Speaker 1: Welcome back, everyone to a new episode of Your Wrong
with Molly Hemingway, editor in chief of The Federalist and
David Harsani, senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Just as
a reminder, if you'd like to email the show, please
do so at radio at the.
Speaker 2: Federalist dot com.
Speaker 1: So, the House voted yesterday to release the Epstein files.
One congressman voted against it. I forget his name right now.
I don't think the Senate has voted as of this recording,
but they will pass it.
Speaker 2: And then Donald Trump said he will sign it. I
find this just.
Speaker 1: I just think it's a terrible, terrible president to taking
him take, you know, an investigation that has uncoorroborated accusations
floated by people you know, aren't even you know, in
the periphery of a case, third hand accounts, theories, rumors,
just throw it out to the public so they can.
And this is what people want to do, destroy the
lives and reputations of a bunch of people who may
or may not deserve it. We already know Epstein is
a vile person, a depraved criminal. That doesn't mean anyone
who spoke to him is like, let's take Larry Summers
on what just happened to him. Larry Summers is a
I think he was a Treasury secretary maybe under Clinton.
You know, he's been around, he was a Harvard president.
The House Committee just releases emails with him in Epstein
destroys his life. Essentially, the guy can has lost all
his professional associations. He is going to elicit almost no
sympathy because he's an elitist. Conservatives don't like and progressives
don't like him. He befriend at a creep like Epstein.
But nothing in those emails are illegal. Nothing in those
emails show that he did anything wrong. In fact, he
stopped writing the day that Epstein was indicted on sex
offenses years ago, and now his life is written.
Speaker 2: Does he deserve it? I don't think that matters the House.
They did this to Donald Trump as well.
Speaker 1: With selective leaks, you know, during his first presidency. I
just not leaks, you know, alleged investigations. The House Committee
can now just open a DOJ investigation, find a person
they don't like, embarrass them and ruin their lives. I
think it's something people should be thinking about. There is
an expectation of privacy. When you have an investigation going on,
and if you did nothing criminal, your name should not
be out there.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm like one of the few people
who's thinking this because you have every single House member
but one voting to just throw this out there. Chump
to the conspiratorial, paranoid mob that's now just going to
sift through this without any context. I think it's I
think it's problematic.
Speaker 3: Well, I actually agree, and I said this publicly and
gotten a lot of pushback from saying so. There are
multiple problems there, and I think that you get both
of them. One, anyone can make an allegation. Anyone can
make an allegation that has nothing to do or very
little to do with the allegation being shown to be true.
And we have people make false or even just confused
allegations all the time, Like someone might think something happened,
but they're wrong about that. There's a reason why we
put things through procedures and have rule of law for allegations.
And then the other issue is, as you note, it's
not a crime to email with a convicted sex offender,
and turning it into a crime, it's not good. Probably
now having said that I do think this is a
legitimately awful, messy situation with very few good ways out
of it. We have genuine concern about the role that
Jeffrey Epstein played in the world. You know, he was
talking to very powerful people. He was convicted of trafficking minors.
He after he was convicted, continued to have very close
relationships with quite a few people. And I don't want
to be little that like, it hasn't been handled well.
It hasn't been handled well by any Justice department going
back like for presidents, And I don't know what the
right answer for it is. I mean these You mentioned
Larry Summers, and there was this email where Larry Summers
asked Jeffrey Epstein if it was true that Trump is
a cocaine head, and Epstein responded, if he could get
a private Harvard tour for a member of the Rothschild family.
It's kind of a salacious look at how these people operate, right,
And Larry Summers does not come out of it looking good,
and I think he was chastened, and yesterday said I'm
sorry that I was such best friends forever with this guy,
seeing how Michael Wolfe, who's speaking of whorors in journalism,
A very bad guy who was giving advice to Jeffrey
Epstein about how to rehabilitate his career after he was
convicted of underage sex trafficking, and other journalists who were
also giving him heads up about hit pieces that were
coming of people look really bad in these. They're not
being convicted of a crime. They are just being exposed
for what they're doing, right.
Speaker 2: Some of them.
Speaker 1: I mean for sure, Larry Summers looks awful in those emails.
There's twenty thousand pages of them. He never spoke to
Epstein as far as we know, after he was convicted
of being a sex offender. By the way, just really
Larry Summer. Yeah, he stopped emailing him the day of
the conviction.
Speaker 3: That's not true. What was when far as I remember, when,
was he convicted?
Speaker 2: Twenty eleven nine or something?
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, the email I'm looking at is October second,
twenty sixteen, and it's about Trump being a cocaine user,
and the context is like, how are we going to
keep Trump from being elected? So he definitely emailed him
after that.
Speaker 1: Yes, all right, well I don't I don't have it
in front of me. I thought I had read that
he didn't.
Speaker 3: Take Bill Clinton stopped his relationship with him when he
became a convicted sex offender. But I could be wrong
about that.
Speaker 2: Sorry, no, I could be I might well be wrong,
but it does.
Speaker 1: You know, the stuff he says is embarrassing, and a
lot of it it's terrible. Most of it isn't, but
a lot of it is. Anyway, a lot of famous
people kept their relationship going with him post conviction, So
that's all true.
Speaker 3: But I just also want to say that the White
House counsel lady who for a Barack Obama, she was
having inappropriately intimate conversations with Epstein while she was in
the Obama White House and he was asking for things
and she was telling things. I mean, it just it
was not good. This person did have friends in high places,
was a prolific emailer, and was kind of an operator.
But I think that people are confusing two separate things.
He might have been unscrupulous in both of these things,
but that doesn't necessarily mean they're related. So one is
the child sex trafficking and his proclivities for young and
in some cases underage women. The other is that he
was a mover and shaker in high circles. That does
not necessarily mean those two things interact. And people always
just assume, because both of those things are true, that
they are one hundred percent fused. And I don't see
a ton of evidence that they were, do you know
what I mean, like.
Speaker 2: One hundred percent agree with that.
Speaker 3: I see these emails people being like, hey, remember that
underage chick I ordered.
Speaker 1: Let's make sure everyone assumes there's a list. Everyone assumes
that there's a pedophile ring running the world. Well, there's
really no evidence for that yet. I'm not saying it's
impossible that it never happened, but from what we know,
he was procuring these young women for himself, not for others.
And it's very he's a he's a very rich guy,
and he had a lot of rich friends, and that's
how it works.
Speaker 2: I have very low I have.
Speaker 1: A very low opinion of anyone who would be friends
with someone like that. After two thousand and eight or
nine or whenever he was came out what he did,
even though probably people knew. But we have a rule
of law, and we have expectations that investigators do not
just indiscriminately release hearsay and stuff like that and that
goes for everyone, even bad people.
Speaker 2: If we allow the House.
Speaker 1: Or the DJ to start saying, oh, well, this guy's
kind of shady, so we're just going to let destroy him.
And that's why they did this to Larry Summers. They
destroyed him. I think that's a problem. I don't care
what a bad guy you are or aren't. And there's
a time and place. Listen, most of the victims are
still alive. Most of the people involved are still alive.
Journalists can go talk to them. Generalists can ask them questions.
They can ask them who it was and who wasn't involved,
like a lot of these victims, and trust me, I
feel terrible for them. Keep making claims that are simply
not they're not following up and telling us who was involved,
or they're not giving any evidence. You can't just go
around smearing anyone who talks to someone who's a bad
guy in this way without evidence. I don't think you should,
at least I don't think the state should. I just
people think through what this means. It means that the
Democratic House in the future is going to take an
investigation into a politician.
Speaker 2: You guys saw how many.
Speaker 1: What can I call them corrupt investigations that were into
Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: Yes, they have access to emails.
Speaker 3: These people who know that our investigative services or deep
state services sometimes do things to make it look like
people are bad when they're not. And then they're like,
release all the files because now I suddenly trust the FBI.
It's like, why, and it's.
Speaker 1: Never going to be enough for people. You're going to
release this and they're going to say, either the government's
holding back what I really think happened, or there's some
other files somewhere no one's giving us, Like, I don't know,
you might know, but the grand jury files, I don't think.
I think a judge has has stopped that from being released.
Grand jury file should never be released. Those are just accusations.
They haven't been proven.
Speaker 2: So so there's.
Speaker 3: Just one thing I want to say about these switches. Okay,
I've said this before. I had people emailing me about
Epstein for like so many years, and I always thought
they were kooks. And then when I then he ends
up being convicted and turns out to really have been
a problem, and I feel chastened by that that I
should have been more open to the idea that there
really was this problem here. But people's interest in this
has always seemed to be politically motivated, not people's in DC.
People's interest is politically motivated. And it is so obvious
that our media and other Democrats are only interested in
the story, not because of the victims, not even because
of like the high profile people who are involved in it.
They are obsessed with finding Trump in these files. And
of all the people out there, Trump is the one
whose relationship with Epstein would kind of know the most about. Right,
they're in the same scene. They are pictures of them,
like even parting together in the eighties or nineties, and
then quite famously, Trump kicks him out of mar A Lago.
I think they I don't think they knew what was
going on with trafficking. But one of the managers at
mar A Lago is upset that he recruited women who
were working at mar A Lago to work for him,
and they just felt like that was an inappropriate use
of his club membership or whatever. And he'd also publicly
said that he thought that Epstein liked girls on the
young side, or something like like, we know all of this,
and we know that they had a famous falling out,
famous there's no evidence that they had any relationship, whatsoeb
from the point of conviction onward. And what's more, these
emails show that Epstein is utterly obsessed with Trump, and
byron Yorke had something about how you know? Again, this
is according to known liar Michael Wolfe. But Michael Wolfe
said that Epstein believed firmly that the reason he got
in trouble with the law was because of Trump. So
Epstein blames Trump for his conviction, is obsessed with him,
is trying to bring him down, is emailing every Democrat
on planet Earth to share dirt on Trump. None of
it like works, And this is a problem for Trump.
How you know what I mean? Like, it's not it
doesn't even make sense.
Speaker 1: No, I mean the Trump administration brought this on themselves,
right a little bit.
Speaker 3: I'm not talking about that part. I get critical of that.
I'm just saying, like, how is this a problem for Trump?
Speaker 1: It just no, for sure, Democrats. Democrats ran everything. They
could have released these files years ago. And that's one
of the things. I'm not the only one who said this,
But if you I just don't believe you could go
through a demo, you know, the Biden years and something
in that file would be incriminating of Donald Trump or
put him in even in a very poor light, that
it wouldn't have been leaked or ready to depress. At
some point we would know about it.
Speaker 3: I do want to say, I am still very curious
about the way Epstein made his money and all of
these high level contacts he had, And I wish we
had a media that could do more of explaining that,
as opposed to who could do more explaining of that,
as opposed to just trying to find Trump in the files.
I am curious, like I don't know how that part
of the world lives. The people who fly in the
private jets and who are have everybody's phone number, all
the powerful people's phone numbers. I mean, I have power
people's phe numbers, but we're not involved in that kind
of thing. You know, It's a different thing when you're
a journalist. And I just wish we knew more about
how he operated, what was going on. I mean, we
know a lot, but we could we could use a
little more insight into the Larry Summers type stuff. And
I know you don't want this information out, but now
that it's out, it seems like we could.
Speaker 2: I bite journalism.
Speaker 1: There's two issues here. Journalists should do their job and
figure these things out. You know, I am I'm like
a maximalist on journalism. You do whatever you have to
do to get a real story. But the state, the
state has a job, and its job is not to
go around, you know, cracking open grand jury testimony to
find something embarrassing about someone just to destroy them. I
don't care who it is. But I also want to say,
even if you find an email where Epstein says Donald
Trump did this or that or Chuck Schumer did this
or that, just because he says it doesn't make it
true either.
Speaker 2: We don't know. This is why we have rule of law.
Speaker 1: This is why we have a process that we're supposed
to uphold.
Speaker 3: So but he even like, I don't think there's evidence
that Trump did It would be kind of cool if
Trump had turned in Epstein for the crimes. I don't
think there's evidence to support that other than Epstein thinking it.
You have, you know, so just because people think something
or say something does not mean it's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know why people are so.
Speaker 1: I think what happens is the legend grows and things
you don't know. Always you assume there's something more dramatic
behind the scenes. I mean, Epstein's was a schmoozer and
not a dumb guy. I think he had some kind
of math degree, and you know, he made his money
in the eighties like a lot.
Speaker 2: Of people in those days did.
Speaker 1: And and you know he wasn't a stupid man, just
an evil man.
Speaker 2: So we'll see.
Speaker 1: I'm sure this is going to be just crazy because
every name that appears now I would just warn people, like,
no one listens to me. But you still going out
there and calling people pedophiles just because they had some
kind of relationship with Jeffery Epstein. You're going to probably
get sued. You should be sued, honestly anyway. So we're
going to hear, unfortunately more about that. One of my
least favorite topics because it is just meaning the Epstein
file itself, because he's dead and you think you're going
to figure stuff out from these files that others have,
and it seems very high it seems highly unlikely to
me that anyone will.
Speaker 2: All right, let's move on.
Speaker 1: There was one story we wanted to talk about, and
one more story that we wanted to talk about. There's
a poll that came out that people were talking about
that showed that more men or young men I think
it was twelfth grader is seventy something percent boys. You know,
young men wanted to get married like it was something
they hoped to do, while far fewer ten percent fewer
women wanted to get married. And then the imagination and
historical contexts, you think that in the way culture depicts women,
you would assume women would be far more interested in
getting married and men would delay wanting to do that
until they were older. But it seems like that has
now switched.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, Pugh asks twelfth graders over time, different questions,
so seniors in high school, and in nineteen ninety three,
when they asked twelfth graders if they thought they would
choose to get married in the long run, eighty three
percent of girls and seventy six percent of boys said yes. Now,
twelfth graders can be idiots, and you can think you're
not going to get married and you do get married,
or you can think you are going to choose to
get married and it doesn't happen for you. But it's
just interesting that eighty three percent of girls and seventy
six percent of boys in nineteen ninety three, that's about
when I was a senior in high school, thought they
would choose to get married in long run. Okay, Now,
if you cut to thirty years later, it's about the
same percentage of boys say that they would choose to
get married. So it dropped just a little seventy six
to seventy four percent, But among women it dropped twenty
two percent. Among girls, now only sixty one percent of
twelfth graders say they are most likely to choose to
get married in the long run. And that's yeah, thirteen
points lower than boys. This is not healthy. You know,
girls might not be answering honestly or whatever, but that
would have been true in nineteen ninety three two And
so to see that twenty plus point drop indicates that
marriage is not being valued and being taught or being
modeled as a good thing. And it's very bad because
marriage is a wonderful thing and you should put a
lot of work into marrying the right partner and having
a happy, stable home and having kids. That's where most
of what's good in life happens. And these kids are
not being taught this at all, and it's probably going
to be harder. I mean, I did have a little
like glimmer of excitement that this means that any daughters
I have who are marriage minded will have a better market. Right.
Speaker 1: I only have theories here, you know. Part of it,
I think is that over the years, there's cultural depictions
and you know, imbued with feminist kind of ideology that
demeans the idea of getting married right away or you know,
being just quote unquote a housewife, or that those things
should be put off because there are important things you're
going to do or you won't be able to do
if you get married right away, which isn't true. Married
couples are more successful than non married couples. I don't
really understand why boys are more inclined to want to
be married than women, because a lot of you, I mean,
I have to be honest, in twelfth grade, I wasn't
thinking about getting married. It was like it wasn't anywhere
on my mind. I wanted to live my life. So
I don't really get that part of it. But also though,
I think because of that feminist and cultural pressure that
maybe some of these young women just feel like they
have to say that that it's not in their immediate plans,
don't you think. I mean, yes, you're right. In nineteen
ninety three, maybe they would have felt the same thing.
But I do think it's more pronounced these days. We've
had decades and decades of demeaning the idea of marriage
for young women. So all right, well, let's hope that
turns around, because marriage is vital to keeping a civilization going,
because the later get married, the fewer kids you have,
and the more you will regret not having them.
Speaker 2: In my opinion, also, older.
Speaker 3: People don't get mad at younger people for not feeling
marriage minded. Help them get married, help like talk to them,
be honest about why it's good, how they should use
a spouse, you know, how to have a happy life.
But offer them help introduce them to people. Everyone should
be a matchmaker if you're good at it, not if
you're bad at it, I guess. But but the way
that we just like let kids fend for themselves is
not healthy or good.
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Speaker 3: Okay, I wanted to read my favorite note that we
got this week. We got some good notes again this week,
I think, and it always blows me away. How thoughtful
I don't know, just like how much time people put
into them too.
Speaker 1: So I don't want to worry people are breaking the
two thousand word rule left and right.
Speaker 2: Just letting you know.
Speaker 3: I love that people keep on being like, I have
to get to this quick because David won't read it otherwise.
But this was this was Yeah, let me do it it.
Stick with me on this because I think this was
really interesting. A note so Dear Molly and David. A
note on the recent troubles on the right or in
the conservative movement that Molly aptly summed up with I
kind of hate everybody right now. A problem that the
Internet has created is mass sophistry without mass education to
respond to it. The likes of Nick Fuentes and then
in princeheses there are many more than he with substantial
followings that have not risen to the level of being
talked about yet close parentheses have basically free reign to
develop whole worlds of interconnected meaning, memes, jokes, arguments, half arguments, lies,
cruel mockeries, and intermingled among the rest some actual, sometimes
true observations. That weird sophistic mix of funny, powerful half
truths and full lies cannot be cured by a column
or an OpEd. It requires the kind of work that
I have done all my adult life, namely waiting into
the errors of my students and getting them truly to
say what they think in a trusting environment, such that
they can actually have their conclusions tested and very often
found wanting. That process usually came about through verbal, in person,
community and in print, then television and radio, which made
the problem more like mass media. Due to the monolithic
nature of the networks, etc. There were still only a
few pathways of error and sophistry possible, so you could
actually deal with it publicly because all the generations were
familiar with the arguments of this or that sophistical argument,
think the Murphy Brown scandal or Will and Grace regarding LGBTQ.
But now hundreds of hours of elaborate sophistry are deployed
and devoured by the young, completely out of the view
of the older generations. That means when someone tries to
deal with the problem socratically and publicly, the whiplash and
horror of just what the hell is under that rock
when it is pulled up and examined in public. Mass
media is intense and justifiably strong, But that is a
real problem which people more in tune with young people
are trying to address. How can you combat mass media
sophistry with the kind of socratic treatment that isn't merely
thoughtless propagandistic counter programming and fearsome shame and cancelation, which
only further alienates young people under the sophist's spell. Having
a conversation that is public yet not effrontery with the
likes of Nick fuentis wherein you gently steer such a
guy to discard his worst opinions, or at least admit
their weakness by comparison has been considered a crucial part
of what needs to happen by many of us. It
needs to be public so those under mass media sophistry
can experience the kind of one on one argumentation vicariously
in a mass media format, given that actual one on
one socratic dialogues with all of them will never come
close to catching up with the mass effects of rumble
and YouTube. Now I kind of hate everybody is not
wrong here because it isn't as though Tucker were only
doing that. He is doing that. I think with a
strongly intermingled agenda on foreign policy, some nasty ill will
toward his opponents in this debate, et cetera. All sides
have PTSD. I think from handing handling each other all
so unkindly for so long, it's a mess. But I
think it would be good, regardless of all the other arguments, good, bad,
and ugly, to recognize that the quote platforming quote framework
has a serious cost. And I think, as I've argued here,
that cost is an educative cost, and I think that
that cost is quite high. I wish to goodness there
were people famous enough who did not also have a
political agenda and an axe to grind. Who could garner
enough eyeballs to both attract the likes of Fuentes to
debate and discuss in this more friendly socratic way. But
I don't see the sophists and trolls coming out from
under their bridge for anything other than billy goat gruff
to try their hand at more public polemics. Perhaps an
impasse is all we can have right now, But pretending
we aren't paying a cost, I would argue a very
great one by circumscribing the discourse by means of a
platforming framework rather than a moral and philosophical formation. And
framework is not the way. So what what's the action
item here? Good question? I suppose a bit of grace
to recognize this educative mixed motive in Tucker or Kevin Roberts,
in whom I strongly suspect the educative motive was far
less mixed and more teacherly in concern than Tucker's. Perhaps
openly praising that aspect might be one idea that could
call attention to the still desperate need to meet this
challenge of mass media sophistry. But that may not be
fitting for either of you to do I cannot say.
I guess my hope is that this little note, my
first after listening to you all with great enjoyment from
the beginning, might make you more discerning civic actors as
you try your best to lead opinion for every generation
of Americans toward the truth, a thing you both love
more than any two interlocutors in the wide world, in
the wild world of podcastry. As I know it, it's
high praise, but that it is why I listen to
you too, so faithfully, and is why I hopefully bring
these thoughts to your attention to bite this moment in
opinion making being such an emotionally super charged one. Okay,
I know that was long, but wasn't that like interesting?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: It was a great It was a great letter. And
I I mean, I don't have any answer to those questions.
I think there's just a it's something that is unstoppable
right now. As far as the dynamics of what happens
online in the incentives, I think the only the only
part I would push back a little bit on is
I think he's and he wasn't being overly charitable, but
he was being a little bit charitable towards Tucker and
the alleged educational I think he was trying to lift
up Nick fent Test. That was my problem, a platforming.
I don't even like using that word. I try to
avoid it, but but it But who we decide to
lift up and help and the like? Just talk about Tucker,
because that's what this is about. He has a massive audience.
He is the guy who could act actually have done it.
He is the guy who actually could have had him
on and challenged the under the real assertions of Nick Fuentes,
the real ones that he makes, not the water down
ones that Tucker pretended that he makes, and challenge them.
But he does have ulterior motives and so it didn't
happen well.
Speaker 3: And he, you know, he can show that not to
be true by how he behaves in the future. And
I don't think there's you know, meaning, if he really
is hoping to educate these other people away from an
insidious ideology, we'll see it in the future. We have
not seen a ton of it in the past, right.
But more than that, I like the idea that we
should be looking for people and formats to have this
kind of discussion publicly that will not be tainted with
all of these side issues, and even I was thinking
about this with Buckley, with Bill Buckley, William F. Buckley,
and some people recently were talking about like, oh, he
wasn't that great of a person and blah blah blah.
And I'm not freaking out about people saying that, but
there were ways in which he would have debates with
people with bad ideology, So you know, yes, publicizing it,
but the debate yielded good results because the bad ideology
tended to crumble upon the slightest bit of inspection. And
I have great confidence that some of these evils that
are out there in the meme world and in the
way that the youths are communicating information will crumble under
the slightest bit of investigation of light. And so we
have to think, and I think it's important that that happened,
because if it doesn't happen, they can just kind of
fester in that underneath the rock picture that was painted there,
and there aren't many people who are trusted to do that,
and we should be looking for those people. Some of
it can happen privately, apart from what was just said
in this note, but we should be looking for better
public ways to in good faith take on and defeat
the evil arguments.
Speaker 2: Well, do we give the name of the letter writer
or should be No?
Speaker 1: I don't want to, Okay, Well, I guess I also
take issue with another aspect of this, and that is
that all these young people are alienated and they're just
if we just gave them a truthful argument, they would turn.
I was a young person, and the young people like
to play with dangerous ideas, right, they like to piss
off boomers, right, they like moral pornography, just this on. Fortunately,
they like regular pornography. So I think we don't need
to take them as seriously as everyone says, in the
sense that, oh if I only showed Nick Fuentes that
actually Hitler did kill six million people, that that's going
to change anyone's mind. We know that the more Holocaust
education you push on people, the more anti the less
likely they are to believe it. For instance, truth is
not always going to turn people, and we shouldn't have
these quixotic views about how large groups of people are
just going to accept your truth. But his underlying point
I agree with completely. These people will get older, these
young people will become more serious, They will have adult
lives and you can challenge them then. And also just
quickly with this, I think the stigma of anti Semitism
has dropped, so people are much more comfortable saying things
they wouldn't have in the past. I don't know that
it's going to remain that way in the long term,
and maybe some of these people are going to pay
a price for being the way they are right now.
You know, call it cancelation. I don't you know whatever.
You can't just say there are repercussions to the things
you say and the things you spread in your reputation.
Speaker 2: That's just the real world.
Speaker 1: And that's something young people should think about as well,
and maybe we should tell them. This is why anonymity
I think is a big problem online.
Speaker 2: Because I was.
Speaker 3: Thinking about this. Our local high school was the scene
of many many beat down stabbings, even shootings, and they
ban Governor Youngkin It's great governor banned cell phones from
school environments, and they were saying that the conflict went
way down, and I think in part is because of
what you just said. When you have to face to
face say to someone that you disagree with them, counterintuitively,
it lowers the heat. You know, It's very easy to
be behind a screen and fire off your most extreme sentiment,
of course, and it can lead to people getting really radicalized.
When you have to sit in class with someone and say, hey,
I didn't like what you said about my girlfriend or
whatever it's you might have some physical interaction. Maybe that's
even an okay thing, but it might be in a
more controlled, reasonable way.
Speaker 1: I'm sure this has happened to you. It used to
happen to me all the time. Someone would send me
an email or say something about me in the paper
or somewhere else when I was in Denver, for instance,
that's awful and angry about me. Then I would meet
them in real life, the tone would change immediately. It's
very difficult to be that way face to face, but
we can't do that.
Speaker 2: It is what it is. You're not going to be
able to stop the digital world.
Speaker 3: And I would just say on this issue, and to me,
it's so much bigger than Nazism or meaning. There are
a lot of bad ideologies they're taking root in our
country right now, but understanding that what, for instance, you
and I do is different than what some you know,
as the letter writer puts it, Educative people are doing
is also good and just understanding that what they're doing
will look different like you and I are going to
be really harsh and be like this is wrong and
this is evil. But what other people are doing in
a more open minded setting to try to get the
person to a better place, it's going to look differently
than what you or I say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to say this though.
Speaker 1: Remember not like half an hour ago we were talking
about I just want to be a writer and make
my arguments. I'm not a life coach. I don't really
care that much, honestly, Like, I'm not here to I'm
not an educator. This letter writer sounds like an incredibly
good person to me, and a very smart person and
a person who can teach young people how to think differently.
But that's not really what I.
Speaker 2: Do, right.
Speaker 1: I am here to give my opinion and I'm not
here to be a life coach to some person who thinks,
you know, drawing a swastika is fun.
Speaker 2: So I don't know. We all have different jobs in
this exactly.
Speaker 3: Okay, thanks for letting me go through all that, though,
But we get so many great letters, and I also
love when you get We'll get like long letters and
people always have these interesting affiliations or places that they live,
and it's humbling also when I think I've said this before,
but like United States senators will be like I totally
agreed with what David said or not. You know, I'm like, wow,
do they do they really have time to be listening
to this? Should they be?
Speaker 2: I'm always hard.
Speaker 1: I forget when we're talking that we're talking to other people.
Sometimes I just you know, it's just a conversation we're
having that we would have normally maybe And.
Speaker 3: Okay, So on that note, do you have any culture?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I watched a show called Death by Lightning. Okay,
it's on Netflix. It is good. It's about, believe it
or not, the presidency of James Garfield and his vice president,
Chester A. Arthur played by Nick Offerman, James Garfield played
by Michael Shannon, and his assassin and his assassin. So
it's like the parallel stories of the two. It's not
I would call it even mildly comedic, and it's you
wouldn't think it would be as entertaining. I mean, I
am like, oh, this is just you know, they made
this for me, but it's actually I think has an
appeal a white more widespread of appeal than you'd think.
The other two things I did was I read. When
I go on errands and stuff, I have books on
my phone, so when I'm going shopping with my wife,
I follow with the card and read my book. You know.
So I read two books on music that were sort
of brain dead kind of things. But one's by Evan
Dando of the Lemonheads called Rumors of My Demise?
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, what are you Gonna Do? And the
other one is what's his name?
Speaker 1: Is that? Mike Joyce. He was the drummer of the
smith It's called The Drums. It's about his life with
the Smiths. Those are the two books I read that
We're not very serious, but if you enjoy that sort
of thing, I.
Speaker 3: Think Mark would enjoy Rumors of My Demise.
Speaker 2: I think so, Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1: Another thing, I don't know if you guys are fans
of the Jesus and Mary Chain or not.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 1: So it's the fortieth anniversary of Psycho Candy and that
podcast I mentioned last week called Life of the Record
has like an hour and a half podcast. So the
two brothers in that band, the Red Brothers, just talking
about how they became musicians, about that album just fantastic.
Speaker 2: So if you're into that, okay, great sol Yeah.
Speaker 3: Okay, So I first off, I thought I turned in
all the final final final edits for my book last Thursday,
which meant that I didn't sleep on Wednesday night and
Mark said, do you want to celebrate somehow? I said yes,
I would like to go to bed early and I
went to pick it. But then like on Friday, they
sent another round from like the last proofreader with a
bunch of suggestions, most of which were excellent. Was that
they wanted me to change every so I use I
use the word he in a gender inclusive way, you
know he or she, I mean he or she, And
they wanted me to change my keys today them's and theirs.
And then that meant that I'm using a plural pronoun
with a singular antecedent and it really bothered me, and
I I'm not joking. It bothered me like all weekend
and they were like, get it back by Monday. And
on Tuesday They're like, you were supposed to get everything
back by monday, and I'm like, I try to accept
all edits, but I feel very bad about these and
I wrote this whole, like long note about why I
have a problem with like thirty seconds later, the editor
writes back, like, yeah, that's that's fine. That's uh, like
you didn't need like we just suggested that you don't
have to, like it's no big deal.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, okay, I'll just say I love writing
a book. Right, It's hard, but in the end number
but the editing process to me is I just dread
it with all my heart. It's so difficult. I think
it's harder than writing the book. I don't know why
I'm telling everyone this, but it's true.
Speaker 3: I love good editing, and I have been blessed to
have some of the best editors in the business. And
the person who edited my first book with Carrie Severino,
is editing this book, Tom Spence. He's amazing. I mean,
he's just a wonderful editor. And then they have other
layers of editing too, which is where these other things
came in. But they've caught like, you know, I said
something happen in twenty that Linda Greenhouse said something in
twenty twenty two, and they caught that it was twenty
twenty one. And I don't like to have errors in
my writing. So I was just like, I love these people.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I love my editors. I just don't like
going through it. I like to hand in my work
and never see it again. I never read it. I
never want to see it. But anyway started to interrupt that.
Speaker 3: So then though, I've watched so many movies because I
was making up for like a year and a half
of not having seen anything, and we Mark and I
just like hung around the house watched movies all weekend long.
So I have a bunch. First one, the Big Short
mm hmm. Have you seen that one? I have about
the housing bubble crisis and about how.
Speaker 2: I mean it's it's a fiction, but it's a good movie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And and I thought it was a really well
done movie that was failing in a few parts when
it tried to be political, like they were trying to
say that everybody didn't blame the banks for that housing
bubble crisis mortgage problems, they blamed immigrants and the poor.
And I'm like, I don't think that's that does not
match with my recollection of events.
Speaker 1: Now, I mean the whole, the whole idea that the
person blaming the bank is like the outsider and everyone's
mad at them.
Speaker 2: It's just ridiculous, but it was so well done like that.
Speaker 3: I remained mad that we bailed out all these banks
and came up with that whole too big to fail thing,
but like anyway, well done. Enjoyed it. Also saw Michael Clayton.
Have you seen that.
Speaker 2: That's George Clooney is like the Fixer? Yes? From years ago?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, no, I did see that two.
Speaker 2: Thousand and seven movie with George Cloone. Well, George Clooney.
Speaker 3: A great actor, but I also love you know, he
has one brother who's a cop and one brother who's
an addict, and he himself is like a former prosecutor
who becomes this fixer but also is trying to get
out of that side of things. And there was a
line towards the end where the cop brother says, all
the cops think you're a lawyer, and all the lawyers
think you're a cop, but only you know who you are,
and he means it as an insult, like your scum.
And then he has this turn at the end toward
being a quote unquote better person. But I liked it.
I thought it was really well done too. I'm getting
even worse in how old these movies are. So the
final one is a civil action.
Speaker 1: Have you seen ends with That's what John Travolta and
James Gandolfini's in it before he was in Sopranos, right, Yes, Yes,
it's about some bad company spillage or something there Pittsburgh
or something.
Speaker 3: Yes, So it's about these personal injury lawyers who suddenly
developed an interest in a case that they'd you know,
picked up like earlier, about a tannery dumping things into
the ground and into the river in a way that
led to like a cluster of leukemia or something like
that in this small Massachusetts town, Massachusetts. And it was
again well done, and I enjoyed it, but I'm annoyed
at that thing we went through in the nineties. I
think it was where we pretended that trial lawyers were
heroes and that they were always like out for the
common man instead of complete hucksters who had maybe destroyed
industry in America working with the government. In this case,
and this is based on a true story, there really
were legitimate, awful problems with the corporations involved, including that
they lied during the trial about what was going on,
or like suppressed testimony, and they were engaged in environmental damage.
I just also was thinking about how the tannery closes,
the businesses in that area closed. Probably now all the
kids are dying from fentanyl overdose. And sometimes we don't
have balance to these movies or to the way these
stories are presented. And I'm not even talking about this
one in particular, because yeah, it really was a bad situation,
but that whole like Aaron Brockovich scam.
Speaker 2: Yeah, itixs stuff.
Speaker 1: Is there a movie you can think of where capitalism
is portrayed in a good light. I mean it's always
that the capitalist is evil, will kill people for money,
the minor, the this, that, that, and the lawyers are
always the heroes. The lawyers are heroes, the actors are heroes.
You know, so this give me.
Speaker 3: Lawyers be heroes, but like the personal injury lawyers really Okay.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this one I actually liked. I thought it
was handled pretty well when I watched it, I believe.
But I mean, there were there were so many movies
like this in the nineties and two thousands, As you say,
it was annoying.
Speaker 2: Three movies wow.
Speaker 3: And then I'm also watching Nobody Wants This season two,
which is about the rabbi falling in love with the
sex podcaster.
Speaker 2: Six.
Speaker 3: Yes, and there are many things I like about this show.
I think it's really well done. But one of the
problems I have with it is that the two main
characters are basically close to my age, right, and they're
having a romance where they talk about like getting married
and having kids, and it's like, oh, guys, that ship
sailed for you like many years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they act very immature, like twenty year olds.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know, because they look like they're in
their forties, you know, like they're very pretty people. Kristin
Bellen whoever that guy is, but still pretty good.
Speaker 1: Kristin bell is forty five years old. So I don't
know how large your family will end up being so
like she is married.
Speaker 3: Yeah, kids are probably like ten years old, right.
Speaker 2: I have no clue anyway.
Speaker 1: All right, if you'd like to reach the show and
send us some more thoughtful emails, please do so at
radio at the Federalist dot com.
Speaker 2: We like to hear from you. We'll be back next week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm so sorry to interrupt. I want to apologize
for my mispronunciation of educative and sophistry like I'm sure
I said it like both of those words twelve different ways.
And I know we have some people who are very
intolerant of my many mispronunciations, and so I just want
to say that I'm sorry. Now carry on.
Speaker 1: So growing up, you know, as a big reader, but
I often didn't hear the words so i'd read them.
So my pronunciations were always off, and I became very
shy about using certain bigger words until I heard them.
Speaker 2: How did you say sophistry.
Speaker 3: Wrong, sophistry? I think it's I don't know, and then
I think I think it's educative. But I think I
said it like fourteen different ways as I read it.
It is not my fault that our listeners are so
academic and area diet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, where was I?
Speaker 1: So you can email us, except we will not read
any emails mocking Molly's pronunciations.
Speaker 2: We'll be back next week until them be lovers of
freedom and anxious for the.
Speaker 3: Right to discern, someone to because the stone is getting
frosten to me, James Jash send someone