It's Friday, September 19th, 2025.

From Peachfish Productions, it's the gist.

I'm Mike Pesca.

Today I bring you a show I'm very excited about, but I have to do a laying of the predicate

to tell you why I'm so excited.

So in the last few days, there's been a lot of earnest and earned worry about the route we're headed as a country.

The petty punishments meted out by the Trump administration are not helping, but they are being executed against a backdrop or the feeling of a backdrop of increased violence.

Is it true? I mean, it's true that we are worried, but worry isn't

expertise. Worry isn't data. So we turn to our experts for the data. Enter Robert Pape.

You Chicago professor. And when I say enter, enter your consciousness, or at least mine,

via ABC, CNN, Fox, CBS, the New York Times.

This cuts from NPR.

We are living through a watershed moment that I call the era of violent populism.

We are living through an era of historic levels of political violence.

Pape's been on the gist before.

I challenged him a bit over his dire predictions of societal decay in general and certain

conflicts in particular.

But don't listen to me.

This is Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth.

He's the director of the Polarization Research Lab.

I love those guys.

And he looks at that very quote, you said, which Robert Pape has said in many

...