The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Why I Voted Against the Democrats - I don’t care for Trump, but I needed to strike back - Ann Bauer

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Author of the WSJ op-ed: "Why I Voted Against the Democrats I don’t care for Trump, but I needed to strike back against the hectoring and fanaticism of the left," tells us about the experiences within liberal academia that led to her decision to vote for Trump. Read the column: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-i-voted-against-democrats-fanaticism-of-the-left-swayed-over-trump-dislike-874daacc

This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous Comedy Cellar. We are available wherever you get your podcasts, available on YouTube and available on demand on Sirius. We no longer have a regular time slot, but we're available on demand. And this is Dan Aderman, Comedy Cellar regular-ish, along with Noam Dorman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar, Perry Alashian-Brand with us. All of us are in studio and with us via the miracle of teleconferencing

we have Ann Bauer. She has written three novels including Damn Good Food, Forgiveness for You, I guess I'll just name the other one, A While Right Up the Cupboards to Forever Marriage. And her essays, travel stories and reviews have appeared

in Al Salon, Slate, Red Book, The Sun, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Please welcome Anne Bauer to our podcast. Thank you for coming. Thank you. By the way, my co-host here, Mr. Natterman, has written a novel as well. And I have tremendous respect for anybody who can write a novel and you've written three. I think that is one of the, that's a talent that I can't even imagine myself having with a gun to my head. It's irrational tenacity. Yeah. I mean, you have to imagine characters and imagine things from the character's point of view.

And you have to be fun. And you have to plot. So you should read Dan's book. I don't know if you can see the drawings we have behind here. I can't, but I'd love to read Dan's book. Oh, yeah. We'll send it to you. And there's drawings behind.

We have to go on with the show, I know, but there's drawings behind me all done by my stepmother. And she's just an amazing artist. And I mean, literally, you could give me my entire life and put a gun to my head and I could not ever do that.

It's a real talent. It's not like modern art, you know, where it looks like a child could do it. Anyway, so writing a novel, I'm very impressed. All right. You heard that Matt Gaetz, you wrote a column. The column is why I voted against the Democrats. You were a Democrat, I assume your whole life, you voted for Trump. More or less. Yeah. And we're going to get into that. But since I just heard that he appointed Matt Gaetz, nominating Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Did you hear that?

I did not. I mean, I was I was busy, you know, getting ready for you. I missed that news. So, you know, are you up on that? You know who Matt Gaetz is? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And what state is he from, Mikey? I can't remember what state he's from, but he was accused of sexual improprieties. But more than that, he's just kind of a ridiculous figure in my estimation. And like a Trump loyalist when I think most of us, even those of us who were feeling like you. Florida. He's from Florida. Oh, right. Florida. I should have known that. Worried about him trying to settle scores with the judicial system.

And here's a guy who looks like he'll just going to do Trump's bidding. So what's your first reaction to Matt Gaetz? I feel so ill-qualified to comment on any of these appointments. This one doesn't thrill me. I mean, my gut reaction is, oh, really? But it's so hard to tell, you know, what's going to unroll from events. And one of the problems that we're having is, you know, the minute Trump does anything, we get seven sides of news and people prognosticating, you know, often incorrectly. I just don't know. I don't know. I hope there's

not churn in the administration the way there was last time. I hope he doesn't appoint a bunch of yes men who then he fires immediately. That would be bad. He promised he wouldn't. I hope that happens. Yeah, I'm with you. This worries me. All right, let's go back to earlier. Why was it that you had it up here with the Democrats and you decided to vote for somebody as difficult as Donald Trump?

Yeah, it was a long road. I was a pretty garden variety, progressive Democrat living in Minneapolis, writing books, you know, this was my life. These I'm really concerned about the closure of schools. Everything else I get, you know, the social distancing and the bars and the arenas, oh my God, yes, let's close them down, you know, but children, especially low income children who are hungry, children who might be abused at home, we need to make some provision. And the blowback was so fast and so complete. That was really early. I was like April of 2020. I lost most of my professional ties. I lost a lot of my community ties and really found myself adrift thinking, am I crazy? Am I just, am I just seeing stupid killery stuff, which is what I kept hearing, you know, you're an idiot and you're a killer and, and you may as well just go to Trump's campaign. That's the person you are.

Well, you look like a killer go to Trump's campaign. That's the person you are. Well, you look like a killer, I have to say. I really, there's a chest freezer in the basement. Don't look. Can I ask, you said you were in favor of keeping schools open. How full-throated was your position? Were you simply opening it up for discussion or were you insisting this is how it must be? No, I was really just opening it up in April. In April, I was saying, you know, oh, this sounds really devastating. This sounds like it would be so damaging. Could we make provisions for low-income children? Where are they going to eat? Kids who are on free and reduced breakfast and lunch.

I raised a pretty significantly developmentally disabled child. I knew what it was like to be a single mother of children who, if you didn't have that school, if you didn't have the support, if you didn't have financial means, you know, this would take you down. And I said that. And it was so immediate that I was sort of flushed out of the societies that I'd been in. I was a regular contributor for the Washington Post that ended that day. Oh, my God. I was an occasional contributor to many other magazines and newspapers. I never heard from a single editor again.

No one who had worked with me. And my friends really said, you know, you've gone off some kind of right wing deep end and sent me Facebook memes and things like that about, you know, I just want a haircut and, and freedom and all that. And so go ahead. Sorry. I spent a really perplexed and, you know, kind of devastating spring and early summer, my husband and I both, we happen to agree on this, which, you know, I know a lot of couples. Is your husband a Nazi also? Of longstanding. Yes. Yeah. It's amazing. He married a Jew. That's so strange. But, you know, we agreed on this, but we felt entirely alone, completely. And I eventually went on Twitter, which I'd gotten a Twitter account for

a book at some point, one of the books I was trying to tweet, and I was awful at it, and I quit. But I had this old Twitter account, Ann Bauer Writer, that I had set up. And I got on, and I started looking for, you know, is there any information out there? Should I just go apologize to everyone I know? Am I, am I insane? And I found a few other people and we started conversing on Twitter and it was kind of life-saving for me because at least I felt like, you know, okay, I haven't lost my mind. There is a point of view here. And that's sort of how it started, that I really,

I had such a problem with that crushing crackdown on discussion. Yeah, well, this is a common problem. It's been going on for a long time. You know, just a couple of things happened. What was it today? Oh, we found the headline today also was that Kamala Harris didn't go on Joe Rogan because the progressive people within her campaign found it unacceptable to go on the Joe Rogan show.

This is really something that comes from the left and not from the right there is no talk show that anybody in trump's campaign would be offended by even ones that they probably should be offended by right even like very far to the right that's just not the way they they they process things and i had a friend i think i lost this friend finally so you know um rfk jr who i'm not a fan of anybody i am not i get it so he tweeted out uh we're gonna get fluoride out of the water i said oh brother fluoride out of the water. I said, oh, brother, fluoride out of the water. And then I sent it to my friend who's a kind of elite journalist. And then Alex Tabarik, who's an economist at George Mason University, very, very level-headed, data-driven guy, tweets out, actually, there's some recent studies which suggest that fluoride might be a good idea to take out of the water. So I'm like,

huh? And I looked at the study. I'm like, son of a bitch, you know, lightning strikes. And he even said RFK might be a painted clock. So I said to the elite journalist, and he got so nasty with me. We may never speak again. I'm like, dude, what's the matter with you? I'm just presenting you with a study. And the conclusion of the study is we have insufficient information to judge whether fluoride in small quantities is safe. Now, that's all I need to hear to say I don't want it in my kid's water, right?

And, you know, unless you can tell me that the study is not reliable, but apparently it is reliable. And they've taken it out in Europe. We grew up all with Flora. Well, it reduces... Whatever. My point is that... No, I mean, I appreciate what you're saying, but my point is that kind of what Anne is saying is that

she hears something that, well, you know what, maybe we need to get these kids back in school, and it seems like a non-political data point, then you think about it and you present what, maybe we need to get these kids back in school. And it seems like a non-political data point. Then you think about it and you present it and they come down on you as if you are making a political point when you're not. You're just looking at the world as an open-minded person

who knows that things are not often what they appear and things change. And obviously we're flying blind in a pandemic. You say, hey, what about this? This says maybe, you know, and obviously there's a big cost to keeping kids out at all. We should consider this. No, we don't consider anything that anybody on the right wing might want. That's really what it is.

If they want it, it has to be wrong. And we, you know, cover our eyes and cover our ears and you become the villain. And we see this over and over and ears, and you become the villain. And we see this over and over and over. And it's – so I'll say one more thing. So Sam Harris, I recommend very highly Sam Harris in one of his monologues about Trump's victory. And he said that although we all have read that inflation had a big part to do with why people voted for Trump, that everybody he speaks to who voted for Trump, and I've had the same experience, 100% of the people I'm aware of who voted for Trump all say things similar to what you're

saying. They had it up to here with the left. The exception being Richard Hanania, who said he voted for Trump for economic reasons. No, you have to read more of Richard Hanania. Richard Hanania also votes for Trump because, no, he said, I'm a conservative, is what he said. Actually, that's exactly what he said. He said, listen, I'm a conservative. I like conservative policies. That's what he said.

But, um, so, yeah, now... I'm curious if any of these people have come around to apologize, given the fact that we know now that you were in fact correct in that assessment. Um, I, there were a couple who said, oh, look, you were right. Or, you know, now the right people are saying the same thing. But of course, we couldn't have known that at the time.

And it was irresponsible to question at that point. No one in my professional life has ever come back. Not a single editor. I actually reunited with an editor who contacted me and said, Oh, I agree with you. But that's why she's no longer working on staff for a publication because, you know, she like I kind of fell into that dissenting heterodox space and we're no longer, we don't qualify. But whether you were right or wrong is beside the point. You were right to say, let's have a discussion. You were right to say, let's keep an open mind. Whether ultimately that policy was right or wrong is no relevance. You're right. You're right what you're saying, but it is relevant to this degree. It's relevant

that they would have you believe that what she was suggesting you keep an open mind about was ridiculous. And the fact that she was right is proof positive that they were the ones being ridiculous, that they were incapable of even seeing what certainly must have been true, that this was something that at least reasonable minds could differ about. And then if both sides agree that it's something that reasonable minds can differ about, then it kind of becomes irrelevant whether you were right or wrong. But the fact that they could not comprehend that they were 100 percent wrong and they should have. And there was evidence at the time that they were 100 percent wrong to rule this out of the realm of polite conversation.

The fact that she turned out to be right makes it impossible for them to look away from that. And also that we have hard evidence now that violence and abuse, the number skyrocketed during that time that the school. Why did they have the Super Bowl playing? I don't know if we have. You know, I almost got thrown off Facebook for the opposite reason. No, no, no. We know that child abuse oh is that true yes well by the way because you were right empirically makes it makes it all the more unlikely that you'll ever see these people again nobody wants exactly yeah being right ended up being the worst thing for me and for those kids and for those kids. And for those kids. And you're so right about the abuse. It was actually that calls to child abuse hotlines went down.

That was the sinister thing was all of a sudden like, oh, look, there's a pandemic. We sent all the children home. And strangely, there's no child abuse anymore. Well, it was no one was laying eyes on these children or reporting. Do you want to say something else? Well, I think it just struck me as so dangerous not to have the conversation. Even at the very beginning, that was the part that kept me awake every night was like, this terrible thing is happening or at least i think it's happening my husband thinks it's happening and it's so dangerous that we can't we can't

discuss so so for some reason early on when the pandemic was first starting it was right wing to want to close the schools i i don't i remember maybe it's because who's going to take care of the kids whatever so and if you remember very early on the way it was going is that they would wait until one of the schools had a case then they would shut the school down and then it and then they'd come back and and you know and at some point it became clear to me where that we were heading into a pandemic very early so i wrote wrote on the local Facebook. I said, why don't we close the school down now and figure out what's going on? Because it seems pretty clear every school's going to get it. But by the time our school gets it, then we know it's too late. By the time we see the first case, it means it's

spreading all around. And we were very scared of COVID at the time. And we didn't know that it wasn't dangerous to children. I said, why are you waiting for canaries to die in the coal mine? Close the schools down. Let's get a grip on this. And then we can bring them back if things settle down. Well, the liberal people on my Facebook, they threatened to throw me off. And the woman in charge of Facebook says, you are not to talk about this again you're a fear monger now i was and by the way i was not saying anything like we're all going to die or i was like yeah let's look at this logically if we wait until there's a case isn't that too late then i remember saying and then they bring it home to grandma well you know we have a lot of people in my town with live with or their parents, and then the kids are going to bring it home.

Isn't it safer to just shut everything down now? And I could not understand. I still have these messages, screenshots of them because I saved them because I knew they would be priceless. The anger, the anger and the nastiness as if I had, you know, called somebody the N-word or something. It was absurd. And then somehow it switched, and the people who wanted to open the schools became the concern. It's just what it was.

That is so crazy, because I think we were in the same time period, and I was saying in Minnesota, I'm in Minnesota. Tim Waltz closed the schools early. I believe it was March 9th. Something like that. And the teachers happened to be on strike in my city anyway. So he was closing schools that were empty already. And then of course statewide, but because our Democrat governor was the person who closed the schools, I got the opposite. Very interesting. So now you also got

in trouble for your opinion about you hate the trans people as well. Is that right? I get in trouble on both sides here. I'm sorry to tell you. I'm serving all comers. I live in Minneapolis, St. Paul. I know a lot of trans people. I love a lot of trans people. I've known trans children. I'm a child of the early 80s. I danced in the streets with Prince back when he was a glyph. Not with him directly. He was somewhere in the vicinity. The artist formerly known as Prince. The artist formerly known as Prince. Former artist, formerly known as Prince. He is beloved to us. Yeah, we love him. But, you know, my, my attitude about trans,

and I've said this online is like, oh my God, I will, I will protect your right to be who you are. And that means surgically transitioned, not transitioned, non-binary, you know, natal male, uh, identifying as a girl wearing a skirt, don't care what kind of, you know, hormones you take or surgeries you have. It became, however, this codified movement to take all of these kids of all of these different wild, wonderful kind of colors and feelings and pipeline them into a medical process. And that is where I say, no, no, no, people are making money off this. We can't be doing this to children for the benefit of pharma or whomever. I don't want to say who I think is benefiting. And one of the things that gives me great hope is that the plastic surgeons of America said, Hey, we don't want to do this anymore. That's not how we want to make our

dollars. But we want to give strippers fake boobs. That's how we want them. All power to them. Consenting adults. Yeah. But I just, I felt like, you know, we already reached this wonderful point of inclusivity where you can be who you are. And then suddenly young gay kids are being funneled into, no, actually, you really and put you through 11 terrifying surgical procedures. And it just felt like it went to this, I'm sorry, it's going to be a little incendiary, transhuman extreme where it was like, oh, no, but we can tinker with that and use our instruments and make this even better. And I'm a great believer in the sanctity of the great variety of humanity, you know, who we are and how we think and how we feel. And I don't want surgeons putting people into chutes and making those decisions. Well, you know, it's interesting. First of all, just because I always like to blow

my own horn, you will remember that I predicted that the first time America sees an XY boxer kick the shit out of a woman on TV, they will turn against this thing. Do you remember me saying that? And we did see that. But there is an interesting thing that happens. I hope I can come up with a few examples of where a cause goes so far that it makes the people who used to support it bedfellows with the racists and the bigots, right? So this happened in my father's lifetime. My father died like 20 years ago, where my father was civil rights was the most important thing in our home. It just was. That was the issue. Civil rights, Martin Luther King, all of it.

And by the end of his life, he had turned against the civil rights movement, not because he started thinking he wanted to see people treated, judged by the color of their skin, but because the civil rights movement had come to stand for judging people by the color of their skin, in his opinion. And all of a sudden, he's nodding with David Duke or something, because David Duke wants to get rid of affirmative action, and my father wants to limit affirmative action. I want to get rid of it, but wanted to limit its excesses for sure. And now you have a bedfellow. And you see this in various other issues. Andrew Sullivan, the father of gay marriage, is on the side of the people who say that the bakers shouldn't have to make gay birthday cakes. He's like, let them not make a birthday cake. We already won

this fight. And here we are. I'm the same as you. grew up as a minnesota hippie but i grew up as a greenwich village boy uh you know where this was ground zero of acceptance for gay and trans and alternative in the country and i always i mean this was always something as a little boy that was acceptable to my family we never thought twice about it and we always as a matter of fact we were known as being one of the first places that would hire anybody of any kind of an alternative lifestyle and all of a sudden i'm like no i don't want my daughter uh racing against uh um you know someone who's been through male puberty and i don't trust the science and perriel and i you know used to fight about through male puberty and i don't trust the science and

perry ellen and i you know used to fight about this and all of a sudden now you know i'm on the side of the people who hate the trans i don't want to be associated no the trans i'm not one of them no i don't want anything to do with them and i refuse that it's done to us right yeah yeah yeah and i and i said um the day after the piece came out in the wall street journal, the first thing I tweeted was, you know, yes, I voted for Trump, but if as Brianna Wu says may happen, uh, hormone treatment is limited for trans adults and trans kids who've been through the old fashioned appropriate medical assessment and process. I'll be out marching in the streets. You know, this is not this. We don't want to take a step toward bigotry. We don't want to take a step toward

preventing people from seeking care that at this point, my God, they absolutely need. You don't take people off hormones they've been on for 20 years. I don't think that'll happen. I truly don't. But I just want it to be clear that I'll be out there alongside them. Yeah. The problem is that very few causes ever declare victory and disband. Too much money at stake. There was too much money coming into LGBTQ plus rights, and they had to develop, you know, some sort of global campaign. I'm less, I don't actually agree with you on that you could be right i i think there's something more in just human nature that we have a cause we have a camaraderie

we we kind of enjoy in some way the victim i hate to say that but it's it's hard and um and we like having people thrown on their back foot when we accuse them of bigotry this is just basic bullying power stuff and for many reasons and i'm sure the money as well there's just no there's no reason to want to give up your cause and declare victory there's always something in it to keep in it so you're just turning up the magnification on the mic turn it up double it double it double it until at some point the rest of country like you and me say no enough of this you know we've had enough of you and don't and don't think i'm a bigot i just think we've gone far enough so what other issues are you are you gone do you want to say something dan well i was just saying that i

mean i do agree that that a lot of people's jobs depend on these people that are heads of these organizations. I mean if racism ended tomorrow, Al Sharpton wouldn't have it. Al Sharpton who got $500,000 from Kamala Harris. This is another thing. The corruption that Al Sharpton is an MSNBC, quote unquote, journalist now, and he's interviewing the presidential candidate, and she has donated $500,000 to his, whatever Al Sharpton's organization is called. And if this was a Donald Trump story, I mean mean can you imagine the outrage and i guarantee you tomorrow morning on it i'm mourning joe mika and joe and uh all mike barnacle whatever the name

you know john heilman all those guys they're not going to break ranks with al sharp i don't think and um anyway so what what other issues get your goat that turned you away to turn you towards trump well my my goat is entirely fixated on speech you know everything everything came back to it everything it was the root of every single issue it was at the root of covid it was at the root of COVID. It was at the root of, you know, the social media interference of the Biden administration. It was over and over and over again, these threats that, oh, you know, that's misinformation, you know, which may be proved correct two months from now, but we can take it out of the public sphere. This terrifies me like nothing ever has. In a little bubble of just us where we did not dare speak, there was a hotline set up to report us for any kind of real or imagined, you know, active or thought crime against COVID rules and regulations.

Really? Wow, that's like McCarthyism, huh? Oh, it was kind of a Stasi technique, right? It's like, here's a number if you feel like your neighbors are doing something they shouldn't be that violates these brand new executive actions that I passed down by the file you know, file full earlier today, please give us a call. But just to be clear, these were actions, not speech that you were encouraged to report. You know, you were encouraged to report anything that you felt violated COVID rules. And at a certain point, saying things against the vaccine were considered out of bounds. Saying that the vaccine did not prevent transmission. The Biden administration said, this is misinformation. We can take it offline. We can, you know, we can penalize people in terms of removing their ability to speak. People weren't

being thrown in jail, but, you know, did feel like we were kind of starting down a ski run that I didn't want to continue on it's terrible when science becomes a partisan issue it's not it's not actually the first time you know uh climate change you would think would just be treated as an objective matter to become very much partisan issue nuclear energy which obviously i think everybody knows we should have more nuclear energy. This has been a partisan issue for a very long time. Even abortion. Totally. If I want to talk about the fact I read somewhere,

the fetus may feel pain at a certain number of weeks. It may be painful for the fetus to have an abortion. Shouldn't we? What are the implications of that? Anesthetize it. Yeah, yeah. And isn't it creepy to think that, well, it's not alive.

It doesn't deserve protection, but we will anesthetize. Well, what is it if you have to? Anyway, so- No, I made this point. Yeah. So these are, you know, but just to,

it's similar to what you're describing. If I say that, people will come down on me like I'm some kind of right-wing crazy person. Listen, this is a scientific question. I understand why you want to circle the wagons around this issue, because it might actually lead to a comeuppance of your view, at least your time window, of when you think abortion should be allowed. But you know what? That's not an excuse. It's not a partisan issue. It's science. You know, debunk the science or say, yeah, they do feel pain and I'm okay with it anyway. Like,

you know, deal with it. Which no one wants to confront. So I do want to say, you know, people come down on me all the time and they have every right. That's not a violation of my free speech. People can yell at me. People can, you know, hate me for what I say. I can suffer the consequences in just about every area of my life. I get that. The issue for me was that I saw government trying to control speech. And I saw two candidates, Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz, saying outright, we want more control over social media. We want to exempt misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech from the First Amendment. And Tim Walz claimed they already are, which is incorrect, acts like they already are, and was sort of moving toward, you know, we're going to take control of this. And I just found that so sinister.

You know, put that together with the hotline. Put that together with these disinformation czars. At one point, I was contacted on Twitter by a woman named Renee DiResta. And she said, I want you to take down thus and such that you have said because it is misinformation. I'm like, who the hell are you? And it turns out she's some, or was some, misinformation professor or, you know, cabinet member at Princeton, I believe, and had been empowered to do this.

That's insane. But you mentioned that it was, that the people have every right to, in the private sphere, to come after you, not hire you and so forth, but they might have that right, but that's not really an ideal way that we should structure our society.

God, no, no, no, No, no. It's not. It's not. And, you know, Trump can't change that. But, I mean, you were lashing out perhaps against that as well in voting for Trump. I don't know. Um, maybe. Yeah, I think that's fair. I'm going to say you guys saved us. Comedy was the prow of the ship that said, no, we have that. And I really, I mean, I was

tearful watching people like Dave Chappelle, like Ricky Gervais, who, you know, do I always love it? Well, yeah, I always love them, but there are, there are some that I don't, but it's still, you know, you're getting up there, you're speaking, you're saying these things. And the reason that it's so powerful is that you say the unsayable and that we have to be able to do that. We have to. And that's, I thought right around 2022, that's what saved us. Yeah, well, Jon Stewart, I was surprised, came out even to defend Tony Hinchcliffe for what was a pretty harsh joke about Puerto Rico. I wouldn't have defended him.

Was it defending his right to say it or defending that it was funny? He defended him at all counts. So he was pushing back on the people who thought that this ought to be something that people judged and factored into their political analysis of who to vote for. I would say that's a fair way to describe what Stewart was saying. As a comedian, how can you hold it? You didn't see that, Dan? I didn't see Stewart say that. I heard the Tony Hinch. Yeah.

And, you know, I want wanted to second what Dan said. It's true that people have a right in their private lives to do whatever they want, but I, I don't respect that at all. Um, we all know that. I mean,

there used to be a maximum. We talk about it on the show that I, I don't like what you say, but I'll defend with my life. Right. Um, we all imagine that there's wisdom in the bill of rights and we should all try to uh carry the spirit of the bill of rights in our um private lives i as an employer have um

the rights to treat people unfairly and yet i still feel like if i if they've been if somebody accuses them of something, they should have the right to confront the person who accused them. And if it's not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, I feel like it should be as close to that as it can be before I take somebody's livelihood away. I feel like I should let them speak. I mean, I'm informed by all these concepts, even if they have to be somehow shaped to be practical in a private setting. I don't say to myself, ah, that's all irrelevant.

You know, I mean, I, and certainly we understand, especially in academia. Well, that's what I understand that, that the,

the clash of ideas is how truth emerges. But that's the thing I think that's so disappointing. Galileo had no rights. Go ahead. Go. Sorry. No, I think that that's what's really devastating. You know, when you live in this, as I did my entire life, you know, this really pretty progressive left-wing world where you're putting it mildly whoa and and critical thinking and intellectual thinking i don't know about that and like intellectual inquiry no and like at universities and all of these things and then like suddenly like you learn like it's all fucking bullshit like all like yeah it's devastating right and you know who the hell wants to vote for donald trump i mean your husband all right well yeah i mean some people do but like i certainly

was not one of those people but you didn't vote for donald no i didn't but i'm saying that like why does that have to be my option like how come I have to get stuck with that now? Because everybody on the far left has, like, lost their fucking minds. Well, they believe in free speech when it comes to vicious anti-Israel protests. All the universities found their

sea legs on free speech when it came to the protests that we saw. That's right. Other than that, I don't think they care much about free speech. And I got to say, so do I. Vicious anti-Semitism without direct threats is protected by the First Amendment. I'm with you. But I find it angering that the universities pretend that they're allowing it because of free speech

principles yeah yeah when it's obviously an outrageous lie and this is a total pretext if these were if these were pro-life protests or anti-trans protests or any number of other issues they would have stopped them i would love to see somebody on Columbia stopping someone and not allowing them to walk on campus for any other reason than being a Zionist and how fast they would shut that shit down. As they have. And we heard, I should probably inform myself as to what actually was said because I just kind of glanced at the headline.

But apparently Schumer was in contact with Shafiq at Columbia and essentially saying, well, you know, let's just, this is really just a Republican issue. We'll manage it until the election or something like that. Meaning that he never said anything to her about, well, you know, free speech principles at stake here. You know, we know, you We know it wasn't that long ago that at Berkeley Law School, they had a rule that said no Zionist would speak at any campus group or 20 different campus groups. Not about Zionism, about any subject.

If you were a Zionist and the universities, where was they? They didn't care about free speech then. They didn't care. And how fast did it escalate into Jews getting locked into the library at Peter Cooper? I mean, it's like- Cooper Union? Sorry, thank you. Cooper Union.

Who's Peter Cooper? That's Peter Cooper Miller. Yeah, Peter Cooper. It's like divers in town. Yeah, I meant Cooper Union. You can get good housing there for a reasonable price. Yeah, you know, I have to say, there's all those stories. I know that they're largely true.

But I also, I don't know, some of the stories. No, no, no. I mean, look, they're true. And I know that they're true because I've seen them with my own eyes. That story, we saw the video. And I also saw videos that Shiley, my niece who just graduated from Harvard, sent me from out her window. So for instance, it's sort of like go back to Poland. But actually it happened outside the university.

Okay, but listen. We've got to be very careful about those things. That's fine. But I'm saying that oftentimes this escalated into actual violence against Jews. Well, no, we will let you go after this. It was that, I don't know, is she trans? I can't remember. Kimani James.

Yeah. He said, there's a Zionist here. Take one step forward. That one, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It turned out they had interviewed him. I think it was him at the time. And he just went on and on about how he thinks Zionists should die.

And I'm like, I hope I don't kill a Zionist. And I said at the time, this is right out of what a kind of manifesto you'd find about someone who actually did kill some people. That he said this to the administrators, and they covered it up. The only reason it ever came out was because he was a knucklehead and taped his own interview, and then put it on Instagram or whatever it was. But to think of, you know,

if any other person had said such things about killing any other group on campus, they would have thrown him right out of there. Oh, it's his free speech, Joey. Come on. This really angers me. I had a big fight with some free speech people about this.

And I felt like, yeah, you can defend it because it is free speech should be defended. But you need to call them out that they're just using this free speech as a pretext. It's very disturbing to me. All right. Anything else? But really, everyone was locked away in their house. They weren't observing anything that anyone else was doing, supposedly. So what they were doing was relying on things like, well, they're the kind of person who would do that because of what they've said. this interplay of, you know, you start attacking people's speech, and then suddenly, you're putting them in a category based on, you know, maybe you're guilty of this because of who you are, the questions that you're asking, just all felt very, you know, conversations of others. It just felt, it felt like we were being eavesdropped upon and judged. I want everyone to speak. Okay. Wait, so did you hold your nose and vote for Trump or are you optimistic that they might do something positive for this country? Oh, well, I am.

Do you have a MAGA hat hidden under the table? I don't have a MAGA hat. No, no. I'm mildly optimistic that he chose a vice presidential candidate who was smarter than himself. I like that. I liked that he chose someone articulate and intelligent. However, I have my own problems with RFK. I think traditional vaccines, really, we don't want to just rip those out of the system before we assess. I think Tulsi Gabbard is fabulous, bringing together different people with different ideas and really spanning a large swath of this is what America wants. You know, America wants to ask questions about the health care we're receiving. America wants to get spending under control.

America wants freedom of speech. I voted for those things. For the rest of it, I was just like, oh, really? I'm voting against the Democrats because this is off the rails. The crackdown on speech is my number one, but the kind of reordering of society, I'm not thrilled with the way that family and community ties are being assailed day to day. There just seems to be something cultural happening in the progressive Democrat movement. It's very angry. It's very, uh, I say the right things and therefore I can do all the wrong ones. I have the right yard signs. So the fact that I live in 5,000 square feet and have nine cars and go to Europe three

times a year, but I support Greta Thunberg. So therefore I've said the sacrament, I'm good. It just, it really felt like it needed to be stopped in its tracks. And that's what I voted for. Well, yeah. I mean, if Trump were to vaporize and leave the earth tomorrow, he has already done something very good. The left is in a full-blown reckoning now.

Yeah. He won the popular vote. There's no more excuses no more uh electoral college and no more like there's no there's nothing anybody can say anymore a majority of the country doesn't want this shit and we can only imagine what that number would have been if trump were a more appealing messenger. Exactly. You would love to be able to vote somebody who felt this way, pro-Israel and, you know, against

censorship and all this stuff, but you hate Trump. So, you know, this has been a very good thing. Yeah, I'm with you. I hope he's a good president. I also dislike Greta Thunberg, for the record. You like Greta?

No, I dislike. Not anymore, you know. I dislike Greta Thunberg. You liked her before. I never really liked her. Well, I would imagine that all those people whose friendship you like, and now you really, you've come out of the closet having voted for Trump for trump i mean i think you might have to start from scratch in terms of of your friendships and your social circle me oh yeah yeah we'll be your friend i okay good because

i need i need some and you you seem cool i'm i'd be very pleased. This was the final step. I live in a place that is so blue. You can't imagine how uniformly progressive my community is. We're in Greenwich Village. We understand. Okay. Okay. we've had customers more than once come over and curse out other customers because they overheard that they were Trump supporters in some way. Just overheard their private conversations. They came out with full sanctimony

and I don't know, what's the word? What's the word when you feel you have the right? Self-righteousness? License to just point your finger and call people names yeah almost almost like it you know i had someone tell me this morning that i voted immorally and you know someone i care about very much. But this was the final step for me. We have sat, my husband is a Southerner. He's always been a little bit more conservative than I. We moved away from the Democrats in sync. He then, you know, a little bit more to the right. We've sat at people's tables and in parties and at work functions for years they'll go, you know, they're going to be good people and they'll go along. You just reminded me of an argument that I've made many times.

And then I really will let you go. So for instance, if you were to say, I don't think we should be taking so many immigrants from these countries that have so much fundamental jihadist Islam, right? You say, what are you, a bigot? You know, they'll come to America and they will become, you know, the tolerance will just come over them and, you know, how could you

possibly say such a thing? You can't assume anybody's opinion because of something like that. Unless it's a white southerner. If it's a white southerner oh it's a white southerner we these these beliefs are so stubborn generations won't change it doesn't like so the only the only people it's open we're allowed to be bigoted against are white southerners we know they can't be trusted on race but come over from Somalia where they literally preach Jew hatred on the airwaves 24-7.

No, it'll be fine. What kind of person are you to judge that? I don't have anything against anybody Somalian or anybody Muslim, but they are raised on this stuff. I'm concerned. I'm just concerned like you would be if white Southerners were raised on KKK stuff. You'd be concerned. I'm just concerned like you would be if white southerners were, you know, raised on KKK stuff. You'd be concerned. You wouldn't want to take any white people from Europe from a KKK country. I remember what it was like during apartheid. I remember how we judged South Africans, white people.

Right. Anyway, they that's where I live. And, you know, all of those people apparently assumed that I would shut up and do the right thing in the in the election. And so I suspect I've lost the last raft of, you know, people now this week who just said. angry when trump won when trump won i found myself getting angry at all the people who've been giving me a hard time for so many years i'm like you've been you've been treating me like an idiot all this time and look everything i told you was right everything that i told you no they're still treating me like an idiot so what would i get angry at they I'm still receiving notes that say, you know, really care about. And it was their choice. And I don't know how to be otherwise. I'm honest. I said what I think and I do what I think is right. And this was the best solution I could come up with in this or the circumstances I had. Was not a close call for you to vote for Trump, given perhaps some of the many things you may not like about him? Yeah, it was. If if Kamala Harris had chosen a different vice president,

vice presidential candidate, I might have voted for Josh Shapiro. Oh, I think I'd have been there. I do. Yeah, I have a lot of experience with Tim Walz. I find him both dumb and dangerous. And the fact that he would be a step away from the presidency was just, it was like being there only, only the dark Freddy Krueger version. Like it, it was so unacceptable to me. The fact that she made such a poor decision seemed like a harbinger of something, you know, poor to come. And so that was the moment where I said, okay, I think I have to, I have to steal myself for the fact that the better ticket is going to be Trump and Vance, who I didn't like at first. And then the more I watched him, the more I listened, the more I listened. I thought, oh,

he's made some mistakes, but he's really young and he's very smart and I need to give this a shot. Yeah, I didn't like him at first either. I'm still not crazy about him, but we'll see how he turns out. You know why I don't like him most of all? It says something at the door. That must be Idenia.

He's humorless. And I very, it's not because I'm in a comedy club. There's something about a humorless personality. I'm very cautious about that because humor is a big part of emotional

intelligence. It's a very important trait. All our great leaders abraham lincoln you know obama whoever it is they're very they winston churchill they're funny yeah because there's a wisdom that comes out when you're funny when you have wisdom it comes out very often humor because wisdom is also often a way of seeing that, that there's opposites that are both true at the same time and seeing that things are, are, uh, there's half truths and humor is one way of illustrating those things, right? Like, like Jewish jokes. I don't know if we're all Jews here, but you know, very often Jewish jokes have that way of like a wry way of bringing out something that's hard

to express. And he shows no appreciation or ability with humor, but we shall see. Anyway, Ann Bauer, my accountant's name was Bauer. Bauer is a German name. Your husband's German? No, this is my ex-husband's name. Ah, was he German? No, this is my ex-husband's name. Ah, was he German? He was German. And I kind of, you know, walked into it, had published a book by the time we got a divorce and said to him, I'm sorry, I'm going to keep going with it. You know, he's like, that's fine. All right. Well, it was a pleasure to meet you and really appreciate your column. James Taranto was at the journal that edited with you. He is.

He actually saw a post that I made on Twitter and wrote to me and asked for it. He is one of the country's great geniuses. He's not a household name. He is an amazing intellect, and he is hilarious. Do you want to talk about humor? Really?

Oh, my God. you didn't know that well now i want to invite him to our circle if you three are my friends now we we can invite james oh yeah he is he is very funny very funny he used to write you know a column every other day or so before he became the editor of the op-ed page whatever you call it um all right so we're gonna let you go it was very much a pleasure to meet you. If you ever get to New York, we'd love to host you and anybody you bring with you. Comedy seller.

So that's it. Where can people... You have a Twitter account? Say it again. I am Ann Bauer Reiter. So A-N-N-B-A-U-E-R and then writer like the scribe so just flame her with your hateful tweets

join the masses who get joy in their hearts from flaming me okay bye bye thank you very much bye bye thank you and that's a wrap send your emails to

podcast.com you have to wait until it says finish uploading right hi nice to meet you do you guys have those videos downloaded over there bye Thank you.