After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Washington Post's Fake “Murder”, and Trump's Deportations "Soft Touch," with Tom Bevan, Plus Billie Eilish's Stolen Land Karma

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Emily Jashinksy opens the show with the delicious story of the Tongva tribe responding to Billie Eilish's Grammy speech in which she criticized ICE and declared that "no one is illegal on stolen land.” Turns out Eilish’s own home sits on the tribe’s ancestral territory and now Emily argues Eilish’s rhetoric should be taken seriously and tested. Then Emily is joined by Tom Bevan, Co-Founder & President of RealClearPolitics and the Co-Host of RealClearPolitics on The Megyn Kelly Channel on SiriusXM 111. They begin with the full-blown meltdown over The Washington Post layoffs, Bevan’s offer to buy the paper, and the real reasons the paper is struggling. Bevan also reveals details about his own dealings with the Post and why his website rarely shares stories from the paper anymore. Then the conversation turns to Chuck Schumer labeling the SAVE Act “Jim Crow 2.0,” Tom Homan’s announcement that roughly 700 federal immigration enforcement agents will be withdrawn from Minnesota, and President Trump’s new NBC interview where he addressed the situation in Minneapolis. They also discuss the 2026 midterms, as well as Kamala HQ’s cryptic post on X. Emily rounds out the show with a breakdown of a troubling New York Times article profiling activist Nekima Levy Armstrong who stormed the Minnesota church. Lovebirds Food: Take back your breakfast with Lovebird Cereal. Visit https://lovebirdfoods.com/AFTERPARTY and use code AFTERPARTY for 25% off your first order Masa Chips: Ready to give MASA a try? Get 25% off your first order by going to http://masachips.com/AFTERPARTY and using code AFTERPARTY Lean: Discover why LEAN is becoming the choice for real weight‑loss results—shop now at https://TAKELEAN.com use code EMILY.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome back to After Party, everyone. As always, please do us a favor and subscribe on YouTube. It helps so much. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast because you're not going to want to miss one single episode of After Party. Look at this. Our guest tonight, Tom Bavin, co-founder and president of Real Clear Politics. We're bringing Tom in in just one moment. So much to get through. Washington. This beautiful, proud city had an absolute meltdown today over big cuts to the Washington Post. No question about it. About a third of their work. force slashed in downtown Washington today. But the meltdown was incredible and telling and so worth just taking piece by piece. You're going to enjoy every moment of it. Now, to be clear, not fun when people lose their jobs, but what was fun is a reaction from other journalists. It's incredible stuff. You're going to have to see it. I'm probably going to play a Reno 911 clip. Also, big big news. Donald Trump's Super Bowl interview with NBC starts has started to like leak out. So we have some clips that we're getting from that. Tom is the polling guru. So we're going to break down the truth about what's going on with Trump's approval

rating as we had into the midterms. And Chuck Schumer in some trouble, he made some rather amusing comments about the Save Act, which Megan actually asked Vice President Van about today. He said he's pretty favorable towards the Save Act, but of course doesn't know that it would be able to get through Congress. I know that's an issue that's important to a lot of people. Well, Chuck Schumer is pulling another page out of the cynical, cynical

playbook of calling it racist. So we're going to show you that clip. And he actually kind of got a clapback from CNN. So we have more to come on that front. Kamala Harris just dropped a very weird video on X. Makes it sound like she's about to announce a presidential run like years ahead of time so uh i don't know there's some different theories about what's going on we're going to show it to you um and get tom's reaction to that as well

first though i am obsessed with this billy eyeless story i can't get enough of it i am absolutely shamelessly in love with this storyline putting this on the screen now um if you haven't heard this Here we go. The Tongva tribe has said that Billy Eilish is living in a mansion built on the, quote, ancestral land taken from them. This is, of course, in response to Billy Eilish's claim during her acceptance speech at the Grammys on Sunday night that no person is illegal on stolen land. well, the Tongva tribe said, and maybe Billy Elish is perfectly consistent in this, they said, all right, you stole our land. Give us your house, basically. So the statement to Fox News from the Tongva tribe is, quote, as the first people of the greater Los Angeles basin, we do understand that her home is situated in our ancestral land. Elish has not contacted our tribe directly regarding her property. Incredible, incredible,

but of course she says no human being is illegal and stolen land. So as long as someone steals the land, I suppose there's nothing illegal about Billy Eilish being on the land. But let me tell you why I'm particularly obsessed with this story. What I think should happen is that the Tongva tribe should genuinely go to the gates of Billy Eilish's mansion, stay there until they get a hearing with her on camera, until we see Billy Elish's security dragging the Tongva people off of the property saying you must leave armed security in maybe like black cars dragging people away, saying, you know, leading them this way or arresting, having them arrested for trespassing, That's what I believe that the Tongva people should do outside of Billy Eilish's mansion because it is about damn time.

Somebody who agrees with Billy Eilish puts her formulation to its logical conclusion and says, all right, this land is stolen. You're talking about stolen land. Well, we the Tongva people have been making this argument about stolen land for years. And I looked into the history of the Tongva people. it is very typical of Native American tribes history with colonists from Spain, eventually then the American government, a brutal history in some cases. And it looks like, I mean, so on the Long Beach tourism website, they say that according to archaeological records,

the oldest known Tongva village was settled some 9,000 years ago at Bolsa-Chika Beach. By 3,200 years ago, the territory known as Tongavar was at the center of a trade network that stretched from the Pacific Northwest to Mexico. Okay. Well, human history is a hell of a lot longer than 9,000 years old. So I don't know that that actually really settles the question of the true indigenous people of the land that Billy Elish's houses on. But if they say it's stolen land, who is she to disagree with that?

Who are they then? If they agree that nobody is illegal on stolen land, I mean, you see how this pulls that every thread in this house of cards, or I guess I'm mixing metaphors. It just is, it's like flicking the exact right cards here, uh, because the Tongva people are going to say, this is our land. Why? Well, because it's within our borders. We were the rightful settlers of this land. Then of course, the United States says, no, through a series of war and treaties. It is our land. You may have been treated unfairly, but it is our land. Billy Eilish says, no, this land is stolen. It belongs to the Tongva people. But Billy, why? Because they settled it and they had borders. It's just like incredible. I'm telling you,

the best thing that could happen for the country right now at this moment is for the Tongva tribe to actually try, genuinely try to get Billy Eilish to seed their property, to seat her property back to them. I want to know what she really thinks. I want to hear the conversation between the Tongva people genuinely. I'm not saying this to be a jackass and Billy Eilish because I want to know what it means to be illegal or not illegal on someone's land. I want to know if she thinks the land was stolen. I want to know if she thinks why somebody has a right to that land over somebody else. And then I want to know if she thinks that somebody actually can legally be on quote unquote stolen land, meaning her, does she have a right to that land? Put it to the test. Let's do it. Let's see it happen. I'm obsessed with the story. I think we

desperately need, as a country, the Tongva people, to make a genuine effort to knock on the doors of Billy Elish's mansion and get to the bottom of this. And I say that again, I promise I'm not trying to be a jackass. The protesters, the anti-ice protesters in Los Angeles, The other night were chanting. Let's see if I can just pull this up. Why not? One of the chants as they were going through the streets was very telling. Here it is. Look at me.

Go. Liberation. Down down with deportation. From Palestine to Mexico. From Palestine to Mexico. The border walls have got to go. The border walls have got to go. Okay. So that's what you, that's the, the key moment there from Palestine to Mexico,

the border walls have got to go. That was one of the anti-ice protests in Los Angeles last week. I think that's from Friday. And so if that is the formulation, I mean, very interesting for defenders of the Palestinian people, by the way, because this question of borders itself, like as a fundamental concept, well, you bet the Palestinian people believe in borders because they believe that was their land. And so the question of open borders in general, that is out of step actually with some of the people that open borders advocates claim to be representing and advocating on behalf of. And so that's all I'm saying is this this core ideological commitment to the idea of open borders. I disagree with it, but it's an honest position to have.

I just don't think a lot of people actually have that position. It's all anti-American, anti-Western at the end of the day. But when you push it to its logical conclusion, there are very few people who truly want to live in an open borders world where nobody can make serious claims to the land. I mean, the nation state is fairly new. And some people are rather uncomfortable with it, of course. But I'm just saying test it to its limits. Let's go knock on Billy Eilish's gates and let's watch her either have a conversation or security on peaceful Tongva people trying to have a conversation about the land that Billy Eilish seems

to agree was stolen. I'm loving this story. I'm loving the story, but I actually seriously want to see something along those lines happen. Okay. We're going to bring in Tom Bevin in just one moment. We have so much to talk about with him. First, though, you guys know I'm skeptical of pretty much everything. It's why I do this job, but especially skeptical of all that food that claims to be, quote, unquote, healthy.

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afterparty for 25% off your first order. You can also find Lovebird cereals at Walmart, Whole Foods, sprouts and other major retailers nationwide, Lopbert Serial, join the Real Food Revolution and take back our country's health from big food, box by box. Let's go ahead and bring in Tom Bevin, our friend, he's the co-founder and president of Real Clear Politics. He's the co-host of Real Clear Politics on the Megan Kelly Channel on Sirius XM 11 and just an all-around good guy, bald guy, but a guy.

Love it. Good to be with you, Emily. So happy to have you, Tom, especially omit, um, emits. your bid for the Washington Post. Tom Bevin has an offer on the table to acquire the Washington Post. Tom, you're offering, what, a cool 50 mil for the Washington Post? We can put it up on the screen. So he bought, Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, 24, something.

It's been 12 or 13 years that he's owned it now. And he bought it for $250 million, which was seen as kind of a bargain at the time. but obviously this thing has been nothing but a headache for him and he's been losing well a lot of money on it some say $100 million a year maybe more so you know my idea was I'm sure he's probably just fed up with it he'd love someone to just take it off his hands 50 million would seem like a nice round number for him although Carl Cannon on the show today as soon as I made that off of Carl's like I think it's too much. I think. And so today I said, I said 10 million and he goes, no, one million. I doubt Jeff Bezos is going to sell The Washington Post for one million. So we'll

see. Our offer is negotiable. But I do think as I look at that organization, how it's been run, that, you know, you see all these journalists, the amount of emoting and rending of garments on X today by all of these folks about how awful Jeff Bezos is and, you know, how he should just out of the goodness of his heart and because he's worth, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars that he should just fund this indefinitely and just lose money forever and ever as a sort of, you know, his civic duty or something is kind of humorous to me. As someone who's run a started a media company from scratch and has, we're independent. We don't have a big, you know, sugar daddy billionaire.

We have to make payroll every single month. And let me tell you, like the economics of this business are tough. They are immutable. You know, you can put your head in the sand and try and ignore them. but at the end of the day, the economics will catch up to you. And so this idea that, you know, the Washington Post has to have a reporter or two or three reporters covering the intersection of race and gender and, you know, health care and all these things.

It's just like, no, I don't think so. And by the way, my plan when we purchase the Washington Post would be to put Carl Cannon in charge. Now, Carl is. you know, his father worked for the Washington Post for like 25 or 30 years, covered Ronald Reagan, and Carl is an old school. It comes from sort of this old school dynastic journalism family. And if anyone could whip that place into shape and restore it to its former greatness just through, you know, sheer common sense and adherence to sort of the traditional

journalistic principles, it's Carl Cannon and he could do it. And I'd be right there sort of cheering him along. I love that idea. I know, right? It's good. It's a good plan. It'd be tough love, of course, from Carl Cannon. And some people just would not like it, Tom. You know, but the thing about Carl is, is such an agreeable person. I mean, I've, Carl's worked for us for about, oh man, at least 15 years, but he's been in Washington for 40 years or so, 50 years probably, working in Washington for that long. And you can't say this about many people. He might be the only one you can say this about.

I've never met anyone in Washington who has a bad word to say about him. They all love the guy. And I know why. I mean, he's like a brother to me. And we've come to become like brothers and like family. He is the nicest, most gentlemanly, most thoughtful. He hardly ever raises his voice, if ever. He is always very sort of circumspect about all of these different issues

and is just really thoughtful and treats everyone with dignity and respect, just as you would expect him to be. So it would be tough love, but I think he's a guy who could pull it off because he has the credibility and the track record and the demeanor. He could make the argument to even, I think, who are, you know, at the Washington Post now who consider themselves liberal that they need to be doing their jobs better and differently if they want to win back the trust and respect of readers. We get it, Tom. You're sick of working with Carl, but lots of good points there.

The news, of course, let's put this up, F4. So Matt Murray sent an email to staff today high up at the post and some of the bits here. The Washington Post search has declined by half in three years. This is from Max Taney pulling the top lines really from this long email. Daily story output has, quote, substantially fallen in the last five years. Murray argues, quote, we too often write from one perspective for one slice of the audience. That is obviously true, but it's interesting in the era of siloing media properties. So New York Times, for example, CNN went so hard in the resistance paint, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, arguably still, and saw its audience decline. But what they were trying to do was go for that niche to develop a very loyal niche that they

could, you know, mine for more and more cash. And Tom, you mentioned that you run a media company. And I got to ask you about this incredible Peter Baker post. Peter Baker is, if you run in journalism them circles, whatever you think of the guy, one of the most respected people in DC media. This is somebody who's considered like the top of the top. Peter Baker posts, F3, we could put up on the screen, this long thing on X about Jeff Bezos's wealth, how it was $194 billion in 2024, $215,000,000 in 2025. It's $250 billion now. He goes to the cost of Bezos' yacht, the investment in the Maloney, and he goes.

money movie, the net increase in Bezos's wealth since buying the post. And then he goes, number of years Bezos could absorb those losses with what he makes in a single week, five. And he also says the last reported annual losses of the post was $100 million. You mentioned that number, Tom. Sounds right to me. So the answer here is that Jeff Bezos should keep his audience small as an act of charity to the nation? I guess. I mean, I mean, it's his civic duty. It's what he owes all of these journalists, you know, six-figure salaries and benefits. There's a certain level of...

For declining performance. That not just Peter Baker, but plenty of folks in the Washington, New York sort of Sella corridor, have when it comes to media properties and journalism, and they think that they occupy this very sort of highly esteemed, morally righteous position, right? They're the ones who are telling truth to power, and they have these very sort of inflated opinions of themselves and what they do and their place in society and all that. Meanwhile, you know, the rest of us, hundreds of millions of Americans have to get up and go to work every day at jobs and no other job would be expected to function. No other business would be, you'd be able to look at the CEO and be like, you know, we just need to keep losing $100 million

a year and, you know, for infinity because I need a job and I want my, you know, cushy little corner office or whatever. I mean, it's absurd and they don't seem to be able to recognize that. I posted something on X about this. I mean, so the Washington, So the Washington Post cuts 300 jobs, and there was a literal meltdown inside the Beltway by all of these folks on X, as I mentioned earlier. I don't know how many of these people even mentioned, but let alone had, you know, got all of reclaimed and had an emotional breakdown over the 16,000 people that Amazon laid off nine days ago. And that news broke. Oh, that's such a good point. All of these people.

I mean, and it happens, this is one of my pet peeves and hobby horses, right? It happens all the time in all across the country. And we read about it, these sort of anodyne pieces in the Wall Street Journal. They're just sort of news reports, you know, UPS laid off 30,000 people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When a couple thousand federal workers got laid off because of Doge, you would have thought that the world was ending. In The Washington Post, the New York Times, they were running sob story. After Sob Story, you know, oh, so and so they had a great job and now they're, you know, they have to apply for unemployment or they have to eat ramen noodles.

I mean, it was, you know, and I get it. It's like, you know, because people who live in D.C., they know they have friends who work for the government, maybe they're married to someone who works in the government, so they're closely connected to this and they have a much more emotional connection. But it also just pisses me off that they aren't able to recognize that, you know, where are the sob stories for the, you know, the worker in Ohio who's factory closed, you know, and they got put out of work. I mean, this stuff's been going on every single day in America for decades, and you hardly see stories about that. And but when it comes, when it, when it hits really

close to home, then, of course, there's a huge uproar about it, which is exactly what we're seeing now. Yeah, it's like it's the same phenomenon as when it snows in New York. It's just like 24 seven blizzard coverage, but if there's a tornado that rips through Oklahoma, they dip into it once. Like, it's the perfect. Like, that's exactly how they see the world. And it's, with this case, I mean, you're talking about the Atlantic publishing, oh, I can't even read the headline. It's so funny. F2, we can put it up on the screen. The murder of the Washington Post. And Tom, you're going to have to have to play a clip for you quick. because this is all I can think about right now when I see this is Terry Reno 911.

And yeah, here we have. I've got it. This is Nick Swartson's Reno 911 character. Terry? Terry? Terry? Terry? Terry?

Here's your word. You were murdered. You were murdered. Okay, you obviously weren't murdered because you're alive and you're basically intact. You weren't murdered, buddy. You were obviously not murdered because you're alive. I mean, Tom, like, can we put the Ashley Parker headline back? I think it's incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible. The murder of the Washington Post,

if we are going to say the Washington Post has been murdered because 30% of its staff was cut in a single day. And some of the choices, I mean, they cut somebody who was on the ground in Ukraine. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure you could split hairs about what was right, what was wrong. But 300 people get cut at the Washington Post. It's clearly a long time coming. They had been telegraphing this was going to happen over and over and over again since Bezos revamped their approach, hires Will Lewis says we're gonna go digital first and all of that. So if we say that cutting the third of the staff

at this dying newspaper that's living $100 million a year is tantamount to a murder, the idea of blaming Bezos and Will Lewis is laughable in and of itself. Blame the people who drove the paper into the ground. And yet what they're doing is venerating the people who killed the Washington Post. It's incredible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, Ashley Parker probably didn't write that headline. And I, you know, I've met Ashley before, and I actually thought she was, she was very cool. And I think she's a very talented writer. But she also, I mean, she does have this mentality. She's writing this for a magazine that is owned by Steve Jobs' widow, a billionaire, who's funding it, you know, as a civic duty. She's losing money. I mean, it's the exact situation that apparently all of these people want.

Now, look, you could say, I heard a lot of griping from people like, oh, they close the sports section, like that's stupid. They should be able to make money on local sports coverage or they're doing away with the book section or, you know, you can quibble with maybe the decisions that they made. But your point is the fundamental one, Emily, which is they had to do something because the product they were producing was inferior. And they were losing ground. And this is the same process that Barry Weiss is going through at CBS News, which is, you know, in a media environment that is more and more fractured, you know, you have to adapt. You have to be able to capture people's attention in the content that you're creating or you're going to fall behind and eventually lose. And the Washington Post was clearly had already fallen behind, but they had no interest in adapting or changing. And, you know, so that's the reality that they faced.

And again, you can maybe quibble with the decisions that it made, but they had to do something. And clearly, losing $100 million a year for the foreseeable future was not really an option. And so they decided to, you know, it's a, I understand losing a third of your staff is, that's a big number. I mean, and I don't know how many employees they had over what was 300, so they have about 1,000 employees maybe. That's a pretty good chunk. But they had to do it and we'll see whether they're able to make the changes necessary to save the paper from actually being murdered, actually being driven into extinction because that's where it was headed. Yeah, I mean, clearly. It is clearly where it was headed.

And again, to blame people who came in, I mean, Bezos is actually not a. bad culprit to blame because he was the one who greenlit the strategy of democracy dies in darkness that made the paper less appealing to a broader audience and siloed it. And they looked at what the New York Times was doing. And they said, and this is back in like 2016 era, they said, oh, let's get in on that action. Let's go peddled to the metal anti-Trump and see if we can, you know, cultivate a really loyal subscriber base, which just it didn't work. Because they didn't do it as well as the Times did, frankly. And then the Times had all of these other acquisitions and went with a game, like, business model. So let's put this on the screen from Joe Wisenthal, who pointed out

the New York Times stock dipped. It dipped. And Wisenthall says New York Times' big bet on video is driving up costs, which is what seems to be spooking investors. Tom, people can go watch this video that I did like several months ago where I talked about how I took myself out of the running for a job at the post, but part of what I learned through that process was what they're doing is clearing room to afford a massive pivot to video, like a massive digital spend and video strategy. That obviously costs a lot of money, and that obviously means that like a restructuring of a third of your workforce is kind of exactly what you would want to do to step in that direction. Yeah, clearly, I think video is, and, you know, the Washington Post,

actually had already gone into video. I don't know if you remember. I mean, we've seen this iteration. I mean, Bloomberg spent millions of dollars to build a studio that hired Mark Halpern and John Heilman to produce his stuff and it like was a complete loser. The Washington Post, a few years back,

had this whole digital buildout. I mean, they were, they spent millions and millions of dollars on video and couldn't get anybody to watch. So they shuttered it. I think part of that is maybe they were a little bit ahead of their time. Maybe it was also the way to succeed in video these days is doing what we're doing now.

Yeah. And what Megan Kelly does and Joe Rogan, which is, you know, it doesn't require a ton of investment and to have a huge studio and have a massive staff and do all those things for slick production. If you can provide good content that people want to watch, right? Well, Tom, the New York Times' breakout video star is the person nobody expected to be. literally Ross Dauphett, who sits in their already existing podcast studios with a microphone and gets mega clicks for them because he has interesting conversations. Exactly.

It's so low budget. Like you don't need to spend that much money on it. Correct. Correct. And build out all these different, you know, and basically trying to be sort of cable news light. You know, I mean, I can turn on Fox or CNN or, you know, go to the Washington. That's what they were trying to do. Right.

And they just couldn't find an audience to support it. But so maybe if the new strategy is more along lines of what we're just talking about, they will end up having more success. Because it is a situation where, I mean, the days of people getting their newspaper thrown on their doorstep and bringing it inside and sitting down and, you know, opening it up and thumbing through it while they drink their coffee, those days are pretty much over. You know, and so they do need to They do need to modernize and get with the times And we'll see if they're able to do that or not I hope they do I mean my offer still stands of course To buy the post but I do hope they succeed and I hope they succeed in

In reclaiming the sort of legacy of of the Washington Post, which was for years, it was a really, really good paper. And it did have the kind of coverage that people were interested in. And somewhere along the way, they sort of lost their way. And I do hope that whether it's Will Murray and Bezos or it's the next owner or whomever,

I hope they can figure it out because, you know, I would hate to see the Washington Post go completely out of business. but that's where they'll be if they don't figure this thing out. Yeah, I mean, my understanding is that Bezos wants to do like a long-term revamp to basically try and build a new version of USA Today, like the paper that was, you know, what that was at one point as a touchstone, like the paper that Middle America had on its doorstep and it could speak to people in the center, speak to people on the left, speak to people

on the right. And it was that kind of thing. That's my understanding. They're willing to like invest a ton of money to do that, which is very interesting because looking at, there are a couple more reactions I wanted to put up on the screen, F1, posts like this from Ben Mullen on the statement Marty Barron put out. A staggering statement from former Washington Post editor, Marty Barron, quote, this ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations. And you know what? It does. Like to the point that you've been making, Tom, it does. But the question is, who put it into the Who thrust the Washington Post into the darkness? Sally Quinn has thoughts.

If people don't know about Sally Quinn, Google Sally Quinn. You'll learn a lot. But this sort of queen of Georgetown, Sally Quinn, who was married to Ben Bradley, and obviously has a close relationship with Washington Post because of that. Here's what she had to say today. I think the only word I can say is grief. Everybody is in a state of grief.

In the last year, it's just been wonderful. funeral after the other. We've had nothing but going away parties. People being laid off, people taking the buyout, people just quitting. And it's just tragic what's happening to the Washington Post.

And I don't, there's nobody who doesn't feel that way. It's not just me. It's not just the people of the Post, but it's everybody in journalism. My colleagues at the New York Times are just as upset as anybody because they don't, they don't want to see journalism dying.

It just trust in media is at a record low right now, according to Gallup, which has been tracking this year after year, after year after year. And Tom, I look at that and I'm like, why, Sally Quinn, weren't you weeping over the horrible Washington Post coverage that is losing the trust of readers? Like, that's losing the money. That's losing the subscriptions. Like, that's what you should be weeping over, not the consequences of it. Yeah. I mean, I saw, you know, there's a lot of. Chaden Freud out there on X. And I resisted the temptation to, you know, pile on and, and, you know,

tell people to learn to code and, you know, all of that. Because, you know, people lost their jobs, and that's always a tough thing. And I've had to, you know, I've had to let people go, people that I didn't want to let go. And it is a hard thing. You have to fire Carl Cannon tomorrow. Not quite. We'll keep them around for. a little bit longer. But it is a tough thing to do and to go through. However, to your point, where was the course correction, where was the reflection, where was the introspection, where was the accountability by any of these people who were at the post as they were speeding, you know, headlong into the iceberg? Democracy.

She dies in darkness. I mean, and the problem that the Washington Post has and the New York Times has and what Barry Weiss is dealing with at CBS is the organizations have been so fully captured by the left. They've hired all of these smart young Ivy League kids that are out of Columbia Journalism School and the like. And they have basically sort of taken over the newsrooms that when you try to. to inject some change, some reformation, some sanity. You get met with a mob mentality. We saw that at the New York Times. We saw, I mean, even when the Washington Post hired Adam O'Neill to run the opinion page,

what was it last year just a few months ago? And he said, look, we're going to, and Bezos made that, release that statement and said, look, we're going to focus on, you know, on the opinion page, we're going to focus on, like, economic freedom and whatever it was. and people lost their ever-loving minds over that. And how dare he, you know, dictate to us what we can write about and what we can't write about. And because the opinion page had become just a left-wing fever swamp of race and, you know, Jonathan Capehart and Karen Atia and all these people. I mean, it was just, it was unreadable, honestly.

If you were not just a flaming left-wing progressive, you'd go to that page. And I go to it every day as part of my official duties at Real Clear Politics to see what people are writing and aggregating content. And it just became, again, unreadable. Like we couldn't use anything from it even if we wanted to. I was just going to ask you that. I was just going to ask you that because I've sensed that. Like you actually don't link to the post very often. And I wanted to ask around when that started to happen.

So we've had an interesting relationship with the Washington Posts over the years. When it started, we purchased, there was the Washington Post Writers Group, and they syndicated all of their columnists, right? It was George Will and Charles Crouthammer and E.J. Dionne. And it was a good stable of columns, like some of the premier columnists in the country. And so we purchased their content from the Washington Post Writers Group. And then we would get it and we would put it on real clear politics in our template. So say, you know, we'd usually, we'd always put the Washington Post byline on it when we posted it on the site.

But if you clicked on it, it would go to a real clear politics page. And what happened was is that after a few years of that, the Washington Post basically cut us off because more people were coming to Real Clear Politics to read Charles Crouthammer and their columnists, then we're going to the Washington Post. And so they basically just said, we will not sell this content to you anymore. And we got cut off. And so, you know, that was kind of a whole deal. And it's not that we stopped using the Washington Post to that point.

I mean, what our challenge as an aggregator, sort of a hybrid aggregator publisher of content are paywalls. Right? We can't link to articles that our readers click on and then go to and get hit with a paywall. and say you have to pay or you have to put in your email to, you know, register and create an account and all this stuff, just to go through to see an article. I mean, that's like a non-starter for most of our readers, right? And we hear about it when they click on something. So that's one of the reasons we stop going and using stuff from the Washington Post.

It's one of the reasons we rarely ever use anything from the New York Times. There are a couple different workarounds that you can use. Like the Washington Post will, you know, they have their content, which goes out, MSN grabs it, and so we can use an MSN link that does not have a paywall. And so typically that's when we link to something from the Washington Post, that's how we do it. But you're right. We don't link to the post that often. And typically now we link to not stuff from the opinion page, but more news analysis articles

and things that appear on the front page, news stories. And we usually link to it via some other web. because the Washington Post will hit you with a paywall, and our readers hate that. It's entirely fair. We have so much more to get to with Tom. I'm going to take a quick break, but right before I do, I want to mention, because Sally Quinn was up there, people think about this post-war period of mass media as this golden era. And in some respects, obviously it was. You're making a lot of money in this sort of thing. But people can go ahead and Google, Ben Bradley and Mary Meyer. And if they don't know the story about how Mary Meyer,

J.F.K.'s mistress, who was murdered, how her diary ended up in the hands of James Jesus Angleton at the CIA. Well, the New York Times reported that it was one Ben Bradley, who gave it to Angleton and the CIA. Obviously, some questions about why the CIA would want the diary of JFK's mistress, and some questions about why the CIA narrative seems to have its, the CIA seemed to have its fingerprints all over the Watergate narrative that was published in Ben Bradley's Washington Post. So just a little little fun tidbit from history about the institutions that we are told to revere and respect as perfect and beautiful and infallible. Tom, we're going to be right back. But first, we got to sell some masa chips so that Tom doesn't have to deal with a paywall if he wants to link to the

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go to masa chips.com slash after party and use code after party for 25% off your first order or simply click the link in the video description or scan a QR code to claim this delicious offer. And if you don't feel like ordering online, that's fine. Maza is now available nationwide at your local Sprout supermarket. So stop by and pick up a couple of bags before they're gone. All right, I'm joined once again by Tom Bevin, co-founder and president of Real Clear Politics. Boy, do we have a lot more to get to. Let's do it. I really want to ask about the Chuck Schumer debacle.

I'm going to roll this clip here, S4. Chuck Schumer has called the Save Act, which is a Voting Protection Act, Jim Crow 2.0, a Republican, I should say, voter integrity act. Let's go ahead and roll S4. The Save Act is an abomination. It's Jim Crow 2.0 across the country. We are going to do everything we can to stop it. Everything we can to stop it.

Okay. So the SAVE Act requires proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. So that's an important thing to know about the bill when you hear Chuck Schumer saying things like that. Echoing Joe Biden when he was talking about new voter laws in Georgia, which I think were still in. Like what was the time that was like that even Delaware had stricter voting laws than what Georgia changed? Yeah. Right. So Harry Enton goes and pulls the numbers because Nikki Minaj posts, I mean, these sentences are ridiculous. I'm talking to Chuck Schumer, Harry Enton, and Nicky Minaj, it's like a Stefan S&L sketch. Nicky Minaj posts, what sensible forward-thinking, cutting edge, leading nation is having a debate on whether or not there should be voter ID. Like, they're actually fighting not to have people. This is F7D-Present ID while voting for your leaders. Do you get it? Do you get it now? So Harry Anton goes and pulls the numbers.

This is S6. And what you see is is that the American people, actually, it's not really all that controversial. The American people are with Nikki Minaj, whether they are Republican, or even if they are Democrats, we're talking about seven and ten Democrats agreeing with Nikki Minaj that you in fact should show a voter voter ID to vote. What's the racial breakdown? Okay. What's the racial breakdown on this, right? Because I think a lot of people make the argument that people of color, non-white Americans have. by harder time procuring a photo ID to vote. But even here, take a look here,

favor photo ID to vote. 85% of white people favorite, 82% of Latino, 76% of black Americans favorite. So the bottom line is this. Voter ID is not controversial in this country. And it also, the bill also requires states to have a program that would remove non-citizens from the existing voter rules.

Tom, what did you make of a little smackdown there from Harry Anton on CNN? Yeah, I mean, the numbers are the numbers. And good for Harry to do a segment on that and point it out because you heard Chuck Schumer. I mean, he said this is a non-starter. We discussed this on our program. Carl was being his lovable, naive self, I think, and thinking that somehow, because the, you know, public opinion was so much in favor of this, that there would be maybe something they got done.

on this. And I, this is one of those issues that, as Chuck Schumer said, Democrats will never vote for this. It doesn't matter if it's 100% people, 100% of people are in favor of this. Democrats will never vote for it. They will always, I think, call it voter suppression and call it Jim Crow 2.0. as ridiculous as that may be. I wonder if, you know, Chuck Schumer has any self-awareness at how, when he uses that phrase at how ridiculous it sounds and it is and how often the Democrats use it to try and explain the world around them. Because it's, you know, as you said, they used it in Georgia.

They use it every time that there's any effort to put any sort of restrictions or guardrails or anything on on voters other than you can just vote you can register the same day you can you don't need ID you don't even have to be from the country you can just you know anybody can vote that that's their policy and they're they're going to go to the mats to defend it no matter what the American public how how against them the American public might be yeah it's been this way on voter ID for years and years years yeah and they say the citizenship is no problem and whatever. Well, I'll check it in just a second, but my understanding here in D.C. You know, in Georgia and some of these other places, like Black turnout was at historic highs.

I mean, it's just, it's craziness. The idea that having any of these sort of, you know, even saying that, for example, you can only have early voting for, for 10 days instead of a month or six weeks or something, that somehow that's, you know, voter suppression. Yeah, no, there was there was a piece, I'm trying to remember who wrote it, but basically saying, I think it might have been in the Washington Examiner, but basically saying, you know, voter ID isn't racist. The Democrats' arguments against it are the racist. They're the racist for saying, oh, you know, black people can't get IDs or they can't figure out how to, you know, navigate the system or, you know, somehow.

And by the way, Sean Trendy, our senior elections analyst was on today. we were talking about this in the SAVE Act, there's no evidence to support the idea that in any empirical way that black voters are somehow, you know, disproportionately impacted by voter ID restrictions or laws or regulations at all. Which is the entire premise. It's like the entire premise. It's just incredible. Incredible.

So last question on this then, Tom, is why? Why? Because I know you've followed this for a long time. Why in your estimation? Is it, is it just this sort of progressive, ideological commitment to making voting as easy as is possible? Want 16-year-olds to vote. They want non-citizens to vote. Is that what it is? Yeah, I think so. I think there is a deep, deep belief among Democrats that the more people who are allowed to vote the better off they do in elections. And that is not always the case, as we saw, I think, in the last presidential election, high turnout. There has been this orthodoxy, this, you know, conventional wisdom, if you will, that high turnout elections always benefit Democrats. That is not true. And, And so I think they do want the idea that any sort of restrictions end up hurting them. That's the way they view this. And so they don't want any restrictions. And then there is the component about people who are coming into the country. And they don't want to scrub voter rolls.

They don't want to update lists or anything, keep anything current. anything that does anything around securing our elections, they reflexively argue that it is Republicans who are, you know, A, racist, and B, trying to suppress the vote of people. That's been their standby, sort of go-to argument for 25 years, and I'm sure it'll be the same way for another 25 years. Yeah, that sounds right to me. Speaking of the Court of Public Opinion, let's go-to. on to Tom Holman's announcement today that the Trump administration, according to Reuters, is quote, withdrawing some 700 federal immigration enforcement agents from Minnesota, although about 2,000 will stay in place. According to Holman, an announcement that he made this morning,

Donald Trump, in some excerpts here that are getting leaked from an NBC Super Bowl interview, addresses what's happened with ICE in Minnesota. And we're going to get to some poll numbers in just one moment, but let's start here with S-9. Speaking of Minneapolis, what did you learn? I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch, but you still have to be tough. These are criminals. We're dealing with really hard criminals, but look, I've called the people.

I've called the governor. I've called the mayor, spoke to them, had great conversations with them, and then I see them ranting and raving out there. literally as though a coal wasn't made. He also said, you know, there were mistakes made, nobody feels worse. What did you make of that, Tom? Well, I think it's clear, you know, that the Trump administration has, and Donald Trump in particular, has engineered a sort of reset, recalibration.

You know, the Alex Prattie killing was a tipping point that, I think, made them rethink who was the face of the organization, who was in charge, and how they were messaging, because they were losing the PR war, and also an effort to reach out, as he said. I mean, he made these phone calls, he had these conversations, and try and lower the temperature and look, Tom Homan said, as part of his announcement that they were withdrawing these 700 agents, that it was because he'd had unprecedented cooperation. Now, I don't know if he's, you know, if that's true and that's really the reason or whether, you know, maybe he was doing a little jujitsu and trying to get Tim Wals and Jacob Fry in trouble with their base by suggesting that they're cooperating with him, you know, to get the lefties riled up. I don't know. But I think it is, you know, because he wants to, I think still, as Donald Trump did in that interview, this is not. a retreat, right? It is a recalibration. They still want to, they still want to continue with these

enforcement actions. And what had happened, though, with Renee Goods killing and Predese killing, is that, you know, Democrats were able to conflate, you know, what people were seeing on the street and say, look, this is an overreaction by these out-of-control. of federal and, you know, federal agents, what Homan has said, and I think done a very good job of sort of resetting the baseline here, which is all we want is for cooperation to be able to get the bad guys who are here illegally

from the jails. And if we're able to do that, then we don't have to go out on the streets and it's safer for us. It's safer for the public. It's safer for the people that we're rounding up. I mean, it's something that we've been doing it this way for a long, long time. We've never had any problem with it.

And suddenly, you know, now we're having a problem. So if we could just get back to cooperation, I think he's done a pretty good job of doing that. And so we'll see how this progresses. But clearly, Donald Trump saw the writing on the wall that the way thing, the trajectory that it was going with the ICE action, particularly in Minneapolis, was causing issues for him in the Court of Public Opinion. And he made a change. So this is the RCP aggregation of polls on immigration. Your number has him right now at eight below water. So disapprove at 52.4% on immigration, 44.4% approve on immigration. It's actually not disastrous. I mean, it's one of his key issues. But when you consider the killings of two American citizens, it's not double digits, which you might expect in the case like that. Quinopeic apparently here had post-Pretti and good, a 12. 21 point disadvantage for Trump. So that's that's brutal. Morning consult had a tie. Tom, a lot of this looks kind of all over the place. What have you seen in these numbers?

Yeah, I mean, for for for most of his first year of his second term, Trump's approval reading on immigration was higher than his overall approval. And that was I think it was the only issue. I mean, he enjoyed real sort of support obviously among Republicans, but even among independence with the sort of mass deportation program as it was rolled out. It was one of the cornerstones of his of his election. It's only recently that we've seen him now dip down into the mid-40s on immigration and that is now I think below his his overall job approval rating. So but there were, you know, a couple of polls out last week. There was a Harvard Harris poll showing I think 73 percent or something of people still approve of the

federal government taking people who are here illegally and who have committed crimes either while in this country or in their country of origin and shipping them out. That is still a majority approval position in this country. What where the drop-off happens is when you asked, should people be deported if they are only here illegally, but they haven't done any, they haven't committed any other crimes. And there, you still have Republicans, a strong majority of Republicans say, yeah, we still want those people gone because they're here illegally. But support drops among independence and drops pretty significantly among Democrats. And so, and that's the issue where Democrats have done a good job of sort of muddying the waters

and conflating those two, so to help, I think, drive public opinion in their direction on that. But look, I think Trump's overall position and the thing that he was elected on, still has majority support when it's when it's presented to the public that way and it's delivered sort of on the ground in a sort of orderly fashion when you have chaos in the streets when you have people getting shot that's a problem and by the way and I've said this before this is where Democrats are you know they're sort of riding this tiger of immigration protests but what are we seeing well we're seeing like them we're seeing these protests get out of control in Portland, in Los Angeles, in other cities around the

country. And the public is not going to like that either. Independence and normies are going to recoil from that as well because they don't like seeing chaos in the streets. And if the Democrats are cheering them on and they're aiding and abetting, that kind of stuff, they will pay a price for it. Let's put F8 on the screen last week, Tom, on, I think it was the Wednesday show. I went in looked back at the RCP averages in 2018 and I think also 2022 and on the congressional ballot as well. And what we're looking at right now, as you pointed out in this post on X, people can see the RCP average here on the generic congressional vote. What we're looking at here is a widening gap, but still not an insurmountable one. You say when Trump took office in late January of last year,

Dems were at 44% in the generic ballot test and trailing the GOP by 1.5%. A year later, they're at a new high of 47.6%. Now lead the GOP by 5 points, 5%, I should say. And Tom, you have watched this happen for a long time. Trump himself said at his speech in Iowa last week. He was like, you know, you never win the midterms when you're in power, like already trying to temper expectations. Sure.

This is still, though, less of a lead when I went back and looked at your all's average. from 2018. It's a slightly lower lead for Dems than it was in 2018, which I guess could suggest they're on track for less of a bloodbath. I mean, that was a historic blue wave election cycle. They probably still will do well. But what do you make of these numbers? In the House, yeah. No, I, yes. I think, look, Democrats usually historically sort of underperform their generic ballot numbers. Like if they're leading by a point or two, you can say, because of the way, their votes are distributed around the country, that, you know, Republicans tend to sort of overperform. But when you get to, you know, three points, we were talking with Sean Trendy about this today on our,

on our show, you know, we get to three points and beyond that. Democrats definitely have an advantage. Not as big of an advantage as they did in 2018. And so, yeah, they might not do as well. I'm not sure there are as many competitive districts as there was in 2018 as well. That might also mitigate some of the damage for Republicans, but they also have, you know, I mean, the margins are so thin. They only need pick up, what, three seats or something for the majority. So they're definitely well positioned at this point with a five-point lead to capture control of the House of Representatives. But to your point, I mean, we're sitting here.

It's early February. There's a lot of time left, and certainly that ground can be made up by Republicans. I think if Republicans could get the generic ballot, if it goes back down to, you know, under three points, then, you know, then I think it's probably going to be a toss-up in the House. And certainly the Senate's a whole different ballgame, and it's a much harder road for Democrats to end up taking control there. They're going to need, they would need a sort of 2018-sized, you know, wave to really get what, they need to net a four-seats. I mean, they're going to have to win Texas or Alaska or some of these states that are considered a real stretch. Nebraska, that's an interesting one.

Nebraska, I mean, you saw Vindman just declared, you know, in Florida. I mean, they are hoping to knock off Susan Collins. They probably get a good shot in North Carolina, you know, with Cooper. So, but they also have to defend Georgia. I mean, Asoff is not, you know, that's going to be a tough race for them. got Michigan as well to defend. So, you know, I think the Senate is, like I said, it's just a different ballgame given the states that are in play. But as far as the House goes, I mean, I think if you were a betting person, and you can be, I guess if you go to polymarket or a

couch year when he's plays. Don't do it. Don't give them your money. You'd have to give the advantage to the Democrats right now in the House. So finally, Tom, actually, a great transition. here to a bizarre post from Kamala HQ. So this is the official office of former vice president Kamala Harris. So they have their ex account of the official office. And about four hours ago, so six, around 6 p.m. on a Wednesday evening in February, year of our Lord, 2026, Kamala Harris HQ posts this S-11. For the listening audience, there is a little like log in and Kamala HQ is typing in

like passwords. The babysitter is weird. It's one of them. Project 2025 was real. Then they finally type in headquarters. And boom. I thought the password was going to be Chardonnay.

Oh! That was good. And finally, then it just says tomorrow. Tom, people are taking this as like some type of signs she's running for president. Max Tanny of Semaphore posted, um, what are the odds that this is a podcast? I think that might be the best,

the best prediction. Well, yeah, and those things aren't mutually exclusive, right? I mean, these days if you want to run for president, you've got to have a podcast and you got to write one book, maybe two books. Gavin's on his, releasing his first book, uh, dealing with sort of his personal issues. And I'm sure we'll get a second book that'll have his policy prescriptions and all of that as we get closer so look kamala harris um you know she's got this weird thing going right she's leading in the polls she's you know she does do well when people are asked uh democrats are asked their preferences for 2028 in the polls she she polls well however that is juxtaposed with

you know you just see this anecdotal stuff there's of people who um like there's just no interest. So Nate Silver and some of the, some of his pals, they did like a live show. I don't know if you saw this clip where they did this 2028 draft and they started they were, it was in front of a live audience and they said, you know, they would shout out names and say, you know, cheer if you want this person to run for president in 2028. It was like Pete Buttigieg, you know, and all of that. Gavin News, and then Kamala Harris, crickets, not a single person cheered or clapped. Like there was no and they, they were all. kind of like, wow, you know, that's crazy. But you keep running into moments like that where, you know, on one hand, she's selling out, you know, her book was a big seller and she was selling out all these events and yet nobody really wants her to run for president. I don't know. It's, she's very interesting in that sense.

Like, she could clearly make the case that she should be in the race and she's got enough support to be considered a real contender. And yet, on the other hand, there's a real, maybe. it's the unspoken sort of dislike, distaste, apathy toward her that is just sort of bubbling and simmering out there. Yeah. I mean, I think the Biden cover up still really resonates with people. I've heard Marie Glouzen-Camp Perez say it's like literally still, like elderly lawmakers is still something that she hears about when she's back in the district. People absolutely hate that. And Kamala Harris is kind of, unfortunately for her, became the face of that. And I don't, I don't know

that is ever something you can overcome in a national race? Well, I mean, to get to the national race, I mean, she'd have to, you know, we're talking about winning the primary. We're a little ahead of our skis. Yeah, well, and the problem is, you know, when she ran in the primary in 2019, like she didn't even make it to the starting gate. And I firmly believe, and I said this at the time, if she were forced to do some sort of mini primary when Biden dropped out

and it wasn't just handed to her, that she probably wouldn't have been the nominee, that it would have been Gavin Newsom or someone else, because I think she had been, you know, her favorability ratings had been so low. And, you know, she just struggled, just struggled. And remember, her press team kept trying to do these resets and reintroductions to the American people.

And, I mean, she just could never shake this idea that she was just not up to the job. And then once it was handed to her, or like her favorability skyrocketed and suddenly she was the, you know, she was this great nominee and she ran a great campaign and all that. It seemed just totally manufactured to me. And I think if she had to do it again and start on her own, I don't know that she,

I don't know that she can win a primary. I don't. Yeah. No, I think that's totally right. We'll see. I mean, nobody's going to announce a run for president in 2026, but if she announced earlier, she could try to consolidate the lane and do all that kinds of stuff.

Who knows? We'll be watching it closely, of course. And I know that over on the Megan Kelly channel, Sirius XM 111, where Tom is the co-host of Real Clear Politics, of course, he's also the co-founder, president of Real Clear Politics. But I know you guys are going to be watching it closely, too, Tom. We are. We are crushing it five days a week, leading the lead into Megan. So, no, it's good.

Please check us out. We're having a lot of fun. 11 a.m. tons of fun. All right, Tom. Thank you so much for stopping back on the show. Absolutely. Thanks, Emily.

Oh, absolutely. My mom was so excited that Tom was on the show. She was like, oh, Tom Bevin's on the show tonight. Can't wait. And I was like, I'm here too, mom. Oh, goodness gracious. Okay. More to come in just one moment. I am going to do a little autopsy on a New York Times article because, you know, I can't resist an opportunity to do that. But first, everybody's talking about weight loss injections because, as we all can see with our eyeballs, the results are so dramatic. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. So, what if you're looking to lose weight but not interested in those painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of the crazy side effects? That's why doctors created a weight loss supplement called lean, and the results are remarkable. The studied ingredients in lean have been shown to lower your blood sugar, burn fat by converting it into energy, and then curb your appetite and cravings so that you're not as hungry. But listen, lean is not for the casual dieter with only a few pounds to lose. The doctors at Brickhouse Nutrition created Lean for frustrated dieters with 10 or more pounds to lose.

So let's get you started with 20% off and free rush shipping so you can add lean to your healthy diet and exercise plan. Visit takeleen.com and enter Emily for your discount. That's promo code Emily at take lean.com. All right, I want to put this article up on the screen. This is from the New York Times. The headline here is, they couldn't break me. A protester at the way. White House and a doctored photo. It is about one, and you can see the photo actually that the New York

Times chose to run this article with, it is about one Nikima Levi Armstrong, who of course ran the protest that disrupted the city's church Baptist service in St. Paul, now what, almost two weeks ago. We're going to take the story almost line by line. This is a story by the Times's White House correspondent, one of the New York Times's White House correspondents. Keep that in mind. This reads to me like a story that would be written by a columnist, but of course I think that's a rather important distinction when you have somebody on the straight news team over at the Times. The lead of the story is when Nikima Levy Armstrong was transported from the federal courthouse in St. Paul, Minnesota to the Sherburn County

jail with three layers of shackles on her body around her waist, her waist and feet. It was the closest, she said, that she had ever felt to slavery. That's the first line of the article. It goes on to say, still, she walked calmly, her face resolute, her head held high. Is this the framing? Does this read like the framing of a neutral voice of God observer who is looking at a story of somebody who pretty obviously violated the face act, pretty obviously trespassed on private property, is this the framing of a neutral glimpse into Nekima Levy Armstrong's activism on behalf of the anti-ice movement? You can tell from the first two lines, no. And again, if you are somebody who wants to venerate Nekima Levy Armstrong as a opponent of ICE activities in Minneapolis, then this is some beautiful writing, moving, touching, beautiful writing, great.

That's not the job of the New York Times White House correspondent, unless the New York Times wants to help fix trust in media overnight by just admitting this stuff is biased in one direction very clearly. Now, the story is really about something the White House did that I actually think is wrong. As the author goes on to say, if you saw a photograph of the White House disseminated of Ms. Levy Armstrong, who was arrested for protesting in a church service, you would not know it. So the White House, as the story notes, quote, posted a manipulated photo of her arrest to its official social media account depicting Ms. Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and activist as hysterical tears streaming down her face, her hair to

shovel, appearing to cry out in despair, arrested, was emblazoned across the photo, along with a misleading description of Ms. Levy Armstrong as a quote-unquote far-left agitator who was orchestrating church riots in Minnesota. So the picture actually fooled me as I was scrolling, and I think I mentioned it. I want to say I mentioned it on the Megan Kelly wrap-up show. I said something like, if a picture the White House just released is to be believed, she was crying when she was taken into custody. It was a very well-done AI-generated image.

And the reason that I think it was a dumb thing for the White House to do is I hate any authorities who play with that without flagging it as AI-generated. unless it's so obviously AI generated because it's like a cat piloting a space shuttle, something like that. But fairly believable, somebody getting arrested might be crying. So it just, to me, is one of those things that it's not worth messing with the public's trust on what's real and what's fake right now in AI. So I don't think the White House should have done that.

But, but, come on, come on. This was a moment where she was very calm, and yet it was the closest she had ever felt to slavery. So how dare the White House depict her as somebody who was crying? There clearly is a tone of racism on this. The writer goes on a note, the exaggerated features in the darkened skin, she said. Nakimi Levy Armstrong said, I can't believe I have to read the next sentence, but I don't want to read the next sentence. reminded her of when the bodies of enslaved people were left disfigured to deter uprisings on plantations. Or during Jim Crow when racist propaganda would depict black people as caricatures.

She said she remained, quote, cool, calm, and collected during both her arrest and the transport to jail. They couldn't break me by arresting me, Ms. Levy Armstrong said, so they doctored an image to show the world a false iteration of that time to make me look weak. Reducing my image to some scared crying woman was just so degrading and it just shows how far the office of the president has fallen. Ma'am, you were arrested for a serious charge, a civil rights charge. The FACE Act, which by the way, I've said many times, don't agree with the FACE Act. I think it's questioning, it's really testing the First Amendment, has all kinds of problems for that. I say that as somebody in the anti-abortion world who

has seen what it's it's done in the past um i don't know that nekema levy armstrong has any problems whatsoever with the face act probably wants to get all those pro-life protesters the heck away from uh the abortion clinics but uh all that is to say she her claims right now that this is in any way comparable or reminiscent of the depictions Seriously. Quote, it reminded her, the exaggerated features on the dark and the darkened skin on an AI image that just showed her crying, reminded her of when the bodies of enslaved people were left disfigured to deter uprisings on plantations. This is being treated seriously by the New York Times.

I don't even know what to say to that. It's so stupid. Let's keep going. By the way, we know it's being traded seriously because this isn't, there's, there's, there's, There's no holes being poked in any of this. It's being framed as powerful and moving and credible by not having someone else. You could easily insert someone else into the story and being like, being like, you know, it's a, it was just a joke. Like it's an AI image, something like that. You could even, because this writer is using such a heavy voice in the article, you could even say that yourself. You could even hint at that yourself.

I can't believe that the New York Times White House correspondent seriously wrote that. When asked about the doctor damage, which the New York Times independently confirmed had been manipulated, the White House was unapologetic. Kalyn Dore, the deputy communication director, brushed it off. Last week, as a meme, enforcement of the law will continue, Mr. Dore wrote on social media, posting the doctored photograph, the memes will continue. All right, so that's nice they had the response from the White House in here. But again, what they are clearly doing is framing, especially with the flattering photography.

It's always unflattering when you're framing it the other direction, but they're framing this as a serious, incredible claim that the White House editing an AI meme of somebody who got arrested on good cause, by the way, who disrupted a church service and potentially set the anti-ice movement back by doing that. So even if you're an anti-ice person on the left, you could say that was tactically an absurd decision. The New York Times is treating this.

framing this as though it's perfectly, perfectly credible and serious. And they go through, you know, the meat and potatoes kind of legal questions. But she, the story notes when she's being arrested, she asked one of the agents why he was filming the arrest. It's not going to be on Twitter. The agent assured her, we don't want to create a false narrative, the agent added. She said she responded that she did not want to be a, quote, trophy for MAGA. But soon after her arrest and the image of Ms. Levi-Armstrong was on Twitter, Chrissy Nome, the Homeland Security Secretary, posted an arrest picture of Ms. Levi-Armstrong, apparently without the digital manipulation.

But within hours, the doctor photo that the White House posted had ricocheted around the country. It had been viewed more than six million times. All right. Here's the altered image. You can see as the New York Times apparently confirmed with an outside expert. Yeah, I mean, it's not obviously when you see it for the first time a doctored image, which is why I think it's just reckless. I don't care if it's Democrats or Republicans are doing that. You can't afford to play with the public trust on this issue.

But legal experts, according to the Times said that the fake image could hurt the Justice Department's case against Ms. Levitt Armstrong. Her lawyer could use it to accuse the Trump administration of making what are known as improper extrajudicial statements. Okay, I mean, come on, come on. seriously. And it goes on to say, like to talk about the AI stuff, which some of it, by the way, I agree with. Talks about her activism in the deaths of Michael Brown and other cases. It doesn't talk about how the entire narrative from that, which I'm sure Levy Armstrong was a super spreader of, turned out to be false. It doesn't get in any of that. It's just a friendly profile

of her. And it says here, it ends on a quote. You always know this is how they're trying to punch you in the gut with the end quote. She says now the author says, now she sees a silver lining in the White House's release of the doctor photo. It was a wake-up call for the nation in terms of really understanding political prosecution, she said, and that people are being targeted and penalized for speaking out against the tyranny and fascism of the federal government. Ma'am, political persecution?

You stormed and persecuted people in the pews of a church. It's not political persecution for then the law that Democrats put on the books to protect the civil rights of people worshipping to see that actually enforced. Again, it's fine for an activist to speak like this. It's fine. I get it. That's what activists do. I don't think everybody has the most well-rounded worldview and we're all completely, nobody is. nobody is immune to hypocrisy and double standards and the like.

Although if you're putting your life into something like this, I would expect you to be maybe a little bit more aware of the holes in your own worldview. But why would you have any incentive to when the New York Times is going to glaze you with basically no outside criticism about whether what you did was a serious act of political persecution? Is there a hypocrisy storyline here? Are there other people's civil rights inquiries? right now. Did you set your own movement back? Literally none of that. None of that in the story. From a White House correspondent, not even from a columnist or an analyst or a justice reporter like

some papers have. This is the White House correspondent. So no, I mean, it's just a good reminder of why it's often a problem for Democrats, not always, but sometimes it becomes a problem for them that the media is so biased towards cultural leftism, it becomes actually honestly a problem sometimes because people in that space aren't used to the rigorous criticism that people in right-wing activism are subjected to, and they're less poorly equipped to defend their own worldview. I mean, if you're getting glazed for disrupting the civil rights of people to worship,

nobody, like, there's a very small part of the country that agreed with that. thought that that was great and lovely and acceptable. So all that is to say, like, when the New York Times is cheering you on all the way and, you know, laundering your claims of, that this was reminiscent in any way whatsoever of bodies being, I mean, I just can't even get back in, but it's so profoundly depressing that that made that to print. But when the New York Times is treating that seriously and not poking holes in it as is their job, then no, you don't have an incentive to be a more persuadable force for your own movement. And so anyway, just wanted to go through that article,

that one was one of the more egregious ones as you're going line by line through how it was framed. And really unbelievable. Very believable circle like 2017. But for the New York Times, which has started to question some of the pre-existing narratives on things like gender medicine and race to some extent and bring the volume up on some different voices.

Just, again, to have that in the news section from your White House correspondent is, I find it profoundly depressing. Okay. That does it for us on today's edition of After Party. I already recorded this week's Happy Hour because I'm going on a little vacation, but I'll see you all here back here on Monday. You can still send your questions in, of course, to Emily at Double Make Care and Media.com. We'll get to them on next week's edition of Happy Hour. This week's is still going to air per usual on Friday. It's an extra long one.

I was not watching the clock. So if you like to hear me ramble, you're going to love this content. Have a great evening, everyone. We'll see you back here on Monday.