After Party with Emily Jashinsky - FBI Secrets Revealed, WaPo Hemorrhages Staff, & NYT’s Need for Fake Words, with Talcott & Klavan

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Semafor White House Correspondent Shelby Talcott to discuss the new reporting on FBI Director Kash Patel finding ‘burn bags’ of Trump-Russia documents in a secret room, the reality of what’s really going on inside the Trump Admin, if there’s still drama, and President Trump’s diss of Senator Josh Hawley.  Then Emily is joined by Spencer Klavan, Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, to talk about The New York Times’ latest headscratcher, “Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’”  The two discuss why there really are problems for men these days, and take a deeper look at the vibe shift in Hollywood and the corporate world with movies like Eddington and The Naked Gun.  Emily rounds out the show with the latest from Below Deck, the Justin Trudeau/Katy Perry romance rumors, and she takes a big picture look at what’s really happening in the media as The Washington Post hemorrhages its ‘celebrity reporters.’PreBorn: Help save a baby go to https://PreBorn.com/Emily or call 855-601-2229.Delta Rescue: Visit https://DeltaRescue.orgto learn more Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi friends, welcome to After Party. It's 10 p.m. on a Wednesday, so you are in the right place. We are live here Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 p.m. Eastern. Thank you for joining us, whether you're joining us live or you're catching up afterwards on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. We appreciate it. Today we are going to be joined by a couple of great guests, both my friends, Shelby Talcott of Semaphore's White House correspondent for Semaphore and the great Spencer Claven. They're going to fill us in on all kinds of different things. Shelby, we're going to start with. with some serious stuff. And then Spencer and I are going to talk about some serious stuff, but I suspect the discussion will be, let's just go off the rails. He posted a tweet a couple of hours ago that he had already started mixing his drinks. So I'm actually doing the Douglas Brent Margarita

with rum, of course, because of my embarrassing tequila allergy. And that's what we're rocking with. Tonight, we're going to go over new details in the Russia Collusion Investigation, but also some tensions. maybe behind closed doors in the White House. We're going to talk about a new, again, I say this every week, a new New York Times essay that says crazy things about men and women.

It's like they do it every day. I think they're doing it for the show. And also we're going to talk a little bit about Sidney. We talked about that on Monday, but we have to keep talking about it. It's so big. We're going to talk to Spencer about his take on Eddington. We're going to talk to him about his take on naked gun. Why not?

And Jamie Lee Curtis speaking out against a genocide, perhaps. not the subject area that you're thinking of. She's actually talking about plastic surgery. So so much to go over. This evening, I have also some below-deck news that we're going to get to. Let's start, though, of course, by bringing on in the lovely Shelby Talcott, my friend, Shelby, it's so great of you to stay up. I know you have your own regimen, but thank you so much for being here.

I appreciate it. Happy to be here. I've got my high noon tonight. So that is my drink of choice. Of course you do. Well, cheers, Shelby. And I just want to start with this report actually in Fox News that had some interesting details from Cash Patel World. This is about the Russia collusion investigation, but obviously I think we can't talk about it in a vacuum as though Cash Patel himself is not getting significant criticism when it comes to the Epstein investigation. But Brooks Sigmund reported over. at Fox News that sources told Fox that documents, a trove quote of sensitive documents related to the origins of the Trump-Russia probe buried in multiple burnbags in a secret room inside the bureau was discovered. Now, sources told Fox that this burn bag system is used to destroy documents that are designated as classified and that one of the documents, FBI officials stumbled upon in this burn bag situation, happens to be the classified annex of the Durham report, which if you are in deep in the, the sort of Trump-Russia collusion world, you are very familiar with the Durham Report.

If you are not in deep, just know that you probably remember the name John Durham, who could keep track of all of the names in the sordid tale. But that's a big, big, big deal. So Shelby, apparently Cash Patel has turned these documents over to Chuck Grassley. There's some anticipation, it seems to be on the right, that more could be coming from this. But I wanted to ask you, because you covered the dynamics behind closed doors so brilliantly in the second administration, first as you were the unofficial Doge reporter over at Semaphore. And now that Doge is gone, there's still all kinds of stuff to cover behind closed doors.

So am I right to suggest this can't be viewed outside of that vacuum, or it can't be viewed within a vacuum, that there's something here happening where Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, people who talked a lot about Jeffrey Epstein before the Pambondi memo just a couple of weeks ago, are going overboard now. I shouldn't say overboard because that implies that these disclosures aren't in and of themselves significant, but they are working very hard now to sort of prove loyalty to Trump and to the cause. Is that right?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a fair take because I can't think, I think you can't underscore when this all started coming out, right? It was sort of at the height of the Epstein files when everybody was mad at Donald Trump and the Trump administration, they were mad at cash, they were mad at Dan Bongino, They were mad at Pambondi.

And then Gabbard came in and kind of swooped in with this big story that is sort of red meat for the base, not to say whether it's legitimate or not, but it is something the base is notoriously interested in. And it's just interesting that it came at this time. And you know that they've been looking into this because you had Cash Patel a few months ago on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he mentioned this sort of finding a bunch of documents in a room. So you know that this has sort of been something that they've been looking into for months. This isn't something that just came about over the past few weeks, but it's notable that it is just now coming to the public eye,

and we're just now talking about it. Yeah, and so where do you see this going? Because Donald Trump has been hitting it really, really hard. And, you know, that's not surprising, obviously. because it's a significant, maybe we could say it's a distraction. He almost put it explicitly last week that way. He said, the witch hunt you should be concerned about is over here. So, Shelby, with your knowledge of kind of MAGA world and the machinations behind the scenes over at the White House, if you were talking, let's say that I was Barack Obama, not a role I often stepped into,

but I'll do it here for the sake of this conversation. Would you be telling me, like, yeah, this is real, like they have every intention of pursuing this as far as it goes for them? I think that they do. I think that they're genuine in trying to take this as far as it goes. I think the question is, is it possible to take it any further, right? Obama was president. It's been pretty well established this presidential immunity standard because of Donald Trump, in part. And so I think the question is, how would they prosecute him? And I don't, I haven't gotten that answer, and maybe that is they're keeping it private or they don't know. But I think that is a really important question is where does this ultimately end up? Because you're talking

about Obama a lot, and he was president of the United States. That matters. So that, I think, is the most important question of all of this, is regardless of what comes of this, whether it is, you know, you have people on the left saying this is all kind of BS nonsense, that it is a distraction from Epstein. You have people on the right who are really jinned up about it and really excited and say that this is a big news cycle and that Obama should be convicted. But the ultimate question is, how are you going to get there? And so I don't see where this ends because I don't see how you can do that to a former president because we've been down that road with Trump, basically, in a different way. Right. The Supreme Court, as you mentioned, the Supreme Court's immunity decision

is there. So do you have a sense? Because this might be, you know, if you were again, hypothetically talking to Obama, this might be helpful for Obama or John Brennan or Clapper to hear. And it's just helpful for all of us, I think, to know. Do you have a sense of how the White House sees the politics of this story? Like, are they, is it your sense that they are very excited about the political juice that can be squeezed out of the story? And again, for the sake of this, we're not talking about the substance of the story. We're talking about how the kind of internal dynamics at the White House are approaching it. So is it your sense that they're actually very excited about this and want to like really be milking it for the next couple of years, maybe even

more? Yeah, I think I think they are excited about it. They see this as politically advantageous, both because it is something that the base has been interested in, because it is something that targets Democrats, because it is coming at a time when they're taking a lot of heat from Epstein. And you can tell that they're really interested in it because you were at that briefing last week when they had Tulsi Gabbard come out. That's unusual for them to have any guest, let alone, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, DNI. And so you've heard Donald Trump talk about it. Whenever he's asked about the Epstein files, half the time lately, he sort of reverts back and starts talking about Obama now. And so this is certainly something that they want to keep in the news.

They want to keep focused on it. When I talk to people who are involved in this effort, they sort of indicate to me also that it is just starting, that it is something that is sort of in the beginning of in terms of investigating, in terms of sort of potential criminal proceedings. I think that this is sort of maybe step three in 50 in the administration's ideal world. Okay, so that's fascinating. And you have better sourcing than me, so I'm curious to test this out on you. I sent that after the uproar over the Bondi-Ebstein memo, there were real tensions and fissures in the administration that kind of threatened the cohesion that stands in stark contrast with Trump 1.0, which was not coherent or cohesive, I should say.

The people were constantly fighting. They weren't on the same ideological page. They weren't on the same political page. This has been completely different than that. And I did sense everyone who was chasing down leads when the rumor that Dan Bongino was actually going to leave his role as Deputy FBI director probably since. there actually were some significant tensions over the Epstein case. And so two-part question for you then, Shelby, one, has this new cycle or this kind of new referral over to the DOJ for investigations into Clapper, Comey, Brennan, and particularly now Obama, has this sort of satisfied or brought people back to the same team in any way?

And are some of those still, part two here, is are some of those tensions still percolating in the background or have they all kind of gotten back on the same page? I think that for this specific investigation, the team of the Trump administration is united, right, in sort of trying to find out more information. But to say that because of that, there are still not fissures would be inaccurate. I think that Cash Patel and Dan Bongino are still extremely frustrated over the handling of the Epstein files. I think that there's still a lot of anger at Pam Bondi. I don't think that that goes away just because they're kind of working together on this Obama stuff and Russia Gate. I think both things can be true

at once. They're working together on one thing, but there's still a lot of anger. And one of my questions that I have is long term, how are they all going to be able to work together? Because there's real, real significant animosity. I mean, to the point where Dan Bongino was literally ready to resign a few weeks ago over the Epstein files. And he's still really frustrated. And Cash Patel is also really frustrated. They're handling it in different ways, but the frustration is certainly still there. Well, can you tell us more about that, how they're handling it in different ways? And even just because, again, if you're not someone that's super well-sourced in the White House and in the administration, you actually might not be seeing any of this because

Bonjino and Patel have done a fairly good job of making any of those tensions. kind of look invisible to, again, somebody who's not well sourced in the White House or in the administration. But your point here, what you're saying is that this is still real and still simmering. So what do we know from your reporting behind the scenes of what's going on there? Well, I think in terms of how they're handling it differently, you have, Cash Patel is a little bit more measured. He was pretty quick to come out with a statement on Twitter that kind of contradicted what everybody was hearing, basically saying that he is, you know, confident in everything and that he stands behind the president. That is not what I was hearing behind the scenes.

There was a real frustration there. Whereas you had Dan Bongino who really let those rumors about his frustration fly. And he's come out since then on true social, on X. There's too many social media platforms and basically said, sent this cryptic message about how since becoming deputy FBI director, he has sort of uncovered all of this information and all these sort of nefarious things without going into detail. And so he's much more public, I think, in his sort of, maybe not overt criticism, but his complaints. And he's more willing to kind of let some of those rumors fly than cash patelle is. I got to ask you, we can put F2 on the screen. This is a really interesting dust up between Josh Hawley and Donald Trump. And it's one, again, we could say this

over and over until the cows come home, or maybe there's the single cow comes home. But this is Trump going after Senator Josh Hawley, who is one of the staunchest mega populists in the upper chamber and frankly in the entire sort of Republican elected Republican Congress group. And so Trump lashed out over the stock situation, the stock trading ban that's being punted back and forth in Congress right now. Why would one Republican, Trump says, Senator Josh Hawley from, he put Republican in quotes, by the way, from the great state of Missouri, joined with all the Dems to block a review is sponsored by Senator Rick Scott.

And with the report of almost all, support of almost all of the Republicans of Nancy Pelosi, he's stock trading over the last 25. years. He keeps on going and going, accuses Josh Hawley. It says Dems are using him to, and he got him elected twice as a pawn to help them. I wonder why Holly would pass a bill that Nancy Pelosi is in absolute love with. He is playing right into the dirty hands of the Democrats. And he calls Holly then a second tier senator. This is, I mean, again, Shelby, I don't think it's completely surprising because what we're hearing is that the White House doesn't want Holly's ban to include people at the executive level, so presidents, vice presidents, all of that. And so it's not shocking

that Trump would be upset with Josh Hawley for pushing it, but it also doesn't go into effect for a couple of years. So Trump presumably wouldn't be president anymore. I think it's 2029, something around there when it goes into effect by the bill. And Holly has been a champion for the Trump agenda, although he was very frustrated with the Medicaid cuts that ended up in the one big beautiful bill. He voted for it and he didn't really raise much of a fuss, even though he could have over the bill. He raised a little bit. So on top of that, another thing going on in like deep policy world is what's happening with Gail Slater and antitrust world over at the Department of Justice. So we're kind of doing a tour here of all of the different divides in MAGA world at the

moment right now, Shelby. But MAGA antitrust world that had Gail Slater's back now feels like she's really genuinely threatened at the Department of Trust, Anti-Trust Division, Department of Justice's anti-trust division, where she's been sort of going against the corporate world, and it's just all a complete mess. But I think I'm curious, Shelby, if you're hearing people in MAGA populist world, like populist populist, not just kind of mega vibe world, but mega-policy populist world. Are people getting depressed? Is it still too early? Like, what the hell is going on with all of this? I think it's a little early, but I think that from people I've talked to, they're certainly viewing all of this as sort of warning signs. I think one of the things,

the big sort of pluses that Trump folks will cite in this administration versus the first administration was the first administration was literally nonstop chaos, right? You had Donald Trump hiring people, firing people, there were fights breaking out. They did not really try to hide it. It was drama all the time. And one thing that this administration has done really well, in part because you have Susie Wiles, Donald Trump's chief of staff, who is very sort of rigid in having a no-nonsense team. Plus, you have Donald Trump who has picked loyalists this time around people that he truly

trusts is there's been a lot less drama. And so when I talk to people, there is concern that this is sort of sort of. starting to bubble over into sort of the Trump 1.0 type drama. I think with the Holly situation, people were especially confused because the stock bill specifically would, at least according to Holly, would not apply to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. And so I don't know, you know, I've heard theories from these folks that Donald Trump didn't quite understand that and sort of just looked at this bill that Josh Hawley. and several Democrats voted for and said, okay, right?

If this is a bill that a bunch of Democrats support, it's got to be bad. And sort of immediately took that as this is a personal attack against me. I'm curious to see what he says tomorrow about it, because I have a feeling in the next few days he might either drop it or he might be asked about it and sort of say something very different because before he came out with that post, also he had said that he liked, the Holly bill conceptually, like that he was okay with it. So it's kind of a confusing thing that makes me think, and based on people I've talked to, that he might just not fully understand

this specific incident. So I'm not sure that that's going to become sort of a long-term drama. That's very interesting. There are a lot of fun facts about you, Shelby, but the one that is most fun is that you were a professional tennis player, and I know that people probably use that as the fun fact about you all of the time. washed up now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, washed up tennis pro. So this was going to ask down that you have the high noon. Do you ever have some highnoons and hit the court? Like, does that make you better? Does it make you worse? It makes you worse. No, not you. Actually, though, I will say, I think, I mean, I never did it when I was like training or playing a tournament, but some, you know,

every once in a while, late at night after a tournament was over, we'd have a drink and then maybe do it. I do think it helps a little bit with your mental, you know, if you're like two in your head and you have a beverage or two, you kind of relax a little bit. But I can't say it helps your like physical tennis game necessarily. Yes, but, but as we all know, 90%, 99% is mental. Only one percent is physical. Maybe I should have been chuging high noons before every match. You're even a chug. Potentially not be here. I would have been at the US Open in a few weeks. Yes. This is actually. Actually, I think we might have just landed on something.

You could put it in one of those camelbacks. You don't even need to chug it. You could just consistently drink it. Nobody needs to know. I mean, I think I just gave you a billion-dollar idea. I'm quitting semaphore. This is my comeback tour. Shelby Talga, White House correspondent at Semaphore.

Go follow Shelby. Read her newsletter, follow her work. Shelby, thank you so much for being here and for staying up late. Thanks, having a little drink with us. See you soon. Okay, let me tell you a story about a guy named Leo Grillo. While on a road trip, Leo came across a Doberman, and this dog was severely underweight and clearly in trouble. Leo rescued that Doberman and named him Delta.

Sadly, Delta was just one of many animals that needed help, which inspired Leo to start Delta to rescue, the largest no-kill, care for life, animal sanctuary in the world. They provided thousands of dogs, cats, and horses from the wilderness. Rescued thousands of dogs, cats, and horses from the wilderness, and they provide their animals with shelter, love, safety, and a home. This dedication and everlasting love to animals is Leo's mission and legacy Delta Rescue relies solely on contributions from people like us. And if you want caring for these animals to be part of your legacy, speak with your estate planner because there are tax-saving estate planning benefits too. You can grow your estate while letting your love for animals live well into the future. Check out the estate planning tab on their website to learn more and speak with an advisor.

We call a dog man's best friend for a reason. You can help those who need it most. So please visit deltarescue.org today to learn more. more, that's deltarescue.org. Spencer Claven is with us now. I actually don't know how Spencer feels about dogs. Spencer, yes or no, you're a cat person. I think you're a cat person. Well, I currently have a cat, but Emily, what do you take me for?

And all good Americans are dog people at heart, I feel. If the Brits are cats, then Americans are dogs spiritually. I do currently, though, have a cat. He's very dog-like. So if the Brits are cats, then Americans are dogs. spiritually and yet you have a cat and purport to stand up for the United States of America. It's a black mark on my record I can see, but I'm a well-known Anglophile, and, you know, I make no apologies for that. So I guess that's part of it. To say the very least, that's a black

mark. Now, what's your cat's name? My cat's name is Tank, although online he goes by the moniker Chad Cat, and that's because he likes lifting whites. Now, I guess I should properly introduce Spencer, instead of just calling him a cat lover, I will call him. That's my lower third, actually. Cat lovers. In Cairo. Censerclavin, cat haver. No, cat lover and cat haver.

Anglophile, associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books. Off to a great start here. I'm really not endearing myself for the audience. Yeah, great. He's also author of a wonderful book called Light of the Mind, Light of the World, illuminating science through faith, which I highly recommend. So Spencer, thanks for joining us. Thanks for, I guess, taking care of your cat.

Oh, yeah. My cat appears in all of my books, including Letter and Mind, The World. So if you want to know more, and he's in a footnote in the next one that I'm working on now. Oh, I didn't know you were working on another book. Can you tell us anything about that? Yeah, I can. It's called actually the title I can't yet reveal, but it is about how language makes us human, which is an ancient philosophical idea, but it now has this new importance in the age of AI when

large language models are starting to maybe produce the kind of language that humans produce. So it's all about our humanity and how language defines it. Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, I'm excited to read that. All of your books are great. Let's start actually getting your take by getting your take on this wonderful New York Times article speaking of, well, actually, I don't even want to set this up too much.

The headline is why women are weary of the emotional labor of quote-unquote mankeeping. And Spencer, as somebody who's currently working on a book about language, please explain to me for the love of God why the New York Times feels the need to keep injecting fake words into our discourse. Okay, well, I was told that I was allowed to drink on this podcast. Not allowed. Yeah, required. Yes, sir. Okay, right, good. Well, I definitely, it's required, I think, to have a very stiff drink to get through most New York Times articles.

I personally am weary of the emotional labor of reading New York Times think pieces by women about men. It's not good for men. It's not good for men. It's a problem. It's really, I'm going to take a quick sip of this marketing. No, please do. I can keep talking about how bad the New York Times is for men all day. I mean, it's fantastic.

It should come. This is what RFK Jr. should be doing. You should put it health warnings on New York Times articles written by women about men because that seems, get that through Congress. Absolutely. The problem with men is they're being subjected to think piece after think piece about the problem with men in the New York Times. Yeah, mankeeping is, I think, what technically we call a neologism. We linguists a new word. And it's probably part of the larger category known or the smaller category known as AlgoSpeak.

Have you ever heard that term before? Okay, yeah. So you know about this. I think Taylor Lorenz was the first to popularize this, maybe. A fellow scholar. That's right, yeah, a serious thinker and linguist, if ever there was one. Yeah, mankeeping is not keeping your man, which you would think would be the problem of the kind of person who would write this article. But it's tending to your man, as a la the illustration of this piece, right, that women feel put upon by the necessity of supporting the men that they're with emotionally, encouraging them to go out and.

do things with their friends, providing for their emotional needs. In other words, being in a relationship and or a marriage with a person. I mean, this is really quite a remarkable piece. It's one of a number of pieces that have come out in the Times recently. Kind of, it's like anthropological fieldwork done by New York Times reporters into this strange phenomenon called masculinity. It's like suddenly we've realized that after Trump's re-election, there's some sort of problem with men. And men don't have enough spaces where they can congregate altogether. They don't feel that they can be their authentic selves.

Why might that be? Oh, I know. I have one suggestion. Maybe it's because of the decades of times berating men ceaselessly for hanging out together, the legal campaigns that have been waged against all male spaces, the fact that even organizations like the Boy Scouts now are being forced to admit women. I mean, this is like a category of peace that I think of us. Here's a problem that we caused. Now we're here to solve it, right? I mean, it's really an amazing article. But they're not even trying to solve it. I guess they're trying to diagnose it. Well, I guess maybe you're right. They're trying to solve it in the most

like bizarre possible way by giving it a name. I guess the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. But what was it last week? They tried to mainstream the word heteropessimism, which they pulled from some corner of some faculty lounge, presumably deep in the Oberlin campus. And it's like I have to imagine. So I have the definition here in front of me of mankeeping, which is, you know, it's kind of interesting. It says women's partners have become their unofficial therapists doing all the emotional labor. I just hate the phrase emotional labor. And that particular role now is name. Mankeeping the term coined by Angelica Putsio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. Okay, so I stand corrected, not Oberlin, but Stanford,

has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional. Also, another phrase that is just loathsome needs of the men in their lives from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil. Again, I, Let me just read that sentence one more time. Supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil to encouraging them to meet up with their friends. Does that sound unusual in any way to you, Spencer? This is like the funny part about this piece if you read into it is that most of it, like I would say about 60% of it is just a blow by blow of like one fight that a couple had.

It's Eve and Glenn. And I guess Eve got a little miffed because Glenn was relying on her to set up their whole social calendar. The really galling part about this to me is this is an actual problem. Male loneliness is a real thing. Loneliness in general in the age of the Internet, the kind of decline in friendship, the replacement of real in-person friendship with these like commoditized likes and social media clicks. All of that 100% real. and especially real, I think, for men,

but part of the reason that men are having a tough time with this is because, and I know that this is a really radical thought that you probably aren't permitted to say on this show, but men and women tend to be different. They tend to behave differently, to act differently. And this is one of the strange anthropological facts at the New York Times is like trying to get its head around, but not really succeeding. And so now, you know, the idea that men are lonely, that men have these issues is like suddenly impossible to ignore. It's been aggravated so badly.

Kind of like the problem at the border or Biden's age, you know, got bad enough that finally we had to say maybe this is an issue. But all of the relevant ways that you might address this problem are off limits at the New York Times. Like you can't discuss the ways in which men might, for instance, prefer to focus together on an activity rather than directly on socializing. There's some social science, I think, to back up the idea that, you know, there are different ways that men connect. They tend to be really driven and goal-oriented, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe it would be good if they had some social clubs. These are all completely taboo subjects. So you're left with this raft of think pieces about like, oh, I don't know, maybe.

Maybe men need to go to therapy more or something, something, something. It's quite amazing. I'm so glad you said that because they did talk a quote from Richard Reeves, who wrote a decent book on the subject a few years ago. It was called Of Boys and Men. And he's the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. And he acknowledges, and the New York Times acknowledges in the piece, that some of these are totally real problems that many of the institutions and spaces

where men used to organically make friends and have eroded, said Reeves, like houses of worship, civic groups, and even the simple workplace. And it occurs to me, Spencer, that as you were talking, the New York Times spent the last decade plus eroding the distinctions biologically between men and women, and that had myriad downstream consequences. There were all kinds of things that, from serious to funny, that happened because they started eroding these distinctions. And they seem not to be aware that mainstream, quote unquote, mainstream media, academia,

which we are now increasingly filtering men through, really did change the culture and in ways that have made men more lonely. So as a lonely cat having man, could you please walk us through what some of those, I'm kidding. Walk us through what some of those actually problems that have stemmed from this eroded distinction between men and women. That's had real life consequences. So what does that look like in the real world? Yeah. It looks like having a cat, I guess.

They just just biding, die alone. My cat eats my eyeballs or whatever is supposed to happen. Many such cases? After they die. Many such cases, yeah. It's been known to happen. No, but, you know, if I think about the really deep, valuable male friendships in my life, and I am lucky to have many, they have all evolved out of shared endeavor.

And sometimes, though not always, shared endeavor in all male spaces. So I was in college, true to form, I was part of an acapella group that was all. all male, has since gone co-ed. But a lot of those friendships, right? It's like you're together, you're doing things. And as you say, those in-person kind of male-coded activities, like barbershop quartets, for example. But more seriously, sports clubs and boy scouts and these sorts of things have become

completely unacceptable and, in fact, have been often legally challenged on the basis of civil rights law. and other legislation. Great point. To like take these things apart on purpose. And so now what you end up with is basically like, men, we want you to express your feelings and make friendships. Oh, no, no, not like that. Men, we really need you to get together and gather in, you know, in friendship groups. Oh, no, no, not like that, right?

Having shut off all of the routes to natural male friendship, all these people can do is attempt to attempt to kind of manufacture it in this really stilted way. And I think this is one reason why, for the first time, probably in my lifetime, the left is kind of losing the culture because they've shut themselves off from the sort of natural wellsprings of just normal human life. You know, I know we're going to talk about the Sydney-Sweeney thing maybe a little bit later in there, the freak out. No, let's do it now.

Oh, okay, yeah. We'll do it live. Let's do it live. Call in an audible. That's when the Martinez gets into me. Just throw the script out the window. Well, you know, this Sydney-Sweeney ad comes out for jeans, and the pun that it makes is, you know,

Sidney-Sweeney has good genes because Sidney-Sweeney's a smoke show, and this is like clearly a joke about how she is beautiful, but also she has these good genes that she gets from, I guess, American Eagle. Not mid. That's the joke, not mid. Absolutely not mid. Well, that's already like three steps into Sweeney-Gate. discourse, which we are on day three by my recollection of public nationwide. It's true. We have not yet discussed Sydney Sweetie's genes to their full extent. No, we've not yet peaked. When we're on

month three of Sweetie Gate, then we can revisit this. So, Spencer, this is how you know it's summer, the silly season, as they call it in new cycles. So keep going with this point. So here's this ad. Okay, right. So here's this ad. Completely unobes. objectionable ad, very similar to, in fact, even probably taking off on an ad from the 80s with Brooke Shields that made the same pun, pretty obvious pun. And there's no rocket science involved. He talks about her genes. Like, you're trying to tell your product. There is this still very dedicated coterie of opinions whose whole we we might be losing Spencer because of his internet but I just

absolutely cracked up at the way he said coterie coterie um cooterie it looks like Spencer's back so keep on telling us about the coterie sorry about that this is the interference of the anti Sydney Sweeney contingent that that are trying to saw me from getting this point out. This is Abercrombie. So there's this, there's this. That's right.

They knew that their competitor was starting to gain traction. And so they said, we must shut this podcast down. Right. Right. So, you know, this coterie of opinion havers lives off of freaking out about totally normal and making other people feel bad about them. And so they pounce on this because the culture is, moving back toward a kind of normal.

What has been normalcy in American life for decades and decades. And what most people consider to be, frankly, unremarkable. Like, nobody would have commented on this had not people said, this is about eugenics. This is about an unapologetic shift toward whiteness. And Trump 2.0, whatever else you want to say about his reelection, as a cultural moment, it really did explode

the kind of cloud of fear that was suffocating people about this sort of thing. And so now you have like page three, four, and five of this discourse is like, Sidney's not even all that good looking,

and she's really just there to dog whistle, to Trump-loving maniacs. But I don't know that this is really carries any water anymore. Like I just, think that once that spell is broken, people look at this and rightly say, are you on crackling?

What are you even talking about? And there's something so out of touch about this and about the man keeping discourse that I think the best reaction to it and probably in some ways the trumpiest reaction is just to laugh and say like, what are you on? I think we're going to say to drink. And to drink. Which we will do here. So actually, On that note, I wanted to get your take. You've written about this at New Jerusalem, the New Jerusalem sub-sac, which people should also follow

such an interesting discourse that you have going on with your father, and just a novel concept. That's lovely. But you've written on Eddington. I also want to ask you about Naked Gun, Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson together, an item. But Pamela Anderson doesn't wear makeup anymore,

and there's all kinds of sex and gender stuff to dive into. Let's first, though, take a look here at the Eddington trailer. This is S3. Is that praying? Where the air and the antel plays. How did we get here? And even worse, is it worth it? At the cost of being at war with your neighbors?

That's why I'm running from there. Mayor Eddington. Thank you, super-duper very much. I used to think that you were some big deal. But I am a much better human man. So Spencer, conservatives are loving this film. Obviously, so much of what we just discussed in terms of sex and gender exploded during the COVID years, and it's exploring some classic American Western themes against the backdrop of the pandemic. I actually have not seen it yet. I'm very

excited to see it, but tell us kind of what you took away from the movie in that broader context of where the culture is going. Well, exactly as you say, this is a COVID retrospect. And we haven't really had that many of those. In fact, I think people are really happy to forget about those deranged years for the most part, especially the timeframe of this movie, which is May 2020. So it's the George Floyd explosion and the summer of love that ensued, the mostly peaceful summer of love. And I think what has caught on about this movie is that it's not a right-wing movie by any stretch of the imagination. There's plenty of criticism of right-wing conspiracy theories.

You might even say that the right-wing character in it, played by Joaquin Phoenix, ends up being kind of the villain, if there is one. But it portrays accurately the fact that this was a moment of national derangement. And the primary source of that derangement was the reaction to COVID and then the sort of knock-up effect of the George Floyd mania. And my own take, I don't think this is Ariasters' take, and I wrote at the New Jerusalem a little bit about why I think Ariaster kind of tends to not stick the landing in his movies. But my own take about this moment is that this was our first national confrontation with the inescapability of death in quite some time. We live in this very comfortable

hyper-technological society, and we had fooled ourselves into thinking that we were progressing toward a moment where all risk would be eliminated. And that was the philosophy that drove the COVID reaction was, here's this fatal thing. It's unacceptable that anyone should die of it. Therefore, we have to shut down our entire lives to keep any person from dying of this disease. And the first truth of all religion is, like, you ain't going to get there in this life. That they're actually, we live in this fallen world. And there are terrible things that happen. And to be confronted with that and with the impotence, even of our best technology,

our best central planning, our best bureaucratic norms and et cetera, the fact that we couldn't stop COVID from happening. In fact, we made its effects worse in many cases, especially for kids, especially in the schools, drove us insane. And yes, there were some right-wingers who also then went insane in reaction to the crazy leftist response. But fundamentally, this was a kind of psychotic break triggered by... It's not a nice way to talk about Michael Knowles, Spencer. I've said it.

I'm getting. So say it here, yeah. Well, yeah, on that point, so the impotence of technology even, I think is a good way to put that as you sort of a driving factor of what ends up. So I was surprised that kind of maha comes out. And I wonder what your thoughts are on how 2024 seemed to be the moment when a lot of people in elite spaces caught up with the culture itself and realized

that there was this vibe shift happening between under their noses that the public, even not the Republican public, but the public more broadly was really starting to reject this buildup of peak woke, capital P, capital W, and say, no. And maybe, Spencer, this is going to be a bit of a Trumpian weave. This is where we end up getting a new naked gun. Let's roll us for.

Over here, Lieutenant, I think someone murdered my brother. Please, take a chair. Thank you. I'll find them. This is what I do. says you serve 20 years for man's laughter you mean man slaughter must have been quite the joke they're going to shut down police squad if you do not solve this case do this by the book why who's going to arrest me other cops yes is she serious is he serious he's no

the hot shot going to get cops it seems this is driving might be more of a problem than we thought before COVID where everyone was pining, and actually in the early days of COVID, where everyone was pining for the slap sick comedies of millennial yore, Spencer, and obviously Nick again is older than those kind of hangover, stepbrothers, typeflex. But is Hollywood picking up on that message? I mean, Eddington is obviously an example of a COVID retrospective, wanting to re-explore some of this and wanting to kind of take the strictures off and to say we're going to be a little bit braver than Hollywood would have been in May 2020

and explore this without fetters. But is that also what's happening here with naked gun? I think it is, actually. Yeah, I mean, this is a normal people's revolution. And I think Trump called it that at one point. Back in 2020, I think I wrote a piece called the Party of Normal People. And it was basically just saying, look, the future doesn't actually belong to these crazy woke It doesn't even belong to guys like me who write right-wing takes online because we're also too brain-rodded from the internet.

It belongs to people that want to live in the basically normal world of basic realities. Like there are men and there are women. They're the same species, but they have many differences. You know, we want to keep deaths to a minimum, but we want to live life, you know, even in the midst of, of, our problems, all of these sort of very, very general and widely popular ideas that have suddenly become completely beyond the pale. And what I think is so interesting about the naked gun nostalgia and the Sidney-Sweeney nostalgia for like the Brook Shields era. And even Eddington to a certain degree is like the thing that's being harkened back to is not actually

trad. Like, it's not even trad. It's not, you know, like homestead cottage where we turn our butter and like paw comes in with the hides from the farmstead. It's like, you know, 1980s American culture. And that culture was itself. Top gun. Yeah, Top Gun. Exactly. It was like full of sex. It was full of violence. You know, it was it was liberated in all of the ways that at the time the left was arguing for. And I don't think people are nostalgic for anything other than that because I think that's basically where the center of gravity in American culture is.

And for a while, we lived in this artificial world where that was forbidden. But now you're having people, young people, especially, who haven't been here for all of the deranged fights that we've been having. They're looking around and being like, wait, the Sidi, Siddi Sweeney, Sweeney, Sweeney, I don't get what's wrong with that. Like, explain to me. what's wrong with that. Explain to me what's wrong about like observing and laughing in a friendly way

about racial differences. Explain to me what's wrong with like joshing your gay friend and your gay friend joshing you back, you know. And and we can't. We can't. Nobody can explain that. It's not not allowed. Required. I need like a permission slip. Absolutely. I wave my magic gay wand over this, over this podcast to, to to endorse all gay jokes. No, seriously, like, you know, and the reason the left hates that is because that's how people, and harkening back to the men issue, that's how men especially make friends, is with friendly joshing and ribbing. And that has been forbidden.

And now you have all these people who are looking around being like, wait, why is it forbidden again? What's wrong? And we can't explain. Nobody can explain why there is anything evil about the Sydney Sweeney ad. Nobody explained for that reason why there is anything evil about America, which is really the central claim behind all of this is that America is a fundamentally racist nation. And you look around and you say, well, why? How exactly? And I think that like this is what one of the things that gives me hope, cautious optimism about Gen Z is that they lived in the world of COVID madness. And now that is the orthodoxy that they are questioning, and that's a completely irrational orthodoxy.

So there's no defense for it. And it's, yeah, normal people's natural impulses that will tear it apart, I think. Yeah, your normal people revolution coincides well with your point that the center of gravity is sort of what many people, Matthew Walter, first described as barstool conservatism. And that's vindicated in terms of like where the country is and where the center of gravity is, which is sort of libertine social ethics, anti-woke, anti-socialist, but the different sort of priorities is where they rank, and we could debate that. But I also wanted to disagree slightly.

And maybe this isn't a disagreement. I'm actually curious because the center of gravity with the Barclosso-conservative shirt, there's something very interesting. And I think both of you and I agree on this happening in a concerning way with some reactionary stuff. I don't see reactionary as a pejorative, like a lot of people on the left. But there is something interesting happening that's rejecting more than just, it sort of goes beyond rejecting COVID-era leftism and has started questioning the entire predicate for COVID-era leftism. That is still the predicate for the Center of Gravity, partial conservatism. So let me roll this clip of Pamela Anderson talking about not wearing makeup.

Talk about someone, by the way, who's been through the ringer based on that predicate of peak woke leftism. We'll talk about this more, Spencer, but here's S6. But it was just me challenging myself, thinking, why am I sitting in a makeup chair for three hours when no one's looking at me? Like, what am I? And even if they were, why am I doing this? Because this just seems like a habit. And not that I'm opposed to makeup because I love getting dressed up and glammed up. And I just felt like it was time to, I had nothing to lose.

And I felt I'm not trying to create. a persona right now. I'm not trying to be famous. I need to use my position to experiment and open up conversations. Okay, so two other elements to get to here. Pamela Anderson is dating Liam Neeson, apparently. This is F5. I think they confirmed it actually today, Spencer, which is such a fascinating couple. Liam Neeson, like this high-octane action star, a highly regarded actor, and now in slapstick, naked gun, reboot. Certainly somebody who's had a wonderful sense of humor throughout. his career, but is absolutely like a Hollywood, a rare staple of Hollywood masculinity. Maybe a dying breed we'll see.

And also, Jamie Lee Curtis, as she is promoting Freakier Friday, has condemned the genocide, Spencer, not the one that many people might think of when you hear that, but actually the genocide that has eliminated or eradicated a generation of women. And I have to say, Spencer, it's tough language. I kind of agree with her. This is my personal Afghanistan is what they did to Madonna. You know, like, it is it's definitely. Wait until they come for Gaga.

Oh, my goodness. I can't, no. At that point, I'm just going to retire into my, into my cups. Yeah, like the language is overwrought. It's a classic example of how these terms. terms get cheapened. I think they call it concept creep, right? You start with actual genocide and you end up with like it was genocide when, when like, you know, Chris Evans wouldn't take my calls or whatever. But Spencer said, I'm not saying, I'm just saying that like you could at least text me to it back. No, but like the, I also am with you that there is something to this that clearly Instagram, face and plastic surgery has gone so over the top that women genuinely are under a kind of

pressure to look perfect, to constantly be upping their game and so forth. And I think that one way that this ties in with your earlier point about the backlash is that if what we're living through is a normal people's revolution, then I think by definition, it's non-ideological. And this is something that's true to large extent of Trump also, that he represents an impulse. And the impulse is, as they say, directionally correct. The impulse is anti-woke, anti-socialist. It's, let's just shrug off all of these speech codes. But the thing that makes it non-ideological is also the thing that makes it potentially a little bit dangerous. Because if we know that we're against too much makeup and we're against too much plastic surgery. We know that we're against

woke speech. Then the next question, what are we for? And there are a lot of people out there who are questioned in various ways with, well, we're for the opposite of the thing that we hate. And I think that you see this in the, to me, appalling return of anti-Semitism into the mainstream of American discourse on the left and the right. You're seeing. seeing this in all sorts of kind of hyper-trad reactions. You see it in the Andrew Tate reaction to feminism. And what the opponents of the normal people's revolution will then instantly say is, look, see, we told you that this was really always just about hatred.

And the task, I think, of people who are in favor of living a kind of normal American life who like America and who like people as they tend to just generally be. Cats. Who like cats. Well, those people should be deported immediately. But everyone else, the dog people, yeah. The dog people and the people that like are in favor of normal life have to insist that just because there are sort of extreme radical distortions of our point of view doesn't mean

that our point of view is the same as those radical distortions. The sad reality is every real deal in human life has negative extremes, right? If you push anything to the nth degree, it's going to become hideous. If you say, well, you know, carrots are good for you. So I'm going to eat 300 carrots a day. You'll get fat, right?

Like this is just a basic rule of life. And I think that we do have this overreaction, predictable but lamentable overreaction. And the task, as always, this is the political task of prudence the ancients would have described it as, is moderating our response so that it doesn't fall into the same kinds of extremism that the left's extremism has been so visibly falling into. It just all sounds so gay, Spencer. Freaking gay. Good. I always feel like I need three hours to do

podcasting with you, Spencer. So sometime we'll have to just do, maybe one time we'll do just a marathon. Because, you know. Three hours, three martinis. Let's make it happen. Oh, no, more than three. What we do one an hour.

Okay. All right, Spencer Claven is an editor over at the Clamont Review of Books, and he has written a wonderful book called Light of the Mind, light of the world. Check out all of Spencer stuff, Falam-Hun social media. And Spencer, we'll do this again soon. Thanks for being here. Can't wait. It's pleasure. Thanks very much. All right. Well, you all know that over the years, I have been perfectly clear that I'm not just pro-birth. I am pro-life, and very proudly so. And being pro-life means standing with mothers not only before their baby is born, of course, but long after. And that is exactly why I partner, again, proudly,

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Preborn is trying to save 70,000 babies this year. So don't just say you're pro-life. Live it. Help save babies and support mothers today. Go to preborn.com slash Emily or call 855-601-2-229. That's preborn.com slash Emily. Now let's get to the real news, the Fed and interest rates. I'm kidding. Below deck.

So below deck, I actually actually, actually have a conflict on Monday nights when we do the show. The show starting Monday nights live at 10 p.m. means that you can't really watch Below Deck live. I love Below Deck. I was a latecomer to Below Deck. I'm very protective of what Bravo is and the Housewives, and for a time, Vanderpump rules, although it probably ended even later than it should have. Maybe we'll do a rant about the Valley in a couple of weeks next week. I have a lot of thoughts, but we'll get to that on a different date. Below Deck had maybe the wildest episode in the history of Below Deck on Monday.

So I finished broadcasting the show. We all went to bed. Everything's good, assuming everyone in the audience went to bed. Not me. I sit up to watch Below Deck. And holy smokes, this Below Deck clip that we're about to roll for you, So a guest got so obliterated that she not only talked about her cats like Spencer Claven. Kidding, she actually didn't talk about her cat.

She talked about how her family was FBI. She just got completely hammered. It was concerning and went off on Democrats. Let's roll S7. No, no, no, no. They're assholes. They're . They're not.

They are. They are. They're not, too. They are. They're fucking Democrats. Democrats. Democrats. Some people don't have been told what to do, you know. She scratched me, just make a wall and just crowd her. They're Democrats. She was calling the crew, I think only one of which is actually American Democrats,

because she was so hammered. She jumped in the water when the captain told her she couldn't. She had to put a life vest on. It was just a disaster. So the good folks at the Daily Mail obviously got to the bottom of the suit. situation. Thankfully, somebody had to do it. So you see this up on your screen. Truth about Trump supporting below-deck guest who was removed by police after drunk meltdown. I should have given you a spoiler report. A spoiler alert. But yes, she was removed by police. Kelly Fury, she was on

this charter in the Caribbean with a repeat charter guest family. And I mean, this was just incredible stuff. I'm trying to see if we can load this picture of her. Yeah, here it is. Come on a yacht. Come on a yacht. And then you get no fun. Isn't that the worst one that happens? Relatable, relatable problems that Kelly had on this edition of Below Deck. But in a strange way, it does sort of relate to the vibe shift we were just talking about with Spencer, which is that if on below deck you have the elite, wealthy, want to be famous guests going off on, the Democrats, you have a problem. And I'm not saying this looked good for Kelly. I wouldn't argue that it looked good for Kelly. But she's got the cameras are all rolling. They're all in her face.

And this woman chose to go off on the Democrats. Now, there is something funny in all of this from the Daily Mail article. The people who were on this charter with her say, this is a quote. This is incredible. Her friend just totally toss her over the, under the bus and the international press.

She says, this is from the mail. Michelle also revealed that the below deck charter wasn't the first time that she had seen questionable behavior from Kelly. Quote from Michelle, if you were at the viewing party with us last night, she was the same way. It's just like incredible. She was a horrible person who was drunk to the point of potentially needing to be hospitalized

last night. So don't worry. This is just who she is. Hopefully we never get to that point on this podcast, but they also, I wanted to mention this before we move on to the Fed, of course. She said, quote, that was the thing that bothered us the most, bringing politics on the boat. You know, that is so true. Worse than disobeying the captain's orders, diving into the water without putting the life vest on, wanting to drive a jet ski after you've had 7,000 drinks. How dare you bring politics?

onto the boat. That's not what boats are for. It's not what politics are for. Politics are for having 25 drinks, getting on a jet ski. Of course, that's a joke. Don't do that. But letting loose, having fun, and the worst thing you could do was bring politics onto the boat. Just incredible. So to all the below deck fans out there, man, congratulations to us on getting an episode. This incredible, it really, really was excellent. And I also have more congratulations in order. this time to Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister Justin, as I call him no longer, of course, but former Prime Minister Justin. And the one and only Katie Perry, I'm just doing gossip at this point.

And it's that time of night. So there's nothing else that we should be talking about, except for the Fed. I promise we'll get to the Fed in just a second. Here is some TMZ footage of Justin Trudeau and Katie Perry at dinner in Montreal. where Katie Perry is on tour right now. Prime Minister Justin and Katie Perry were also, this is actually incredible from the TMZ report. They went on a walk in a park before the dinner.

So as TMZ says, quote, the duo had security trailing them as Justin all smiles dropped Katie and her pet pooch off at the Ritz Carlton, presumably for a quick freshen up before they swapped outfits. and headed out for their dinner session later. Just incredible stuff that Justin Trudeau, disgraced Justin Trudeau, who left office embarrassed, or, let's say, being shamed by people both on the left and the right

in his own country, not being, let's say, from both the right and the left, people saying, why did you go down to Mar-a-Lago and take this smiling picture with Donald Trump? Are you enabling fascism from the left or people on the right saying, why are you making us look weak? Why are you undermining Canadian nationalism, which I will personally reserve my thoughts on for the time being. But Justin Trudeau's rebound from Canada.

So Katie Perry's rebound from Orlando Bloom is Justin Trudeau. Justin Trudeau's rebound from Canada is Katie Perry. Trudeau obviously, of course, was, I think, separated from his wife in 2003, or divorced formally from his wife. 2003, not 2003, 2020. So just a couple of, I think, updates that were important to get to ahead of talking about the Federal Reserve, which I'm kidding. We're not going to talk about the Federal Reserve. Why would we do that? When the Washington Post is hemorrhaging talent, like you wouldn't believe this is another just incredible story. The Washington Post

has lost Glenn Kessler. Glenn Kessler, storied fact checker over at the Washington Post. gone from the paper as these buyouts are absolutely taking so many different high-profile people from the Washington Post down. And I want to talk about this because I do think it's important that Glenn Kessler is being swept out with this buyout. Fox reports, quote, other high-profile writers who have taken the buyouts include columnist Jonathan K-part, Catherine Rampole, Philip Bump, and Joe Davidson. K-Part, Rampel, Bump, some of the most high-profile people at the Washington Post. not including that actually just a couple of hours ago, we learned that Eric Wemple, who does a media column for the Washington Post,

is also taking a buyout. These are post-Bezos buyouts, of course, and that's always worth mentioning. But basically, people inside the Washington Post don't want to go along with new leadership at the Post, and we're on the cusp, genuinely on the cusp, of seeing a totally different Washington Post. And the jury is still out on whether that's good for the Washington Post or bad for the Washington Post because I think whenever you have a billionaire take over a media organization, you have to be deeply skeptical of where that's going, even if, you know, it's

supposed to be the editorial position of the opinion page, you're supposed to be in favor of free markets and American individual values and rights, I should say, as Bezos has said, the new line of the Washington Post is, you of course always have to be skeptical of that. But Kessler, I just want to share some of Kessler's greatest hits. This is a thread actually from Greg Price, who works. Greg is like a Republican. So again, you date that with a grain of salt, but these are actual screenshots from what Kessler gets up to,

what he got up to in his history at the Washington Post. This is a good one. I fear Ted Cruz, tweeted Glenn Kessler, missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts and viewers can judge for themselves.

We in the Washington Post deal with facts, and the lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory. There you got that from the fact checker. Glenn Kessler, who is now going, by the way, to the New York Times. Where else? I'm sorry, Eric Wemple is going to the New York Times. Glenn Kessler, I don't know where he's going.

It's a good question, actually. Glenn Kessler famously, famously, before Joe Biden, crashed and burned at that debate, was fact-checking, quote-unquote, cheapfakes, which it cannot be noted strongly enough was a talking point from the White House that was the Biden White House that was putting out press releases that were basically then just regurgitated by people like Glenn Kessler, who was debunking a cheap fake video of Biden that, quote-unquote, enraptured right-wing media. Here's another one. Tim Scott often talks about his, I can't even read this. Tim Scott often talks about his grandfather and cotton.

There's more to that tale. My God, Glenn Kessler and your editors, what on earth were you thinking? Is this the death of fact-checking? I don't know. I think probably what this really is is the media, the sort of died in the wool, major outlet journalists in Washington, D.C. in New York City, revolting against a billionaire telling them that their paper should be more right-wing than left-wing when Bezos had previously been content with a paper that was more left-wing than right-wing.

When Bezos was doing an anti-Trump stick and allowed the leadership to slap democracy dies in darkness on their masthead, people like Glenn Kessler and Eric Wampel, who, by the way, has done one of the most definitive takedowns of the Russia collusion narrative that was spread by the Washington Post, to his own credit. You should go back there. It makes for great reading. There's a whole page of Wemple debunking Russia collusion on the Washington Post website, although, of course, their coverage of it still suffers from seemingly not having read

their own coverage that was criticizing their own coverage. But all of this is, I think, representative of, or it's symbolic of people who perceive themselves as the arbiters of what's fact and what's fiction. Glenn Kessler says, we deal in facts. He doesn't say, I'm a liberal who deals in facts. He says, we deal in facts. He doesn't say I'm a progressive, I see myself that way and my views may be colored by my ideology, but I really try to deal in facts. He says, no, we definitively deal in facts. These folks are having a difficult time with the vibe shift, with the changes in the industry, with what's happened, with even Colbert, For example, I think we have this is F-10 we can put up on the screen.

This is David Ellison. There's a lot, Larry Ellison's son, by the way. There's a lot going on with this Paramount merger. But basically saying that the headline here is what began as a Hollywood studio merger has become a test of how far corporate America will bend to the president's will. But David Ellison, again, son of Larry Ellison, so you can take all of that for what it is, is saying that they want CBS to be a better version of the media. there's been all kinds of talk about potentially Barry Weiss of the free press going over,

getting a buyout potentially even from CBS. There's lots of scuttle butt, lots of reporting going around on that point. Basically what you're seeing are people in C-Sweets recognizing the profit potential of actually trying to serve consumers who want news that they can trust because there's transparency about the biases, or because there's what they see, what they perceive, as a real effort to be objective. And the real effort to be objective,

that's the harder lane to run in. If you're a media mogul right now, trying to convince your readers that you're actually just calling balls and strikes is going to be really difficult. Trying to convince readers that you are actually calling balls and strikes from a very particular perspective

and being honest with them about that is much easier to do. I just wanted to put this on the screen, This is something I caught in the New York Times, their coverage of a Daily Wire story, a story that the Daily Wire broke, that Luke Roziak over at the Daily Wire broke, about counsel at the NSA leaving. So April Falcon Doss, that's a hell of a name, left the NSA, seemed to have been pushed out of the NSA. Here's the New York Times coverage of it.

They say the top lawyer for the NSA was removed from her job on Friday and had been appointed in April 22 during the Biden administration, on July 23rd, the Daily Wire, a conservative website, wrote about Ms. Doss and her former work for the Senate Intelligence Committee's Democratic staff. Later that day, Laura Lumer, a far-right conspiracy theorist amplified a social media post-critical of Ms. Doss that cited the Daily Wire article. So I actually read the New York Times coverage before the Daily Wire coverage and was trying to figure out exactly what had happened with the top lawyer at the NSA, and I got to the end of

the piece, which is co-bylined. thinking by top New York Times reporters thinking, okay, I still don't understand exactly what happens. You click through the link to the Daily Wire. And Luke Rosiac, great reporter, wouldn't you know it? He's got the actual answer. Just months into Trump's first term as president, Luke writes, she took a high-level job working for Senator Mark Warner on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election. DOS was the Democrat's senior counsel for the committee's Russia investigation, which conducted hundreds of interviews in this field to find evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and Russia. So just pausing right there,

she was the senior counsel for the committee's Russia investigation, the senior counsel for the DEM committee's Russia investigation, period. Now, why couldn't the New York Times have taken this exact sentence from Luke Roziak, where he says, quote, investigating or this, it's not even, it's a fragment of a sentence. Why couldn't they have injected this into their coverage? investigating supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election. Why can't the New York Times use that exact same language, which is fair, which is genuinely calling balls and strikes? And it's from an openly conservative website,

but you needn't be an open conservative to write about the quote-unquote supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election. Because that supposed Russian interference was considered to both be, you had Hillary Clinton flirting with the idea that it was, the voting machines themselves, and what we know is true. And nobody, by the way, in the Trump administration is denying is true that Russia ran this silly, foolish meme campaign. Why couldn't you use language like that?

Why couldn't you tell your readers what actually happened in this case? And maybe that's why the Times is smart to hire Eric Wimple, somebody who actually, for all of his faults, went and reviewed the papers coverage and the major media outlets coverage of the Russia collusion investigation. But I'm not optimistic, to be honest, because I think what the Washington Post losing so many of these high-profile real D.C. celebrities, you know, they're not celebrities to any of you out there, but here in D.C., when you use names like Philip Bump, who had that infamous

interview on the Hunter Biden story, you should go look up if you haven't seen. And Jonathan K. Park and Eric Wemple and Glenn Kessler. I mean, here in D.C. those names have some weight to them. I'm sorry to report. When the Post is just hemorrhaging these people, first of all, it's probably exactly what Jeff Bezos and the new leadership of the Post wants because they're trying to steer the ship in a different direction. If they'll be able to do that, is an open question. And two, I think it just reflects that the media right now is not really swallowing its criticism, swelling criticism of it and reflecting internally on what went wrong. There still seem to be some of these really high profile, highly paid celebrity journalists are still digging their heels in.

So that's your nightly report on the media. And it was such a blast to have Shelby and Spencer here, two good friends. I really appreciate both of them staying up late and having a little drink on the show. I shouldn't mention just that, you know, with the Washington Post and like Wemble's going in the New York. time. Like, all of this, the stuff is just so insane. I think it underscores the point that we make here on the show all the time, which is that there's a premium right now, and the great Megan Kelly is fantastic on this, and just asking good questions, doing good research, doing good journalism, but being open about where you're coming from. I think that's what people, including myself, want to

see from a lot of journalists now. We recognize that we're probably smarter than Glenn Kessler and can make up our own minds without having to say, ideal in facts, therefore the lab leak is ridiculous. All of that stuff is just, it's so tiresome. It's so 2020. It's, you know, that's what Eddington really is about. I'll update everyone when I see it. Still haven't gotten a chance to see Happy Gilmore, too, by the way,

which I'm bummed about. But that's, it is true that corporate America is noticing people are tired with some of the things that were trending about 10 years ago and then culminated in 20. And I think finally we're kicked out the door in C-suits. And some of it is going to be profit-motivated in a bad way. Some of it will be profit-motivated and the result will be a better version of the Washington Post that, for example, doesn't have Philip Bump on staff. So congratulations to the Washington Post on that.

But some of it will also, you know, it could go in a bad direction. And that's what we're going to do here. We're going to call balls and strikes. And I'll just tell you where I'm coming from. So thanks for tuning in to another lovely after party. I always say the hardest shows are Wednesday nights. What I know I'm not going to talk to all until Monday, because so much happens in the interim. Appreciate you staying tuned.

As a reminder, I'm Emily at Double Make Care Media. I've gotten a lot of great notes. Try to reply to every single one of them over there. So hit me up, Emily at Devil Make Care Media. I will do my very, very best to respond. Appreciate everybody tuning in. Great, great guests next week. So make sure that you are with us 10 p.m. Eastern live Monday and Wednesday is right here. We'll see you back there soon.