Welcome to the Mona Charon Show.

I am delighted to welcome today, Josh Barrow, who is the author of the Substack Very

Serious and who is also host of a podcast of his own called Serious Trouble that he does

with Ken White, aka Popat, of Twitter fame.

And Josh, thanks for joining me.

You had a very provocative post last week titled Dems Need Their Own DEI Purge.

Yes.

And I want to talk with you about that.

I have to preface it, though, by saying this,

as we are witnessing a sort of all points attack on our very system of government by a would-be authoritarian,

it is hard to criticize the Democrats, at least for me. I have a certain emotional resistance to focusing on the flaws with the Democrats because for me they pale in

comparison to what the Republicans have become. That much having been said, if we want to deny power to the MAGA forces, the only way is

with a viable Democratic Party.

And I think your criticisms go a long way toward pushing us, pushing them in a better direction.

So let's start with, you keyed off a speech or, you know, a panel at

the Institute of Politics in Chicago where Pete Buttigieg was complaining about the last

DNC meeting. So why don't you start there? Yeah. I mean, so first of all,

I would say, Mota, I think when you are facing an opponent who is in power, who is doing really

bad things, that's when it's most important to be critical of the opposition, or at least the way

the opposition is trying to win elections. I mean, to your point, it's important that Democrats be good at winning elections, and they haven't been.

And then also, I think the Democratic Party has in certain ways been very self-indulgent,

which is that Democrats have spent a decade talking about Donald Trump as a threat to democracy,

...