After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Joe Kent Talks Iran and Charlie Kirk, Talarico’s Troubles, with John Daniel Davidson, PLUS Trump’s Big Poll Numbers & CBS Gut Punch

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

Emily Jashinsky opens the show with new polling on President Trump and how he retains almost total support among MAGA voters amid the Iran conflict. She details the polling and how the strong backing does not extend to the broader Republican Party or Independents. Then Emily is joined by John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at “The Federalist,” and they go deep on the resignation of National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, Kent’s appearance with Tucker Carlson, his comments on the Iran War, what DNI Tulsi Gabbard told Congress on Wednesday, and Kent’s comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. Then the pair gets into UAPs, Peter Thiel’s recent discussions about the Antichrist, Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico’s claim that his message reflects “biblical Christianity,” and Talarico’s ridiculous pandering to supporters about meat. Emily wraps up the show with a look at CBS News’ rating struggles and why she won’t be surprised if there are changes in the new future.   Unplugged: Switching is simple, Visit https://Unplugged.com/EMILY and order your UP phone today!   Lean: Discover why LEAN is becoming the choice for real weight‑loss results—shop now at https://TAKELEAN.com use code EMILY.    Cowboy Colostrum: Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code AFTERPARTY at https://www.cowboycolostrum.com/AFTERPARTY   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to another edition of After Party. I appreciate you being here. My friend John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at The Federalist, will be joining us in a moment on tonight's show. Excited to go through all of the big news that has actually, even just since the newsday ended technically, it doesn't really ever end at 5 p.m. these days. Not that it actually ever did, but John is going to help us break down some of what we just heard in a very stunning conversation between Tucker Carlson and Joe Kent, who up until yesterday was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He is a gold star husband. He is a combat veteran. He is a close confidant of Tulsi Gabbard. And we learned a lot more about the new conflict in Iran from Joe Kent's perspective in this conversation with Tucker Carlson. So there's going to be a lot to discuss on that front. We're also going to be talking a little bit about why the government just bought alien.gov. Alien.gov. We'll have details for you from that.

James Tala Rico is against meat, but he's not against meat. We're also going to talk about that. I can't resist that particular subject. And the CBS evening news ratings that we have been tracking for months now are looking less than really. Now that Tony de Cople has a couple of months of hosting under his belt. Actually, we're pushing four months. He's like three and a half months in. So we're going to bring you the latest on that.

But first, but first, let's talk about Donald Trump's ratings. So now we're, the politics of the Iran war are very interesting. So now we're what three weeks, not quite three weeks, but almost three weeks into this conflict. And it's not as. some expected tanking Trump with self-identified MAGA voters. There's some important nuance in that, though. We're going to get to in just one moment. For now, let me go ahead and put this video of Harry Anton, polling guru over of CNN up on the screen. 100%. 100%. If you are a member of MAGA and the GOP, you approve of Donald John Trump. Zero percent say that they disapprove. You don't have

be a mathematical genius to know you can't go higher than 100%. He is the 1972 Miami Dolphins. Now there are some Republicans who disapprove of Donald John Trump, but they are not members of the Make America Great Again movement. The bottom line is this. If you are a member of MAGA, you approve of Donald Trump. It's interesting though, because there have been a couple prominent people who have sort of come out online and they're very mad about this war with Iran because he promised

no new wars. Is there any sign that people might be leaving MAGA relative to 2024? Yeah, okay. So, you know, I've said it before, and, you know, the theme of this segment is Tucker Carlson B. Darned. And when we look at the numbers, I mean, I've heard some people say, oh, you know what, when you look at those MAGA numbers, it doesn't account for those who might have left MAGA. But take a look here, Americans who identify as MAGA in November of 2024, it was 28% of Americans.

Now it's basically the same of anything. It's slightly higher at 30%. The bottom line is this. The MAGA base within the GOP is not shrinking. It's the same size. If anything, it is slightly larger than it was back in 2024 when, of course, Donald Trump won a second term. So that 100% that Donald Trump has approval among MAGA GOP, that is not an artifact of MAGA shrinking. It's just an indication of how strong Donald Trump's grip is on that MAGA base. All right. So we can just stop it there because this is enough to tell you what you need to about how Trump voters who identify as MAGA think about this war.

And it should be enough to demystify any, well, let's just say myths or any stereotypical impressions about Trump voters and what they make of the last couple of weeks that exist in elite media spaces. But, but I will say, how we define MAGA can often be different from how voters define MAGA. this is not all good news for the president, though it is certainly very good news for the president. I would say, you know, to add some nuance, it's likely true that many Trump voters are trusting him to prosecute a war that doesn't start feeling like and threatening to become a quagmire. So I think, you know, he's to some extent, I don't want to say borrowed time, but he's to some extent,

on a timetable probably with some mega voters. But more importantly, this was brought up not long ago in a free press story where they looked at all of the surveys. This was last week. And they talked about UGov looking at Republicans who identifies as MAGA Republicans finding 85% support, only 5% opposition to the Iran strike. So that certainly puts those numbers from NBC that Harry Anton was looking at, that looks a lot like support for those numbers. The NBC poll, of course, had 90% support, 5% opposition, 88% support from CNN with 13% opposition. So these numbers are very good for Donald Trump.

But among Republicans who don't identify as MAGA Republicans, the war has only 54% support with 36% opposition. I mean, that's in the NBC poll that plummets from MAGA at 90 to non-Maga Republicans, not non-Mega voters, but specifically non-Mega Republicans at 54%. In the CNN poll, which had 85%, that number plummets to 61%. In the UCOV poll, which had 85%, that number plummetes to 63%. So these numbers are pretty consistent across the board, and I would argue what's worse is that there's a cohort of independence. I don't know exactly how big it is, but of independents who voted for

Trump. This is a hard cohort to poll because it's relatively small, but independent voters, they're not Republicans, they voted for Trump. This is the type of person that maybe heard Trump on Joe Rogan or Lex Friedman or Tim Dillon or JD Vance on Tim Dillon, for example, and thought, oh, I like what I'm hearing about no new wars. You know, I like what I'm hearing about ending all of the like cultural elitism. I like what I'm hearing about training the swamp. I think this guy, I don't necessarily trust him 100%, but I think he's certainly better than Kamala Harris. That type of voter is not on board to the extent that MAGA Republicans are, but that's not also the type of voter. This is something the media gets wrong a lot. That's not the type of voter who defines them

themselves as a MAGA voter. Megan, Megan Kelly, of course, has made this point that she is an independent. She gets sort of lumped in with MAGA, but she considers herself MAGA adjacent. So it would be incorrect to say, like, quote, MAGA podcasters are in disagreement with the president as though that's representative of the MAGA base. Because a lot of people who identify themselves as MAGA, or most people who identify themselves as MAGA, are not in the sort of podcaster, independent podcaster space that was sort of identified as what fueled, a demo that fueled Trump's 2024 win. And that's true, right? He won young voters, or he made huge inroads with young voters, I should say. And he won over a lot of independent voters. And that's really what helped tip the scales for him. So if it's a question of the MAGA coalition, that's different than the MAGA voter. So again, I don't want to downplay.

what much of the media is downplaying, which is that Donald Trump has the support of his base on the war in Iran for as long as we're about three weeks in, he has the support of the, quote, MAGA base that's rock solid, as Harry Anton points out, literally 100% in that new NBC news poll, which is updated since the one that I mentioned the free press wrote about. So that's significant, extremely significant. But if you're talking about the midterm elections, is it politically helpful for Republicans who now have to defend this in purple districts in a state like, let's say, Maine, perhaps not? That's a totally different question. Maybe even in a state like Nebraska, that's a totally different question. So this isn't exactly the same as what a lot of the, I think, media is saying that it is in a couple of different ways. So on the one hand, yes, Trump has the port of his base. On the other hand, his coalition isn't just MAGA voters.

His coalition often gets described as MAGA, but it's people who are independent in many, many, many cases and were MAGA curious, mega adjacent, or simply said they looked at the options and they said, if I'm being asked that she's between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, I'm going to go with Donald Trump. And those people are not, certainly not, at 100% level of support for the war.

But I wanted to talk about this because I think it's one of the things swirling right now in the media environment that just gets misunderstood about what the MAGA coalition actually is, who's in it, what it means that there's a huge amount of support for Trump. People who identify as MAGA, these are people who go to rallies, there are people who buy merch, there are people who are super active, probably making calls at the county party headquarters. That's a bit different. than somebody who is in the same type of vein as like a Joe Rogan or a, you know,

Tim Dillon, Lex Friedman type character. So important distinction there. Some good news for Trump, some bad news for Trump. And I just wanted to add a little bit of texture to what the media is in some sense panicking about and cheerleading about to at the same time. All right. I'm going to bring John Daniel Davidson in in just one moment. But first, everybody is talking about weight loss injections because the results are so dramatic, so dramatic. They work by lowering blood sugar and then reducing appetite. So what if you're looking to lose weight, but you're not interested in those painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of those awful, intense side effects?

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All right, so happy to be joined now by my former colleague at the Federalist, Senior Editor at the Federalist, John Daniel Davidson, who's also the author of a wonderful book called Pagan America. John, I don't know if I've ever told you this, but I certainly think of you as a mentor, and I'm very glad you're here this evening. Well, thank you for having me, Emily. I'm very proud. If I'm your mentor and you're my mentee, I'm very proud of what you've done with your career. and I watch your writings and your commentary with great interest and learn a lot from you. So I'm glad to be here. Well, if anyone's ever heard of me say, you know, I was in northern Mexico during the Biden surge and saw this.

John. I dragged you there. You didn't really have to drag me there, but you definitely dragged me through a forest towards the Rio Grande. Looking for migrants and cartel members. and we definitely saw some. Well, we ended up being yelled at by a couple of Texas National Guardsmen with M16s because we were not where we were supposed to be, but that's okay. We're American citizens, you know.

There's a lot of people that weren't where they were supposed to be that day. As you told them in the moment, you said we're American citizens. So, John, again, as I mentioned, you wrote a book called Pagan America. I know we have some stuff to talk about in that genre in just one second. But first, I want to play this clip. Let's talk about this Joe Kent-Tucker-Carlson interview. You have been writing, I think, very helpful analyses over at the Federalist. I know you have another analysis coming out tomorrow over at the Federalist about the first couple of weeks of this war with Iran.

Joe Kent, who was formerly the head until yesterday of the National Counterterrorism Center. He is a gold star husband. He is a decorated combat veteran. He's a close ally of Tulsi Gabbard. When he resigned yesterday, because he said in a resignation letter that he no longer could go along with the war, we were not under imminent threat from Iran. He argued that Israel dragged the United States into the war, which is a topic that we can get into in just one moment, John. But he goes on literally like 24 hours after live with Tucker. Carlson this evening. And here's a little bit of what he said. I'm going to put it up on the

screen. This is maybe the biggest part of it. On the verge of getting a nuclear weapon. No, they weren't three weeks ago when this started and they weren't in June either. I mean, the Iranians have had a religious ruling of Fatwa against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That's been in place since 2004. That's available in the public sphere. But then also we had no intelligence to indicate that that fought to what was being disobeyed or it was on the cusp of being lifted. The Iranian strategy, it's actually pretty pragmatic. The Iranians are obviously aware of what's taking place in their region and their strategy was to not completely abandon their nuclear program because they saw what happened to

Muammar Gaddafi in Libya when he said, hey, I've got no more nukes, I'll do what you say, I'll give up my nukes. And we gave them the Nobel Peace Prize? Yeah, we regime changed him and he was executed by his own people in the most horrific way. He's sodomized by a bayonet. Right. Okay. So that's what, that's the lesson, I think, that the entire region took from that when Hillary Clinton.

Unfortunately, that's what the neocon neoliberal warmongers. That's the lesson that they showed everyone in the region. And then conversely, the Iranians also knew that if they came out and said, okay, we've got a nuke, whether they were bluffing or not, Saddam Hussein, Iraq right next door. So they kind of had this. And he hung, I think. He was hung by his own people, you know, after a bloody. So, John, I'll just stop it there because what we have from Joe Kent is him saying we were not, the intelligence was not suggesting there was an imminent threat from Iran. He says, I have no love lost for Iran. He spent his military career fighting Iranian proxies. But he says he can't go along with this idea that there was an imminent threat, meaning Iran was preparing to immediately attack the United States. He believes that it was. was timing dictated by Israel that nobody said, well, what if we don't just go along with the

Israeli plan? And again, this is the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center. What did you make about that? Well, he was echoing something that Marco Rubio said right out of the gate, you know, just a day or two. But it's a conspiracy theory, John. How dare you? Yeah, you know, and I wrote about that when it happened, you know, Marco Rubio came out. He said, we went ahead with this war because Israel was going to, act unilaterally and we knew that Iran would respond to a unilateral Israeli attack by attacking our bases in the Middle East. And of course, he tried to walk that back, you know, the next day and they've tried to walk it back since, even though, you know, it wasn't just Marco Rubio. Tom Cotton said

the same thing. Speaker Mike Johnson said that. And then Trump has alluded to it several times. And so you, you know, once you kind of admit that right out of the gate that that was the scenario, it kind of colors everything that comes after. This has been the big question. Look, I sort of put myself in the Joe Kent camp. I'm not opposed in principle to using military force against Iran or anybody else if it's in the American interest. I thought the operation last June to take out Fordo and those other nuclear sites

was successful. It was a long overdue action that we should have taken into. If we'd done it in 2006, we wouldn't have had this problem now. The taking out Soleimani was a great move as well in Trump's first term. But the problem, the kind of the cloud that's hanging over this war is that nobody can articulate in a clear and consistent way why we had to go to war when we did. What was the incepting incident? What was the threat that we were meeting? And none of the explanations make sense.

A couple days before the war started. I wrote something that other people have been talking about for a while in the lead up to this war, which is if we totally obliterated Iran's nuclear capabilities last June, which is what the Trump administration, which was what Trump said. He said it last June. And then he said something similar to that literally every single month up until February, that we had totally obliterated their capabilities. We'd totally destroyed their future of their nuclear program.

He said it in a thousand different ways. ways to really drive. And if you disagreed with that or if you doubted it, you were fake news, on and on. Well, if that's true and we destroyed their nuclear program, what was the reason for this war? And I understand that they've been clear about saying, oh, we have these four goals to destroy their Navy, to destroy their missile program. Right. But it just doesn't add up. And for all the explanations that they've given, the American people, I think, are just not buying the explanation. They don't, you know, It's not sort of credible. What they've offered is not credible.

And the fact that they haven't offered any, you know, there was this clip of Glenn Beck the other day when Joe Kent said there's no imminent threat. Glenn Beck was like, well, if you don't think there's no imminent threat, what's your proof? Sorry, that gets it backwards. The burden of proof is on the people who launched the war. Not the, you know, if you're the one who decides, yes, we're going to go to war because of an imminent threat, it's not my job to prove there's not an imminent threat. anybody else's job. It's the job of the person who decides now is the time to go to war. Why? Because

of an imminent threat. What's the imminent threat? And then the explanations don't make sense. Well, and this is what Tucker Carlson was pressing Joe Kent on. He was saying, what is the definition of imminent threat? Because we hear repeatedly. And I think, John, you and I would both agree that, of course, there's an imminent threat from Iran its proxies to U.S. bases oversees to potentially people on American soil, if there are. I mean, Kent said there are limited sleeper cells, but that is something that exists, certainly. But obviously, there's some threat. But Kent was in defining the threat as a, like, actual, quote, imminent threat, meaning an imminent plot to take action against the American people. He said they were not on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon. Tulsi Gabbard, actually,

Actually, let me get your reaction to this, John, because OD&I head Tulsi Gabbard was testifying Stride CIA head, John Ratcliffe and FBI director Cash Patel today in Congress and got some of the same questions that Tucker asked Joe Kent. Let's roll S4 here to get Gabbard. So the assessment of the intelligence community is that Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated by last summer's airstrikes. Yes. In the opening statement you submitted to the committee last night also stated, quote, there has been no effort since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability, end quote, correct? That's right. And that's the assessment of the intelligence community.

Yes. The White House stated on March 1st of this year that this war was launched and was, quote, a military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime, end quote. Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that they, there was an imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? The intelligence community assessed that Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability. Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was a, quote, imminent nuclear

threat posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no? Senator, the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president? You're false. This is it would be timely, objective, and independent of political considerations. Exactly what I'm doing. No, you're evading a question because to provide a candid response to the committee would contradict a statement from the White House. So, John, reading between the lines of that testimony from D&A Gabbard, she's not wholeheartedly embracing the war.

Obviously, she sold at one point no war with Iran T-shirt. She repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly opposed. She opposed the strike on Soleimani. she's opposed a war with Iran for a very long time. I think reading between the lines, she punts to Trump and says he's the one who can determine the imminent threat. Is that what you got from that? Yeah. And I think, you know, so a lot.

John may have just froze. I'm sure he'll come back momentarily. Oh, here we go. If it is the president's job to determine if it's imminent, why hasn't he told us anything? Why hasn't the president told us what was the imminent threat? And the other thing that really it just shakes people's confidence, I think, is the shifting justifications. You know, is it to free the Iranian people?

Is it, you know, and to do regime change and liberate them? Is it that Iran has posed an imminent threat for 47 years? We heard this a lot in the first week of the, you know, which is a really stupid thing to say, you know, because it renders the phrase imminent threat totally. malleable, totally meaningless. What was the imminent threat? You know, was it that someday their missile program was going to be so advanced that it would shield them from anyone doing anything about the nuclear program?

Well, that doesn't, I mean, we're stretching the definition of the term imminent here, I think, to justify the fact. I think that the reality is that Trump believed or he was convinced. Either way, he came to believe that the Iranian regime was weak and could be toppled with some airstrikes. And he went ahead with this without a real clear theory of victory, which is why the administration is having these problems communicating what our war aims are and what our theory of victory is. And they're also not doing anything to prepare the American people for what might be necessary to actually win this war. They're not preparing the American people to accept the kind of escalation that it seems is going to be necessary. Okay.

So I think that's a really important point. I just want to bring in a quote from Mark Levine here who's been just hammering Jo Kent all day and said he knew for a fact that Mark Levine actually leaked an interview or leaked that he had been in the White House. to Tucker. I'm trying to find the exact quote here. But Mark Levin also said, this is what I want to get your take on, that the imminent threat, it wasn't an imminent threat. It was an ongoing threat. This is a quote from Levin today. And I ask you that because you just made this point in a very, I think, important way, which is that's semantics. And to the average American, that distinction between imminent and ongoing is enormously significant. And people don't like playing semantics with war. Yeah, yeah. No, right. And I understand that in like strategic security studies, like the academics who kind of study this stuff and in the war colleges, that there are, you know, some of these things are terms of art that imminent threat and, you know, potential threat. And these things have different kind of meanings like in the jargon of academic military security studies. But if you are going to launch a war with Iran,

of choice and you're the White House, you need to communicate that in a way that ordinary people can wrap their brains around and not feel like they're being handled every time a reporter asks a super straightforward basic question and not have, you know, Trump's team, his top officials give different answers on different days and get super touchy and defensive

when they're given what should be softball questions like, how does this war end? Are there going to be ground troops? How long is this going to last? I mean, what is victory look like? Is this a regime change war? These should be questions that can be answered in ways that ordinary people can understand. How are we going to open the Strait of Hormuz? What do we do when gas gets over $200 a gallon? And people are paying $5, $6, $7, $10 a gallon at the pump. I think that there was a lack of planning on the part of the Trump administration that is becoming clear as each kind of weak ticks by in this war and they're unable to communicate or persuade a lot of people in this country that they have a theory of victory. And as you say, playing semantic games about imminent and ongoing, man, screw that.

That's not what people want to hear. We want to hear why are we go, why are we in this war? What is the point? Why did we have to go to war now? And how do we win? What does victory look like? Those should be questions that should have already been answered in a way that is satisfactory to ordinary Americans. Yeah, it feels like everything from respirators to, right, like, it feels like everything

from that to weapons of mass destruction. And people are really, like people really have their radars on for that right now in a way that happened because of those prior examples. So maybe people weren't as attuned to it then, but I think now people are really, I mean, it's a very low, it's an era of very low institutional trust. So to already have breached that trust with such a poor messaging campaign at best, if not just a muddled, do you interpret this as the president having been polled in different directions by his own administration, by the president making maybe, I don't want to use impulsive as a pejorative because I don't think that's appropriate in foreign policy. sometimes you have to make quick decisions, but I'll say like the president making an impulsive decision here, why has it been kind of all over the map?

I think because there wasn't they didn't, there wasn't a planning process that kind of, I understand that there's planning processes, like the Department of Defense plans for everything. They have rooms full of people. All they do is sit around all day and game out scenarios. But I don't think that planning process filtered up to the top echelons in the White House. And, you know, I don't, I'm just a, you know, I'm just a simple woodcutter,

right? I don't have any special information. But it seems to me that that Trump was persuaded that this would be an easy, it seems clear, even though they said, I realized when they started this war, they said it'll be four to six weeks or four to five weeks, something like that. But I think that Trump thought it would actually be a matter of like 48 to 72 hours, the regime would collapse. And I think he became persuade. Once he became persuaded of that, it was just a matter of moving the carrier groups over there, you know, which took, you know, some weeks to do that. And that was the extent of it. And they didn't plan, by their own admission, they didn't plan for the Strait of Hormuz being closed down and, you know, one fifth of the world's oil supply being cut off.

They didn't plan for an all-out assault on civilian oil and electrical grid infrastructure among the Gulf states and our allies in the Gulf where our bases are. And we also maybe didn't plan for what Israel's war aims are. This is a situation where there's not a unified chain of command. First conflict in American history where we are fighting a war with allies where we don't have a unified chain. of command and we don't have veto over what Israel does. So today, Israel hits this, you know, civilian energy plant. The name is escaping me right now, but there's videos of it all over the place today. And Iran responded by hitting this liquefied natural gas facility in Qatar. And we weren't part of that, that strike, right? That's crazy to me that we don't have a unified

chain of command in this war. And that, that to me, speaks to a failed. of planning along with all the other things that we mentioned. Super interesting. A couple of other moments from the Tucker Kent interview that just wrapped like an hour or so ago. He said the Israelis, Kent said the Israelis drove the decision to take this action. He said the Israelis felt emboldened that no matter what they did, basically we, the United States, would have to react. He claimed that we could have still backchanneled to the Iranians in the negotiation process. He said that if the Ayatoll was killed, the regime would survive, which was an interesting part of the

interview, that a good deal of key decision makers, I'm just going through my notes right now, were not allowed to talk to the president. It sounded a lot like he was implying Tulsi Gabbard herself was not allowed to talk to the president with this and communicate this information. But he also said that the Israelis do not care to the point you were just making, John, that there's no regime change plan because they see, and Netanyahu sees utter care. chaos in Iran for some like reasonable I mean you could make a reasonable argument that the chaos in Iran weakens the country and therefore weakens their enemy I don't necessarily agree with that but where we end up here now is Mark Levin as I mentioned saying that he knows for a fact

Kent leaked to Tucker Carlson a meeting that the president had with him and now interestingly enough Kent has been derided as a leaker by anonymous leakers for the last 24 hours, which is always amusing. But according to Shelby Talcott over at Semaphore, Joe Kent is under FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified information according to three sources.

And the investigation, according to Shelby, predates his departure. John, that seems particularly out. Dun, dun, done. Didn't they say the same thing about that guy, Dan Caldwell?

Yeah, and Dan, Yes, and Dan was cleared because he was just rehired. Yeah. So this seems to be a PR stunt, I think. I don't think you need to have like a lot of special knowledge to kind of see that this is a communications kind of scheme to limit the damage from Joe Kent's resignation. I will paraphrase what my boss and your former boss, Sean Davis, posted on X. But I'm sure glad that all the Russia collusion hoaxers are all in jail. And, you know, all of the people who broke the law and undermined our government and spied on us and just, you know, tried to undermine Trump's first administration.

That's all been taking care of. I'm really glad that that's all been taken care of. And now we can move on to this. It's just crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just crazy. It's crazy to me that we're going to, that the administration.

is going to start scapegoating the Iran War dissenters in this way when they, you know, they have problems enough of their own. And the least of their problems at this point is Joe Kent resigning under protest, which, by the way, is this is what you should do. If you don't feel that you can in good conscience carry out the president's agenda, you should resign. And that's what he did. So rather than, you know, remaining in the administration, as a lot of people have done in both of Trump's terms and try to undermine the president from within. So, yeah, I think it's a very bad sign,

and it communicates, I think, and suggests a kind of fragility and insecurity and a kind of ad hoc decision-making in the White House right now, that, again, I think all stems from a lack of contingency planning about what was actually going to happen when they decided to sort of tip over, you know, and start this war with Iran. That's apparently, as you said, there were plenty of people inside the administration who were dissenting voices and they were sidelined.

And that's, you know, kind of how Trump came to be convinced that this was the right thing to do. Right. You know, it doesn't inspire confidence. Well, before we leave this question of or this conversation about, Joe Kent's comments this evening, I did want to get your take on this moment. It was more than a moment. It was actually, it turned into a fairly substantial chunk of the interview. They talked about how Joe Kent was stopped from his perch ahead the National Counterterrorism Center from investigating according to his take, this is Joe Kent saying it, further investigating whether Charlie Kirk's

death had any connections to foreign government state action. and the like. This is S-1. And the last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June in the in the west wing in the stairway. And I said hi to him and he looked me in the eye. And he said very loudly. And it's a small, you've been in the west wing. It's small. It's a tight space. And he said, Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran. Very loudly. He was single minded. And he walked off. And he went, I believe, into the oval. So when one of President Trump's closest advisors who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink at least our

relationship with the Israelis. And then he's suddenly publicly assassinated and we're not allowed to ask any questions about that. It's a data point. It's a data point that we need to look into. What do you mean when you say we're not allowed to ask any questions about that? We've been told that this individual Robinson is a lone gunman and maybe he is. but the investigation that I was a part of, the National Counterterrorism Center was a part of, we were stopped from continuing to investigate. And the FBI will say that they stopped that

because they wanted to turn everything over to the Utah State authorities, everything's going to trial, it's very, very sensitive. But there was still a lot for us to look into that I can't really get into, but there was still linkage for us to investigate that we needed to run down. I'm not making any conclusions.

I'm not saying, No, I don't think you are. Because of this, this happened. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying there's unanswered questions. We know the pressure because of the text messages that have been made public that Charlie was under a lot of pressure from a lot of pro-Israel donors. And again, we know Charlie was advocating to President Trump against this war with Iran. That's really explosive, John, because again, just 24 hours ago, he was the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. He's confirming what was reported back in

October in the Daily Mail that Patel had shut down the foreign intelligence probe in an explosive feud with Trump's counterterror chief that's in the Daily Mail's words. They talk a little bit about Butler in addition to some of the unanswered questions about what happened at Utah Valley University. And it gets into almost Kennedy territory. I thought the conversation went there. I'm just curious what you make of those. So many lone gunmen. There's so many lone gunmen. We, I think we essentially... But it's not a pattern. It's not a trend.

It's just, it's just a lot of, you know, just disturbed young men acting totally alone. We essentially don't have an FBI. I mean, you know, unfortunately, I, you know, when Trump won the election, came in with high hopes, we're going to get, we're going to get in here. And after like the insane abuses of the FBI and the intelligence community during the Biden administration, and even during the Trump's first term, we're finally going to, you know, and I and others were advocating hard, like you've got to clean out these institutions, you dismantle them, end them if necessary, and reconstitute something in their place.

But actually, it just turns out we essentially don't have an FBI. We, you know, the, the, and people can call me a conspiracy theorist that they want. I don't think that the explanation of Charlie Kirk's assassination makes sense. I don't think the assassination attempts of crooks against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania makes sense. I don't think a lot of these things, the official stories, like what we know, none of it makes sense. It certainly doesn't make sense that we don't know anything, for example, about crooks. And we know, you know, but with other similar crimes, we know everything within like five minutes, you know, about these other mass shootings. I think it's crazy, and I just saw that clip right before I came on with you.

I think that it's just insane that this is what they came down to with the Charlie Kirk assassination. That was in September of last year. And the fact that he was so vocally against our involvement in this war, the fact that he was facing enormous pressure from donors, the fact that he was not going to back down. It's become very clear. It didn't matter what the donor said. He had completely changed his views on some of these things from going back, you know, from five or six, seven years earlier.

And then he's assassinated, you know, in the way that he was assassinated. I agree with what Joe Kent said. It's not conclusive. I'm not making any claims. But these are questions that we need answers to. Why wasn't the National Counterterrorism Center allowed to investigate this? Why didn't the FBI investigate it? Why won't anyone talk about it?

These are the kinds of things that destroy ordinary people's confidence in the people at the top of this administration. Yes, and the big picture implication is that potentially that sort of Darmocles is hanging over Donald Trump's head whenever he makes a decision that might be, out of step. This is the implication that they get to in the conversation. I'm not necessarily validating it, but the broader kind of conspiracy theory is that there's a sort of Damocles that's hung over every American president's head since, as Tucker would say, and frankly, I think there's a lot of evidence to suggest this. The CIA coup took out John F. Kennedy. We don't know exactly why. We have some indications of maybe why that was Oliver Stone. It would say it was trying to have peace with the Soviets. Some people

would say he was pressuring Israel over its nuclear program, but that every American president has since had that threat hanging over their heads. And that's the kind of big picture reason that they got into that conversation, John. Yeah. And I haven't seen that. They'll hold the whole exchange between Kent and Tucker there. But I think, you know, in the kind of information environment that we're in, you know, it behooves the administration to be as clear as they can be. You know, we are the most propagandized people in history and we're aware, like many of us are aware of it now, having lived through COVID, having lived just through the past 10 years, like we're aware that we're being propagandized all the time.

So when you come out and you play games, semantic games, with something as serious as a war with Iran when you try to kind of, you know, do flashing hands and wave shiny objects and get us to stop talking about Charlie Kirk's assassination or try to smear anyone as an anti-Semite or conspiracy theorist Kook who asks, you know, good faith questions about it. Boy, that does so much more damage that it doesn't solve any problems. You know, they're not solving any problems. The only thing that's going to solve any problems here is sunlight and the truth. John, I hope you can stick around because I went long on that segment and would love to keep talking. I'm going to take a quick break if that's all right. Sure. Perfect. All right. Well, this spring,

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and also the author of a wonderful book called Pagan America, which is very timely John, because literally, just today, just today. The news broke, this is from defense scoops, the news broke that the White House registered two new government domains this week, quote, alien.gov and aliens.gov, they didn't want to leave the plural off. According to publicly available federal records, their appearance comes about one month after President Donald Trump announced plans to direct the long-anticipated release of U.S. government records about unidentified anomalous phenomena, so UIP, and extraterrestrial beings. Meanwhile, we should also mention there's a big CNN report that popped today. Renewed

attention is falling on the base. This is the Wright-Patterson base, the infamous Wright-Patterson base, quote, after the disappearance of retired Air Force Major General William Neal McCasland, a former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson, whose career placed him at the center of some of the Pentagon's most advanced aerospace research. Authorities say there's no evidence linking McCasland's disappearance from his Albuquerque home to UFO research, but the case has revived curiosity about the base. McCaslin reported experiencing mental fog before he disappeared. The base, we also know, hosts several key organizations,

which include the Air Force Research Laboratory. And McCasland, who retired about 13 years ago, once commanded that laboratory, which, as CNN reports, is where scientists and engineers develop technologies ranging from advanced aircraft materials to cutting-edge propulsion systems. John, we have absolutely no idea. whether any of the McCaslin story is connected with the recent push for UAP disclosure.

It's interesting. And overall, I'm curious what you make, because in Pagan America, you spend a lot of time thinking about actually, like, supernatural, why we might be approaching this age of disclosure to quote the name of the documentary right now in Trump 2.0. Yeah. So it's an easy question. It was a short question. You have 20 seconds. Just to be clear, Pagan America isn't about aliens. No, it's not. It's not. We don't, I don't talk about that. But I will say, here's what I'll say. But you do talk about demons. And John, John, tell me if I'm wrong. I'm going to guess you believe that aliens might be demons. Well, I told Tucker Carlson that when I was on his show ahead of my book launch. So he asked the point.

blank, you know, what do you think they are? And I said, yeah, I think aliens are demons, okay? I, you know, look, the people in the UAP world and in the UFO world often talk about interdimensional beings and discarnate intelligences. And I think any other society in human history and every other culture in human history would recognize that a discarnate intelligence or a multidimensional being is a demon. It's a spirit. It's a spiritual being. And I think that we need to keep our heads about us. But I think that this we're not going to, but we need to. I think that this push for disclosure may be part of a way to just control information. Thank you.

And it's not actually disclosure. There are people, and I would recommend if your listeners are interested in this, my book is not the book to read on this subject, but there's a book by a scholar named Diana Pesolka. And she wrote a book called Encounters, which was a follow-on to an earlier book she had wrote called American Cosmic. And she's a scholar of religion. And her work does touch a lot on the UAP, UFO stuff. But her contention is that this stuff constitutes a kind of new kind of religion that's emerging. And she interviews a lot of anonymous sources in very high places that have a lot of

interesting things to say about what UAPs and UFO phenomena are. And some of these people are in Silicon Valley and they seek out, they have sought out on purpose and used AI in some cases to do it, these discarnate intelligences because they feel, they believe that they're receiving information, advanced information and technology from these entities. So, you know, without going too far afield here, I will just, I will suggest that this is, my book. It's in the first part of my book and there's a part of an AI in the book as well. It is a, in a pattern throughout human history and especially in antiquity that seeking divine knowledge from spiritual beings is something that has been part of every human, every pagan

culture in all human history across geography, across cultures. This is a pattern, right? And the link between spiritual beings, you know, if people are uncomfortable with demons, I'll call them spiritual beings, right? And technology is maybe not intuitive for us as modern kind of people, but it is nevertheless a very close connection. A very close connection between technology and spiritual beings giving knowledge to kings, princes, emperor. religious leaders. And I think that if I, you know, if demons or these malign spiritual entities were going to try to communicate or interact or cooperate with people in the 21st century, technology is absolutely the way that they would do it.

And a convenient story for how we got some of this technology would be, oh, it's from aliens. They crashed and we recovered their craft and we reverse engineered it. Don't worry, you know, we have evidence of it. So I guess just cards on the table, I don't think there are any aliens. I think that the alien story is a cover for something else. So interesting because I also wanted to ask about Peter Thiel going to Rome, taking his show on the road to Rome about the Antichrist. And John, I imagine, as a faithful Catholic, you have consumed some of Teal's lectures. He did a couple of interviews with Peter Robinson over the course of the last year.

He sat down with Ross Douthat, and Dautha kind of probed him from a Catholic perspective. He's a Gerardian, so that's all wrapped up in this. But he's basically been talking about the catacon and how it's possible the de-accelerationists, the Gratuttonbergs, are actually the Antichrist, and they will manifest. This is going way far afield. But we're going to talk about it because you wrote the book, literally that kind of points us towards some of these important questions. Chad Ripperger, Father Chad Ripperger was on Sean Ryan recently talking about the sort

Catholic perspective on end times as a counterweight to the dispensationalist perspective on end times that has pushed a lot of people into support for the Iran war. And what I'm trying to get out here, John, what kind of show is this? Yeah, yeah, I know, right? I was like, Don, you got to come on. But actually, what kind of book is pagan America? Let's go back to talking about Iran. I know. What we kind of are. But all I'm saying is that AI, you have AI happening in the space. You have UAP what looks a lot like planned disclosures or strategic disclosures or limited hangouts happening in that space. And at the same time now, you have this, I think, serious conversation about how in the end times are described as a, it's a global phenomenon. People have the mark of

the beast, which is something that everyone has and sort of brings, there's a shrinking of the globe that you can pretty easily read into that. I'm not asking you if we're in the end times, but I'm asking you why right now so many people are contemplating whether we're in the end. Like, is there something in the water right now that makes us feel like humanity is in? I think there's a deep anxiety and deep reservations about technology. We have seen, we've seen kind of what the technological, the digital, the online revolution has done in our lifetimes, right? A brilliant writer who I think you know and maybe have interviewed Mary Harrington. Yes.

You know, she says that the singularity already happened, right? And it was the iPhone and social media and we're actually in it. You know, and I think that has caused an intense kind of anxiety. That is justified, right? It's justified anxiety. And now the pace of our technological, you know, are merging with technology, which, you know, these phones and our social media is merging with us in, in, like, psychological and emotional and intellectual ways in our habits,

and our habits of thought, in how we interact, in how we see the world and think about the world, in our relationships. And it's incredibly anxiety-inducing. I think people feel on an intuitive level that there's something wrong with it, that there's something malign about it, that there's something sinister about this technology and the way that we've incorporated and grafted it into our lives and our consciousness. I think that's why people are talking about these things. And they should be talking about these things. One of the things to, you know, you mentioned the Antichrist and Peter Thiel's lectures and these different theories about the Antichrist. He's in Rome now and a lot of Catholics are upset. A lot of the Catholic.

Catholics in Rome are actually like denouncing what's happening. Yeah, I heard from people today in Rome about this. Really? I think the, you know, if you want to talk about the Catholic perspective, the church fathers were unanimous on this idea that the Antichrist, when the Antichrist appeared, it would, it would deceive many and deceive many of the faithful. And it would offer, seemingly offer answers and powers. to answers to our questions and powers and capabilities that were beyond our, you know, human,

human power. And it would, it would draw people in on that basis and many would be deceived. And I think that there's a danger here. And this is why people like Peter Thiel make me uneasy, to the extent that he's a transhumanist like Elon Musk and some of these other guys who see technology as this, who see our future as merging with technology to achieve these great superhuman things and to sort of create our own kind of deities and then become those deities, I think that there is, first of all, that's totally antithetical to my Catholic and Christian cosmology, to my understanding of what man is and the human person is, is and I'm totally against it.

And so I understand maybe thinking that from Peter Thiel's perspective that, you know, decelerationists like Greta Thunberg or whatever or the, you know, are an Antichrist, I'm much more concerned that his vision for the future and his ideas will lead to a form of Antichrist for those reasons because of what they're, what they would like to do and what they think that now maybe they're starting to glimpse they could do with the technology that's coming online. And so these are things I think that, you know, we need to talk about and people are talking about, I think, because there's an intense anxiety about it that's totally justified. Okay, that's so interesting. I'm going to keep you for one more. That's a okay job because

you're a former Texan. And we're going to talk about James Tala Rico, not eating meat and then maybe eating meat, a little bit of a drawing transition, but find out we're going to go from the Antichrist and James Tallerico. I feel like it's perfectly. I was going to say it's perfectly appropriate. That would be inappropriate. I'm not going to say that. But we do have this clip of James Talarico. This isn't meat related. We'll get to that in just one moment. This is him talking about how he's not into progressive Christianity. It's just biblical Christianity. That's five. Go back and read Matthew 25. South by Southwest. Read the parable of the sheep. the goats. It's a fascinating story. At the end of the world, Jesus gathers all the people and all

the nations. So it's us as individuals, but it's also us as communities, as societies. And the story says that Jesus is going to tell some of us, depart from me because I was hungry and you didn't feed me. I was sick and you didn't heal me. I was a stranger and you didn't welcome me. And then we're going to respond and say, Christ, when did we see you hungry or sick or a stranger and not help you? And then he replies, what you do for the least of these is what you do for me. People are always finding Jesus in a piece of toast or a stain or a stain on the wall. But we're not finding him where he told us we would find him in the poor, in the sick, in the needy, in the bombed, in the starved, in the oppressed.

And so I'm not preaching a progressive Christianity. I'm preaching a biblical Christianity. So amen to Matthew 25, but that's freshman dorm level analysis, yes? The interesting thing about leftists is that they hate Christianity. And so somebody on their side decides to deploy a false heretical form of Christianity. And they hate politicizing it. Oh, then they love. Yeah, you can't be political about Christianity unless you do it from the left. Then you can be as political as you want and it's just heartwarming and you get the polite applause and affirmations.

But if you deploy it from the right, then it's literally fascism. Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism. It's white supremacy. You're basically a Nazi. Yeah. It's so stupid. It's hard to respond to it, like in good faith, you know, to engage this, this kind of performative kind of David Frenchian version of, yeah, which I think David French actually praised this guy saying like, oh, finally, he's a, you know, he's a, he's a decent. I think that was the thing. His decency, he's decent because of what he says.

No, but, but ultimately this, this guy is a, is a diabolical creep. and a heretic who's who's peddling a false version of Christianity. He's not, yeah, I mean, that's what I think. Well, I mean, on this show, we call him James God is non-binary Tilarico because that's his favorite thing to say about the Lord. Look, he's peddling something that is, is no different. His version of Christianity is actually an old sclerotic, worn out. version of mainline Protestant Christianity that decided in the middle of the last century that it was

going to accommodate political liberalism in exchange that it would change its doctrines and its beliefs and its teachings for the sake of political power and influence. And here I'm talking about the Episcopal Church USA, the Methodist, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian, the mainline Protestant churches, that they would essentially turn their back and renounce the traditional Christian teachings and doctrines that those churches had maintained for a very long time and accommodate sort of liberalism.

And what happened to those churches is that they collapsed. And some of them within our lifetimes will cease to be anything but a bank account, right? The Episcopal church will be a bank account. There won't be actually any Episcopalians left before long. The only thing that Tala Rico is doing is taking that worn out, totally discredited version of liberal pseudo-Christianity of the mainline Protestant denominations and putting it, kind of wrapping it in TikTok and Instagram.

That's all he's doing. There's no substance there because we can see what has happened to the teachings, the doctrine, the theology of the, Protestant mainline bears no resemblance to historical Christianity. It bears no resemblance to any kind of reasonable or historically accurate interpretation of biblical scriptures. It is simply a veneer, a Christian veneer put over progressive liberal politics. And James Tala Rico's only contribution is to break it down, into little social media sound bites for TikTok.

Yeah. And you will find a few more charitable organizations than conservative Christian denominations. Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. It's so deeply offensive to say that if you don't support a bigger welfare state, you're not in support of Matthew 25. I mean, it's just.

Right. Jesus wasn't talking about the welfare state there. He was talking about individual people, individual Christians, and what their obligations are to the poor. And when you look at the data on philanthropy, who actually helps the poor, who actually puts their money where their mouth is. It is overwhelmingly conservative Christians, like conservative Bible-believing, you know, Christians, the kind of people that Tala Rico and those who applaud him at South by Southwest

would call fascists and white supremacists. Those are the people who actually give to charity and support the poor and volunteer and do corporate works of mercy. That's who does it. No, it's a fact. And they pay their taxes too. So John, this is Talley Rico in 2022 declaring that his campaign at the time had gone meatless. Again, as a former Texan and a meat eater, we got to ask you about this one, S6.

We have, I think, heard more and more. Oh, he's in a mask. It's 2022. I think not just because it's the right thing to do and the moral thing to do. But also it's, as all of you know, necessary to fight. climate change. It is now existential that we try to reduce our meat consumption and that we try to respect animals in all aspects of society. And so I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign. So we have, we are, we are only buying vegan products

from our local vegan businesses. So then his campaign, this is this type of person that chased John Daniel Davidson out of Austin, by the way, during COVID. This is F7. This is Tala Rico's campaign. Put out a picture of him chowing down on what looks like a turkey leg and says official statement from James Tala Rico on vegan accusations. John, this is so annoyingly bad just on a political level that he's out there lecturing people on how going vegan, going meatless for his campaign is the right thing to do in the sanctimony. I mean, he was dripping with sanctimony and content for people who disagree with him in that statement. And then there, he now that he's running for a major Senate office as the decent man, as the

civil man, he's like, oh, no, no, no, I love meat. How dare you accuse me of anything else. Ha ha, ha. It's all a joke. It reminds me of when Beto O'Rourke said, was asked about AR-15s. I think this is either when he was running for Senate in Texas or. or running for governor. He's lost everything. He ran for Senate and governor and president, and he lost all three. So I can't remember which one.

There was either senator governor. And he was asked about gun control. It was for Ayatola. He was running for Ayatollah. Yeah, right. And he was asked about AR-15s. And he's like, you're effing right. We're going to take your AR-15s.

Like, that's the wrong thing to say in Texas, even if you do plan to take their AR-15. What do you do about the hogs? You're not campaigning in Massachusetts, right? It's Texas, you know. So you don't say, yeah, we're going to, F, yeah, we're going to take your AR-15s. And you don't go out there and say, you know, we're going to go meatless for our campaign because we got to respect all animals. You know, Texas is oil and cattle and AR-15. So people's livelihoods.

It's not just their diets. Right, right. Yeah, it's not just a pose, right? It's a huge industry in Texas. You might as well say, like, we're going to shut down oil production. in Texas. Literally, you might as well say that. So it's, this is, you know, this is part of a long tradition of progressive leftists thinking that in Texas, it's just, it's, you know, this time, we, you know, this time will be different. You know, we just have to go harder to the left and we have to

go harder in getting out the vote. And, and we, we have to be more outrageous in our leftism and this time will win. And it's never. worked. I mean, maybe, maybe, you know, I'm not into political, you know, predictions. Maybe it'll work this time, but it hasn't ever worked yet. And I don't think that Tala Rico is the man to sell this particular message, because who does his kind of demeanor and his kind of sort of weak, on the one hand, weak, you know, presence and carriage and tone and his insane neo-pagan Christian heretical Christian-istic beliefs. Who does that appeal to outside, you know, Libs in Austin and, you know, and people, you know, who

were already committed? It's not going to persuade anybody. It's certainly not going to persuade any of the people, the Hispanics in South Texas, who have been Democrats for generations, who voted for Donald Trump. in 2020 and 2024. It's not going to persuade them. And you need those people to win statewide elections in Texas. Selfishly, John Daniel Davidson, I feel like I kept you this long just to catch up because it's been too long and we used to work together every day. And also, John's on like a weird time zone. So it's just been so good to have you on the show,

John. Please, people go by Pagan America. It's been my pleasure talking with you, Emily. I hope that I didn't freak everybody out with my answers to your sidewinder questions. If you did, it's because I invited it, and happily so. John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at The Federalist. He's going to have a story up about Iran tomorrow. So make sure to check that out over at the Federalist.com and Pagan America. You can get on Amazon wherever books are sold. Thanks, John.

Thanks, Emily. All right, we're going to close out the show this evening with new ratings from CBS Evening News. This is brutal. This is brutal. And one of the reasons we've been covering this story, One of the reasons these numbers, I surmise, are so brutal several months now into Tony DeCopold's high-profile run as the anchor of CBS Evening News is that journalists are supposed to challenge power. It's an era of very low institutional trust, very low institutional trust, like across the board. And that's what people are going to see when they tune in to the news, even to the evening news, which is a much more state.

format, they want to trust that you're holding people to account across the board without fear or favorite, which is why, by the way, journalists should always be protective of their own privacy because you should be challenging power. That's the job. And actually, all of us should be protective of our own privacy, which is why, as a journalist, yes, I have some tricks that probably other people would employ on their own as well. One of them is our great sponsors unplugged with the Upphone. You've heard about before I have it here in my hand. It has amazing features you can actually pulling up right now. How many people have tracked, like how many trackers I've had today, how many tracking attempts have been blocked in the last 24 hours. You can turn the VPN on and off

super easily. And you can also, it's amazing, basically just make your data in acceptable. in inaccessible with the flip of a switch. So if you are concerned about your privacy on the same level as a journalist, which honestly I feel like we all should be, because powerful people are coming no matter what. If you are, you should go check out the app phone from unplugged at unplugged.com slash Emily.

That's unplugged.com slash Emily. But if you're Tony DeCopold, you might not even have to worry about this because what threat do you pose to the powers that be? That's a little mean. But it's serious because obviously the public isn't picking up on it. I mean, we have this variety headline, quote, suddenly CBS Evening News is back where executives at the news division behind the show

hoped never to return, lest you think that's dramatic. Listen to the numbers. Variety goes on to say viewership for the program has once again dropped below 4 million, a critical demarcation point that previously spurred alarm at the Paramount Skydance. News Division, they actually scrapped, as Variety points out, the prior iteration of CBS Evening News, which was anchored by Maurice Dubois and John Dickerson. They got rid of those guys because they were dipping below the level that DeCopal has now dipped below. Four million. The threshold is four million. Why? Well, the overall audience for the program, Variety says, for the five days that

ended at March 13th, stood at nearly 3.83 million. This is in the middle of a war. One of the biggest news events in a generation. Plus, it's the Trump administration, which every network television executive will tell you is generally good for getting butts in seats at the right time. So they're in the demo, so that's between 25 and 54, they were at 468,000. The numbers from ABC, World News Tonight, I mean, This is a disaster for CBS. They were averaging 8.48 million, basically 8.5 million with over a million in the demo.

DeCopal is at 468,000 in the demo. Below 4 million total viewers. NBC averaged six and a half million overall viewers with almost a million in the demo. Man, that's rough by prior standards, but they're at about 946,000 in the demo. That amounts to wiping the floor with CBS Evening News. And CBS News has just done this massive revamp where they bring in Barry Weiss.

Paramount is under David Ellison. It was merged with Skydance under David Ellison, who is, of course, Larry Ellison's son. Larry Ellison is very friendly with the Trump administration. I wouldn't say that Barry Weiss is friendly with the Trump administration. I actually don't think that's true. But she's certainly very friendly. with powerful interests. Whether they are in the Trump administration

or on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, she is enormously well-connected. And part of the rationale for buying CBS News under Ellison, buying the free press for like $250 million, it's precisely because Barry had built up such a Rolodex. I mean, what happened as soon as they were, hit the ground running, you may remember Barry put together like a town hall with, I think it was Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. That's the deep rolladex. If you're the type of person that

is so respected, especially in the foreign policy world that you can pick up the phone and get principals on the show ASAP, that's gold in the media business. And so I just want to remind everybody that these numbers for DeCopal and CBS Evening News more broadly, after they spent lots of money rebranding the show on a marketing campaign and bet on Tony de Cople to be Megan calls him Topra because he tries to kind of infuse a personal touch, maybe a little heavy handed of a personal touch to the news. He almost tries to explain the news a little bit sometimes on his sendoffs. It always feels so ham-fisted. I'm not going to pretend I watch it every single night. But every time I do, it feels like this ham-fisted, heavy-handed

effort to almost patronize viewers. And so it's no surprise to me that the couple is dipping below $4 million, which was previously seen by the network as their breaking case of emergency number, right? Where they're like, all right, Dickerson, you're out. We're bringing the Copeland. This is all happening in the midst of a generational foreign policy conflict, one of the biggest news stories of the 21st century, and one that features the Trump administration, where Barry and her allies were supposed to use their deep roadaxes, their many connections, and what I will say is a different and in many ways better approach to the news, which was to be a little bit more honest about perspective,

to feature a little bit more of that, although I don't think it's been enough. That's probably part of the problem. But also just to give people who are sitting down on their chairs at the end of the day in their routine of watching nightly news, what they're looking for, which is nuts and bolts. Give us the nuts and bolts. Tell me what the news is,

and I will feel more informed when I'm done with my 30 minutes sort of checking in on global affairs. And if anything, this is a news cycle tailor-made to exactly what CBS bought when it bought the free press and brought it in to CBS News,

and to the family and brought Barry to the head of the news. And again, it's hilarious to me when journalists that have been at CBS News for a long time, as the network failed and dipped below 4Mille for their evening news broadcast or got story after story incorrect or stood behind Leslie Stahl like it was the most important career duty they've ever faced, the people leaking and complaining about Barry are no better than anyone who is coming in and being accused of being pro-Trump or whatever. I mean, if you read the free press, it's not pro-Trump. It's more pro-Trump than CBS News was before Barry walked in. It's more open-minded, certainly, and it publishes debates and alike.

And I think that's probably should be showing up more in CBS News than it is right now. And I'm sure it's a long battle. But to hear the leaks from inside is amusing. And I have no sympathy with those people. And I don't want to act as though I think Barry Weiss and her team are in an easy position right now. I don't think that's the case. But they're caught in this major transition between old media and new media, which has been a payday for Barry and people who were out in front of this and saw what was coming and saw that people were sort of becoming more siloed. They wanted to trust personalities.

DeCopal is clearly not a personality that people feel that they. can trust on a scale that CBS needs to put him in that position if they want to be competitive again, which clearly they want to be competitive again. Now, is the evening use a dying format? Absolutely. Just like CBS is also jettisoning Stephen Colbert, not just him, but the late show itself. The whole franchise gone, because these are dying formats, but they're formats that can work across multiple platforms if you're really savvy about it. And that's the trick for everyone going forward is to have a, I mean, is to have a show. It's a little leaner. You can cut the budget a bit, but you can succeed on YouTube. You can succeed with your evening news clips on TikTok or wherever

else. It's very hard to do. Very hard to do. But the early efforts from CBS News have been, like, weird de Koppel man on the streets. It was just, it's not working. It's not working. And this is a time in which it should be. So listen, I'm not underestimating all the challenges internally, but there are some headwinds that should be balancing those out, given the news cycle and the connections and the trust that the new team brought in with them. And to dip below $4 million, that has to be, that's the type of news that the copal has to get that just is sinking.

It's like a gut punch. So maybe he can turn it around. But it seems like this is a, him problem that he is, as people turn to personalities. I mean, that's a great example of how you can have synergy, worst world in the English, worst word in the English dictionary, but the right word in this case between TikTok and evening news. People who watch the evening news, they want to trust the person delivering the news. They don't want to hear a lot about it. You know, they just kind of want to know that the entity that is saying the words that they trust them. TikTok trusts

personalities. They're different types of trust. But DeCopal's clearly not earning a bunch of trust across the board as a personality. And this might be the type of thing that actually gets him swapped out. Now, we're several months into it. Maybe they cling to him for a year and see if they can change something. But I also wouldn't be shocked if you saw a swap, not that far into the future, because these are really competitive shows. And if you've watched the morning show, which obviously I very much enjoy. You get just a taste of how consequential the business side it is on the morning end of it. It's the same on the evening end of it. These are like this is real money. There's real money for these networks. So a lot on the line.

And that is a very, very bad sign. I'll leave it there for this evening. I want to give one more shout out to John Daniel Davidson, who filled in for the great Billy Hallowell tonight, Billy had a family emergency. So we were very glad that John, who wrote almost like a Catholic version of Billy's book playing with fire, he was able to jump in at the last minute. I'm so thankful and he stayed for the whole hour. Please do check out Pagan America. Read John over at the Federalist where he's senior editor.

And make sure to subscribe here, by the way, if you haven't yet, it helps us a lot if you subscribe on YouTube. You can email me at Emily at devilmaicaremedia.com. We will be back with a happy hour edition on podcast. podcast-only format to just audio on Friday at 5 p.m. right around half every hour of time. It will hit the feed, so subscribe there. Otherwise, we will see you back here on the after-party YouTube channel or on-demand live Monday at 9 p.m. See you then, everyone.