Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of You Were Wrong with
Molly Hemingway, editor and she for the Federalists 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 Federalist dot com. We love to
hear from you, Molly. We're doing the show a little early,
it's Christmas. We didn't want to leave everyone hanging this week, and.
Speaker 2: It'll be able to be listened to by like four people.
It's a very intimate, special Christmas.
Speaker 1: Edition, a very special episode. We'll keep it short, but
you know, we had a few things to say.
Speaker 2: Well, last week I talked about how there was this
story I wanted to talk about last week, but we
were so loquacious ourselves, just like Tanji Brown Jackson, that
we ran out of time. But it relates to this
Inspector General report that came out a couple of weeks ago.
And the report was ostensibly looking into how the Department
of Justice had gathered communications from two members of Congress
and then forty three congressional staff and what protocols they
followed and whether it was okay. So we already kind
of knew that there had been some of this surveillance
of people who work for Congress or even the members themselves,
but this report, the report everyone kind of talked about
that should the DOJ really be getting the communications of
a completely separate branch of government that oversees the Department
of Justice? And I would say no, And that's a
really important topic to talk about. But hidden in this
report were three bombshells I thought about the Department of
Justice as it related to the Russia collusion. Hope, because
the Russia coclusion hoax was kind of deeply involved in
why they were gathering communications from these members of Congress.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bombshell one.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, so sorry, I'm just like, there's so much
to say here, so I'm just just going with so
what It all dated to the early days of the
Trump administration, And in the early days of the Trump administration,
you had deep state actors leaking like sieves to compliant
people in the press in order to set this false
narrative that Donald Trump was a Russian spy who had
colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the twenty sixteen election.
And it was so stupid, but it really was what
people in DC believed and or they claimed to believe,
and it was all fed by these crazy, crazy, crazy,
insane stories. And so more than four, but four in
particular stories included classified information where the Attorney General asked
investigators to look into how that classified information appeared in print, right.
Speaker 1: Right, and so which is illegal. It's illegal to leak
classified information to the press.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I'd say the big story here is that
the DOJ didn't really look that hard. Okay, they the
investigation starts in twenty seventeen, and they train their eyes
on Congress, which is interesting because I think probably most
of the leaks in this story always came from even
high level FBI and DOJ officials, But they trained their
eyes on Congress. And the first bombshell, in my opinion,
was that there was a whistleblower on Adam Shift's committee,
a whistleblower who was like, yeah, we're all leaking over here,
not he himself, but everyone else. And he says this
in twenty seventeen, and he fingers Adam Schiff and Eric Swallwell. Again,
none of this is surprising. We all know that Adam
Schiff and Eric swallm Well we're leaking like sieves. They
were constantly going on the media. Eric Adam Schiff in particular,
was lying and claiming that he had access to super
secret information that substantiated this Russia collusion hoax.
Speaker 1: Oh wait. Eric Swawell was on the Intelligence.
Speaker 2: Committee on Hipsie Yeah, until twenty twenty three when Kevin
McCarthy removed him.
Speaker 1: Oh I remember now er Well, No, no, I'm just
gonna say he's you know, he's not bright a but
also obviously he got he was the one who was
got caught up in a honeypot operation right with Fang Fang,
and seems like not the right person for this particular committee.
Speaker 2: Well, yes, she Feng Fang was the Chinese communist operative
who lured a lot of Democrats in But he actually
had a relationship with her, an intimate relationship, if you
know what I mean, And I do, so. Okay, So,
first off, there's a Democrat staffer whistle blower, and he's
telling the FBI investigators they're leaking over here, and he
even explains like what their motivation is and what they're
trying to do. And we know it's Adam Schiff and
Eric Swalwell. Even though this report doesn't name them because
the New York Times, which is one of the groups
that leakers were working with, named them in twenty twenty
or twenty twenty one one. Yeah, and they said that
there were these two members of Congress, Adam Schiff and
Eric Swawell, who had their communications surveilled by doj And
this report says only two members of Congress were so
had their communications intercepted. So we know that's him, and
you know the committee. So the second thing is that
the whistleblower also fingers the staff director I think his
name is, or it seems like it, I should say,
it seems like it's this person, Michael Bahar And that
person was also named by the New York Times as
being the target of the investigation. And what's so funny
about this DOJIG report? And I hate IG reports. People
always think they are legitimate investigations. They are not. Doj
IG in particular is run by a Barack Obama appointee,
and IG's in general usually exists to protect the institution
that they're supposedly investigating. It's like going to your hr
and thinking you're going to get justice, you know, like,
instead of that, they realize you're the problem if you
complain to hr.
Speaker 1: What was his name, Horowitz maybe his last name. I
forget what his name was. But there was an interesting
IG report about all the Faiza stuff that went wrong
and everything. I mean, they're not useless obviously, and you're
talking about one now.
Speaker 2: Right, great example of what I'm talking about. So you
have in the Russia collusion hoax, the worst thing to happen,
you know, are one of the very worst things to
happen in the government in history. And the report comes
out and it's like so dryly rich, and it's so calm,
and it's like okay, and so you know, the way
that they explained that Kevin Kine Smith falsified evidence to
secure a warrant is like your mother putting you to
sleep as a baby. It's like do do You're so
beautiful and so nicely written. And also Michael Horowitz and
it's just sort of like, well, there's not much that
can be done to fix the department, is sort of
how he writes it up. He also was the one
who falsely claimed that the predicate to start the Russia
collusion hoax was legitimate, you know, so he puts in it,
you know, it's just it's crafted in such a way
the investigation themselves can be done either to destroy your
life or to be very gentle. And I think this
is a great example. The real story of this leak
investigation is that DOJ did nothing and instead the report
very dry, very boring. You have to like read it
six times to understand what's going on. Is that, you know,
they just completely messed up this investation and never had
any intention of discovering who the leakers that they were
working with were. So he names the senior staff director
and they do nothing about it for three years, only
when Attorney General Bill Barr comes in and says, like, hey,
whatever happened with that leak investigation? And they realize, like, oh,
we did have that whistleblower kind of name who was
doing it. So I guess we're going to have to
pretend to care. And so they go back and they
interview this guy and he had left, you know, congressional
staff years prior, and they explain that he went into
the special room where you could review the classified material
that was leaked, and shortly before he went into the room,
and shortly after he left the room, he called all
three reporters involved in the publication of the classified information.
So they asked him about it, and he's like, no,
I have the perfect alibi. And his alibi is that
sure he was talking to these people who published classified
information that he had access to, but he talked to
two of them all the time. And so they look
into it and they're like, he did talk to them
a lot. So we decided he wasn't the leaker.
Speaker 1: The more you talk to someone, the less likely it
is that you're the one providing the information. I understand, I.
Speaker 2: Don't know if he was the leaker, wasn't the leaker,
was one of four hundred and eighty leakers, But the
idea that that would be exonerating information is so laughable
to me. Then the other thing is that the whistleblower
says that this guy said, you know, one way to
communicate with reporters is to use your spouse's phone, because
you know, that's harder to track. And so they say
for that reason and also other reasons, we you know,
we had reasons to believe that this person was using
his wife's phone, and so we also took we also
looked into her communications. But later we found that his
claim was without foundation, and it's like, what does that
even mean? He says he heard this guy firsthand say
this thing, but oh they would kept on saying, oh, well,
you know, he thought Schiff and Swallow were leaking, but
he didn't like personally witness them leak. Oh Okay, that's
usually not you know what I mean? Like sure, but
the way that they described this person is like blowing
the whistle without having a foundation. It's clearly that they're
just trying to make the guy go away for revealing
how the operation that they were themselves participants in, how
it worked. And that was the second Okay.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you a broader question now about just
thinking back about this time, so you have Shift Swawell leaking.
Do you do you think that the reporters, obviously they're
leaking classified information in ways to make Trumpet guilty, to perpetuate,
to propel this narrative about Russia. Do you think that
the journals were just scredulous and they believed whatever they
were told. Do you think they were part of it?
Like it seems to me that maybe they were misled.
I mean, not that I want to let them off
the hook, but does this kind of make you feel
more of that or is it just more complicated than that.
Speaker 2: Well, you remember that story I told about how I
realized the Russia collusion scam with a hoax because I
was on set at CNN when they revealed where their
sources were coming from. And I always think about that
I had so much less information than they did, or
you know, it was harder for me to get that information,
but I was smart enough to know what was going on,
And then they spent years pushing this coax. Did they
do that because they're stupid or did they do that
because they are such propagandists that they were willing to
do whatever it took to try to do a coup
against their political opponent. I think probably the latter, with
a sprinkling of the former.
Speaker 1: Right, I don't and I want to say I've said
numerous times skepticism is like the number one tool of
being a good journalist in my view, and obviously they
had none of that. But also they obviously CNN acted
inappropriately with their sources, knowing that things were coming from
the same office, for instance, stuff like that, So obviously
they were a part of it in some way. But
I just wonder how much you know what was what?
That's all.
Speaker 2: I want to give an Adam Schiff example to this too.
And it also happens to deal with CNN. You might
remember that I think it was twenty seventeen, might have
been twenty eighteen. I can't remember. Because this scam went
on for so long. Someone at CNN reported that they
had multiple witnesses showing that Donald Trump Junior, the son
of Donald Trump, had gotten secret access to wiki leaks
prior to its public release.
Speaker 1: That was Manu Raju and another reporter I forget with
the other, okay, and.
Speaker 2: They had two supposedly independent sources or two sources. Then
you had a bunch of other reporters claim that these
sources were anonymous.
Speaker 1: Of course.
Speaker 2: Then you had other reporters like Kendelanian at ABC or NBC.
I forget and NBC say that they had confirmed this leak.
They had confirmed it. And it turned out that the
supposed early access to wiki leaks was in fact a
random email from a random dude in California who just
saw the publicly available wikileak stuff and sent it to
a publicly available email account associated with Donald Trump Junior.
Didn't know him. He just was like, hey, check this out,
this publicly available wikileik stuff. And the sources, supposedly independent,
supposedly confirmed by Kendelanian, had gotten the date on the
email wrong. So the whole story was that he'd gotten
an early secret access and it turned out it was
like a few days after everybody else in the world knew.
Speaker 1: Both source independent completely independent sources gave the same exact
wrong date by somehow happenstance, I guess never. But by
the way Cianna never explained it. Manu Raju has a
better job today than he did then.
Speaker 2: Actually he doesn't. He doesn't.
Speaker 1: I thought he's like some kind of sea I think
he has a show in CNN. Does is anymore?
Speaker 2: I don't think. I think he's literally still a hallway
troll for CNN.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he just does.
Speaker 2: Like Democrats who like, could you ask Republican members of
Congress this question? And he says, sir, yes, sir, I'll
do exactly what you want. And I will never ask
democrats a tough question. If the gun has put to
my head, I won't do it. I'll troll the hallways.
That's Manu Roger when.
Speaker 1: He asks democrat question Democrats questions. It's like this, did
you hear what Donald Trump said about you? I'll holland
omar and it wasn't how terrible was it or was evil?
Was it terrible? Like he that's what he does. But anyway,
he you know, if sources burn you like that, Like
obviously access is important, but if sources burn you like that,
you've been used, you write about it. But he wasn't used.
He participated in it. So anyway, Yeah, I like that
one because it's the most embarrassing I think of all
of them.
Speaker 2: Okay, I just okay, I'm going to wrap a few
things up on this. I'm going off on tangents of tangents.
But the story was sourced basically to two people on
Hipsy and Hipsey was always the source of leaks about
the russiacclusion hooks. I don't think it was just Adam
Schiff and just Eric Swallwell and just the staff. I
think it was also Department of Justice and various other
Democrat operatives, but they were a key location of leaking
on the being burned thing. Last week we talked about
the Pro public A story where Pro Publica tried to
do a hip piece on Pete haig Seth and then
they got totally burned. They had called the admissions office
or whatever west Point and twice a West Point person
said that Pete haig Seth had ever even applied there,
when not only had he applied, he'd been accepted. And
one of the critiques that real journalists had against Pro
Publica was that when that happened, they should have written
up the story about how West Point was lying to
hurt Pete Hegseth. It's like a really big thing that
was like a should have been done, And so some
people were making that point, and then other journalists other sorry,
I should say propagandists with other corporate media, came to
the defense of Pro Publica, and one guy at Politico
I think, said, if I think it was Josh Gersin,
yes it was wrong, the guy who published the dobs leak.
And He's like, if I wrote about every time a
government operative lied to me, I would that would be
half my time. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I.
Speaker 1: Went off on that.
Speaker 2: I think that's.
Speaker 1: First of all, yes, you should be writing about that,
and I'll tell you why, because then they will stop
lying to you and you won't have to spend that
much time writing about it. The reason they lie to
you is because they know that they will never be
burnt and you care about access more than anything, and
that you will continue to take their word for stuff.
So yes, he's that was a perfect example of why, Well,
I don't want to curse, but journalism isn't a bad.
Speaker 2: Place unsourcing issues. I want to explain to non journalists
out there how that works. So generally speaking, you shouldn't
use anonymous sources because it's very easy to say things
when there's no accountability for you getting something wrong. But
it is also true that for a variety of reasons,
you may need to use an anonymous source. And I
write on topics that involve a lot of discretion, either
because of the position that someone has or because of
national security issues, and so I'm dealing with this a lot.
I really try to avoid anonymous sources, but I also
sometimes just want to talk to people and get information
so I can write with some authority. So when Carrie
Severino and I wrote the cap A book, we interviewed
more than one hundred people, and we did it almost
all on background, which means people could just speak freely
to us and we wouldn't attribute what happened to a
particular person. It was a great way to collect information
because you talk to seven people who are in the
same meeting, and they all tell you how that meeting went,
and you get confirmation of what one person said, or
you get different perspectives and you kind of get just
a fuller picture of it. Right. But when you're explaining
to people this is on the record, or this is
on background, or this is off the record, a good
reporter should explain what all of those terms mean with
people who aren't familiar with how it works. And they
should also say if you lie to me, like all
bets are off, so that people feel threatened about telling
the truth.
Speaker 1: I mean, and also with politicians, and I'm sorry with
people in government, and even when I reported locally in Denver,
anyone in government, anyone in a power position, knows exactly
what's going on with being off and on the record.
It's not I think to normal people that should all
be explained. But just as background to this, they know,
they know what it means, they know how to manipulate it,
you know, and all of that. But yeah, and being
on background, by the way, just so people aren't journalists
know you know, like you said, but you know it
gives you an idea from different perspectives. But you also
needed to write a full fulsome story. You know, you
need to understand what went on, and not everyone wants
to sit down and be in the newspaper or whatever.
So anyway, started interrum.
Speaker 2: Right, and I'm able to talk to a lot more
people because I speak on background, although I do want
to say sometimes people will tell me this is off
the record, and then later they'll be like, so I
gave you that stuff and it never came out, and like,
because you said it was off the record, and so
there's this DC off the record, which I think really
means I want this to get out, but I really
want you to be careful with how you say it.
And it is infuriating to me because my whole reputation
is based on my ability to hold information. So when
people tell me something's off the record, I take it
very seriously.
Speaker 1: Anywayeah, because no one's going to talk to you again
if you don't do it right right. I mean, if
you blow someone's cover, they never no one's going to
talk to you. Even other people will be nervous to
do it.
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Speaker 2: So back to the CNN store. About the Wiki leagues,
if they were a real news organization and they had
been utterly humiliated by how they handled it, they should
have burned their sources. They should have said this was
Adam Schiff, or this was Adam Schiff's chief of staff,
or this was Adam Schiff's mother, whatever it is. They
should have said who the people were so that you
could judge, so that you knew that they took it seriously,
delivering news and not just attacking Trump like with CNN.
More recently, they had the whole thing with pretending that
they were releasing a political victim in a Syrian prison
and it turned out to be a guy in the
regime who'd been engaged in fraud or something like that,
and they didn't even apologize, and they didn't explain how
it happened that they got it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the problem. I mean, everyone gets fooled journalists.
People try to manipulate you. It happens, but like, if
it does, you should explain yourself and light up and
then who was involved. But they never do. That Syrian
thing was embarrassing.
Speaker 2: Okay, So back to the bombshells in this IG reports,
there was a third bombshell in there, I thought, which
is DOJ was supposed to be investigating leaks that were
designed to destroy Donald Trump's presidency, and they were clearly
focused on Hipsey the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
On the one side, you had Adam Schiff, notorious for
being an active and major participant in the fraud, and
his staff. On the other side, you had Devin Nunez
and his staff, people like Hash Pattel or you know,
who were well known for being the only people in
all of America who were willing to stand up against
all of the elite establishment to say that the Russia
collusion hoax was a hoax. So when you're investigating who's
leaking to left wing media outlets the Washington Post, CNN,
and New York Times stories and information designed to hurt
Donald Trump and Devin Nunez, guess who the FBI.
Speaker 1: Investigated, I'm going to say new Nez.
Speaker 2: Well they I told you already. It was two members
of Congress, two Democrats, and then forty three.
Speaker 1: Staffers of Okay, go on.
Speaker 2: Of the forty three staffers, two were nonpartisan, twenty one
were Democrat, and twenty were Republican. So, in other words,
when the leak started happening clearly from a Democrat resistance
throughout the government, our FBI used it as an excuse
to surveil the only people who were coming after them
Devin news a staff.
Speaker 1: Oh so was Devin As' staff? Yeah, gosh, I just
remembering now how much pressure was on that guy, how
every outlet went after him. Know I mentioned this before,
but I just remember writing like, can we just hear
him out and let's see what he has to say.
And I was just bombarded with some more anger over
that than almost anything I've written in years. You know,
it was just so much pressure not to talk about it.
And his memo, which turned out I think to be
one hundred percent accurate that it was suspicious, right, I mean,
we worked together and you were obviously all over that.
But it made me and I wasn't paying that much
attention to this very suspicious, Like why is there so
much pressure from people in power, from you know, for
you not to even read a memo from someone who's
on that committee. I mean, if you find out he's
lying about everything, fine, he's ruined. But let's look and
one last thing just on that is shift. It's not
just that he was leaking stuff, but he used his
position of power to intimate that he had access and
he constantly did this to all this information that would
blow your mind, like he is a spy for sure,
like you know, and he turned out just to lie
about everything. And where is he now? He's in the Senate, right,
I mean if.
Speaker 2: You remember when like I don't remember who asked him,
but they were, like you said, you had all this
secret explosive information what were you talking about? And he
was like, I was just talking about like what we
read in the papers.
Speaker 1: Megan McCain on the View, like the only person who
asked him anything, right, I mean, he was on CNN
every day, MSNBC all the time, No one asked him
that question. He had to go on the View and
the one conservative astor asked him.
Speaker 2: And you know, think about it even right now, right, so,
George Stefanopolis and Chuck Todd and Kristin Welker, if they
have a Republican elected official on, they say, you don't
believe there was anything other than the most perfect election
in history in twenty twenty, right, we won't move on
until you agree with my opinion on that, or they say,
or you know, throughout the Russia collusion hoax, Chuck Todd
would mock people who thought it was a scam, mock them,
and all of this, you know, just hostile media coverage
to this day. When Adam Schiff is on, does anyone say,
we should probably note that you lied for years about
having secret information that Donald Trump was a Russian mastermind spy.
Now we're going to ask you about something else. No,
not even like a hint of a question, not even
a hint of pushback. They were happy to work together
on all of this. But I want to make a
point of clarification on the monitoring GOP staff. I don't
really believe that congressional staff should be monitored by the
DOJ no matter what. But when I point out that
they were going after as many Republicans as they were Democrats,
I don't mean by that that there might not have
been Republicans worth going after. I mean there were Senate
Republicans who were clearly pushing the Russia collusion hoax and
giving it amplification because they didn't like Donald Trump, so
they were willing to take part in deep state operations.
My point is just that those people were not on
Devin Nunez's committee or the House Judiciary Committee. Those are
the people that were, or they weren't Senator Chuck Grassley's staff,
who were fighting it. So that's who our DOJ went after.
And you're just thinking, oh, you went after the people
who were exposing your corruption, and you got access to
their information using all these authorities. Must be nice, you know.
And the DOJ proceeded to attempt to fight any oversight
of what they were doing with the Russia collusion scam,
even as their top officials were leaking like sieves, people
like Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe, you know, who were
caught leaking information. They used this leak investigation as an
opportunity to further go after their opponents on the Hill,
even as they refused accountability for what they'd done in
congressional hearings.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about how easy it is for there's
always leaking going on in Congress, and then the DOJ
the FBI will say we have to look into this,
and then the head of the FBI says, well, let's
look into all these Republicans as well. Like you know,
there's no you know, no one can stop them. It's
a completely politicized operation. Maybe it won't be in the future.
We'll see, but and.
Speaker 2: I will just make another point here. I have written
some stories that involved explosive information that I got from people. Right,
Not once did anyone in the Russia collusion fight leak
anything to me, And I don't believe we have evidence
of them ever leaking anything to a reporter. It was infuriating,
by the way. It was hard to fight that battle
with nobody giving you anything. But the level of integrity
that these people who had access to this information showed
is just sky high relative to the constant deluge of
leaks from Schiff and Swallwell and people like that.
Speaker 1: It's a problem. Okay, let's talk about culture. We decided,
I think we have very we have very short meetings,
but I think we decided that we were going to
talk about our favorite Christmas movies. Right, Okay, do you
want to start? Nope, all right, my movie?
Speaker 2: What are your What are your favorite Christmas movies?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Here's what I came up with. They're
not exactly the traditional kind of movies, but I think
you know. The first one is Trains, Planes and Automobiles.
Speaker 2: Oh isn't that a Thanksgiving movie? First? Always yes, but
I love that movie. I cry at that movie. It's
so beautiful.
Speaker 1: Oh it really is. It's almost it's a perfect movie.
It's sentimental, but it also is very funny. The scene
where Steve Martin comes back from the rental car thing
where he doesn't get it and curses every second word
to the woman there in the booth is one the
funniest scenes. And anyone who's been you know, in an
airport probably understands why so I think I think you're right,
but I'm not sure. So I'm sure we're gonna get
a lot of mail on this to explain it, but
it might be enough.
Speaker 2: You can definitely watch it for Christmas. I just want
to say John Hughes is so wonderful, such an I
know everyone loves his movies, and yet still does not
get talked about enough as this great director and such
an American director, and his films to me evoke the
America of the nineteen eighties that I grew up in.
Speaker 1: And what's crazy is he started out with a National
lampoon on a staff with PJ O'Rourke. Can you imagine
the level of talent at that place? Who I believe
they work together on Vacation the movie, and then there's Christmas.
Vacation is a Christmas movie but gone?
Speaker 2: Okay, So on the Plans Train an Automobiles thing. Did
you were the one who told me to watch that
Steve Martin documentary?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was really good. But do you remember that scene?
I don't remember exactly what's happened, but there was a
scene where he's remembering, Oh it was it was that
John Candy had actually a much longer scene and that
it had been cut down by Hughes, and he's just
talking about how beautiful and perfect the longer thing wasn't
how he didn't quite understand why it was cut down.
But Steve Martin gets emotional and just it was clear
he really respected John Candy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean I recently pulled him up on Wikipedia
to see when he had passed away, and it was
it was so he died in nineteen ninety four, and
it's just I can't believe it, you know that it
was that long ago. So I don't know if young
people realize how many you know, he was just such
a part of my childhood and growing up. He was
in like every second movie, and he was always funny
and perfect for whatever. And he really had a lot
of range too, you know what I mean. He was
just super funny. And you started out an SETV and
almost everyone on the SETV cast is known to people
and hilarious more and sure, Eugene Levy all you know
all those people. But anyway, yeah, so that's my first one.
Speaker 2: You mentioned vacation. Yeah, and my husband who's constantly reading
but had somehow never read Grapes of Wrath, the Steinbeck
novel that everyone has to read when they're in high school,
and that I like in part because it takes place,
you know, where they end up in California's right near
where I grew up and matched some experiences. I know.
People say that Steinbeck totally got a bunch of details wrong,
but the living in the trading cars and stuff like
that matches the experiences of people I knew growing up. Anyway,
Mark was saying that Grapes of Wrath, that vacation is
clearly a riff on Creeps for including the grandma dying
in the vehicle and stuff. Anyway, I was like, you
should write that out.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. I don't remember Grapes of Wrath very well,
so okay, i'd have to readvisit. Why don't we trade
off one'?
Speaker 2: You go, oh, I don't really have anything, because I haven't.
I didn't think.
Speaker 1: So this is just an episode of my favorite Christmas movies?
Speaker 2: Did you do one more? And then I'll come up
with something and then you and okay.
Speaker 1: I watched this last week die Hard, so I want
to say, you know, very saddened by what's going on
with Bruce Willis. You know, he's ill, but he had
such charisma and I don't know that people. I actually
read a lot about this movie while I was watching it,
as I tend to do on my phone, and it
was just it changed the way action movies were. Now.
You might not people might not care about this very much,
but before die Hard, you had I Arnold Tchwarzenegger, you
had other heroes who are almost very strong and perfect,
and he was just a mess. And it was It
just gave the movie a lot of heart and it's
just a lot of fun to watch. I've seen it
a million times and I always enjoy it, and I
do I am one of the people who think it's
a Christmas movie.
Speaker 2: So I'm one of the people that just gets annoyed
at people talking about whether or not it's a Christmas movie, right.
I feel like it's a way of saying I'm a
boring person and I have nothing interesting to say, thank you.
Speaker 1: I did not. I don't like that debate. I just
it happens during Christmas. There's Christmas music run dmc is
in talking about you know that Hollis Queen's Christmas rap,
and I just I considered it a Christmas movie. I
don't really like to debate it, you can, you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, cool? And I don't.
Speaker 1: Also, I don't have a lot of choices, so you know,
it is what it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I will say the one movie that I
definitely like to watch each year is one that I'm
pretty sure is on literally nobody's list, and I it's
a movie where when I ask other people to watch it,
they're like, what are you talking about? My brother is
still angry that I made him watch this movie as
a Christmas movie. He just did not find it funny
at all. And it's Trapped in Paradise.
Speaker 1: You've mentioned this movie in our podcasting career together, which
you know, I guess is two or three years old now,
but we used to do it before. Every once a
week usually you have mentioned this movie number of time.
You love this movie? Now this is with John Lovett,
Nicholas Cage, and the Dana Carvey.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I'm trying to pull it up. Where did
it go? Anyway? It's sorry? Did you already say Nick
Cage too?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I think I did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so it is. I just came upon it
by accident, you know, when you're doing that Netflix scrolling
and this was years ago and we watched it with
the children, which is a horrible idea because of all
the Christmas movies ever done. Yeah, it has the most cussing, okay,
and yet it is I think it has a wonderful
message of redemption and it's so stupid. This is the
movie that my kids and I will recite lines from constantly.
And it's Goofy. So you have to ender watch Goofy
and it's not true. Oh please do. I can't wait
to hear what you think of it.
Speaker 1: I'm going to watch it if it's streaming.
Speaker 2: Yeah and yeah. So it's about these two brothers who
get out of prison and then they con their straight
brother into taking them to Paradise, Pennsylvania, where they claim
they're doing a good deed, but really they're robbing a bank.
And it's about what happens as a result, how the
town reacts to it, and the demonstration of love in
this film I like very much. It does have We
were talking about idiot plots last week. There's quite a
bit of idiot plotting in it. But it's just stupid
and funny and great and I like, again the message
of giving and love and repentance and turning away from
sin and redemption and what forgiveness really looks like. Like
there's a scene where or let me put it this way,
when we talk about forgiveness in Christianity, we believe that
God blots out our sins, you know that it's like
they're just blotted out, and like take he covers them,
and that they're not done. And there's some representation of
that in this film that I really like.
Speaker 1: The director of this film wrote the film Midnight Run
with Robert de Niro that I like, and I was
just looking it is funny because I was going to
look at reception for this film and it does not
have a very good Rotten Tomatoes score. In fact, it
has a ten and then it says your ear end lists,
it's like eighth worst film Rocky Mountain News and stuff.
But I don't care. What what's that? You know that guy, right,
Robert Zenerson, Yeah, anyway, I'm gonna watch it. I like
all three of those guys. I think John Lowitz is funny.
I have a kind of a movie too that our family.
Speaker 2: The IMDb rating is better than the ten percent Rotten Tomatoes,
it's still very low. It's five point nine. I think
that it's just one of these things where you have
to be in the right mood and you have to
accept the silliness of it.
Speaker 1: I listen. I think there are movies you have to accept.
You have to accept them for what they are and
enjoy it if you want. And there are a lot
of bad movies that I like, you know what I mean.
I have a movie. Our family watched this movie year
after year with the kids that it wasn't very successful,
but I thought it was really delightful and we liked it.
Was called Arthur Christmas. Have you ever seen it?
Speaker 2: Nope? It has mentioned this one before, but yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, probably last Christmas. It's got Hugh Laurie and
James McAvoy I think his name is, you know, the
Scottish actor. So it's kind of one of these delightful,
you know, Christmas movies. I think it's very nice, and
then I feel like such a loser. But it's so
uninventive or so obvious. But I thought, I was watching
Home Alone the other day and that movie is just
really He's so cute, the movie's so funny. Joe Peshy's
great everyone's great in it. And that's another John Hughes movie.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, I mean, it's just it's a
great it's great, it's wonderful.
Speaker 1: I'm going to watch the second one with the starring
co starring Donald Trump. Donald Trump's in that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah. When we watched that last year, the kids were like,
oh my goodness. But I'm like, if I weren't busy
this Christmas trying to finish a writing project, I would
be watching a ton of movies. It's actually what we
love to do during our Christmas celebrations, just going to
gather watch.
Speaker 1: Movies and are you into the like It's a wonderful life.
Do you like that movie?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I do. I love that. Charlie Brown's Christmas.
Speaker 2: I love Charlie brown Christmas, and I love the Vince
Giraldi album. And I pull out all the Christmas music
and we listen to John Fahey on the guitar and
the Vince Giraldi Christmas, John Denver and the Muppets Christmas album,
one of the most christ centered Christmas albums from pop culture,
and then like a ton of like Bach and other stuff.
I just love it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, do you have any other movies. I'm trying
to coax you to say something. Now, all right, Trapped
in Paradise it is, which is fine. I'm going to
watch it. I hope your family and you have a
great Christmas. Merry Christmas, Thank you you too. And I
hope all our listeners have a wonderful Christmas as well.
Speaker 2: And I hope they send in movie recommendations, whether or
not they're Christmas related at radio at the Federalist dot com.
Speaker 1: That's so good. And let me just say we need
them obviously because I'm still watching die Hard.
Speaker 2: The weirdest Christmas recommendation list.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's all right. Anyway, we'll see you guys next week.
Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the
Fray