Muse

There was one song. This is the most offensive song title that I can think of any song. Oh, my God. Do it. This song title was. Oh, my God. We know of new methods of attack. The Trojan Heart.

The Fifth Column.

Column. Column. Column.

Your readings and welcome back to another exciting installment of the Fifth Column Podcast. This is your weekly rhetorical assault on the news cycle, the people that make it, occasionally ourselves. I'm Camille Foster. I'm delighted to be here. I'm joined by Matt Welch, Michael Moynihan. You looked at the right person when I said that.

You're like, I think you're trying to figure out what you should do. I am. The greetings in the camera.

Well, I'm pretty sure the last time this happened, there was a credit sequence happening while I was saying some of that. Oh, okay. Over the greetings. So I'm imagining I won't be on camera. That's why we created the credits sequence. looking weird so you don't because i don't want to look awkward on camera doing the greetings i mean people can't even imagine like the video movie magic situation this is why i created my own show but the video movie magic is such that i am saying it and there's no actual music or anything played so it's weird we go from silence to me shouting greetings and that's always been

the case it has been but now people can see that that's happening well yeah i always forget that because I just went into the bathroom to towel off because I was all sweaty. It's very hot outside for some reason. And I realized I had like stains all over my shirt. Oh my God. And I was like, oh fuck, we do this on camera now. I'll just, I can fold it over. Can we roll this whole thing back just five minutes? No, no. I mean, I've been trying to roll this back for about a decade. That's true. But my involvement is now secured.

Although we have better whiskey than usual. Yeah, we do.

So can we point out that we've never had an ad on the podcast? Right? No. Not one, which means you should subscribe. Yes. That's how we do this. We've done some impromptu ads. You've done impromptu ads, but this one was an ad that we did without these people knowing it. We've decided to make our own ads and we enjoyed the whiskey so much and it loosened up Megan and everything went viral because of this whiskey, right?

I think the fire would have come out of her nostrils anyway, but it lubricated a little bit.

I think that it was probably just the way she is. um it's the dragon puff the magic uh hater um but they sent us a bottle didn't they they may

have no no they may have they didn't no they sent us three i think no there's a whole suite over there now yeah this is the new one because we drained half a bottle with megan by we i mean

no yeah we drained it yeah i don't know i don't know if we if they officially sent it to us or if we we procured it somebody bought it we didn't pay for it and as i understand it it is very expensive they are not a sponsor i will say it is also fabulous really great dragon you should totally buy a bottle figure out what it is and yeah we didn't pay for it but the maclo.com yeah yeah and they're not paying us that's actually important to point out that's a real endorsement but thank you but if you would like paid sponsorship we're interested we're fine with um but yeah it's been a busy busy week we haven't been together around this table for about a week the last time we were here we were here with one megan kelly i think the the sirens that you may be able to hear in the background or because i'm mentioning megan yeah um and it sort of became a thing it went viral and apparently we are three democrats who had a debate with me in which we

were eviscerated yeah eviscerated but the three communists were destroyed we haven't been back in

a week this is this has inspired many people the dsa members destroyed they clipped the hell out

of that video and you know the best was i sent to you guys that there was a screenshot of it And it just had the RT bug in the car. Yes. Shit, we have a show on RT now. That's awesome.

What it makes you realize is that there is this interesting universe of people like Yashar Lee, who's one person who does it. They spend a lot of time. I knew this existed, like the media-ites of the world or whatever, who just harvest whatever Bill Maher says or what happens on Bill Maher. They have the story up within three seconds of that show ending, but they just harvest clips, put them natively on Twitter, and just a million hits. That's fucking amazing. And that's like a lot of people.

In addition to spawning a bunch of clips, it's also spawned a number of editorials and media reports, a lot of commentary on Megan's comments, a lot of commentary on the fifth column sub stack as well, wethefifth.com. You can get there and you subscribe. And we should probably talk about that and respond to some of it, but we are not going to do it tonight. We will do it tomorrow on the members only. Which you will see probably on Saturday or something. But if you want to be a part of that conversation or at least hear it, you can certainly message us or mention us in the comments there at wethefifth.com. But you can turn to that. We've got a lot of email talking about it. A lot of controversy inspired by that one.

The two main benefits of subscribing to the wethefifth.com.

Substack thing is, one, you get the members-only episodes. We do one a week, during which oftentimes we read listener comments and razzing to us. And then the other one is that that gives you a privilege just to go in the comments and chat there. And then everyone argues amongst themselves, and it's pretty fun. It still has managed to not be a horrible place.

Yes, not too accurate.

I wrote a mean email to someone recently.

Oh, no. Did you?

Yeah, I was, like, searching my Gmail. And I found an email that somebody had sent us in September, like early September. And it was really long and really neat. Getting mad at a September email? Yeah, I said, you know, I'm going to respond to it.

Did you actually read the whole thing? Fuck no.

I didn't even have that kind of time. Camille would have the chat GPT read it for him, which he does with our emails, by the way. But my response was just like, I literally wrote back, I don't know how do you have so much time to write these long emails to people you don't know. I'm mystified by it. It was like really long. And I was like, I made you that mad. So I didn't respond to anything, like any criticism.

You just tried to make him feel bad about his life choices. Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

But I also said the part of your argument that I did read made out of census. So sorry about that. But if you want to be a member, I don't know if you don't want to, but join up. I'll address it when we do the members only this week.

I'll mention you by name and denigrate you directly. So there's lots of stuff to talk about. We could talk about the budgetary situation in Washington, D.C.

You want to talk about that so badly. I do kind of want to talk about that. We literally have a Mideast peace deal. and you're like let's talk about the shutdown

I was gonna get there I was gonna tease the other stuff we might talk about like National Guard deployments all over the country and all the crazy consternation that's creating Ted Cruz white knighting maybe sort of possibly probably gonna run for president I don't know man I don't want this I don't want this he's doing this to me you don't want that feeling of love no not towards Ted Cruz I'm just gonna be honest about it

we're trying to get him on the show stop saying things like that

if he comes then maybe he'll turn into a full blown love I don't know

before we started shooting you were like man his dad killed Kennedy and I was like dude

these are just the truth yeah what happens if he plays you one-on-one on basketball and beats you is that even possible are you kidding me basketball or something yeah he famously

um played basketball against i'm gonna mess it up but a late night comedian who'd been

razzing jimmy kimmel jimmy kimmel yeah oh really i think jimmy kimmel called him a bloat bloat

fish or something and also mentioned that he looked like that uh that uh annoying player from duke from a few years ago still in the nba um he's not a bad player actually and uh and they like played one-on-one i think cruz took him is that right yeah cruz would not take me are you

sure i'm absolutely sure yeah i mean elbow to the throat right away all of a sudden camille's black again i didn't say that i'm athletic no uh-huh athletic yeah i'm luka donchish-esque that's what

i was telling camille earlier today that i was at a really fun interesting conference about free speech last weekend and everything had ai appended to the every lecture was like you know uh salman Rushdie and AI and I'm like what does any of this stuff mean but we had an AI conversation and there was some conversation about censorship and AI and I decided to ask a series of very controversial questions and I and I went to Grok which is supposedly the Elon censorship-free one yeah and the unwoke AI yeah and I was like okay so why is why are all the runners from from ethiopia and kenya that is that is obviously what my first response was colonialism i was like dude that doesn't make what really no that doesn't make any sense i can read you i'll do it on the members only because i said dangerous lean into i got mad i think i was a bit racist racist to grok i was like look people are different genetics yeah just say oh those guys are black yeah that's what you want ones are white and they had all this stuff it's like well some of the some they're very fast white people like really said that and i was like that's not what i was asking did it say that 100 oh okay so go out there and ask uh did you yeah if you want to keep your job maybe don't do that on like your work computer did you ask the cornerbacks

question that's always the big one oh is that what is the cornerback question man you guys don't spend nearly enough time with racists with uh race realists no you guys have a different sort

of appointment is that is that in your uh steve sailor group chat absolutely i think he maybe ran into nick fuentes here in new york this week did you listen to nick fuentes on the dave smith show

no i haven't listened to that yet i did see a couple of clips um but that's that's enough

for right now i will say i saw it's three hours long i would say uh that seems to be the length of every one of his podcasts he didn't want coleman to but i will say that i love that the One clip that I saw was Nick Fuentes denouncing certain anti-Semites and racists because these guys think of themselves as the kind of high IQ ones. And they often refer to like low IQ anti-Semitism, which is not a denunciation of anti-Semitism. It's just the low IQ anti-Semitism. And they're a little upset that the dummies are giving the anti-Semites a bad name.

Because I thought it was the Nazis that did that, but apparently it's the people on Twitter. That's all I saw.

All the divisions between these coalitions right now are just kind of hilarious. Dinesh D'Souza is now against conspiracy theories.

It's amazing. Didn't he do that movie 6,000 Mules?

Now he's just down to 200 Mules now. Yeah, yeah. It was- 2,000. I interviewed him.

Wasn't producer Scott? Scott was there, yeah. I interviewed him, I think, in LA or something. and uh this is before the mules or after he has it before mid mule okay pre-mule yeah and uh he was wearing mules the backless shoe and i did ask him at one point about um you know being the guy at the beginning of his career who was a kind of like intellectual conservative yeah he was at AEI um he made a couple of people quit including Glenn Galloway from AEI but he wrote this book The End of Racism which was like a you know controversial book but it was reviewed in the new york read books and you know heavily footnoted and he basically acknowledged he's like yeah no i don't want to do that anymore i'm going to be the guy that makes millions of dollars in like

crazy conspiracy there's a lot of people who don't want to do that anymore i think we're living through the not doing that anymore yeah including temptations yeah exactly what i'm doing he's

these shin stroking things to the wall street journal once in a while and now i'm like getting drunk on camera and talking about uh nick fuentes well the only difference is that we have cameras

because we've been getting drunk on microphones for a long time. And now that we are finally in person often and in person at night with some regularity, we can reintroduce some of the booze.

I mean, not that we haven't done day drinking before, but that may be a little bit too much information for the audience. But we should talk about the biggest news of the day, which you've already mentioned.

It's crazy. And Moynihan, you were like podcasting with somebody else.

I was with the Comedy Cellars Lab at the Table podcast, did one which will be out, I think, probably tomorrow, the day after, with Noam Dorman, my dear friend, our dear friend Coleman Hughes, and Brett Stevens, who I don't know well, but did go to high school in my hometown, I found out. But he was a really, really bright, interesting guy. And it was a really, really great conversation. So, yeah, I missed the fact that there was a My Pet Goat moment. Yeah.

So Trump had one of the most embarrassing scenes I've seen in the White House since the last time I paid attention to the White House.

So, you know, his Antifa roundtable was embarrassing.

Yeah.

He had an Antifa roundtable with Andy Ngo, Christy Noem, and half his cabinet. Half his cabinet. Jack Posobiec, the pizza gator, was there.

Real think tank there, right?

We have actually one of the things that we're doing today is that we're experimenting with playing clips. So at some point we can call a clip. And I might. Should we do the Jack Posobiec Antifa is 100 years old clip? Yeah, yeah. I didn't watch this. Because I think Moynihan.

So this is new to me.

This is Pizzagate guy. They're talking about why Antifa is a horrible threat. And so therefore, you know, that's why you need to send the National Guard to go after this terrorist organization. Cool.

Mr. President, thank you so much for having us here today and holding this roundtable. Well, Antifa is real. Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.

I do find that there's just a little bit of whiplash that I'm experiencing when you go from one administration who insists Antifa is just an idea, it doesn't actually exist, to another administration who's hosting roundtables. And then people tell you, oh, it's been around for 100 years. Not just around for 100 years. The most dangerous threat to America.

We should go ahead and just piggyback with the Kristi Noem thing, because this is someone who I think is the head of the Department of Homeland Security, if I'm not mistaken. I mean, like a senior politician.

She looks like one of the moms at a school in New Jersey, but go ahead.

I like how they use a different camera for her.

We arrested recently in Portland, was the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa. And that we are hoping that as we go after her, interview her, and prosecute her, we will get more and more information about the network and how we can root them out and eliminate them from the existence of American society. I want to thank the new journalists here today for telling their stories and for being able and willing to go to the streets and to cover what's happening here in America. Many times the legacy media has looked the other way, refused to tell the stories. The networks have not really focused on what this is and what damage it is doing to our country and how this network of Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA, as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them. They are just as dangerous. They have an agenda to destroy us, just like the other terrorists we've dealt with for many, many years. and today is the day that we have a president that won't tolerate it and will stand up and fight for the American people. So thank you for being here, for being so bold.

standing in the gap at such a time as this it will matter it will make a difference and your life will be one of significance because of what you've done today so with that god bless you and holy overstatement what the ever loving fuck was that okay first comment by the way has anyone noticed that antifa has been around for 100 years yes and they she found the founder of antifa who's apparently 115 years old in german she's like what you're talking i'm not the founder i'm just an old german lady it's like Christian, I'm like, get the fuck down on the ground. That is absolutely deranged. But also, I love, they are just as sophisticated as Hamas.

Hezbollah.

It's the same.

Just as sophisticated, just as dangerous.

So, you know, our dear friend Nancy Roman, who always does the best reporting out of Portland. Including this past week. Including this past week. And I got to say, that thing that she did on all the tunnels beneath Portland, like they are sophisticated these like the they thems of Portland

have you seen the footage from Portland over the last week it's like four people in three costumes jumping up and down

yeah they're getting like sprayed with mace and they're like in frog suits this is not and by the way

the minister getting shot in the head with a pepper ball today

I do also want to say that when you go back and it's very rare by the way to hear someone say Weimar Republic and not Weimar Republic, because it's become kind of normal to say Weimar Republic. But, you know, back to the 20s and the Weimar Republic, is that I just want to say that was kind of the good Antifa. Because who is the fa in that? It was the actual Nazis. Telling all yourself. Yeah, I don't like that fa either. But when your fa is Andy Ngo, man, I don't really care about that.

Anyway, we're poking a little bit of fun, but there are some legitimate elements to what Christy said there. Journalists looking in the other direction with respect to violence carried out by left-wing activists. There was a hell of a lot of that in 2020 and 2021.

As per usual with the administration and with the right in general, they are really mad about how 2020 went down. And they also really wish that 2020 was here so they could be the foil against them. And they keep waiting for 2020 to happen in LA. Let's send the National Guard and the Marines to LA over the objections of the mayor and the governor. And it kind of isn't there. Portland, you know, instead of 200 consecutive nights of besieging the federal building and throwing shit in there, people were locked inside. On a nightly basis, like serious bad property damage. the Antifa there, which is where it's, I think, the strongest in the country, they would hound politicians. They find out where they live. Those politicians had to move. It was fucked up for a long time. And some people were noticing this and reporting about it and talking about it in real time. And oftentimes that wasn't the mainstream media. One of the things that-

Oftentimes it was Nancy Rommelman.

And one of the things that she pointed out then was that Antifa was actually very aggressively shaping what journalists could report. They were intimidating them. They beat the, they take people's role. Yeah, and by the way,

whatever you think of Andy knows, journals might not pay much attention to the guy, but it is undeniably true that the guy was attacked a whole bunch. Multiple times. And he's not the only one. Multiple times. And he should fear for his safety, which I don't say, that's, you can say that in a threatening way, but I'm just like, it's just an objective. You should fear for your safety. You're not threatening him, to be clear. I'm not threatening him. But it's objectively true that he is not safe if he goes out in Portland on his own. And that should not be a situation that we're okay with.

Exactly. That's terrible. And people haven't talked about that. And they haven't come clean about the sort of journalistic looking the other way during the violence of 2020. All that is true. And it's also true that in 2025, now there's this sort of the influencer journalists are like going on the roof with Kristi Noem as she's doing photo ops, looking stern, looking down at the war ravage. These are the words that they use at the administration to describe Portland right now. It's not war ravage. I mean, Portland in areas, including this one, sucks. It sucks in a lot of ways. I mean, I say that as a Portland stand. My parents are from there and I spend a lot of time there. I mean, but Drugstore Cowboy, it wasn't a great scene in the 80s. Great movie, not a great scene.

No, I mean, my friend and a friend of a couple of people that are here on set with us is in was in surgery today um he lives in portland and he was jumped and and he's a camera guy so very important to have your eyes and he's on the second eye surgery wow um today uh and they don't know if he'll recover sight in in in this eye um and

that was important it wasn't antifa it was as he said a bunch of like meth heads that hit him in the eye with a skateboard like the tail of a skateboard also a problem for a city if it has a skateboard sitting in the head it's a bad it's a bad vibe there these days and i mean he said to me um you know that portland was getting better he's listening to the show too by the way um he said it was getting better but he said that before he was like blinded by someone the other day in a in a violent attack. Jeez. It was so,

but like the, some of the, one of the guys who was invited to the White House today, this guy named Nick Sortor, he basically staged a moment three days ago where he saw someone burning an American flag. And so he went and he took it. And then there's a little fracas and a scuffle around it. He ended up getting arrested within like a second and a half. Pam Bondi is on the phone with him. And like, and now he's at the White House getting his head padded and he very embarrassingly it's like you know mr president i brought the flag here for you i mean there's people who are going there to do like influencer like tiktok garbage yeah and calling it brave reporting it ain't and also what what is whatever's happening in portland 2025 it just ain't 2020 it isn't it's a bunch of old grandmothers and a few people in furry suits and there was uh by uh most reported accounts 20 30 people outside of ice because ice has like they have everywhere they've stepped up their enforcement in ways that is causing a lot of people to be upset and wanting to protest for reasons that I understand entirely. But it was only after Trump said, we're going to send 200 National Guard against the wishes of the state and local leadership that the local protests went from 25 people to 200 for a couple of days.

To point out, our friend Megyn Kelly, we always have fun disagreements with, is like you know fuck these people revenge is what we're after even she said on our episode that like if he's sending um troops into places where they are not invited that bothers me that's not good so yeah there's there's a lot of that but i want to say something about this uh nick uh whatever his name is um and don't tell me i don't care yeah i just i'm gonna tell you yeah straight down the barrel of the camera i don't care okay um but he rescued a flag we i know thank god it's the rick monday what would we do yeah it's in the hospital next to my friend the flag is recovering um i we said for so long twitter isn't real life twitter is absolutely real life now they're all in the white house with the president of the united states talking about what's going on portland from the perspective of performers yeah some of the people in the past i mean you look at what happened in wisconsin during the jacob blake stuff i was there right after shooting stuff there yeah um portland and a whole bunch of other places and there were a lot of really useful journalists there are people who didn't really know what they were doing but they were filming stuff that nobody else was filming kid with a skateboard skateboard in and in wisconsin was he was an unbelievable and everyone in the right and the left loved him because he was live streaming everything as it was happening there's enormous utility to that and i don't like this thing well you know you see with the barry weiss free press stuff like well shit like we'll get to that later like she's not a real she has no experience beyond the fucking place that she just created that had a newsroom and sold for 150 million years and the wall street journal and all this stuff it's like this narrow view of journalism and it's like guys do you realize why everyone hates you it's because these people are out there doing great stuff these guys now though as you say five years hence from the original kind of blow up in process it's not just 2000 2020 but there's a lot of other stuff they're there for performance well grabbing the flag and filming it and calling pam bondy yeah it's all reality tv but there's some context here that we haven't talked about

at least today we have talked about it in the past you actually have brought it up several times but the deadly attacks on ice facilities that have happened yes this year in recent weeks yeah and they were both in texas um i guess there was another incident in chicago earlier this week where there's been a few like a car that was involved in an incident with but also ice is flooding into chicago yeah but yeah but part of the part of the reason at least the rationalization yes yeah on the part of the administration is we have to protect these federal facilities because there have been this string of attacks. They do seem in some instances to be part of these various cells or different left-wing extremist organizations. The possibility that there could, some of them are furries, some of them are murderers. So we have both things unfortunately. Yeah, shoot the Pikachu.

If only they were only Pikachu. If they went to Times Square and shot the Pikachu.

Oh, that'd be awesome. No violence. I don't like violence. No violence. We don't advocate for that on this show. Pikachu takes the head off and it's like a Guatemalan. I'm like, oh, God, sorry, I didn't want to shoot that guy. But we do have to acknowledge that there are some legitimate challenges here. And interestingly, with this particular court proceeding, the president does have some authority to deploy National Guardsmen to protect federal facilities, did it in California to protect federal facilities, much smaller footprint than what we saw in, say, D.C., for example, where he did have the authority to do the deployment. It is kind of confusing things here. And I suppose part of the reason why it's confusing things is because the administration actually talks about this stuff.

well i mean really charged ways a war ravaged place when it's not i mean you send the national guard and like there's reporting today that the president and his team are thinking about um the legal arguments and building up towards if they have to insurrection um using the insurrection act which is what the tom cotton op-ed that got barry weiss fired eventually was all the fuck about it was about using the insurrection act as a way to have a president send the national guard to put down riots in 2020 that were happening in real time. Actual riots. Actual walllessness.

Federal buildings under siege.

You know, more than a dozen people died.

Which wasn't a crazy argument at the time.

I oppose that sort of thing,

but there was actual violence happening.

That's not happening in Portland right now.

It's just not. What if they had done that at the time? In 2000, if the Trump administration had not been essentially exercising so much restraint and was willing to do more in that period of time, would they have a ignited a powder keg and made things far far worse at a time when the country was already on edge real possibility or would they have perhaps shut all of this shit down and maybe things would be even calmer now i don't know i don't i don't know but it was so widespread

was one of the problems yeah i mean i was looking back when um in june when they sent the deployments to la and just did a comp of like oh what was happening in la during george floyd times right you know we don't think of la during the george floyd times the sheriff substation like uh you know a few blocks from my childhood home like it was on fire it wasn't destroyed but it like it was yes there was big riots in lakewood fucking california they were like all over the place so i think you know there could have been especially to minneapolis because that's where

the the epicenter was did have it was abandoned yeah i mean it was it was going off the rails

but it was so widespread that I think it would have been kind of difficult I don't even remember what we had said at the time probably like maybe but also like

I think that's where we were yeah

but also this it was just such an incident and we were all the entire country including ourselves especially Moynihan probably we're losing our minds just because of COVID we'd all been inside I think I was maybe the craziest

I think I was the only one of the three of us with a COVID beard at that particular time I think we all like a real COVID

no you look like fucking Angela Davis you look like an afro

yeah guns by June by June of 2020 basically by the time um George Floyd was killed we had all

bought COVID cars yeah that's right yeah I even bought a COVID house that's true in memory of George Floyd yeah um yeah I was no it's not probably made the joke at the time but the reason I don't think it would have been much different is because I was wrong about something in a huge way, and I've thought about it a lot, and Matt was right about this, is that I was saying about the second Trump administration, cool your jets. The first time around wasn't that bad. And you were like, vengeance. It's going to be a lot of vengeance. And I was like, well. He said so. And also, I was wrong about that.

The removal of obstacles.

Removal of obstacles. And I played that down. And look, if I had 1,000% batting average, if all of us did, we wouldn't be pundits. We'd be fucking Rasputin, right? We'd make mistakes. In that thing that I was like, I think everyone should chill out. I still think they need to chill out about certain things. But I think that no matter what happened the first time around, maybe it would have affected his electoral chances in 2024. I doubt it. But I think that no matter how they handled that, it's the other stuff that makes this happen. It is the Russiagate stuff. It is the Jim Comey stuff. It overwhelms Donald Trump and this idea like, you fuck me over? You think it's a mafia boss in that way. You fuck me over. I'm going to do everything I can to fuck you over. And I have that attitude myself about certain things in life. When somebody screws me over at a job and I'm like, you wait, motherfucker, because I will, if it's 10 years from now, I will make sure that you remember me and what you did to me. I get that, but you can't do that as the president. We should. But so I think that that's probably, no matter what happens, is going to be because of all the other exogenous factors and the, you know, even like the raid on Roger Stone. I mean, stuff like that. I mean, Megan pointed something out, which I poo-pooed at the time, but I actually think she's right about, was pointing out that.

CNN was there.

Yeah. At Roger Stone's house. That's kind of crazy. Yeah, at Roger Stone's house. It's like, yeah.

They were there at a raid at 6.30 in the morning, like waiting. They were there before the people that were raiding his house.

In fairness, a camera crew outside of Roger Stone's house at 6 in the morning. You'll get something. You're going to get something. Yeah, yeah.

You're going to usually, like, you know, I'm not going to say it. Yeah.

We can all feel it. We should probably move on to some other stuff. But I will say that I suspect that the restraint the administration exercised in 2020 was probably a good thing. It was a good thing. I think so. That it almost certainly would have made things much, much worse. A lot of people were looking for reasons to escalate. And things got exceptionally dodgy in 2020. I think the thing that actually turns out to be the most dangerous about that time in the present moment, as you said, Moynihan, I would agree that what animates Trump's desire for vengeance in this moment are the various things that were directed at him and the various people around him, for sure. Not the situation in Portland. Yes. And what makes that particular moment of civil unrest and societal dysfunction in 2020 so dangerous is the amnesia. It's the fact that we barely seem to recall that any of that craziness happened, that there were autonomous zones in major cities in the United States of America. That's secession. That shit happened.

There's one person who is a young black man, by the way, in Seattle in CHAP or CHAS. In the CHAS, yeah. By the way, I love that all the acronyms were like WASPy names. Like CHAD. It's like, is it CHAD? No, CHAD. CHAD and CHOP. CHAD and CHOP. I actually noticed that. Remember CHAD Freeman? Remember him? Yeah. Yeah. CHAD.

Foreign policy guy. Former fucking Saudi Arabia ambassador. Oh, that's right. He was an ambassador. Yeah, he was a leader. And one of the series of apologists, former U.S. ambassadors who went on like, oh, they're not going to be a jeffersonian democracy tomorrow but really the prince is uh he's in the lawrence

kind of yeah but no i think that's i think that's right the the way that we forget about political violence is pretty fascinating and how you respond all the bad moments not all that a lot of bad moments in american history and world history is how you respond to riots is if you respond in the way, I mean, was weather, the weather underground, was all the new left movement that pushed towards violence, was that precipitated by things like Chicago in 68? Was it precipitated by Kent State? For sure. But use that as this is the moment that American fascism is turning their guns on us. And therefore, the same thing happened in Germany with Bader Meinhof and the killing of student, Benno Onesorg, during an anti-Shah protest, I think in 68 or 67, in Berlin, people like took up arms. I mean, you really have to play this stuff very carefully because people exploit the overreaction and then they overreact in the spiral of violence.

And the Trump administration and this group of authoritarians, they're fucking authoritarians. Christine Noem is an authoritarian. Donald Trump is an authoritarian and Stephen fucking Miller. You want to make the case? No. I want to make the assertion. But Stephen Miller is out there saying that when the judge in Portland, a Trump appointee, said that you didn't satisfy any minimum requirement to justify this deployment of the National Guard. You are right. They have an ability to if the federal place is under attack and the local law enforcement is overwhelmed and et cetera. There's a flux there. There's danger around us as opposed to a person in a frog suit and some old lesbian grandmothers. um uh they didn't they didn't get they can be dangerous that antifa they can't really no and there's and those antifa assholes who have committed murder there like it's some of them

bad shit everybody got there katie lang is out on the street the indigo girls are out on the street

that's katie lang fucking great voice but um uh as i was saying what was i saying um i'm saying about lesbians lesbians i always always get distracted that is usually what you get distracted No, but the judge said that, like, you didn't satisfy any of the pretext at all. Trump administration wants there to be they want to be able to send in maximum amount of leverage and power and force and have conflicts with 2020 protesters who aren't there. Well, that's that's that's the part of this. And they're using – and one of the differences between now and 2020, in addition to like it was an insane moment and that we've all kind of had amnesia about and we haven't had that proper kind of truth and reconciliation commission about how everyone lost their fucking mind. And won't. Except us.

That's what this podcast is, one of the truth and reconciliation commission. Not a lot of reconciliation, by the way.

Not too much reconciliation. But now he wants to use this as an excuse to do things that we hadn't done. In 2020, it was still kind of like, ooh, sending the National Guard, that's, you know, posse comitatus, that's bad. Now that Overton window has shifted so much. And whatever Trump sort of like says, he said today, you know, we should put the Illinois governor in jail.

Can we play the clip of the flag moment?

The flag moment's amazing. This is, again, at the clown show Antifa conference at the White House. After Nick Sartor had flapped his flag around.

Let's look at Trump on this one.

A flag-burning mob, and we've made it a one-year penalty for inciting riots. We took the freedom of speech away because that's been through the courts. And the court said, yeah, freedom of speech. But what what has happened is when they burn a flag, it agitates and irritates crowds. I've never seen anything like it on both sides. And you end up with riots. So we're going on that basis. We're looking at it from not from the freedom of speech, which I always felt strongly about, but never passed the courts. Huh? I don't. What is he saying?

Can I say to our producers, I can you guys in your free time? I got a lot to do, but in your free time, can you put together a super cut in lieu of an episode? Cause it'll be an hour and a half of Donald Trump saying, I've never seen that before. You're the president. Never seen anything. Second term. He's never seen any of this stuff before. It's always because can someone attempt, and either of you, if you can take this, decipher what he just said. Cause if you took that, we got rid of the freedom of speech.

And then does he say that the courts, he seemed to say both that the courts, have supported stopping people from burning flags and that the courts won't stop people from burning flags. Correct. I don't know what just happened. I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure he wants to stop people from burning flags and make it criminalize that conduct.

And said... I'm happy he's still referencing the courts. Yeah.

Said out loud that we had to stop the freedom of speech. I mean, that's a direct quote from the President of the United States, one of many crazy ones.

Is that what he said? We got to stop the freedom of speech? Is that the... Can we see that again? Play it again. Can we watch that one more time? i'm sorry that you probably minimize that one but let's watch this one more time a flag burning mob

and we've uh made it uh one year penalty for inciting riots we took the freedom of speech away because that's been through the courts and the court said you have freedom of speech

this is only event of the day by the way what he's his only event of the day yeah i mean i don't know

what's going on there until like uh you know 30 45 minutes later that's when we have the my pet goat thing, where Marco Rubio, who's the secretary of everything, comes in and whispers in his ear that, oh, by the way, the Middle East piece has been done.

Enormous credit to him and Dopey Steve Whitcoff and all the people that have been involved in that. If this actually happens, we'll see. I don't trust Hamas on this point, but we'll get back to that. But I think I know what he's saying, is that the problem was with their executive order, is what he's talking about. There's an executive order where he said, we made it one year in jail. you can't do that by executive order, first of all. You can't decide. And there's also, inciting a riot, there are also laws on the books about this, right? And those are these kind of exceptions, quote unquote, to free speech, inciting mobs, et cetera. But then the court said they had the freedom of speech, but he's saying after that, and I'm sorry for this criminology of this very, very weird minute. Well, we have said that if it's inciting a riot, then it's no longer freedom that's when we take the freedom of speech away but that actually prior to the donald trump first administration was an exception to freedom of speech if you are like if there is incitement if you say and it's a very narrow thing by the way it's not firing a crowded theater if you say there is a synagogue behind me you go burn it down it's full of zionists and they do that you are liable for that that is not covered under the first amendment so i guess that's what he's

talking about it seems to be what he's talking about but he's not talking about incitement he's just talking about flag burning he's not a flag burning yeah somehow inciting a riot well because

yeah because that burns any and he said it makes people very mad and then they riot it's never seen

anything like yeah when nick sartor took a flag and made it a story for 10 seconds well what would

happen with the guy that was the uh black head of the white supremacist proud boys uh what's his name? Enrique Torrio. Enrique Torrio. He actually, do you remember he went to jail for burning some, maybe we can have a, we got to get, who's the guy on Rogan that they talk about?

Does the fact checking? Yeah. Who's that guy? I can't remember his name. Kenny or something like that. Enrique. Dylan. Dylan would be good. Kike.

Yeah. Yeah. If we can get a fact check on this, it might be, might be wrong. I think he went to jail, Enrique Torrio, for setting something on fire on church grounds that was like a blm thing i think right i think that's right i think that's the case burning a blm sign yeah burning a blm or something in that logic because the courts have decided all these things there is no special protection for the flag if that incited a riot as a result

by BLM supporters by Donald Trump. Or was suggested that it had cited a riot. Correct. How could we know? How do you know? But like this kind of stuff, that would seem to apply to something like that too, right?

Sure. And then Trump would pardon him. And then Trump would pardon him again. Which he did to all the January 6th people who committed violent hellanines.

Although in that particular case, probably fine.

We would have commuted that sentence.

No, this is my most... Jason was fact-checking that. And the website was the Black Wall Street Times. Oh, that's a good one. Which I guess is one of my favorite publications. I think that's Jason's porn bookmark. I'm not sure about that source, Jason. But I also have the most controversial opinion, which I've said on this podcast. I would support the commutation of his sentence particularly. Yes. Which I thought was a bad sentence. Not all the other ones that went to- Which is different than a pardon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was different than a pardon.

If you're fucking serious about political violence in this country, which nobody is, you would be against the pardoning of people who were convicted of or pled out, even under force, and I understand that, or under duress, pled out to committing violent felonies on that day.

Although he did not. He did not. On that particular day, he didn't even come to D.C. He was in Baltimore. He was in Baltimore. He had an interaction with law enforcement. They told him not to come to D.C., so he did not. And he did not come.

Yeah. Isn't that the thing that trying to get into the mind of certain MAGA people, many of whom I know and friends with, that this kind of thing – this is too classic. If this happened under Donald Trump, right, Donald Trump wanted to make it a political example of people who had done something wrong in the way that the Biden administration, the Justice Department did. It said – I had said on the day or the day after – I think it was the day of January 6th that all these people should go to prison. yeah you were i was very adamant and i believe that and i still believe that you want to put them under the jail particularly assaulting police officers breaking windows of the capital going in when they're told not to go in etc well i know the conspiracy theory is that they're not in super cool hat yeah you're just jealous wearing that hilarious auschwitz t-shirt it's a joke come on um but that if there was a version of that under donald trump and leaders of Antifa, let's say it's that, get 23 years in jail, yeah, I would imagine that people would say, this is the politicization of our Justice Department to set an example. That's not what the Justice Department should be for. I know it's for that in a lot of ways, but they do that, but that's not what it should be for.

Part of today's Antifa new journalist clown show in the White House was to talk about precisely that. we are going after Antifa as a major terrorist organization. We saw the Kristi Noem grade inflation. Now they're as powerful and threatening as ISIS, Hezbollah. I didn't know that Antifa controlled territory beyond Chaz and CHOP, but I guess we learn something new every day, but that they're doing that. And similarly, last week, the Trump administration said, we're just going to go after George Soros, even though he's 94 years old at this point, because we sort of assume that Alexander has some pneumatic tube of money that ends up in Antifa's pocket. So they're starting with, we just assume that they're guilty, so we're going to investigate them. That's not really how you should be doing investigations, and they're just being open with it. You watched a little bit of Pam Bondi this week, I understand, also. They're being very blatant about picking their enemies.

Megan Kelly, big Bondi hater, by the way. Yeah. Big Bondi hater. That's right. Yeah, she's a big body hitter.

But before we talk about that hearing, we should probably talk a little bit about the Trump Peace Accords. It's amazing. The Israeli-Gaza-

I would say one short thing before, and it will be a short thing, I promise. I promise you. I don't believe you, but go ahead. You shouldn't. I have a bad track record on these things. He did come at 7.30. Yeah. The ISIS thing that drives me crazy about this and the email that that guy sent me when I wrote back to him in a very pissy- Oh, he read the email after all. Well, I read some of it. Enough to be angry. Enough to be annoyed at this jackass. Not just at the length. It was about the word fascism and about me refusing to call it fascism. And I still refuse to call it fascism because it's not fascism. The same thing applies to these people. The reason you don't call it fascism with this redolence of Nazism, because that's a very specific, unique and uniquely terrible period in modern history. And the same thing is true with ISIS. If you say, we're not fascist, how dare you? Look what you're trying to provoke in people. Calling Antifa ISIS is the same thing.

I mean, Stephen Miller was accusing Democrats of, it's like, your rhetoric is responsible for Charlie Kirk. Also, this... judge's decision was is a legal insurrection as he call it democrat the whole democratic party is basically an extremist cell um that is uh used to justify terrorism referred to them as like

being the party of satan who did he did he i think he did social yeah well that might be true though

yeah well maybe so i mean there's a lot of demons i'm just saying right we are living in a demon

fuck yeah tucker has convinced me that there's demons everywhere wow or that you have a lot of dogs in your bag i mean or someone scratched you while you were naked most people around the world

believe something along those lines um yeah but gaza israel peace hostages released maybe tomorrow not yet we'll see what happens um but this could be a big deal this is also coming on october 8th that's when we're recording the evening of october 8th yesterday was october 7th yeah this would be the the anniversary of the horrific attacks in israel perpetrated by hamas which i learned yesterday because i was leaving nyu and i got a flyer handed to me and i thought for sure oh this is about the hostages yeah sure to be free and it's not it was actually apparently yesterday was the anniversary of the beginning of the gaza genocide per that flyer um only flyer i received yesterday i didn't see signs being posted about people being released in hostages or anything like that just that one flyer um so at any rate peace maybe tomorrow seems like a big deal yeah i guess the trump deal was announced maybe a week ago at this point and it was kind of floated out there israel immediately said they would accept this hamas on the other hand well i mean they're

alone in this i mean the qataris said they were on board with it the egyptians europeans i mean Everybody on board, except for Hamas and the protesters yesterday, they were not saying, these people who have been talking about a genocide, what happens when there's a genocide? You want it to stop, right? As quickly as possible. Under any conditions, stop the genocide. We'll figure it out then. And that's, I mean, you see an editorial, an unsigned editorial in The Guardian. Well, I don't know if I like this deal. It's like, wait, what? There's a genocide going on according to you? Maybe you want to stop this under not the best circumstances, particularly because when you lose a war, which I think that all of these protesters implicitly suggest, considering they say, oh, you know, Gaza is just a big one big parking lot and they've killed everybody and they're trying to kill, you know, the rest of them, that that's not a war that they've won. So therefore, you must come to the table. You have a lot of Anthony Blinken. I mean, Anthony Blinken did this and he supported the plan on a podcast, but he had to do the thing where like that was our plan, too. We had the same plan. And so like trying to take a little bit of credit away from Trump, which I don't do. I think that he's done a good job on this so far. He's been very tough on everyone involved. And the thing is, is that the Biden administration was saying, don't go into Rafa. Don't do this. Don't do that. They were very, very, you know, difficult with, you know, you can make the argument that they should have been, but you can't say that this plan would have flourished under the Biden administration, you know, eight months ago.

We don't know. We don't know, certainly. And he didn't do it when he was there. And he wasn't a particularly energetic executive. And I'm not sure that the people that worked for him were all that effective. And Trump is erratic in a way that is.

Quitting the administration because of their complicity in genocide.

Well, this is this is one of the questions I wanted to ask, though, because one of the things that happened when this deal was announced was very soon thereafter, before Hamas had actually agreed, the president essentially suggested we're very close to a deal. Yeah, they pretty much agreed that we've got a deal. It's going to happen. We're there. It's as if he bluffed it into existence. I mean, sometimes he does seem to do that. I mean, this is very art of the deal, like essentially announce the deal, insist that it's already agreed to, which seems to put a little bit of pressure on the various parties.

The problem with Trump is obviously, like you saw those videos of during the General Assembly at the UN of certain leaders laughing at him when he was like, I solved that. You know, there were two guys there in Azerbaijan, wherever it was, I solved that. And they were like, oh, for God's sake. And of course, he's the rhetoric of Donald Trump is to take credit for everything that happens always, but to be a sort of neutral arbiter of this stuff and say, let's judge Donald Trump on the merits, is to not say, because he's that jackass, he didn't do this, or he didn't help with this. Because if you think of a couple things, one thing that's really important, I don't think anyone's really pointed out that I've seen since this deal was announced, is that the Israelis attacked Qatar. These people who were involved in the dealmaking, right?

They're central to it.

central to it didn't kill them there was initial reporting that they did and i think killed a couple bodyguards and somebody who was of some moderate importance. But that was going to unravel the whole thing. Trump called Netanyahu. I don't buy for a second that this didn't happen with the American acquiescence in some ways, approval perhaps. But he called Bibi and said, apologize. And he called the Qataris. And Bibi then called the Qataris and apologized. Does that mean anything? No, but the kind of kabuki theater-

It was like a rotary phone in the White House. Have you seen the photos? It's very, very funny.

Oh, and he's like, give him a call. Give him a call right now. Show him in front of the cameras. Give him a call.

And apparently, B.B. just apologized if anyone took offense. It was, he found a way to qualify.

No, B.B., he's a bit fine. Yes, he's fine. But that kind of diplomacy is not George Kennan. It's not Kissinger. It's this deranged kind of, that works sometimes, right? And I hope this works. I think it's a little too early to tell. But the plan—so you have the Israelis, along with America, bombing Iranian nuclear sites, Israel taking out Hezbollah to a point where they're absolutely toothless now. And I'm sure they're trying to rebuild themselves.

Maybe that's what Christy Nome meant, that Antifa is like Hezbollah. Now. Now. Yeah, they have no power.

Yeah, dude, you're like a bunch of guys in Portland running around.

Don't know how to—scare to pages.

Handless people in Beirut. Hezbollah's still probably more of a problem, actually. Getting the entire Houthi leadership in a meeting that they effectively set up and to have them all in place, killing all of them. Oh, my God, the backlash is going to be so huge. Not a single Iranian plane in the sky. Not a single Israeli-American casualty in those bombing raids. An attack on Qatar and the Qataris are supporting this deal, what, three weeks later, a month later? Something's happening here that's pretty interesting in the way that the Middle East has been remade. But it's telling us a lot about our fears about some of these people in the Middle East now, that the Iranians are what bin Laden called us after the Khobar Towers, a paper tiger. That's the Iranians are paper tigers. The Houthis are paper tigers. And the Qataris, all you have to do at this point is say, you want our shit? You want our bases there? You want us to defend you? or do you want us just to go hang out with the Saudis? They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, hold on. And that's a type of diplomacy that is clearly effective. We hope it's lasting. We have no idea, but so far it's-

I mean, the thing about lasting and the thing that I'm the most- Nothing lasts in the Middle East, but yes. Nothing lasts in the Middle East, but it's getting the hostages and bodies back.

The most important thing.

That is a finality. That is what the whole thing has been about for two years And also is the way that Hamas could have ended this on October 10th and chose not to. Do you know what Hamas can do, by the way?

I just realized this today when they were talking about the hostages. There are 20 hostages, supposedly, that are alive. They can keep those people safe, right? Can they keep their civilian population safe? They don't give a fuck. They don't care. And the reason they can keep them safe is because they have a very large underground network, one of the most impressive engineering projects with doing so much with very little in modern history. And the Israelis blow up some of those tunnels, but there's still a lot of tunnels and there's still a lot of places. They've managed to keep those people safe because they're their only bargaining chip, right? They don't give a shit about their own civilians, never have, and are quite vocal about it, by the way, too, when asked, why don't you have bomb shelters? And they say, it's not our responsibility. Where in Israel, there's a bomb shelter in every building. it's there's no place to hide those people who died that we don't know what those numbers are there so many people that have so many different political reasons for announcing high numbers low numbers but when you see those images from gaza you cannot in any way stop and say this i want this to continue i love it's a horror show and i want that to end but i do also understand whose responsibility it is and it is the responsibility of hamas who when they have valuable people they can keep them alive they don't see any value in the average citizen of gaza and they've sacrificed them to this moment and i'm surprised that they've come to the table after so much negotiation with about hostages etc but i want to be hopeful because i want i want the i don't want this to happen to the people of Gaza anymore

either. We're recording this on a Wednesday night. They are scheduled to have a signing ceremony in Egypt tomorrow and Trump had been talking about flying out like he wants to, like the My Pet Goat thing was that Marco Rubio wanted him to announce it first on Truth Social and Trump

He wants that Nobel Prize.

He wants a Nobel Prize. If this stops this war, fucking shine that thing up and hand it over.

You know, it's like me as a diabetic when people denounce big pharma. I'm like, yeah, if their motivation is money and it helps me in the end, fucking great. I could care less. If the motivation is a stupid prize and it helps end this conflict. Prizes are great. We need more prizes.

One of the foreign policy victories of the first Trump administration was the Abraham Accords. Correct. Undersold all the way. But part of the Saudis' interest and motivation in getting behind these is this conflict, this rivalry with Iran. Does the fact that Iran has been proven a paper tiger at this point and that so much of the power that they were wielding in the region has been decimated at this point, does that change the calculus of the region in a way that is helpful?

The Saudis are in the catbird seat now in so many ways. But like Iran has been a regional funder of hatred and terrorism for as long as it can – since the Islamic Revolution, 1979, is where do the Houthis got their weapons? Where does – Hezbollah was a creation of Iran. It wasn't an indigenous – it was a creation of Iran. and despite the sunni shia gap so much of the the weaponry and the intelligence and things like that that come through gaza comes from iran too and when you have an iran on its back heels because iran also has a population of people who are pretty liberal in a lot of ways there's of course you know a lot of people support the government but the old joke was if you want to go to the Middle East to find a country that loves Americans, you go to Iran. I mean, Israel, okay, fine, but you go to Iran because the Iranian people have been living under this boot heel since 1979. So this kind of scrambling of power is good. And like Matt, I mean, Matt has been a sort of champion level hater of the Saudis and I'm with him on this. But when it came to, for instance, this comedy- The Saudi regime, to be clear. You saw this Riyadh comedy festival and everyone's attacking them and I get it. I get it. But any little thing that brings the Saudis in from the cold, any little thing that empowers them over Iran, in my view, is good. It's a positive thing.

They give like $2 billion to Jared. It's good. They give $10 billion to Jared. Bring him in from the cold. Jesus Christ. Please do. Jared seems like a nice guy.

We should have a – can we have a human sponsor this podcast? That's very funny. Sponsored by Jared.

My worries about – The subway guy? About this going forward besides – Who is him? He's a kiddy porn convict. He's a kid diddler. Like I said, it wasn't – Oh, God.

No. No. You're a libertarian or not, Camille? Not that kind of libertarian. Yeah, those are called libertarian party libertarians.

Now, now. Jeez. Uh, no, what I'm worried about, uh, I'm always worried about the Saudis because they're rat bags. They've been trying to get a security guarantee from Trump. Um, and Trump is just all in. He's like, he opened up seriously last week. He opened up a new Trump tower in Riyadh and like, it's just not even covered anymore. It's like, ah, you know, whatever.

Um, it's called Jared with an exclamation point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. this is by the way for the record this is this is just because her show has an exclamation point

there's nothing beyond that which you called i i advocated call i was like put a fucking

exclamation and then the next day it was like her new show yeah yeah we love you bought you we do sorry about yelling at you that one time no you're not no you're not no i'm i'm worried

about what i was drunk what over i was fucking wasted like it was a day that ends in y um what guarantees that we are uh giving uh to saudi arabia although i don't think that's really part of this deal necessarily but qatar um like we have uh according to the administration a couple of weeks ago we're giving them an article five like yes security guarantee at a time we're like executive order by executive order which that's not how that thing works at a time that we are very much sort of downplaying Article 5 support for the Article 5 NATO allies and members. I don't want to be... I was mad when we made Qatar a non-NATO ally, a major non-NATO ally, which is like, that's the next level below.

But shouldn't you be mad about this? Under the Biden administration, though, right? Yeah, and shouldn't you be mad about this because we got almost nothing in return. But is it... I mean, this is the Jean Kirkpatrick article that she wrote, I think it was 79, in commentary called Dictatorships and Double Standards, which – I mean, she was a Democrat, which so impressed the Reagan administration.

They made her a Republican, who at the end of her life was very strenuously opposed to the Iraq war, wrote a book about it, but she became Reagan's ambassador to the UN. But the argument of dictatorships and double standards is essentially, it's much more nuanced than this, is that you've got to do deals with bad guys to ultimately support liberalism in the end.

To support your overarching project.

Yeah. I mean, that's, yeah.

So what is our overarching project?

Well, if the overarching project in Qatar, Qatar has been a safe haven from Hamas. It has been a funder of Hamas. It has provided some sort of international ballast and recognition to one of the biggest scumbag political terrorist organizations in modern times. So basically Switzerland is what you're saying. Yeah, they're neutral about all this stuff.

You're talking me into bombing them. Keep going.

Like, Jazeera Arabic was very aggressive in its propagandizing on behalf of Hamas. If there is some, okay, we've made this deal. Part of this deal and part of this Article 5 stuff, they're not writing toothless executive orders for nothing in return. There's no chance of that. There's no chance of that. And I'm not even that cynical to say, you know, Jared's getting pocket money from this. I think there's something else going on here.

We'll see. What do you suspect is the category of something else?

What I suspect is that they're going to kick out some of these Hamas people or maybe take a different tack towards terrorist organizations like Hamas. I hope. I don't know this in any way. This is just a hope. Sure. And maybe this is giving them too much credit.

And then also, presumably, and this has been a sticking point, it's impossible to solve, but be involved in whatever the fuck happens next in Gaza. Like taking some direct responsibility for it in a way of like – or being part of someone taking direct responsibility in a way that – Although no one really wants that job. No one has wanted that job.

Nobody wants that job.

But they've got to stop shooting rockets at Israel and kidnapping people and murdering them and stuff.

So it'll be interesting to see the conditions Hamas had objected to some of these disarming, where, you know, this kind of handing the weapons over, which, you know, this is a common thing. The IRA and the Good Friday Agreement, 1996 and 97, were very reluctant to do this. I also don't know how you confirm that they've been disarmed. That's the thing, right? Yeah, you can. because there was the hidden caches of weapons of the ira were like supposedly hiding in the republic of ireland etc and did they give everything up british intelligence and that they knew a lot they didn't know everything but at this point they they're making arguments like well if there's going to be some sort of security force here we can't be disarmed right you have to have guns if there's you know this will be chaos and anarchy and we don't want that but that's not really what they're talking about they want their weapons and but you know all those rockets that are there's the really crappy ones that they build and then there's the more sophisticated ones and of course keeping in mind in lebanon the fear about attacking hezbollah much like it was the fear in 2006 when they invaded hezbollah uh invaded lebanon again in southern lebanon was that they had and the numbers were always 100 000 rockets this you know 200 000 rockets um where were those? You know, they're taking out people who control that stuff. They're taking out places where you can launch them from. My thing is that I was always hoping, and there's no possibility of this, this is the brain of somebody who's not in the room with the American guys and Israeli guys, what Mossad knows, et cetera, is that I hope they understand, and this is why they did this in the past was after the Munich attack in 1972, in which all of the Olympians were brutally murdered by Black September, which is an offshoot of the PLO, is that they had something called Operation Wrath of God, which was with Steven Spielberg in a movie about Munich, which is wherever you are, you think you're going to rest your head in peace, we will fucking kill you. Do not rest and do not sleep with both eyes closed because we will find you. And they did. And they made some mistakes, too, by the way, in doing that. But, you know, that kind of thing sticks in the head of Hamas. And there's a reason you hit people in guitar. There's a reason you blow up their pagers. There is no safe place. There is no safe place. The problem is, of course, when you have an enemy who, quote unquote, loves death more than you love life. But that's a hard enemy to deal with. Because surrendering, do you want to surrender or do you want to surrender to God? That's a problem, right? In, I think, the long run, thinking way down the line of...

reassessing how the people in those territories after being kind of bludgeoned by the Israelis for two years, how that goes. What is that peacekeeping force? Right now, very, I just

want those hostages back. Yeah. If that happens, and that happens in the next couple of days. That will be a celebration. That's an amazing celebration. And like, you know, white knuckle until that and there's every reason to be sort of um not skeptical necessarily but

just like particularly that one video that i found the most heartbreaking thing i've seen in a very long time of the kid digging his own grave if anyone saw this it's very hard to watch um in a tunnel looking auschwitz like it may be a hundred pounds or something crying and them taunting him on camera and he's literally digging his own grave, unless you do something, people, to the Israeli government. That level of cruelty is unbearable. And I really hope that that guy is home with his family in two days. I really hope so. I mean, it would be a fucking miracle. I never thought that would happen. So give credit to the guy that I don't give a lot of credit to.

What's your projection for, let's say, the good thing happens? That it's enough of a peace deal to get the hostages back and there'll be a bunch of Israeli prisoners or Gazan prisoners that Israelis have sent back, et cetera. But if it's a success, in other words, what is the way that it will be portrayed as something different? Oh, my God. um like uh it i my prediction on this would just be like everyone will be mocking trump for being so needy about getting a nobel prize oh for sure and that that will be well we will be too

it's funny yeah it's super fucking funny he's too thirsty that's that's the problem i'd say even the russians trolling him with respect to that like he's been talking about giving the ukrainians more arms and like ah you don't get a peace prize if you do that sort of thing um but at any rate i do want to talk about some other things and perhaps we take a quick turn after that hopeful note to talk about something less hopeful which is the government shutdown and we only have to talk about it briefly I don't really care

he lives in Maryland I don't care about the government employees so much if we cut that camera do this

not a black like a non-black I have one issue that I want to bring up here it's Fleet Week in San Francisco this coming weekend Fleet Week is the most important important event in the Bay Area. In your life. In the Bay Area. In your pants. And the one time where I am particularly excited about AI tech. I'm particularly excited about AI tech. No, the one time I'm particularly excited about It's Fleet Week! No government shutdown! Stop! Military propaganda is when the Blue Angels are flying overhead. I apologize. And it turns out that the Blue Angels will not be flying because of the government shutdown and that was the moment when it really really hit home for me and this almost certainly can't be reversed no matter what's done now congress hasn't quite sorted things out we don't have to talk about any of the machinations beyond that that's the only real thing i'm just looking for your health care or anything else i just want to see those blue angels the there's apparently something called the snowbirds of canada the snowbirds. What? And they're supposed to replace the Blue Angels. I won't go. The Canadians are coming down? I don't want to see this. Yeah.

We should shoot those motherfuckers out of the sky. The fuck? Are you serious?

So I don't want to talk about it anymore because it's too tough. Somebody watched the new Top Gun too many times.

Are we forgetting the 1812 war? Yeah, exactly. Really bad.

So this is very unfortunate. At any rate, there are other things worth talking about. One thing in particular, our friend Barry Weiss made a little bit of news

this week. Why is there a Blue Angels video on the screen? Oh, yeah.

Ben Hagar.

Wow. Yeah.

This is not gay at all. It's not gay. No. Not that there's anything wrong with it. Look at those super hard nose cones.

Yeah. I mean, this is when they weren't allowed in the military.

They? Yeah. Just in the land.

Look at that long hose. Actually, this is pretty gay. Yeah. That's just gay.

It's big.

That's a Ben Hagar video. Why is it gay? Not that there's anything wrong with it.

yeah wait is this really a van hagar video i think it is they did a blue angel song it's just uh dude david rott never would have done this cool show no no oh look at that

i'm glad we don't have a camille boner i mean honestly like this is

I feel patriotic as well, like right now, in this moment.

You want to.

I would join the military if I, well, they don't want me. What the fuck is this?

How did I miss this?

It was the 80s. It's working. Whatever it is, it's working.

Is Sammy Hagar in one of those planes? That's Michael Anthony. That's why his voice is so high. Michael Anthony in a plane. Jack Daniels, this guy.

Okay. I don't want to overdo this. I don't want to overdo this. We can cut it. It's fine.

Oh, I know this song. Oh, it's a great song. Oh, it's garbage. I saw Van Hagar.

Oh, I didn't know this was about the Blue Angels.

It's not.

It's not about the Blue Angels.

They just decided to do that because Top Gun was a success. Well, thank you for that, Jason. I didn't know that that was what the Blue Angels was. Really, really good.

That was an anti-government shutdown song.

I want to point out, because this is a humble brag, that I saw Van Hagar play at the Fabulous Forum in July of, I think, 1986. um and the brag part about this is not seeing like sammy in his like yellow jumper um but uh is that the opening band was uh bachman turner overdrive bto played and the two main dudes in it who are also the from the guess who uh back in the day as you well know camille um yeah i don't

know i once saw future and young thug in concert yeah like they're both bto like 300 pound canadian

rednecks in overalls just fucking playing taking care of business that's the only song they had

right i had a couple uh you ain't seen nothing yet so they don't give a shit about the fucking

blue angels no they don't they cared about the snowbirds no they don't care about the snowbirds

they probably probably did a song for the snow but we should talk about barry weiss because we've had we've had recently another outbreak of barry weiss derangement syndrome uh the the national

you know what's interesting about that in arms is much like the thing that the anti-israel people it's also bds barry derangement syndrome yeah different kind of bds yes they support both of

them well barry weiss's free press acquired by cbs or i guess some sort of partnership with cbs barry weiss is joining and there have been rumors about this for weeks great perhaps perhaps more than a month the rumors were swirling around we were beginning to wonder like what the hell is going on i gotta i have a correction to make but continue okay well at any rate barry weiss now head of cbs news and everyone is thrilled about this they couldn't be more excited she launched this new publication in the last five years it has gone on to be hugely successful and was acquired for something like 150 million dollars or something like that it's an interesting cash and stock deal but barry in charge over at cbs news and a lot of people aren't happy about this the tiffany

network who's surprised yeah yeah i'm so upset because as a as a regular consumer of cbs news i just don't know about the quality is what's going to happen here you you love cbs news don't

you matt cbs news in fairness was one of the hugest brands of news what was the participle

Was it past participle use there? I think there was. Yeah, that's the word was.

David Halberstyn's fantastic book, which I recommend our media literate listeners and viewers to read, The Powers That Be. It's a tremendous book from 1979. I've never read that. Oh, wow. It's great. It's a phone book. I don't have the stama anymore. It's too big. I don't know what that means. uh it covered three or four uh four uh families of of news organizations cbs news was one of them the la times was one of them which was a kingmaker back in its day the henry loose empire time

magazine and then his phenomenal wife claire booth just like implicated in all of american

power for especially in the cold war era but also before a little bit um and then also um The last one was on the tip of my tongue and I know Washington Post slash Newsweek back when those were gigantic things and Catherine Graham and the brilliant Philip Graham, her husband, who committed suicide, as we all know. But anyways, reading that is totally inspirational. It's very 20th century, and you will have a lasting respect for the way that CBS News was originally kind of forged. When the networks were coming out, CBS, ABC, NBC, that's it. And CBS took all of these actions to, like with Eric Severi and other people, to forge a great news network. That is absolutely true. it was it was different than the other ones always better always more serious the gravitas would go there the war reporting was better everything was better about it it was this name and it's just so much fucking past tense it's so much past in everything like

There was literally a Salon, which still exists, .com headline.

Salon.com? Yeah. Wow.

Believe it or not, I think it was the Salon.com. And if not, I'm sorry. But I think it is. That was like, how do we go from Dan Rather to Barry Weiss? It's like, oh, my sweet dears. You missed out on how fun 2004 was. Yeah. Like the fake document scandal. The fake documents, the kerning of George W. Bush. um dan uh danny shit the bed uh quite a bit but like all other media um cbs news has collapsed all media has collapsed this this deal which i think is interesting for a lot of things reasons um one of them is that all of these media properties that once were great or interesting in some way are not like the la times is just not it's a 20 page newspaper it's smaller than my college paper was now um like it doesn't have these places don't have heft so the weirdest thing for me about it, besides the fact that, you know, Barry and like we did election night here with Moynihan and she's been on the program five times and we've, we've all, we all know her very well, is that it's kind of interesting to go back into one of the old media properties

and kind of weird, frankly, there's something weird about it, I think. I can't understand it. I mean, and again, Barry founds the free press January, 2021. If you told me back then, you know, they're just going to, they're going to acquire this and she'll be running CBS News back then. I would not have believed that. No, no, no. I wouldn't have either. I'm not at all surprised that the Free Press was a success. I'm very surprised by this particular acquisition. Honestly, and Barry's a friend, and I wish her all the success in the world. I am shocked that she wants this job. Yeah. She's going from a place where she was in charge. She had her team that she had pulled together. And she created it. A place where you can imagine those people are cheering for you. Yeah. And she went there leaving the New York Times because of the controversy that she inspired there. They hated her.

Yes.

That's not an understatement. No, it's not. She's going into a place where some non-trivial percentage of the staff hates her again.

That's why she's fucking great because that is a very brave thing to do. Knowing that people hate you and the power that Barry has to charm people because she's an incredibly lovely person.

This is the thing that all the people who hate her, and I understand a little bit of where they're coming from, especially when they don't know her, because she inserts herself into controversies and gets in the middle of it. Which is great. It's what we're supposed to do. Journals.

She barely even has to try, though.

Remember that there was a person at Vice, a woman whose name I don't remember. She's kind of disappeared from journalism, but she attacked Barry a whole bunch. and then she met Barry and then alongside Barry wrote a column for the New York Times about people who really disagree who can become friends and this was somebody who really brutally attacked her and I don't remember her name but they wrote a piece together and I remember at her book party that I saw her there and that's something that Barry is incredibly skilled at of you know just you know breaking bread with people who disagree with her and that idea which he puts out in you know the memo and all this stuff is something that she lives and agree it doesn't matter if you agree with her if you have an old ossified dying cbs news and you don't want i had one person at cbs news uh send me a message um and somebody i think that politically very different from barry and said to me look i'm i have an open mind and we need some shake up in here and this is a very high level person and i was like you're gonna get it we saw you guys probably didn't see but

today we received an email from someone who works at uh cbs affiliate norwegian and said just mark my words trust me that there is a generational level of acceptance of like oh you know the people who are between 30 and 55 they're like or maybe a little bit younger but they're kind of excited because they haven't had any new wind blowing through the building for a while. And these old media carcasses, and I used to work for one of them at the LA Times, the stench of death is just overwhelming. To the extent which I counseled Britain, we talked about this at this table when this news first came around. I wanted her six years ago, five years ago, when we were all kind of talking about how do we respond to this weird media moment where people think about now where people like us are being kicked out of the margins i mean there's uh nancy ronman wrote about this a few months ago and she wrote a piece about paloma media for like fee for some reason um but like she it started with the 2019 uh what was the name the name that uh barry had for her parties that she used to do over the seller

The Thought Criminal Dinners.

The Thought Criminal Dinners.

I don't know if she named it that, though. Yeah, I don't think that was her. Some.

I hope.

Somebody else did, yeah.

Bad branding. Didn't like it at the time. But like, you know, there was one in 2019 where I think, I don't know if we were all there, but I was there definitely. And Jesse Single was there. And he had, that week, something had happened to him. And I think Thomas Chatter-Williams was there. That week, something like- No, it was me, not Thomas.

But I understand. We all look alike.

No, but like, there was-

Tracy Morgan was there. Also, all look alike. I'll make the jokes. Billy Dee Williams was there. True quote, by the way. It was very sexy. And it's like drinking some Colt 45. Works every time, Camille.

But like everyone had been pushed out and canceled. And like the question is, what do you do with this? And my counsel was always just like, leave. Leave those places because- Build something, yeah. Build something because you can build this beautiful new thing. But also because the old things are so stinky and they have all of this kind of hungover baggage.

So this is you claiming credit for Barry's success.

Not at all. I'm claiming that she is smart by not listening to me. Listening to me at the beginning.

She was smart for listening to you at the beginning. And now she owes you how much exactly? $78.

But it is like who at this table thinks that anyone is going to learn that butterfly effect lesson? Send that emoji. bully somebody inside your organization and then they take over cbs news it's like you didn't see that coming did you there's something absolutely hilarious about that to me and all these people whinging and crowing you know you're not producing stuff that look i will give enormous i've always loved i will always love 60 minutes i think the conservative attacks on 60 minutes are brainless the attacks particularly on how that uh um kamala harris interview and people just have an instinct so i'll get emails saying i'm wrong about this but i'm not um the editing in that interview is fine and the reason they knew about this is because they put another clip out on some what was that it was like on another show right they put a clip out on another show or online online that wasn't like if they were if they were doing this large like this conspiracy to get Kamala Harris elected, that wouldn't happen. They wouldn't slip into it. It's just the way stuff happens. In TV, you do a two-hour interview, hour interview, and what is the segment on 60 Minutes? 15 minutes, right? She's going to say a lot of shit that's dumb, and you're going to cut it out. And you also cut out the world where it's sound because it's bad television. But that was interpreted in the wrong way, I think, and Trump's suing and all this nonsense. But I have to say that it's a great institution that has done some exceptionally bad work, but it's also done some exceptionally good work too. And you don't burn things down because they've done some exceptionally bad work in an ideological direction that is the opposite of yours. That's not how you do it. The idea that Barry is going to come in and make 60 Minutes Newsmax is not understanding who Barry Weiss is at all. And I want to, this is my correction, by the way. I said when this news came out on the show that it struck me as totally implausible that they would make her editor-in-chief. Yeah. And I thought that was like, you know, some spinning up. Fever dream. Fever dream to make everybody angry and get clicks. And I was wrong. Yeah. And that was, whoever did that, I have to find who that was. It was very good reporting. So good on them.

Oh, it was Dylan Byers from Puck News.

Well, Dylan Byers, come on down, because he was right and I was wrong. And I said that, I don't buy that for a second. I didn't buy it either. I didn't buy it.

I heard some of the same rumors.

Seriously, until the final confirmation a couple of days ago. Yeah, I didn't buy that.

I mean, it got so quiet. It wasn't clear what was going to happen.

But Dylan Byers deserves, if that was him, all the credit in the world to Dylan Byers because he was right about that and it was good reporting.

So the best thing about this deal, so far as I can tell from here, not knowing anything about what's likely to happen- Is that it makes everyone crazy? Is one, that it makes everyone crazy, But two, that it injects some actual intellectual diversity into a major media organization in a pretty interesting, dramatic, disruptive way. The kind of way where you actually can imagine you purge some of the worst people like right away. And beyond that, like Barry is not the sort of person, as you said, who's going to be looking to transform them into Newsmax. There's nobody she's going to disallow to come into the building. Like she wants the diversity of perspectives. I'm confident that there is a universe of people who she would have liked to talk to that they just would not talk to her because they imagine the Free Press is this horrible, monstrous, MAGA outfit. And it just, it's never been that. It's never been true.

Well, there's people that we know who used to be friends with this podcast in some way who spend their pathetic time You keeping score on how the free press is reacting to a certain thing in MAGA world. And if they're not reacting in the way that those people think they should be reacting, they tweet and blue sky, or what do they call the blue sky ones?

Blue ski, I don't know. I don't know. I think they still call them tweets. Okay, whatever those are. Stroke out.

Jack asses that they put out there. It's like, you can game that every time. Sure. You know, I mean, you hire Tyler Cowen I don't think that's because you need a MAGA guy. I mean, the opposite of a MAGA guy. Right. Because he's a smart guy and an interesting guy.

I mean, oftentimes some of the best MAGA critiques are coming out of the free press because there are people who take MAGA pretty seriously and give you an actual robust argument. Yeah, but there's going to be stuff that's sympathetic to MAGA in there.

And that is what sets off all the alarm bells with these people because you're supposed to... I mean, there is a kind of authoritarian, an anti-authoritarian authoritarianism. Sure. Like an intellectual authority type. Like, how dare you have that within the precincts of this publication?

I'm not familiar with people who lob these types of accusations towards... I'm not... Established.

...either at all. But no, the critiques are... And I go through this again. My show, The Moynihan Report, I did last night. I did an intro with a free press person beside me. I love you, Olivia. I'm so sorry to put you in this situation. But I said, you don't have to say anything, and she didn't. And, uh, you know, like this Hassan Piker guy, um, some of these other ones, we have some tweets we'll look at, of like this person failing up. Motherfucker, do you have, what the fuck is failure to you if you go from the Wall Street Journal to Tablet to New York Times, making all of them better by the time, to your own thing that has million, like a million plus subscriber. And then you have this little thing. Well, actually, how many of those are paying? They overpaid. There was a New York Times headline about Vice's acquisition of Refinery29. And Refinery29 was some sort of women's nightmare. It was a terrible publication.

They got into terrible trouble during the crazy summer of 2020. I think over like an insufficiently black square on their Instagram. Oh, did they really? It was dark gray. Yeah, there was a purge based on like you weren't serious enough.

Oh, was that refinery? Well, I don't know if we have this headline or we have to log into the New York Times to get that headline, which is the problem. Vice Media. But Vice Media purchased Refinery29 in 2019. And this was, for me, a slightly unwelcome thing just because I just didn't think they did anything good. But this is the headline in the New York Times. Vice Media acquires Refinery29 in $400 million deal. Do you remember?

$400 million?

The human cry, the outrage about this. That, oh, that's not worth $400 million, which it clearly was not.

$400 million? $400 million? Refinery fucking 29? We're not even talking about Refinery23? It was Refinery29.

That shit was so bad. And that was essentially one of the things that pulled Vice under the ocean and drowned it, was this albatross of a publication that just regularly produced pieces about why you shouldn't watch Dave Chappelle, stuff like that. And it was unbearable. $400 million. Consequential journalism. Can anyone at any point say, what a fucking bad deal this is? It was a terrible deal.

Is there a single newspaper left in this country that could sell for $400 million?

By the way, they got nothing in the end because it was a swap of stock. Which at the time we all thought was pretty great. That's a letter of the stock. In 2019, I thought I was going to make some money.

No, there's no valuations like that anymore. Should we look at some tweets? Oh, my God.

Ben Dreyfuss. All right, the first tweet is Ben Dreyfus. The best Ben Dreyfus, his October 7th, October 7th, 2025. Paramount breaks glass ceiling as Barry Weiss becomes first lesbian to lead network news division. Ben Dreyfus, take a bow. No, but no. One that's probably false.

Keep going on that thread, on that thread of Ben Dreyfus, because it gets better. Oh, no, he doesn't have it loaded. Oh, no, no. It's obviously a screenshot. That is so good, though. No, because it gets into cunnilingus.

I think we can probably leave that one. That's fine. Probably leave that one. It's okay. It's really funny. But no, that is like amazing in exactly what you would expect in any other situation if you had the right politics, right? Yeah. What's the next one? Oh, Swim?

former guest on this podcast, Swin.

Why do we have him on? Why? He had a book. He had a book. What? The thing about Barry Weiss... The thing about Barry Weiss is how fucking boring she is. She's not even bad in a fun way. Anyway, congrats. I will continue not relying on CBS News. Okay. I'll defend Swin in one sense. What? I will continue...

I like Swin. I'm not going to defend him on this. He's a friend, but not. It's snotty.

But, like, I will continue not relying on CBS News. One thing that happens in all of this, and Caitlin Flanagan had a good piece in The Atlantic about this, like, suddenly everyone's remembering the Tiffany Network and they're crying all these tears for a third-rated network show that, like, no one's been watching for pointedly with the exception of 60 Minutes and a couple of other things on there. But, like, you know, when there was a media merger, when AOL bought Time Warner, which caused everyone to lose their fucking minds 25 years ago, and it was just, like, me and Nick Gillespie and Jack Schaefer were the only people who said, like, who cares? What do you consume in the time? Do you read Time Magazine?

He still writes TV and a piece. I want more Jack Schaefer.

We all want more Jack Schaefer. But, like, whenever anyone is freaking out about media, they are always incredibly overrating the power importance and how much. 100%. Like, does CBS News really matter that much anymore? And this goes for people who are defending it and those for people who are using it as a boogeyman. Like, in either case, they just don't have the power anymore in the Jews. So I appreciate that part of the story.

Well, one final thing on this is that you remember something, and actually the free press is involved in this because they did a story about it. But my old co-worker, Tony DeCouple, who hosts the CBS Morning Show, along with Gayle King, did a critical and tough interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about his book, The Message, which was about how terrible Israel is or whatever.

I mean, it wasn't even a critical and tough interview. He asked a couple tough questions. He asked a couple tough questions. Which is what you're supposed to do. Correct. It's the job.

And if it was any – like somebody had written some pro-Israel book, you would get those and I would watch it with interest and hope that there was an interesting exchange of views there. And Tony did mention that his children do live in Israel. His ex-wife is Israeli. And the shitstorm that followed was absolutely astonishing and it should have been more telling to people.

All hands on deck. Meetings.

Meetings about a guy doing a slightly critical interview. And it wasn't in 2020.

There was no outrage during the interview either.

No.

Coates is talking to him.

They have a conversation. Yeah, I mean, look, kind of honestly, Coates can handle himself. He's not complaining about it. I don't know. Maybe he did complain about it. He did after the fact. Oh, he did? Yeah, he eventually realized that this was a very bad thing.

He realized it was very good for his brand.

It was a couple of years ago only, so it wasn't at the height of the madness. And we only have to be reminded of two weeks ago when he sat down with Ezra Klein. and Ezra Klein, who right now is in a very like, I want to, you know, he wrote a thing that people got lost their minds over saying that Charlie Kirk did it the right way, the way that he engaged in politics was the correct way and he got killed for it and that should be a cause for reflection on people on the left. And I think he's right about that, all of it.

But by the way, we've asked Ezra to come on. I hope he will. I hope he will too. But just for the record, when people attack Ezra Klein so viciously on that, when he comes on this show, And I'm going to say when, because I really hope he does, is that he will be in direct opposition to about 95% of what we say, because Ezra Klein is a liberal. But he's a liberal who says, okay, we need to rethink a lot of things. And talk to people. Which is a normal, and talk to people. And 95 seems a little high.

It seems maybe a little bit high, but he's all with the progress agenda and everything. He got bucketfuls of shit, the way he talked with Ta-Nehisi Coates just last week, literally.

And the abundance stuff. I meant abundance, not progress.

But it's progress, conference, abundance.

Yeah, anyways. Let's read this one because it's Casey Chambliss. Casey, first of all, before I read this, Google my handle and the spelling of my name. Good Lord.

That's not how you do it.

That's not even close. No. Not even close. Michael Moynham? Well, if it was my full name, I get the mistake. But it's Michael Mahala, Inshallah. I hereby demand Michael Moynhan, at Michael Moynhan, do a Finkelstein voice reading and explanation of this post on We the Fifth that is this very podcast. Read the next sentence. Michael doesn't get on X enough, so this is addressed care of Matt Welch. That's a good thing she did. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have seen it.

And to be clear, we've had several emails making this exact same request.

So the tweet that he's referring to is Norman Finkelstein, who...

Legend. October 7th, on October 7th, tweeted this. And I think, by the way, that this is about Coleman, right?

No, this is about Van. Because Van got into some trouble on Reel Time this past week.

Right, right, right, right. It says, newsflash. Barry Weiss hires Van Jones to head up the CBS News Schwarzer division. Huh. That's an interesting word. Unbelievable. There is a video. We're not going to play it. There's a video of Norman Finkelstein. You should play it. Previously saying, Schwarze is basically the N-word in Yiddish. And he actually doesn't say N-word. What does he say? Well, he drops it. He doesn't give a shit. So we should play the video. He drops it. That's why you get so excited about that, don't you? No, I just play the video. You love it.

Why wouldn't we play it?

We'd be playing clips all day.

He loves the N-word almost as much as the guys who are flying the Blue Angels.

We'll cut it in in post. But he had another one. Do we have the other one? I don't think that. There's a Coleman one, too, but it's fun. But there is another one where, oh, that's Max Blumenthal says something very similar. It's funny to see how mini Van Jones, all those Negroes are the same. Is that the message we're getting? I don't know. How is he mini Van Jones? What is the commonality?

The commonality is making pro-Israel arguments in the same week, within three or four days, of Van Jones getting into exceptional trouble. Okay.

That's what it is. Mini Van Jones is because he's white. It's very likely. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that's pretty. Could be that too. I don't think he sees race in the same way you do. It could be that too. Is what I'm saying. I'm just saying.

That's the reason to mention Van Jones this week.

Yeah. Okay. This is somebody called Kim Kelly, appropriately titled Grim Kim. The Barry Weiss news is just so depressing. $150 million for hateful, toadying, slop. Meanwhile, all the best actual journalists I know are struggling to make ends meet and losing their health insurance and also not building enormous media properties. Shai Davidei, who was the Columbia professor who, you know, I think he got kicked out of campus, but he was the one, the Columbia professor that was talking about the anti-Semitism on campus, responds, I doubt that all the best actual journalists work at Teen Vogue. You might want to get to know more journalists. Kim Grim Kim Kelly says, Ew, do not speak to me, you racist piece of shit. Free Palestine. Can I say a personal thing there? I don't know this person. She used to work at Vice. Okay. She was also did like a manager, did PR for the band Anal Cunt.

She did not. She did indeed.

Huh.

Fact check that. True.

Give us, I don't know, three anal cunt song titles. I don't even know what you're talking about. I can give you one. Yeah.

Oh, my God, it's so bad.

You have to do that. Do you want to do it? You actually have to do it now. We don't care about getting monetized or anything.

By the way, they're so horribly fined up. He's not. No, the one that I was thinking. Guys, I want to apologize for this for. Wow. This is Seth Putnam.

It's 2025, not 2020.

there was one song this is the most offensive song title that I can think of any song oh my god do it this song title was oh my god Connor Clapton killed himself because his dad sucks wow that's that's so it could be worse yeah that's bad you know the you know the story there right yeah yeah There was one called I Sent Concentration Camp Footage to America's Funniest Home Videos Wow They had an album called It Gets Worse which is like kind of the truest album Oh my favorite one is Wind Chimes Are Gay I remember that song and the most matter of fact song title which I think is on the same record I Just Saw the Gayest Guy in the World which is Seth Putnam who uh the crazy thing about this guy from newton massachusetts he all the songs were like three seconds long grind core unlistenable but he had a song about somebody like having a stroke and making fun of them and he had a stroke oh and then died very young and continued to perform like in a wheelchair which he thought was quite funny to be honest so he played the bit all the way to the end but if you listen to ac which was how they were you could see but the song titles some of them i laugh for hours they're so funny but those are the most offensive ones stick in my head so anyway yeah uh hitler was a sensitive man was a good song yeah she was there uh she

was there uh something or other um i don't know how long we've been going i'm not keeping track too long but we probably have to wrap up soon we should we should um we do have more work to do tomorrow i don't know what time we're getting together um but the fifth column schwarzer should wrap this up you're not allowed to use that word yeah apparently well i mean apparently

you can it's fine no it's funny like when you learn a foreign language one of my favorite things was when you found out a really offensive word which does not sound offensive to you and you say it to people and the entire room convulses like, oh, this happened in Sweden when people would tell me a word and I'd be like, oh, that's funny. And I would say it and everyone would freak out. It just doesn't sound weird to me. So that one, I didn't grow up in a Yiddish speaking household.

Did you have the people who would tell you that the word for class was basically cunt? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they'd try to get you to say it out loud. Oh, sure, I said it every time. Yeah, yeah. And I knew it was. Yeah.

I was like, this will be funny. Don't play the dumb foreigner But yeah, I've been going for a while Alright, we'll wrap it up Alright, bye We know of new methods of attack The Trojan Horse

The Fifth Column