James Talarico

Absolutely.

And I agree that political polarization is a problem.

What I'm trying to get us to realize is how these systems that we're in, a broken political system, a broken media system, a broken social media system, how that exacerbates ideological differences.

Of course, we're all very different people.

We're going to have different opinions.

But these algorithms, these cable news networks, they fan the flames of those disagreements.

And that's why we have such polarized politics, in my opinion.

Yeah, I think that these billionaires, let's, you know, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, the people who increasingly own traditional media and new social media, they have a vested interest in all of us being divided.

Because if we recognize that we are far more alike than we are different, if we realize that we have far more in common, we're going to take power back from them and we're going to bring it back into our communities.

Well, that claim is pretty gut-wrenching given that we've had five of the deadliest mass shootings in American history right here in Texas.

One still haunts me to this day as a former public school teacher, and that's the massacre in Uvalde, Texas in Robb Elementary when we lost 19 babies and two teachers.

Here's where I'll disagree with you on this claim, though.

I saw those parents from Uvalde.

I saw them make the 160 mile drive from Uvalde to the state Capitol multiple times during that legislative session, demanding, begging for basic common sense gun safety.

They believed in the Second Amendment, just like I do.

But they knew that there needed to be some kind of regulation to keep everyone safe and protect everybody's freedoms, including the freedom of those 19 babies to live and fulfill their potential.

What I saw them do just over the course of one legislative session is move the needle

on a common sense bill to raise the age to buy those kind of weapons from 18 to 21.

The murderer in Uvalde turned 18 the day before he committed that horrific massacre.

This is the party that ran against cancel culture, and now they're trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read.