Speaker 1: Welcome to the latest episode of Your Wrong normally with
David Harsani and Molly Hemingway, but this week it's a
special episode. So you are here with Molly Hemingway, editor
in chief at The Federalist, and my amazing husband, Mark Hemingway,
Books editor at The Federalist, and the person who gets
to deal with me day in and day out in life.
How are you doing, Mark.
Speaker 2: I'm glad to be here in my own home with
my own wife.
Speaker 1: So David Harsani is taking the week off as Jews
normally do during Christmas, you know, So that's good.
Speaker 2: I think it's technically honaker right now. All though, to
be honest, that's not one of the bigger holidays for
the Jews.
Speaker 1: Yeah, although for David it really is a big holiday.
He's always been a big fan of Hanukkah. But we're
here and we're just going to do a quick episode
on some of the biggest news of the week.
Speaker 2: Just a quick episode usually happened in the last week.
Speaker 1: Anytime we say something like that, it then becomes a
three hour episode too. But just wanted to go over
a couple stories, and we'll start with the sixty Minutes
Brew haha, which is a really big story in Washington,
d C. Probably less of a story in most of
the country, but it's an interesting one that relates to
our current media landscape, and so I think it's worth
going through. So CBS News has you know what it
frequently has called its flagship product, sixty minutes, which has
had a very troubled past, which I'm sure we'll get into.
And the media outlet has had a bunch of bumps
in recent years, and new owners placed Barry Weiss, the
editor in chief of The Free Press, in as the
head of the organization to kind of clean things up
and help them become a more respectable news product. And
she has been met with fierce resistance. She's a woman
of the left herself, but she would describe herself as
center left, and so she is very you know, blood
People find her reasonable in dealing with the right, even
as she herself holds views on the left side of things.
And there's been a lot of internal resistance, and it
all kind of came to a head this weekend when
she said that a piece needed more work before it aired,
and the staff responded by essentially leaking the piece globally
and saying that she was a monster for wanting to
have an improved, in her view, an improved editorial.
Speaker 2: Look.
Speaker 1: I think she basically thought it was too much of
a joke of a piece and that it could be
stronger against the Trump administration if they prot if they
did some basic due diligence of for instance, featuring the
commentary from Trump administration officials in the in the piece
itself before it ran. What do you know about the Well.
Speaker 2: If you read the memo that she wrote, basically what
she said was the New York Times and others have
basically already reported this story that you.
Speaker 1: Know the and should we explain what the story was about?
Speaker 2: The story was about with the president in l Salvador.
Is that the right country where you know, the Trump
administration has been sending officials and this this place is
kind of notorious because you know, the president of El
Salvador has gosh, I hope I have the right country there.
Speaker 1: It's all Salvador, Okay, great.
Speaker 2: The president has basically cleaned up his country by you know,
building this huge prison and you know, stashing away anybody
who's causing any problems there. Now a lot of there's
a lot of controversy with this obviously, because you know,
that seems very authoritarian. At the same time, this guy
went from the El Salvador, went from a country that
was you know, completely plagued by violence and corruption to
a place that has I think maybe the lowest level
of violence and you know, the you know, in the
in the western hemisphere right now, you know, lower than
American I think, key measures. So you know, it is
a controversial story, and it's controversial the United States is
sending people that you know, are violent or criminal immigrants there,
or even people that are not criminal immigrants there is,
as the story alleges. But Barry Weiss was like, look,
New York Times and all these other people have reported
this story, how can we advance it? You know, this
is just you know, regurgitating a lot of what's already
out there. And then she had some other concerns about
the tone of the peace, you know, and there was
you know, all sorts of other grumblings you know, that
were leaked from the people that worked on the piece
that it's hard to tell, you know, are accurate or not.
But if you read the memo that was released what
she wrote, it sounded utterly eminently reasonable.
Speaker 1: I'm going to quibble with you there in the spirit
of the Year Wrong podcast, but I want to first
before I kind of disagree with how it came off,
just go over the highlights of that memo, you know.
She begins and says, I'm writing with specific guidance on
what I'd like for us to do to advance the
Seacott story. I know you'd all like to see this
run as soon as possible. I feel the same way.
But if we run the piece as is, we'd be
doing our viewers at disservice. So first, she says, last
month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed
the horrific conditions at Seacott. So she agrees with the
leftist perspective that the conditions at Seacott are horrific. Our
story presents more of these powerful testimonies, as she puts it,
and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable
in and of itself. But if we're going to run
another story about a topic that has by now been
much covered, we need to advance it. Among the ways
to do so, does anyone in the admin or anyone
prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act
now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured
at Seacott. That's a question I'd like to see asked
and answered. I just want to point out what she's
saying is what a reasonable person of the left might
have said in journalism, like a couple decades ago. So,
you know, the media have been overwhelmingly biased with leftist
framing and leftist viewpoints for a very long time. But Mark,
you and I grew up in a journalism where our
leftist editors would say stuff like that, right, like, hey,
you need to advance this story. We don't just want
to regurgitate what the New York Times says. Now, regurgitating
what the New York Times says is like the highest
calling of many journalistists, right.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, you know, questioning the entire framing and premise
of the story I think is a little different than
her acting in her capacity as an editor.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm sorry, is she editor in chief or not?
Because as editor in chief, questioning the framing of the
story is actually your most important job, right sure, I'm just.
Speaker 2: Trying to say that, Like when I said, you know,
it was a reasonable editorial memo. I wasn't, you know,
agreeing with the premise of the story. But you know
what you're saying, is you know, essentially correct.
Speaker 1: Yes, she says, at present, we do not present the
admin's argument for Wyatt sent two hundred and fifty two
venezuelans to seacut. What we have is, you know, Caroline
Levitt's soundbye claiming that there are claiming they are evildoers
in America, rapists, murders, et cetera. I just want to
again say, it's so frustrating as an American who doesn't
believe an invasion of our land by people who have
no right to be here and who many of whom
are committing crimes like rape and murder, to have this
like dismissed as a mere claim by Caroline Levitt.
Speaker 2: Well, speaking of the claim from by Caroline Levitt, I mean,
one of the issues there is I think it later
came out that CBS News had something like three administration
sources on record discussing the story, and they didn't use
one of them in the piece.
Speaker 1: Yeah, none of them. Yeah, they asked three actual people
involved or you know, dhs and other people, and they
didn't use any of the commentary they got. But she says,
isn't there much more to ask in light of the
torture that we are revealing. So she's like, you know,
Tom Homan and Stephen Miller are crazy and they'll talk
to anyone, so why aren't you talking to them? Which
is a good point except for the part you know,
hold on, and she says, the data we present paints
that's a I want to put sick in there. The
data we present paints an incongruent picture of the two
hundred and fifty two Venezuelans sent to Seacott. We say
nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more
than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a
beat explaining this. We then say that only eight of
the two hundred and fifty two have been sentence sentenced
for violent offenses, But what about charged? My point is
that we should include as much as we can possibly
know and understand about these individuals. Excellent point. Also, I
don't trust anyone at CBS to be honest about those
figures in it.
Speaker 2: Well. Also worth noting that CBS's source for this entire
thing is there's this group at cal Berkeley that basically
like train students to supposedly find and root out war crimes.
So this is like a college project essentially. And yeah,
it's gotten some acclaim for this or that before or whatever,
But again you're talking about well, you know, sixty minutes,
which does not have a reputation for being you know,
fair or unbiased, you know, leaning on a cal Berkeley
like working group of students, So this is not a
recipe for getting a particularly objective report.
Speaker 1: And then she says, you know, Secretary's and Secretary nomes
trip to Seacott. We report that she took pictures in
video there with MS thirteen gang members, not not trend
de Arragua members, with no comment from her or her
staff about what her goal on that trip was, or
what she saw there, or if she had or has
concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in
our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from
the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming, we
should include them, but what does the analysis add. I
don't know what she means by that point, and I
again wouldn't trust a Berkeley student group well regarded as
you say or not. We need to do a better
job of explaining the legal ration now by which the
ADMIN detained and deported these venezuelans. It's not as simple
as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able
to deport them immediately, and that isn't the admin's argument.
She goes on to what their actual argument is, that
the detainees are doing judicial review, and we should explain
this with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding the
authority under the relevant statute and another arguing that he's
operating within the bounds of his authority. There's a genuine
debate here. If we cut down Christy nome analysis, we'd
have the time. My general view here is that we
do our viewers the best service by presenting them with
the full context they need to assess the story. In
other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.
I'm eager and available to help. I track down cell
numbers for Homan and Miller and sent us along. Please
let me know how I can support you, and particularly
that last point, like we should show what the legal
arguments are against what the Trump admin is doing, and
then we should do something that hasn't happened very much
in corporate media in the last ten years, which is
present the legal arguments in favor of what the Trump
admin is doing. And the staff responded by saying, how
dare you If you make us do this, you're killing
the story, which is such an unbelievable admission from the staff. Right,
if we were to be fair, if we were to
do like if we were to take our left wing
framing and all of our left wing desires but just
put like a fig leaf of balance on it, it
would destroy the story. It's what they're saying. And so
they were like, we can't do that. We cannot even
mention for a moment that there is a different perspective
than the one we've been force feeding our idiot viewers
for years. It will kill our story. And they lost
their minds, And I'm like, wow, is that amazing?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah, Well, I did see a lot of people
that were initially like, oh wow, this looks really bad.
Then when they read the memo, were like, oh, well,
you know, this seems you know, reasonable, which you know
is a is a step in the right direction. But
also this entire story and a lot of what's going
on at CBS News seems to rest on this idea
that like CBS is this prestige news outlet, you know, news,
and sixty minutes is their crown jewel. And I do
think that in the forgotten times of a decade ago,
this was how it was perceived kind of broadly, you know,
certainly not among half the country, but among you know,
a lot of people, and they just have not adjusted
to this like new reality where sixty minutes is a
joke and you know, all of the major news networks
you know, basically aren't trusted by most of the country
at this point in time.
Speaker 1: So you were actually involved in one of the big
stories that that created the reason why we consider I.
Speaker 2: Was tachnically involved in a couple but yes.
Speaker 1: Okay, well for the first one though that I remember,
and I don't remember if it was the two thousand
election or the two thousand and four election. Dan rather
utilized forged documents as part of a hit piece right
before that election against President George W. Bush. Can you
remind us of what that is?
Speaker 2: Yeah, in order to basically dodge service in Vietnam, George W.
Bush got signed up for the Texas Air National Guard.
And there was always this question of favoritism because you know,
whether or not his service in the Texas Air National
Guard was legit in order to avoid Vietnam, and you know,
I believe it was like late September, so it was
like very nearly at a literal October surprise. Dan Rather,
who was probably the biggest news figure on the planet
at that time, ran a segment on sixty Minutes questioning
I can't remember this specif the aspects of George W. Bush's,
you know, international Guard service. But the point was to make,
you know, basically accuse him of being a draft dodger
to some degree and presenting these documents on air that
people looked at and quickly determined, you know, these documents
from nineteen seventy one or whatever it was were not
produced on an actual typewriter, but they were done by
a modern word processing program, and all of a sudden,
Dan Rather had to account for his reporting how he
got to documents the providence of it, and absolutely could not,
and CBS ended up basically melting down over this. Dan
Rather got fired and it was a huge deal and
a huge watershed moment because it was the first real
time that you know, what were then bloggers on the
internet basically completely debunked a major news story, and I
can't remember I got roped into this was part of
a website called rathergate dot com that was reporting on this,
you know, daily, and I can't remember I advanced the
ball on that in a few different ways. But sixty
Minutes is in the last twenty some years since Rathergate
has had a whole spate of controversies. In another thing
that I was heavily involved in reporting on, they did
a big segment involving ben Ghazi where they had to
retract the entire piece, and some years after the fact,
I eventually reported that my former CIA official named Tyler Drumheller,
who was who was a security consultant the CBS News
was basically actively involved in the shaping of that report
that later got completely debunked because it had to be
basically retracted because it relied on in an inaccurate source.
And I come to find out later that this guy
was basically on the payroll of Hillary Clinton at the
same time he was working as a security consultant or
whatever for CBS News sixty Minutes and so, you know,
basically he spiked the story that was there was going
to be very unfavorable to Hillary Clinton, and then you know,
they've had all kinds of other things. You know, there
was the debacle with Kamala Harris last fall, which you know,
they paid out a settlement to Trump millions of dollars
where they completely sliced and dice Kamala's interview to make
her sound more coherent than you know she you know,
famously is not, and did not release a transcript for
the first time ever of their interview with a presidential candidate,
which was, you know, a really shady and crazy thing
for them to do. And then you know, just this spring,
Leslie Stall, one of their you know, top correspondences in
sixty Minutes Forever, had this report where she talked on
air where she she asked whether or not Israel was
responsible for the starvation of the hostages taken by Hamas
on October seventh because they hadn't been getting enough food
into Gaza. I mean, it is well known that Hamas
was stealing all the food shipments and taking them from
the people of Gaza, and it was just appalling that
she would ask this, And so you know, that ended
up being a sort of a big that ended up
playing something of a significant role. It was a recall
in the in the paramount purchase of CBS simply because
you know, some of the investors in Vault were were
Jewish and not happy with how things are being reported,
and rightly so. So there's just been a cascade of things.
And there's you know, probably about ten other things that
I didn't mention. And there's this this idea that sixty
minutes is still the prestige news magazine show that everybody's
paying attention to. It's just laughable. It's not I did
see Axios. I think I think it was Axios running
a story esterday talking about how, you know, people take
CBS News of sixty minutes so seriously because it's the
highest rated news program by a wide margin, you know,
and has been for many many years. Well, SEBA sixty
Minutes airs at seven pm on Sundays. The only reason
is the highest rated news program is because people forget
to turn off the TV after the football game is over.
It's it's just absurd. And like CBS News and sixty Minutes,
you need to deal with the reality that their reputation
is very tarnished and very diminished. And when somebody like
Barry Weiss comes in and very gently suggests that, well,
maybe we need to add some sort of counterbalance, or
maybe we need to you know, advance the ball and
not just have these you know, hit pieces constantly. They
lose their mind.
Speaker 1: So I want to just before we move on to
the next part of this story, I want to add
to it. You know, you're talking about some of these stories,
but this pattern of CBS News and how they treat
friends versus foes is very much worth thinking about. You know,
you mentioned some of this, but like their interview of
Kamala Harris in which they edited her answers to make
her seem more coherent. You know, we're all familiar with
how incoherent she is and how much difficulty she has
with the English language, but they were editing her to
make her answers seem tighter, better, more competent. Similarly, I
was working on a story and had some trouble getting
people on the record, But then it was admitted to
by the new owner of CBS herself that they were
very worried that stuff would come out about how sixty
Minutes handled their Joe Biden interview. I remember it was
an interview from October twenty twenty two. Wait, what year
was the horrible attack on the October seven attack on Israel?
Speaker 2: I think it was twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: Maybe okay, so then maybe it was sar it was
twenty twenty three. So I'd heard from people inside CBS
that it was a quote monster edit to make that
interview able to air. So if you go back and
you look at it, the guy, I don't know if
it's I get all these people confused, I get all
the white people confused as CBS News. Is it Scott Pelly,
I don't remember. But he kind of begins and he goes,
it had been a hard week on President Biden, and
you could tell that he was exhausted or something. So
that's the that's their opening statement, which you might notice
already is not something that they would ever give that
benefit to a Republican that they had on. You know,
it had been a hard week on President Trump and
he seemed to be short tempered with us or whatever,
you know, But they say, oh, it's you know, been
a hard week, and then they just sliced and diced
in like tiny edits on everything, so that Joe Biden,
who they must have known, was coming off like particularly
on video, because the transcript isn't as bad but had
come off very poorly, So they were just kind of
slicing and dicing to make him seem better. And then
you compare that with what happened in the lead up
to the twenty twenty election when Donald Trump and Leslie
Stall got in a fight over Hunter Biden's laptop, which
showed the corruption of the Biden family business. Isn't funny
by the way that these Biden family business or Clinton
Global Initiative, they all go away when the people have
no shot at being president anymore. Just find that so fascinating.
Must be non corrupt businesses in play here. And she said,
this is sixty minutes, mister president. We can't traffic in
fake news like the Hunter Biden laptop. So she says
fake news and defends herself by saying they can't do
fake news. And it's just just like a horrible pattern.
But even more specifically, I want to look at the
woman who Barry Weiss employs cheerfully apparently, who should have
been fired the moment Barry Weiss took over, And any
I think good editor would have fired her immediately, which
is this what's her name like Sherry Alfonso or Alfonsi.
The woman who did this Seacot story has a horrible
track record of journalism, of bad journalism. So the one
that really bothered me was when she deceptively edited a
response made by Ron DeSantis about vaccine distribution at Publics,
where she asked him a question. He utterly eviscerates her
and lets her know that her entire framing is wrong,
and he does it so conclusively, like he off the
cuff knows the entire chain of events of how Publics,
which is a very popular grocery store down in Florida
and everybody trusts it and all that kind of thing,
how they got the part of the vaccine distribution program
that they did, And he explains that other similarly situated
retail outlets got other parts of the vaccine distribution program
or other parts of the program. And he explains how
why who he met with, like how it's working and
what's going to happen going forward, And she takes like
one tiny part of his answer and the part where
he calls her fake news, and she and she puts
in the middle of it something from someone claiming he's wrong,
but not really addressing what he actually said, and it
was horrible, and she didn't get fired after that because
CBS and sixty minutes aren't legitimate news outlets. And then
she did that horrible censorship story in defensive censorship in Germany.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that one was really just shocking.
Speaker 1: She just still keeps a job. So it's kind of
hard to feel bad for CBS or sixty minutes or
Barry Rice when this woman is still getting to work
as a quote unquote journalist when she's clearly not one.
Speaker 2: You know, well to put the best construction on this,
I mean, you know, if you were serious about reforming
a place like c News in sixty minutes, I mean
it would be you know, seering a battleship and not
a sports car. But it's still, you know, there's still
a lot of low hanging fruit here, Like you're right, Like,
why that Sharon Alfonsie or whatever woman still has a job.
It's just it's astonishing. I mean, she's reared her head,
you know, a bunch of different times. You know, I
will say that like one of the worst actors. I
forget the guy that was I think he was the
executive producer of sixty Minutes or whatever for many years.
He basically resigned earlier this year and some other things.
So I don't know. I mean, I think they need
I think that things might be moving in the right direction,
but I don't know. I'm mean, I don't trust that
they they will.
Speaker 1: I just want to wrap back to one of my
first points though, which is another thing I think was
a problem with this was the last minute intervention. One
in fact, early intervention is what is needed to help
CBS in sixty minutes they had their framing of so
or let me say this, as a normal American who
loves her country, I want supposedly flagship news outlets and
supposedly great places to cover the actual problems we're dealing with.
I'm very used to the New York Times Washington Post
sixty minutes approach of trying to stop any improvement in
our country by working with the Berkeley School or cal
Berkeley to sabotage any efforts at improving things. I am.
I'm so used to that, I'm sick to death a bit.
What I would like is someone or a group with
the resources, the unbelievable resources of corporate media, where they
have been given this huge gift of ownership of airwaves
that enable them to have these massive news operations that
you and I couldn't even dream of, like a tiny
fraction of if they devote those to helping the country
rather than hurting the country. And so if you take,
for example, a really important story with multiple size, which
is the story of immigration and mass uncontrolled migration to
our country, where we now have the highest percentage of
foreign born people in this country, then we've you know,
had interval well yeah, and since we've been like looking
at it, and that doesn't even count all the people
that we don't know, we don't have counts for because
they're here illegally. And look at what that does to
normal Americans. What does that do to our school systems?
What does that do to our hospitals? What does that
do for firemen and policemen? You know, you think about
a city like Los Angeles, which had horrible fires and
has about the same number of firemen now as they
did in the sixties, even though the city is like
massively bigger and now having to deal with every language
known to mankind in a tiny you know environment, and
horrible leadership of some kind. You know, like I would
love sixty Minutes to devote their resources to what it's like,
you know, since they're caring about Venezuelan terrorists, maybe what
is it like to live in Aurora, Colorado next to
some of these terrorists? What does it do to your
home life? How does it affect your children? Like, I'm
glad that they care so much, like deep, so deeply,
along with their other Democrat partisans, like who's that senator
from There's a Rep in Maryland who all he does is.
Speaker 2: Cares about tomar By flew down to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I'm glad. I'm glad that Democrats care. Democrats
like CBS News and sixty Minutes and these Democrat representatives
like they care so deeply about Venezuelan terrorists. But I
would like a news organization to care about Americans and
what we have to go through and what it's been
like to have people like themvoice this mass, uncontrolled migration
scheme on our country and show us, you know, show
us the growth, show us what can be done. The
entire framing was wrong, so that when you come in
at the last minute and go, oh, you totally mess
this up, that's way too late to fix something.
Speaker 2: Well, sure, what you said, is of course all true,
but like, even just on a more basic level, if
you're going to have a super hard hitting report on
the Trump administration enabling the torture of people, you know,
at the very least you should have a track record
of having been that hard on the previous guy and
the guy before that. You know. You know, as a journalist,
your job is to hold people in power to account.
And I don't have a problem with you going hammer
and tongs against the people in power as long as
you don't discriminate. And incrimination is so blatant and obvious
that I don't know how anyone takes it seriously. I'man
like everyone knows the game at this point in time,
and the reason why the Trump administration can literally just
write off the media in their second term here is
because everyone knows that's the case, and they don't hold
any power of credibility because they haven't been holding people
to account equally.
Speaker 3: Fed Chair Jay Pal seems like he's straight out of
reservoir dogs stuck in the middle. The watch Dot on
Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski every day. Chris helps
unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how
it affects your wallet with inflation on one side and
unemployment on the other. Jay Pal's acting clueless with a
dual mandate coming in from both sides. There's not much
else he can do. Whether it's happening in DC or
down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially. Be informed.
Check out the Watch Dot on Wall Street podcast with
Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Well, what would be the next thing we should talk about? Sorry, David?
Do you see the important work that David does by
managing this whole process and what a disaster it is
when he's gone. Okay, So the other thing that I
kind of want to talk about real quick was a
story that blew up last week out of Federalist reporting,
and the Federalist has been so on top of this
story for the last five years. But Fulton County, Georgia
admitted in a videotaped hearing that they did not dispute
that they had failed to do something that was required
under Georgia law and statute in the twenty twenty election,
which related to how they processed ballots from advanced voting
and advanced voting. You know, they're different kinds of voting.
There's unsupervised mail out balloting, which is where you just
like send ballots out into the ether and they come back,
and you're supposed to do some kind of diligence to
make sure that the ballots that were sent back match
with voter rolls. Actually, let's go, let's let's say first off,
historically speaking, we've developed a system for secure voting, which
involves people coming into a place that is judged by
election workers and showing that they are who they say
they are, or at testing under oath that they are
who they say they are, getting a ballot and the
ballot itself is like in a controlled environment. Then you
put the ballot in a box that's controlled And as
we change to different styles of voting, we see people,
you know, supposedly trying to replicate security provisions associated with
in person election day voting, where everybody comes in within
a certain like you know, ten hour period or whatever.
So there's mail out balloting, which is where you just
like send stuff out and it comes back in. And
we already kind of know Fulton County messed up that
part of the process. So when you're getting ballots from
out there and you don't know you know who they're
coming from. You have sometimes something as simple as a
signature match that you're supposed to do. In Fulton County
basically failed to do that, and that's why some of
their election commissioners did not vote to certify. That was
one of the reasons why a couple of the election
commissioners did not vote to certify the Fulton County election
in twenty twenty. But this dealt with advance voting, which
is where you come into voting locations ahead of an election,
but otherwise it's the same as election day voting. And
Georgia state law requires you to certify the ballots coming
out of those screening machines, and then Georgia rules and
regulations specify that what that means, which can include like
accounting for how many ballots were in there, how many
of them were able to be read, how many of
them were spoiled, and then signing your name and the
names of two witnesses, and for nearly every single precinct
in Fulton County, they failed to do that. And the
reason why you have these procedures in place is so
that you can trust the results of the election. You know,
there's a lot of ballots flying around and you need
to have strict control over them at all times, and
people attesting to that control so that you can, if
there's a problem, go back and identify where the problem is,
and that you can replicate results and all these kinds
of things. And so a guy just like, just like
a guy who cared about election integrity had figured out
that this had not been followed, this procedure had not
been followed, and that it affected three hundred and fifteen
thousand ballots. And yet you know, all the certifications had
gone through even though this step of the process had
not been done properly. And Fulton County attorneys are on
TV saying, yeah, we don't dispute this, that's true. What
he's saying happened or didn't happen, It didn't happen. And
you then see the state election board kind of reacting
to this and being very upset about this failure and
referring this failure to the Georgia Attorney General, who my
sources say is worthless and won't do anything about it.
But also the Department of Justice, which has begun once
again investigating Fulton County, and I say once again, because
they have such a bad track record of election administration.
No offense to the lovely people of Fulton County, but
y'all got problems down there. And so the Department of
Justice has, over the years, you know, nothing to do
with the twenty twenty election, has had to intervene to
make sure that their voting systems are or to try
to help them with their voting systems being better run.
So Brionna Lyman, our wonderful one of our elections team,
just writes up this that this happened. It's on video
in a state election board media and we've written a
lot about problems in Georgia and problems in Fulton County,
and it kind of cracks me up when some of
those stories take off, and when some of them don't.
This one definitely took off, and a ton of people
were noticing her reporting on this and knew yourself, what
did you?
Speaker 2: Oh, well, no, I mean I just tweeted this out
and like, I don't say this lightly, Okay. I've done
a ton of reporting on election administration issues, and you know,
you know all you know, the things involving ballots, things
involving you know, actual ballot fraud, on and on and on.
I've never got out there and said the twenty twenty
election was stolen or anything like that. I mean, the
problem is is that, you know, often these issues are
very murky and complicated or whatever, but there were so
many problems in Georgia in twenty twenty. I genuinely don't
think we can say with confidence who won that state.
I'm you know, Biden only won it by ten thousand votes,
and you know, just the thing that we know, you know,
first off, you know, it doesn't really count for the general,
but we know that they basically had a complete meltdown
in the primary of that year with voting machines. Was
it and it was a whole thing. New York Times
did a big story on how like Georgia canad minister elections,
and of course and Biden wins the state. A few
months later, all of a sudden, it's the safest election ever,
you know, Never mind a few months ago, New York
Times is saying they're, you know, disaster, you know, the
situation with you know, the Mark Zuckerberg grants, the zuck
Bucks situation or whatever, where of the three hundred and
some million dollars or four million dollars overget exactly what things.
Total was literally one tenth or more of those grants
and it was like forty one million dollars went to
swing counties in Georgia to try and influence the outcome
there where they were, you know, giving grants to local
election offices to basically juice democratic turnout. And you know,
and amazingly this wasn't quite illegal. You had this situation
where where Georgia loss is that you know, if you've
if you've if you're registered in one precinct and you
move to a new area and you don't update your
your voter registration and you vote in a new precinct,
then your vote is invalid. And there was you know,
huge problems with that in the state. You know, And
again you can ask all these questions like is it
is it helpful to like throw out you know, a ballot,
a ballot from a legal Georgia resident based on you know,
technicalities and voter law or things like that. I mean,
these are these are legitimate questions, but the reality is
is that no one in Georgia, and specifically Fulton County,
seems to have any sort of handle on, like what
is going on in that state, who's administering elections, who's
enforcing regulations, and it's a complete disaster.
Speaker 1: So every step of the way when we have reported
on problems, and you mentioned the residency issue, it's a
very complicated issue, but it was. It was a major
part of the lawsuit filed in Georgia to challenge that election, Okay,
and it turned out to be one hundred percent true.
So Georgia law requires you to vote to live and
vote in the precinct that you're registered in. And there
were a lot of people who had who had reported
that they had moved out of that out of a
given county. So I didn't say I said precinct. I
should have said county. So you're supposed to vote in
the county that you're registered to voting, and that you
live in that county. But people had publicly filed that
they had changed their address to a different location but
then gone and or you know, someone had had voted
in their name in the old county, or they had
voted in their name and you can say, well, you know,
it doesn't affect the presidential election because they're still Georgia
voters blah blah, and of course affects the presidential election.
First off, anyone who's fallen owing the law, and the
law is clear, or was in twenty twenty, the law
is clear, you're not supposed to do that. So anyone
who's following the law and therefore doesn't vote somewhere that
they're not living in is disenfranchised relative to people who
aren't following the law. You know, you don't know the effects.
You have to enforce the law across the board. And
then also like how cavalier people are a lot of
county commissioners and mayors and school board like all these
races are affected people who care about election integrity, not
because they care about Trump, although they might, you know,
in this case care about it because of Trump. They
care about it because if you don't have secure elections,
you don't have free people. If you cannot trust elections,
it's over. And so when Raffinsberger, who is the Secretary
of State, who I think is running for governor in
Georgia now he kind of was like, yeah, it's yeah,
that happened, but like we're not going to do anything
about it. And always and always and always again that's
sort of his approach. And so in this reporting he
totally responded poorly, I thought, which is he claimed that
the rules that he is elected to enforce and uphold
and all that were just clerical errors, and that anybody
noting the problem was trying to challenge the right to
vote of people. And it's like, buddy, buddy, buddy, we
have election rules precisely so that people can trust elections.
That's true, whether Democrats win or Republicans win. You really
want the loser to feel confident that they lost, not
you know, the winners should feel confident they won. But
like you really need to have peace and civil society
that the loser trusts it. And so when you're just saying, yeah,
we have rules, Fulton County followed, like, you know, some
percentage of them well below one hundred percent. And that
was a mess of a place. And it was also
the place where we were videotaped with unsupervised ballot screening,
And it was also the place where we told everybody
we were done counting, but then they kept counting. And
it's also the place where they were supposed to only
screen ballots under supervision, and they didn't have supervision the
whole time. It's also the place where they didn't do
signature match. You know, it's the most populous county in Georgia,
so it's not some county with four hundred people. It
the election very much rode on how Fulton County administered
their election. The Secretary of State's office was supposed to
be monitoring it much better didn't. And now when anybody
like shows that beyond a shadow of a doubt, they're
like dismissing it, and that does not inspire confidence.
Speaker 2: So the other thing about this, though, is that it
also kind of highlights how election administration has become a
sort of part is an issue where you know, we
had examples of this in rig Remember you did some
very good reporting on that where there were you know, counties.
Part of the problem with what was going on in
Pennsylvania was there were rules where you know, the Democratic
counties were just flaunting and the Republican counties were you know,
adhering to them, to their detriment in terms of election
administration or rule of law or whatever.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Raferensburger is weird because he seems to be like the
one Republican official in the country that is like, hey, yeah,
who cares about election laws? I mean, it's just absolutely insane. Now,
of course he's running for governor now, and he got
all these plaudits for quote unquote standing up to Trump,
and by standing up to Trump, it was literally, you know,
defending the fact that democratic counties in Georgia were doing
a terrible job. And so you know, this, this really
needs to be an issue, and I you know, I
don't know. I mean, maybe the DOJ can do this,
but we're rapidly approaching this problem where you have basically
urban democratic areas in this country that are just you know,
letting everything go, you know, in terms of election administration,
and there's no breaks and no one's going to stop them.
And maybe there will be some reportes reporting five years
after the fact that shows they re really screwed up,
and well, by the way, you can't trust the results
of that election, but it doesn't matter because that's all
ancient history.
Speaker 1: That was one of the things that was interesting too.
The state election board is where you will hear cases
like this or where you know, they'll they'll work their
way up and the previous or I don't know if
it's the current chairman, sorry for not knowing my details
on this. Had just basically been keeping any cases like
this from being heard. The rest of the board kind
of got sick of it, and now they're seeing a
flood of cases. So sometimes you hear claims like I
just want to say, Rafisberger said that this was like
the safest and most secure, that Georgia had the safest
and most secure election in twenty twenty in the country.
That's just that's just not true in any way. And
he is personally involved in it because he was the one.
So you referenced how the New York Times was very
upset about Fulton County in the primary election in twenty twenty,
and that's true, but it was all a kind of
part of a part of a ruse. So first off,
you hear people on the right now being very suspicious
about election machines, But for the longest time, from George W.
Bush's second victory until November one, twenty twenty, it was
Democrats who had no trust in voting machines. You know,
Barack Obama on down were holding hearings in the Senate
about how Carl Rove had stolen the Bush's second election
by controlling voting machines in Ohio, and you know, it
was very strongly held, and so also Georgia had bought
new voting machines, and the New York Times, Politico and
other Democrats were just freaking out about it and saying
this meant that they could be easily hacked and everything.
And it also even like I think there was a
PBS thing that aired on November first, twenty twenty that
was like, the Republicans are going to use voting machines
to steal Georgia. And then when Biden sort of shocks
everybody by winning Georgia, it's the Republicans who start being
suspicious about voting machines. As you know, and as we
wrote in the book, were not big voting machine conspiracy theorists.
And we made the case in the book for what
really happened in the twenty twenty election, which was flooding
the zone with tens of millions of unsupervised ballots, mail
out ballots, changing laws and regulations overnight to accommodate those,
and using actual government offices to get out the vote
in Democrat areas of swing states, and we make the case.
I'm very proud of that book and what we accomplished
with that. But Georgia was where Zuck spent most of
his money or you know, I think that was the largest,
biggest at large state.
Speaker 2: That received the most grants, was I believe Georgia.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, And they did it in part through this. Okay,
So they have the primary Fulton County, which is a
mess of a county, has these long lines and they're
not running their elections properly in the New York Times
and political freak out about it, and so it helps
bring in that Zuckbuck money where Zuck Bucks where they say, well,
what if we a bunch of Democrat activists took over
Fulton County kind of like helped you out on the inside.
We run ads encouraging everybody to do mail out ballots,
and then we can control that part of the process
to make sure the Democrats vote blah blah blah. And
it moved the state more than any other state in
the country. And so Raffensberger was the every other state
that they did this in they were using Democrat politicians,
secretaries of state governors, or Democrat controlled legislature. Georgia was
the only one where it was the Republicans who were like,
we don't like bad press from the New York Times,
so we'll do whatever you say, Mark Elias. And they did.
And so it was a disaster. And so Raffensberger, I think,
is embarrassed about that or just doesn't want to deal
with his role as a stooge like unwitting studient.
Speaker 2: He just he just can't admit he's terrible at his job,
and you know, he's responsible for this debacle.
Speaker 1: I should be clear. I was just thinking. I was like, well,
if he's running for governor, and if he's going to
be the nominee, and if he's going to win, I
sure hope he's a better governor than a secretary of state.
Speaker 2: There's no evidence of that. I mean, part of the
problem with Raffensburger isn't just him, it's that, like, you know,
his staff was also a zoo. Remember his staff was
the one that leaked all those quotes to the New
York Times that Trump had supposedly so his.
Speaker 1: Staff illegally recorded the phone call. And I just want
to do a little fine point on that too. We
heard a lot about Donald Trump saying find me eleven
thousand votes. This is a great example, like the story
that the Federalists published this week is a great example
of what the Trump lawsuit actually did. It would say,
we think they're be as many as this many votes
that had residency issues. We think there could be this
many votes that didn't have or we think there were
this many that had this, that or the other. And
they tied it to statute that didn't have proper certification,
that were improperly registered. All this stuff that is really
real and important. And I can't remember what the total
number of votes was, but let's say it was like
one hundred and fifty thousand that they had listed. And
Trump was saying, you don't need to agree with us
on every category in every vote, but could you agree
with us on enough to be more than the margin
of victory which was like eleven thousand, right, And it
was portrayed instead as him saying can you find eleven
thousand fraudulent votes? That was not true at all. He
was on a phone call trying to get so. When
the Trump team had filed their lawsuit, they also had
a problem that they couldn't get a judge to hear it.
It was just a bunch of bs. Nobody was hearing it,
and they these things need to be timely heard. It
doesn't matter after January sixth, when the election is you know,
when the electoral call it when the Electoral College votes
are ratified. So they're trying to get everything done as
quickly as possible. And it also relates to why they're
having alternate electors in the case that their lawsuit is
heard and agreed to and they can can hold a
new election, which could have been done easily as part
of the runoff election. So there are a lot of
people who are feeling very vindicated by some of this
recent reporting because they were treated as if they were
being crazy for saying there were problems in Fulton County
and they weren't crazy, right, No, Well, and the other things.
Speaker 2: I just want to point out that the whole you know,
find the fraud episode or whatever that you were talking
about there, and that didn't just that didn't just you know,
get Trump's some negative press. I mean that was used
in Trump's impeachment trial and it.
Speaker 1: Got him indicted, and it got the entire Republican Party
of Georgia inded it, which shut them up for five years.
It was horrible political interference and it was also related
to you know, they were also working with the DOJ
on that too, Fawnie Willis, who's now been discredited. And
also because of federalist reporting. Sorry, I love all of
our federalists reporting on this, and I'm thinking of a
I think I was the first person to report the
actual meaning behind that phone call, what actually happened in
that phone call, as opposed to how the Washington Post
and s News reported it. And then also I was
reading a book in which they admitted something I had
always suspected based on reporting, which is that this kind
of weird lady who worked in the Secretary of State's
office had illegally recorded the fal and she had not
testified in front of the sham J six committee because
she knew she'd broken the law and they were worried
that if she had to talk about it, the whole
reason she would have been called would be to talk
about the phone call, because she also leaked it to
the Washington Post. She also leaked false information to the
Washington Post, where she falsely claimed that Trump had made
a call and said something that he never said. The
Washington Post had to admit that error, and that was
in the impeachment.
Speaker 2: The correction the Washington Post ran on that was just astonishing,
and it was two months after the fact. But in
some the Washington Post anonymously printed fabricated quotes they knew
were from a secondhand source in the office of a
political enemy. They could not confirm those quotes with additional sourcing,
still attributed them to the sitting president of the United States.
Use those quotes as a basis to speculate the President
committee to crime, and the Democratic Party would later repeatedly
cite this bogus article would attempt to impeach Trump for
high crimes and misdemeanors. But it gets worse. Several other
major media outlets, including NBC, ABC, USA, DID, APBS, and
CNN all confirmed the fabricated quotes from the Post anonymous
source by citing their own anonymous sources. Is what passes
for reporting on election integrity in this country.
Speaker 1: And then I'll just mention another person who works for
Secretary of State Raffensburger as a consultant or something, Gabe Sterling,
who was all over CNN saying that Republicans were insane
to think there was any problem with how they had
run the election and I saw yesterday David Schaefer, who
had been the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and
went through really bad persecution from Fannie Willis. Fanny Willis,
he noted that among the people who voted illegally in
the Georgia election were there was a woman who lived
in Maryland but voted at Gabe Sterling's address. So one
of the top people in Rafensburger, someone's voting at his address.
They're like, there are no problems in this election. Okay,
moving on. I actually think we should move on to culture,
because there was another topic we wanted to talk about,
but it fits nicely with the movie we watched last night.
So I don't know, I'd had a really rough day
yesterday of just NonStop go go go, and then being
on special report, coming home and had more work to do,
and so kind of late I said I'd like to
watch something, and somehow we ended up on what was it?
Speaker 2: I always Amazon Prime or whatever, and you know, we're
just basically whatever was available, what was free or whatever,
and so we ended up clicking on and watching this
movie late night, starting oh yeah, and then The Calling,
which is about a perky young Indian woman with no
comedy experience who uses some like weird like intra office
competition to get an interview to be a comedy writer
on one of the a huge late night network TV
show and gets the job again despite zero comedy writing experience,
zero writing samples, and manages to transform the television show
by explaining to everyone how it's really important that white
men not be allowed to control everything is basically what
the premise of this quote unquote comedy is about. And
it's kind of, you know, amusing because the big story,
one of the big stories last week was this amazing
article publishing Compact Magazine by a guy who was a
Hollywood writer. You talked about how his entire career was
basically like shut down, you know, from start, I think
starting in like twenty fourteen, basically everyone in Hollywood decided that,
you know, millennial white men were never going to get
any jobs. And he had all kinds of receipts and
it wasn't just Hollywood, in all kinds of fields, it
was seen that millennial white men were basically shut out
of a lot of entry level positions or advancement in
their career fields because there was so much cultural pressure
in certain industries to make sure that they promoted women
and or minorities above them to a degree that was
really shocking. Like white men went from being overrepresented to
in the span of a few years in several industries
to being like way underrepresented relative to their share of
the population in lots of key industries. And like this
entire movie, which came out in twenty nineteen, to the
height of woke, I guess, was you know, basically like
an ode to this. I mean, it was really kind
of amazing in that regard, and there was just all
kinds of other like liberal politics infused in the whole thing.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: But and you know, I don't know it was what
it was. I mean, it wasn't horrifically bad. I mean
it was generally well paced though like a lot of movies,
it was you know, twenty minutes of a half an
hour two long, and you know, it had you know,
funny in moments, and had Emma Thompson. It was obviously
John Lithgallum, and it was obviously well acted. But it's
just was like from a it was a film that
was like six years old that felt like it was
from another era. Entirely. I mean, it was just like
really astonishing how out of touch it was relative to
the way things are today.
Speaker 1: Well, the compact piece was so interesting and in that
and that it broke through to like squishy people about
the problem of anti white racism. And it was a
little frustrating, being that we have published a lot about
this at the Federalist for many many years.
Speaker 2: Carrel wrote a great book on this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jeremy carl wrote The Unprotected Class, How Anti White
Racism is Tearing America Apart. It is a great book
and well worth a read. And it's good that more
people are accepting that racism is bad against whites, and
that there was rampant racism against white males in particular.
But there was a line in the movie toward the end.
First of all, I actually like Mindy Colling fine, I
do not fine. That was not well written, and it
was also directed by someone who who I didn't recognize
and not well directed. And I was like, hmm, maybe
we should let maybe we should let the men handle
the right. But there was a part at the end
where she in this poorly written movie that kept on
having ending after ending after ending, but no need for it.
It wasn't like a FuMB cute we're going to keep going.
It was like, let us out of this misery of
this movie. But she agrees to go back and work
for the absolutely mean lady if she won't white men
in the future. Yeah, And it was so casually said,
like it's okay to say, now, don't hire any black men.
We don't like them, you know. That's it was like
she didn't know she was saying something really awful and racist.
And it was just incoherent too, in the sense that
the show comes back to greatness under only white men apparently,
and yet then we're supposed to be mad at the
white men, and then the final.
Speaker 2: Scene is them like panning across the office, and of
course it's gone from being mostly white writers to like
a Benaton ad. Never mind, it is saying what happened
to all the white writers that were likable characters previously
in the movie.
Speaker 1: I don't think they were fired. I think they were
in that not all.
Speaker 2: Of them, No, not all of them were in that
shop pile.
Speaker 1: But just the other thing that was so funny about
it is the show is boring and bad, and she's
always having on people like plagiarist Doris Kern's goodwin to
talk about how great Doris Kern's goodwin is and Senator
Dianne Feinstein, who even six years ago was already dead
and she's like the solution to a boring show with
Senator Dianne Feinstein and Doris Kern's goodwin is that she
needs to talk about abortion more. And she's a childless witch.
And the idea is if she'll talk about her love
of killing unborn innocent children, that'll jazz thing you.
Speaker 2: Well. I think she's edgy and authentic, and she's sharing
stuff about.
Speaker 1: Herself and the hilarious joke she tells you just let
me share this with you. Republicans are trying to defund
Planned parenthood, the largest obortuary in the country and also
responsible for transing children and all these things, and she says,
is it's interesting that the people who want to ban
abortion don't have sex. I mean, like, that's not funny
at all, it's idiotic. And also it's everything that Stephen
Colbert and right Allan I get their name.
Speaker 2: No, Stephen Jimmy Fallon is the one that stayed relative.
Speaker 1: The one who's that guy who likes Jimmy Kimmel, Yeah,
who like tried to accuse the killer, the assassin of
Charlie Kirk being maga and then cried about how people
were mean to him when he falsely accused the person
he hates and being killed by other people he hates.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what she gives her is advice to revive her
show in twenty nineteen is the reason why, you know,
Jimmy Kimmel got yanked off the air and Stephen Colbert's
you know, had the plug pulled on him. Like they
literally cannot appeal to broad audiences because all they care
about is politics or whatever, and they think that, yeah,
being on their authentic, you know, highly political selves is
the way to go about it, rather than actually entertain
people and meet them where they are. But yeah, no,
it was I don't know, Like I said, it was
weirdly competent in certain ways. The acting was very good
across the board, and there was a lot.
Speaker 1: Of rooms Thompson could could redeem anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much, and it did have some funny moments,
but by and large, it was just a complete nightmare.
It was like I could not believe how out of
touch it seemed, even just six years later. I mean,
it's just like shockingly said, and I don't think I'm
saying that just because politically I disagree with it. May
think any person watching this that lived there last year
would be like, wow, this is a time capsule from
twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: There's like one good guy in it, just John Let's go, right,
like one decent character, and then they make him indecent
at the end.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well what yeah, yeah, no, he's like.
Speaker 1: A really nice, supportive husband of this very mean woman
who has nobody in her life.
Speaker 2: And then they like, I don't care if you see
this or not, but they basically excuse infidelity by Emma
Thompson by him revealing that, you know.
Speaker 1: He fandoned his wife and children to be with her.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So yeah, like like we're supposed to feel better
about the whole thing as a result of that. Well,
I guess they're both terrible broken people, you know. And again,
as you mentioned, he was like the only really like, well,
it's not the the head writer guy was kind of
likable and with one intention, but basically he was kind
of the moral core of the movie, and they just
completely undercut that because otherwise it would have looked, you know,
very disempowering for their feminist protagonist, for her to have
been you know, unfaithful, so they had to go and
do that. But anyway, yeah, I saw that, and God willing,
I'll never think about it again.
Speaker 1: So we since we only usually talk about what culture
seen over the last week, so I already talked about
my hatred of Hamnett last week. You liked it much
better than I.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't say that. I mean, I think that it's wildly overrated.
Jesse Buckley, the female lead in that film, is just
NonStop history onics for the second half of the film
and completely drags the whole thing down. I think it
was a the story was well intentioned, and there were
parts of the ending that I liked. But like, the
more I think about that woman in her performance, and
she'll probably be nominated for Oscars.
Speaker 1: He's gonna win it.
Speaker 2: I'm just beside myself at how how much of a
showcase to overacting it was. You know, basically the plot
of the movie is, you know, I mean, should I
just ruin things for people? Something bad happens and the
woman spends the rest of the movie just you know,
beside herself and just wailing and gnashing of teeth and
rending of gardens to garments to a degree that's just
intolerable to watch.
Speaker 1: Okay, and then we also okay, we had company this weekend,
which was wonderful.
Speaker 2: They had an eight year old son, dear friends.
Speaker 1: And yeah, yeah, so that was really fun to watch
some stuff with him. So we watched something I'd never
seen before, which is the animated Grinch. I do want
to say, I get a lot of people making fun
of me for my reviews of things that were done
decades ago, So just deal with it. Okay, watched the
animated Grinch, which I had never seen.
Speaker 2: How have you never seen the animated Grinch?
Speaker 1: I've thought about this. I want to talk to my
mom about it, but I'm pretty sure so I didn't
know even when it came out.
Speaker 2: I thought maybe I had sixty six.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought maybe I hadn't seen it because it
came out like in the late eighties, at a time
when I wear every.
Speaker 2: Year on television with much fanfare, when you were growing up.
Speaker 1: I'm going to assume that we didn't watch it because
it's stupid and awful and horribly animated, and my mom
probably hated it. My mom who's wonderful? What elementary school teacher.
I'm sure she didn't like the art or the storyline.
I didn't like it at all. And I've read the
book I knew. I haven't seen the movie. What the
long form?
Speaker 2: Jim? What? Either? This is the first I'm hearing this,
and then I just watched it with you?
Speaker 3: What do you?
Speaker 2: The Grins was directed by Chuck Jones, made the greatest
animator in history, Chuck Jones.
Speaker 1: The art was ugly, and I do think I have
a bias again.
Speaker 2: Are you god?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: This is unacceptable for crying out loud.
Speaker 1: No, it's messy and ugly, and I think art should
be beautiful.
Speaker 2: Are you? Oh my gosh, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: It was Chuck Jones, a man who was responsible for
like all of the greatest like Loony Tunes cartoons. I mean,
it's a masterfully I think.
Speaker 1: He was dropping acid when he did this.
Speaker 2: Wow, Oh my gosh, you have sixty years of this
being an absolute American classic that literally everyone apparently but you, loves.
I don't even know where to begin with this.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing that really turned me off. Was okay, so.
Speaker 2: Oh for crying out loud? If you're going to go
down this path, you'd better own it, happy to own it.
Speaker 1: I hated it. But the thing that really bothered me
more than anything, more than the ugly art, more than
the I did like the one song You're a mean one,
mister Grinch ugly art. The other song the dozel fosal
gossled pooh like. I didn't get that, and I did
not like that.
Speaker 2: Have you read Doctor seuss Is?
Speaker 1: This is this whole stick Okay, when the Grinch steals
everything and then gives everything back, and they say, that's
the true meaning of Christmas, and I'm like, what is
the true meaning of Christmas? Let's compare this with the
with the show we watched immediately after The Grinch, which
is Charlie Brown Christmas, in which they also want to
know what is the true meaning of Christmas? And what
is the answer given by Linus? Okay, he reads Luke
too and talks about the incarnation of God coming in
human flesh and saving the world. That's the true meaning
of Christmas. And it was clear and it was easy
to understand, and it was beautifully done, and the music
was amazing. And speaking of Acid, I think I think
probably been Squirldy was also on drugs doing that thing.
But like, it's great music, great story, animation.
Speaker 2: Look, I'm not going to dispute that Charlie vin Christmas
is a better film. It's a better special thematically, Okay,
But my question is, since I was in the same
room with you, did you watch The Grinch? Because everything
you just said got it wrong. Okay. What happens, as
you might recall, is the Grinch steals all of their
gifts and he hikes all the way back up the
mountain and then he looks down and thinking that this
is going to make them miserable like he is, and
guess what, they still come out of their houses and
they band together and they sing Christmas carols because it
doesn't matter that they have the gifts. That's the spirit
of Christmas.
Speaker 1: And then at that point he's like Chris, it's all
about them.
Speaker 2: I'm just that Yes, of course, no, it'd be much
better if there was a gospel reading. Of course, but
your summary of it is in fact inaccurate, So that
needs like maybe factor into whether you disliked it or not,
because apparently you'd missed that scene. No, the point is
is that you know, yes, on some little Christmas is
about you know, coming together and appreciating each other and
whatever else. Again not a gospel message, but still a
good one, Okay, But yes, no, it is hard to
top in terms of Christmas specials. A Charlie Brown Christmas.
I remember early. I remember reading somewhere that you know,
not only did Schultz write that himself, he basically, you know,
he was a you know, a big deal in popular
culture at the time, and he was the one that
demanded that Vince Garaldi do the soundtrack, which is just,
you know, absolutely iconic. And it's just fascinating to me
that Schultz's vision was like so complete. As an artist,
you know, you don't really think much about you know,
just you know, a three panel comic strip or whatever.
It doesn't seem like it's that much on the surface,
but you know, by then, and he'd probably written thousands
of Peanuts things and you had it very much in
his head like what he would want to present. It
is interesting that it's it's so it is so religious
in part because Schultz had an interesting religious journey. I
think he was raised Lutheran and then he became kind
of evangelical, and then by the eighties, he was calling
himself a secular humanist. But you know, but it is
true that spirituality was very important to him. And I
find it like, really, it's really remarkable by the standards
of today that you could just have an animated character
like step in front of the stage and you know,
read from the Bible in a Christmas special. And yes,
it doesn't make me feel like it was a better
America when that sort of thing was happening.
Speaker 1: All men, Well, great, Barring any other music, TVs books
you want to discuss, we are going to have We're
going to be celebrating twelve Days of Christmas. You mentioned
those guys being Lutheran. We're Lutheran, and we celebrate twelve
days of Christmas beginning on Christmas. And so many people
think of the Christmas. They think of Christmas as a
day and that it's December twenty fifth, And if they
think of a season, they think it's the Advent season
where you prepare for Christmas. But historically we celebrate Advent
for the four Sundays prior to Christmas and the weeks
they're in and then we do twelve days of Christmas
and then we do Epiphany and so we are about
to enter into our party season of celebration about Christ
coming to Earth to save us. So we will be
watching more Christmas movies and other things as part of
those celebrations, and so maybe we can even talk about
it next week if you wanted to join. I don't
know if I think day it'll be back, but if not,
we'll do more of these discussions.
Speaker 2: Yes, we need the Jewish guys perspective on the secular
Jewish guys perspective on Christmas.
Speaker 1: So thanks for listening, and thanks also to all of
our supporters. Make sure you download the podcast. Like the podcast,
also subscribe to Federalist Premium, and we also greatly appreciate
all support from our donors. If you have any questions, comments, insults,
and I'm sure Mark, you're going to get a lot
of people yelling at me about my lack of love
of the Scrooge, but send those the Scrooge the Grinch.
Speaker 2: Sorry I think you weren't paying attention. I'm just going
to put that out there.
Speaker 1: Send all comments to radio at the Federalist dot com.
Be lovers of freedom and anxious.
Speaker 2: Greasy Black. You're a monster, mister Grinch. Your outside m
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