I'm being unfair. One weird, rainy So here's where I have to be honest with you folks. I thought maybe it was just Portland. Maybe I was being unfair. One weird, rainy, overcaffeinated city is an antidote, not a pattern. Right? One cigarette doesn't make a tarry. So I went looking. Because if there's really a gap here between what gets said and what gets done, then Portland won't be the only place it shows up. It'll show up where it actually counts. Not in a city's zip code, but in a decision. Clean, easy moment where the people who never stop telling us representation matters had every chance in the world to act like it. And that's when I looked up and I found a woman, a real one, a genuine history making first one of her kind, the exact kind of first that on any other Tuesday gets the magazine cover, the documentary, the postage stamp, and a standing ovation from every single person who's ever said the word representation into a microphone. Watch next who showed up to celebrate her. ⁓ And more importantly, who didn't? Diversity for thee, not for me. So I told you I found a woman. Here she is. Her name is Winsome Earl Sears. And on paper, she is the single most on-brand representation matters story you could possibly invent in a lab. She's an immigrant, came to this country from Jamaica as a little girl, following a father who, the story goes, landed here with a buck seventy-five in his pocket. A dollar seventy-five. She joins the United States Marine Corps. She runs a business. She gets into Virginia politics, and in 2021, She wins statewide, and when she does, she becomes the first woman, the first black woman, and the first naturalized citizen to hold statewide office in the entire history of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The entire history of the state. It's huge. Three firsts in one woman in the former capital of the Confederacy. That's not a candidate. That's a PBS miniseries. That's a stamp. That's a chapter in somebody's kids' textbook. And so naturally, when a black immigrant Marine makes that kind of history, naturally, the people who never stop talking about representation threw the biggest party you ever saw. Is what I'd love to tell you. What actually happened is the confetti cannons jammed. The whole celebration apparatus, the one that fires automatically, the one with the hair trigger, the one that goes off if a city councilman in Toledo identifies as anything interesting. That machine developed a sudden mysterious case of laryngitis. The squad that tweets a press release when someone becomes the first left-handed comp troler of a mid-sized county went quiet, real quiet. Crickets in a library quiet. And then a few years later, she ran for governor, which would have been another history making first, and she lost. Got beat pretty handily. And there was no great mourning of a loss first either. No, what could have been? She made history and the historians stepped out for a smoke break. So I just want to ask the obvious question. I want to ask it without any venom, because I'm genuinely curious. Why doesn't she count? I'm not asking you to agree with her politics. I'm not asking anyone to vote for her. You can think she's wrong about every issue under the sun. That's allowed. That's America. I'm asking something much narrower than that. If representation matters so much, if the demographic fact of the person is the thing that matters, which is what we've been told for a decade, then how does that fact suddenly stop mattering the second she's got an R next to her name? Because either it matters or it matters when it's convenient. And those are two very different things wearing the same coat with DNC typed on the side. Now I have to be fair here, and I want to be, because there's a comeback and it's a good one, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't exist. Someone's going to say, Chad, that's ridiculous. Democrats make history all the time. And true, in fact, that very same election, that very same night in Virginia, the other side did make history. They elected the first woman governor in the state's history. Down the ballot. They elected the first Muslim woman to ever win a statewide office anywhere in the United States. They elected the state's first black attorney general, real first, genuine ones. And they celebrated. Confetti cannons, fully operational, working beautifully, not a jam in sight. Not a jam in sight. And I want you to notice what that actually proves, because people think that's the rebuttal. I think it's the whole case. It means the machine works. It means the celebration apparatus is in perfect working order. The confetti's fresh, the batteries are charged, everybody knows how to throw the party. It just only seems to fire for one team's jersey. Same night, same state, same history being made. One set of firsts gets the parade, the other set gets a guy clearing his throat and changing the subject. That's not a broken machine. A broken machine would be more honest. That's a machine with a guest list. And that right there is the whole show in one Tuesday night. The standard is real. The standard exists. We just watched it work. We're just learning it has a velvet rope. And if you doubt me, try the experiment with me right now in your head. Take her resume. Every line of it: the little immigrant girl, the buck 75, the Marine Corps, the business she built, the three firsts in the old capital of the Confederacy. Don't you change a single fact. I just want you to change one letter. Take the R off the front of her name and put a D there instead. And you tell me the documentary doesn't get green-lit by Friday. You tell me there's no street getting renamed, no children's book, no HBO limited series, no in her own words photo spread, no keynote, no tearful montage with a piano under it. Same woman, same immigrant, same Marine, same history. One letter the exact same life that guy The exact same life that got a guy clearing his throat and checking his phone would have gotten a parade you could see from space. Same parade route they keep gassed up and ready. They just check the jersey at the gate. That's not being clever. That's not a conspiracy. That's a thought you can run yourself at home in about four seconds, and once you've run it, you can't unrun it. Which got me thinking about the word itself, representation. Because I realized I've been using it like everybody else uses it. Like we all know what it means. And I'm not sure we do anymore. Let's actually pin it down. What do we mean when somebody says represents a community? Because sometimes it means demographics, they look like the people, same race, same gender, check the boxes, your representation. Fine, clear. I can work with that. But except sometimes it means experience. They've lived what the people have lived. And sometimes it means values. They want what the people want. And sometimes it means identity in this deeper, hard-to-define way. And sometimes, and here's where it gets fun, sometimes it just quietly means their political party. And the magic trick, the thing that's genuinely impresses. And the magic trick, the thing that genuinely is impressive if you watch closely, is that the definition changes to fit the answer you already wanted. Winsome Sears checks the demographic box clean. So when she shows up, suddenly overnight, no memo. Representation isn't about demographics anymore. Now it's about authentic representation, real representation. The word grows an asterisk. There's fine print now, but there was never fine print before. It is the only word in the English language I know of that can mean a thing at the exact opposite of that thing, depending entirely on who's standing in front of you. It's It's a war shock test that always somehow comes back the same answer, which is a neat trick for the word to do. Most words just sit there and mean what they mean. This one does cardio. So that's the people. Let me show you the same move, but with the maps, because there's a whole second front in the representation war, and it's fought every couple years like clockwork over lines on a map. You saw it big last year in Texas, big fight over redrawing the congressional districts, and it got so heated that the Democrats and the legislator did the thing they do. They fled. Physically left the state. Chartered the planes, packed the bags, decamped to Illinois, to New York, to whatever specifically, so the building wouldn't have enough bodies in it to hold a vote. Grown adults, elected officials leaving the state on a getaway flight to win an argument about geometry. And listen, I'm not even mocking that tactic tonight. It's a heck of a tactic. There's something almost beautiful about a job where one of your tools is, and then we all just leave. I'd love to have that in the corporate world, meeting going badly. Gentlemen, I'm off to the airport. But here's what I want you to notice underneath all the drama, all of that energy, the planes, the press conferences, the lawsuits, the speeches about the collapse of democracy itself, hanging in the balance. All of it is poured into the map, the lines where you draw the boundary. And there's a sentence that's been rattling around in my head for weeks now, and I finally figured out why it bothers me so much. Let's see if it bothers you. Districts reflect voters. Candidates reflect parties. Say it slow with me because it's simple and it's the whole thing. A district is just where people live. That's all a district is. You can shove the lines north, you can shove the lines south, you can make a district shaped like a salamander doing yoga. At the end of the day, you're just rearranging furniture in a room full of people who already live there. You're moving the couch. But the candidate who you actually run. That's not geography. That's a choice. A pure, clean, 100% in-your-control choice that some people make in a conference room with coffee and a whiteboard. Nobody draws that for you. Nobody gerrymanders your candidate list. You just pick. So here's the question: I can't shake. If minority representation is the great moral concern, if it's the thing worth fleeing the state over. Why is roughly all of the passion aimed at the one thing you don't fully control? The map, and almost none of it aimed at the one thing you control completely. The candidates. Why is the conversation always, always about the district lines and almost never about the recruiting? Where's the all-night session? Where's the chartered plane for we need to find and run more minority candidates? How's that? Where's that flight? I never see it. I keep looking for it. I see enormous effort spent making sure the right kind of districts exist. I see very little spent making sure the right kind of candidates run in all the other ones. And that opens up the bigger question, the one I think is actually underneath this whole segment. If you genuinely believe, down in your bones, that it's important to have more minority leaders in this country, the move is so obvious it's almost rude to say out loud. You run them everywhere, not just in the safe seats drawn to be safe. You run them in the white suburb, you run them in the swing district, that's a coin flip, you run them for governor in the purple state, you run them for senate. You run them at the top of the ticket, you go win. You run them at the top of the ticket and you go win. And we know it can be done because it gets done by all kinds of people in all kinds of places all the time. The country is full of voters who will pick the person they like in a district nobody drew special for them. So why the hesitation? Why does so much of the strategy seem to assume that these candidates can only win if you build them a custom district first? Which, if you sit with it for a second, is A weirdly grim thing to assume about your own candidates, your own minority candidates, and about the voters. It almost sounds like they don't believe the thing they keep telling us. And I'm just asking the questions. I'm not handing you the answer tonight. I'm handing you the questions and trusting you to be smart enough to carry them. Because by now you've probably noticed the thing I noticed. The lecture sounds incredibly familiar. The example never quite shows up. Terry could tell you with total authority exactly what a healthy person eats, how a healthy person sleeps, what a healthy person absolutely does not put in their lungs. Flawless, five stars would recommend the lecture to a friend. You just didn't want to use her as the before and after photo. So maybe it's just Virginia, Portland, one state, one race. One woman the cheer squad forgot, maybe. And maybe the map stuff is just hardball. Everyone does hardball, both sides draw lines. I'm a big boy, I get it. Maybe redistricting's awash. But here's where I finally got genuinely curious. Because Virginia is voters, the maps are voters, all of that at the end of the day, you can sort of blame on the electorate. Hey, we ran ⁓ The voters didn't bite, not our fault. Fine. So let's take the voters out of it completely. Go inside the building, inside the DNC, inside the rooms where it's nobody's decision but their own, no voters to blame, no map to redraw, no Republican in sight, just the party and a mirror and a choice about who themselves lift up. When the Democratic Party gets to decide entirely on its own, Folks, when the Democratic Party gets to decide entirely on its own, with the lights off and the doors closed, who rises, who runs the place, who they want standing at the very top. Who do they actually pick? It's not minorities. ⁓ no. And what happens to the guy in Maine who didn't wait to be picked? That's another question. And best example I can give you is this. Not too long ago, the party held an internal election for its own leadership. Some vice chair slots at the DNC. And two guys win: a young activist named David Hogg, and a fellow named Malcolm Kenyatta, who happens to be black, openly gay, and a state legislator. So far on paper, he's the brochure, he's the DNC brochure. And then it all falls apart. Because someone files a complaint saying the way the election was run shortchanged the women of color candidates. And the party looks at it and goes, you know what? Fair point. And votes by a landslide to throw out the result and run the whole thing again. The Party of Diversity held a diversity election and could not get it diverse enough to its own satisfaction. They had to send it back to the kitchen. And when the dust settled, one of the guys who'd won, the young activists, just walked, gone, eaten by the very machinery he helped build. Now, I'm not telling you who was right in that food fight. Honestly, I don't care who was right. The point is the spectacle of it. The one organization in America most certain that this stuff is simple, clarifying, obviously good, applied it to itself one time in one room with total control over the outcome and turned it into a demolition derby. The instrument they want every company and campus and HR department in the country to run on, they could barely run it themselves without somebody losing a limb. And it makes you wonder about the bigger chair, the top of the ticket, because the same party that for years ran on the romance of the historic first, when you look at who the smart money and the big donors seem to be quietly gathering behind for next time, an awful lot of that establishment energy is pooling around a tall, telegenic governor from California named Gavin Newsom. Now, fair is fair. The bench isn't empty of diversity. Kamala Harris is right there, neck and neck in the boiling. There are others. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you the field is six guys named Chad. One Chad is print, one Chad is plenty, trust me. But I just gently point out when it was a city council seat in Toledo, the first historic urgency was at 11. When it's the actual presidency, the thing with the real power, the urgency seems to be cooling into something a lot more practical, a lot more, let's go with who's safe. And I'm not just asking where'd the romance go? Where'd it go the second the stakes got real? Right? And here's the tell: listen to the vocabulary change when the chair gets real. When the stakes are low, a symbolic post, a committee seat, the word is representation. Representation, representation, who's in the room, who reflects the community. But the second the chair has actual power bolted to it, the dictionary swaps out on you. Now the words are electability, experience, qualification. Who can actually win? Diversity's the priority on the appetizer. Merit shows up the instant the entree has money on it. Let me give you the cleanest example I've got, and I'm gonna be fair to every single person in it because nobody here did anything wrong. That's exactly what makes this perfect. Texas, this year. Democrats finally smell a real shot at a Senate seat. Real power, the thing they actually want. Primary comes down to two people. One is Jasmine Crockett. She's a congresswoman, civil rights attorney, nationally famous, a bona fide progressive star, the exact profile the party usually slaps on a poster. The other's a 36-year-old state legislator named James Tallerico, former school teacher, seminary kid, goes viral quoting scripture at Republicans, telegenic, goes on Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan looks at him and goes, You need to run for president. And the energy, the money, the momentum, the ooh, this is the one who can win. It all gathered around the young white guy, raised $27 million in one quarter, record-breaking, and he won by seven points. Fair and square. Voters chose no funny business at all. And I'm not knocking the man in this context. He sounds like maybe he's talented at this stuff. I don't know. And I'm definitely not saying they should have picked Crockett because of her demographics. See, that would be the exact box checking this whole show is against. I'm just asking you to clock the instinct. When it's a poster representation, when it's a winnable seat with real power on it, the gut reaches for the guy who kills on Rogan, a white guy. The party's own reflex when the chips are genuinely down knows precisely what it's grabbing for. White, middle-aged men. And it ain't the brochure it hands the rest of us. Diversity for thee, not for me. All right. I told you way back at the start of all of this there was a town and that the gap between what was it had been promised and what was delivered. All right. Switching gears for a second, I told you way back at the start of all this that there was a town and that the gap between what was promised and what was delivered there was gonna be measured in parking lot irony. All right, I told you way back at the start of all of this that there was a town, and that the gap between what was promised and what was delivered, there was gonna be measured. All right, I told you way back at the start of all of this that there was a town, and that the gap between what was promised and what was delivered there wasn't gonna be measured in parking lot irony. I wanna keep that promise to you now, and I'm not gonna change my tone to do it because this one earns it. California, the most progressive governed state in the country, a place whose whole civic identity is built on the idea that it protects the vulnerable, that it sees the people other places overlook. That's the promise, that's the brand. January of last year, the Eton Fire tears through Altadena, just outside Los Angeles. And inside Altadena, there's a neighborhood called West Altadena. That neighborhood is historically proudly a black community, multi-generational. Families who have been there since the era when it was one of the few places where they were even allowed to buy homes. Nineteen people died in that fire. 18 of them lived in West Altadena. The average age of the people who died was 77 years old. It's so sad. And here's the part that's under investigation right now. So I'm gonna stick to exactly what's documented and let you do your own thinking. The evacuation orders did not reach West Altadina the way they reached the rest of town, while other areas were being told to get out. That neighborhood by the country's own after action review went hours and hours with no order. Warnings that went out to one side of a street didn't go out to the other for a long, long time. And the people who couldn't move fast, the elderly, the ones who needed the most warning, got the least. Now, this isn't a conservative talking point. The person who looked at all of this and said something here needs investigating is Rob Bonta, the Attorney General of California, who's a Democrat. His own office opened a civil rights investigation into whether the people of that neighborhood were failed because of their race, their age, or their disability. The County Fire Department disputes that there was any bias. And that's exactly why there's an investigation to find out. I'm not going to stand here and tell you what if it was malice. I don't believe there was malice. I genuinely don't know, though, and neither does anyone else yet. But I don't need to know the motive to ask the only question that matters. The promise was we protect the vulnerable, we see the overlooked. That was the brand sold loud for decades to all the people in Altadena. Did the outcome match the promise? In the most equity-committed state in America, in a community that had every reason to trust that promise, did this match? No. No. And I'll let it sit. I'm not gonna just put a bow on it. Some things you just have to leave on the table and let people feel. Imagine one of the last historic closed loop black economies, black neighborhoods. Black communities with black churches, multi-generational landowners. I mean very, very successful, beautiful community. And what do the Democrats do? Let it burn. And it's because that one's so heavy that this one leads the way it does. And it's because that one's so heavy that this next one lands the way it does. Because watch how cheap the standard gets when nobody's life is on the line, when it's just power and convenience. For years, and you know this, you've lived through it, we were told certain things were simply disqualifying, certain symbols, certain associations, certain old comments, the rule was absolute and the rule was loud. If it's in your past, if it's on your body, if it's on your old posts, you are done. No appeals, no context, disqualified. Okay? Hold the party to its own rule. There's a Senate candidate up in Maine named Graham Platiner. You guys know him? He's an oyster farmer, a veteran, runs as a populist, catches fire, raises a fortune fast, gets the blessing of the biggest progressives in the country. And it comes out that he's got a history of crude, deleted online posts, including some genuinely ugly stuff making light of sexual assault. A tattoo on his symbol that is an SS symbol. He says he didn't know what it was when he got it years ago and he's covered it up. Fine. I'm not here to relitigate that. The framework of this show is not, is this man a Nazi? I don't know. That's not the point. The point is the standard. Because by the rule the party spent a decade enforcing on everyone else, there's a stack of disqualifiers tiring a point is the standard. Because by the rule the party spent a decade enforcing on everyone else, that's a stack of disqualifiers tall enough to end 10 campaigns. And what happened? He led. He kept leading. The party establishment got so nervous they recruited the sitting governor to come in and stop him, and she lost. They had to fold up her campaign. The disqualifying stuff didn't disqualify. The rule that had no exception suddenly had one. The moment one of their one got useful. And here's the strongest part, and it's why I can say all this with a clean conscience. I'm not the one raising the alarm. They are. The loudest objections are coming from inside the Democratic Party. I mean, his own campaign's political director, quit over the posts, said flatly that they were not values she would stand behind. A Democratic rival in his own primary called the posts and the tattoo disqualifying their own rural, not mine. The governor they brought in to beat him said if he's the nominee, the Republicans will make mincemeat out of him. And a former spokesman from the Biden orbit warned that circling the wagons around him pulls the plug on the party's credibility as the self-appointed champions of women. That's not Fox News. That's not me. That's the family talking about itself at the dinner table and not bothering to lower their voices. So let's lay them out, all of them. On the table, side by side, and you tell me what you see. Portland, the city that talks about diversity more than anywhere on earth and looks less like it than almost anywhere on earth. Winsome Sears, a genuine three times over historic first, and the confetti cannon stayed in the closet because of her political party. The maps, oceans of passions poured into the district lines, a desert of silence where the candidate recruiting should be. The leadership room, the one election they fully controlled and they couldn't run it clean enough for their own rule book and the bench where representation quietly turns into electability the second the chair is worth having. The town, the promise to protect the vulnerable, and an outcome their own attorney general had to investigate, and the guy in Maine, the unbreakable standard that broke the instant it got inconvenient. Now, any of these by itself you can explain away. I mean it. Portland's got a hard history. Sears lost on the other issues. Redistricting is just hardball. The DNC thing was procedural. Altadena's still under investigation. Planters and an insurgent in the party, and they tried to stop. Every single one of them has an alibi. I'll grant you every alibi individually. But at some point, and I think we just hit. But at some point, and I think we just hit it, you've got six alibis stacked on one table, and you've got to ask the grown-up question. I mean, is this six separate coincidences that all happen to point the same direction? Or is it one thing wearing six different outfits? And I call it diversity for thee, not for me. And here's the thought I can't get out of my head, ladies and gentlemen. The one I think the whole night has been walking towards. Every one of these institutions has a test. They've spent years building the test, administering the test, grading the test. Is your company diverse enough? Is your school inclusive enough? Is your hiring equitable enough? Did you say the right words in front of the Did you say the right words in the right font at the right meeting? They will test your bakery. They will test your book club. And the one entity that never seems to have to sit for the exam is the one handing it out, the Democrat Party. The least diverse institution in America. It's an open book test for everyone else and a hall pass for themselves. The rule is for thee, the exception is for me. And it's so consistent across so many different rooms that at a certain point coincidence stops being a serious answer and starts being a security blanket. feeler in the room by now, don't you, Terry? Don't smoke, kids. Because the lecture tonight never changed, not once. Diversity matters, representation matters. This is who we are. Beautiful lecture, word for word, every time with flawless delivery. The example just never once matched the lecture. The ashtray stayed full, the cigarette stayed lit, and the smoke filled up six different kitchens while the same voice kept telling everyone else to quit. So I'm gonna leave you before the last word of this show with a question this whole hour has earned, and I'm not gonna answer it yet. I want you holding it when I come back. If diversity is really If diversity really is one of the most important values in all of modern politics, if it's the medicine, the cure, the thing worth testing everybody else on, then why do the people selling it the hardest? seem so strangely unwilling to take a dose themselves. Why? Because it's diversity for thee, not for me. So again, why do the people selling Diversity the Hardest seem so unwilling to take a dose of it themselves? And I'm not going to answer that by arguing it all over again. You don't need me to re-prosecute the night. You were here. You've got the six exhibits sitting right there in your lap. I just want to do the one thing we haven't done yet, which is hold them all up at the same time and notice the shape they make. Because look at what they have in common. Not the details, folks, the shape. Every single one of these. The standard is enormous, immovable, sacred, right up until the moment it's pointed at the people who built it. Portland will grade your hiring practices and run one of the WHITEST cities in the country. The representation crowd will throw a parade for a historic first and skip the one that's wearing the wrong jersey. The party will burn down a state legislator over the lines on a map and go strangely quiet about who they actually run. They'll administer the diversity exam to your bakery and then botch their own. They'll promise to protect the vulnerable and leave the most vulnerable neighborhood waiting in the dark in the flames. They'll tell you a man's past is disqualifying until the man becomes useful. It's the same move every time. The standard is a hammer when it's pointed out at you, and when it turns into a pillow. It's the same move every time. The standard is a hammer when it's pointed at you. And then it turns into a pillow the second it swings back towards them. Strong as steel facing out, memory foam facing in. And that, that right there is when Terry finally makes sense. After 30 years in a parking lot in Portland, the lady from my friend's kitchen finally made sense to me. Because here's the thing I want you to really hear, because it's the soft center of this whole show. The point of Terry was never the cigarettes. I want to say that plainly. Terry was not wrong about smoking. Every word of her mouth was true. The lungs, the teeth, the early grave. Medically, the woman was a genius. She just couldn't be heard, that's all. The message was true and the messenger was unbelievable. And after a while, the truth over and after a while the truth of the words couldn't survive the contradiction of the hand holding the cigarette. We stopped hearing the lecture, not because the lecture was wrong, but because we could see. And that's people. That's just how people work. It's how you work, it's how I work, it's how every human being who has ever lived works. We do not believe what you tell us, we believe what you show us. You can have the best slogan in the history of slogans, the most beautiful mission statement money can print. And if we can look at you and see that you don't live it, the slogan turns to smoke. The branding becomes background noise. The trust, the we always trust the example over the lecture, the behavior over the slogan, the receipt over the press release every time. We can't help it. So here's where I think this whole thing actually comes to rest. And it's not where the loudest people on either side want it to come to rest, which is usually a sign you're getting close to the truth. There's a story going around that Americans are turning against diversity, that they're soured on representation, that inclusion is out of fashion. And I think that story is wrong. I think it's almost exactly backwards. See, I don't think Americans are rejecting diversity. I think we're rejecting hypocrisy and that somebody slapped a diversity label on it. I don't think Americans are rejecting representation. I think they're rejecting selective representation, the kind with a velvet rope and a guest list. I don't think they're rejecting inclusion. I think that they're rejecting being handed an open book exam by people who refuse to sit for it themselves. Because the regular people I know, the ones this show is actually for, the ones raising the kids and running the businesses and coaching the little league and wondering when common sense became controversial. Those people are not against fairness. They're not against anyone. But what they cannot stand, what they have never been able to stand, going all the way back to the kitchen table when we were nine years old, is being lectured by someone who won't follow their own rule. That's not a political instinct. That's a human one. Every kid figures it out before they can spell it. You know, Ronald Reagan had this phrase he loved. He got it from an old Russian proverb of all places. He would say, Trust, but verify. Talk about this all the time. And I always thought that was the warmest cynical thing anyone ever said, because the trust part is real. He's not telling you to assume the worst. He's telling you to keep your heart open and your eyes open at the same time. Believe the promise and then go check the receipts. That's not hostility. That's just grown up love. And I learned that of all places behind a chair. Before any of this, before the cameras, I did hair. I stood behind a chair and I had my hands on the heads of half the town week after week. And let me tell you what you learned back there. People tell you everything in that chair. Left, right, down, every politics under the sun would sit in my chair and open their whole life to me. And you want to know the one thing every last one of them had in common? Republican, Democrat, none of the above, every single one of them could smell a phony from across the room. Everyone, that radar does not care how you vote. It is the most bipartisan instrument in America. And that's the big tent, isn't it? That's the whole shelter we built here for the politically homeless and the politically exhausted, and everyone tired of choosing between two bad ideas. We are not the anti-diversity tent. Good lord, look who's hosting, the last gay conservative standing under the only rainbow that matters. We are just the trust but verify tent. Where the people who heard the beautiful lecture nodded politely and then walked over to check whether the ashtray was full. And it was. In six different kitchens it was full. So let me be as clear as I know how to be because somebody out there is itching to twist this, and I'm not gonna give them the room. I'm not standing here telling you Democrats are racist. That is not what tonight was. That was never the question, that's the lazy answer, and I've got no use for it. Half the people in those stories, I'd bet believe every word of their own lecture. Terry believed hers too. What I'm telling you is much simpler and much harder. If diversity is one of the great values, and maybe it is, then there's only one thing to do with it. Apply it to yourself first. Model it in the room where only you are watching. Trusted, actually trusted enough to run your own people everywhere and let the voters decide instead of building them a safe little district and calling that faith. Demonstrate it in the outcome, in the town, in the warning that goes out to everybody in time. Because the fastest way to kill a good idea. The single fastest way there is is to demand that everybody else live by a rule you keep an exception to. Do that long enough, and people don't just stop trusting you. They stop wondering if the rule was ever the point, or if the rule was just always just a stick you carry to hit people you don't like, basically. The lecture was fine. The lecture's always fine. It was the cigarette in the other hand that did her in. So if it matters, live it. And if you won't live it, then at least be honest about what you're actually selling, which is not diversity. It's diversity for thee. Not for me. It's the entire DNC platform today. This is about racism. It's about representation and diversity. That's the show. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative America's binary brother. Don't forget the phone number, 252 Chad Law. Call it, text it, leave a voicemail, send a text, tell me where I'm wrong, tell me where I'm right. You'll end up on the show. We're on X, Substack, and Rumble. Common Sense by We're on X, Instagram, Substack, and Rumble at Common Sense with Chad Law. And if you're on Rumble, stick around. In 10 seconds, I'm going to reset the studio and answer all the questions you all sent in during the show. All right, doors are shut, the main show's in the can, and it's just us now. This is the part of the night I look forward to. This is where you get to push back, I get to push back, and we actually get to have a conversation. Don't forget two five two Chad Law, the phones are still open. First question, send those over. Marcus in Ohio. You guys are always putting Marcus. I love you, Marcus. Don't get me wrong, but he shouldn't be the first one every time. Mix it up a little bit. All right, Marcus. Come on, Chad. Strip away the jokes. Aren't you just against DEI and dressing it up? I do love Marcus. You do you gotta ask great questions. There's no reason why the producers put you in the front. But no, and here's the honest answer. I never asked tonight ⁓ if DEI was good or bad. And I I did that on purpose. Tonight was narrower and meaner. Do the people who scream about it the loudest actually live it? You can be completely sold on a thing and still notice when it's the biggest. Right? I mean, think about it, Marcus. You can be completely sold on a thing and still notice when its biggest salesman won't use the product. I can love hammers and can raise an eyebrow when the guy selling them builds his own house with screws. That's not being anti-hammer, it's paying attention. So if you walked away thinking tonight, Chad hates diversity, I didn't do my job, or you came in already knowing what you wanted to hear. The target was never the idea. It was the gap between the idea and the behavior and the result. All right, Priya in Washington State ending in 8810. A serious Democrat would say you're missing the point. Representation isn't about running more candidates, it's about structural barriers you just can't wish away. Fair? well, that's a smart objection. I'll give you that. It's real. ⁓ yeah, there are real barriers: money, name recognition, who gets the donor calls returned, all of it. It is genuinely harder for some people to get the starting line, right? And waving the wand doesn't fix that. I get it. But let me push back on you a little bit. If the barriers are the real problem, then the energy should be aimed at the barriers. Recruit harder, build the bench, fund the unknowns early, make the donor calls. And nobody's stopping that. That's the part they fully control. What I can't square is the ratio. All night sessions and chartered planes over the map. Crickets over the recruiting. So if structural barriers were really the obsession, you'd see that obsession in where the effort goes, and mostly I don't. So your point is serious, but the Democrats don't act like that point is serious, if that makes sense. All right, Dale in Texas, ending in 2096. Isn't Winsome Sears just different? You're allowed not to celebrate someone whose policies you think are bad. Dale, 100%. And I want to be careful right here because you're right about something. Yes, you're allowed to disagree with Winsom Sears. You can think she's wrong on every issue on the board. I never said one human being had to vote for her or throw her a party. That'd be a dumb thing to demand, and I didn't demand it. But watch the move you just made because it's the whole episode in one sentence. The second she showed up, the standard quietly changed. For years it was representation, the demographics, historic firsts. Then she arrives, checks every one of those boxes on the other side, and then it's ⁓ it's just about her policies. I agree it should be about policies. That's what I've been saying the whole time. I just want everyone to admit that that's the rule now for everyone, and you don't get to switch it back to demographics next time. It's convenient. Pick a lane and stay in it. That's all I'm asking. All right, text from ⁓ this one's anonymous in Arizona, ending in 5532. Okay, ideal world, no gotchas. What does good representation actually look like? That's up to us. I mean, honest answer. Good representation is a party so confident in its people that it runs them everywhere and trusts the voters to do the rest. Not, here's a seat we drew to be safe so you can't lose. That's not faith in your candidate. That's a participation trophy with district lines. Real representation looks like running your best person in the toughest room you've got and saying, go win it. That looks like a swing district, a purple state, the top of the ticket, and trusting that an American voter can look at a person who doesn't share their background and go, yeah, that's a guy, that's my guy, that's my gal. Voters do that all day long. They're better at this than consultants think. The version I don't buy is the one that quietly assumes your own candidates can only win on rigged, easy mode. That's not respect. It's dressed up as respect. All right. Janelle in Oregon, ending in 7768. Be honest. How do you look like that? That at thirty nine. My husband demands your skincare routine and he is not happy about it. Well, first of all, Janelle, tell your husband I said you've got great taste and he's lucky. thirty-nine is a number we're agreeing to honor and not investigate too closely. So thank you for your discretion. But here's the thing that people forget about me before all the politics. I came up in the beauty world. So that was my whole first life. So when I tell you skincare is real, I'm not guessing. I've got receipts on this one. Sunscreen every day, rain, shine, apocalypse doesn't matter. That's eighty percent of it and it's Basically free at the drugstore. ⁓ the other 20% is good genes and a deep abiding refusal to read comments and go on TikTok. Avoiding TikTok has taken years off my life. The people there, it is the toxic suckhole of double-digit IQ people who are missing teeth. All right. Next text from Tommy in Pennsylvania, ending in 3301. What's the single weirdest thing about getting recognized in public now? ⁓ you know what's so funny, Tom, Tommy, sorry. ⁓ it's not the photos, it's not the hellos. I love all that. The weird part is the whisper. and I live in half the year I live in a red area that's becoming more blue, unfortunately. And then the other half of the year I live in the deepest blue, so blue it's black up in Oregon. And I will tell you, Oregon is like Pretty much all normal people, other than just the coast up through Portland. Everyone else is pretty cool. ⁓ but people will spot you and then they turn to whoever you're they're with and they whisper and stare directly, full eye contact, but no volume. I always just wave. But it doesn't happen that often because most people in Oregon don't recognize me because no one's listening to me up here really, except for you, Janelle. But ⁓ And then it happens quite a bit in Arizona. I'm I'm pretty well known in Arizona and Southern California. ⁓ and I love it. I love talking to people. I mean, most of the ideas that I get this show is from conversations that I just have either at the dog park or walking around. There is no like big think tank here. This is just me driving, getting stuck behind someone in the fast lane, going, you know what? These senators are just like someone who's trying to teach you a lesson from the fast line. Or, you know what? Diversity for thee, not for me. Portland talks about diversity more than anyone. It's the WHITEST city, WHITEST city hall, WHITEST city employees in all of the country. What a joke. It's also probably why it's so dysfunctional. Because, like I've said on many of my shows, being from Southern California, where the entire backbone of the service industry and most industries is run off Hispanic, Latino, Mexican labor, and there's not a lot of that in Oregon. Everything runs like a dream down in California. Because Mexicans work hard. They love their jobs, they love what they do. They don't, you know, I I've never seen dysfunction in service like I see up here with a bunch of blue-haired, bratty little blue-haired white kids. Or you go down into Southern California or Arizona, mostly immigrant, and it's are the backbone of the service industry up from Mexico or Central America, and everything runs like a well-oiled machine. It's it's it's crazy. All right. ⁓ and the other one, someone will walk up dead certain they know me, and it turns out they think I'm someone completely different. Had a guy last month swear up and down I sold him a car in 2019. I've I've never sold a car. But he was so happy to see me, I almost wanted to apologize for the Hyundai. All right, text from Rosa in Florida, ending in nine zero eight seven. You guys are obsessed. What does Margaret Thatcher think of the episode? Rosa, Rosa, for everyone just joining us. Margaret Thatcher is my goat, an actual goat, lives on the property named after the Iron Lady, and carries herself accordingly. I'll be honest with you, Margaret Thatcher is deeply unbothered by today's discourse. Shouldn't watch the episode. She is a single issue voter, and the issue is snacks. I've tried to explain selective representation to her this morning, and she ate part of the fence and kicked me in the balls. Which now that I say it out loud is the most decisive position anyone took all day. Maybe the goats got into something, who knows? No luxure, no slogan, just behavior. never seen anyone eat more and kick more than this goat. She is the Iron Lady of Central Eastern Oregon. Hey, real quick before we go, I don't take this lightly. The fact that you give me an hour of your night, I know what an hour's worth. So thank you. Genuinely thank you. If something in tonight's show made you think, not made you mad, made you think, do me one favor. Drop it in the comments. Tell me where I'm right. And I really do mean, tell me where I'm wrong. Because The pushback that's smart, that text and line was better. Tell me where I'm right, and really do I mean tell me where I'm wrong, because the smart pushback in the text line tonight was better than half of cable news. And I'm not even joking about that. If you know someone who's tired of being lectured by people who don't follow their own rules, somebody out there in the politically homeless, somebody under the big tent who hasn't found the door yet, send them this one. Because the algorithm won't do it for us. You're the algorithm you always were. Remember, if you see us, share us. I'm Chad Law. Trust but verify, and I'll see you back here tomorrow night. God bless you, President Reagan, and may God save America.