Jeremy Hobson on the "Rally Around the Flag" Risk in Iran

Summary

The Gist – “Jeremy Hobson on the 'Rally Around the Flag' Risk in Iran”
Podcast: The Gist (Peach Fish Productions)
Host: Mike Pesca
Guest: Jeremy Hobson
Date: January 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Gist features Mike Pesca joining Jeremy Hobson for the inaugural episode of “The Follow Up,” a new, more conversational podcast spinoff from The Middle. The core focus is on the dynamics and consequences of recent U.S. policy moves: the Trump administration’s hardline actions on immigration and foreign policy, particularly the risks of “rally around the flag” effects in Iran and the fallout from capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. The conversation blends sharp critique, dark humor, and journalistic self-reflection, offering context on law enforcement controversies, media responsibility, and the cost of extreme policy corrections.

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Main Topics & Key Discussion Points

1. Opening Banter and Reflections on Broadcast Censorship

• The show opens with lighthearted banter about podcasting’s relaxed format (i.e., the ability to swear) and the hosts’ long professional history.
• Notable quote:
  • “Why do a podcast if you can’t do that?” – Jeremy Hobson, on letting loose on podcasts (09:17)

2. Minneapolis ICE Shooting – Lawful but Awful?

• Discussion of the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Goode by an ICE officer in Minneapolis.
• Emotional impact on both hosts and the broader public, despite professional distance.
• Legal vs. moral dimensions: “It might fall into a category called ‘awful but lawful’.” – Mike Pesca (11:26)
• The Trump administration’s public branding of Goode as a “rioter and domestic terrorist” is critiqued for its disconnect from video evidence.
• Comparison to the aftermath and initial misreporting of George Floyd’s death.
• Speculation that the administration’s approach (defining “black as white”) is strategic, borrowing from post-January 6th tactics.
  • Pesca: “Maybe this is why the Trump administration thinks it’s a smart play to define black as white...” (13:34)
• Public reaction, even among Trump voters, is seen as a possible turning point:
  • Jeremy Hobson: “I voted for Trump and this is too far.” (17:23)
  • Listener Janine (voicemail): “I don’t recognize America. It makes me very sad... I don’t know where our humanity and our empathy has gone.” (16:29)

Breakthrough Moment

• Pesca argues that Trump’s “corrections” always go too far, using immigration as a prime example.
  • “Everything is solved with a butcher’s knife or with a chainsaw... the Trump administration goes too far. This is a feature of the Trump administration.” (17:36)

3. Venezuela and the Capture of Nicolás Maduro

• The U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro (and his wife), drawing mixed international responses.
• Pesca highlights a key risk: lack of long-term planning or consideration for second-/third-order effects.
  • “That there is no plan for a year or two from now, that there was no, as far as I can tell, consideration of not the second, but maybe third order effects.” (19:31)
• The likelihood that removing one strongman simply opens the door for another or sours hopes for true democracy.
  • Pesca questions the sustainability of replacing a dictator with another unelected leader: “We really want a democracy, we don’t want a dictator whose only qualification is she’s still running the prisons… but she’s cutting the American administration in on their oil deals.” (20:28)
• Comparison to Iran: Trump’s threats risk uniting the Iranian populace against a common enemy instead of pressuring the regime.
  • “If the United States, the Great Satan, attacks… all but the most dedicated protesters will say, well, we at least now have a common enemy.” (03:09)
  • Strategic silence by Israel is noted: “If your enemy is intent on destroying himself, let him...” (04:00)

4. Anonymous Sourcing and Trust in Journalism

• In his “spiel,” Pesca reflects on a recent longform New Yorker profile of Marco Rubio by Dexter Filkins—specifically the heavy reliance on anonymous quotes.
  • The issue of trust and the interpretive bias of anonymous sources: “Anonymity, the granting of anonymity, works on us in ways we don’t always recognize.” (22:32)
• Examples of anonymity protecting sources but also making it easier to manipulate perception.
• Pesca critiques how anonymous characterization can nudge readers to accept conclusions (“Rubio bad”) without full context.
• Journalism lesson: “It’s important to try to limit the number of anonymous sources, not because it’s an invitation for lying, but because it’s kind of unfair… it goes further than a normal on-the-record quote would.” (26:23)
• Entertaining examples of “justified” anonymity and quotes from both prestigious and tabloid outlets.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Pesca on policy overreach:
  “Do sure, there’s government waste… And then people with AIDS in Africa are going to die, maybe hundreds of thousands of them because they attacked USAID. The Trump administration goes too far. This is a feature of the Trump administration.” (17:36)
• Hobson on emotional impact:
  “I don’t usually let myself get too affected by the terrible things that happen in the news… But this one really did hit me.” (10:35)
• Listener Janine (voicemail):
  “I just think it’s horrifying. It’s like we have lost our humanity. We’re just turning into this cruel country…” (16:29)
• Pesca’s warning on Iran:
  “The only thing that could save Iran… is a rally round the Islamic flag phenomenon. If the United States… attacks, then all but the most dedicated protesters will say, well, we at least now have a common enemy.” (03:09)
• Pesca on anonymous sources:
  “When you read a book, you put it in your voice, in your own head, and it’s an entirely different experience than when you listen to an audiobook…” (31:30)
• Pesca (with signature wit):
  “Rubio is advance.” (32:47)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–08:56 – Pesca’s introduction, reflection on Trump’s Iran strategy, rally-round-the-flag, preview of topics
• 08:56–09:53 – Jeremy Hobson introduces The Follow Up and welcomes Pesca
• 10:35–16:18 – Discussion of the Minneapolis ICE shooting, legal/moral implications, administration response, public reaction (including listener voicemail)
• 17:36–18:50 – Pesca on the Trump administration’s tendency for excessive “corrections”
• 18:50–21:25 – Capture of Nicolás Maduro, U.S. plans (or lack thereof), potential fallout
• 21:58–32:47 – Pesca’s “spiel” on Marco Rubio profile, anonymous sourcing in journalism, how anonymity impacts public trust and perception

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Tone & Style

The conversation is frank and unsparing, mixing careful analysis with biting humor and journalistic skepticism. Personal anecdotes and listener voices ground the policy debate in real-world emotional responses. Both hosts maintain a conversational, sometimes irreverent style that feels approachable and incisive.

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Takeaway

Mike Pesca and Jeremy Hobson dissect how political overreach and reactive policymaking—whether in immigration enforcement or foreign interventions—can produce backlash, both at home and abroad. The pair warn that ignoring second-order consequences (like rallying adversaries or alienating core supporters) risks undermining American goals. Through their reflections on both politics and the media’s role, they urge for greater transparency, nuance, and responsibility.

For listeners seeking sharp, nuanced, and often funny insight into contemporary American politics and journalism, this episode delivers both critique and context—and a rare dose of humility about what anyone can truly know in turbulent times.

Transcript

[A]

The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Hello, it's Saturday where we bring you one from the week and one from the vault. It's not really the vault this week. It's another appearance I did on a show. The show the Middle is one of the fastest growing, maybe only fast growing, NPR shows or public radio shows. It's hosted by Jeremy Hobson, who I've known for a long, long time and he is they are branching out to some online only content because the show doesn't air every day. And he had me on for the inaugural one and that is called the follow up and so I thought I'd return the favor. He was nice enough to have me on as the inaugural guest. I'd like to play it on my show and recommend it to you in that you will hear us talking about Maduro and my point about the end game and not thinking about second or third order effects that holds on the show. This show. The gist, which I didn't get to follow up on this week but I did want to say for the record, so I'll say it now. I think the same thing's going on with Donald Trump and Iran. He I did talk about how much he is enjoying the threats he's been making and I analyzed. My analysis was he has always liked making threats, but this is now a time to really make threats. Why? Because the Maduro threats, which like a lot of his supposedly taco threats turned into an arripa, which is they are repaed Maduro out of his bed and brought him to the Metropolitan Detention Center. You know, is that a good enough pun that I use it on Thursday show today? I guess it is certainly slightly insensitive. But if Maduro is the one complaining, he has bigger says a Pescar. A Pescar. So he threatened Maduro. People wrote him off. The threat was real. Now Trump, I don't think he's analyzed it, just senses it. Oh, now's the time to make more threats because people will think they're real. So he was threatening Iran. And this is so stupid. Not for the same reasons as threatening Minneapolis is stupid. That's just, you know, violating the Constitution, being something of a monster. Not just for the same reasons reasons that threatening Jerome Powell or even Raytheon for a late delivery. It's just unprecedented and maybe will blow up in his face. The Iran threats are so potentially unless they are ignored and not followed through with which history shows is usually the case, they're so backwards to his goal. In fact, the only thing that could save Iran at this point, and I'm not going to say the government's going to disintegrate in the next week and a half, but they're in a long term trajectory to decline and the only thing that will save them is a rally round the Islamic flag phenomenon. If the United States of the Great Satan attacks, then all but the most dedicated protesters will say, well, we at least now have a common enemy. This has never been truer in Middle east in world history. It's so common, it's so easily foreseen. Donald Trump should not be threatening Iran. Guess what? Israel should. The little Satan in the parlance of the Ayatollahs. Guess what they're saying about all the protests in Iran? Nothing. Because they know if your enemy is intent on destroying himself, let him. You don't even need Sun Tzu to say that. I don't even know if Sun Tzu said that. I should have said that. I'm saying it on the Saturday show. All right now, enjoy. This is me with Jeremy. And then the second part of today's Saturday show will be a spiel I just did a couple of days ago about a Marco Rubio post I just made about anonymous sources and why they're not always bad but but they're not always good. And they do have the effect, I think, of confirming what the reader already thought. So like I say in the piece, if you're pretty suspicious of Marco Rubio, the anonymous sourcing won't bump you. But I do think, as with any heavily anonymous sourced article, if all the names were there, you could assess the motivations and a couple of the charges might lose their oomph. I don't know. Something to consider. If you want to read the whole piece, it's on Mike Pesca that substack.com enjoy. Thanks to Home Serve for sponsoring this episode. Being a homeowner is amazing. It helps to be married to a somewhat brilliant architect who designs a home such that it should go in some sort of digest. But I got to tell you, there's a lot of stuff to do around the house. 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Get 15% off your first [e-mail] with code the gist a lot of times we spell the name of the company. It's very important. There's a little wrinkle here. T R U E W E R K. You get it? T R U E w e r k.com the gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. I do think that this is breaking through because I think she resonates as just a person who is trying to extract herself from a situation she didn't want to be in and maybe even wasn't really of her own making.

[B]

I am Jeremy Hobson. Happy 2026 and welcome to the very first episode of a brand new show we're calling the Follow up, which is available exclusively on the Middle Podcast feed. We are going to be doing this show in between Middle episodes and I'm going to tell you three things about it right now. First of all, you're going to hear us talk to some of the smartest people we know about some of the biggest news of the week. You're going to hear from ordinary Americans. We're going to bring in some of the many, many, many voicemails that we get from you into this show. And because we are the only national show on public radio that takes live calls, we get a lot of calls. We're going to use more of those here and we are going to have a little more fun, be a little more relaxed and conversational maybe than we did on one thing Trump did. Because it is now 2026. We have grown up and we give fewer fucks, which Mike Pesca, our first guest hosted the Just Podcast, may be shocked to hear me say but we're not on broadcast radio right now, Mike. This is the podcast. Why do a podcast if you can't do that?

[A]

It's not that, Jeremy. It's that I had no idea someone had taught you that word. People would always say, well, Jeremy is way too proper to use the F word. And then friends of yours would say, I don't think he knows it. We've kept it from him, you know, to protect the guy from FCC fines.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So I'm shocked the jaw is on the floor.

[B]

Well, yeah, Just to tell our listeners, you and I have known each other for more than 20 years because we used to work on the show day to Day at NPR, which was the midday show back in 2005 is when I was there and you were there.

[A]

When we both had long flowing manes of hair. Much more than me.

[B]

Those were the days. You didn't go to Turkey back then to fix that problem.

[A]

That's right. Just to get neither. Right.

[B]

All right, so we're going to talk about three things in the news, and we're going to get a prediction from you at the end. And the first thing I want to talk about is something that we've all been thinking about, what happened in Minneapolis, the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Goode by an ICE officer. And I have to say, just personally, I don't usually let myself get too affected by the terrible things that happen in the news, the mass shootings and stuff like that, just because it would be terrible. It would just be awful to always, especially when you spend as much time as you and I do focused on the news to get pulled in so much. But this one really did hit me. It was just awful to watch that video over and over again. See this woman who was a mother who had a dog in the back of the car, you know, get shot by an ICE officer.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the juxtaposition of the prosaic and the horrific. And I'm right there with you. I'm less emotionally affected maybe than I should be by so many of these news items, but that was horrible. Now, my mind also went to, okay, horrible, but is it illegal? What will be the adjudication? And I think it falls into a category. It might fall into a category called awful but Lawful. It was certainly awful. But we're going to learn a lot about the rules of policing and what happens when an officer, reasonably. And sometimes the word reasonably isn't even written into the law, feels that there is a vehicle coming at them. Now, we also saw that The Trump administration quickly jumped out and tried to brand it just as that. And in fact, they went way overboard calling poor Miss Good a rioter and a domestic terrorist.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Describing scenes that we all saw. Because this is video that is rivaling the George Floyd video in its ubiquity scenes of confrontation, light confrontation with ICE officers into rioting. And I think the Trump administration thinks that it's playing the PR game, right? But I don't think that they do. I don't think that they are. And I'm not saying from a moral or ethical standpoint. I'm saying from their own self interest, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot, pardon the. If it's a pun or reference.

[B]

Well, and the thing I think that was kind of shocking about that was that they came out right away, called her a domestic terrorist when we were all watching a video that didn't seem to show that at all. And actually, now even more angles have come out that where she. She waves the ICE officers on and says, go ahead, I'm pulling out, you know, and she's about to leave and then gets shot. And the Trump administration is saying something that we can see with our own eyes is not what occurred there. And it was happening at the same time as January 6, the anniversary of January 6, when there was a member of Congress who came out and said this was just a tourist event, that, you know, people just came into the Capitol to check it out, which is like anybody that was watching on that day knows that that's not what happened.

[A]

But maybe the January 6th example is one reason why the administration or some members. I saw Tom Homan in an interview saying it would be improper for me to comment. And then the interviewer, Tony De Kobe, said, well, isn't that exactly what DHS has done? And Homan said, well, that's them. I'm me. But maybe this is why January6, why the Trump administration thinks that it's a smart play to define black as white. Because, as you said, they did that with January 6th, and I thought on January 7th or 30th or within a year that this was really going to redound to their detriment. But defining is up is down and black is white on January 6th. Help them. It at least put them in good stead with their constituency. It's a rousing example that they would say, well, we'll do this again. We'll describe it as something other than it wasn't. And so maybe that's why they're doing what they're doing calling this rioting and domestic terrorism. Or maybe it'll be like the George Floyd incident, which as you recalled, began with an inaccurate description of person having a medical incident, a person in medical distress. And there was a lot of horrors with George Floyd. But if you go back to that initial description, it really put the state officials in a bad light.

[B]

But when you look at what happened in Minneapolis, do you see it playing out in a different way? Because it's not the first incident of ICE going in a way that many Americans view as too far on immigration enforcement. Even if they voted for Trump, they may believe that it's too far.

[A]

Yeah. And the polls show that people voted for his immigration policies. He was more popular on that. And you know, he will tell you, and it is true, almost zero border crossings. And he did deliver on the numbers. But the public has soured on the methods. Maybe they never considered the getting. Maybe they just voted for some sort of wish casting version of immigration. But yeah, I do think that this is breaking through because even with other incidents like the see COT prisoners or specifically Kilmar Abrego Garcia, there is some, there is some amount of argument or gray area or, you know, he is being charged with a crime. So it's not pure innocence. And to think of this woman, Renee Nicole Goode, as a criminal is a huge stretch. As I said, it might be the case that this officer is not going to get found guilty of anything. But I think she resonates as just a person who is trying to extract herself from a situation she didn't want to be in and maybe even wasn't really of her own making.

[B]

Well, and even before this happened, we did a show asking people how they felt about ICE's tactics and whether they thought that they went too far. This is listener Janine from Minneapolis.

[C]

I'm an independent voter, not really a Democrat, not really a Republican. Voted for both parties in my lifetime. But what I'm seeing right now makes me not even recognize America. I just think it's horrifying. It's like we have lost our humanity. We're just turning into this cruel country. And the thing that really bothers me is, you know, when Trump was running, it was about getting the illegal people out. Okay? Nobody's against making sure that people come to the country legally, but it's been lost. Now it's rounding up people. Now we have minimum numbers of people that need to get rounded up. They're sent to countries that they have no reason to be sent to, to terrible facilities in those countries. And it's just horrifying to me. I don't recognize America. It makes me very sad. And I don't know what has happened to us. I don't know where our humanity and our empathy has gone.

[B]

You know, Mike, it reminds me just of some of the people that I saw in the aftermath of the good shooting in Minneapolis, people that said, I voted for Trump and this is too far.

[A]

Yeah. I think that a characterization, a characteristic of how Trump does things is always too far. So there's a legitimate issue, immigration. The Biden administration didn't hand it handle it well, didn't handle it at all. I recommend you to great New York Times coverage of that. So we want a correction. And the correction, always by design, goes too far and appalls people, perhaps college campuses, and they got too woke or they got too social justice oriented. And then the correction, trying to strip colleges that do funding into Alzheimer's disease for hundreds of millions of dollars goes too far. Do sure, there's government waste. We should do something about it. And then people with AIDS in Africa are going to die, maybe hundreds of thousands of them because they attacked usaid. The Trump administration goes too far. This is, this is a feature of the Trump administration. I think it's what they want to do. I sometimes just wonder, is it possible to even solve our problems with a scalpel? Everything is solved with a butcher's knife or with a chainsaw. I mean, Elon Musk actually wielding the chainsaw from a stage to illustrate what he was doing with Doge. But this is the story of the Trump administration correctly identifying issues that the public agrees with and then going too far in the correction, if it even is a correction.

[B]

All right, so let's get to the next story we want to talk about, which is also an area where the Trump administration is making some people happy and some people think that it's going too far and is going to cause all kinds of other problems, and that is capturing the Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in Caracas and his wife, Celia Flores. They're now in US Custody on drug trafficking. There's been a pretty strongly negative reaction to this from other world leaders, from some lawmakers about the legality of this. But Venezuelans and Venezuelan Americans seem pretty happy. What do you think is the most significant part of this entire development with regards to what the US Just did in Venezuela?

[A]

That there is no plan for a year or two from now, that there was no, as far as I can tell, consideration of not the second, but maybe third order effects. So I understand what the administration would articulate. And by the way, when we say the administration, I think JD Vance is on a totally different page than Marco Rubio. And Trump has his own motivations. So that's really interesting. But this much I understand, and I'm not even going to tell you if I agree or don't agree. But if we were to ask them, articulate your theory of the case, how it's going to play out, they would say, we got this dangerous man off the chessboard. We're replacing him with perhaps not, definitely not, the greatest avatar of democracy in. Delsey Rodriguez is then vice president, now the leader. But we're going to make her slash, force her to share the oil wealth and this will benefit America and she'll be in place and we'll be running the country. All right, that gets us somewhere if that's. That is how it all works out. And then what? And then what happens when the people of Venezuela, the people who left Venezuela, the people who are cheering from the streets of Venezuela, are saying, well, we really want a democracy, we don't want a dictator whose only qualifications is she's still running the prisons, she's still running the Secret Service, but she's cutting the American administration in on their oil deals. So it's going to come to a head. And I haven't heard any concept of what happens then. The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

[D]

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[A]

And now the spiel on the Substack channel. I did a Pesca profundities piece on Dexter Filkins, who's a great reporter, has been on the show twice and his recent gigantic profile of Marco Rubio. I was not exactly critical of Filkins. I'm glad I read the piece. A lot of information there. I did note it kind of smacked me in the face that it was filled with anonymous sources, which aren't necessarily bad. Sometimes they give you the most delicious quotes because they are anonymous. Although I have another theory about that. If it seems like the anonymous quotes are the most vicious quotes, are they because the freedom of anonymity allows it? Or are they because if they put the name to the quote, you'd say, that guy, why are we believing that guy? Or I've not heard of that guy, but you could see why he'd say something like that. Anyway, I put together a spreadsheet of all 80 anonymous quotes. Of the 40 something quotes that are attributed to people, the article had about 250 quotes. And I'm not talking about the two quotes that were from New Yorker cartoons that ran within the pages. The 16 pages in print of the article. My Pesca profundities piece got some good reaction, some bad reaction, but one of the things that I wanted to talk about was this knee jerk reaction from. I don't want to jump to conclusions and just eschew the first syllable of knee jerk, but certain critics who find me tedious say that, you know, Mike, anonymous quotes, they're the backbone of sourcing Dexter Filkins, he is a great reporter and without anonymity. And then, you know, they tell me something that the Columbia Journalism School probably tells their kids. Yes, yes, I know all that. But if you can, you should try to get all the quotes you can on the record. And as a reader and as a citizen trying to evaluate things, we actually don't want to sacrifice the great insight that can only be gleaned from anonymity. But I think subconsciously, anonymity, the granting of anonymity, works on us in ways we don't always recognize. I'll get to that in a second. So here are a couple of quotes from the article that did they really need to be given under the COVID of anonymity? Marco got lucky. A Republican lobbyist in Florida told me, Charlie fucked himself. Now of course the quote's going to run. It says, Charlie fucked himself. That's Charlie Crist, who was Rubio's last opponent in the Senate race. Charlie fucked himself. He governed from the left, which he could get away with. But then hugging Obama, Marco just jumped on him. Like we know Marco jumped on him. It was chronicled in quotes right beforehand that Marco made a big deal about Charlie Crist hugging Obama. And we don't know who that lobbyist is. If he's an NRA guy, would we, would we take that with a couple of Bullets or rounds of salt. Maybe we would. There was another quote in there attributed to a former Rubio staffer. He reads voraciously. Most senators don't read. Again, maybe the quote couldn't have run if the guy wouldn't go on the record. I understand that it came after a quote that the staffer gave talking about Marco Rubio is an introvert. I'd not heard that. So maybe, you know, a psychological examination of your former boss can only be given off the record. But then maybe you do the thing that journalists do where that quote's on the record. And you also have later in the piece something about him being a great and voracious reader. There was an unnamed British diplomat who also said his speeches are good and most people write their speeches with AI. But Marco Rubio looks you in the eye. I understand diplomacy is shadowy and in darkness, but did that have to be just a nice general quote? Yeah, Marco Rubio is pretty sharp. Does that have to be off the record? And likewise, do some of the more vicious criticisms of Marco Rubio have to be off the record? Bob Woodward. And we know about Deep Throat Famous off the record source, Mark Felt. Did we. Oh, wait, did I blow anonymity? No, I think it's okay. He's dead. Bob Woodward wrote a series of books, Rage, Peril. Hey now. About the Trump presidency the first time. And a couple of them certainly contributed to the public record. A couple of them added question marks. In one of his passages, he has Trump talking about nuclear weapons. And the passages make it seem that Trump is curious to the point of near term essence about the use of nuclear weapons. Woodward then released tapes or some tapes about these conversations. And the tapes didn't contradict what Trump was said to have said, but they certainly didn't fully confirm it. It made it seem like Trump was talking in general terms about nuclear power. And he wasn't talking like an anti nuclear activist would, but he was maybe talking like someone who is drawn to power. But also, and I think this is important deep down, wouldn't use nuclear weapons. I don't know. You got to say, you can't put anything past Trump. But from the Woodward book, you certainly got the impression that Trump was dangerously ensorceled by the power of nuclear weapons. He does like power and things shape like penises. But I do think you'd be convinced that Trump was more into actually using nuclear weapons than he was. And if the quotes weren't anonymous or were actual quotes and not just reminiscence s of certain people, they'd have a different effect. That's another thing, an off the record quote characterizing a conversation can lead to digging more into the conversation and then you find out what actually happened. So I do think newspapers, as opposed to the New Yorker, especially the New York Post and the Washington Post for a while, very much wanted to address the topic of anonymous quotes. And so what they did is they started a procedure by which they would always explain why they gave anonymity. And Gene Weingarten, in the Washington Post a few years after this started, wrote a very funny piece about certain quotes that were given off the record. He quoted one after the impending death of Aretha Franklin, quote, it's in God's hands, said one longtime friend who requested anonymity because of the family's wish for privacy. I guess they could have said he requested anonymity due to their closeness to the deity, said someone familiar with the Lord's thinking. Here was another one about Tiffany Trump's appearance as a student at law school. People were following her around with cameras and it looked really uncomfortable, said a student who attended the event. And like most of Trump's classmates, requested anonymity to discuss a fellow student. So I guess, as Jean Winegarden noted, dishing on a celebrity, this is always protected speech. We can't make you go on the record. By the way, they were following her with cameras and they posted them on social media. So do you really need someone to anonymously tell you they were following them with cameras? There was nothing quite like that in the New Yorker piece. But I do think that there is a problem of trust with the media. And it is true that if anonymous sources were fabricated or made up, that would further erode the trust. But even the presence of these anonymous sources often does more work in the reader's mind than if the name and motivation of the speaker were attached to the quote. Here's what I think is happening. When you read a book, you put it in your voice, in your own head, and it's an entirely different experience than when you listen to an audiobook and the book read in your own head, goes through your own filter and is more likely to be affected by your own view of the world. Therefore, if you are an anti Marco Rubio person or generally disinclined to cut the guy a break, you read these anonymous quotes and you know that they are attributed to a former official. The same former official, a senator who attended a classified briefing. He doesn't say which party, any senators. Anonymous senators are a former Florida politician who knows Rubio, a former U.S. official who worked in Latin America. You see that and you just kind of gloss over it and you give it credence. And I do think with the names, less credence would be given. And I think it's important to try to limit the number of anonymous sources, not because it's an invitation for lying, but because it's kind of unfair. As a journalist, it goes further than a normal on the record quote often would. I understand sometimes you have to have quotes that are off the record, like in that classified briefing. But how often have we gotten quotes after a classified briefing? And then we hear quotes on the record, or at least from senators identified as the other party, and they're in total conflict. And then the truth doesn't really align with the off the record quotes. So many examples of that. I also read a lot of stories, well reported stories in places like the Washington Examiner. And when they use off the record sources, they're trying to, if not prove a point, more or less advance a worldview, such as Filkins does in his version of fairness, which I do think is fair. Advance a worldview. And the off the record quotes there clearly serve a purpose. But if you don't agree with the Washington Examiner's worldview, it's quite. Or at least they're skeptical of it. It's quite natural to read such a piece and saying, well, who is this? Why are they saying that? And I'm just saying the same skepticism, the same level of scrutiny should be applied to the New Yorker. And the reason I did it in this piece was the sheer tonnage of quotes. But also, as you'll see from my Pascal profundities, I think the quotes were used in service to come to a conclusion that I don't quite agree with. I don't think Marco Rubio was done dirty. I've read a lot of especially business stories with disgruntled employees grousing from inside the organization. If you knew more about the status of the disgruntled employees, sometimes, and this happens with union fights, also if you understood who these people in the union were, you might have a different view of management. If the papers allowed management to go off the record to denigrate the union, you'd say, wait a minute, what is their motivation? So that does always go on. But in my piece, I in Pesca Profundities, which was done under my own name and byline, I did say, you know, generally, this is not a hit job, not a smear job. It's kind of an everything It's a kaleidoscope and a panopticon because it runs so long at 12,000 words. But it does come to the conclusion. Rubio bad. More or less, Rubio bad. Secretary of State. And I have come to the conclusion in part from reading the piece and there are some nice quotes there and some people calling Rubio a realist. I have come to the conclusion. Not going to say Rubio good, but for Trump administration, Rubio good. And I don't want to blow the entire joy of reading my piece. It's mostly in the spreadsheet, I have to say. I'll just read the last line of it. Filkins offers a thorough dossier of sometimes indeterminate providence. I offer a three word rebuttal. Rubio is advance. That's it for the show. We're going to talk to you. Not on Monday because that is the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's day. We'll talk to you on Tuesday. It's big weekend of football, so we're going to come with Chuck Closer man. First two parts on Tuesday, analyzing the action from Buffalo. Now, we're not talking about specific games. In fact, we recorded that interview a couple weeks ago. And yet football's still popular. So we nailed it.

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