After Party with Emily Jashinsky - Zelensky BACK at the WH, Andrew Klavan on Hollywood Secrets, Comey the Swiftie, and MSNBC’s Rebrand

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Andrew Klavan, host of “The Andrew Klavan Show.” They discuss the high stakes meeting between President Trump, Ukraine's Zelensky, and other EU leaders, following Trump’s historic meeting last Friday with Russia’s Putin. The conversation focuses on what happened, Trump’s flair for optics, and how the media responded to it all.  Then Jashinsky and Klavan dive into Hollywood, Chris Pratt’s recent comments about Trump and RFKJ, and Klavan explains what he experienced behind the scenes saying “the only opinion you have to hide in Hollywood is your conservative opinion,” they touch on the racist past of The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Felix, and the controversy over Big Tech and IVF following the NYT’s Ross Douthat interview with Orchid CEO Noor Siddiqui.  Emily rounds out the show with a hilarious takedown of James Comey’s Swiftie obsession, Gavin Newsom vs JD Vance high school pics, and MSNBC’s ridiculous rebrand. Masa Chips: Go to https://MASAChips.com/AFTERPARTY and use code AFTERPARTY for 25% off your first order. PreBorn: Help save a baby go to https://PreBorn.com/Emily or call 855-601-2229. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Africa Party, everyone, Big Day here in Washington, D.3. And I'm grateful to be joined tonight by Andrew Claven. We're going to bring him in in just one moment. But on our docket for tonight, can Donald Trump become the president of peace? We'll see. Obviously, world leaders were here in D.C. today talking about a potential path to peace in Ukraine. Are we living in Gattaca? That is another question we might be able to solve today.

Chris Pratt is making more public comment. on politics, on culture than usual, because he sat down for almost two hours with Bill Maher on club random. So we're going to get Andrew's thoughts on all of that as well. And in case you haven't heard of this story, the New Yorker is currently employing someone who appears to be just like a clear-cut racist. Doreen St. Felix, we are going to get to all of that. Also, the MSNBC name change. James Comey's substack post about Taylor Swift and the burgeoning feud between Gavin Newsom and J.D. Vance. So let's start here in Washington, D.C.,

and bring in our guest for this evening, Andrew Claven, of course, the host of the Andrew Claven show, and also the author of a new book. After that, the dark book cover comes out on October 28th. Andrew, thanks for being here. That's great to see you. If you were watching Spencer Claven a couple of weeks ago, and you thought, let's get a bald version of that man on.

That's too kind, I think, Spencer's Claven 2.0, I think he's a big improvement. But you're working your way down. You'll eventually get to my pet turtle probably. Do you actually have a turtle? No, I made that up. I mean, he's a made-up turtle. I was about to actually just say, like, someone pull the plug on, Andrew, this is a grown man with a turtle. I can't listen to him. Now I'm kind of yearning for a turtle. I don't know why. Okay. So, Andrew, the new book, by the way, it's called After That, October 28th. After that the dark, yeah. It's October 28th. It's the fifth installment in the Cameron Winter Mystery Series. But frankly, I think it's the best installment. And you can start with this one. And if you like it, move your way back to the first and catch up.

I love how I just did a Joe Biden and read after that the dark book cover off the page. After that comma. Well, Andrew, thank you for being here. I appreciate it. And I want to start with this video. Actually, have Peter Ducey asking, Vladimir Zelensky, a question during a press spray in the Oval Office today. So basically, so for people who were mercifully free from the news cycle today, there was a press spray in the Oval Office where reporters were peppering Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky with questions. Then we got a televised broadcast of Trump doing a roundtable with leaders from all over Europe, head of the EU, head of NATO, Georgia Maloney, Kirstarmer.

It was German Chancellor. It was a really spectacular scene. Here is Peter Ducey asking Zelensky question S2. Mr. President. President Zelensky, are you prepared to keep sending Ukrainian troops to their debts for another couple years or are you going to agree to redraw the maps? Thank you for your question. So, first of all, you know, we live under each day attacks, you know, that today have been a lot of attacks and a lot of wounded people and the child was that small bomb. one year and a half. So we need to stop this war to stop Russia and we need support American and European partners. We will do our best for this.

So, and I think we show that we are strong people and we supported the idea of the United States of personal President Trump to stop this war to make a diplomatic way of finishing this war. And we are ready for trilateral. trilateral, as president said, this is a good signal about trilateral. I think this is very good. Thank you. So there was no confrontation with J.D. Vance. He was sitting off to the side in this Oval Office meeting, Andrew. And just lastly, before I toss you, President Trump has posted F1, we can put this up on the screen of True Social, confirming media reports that he has since called President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Big takeaways from today. They are setting up a Trump.

bilateral meeting where Donald Trump seems like he will be involved in that. They are working within the next 10 days on that time frame to work out what security guarantees for Ukraine from the United States and NATO may look like. And Trump at one point said that they might not actually need a ceasefire to start working on this peace plan. So Andrew, you wrote last week on New Jerusalem that after Friday's meeting, conservative media felt compelled to depict Trump, quote, as masterful and triumphant, big media skewered every development as a Trump error or loss. He's fascinated by Putin, they said. He handed the Russians a win just by meeting with him. He was ready to betray, brave little Ukraine for his own benefit. There's nothing I saw in any news report that even vaguely resembled the reliable fact about where the Senate ended up. But, of course, Andrew, today we could watch much of the action, not all of it. So what sense did you get about whether there's real progress happening here? Well, I think there's progress in the sense that nothing was happening before.

And I think that the wonderful thing about Trump in these situations is that he is a a true dealmaker and that he understands the reality and he understands you can't get everything you want. He gets frustrated with Zelensky, I think, because Zelensky is in a position that I kind of sympathize with. He has to pretend to be a bigger power than he is and he's fighting against a massive force that is obviously not going to go away and it's obviously not going to seed any of the land that it's taken. And meanwhile, what just struck me on Friday and throughout the weekend until today was the way that the press, we know nothing about any of this. We know nothing about what's happening or where it's going to go. And the reason we know nothing is that each person involved

has his own reason to skew, you know, to spin the facts. So Putin is an inveterate liar. He's a cartoon villain. He's a genuinely bad hat who just every word out of his mouth is untrustworthy. Trump is a negotiator. So he's always looking at the end of the line. He's always trying to manipulate how he can get to the place he wants to get to, the best place he can get to. If you read the New York Times, for instance, that says, well, Joe Biden, you know, said, talk tough to Putin, but Trump really likes him better. Trump doesn't like, Trump knows exactly who Putin is, but just like, you know, a prize fighter getting into the ring with the prize fighter is just as big as he is, he knows he's up against a wily powerful opponent. And so he treats him with respect. So none of the

things that the press said were going on were going on, none of them. What you have is Donald Trump, who is a guy who he imagines this country's future in economic terms. He does not look at America and think one day we can march, conquer all of Western Europe. One day, we're going to march, send our soldiers into Russia. That's not what he's thinking. He's thinking one day we can turn the supply side problem around. We can bring manufacturing back to our friends and ourselves and we'll have this wonderful new golden age of prosperity.

He wants peace for that to happen. And I think he has a genuine heart for the people who are being slaughtered by the thousands every day in Ukraine and in Russia as well. And so I think he has an interest in bringing peace. Not his war. He didn't start it. He wasn't there when it started. He's the only, he has become the essential person for bringing people together. He did that today.

He brought the Europeans in. Very important. Remember, it is their war. It's not our war. It's their war. And so he brought them in and they're talking. A lot of what was being talked about, I thought was pure. nonsense, the kind of NATO-like, the make-believe NATO security guarantees that we're going to

give Zelensky and give Ukraine. Never going to happen. Why do you think that's an important point, Andrew? Because it essentially puts in Putin's hands the power to start a world war anytime he wants and to bring down, you know, bring all these people into conflict that they may not want to get into. And certainly we're not going to give NATO privileges to Ukraine. We're not going to war with Russia because of Ukraine. And nobody, nobody wants to say this stuff, but it's just true. I mean, listen, I think Ukraine was hard done by. I think the Russians are wrong. I think, you know, I don't think Ukraine is a wonderful country. I think it's a corruptocratic country. But still, it deserves not to be invaded by Russia and Putin is completely out of line. That said, the reality on the ground is that

Putin has taken land. He's not going to give it back. We're going to have to seed certain things. He's going to have to seed certain things. He doesn't have to admit that he's doing it. In fact, I think that would be wrong. He doesn't have to say this is now Russian territory. What he has to say is, I will make peace in spite of the fact that you're sitting on our land. That's usually the formula for this. And so I don't necessarily want to get into a World War I situation where we are bound by treaty to enter war with Ukraine.

I don't want a single drop of American blood. I'm not an isolationist. I believe you have to fight sometimes. But I don't want a single drop of blood, American blood. spilled in the defense of Ukraine. I don't think Trump does either, and I don't think the American people want that either. I mean, I'm pretty sure that's the case. So we can't give them security guarantees like NATO, and that's what they were talking about. And I just don't think that that is a reality. If what they're talking about is we and the Europeans will continue to supply Zelensky

as long as he needs supplies in a realistic way, if Putin doesn't back off, I think there's some grounds for that happening. I think that something like that might happen. But look, nobody knows what's going to happen because nobody knows how Putin's going to play it. You know, it takes two to make peace. And I think that Zelensky has good reason to not want to, you know, cave in. And Putin is just a very, very difficult guy. One of the things about Putin that I don't think people talk about enough, Putin's a very powerful tyrant.

I think you say, a horseback rider. Yes, yes. He writes bears. People don't talk about it. He writes bear back on polar bears. And I think I think the thing is, even the most powerful, tyrant has a glass jaw that at some point

if he gets his country into deep waters in Ukraine which he already has, if he can't get out of it, if he can't continue to supply the army there with men, if he can't continue to afford to pay for an offensive war, at some point he's going to wake up

one morning and there's going to be a bunch of guys standing over him with long knives and his reign is going to be over. So he in some ways, at some level, he's fighting for his life as well. And I think that that's something that Trump understands that the press doesn't talk about at all. The press has been shameful. I mean, the press has just been every word out of Trump's mouth is some kind of concession,

some kind of, you know, they say he's entranced with Putin, like in a pig's eye, you know. I mean, he knows exactly who this guy is. He knows exactly what he's dealing with. And he knows that Putin is probably weaker in some ways than he seems. And so I think he's playing the cards that he was dealt. He came into the middle of the, you know, he came on stage in the middle of the story. he's playing the cards he was dealt. And I think so far he's doing an excellent job in the sense that without him there'd be nothing.

So I guess what I say is it's going to be a constant wait and see situation. And the press just has to be ignored. The end of that piece on Substack you were reading is make like Socrates and no, you know nothing. And I think that that's essentially the case we're in, as we're in so often with our corrupt press, our press that is just corrupt down to its bottom. And, you know, it's a shame. And media incentives are stacked completely against epistemological humility. There's no incentive for that in the 24-hour news cycle.

In fact, people were upset with Peter Ducey for asking that question and said it was plucked from the mouth of Kremlin propagandists, even though it's a perfectly legitimate point to pose to Zelensky. And let me get your take on this, Andrew. This is Nikki Haley responding to this post from Newswire. Trump does not rule out sending U.S. forces to Ukraine. And she responds, and I was supposedly the warmonger. America should not support Ukraine with the equipment they need,

but we should not send cash or American soldiers. And I wanted to get your take on that because I saw some people genuinely concerned about Trump flirting with the idea that we shouldn't rule out anything. To me, it sounded like him doing. his typical KG negotiating strategy. Did that concern you at all as we're speaking in the context of security guarantees and what those could look like?

Well, when I heard the word security guarantees as in NATO, I did sit up a little bit in my chair. And my first thought was, Trump is never going to let that happen. That is not a thing that he's going to allow to happen. Trump is always on the move. This is the thing. He's always in motion.

And the press is always reporting on him as if he were a snapshot. They're always reporting on as if he's standing still. So if he says, you know, oh, you know, Putin, he's a smart guy. We get along great. It's, oh, he loves Putin. It's never, oh, he's trying to move to a place where they can have a conversation, which only he is done, only he is capable of doing.

We've had the guys talk tough to Putin. We've had them shake their fist at him. One of them was a Kristen Welker on one of the Sunday shows said to Marco Rubio. Why don't you just tell Putin that we're going to put sanctions? You know, what is she talking about? She's like living in this like little bubble. So my short answer is no. I do not believe that Donald Trump is going to put us in a position

where American lives have to be spent defending Ukraine. Because in the end, I think the truth is we don't care enough. It's not important enough to us to risk our lives for that, to risk our sons' lives for that. It would be ridiculous. And I think that he's smart enough to know that. But I think reporting on Trump as if every word that he speaks in a negotiation, especially if it strikes the press as negative,

toward him that everywhere is somehow carved in stone is absurd. He's constantly negotiating. He's constantly giving and taking, seeing where the weaknesses are. And if you don't report him like that, you're not reporting him at all. You're not doing anything except sitting there throwing mud like some, you know, former late-night comedian about to lose his show. You know, I think that that's, this is the thing that I find. How dare you?

Yeah, exactly. This is the thing I find so appalling about our current situation. we're living in a nation at the center of world events in which no information is reaching the public. Almost, I'm exaggerating, but only a little. No reliable information is reaching the public so that when you have people, just to name one, like Tucker Carlson saying,

you know, like, oh, America, bomb Nagasaki, because that's where the Christians live, which is an absurd statement, it might as be true. It's as true as anything else that you're hearing from the old reliable sources. I think it's a really dangerous situation for us to be in. I think that it's something that needs reform.

And I think it's going to, because of the First Amendment, we have no power to reform it through the government. But I think that people of goodwill are just going to have to start getting the news out and really doing reporting. I think Trump was really prescient in recognizing that we'd entered a new phase of propaganda and propaganda war.

And I want to ask you about we can put V1 on the screen as we're talking. this was Trump's flyover during the Anchorage Summit in Alaska with Putin. And if you're not watching this and you're just listening, you may have already heard about this or seen it yourself. But as they're walking the red carpet off of the airplanes, you see this spectacular flyover happening in the skies of Anchorage, as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are walking a literal red carpet in Anchorage,

about to greet the press. So, Andrew, on that note, I really was struck watching, I thought today, Trump was reveling in the pomp and circumstance, you know, in the Oval Office with the new literal golden age of the old and oval office on display. As he sat astride Zelensky, he loved having the world leaders sit around the table and, you know, thank him and participate in this kind of Western diplomacy theater. Do you think Trump is sort of ahead of the media that he's sort of framing this successfully as a path to peace, such as that if it does happen, he's kind of, he has the upper hand over what the media has been saying for so long because he was conscious about putting out this imagery and being really intentional about it. Am I reading too much into it? Or is this Trump really actually striding towards the historical marker? of the golden age in foreign policy, as he would put it. Well, I think he is far ahead of the press in that he loves, he does love the pomp and circumstance. He loves, you know, maneuvering.

I mean, that was a great moment when the B2. I laughed out loud when I saw that. I mean, it was basically Trump saying to, you know, to Putin, you know, Iran didn't like them and you won't like them either. And I thought that was, you know, it's really funny stuff. The difference between Trump and the press is Trump understands that it's all make-believe, that it's all maneuvering and all image-making, whereas the press takes it all very, very seriously.

I mean, these are things that people do, you know, in some ways they're petty, like when your boss sits you in a chair that is, you know, lower than his chair or something like that. You know, is that kind of petty maneuvering. Ben Shapiro would never do that. No, no. Well, you can't tell if he's sitting in a chair that's lower than yours. Set you up for that one. I appreciate the straight man.

But no, but he understands that these are things that are happening, but he also understands the realism, the realities on the ground. I mean, that moment when he was yelling at Zelensky that time, and he said to him, you just don't have the cards to be talking like that. That was just the truth. He doesn't, you know, he has to play. Look, you know, I worked in Hollywood for a long time where there's a lot of negotiating, a lot of bargaining on.

I know what it is to play a strong hand and a weak hand and to negotiate over your career in ways that you think like, oh, I have nothing here, but I got to pretend I have something. I get all of that. And I think Trump gets all of that. all of that. The press just reports on it with this kind of po-faced stupidity that makes you think like Trump, they report on Trump as if he were like an animal, you know, as if he doesn't know what he's really doing, he's just stumbling along. And the reason they get away with that sometimes

is that Trump is, in fact, a Gestalt thinker. He's a guy who sees, you know, they say he works from his gut. He's a guy who sees the big picture and feels his way a little bit. But he has definite plans. His plans have to do, he's always thinking about. China. In this case, he's thinking about can we separate Russia and China a little bit? Can we pry them apart a little bit? He's always thinking about where the United States is going to end up at the end of a situation. And here's one thing I'll say. And I could be wrong. I'm speaking from memory here. But I've seen Trump come out of a negotiation with nothing. That sometimes happens to everybody. You go in, you don't get what you want, and you walk away. I've never seen him come

out of a negotiation with America in a worse position than it was when he went in. And so whatever happens here, I feel, I kind of trust him that we're not going to get ourselves in deeper than we want to be. We're already into a certain degree. Now he's gathered NATO in a way that they've never been before. They've never actually had to step up like this. They're spending more money on their own defense, which is a way that Trump is moving our assets into the east toward China, because because he's going to leave the Europeans to defend Europe, just the way he lets Israel defend the Middle East. He's going to do that while we go to China.

So he's really thinking about a big picture, and he is thinking in a kind of instinctive way. But he's very, very smart about this. And the press just, I'm telling you, as far as I'm concerned, they come across like idiots. I feel humiliated for them sometimes. When I see them questioning Marco Rubio and he has to explain to them,

like they're kindergartners, how these things work. I just think that we are actually in a better situation than we've been since this war began. And we can only hope that it comes out well and we can't tell whether it will because so much of it is in the hands of Putin and he is a villain. Well, I have Hollywood questions for you after this quick break. And you're speaking of villains. Let's start with a hero. The hero of massa chips. Did you know all chips and fries used to be cooked in tallow up until the 1990s when big corporations switched to cheap processed seed oils?

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That would be Andrew Claven, host of the Andrew Claven show and author of the new book. It is out on October 28th. It is called After That the Dark. Andrea, I want to get your reaction to this clip of Chris Pratt on Club Random with Bill Marr talking a little bit about his. He stayed, I thought he was pretty careful on this podcast, but it's remarkable because we don't, we get sort of hints here there of what Chris Pratt thinks about culture and politics. And he seems to think quite a bit about it. But one of the most influential people in all of Hollywood chopping it up with Bill Maher. this one is S5.

In politics, you inherit enemies. And when you jump on in, on, you know, the bandwagon with who is, you know, the most divisive president ever, it makes sense that you're going to be made to look terrible. And so I don't know what to believe. Because it's not like I sit with Bobby and I go, so hey, let's talk about this. It's like we're just playing cards or playing mafia or having fun or having dinner. I'm not going to pick his brain to find out exactly which of those things are true. I just kind of assume that none of them are. And for the most part, I wish him well, man.

I hope there's certain things that he oversees that seem to be supported in a bipartisan way, like getting terrible toxic stuff out of our kids' food. I think that's a great thing. And so, like, if you just do that, that's amazing. I'd hate to be so mired in hatred for the president that any success from his administration is something I'd have an allergic reaction to, to be like, oh, well, if they do it, I don't want it to happen. I'll feed my, I'll put Clorox in my children's cereal myself.

You know, I'm saying, come on, have some, be reasonable here. There's certain things that would be a good thing to have. I want them all to be successful. So Andrew, Chris Pratt obviously married into the Kennedy family, was talking a little bit about his interactions with Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy. So from your perspective, Chris Pratt, just an every man, basically everybody loves Chris Pratt. People do not hate Chris Pratt. Super influential,

beloved. One of the closest things we have left to monoculture in Hollywood. And here he is talking to Bill Maher a little bit about political correctness, a lot about the media, and just sort of common sense. What can you tell us about how Chris Pratt, how we should think of Chris Pratt and the sort of pantheon of celebrities right now, especially superhero celebrities. Are people wrong to sort of peg him as a conservative, or is the correct interpretation here? He's just all of us. Well, he's being so, you use the word careful. He's being so careful in what he was saying there that my guess is, you know, I have never met

Chris Pat. My guess is he's on the conservative side. That is my guess about Chris Bratt. And what's pitiful is that he can't simply come out. and say it. Or say nothing. You know, simply say, look, I don't talk about my politics and I don't want to hear about your politics. I don't care. I'm an actor. I pretend, you know, I speak other people's words. Even the words I say on the screen are written for me. I do not want to come out here and talk about who I vote for. I have total respect for that. What I don't have respect for is a culture

in Hollywood where if you come out and vote for Bernie Sanders, you're golden. Nobody says a word to you. If you make an Oscar speech about how stupid 77 million of the audience are, for voting for Donald Trump, nothing, you're fine, you'll get hired the next day. But if you should come out and say, yeah, I vote for Trump, I really like the guy. He's my guy. He's, you know, like me, I'm like gleeful

in this Trump administration. I haven't stopped laughing since he got elected. I think it's been a great administration. And I did not start out as a big Trump fan. I just think, like, I think he's doing a great job. You come out and say that and you're quote unquote controversial, which only mean, which doesn't mean you're somehow in conflict with the majority of the movie going public. It means that you are

in conflict with a small, a very, very tiny group of leftists who govern what we see and what people are allowed to say. You know, I was making a joke before about Stephen Colbert being knocked off the air. My problem with Stephen Colbert is not that he had become an unfunny ranter of political nonsense, which was all true. My problem with him is that if he had gotten up and made jokes about Joe Biden and supported Donald Trump, he'd have been, you know, hounded from pillar to post. So we are in this situation where a very, very tiny sliver of human beings in our country have acquired the power to make us feel that they are the majority, that they are the opinion makers, that they're the ones who matter, that they can take a harmless Sydney-Sweeney ad

and turn it into a controversy. And that's what you're seeing with Chris Pratt right there. You're seeing a man who understands that his career, which is sure is deeply important to him, what has happened to him happens to extraordinarily few people. It takes incredible hard work. It takes incredible luck to get where a guy like Chris Pratt is. He doesn't want it to go away. And so he's tiptoeing around an issue saying, you know, there's some things that even

I might like about Donald Trump. I suspect, yes, I suspect we can, I suspect we can, we can, we. can feel that he is actually a lot more conservative than he's letting on because the only opinion you have to hide in Hollywood is your conservative opinion. I mean, I used to, you know, before I was, before my phone went from ringing constantly to ringing not at all in the course of about a single week, I used to go in to meetings and guys would come up to me and they dropped their voice and say, oh, I saw you on Hannity last night. You were great. And I would say, why are you whispering, we're in the right?

You know, we should be talking about it. And they couldn't. They would get fired. I mean, I heard stories, especially stories from black people out there, of how their careers were destroyed, of how they were treated like absolute garbage for expressing any kind of conservative view. You know, we had this theoretically secret club,

the Friends of Abe, you know, which was, you know, Gary Seneese organized. used to argue with Gary. He used to say, you know, we should come out. This is like being an alcoholic's anonymous, you know. Hi, my name is Andrew. I'm a conservative. Hi, Andrew. You know, this is awful, you know. But Gary would say, you know, you can afford to do that because you'll find work somewhere else. I can afford to do it. But the people who are coming in here, they lose this job. They've lost everything. And so Chris Pratt is being smart in the area that he's in. You know, I know for a fact,

even John Voigt, one of the most outspoken conservatives in Hollywood, one of the great actors, you know, Oscar winning, a deservedly Oscar winning actor, a truly great actor. I know he once took a pal of mine aside and put his arm around him and said, a younger guy and said, you know, tone it down, keep your voice down. You know, let me do the talking because they can't touch me, but if you want to have a career in Hollywood, keep your voice down. You know, don't be a conservative out loud.

And so that kind of fear which pollutes our entertainment life, which pollutes the movies we get, skews the movies we get, skews the information we get, skews the view of culture we get is a sin, but it's not up to Chris Pratt to risk his career fighting back against it. So he's being careful. At least he's being as honest as he feels he can be. But I think, yes, he's probably more conservative than he lets on. I'm really glad that you brought up Sidney Sweeney, not just because Sydney Sweeney, hey, great for clicks. Actually, because the Sydney Sweeney question is where Chris Pratt now is speaking, even though he's being careful and dancing, tap dancing around the point, more directly than I've heard him throughout his career. I mean, even sitting down for club random with Bill Maher is something that I imagine his agent was not super psyched about. Probably need to be convinced to give that one the group. green light. And as you were you were talking about how the incentives for Chris Pratt to just

be honest and kind of authentic and talk about politics or say I'm not talking about politics, whatever it is, that's the question I wanted to ask you is like we've got the vibe shift sort of happening in some ways and not happening in other ways. So what's your assessment of whether cancel culture is actually gone? Is that like a sleeper cell that's just going to be awakened or have we moved into a different chapter entirely where people like Chris Pratt actually could have said. Maybe he could have gone further in club random without really hurting himself at all. What do you make about that? Well, it's possible. I think that the situation we're in right now is that we have won a major Gettysburg-sized battle in the culture war.

What was the pickets charge? It was, you know, the day, the very night that Trump won the second election, I truly, I felt this kind of bath of peace come over me because I felt the fight that I had been fighting for 20 years was over and we had won. There was no question about it. We had shattered the reliability of the press. We had exposed them. We had developed a secondary media, much of it with the help of Elon Musk buying X, where we could expose. their lies in real time. And that was absolutely telling.

So they convicted Trump of, you know, felony, made up felonies, the most ridiculous, you know, crimes ever made up. They hounded him. They did everything they could. They almost killed him. And the people turned out, and they voted for him,

saying, this is better than what you guys have gotten. You know, they didn't vote by as many people as I would have, I would have liked to see every single person vote for Trump. But still, the fact that they lost that, after bringing all the power of their media to bear, all the power of their culture-making classes to bear, they lost. That, to me, was a major victory for places like the Daily Wire, for places like Joe Rogan, Megan Kelly,

all those voices that had finally, finally gained the power in a revolutionary sense that the mainstream media used to have. So yes, we won that. So now what you have is a battlefield with bodies lying there, smoke coming up off the ground, you know, the battle is won. But the question is, who is going to build the new world in that place? And I think that if you're waiting around for Hollywood to build it, for Hollywood to say, oh, we see the error of our ways,

we now realize there's this large audience is waiting out there for the pro-Trump movies. Not going to happen. That is not going to happen. What should happen and what may happen is that the new media is also a democratizing force in entertainment as it has been in the news. So just like in the news, we've acquired the power to expose them, but we haven't acquired the reporting power

that say the New York Times has. That is something we need to build. This reporting power, we also need to build creative power. We need to have entertainment venues of our own. We need to have an infrastructure of awards, of reviews, of expertise, of conversations, podcasts. You know, if you listen to this slate culture gab fest,

Okay, you will hear people who are sequestered in a culture like an iron lung. I mean, these guys do not know that you and I exist. They do not know there are any opinions but their own. However, they know a lot about the movies, and they sit and talk about the movies, and I listen to them and I think, oh, yeah, they know the movies like I know the movies. The way no right winger that I know knows the movies, they know that. So we've got to develop that kind of love of culture and that kind of investment in culture. And I don't know whether that's going to happen.

It depends. Conservatives can be awfully stupid about these things, and they can also be overtaken by the haters. They're on all sides. I mean, the anti-Semites who have risen up on the right, the Christian haters, the people who are Christian, but they express their Christianity in hateful terms, those people have loud voices in the left,

loves to magnify those voices to expose us. We have an opportunity now, an amazing opportunity, the greatest opportunity of my very extensively long lifetime to actually start making things and saying, we're here, you know. Not every movie has to be yea America or yay God or anything like that. We just have to do things in which people are actually the way they are, in which women don't punch men and the men go rolling out the door

because that doesn't happen in real life, you know, in which women are like women, you know, which would just be an amazing thing. One of the things I kind of liked about the new Superman movie is Lois Lane is a girl. She's, you know, she doesn't fist fight with people. She's a bad driver. Yeah, she's a bad driver.

She's smart. She's resourceful. You know, she's brave. She's all those things. But she's not a guy. And I thought that that was really charming in the movie. And I think the more we can make films that reflect the world as it is, and not just films, but all the new things that are coming along.

Just AI entertainment is a new thing. Three-dimensional entertainment will be a new thing. I think this is an opportunity. to do all that, you know, and I think I'm hopeful. I'm not, I'm not absolutely certain, but it's not going to happen. The one thing is I know is not going to happen is it's not going to happen because somebody in Hollywood suddenly goes like, oh my goodness, and I thought the left was right, you know, now I realize that we have to hire more conservatives. That's not going to happen. So on that note, I want to ask you about the curious case of Doreen St. Felix,

the wonderfully named staff writer for the New Yorker, who has been exposed. as basically a full-blown anti-white racist. So she wrote about Sidney back on August 15th and talked about, or earlier this month, talked about Sydney Sweeney as a, quote, Aryan princess. And it was after that exposed for having all of these posts on X.

One of them was just, I hate white men. One of them was, you all are the worst, go nurse your fucking edible complexes and leave the earth to the browns and the women. Back, that was 2014, back in 2015. She said, TBH, whiteness fills me with a lot of hate. Can't really be approved about that anymore. I'm often angry and hateful about it.

In January 2015, she said, also, all humans are not the reason the Earth is in peril. White capitalism is. We lived in perfect harmony with the earth. Pre-whiteness. I remember that. I remember that. Incredible history. But Chris Rufo has been behind a lot of the research into Doreen St. Felix.

background, and he posted just today, I've asked Doreen St. Felix's defenders these simple questions, and they have thus far refused to answer them. They're not moral paragon's, but moral cowards, who find it impossible to say, quote, virulent borderline exterminationist rhetoric against whites is wrong. Rufo also posted yesterday, do you endorse anti-white race hatred? Are white people genetically inferior animals who breed lice, syphilis, and plant destruction? This is Louis Farrakhan, a model citizen worth emulating. I'm against all of this, but your friend Doreen, all of these are open questions. And I think the New Yorker not addressing this at all, they've ignored it up to this point. They've blocked Chris Rufo on X because that's a worthwhile use of their time, is illustrating

something we're seeing more and more, which is these institutions are aligning more with the niches that they represent. And I think the New Yorker probably thought, rhetoric of people like Doreen St. Felix, which was commonplace on campuses, and I'm sure still is in many campuses, in the sort of different departments, feminist studies departments, queer studies departments. This is not, I mean, it's shocking rhetoric, but it's not shocking at all. You've been a college student in the last 20 years of the United States of America is pretty commonplace on college campuses. And the New Yorker thought that represented more of the public than it did. The New Yorker's always been a sort of niche publication. It's literally

called the New Yorker and it's never pretended to be the paper of record like the New York Times up at the Big Apple. But I think what we're seeing here is an alignment that's happening more consciously with these niche audiences. Because the New Yorker, by all of the standards that it has helped set for the last 10, 20 years, it is incumbent on them to respond to this. And indeed, to cancel Doreen St. Felix and get rid of her. I mean, the double standard is so completely obvious just because this is anti-white racism, they are indulging a double standard. But they simply do not care. What do you think is happening here, Andrew? Well, yeah, that was built in. That's the vicious circle built into the business model that came up when niche media

replaced mainstream media. Once you're playing to only one side, you have to keep playing to one side. If Stephen Colbert goes on TV and makes a joke for Trump, you know, and against Trump's opponents, then all his audiences, his entire audience is offended, and it's not like he's going to be able to bring in the right-wing audience who now hates him. You know, so he's stuck exactly where he is and he can only up the ante. To read the New York Times, I read it every morning just for the laughs almost. God bless. I mean, yeah, no, it's like a spasm of Trump hatred.

Every headline is like, you know, it's, you know, it'll be sunny today, but not if you're watching Trump, you know. I mean, it's just like, really is this way. it's happening. But the difference is now, you know, it really is shocking when you look back at the Biden administration and think how close we came to losing the First Amendment in practice. I mean, the absolute forcible bullying attempt to silence people online and to force online carriers to silence people that the regime did not like was real. It was intense. It was intense. It cost the daily wire millions of people and dollars.

You know, they tried to shut us down. They tried to shut anybody down and came out and said, oh, you know, the COVID came from Wuhan or the vaccine might not be good for everybody. Anybody who said the things that later turned out to be true was silenced and was actually lost their ability to reach any audience at all. The reason that was in place, that wasn't in place for no reason. It was in place because if they let us speak, they lose the argument. if they let us speak, people can see that this kind of hateful rhetoric that you're quoting

from the New Yorker exists and is the basis of a lot of left-wing thought. People don't like it when they see it. That's why in England, you know, they bring more and more Muslims into Great Britain and people say, you know, they're raping women, and the person who says they're raping women is put in jail, is threatened with jail. They have to do that because they can't keep the welfare state alive without the immigrants. the immigrants are who they are and people who say what they say

are exposing the people in power and the people in power don't want that to happen. So what is happening is, yes, each of these niche instruments have to play to their niche, but at the same time, they're now being exposed

in the ways they were afraid of, the reason they tried to destroy Elon Musk who went in a day, he went in a day, a single day, from being the hero of the left because he was making electric cars to be the deepest villain villain on earth because he was allowing right ringers to speak on what used to be Twitter,

you know, showed you how important it was to keep their stranglehold on the instruments of information. They have lost that stranglehold. They cannot, you know, silence you, they can't silence all the people who are talking, you know, off the mainstream. And so these people are now being exposed. And the question is, at some point, at some point, the people who read the New Yorker, And I know the people who read The New Yorker. You know, they're friends of mine. You know, they're the kind of cleracy of New York who think they're still the culture, but aren't anymore. They still, see, they don't know.

The news hasn't reached them yet. They're like the king of France when he sees the guys out in the twillery. It's like, what's going on out there? They do not know that the revolution is upon them. And so they're going to find out. I mean, they're going to find out that even people on the left are going to start saying, you know, I don't think this race hatred is good. I happen to be a white person.

I don't really want people hating me. I have nothing against black people, but I don't want that going on. You're seeing that with, for instance, Trump's moves to bring more safety to Washington, D.C. You're seeing all the people screaming fascist, fascist, fascist, suddenly you're hearing a lot of voices saying, you know, it is kind of dangerous when I go out there in Washington, D.C.

You know, it's like it's not, it's a lot more fun with the National Guard on the streets of D.C. I was just, you know, I live close to D.C. I was just in there, and it is. it's better, it's safer than it was. So you're starting to hear, you know, Trump's ratings just went up because of the meeting with Putin,

despite all the attempts to attack him. They've lost a lot of power, much, much more power than they think they did. Their project was to make everybody think that it was okay to hate white people. That was their project. Their project was to think is, oh, well, if that's what everybody's saying,

maybe I should keep my mouth shut. That power that they had, that power, that power is gone. And that's why, you know, going back to Chris Pratt, that's why I would like to see somebody stand up and say, you know, boo-hoo, I like Trump, don't go to my movies anymore. You know, don't go to the next movie

in which I conquer the galaxy or whatever the hell he's doing. You know, it's like, I'd like to see somebody say that. Yeah, but it's going to take time, and it's going to take courage, and it's going to take people who are willing to lose audience at times. And that's very rare. You know, it's much more rare than you want to think. You know, the guy, they make movies,

about people who have the guts to stand up to the regime. You know, that's how rare that is. But it will start to happen as we get the idea that more people agree with us than agree with them. It's not that they agree with the right. It's that they agree with someplace kind of in this amorphous center. Common sense. Yes, a common sense,

but also a place where we can disagree amicably. I think that that, which was an old American, when I grew up, that was the American. way. You know, I mean, I remember, you know, well, well into my 50s playing tennis with a guy who we just would scream at each other over politics. And then we go back to playing tennis and then we go out for a drink, you know, and that was classic American behavior that they tried to destroy because they lost the argument when people did that. When you go out into the Midwest and you see that people are having interracial marriages, interracial adoptions,

and when you get up and say, you know, the people in America, you know, the people in America, are white supremacists. They're going like, what the hell are you talking? You know, have you ever left New York? Have you ever left D.C.? You know, so I think that that power that they had has gone. Women like this, I've lost her name, Emily St. Deereen St. Felix. Sorry, St. Felix. How could you forget a name like that? Yes. How could I forget that name? I actually blocked it out again just this moment. But people like that were hiding behind that censorship. regime and they can anymore and I think that that's a great thing. I don't think I don't think even on the right they've noticed like how powerful the turnaround is. It is really really is a big deal

what happened when it Trump's winning was not the cause of it. It was the mark that it happened. It marked the fact that we had won that battle and it's why I want to see more people telling stories online. That's why I want to see people using AI to build little movies. I want to to see all the, you know, people self-publishing books that are really good, all of those things that I think will change everything, you know. And it's why it's why I feel a special animosity to the people on the right who are actually hateful, who are the people that the left think they are, the Jew haters and the black haters and all the, you know, the Nick Fuentes types and all these people who just spew that hatred because I think really, really,

the good guys and we have to stay the good guys. We don't have to be soft. We don't have to be nice, but we do have to be right. And I think that that's, you know, that it's important that we present. What we're talking about is freedom. We're talking about constitutionality. We're talking about, you know, preserving the traditions of the West, which are there for a reason. You know, they're not just, we didn't just make up the idea that people should get married. We didn't just make up the idea that, you know, a male, a mom and dad family is the best possible family. Those are not just things we invented at, you know, it wasn't like a meeting one day. And we said, ha, ha, ha, this will get the gaze, you know.

I mean, it's not the way it went down. These are traditions that we built up through learning over time. If we want to bring those traditions back, and I think we should, we have to bring them back without hatred, without exclusion. I mean, there's no reason people cannot participate in those things, as long as we elevate them and keep them at the center of our hearts and culture. And I think that that's the opportunity this year now. I'm really excited about it.

I think it's a beautiful thing that's happening. And even when a woman like this gets exposed, I think you're seeing that in operation. And nobody knows the future. Nobody knows if it'll hold. Nobody knows if something terrible will happen and we lose the next election and they're right back in place censoring people.

But right now it feels awfully good. So on that note, before we let you go, we're going to open a giant Pandora's box here and ask about this interview that Nora Sadiqui, who is the, CEO of a company called Orchid did with Ross Daufit. And I think this puts everything you just outlined in stark, I mean, it actually is, it makes the stakes as high, look as high as they really are,

which is as you have this sort of great thawing in the culture, you also are starting to confront some of the deepest technological questions really, really urgently. And so Dauphit, who is a, is a devout Catholic, was questioning Sidiqi on her technology, which essentially allows people to screen embryos and determine which ones have the best shot at healthy lives and then implant those and basically to screen for conditions, disabilities that may make life very difficult for new human beings coming into existence. So let's take a listen to this part. of their interview in the New York Times podcast that went super, super viral.

It was a long conversation, it was a long podcast. This part seems to have gotten the most traction online. This is S6. And Cannell writes, In the half-darkness, we look at each other and smile and touch arms across this little startlingly muscled body, this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making. Sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,

this blessing love gives again into our arms. Sorry. Do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife in a relationship with a child? What do you mean? I mean, in your future, the feeling, in a future where orchid technology becomes a norm,

the feeling that that poet is expressing. aren't you pushing some really intimate and important aspect of human experience out of human experience? Yeah, I think people will obviously continue to have sex. I mean, it's a profound source of connection. I think it's just that people will, I mean, it's actually funny. I mean, this quote that I've said of, you know, sex is for fun, orchid, and embryo screening is for babies. Yes, I didn't want to quote that to you because I thought it was so ridiculous. But go on.

I actually don't. I think it's already true. I mean, already people are having sex much more often than they're having babies. Sex is already for fun and not for babies, you know, 99% of the time. So it's actually not so, so strange. But of course, that is, that in and of itself has been enabled in many ways by new technologies that are new, but we don't think about it as new because they've been around for a while. Actually, there's a funny study that was done by Janet Yellen when she was at Brookings. And I think her husband, that found abortion, the availability of abortion post-row, well, post-row, pre-post-row now, but after the initial row decision came down, actually increased the incidence of out-of-wedlock births because sex was being had more casually. So we don't necessarily think about that as a new technology at this point, but, Andrew, after Dothet reads that poem, I think some people were struck by Sadiqi's sort of flippant. She's 28 years old.

She was a former Tiel Fellow, has a lot of tech money. wrapped up an orchid. What they felt was a flippant response to something that he was expressing that was sort of grave and serious. And she goes on to talk more. He asks her, does the embryo have any moral status? That's all I'm asking. She says, sure, I think that the question of an embryo that is going to get adult onset blindness, what do I think about that embryo? My mom doesn't want to be blind. She doesn't want me to be blind. She doesn't want her grandkids to be blind. So I think that it is a positive moral choice. It is the responsible decision as a parent to detect that risk at the earliest possible stage and to transfer the embryo that has the best probability of a healthy life.

So she really flips the framing. What did you make of it? Well, to me, first of all these women have the same psychotic smile on their face. They look like that movie's. Every single one of them has that same like days smile like they're on. Yeah, exactly. If you're listening to it, that was, I modeled it. Anybody who listens to my show knows that I think that this is the central question of the time. And it is the question, the broad question of how do we feel about mothers and why is it that feminism became essentially took a reductive attitude toward mothers? That the famous conversation between the socialist Simone de Beauvoir and the socialist, Betty Friedan, where Simone de Beauvoir said women should not be allowed to choose to stay at home and raise their children because too many of them will make that choice. That is what she said, and that is essentially what became the official feminist line.

And I think that when you, it takes a long time for me to explain this. And if I say it quickly, it's going to sound really offensive. But it's really not. What women are as mothers and as homemakers is unique to women. And it is, and nothing else that they do is unique to them, like that is unique to them. like that is unique to them. So we're actually talking about when we talk about motherhood. And I would include homemaking, which I think is an aspect of motherhood.

When we talk about homemaking and motherhood, we are talking about being human. If you eliminate that from the scenario of raising children, having children reproducing, you have eliminated humanity. And what was so incredibly touching to me about that exchange, I watched the entire interview. I watch every minute of the interview. And when Dow Thout, who's a lovely guy, absolutely great guy, he's reading a poem by Galway Connell. And it's called something like after making love,

we hear footsteps. And the point of the poem is that the making love to your wife, a husband and wife, making love, is continued in the creation of a baby, that the whole thing is connected. It is the human experience that you make love, a man and woman make love, and then there is a baby.

and doubt that starts to choke up on the beauty of this poem and the beauty of the thought in the poem. And she looks at him with that psychotic smile, says, what do you mean? What do you, what do you, what do you tell? You know, what, what's going? What do you mean? You know, I thought that that was just, that basically summed it up because I think that is what we're talking about. I've said for a long time that the existence of the artificial womb is going to be the dividing point between the past and the future. once babies can be made as if in a toaster, which is basically, you know, Brave New World.

I mean, that's what happens in Brave New World, that they make babies in a genetically arranged babies in little machines. And sex is something completely without any kind of meaning at all. And women are just, it's basically a homosexual world in which people are just having sex for the pleasure of it and children happen somewhere else. I mean, that is essentially what it is, except for the shape of some of the people, the female shape of some of the people having sex. That's the only difference between that and the old bathhouse days of pre-age homosexuality. And so the fact that she couldn't even understand the question, couldn't understand the depth and gravity of the question, I think is chilling and frightening. I have thought, and you know, it's interesting, even the administration contacted me about this, which if I kind of frightened me. I thought I should be talking to you, not the other way around.

But no, you know, because I don't think anybody is talking about the fact, you know, people are not reproducing. People in the West are not having children. We're dying out. You know, that's what happened. It happens very quickly. And once it happens, it's really hard to reverse. And people keep saying, well, we should give women money. We should give women more time off.

We should give them more maternity leave. We need more child care at work. You should give them podcasts. Yeah, we give them podcasts. And my think is how about giving them respect and honor for the key. act of humanity, which is motherhood and not just motherhood in the physical sense of having some baby come out of you, but the magical thing that mothers do when they turn those infants into human beings, which they do through a lot of scutwork, a lot of boring work,

but also a lot of very rewarding deep work that has, you know, you know, whenever I hear a woman say, I'm just a mom, I always think, does anybody ever think of their mom? Oh, yeah, she was just just a mom. She was just my mom, you know, like, I mean, No, of course not. That's a center point of your creation and your identity. And if it goes badly, you know it. And if it goes well, you know it. And it's a very central thing to humanity. There's no money in it. There's no physical, you know, rewards in the sense of, you know, you don't get awards. Nobody gives you a red ribbon at the end of it. Nobody gives you a gold watch. Nobody does it. There's no People magazine for mothers. You know, if you walk down a runway in your unwinds,

underwear, you're a supermodel, but if you give birth to a human being and bring that human being into fruition as an individual, you're just a mom, you know. And so I think that to begin with, to begin with, we have to confront the fact that feminism, like every other social movement in America, has been taken over by the left. And that distorts every social movement in America. Civil rights starts out saying, let's treat black people fairly and everybody gets on board. It ends up with white people are disgusting and they give you lice. I mean, that's how the left takes over every social, you know, environmentalism.

We all think, let's keep the air clean, let's make sure we have water to drink, the world is beautiful, let's preserve some of it. It ends up with its climate change. We have to give government power over every single thing that we do. The left takes over every social movement in America. Feminism starts out as saying women should have the right to choose their life. Most decent men think, well, yes, of course, and it ends up with men stink and mothers, you know, are nothing.

And if you don't have a job in the workplace and if you don't have the qualities of a man, you're worth nothing. And in fact, if a man dresses up as you, he is you and a better version of you on a sports field than you can ever be. And that is the way that the left takes over every social movement. We have to go back to a feminism that elevates motherhood to equal status, if not.

higher status than most of the other things that people do in life. And if you treat mothers like they deserve to be treated as if they are the core of a society, I think that you're going to solve the fertility problem a lot faster than people think you are. They don't need to, you know, they do, they do need home businesses. They don't need to work remotely for corporations, but we do need to make it easier for women to build businesses at home. You know, when you go back and read Proverbs 31, the description of the perfect woman. She's an actual financial, you know, powerhouse, but it's home-based cottage industries that were destroyed in the Industrial Revolution, which is when feminism starts, when women are stripped of their home-based power that they have.

So I really think that we need to reconstruct, and people on the right are going to have to have the courage to do this to reconstruct our conversation about women and start saying, yes, women should be mothers, they should be homemakers. That role should be elevated both in our respect and also in its diversity of choice so that you can be a mother and a homemaker in different ways, depending on how you choose to do it and still retain economic productivity and power and intellectual productivity and interest. You know, I think that that is the one solution.

It's the one solution you never hear. And the reason is simple. Socialists hate the home because it's a source of a source of, individual power and capitalist hate the home because it takes women out of the workforce and takes them, you know, means that they can pay people less. There's a reason that wages have stagnated ever since feminism became the law of the land. And so I think it's a tough fight because it's a spiritual fight. You have to believe that men and women are something more than flesh and blood. You have to believe that. You have to believe that a mother's staying home and losing her income

and losing whatever the gifts the world gives you out in the world, the awards and the applause and the paychecks that people give you out of them, you have to think that that is worth something of greater value than all those things. And we live in a society that has taught us through feminism, leftist feminism, that that's not the case. And I think as long as that's in place, we'll continue to die out. Andrew Claven, that hour flew by because I could stop listening to you. Your new book is called After That, The Dark, It's Out on I.

October 28th. Thank you so very much. I was so happy to have you on tonight and get to hear all of your fascinating insights. It's great to see you, Emily. Next time, invite me to the party, not just the after party. I felt like I was here to clean up or something. It's not a party if anyone's cleaning. I don't know. Maybe for women. Okay. Now also. All right. I'll move on. Andrew, thank you. Seriously. It's a pleasure always. Appreciate it. All right. So after this, stay tuned. We have updates on. on the name of MSNBC. So we're gonna get into all of that.

But what Andrew was just saying is really a great segue to talk about pre-born. And over the years, I've been clear about this that I'm not just pro-birth. I am pro-life and being pro-life means standing with mothers not only before their baby is born, but long after. And that is exactly why I partner

and why I partner very proudly with pre-born. Preborn does not just save babies. They make motherhood abundantly possible. They provide free ultrasounds and share the truth of the gospel with women in crisis, and then, this is so cool, they stay, with real practical help, including financial support for up to two years after the little baby is born. This is what true Christ-centered compassion looks like, not just for the baby, but for the mother too. And here's where you can make a difference. Just $28 provides a free life-saving ultrasound, one chance for a mother

to see her baby. And when she does, she's twice as likely to choose life. That is, so amazing. Preborn is trying to save 70,000 babies this year. So don't just say your pro-life, live it, help save babies and support mothers today. Go to preborn.com slash Emily or call 855-601-229. That's pre-born.com slash Emily. James Comey is a Swifty. I'm just going to let that sit here for a moment. James Comey, former head of the FBI, enemy of Martha Stewart. Not only does he have a subset, but he is using the substack to promote his fandom of Taylor Swift. And I really can't believe I'm saying this because it's so deeply undignified. It should be obvious.

But actually, before I show you the clip, I'm going to show you James Comey's substack because it is wild. Why the former FBI director feels the need to have a substack? I just, I don't know. I can't tell you, but I did want to zoom in here on his bio. know, it's really unbelievable. Subscribe to James Comey launched three months ago. Former government person, author, teacher, father, grandfather, tall, and really quite funny. That is Jim Comey's substack bio, where he pedals, takes, like this one, on America's sweetheart, Taylor Swift.

I want to talk about a truly inspirational public figure named Taylor Swift. I'm in a family's Swifty group chat. I know all her music and I listen to it in my headphones when I cut the grass. Like a lot of you, I struggle with how to stand up to bullies without letting their meanness infect me and change me. At my second Taylor Swift concert in Hartford, Connecticut 14 years ago this summer, she sang a song about this topic, asking, why you got to be so mean? and she spoke directly to the nasty people. I bet you got pushed around. Somebody made you cold,

but the cycle ends right now because you can't leave me down that road. Thank you, Taylor Swift. Keep the faith. I'm profoundly disturbed by that video. I'm not even joking. That man was the head of the FBI. The head of the FBI.

He also appears to be slowly morphing into Donald Trump. He's got the orange skin and the white circles around his eyes, which has to tell us something through a sort of Freudian lens. But I think it's quite interesting that it's 2025, and James Comey continues to use this anti-bullying attack on Donald Trump. This was very popular in 2017. It's been very popular with the, never Trump contingent of former Republicans and intelligence community, military officials,

ever since. And it obviously doesn't work. But James Comey is so out of, he's so deeply ensconced in his own thick, thick bubble that we're a decade into the Trump era. And this man still doesn't realize that the bullying line doesn't work to the point where he is actually using Taylor Swift to make the argument. He is now laundering this failed argument through a song that Taylor Swift wrote when she was like a immature, what, 20-year-old, I don't know, maybe early 20s mean? Why you got to be so mean? This is a song that resonates with 12-year-old girls and the former FBI director. And the middle of that Venn diagram should be infinitesimal. And yet here we are, not only is he finding this to be resonant and moving,

but he felt the need and, in fact, felt that it would be okay to say so publicly. This is not a man who should have a substack. This is not a man who should be in a swiftly group chat. this is not a man who should be posting videos of himself on the internet. And the Trump as a bully line has always failed because it's come from people exactly like James Comey. Again, this is the FBI director, who we now know just about every day that goes by in greater detail, was orchestrating a plot to essentially coup

the duly elected president of the United States from his perch at the Federal Bureau of investigation. That's why saying that Donald Trump weaponizes his power to hit out at the week from a position of strength doesn't work when you're James Comey. It doesn't work when you are MSNBC, which I will get to in a moment, believe me. It doesn't work when you are a powerful establishment Democrat. Like, there's nothing about it. In fact, I think this is actually why, by the way, you see Gavin Newsom. Can we put F12 on the screen? This is the, if you're not on Twitter, God bless you, but you've missed or X, whatever I'm supposed to call it now. You've missed a hell of a ride here. There's been an ongoing several days long attempt to juxtapose.

Here's a post that puts it this way. Chad Newsom with Chud Vance. And it's a poster or it's a picture of Gavin Newsom in high school, juxtapose with J.D. Vance. In high school, we can put F-14 on the screen now as well. This is another high school mashup. So Gavin Newsom in like a burberry scarf with J.D. Vance, that famous picture of him looking slightly chuddish with girls at a urinal in a high school bathroom. Spencer Cleveland reposed this and said, in high school it was practically a defining measure of your emotional and spiritual maturity, whether you recognize that the guy in the right was a sweet and loyal friend or whether you were mean to him for no reason. But Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, has

been posting, check this out, in Trump style. So he's been on X, just saying, like, here's a picture of an AI generated Mount Rushmore with Gavin Newsom on it, and he's been posting all caps. Wow, what an honor. I'm Mount Rushmore. Thank you, GCN. So this is from the Gavin Newsom press office, and you can just scroll through here, and you're going to see just intense trolling. This one is with Tommy Lerrin, Newsom versus Tommy Laren. And basically what they're doing, you know, is is trying to take Trump style, use it against him. I will concede that some of it has been a little bit funny. But for the most part, it's exactly why.

Or it's an illustration of Gavin Newsom embracing his strength, right, in a way that we've seen Comey and others sort of downplay it, right? Like Chuck Schumer had that one quote about Trump angering and tell. the intelligence community. This was back in like 2016 or 2017 and said something like, you know, if you piss them off, they have seven ways get back at you till Sunday. So I'm, paraphrasing, but he said something like that. But the James Comey's and the John Brennan's, never, they're never overt about that because they want to cast themselves as the victims of a vicious bullying campaign by Donald Trump while not admitting that they have been pulling at the

levers of power for however long to go against Donald Trump. And the same thing goes for Hollywood. The same thing goes for all of these massive media conglomerates who have also been using their power to take on Donald Trump in some really substantial ways that make his claim to being the one who's actually the victim of the elite scam much, much more powerful with the American people. We know that there's some truth to it when it comes to the intelligence community, for example. We know that media platforms have used their power intentionally in partisan ways. is to hurt Donald Trump. So now, of course, there are much more,

Trump has consolidated some seriously support in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but his argument is still the one that politically resonates with the American people. And I can't believe I even just spent, what, five minutes giving any credence to the fact that James Comey is identifying in a way he seems to think is very cute as a Swifty.

On a substack. I mean, he's like, he's like a Tumblr girlie, circa 2010 talking about, I mean, it's just like, I know the emo Comey thing is a meme, but it is so undignified. It is so embarrassing. And somebody who loves him should take away his phone and smash it with a hammer, clean it with a cloth, like Hillary Clinton said, anything. Just get it away from him because what little reputation that he has left is being tarnished by his impulse to post on substack. Substack. I'm overwhelmed by the potential. Or I'm overwhelmed by the, I'm overwhelmed by, I'm so overwhelmed I cannot speak. James Comey has left me speechless. I didn't think that was possible. Come on, James Comey. All right. Let's move on to MSNBC because I'm out of loss for the words. I genuinely don't know what else to say about the fact that the former FBI director has a substack where he is calling himself a Swifty. All right. Let's talk about MSNBC. MSNBC has a new name. Actually, speaking of James Comey, MSNBC has a new name. They're trying to rebrand after a decade plus of platforming seriously people like uncritically people like James Comey. Tommy and John Brennan and MSNBC host Nicole Wallace and Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzeinsky.

And this list is too long. It will take up the rest of the show for me to even go through. But they rolled out this new name today. No spoilers. I'm going to roll the clip for you. This is S-10. We have breaking news as it pertains to our network this morning. A new name for the network by the end of the year.

We will become MS now, which stands from my source for news, opinion, and the world. And look, Andrew, they even have a graphic up. There it is. The new logo. It looks very sporty. It's like, you know, what's in the name? Well, whatever you put into the name. But I like this because I think it actually does have the sort of independence and actually

gets away in some ways from even the idea of legacy media. The media landscape has been changing a lot over the last decade or so. but it's been really accelerated in the last few years in this particular moment. So it does seem an ideal time to re-brain, an ideal time to embrace a new identity, as you said, to be an insurgent network. What do you think?

I think it's good. You're just saying that. You're just saying that. No, I think it's good. Okay, did you hear that? An insurgent network. An insurgent network. That's the way that MSNBC, I'm sorry, MS now.

My name's suggestion is MS-2013. So it combines things that they love, MS-13, with the gear that they are frozen in, 2013. MS-2013, still free. You can use it. I won't sue or anything like that. But MSNBC, of course, stands for Microsoft NBC because it was sort of the pinnacle of corporate media in so many ways when MSNBC first hit the airwaves. And now, as Jonathan Lemire, just put it on Morning Joe, it's time for them to, to feel a little bit, as Andrew Ross Sorkin said, more independent.

And as Jonathan Lemire put it, more of an insurgent network. This is, again, bear in mind, the network that for the last 10 years has been the most prominent and least critical platformer of people like James Comey and John Brennan and the intelligence community as they went about dividing the left, dividing the American public, and undermining what the left sees as democracy. Republican system, the lowercase D democracy that they have purported to treasure and cherish, they have allowed people like substack, Swifty, James Comey, to undermine that uncritically, again, for years. In fact, they have cheerleaded in it, they have participated in it, and they now want to see themselves,

and they want you to believe that they are an insurgent and independent network. And this is the most cynical exercise in branding that I can remember. So it gets one thing right and one thing deeply wrong. What it gets right is diagnosing the media landscape. And of course, it's very late for MSNBC, now MS-2013 to recognize this, because, you know, these trend lines were apparent 10 years ago and there were some people who were way ahead of the curve and have come out on top of this, Megan Kelly being one of them. but MSNBC now realizing things have splintered.

The landscape is a bunch of sort of independent creators competing seriously on the same playing field, a leveled playing field with the old guys. So we need to cut overhead, cut costs, rebrand, and what do they then want to do? Well, they've realized that what people prize in an era of low institutional trust, we talk about this all the time here on After Party, in an era of low institutional trust, people prize authenticity. They prize a voice that they feel like they can trust, and they don't need to agree with 100% of the time,

but they believe is doing their best to present a fair and honest set of facts or opinions that they can then compare with other sources. We're all just putting in more legwork now to consume the news because we're comparing different sources instead of saying, I'm putting my trust in Walter Cronkite, or Peter Jennings or whomever and, you know, consuming bits and pieces of opinion on the side. But mostly I'm, you know, taking seriously the paper of record, whatever it is. That era is gone.

It was a fleeting moment of mass media post-war technology. And it's not the case anymore. And MS 2013 is just now realizing it in 2025. But what they're doing wrong, of course, is not actually having any intent. of meeting the demand. So they know that they are going to have a more niche audience right now, right? They actually, during the Zucker era, kind of leaned into this and realized that what was they had a really controversial slogan at one point. It was like forward. I don't, I forget what it was. But they were openly branding themselves as being on the left for a particular part of time.

They're being a little coy about it, but they were sort of openly saying this is the home. the cable news home for the left. And that was obvious in their programming and all of that, although their daytime news anchors so purported to be very serious journalists, capital V, capital S, capital J, VSJs as I call them. And Lean Forward was the slogan that they used, thank you, to our great producer for reminding me, lean forward was the slogan. And, you know, they knew at that point in time that it was smart to just brand themselves that way.

But they also thought that's where the whole country was going. And of course, this was incoherent. They thought the country was like a white supremacist hellhole. At the same time, they were like, actually, no, we're all going to live in, as Trump says, everybody transgender. It's just to be a utopia of the Oberlin faculty lounge in America from now until eternity. So it was always incoherent. But that is really what they believed. And come to find out, that people like that do exist, right?

Like, there are dozens of them. but they do exist. So that does, you know, you can have a niche following. There are some left YouTubers. We're talking about Hassan Piker. There are some lefty YouTubers who are even like less interesting and more politically correct and more deferential to authority who do okay on their various platforms because they don't have high overhead and they know that they're going to have a niche audience.

And now MSNBC is entering that fray. And so, you know what, do I think MSNBC? and CNN can lurch into the future if they cut a bunch of overhead. Yeah, I actually do. I think they have really powerful brands, even though trust in media is low. CNN has one of the most popular news websites in the entire world. MSNBC, they're at more of a disadvantage because they're losing the NBC. They used to like get a lot of firepower, journalistically, to the point that you can even say that from being combined

with NBC. And my understanding is that a lot of that is going away, but they still have the stable of people with name recognition in this niche community. Like they'll, Nicole Wallace and Rachel Maddo, so long as they can cut down on the overhead, we'll still continue to have an audience. But they're not going to appeal to more and more people by claiming to be insurgent and independent. they might be fine with just that small audience, but it's not expanding, that's for sure. So if their rebrand effort isn't just an attempt to consolidate their dwindled, but existing, niche audience of people who love to slug yellowtail and cheer along with Nicole Wallace as she talks about her husband's latest, quote, scoop with her husband. fine enjoy it you know you guys you'll always have each other but if they genuinely want people to believe that they're insurgent and independent and are planning a brand campaign putting millions of

dollars into making people think that they're insurgent and independent god bless them that is going to be hilarious so name changed by the end of the year according to joe scarborough and i am so excited to see how they try to sell this to all of us. I've gone way long tonight, but I had a lot to say, busy news day. Thank you so much for tuning in to After Party. We are here Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 p.m. Eastern. We're live. Remember, you can email me at Emily at devilmaycaremedia I try to answer all the emails that I get. There are a lot of them, but I'm doing my best. Man, I just heard about our guest lineup for the next several weeks, and it's incredible.

So do us a favor and subscribe. Wherever you get your podcast, subscribe on YouTube. It helps us so much. And I can't wait to be back here with all of you Wednesday night, live at 10 p.m.