← After Party with Emily Jashinsky
After Party with Emily Jashinsky
Kimmel Returns, Kamala’s Unwelcome Comeback, and Trump Takes on Antifa, w/ David Weigel and Andy Ngo
01:29:03
Emily Jashinsky is joined by Andy Ngo, Editor-at-large for The Post Millennial and author of Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, on the breaking news President Trump has signed an executive order designating Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist’ group. The two dive into the history of Antifa, where its money and organization come from, what Trump’s order really does, the SLPC, and the rise of so-called “Tran-Tifa.” Then Emily is joined by David Weigel, Politics Reporter at Semafor. They discuss news that ABC is allowing Jimmy Kimmel’s show to return, why it’s happening, plus Rep Jasmine Crockett saying she’s disappointed in her white Democratic colleagues who voted to honor Charlie Kirk. Then the pair talks about Kamala Harris’ new book that’s out this week, why the former VP is really so unkind to Biden in the book, the chances AOC could run for President or take over as Senate Democratic leader, PLUS Charlie Kirk’s legacy. Emily rounds out the program with a...
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Welcome to After Party, everyone. We are following a couple of breaking news stories tonight. The first, of course, is that Jimmy Kimmel is back. Kind of maybe hard to say as of right now exactly what the fate of Jimmy Kimmel will be. But stay tuned. We're going to break down the new details. Kamala Harris is actually live right now on Rachel Maddow show or was just live on Rachel Maddow Show. So we're also going to be joined by Dave Weigel of Semaphore to break down some of what Kamala Harris said as she is shilling her new book across the country. And we will be covering a little bit more from the Charlie Kirk Memorial and potentially news on whether Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wants to run for president or could run for president. I don't know. Who knows? Remember, we're also now doing a really cool audio only edition of the show. So if you subscribe on Apple and Spotify, you get Happy Hour where I answer all of your questions from email and Instagram. DMs had a ton of fun last week and actually a really great response. So thanks to all of you guys. We will be doing that on a weekly basis. So send your questions in so that we can make sure to get them in the show. But first, tonight, the president signed just hours ago an anti antifa executive order. And we are privileged to be joined now by perhaps the world's preeminent expert on antifa, Andy Ngo. Andy Ngo is an editor at large over at the Post Millennial. He has a substack called no Comment, of course spelled N G O comet, and also a great book called Unmasked about his long coverage of antifa and the movement. So Andy, this is a really busy day, a really bus week for you. Appreciate you being here.
- [02:56]
C
Thank you so much for having me on for the first time.
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B
Of course. It's great to have you especially on tonight. I want to get your initial reaction to the Executive Order, which reads, quote, I hereby designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. All relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt and dismantle any and all illegal operations, especially those involving terrorist actions conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support. Almost done. Including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions against those who fund such operations. Andy, I wanted to read that meaty section of the text from the Executive Order because I think some of the legal particulars here are important. You have yourself written just in the last week. At the end of the day, any executive declaration labeling Antifa a terrorist organization is symbolic. Trump already did it in 2020 when the riots erupted. It's not all bad news, though. The courts have interpreted the First Amendment to bar U.S. and local governments from banning domestic groups based on ideology. Free federal terrorism laws banning membership or material support only apply to foreign terror organizations. And then you go on to say you could end up with more uses of rico, for example, to target these antifa groups. So do you agree with that? Take now, actually, having seen the text of the eo, what do you make of all of this right now?
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C
Well, I think the executive order shows that he meant the statement that was on Truth Social. So the difference is five years ago in May 2020, when the BLM Antifa riots were first breaking out after George Floyd died, Trump made a very similar statement on Twitter. At that time I am declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. And then that was that there was no executive order. And crucially, there was no steps taken, as far as I know by then, Attorney General Barr, to actually dismantle some of these networks that were engaging in real time violence in Portland against federal property, might I add, in an organized criminal manner. So what I like about this executive order is that how it defines ANTIFA is actually very clear and anarchist, anti government ideology, violent extremist movement. And then it goes on. All the things that you just read out which are important and there's to tackle Antifa, to try to dismantle them at a government level is it's going to be difficult because as you said, it's going to come up immediately. The opponents of any efforts to go after Antifa are going to bring up First Amendment type of arguments which are disingenuous, I think, because first of all, Trump has not stated that he's directing the DOJ to go after people for adhering to an antifa ideology. That part is protected. In fact, I see a common response from the left is oh, but what about the kkk? How come they aren't, how come they aren't banned or declared a domestic terrorist organization? Because I mean there's a reason why Obama and Biden didn't do that. It you in the US no government can ban a domestic group. It's considered freedom association there. That's why neo Nazi groups that are involved in organized criminality, they aren't banned. The people who are prosecuted for, are prosecuted for assault or murder, those type of charges. I think the deception of antifa that's been quite effective all these years, I mean it's reach all the way up to Biden is that antifa is just an ideology. And then it stops at that. In terms of people who say that line when there's much more, it is ideology, but it's also, there's organizing involved. And how that ideology manifests in the individual varies a lot. There are those who are individually radicalized because of the propaganda that's put out on blogs, on websites, on social media. And then there are those who because of that radicalization process, get involved in a local group or local cell. And then there are quite formalized groups as well that exist. People always deny their existence. I don't know why. Oh, I do know why they're lying. Ro City Antifa is one. That's the one in Portland. In fact, the people watching, listening now can Google Rose City Antifa website, go on it and look at the Q and A section and it provides information about how to reach out if you're interested in joining. They describe themselves as an organization. Road City Antifa is just one cell amongst many in the Torch Antifa network. So Antifa is better thought of as all of the above ideology, organizations, networks and individuals. I always make the comparison to radical Islam because we have a longer history of that in terms of terrorism. You know, there are individuals in the U.S. let's just say, who have gone, gone to Syria or Iraq in the past and received training with Al Qaeda or Al Shabad in Somalia or ISIS and have come back without training to radicalize others and recruit or carry out terrorist attacks abroad. And then there are many young radicalized Muslims who consumed the ISIS propaganda about a decade ago, simply online at that time. ISIS had many accounts on Twitter at that time. People forget that. I still remember those days. You can consume that propaganda very easily online. And then they would get access to firearms and just carry out a violent direct action. On their own. And there's been a number of those attacks or with firearms or with the car. So you can think of antifa as being organized in that same type of way. It varies a whole lot. And I've been pressing that what needs to happen next is that. And actually I had a report that came on the post Millennial today. According to a source, the intelligence community right now is working on establishing the international links to the American antifa so that they can give a formal recommendation to the State Department to declare the international antifa a FTO foreign terrorist organization. Now, that is an actual designation that's in the law, in the federal legislation. Most of the terrorism legislation comes in the post 911 context. It is a bit outdated, but the framework of that is international terrorism. So the American antifa do maintain links with their Canadian, European counterparts where tactics and methods of attacks are shared, targets are shared as well. Government officials, infrastructures, individuals, and those who carry out attacks are praised within these networks. So the State Department ultimately is the one who will make the call on a, on if it will declare antifa foreign terrorist organization. But if it does that, then the foreign international part is taken care of in the law. Domestically, that's where it's more challenging. And I think that the US DOJ can look to what's happened at the state level, where some places have actually been very effective at breaking up one cell in particular.
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B
Yeah. Could you give us an example? Because I saw you mentioning that, and it seems like a pretty clear blueprint.
- [11:03]
C
Yeah. So this, it was out of San Diego last year when it went to trial, and it got no national attention, none at all. I think myself and my colleague were the only ones who were reporting on it. So SoCal Antifa were accused of carrying out a violent attack on Trump supporters in January 2021 in Pacific Beach, San Diego. And immediately federal prosecutors recognized that there was an organized element to what had just happened. Like people in the public were beaten with weapons, police were assaulted, even a dog got assaulted. It was very violent what had happened. And ultimately 12 people were charged with felony conspiracy. And the prosecutors and the evidence came out at trial because most of them took plea deals, but two did not, and he went to trial. So all the evidence came out, the signal chats, the attempts to intimidate the witnesses, how they met together before the riot, how they planned it, how they who was bringing what, who was driving, who was going to help be the getaway car, all of that came out at trial. And the. The two on trial were convicted by the jury and all 12 got either local jail time or state prison, which is really. And two year prison sentence was the longest. That was really the longest that could be given under California legal guidance on sentencing. But still it revealed that there was one cell that existed. These were the members. This was a conspiracy. There were convictions, and that cell was effectively dismantled. And when the charges first came out in 2021, I know that it really rattled Antifa broadly, because I had already been tracking what they say online for quite a long time. And since then they've moved even further underground in how they organize. So a lot of these formalized antifa groups, I named a few earlier, Rose City Antifa, others in the Torch antifa network, they've been quiet for actually a few years. I think they recognize that there's a potential vulnerability in putting their name and logo on flyers for direct actions that they organize and call for.
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B
I wanted to ask you about that, Andy, actually, because it's a really interesting point based on the text on the eo. I'm sorry to interrupt because I was thinking as you were talking, actually, that with this executive order, because Antifa itself isn't like, for example, the Sinaloa cartel, it's sort of intentionally hard to, you know, pin down. You're like playing whack a mole if you're trying to catch antifa. So I guess how many cells like Rose City Antifa exist and to what extent might they be able to evade the consequences of this designation by, I don't know, maybe just going with different names and completely underground? Is there a lot of room for them to kind of wiggle beneath the surface still?
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C
Huge room. You bring it up right away, names. A lot of the antifa groups that are in the network and antifa adjacent groups like allies, co conspirators, they don't even have Antifa in the organizing name. I'm trying to think, here's a good example in. In 2020, in Portland and Seattle, the group that was involved, the antifa group that was involved in organizing the nightly riots that as it went on for months and months, every night, that was primarily the Youth Liberation Front, which was an antifa group. It was just. That was the name they used and it didn't have the Antifa name in it. But if you looked at, for example, when they would riot, they would also write graffiti and so they would mark all the antifa symbols. So it does take a little bit of work in that you have to look slightly below the top layer. And also it would be easy for Some of these violent extremists to stop using the symbolisms. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing them not using the iron front three arrow symbols or the black flag and the red flag together out of just maybe some fear. At the same time there exists very large networks of what I call antifa legal groups. These are registered non profits. A lot of them get funding through Soros philanthropic arm. It funnels down to some of these legal groups and what they do and.
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B
That would be something like national bail fund network that goes. They get money through Tides which gets money through what Open society. And then you have like the SPLC which gives that.
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C
Yeah, so that's, that's all of these serve a particular function like SPLC is within I would argue like the propaganda part of the antifa apparatus. Like they put out essentially the hit list. Like they're. When they create these hate list hate watch lists and have individuals who are on the right on the mainstream comparable to like the kkk. Like that's part of the dehumanization and demonization process. Other particular targets I've been in target of that unfortunately. So it does.
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B
Was Charlie Kirk a target of that?
- [16:21]
C
Do you know Andy by the splc? I'm not sure actually that's a good question that I know Michael Knowles was Jack Posobic. Many peoples who were in the Charlie Cook sphere let's say or even you know, attended the memorial or spoke at the memorial. So yeah, the targeting through the propaganda is very important and also to lie about the nature of far left violent extremism as well. Because antifa really only thrive in. Within a liberal context or democratic power context like in, in Oregon or Washington state. Because then you know they have judges that are sympathetic to the left wing cause district attorneys which that's very catastrophic. Many district attorneys we've learned through the years were their campaigns were supported through George Soros funding. And so like all that is part of the apparatus. It might not have the label of antifa on it but it's connected. And then so going back to this executive order you see the administration is going to have to be really creative and I think with the limited time, the limited resources that are there really they should focus on, on dismantling the networks when they are involved in the riots. Because like that's in front of your face, you know. And so far going back to Portland there's been riots now for months since the summer outside the ICE facility that's been organized by antifa. And the Portland police stopped making arrests Back in June. Whereas the violence, violence is continuing every day. One of my friends and colleagues was just assaulted on Saturday night. Katie Davis Corps and Charlie Bou Farage right outside the facility. This person in black, fully covered went up try to rob their camera equipment and sprayed bear mace in their faces to blind them. So this type of violence has been going on for a long time. I think there's been more than 26 individuals who have been federally charge so far in relation to the Portland ICE attacks and none of them have been charged with conspiracy. They're charged with felony assault, unlawful use of an explosive device, felony assault on a federal officer, trespass. So like a whole list of crimes that you would expect from rioting, but none, none that would really kind of get to the heart of why it's ongoing.
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B
Yeah, that's okay. So that's also a really interesting point because I'm thinking of as you were discussing earlier, there's no conspiracy charge. It's not illegal to conspire for the cause of a non violent ideology. But what we've seen in the past is for example the FBI, I think it was the FBI, it may have been the ATF selling like Randy Weaver a sawed off shotgun to rope him into some, some illegal activity because they disliked the nonviolent ideology. But the difference in this case, Andy, is that you're talking about a well organized paramilitary group essentially and a formal formally organized paramilitary group essentially that is difficult to pin down for reasons that are by their own design. And some of that is these like left wing nonprofits. You were just explaining this, but it's so complicated that it would help also to just go deeper into it. It's, it's the left wing nonprofits that are getting money from other left wing nonprofits that are supporting the activities of Antifa. And then there are the cells themselves which are sort of formally or organized by actual antifa. I don't know if we can call them activists, criminals, disruptors, militants. Militants. So that's, that's sort of, it's almost. Is it two categories, would you say it?
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C
I would say there's different stratas of it. When, like when people think of my reporting in Antifa, I have focus on those who are the violent ones on the ground. But that's only one small part of them. And even at their sort of at their peak, largest numbers, which I would say were like in 2020, they, in the city where they have the most militants who are like that part of that inner group, there would be hundreds, which is a lot. And they can do huge amounts of damage very quickly, moving as a mob, quickly weaving in and out of the streets and smashing up windows and throwing in Molotov cocktails and other explosive devices. A small number can do huge damage, and they did that. But there's these other different layers. And I would actually argue they're kind of like concentric circles in some ways. You know, like even left wing mainstream media serves a function for the antifa ideology. And they do maintain ties, some of them to journalists who work in legacy media and MSNBC or Vice or Vox or Daily Beast, any of those places, because headlines from those places have really wide reach. And it's been very effective. You can see the liberal response immediately when Trump did the truth social post was that there is no antifa. It's made up, it doesn't exist. Like immediately they say that. And that's because they've been conditioned through the years from the lies from these left wing publications. So you have that, you have the non profits and the funding that goes to the nonprofits. A lot of it comes from Soros, but a lot of the funding is just through what they call mutual aid, which are these allied groups that provide essentially support in different ways, food, housing, legal aid, bail money. And that's a lot of, most of that's done through crowdfunding. They're really effective on it. They use all the platforms out in the open. You can see the campaigns. Like in Portland, there was, I think it was Go GoFundMe that was used for one of the main, the Portland Bail Fund that raised like almost a million dollars. And that was.
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B
Didn't Kamala Harris post a link to.
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C
The one in Minnesota, Minnesota Freedom Fund? Yeah, so that, that was, that's an example of a mutual aid group, nonprofit that's within this serves an auxiliary role to antifa. You know, they might not themselves say they're an antifa group, but they function to benefit antifa. So it's all, all radical left and their networks are huge. And they may have different agendas and goals, but they have a shared enemy. And that's for law and order, it's for conservatives. They collapse all of that under this label of fascism and far right. So they make no distinction between a neo Nazi versus a Charlie Cook. All of them are worthy of death, which is why you can see the reaction that existed on the left after he was murdered.
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B
Speaking of that, actually. Yeah, just as you were talking, it occurred to me I should just look up what the Southern Poverty Law center had to say. About Turning Point USA. And this is just from May. Turning Point USA's primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ + community and civil rights activists. This is under the tab on their website dismantling white supremacy. So, Andy, this also brings us to the question du jour that the chattering class has been tossing around like a football. Is there an equivalence between the left and the right when it comes to incitement of violence and then violence itself? People are throwing around different numbers. I want to say my old editor Tim Carney over the Washington examiner did a great job today fisking some of the studies that have left out all kinds of left wing violence to come to the conclusion that the right is more violent. But the fact that this even exists on the website of the Southern Poverty Law center, which I would say until a couple of years ago was considered mainstream, was enormously influential. You could probably still argue that is considered mainstream, was driving media coverage constantly. The fact that this exists, I think tells you a lot about what comes from powerful, quote, mainstream people or groups when they're on the left, but considered sort of neutral actors like the splc, which is laughable.
- [25:14]
C
Yeah. You know, the SPLC has a very checkered history that people seem to forget because the mainstream media didn't report on it very much. But they were subject to past employees who sued them over allegations that the nonprofit was systemically racist and sexist, actually, and they settled with those who sued. So we don't, we don't know what evidence could have existed, you know, if it had gone to trial. They just settled. They sit on half a billion dollars in endowment. That's how much money, how much money they have. It really blew up in terms of donations for them, like immediately in November 2016 when Trump won. Because then immediately the whole media machine propaganda was us had elected a white supremacist, a fascist, and not the same lies that were told last year. But back then there was like that spurred a lot of funding donations that went to splc. Huge one.
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B
And big corporate donations. I think it was like Apple at the time.
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C
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So all levels of influence on, on the left amongst liberals donated to some of these non profits. And I. It's a red herring. I think when Democrats and those on the left are bringing up misleading studies or research projects that purport to try to find out, oh, who's more violent, it's a red herring because the, the question really shouldn't be who's more evil than who. Like violent extremists on the far right, violent extremists on the far left. I feel when they say, oh, the other side has a more higher body count, it's just uses deflection. That's 1.2 the methodology of these studies, if you want to call it that, most of them are done by counter extremism groups that are quite liberal or the researchers themselves are quite liberal on the left or even activist groups, ones that have a particular agenda against the American political right. And you can define left wing extremists in a particular way that it omits really key and big data points. For example, in a lot of these research, so called research projects, they will omit the violence that occurred, the deaths that occurred in the course of the BLM rise and they'll argue, well you know, the person, there was a person who died in the course of the riot, but there's no evidence that they were killed for a political reason. So you know, you can define in a way, okay, how convenient you just omit several dozens who were killed. Some. A lot of the politically motivated violence that happens is complicated and multi, very multifaceted and that does not fit conveniently into left or right. For example, there have been a number of black nationalists who have carried out deadly attacks. Several years ago in Jersey City, black nationalist man and woman killed some Jewish people. In 2021, pretty soon after the 6th of January, there was a car ramming attack on the Capitol building where an officer was killed and that was by a man who was strong, was in the Nation of Islam and expressed black nationalist sentiment. And there's many other examples. In 2016 at a BLM, maybe it was 2015 BLM protests in Dallas, there were five police officers, officers who were shot dead by a black nationalist man. So all these killings that I just named, they aren't included in the left wing violence like they. So they define it in such a, you know, left or right in a way that really is so narrowly defined on the left, but on the right it's like quite wide to the point of where let's they. I've even seen them include examples of where let's say the assailant is white, the victim is black, and there was no evidence at all any of that was racially politically motivated. But because of that racial dynamic they included it as an example of like right wing violence. Or they will highlight that maybe that person's social media was pro Trump and suggests that therefore that, that that interaction was because of racial animosity. So anyways, my bigger point is all these charts and graphs that you're seeing floating out there are misleading at best and I would say at worst they're, they're disinformation. And then the other question is is this a game about like who kills more than who? Which side kills more than which side? Because I think the problem is any, it's the violent extremism. And you can have violent extremism that doesn't result in deaths but is still extremely dangerous. Maimings, injuries, billions of dollars in damage to the economy. Like so those are other important variables that you have to consider. And these, these research papers, they're not even research papers, they're just published by think tanks. They're. They're misleading and easily and easily sort.
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B
Of manipulated to be misleading. Andy, I want to hear more especially in the wake of, of what happened to Charlie Kirk about quote tran tifa because when Charlie Kirk was shot dead he was being asked a question about transgender identifying mass shooters and you posted recently I've been warning for a long time that leftist trans people are being radicalized openly into carrying out acts of ultra violence. All of the trans propaganda is about disembodeling, slitting throats and shooting dead those who oppose their agenda. If you could flesh out some of what you see as the link here, that would be great, especially in light of obviously we know what happened sadly in Minneapolis at the back to school Mass where two little kids were shot in a mass shooting. Many people were injured. Those kids were. Those kids passed. And then you have shortly after that Tyler Robinson shooting Charlie Kirk connected apparently to a trans roommate slash lover. Both of them seem to be into the world of God forbid I say this furries, what's going on with this?
- [31:56]
C
So five years ago during the BLM Antifa riots I immediately noticed that there was something weird going on in that disproportionately those who are being arrested in Portland as well as other cities I mentioned Portland just because the riots went on for so long that and I every night I would request the public records of who were being arrested, names, accused crimes and photos and I would look into them and then I was finding but disproportionately they were gender diverse. I'll say that and that that is an umbrella term to include people who are non binary and trans and any of these identities around gender. Some nights it was like 15% of arrestees who were as and it would go up as high as a third. You know, it's like this is a really interesting phenomenon. I mentioned it briefly in my book Unmasked. At that time it was just sort of like a pat, not a passing observance, but it was like, hey, there's a bit more to that. So Antifa and I would say the radical left, they are very context and time specific in how they mobilize people and radicalize people and recruit. So for more than half a decade they had BLM as a messaging amplifying lies about racial grievances, lies about police brutality, using that with references to history, slavery and Jim Crow era to really try to radicalize many liberals. And there's. I've seen it so many times in, in those who have been convicted at the riots. This sort of pipeline like beginning of their university. They were campaigning for Democrats and all that. And then they would join DSA and then eventually they would join Antifa like this gradual moving further and further left and it would start with those who are supporters of Democrats and. But BLM has had some catastrophic PR moments in the scandals financially even to the point like where those who are sympathetic in support of a blm, they, they heard about you, you know, the how, how the money was wasted and used to really just enrich organizers like there was. You can look, there's been no better outcome for, for black people in any of these cities where BLM was very active, in cities where city council would defund police or cut back funding on police who support racial justice causes. It's like crimes, violent crimes went up, more black people died. So the grievance that Antifa and the violent far left are really focused on has been around trans. And they will say that like in the last five years the efforts by various conservative states to pass laws that would limit or ban transitioning of minors in the state, for example, they would bring that up protests and criticisms of so called family friendly drug events. They would view that as an event. And the lies they use is there's a genocide going on. So it's many. It's. The themes of the BLM lives are very, it's similar to those of BLM lives. It's just now the target of the victim is different. So talk about trans genocide and trans.
- [35:27]
B
People being killed for being trans in hate crimes against the transgender community, which is not what the metrics really show.
- [35:35]
C
Yeah, so like back in 2019, I remember every year the Human Rights campaign and many Democrats kept, they kept bringing up this thing about Trans Day of Remembrance because there was transgender side going on. And I would look into that, like, there would be an average of between 25 to 35 trans homicide a year in the US in a country of 360 million. So with the number that small, I could actually dig into each case. Like, okay, case by case, what was the circumstances? Over and over, it was a black sex worker where the suspect or the convict of the murder was a black male. And these were people engaged in street sex work. And that, that is a type of work that is dangerous for anybody involved in it.
- [36:22]
B
You know, just extremely sad stories too.
- [36:25]
C
Yeah. So, but that wasn't evidence of a genocide happening. And, but nevertheless, it's. It's about narrative. And those lies have been mainstreamed. Not just mainstream, but the reaction from those, the trans activists has been to urge violence against those who they view are against trans rights. And they're not subtle about it at all. At all of these trans demonstrations and protests, you'll see that they will often brandish weapons, carry weapons. They'll wear signs, they'll wear shirts and hold placards and signs that say things like protect trans kids. And then there's an image of a knife or the Minnesota Attorney General.
- [37:14]
B
Right. Isn't that what the Minnesota.
- [37:18]
C
Governor. That's right. She wore that shirt with the knife on it at a press, press oppressor announcing that Minnesota was a sanctuary state for, for trans kids. And there was no social pushback at all. So when you create this environment where that type of violent extremism is normalized, you're going to have people that celebrate assassinations, as we see, you know, and going back to like, that data of like, right versus left violence. I think part of that research needs to look into how welcomed is those acts, those killings, because, like, that is indicative, I think, of something much more dangerous of where the culture is moving in, because there's always going to be isolated incidents of hate crimes or violent homicides that have some type of hate motive. But, like, if those individuals who carry out those ideologically politically motivated attacks are celebrated and treated as heroes within the wider culture, like, like that's the bigger wtf, what's going on? And I don't think the right at this point has a cult of personality around killers. You know, some people make comparisons with Kyle Rittenhouse. It's not, it's not fair to compare Kyle Rittenhouse with Tyler Robinson, for example. Completely different scenarios. Rittenhouse was, was viewed as a hero because he was somebody, a teenage boy who was under attack and under physical attack by adults and fired in self defense. And he was put through the fire. I mean, he was prosecuted and went all the way to trial and he was facing murder charges and many, many years in prison and he was acquitted. You know, it wasn't somebody, I, I struggle to think of examples on the right where somebody who's assassinated for a right wing cause has been treated as a hero.
- [39:29]
B
Yeah. And I think that says a lot, Andy, just in and of itself. Andy, this has been fascinating in your book Unmasked. If people haven't checked it out, they absolutely should. We appreciate you being here at such a busy time and appreciate your, your insights in your reporting. Andy, no Substack is no comment. Ngo comment. And his book is Unmasked. And he's an editor at large at the Post Millennial. So, Andy, thanks for joining us.
- [39:57]
C
My pleasure. Thank you.
- [39:59]
B
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- [41:15]
A
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- [41:42]
B
All right. I'm joined now by Dave Weigel, who Is politics reporter at semafor. Dave, when did you leave Antifa? When was your last. I'm not kidding.
- [41:51]
A
Oh, you're not. You're not supposed to say.
- [41:53]
B
I know, you're right.
- [41:53]
A
There's an oath you swear. You and Andy, I think, just dealt with that. Yeah, you're right.
- [41:57]
B
I shouldn't have said it. I shouldn't have said it. And now I know what's coming from me. My card has been revoked. Well, we have breaking news tonight, which is that Jimmy Kimmel is maybe back on the air. I think we can put this statement from Disney up on the screen, which they released this afternoon. Disney said, we're going to bring Jimmy Kimmel back Tuesday night. And then Sinclair announced that its affiliates would not be airing Kimmel. It's unclear right now what nextar will do, but Donald Trump and well, I shouldn't say Trump, but Trump World is sort of framing this as local stations, many of which, Dave, you know, because you've been around the country, are responsive to much more pro Kirk audiences standing up to Hollywood, standing up to big media. That's what a source close to the FCC told me and the deal told me recently. So what do you make of that dynamic that Trump World is running with that here we have Sinclair and the little guys standing up to Disney and big Hollywood.
- [43:01]
A
It's very convenient that this is populism, rhetoric and rapping around what is essentially a good deal for a large corporations. And Sinclair is not the biggest media corporation, but it owns hundreds of TV stations. It wants to acquire more. It's not doing it in the same splashy way that NextStar was one big acquisition. It's adding them all the time. And so I guess I'd do that if I was them. Carr has not admitted a mistake, but that's probably a better line for him to go down than easy way or the hard way. I think that's already infamous. The extent that anything can last a news cycle. I think the way that Carr presented that has lasted. It is a mnemonic for people who think that the administration is leaning on companies to go easy on the president. But that's when they frame it like that. And they got very, very emotional after the Charlie Kirk assassination, which I understand when they frame it like that, they do open it up to these, these calls of censorship and you can thread things together and say, well, it follows that a president who's sanctioning law firms in suit him wants to knock media companies out of their perch if they're not nice to him. He's, he's giving a lot of ground to the libs on this one, I think, in the way he's presented it.
- [44:16]
B
Interesting, because on the right, and I know you've seen this, like immediately Benny Johnson ran with, you know, we got Jimmy Kimmel fired or something like that. I'm paraphrasing him because we don't know that Kimmel actually was fired. It looks like he never was fired, but was always indefinitely hanging in suspension limbo. But the right has seen this as a huge rallying cry. Many of them, my friends, honestly, Ted Cruz sort of dissented from it. But people were saying this public interest, interest standard has existed forever. The FCC just never uses it. And hey, you know, if the, the networks are going to be biased towards conservatives for years with no threats, what's a little threat after, you know, a pretty, a pretty tasteless joke by Jimmy Kimmel. And so it's playing out very differently in Trump circles which see this as sort of like the, the thing that was wrong with the old right is that they wouldn't have pushed this leverage.
- [45:07]
A
No, that has been the discourse. Do you want to be a libertarian who doesn't change the way the government works and doesn't use power to reorder things, or do you want to be a national conservative who does? That makes sense. The hypocrisy that people are pointing out from liberals though, was really about the way that liberals pursue this. They do not. And maybe they don't need to lean on the FCC in the same way or on companies saying we had to cover them fairly. They had a monopoly on, let's say, the dominant pop culture for a long time. But what did they have to police speech? It was boycott campaigns, color change, move on to an extent, Media Matters. It was these groups that conservatives did not cheer that on when they had the power like Elon Musk or I guess the money. They would sue and call that collusion. But I hate First Amendment debates when they're the dumb version that the First Amendment means I don't get to never be on tv. There just was a left wing sort of group cancellation, which was organized people in an online, a little bit in public. The biggest failure in this regard, I guess, was trying to cancel Netflix over Dave Chappelle. Just organize people, but don't lean on them in a government way because that's going to get out. And this is a thing that liberals had in power. As much as people can go back to the examples of liberals using their power, like the IRS scandal under Lois Lerner. But they didn't come out and go on a podcast and say, there's this great woman named Lois Lerner and she's going to deny groups their tax status. Because we don't like it when conservative groups are unfair to us. Like, they, they, they were just, they had the advantage of assuming that the media was going their way and culture was going their way, but they didn't lean in the same way. And that's still what I'm wondering, wondering in the, in the shakeout if it looks like the Trump administration is using its power to lean on the media. There's natural, I think there's a natural, not just libertarian, but American backlash to that. Don't tell me what to watch.
- [47:02]
B
Yeah, that's interesting because it's not as though, right. There weren't broadcast licenses being threatened in this, like, specific sense. There was a. Yeah, I think that's interesting signs.
- [47:14]
A
The Telecommunications Act. It's there. There are, when liberals want to go after Fox News, they have color change and these other groups do it. They don't have, they don't say, Barack Obama, can you please break up Fox News and break up News Corp and take away new Burdock citizenship or whatever. They might now they've gotten a lot more.
- [47:29]
B
And they might spy on the Fox reporters like James Rosen and actually James Risen, too. They might do a little of that.
- [47:34]
A
But again, not say it in public. This is the, this is the rare case of something that is said in public being more interesting than the thing that is said secretly. Because, yeah, Carr wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC and he's said various things about this over the years, but that just seemed that I'm stuck on that because I'm pretty capacious when it comes to let's like, let's just fight out what different media are, are saying. Let's just have it out without censoring them. And that left a bad taste for me. I can imagine if President Jamie Pritzker or whatever has an FCC chair doing that, I can imagine the backlash. I would support the backlash.
- [48:09]
B
Well, and I actually want to ask you about how the left is rallying actually around what happened as well. This is not to say the View is representative of the left, but here's a little taste for everyone of what happened on ABC's midday airwaves when the View finally addressed as the entire country was waiting with baited breath on the edge of our collective seat for what Whoopi Goldberg had to say. This is what happened.
- [48:34]
C
Did y' all really think we weren't.
- [48:37]
A
Going to talk about Jimmy Kimmel?
- [48:40]
B
I mean, have you watched the show over the last 29 seasons? Yes.
- [48:45]
C
So, you know, no one silences.
- [48:49]
B
I want to start by thanking our loyal viewers for demanding truth and courage from us. We deserve it. You deserve it and we will give it to you. You know, freedom of speech undergirds our democracy. And our founders were very, very clear on that. Our founders drafted the First Amendment specifically to protect the rights of citizens to criticize the government. The government itself is using its weight and power to bully and scare people into silence.
- [49:19]
C
The government cannot, cannot apply pressure to.
- [49:26]
A
Force someone to be silenced.
- [49:30]
B
This is what dictators and authoritarians do.
- [49:33]
C
It does not matter the ideology.
- [49:37]
B
Sorry to replay that for you, Dave. I know you caught it live as you do every episode of the View, but Zoram Mamdani, whose campaign you followed very closely, was scheduled to do a town hall with local New York City ABC affiliate pulled out of that. Then when Kimmel announced he was or Disney announced Kimmel would be back tomorrow night, Mamdani said he was looking to reschedule that town hall. Rachel Maddow reacted tonight, I think ahead of her Kamala Harris interview by saying the Colbert show so his late night show should be un canceled by cbs. This has been a source of like significant energy on the left. And as someone who sort of followed the left throughout like cancel culture era, whatever we want to call it. Is this interesting at all, Dave? I mean it's not surprising, but there is now this like real almost like old school boomer lib energy around free speech.
- [50:31]
A
Again, there is and you said the boomer word. That's the thing I've noticed in covering protests this year, not, not the ones Andy covers. But protests are older than they were eight years ago in the first Trump turn. And you do see more representation of older people with the argument that they thought they were passing down a different kind of country to their children. It's less use driven. Now there are young people at protests, but I do see this. A lot of the energy and argumentation comes from people who say there was a norm and we thought we had that norm. And anytime that norm is being stripped away by the Supreme Court or by Trump, we have to fight it. And they look behind them and there are fewer young people who agree with this. Fewer young people, for example, who care what is on late night tv. Although every late night shows, every good piece of TV lives on in clips on TikTok, et cetera. So people know who Kimmel is. But yes, it was fairly organic too because ABC had already not endeared itself to liberals based on one the George Stephanopoulos settlement before that. The way Disney fought and then bent to Ron DeSantis and my colleague Max Tawney would know more about this because he's a media reporter. Anecdotally, I knew people who were canceling Disney accounts and it reminded me of, I guess this is a year ago, knowing people who are canceling their Washington Post accounts. And I guess they're more likely to tell me because I used to work there. But I would not be surprised if Disney was taking some sort of hit because Kimmel was in a good negotiating position in order to get back and not be on Sinclair. They are going to air a show that's not going to air in every market. Were they losing money because of the way this was handled? I assume they were. And so yeah, that's the power that a lot of the older activists have. They subscribe these accounts, maybe their kids free ride off the Disney account or they got it for their grandkids. I do think there was a consumer boycott and again, more organic than 10 years ago when a lot of cancel culture was Astroturf was groups saying we're going to organize people and get Bill O'Reilly off the air or protest Tucker There are things in this second Trump term that have seemed a little bit prefab and they haven't really worked out this. This felt very different and also the different worlds people are living in. That's not an original point, but they're just, I think liberals were surprised how much appreciation and love there was for Charlie Kirk who they if they knew it all, they knew maybe their kid watched a clip of his. They didn't know how important he was to the movement. And I do think conservatives Kimmel's ratings are easy to make fun of. But Kimmel had a lot of credibility among liberals, mostly from the first Trump term. He went from being fairly non political making fun of Trump because that was the reflex to being this advocate for saving the Affordable Care Act. And he had a lot more appeal among liberals than I would have expected. At the start of the cycle, Colbert was a bit more obvious. Colbert became not just a Biden booster, but a vaccine booster. Kimmel I do think that the tools that liberals have right now and the kind of movement they have was very good at mobilizing around this.
- [53:37]
B
I'd forgotten all about the Bill Cassidy, Jimmy Kimmel Obamacare dust up. That's such an interesting callback where Cassidy.
- [53:44]
A
Felt the need to say we need to pass the Jimmy Kimmel test if we want to reform Obamacare. And then he had to not go through the whole thing. He had to vote for the repeal. But Kimmel had that level of importance. And there's been a sense in this term that the media doesn't have that level of importance anymore. I'm not wrong. Just the ratings are down, people. Anyone I talk to who's under 30 doesn't get their doesn't have linear TV, period, doesn't watch it. So for them to have that kind of punch that is a representation of an older set of activists, but lots of them, millions of older people who were really involved in this.
- [54:17]
B
Well, and I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after the Tani story that you just mentioned on Semaphore. You wrote a great story about the FCC and media consolidation. And I thought those stories actually were great compliments to each other over at Semaphore because that story started to flesh out also a little bit how people like JB Pritzker, potential candidates are thinking about giving op EDS to substack instead of the New York Times. Like substackers, like dumb substackers instead of the New York Times. And I actually wanted to play a song of Jasmine Crockett. This is going to be S6 going. This went really viral over the weekend on her reaction to people voting for Dems voting for a Charlie Kirk Memorial bill in the House of Representatives. We can roll it. One of the things I do want to point out that's not been laid out that honestly hurts my heart is when I saw the no votes, there were only two Caucasians for the most part. The only people that voted no were people of color. Because the rhetoric that Charlie Kirk continuously put out there was rhetoric that specifically targeted people of color. And so it is unfortunate that even our colleagues could not see how harmful his rhetoric was specifically to us. So to the right and probably some people in the center, that's a jaw dropping clip. But to people who are now on the left finding new niche media habitats to live in because they're pissed at the Washington Post from last year, as you mentioned, or they're mad at abc, they're mad at cbs, they're finding different homes. Maybe they're going to Midas Touch, maybe they're going to crooked in one way or the other. The Bulwark, this plays a lot better in those spaces. So if you're a Jasmine Crockett, you don't necessarily even need to just worry about the Netroots nation crowd versus the DNC crowd. You sort of have a bigger, I don't know, a bigger microphone among the.
- [56:14]
A
Hardcore activist folks in a lot of those spaces. Crockett does have this tendency to bring things back to race in a way that most of the party is not comfortable with. I think this is why she has run twice for one for oversight chair, once for a leadership position. She did not come very close either time. The party post Neely and Kente Clough five years ago. The party does not think that is a great opener to win people over anymore. Now you win power. Do you want to restore some version of Vertive action? You probably do, but you're not running on it. So that what she's doing is not popular. You're right, though, that people are grow. People on the left are growing more untrusting of the mainstream media, more ready to go elsewhere. You see that with the bulwark keep occupying. Max, Max, Max. Profile of how popular they are. But the sort of people who were watching, not everybody, but the sort of people who are watching Natto every night, MSNBC every night. In the first term. Well, one, I think there was an expectation for a lot of those viewers that maybe this is the scandal that takes Trump down. And that's not theory in the second term, it's more how can we band together who will get me through these next four years, who will huddle in the bunker with me? And that is much better delivered by the bulwark and everyone else. You mentioned people who. The respect for the people who are in the Brady Room waiting to ask their question every day that's not there like it was in the first term. But the final thing I'll say on Crockett is her response again, bring up braces. That's not necessarily where the party is going to go. It's. I don't think it's going to run beyond her a campaign about this. The question I was dealing with in that story was what are they going to do if they get power again? What kind of conversation will they have about this? Because there are progressive think tanks, but they're not really laying out plans the way that the right did four years ago. But there is a tendency in the movement to say, the next time we control the ftc, fcc, all these organizations, we're going to inherit more ability for the president to fire people and appoint who he wants. Maybe we need to use that to break up media conglomerates. And that, I think is where they were. I could see them starting to go on Friday, even after this Kimmel thing, I could see them starting to go. And that means just in a different attitude. We don't trust the good white knight media organizations. We don't like any of them. We don't trust the corporate ownership. You've seen this change in the way more mainstream liberals talk. They talk like Noam Chomsky and saying that the owners, no, the owners of these organizations are changing their politics and rigging them. And that hangover, the Bezos and Patrick Soon Chang endorsements at the LA Times too, those started it. But that is the main tendency I see. And I talk to Democrats, Republicans, but in talking to Democrats eight years ago, they had a lot of respect for the kind of Edward Murrow, Catherine Graham citadels of journalism. And it's just not there anymore. They think they're ready to break it all up.
- [59:09]
B
They freaking rebooted Murphy Brown after Trump was reelected. Don't forget that. They fucking brought. They wheeled Murphy Brown back onto network television and trusted media went up among Democrats and trusted mass media went up among Democrats. And that seems to be not at all what's happening. I want to ask a couple of 2028 E questions. Let's roll this clip of Harry Enton on CNN talking about the plausibility of an Alexandria Ocasio Cortez presidential run back.
- [59:41]
A
In June of 2014. Look, Hillary Clinton was way ahead of everybody with 69. Bernie Sanders was like in 9th or 10th place with just 2%. Look at where we are right now in September of 2025. Look how much closer AO AOC is to the top now than Bernie Sanders was back a decade ago. She's at 12%. So she has six times his amount of support. But more than that, look how much closer she is to the leader. Gavin Newsom leads the field right now, but just with 21%. Get this, 62% of Democrats say their party leaders should be replaced compared to just 24% who say no. You know, you go back at the beginning of the Donald Trump presidency, the majority of Democrats, Democrats said their party leaders were taking the party in the right direction. That is not the case anymore. You know, if she doesn't go for the top job, maybe she wants to go for the guy who has the top job, at least on the Democratic side in the United States Senate. And take a look here. Net favorable among New York Democrats. Look at this difference. Look at this difference. The net favorable rating for Ocasio Cortez among New York Democrats plus 46 points. Compare that to Chuck Schumer who's only plus 16 points.
- [60:48]
B
I mean, amazing. Not entirely surprising with the side by side to Schumer, Dave, but Kamala Harris was on Rachel Maddow show tonight. She's on a book tour promoting a book that's sort of a retrospective on the disastrous end of the 2024 campaign when the torch was passed to her. And we have a clip. She endorsed the, quote, the Democratic candidate in the New York City mayoral race, which is a huge question on everybody's mind. Obviously that's Zoramdani who defeated Andrew Cuomo but came out and called Donald Trump a tyrant. Let's go ahead and roll the clip. Right now we are dealing with, as.
- [61:24]
A
I called him at my speech on.
- [61:26]
B
The Ellipse, a tyrant.
- [61:30]
A
We used to compare the strength of our democracy to communist dictators. That's what we're dealing with right now in Donald Trump.
- [61:39]
B
Okay, so jockeying for a potential primary, I suppose. And I'm sure you've heard more, Dave, about a potential presidential run for AOC or Kamala Harris. And maybe you can share some of what you've heard just as the rumblings in the Dem world about either of them. But also, where is this going? I mean, you know, I remember in 2020, Biden won wasn't that long ago on a sort of like unity ticket. He promised to bring back normalcy. I mean, he was very hard on Trump. He wasn't quite as polarized as the other Democrats in the race when they were jockeying for the nomination in 2020. So is that going to be something we see talk totally out the window in this 2028 primary as we get closer?
- [62:24]
A
Definitely out the window. The Biden argument was that if he won, he would make the Trump era an aberration. We would look at it as as just this freaky guy lost the popular vote and he took over for four years and we're going to take his, wipe away his entire legacy. And Democrats don't think that way anymore. That's not possible. If they wanted to stand up the government the way it was on January 19th, they kind of couldn't how they would need to go about refunding, recreating agencies. They can't think that way anymore. Biden is because I reviewed wrote about the Kamala book today and then she's going to contour it all week and I'll see her in one of the stops this week. She is finishing the job distancing Democrats from Biden. She's not kind to him in the book. She did it with Todd Frankel. So it's not all her writing, but there are a few mentions of Biden that don't have some sort of line a couple sentences later about how Biden didn't respect her, the team didn't respect her, Joe Biden didn't. And who deserves the blame for losing the election? The theme of the book is basically lots of people, least of all her. Least of all her. She inherited a situation from Biden that was hard to get a win out of. She was part of the administration that was mishandling immigration, but says that they just didn't explain it well enough. She on Gaza behind the scenes working on Biden, saying that he needed to handle it differently, but he didn't. So both of them failed in different ways during the campaign. And yeah, that sets up the situation that Harry was talking about in that clip where the base of the party, they want to vote for Democrats. They've been voting for Democrats in special elections. Every time they can. They turn out they're turning out tomorrow in Arizona for a special. I'm sure they'll win just fine. They think that their leaders told them they would make Trump go away and they didn't. And that's unforgivable. So no one who is close to that process and they're kind of getting cordoned off. Even Buttigieg has several One foot inside the Biden administration. Spent four years inside there, but he got out before Harris in talking about things he would have done differently. He has said that Biden shouldn't have run again. She's now said that she should have pushed him. This is the thing she's. It's in the book. But she was harder on Maddow that she should have pushed him to run. He's gonna be not erased from Democratic history, but the story will be that the party made a mistake by giving him the wheel. And really every. I think that would be different when he passes away. And I'm not saying it's about to happen. He's an old man. He's battling cancer. Until that happens, the version of politics he lived by at the end of his career, totally being banished from the party now the AOC position. I covered her rallies with Sanders just I spent the most time in Denver to see a full day of rallies behind the scenes, etc. I did find when I was talking to people at the rallies I was looking for in the crowds. You only have so much time at a rally. But I was looking for people who might have shown up to see any normal Democrat or just do their errands. Not people with a lot of Bernie dear. And they liked AOC and they were already talking to themselves into thinking that a woman can't win. They can't watch a woman get nominated and lose again. She has that disadvantage. Does she pull better than Bernie early when he was running against Hillary Clinton? Sure she does. But does she in a presidential race, one, reach people who the Bernie voter who doesn't really like the left but thinks Bernie's honest. So far she hasn't in polling. And two, do Democrats think she can? So far they don't think so. But who are the Democrats they're more excited by? It is the governors who are fighting Trump and are saying things out loud about how this guy is a fascist, not that we can work with him. Anyone who's in D.C. less so her because she's not counted on to pass bills. Anyone in D.C. is at a disadvantage compared to Jamie Pritzker to an extent, Newsom Wes Moore to an extent. To these governors who can just give speeches about how they're fighting him and say that not just, oh, it's an aberration, but that this is American fascism and that we need if we get me in there and I'm going to uproot it. That's just not what Biden was saying. Biden made it sound like with his pen on day one, he could undo everything Trump did.
- [66:42]
B
You just described a category that is so important, but you put it so simply and so well, which is Bernie voters who don't like the left. And it's the same as Trump voters who don't like the right. You know, Dave Portnoy, it's sort of the inverse of that. They don't want to be attached to the party, but they like the person. And those aren't necessarily going to come along with the Dem socialist package if Bernie's not a part of it. That's so interesting. And Dave, before you run, you covered Charlie Kirk for a long time. You saw him from the very beginning of his career, basically as you've been at Trump rallies and in those sort of grassroots spaces. If you have any reflections, I'd be really interested to hear how Michael Knowles right now is on a campus of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Big crowd. Michael is on the show soon. Love Michael. Charlie Kirk was a full time activist. It's a different thing. And so what does this mean? I mean, from your perspective, having seen the influence that Turning Point grew to that Charlie grew to as you've had a couple of weeks to think about it it what comes next?
- [67:52]
A
Well, Kirk is still irreplaceable. I think I first talked to him in 2015 when Turning Point was the anti Bernie organization on campuses basically and then covering him in the year since then. There are people that you don't understand how they pack as much into the day and have the time to complete their management tasks and have the time to research what they need to for debates network. Now not every college student is going to be a genius. That is a true challenge to you. But the talents he had, you found the same thing. You talked to people around him. Just no one has that set of talents and that drive. There are a lot of smart driven people, people who know different stuff than he did, but no one can fully replace that. So what Turning Point seems to be doing is building around his legacy and his fan base. He had a very large following on his podcast, the radio show and just seeing what works and kind of iterating. This is what Turning Point did very successfully for a long time. And I covered the left, I covered the right. The left wanted to believe that Kirk was not smart, that the organization was all being floated by Foster Priest's money and it wasn't really building anything. And then I'd really say in Trump's first term interregnum. But even though they had a kind of a mediocre election night In Arizona in 2022, they just the left was astounded at how many people were coming out of the Turning Point campus. Basically the people who had huge followings on social media, who could go to campus and get a get a crowd for their speech or get a viral argument. Turning Point when their Frontlines project, which is man on the street reporters, they were creating news just by going to cover liberals and liberals are giving them endless content. Liberals are showing up not just to these things, but there's going to be the no Kings Part 2 in October. And there is an alternative media ecosystem that was already really robust when Kirk was starting, but now is very good at generating new young talent. It wasn't as good before he did this. There was the occasional star who would get a profile in the Times and go on tv. But TV could determine by tv, I mean cnn, et cetera, could determine who is the serious conservative thinker. And that's been blown up now. So they have this help from the administration. You've seen Dennis Prager and Heritage and a lot of people are going to help with the official America 2050 programming. This is going to be interlaced with that clearly. And I'm not breaking news, just this is clearly what's happening. That the administration is very confidently working with conservative groups to rate patriotic content and embracing Kirk's legacy as the model of what Americans should be. Be patriotic, be Christian, start a family, et cetera. And Turning Point is going to keep finding people who will do different things. They might leave Kirk's microphone and chair empty for good and just keep having guest hosts on the program. But that program has a following and people inspired, not just inspired by him, but inspired by sort of the great works, the Bible, the Western canon, the things that he was most interested in that helped him out. Debate people on campus, very widespread. He really did start a brush fire. I'm trying to think of people on the left who have done the same thing. And this is a problem. I've talked to some people on the left about their movement for various reasons. It's moving away from the classics, moving towards activism, things that happen. This has been in critical theory for decades now of how you can unbill Western sids. They're not as competitive with the right and they're not turning out talent at the same level. So I think that the official legacy is the White House is going to play a role in that. The unofficial Turning Point legacy, I think very big. I don't think the organization's gonna fade because of Charlie Kirk, even after he is not in the news cycle. I'm not on campus as much as I used to be, but it's very different than when I was there and there was a college Republican group and maybe they'd bring a guest speaker every few months. Very different ferment. I think the only impediment, not the only impediment. One impediment they have though is they were the. It is not as rebellious as it was to be a campus conservative. It's pretty rebellious on a lot of these campuses. But when the administration is cutting your funding too, that you're not rebellious, you're just offering different kind of vision for life to your fellow students. You are offering. I want to repeat myself too much. But instead of being an unhappy, self hating Arthur Rambeau kind of college student, you can grow up and have a family. That's still the offer. And that was not as proud and as blatant when I was going to school 20 years ago as it is now. And that's. That's. So much of that is Kirk. So much of that is what Charlie Kirk did.
- [72:46]
B
Dave Weigel, Politics reporter at Semaphore thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.
- [72:51]
A
No, it's great to be on. Thank you very much.
- [72:54]
B
Fantastic. All right, I'll have some more thoughts right after this quick break. First, are you looking to support more made in the USA manufacturing this year like I am? Definitely. Whether it's home decor, clothing or furniture, it's become extremely difficult to find high quality products that are that aren't made overseas. A recent Forbes report revealed that annual earnings for small businesses across the US have dropped by over 75% just since 2023. Small businesses in this country are struggling to stay afloat and with the likes of Amazon and Target dominating the market, it's no wonder basically any small business owner here in the US Will tell you the same thing. That's where a warehouse comes in. Your one stop shop for artisanal home goods made exclusively by small businesses. With hundreds of products to choose from, they're deeply committed to supporting American manufacturers. They're easy to navigate. Online marketplace lets you browse a wide range of independent makers and you can feel good knowing that your purchase supports real people and small family run businesses. A warehouse believes that true luxury isn't about fancy labels or big brand names. It's about the dedication, creativity and care that goes into every product. Help a warehouse hit their goal of supporting over 100 small businesses this year? Head to awarehouseshop.com and use code party for 15 off your first order. That's a warehouseshop.com code party.
- [74:12]
A
When work gets crazy, I like to stop by the bar after have a few cold ones. I don't drink at all until 4 o'.
- [74:20]
B
Clock. We limit ourselves to one bottle of wine a night.
- [74:24]
A
Excessive drinking has a way of sneaking up on us. A few drinks a few nights a week. It can add up and suddenly we're.
- [74:31]
C
At greater risk for long term problems like heart disease, cancer and depression.
- [74:35]
A
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- [75:08]
B
Daily Don Lemon Sorry, we have to Don Lemon had some thoughts that he felt he had to share on Charlie Kirk's memorial service, massive stadium size memorial service on Sunday, which, as the numbers are coming in, appears to have drawn at least 20 million viewers live across different platforms. That number is almost impossible to quantify because it was, as you probably saw on. It was on TV, it was on Twitter, it was on YouTube. So it's not easy to get the full picture. But that is astounding. That's actually similar. I happen to be looking up the figures for how many people watched 60 Minutes in 1991 on average. Don't ask why, but it was around 20 million. And that's when everyone was sitting down and watching 60 Minutes and 1991. So to get those kinds of numbers today is incredibly rare and just remarkable. A remarkable achievement for the folks over at Turning Point usa, and for Charlie Kirk's friends, families and colleagues who wanted the world to remember him as they remembered him. So Don Lemon, though, felt the need to weigh in. Let's go ahead and roll. Whatever the hell this clip is.
- [76:29]
A
To me, this was not mourning. This was a mobilization. And here is where we have to tell the truth here. What we saw in that arena was not simply faith finding public expression. It was religious nationalism on full display. That is the truth. That is my truth. This is my freedom of expression. This is my First Amendment right to be able to tell you the truth. From my point of view, not just from my point of view, this is what it is. The language was unmistakable. Take the nation back for God. Restore America's covenant. This is a holy calling. That's what it sounded like. This is not the language of democracy. This is the language of domination.
- [77:19]
B
You should go back and read the way that the founders of the country described the American nation. And actually, I think it's a mistake for people to do what I just did as often as they do and say, go back to the founders. Go back like 50 years and listen to how Democrats, black, white, Hispanic talked about the country. Go back 100 years and listen to how people talked about the country. The rapid secularization of the United States is actually a new chapter in our history. And what's closer to the norm is talking about the United States as a constitutional republic, as a, quote, holy calling. One of the books that I recommend the most ever, just in general, is Tom Holland's book Dominion, which has, as it gets to, I think the. The New York Times called it like a galloping tour of Christian history. I'm paraphrasing it, but I know they use the. The phrase galloping. It's on the COVID of the book, and it's exactly right. Long book. But as you get to the United States, you sort of see how the. The Christian religion that spread in the Middle east and in Europe and then into the New World was part of the conception of the United States in ways that were sort of different from how it was seen in, you know, the. Let's. Let's say Roman, the Holy Roman Empire. Obviously, there's a. There's a change as the Enlightenment hits. But to. And actually, some people on the right make this mistake, too. It's not a mistake, you know, when you're arguing with, for example, like Adrian Vermeule, someone who is intellectually a giant at Harvard. So I can't really say it's a mistake, but I think it's an error for some people on the right to wave away the Enlightenment as a secular, as the sort of time when the west secularized, rather than, I think, probably the apotheosis of what Christianity does for the human spirit and for freedom and for all of that. So, anyway, this is a long way of saying Don Lemon sounds historically illiterate. And I think what we're really seeing from people like Don Lemon. And actually, I want to put this from Thomas Chatterton Williams, who I really respect. I'm going to put this up on the screen. He posted some pictures from the Kirk Memorial and said, I've spent half of my adult life living in one foreign country or another, and I don't think I've ever felt so estranged from the surrounding culture as I am from the aesthetics and sensibilities of this movement. Not even a criticism. I just feel more at home in Greece than in these images. Thomas Chatterton Williams is a really smart writer over at the Atlantic, and I think it's important to include what he said there. Not even a criticism. I just feel more at home in Greece than in these images. We obviously talk a lot about Charles Murray's book coming apart from 2012 here on the show, because I bring it up nonstop. I'm like a broken record. But I think it's one of the most, most important books that's been written in modern American history. It explains 2016. It explains 2024 in so many ways. But it also explains the sort of peak woke period. It explains what we saw in the MeToo movement. And a lot of it just has to do with elite sorting patterns where you have Super Zips clustered around the most powerful cities in the United States. Washington, D.C. is like the highest concentration of Super Zips. So people who are Disproportionately or disproportionately. Areas that are disproportionately pop, populated by people with higher income and education than the average population. And what we've seen in the last 20 or so years, 20 plus years, really is a great sorting based on taste. And based on the taste sort of follows with education and income in ways that are even more acute and even more distinct than they used to be. So we watch different TV shows, we read different books. If we read books, listen to different music, eat at different restaurants, and. And that is where people like Thomas, Chad and Williams will say, you know, I've spent half my adult, adult life living in one foreign country or another. I don't think I've ever felt so estranged from the surrounding culture as I am from the aesthetics and sensibilities of this movement. And Inez Stepman, I think, put it really well. She said, among my pet peeves is people who allow what are, at the end of the day, matters of taste to obscure the plain fact that American evangelicals are one, really good people and two, built the great country in history. So Inez, as a non Christian, weighing in on that, I found very amusing. She actually also, Inez and Rachel, right before I went to air, started to goad me into a bitter debate about Protestant versus Catholic aesthetics that I found highly distracting. And they deserve to be disciplined for their actions. But that's for another time, because in this case, they will be back on soon, so I can discipline them appropriately then. But in this case, I think Inez is right on that. What people are really afraid of and uncomfortable with are the tastes, the sensibility, the sort of cultural sensibilities of American evangelicals. But one of the reasons that that Charlie Kirk memorial, again, you know, Charlie Kirk was a somebody who was so familiar to Gen Z, maybe not as familiar to other generations, but basically a daily fixture of the Gen Z social media diet. Diet period. But I think part of what explains why the images, videos and clips of that memorial service are resonating is because the sensibilities of it, the aesthetics of it, are really familiar to middle America in a way that they're not used to seeing from the political class. I obviously say that as someone from the Midwest who's like evangelical mega church goer and was watching people like Michael Tracy tweet during the memorial service, is it normal for pastors or. He didn't even tweet that. That he said something like, noted that one of the pastors asked people who had, you know, given their Life to Christ to stand up. And then there was a QR code that came up on the screen. And I think Tracy asked, like, is it normal for people to do this? Well, maybe not in some mainline Protestant churches, definitely not in most Catholic churches. But if you're one of the millions of evangelical churchgoers in America, then of course, that's familiar to you. And so it just, I think the memorial service, for all of its beauty, really exposed how uncomfortable so much of the power, so much of the country's power brokers, people in media, people like Don Lemon perhaps, are with middle America and with the way average Americans see the country, worship, see their faith, see one another. And I mean, if you're a Christian, you have to look at what happened on Sunday and just be enormously proud. Trump had a truly awful moment when he, I mean, I know some people think it was a joke. I don't know that was really a joke. I don't know that Trump would want you to say it was a joke when he mentioned that he hates his enemies, that he disagrees with Erica. He actually hates his enemies, that he can't forgive them. But when Erica Kirk, if anything, what Trump said about that actually highlighted how incredible Erica Kirk's decision to publicly forgive her husband's assassin in front of millions of people, live within days of it happening, just over a week of the violent assassination happening in front of everyone. What an incredible moment. What an incredible testament to the beauty and the power and the truth of the faith. So I just wanted to weigh in on that quickly because I thought the discourse from people who were operating good faith, like Thomas Chatterton Williams was totally worth talking about in this case. Now, before we wrap tonight, because I'm going long. I can't help myself. I'm going long. I'm fueled by pumpkin spice lattes because it's September, obviously. I was going to talk about watching ABC's new Hulu documentary commentary on Lilith Farrak tonight, but I actually think I'm going to save that for Wednesday's show because I just have too much to say, as you might expect. But I could not leave you without playing this beautiful clip. And if you're listening, I'm sorry, you're not gonna see the full glory of this clip. But Donald Trump, I can't weigh in on the. The science of the autism announcement that he made with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. At the White House today. I can, however, weigh in on the comedic contribution that Trump has, has once again left us with. So here's Donald Trump on Ozempic at the. At the autism speech.
- [86:40]
A
A shot of like an Oz epic or the fat.
- [86:45]
B
I call it the fat pill or the fat drug.
- [86:48]
A
Sometimes it works, I guess, for people.
- [86:50]
B
The ones I've seen, it hasn't worked so well. I got a lot of friends, they're fat. They said, yeah, I lost some weight. I said, you don't look it to me. He's done this before, but first of all, I love that he insists on continuing to do it. And second of all, if you're listening, what you're missing out here is the face of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Who is at one of the most politically significant announcements of his politically significant life, a sort of culmination of much of his career. And there you have the President of the United States talking about how his. His fat friends think they're skinny, but they really are so fat. I mean, well done, Donald Trump. I don't even think he tries. I don't even think he tries. I think this is all completely effortless, just amazing stuff. You can't script it. But I would have been remiss to not mention that. One thing I should make sure to mention is if you are sending in questions, we're doing a show where just audio. So if you subscribe on the itunes and the Spotify podcast feed, it's going to go right into your podcast feed at least once a week. We're starting with it once a week, but it's called Happy Hour and it's where. Where I get to chat with you guys through the questions that you send in on Instagram and over email. Final thought, by the way, I just have been thinking a lot about the ugliness the last couple weeks. And this is, you know, as all of us have been, but this is fodder for another day. I do just want to say, though, I've been thinking about how the more politically disempowered we feel, the more those sort of cheap virtue signals on social media. Media feel like a substitute for real influence. And one of the things that Charlie Kirk was good at talking about in his last few years particularly, was how you can make such a significant influence on the culture just locally and in your own life by, as he would say, get married, have kids and pass down your values. So I get some emails and questions about that, a lot like, what can I do? And one thing I would say not to do. I mean, don't underestimate the enormous power that will have on the world. We just live in a really big world in a really big country. So it does feel disempowering to constantly be surrounded by the thoughts and behaviors and circumstances of the millions of other people in a way that never happened before. But algorithms are biased towards us posting and then biased towards us posting with strong emotions. So they teach us to bias our own behavior towards posting and posting strong emotions. So that biases the discourse, it distorts the discourse. It teaches us how to think in ways that involve publicly posting and then publicly posting strong emotions, because those are what get bigger responses. Those are what get more likes and retweets and help us feel more empowered. But it's really a sort of cheap power. I mean, sometimes it's extremely influential when you're changing people's lives and cancel culture or going viral and finding other like minded individuals who also enjoy celebrating political assassinations. But, you know, we're not adapting to this sudden change in our communication habits. I was pretty disappointed with the White House's TikTok announcement today. That basically was like, what a win for children. We have a deal where American businessmen get to make more money off of TikTok and we aren't going to force them to do anything that would change the app and make it healthier. Maybe they will in the future. But why do we not just text our thoughts privately to each other when they're really bad or mention them at the dinner table? Why are we increasingly even having some of these dark thoughts? And it's really because we're being trained to be more provocative and to be more outwardly provocative. So best solution that I can think of is just taking algorithms out of social media feeds and going back to literal timelines. But that's something for another day. It was just on my mind over the last couple of weeks and then with the TikTok announcement today. So if you have questions for me, emily.com is where you can send them. We'll answer some of them on this week's edition of happy hour. But of course, we'll be back here Wednesday live, 10pm Eastern, with more afterparty. See you then.
- [91:30]
A
Hataday presents, in the red corner, the undisputed, undefeated weed whacker guy, champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere.
- [91:41]
B
And in the blue corner, the challenge.
- [91:44]
A
Extra strength Hadaday eye drops that work.
- [91:48]
C
All day to prevent the release of.
- [91:49]
A
Histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner by knockout is Patterday.
- [91:57]
B
Patterday.
- [91:58]
A
Bring it on.
- [92:00]
B
What does possibility mean to you? Um, that's a hard question.
- [92:04]
C
Something that you can strive for.
- [92:06]
B
I'm able to do anything. I set my mind to your confidence. Confident in yourself and you believe in yourself. Stuff that you could achieve. I feel at Sarah anything is possible when you're more confident. Shoes are a huge part of that.
- [92:18]
C
They are the most important part of my style.
- [92:21]
B
You can like express yourself in the right shoes. Anything is possible.
- [92:25]
A
Dsw countless shoes at brag worthy prices. Imagine the possibilities.