Emily Jasinsky (44:12)
Let's go. All right, Mark, well, you get Back to your StairMaster. Thanks for coming back on. We'll talk soon. Likewise. Incredible. He's going back to the StairMaster. Well, before we get on with the rest of the show and Mark goes to his StairMaster, did you know that chips of fries were once cooked in beef tallow until the 1990s when corporations swapped it for cheap seed oils? Now, those oils make up 20% of the average American's daily calories and are linked to inflammation and metabolic issues. Somehow that got sold as healthy. These are the types of things that send you to the StairMaster at 10:30pm But Masa Chips is flipping the script. They use just three ingredients, organic corn, sea salt and 100% grass fed beef tallow. No seed oils, just bold flavor and serious crunch. Strong enough to scoop guac without crumbling or salsa. By the way, I was experimenting with this over the weekend. Snacking on Masa is a whole different vibe. You feel satisfied, light and energized with zero crash bloat or that gross sluggish fog. It really is different. And they're so delicious. Beef tallow is the secret sauce. It helps keep you full and focused, not mindlessly munching. Favorite flavor, I really like the spicy flavor. I like the lime flavor. I really love the churro flavor. Basically, I just love Masa chips. So if you're ready to give Masa a try, go. Go to masachips.comafterparty and use code AFTERPARTY for 25% off your first order. That's masachips.comafterparty, and code AFTERPARTY for 25% OFF your first order. Don't feel like ordering online? That is totally fine. Masa is now available nationwide at your local Sprouts supermarket. So stop by and pick up a bag before they are gone on the rest on the docket for the rest of the show. Rosie O', Donnell, Donald More New York Times and J.K. rowling I think because we just left off talking with Mark in some detail about media changes, the Washington Post, the New York Times. We obviously talked to him about what Tanakasi Coates had to say in regards to Charlie Kirk. I think it's a good time to dive into this New York Times article on Charlie Kirk. I'm going to put this up on screen and what we're going to do is walk through it a bit. I mentioned a tease at the top of the show. It's a little might be a little academic. This is the type of thing I used to do with my students at the National Journalism center. But sometimes it just helps to take apart different paragraphs of an article so you can see the full picture that's very intentionally being built in a piece itself. So here it is. The headline here is the debate style that propelled Charlie Kirk's movement. And this is an attempt to deconstruct all of these different videos of Charlie Kirk over the years and try to come up with the individual pieces of the big puzzle and explain to New York Times readers how Charlie Kirk did what he did. But you'll soon see why it's worth taking issue with it. The first line Charlie Kirk may be best remembered for arguing in public. Nothing really wrong with that. But they go on to say by tackling hot button issues like abortion and trans rights, Mr. Cook created content that became perfect fodder for brand building on social media. Curated clips highlighting his wins promoted with captions describing him as destroying. Liberals have racked up tens of millions of views on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram since his assassination. Mr. Kirk has been lionized mostly by those on the right, but also by some who do not share his views as a champion of free speech and an interrogator of you points that spanned the political spectrum. And here's where they do a little, a little bit of bragging. The New York Times reviewed more than four dozen of Mr. Kirk's debates stretching back to 2017 and discussed them with four debate coaches and university professors. They say the Times review reveals how Mr. Cook used the debate to deliver a consistent hardline message while orchestrating highly shareable moments. Now what they're doing, you're already seeing it in the this paragraph is trying to make this more about style than substance. So they're trying to it's actually an interesting new Cope, I think, is probably the best way to put it that we're seeing from some on the left as they react to the legacy that Charlie Kirk leaves behind. Rather than deal with the substance of why Charlie Kirk was so impactful and influential over young Americans and over the conservative movement in the Republican Party, they are going to chalk it up to clever media techniques. And yes, Charlie Kirk was a fairly clever strategist, but I think you're going to see why this is probably more cope than anything else. So they say this genre of debate, which Mr. Kirkhoff Pioneer, is now a template that other social media personalities across the spectrum have increasingly adopted. Here's a look at how Mr. Kirk constructed his viral confrontations and. All right, well, we'll go on. I have more to say about this, but here, you see, they take out an example and their subheading is hyperbole and go to quips. This part is actually really. This part is just funny. It's also kind of weird, but they act as though it's some type of scoopy bit of information that they found four times where he referred to North African lesbian poetry. You guys needed to sit through hours of Charlie Kirk debates to bring your readers that he, like every public speaker, uses canned lines. Okay, so he used this line about North African lesbian poetry five times. He used the exact time, the exact same line in the past two years, five times. They found at least four other examples of it. He's a speaker. This is what public speakers do. And they're acting like this quote, go to quip for Charlie Kirk is some type of like, like, listen, it doesn't say this in the story, but we're talking about what they're implying and what the sort of point of the entire story is. Because don't tell me that someone at the New York Times pitched a story about how they're going to find the quips that Charlie Kirk used five times over the course of two years. No, they're trying to imply that Charlie Kirk was up to no good, that he was being intentionally manipulative rather than actually just being a good debater. They say he's engaging and subdued the audience. So they say by restraining his audience from shouting down his opponents, Mr. Kirk insulated himself from seeming like a bully to many viewers of clips shared on social media. Insulated himself from seeming like a bully. You could also just say he was not a bully. There's another way to communicate the point that you're making. But of course, the New York Times is conveying this point, which is From a reporter, by the way, this is not in the opinion section, but is conveying this point in a way to suggest that it was. It was all an act. It was all a clever manipulation. And not just that Charlie Kirk genuinely wanted to hear from other people because he was fully confident in his own beliefs and also knew, unlike readers of the New York Times, that people on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube want to see the clash of ideas, the sort of clanging noise of debate. That's actually what happens. So they go on to say Nazi analogies and playing to the crowd. This is another of their subheadings, trying to capture what made Charlie Kirk a clever strategist here and this one man, they say in this one example of the University of Tennessee, Mr. Kirk, who opposed abortion, responded by proposing a cesarean section as a better alternative and then asked the student if she knew what the procedure was. Knew what the procedure was. This is the New York Times quote, it was a tactic Mr. Kirk frequently used asking opponents to define a term so he could score easy points by making them appear uninformed if they could not. Again, that is meta as hell. And avoiding saying that Charlie Kirk, who did not go to college, was just raking these college students over the coals in the debates because they couldn't define terms like cesarean section, even though they purported to have great arguments about points about it. So as we're deconstructing this article, I hope it's becoming clear what the New York Times is trying to do. This is again, maybe a perfectly clear, a perfectly fine, acceptable piece for a lib to write in their opinion section. For this to be published under the news section of the paper by a reporter is completely insane. And you would not see treatment of somebody on the left in. In this meadow way in, because it's a cope. That's what this fundamentally is in the pages of the New York Times. So they say in the student knew what a C section was. So Mr. Kirk quickly pivoted to another common strategy by addressing allies in the crowd. This is for you guys with advice on how they should respond to the question if they ever came up in their own lives. Mr. Kirk's claim that C sections are safer than abortions is widely disputed by medical professionals. The rate of medical complications during C sections is more than four times that of abortions, according to research published. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Again, this is a New York Times fact check of posthumously of Charlie Kirk. I'm sure he would have significant rebuttals. What the New York Times is saying right there. They say later in this debate with the same student, Mr. Kirk shifted to more extreme rhetoric, calling abortion, quote, worse than the Holocaust. Then they cite a professor of rhetoric at Southern Methodist University saying, quote, discussing forbidden topics and upholding forbidden arguments, quote, is a muscular and emotionally resonant strategy to which Mr. Kirk regularly returned. A strategy? I mean, you have to be kidding. Kidding. You have to be kidding. Of course, it might have been part of a strategy, but on the left, we would. In the media, people would take that as what they. As their sincerely held beliefs. I'm telling you, somebody on the right, that is the sincerely held belief of many, many people on the right. They're not people that the New York Times often comes into contact with, but they are real people with real views and beliefs and even in death. The New York Times is publishing an article in which they're posthumously analyzing all of this as a clever strategy more than it was these sincerely held beliefs of Charlie Kirk. So I say after more back and forth, Mr. Kirk later, rhetorical trap. When the student replied human to his question about what species an embryo is, he claimed victory, saying that implied embryos deserve human rights. Again, do they listen to themselves? Seriously, do they listen to themselves? They're chalking this up to a rhetorical trap rather than just allowing it to be Charlie Kirk believing he had won an argument and Charlie Kirk's allies believing he had won an argument. Because if you look logically at what the student just said, which is that an embryo is part of the human species. Again, we don't often hear that in the pages of the New York Times, not from the opinion side, not from the news side. But it's possible also that, that Charlie Kirk maybe just won some of these debates and it wasn't a dark op, it was just him being better at debating despite the fact that he did not go to college. Now we just, we're seeing a lot of this stuff repeated over and over again. They quote, a professor of speech and debate who says this approach is trying to, quote, trivialize his opponents as an out of touch member of the elite while, quote, increasing his own ethos as the defender of the rich, regular working class people. Because he once accused his opponent in a debate of insulting, quote, the working poor by suggesting there's a correlation between poverty and violent crime. So just over and over again, rinse and repeat, same time, just, it just keeps going. More of these, more of these quotes that we've seen taken out of context about the Civil Rights Act. The New York Times I think does a slightly better job. A slightly better job treating it with more context. Still not great. But they also at this point talk about a debate that Kirk was winning with a student. And they say because his opponent was unable to fact check Mr. Kirk in real time, she was forced to concede and debate in a framework that was no longer grounded in reality. Well, was he fact checking in real time? They're acting like because she didn't have her laptop up and was able to fact check in real time. But that Charlie Kirk, she, she approached Charlie Kirk, she had all the time in the world to prepare to have a good answer for this question, just as he prepared to have an answer for the question. So again, like, it just, it's cope over and over again. They next accuse him of unprovable generalizations. Basically, you get the point of all of this. There's, there's really no read, no need to, to read the article. But they, they end by saying debate videos are now a widespread source of entertainment information, but particularly for members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Yes, yes. Because they don't get this in the pages of the New York Times and they certainly didn't until relatively recently. But that is something that Charlie Kirk strategically was smart about understanding. And I saw this happen from behind the scenes. I've mentioned this before. My first job out of college was working with a group called Young America's foundation that was sending Ben Shapiro to campuses after particularly. What sticks out in my mind is you may not remember this, but there were. There was a really nasty dust up at the University of Missouri that I think ultimately led to their enrollment numbers going down significantly, at least for several years. I haven't checked back on that. Lots of schools are losing enrollment, but this seemed to be a pretty clear correlation. And we sent Ben Shapiro to that campus with a camera crew and we're starting to clip this stuff for social media. And Ben was really eagerly debating people, particularly on the left. And then he started doing that at more and more schools. And people like Charlie Kirk learned from that about the appetite for moral clarity and debate. I've said this a bunch of times, but what the New York Times here is accusing him of doing is having a sense of moral clarity on a lot of issues that other people are sort of timid about. And that's another thing I wanted to say about the TA Nehisi Coates quote calling Charlie Kirk a hate monger. A hate monger. First of all, Ta Nehisi Coates is a terrible leftist. Leftist to say that in corporate media. Listen, yes, he doesn't need me conservative to call him a terrible leftist, but I genuinely mean that because he is encouraging the division of working class people, middle class people, along racial and gender lines. And that should be anathema to anybody who cares about the material circumstances of the middle class and the working class. These are often distractions. This idea that that Charlie Kirk was necessarily a hate monger is more divisive. And if you're a leftist, you should see that as something that is dividing people from being able to come to the table on questions of material prosperity. Maybe you would also say that Charlie Kirk did that, but I'm talking about TA Nehisi Coates here who purports to be a leftist. So that's part A, part B gets to why this continues to happen, which is that Charlie Kirk saw the examples of other conservatives who went before him and had very timid conversations. I mean, think about how many people on the right Republicans reacted to the Duke Lacrosse case. People were terrified in real time to other than Stephen Miller, who by the way, I think there are clips of him on Fox News at the time talking about the Duke Lacrosse case. How's that for full circle? But people were timid and many, many, I mean Mitt Romney was, I would say probably one of the more timid voices in a very racially fraught time period, 2012 on that campaign. And Joe Biden still came out and said that Republicans want to put y' all back in chains. Mitt Romney was accused of being a racist and people like Charlie Kirk saw that and realized that their arguments were going to be called racist no matter how they were packaged. And so they realized also that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are swimmin coming in a a pool of information that is from varying sources. It's hard to, to parse through. It's just sort of everyone's adrift in the information sea and, and in the argument C and what people value is those who come to the table and make their arguments are boldly leaning into it, whether they're on the left and the right. Because as Mark said earlier in the show, that allows you to compare right and left. A right wing voice, a left wing voice. And you can say, well, well in this case this guy's wrong. In that case that guy is wrong. But you've had the opportunity to compare and contrast. And yes, it's true that Charlie Kirk understood that Gen Z was interested in that kind of content and actually that a lot of Americans are interested in in that kind of content. But to act as though he was an evil genius engineering it specifically like he was the, the Monsanto, engineering these crops of argumentation is completely insane. And it is a cope that I'm increasingly seeing on the left so that they don't have to reckon with why Charlie Kirk was winning so many of those arguments and winning over when you look at polling, particularly young men. But we have seen shifts towards the Republican Party and shift towards cultural conservatism on many different issues. And rather than, I think at first there was this moment. Ezra Klein's initial column was a good example. And what he's been doing over the last couple of years by talking to people on the right is a good example. There's this initial reaction that this young man was doing something laudable by going out to campuses and having these conversations where he brought the people who disagreed with him to the front of the line and sent these debates bopping around the Internet so that people could make up their minds for themselves. And that has now evolved into him basically, basically being only successful because he was some type of strategic genius and not actually somebody who was making good arguments and doing it in a way that the audience felt was helpful. So those are some thoughts on that insane New York Times article. For some levity, I thought we would listen to Rosie o' Donnell talk about publicly about conversations she has with her therapist on Nicole Wallace's podcast, which I believe believe hilariously is called the Best people. You can't make this stuff up. Let's go ahead and roll the clip.
