Listen, when we do these Weekender episodes, I almost always started with opening a beer and refreshing myself for the weekend.

It's been one of those weeks, Nick.

The beer is already opened.

The beer is already halfway consumed.

So all I can say at this point is, cheers.

Welcome to the Weekender. I'm Jared Yates-xton. I'm here with Nick Houseman. We got a lot to talk about as always. It is a lot, man. It's a lot. Man, next time, just let me know. I'll try. It's funny, I don't have beer that you crack open in a can. So we don't do that in the L, I guess. But it's a refreshing sound on the podcast. It is, it is. I mean, I could try and do like a soft drink and no one would know the difference, but... I would know. I would know. That's the difference. Well, either way, by the way, I stopped drinking, you know, stop eating sugar. I had a Diet Coke, I think, last night or two nights ago. It was awful. It really is amazing how it can change. When you don't build up the tolerance for it, it tastes like pure chemicals. Yeah. And I don't know, I don't know any other way to segue to what we have to talk about besides bad taste left in our

mouths. Obviously, you're listening to this. You're in this for the long run with the rest of us,

and we thank you for that. But we got to talk about not just what happened in Virginia with the

governor's race between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Yonkin.

We got to talk about the Democratic Party.

We got to talk about the media.

We got to talk about CRT.

There's a lot to dig into here.

Nick, start us off.

What was your initial reaction looking at the results that came in on Tuesday?

I guess I want to say mild surprise.

I thought maybe there was some hand-wringing here that was sort of going to be all for not, kind of like with the recall in California, with Newsom.

But what it sounds like is that the outright lying that the Republicans took to doing during

the campaign really, really worked.

It served to get enough of the people off of their butts into the ballot box to vote on the

Republican side.

And that was, that's really just too bad.

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