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- [00:04]
A
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drink champagne Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, February 2, 2026. It is Groundhog Day, and we are told that we're going to have six more weeks of winter. Gee, what a surprise to all of us that winter is not going to end prematurely given the conditions under which we are now laboring with garbage piling up in front of all of our. We have, we have apartment buildings here on the Pie. We have houses in the District, we have houses in Maryland. And one thing you can say is that the garbage is not being picked up. And it's been like a week, week and a half. And the snow, particularly in New York, is starting to look like a, I don't know, like a dog run nightmare snow cone. It's not, I don't think it's healthy for people to live around this much fecal matter. I'm John Pot Hordes, the Commentary with me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:32]
D
Hi, John.
- [01:33]
A
Okay, I'm not going to go into the details. Let's just put it this way. Really disastrous result in a Texas special election over the weekend for a state Senate seat that seems to have swung 30 points in the direction of the Democrats. And nobody can put a lipstick on this pig. And so I think so dire are the implications of this one result in, of course, the very red state of Texas in a, in a district that Trump won by double digits. Is that Ron DeSantis, the outgoing governor of Florida, term limited. So he will not be running again for governor. Basically said we better take very serious note of these election results and then tweeted out the election results, which is like a little bit of a, Hey, I know you guys are all talking about J.D. vance and Marco Rubio and everybody in the Trump orbit, but if you want to do some planning for the future, you know, we're starting to look at some pretty problematic trend lines that might make you want to look as we generally look in the Republican Party outside of Washington for your salvation. That's how I read talmudically, the Ron DeSantis tweet. Anybody else have the same experience?
- [03:09]
D
Well, I mean, I actually thought it was useful. It was helpful to see him weigh in. But I was struck by the fact that, you know, we all noticed this because it became a National news story, in part because of DeSantis tweet. But the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, has been talking about the shift he's been seeing in Texas for a while now and sort of raising alarm bells and saying this is. This is bad. And in large part, it's bad because some of the people they're losing are the Hispanic voter coalition that Trump won in 2024, that those voters that swung to the Republican Party and that helped carry him back to the White House. And we've talked about this a bit on the podcast, but they're losing those voters, and that should be point of concern, not just on issues of immigration, which we will probably talk about, are leading up to a potential another government shutdown, but also the economy, because those are the voters that were feeling insecure in the economy and insecure about the Biden administration's policies with regard to inflation and whatnot. So it is an alarm bell. And I say, good for DeSantis. I mean, he's got nothing to lose now. He's in. You know, he's. He knows he's leaving office. He should be out there reminding people that there are people, that there are other leaders in the GOP who understand voters outside of the Beltway and outside the absolutely impossible to avoid Trump orbit, which seems to suck up every news cycle. Different things are happening outside the Beltway.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I mean, what I thought was extraordinary about is Texas is not only a red state, it's a border state. You know, it's like the whole policy of Trump's is almost like Texas's revenge, you know, and he's. He's. He's gone too far for them.
- [04:47]
D
And.
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B
This just didn't show up.
- [04:50]
C
And this district is. Is a billion people. That's. The other thing is that, you know, it's an enormous district in Texas, a million people. This. This particular seat represents something like that. So it's. It's not like you can. Not like Republicans can dismiss it as, like. Well, you know, it's the state district, state Senate district, and, you know, House. State House districts are not a big deal. I mean, this is. This is a huge district, and she outspent him, you know, a gazillion to one. I mean, she raised, like, you know, a few million dollars. Oh, the candidate. The Republican candidate.
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A
Right.
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C
I don't.
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A
I know. I know this.
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C
Or something.
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D
Yes. Yeah, something like that.
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C
I have trouble. Whatever.
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A
It's fine. You don't need to know her name.
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C
She's not serving in office.
- [05:44]
D
Taylor is the winner. The Democr.
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A
Right, right.
- [05:47]
C
But she, but she, I mean she raised a few million dollars. He, he, he didn't, he didn't even crack half a million. So you know, this was like this is, that's another thing is that this was clearly one of those trend elections or wave elections, whatever you want to call it. It was clearly like a national mood or at least the state mood type election because it certainly wasn't anything that was happening on the airways. Right. Nobody knew who this guy was. He certainly wasn't raising much money and getting his name out there. So you know, and there's, and again it's a huge district. So this, this is just one of those things where a lot of people. Yeah, didn't. That didn't help either?
- [06:23]
A
I mean, no, maybe the opposite. Like there's a lot of, there's a lot of own gold things going on in this, the results that are coming out now or cell phones or whatever you want to call it, not cell phones, self hyphen owns. Because I realized it sounded like I was saying cell phones and I wasn't saying cell phones. Okay, to move on.
- [06:46]
D
Can I, can I just add one other.
- [06:47]
A
I had very little sleep last night, so I'm a little punchy.
- [06:50]
D
One other point though about Texas and current Politics are the GOP's House margin vote margin is now down to one because a special election was also sending a Democrat or a Democrat which is going to be sworn in today most likely. And this has a lot of ramifications for whether they're going to get some, some sort of deal to keep the government running.
- [07:11]
A
This is an office that was a Democratic seat, but that was essentially the Republican Party in Texas played games to keep the special election from happening and it was left empty, unfilled. I guess the person who had it died. Was it Sheila Jackson somebody? It was either Sheila Jackson Lee or somebody is no longer in office. And they kept the seat open to help to give Mike Johnson like a path to some kind of majority or to win things and they just couldn't hold it open any longer. And since the special election day was called and of course scheduled to make it impossible for this result to happen because you schedule it on Saturday in February in Texas, a very weird time to schedule a special election. Nonetheless, there it is. And, and, and it was a Democratic sweep. But the own goal, things that are.
- [08:13]
E
Going on here as opposed or the.
- [08:15]
A
Self owns or whatever you want to call it include the idiot Machiavellianism played by the Republic National Republican Party led by the Trump administration's idiot Machiavelli who decided to play these mid decade redistricting.
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B
Games.
- [08:35]
A
Because Texas, apparently one of the things that happened here is that some of these districts or this got diluted. They redrew maps, they have diluted the districts in order to spread voter, in order to get more Republican voters into Democratic seats. But the result of that is that there were fewer Republican voters in Republican districts. And that's one of the things that may have happened in this case in the weird special election sense. And of course we have in the, in the California, in triggering the California referendum to do mid decade redistricting favoring Democrats. And a couple of things that happen, including a really, really slimy court decision in New York state that essentially voids the Republican seat in Staten island and tries to sort of shove it into Democratic districts. The Republicans, by raising the specter of mid decade redistricting, have shot themselves in both feet, the hand and the shoulder. Because all of this is now working, has been working to Democratic political advantage. Caused a lot of organizing, it brought a lot of people and a lot of money into the game who might have been depressed at Trump's third term. It reignited the idea that, you know, Trump will do anything and therefore we have to do anything in response. And I call it idiot Machiavellianism because, you know, if you're going to start playing games with the rules and you don't have it all wired like that, this is not something that you without 100% or 90% certainty that things are going to go your way because all kinds of unanticipated results can happen. And one thing I think is very clear is that these kinds of plans gang afta glay when you're in the Trump administration, he, you know, Trump proposes and God disposes like you don't. Doge ice in Minnesota, all, you know, these kind of like political efforts to make political hay out of certain types of things are just not working and in fact, redounding against the political interests of the party that is igniting them. And that's a cautionary tale because there's a lot to be learned from it about how to go forward from this moment, like stop doing stuff like this. And whoever has been coming up with these plans, get rid of them and get some old hack who can say to you, you know, back in 2002 in Wyoming, they tried to pull an end around on a judicial election and they got their hat handed to them, let's not do that this time. Which is what old hacks can do for you. You know, they can like remind you of when thing when moments that they were involved in when everything went haywire and therefore at the first they could at least help you do no harm in the Hippocratic political oath sense. And there seems to be nobody with that kind of sensibility. I mean, we don't know what Susie Wiles is or is not doing in the White House politically, but it just does not seem as though there's like a kind of, ah, you know, if you send a lot of surge, a lot of people into a really left wing city where they've already had extensive organizing experience, this might not go the way you think it's going to go.
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D
You know, the Trump, the Trump return in 2024 was viewed by the victors as the final nail in the coffin of the old political hacks. They don't trust the polls, they don't trust the institutions, they don't trust the old hacks who would say things exactly as you've said, which is get someone on the ground who understands how politics works in that particular district and listen to them. That was, that was what as a revolutionary movement, the revolutionary side of the Trump populist movement has always rejected that. And there's always been a huge amount of hubris that, that, I mean, some of us have get a lot of flack for criticizing that hubris, but the hubris only works if you can actually effectuate a policy that is, that can stand the test of time. And that is always the challenge for revolutionaries. Right? You want to burn it all down, but then you're sitting there warming your, your, you know, building your building what over the ashes, warming your hands, maybe making lots of cool AI slop memes and people think you're great online. But at the end of the day, it has to be sustained. And he has managed to do this with certain culture war issues. He did successfully close the border. That's a victory for, for this administration and one I think most voters agree with. But that was policy.
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A
That was policy and for preexisting law.
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D
Right?
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A
And it was the ignorant ignoring that law and all of that that led to this. I'm talking about like, hey, let's try bringing in Elon Musk and he'll just shut departments down for three months.
- [14:04]
D
But if it had worked, I think everyone would say, wow, impressive.
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A
But there's a reason that it didn't work, which is that it doesn't work. Like that's what the, the political hack would say. You know, we all came in and the Reagan 1981, we were all revolutionaries. And we, with our first goal was we wanted to shut down the Education Department. That's working either.
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D
So that's the bind they're in. He was brought back by voters who also don't like the status quo. So how do you change that? That's.
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A
Well, you shut down the border. If that was the only thing that he did, he changed the stats quo at the border and in our foreign policy, you know, in the Middle East. And if he had just done those two things and otherwise had just, you know, like, I guess torn down the East Wing and done a couple of other things, but hadn't, if they hadn't gotten cute with the redistricting and with the. Let's, let's try to get the Somali fraud. Let's use the Somali fraud to kind of merge our issues together. Democratic malfeasance and misgovernance and leftist fraud with our ice, you know, with our efforts to surge ice. Like, as I say, if you're, if you like, take this seriously, you don't experiment, like, it's just too much at stake. And now what's at stake, obviously, is Trump's political future. I mean, he, he, this has been one of the worst months for a presidency. You know, I mean, obviously Biden had this horrendous month of his decline and then eventual exit from the right, from the, from the race in 2024. But, you know, there are a couple of months in the second term of the Bush presidency when you were like, oh my God, like, everything is going wrong.
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C
Everything, but also like, not. And part of the part difference was that, like, there was stuff going wrong in the Bush presidency in the second term that was not avoidable necessarily in this, in the classic way that this is unavoidable.
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F
Right?
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C
Like, yes, maybe things could have been better prepared for Hurricane Katrina or whatever it else, but that, that was not something that, like, they weren't like, let's have a hurricane. Trump is like, let's have a hurricane. Like, he's that guy who's like, let's have a hurricane and see what happens. But the, the political, the old hack that you speak of would have, could have told Trump, very simple, call the head of the Indiana Republican Party and ask if the Indiana Republicans want to do a redistricting circus before you put it out there. Because you had months of Trump fighting with the Indiana Republican Party and people leaving the Indiana Republican Party and chaos within the state party because they needed every single vote to support a, you know, the redistricting plan in Indiana and it, you know, it fractured the coalition. There was no, there was nothing wrong. You know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And now it's like the Indiana Republican Party is somewhat broken. There's a huge crack there. He's, you know, then he, then the president is like, well, I'm gonna back, I'm gonna back primary challengers against, you know, these Indiana Republicans. And it's like, okay, if you're a Democrat, you're sitting back and it's, it's, you know, it's like one of those cartoon, you know, fight clouds. And, you know, Bugs Bunny jumps out of the cloud. And so Elmer Foot is technically the only one still in the cloud, but the cloud is still happening. He's fighting himself. That's what the Republicans look like.
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A
Well, that's a fantastic analogy. And I'm just, I'm just thinking about the, the cloud, the cartoon dust cloud. Fantastic.
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B
To Seth's point about, you know, he's the let's have a hurricane guy, which is also a great point. We could talk about the people around him and the idiot Machiavelli's and how there needs, need to be old, old hacks in there. It does come from him. His whole approach is, okay, what's the next fight? That's, that's he's got to move on to the next fight because he doesn't know what else governing means. He doesn't know what else business means. He doesn't know what else to do. And it's not that he's getting cutesy. I think that it's just in trying to tackle the next thing, he ends up getting overwhelmed.
- [18:35]
E
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- [19:55]
A
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- [19:57]
E
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- [21:04]
D
This is really important because it speaks to some of the problems he had in his first term as well. He doesn't see, he doesn't see himself as part of a larger movement. He sees a movement following him. Donald Trump. It's Trump. MAGA is Trump. He said it many times. I am maga. MAGA is me. And the problem is that if you're on the right and you're in a culture that's predominated by left leaning institutions and a left leaning culture, to win these wars, particularly the culture wars, you need a lot of different foot soldiers. And I think we were talking about this right before we started recording. But the only victory I've seen from this administration in a culture war happened in spite of the administration and with them understanding that there are many tactics. And that's on the trans issue, where he very quickly moved to undo some of the more extreme ideological federal policy statements that the Biden administration had embraced and that were wildly unpopular with American voters. But long term, what's going to win that culture war? What's going to bring the nation Back to a place of sanity on these issues is, you know, we have people at these amazing lawyers at the Beckett Fund, which brought this case of orthodox Christian and Muslim parents in Montgomery county in the Mahmoud case and won 6, 3, a victory. Because what they argued is parents have the right to have some say in what their children are taught in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and the right to opt out because that had been taken from them. That was about a transgender case. The boys in girls sports stuff, the cases that are before the court now and coming through the federal court system, those are also about that issue and the lawsuit that was recently by a child who has transitioned and then sued the doctor for malpractice and won a, I think, $2 million settlement in New York. So these are all points in the same battle. And the Trump administration has done one thing that it can do, and I think what it did was important, but it hasn't tried to pick fights or get involved in any of these other things. And that's useful. We need. He needs to understand that kind of strategic vision, but I don't think he can, because everything about MAGA is about him. I think Abe's absolutely right that he is the motivating force and doesn't understand the strategic importance of allowing other people on your side to fight those battles in other. On other fronts.
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A
The one place that I will disagree with the two of you is like, Trump doesn't know from redistricting. Trump doesn't know from Indiana's complex political situation. Rock ribbed Republican state that didn't need redistricting, really. And then they push a redistricting plan. Somebody comes to him and says, we love to break things, right? And, you know, do move fast. And what was that? Was it Eric Schmidt who said, move fast and break things?
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D
It's Mark Zuckerberg.
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A
Mark Zuckerberg. Okay, so move fast and break. We want to move fast and break things, and then we can rebuild them better, stronger, you know, with, like, the $6 million man. So he goes, that sounds great. But, like, that's where the old hack comes in and goes, it's not that great. Like, just let's. We're all sitting around a table, so let's talk tacless. Like, it sounds great to say you can, like, arrange it so that there'll be a Republican majority and for, you know, for 100 years. But politics is the art of the possible. And there's all kinds of, like, things. Buttons you push and, you know, like, sleeping dragons, you awake and all of this. And so Just you will do what you want to do. Let, let's just air out both sides of this.
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D
But for Trump, politics isn't the art of the possible. Politics is the art of the deal. I mean, I think that's where he doesn't understand politics in that way. And so he has no one around him who would bring that to, I think he had some of those people in the first term. They do not exist in the second term administration from what I can tell.
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A
Right.
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D
Perhaps Susie Wise.
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A
They don't. They don't. And that's, and as I say, he's reaping the whirlwind or the Republican Party is reaping the whirlwind. And Matt Con Nettie Friday wrote the piece on the free expression vertical of the Wall Street Journal saying Democrats really have an uphill climb to win the Senate. And I understand that technically speaking they have an uphill climb, but if what's gathering is a wave, then the uphill climb, you know, the people have enough, may have a, may have a tidal force that pushes them up the hill and over.
- [25:35]
D
Trump will be their Sherpa if he keeps it up.
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A
Well, Texas is a very good example of this. Like there is a weird primary race in Texas between sitting Texas Senator John Cornyn and a very problematic Ken Paxton, state official. Lot of corruption, swirling dust clouds, bad marital circumstances. Cornyn is a hundred percent, you know, like conservative voting record guy. There's no reason for Cornyn to be ousted. Trump hasn't endorsed Corny, hasn't endorsed Paxton. But Paxton, you know, is a very, you know, if the, if the party's primary is dominated by maga, you know, I don't know, like listeners from, you know, Tucker Carlson on the left to Alec Jones on the right, Paxton will win. And then can a Republican, can a Democrat beat Paxton? Oh, yeah. Can a Democrat beat Cornyn? Probably not, right?
- [26:51]
C
I mean, it's a Georgia situation. But also he, he, he, I think, just to be clear, I think he, he, he said yesterday he's going to back someone. Right. I mean, I think the endorsement, he said something to the effect of whoever I support will win. So it sounds, it's which, which is not the trend, but nevertheless, I just mean it's, it sounded like he, he is planning on endorsing and that's going to be a pretty big deal.
- [27:21]
A
Let's go back to Christine bringing up the trans issue and the, the potentially epical nature of this decision granting the transitioned teen $2 million in malpractice from the gender affirming surgeon. Because it gets to when a political issue isn't just a political issue and how not everything is politics. So this whole question of whether or not people who take these extreme measures and are supported or encouraged to do so by people with a financial interest in them taking extreme measures involving their health, going under the knife, altering their bodies in irreversible ways, when that the whole issue was, this is a steamroll, you're never going to be able to stop the progress of this because there's now a whole, not only is there a whole cultural support structure for transing, transitioning, multiple genders, all of that stuff, but there's a whole world of people who are making bank doing these surgeries. And until and unless psychiatrists, you know, psychologists, and the people who then actually perform, who, who encourage the transitioning and then the people who actually perform the surgery have some accountability for what it is that they are advocating and doing, creating irreversible conditions. There was. The steamroller was never going to stop. So this case is a landmark because it starts raising questions. Got to start raising questions in the mind of the people who thought this is the next big profit center, even if they believe ideologically that it should be, because this is what the world is really like and what, what we're genuinely like in human nature. We, we're not fixed. Gender is a social construct, all of that. Even if they genuinely believe that, they still have to deal with the consequences of what they do. And you know, like cutting off body parts is something that we never let doctors do unless the body part was, you know, like gonna kill you.
- [30:05]
D
This, this was what was interesting and revealed in this trial two things. One, the, the absolutely emotionally blackmailing efforts by this doctor telling the parent of this child that the child would commit suicide if they didn't allow this surgical transition. And the child instantly regretting having had her breasts removed right when she came out of the surgery. And, and then the patient, this child being browbeat and told, no, no, no, you'll come around to it. So there's that. What, what a lot of conservative folks have raised over the years about the emotional blackmail, this idea that if you don't allow this, this necessary cultural change to happen, children will die, trans kids will die. Protect trans kids. That's the message over and over again. This trial exposed that evil fallacy of that logic. So I think that's very important. The other thing to think about is all the cases. There's, there's hundreds of cases in the works now. Another one of the big Ones is not suing a practitioner, it's suing Kaiser Permanente Health Care, an entire system of health care providers. And that's based on the beginning with the provision of hormone treatment. So not even the surgery, just the hormone treatment and the long term unknown effects of that. So all of these cases are chipping away at the idea that this was harmless, necessary and anyone who denied that this was care or health care was lying to you or a bigot. And I think that's where the watching, how the language will shift in how mainstream media tries to cover these cases now will be interesting. This isn't health care. This is, we've now seen medical malpractice, at least in this case.
- [31:44]
B
And these cases, like the complainants are going to have great cases almost universally because there's so much evidence out there that practitioners had no actual proof that so called gender affirming care produced any positive benefits or enough positive benefits to outweigh the negatives. And there's so much evidence that practitioners were so loosey goosey about transitioning people. You know, you just had, you just say a few things, you know, I play with trucks instead of dolls or whatever and off, off you go. And these mountains of, of data and evidence were ignored or buried, but they're out there and now they're being excavated, right?
- [32:37]
C
And they also like in those, if you talk to people in these industries, people who work, you know, in health with children, you hear the same thing over and over again, which is that they are dissuaded from arguing with the premise of the problem that that is handed to them. When the patient walks through the door, right? Patient comes in and says I feel this way, I think I want this. And the doctors are, whether they are medical doctors or psychological doctors are taught like don't disagree with the way the patient feels. So it could be a 7 year old kid that they're talking about, you know, transitioning or giving hormones to. And you're not supposed to tell the 7 year old K that the way they feel is really this, right? It's really, you know, I can open the DRM and say, you know, here's a, here's, here's what it is. You know, we've been, we, I went to medical school and you have a certain condition known as X and here's what we do for that condition. It's a seven year old diagnosis and you're not supposed to argue with that. And so, you know, usually when the seven year old, and then after a while because of, you know, Everything that happened, the trends, the social trending of it, it was really the parents in some of these cases, not the seven year old saying this, you know, and then, and then they feel feared liability in the other way. They had parents coming in. So it was, it was a lot of this. At the root of this was you're not a doctor anymore. You're not the one who decides. You're not the diagnostic, you're not the diagnostician. In this case. They bring you and you're, you're, you are a, you are selling your wares like on the streets of Manhattan. They ask and you tell them how much it costs and you make the exchange.
- [34:26]
D
And this is where the cultural script problem comes into it and why things like the Mahmoud case and there are cases now in coming through the court system that deal with what's called like secret transitions where schools will not inform parents of the child wanting to live as a different gender while at school. These are really important cases because in the Mahmoud case, these were parents who were objecting to the indoctrination of their, of their children in the classroom with that same cultural script. So that how does the 7 year old know what to say when they go to the transition doctor? They know because they've been reading books in elementary school telling them this is normal, this, you know, gender is assigned. We don't know if you're a boy or a girl at birth. You can be either and a confused child. And the interesting coalitions forming around issues of the secret transitioning include, you know, staunch Catholics and gay parents, all of whom are worried about this idea that the schools might try to transition their kids when the kid is, maybe the kid is gay, not, not trans. Maybe the child is just depressed and just needs mental health treatment. So you have these really fascinating coalitions forming all around, questioning the ideology, but the ideology starts early. It's, it's why you do need every piece in the puzzle to come together in order to have the cultural shift happen. So it's, that's now what's going on with a lot of this transitioning stuff.
- [35:45]
B
And you know, by the way, that line regarding the emotional blackmail of the parents, that line about how being told that your kid would, would commit suicide without being transitioned. I've heard that over and over and over and over again for years from parents. This, this, this was the script that, that doctors and therapists and whatever we're told to tell parents, and it's the most effective script in the world. Your child will die without this.
- [36:20]
A
And of course it's interesting because it's so counterintuitive to tell a parent, what we really want to do is put your child under the knife, bring them in, let's do a 12 hour surgery.
- [36:32]
D
Sterilize for life. Yes.
- [36:34]
A
Well, no, but the result just. You're talking about the result, right? Sterilizing them, changing their body structures superficially, because you can't really change a body structure in, in many ways. But let's, you know, sure, let's do that. Because your child says they're, you know, they don't want to live if they're not X, Y or Z people. These are, you know, upper middle class parents who like, don't want to give too much Tylenol, you know, like are, you know, worried about how much, how, how much broccoli the kid is eating, healthy diet, you know, do the kids get enough exercise, too much time on screens, all of that. And then you say no. I'll tell you what, you have all these concerns. You're trying to be responsible, sober, like meticulous parents here. We're just going to take them in and we're going to like do major surgery on your kid. Like, you know, my sister had, one of her kids had to have a hernia operation, you know, at the age of seven, she didn't sleep for six weeks. It's a hernia operation like every, you know, it's like very commonly performed procedure, right. And just the thought of her beloved child being under anesthetic alone was tormenting to her. That's the normal response. Somebody says your kid needs surgery. You're like, oh my God, really? Isn't there anything we can do to not have surgery? And this is an elective surgery. The thing that is so pernicious about the, your kid is going to kill herself or kill, kill himself if he doesn't have the surgery, is that it turns it into something that's not elective but absolutely necessary. And that if it's like if, if you knew that your kid had a, you know, suppurating, had something that was, you know, a wound that was going to turn into sepsis and kill them. And you said, I don't want that kid to have surgery, then you would be, you know, neglectful or malign or, you know, like letting your own neurosis get in the way of what would, what would actually genuinely heal, Heal your kid. So you can see how clever and pernicious this is because you take something that people should have a natural revulsion toward, right? Which is having their kid undergo a major surgery and turn it into like their, you know, their, their salvation, which it might be if they had cancer or if they again had some, you know, had. Had to have something very extreme done to them because otherwise they would almost immediately die. Right.
- [39:31]
C
I mean, that's the point. It's, it's, it's a, that it, it's a response to a non physical ailment when never before have we responded to a non physical ailment with major surgery. You don't respond to physical ailment with, you know, I mean, you respond to physical.
- [39:55]
A
Which we don't do anymore. And is viewed as like a great crime cardinal crime of the 20th century that was a surgical intervention to deal with a non physical problem.
- [40:06]
D
Well, body dysmorphia is the closest analog to gender dysphoria in terms of diagnosis. Someone saying I feel this way when it is obvious they are not that way. Like I feel like this limb should be cut off or I feel obese when they're starving to death. And so gender dysphoria is saying I feel like a boy, but I was born a girl. And that's the absolute point, Seth, that you. We don't tell someone who's experiencing body dysmorphia that yes, you're right, your arm is disease will cut it off. So then you'll feel better because you'll have cured this thing. Because of course what we know from these conditions is that then there's a new thing that they find that is wrong with them. And because it is a mental health condition. And there are lots of treatments for anyone who presents with gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is real and there are lots of treatments for it. But to begin the treatment with radically altering someone's body, either through surgery or hormone treatment, for which we do not know the long term risks beyond probable sterilization for a lot of these kids, that's horrifying. And I think we're going to see a lot of cases of adult children who can't have kids and who've maybe de. Transitioned really struggling with their own mental health. In this particular case, the Fox Varian case in New York, she's now lives as a woman again. She began cutting herself after she had the surgery to have her breasts removed. She became even more depressed. So that, that I think was one of the more compelling pieces of evidence that this argument that this will cease the harm that they seem to be experiencing, that it's quite the opposite. It often exacerbates it by the way, as an aside.
- [41:35]
A
Yeah.
- [41:36]
B
There is a move or there is or was a movement in Canada to cut off limbs of people who said they feel they, they are, they should be. Yeah.
- [41:47]
D
Anyway, they're on the forefront of euthanasia too.
- [41:50]
C
So I guess, you know, imagine, imagine giving a, you know, imagine giving, you know, a bulimic person liposuction.
- [41:59]
A
Yeah.
- [42:00]
C
Or an anorexic person liposuction. That's what it feels like.
- [42:04]
E
Little bit of history for you. It took us a long time to decide to do this podcast. Our old colleague Noah Rothman wanted to. I didn't want to. I was very skeptical. I was nervous about starting a new effort at Commentary. How would we do it? Is it the right decision? What if it doesn't go? What if it makes us look foolish? All that uncertainty. But making that leap was one of the best decisions we ever made here. And you know what? Over time, Shopify has helped ease some of our worries with its expertise, helpful tools and easy to use platform that has helped us so much in our e commerce. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US.
- [42:50]
A
From household names to Commentary magazine, which.
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E
Of course is a household name for you. Get started with your own design studio. Accelerate your efficiency.
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A
Get the word out like you have.
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E
A marketing team behind you. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert. With world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. It's time to turn those what ifs into ka Ching Shopify. Today is your way to do that. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com commentary go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary. This is not just an ad for Brooklyn Bedding, it's a testimonial. This is a mattress company that sent me a mattress to test. And not only did I find it so comfortable, not only did my son whose bed it was on, find it so comfortable that we were stunned by it, but we got two more mattresses for my daughters for each of their beds as well. I don't know what more I can say to endorse Brooklyn Bedding, which handcrafts every mattress in their Arizona factory. No middlemen, no gimmicks, just top tier quality, honest pricing and real American craftsmanship for a better night's sleep. So go to BrooklynBedding.com use my promo code COMMENTARY at checkout to get 30% off site wide. This offer is not available anywhere Else that's Brooklyn bedding and promo code commentary for 30% off site wide. Support our show and let them know we sent you after check out BrooklynBetting.com promo code COMMENTARY.
- [44:36]
A
But you know, not to get pretentious, but epistemologically there is a fundamental untruth that is being told here. And it is like this. A kid says, I'm not a boy, I'm a girl. How does a kid or an adult, or an adult male or an adult female or anybody know that they're in the wrong body? By which I mean, how do I know? If I said to you, I think I'm a woman, how do I know what being a woman is? I cannot know what, literally I cannot know as I have an. I am a person made up of XY chromosomes. I don't know what it means to be a woman. I know what it means, what women look like. I know that I, maybe I prefer the idea of looking that way as opposed to the way I look. I know that a woman is, in caricatured sense, more openly emotional or more nakedly raw or more committed to a world in which relationships are the fundamental factor as opposed to individual self expression. All these ideas that people have about what maleness is versus what femaleness is.
- [45:59]
D
But I'm gonna cut you off and cry to undermine the stereotype, but I won't do that.
- [46:02]
A
Right? No, but, no, but I'm just saying it doesn't. There is, it is a nonsensical idea in the understanding of what knowledge is. It is one of the very few things that you cannot know. You cannot know because being a male or being a female involves not only your chromosomes and all that, but like an enormously complex interplay of hormones and, and, you know, body chemistry and dealing with, you know, whether or not you are the person who produces eggs or you produce sperm, like, and how your body regulates that and where, what happens every month when you have to, when an egg has to be disposed of or how sperm is create all of that stuff that is, you're, you're not a machine. Human beings aren't a machine, but we're made up of 10 billion different things. And so if I, if somebody comes to me and says I'm a woman who is a male or I'm a man who is a woman, the only genuinely profoundly proper responses. You cannot know what you think you know, you are engaged in a category error. It is unknowable what you feel, and particularly if you're five years old, like what does that mean. That means you want to wear a dress or, you know, you want to be a princess and not a prince. You don't want to be a cowboy. You, you know, you want to be a. Yeah, you want whatever. Like. So I think when it gets down to it, this is the thing that gets under people's skins and terrifies them and all of that, which is that we're being told that this immutable fact about us is not immutable. And we all know. I'm sorry, that it's not true. Now that doesn't mean you can't do it. Like, we live in a time of extreme, you know, sort of like physical personal autonomy. There's never been any time like it. And the, there are. Now there's the ability to do this right. Not just to act like it, you know, to be George sand and to say you're a man and wear men's clothing and all of that and call yourself George sand or whatever. But you know, you. Now you can get somebody to cut your breasts off or, you know, or your penis off or something like that. They'll do it for you if you want it.
- [48:36]
D
But this is where, and this is where I think the limits to the expression of personal freedom. And, and that's when it comes to children who actually don't have the ability to give full consent because they are not fully adult yet and fully capable of reasoning through the long term consequences. And we see this in. This is an accept social norm or has been up until recently. And I think one of the reasons this has become such a huge cultural issue is that it failed to recognize that it's different when it's kids. And I think a lot of us, I mean, I have no problem if someone wants to. If, if John, if tomorrow you appear on YouTube wearing a dress, I don't have a problem with that. If that's, I mean, fine, wear a dress. It's a free country. You're an adult. But if you putting your son in.
- [49:20]
B
A dress, I might have a problem with that.
- [49:21]
D
Okay, Abe has a problem with that. I don't care.
- [49:23]
A
You don't want to see, you don't want to see this in a dress.
- [49:26]
D
I feel like, let me tell you right now, fundraising opportunity here. But anyway.
- [49:31]
A
You know, or something like that with the kids. Yeah.
- [49:37]
D
When you, when you, when you violate a norm regarding either parents ability to make decisions for their kids, like in the Mahmoud case, or a parent's ability to protect and understand what's best for their child, when the Entire medical establishment is and, and an ideological movement is saying to them the harm is not cutting off the kids breasts. That's where I think that's what we're litigating now. And thank God there's enough common sense still on these juries. When they listen to the evidence and think about it, they say, no, that was harm. You were harming this child and the parent in this case. I mean, I can't imagine the guilt of this parent who brought this case. But it's an acknowledgment that huge parenting mistake was made too. But that the pressure, the unrelenting pressure for the medical establishment for these cases, that's got to stop.
- [50:26]
A
AB wanted to talk about the Epstein file release. I'm not sure what to, what to say. I want. Except for one thing which is we are seeing, by the way why this shouldn't have happened legally. Like we are seeing the monstrousness of this law to pass to release these files, which is that there are, there is a. There are millions of pages of, you know, allegations that are being released into the public that have no basis in evidence and you know, photographs and all kinds of things that have literally no basis in evidence. And that's why you don't release raw files in some case where evidence is being gathered for a potential criminal prosecution. Because anyone can say anything in these files and they're collated and they're left there and they are generally speaking kept under unbelievably secure lock and key in order to protect people from being defamed. And there are a couple of very famous people here, so they're famous. So whatever. Who, if, if the things that are in the files are not true, have had their reputations ruined for all time because there was a political hunger to get these things released.
- [51:52]
B
Even worse, they've botched the release in that they've failed to black out images of the victims. Some of them faces and bodies, some of them might perhaps be even teenagers. They're going back to correct that now. But it came out. I mean.
- [52:16]
A
Yeah, but everybody who downloaded the materials has it.
- [52:18]
B
Yeah.
- [52:19]
A
So there's like basically. Yeah. Like naked pictures of 15, 16 year old girls.
- [52:25]
B
Yeah.
- [52:25]
A
Which are, that's actually a federal crime to distribute naked images of underage people. That is like literally. There is a, it is a federal, federal crime as of like 1994, 1993, something like that. Anyway.
- [52:46]
B
No, look, what, what I remain, you know, completely stupefied about regarding this whole Epstein thing is we know he and Gilan Maxwell were trafficking in females for him. Do we yet know that they were trafficking in females for any other people? I mean that's, that's, that's the grand assertion.
- [53:15]
A
I mean nobody, every, everything, nobody has been indicted, nobody has been charged other than the two of them.
- [53:21]
B
Yeah.
- [53:23]
A
And you know, there have been two different cases, right. I mean there was the case against him in 2007 in Florida and then.
- [53:30]
D
There was not guilty to in serve time in prison for. And everyone who spoke to him after that should be implicated in extremely poor judgment. I will say that that is something.
- [53:39]
C
That's what happened to Larry Summers. Right. Larry Summers was still texting with him after that. And, and that's what, and that's what. You know, Summers is a guy who's trafficking charge sort of kind of canceled in his career once or twice, but this was the thing that really did it.
- [53:53]
A
But also like Peter Mendelssohn in England who is now basically, he's gonna have to resign from the House of Lords eventually. I mean he's Lord Mendelssohn. He just left the Labour Party. And obviously what happened to Prince Andrew.
- [54:10]
C
I mean one of them mucked.
- [54:11]
D
He's no longer what happened to what he brought upon himself.
- [54:14]
C
What he brought upon himself and ultimately.
- [54:16]
A
The consequence for him is that he.
- [54:18]
C
Suggestions in the, in the emails that have been released that he wanted more brought upon the House of Winter, that he was flirting with all sorts of stupid stunts about bringing Epstein in there and you know, whatever. I mean like imagine the, the, the blast radius of the royal scandal that would have ensued had he had his way, had his ideas come to fruition.
- [54:45]
A
I mean, look, the reason that this case will never die and it will never die. I mean, in other words, like 200 years from now people will be writing whatever passes for books involving this matter. You know, the way people still write about the affair of the Necklace in.
- [55:01]
E
The, you know, during the, in the.
- [55:03]
A
Run up to the French Revolution and stuff like that gigantic conspiracy that happened at the time of the downfall of the, of the French royal family. And literally, I mean there are like books like there was book published last year about the affair of the Necklace, you know, where the doctors plot in the Elizabethan England, like that, that kind of stuff. So it'll be around is that nothing at it does not add up that Jeffrey Epstein, a person who didn't have very many people working for him and was said to be a great genius, but wasn't like doing a lot of trades or this or that or the other thing, dies with $560 million in cash. And the only thing we know about him is one very rich guy gave him a house worth $70 million, just.
- [55:53]
E
Gave it to him.
- [55:54]
A
Another rich guy paid him $158 million for tax advice. That's a lot of money for tax advice. Theoretically, that would mean that he should have saved that rich guy about 7 or 8 billion dollars in order for him to get a kind of, like, compensation for his tax advice of $158 million. None of this adds up. Everybody knows that it doesn't add up. Everybody understands that whatever he did, whatever he was, he was. If there was blackmail going on, he was a very, very good blackmailer in the sense that when it came, he blackmailed them, but, like, when they came after him and these people didn't actually give him up, he didn't give them up either. And so we're in this, you know, cycle. And then, of course, the thing, the way he died still doesn't add up.
- [56:53]
C
And everything that's being released of the Epstein case only feeds the questions and not the answers. Everything that comes out just strengthens the conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. There's no. There's no. Like. It's not like a document came out that was like, sorry, you know, Tucker and Megan, he was not on the payroll of.
- [57:18]
E
Of.
- [57:18]
C
Of Mossad or whatever. You know, it's not. It's not like you even got any. Anything that. That knocked down some of the conspiracy theories that fester online about this guy. You just got, like, now there's pictures of him with more people, you know, now there's him, you know, like, you know, Mom, Donnie's mother, is named in one of the emails. And so people are going around making all sorts of hay out of that when it was, you know, because she made a movie and he wanted to throw a party or something like that, show whatever it was. But it's like, these people's names now or forever, you Google them, right? And it's like, whatever they did in life, maybe they could have won a Nobel Prize or whatever. You know, they could cure cancer if they were in an email with Epstein. That's the thing that's going to come up. And. And nothing. And there's nothing that actually shines any sort of informational light on how do you get his money? How was he dealing with people? Why were people this way toward him? Why was. Why was. Why did he have access to this when he shouldn't have? You know, there's none of the questions around that stuff, which have answers somehow There are answers in the universe. Nothing gets answered. Every page dump just throws more pictures and names into, like, this giant vat.
- [58:33]
A
Yeah.
- [58:34]
D
But it is a useful tool in the proxy political wars that go on on the left and the right. So you've got Bill and Hillary Clinton perhaps going to be censured for refusing to come before Congress when subpoenaed. You have, you know, obviously it was very useful for Democrats on the. On the left side of the aisle to use it against Trump, and they continue to do that. So it is. It's almost like a proxy war with. With clearly salacious details, which makes it even more interesting to people, I suppose. But you're right, nothing really sticks.
- [59:03]
B
But at this point, everything's canceled out by everything else. I mean, Trump's canceled out by the Clintons.
- [59:09]
C
Right. If everybody's in the Epstein files, then nobody's in the Epstein files.
- [59:13]
B
When Musk was going to war with Trump, he said, here's a secret. Trump's in the Epstein files. Now Elon Musk is in the Epstein files.
- [59:22]
D
You know, he's one of the few who actually comes out looking legit because he's obviously so straightforward in how he understands communication that Epstein hinting, hey, hey, come hang out with the diplomats. And Elon Musk, like, diplomats are boring. He's like, no, no, I have young diplomats. And Elon's like, still bored. No going to work on my rockets. I mean, there is something kind of.
- [59:42]
A
Well, there's the funny thing that he said, which is that he said that Epstein tried to lure him to the island with the promise that he would be on the island with Reid Hoffman, the guy who invented LinkedIn. And he said, if Epstein knew anything about me, it's the last thing on earth I would ever want to do is spend a weekend with Reid Hoffman. Now, I didn't know that. You didn't know that. Nobody knew that. But at least we now get a little bit of detail about how the billionaires feel about each other in that sense. But in the end, what this does reveal, and it reveals it to everybody and therefore is a Rorschach test about who you want to blame is that there was. There is in this weird new elite, right? Not an aristocratically, not a moneyed elite per se, not a social elite, but this weird combination of highly educated people, very rich people, politically connected people, politicians, all kind of jumbled together and doing things that must be untoward, or associating themselves with somebody that no rational person, if they. If that person lived on your block and he moved onto your block, and you said, oh, he just served a year in prison for, you know, like, sleeping with teenage girls. You would be like, I'm. He's not come over to my house.
- [61:09]
D
He was a registered sex offender. He had to.
- [61:11]
A
Registered sex offender. And then, like, you know, he. He's not coming over to my. No one talked to him. Like, he is not, you know, he. That's the normal response, is that person is out of society, and he wasn't out of society because he had the wherewithal to stay in it. And that's what's so chilling, because the elite, the amorality of the American, like the upper, upper, upper echelon, you know.
- [61:44]
B
But it's got to be said, the.
- [61:45]
A
Richest man in the world, the second richest man in the world. Prime ministers, the brother of the, you know, the son of the Queen of England, you know, former presidents of the United States, former prime ministers of Israel, you know, like, it's not good. It's not a good thing.
- [62:04]
B
You got to say, though, Trump dropped them earlier.
- [62:08]
A
Well, part of the thing, though. Yeah. And, you know, is the other thing that they bungled is that they released all this stuff, and then it turns out that there's 3 million more pages that they didn't release. And of course, maybe for good reason, because as I said at the beginning, they shouldn't have released any of it, but now it's like, now there's like, well, what's in the 3 million missing pages? That'll never end either, you know, so.
- [62:33]
C
There'S one useful thing, which is the funniest tweet I've seen in it, and I get. And. And it's useful, is an economy. A French economist tweeted that if you. If there's an academic article that someone sent to Epstein, the PDF is there in these files. And therefore, the Epstein files are a tool to bypass academic journal paywalls. So if you're interested in that, if there's a. If there's an academic paper that you want to read that is paywalled, and they're saying, you know, 75 bucks to read a PDF of this. First search the Epstein files, it very well might be in there. This economist posted a PDF of something that was in there, like some random academic article.
- [63:23]
A
So Larry Summers, who is said to be one of the most intelligent people on Earth, and people I know who know him think very highly of his brain, was texting with Epstein constantly, like, sending him such articles, things, economic papers, science stuff, interesting stuff on science, and all of that. So you get this sense, like, people say, he must have been very brilliant, all of this. The only thing I will say, and then we can move on, is reading his texts to people. Not impressive.
- [63:59]
D
Epstein's text, you mean?
- [64:00]
A
Yeah, Epstein's text. Barely literate now. Okay. People are typing on, you know, iPhones or whatever. Barely literate. Kind of little hard to follow. Like, where's the genius? You know, where's the. Where is the person? Larry Summers. Why does Larry Summers want to, like, be in constant communication with this guy? He sounds like an idiot. I mean, that's. The other striking thing is I keep waiting for some evidence of the. Of the brilliance of Jeffrey Epstein's financial guidance that would explain the degree to which Leslie Wexner and Leon Black and Bill Gates and all these people were, like, so heavily involved with him. And his. The texts themselves are therefore damning of them because they don't suggest that there's any reason for them to be in close proximity to him.
- [64:57]
C
Because that, John, is the answer. The brilliance of Jeffrey Epstein is that he has never put anything in writing worth anything to anyone. No information, no nothing. No glimpse inside his brain, know what he's really like.
- [65:17]
D
A very long time to convict him in that first case, too. That was, like, years and years of gathering evidence for that reason. I mean, it was a very difficult case to win. And there were journalists in Miami who were, like, following this for years. I mean, it was. It was tough case.
- [65:31]
A
But it is said Meyer Lansky, who is the, you know, basically the kind of, like, banker of the mob, kept their books in his head, and they trusted him. And so no one ever had any books because he had this encyclopedic, you know, he had one of those crazy brains. And so he could basically have the, you know, Genovese family and the whatever, the Bonanno family. Everybody's books in their. In his head. And maybe that's, you know, Epstein, not only books, financial books, but also their preferences, shall we say? Okay, just quick conclusion. Catherine o', Hara, the comic, actress, sketch comedian, writer, performer, died suddenly, I guess, on Friday at the age of 71. I have a commemoration of her on the Free Press website today. So just as a matter of recommending. She was, as I say in the piece, like, from the age of 21.
- [66:36]
E
When she was first on the show.
- [66:38]
A
SCTV, the Canadian, the best sketch comedy.
- [66:41]
E
Show in the history of television.
- [66:42]
A
She was 21 years old when she started on the show till last year when she was on the studio as this deposed studio chief 50 years of unbelievably brilliant comic performing. Believable. She could be a caricature. She could be a believable person. She could be a believable person who turns into a caricature. And so if you want. If you don't know her work and a lot of people probably haven't seen and you can't really find sctv, which.
- [67:17]
E
Is, you know, one of the obviously.
- [67:20]
A
Great resources if you are Catherine o' Hare and completist. The place to turn, because you have seen her at home alone, I assume. But the place to turn are the Christopher guest improvised movies. There are three or four of them waiting for Guffman. Best in show, for your consideration. And a mighty wind. Mighty wind is about a folk music festival, for your consideration is about a terrible movie that suddenly gets Oscar.
- [67:49]
E
Gets.
- [67:49]
A
Gets Oscar buzz way for Guffman's about a small town pageant and the delusional.
- [67:56]
E
Ideas that everybody has about how the New York times is going to come review the pageant.
- [68:00]
A
And best in show is about the Westminster dog show and she is in each of them playing a wildly different kind of character and is like unimaginably brilliant.
- [68:10]
D
The Internet archive does have the first season of SCTV if you want to watch.
- [68:14]
A
Oh, my God. Okay.
- [68:16]
D
The quality is not good. Great. But you can see some of the episodes on the Internet archive.
- [68:20]
A
So that's archive.org you go there, you type in, I guess SCTV and see.
- [68:24]
E
See what comes up in the videos section.
- [68:26]
D
Yeah, they've got the first season.
- [68:28]
A
That's.
- [68:28]
D
I mean, that's all I found was the first season. But they are there.
- [68:32]
F
Okay.
- [68:34]
A
All right. We'll be back tomorrow. So for Abe, Seth and Christine, I'm John Pothor. It's keep the candle bur.
- [68:43]
C
Foreign.
- [68:48]
F
It's tax season. And at lifelock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points lifelock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll figure out it. Guaranteed one last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply.