After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Christianity Comeback, Old Media Folds to Bari, and Trump's Message to Cartels, w/ Stuckey and Rogan

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Allie Beth Stuckey, host of “Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey,” to discuss what’s fueling the comeback of Christianity, including Michael Knowles recent comments to Tucker Carlson about Catholicism.  The two discuss why we’re seeing such a dramatic shift in such a short period of time, and connect cultural nihilism, mass shootings, and the fallout of the sexual revolution to the accelerating chaos of modern life. They also discuss tensions between AI-driven tools and humans, the rising fascination with self-help trends, and new polling that shows Americans are losing faith in the American Dream. Then Emily is joined by Tom Rogan, Foreign policy writer and editor for the Washington Examiner, to discuss the U.S. strike on the alleged drug boat and what it means for our military. They also address the arrest of Graham Linehan that’s sparked a free speech debate in the U.K. Finally, Emily dives into the report that Paramount is ready to buy Bari Weiss’ Free Press and give her a senior role at CBS News. Masa Chips: Go to https://MASAChips.com/AFTERPARTY and use code AFTERPARTY for 25% off your first order. Cozy Earth: Visit https://cozyearth.com for up to 40% off with code EMILY. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome back to After Party, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us live here at 10 p.m. on your Wednesday night or catching up wherever you get in your podcast always helps us. If you subscribe, subscribe on YouTube, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And don't forget to join us live. If you need a little dose of fun with your Monday and Wednesday night, we're always here at 10 p.m. So keep that in mind. We have a great show for you tonight. Allie Beth Stuckey is with us. We're going to break down some faith-based news, really interesting faith-based news, have some new clips. studies to talk about. And also we'll be joined by Tom Rogan to break down foreign policy. Obviously, the cartel strike in Venezuela is very big news. And Tom is both an American and British citizen. So he'll have, he's also a ne'er-do-well with all kinds of naughty thoughts about political correctness. So he's going to talk to us about arrests for speech cases in the UK, which are mounting at a frightening pace. There's another very high profile one to discuss this week. and news just in before we started doing the show tonight. It looks like CBS is about to close its deal with the free press.

This is a massive step in the new media space. So I'm going to break all of that down. Stay tuned for the whole show, of course, but I'm very pleased to start the show this evening with the one and only Allie Beth Stucky, who is of course the host of Relatable with Allie Beth Stucky. Thank you so much for staying up late, Allie Beth. I appreciate it. Of course. I'm so glad to do it.

Thanks for having me. Huge newsday right now. We have two seemingly paradoxical trends going on with big stories actually related to both. You know, if you're an evangelical woman, millennial like us, Alibeth, the Jen Hatmaker News, we can put this up on the screen, is not at all surprising, but is somewhat significant as a mile marker. This was the headline related to Jen Hatmaker this week. It was quote, why this Christian influencer no longer goes to church. That's the Time magazine headline about Jen Hatmaker. On the other hand, we have Christian musicians, like of course, Forrest Frank, who you've talked a lot about,

charting on Billboard. Pew recently found the decline in Christianity here in the U.S. had slowed down for the first time in a very long time. And we've seen conversations like this one that Tucker Carlson had with Michael Knowles. Actually, today, it broadcast a few hours ago where they had a conversation that I want to play for you now, Alliebeth, and get your thoughts on afterward. after it. So let's roll SOT 2. If I live my life on this little portal to hell that's in my pocket all day long I'm sitting. Exactly where it goes. If that's where I live in my own perception, then my body really doesn't matter that much, does it? My instinct has been for the last few years that physical reality does really matter, even as I feel like I've had a heightened spiritual

awareness and the dead certain knowledge that there is a spiritual, an unseen realm that is, is acting on us all the time and that that's as real as anything. You know, like everyone's becoming Catholic now? You've noticed a strange phenomenon. Yes. I think this is a big reason why. The decline in religion has tapered off. Other denominations and traditions are growing,

but Catholicism in particular is exploding. Why? I think it's because it's a sacramental theology. I never would have called that. Isn't it? Yeah, 20 years ago, could you imagine? At all. Certainly not.

And I beth, I know you're planning your share the arrows conference right now and are actually dealing with that question. Are young people wanting to come back to faith? Is this actually happening? So what's your perspective on that dynamic? Yes. You know, I would want to be the first one to say, yes, Christianity is making a comeback. And of course, I am encouraged that the religious nuns, as Pew Research has named them, that that seems to be leveling off. people aren't leaving Christianity or even just faith in general as quickly as they were before.

But I also want to be realistic about this. I can be excited about Christian artists, you know, chopping the charts, and I can be excited about what seems like a resurgence and enthusiasm about the sacred. However, when I actually look at the data, Pew Research has another really important study that I've seen both Catholic and evangelical outlets report on. that the net growth for both evangelicals and Catholics is not good. And it's actually far worse for Catholics than it is for evangelicals. For every one person that joins the Catholic Church right now, eight people leave. That is actually up from where it was in 2014 that for every one person that was joining six people leave. It's not as bad in the evangelical world, but it's also not great.

And so I think that we just have to have a realistic understanding of what's going on and we can be enthusiastic about the good signs we see while also realizing, wow, we still have so much work to do when it comes to evangelism, when it comes to equipping, when it comes to apologetics. I think it's a super exciting time to be alive and to be a Christian because people are interested and they might be listening more than they have, but not everyone believes yet. So we have a lot of opportunity. Yeah, you know, there's this happening on one side. And the other side, I'm seeing what people describe as like the post-Christian right. And I don't know if that's my algorithm.

I don't know if that's everyone else's algorithm pushing some of this content towards them. But on the one hand, you can see how this world that has been so stripped of meaning and beauty, this high-tech world that we live in, being stripped of those things. You could sort of understand how that might lead to people going towards nihilism.

What do you make of that? I mean, actually even just the shooter in Minneapolis last week seemed to have the smattering of ideological commitments that amounted to no coherent ideological commitment overall. Yeah, we kind of saw that with the Trump assassination too, and it almost maybe seemed like that when it came to the covenant shooter. I mean, obviously all of these people have evil motives. Obviously, that is the theme that we see in all of this. But, yeah, you're right. It's strange. We see this kind of nihilism. We see this kind of, I don't want to be here anymore. I don't even know who I am.

This shooter allegedly from Minnesota said, I'm tired of being trans. That was one of the things that he allegedly wrote in his journal. I wish I hadn't been brainwashed. And so I wonder if we are already starting to see this very rotten fruit of secularism and progressivism. I would have thought that the chickens of progressivism would have come home to roost like when my kids are adults that we would really see the damage that it caused in 10 to 15 years. But man, this is going fast. Just as fast as the sexual revolution went from, we just want, you know, hospital visitation rights to you have to allow us to chop off your kids' breasts. In a matter of a few years, we are now seeing the damage that has been caused by that sexual revolution to where

the adolescents who fell prey to it within a matter of like 12 months are saying, I don't even want to live anymore. And so while I don't like that acceleration, because of the consequences, I do wonder if that is what is going to teach us a lesson as a society about what works and what doesn't. Okay. So that actually seems to me to be a very deep observation that as technology accelerates, and people like Brett Weinstein have called this hyper-novelty. So as technology accelerates, in some cases faster than our bodies can keep up with, as that starts to happen, do we then change more quickly, meaning we can change in a progressive direction more quickly, but then change in maybe a reactionary conservative direction just as quickly as it lurched left in the first place.

What do you think about that? Yeah, gosh, that's a really good question. I mean, I think that we're all just trying to make sense of everything that's going on. And I think the older you get, the less energy you have to do that. Like if my grandmother were still alive, she died five years ago. I don't think she knew what transgenderism was. I don't think that she knew that it was a possibility that someone could identify as the opposite sex.

And if she were here today and I tried to explain this to her, I think it would be very difficult. Whereas I feel like I have a pretty good handle on all the craziness that's going on. Yet every day there's something new that I have to learn, new terminology, a new parapheria or something that is being normalized. And I'm trying to formulate, okay, well, what does the Bible have to say about this? How do I think about this? And so, yeah, I mean, I guess the short answer and maybe the overly simple answer is that the world gets more and more chaotic. And as that happens, people are looking for simplicity.

They're looking for clarity. They're looking for things that they can hold on to and know or real. While I'm not Catholic, I can see how someone would be right now attracted to that aspect of Catholicism, which is very regimented and very routine and very tangible and very seen and very aesthetic. It also matches an aesthetic that I think is on trend today. And so there's a lot. Yes, there's a lot changing. And I think people are just desperate for meaning. Yeah, I think that sounds right. Yeah, my theory has been that, you know, I don't mind going to church in a gym or, you know, wherever, whatever it is, I've been to church in a lot of funny places. I'm sure you have to to a hell I bet. But I feel like there's an incredible market right now for evangelical church

plants to build something beautiful, someone. Build a beautiful, beautiful home for your church. That's waiting to be tapped. Now, actually, on that note, what do you think, you mean, you're just mentioning young Catholic men in particular? That's who's gotten a lot of attention in this. But you are particularly close with young Christian women, evangelical women. Are you seeing from them in your own life, movement there? If so, how do we explain it? How do we explain maybe young evangelical men? What do you see in overall, just as somebody who's so close to it? You know, the biggest surge that I saw, not just in my following, but people reaching out to me saying, okay, I didn't believe this, but now I'm wondering if it's true, was 2020.

And 2020, a lot was happening. Obviously, it was an election year, a very contentious election. Obviously, we had COVID, and then we had the summer of George. George Floyd and the evangelical church, much of it reacted in a way that I thought was very shameful at the time, really adopting the secular, worldly definitions of justice, repeating the mantras of Black Lives Matter and kind of like, I don't know, trying to apply the biblical text to BLM and package it for Christians. It was very, very strange. It was a very strange time. And I called a lot of that out and talked a lot about it at the time. And while I also have never gotten as much pushback as I did at the time. I also, after that, got so many people who were like, gosh, I was all into BLM. I was all into COVID. I was all into that. But then just the, I think, the terror that they saw on TV, the ridiculousness of the COVID policies and the fear that they had when they looked out their window thinking, what kind of community and world am I raising my kids in? I think that made a lot of people at least conservative. And maybe just at first,

conservative. And then, okay, well, what is this conservatism all about? Where does it come from? They keep talking about God. I find that a lot when people become more politically conservative, they end up becoming Christian, but also as people become Christian, they end up becoming more politically conservative. And just, I think, I mean, that's why Trump won. That's why Trump lost in 2020 and won in 2024. It just took a while to see how bad things had really gotten. That is really interesting. Is it, is there Maha crossover? I want to ask, you that one because this is just this is anecdotal observation. I do not have data on this. But a lot of young evangelical women I know are super super, super maha. Do you notice that? And what is the explanation?

Also happened after 2020. Okay. None of my friends, no one that I know, no one of my family questioned vaccines before 2020. I mean, everyone was just like, yeah, you just do exactly what your doctor said. I didn't even know anyone who questioned their doctor. You all love your doctor. You do what they say. I mean, I'm sure that there were plenty of people before that who were crunchy, hippie, and didn't trust Western medicine and for good reason, but they were kind of seen as an outlier. I remember I had like a vaccine skeptical doctor on my show at the time, and I was like so nervous because it was a really big deal to have a doctor on who was like, well, maybe you shouldn't be following the vaccine schedule.

Okay, then 2020 happened. I start taking my six-month-old, six or seven-month-old. that's how old she was when COVID hit. I take her to the pediatrician for her regular well visit. My doctor is already talking, well, a few months after COVID had started, he starts talking about the vaccine. And as soon as the vaccine is ready, my husband and I have to get it. And as soon as it's available for babies, he'll make sure that all of his patients get

it, including my child. And I'm like, hang on, this is too fast for me, okay? I was not some hippie-dippy person before this, but now I feel. bullied by my doctor to the point to where I wouldn't even go to the pediatrician without my husband because every time he'd bring up the COVID vaccine after, you know, they started talking about it in the news. And I was like, I can't do this. And then we stayed there for a little bit. He started talking about, okay, as soon as she turns to, she needs to start wearing a mask. And I'm like, this is just, I'm starting to question everything. I'm starting to question everything. I'm starting to

question the credibility of my doctor. And they're telling me that I have to stay six feet apart. That doesn't make any sense. At first, they said that it was stupid to go out and get masks, and they said it's obvious that everyone should be wearing a mask. And then we couldn't travel to visit our family in another state for a couple years because I wouldn't allow my toddler to wear a mask on the plane. And so all of that happened and so, so much more that we could relitigate. And I think a lot of moms, a lot of people were like, I don't think that these people freaking know what they're talking about. I really don't.

And I don't think they care if we live or die. I mean, we saw what so many politicians did. We saw what Cuomo did. We saw what Whitmer did and all of the grandmothers who died because of stupid COVID policy. I know someone personally whose father died in the hospital because of COVID because they kept on doing remdesivir and they wouldn't give him ibupmectin. So a lot of people went through a lot of suffering during that time because of the medical system, because of scientists. I'm not anti-medicine. I'm not anti-scientist. I'm not anti-hospital. I'm not anti-all of those things, but I question them a lot more than I used to. And I would guess that a lot of people in my audience feel the same way.

Well, again, there's also something to what you said earlier about people wanting a tangible things that they can touch that are simple that are like very obviously okay and safe. And that is, I wouldn't have seen that coming probably 20 years ago or at least not happening this quickly. I mean, it makes sense. when you think about the high-tech world and the hyper-acceleration of technology. But I think that has something to do with it, too. Yes. I think AI is like a big, okay, so you talked about everything happening so fast, like with the sexual revolution, all of that happened so fast, and now the reaction is happening so fast. I mean, you've got people seriously talking about overturning Obergfeld. It's only been 10 years. But the same is true of technology. Like, okay, a year ago, maybe, I was like, I will never do Chad GPT.

I will never input anything into this because I don't want to feed the beast and this freaks me out. And then I started using grok and I was like, this is amazing. It just planned my whole trip to Hawaii with my husband and me. This is awesome. But now I am already seen like people who work with me or like a product that I'm buying. I ask like, did you write this or was this grok? And I don't want something that was just, you know, copy. and pasted from GROC. I want the human fingerprint on it. When I see artwork, when I see a video,

when I see a company, I want to know, like, are humans working on this? Am I talking to a human? To me, at least, it's already gotten to the point to where I think, like, the next stamp on a product or a company will be made by humans, instead of made in the USA or whatever, made by humans. And I will be more likely to work with that company or that person than I will, the company that says powered by AI. I'm not saying all AI is bad. I just like human beings and think that there is a special spark and touch that they put on everything that I don't want to lose. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, the Wall Street Journal had a big deep dive into one mom who weaned her and herself and her child off of ultra processed food for a month today. And I don't know if you saw it, but this translates across

the board. It's like beyond food. I feel like people are realizing there's ultra processing in our communications technology, ultra-processing and our politics and our bureaucracy. So true. Yeah, that's such a good point. I think a lot of people are like, okay, how can we just get back to the basics? Like, not even how did our moms and grandmothers live, because I can think of a lot of things that our moms and grandmothers did that were not maha at all. They helped us in some ways get into this mess. But like, I mean, I think a lot of people are even asking, like, how does God want us to eat. Like, what does the Bible have to say about, like, what is healthy? I'm not saying that Christians are obligated to follow ancient Israel's cleansing laws, but I think a lot of people are like,

okay, give me something simple, give me something real. How do I know that what I'm eating and the people that are making my food really care about my body? And it's all interconnected with not trusting doctors, too. Yeah. How have you changed that in your own, like, as you're going about feeding yourself, feeding your family, thinking about what's healthy involving screen time and AI, just since you mentioned 2020 changed this for so many people. For you, how has that changed things? How do you do it, basically? Yeah, I would say how we eat is healthier for sure than how it used to be. Now, not perfect, but I cut a lot of things out of my life that just have never been introduced, and now I actually feel like I can't tolerate a lot of the processed food that I was eating before.

We do our best that we can with our kids, prioritizing protein and trying to cut out the process stuff, but we're not like, we're not the fun police. We do allow them to have, like, cookie and birthdays and things like that. Our kids don't do, unless it's a very rare case of, like, being on a long flight and they can watch a movie or something. We don't do. I've got three kids. They don't do iPads. They don't do phones. I was at a park the other day, and there were these eight-year-old kids.

And one of the kids told his dad, I lost my phone. And the dad was like, what? You lost your phone? And I'm like, why does your kid have a phone? He's eight years old. And so I think that is like very prevalent. I know for us it's going to get harder and harder as they get older. But gosh, I think also the longer we go and we see the damage that this kind of technology causes,

I just like, I want my kids to be smart. Like I want their brains to work, you know? And most schools today, private Christian schools included, use iPads in the classroom. And starting in kindergarten, four, five-year-olds are using iPads to read ahead. And so we had to search and look very hard for an education program for our kindergartner that did not use any technology. And it was tough. We found it, but it was tough.

That's also a lot of a big reason why a lot of parents are homeschooling right now. Totally, because it costs money and it ends up, you know, being. much easier for people of means and people who have less means to find that place, be able to make a drive in some cases. It's so sad. And I wanted to run this quote that I caught in Rod Dreher's newsletter just from one of his recent diary entries the last couple of days. He's quoting another thinker here who wrote, a radical separation of the body from the mind, leaves Christians who think in that way, especially vulnerable to deception from AI and digital culture. And then I think this is, this is Rod goes on to say, surprisingly,

death of God did not lead to the death of spirits. A demythal mythologized cosmos did not lead to the end of myth. Disenchantment instead led to re-enchantment via a maze of successor ideologies. And this is what I really want to finish on here. And it is so good. He ends that quote by saying and DIY spirituality. And it is now fall. An elderly gentleman named Bruce took my pumpkin spice latte instead of his quartado at the local Starbucks the other day. And I've been recovering ever since. but a lot of people are now like going into fall mode and getting into, dusting off disgusting Ouija boards and whatever else. And that's serious.

And I don't know, Alibeth, there's been this, there also seems like as we're seeing more people go back to church, whatever it is, we're also, I feel like seeing more people do astrology, more people go to psychics. They're both kind of happening at the same time. Yeah. And also, I think that. like I think women's self-help, even in the Christian world, is like a form of astrology. Like, I feel like Christian women use- Oh, are we getting into the Enneagram?

Oh, no. Well, I'm not just, I'm not completely wholesale hating on all personality tests, but I do think a lot of women use the Enneagram, but also use like the let them theory and girl wash your face and lean in and untangled or whatever Glyn Doyle's. Untamed, untamed, whatever Glennon Doyle's thing. She's very much tangled. Yes, as a form of mysticism and incantations. And thankfully, for the Christian, spirit, like, enchantment is real.

And the spirit world is real. All of the people that she decided today do realize that, and that is a good thing. There is good. There is evil. C.S. Lewis said there is no neutral ground in all of the universe. Every inch has been claimed by Christ or counterclaimed by Satan. And one day, Jesus is coming back and he will win, and he will win. and he will claim victory once and for all forever and ever,

but until then Satan is doing his darnedest to take as many souls and to take as much joy as possible. So it's always going to be a battle, no matter what the statistics and the study say, and we're in it. We get to be happy warriors for things that are good, right and true. Why do you think this is particularly appealing to women right now? Is there something for, I mean, actually,

if you go back to spiritualism in the 19th century, women were kind of at the center of that, too, Mary Todd Lincoln, perhaps most famously. But what is it, do you think, appeals to women about those trends? Yeah, you know, there is a passage, I believe it's First Timothy two. Might be First Timothy three. One of those passages where he's talking about the end times. In the end times, people will be lovers of self. They will pursue passion rather than pursuing God. And the people who peddle these kinds of ideologies, I'm paraphrasing, but they sneak into homes and manipulate weak-minded women is basically what the text says, who are always learning, but

never arriving at a knowledge of truth. And oh my gosh, if that doesn't describe the new age and astrology and so much of self-help, a new program, a new thought, a new thing, a new incantation that's finally going to help me liberate my inner goddess. And it's capitalism's fault. It's the patriarchy's fault. It's your dad's fault. It's your boyfriend's fault. But once you release all those toxic people from your life and you find out that you're really beautiful and perfect the way you are, then everything will fall into place. That doesn't work. They read the next book and listen to the next podcast. It goes on and on.

It goes all the way back to the garden. When Satan asked Eve, did God really say, you can be like God. You can have the power and the knowledge and the wisdom that God has. It's all inside you. And that lie has been tempting women ever since. Before you run, Alibeth, I wanted to also get your take on this new Wall Street Journal poll. This is F5. The headline was Americans lose faith that hard work leads to economic gains, according to the Wall Street Journal poll. And we'll also at one point put the graphic F6 up on the screen.

This is a chart of people like me have a good chance of improving our standard of living. The amount of people who agree with that right now is experiencing a pretty tragic decline, especially when you consider a lot of Americans believed what was best about our country was this eternal optimism that things will get better. Yeah. This seems like a blow to something so foundational. And I wonder, Alibeth, just how you think about culture and economics intertwined in this. That's something that I've thought about a lot more, just like the last 10 years, how the material conditions, it honestly was Trump that started forcing this conversation, the material conditions of a lot of people in places like where I'm from in Wisconsin have,

have declined in ways that seem grossly unfair when you look at what's happening at the private equity firms and the hedge funds that are making money off clothes in those factories. So how do you see that contributing to all of these things that we've talked about in the cultures so far? I think it's really demoralizing for a lot of people. I mean, baby boomers had a reason to feel optimistic, not that they didn't have their own hard times. And of course, their parents and grandparents had really hard times too.

So I'm not like a total boomer hater, but it was a different. time. It's very, very expensive to live. It is very, very hard for a young couple to find a house. A huge part of this is immigration. I mean, you have these multi-generational immigrant families who move into a neighborhood. They're not necessarily, I'm saying, doing anything wrong themselves, but they a lot of times have multiple incomes that allow them to put a down payment on a house, whereas the young couple who's 25 and just got married and is, you know, they make maybe $60,000 a year. There's no way they can compete against the multi-generational offers that are being put down on houses. You coupled that with the private equity buying up the homes.

Oh my gosh, demand is so high. Supply is really low in a lot of areas. It is making it hard to live. Couple that with inflation. There's so much. And actually, I know we talked about technology advancing. And I think it seems like that to us, but really we're in an age of technological stagnation in some ways, especially when it comes to medical innovation.

Like we have been basically where we are when it comes to, for example, Alzheimer's research or childhood cancer research for like 50 years. So I think our parents saw so much change in their lifetimes. And we're like, well, if my kid went back to 1990 right now, they would basically understand everything that's going on and like would have access to everything and I don't know that that's been true for many generations before us or at least in the past 100 or so years. So it's a weird time. It's like a very weird time. And so I could see how that, I don't know, a demoralizing attitude could lead people in two directions toward the nihilism that we talked about or toward the hope

that we have in Christ that it is all going to be okay in the end. Well, I know you'll be continuing this conversation at Shared the Aeros. So Alibath, tell us a little bit about that and where people can go to find more information. Yeah, thank you so much. So this is our second year of doing Share the Arrow's. It is a Christian women's conference. Last year, we had about 4,000. This year, we are about to surpass 4,500. And so we're super excited. That alone just shows me, because I've been to a lot of Christian women's conferences, but that alone shows me that women are really hungry for truth. Because this is a theology conference. It's an apologetics conference. It's a how do we navigate culture and politics this Christian Women Conference, Motherhood, Biblical Health, so many of the things that we talked about.

And it's not for the faint of heart. Like, it is for the woman who wants to be courageous, whether she's a stay-at-home mom, whether she's a student, whether she is an employee, whatever she does. She wants to boldly represent what is good and right and true in the world. She's coming to share the arrows. It was so amazing last year. By the grace of God, hopefully it'll be amazing this year or two. We have an incredible lineup.

people can go to share the arrows.com. That's where you can get your tickets. You can come by yourself. You'll definitely meet friends if you do. Or you can bring your mom. You can bring friends. You can bring whoever you want. They just have to be a woman.

We only allow women into this woman's conference. I know. That sounds like something you can get away with in Texas. Yeah. I guess so. Well, Alibeth, I just want to tell you before you run, you have managed to like get into the Normie world, which is a very hard thing to do.

in media, like the amount of people I know who are just normal and not obsessed with politics who listen and love relatable is enormous. Oh, thank you. I mean, we're roughly the same age, but I admire you a lot and I'm grateful for everything that you're doing. So thanks for stopping by the show. And likewise, and congratulations on the new show, it's great. It looks great.

You're doing great. So I'm excited. Thank you. Have a great rest of your night. Appreciate it, Alibath. Thank you. Cool. All right.

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Starting in October, Masa will be available nationwide at your local Sproutes supermarket. Huge news. So stop by and pick up a bag before they're going. Now I'm excited to bring in a good friend of mine. That would be Tom Rogan. He is a foreign policy writer and editor at the Washington Examiner. Tom, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me, Emin.

Oh, Tom, truly my pleasure to have you join us with your lovely accent on the program. But let's start, Tom, with Venezuela. Why don't we talk about that, I don't know if Trump's described it as beautiful yet, but if he hasn't, he's sure to describe it as beautiful very soon, that strike on the marine vessel in the Caribbean waters off the coast of Venezuela that is alleged to have been, we actually have the video. The control room has the video. I think we do have it. If you haven't seen it yet, yeah, here it is. It's up on the screen. You could just see this vessel getting lit up, but paying attention to it, and if you're listening to this, I'll describe it a bit. Actually,

a smaller boat than what a lot of people probably would expect to see from an alleged trafficking vessel or cartel vessel that's allegedly trafficking drugs. Some experts, Yoan Grolo, I'm thinking of who's covered cartels for a long time, initially thought that was a bit odd. So Tom, I just wanted to get your reaction here. Others have said it was perfectly normal that you'd have a small vessel like this, but naval capacities in particular are a fascination of yours and a subject that you have covered for a very long time.

So are we going to war, Tom? I think what you're seeing here is signaling from the administration. So it is unusual both in terms of to see a strike like this on, you know, a drug smuggling vessel. I think there's pretty high confidence that indeed there were drugs on there, that it did belong to this Venezuelan cartel. Why do you say that, Tom? Because that's obviously under enormous, it's like the most enormous microscope right now is how did they know? They said they had intelligence tracking the movements. Is this part of a designated foreign terrorist organization like Trenda Aragua?

or is it like cartel of the Sons, which they've accused Maduro of being the head of, but also providing material support to Trenda Aragua. So how do we know that? Yeah, so both cartels, right, have been associated with Maduro and his regime. I think particularly in this case, why we can be relatively confident

that it was a, you know, the part of the Trendor Agua is that the military, and I apologize, my Spanish pronunciation there, Cool, boy. For the US military to carry out a, what they would call kinetic operation or a lethal strike such as this requires a lot of legal safeguards to go through. Far more than, for example, there would be the case of the CIA where there would be

more expedited process. I also think when, you know, again, the extant interest in here is sending a message. and they would not want to be in a scenario of the administration where this turned out to be, as was the case notably in Afghanistan, where the Biden administration authorized the strike on what turned out to be innocent people in relation to the bombing at Kabul Airport that killed 13 Marines. There's a huge amount of a risk that would be attenuated to a mistake. and the gain here, you know, for a relatively low, well, very low risk operation where essentially a drone or some kind of aerial platform, it seems, has struck something far away from Americans.

To me, all the indicators would suggest, including then that the backdrop, you know, you know, I've talked to a couple of people. And as you mentioned, Yon, who is one of the, you know, very best people on this, you know, he mentioned one of his sources saying that the center mass in terms of the, the, vote did potentially. So I think we can be confident it was a drug trafficking vessel. I think the most important takeaway from this is the signaling, right, that the video is released, that they decided not to try and intercept it, that they destroyed it, that they are sending a message now to the cartels that we are going to kill you if you come to deliver or attempt to smuggle drugs onto

American soil. And that raises a whole range of political ramifications in terms of how did the cartels respond? Do they retaliate? Which they manifestly have the means to do. But clearly you see here, I think the Trump, the Trump putting meat on the bones of what for him, I think, has always been quite an emotive policy issue, which is, you know, stopping the flow of drugs into the United States. So watch this space, I think, would be the top line. So Pete Heggseth, obviously, the Defense Secretary Pete Higfuss said today, we have assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us,

and it won't stop with just this strike, to the point you made, Tom, about it being a warning. Anyone else trafficking in those waters, he continued, who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate. So is this, do we have more information now on how this happened? Because it's actually a fairly critical question here.

We've seen this type of thing play out in the Middle East, but was this a drone? Was this a helicopter? Do we know any... Because that would get to like where potentially we have bases and are launching strikes like this. So what more do we know about that at this juncture?

I mean, I don't know. But for me, the video looks like it's probably a drone based on, you know, that you would have... That would be in range going across the Gulf of Mexico that, you know, you wouldn't necessarily... I mean, you know, feasibly you could launch it covertly from Colombia, where the Colombians just denied it. I suspect it was launched from the US.

Regardless, I think because of the number of naval forces that are really off the Atlantic coast of Venezuela now, we will see direct engagement by manned platforms, whether this was or not. This is just the kind of apatif, as it were. I mean, maybe that's a sort of callous choice of words, but we're seeing the beginning here, and this is clearly a signaling element.

And one of the things that I think people have to be aware of or should certainly form part of the debate about this is, you know, President Trump and the MAGA movement have obviously vested a lot of intellectual capital in the idea of avoiding stupid wars, avoiding entanglements. And there's a cartel which I've been writing about recently. And again, you know, Yohn, who I think you or Ian, you know, depending on how you do the pronunciation, would be. you know, is a true expert on this. But this cartel in particular, the Holisco New Generation Cartel, the increasingly powerful cartel kind of almost taking over Mexico. If we start doing this kind of stuff to them, I think it's very credible that they would start, you know,

kidnapping American college students in Cancun or hitting American cruise ships or doing stuff on American soil that they have far more logistical capacity to do than, you know, terrorist groups in the Middle East. That is why this conversation about one particular boat and one strike on one boat is, I mean, it's genuinely, I think, a new chapter. I don't know if you read CDR Salamander, Tom, but I wanted to share this story here that CDR Salamander published after what happened yesterday, said, well, I was wrong Tuesday afternoon. And, you know, CDR Salamander, who has, I think, retired Navy, Tom, you may know this more than I do, said, well, I was wrong Tuesday afternoon in reference to a post. that he put out after the strike that said, we have been doing this for decades. Well, he goes on, we have been doing a bit of shooting at drug runners a bit,

and then goes on to say, this is new, significantly new. I also don't think this is a one-off. That's similar to the point that you made, Tom, but I wanted to ask you because we have seen drone strikes, we have seen this type of action in the global war on terror, particularly in spheres in the Middle East for a very long time. We are familiar with it. We are familiar with the legal justifications that are built up. And what's important about this is the foreign terrorist organization for Trenda, Aragua, then saying you sanction

cartel of the Sends because they provide material support to Trenda, Aragua, and then you can wrap Maduro into this, and you sort of build a case. Secretary Rubio today cited a, what was it, a grand jury decision in New York or a court in New York that had laid out some of the case related to, I think it was Trenda, Aragua, you can correct me if I'm wrong. But it's, like, is this now coming to our hemisphere? Is it crazy to say that this is coming to our hemisphere? Well, I mean, look, the drug smuggling on a vast scale has, you know, been going on for a long time. I think what's changed is that President Trump, and this was true in his first term, had a much higher tolerance than both Barack Obama and Joe Biden to do one-off, you know,

targeted strikes against individuals. Kassam Soleimani, the Iranian Quds Force commander is the best example of that. But there were others that are, you know, still classified where, you know, would have these limited incidents where the U.S. would essentially kill someone who was determined by the president to be, in this case, President Trump to be, you know, a threat to the national security of the United States. through, sort of mentioned before, either that CIA or military legal process, what I think is noticeably different here is the deliberately public nature of this strike, right?

Releasing the video of people being killed, you know, narco-traffickers on a boat. And any signaling there to the cartels and to their enablers, you should have a moment of pause. There's also, I think, probably an intelligence angle that once you do this, people who are kind of on the fence or lawyers, accountants, politicians who are sort of facilitators for these networks that again almost definitely operate as transnational

corporations in a sense taking away the legal factor that you can say okay well we've got the national security agency which listens to the phone calls etc intercepts emails has an identification or maybe this is a person to approach and say

all right do you want immunity now you know we've heard that you're concerned or here's a bit of money you could relocate at some point with your family, you know, we want you to infiltrate. And or, you know, in the plateaued plomo, you know, Pablo Ascabar way of, you know, the bullet or the silver, do you run the gambit of ending up like those guys on the boat? And so it's psychological, this is a, you know, a kind of a very blatant example of physical warfare manifesting itself into,

or as an extension point into psychological warfare. And that's normally, this would be, you know, a rare thing that would happen. And we wouldn't hear about it because it would be very highly classified. And the drug traffickers wouldn't want to admit it, obviously. Now it's in the public domain. But to that point before, they also have the capacity to operate against the United States in the public domain. So this is not a simple kind of nice, easy, you know, check a box when we want to kill terrorists thing. Yeah.

Secretary Rubio was in Mexico today. and speaking a little bit about what feels, it does feel almost like attention, Tom, which is on the one hand, these cartels are increasingly more advanced, and that is absolutely accurate. You know, we're seeing, and he talked about,

he was in Mexico where they're very concerned. The line of Moreno and Claudia Shane Mom is basically that a lot of the stuff comes from the United States, a lot of the guns come from the United States, and the Secretary of State actually acknowledged that today, which is unusual for a Republican politician,

I would say. You follow this as well, Tom. So tell me if you disagree. But on the other hand, the line is that we're also just going to light them up. And it's going to be totally fine. We're just going to strike these boats. And we're ready for whatever puny, pathetic retaliation they can muster. But these are not your grandfather's cartels, so to speak.

Over the last five years in particular, they've exploded. They control, I mean, this has been going on for decades and building, building. but they control large swats of territory in countries like Mexico. And the same is true in many different South American countries, Latin American countries. So, Tom, this could easily spiral. And I'm not saying it will, but I'm saying it would be wrong to downplay the odds of actual potential American troops dying in particular missions that could be related to this cause. Absolutely. I mean, a lot of Americans are not going to stop using the drugs.

that create massive amounts of revenue for these organizations. And they have, you know, very little incentive at the moment as things stand to back away from that. And even if you took out, you know, one producer, another potentially fills the space. And so, yes, the Trump administration is banking on the U.S. having the ability to out-escalate any counter-escalation that the cartels might apply. But when you reach up the ladder, the only way the United States could master that escalation curve would be to apply the same kind of counterterrorism campaign that we saw really in 2006 to 2009 in Iraq, where you have Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, CIA Special Operations Group, doing raids every single night, you know, that it would be drone strikes as well.

Like in Sinaloa, right? Exactly, across Mexico, right? that is incredibly aggressive, that is violent, that as you say, you know, suffers American casualties, that the cartels are then using their leverage and their logistical networks, you know, firearms, explosives inside the United States to potentially do things. And even if the United States can sort of contain the damage or contain the threat to American citizens or civilians, there's also the second order effects of what impact does that have on the Mexican government, right? Where the cartels then, you know, start as happened with Escobar again, that they would execute anyone who was seen

to join the American emboldened campaign against them, and who's willing to step up or, you know, does the government potentially fail? So, you know, ultimately, I think the United States could be, could really bring the cartels down to a position of relative weakness as to where they are now. Functionally, I don't think you could really destroy the drug trade because there's a market for it and the production ability is not hugely complex. And the financial incentives are there. So you could wage, you know, you can bring it down. But the question is, how far do you want to go with this?

And I wonder that it agreed to which the Trump administration is essentially trying to establish, you know, a new quid pro quo with the Mexican government in particular, that right there they didn't target a Mexican cartel here. It was a Venezuelan one. That they're saying, you guys really engulf, President Shine bomb need to get a grip here because if you don't, stuff's going to start, you know, blowing up and maybe we'll release a video, maybe we won't. But do you want that and do you want to worry about those consequences?

And so, again, a lot of posturing. And I would say as well to your viewers, Emily, you know, looking at the, you know, the naval forces, a marine expeditionary unit, 2200 Marines off the coast of Venezuela now, you know, there's a lot of military resources that are very finite that have been. deployed. I don't think we're about to invade Venezuela, but clearly President Trump has decided to invest significant strategic risk and political capital in, you know, taking a hit at this issue. And there's such a significant, interesting distinction between Venezuela and Mexico. I don't know if you caught, I know Tom that you hang on every word that Nicholas Maduro speaks because of the poetry and eloquence that he's capable of. But his response was fascinating. to the strike, which was to try and drive a wedge between Donald Trump and Marco Rubio.

He basically was saying Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, he's trying to draw you into another bloody conflict and was saying, you know, Rubio does not have your agenda. I'm sure that we can work this out addressed to Donald Trump. That was honestly how Maduro reacted. And I found that pretty interesting because Rubio, obviously is the son of Cuban immigrants, carries with him. this sharp Cold War era anti-communism. And there's a fascinating debate right now, whether how, to what degree that comports with the America first MAGA New Right agenda.

And Ruby has been a participant in that debate, I think, to his credit. And, you know, he's contributed great substance to that conversation. But at the same time, Mexico is not led by Nicholas Maduro. It's not led by a sort of idiot. theological, what's the best way to put? I mean, Claudia Schaenbaum is a populist. Marana is populist. Amla was certainly populace and steeped in some of this Marxism, mid-century Marxism, but there's a difference between Mexico and Venezuela. I thought it rather interesting that Rubio was on his trip to Mexico after this strike in Venezuela. What are we to, am I reading too

much into things? Like, what's the dynamic here, Tom? No, and look, the, the, the, but Rubeo regime has always hated Rubio indeed, you know, a few years ago. He backed Guido. People can Google this, you know, there was serious concern about Rubio being the target of Venezuela or a Maduro regime assassination plot by essentially the, you know, underboss of one of the Sun's cartel in Venezuela. And so they hate, they hate Rubio. They know that he's a hawk on this.

clearly also they are gambling as, you know, Vladimir Putin, other leaders have that building a Kim Jong-un, a personal relationship with Trump can sort of perhaps obfuscate the president away from some of the, you know, policy complications. I think what perhaps they miss here or what they likely miss here is the sense that President Trump, as much as, you know, Markerubia might be associated more with the, you know, interventionist side of the Republican foreign policy movement on things like Iran, for example, I think his impulse would be much more naturally aggressive than President Trump. On drugs, President Trump has persistently sort of, you know, taught to be offensive,

that the way this is destroying American communities seems to take it in an emotive level. And, you know, clearly with the kind of military deployments, especially that we've seen, in a sense, this sort of destruction of this one boat is, you know, a minor adjunct to the broader military build up around Venezuela that President Trump, you know, has to know simply through the logistics of how you go through authorizing that and organizing that, you know, that this is a big deal. This isn't just for show. And so I think there's a lot of pressure clearly on the Maduro regime about how they respond to this. And again, you know, maybe the calculus on the part of President Trump is that Maduro will, you know, reduce the supply by 20, 30 percent. And there's some kind of,

you know, we'll a dealer, you know, understanding here that, you know, both sides are, you know, can tolerate. But I think it would be a mistake to perceive this as, or perceive Maduro's strategy of trying to, you know, separate Rubio and Trump as one that could bear fruit. Because I think ultimately, the endgame here is that the Trump administration has decided they need to see a significant reduction, at least in the power of the cartels, if not the amount of narcotics being smuggled into the United States. Well, stop buying their drugs, Tom. Well, exactly. I've never, honestly, one of my few things. I've never, I've never used drugs, but I can blame that on my very nice mother. Oh, yes. Shout out to Tom's mother, who is absolutely lovely. Now,

despite Tom's ridiculous accent, he is actually a dual citizen and we'll be upset if I don't point it out, Which, Tom, aren't you also technically like a barrister or a solicitor or whatever the hell you people call it? Well, the solicitor side, yeah, in the UK, I wasn't actually very good at law school. That I couldn't deal with the minutiae of business and land law. You know, criminal law and constitutional law is fascinating. I always say that if people graduate through law school and end up being lawyers, you have to have a lot of respect to them because lots of law is incredibly interesting. Lots of law is incredibly tedious and time consuming and boring.

and, you know, I don't know what that says about journalism, that I decided I was a better fit for that, but yeah. I don't know what that says about journalism either, but, you know, it seems right now a chap, again, to use your language, Mark Rowley agrees. He is the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and is waiting through the tedium of whether or not you should lock people up for tweets. And he said that his officers, this according to New York Times,

had been put in a, quote, impossible decision in which laws were drawing them into, quote, toxic culture war debates. Imagine that. More of the New York Times in a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Rowley said he had suggested to the government changes that would enable police to, quote, limit the resources we dedicate to tackling online statements to those cases, creating real life threats or real threats in the real world. Now, he was alluding, of course, or he was responding to people who were raising serious questions about Graham Linehan. Linahan is, again, I'm reading from the New York Times description here, an Irish comedy writer and anti-transgender activists, as they put it,

who was detained at Heathrow on Monday. Linahan was creator of the 1990s comedy series, Father Ted, wrote and directed the IT crowd. He said he was arrested after landing at Heathrow on a flight from Arizona. I believe he's actually moved to Arizona because he realized that this crackdown was happening in the UK. He wrote on his substack that he was taken into police custody, searched and interviewed in relation to three posts he made on X in April,

including one that read, quote, if a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent abusive act, make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls. Tom, you have done that several times. He also said it was not a call to violence in that he had, quote,

been arrested for jokes. I mean, you have a call. comedy writer and that post it all adds up to yes a man was just arrested for jokes in the UK this is part of a trend if you are just hearing about this incident because it is a fairly high profile one the free press which we're going to talk about in the moment actually had an editorial on this today they said we've reported on the woman arrested for praying in silence the 41 year old mother with PTSD sentenced to 31 months in jail for a post about immigrants that she quickly deleted the Scottish grandmother detained for standing outside an abortion clinic

with a sign that read, quote, coercion is a crime here to talk only if you want the arrival in the UK of de facto blasphemy laws, and they say on and on. Seriously, Tom, please explain how, how. I think this happened. Well, first thing I think to emphasize, and again, it kind of might seem blasé or, you know, wishy-washy, but it's a reminder of the wisdom of the founders and the Constitution and the First Amendment. because this could not happen in the United States. It's also, I think, a very powerful rejoinder, in my view, to President Trump's recent effort for the executive action

to go towards, you know, trying to restrict flag burning. Like, this is where it ends up. Okay, it never, it never ends with just the stuff you don't like. It ends with a political establishment that cares more about the emotion of, you know, individuals who are offended than the importance of individual freedom and the right to speak. So in the UK, the law basically is much more restrictive in terms of speech that constitutes offence to a particular party or could be perceived as a, you know, it could be perceived as a

threat, even with jest, you know, has some potential of being criminal. And so the police officers who arrested the comedian in this case, you know, are essentially following the law, the problem is the law. And what I do think is striking. You mentioned Mark Rowley, who's the commissioner in the Metropolitan Police, London Police Unit, which also kind of has some FBI-type national security responsibilities. A couple of months ago, he was threatening implicitly that Elon Musk could be arrested for some of his tweets in the United States. And his change in tune, I think, reflects now the understanding of or the growing understanding of the British political establishment,

more for reasons of popular opinion, but it's a change in their own view of individual freedom and morality, that they are not on the winning side here, that this is enraging people as it should, and that this is utterly untenable. And you mentioned that case of Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for 31 months. When that happened, when that sentence was imposed,

I went back and looked at the judge, who sentenced her to prison for some of his cases. I found a case and wrote about it where he gave a pedophile who had a thousand images of child pornography, including 200 at what the UK law calls category A, which is the most serious. And you can, well, you can infer what the most serious type of child pornography might be. He gave that guy zero days in jail. and 31 months for an admittedly stupid and quite unpleasant tweet, there's a rot in, you know, the UK democratic system, frankly the European system where political establishments,

judiciaries have decided that it is better to corral potentially offensive opinion rather than let it vent against itself and, you know, trust in the people to find a way forward, And of course, the problem that that breeds, which you see in the UK increasingly with these escalating protests, civil disorder, is that people feel they're losing a stakeholder in their own country. That it's their freedom and their tradition of, you know, their democratic tradition has been taken away. And so, you know, I do think there will be a change here either because the Labor government of Kirstama, changes it or because frankly, you know, Nigel Farage becomes the prime minister, you know, or a conservative leader, and then it changes. So, you know, democracy will, I think,

write this wrong, but we should never have got to this face. And again, it is a reminder of why, you know, written constitutional law that obligates, you know, very high standards for Congress and the people to overturn a constitutional legal foundation, why that is so important, because the whims of the moment, the emotion of the moment should not be able to burn a hole through the individual's freedom, which is absolutely what is happening in this case. And again, it's not just about these individuals, right? It's about what message it sends to the people around the rest of the country who, you know, might think, you know what, I don't want to send that tweet that is relatively harmless compared to the one that got someone arrested because the risk to my,

you know, position is too great. And that chilling effect, you know, is profound. So, you know, it's really bad. And I think there has to be a reckoning as well, you know, as we go through this, that people like Mark Rowley, the commissioner, you know, are essentially full of, well, I don't want to use profanity because he was saying exactly the opposite thing. He was threatening to an arrest an American citizen a few months ago for tweets on American soil. And now he sees that the political winds have really shifted. And he's saying, well, we need to see a change in the law. Why don't you think about that a few months ago?

Why don't you think about individual freedom? You know, why is this the deployment structure instead of, you know, prolific gang activity, phone snatches, whatever it might be in London that should be under Eremont. And so there's, anyway, there needs to be a political reckoning here. I think it's beginning to happen. And in a kind of ironic way, just to include, I think it's quite amusing that the source of the perceived criminality, right, the offending posts on X or social media are the individuals who, you know,

who are being persecuted for that, are kind of finding their liberation in the outcry on social media and how that galvanizes, you know, as public opinion to draw attention quickly to an issue because it's not the kind of mainstream media outlets that are saying this is so outrageous in the first few days. It's the social media and then the media outlets kind of catch up and realize, you know, 90% of our readers think this is outrageous. We might want to get on board with it. Where is Megan Markle in all of this? Yeah, sorry, that was my excited high-pitched laugh.

But I was, no, it was, it was whimsical. It was lyrical. It was whimsical. Yeah. I don't know. Probably, probably trying to invent a podcast to do with cookery and bullying of royal staff and the need for privacy while making millions of dollars somewhere. But yeah. Yeah. She's not punching trans people in the balls or laughing about trans people being punched in the balls, presumably. If you see Tom on the street, make sure to snatch his phone so he feels like he's back at home in. Tom Rogan of the Washington Examiner. What a pleasure Tom could keep this going for hours. So I actually just came from a GP news party where Nigel Farage spoke, and people were asking where you were.

People were like, do you know where Tom is? And I was like, I don't actually know where Tom is. And the answer is a couple of people asked me as well as the sad, undeniable truth is I've been here with my sparkling lime waters and was not invited. So fortunately, you invited me to a much better part. Yay, that's right. All right. Well, Tom Rogan, thank you so much for stopping by. Thank you. I want to also shout out to Yohen Grillo, whose subset crashed out. We just mentioned a couple of times.

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quote, Paramount is on the verge of acquiring Barry Weiss's The Free Press and tossing her the keys to CBS News. The deal is on the one yard line, I'm told, according to Byers and Puck. So I watched the Malcolm Gladwell clip that's been going viral in the last couple of days. Megan covered this today on her show, in which you hear Malcolm Gladwell say that he was, quote, ashamed to have gone along with trans ideology related to women in sports. And I think these two things are connected. When I saw that Gladwell clip making the rounds on social media, I thought to myself immediately, if someone had showed this to me in 2021 and said it was from 2025, I would have been shocked. And the same goes with this news of CBS being close to acquiring the free press. I mean,

this is a massive, massive deal, financially a massive deal, but also a really big deal, not just for new media, independent media, but for the media, period. And then for all of us, of course, because as I always say, the media is our window, if you're a member of the public, into public affairs. And if that window is cracked and smudge, what's on the other side of the glass, it's real. But depending on what you're looking through, it looks differently. So you kind of have to now go to every different corner of the window that you're looking at an object on the other side of to try to ascertain what the truth is as best as you possibly can. And the free press was a huge, huge, I mean, a huge part of this movement away from corporate media and as critical as people can

sometimes be of the free press, particularly over the outlet's coverage of Israel, what they did was build up a parallel institution to the New York Times. Barry Weiss left the New York Times, brought with her the institutional knowledge from the Law Street Journal and the Times, and helped build something new. Nellie Bowles, also from the New York Times, helped build something new that was genuinely competitive. And I mean that, genuinely competitive. So it's not to say that I wouldn't have seen the logic in all of this happening. I wouldn't have seen the logic. of Malcolm Gladwell, you know, a few years into the future saying what he said, or CBS coming close to buying the free press, I would see the logic in all of that, because Gladwell is now

reflecting a more obviously true perspective. And the free press has often been much closer to the truth on any given cultural issue than the major media. Truth is what people want in a low institutional trust environment like this one. So it makes sense that the truth would be rewarded in the marketplace. And again, that's something that we've seen happening. We've covered it here a lot. But it happened really, really fast. And that, to me, is what's surprising.

And this came up actually in our conversation with Ali Beth earlier in the show. What seemed like the crescendo or the crowning moment of decades of mounting institutional capture, like Gramscian institutional capture, the long march through the institutions, actually gave way to democratizing technologies

and then the predictable backlash to that long march through the institutions, you know, the backlash to DEI, the backlash to trans ideology, it gave way pretty quickly. And both of those things kind of fed off each other, right? That reactionary backlash to what was happening in the institutions and also the democratizing technologies, you know, suddenly you can have a podcast with a low barrier to entry. It just doesn't cost as much as it did 10 years ago to reach as many people with some level of credibility. and that has advantages and disadvantages.

But major media, I think, is clever to see the value in the free press. Honestly, actually some of my friends, I believe their email list alone. The free press email list alone is worth millions because it is densely packed with influential people, billionaires, you have right in your pocket, one of the most influential email lists, email distribution lists in the world in the freight press. You know, if you move in media circles for the last several years, one thing that's become clear is a lot of people who are in very powerful positions in the business world have been very impressed with the free press, which means they're reading the free press, which means that they're probably on the email list of the free press. I think one person that has in all likelihood been inspired by the free press is Jeff Bezos. And I think that actually changed the way Jeff Bezos was seeing the Washington Post.

If you need tips on that, by the way, please send them to me because I've been trying to track down the story and confirm some of this for a long time. But I think it's also just sort of fairly obvious from the outside that people like Jeff Bezos, Bill Ackman are reading the free press. And that makes their email list very, very valuable. And I would strongly assume, by the way, this is an important part, that an acquisition of the free press is going to come with cuts at CBS. The free press, like other independent outlets, is very influential with much smaller overhead than CBS. And that is the path forward for old media. MSNBC, I'm sorry, MSN now was trying to talk a little bit about some of this recently when they did their rebranding exercise and discussed how they're actually independent media

and like renegades, incredible. But they're realizing that they're going to have fewer resources, and so they have to brand themselves, make the sort of lemonade out of those lemons. of a fractured media environment. And I mean, that's their way to survive. So you kind of try to maintain this lower level, but not an insignificant level of influence and commercial success,

but on the smaller budgets that are demanded by having a fractured landscape. So how does this affect the content? That's a really, really, really big question. It is the key question. The free press, to its credit, has hosted genuine debates on major topics, actually even on Israel.

on some hot-button MAGA controversies, and that is a muscle that has atrophyed at CVS. And so, too, has the network's tolerance for cultural preferences, the cultural preferences of most Americans, people who didn't buy into, for example, the Biden border policies, people who didn't buy into trans ideology, DEI or equity ideology, and on and on.

And so if the free press is captured by the corporate mentality of CBS, which is a real risk when you hand the keys over, to a major corporation, they will also lose their commercial value. Their commercial value right now is being different than CBS. CBS knows that. So the goal for both of these entities, as they merge, assuming that CBS isn't doing a little catch-and-kill action here, which I don't think there's an indication that's happening,

that CBS is sort of buying the free press to kill a competitor and ensure that it stops writing critical pieces about DEI or anything like that, Democrats or anything like that. I don't think there's, I mean, this is, we're talking about Larry Allison's son who's involved in all of this. So that's, that's, you know, a, it's not like it's impossible, but I would say it's, it's also not likely in this case. So if they want to stay competitive, if CBS is buying the free press to remain competitive and influential and a commercial success, that can actually no longer include a middle ground with the like blathering, talking head ethos that has dominated CBS News, the home of Nora O'Donnell, for a long time at this

point. There is no middle ground. You cannot do both of those things. You cannot retain the commercial value of the free press and the old media ethos of CBS News right now. So how does that work? We will have to see. CBS and the free press are going to have to recognize that they will have to have the courage to execute on this. They have to recognize that. They have to have the courage to execute it on it. And especially as the old guard that came so easily to radicals around 2020, just as one example, are then faced with shifting their foundational values once again. And believe me, that is what they did. Truth was relative. This is the fundamental core of all of it. Truth was relative. And now it's not. That is not a small matter. These outlets really did

buy into the idea of, quote, your truth and my truth, because that's what a lot of younger employees, and actually Barry herself has written about this, her letter to the New York Times, was, you know, addressing this to some extent. So it's, we're just talking pure business sense right now, and able to maintain their commercial value to CBS and their momentum and their success. They are going to have to withstand a lot of pressures from the same people inside the company that, you know, had the mentality where, you know, people were leaking their weird Slack chats about Barry at the New York Times, you know, back in 2019 or 2020 or whenever it was. And she eventually founded Free Press as a substack in 2021, which I think was called Common Sense.

That mentality still exists at CVS News. It's not everyone. And the top brass is more resistant to it. and they're more aware that these little internal backlashes and Twitter dustups are not reflective of their audience as a whole. But there are still some people who believe in what I've called in the past, the progressive or bigot binary, that you are either necessarily a full progressive at every turn or you are a bigot. You're not merely somebody who disagrees.

This is a problem that Barry yourself ran into at the New York Times. You're not merely somebody who disagrees. You are a bigot. You are on the wrong side of history. There is no middle ground. You cannot possibly be approaching this conversation with civility and decency because you do not agree that what did Zoran Mamdani say? My favorite tweet of his,

Queer Liberation. Defunding the police means queer liberation. Disagreement with that was tantamount to bigotry and was treated as such. Remember the video of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry, not wanting to go fully along Democratic Farmers, well, DFL, Mayor Jacob not wanting to go fully along with, like, defund or abolish the police. I forget which one it was after George Floyd.

And he was, like, booed out of this protest or out of this, like, memorial gathering because he wouldn't go fully along with it. That video illustrated this binary perfectly. And it does still exist. And again, it's not as powerful as it once was. But there is a remnant inside CBS News. And it makes for bad business and it makes for bad journalism. bad business and bad journalism.

And that is no easy thing to resist. When the institutions have been captured, you may have people like, again, Larry Allison's son who want to make a deal like this work and want to see change at CBS News, but aren't making the minutia decisions, aren't hiring everyone, aren't in charge of all of that. And it's easy for people to eventually cave and give in.

So this is a very interesting deal. It's a very big deal for new media as we've been talking about. So thank you for listening to me, talk through some of the news as it breaks. Really do appreciate it. Appreciate you being here as a reminder. We're here Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 p.m. live. Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 p.m. live. We're probably going to have to – we probably are going to have more fun in the future with your emails and your Instagram questions. So make sure to send those in. I'm Emily at devil make caremedia.com. I was literally responding to some of your emails right before we went to air tonight.

So make sure to send those in, Emily at devil make care media.com. And hey, I'm going to the Heim opening tour night. I'll be there. I'm really excited. And I hope everyone else has fun plans for the next several days to tide you over until I'm back here on Monday at 10 p.m. Once again, I know that is the highlight of everyone's week. To be fair, it is the highlight of my week. on Wednesday nights 10 p.m. live and catch us on podcast afterwards. Appreciate it. See you all soon.