Welcome back to a new episode of That You Were Wrong with Molly Handingway and
David Harsani. Just a reminder, if you want to email the show,
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David. Was this week the most exciting week ever for you? In the
first time you've ever supported a political candidate that person one. Yes, this
is the first time that I can recall where I actually loved a candidate for
office, even though it was in Argentina, who actually won Javier Malay.
He won handily. I think he won by fifty I think he got fifty
six percent of the vote something like that. He is you know, he's
overturned I don't know how many years, seventy years of Barnast rule, you
know in that country, which is that country is a disaster. Not long
ago it was you know, one of the wealthiest countries, certainly in South
America, but even in the world. Now it's seeing you know, rampant
poverty. I think interest rates were up to like one hundred and thirty percent.
So if you're like mad about the eight percent or whatever it is right
now in your house, imagine that inflation, massive, massive borrowing and spending.
So what excites me about Malays are two things. One, he's obviously,
you know, small l libertarian, but also he is i would say
a social conservative as well. He's pro life. He's pushing back against sort
of the all the gender politics and all the extra rights and all the you
know, the usual social progressive all those ideas, and he's done it in
a very populist manner. So I'm excited that there's a country where those ideas
can be you know, expressed fully. And the guy does not like hold
back. He's not a moderate in any you know, which is a kind
of a dumb way to talk about those issues. Anyway. But he can
convince people overwhelmingly to vote for him, and even more importantly that he convinced
people to vote for him during an economic crisis. Most of the time in
history, when you have an economic crisis, people turn to more government.
Here in great depression or you know, the only time I can think of
that perhaps that didn't happen was when Reagan won in nineteen eighty. Every other
time Obama, you know, and whenever you think about it, people turn
to more government. So in this case, they turned to someone who's going
to hopefully be able to even though he faces huge, you know, gigantic
forces they're going to try to undermine him, is going to maybe pull back
government, dollarize the economy over there, and do a lot of good things.
So yeah, pretty excited about it. So the most I've cared about
Argentina in my life. Yeah, Well, you wrote a piece a few
months ago about how much you liked him, and then he had that presidential
sort of runoff and he came in second, and I was like, oh,
is he not going to make it? But then, as you said,
it was a pretty resounding defeat. Also interesting to note that Argentina is
a is a whole country, and they were able to count their ballots and
have a result within hours of the polls closing, which is something that I
remember we used to do in this country as well. Yeah, I looked
into that because I I wondered if this was kind of a direct, federally
controlled voting system over there, And it seems to me, though I'm not
certainly not an expert, that it's provincially run. So yeah, they did
it pretty pretty quickly and had the results pretty quickly. I guess if you
win by fifty six percent, maybe it's easier to to call it. Do
you think, well, it's we're having such problems with elections that it doesn't
matter whether we don't. We're just not finishing the counting of ballots for like
days or weeks in some cases, months in some cases. Actually, so
it's affecting not just presidential elections but local elections. We've had a real deterioration
in the quality of our election administration as we have expanded it from a voting
day to a voting season that can last for months, and major technological advances
and a complete deterioration of our system. It also, Yeah, now I'm
just going to say that, you know, even if they got it right,
you know, and all of that, when you take that long to
count, it just fuels conspiracy theories. You know. It just creates this
gap where people are, you know, where they see they're winning, then
they're losing. You know. It just it creates this Yeah, it just
creates a lot of conspiracies. I'm not saying that nothing is true when people
say, you know, bad things are happening in elections, but it also
creates a lot of conspiracies because of the time gap. Yeah, and more
time and less transparency leads to greater shanigans. So as from La, I
also I really like him. I find it fascinating when there are populist movements
that are very principled. So I loved the Tea Party movement and hate what
this country did to the Tea Party movement. Here people were really focused on
constitutional governance and they were treated very poorly for that. It sounds like there's,
you know, something similar. I was thinking one thing unimportant and one
thing important. The unimportant thing is I was wondering if from here on out
I would be well served to just pick candidates based on the absurdity of their
hair, because like Javier Malay has insane hair. He's called the wig,
right, I think I read that in your piece because of his crazy hair.
I also love his energy and all that. Okay, The important thing
is that I get very angry when I read corporate media saying that anger is
what leads people to vote for someone who whose ideas they like. They never
say this about people on the left. So if there's a left wing takeover
of a state or a country, no matter how much death and destruction comes
with it, it's always painted in like a very positive light. And when
someone say loves their country so much that they are willing to vote for an
outsider candidate who they think in hope, you know, in hope and love
for country, they think this person might restore this country the way we want
to, that is always characterized as anger when the candidate is on the right.
The Washington Posts lead on this was cartoonish in how it described what was
going on with with people voting for Malay. You have people who have been
really hurt by left wing economic policy. You just went through some of that
with the inflation and the economic ravages that have been caused through left wing governance,
and so they're hopeful and optimistic and they're voting for Malay. And the
Washington Post said, like a wave of right wing hysteria and anger led people
to vote for someone with no government experience, a Trump fan. You know,
it was just like it was just it was almost funny to read it
because it was so absurd. Well, yes, I'm happy you brought that
up. You know, whenever the right wing wins and I don't have it
what I mean, but I've gone back even to like Reagan's win. You
know, it's always i'll give you the words they use. Its rage,
but it's also discontent, anxiety, you know, white people having anxiety or
whatever. And when it's the left, it's always hope and rebuilding and so
forth. Now I'm going to give you a very specific example. Actually,
so everyone calls this guy a far right something far right outside or far right,
populist, far right, libertarian, radical. Every story has far right
in it. When in Brazil, nearby Lula the Kami Lula socialist Lula one,
this was the headline. This was the headline in ap Lula beats far
right president to win Brazilian election. Brazil's Lula sworn in vows accountability and rebuilding.
That was I believe in Reuters or AP again. So yeah, it's
always the same way, I think. I mean, it seemed to me
and maybe i'm you know, because I agree with him that the movement surrounding
Malay was actually very idealistic and hopeful, like you just mentioned. I mean,
you can see the people are so excited about the ideas that I think
that he probably convinced them of. There was actually no real tradition of what
he believes in Argentina, you know, I mean, there's no He's always
got like a Gadsden flag behind him. That's those are that's American imagery.
His ideas are very American, you know, called liberal in Europe, but
they're very unpopular and certainly unpopular in South America, you know, for the
most. Like you said that he named his dogs like Ludwig and Murray after
Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Macis or maybe Friedrich. No, I think it
was Milton and Murray. He also he is big on which he's big on
studying Talmud. He's very pro Israel, He's very pro America. Oh,
I had a question about that because I saw that that he studies like I
saw him wearing a kippa, and he studies Hebrew scriptures. Is he Jewish?
Is that a silly question? Or is he just doing it in a
different way. He I don't believe he is Jewish yet, but he might
be converting. He he had. I read one interview, but I had
to translate it on the Google translator, so not to get all of it.
But it seems like he's really into Talmud, which I have actually been
reading about too a bit a lot, even though I learned it when I
was young, you know, to help but like sort of you know,
help him with his thinking and about about the world and about morality and stuff.
I'd read that he was he was instructed to read this for help with
economic thinking. Oh yeah, and I didn't see that. That's another thing
I really like about him is that he is an intellectual. I mean,
he has a PhD in economics. He's not, you know, so he
can argue on that, you know, on that plane as well, and
not just you know, as a populist, you know, which he does.
Can we talk about your column this week? You wrote, I'll give
you the headline the Washington Post, Paul Farie, I think I'm pronouncing that
correctly. Shows why professional journalism can't be salvaged. Now, what was so
this? This was sparked by a tweet from this Washington Post. He's an
editor there, I believe, correct. Yes, Okay, well, I
think he covers the media for the Washington Post. So I'm going to read
the tweet. It was one of the funniest tweets I've read in a long
time. So he says, someone invented the phrase quote citizen journalism a few
years ago to describe amateurs doing the work of pros. Yes, it occasionally
works, but probably no more than quote citizen cop, citizen attorney, or
citizen soldier. Do you want to take it from here? Because I have?
I mean, where to begin. I couldn't believe this. I hate
the media, and then sometimes they do things where I'm like, I don't
hate them enough. So Paul Farry, who works at the Washington Post,
who covers the media, and you know, you can get the feeling maybe
he's not the right guy to cover the media when he's running like defense operations
like this, But for some reason, I actually think it's the last thing
he said that needs to be mentioned first, which is where he says citizen
soldier is something that doesn't work. Hate to tell them about the American Revolution,
but you know, I mean, citizens soldier is a great thing.
Yes, it's very important to the American founding, the idea that people personally
defend democracy door sorry, I should say, defend the values of their democratic
republic, their belief in the values that define them as a people. Citizen
soldiers work really well throughout history, not just in our country, but throughout
world history. It's fundamental to Western civilization. And the fact that he thinks
that this is some kind of like gotcha, like, how dare citizens think
they can do journalism they can't do soldiering either, is just a great indication
of how ignorant, the level of ignorance that we're dealing with. As a
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zero that's gold code dot com slash federalist or call eight five five six one
eight ten thirty. Also citizen cop, I think is a good thing too
in a way. I mean, people can make citizens arrests. It works
plenty of times. People defend themselves, people help their neighbors, people keep
an eye out there in my neighborhood. There's like a neighborhood watch, right.
But the funny thing about this is the attorney one and any kind of
like specialized intellectual skill. So essentially he's comparing being a journalist, which should
be at best a two year degree. I mean, it takes a lot
of comments. Oh, you don't need a degree at all, right,
we don't need a high school diploma. You certainly don't need a degree.
Journalism is a craft. They don't practice it anymore. But it's not that
difficult when I see that, you know, I always used to laugh because
one of the worst journalists I've ever worked with at the Denver Post became a
journalism professor, and it was just perfect. Like, you need to get
your PhD, which most of the times means you've never actually have to be
in a newsroom to teach journalism and these are the people who send journalists out
into the world. But anyway, I just want to point out he did
also take this idea out for a spin seven years ago when he tweeted is
there any other profession in which more people think they can do the job better
than the pros than journalism? Medicine, teaching? And again, one of
those things is not like the other two. Medicine is something that requires a
great deal of education and really has since the thing was invented, you know,
many thousands of years ago. And yeah, teaching is something that probably
you actually get worse with an education degree than better at the school that my
children are associated with. We kind of look at teaching degrees as a net
negative, like we'd much whether you have a history degree or a chemistry degree
than a teaching degree. But journalism, like, even compared to teaching,
it's absurd to think you need some kind of specialized training in journalism. What
you need is a level of curiosity, a focus on honesty, something that
is completely like in most of our corporate media environment, and like a willingness
to just hear people out, a willingness to find out stories, and a
desire to tell the truth. You have to have basic writing skills, the
kind that you can develop through eighth grade, and basic logic skills ditto on
that, and certainly, like knowledge of history can help, or knowledge of
how economics works can help. I've never worked with people in corporate media who
understood the basics of economics because they probably went to journalism school where they don't
teach such things. But yeah, it's just it's so snobby and arrogant and
wrong. It would be one thing if journalists were doing a really good the
professional journalists were doing a really great bang up job. To take just the
Washington Post for example, this is a paper that completely, willfully and eagerly
participated in an information op called the Russia's Collusion scam. They helped launch it.
David Ignatius, who's kind of known as a mouthpiece for the deep state,
ran the original Logan Act thing where he said that because the incoming National
Security Advisor had talked to his Russian counterpart, that meant that the twenty sixteen
election had been stolen and there was a Logan Act violation. I mean,
it really got things going crazy and in a way that was materially awful for
the Republic. They continued that operation, willfully publishing false stories based on anonymous
sources to convince people that the twenty sixteen election had been stolen by Donald Trump
colluding with Russia to undermine the Republic. This was like so bad. It's
one of those great examples where anybody with a brain in the rest of America
from the moment they heard this, they were like, I don't know.
I think people just voted for Trump because they didn't like Hillary. You know,
they had greater smarts as citizens than all the wisdom of these professional journalists.
The moment they read that absurd, comical joke of a dossier, they
were like, Oh, it's definitely fake. But not Paul Farhe Paul Farry
was out there years into the Russia collusion scam. There's a tweet of him
tweeting out a McClatchy article that is kind of known as one of the worst
examples of Russia collusion scammery. It's an article based on anonymous sources which says
that Michael Cohen had been in Prague secretly meeting, probably to verify this part
of the dossier that says he was secretly meeting with Russians. I think I
mentioned that. Who knows if this was true or not, but I interviewed
the guy who was supposedly on the other side of that meeting, and he
was like, I've been to Prague, but not in ten years. Michael
Cohen, for his part, says he's never been to Prague. There has
never been a scintilla of evidence supporting this claim. McClatchy runs with it on
anonymous evidence, and Paul Farhey, professional journalist who's better than the citizens,
said as if this turns out to be true, too, chuck up another
win for the Steele dossier, another win, like another. Nothing in that
was true, nothing other than like Russia's a country and Donald Trump's a man
and Michael Cohen worked for like those kinds of things that are publicly available were
true. But none of the outlandish allegations were ever found to be true,
not a single one. Yeah, well so, journalists, the one skill
they have is that a big institution like the Washington Post gives them a job,
and then they have access to people in power, and people in power
give them information. They are supposed to be skeptical of that information, go
and figure out if it's actually true. That's their one job they do,
not you know, in movies they're like journalists are just like snooping through files
and like figure you know, figuring stuff out. No, they're not.
Someone's calling them and leaking stuff to them, and then they are supposed to
go and make sure if it's true or not. But because we have the
key to being a journalist is don't be a dupe. Again, I mentioned
this on a much lower level when I was, you know, reporting on
local news. People will call you and try to use you to hurt political
opponents, to hurt some corporation, to do whatever your job is, to
figure out if what they're saying is true or not. Journalists don't do that
today. They are they are mouthpieces for people in power and and you know,
and a lot of citizen journalists listen, I'm not saying every citizen journalist
is you know, good at their job, or that we should trust everything
everyone says, but a lot of them have a lot more common sense and
a lot more skepticism that's needed to be a good journalist, in my opinion,
than do the pros. They've destroyed that industry, like, you know,
they just they've destroyed its credibility and no one trusts them anymore. And
you know, and it's because of this again style report. He's for the
Washington Post Style section covering the news media. I have a story, idea,
Paul Farry, something you can spend the next couple years on the complete
cratering of trust in corporate media. Like the Gallop survey that they do every
year shows that we are tied for worst ever in terms of media trust.
There is there are Okay, so thirty nine percent of Americans surveyed say that
they have literally no trust in the media to report anything with truth, fairness,
or accuracy. Thirty nine percent, another twenty nine percent say they don't
have very much trust in the media to report things accurately or honestly or truthfully.
And so of those and then so that just thirty whatever percent have any
have actual trust in the media. Those are almost all Democrats. Only eleven
percent of Republicans, which seems a little bit high as it is, have
trust any trust in the media to report things honestly, but sixty percent of
Democrats do. And that's because Democrats note that the corporate media exists to help
them with their narratives, so they better be appreciative of it. That's a
huge story, the fact that everyone in America basically realizes how our corporate media
are a propaganda operation for Democrats, and they're not like the arm of the
Democrats, because I frequently think they're leading the Democrats. They work together and
they sort of tell the Democrats what to do. That's a huge story that
any actual reporter who covered news media would be thinking of really interesting ways to
cover day in and day out, and instead he keeps doing defenses of people.
He did this one that I found when I got angry at the tweet
and wrote about it, where he was like, gosh, Conservatives think there's
something weird about the kavanaughs smear allegation. They find it hard to believe that
this well respected federal judge who'd been on the bench for twelve years, that
this is like an organic thing happening where people on the left are doing what
they do every time a Republican gets nominated to the Supreme Court and inventing a
smear about him. They think there's something weird about it. Well, there's
nothing weird about it. And then he quotes Jane Mayor to take his side.
Jane Mayor, who's got a demonic obsession with destroying the life of Clarence
Thomas and has done it for decades, who wrote an error riddled book after
his confirmation to try to destroy him, who's been part of every effort to
destroy him, who's devoted her life to destroying this man. He quotes her
saying like, yeah, there's nothing there, there's no conspiracy. I mean,
the woman is nothing but an activist, and he quotes anyway. I
don't know why I'm yelling about it, because obviously the Washington Post is propaganda,
and even to be acting angry or surprised about it is ridiculous. But
point being media delenda est they must be destroyed. They're destroying the country.
They're a problem. You know. It's interesting when we first started at The
Federalist, you wrote a lot of pieces pointing out how the media knew nothing
about faith, meaning religion. Reporters knew nothing about faith, especially Christianity.
But I see it in Judaism as well, And it's interesting they don't now
that this Gaza Israel thing is going on. I see that they don't know
anything about history either of the events they're covering. But more than that,
they show no curiosity to learn. It's all emotion driven, it's all politically
driven. There is just most reporters have no intellectual curiosity about these things.
It's just that they're activists. So you reminded me of something that I wrote
about actually earlier this week. But the White House. So the New York
Times ran a piece last week and the headline was why Trump seems less vulnerable
than other Republicans on the issue of abortion. So they go through Donald Trump's
vagueness on that issue, how He's trying to occupy middle ground. They show
you polls that show that he is more popular than other Republicans on this issue
as well. And now obviously he has set some stuff to moderate his position
because like every other candidate on Earth, he's who's been way ahead in primaries,
he's already running for the general. It's like and while Ron DeSantis and
others they have to have more, you know, they're more focused on trying
to get more conservatives and primary voters, a story as old as the American
political system. So the Biden White House, the White House sent a letter
out to the media that says, for quote, for the political press corps
spelled core wrong, especially our friends at the Gray Lady, which is The
New York Times. It's time to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate
of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is
allowed allowed back into the White House. So, first of you have a
White House telling the media what they should be doing, not disputing any facts
of that piece, but telling them that you have to spin a story to
let them imagine how terrible Donald Trump is. Meanwhile, when I think about
those years, you know, it was pretty crazy. But I think about
a better economy. I think about fewer wars going on in the world.
I think about Iran not getting you know, billions of dollars from the administration
to help Humas. I think of a lot of things. That's what where
my imagine imagination takes. You know what I mean? Can you believe imagine
if Donald Trump told someone what they should report and how they should report it.
I feel like there would be a big blowback about that, Okay,
But also imagine if you had a corporate media environment that for decades had been
doing everything in its power to lead the country to a darker place, and
you didn't have people on the right responding like with that awareness Publican party members
still like hungry for adulation from CNN and the New York Times, Like that's
in bleeping excusable, that is, it's intolerable. The Watchdot on Wall Street
podcast with Chris Markowski every day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the
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can say, to all the leaks, they still give them to these papers
and let them launder not all of them, but many of them. And
they're laundered through this kind of like left gift. This language, Yeah,
just the language itself, the rhetoric, the framing all of it. It's
going to be from the left rather than letting conservatives have those leaks. So
can you have all these left wing corporations and donors who fund and finance left
wing media operations because they understand that even if nobody says they trust the corporate
media, they still dictate what you talk about, and so you fund and
finance them so that you can control what people talk about, what the terms
of debate are. And people on the rider a like, gosh, why
why are the media so bad? I mean, wake up, it's not
the nineteen eighties. Your quaint like complaints about media problems are ridiculous. It's
definitely beyond time to be much more aggressive in fighting back in the airspace.
Which brings us to another thing that happened this week, which I think is
very important, which is Elon Musk launching a lawsuit against media Matters for America.
Did you follow that? I did. I read an in depth report
on this from a reporter named Mark Hemingway at Real Politics. The headline is
why Elon Musk is going a Thermo nuclear quote unquote. I'm going to try
to explain it. You'll let me know if I get it right. Okay,
So Media Matters has been around a long time. Essentially their job is
to go after so to smear right wing personalities, media personalities, and then
convince sponsors not to you know, support those shows so they'll go out of
business. So they've been doing this to Fox and Glenn Beck and others.
Just thinking back, and so obviously they do not like Elon Musk because he
has basically an open social media platform where anyone can speak. That includes some
bad people, but that also includes a lot of conservatives who have been censored
before by said social media platform and others. So what they did was this,
if I understand it correctly, they set up a bunch of dummy accounts.
The just dummy accounts would say horrible things online and they would keep saying
it thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, until one of these
tweets would appear next to an ad so American Express, Nike, whatever it
was right next to it would be something horrible, like the N word or
some anti Semitic comment. They would screenshot it, take it to the corporation
and say do you want to be associated with this sort of thing? And
then that corporation would say, of course not, and they would remove their
advertising from Twitter, doing financial harm to Musk in his company, and he's
suing them for that. Do I have that? Basically, I think the
difference is that rather than them tweeting something out thousands of times, they were
just refreshing their own tweet that they had created until they achieved the outcome they
desired, which was an ad from one of the targeted companies appearing in the
space around the offending tweet in question. But it was a completely manufactured operation
from a crazed left wing, anti free speech, anti American group Media Matters,
and it worked. Like they got all these companies ibm Apple, NBC,
Universal, Comcast, they got them to withdraw their funding. Media Matters
has existed for decades on this theory that if they can financially harm conservative press,
whether that's radio, cable, print, or otherwise, that they can
win their political battles. And they're right. It is a very effective thing
to go after the financial support, just like we were just talking about,
for conservative or non leftist media. And there has been very little pushback since
the time they went after Rush to the Times, the thousands of times they
went after Rush Limbaugh by taking out of context things he said, taking things
he said out of context, and trying to gin up like media hysteria over
it. And they've done a very good job of doing that. With cable
news. You know, you've got ABC, NBC, CBS being pretty uniform
in their thinking, and then MSNBC, which is you know, obviously part
of NBC and CNN being also very left wing. There is one place,
you know, obviously I work there, Fox that is not as cartoonishly left
wing as the rest of the people, and they must be stopped as a
result. They give voice to conservative speech, and so Media Matters has tried
to destroy them by working with sleeping giants and other anti free speech, anti
American groups targeting advertisers. It's really effective. Like you know, Fox is
overwhelmingly the most watched program out there, or cable outlet, cable news outlet
out there. But you know, you can be on a show that's barely
watched on NBC MSNBC and you get Lexus ads and you don't see that on
Fox. Always because of how effective this propaganda campaign against speech, against conservative
speech, against America, how effective that has been in the form of media
matters and their affiliate organizations or groups they work with. So kudos to Elon
Musk for taking them to task for manufacturing a scenario to hurt Twitter financially.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good suit. I don't know
the legality. I don't know, you know, if it's going to succeed
or whatnot. But I think it's time to fight back in that way if
you can, and he obviously can listen. I think that if you're just
taking someone out of context and you're popping it up there, I mean,
that's an age old way to smear people, and it's there's nothing, there's
no illegality in it. This is an illegal but you know what I mean,
there's no it's just how it works. But when you start setting people
up and framing them this way, that's a completely different story, right.
I mean, I think they were always nefarious, but I think that this
is not illegal, but it is suable, and you know, hopefully Elon
wins. Well, it's really important to take these people to task in the
courts to fight back. They have outsize effect on elections. It's been a
really smart strategy from Democrat donors to do stuff like this. When you control
the information space, you control the ground game. And the left completely controls
corporate media. And they don't just have the market dominance that would come like
through sort of above board tax tactics. They also have market dominance because they
are artificially suppress the spread of conservative speech and information through vehicles like this,
through other vehicles, like other parts of the censorship industrial complex. And I'm
a little heartened that the right is starting to wake up to it. But
there's a lot more to be on. What's you mentioned sleeping giants? Can
you explain what they do? Are they just very similar to media matters or
oh, you know, I wish sometimes like Mark Hemingway were on here because
he could he could say much more about it. He has written extensively about
sleeping giants and what they do is they organize mobs to come after advertisers for
conservative speech. And yeah, there's a place called the high pressure Business of
selling woke corporate armor, which looks like it deals with sleeping giants and how
they get people to boycott conservative media. Now, I will say it used
to be harder work for them to do this because they would have to like
contact the company kind of like what Media Matters did with this. Contact the
company and get it like individually, get them to take down their advertising by
controlling search algorithms or getting Google, which controls most of the advertiser space and
the search space, to deeplatform conservative outlets. They get a lot of their
work done for them. And it does remind me like what we were talking
about with Media Matters. It's very reminiscent of what happened to us at the
Federalist in twenty twenty, where a fake group called Center for Countering Digital Hate.
It's a foreign disinformation operation. They actually work to spread disinformation and they
work to take down media outlets and individuals whose speech they disagree with, and
they get I think I was talking about this last week, They get like
regurgitated by the Washington Post and CNN and other crazy left wing propaganda places.
Whatever they say goes. You know, so if Center for Countering Digital Hate
says X has a problem with X with such and such content, the Washington
Posts won't do their own research, They just regurgitate it and print it.
Same with CNN. And what happened in twenty twenty is probably something very similar
to what we just saw happen and with Media Matters where they manufactured a situation.
It's a little hard because I don't actually I don't actually know precisely how
they did this, but they claimed that on our website that we had comments
that were inappropriate, so people who came to our website and just commented on
our articles. They claimed that since advertisers could be on the page of an
article that included comments from outside sources, that we needed to be deplatformed and
demonetized. They went with NBC News, which has also part of this disinformation
censorship industrial complex. They the Center for Countering Digital Hate, went to NBC
News and they ran this hit on us to get us deplatformed and demonetized,
not because anything they said was true, but because we're so effective at countering
left wing speech, and these types of operations have been run against all sorts
of people. So when you're out there and you're thinking, I don't feel
like the country is as crazy as one would feel from our elections or one
would sense from when I run a simple Google search. The reason why is
because of this meddling in our elections, by meddling in the information space,
and it really can create disastrous results, and that's why it's so important to
fight against it. So I wasn't at the Federalist when that happened. I
had been away for a couple of years. And if I remember correctly,
the story made it sound like the site itself we had some kind of racist
content, rather than someone maybe just setting us up in the comments and listen,
there are nuts and comments sections everywhere saying crazy things. It's not like
outrageous to believe that. But the whole story at NBC is one of the
worst. I just want to mention NBC News is one of the worst outlets
they are. I don't think they get enough credit for how dishonest they are
and how much they're part of this smearing of the right. But so am
I right about that? So they made it sound like there was so not
just that. Let's just think about it rationally. You have a site,
you allow comments on the site, and you know that you can get a
site taken down if there's like a bad comment on the site. The idea
that you wouldn't, as part of your bag of tricks, artificially place the
comment, just like Media Matters just did in an effort to take down X
is like obviously that's what you would do. So yes, first off,
you know, like we got hit with an operation by a nefarious left wing
act by a collusion between various left wing actors. But the article in question
was John Davidson's article about how the media were lying to you about the BLM
riots, and that was what made them angry because like it was such a
big push to push this identity politics. It was a big part of sort
of the color revolution that they had planned for that election year. And to
have an effective conservative voice like John Daniel Davidson at an effective conservative outlet like
the Federalist was more than they could bear. So they had to take us
down. And it's like just what you have to fight every day to keep
going. Do you think there is no media matters on the right. There
is no similar organization that could say listen, BLM has this. You know,
BLM says AB and C they're racists, their anti Semites. How could
you give them money? Do you think if you went to Coke Cola and
said, how could you give this group money? Because of AB and C,
they would withhold money. Do you think that that that kind of campaign
would work well? Now? You're getting me very What do you call it
black pilled, because no, obviously it wouldn't a You have to give credit
to the left for spending decades thinking through how to destroy the country and to
push anti americanism, taking over educational institutions, taking over the academy, take
over the media. Like you get to do things like what Media Matters has
done to harm this country only after you've spent decades hollowing out your institutions.
So no pointing out to Coca Cola that the thing that they support with billions
of dollars of racism is bad. I mean, you have to have a
media that would be willing to be honest about that, and instead you have
the media that have also done things like hire a bunch of Dei things and
focusing on DEI and embracing racism. The New York Times ran the historically absurd
sixteen nineteen project and got it put into school curriculum around the country. Like,
we're dealing with some major problems. It makes me very pessimistic about how
successful we can be. Given how like at every step of the way,
basically the Republican Party and the conservative movement in general, who's just kind of
like, yes, rendered yeah, could you tell? Could you tell what
I was trying to avoid saying, knowing you I did. Yeah, I
mean I've vote. I try to try to explain that I have. I
have trouble explaining this, but I think that just the conservative disposition is not
to be activist. It's not to march, it's not to have a group
that go, you know, goes after people. A lot of the conservatives
I know are you know, engineers or you know, they don't. Politics
has never been the center of their life, whereas on the left, politics
is your faith in many ways, especially now that progressivism has sort of infected
the Democratic Party in the way it has. So when I look at polling,
and I keep going back to the Hamas thing because it's what's happening right
now. But you look at polling and take a deeper dive, like most
Americans are normal, right, they're anti terrorists. But when you take a
deeper dive, you're like, oh, you know, college students are different.
Younger, the younger they are, the more pro Hamas they are.
You know, the more left they are, the more pro Hamas they are,
And more and more people are headed in that direction. So the entire
trajectory is wrong. But what do you do now? You don't have any
say within the universities. You see what's happening, So what can you do.
I don't know what you can do anymore because conservatives aren't built to want
to be, you know, professors of literature or whatever, and it's going
to be very difficult to take those institutions back. But listen, someone wrote
me a letter. They send them a real downer sometimes, so I am
not going to be negative. I think it can be done. A lot
of times. You will send me letters like if you have the right arguments,
you will win. I'm like, have you ever read a history book
in your life? I'm just reading about Stalin and I'm like, no,
people are like the worst ideas. Also a short term win versus long term
win, you know, and you just you have to do the right thing,
regardless of what the short term. Speaking of literature, nah, speaking
of movies, talk about culture. I actually did not see many things this
this week, but I wanted to just mention one thing. I did go
see a movie in the movie theater, which I do occasionally with my wife,
but not often, maybe twice, but twice recently, and I've noticed
something that really drives me bananas. So I saw a movie called Last Goal
Wins. Believe it or not. It's about soccer. It's about the American
Samoa Samoan team. It's kind of like what was that movie with the Jamaican
bobsledters. It's kind of like that, but update it. I thought it
was there's a story about some transgender person in there, but overall I thought
it's heart wasn't the right place whatever. I just feel like there were I'm
always just being lectured too, But anyway, overall was fine. Here's my
problem. Movie starts. Let's say at eight I show up at because I
can't be late to a movie. If I miss five minutes, I have
to not see it. I literally now realize you have to sit for like
forty five minutes watching commercials, previews like ten of them, and then commercials
again, like is this how it's been? How long has it been this
way? I'm sitting there. I cannot sit in a seat for three hours.
And that's essentially what you have to do to see a movie today,
even if it's two hours long. Do you have a problem with that?
I don't go see movies in the theater. But I know enough to say,
like I've go to like one a year, and that's what it's been
like. And it seems like each year it gets worse. Yeah, And
it's part of why I don't mind not going to slee. I mean we
also, my husband just bought like a massive Mitt Romney sized television for our
home viewing experience, so we really don't need to We don't need to go.
It actually is not Mitt Romney sized. I remember him saying that this
detail in the Mitt Romney book that he read and reviewed for which was hilarious,
that the size of Mitt Romney's TV was like cartoonishly big and like that
when you get to the really big sizes, each additional size is an absurd
amount of additional money. And so he was telling me something about the absurd
amount of money. If the TV gets too big, I find it too
like too much for me in my room, Like I feel like it's a
movie screen almost. We have a small house and a small room for TV
viewing, so it is. And I you know, I told him,
I was like, this is ridiculous, and he's like just smiling and laughing
and He's like, no, it's not. It's great if I have to
like move my neck and look across to see what's happening on a TV doing
seeing like, I want to see the whole thing just sitting there. I
don't need no peripheral vision stuff. Anyway. Another complaint about movies. So
we went to see I listen, my wife does not want to go see
movies with like violence or sexual content or anything like that. So I found
a movie about soccer in American Samoa starring Michael Fass. So we go to
see it. But the previews will be like horror movies that are like ridiculous
sexual like you know when you know, So the previews should match the tone
of the movie you're seeing. I don't I have someone who doesn't want to
see that in my family, or I might have brought my kids to this
movie. Like these are my complaints. I don't know who to take them
to, So I'm taking them to you. This is the where I've been.
Yeah, no, I have definitely experienced that with my own kids.
But we'll pick a movie that is that we've researched and we've reviewed, and
we're okay with showing it to them, But that doesn't mean that the previews,
which frequently nowadays just show the entire movie. I know, wors and
all. So yeah, I don't like that they now have a preview for
the preview. Have you seen this? Like they'll be like there's like a
little like five second preview, and then they're like, now comes the trailer,
and then they do the trailer. Why am I even seeing this movie?
I don't know? So did have you seen anything else? Or now?
Again? I have to say that I just I have a bunch of
streaming services and I'm always like I have nothing to watch. I just feel
like there's nothing really good to watch. So I watched a nineteen seventy one
movie called Get Carter with Michael Caine, which I enjoyed a lot. Yeah,
it's one of these kind of British gangster movies from the early seventies late
sixties. And then I watched The Firm with Tom Cruise, which I've seen
like a million times. Have you ever seen it? I saw it many
years ago, but I don't remember it. It's okay. I watched a
little more of that documentary that we talked about last week called Slow Horses.
It's a documentary about how the deep state of the US government frames people.
It's not a documentary slow horses though, Yeah, but it feels like a
documentary. It's a fictional description of the British Intel Services and how they run
an operation the kind of which you hear about the FBI running, you know,
where they were going to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, and then it like goes
awry, and I can I give put a little more meat on that for
a second. Yep, So the show is actually about these six or five
I for here which one it is agents who have kind of fallen out and
they put them five who have fallen out of favor with the with the main
group, and they put them in this like building together and Gary Oldman's kind
of their leader. He's a mess and they love him. Yeah, me
too, me too, and anyway, so yeah, did you get so
many? He's like, I'm not good at giving these kinds of motivational speeches,
but you are all the worst people I have ever worked with, and
a disappointment to my like a horrible capstone to my disappointing career. It's amazing.
It's the best speech at the next Federalists staff the retreat. You guys
are a disappointment. Nothing has changed. Sometimes I think we should start these
podcasts with the culture stuff so we could let Okay gets listened to a better
mood and then we won't be so angry, downcast and angry about the world.
That's it. Did you go and see any movies or anything. I
just want to say that I had forgotten. I had forgotten a band I
really liked for like decades, and I don't understand how I forgot them.
I had this memory of going to see in concert in Denver in like nineteen
ninety three Dead Can Dance. Do you remember that band Dead Can Dance.
I remember the name, but I do not know that I've never listened to
them or know what their music's about. They're brilliant and amazing, and so
I've had this like revisitation of Dead Can Dance and I don't know, you
know, I don't know why I don't have albums of them. I need
to get that taken care of. They mix really interesting music from around the
world. They sound very haunting and gothic. The voice of the leads is
just amazingly beautiful. They kind of remind me of the Coctau Twins, but
in a more like deep complicated way. I don't know anyway, So I've
been having fun listening to that. And I never listened to more than thirty
seconds of a Coctau Twins song because I literally will fall asleep just hearing it.
It's the most boring thing. So I hope deed Can I'm not trying
to offend you, but I hope dead Can Dance is better. I will
give it. It's a real acquired taste. I mean, if you weren't
a goth girl, I'm not sure you would like them, but I mean
I would. I would say give it a chance, like put something on.
In fact, I have something i'll send to you, which is like
Altulaisic, a compilation of different songs from different albums. But I really really
like them. And then, just like a lot of music i'm listening to,
well writing, I like that. There's this thing online called Circle or
Circle. It's like a French music production company or something. I don't know.
They have these things where they do concerts of really interesting people in beautiful
locations around the world, and so I don't watch them, but I listen
to them while I'm writing. So that's my cultural stuff. So that wasn't
very exciting. I realized, No, it was fine. By the way,
it's going to be Thanksgiving, so I hope you and your family have
a very nice Thanksgiving. Quick last thing on music, just since you mentioned
it. So since Twitter has been monetized, I make like a little money,
and when I may say a little, it's a little money every two
weeks or whenever, however often they give it to you. So that has
become my slush fund for buying vinyl. So the better I do, the
more vinyl I can buy. I give myself an excuse to do it,
and I've gone a little crazy. What's of life to hear? On the
vinyl front, I'm always like, I'll go out and get it before she
can see how many I bought. But the other day they delivered like four
records to my neighbor and it came over and handed it to our She handed
it to me. So I got in trouble. But yeah, that's all
I have to say. Anything good in the hall I did, so I
do a lot of the bidding on eBay and I did get a Nick Cave
record Love In for pretty good price. I don't remember what else. I
just find things left and right. Yeah, that was basically it. Oh
you know what I did get? I got an album from the group Medications
that does our opening song. Yeah, you got one of their albums.
It's pretty good. Yeah. They were a DC band or maybe Baltimore and
I forget. Oh yeah, and I got lung a band called Lungfish that
I just absolutely loved. They were also a Baltimore, DC band. Do
you like Susie Sue I The first three or four of their albums I think
are incredible. Yeah, that's what I was also thinking about that song happy
House. Yeah, I've been really listening to that a lot too. Yeah.
They have an album called Join Hands where they do the Lord's Prayer and
it's like fifteen minutes longer whatever. And I just I love the guitar.
I like the feel of it. Big big fan of their early albums.
I don't know. Later they kind of I don't really know, kind of
got you know, I don't know how. I'll hope that Susie and the
band cheese all right, I'd like to email us Please do the radio at
the Federalist dot com. We'd love to get your mail, and we'll see
you next week. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.