 I wanted to get your take on this here. So this is from the Texas Tribune and you might've seen it, but we failed. Gay Republicans who fought for acceptance in Texas GOP see little progress. Now we'll dive into the story a little bit, but I just, I wanna ask you, Dylan, how shocked are you by this? Because I'm completely shocked. I thought they would revolutionize the GOP. I thought we were like just a few weeks away from Mike Pence doing a drag queen story hour, honestly, I'm very, I'm very surprised. Look, I've said this time and time again and I'll say it time and time again. If you are a gay Republican, there, it doesn't make any sense to me. The only situation where it makes sense for you to be gay Republican is if you care more about your money than you do, you having the right to marry, you having civil protections, the right to adoption, your taxpayer money not going to adoption centers that won't adopt to you, which is actually a huge issue still ongoing in this country. Any of these issues, you were choosing your tax status over that. So for very rich gays, maybe it makes sense, but for the rest of us homos, maybe not as much. So I guess for me, I'm just not surprised. Every time I see this, it's like the leopard eating, what is it, the face eating leopards party? You voted for it. I don't know how exactly you're surprised. I never thought leopards would eat my face as woman who voted for leopards eating faces party. Exactly. I remember there was this big moment in the Texas U.P. I don't know if you saw the Texas U.P. platform, it was very fanatical to say the least. And it said like being gay, it was like along the lines of being gay is abnormal and it's this and it's that. And he actually stood up and he said, this was a gay Republican at the meeting, he was one of the delegates debating if this was gonna be the platform or not. And he said, look, last time we had this in 2018, we said we weren't gonna do it. We said we weren't gonna have this in here. We negotiated it away. Now you're not. No, you're putting abnormal in here. And I know that you're about to say oh, statistical abnormality, but you're not gonna say that about the Vietnamese. You're not gonna say that about Mormons. You're not gonna say that about other people who are statistical minority when you say abnormal. And he's just basically saying like, I know what you're doing, you little son of a, you motherfucker, like, but he's like, look, I thought we were over this. I thought we were done. And to him, he thought there was movement in the party and it has either regressed or it never really changed. And for all the people who I think are surprised by this or in the last seven years after gay marriage, the gay marriage ruling during the Republican party, that was only seven years ago. Those people didn't all die. This isn't like the 1860, like whatever referendum, like where everybody's dead. Those people are still here, right? You only had seven years for people to leave the voting poll. Like those people still exist. They're still in the party. They still have influence and they still have the money. I mean, the evangelical vote is still heavily anti-queer and that is one of the most influential, if not the most influential vote within the Republican party. It is the party that got Trump elected. There's a reason why Mike Pence was his VP pick, the same guy who was in favor of conversion therapy a form of torture for queer people. You should not be that surprised. And that same party doesn't take your interest in the consideration. If you're a gay Republican and you're trying to like start, look, honestly, if we can't have you in the Democratic party, at least go join the Libertarians, okay? At least it's a little bit more consistent. Yeah, that's what I don't get. Like you, I understand not liking the Democratic party. I, as a leftist, do not like the Democratic party. In fact, I hate the Democratic party, but that doesn't mean that, well, since Democrats bad, automatically Republicans are good. You can just vote for a third party if you want to, but don't affirmatively support a party that hates your fucking guts. And here's what I think has happened because there's been debates about whether or not the GOP was shifting and changing and evolving since they haven't talked about it. But really what I think we were witnessing as Mark Joseph Stern put it, is this tactical retreat to where they know that culturally they're in the wrong and they're not gonna win over people by being bigoted and homophobic. But now they've ended that tactical retreat because more savvy fascists like Ron DeSantis have found a way to repopularize homophobia with the don't say gay bill and whatnot, to where even some Democrats in Florida, based on polls that I've seen, think that it's acceptable when they don't realize that it's actually like a modern equivalent of don't say gay, or excuse me, of don't ask, don't tell, which was the military ban, albeit for teachers. And so I think that really now that they see that they can actually say homophobic things again, and it's, I guess, somewhat acceptable, they're letting their freak flag fly. And that's kind of what we're seeing now. And just to kind of go through the subtitle of this, gay Republicans who have fought for acceptance within the Texas GOP over the past three decades, told the Texas Tribune progress has been excruciatingly slow. Many of them have left the party even as the number of log cabin Republicans in Texas continues to grow. This is really just one of those instances of people putting their own, as you said, their own class interests above their identity. But what doesn't make sense to me is that it doesn't matter if you're a rich gay or a poor gay, like all of us are going into the blenders. Like if they really had their way, fascism would not allow any of us to exist. So it just, it doesn't make sense to me how they continue to do this. And I wanted to get your take on the 157 Republicans who voted against same-sex marriage, to codify same-sex marriage, the Respect for Marriage Act, but there was 47 Republicans who decided to support codifying marriage equality. Even though I'm not surprised that the overwhelming majority of them voted against it, the 47 honestly did surprise me because I would expect there to be like two. Are you surprised by that or am I just like super cynical? There's one last thing on what you were just talking about with the situation around like, we're all going in a blender. What happened to Ernst Röhm? That's like, whether if you join a movement that is inherently anti-queer, like you are advocating for your own downfall at the end of the day. You are basically just crossing your fingers and hoping that they overlook the fact that you're a gay so you can keep your tax dollars. And it's not the safe strategy. Now when it comes to, could you say that again in the second part? Sorry, I just, I was Googling what his name was, I forgot. No, so the 47 Republicans who voted to codify marriage equality, I'm curious, did you find that surprising because I found that surprising because I didn't expect more than like two. If you are a Republican in a swing district, I think it's gonna be hard to look a lot of like the moderate centrist types, the actual moderates in the country. Like it's gonna be hard to look them in the face and explain exactly why you voted against it. And I think a lot of this, you're gonna see a lot of Susan Collins types in this list. You're not gonna see Matt Gates in this list. You're not going to see Mike Pence or he's not even in Congress, but you're not gonna see those types in this list that just had like an epiphany. You're going to see mostly people who are in swing districts. And there's gonna be people on that list who I assume actually did change their mind. But I think it's gonna be made up of people who understand the political consequences and that even though right now the rhetoric has heated up against queer people, gay marriage was a big milestone for the community in the vast majority of Americans support gay marriage. It is a popular issue for the left gay marriages. And so the right, whether they like it or not, certain sections of it in swing districts have to accept that fact. Whether they like it or not, it's not really negotiable for them, electorally at least. Yeah, yeah. And one thing that I feared at first was that they would take away a lot more of our rights because they're so emboldened. But now there's a lot of polling showing this huge shift in the 2022 midterms from Republicans now to Democrats in terms of momentum. So they're on track to win the Senate. So I'm curious, do you think that they would maybe back off a little bit seeing as how this hurt them politically or do you think they're just gonna steam ahead as Republicans usually do? Because I genuinely don't know. Because I think that maybe some more savvy Republicans will definitely back off. But a lot of them, and we're really talking about the foaming at the mouth, feral Republicans who have barely been domesticated, like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Green, they're gonna chug full steam ahead. But like collectively as a party, do you think that that is going to scare them or do you think they just won't give up? Okay, wait a second. The same Matt Gaetz has been domesticated as a stretch considering. I mean, don't put him around any children. Yeah, he has been domesticated. But I think for Republicans, if I was a Republican strategist, I would be number one, the devil. But number two, I would say that, look guys, okay, I understand the reaction right now for you guys is maybe to reel it in a bit. But if you guys go from okay, fine, we're kind of chill with the Gaetz now to brah, back to nevermind, we'll chill with them again. You're gonna look like you're flip-flopping. You're gonna look weak. And why they might be trading this issue for more like centristy people, they could end up alienating their enlarged part, not all of them, but many of much of their homophobic base, much of their hardcore right-wing base. If I hate to compare it to a left-wing issue, but if we had like a Democrat, I would say $15 minimum wage, nevermind. Actually, like you're gonna piss off people like me and you, right? And so, and then that means you get less fundraising, that means you get less people going out to Canvas and you don't have an energetic base, then it's gonna be a problem for you. Definitely when you're running on candidates like Trump, who largely won because of how like devoted the bases that they're determined to go out and vote. So I would say that as a, it's actually gonna be, I don't know what they're gonna do because I think there's an argument from a Republican standpoint to reel it in because you need to get those centristy. If you wanna win big in 2022 and big in 2024, you're gonna have to win the people Biden won, which was the suburbanites who are largely in favor of gay marriage. But you don't wanna alienate that base because that base is bringing in big bucks right now. So it's hard. It's hard to know what they're gonna do. Yeah, they're having to do this balancing act and watching them tap dance around this is hilarious to me. Like I've covered on my show how Republicans in the Senate are desperately trying to not talk about this because they don't wanna show their cards because like, you know, there's this sense that there's the Trump Republicans and then there's the more normal Republicans, the more moderate Republicans, if you will, which I would argue that there's no moderate Republican. They're all far right. But regardless, you know, the Mitt Romney's or the Josh Hollis who pretend to be populist, they're having to show their cards and admit, yeah, I'm against civil rights. I'm not actually a populist. And I love to see them do that. I love to watch them squirm. That's like the one joy that I get.