The Megyn Kelly Show - Dem Establishment Failures, with Ana Kasparian, and if Bieber Launched the Trad Movement, with Evita Duffy-Alfonso

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00:00:45.460 Hey everyone, it's me, Megan Kelly.

00:00:47.220 And today I want to bring you an episode of our latest MK Media Podcast Network show,

00:00:51.920 After Party, with Emily Jashinsky.

00:00:54.420 You know Emily from this show. She's the best.

00:00:56.280 She's one of our favorite EJs, and I think you're going to enjoy this episode.

00:01:00.640 Go ahead, don't forget to subscribe to her show wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:04.660 It's free.

00:01:13.840 Welcome to After Party, friends.

00:01:15.420 Thanks for being here.

00:01:16.340 It's 10 p.m. on a Wednesday, so you know where you need to be right here at After Party.

00:01:21.200 As a reminder, we are here on Mondays and Wednesdays live at 10 p.m.

00:01:25.900 You can, of course, catch up with the show afterwards on podcast platforms and YouTube.

00:01:29.980 And if you throw us a subscribe, that's always so helpful.

00:01:32.940 Tonight's show is an exciting one.

00:01:34.800 We are joined first by Anna Kasparian, who is the executive producer and host of The Young Turks.

00:01:39.560 We are also joined by my friend Evita Duffy.

00:01:42.340 We're going to start to talk with Anna about some very interesting developments on the left,

00:01:47.180 and then maybe compare and contrast with what we're seeing on the right.

00:01:50.340 Gavin Newsom is still on the podcast circuit, of course.

00:01:53.640 And now Hunter Biden has joined the podcast circuit as well, as of today at least.

00:01:57.800 So we have all kinds of good stuff to get into.

00:02:00.360 Evita is going to speak with us actually about the new Justin Bieber album,

00:02:04.800 and then I'm going to take us home, land the plane, whatever you want to call it,

00:02:08.380 with the imminent threat to NPR and PBS.

00:02:10.960 So Anna Kasparian, host, executive producer of The Young Turks, thank you so much for joining us.

00:02:17.000 Thank you for having me, Emily.

00:02:17.960 I'm a big fan of your work, and I'm super excited for your new show.

00:02:21.660 Congratulations.

00:02:22.720 Oh, well, thank you.

00:02:23.400 That's certainly mutual.

00:02:24.520 And I want to start actually with the—because you're really the perfect person to talk to you about this.

00:02:29.600 You've been in left media spaces for a long time and have been sort of feasting on the Democrats' ability,

00:02:38.000 or lack thereof, to really recapture some of these cultural institutions.

00:02:43.780 The podcast space is one really good example of this.

00:02:46.000 And we can put F1 on the screen.

00:02:49.240 This is really true.

00:02:51.200 It was reported in Semaphore that the Jamie Harrison podcast, At Our Table,

00:02:56.260 Jamie Harrison, obviously, formerly the head of the DNC,

00:03:00.700 this is Dem's answer to losing Joe Rogan.

00:03:03.740 That's how Dave Weigel put it in Semaphore.

00:03:06.120 We can put F2 on the screen.

00:03:08.360 And to make matters even more satirical, if you were trying to, like, rip this from the pages of satire,

00:03:14.820 Jamie Harrison is saying of Hunter Biden that a lot of people don't know how smart he is,

00:03:19.860 don't know his background, don't know the stuff that he's worked on.

00:03:21.960 They only know what either his allies or his enemies have put out there, and he's been defined by that.

00:03:25.940 So, and I have to ask you, on its face, it seems ridiculous that Jamie Harrison is the answer to this,

00:03:32.460 that anybody thinks that's a good answer to this.

00:03:34.480 But secondly, that they think the right first guest is a sort of uncritical treatment of Hunter Biden.

00:03:40.600 What did you make of the news today?

00:03:41.620 Well, let me just first say, I think it's pretty funny how people in political spaces

00:03:48.880 who have no experience in broadcasting at all think it's, like, not a big deal to just, like, launch a podcast.

00:03:54.720 Of course.

00:03:55.300 I mean, I might be the most uncharismatic, uninteresting person on the planet, but who cares?

00:04:00.140 Anyone can do it.

00:04:01.280 It's just laughable to me.

00:04:02.880 Look, you can't manufacture a Joe Rogan.

00:04:06.700 And that's what the Democratic Party is currently trying to do with Jamie Harrison, really, of all people.

00:04:12.900 The reason why Joe Rogan resonates with so many people, especially young men, is because he's a real person.

00:04:20.080 And whether you love him or hate him, he's pretty authentic and he means what he says.

00:04:24.980 Now, I might not agree with everything he says, but at least I know it's coming from a place of sincerity.

00:04:30.300 He's not someone who's bought.

00:04:32.280 He's not someone who can be paid to say something he doesn't actually believe.

00:04:35.740 And he's got a broad range of interests.

00:04:39.080 And so that's what kind of makes his podcast as interesting as it is.

00:04:42.840 I don't think that the former chair of the Democratic Party is going to resonate to the same extent that Joe Rogan does.

00:04:52.560 And to your point about Hunter Biden, you know, that episode has already made some news,

00:04:58.760 even though the entirety of the episode hasn't aired yet.

00:05:01.000 And it's because of the fact that Hunter Biden was essentially scolding Democrats for not being, you know,

00:05:08.260 sufficiently loyal to his father, who was lying to the American people about his cognitive decline.

00:05:14.660 And the entirety of the Democratic establishment seemed to be in on this cover up.

00:05:20.260 Voters don't really appreciate being lied to.

00:05:23.240 And so this effort to kind of rehabilitate the Biden's image or rewrite history, I think, is not going to work.

00:05:31.800 And more importantly, on one hand, you have members of the Democratic establishment chide Trump voters for being cult like in their loyalty to Trump.

00:05:41.160 On the other hand, in the context of this interview with Hunter Biden, basically, you have this like weird commentary about like, you know,

00:05:48.460 if only Democratic voters could be as loyal to their Democratic leadership as Republicans are to their leadership.

00:05:55.000 No, no, I don't think voters should be ridiculously loyal to any politician in a democracy.

00:06:01.680 There should be accountability, including from members of your own party.

00:06:04.960 You know, one of the reasons I've admired your work for a long time is that when I was, you know, growing up and like coming of age, like late teenage years, college years,

00:06:13.660 I was watching a lot of Young Turks and it reminded me sort of what I was seeing at the same time on the right, which was the Tea Party movement.

00:06:21.540 You had Occupy, you had Tea Party.

00:06:23.260 And on the right, some of these new Tea Party era media outlets started to spring up.

00:06:27.800 And for whatever reason, I think it took national Democrats a really long time to look at what you all were doing and say, hey, there's something here.

00:06:37.200 They're connecting with audiences.

00:06:39.200 And that I wonder if they're still not doing that, because frankly, the reason that you guys resonate and this isn't to do an apples to apples, you know, with Young Turks and right wing media.

00:06:49.620 But it is to say the reason right wing media resonate, I think one of the reasons you guys resonate is because you're very critical of establishment Democrats.

00:06:57.580 So to me, the idea that Joe that the answer to Joe Rogan would be having a former DNC chair who is not like dishing and spilling on corruption or diving into how they totally bungled the Bernie Sanders movement or like getting Hunter Biden to talk in some detail about mistakes that he's made, but instead giving him this platform.

00:07:19.480 And Jamie Harrison has intimated in the Semaphore interview, for example, that he agrees with Hunter Biden's analysis that, and of course he does, that, you know, had Democrats just double down on their loyalty to this ailing president, they would have been fine against Trump in 2024.

00:07:32.800 I just can't imagine how frustrating it has to be to watch all of this play out and say, guys, you're completely missing the story, which is that voters don't trust you.

00:07:41.880 This is not the way to rebuild the trust.

00:07:43.480 That's exactly right. And if you kind of back up and look at the full picture and what the actual thinking of these Democratic leaders and, you know, creatures of the Democratic establishment really think, it's this sense that the American people, their base, their voters are really there to serve them.

00:08:05.860 When in reality, these are individuals who signed up to be public servants like, I'm sorry, I have enough trouble focusing on my own career.

00:08:15.020 It is not my job to build a politician's career, but that's the way they behave.

00:08:20.160 They feel that we as voters owe it to them to build them up, even when they're lying to us in our faces.

00:08:27.200 And so for me, I have I don't know if this speaks poorly of me and I don't really care, but I have no loyalty to any politician.

00:08:34.760 Right. You either do things I like or you do things I don't like.

00:08:38.540 And I'm going to speak out about it regardless.

00:08:40.860 And that goes for politicians that I generally like.

00:08:44.620 I generally like Bernie Sanders.

00:08:47.120 You know, some of what he said following October 7th in Israel, I didn't agree with.

00:08:52.100 He eventually came around, but it took him a while to see what Israel was really up to in Gaza, for instance.

00:08:57.840 But I'm willing to speak out about things like that, even though on the whole I see Bernie Sanders is one of the better politicians in Congress.

00:09:05.560 But if you don't have accountability, if you don't have an electorate that, you know, doesn't consist of partisan hacks who just root for their team because it's their team.

00:09:16.120 If you have voters who don't want to engage in any accountability for their own side.

00:09:20.140 Well, we're going to we're going to find ourselves in the situation that we're currently in, if you ask me.

00:09:24.720 I think election after election were usually presented with two terrible choices, and it's because if you just cheer for a team and you don't really care about anything else, I mean, you're going to create an environment of subpar politicians who are more interested in their political careers, more interested in serving their donors as opposed to serving their constituents.

00:09:49.020 And we're seeing that across the board, Democrats, Republicans, they both have low approval ratings right now.

00:09:54.660 And that's for good reason.

00:09:56.140 And that's the core of what was happening simultaneously, I think, during Occupy and the Tea Party movement that so many people just didn't put together.

00:10:02.680 And one of the people who did was Donald Trump.

00:10:04.360 He sort of heard something similar, I think, from both movements, whether it was conscious or otherwise.

00:10:09.220 And Dave Weigel from Semaphore notes that his line about Joe Rogan was a joke.

00:10:13.860 But to Jamie Harrison, it's not.

00:10:15.200 I mean, Jamie Harrison, like, clearly thinks that this is some type of serious competitive product to make Democrats compete in the podcast space.

00:10:23.960 In the meantime, maybe they should be actually even more introspective, which they seem to have zero interest in doing, because let's go ahead and roll this thought of Harry Enten talking about Dems actually lagging from where they were in the 2018 midterms when they picked up seats.

00:10:38.000 We can take a look here.

00:10:38.880 The bottom line is this.

00:10:41.020 Democrats are behind their 2006 and 2018 paces when it comes to the generic congressional ballot.

00:10:48.020 What are we talking about here?

00:10:49.560 All right.

00:10:49.880 The Democrats versus the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, the margins.

00:10:53.420 Look at where we are now.

00:10:54.740 Democrats are ahead, but by just two points.

00:10:57.260 Look at where Democrats were already ahead by in 2017.

00:10:59.960 They were behind by seven points.

00:11:01.520 How about 2005 on the generic congressional ballot?

00:11:04.280 Behind, excuse me, ahead by seven points, ahead by seven points.

00:11:06.700 And now they're only ahead by two points.

00:11:08.640 Their lead is less than half, less than half of where it was in either 2017 or 2005 in July of those years, the year before the midterm election.

00:11:19.260 Yes, Donald Trump may be unpopular, but Democrats have not come anywhere close to sealing the deal at this particular point.

00:11:25.220 You know, here in Washington, D.C., you could practically sense the giddiness among Democrats when Donald Trump and Republicans passed the, quote, one big beautiful bill because it did pay for tax cuts to the rich partially by cuts to Medicaid.

00:11:39.080 And Democrats saw that as a significant political gift and all kinds of other sort of things that were stuffed in it as political gifts.

00:11:46.240 So what explains these numbers as of right now?

00:11:49.600 Well, I think that Democrats aren't, you know, enjoying high approval ratings yet because enough time hasn't passed where voters forget about the pretty gross games that were played by by the DNC, the Biden campaign, all of that leading up to the 2024 presidential election.

00:12:11.000 But what the whole of the Democratic Party seems to have done so far in Trump's second term is take James Carville's advice to heart.

00:12:21.260 And his advice was play dead. Do nothing. Just let the Trump administration hang itself, which, look, if all you care about is allowing the pendulum swing to go from Trump right back to ineffective, pathetic Democrats.

00:12:37.500 OK, great. I guess we have that to look forward to. I don't really care about that, though.

00:12:41.960 I don't care about Democrats winning. I care about the right Democrats winning Democrats that actually stand for something, want to fight for their constituents and, you know, engage in necessary reforms.

00:12:54.460 And if you remember this omnibus bill, yeah, you're right, is actually pretty unpopular with the electorate polling indicates that most people are not in favor of losing, you know, funding to Medicaid and snap food assistance for the needy in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

00:13:13.880 But at the same time, when Biden came into office, he had promised all sorts of things.

00:13:20.560 Oh, I'm going to get the corporate tax rate. Back up to twenty eight percent.

00:13:25.680 No, no, no, no, no, no. Trump cut it from thirty five percent to twenty one percent.

00:13:29.660 Biden's starting offer was twenty eight percent. And by the way, he didn't even accomplish that.

00:13:35.100 So can I curse? I don't know if I please. You must. It's a necessity.

00:13:41.260 So Democratic establishment candidates are full of shit and I need people to understand that.

00:13:47.460 And we need to get out of this like vicious pendulum swing cycle where we go from one terrible administration to another terrible administration.

00:13:56.480 They just have different branding. But in the end, they do nothing for ordinary people.

00:14:02.160 And that's what people are hungry for. I think that's part of what explains the popularity of Zoran Mamdani in this mayoral race in New York City.

00:14:11.220 You know, he's running as a Democrat, but he's very different in his messaging compared to other establishment Democrat candidates.

00:14:17.980 It's funny you say that. I was just going to ask you whether you think that partially explains the success of Zoran Mamdani,

00:14:24.740 because he was up against this perfect foil in Andrew Cuomo.

00:14:28.540 I mean, you couldn't have almost a more perfect coil, perfect foil in Andrew Cuomo.

00:14:34.220 And that's a good, I think, point also to bring in this clip of Gavin Newsom going on the Sean Ryan show.

00:14:39.760 Newsom, I'm really curious what you think about this, Anna, strikes me as someone who is smart enough to know where the winds are blowing,

00:14:45.940 but not honest enough to sort of pull off the strategy like he knows what the strategy should be,

00:14:51.480 but he can't quite execute on it because he is such a career politician who's driving forces power and ambition rather than any sort of first principle.

00:14:59.100 So we can go ahead and roll S3 here.

00:15:00.940 This is Gavin Newsom on the Sean Ryan show, which is obviously very popular with the right.

00:15:05.240 About people being outside even.

00:15:06.600 And we realized then, after the fact, what the hell are we doing shutting down the beaches and open areas and, you know, and not understanding that early on.

00:15:16.000 And so I think that of all issues, looking back, I remember Florida, that was a big issue, too, even there.

00:15:21.680 He's so cool and relatable in his genes, Anna.

00:15:27.680 But like between Cuomo and Newsom, these are actually two really good examples of people who represent the Democratic Party establishment

00:15:34.840 who have not fully reckoned with their unpopularity during the COVID crisis and are now sort of trying to be, you know, as powerful as they were before without, I don't know,

00:15:46.800 maybe actually even being seriously introspective as opposed to whatever the hell that was.

00:15:51.680 You're absolutely right.

00:15:52.680 OK, in your analysis.

00:15:53.780 And let me just say, you know that I like you when I'm willing to sit through a podcast episode featuring Gavin Newsom just to prepare to prepare for this.

00:16:02.640 OK, because I can't stand him.

00:16:05.700 I can't stand his raspy voice.

00:16:07.280 And it's not for any superficial reason other than the fact that I live in California.

00:16:12.640 I've had the displeasure of experiencing what his leadership actually looks like.

00:16:17.420 He's a snake oil salesman.

00:16:19.040 He's a terrible person.

00:16:20.480 Look into the campfire, look into PG&E, one of his major donors, and how he shafted Californians who lost everything as a result of PG&E,

00:16:31.400 refusing to upgrade their hundred year old equipment, including a ten dollar hook that was suspending electrical lines.

00:16:39.000 Yeah, that hook finally just gave out.

00:16:42.320 Electrical lines fall onto dry brush.

00:16:44.460 And that caused one of the most devastating fires in California's history.

00:16:48.060 There are people who lost their homes who are currently still living in these like, you know, RVs or trailers parked on their land,

00:16:57.200 hoping to rebuild, but it's insanely expensive to do that.

00:17:01.420 And they're still not getting the settlement money that they're entitled to.

00:17:04.520 He's just a really bad person on the Sean Ryan show.

00:17:07.580 One of the other things that Newsom said that I really want to just mention, he was like doing this faux taking responsibility and ownership thing.

00:17:18.540 And I can see right through it because he lies even in that context.

00:17:23.660 So, for instance, he was like, you know, I really did something terrible.

00:17:28.060 I got caught having dinner for my friend's birthday at the French Laundry when I told people, you know,

00:17:34.660 don't get together with your family for the holidays and whatever because of COVID.

00:17:39.600 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Newsom.

00:17:41.200 You didn't get together for your friend's birthday.

00:17:43.940 That was a meeting with your donors at the French Laundry.

00:17:46.860 He's a liar.

00:17:47.620 He's a snake oil salesman.

00:17:48.860 So, like, if there are any Democrats watching this right now and they had hope in Gavin Newsom,

00:17:54.180 I'm sorry that I'm telling you things that are making you upset and angry.

00:17:58.100 But take a look at my state.

00:18:00.300 Take a look at the homeless, homelessness.

00:18:03.720 Take a look at the fact that $24 billion that were allocated to help the homeless.

00:18:09.160 Nowhere to be found.

00:18:10.200 Gone.

00:18:10.840 That's taxpayer money.

00:18:12.080 Gone.

00:18:12.880 OK, the drug epidemic, overdose epidemic.

00:18:16.780 I mean, things have fallen apart in this state.

00:18:19.780 He's starting to finally take his role as the governor seriously.

00:18:24.160 And things have gotten like a tiny bit better.

00:18:27.320 But make no mistake about it.

00:18:28.840 California went from being one of the best states that has, you know,

00:18:33.200 just a tremendous amount of resources, natural resources, industries that were doing really,

00:18:39.560 really well.

00:18:39.920 All of that has been decimated due to the terrible decisions that he made as the leader of this state.

00:18:46.400 And I just honestly, I cringe at the idea of him winning a Democratic primary to become

00:18:53.340 president of the United States.

00:18:55.140 I don't even.

00:18:56.340 Gavin Newsom cares about one thing and one thing only.

00:18:58.220 And that's Gavin Newsom, period.

00:19:00.560 And, you know, what's interesting is I wonder, too, the extent to which the Bill de Blasio

00:19:04.600 years in New York City, which a lot of average New Yorkers came to see as failed social policy

00:19:11.480 and like the policing front.

00:19:12.800 And we can all debate that.

00:19:14.360 But I wonder to what extent that ends up haunting Zoran Mamdani because Newsom was doing this

00:19:20.020 half-baked attempt at, and this is another, this is something that you follow really closely,

00:19:25.020 this half-baked attempt to like sort of give some stuff to the left and make it look like

00:19:29.860 he was this full cultural progressive while also being totally corrupt crony capitalists

00:19:35.260 in his relationship with PG&E, for example.

00:19:37.260 And so I know that's kind of a sort of nebulous connection between Zoran and Gavin Newsom and

00:19:45.180 Bill de Blasio, but there's something there like the left also has to grapple with the

00:19:49.100 class dynamics of some of those those cultural shifts as well.

00:19:52.740 Yes, actually, that's a really good point.

00:19:54.420 And I'm look, I'm excited about Mamdani.

00:19:57.540 I don't live in New York City, so the people of New York City will decide who their next leader

00:20:02.720 will be, but I'm excited about him because he is out of the box and I want to see him

00:20:09.320 succeed.

00:20:09.860 I do.

00:20:10.980 One of the things that I do have reservations about, though, is he's very much in line with

00:20:15.740 that whole like reimagined policing, defund the police.

00:20:19.340 And look, I think policing absolutely needs reforms.

00:20:24.200 And I thought that's what I was signing up for when I was going along with BLM back in the

00:20:28.520 day.

00:20:28.800 I didn't realize that there was a massive contingent that actually just wants to abolish

00:20:33.780 police, which is disastrous.

00:20:34.960 So I just published an investigative report about what has happened in Los Angeles following

00:20:41.580 the city council cutting one hundred fifty million dollars from the LAPD back in 2001.

00:20:48.680 And that has actually had lasting consequences for our city, because when you start eliminating

00:20:55.660 positions for sworn officers, well, you can hope and pray that crime won't be an issue

00:21:01.780 and you won't need those officers.

00:21:02.960 But that's not what's happened.

00:21:04.400 So right now, the city is dealing with a lot of fiscal issues because of the fact that,

00:21:08.800 you know, especially lately, there's been more of a need for LAPD as a result of demonstrations

00:21:15.060 and social unrest in response to Trump's immigration policies.

00:21:19.720 And the city had to take out a five million dollar loan just to pay for police overtime.

00:21:25.840 The police had racked up over 17 million dollars in overtime alone during the anti-ICE protests.

00:21:33.980 And so it's really starting to hurt the city financially because the overtime, of course,

00:21:40.940 costs a lot more money.

00:21:42.080 It's a time and a half for the average, you know, hourly rate for sworn officer.

00:21:48.220 We literally have a detective who raked in over six hundred thousand dollars.

00:21:53.160 His name's Nathan Corey.

00:21:54.760 Other detectives have also raked in, you know, over four hundred thousand dollars.

00:21:58.680 I think it's about three dozen sworn officers have now made over two hundred thousand dollars

00:22:05.580 in overtime pay alone last year.

00:22:08.480 So this is an expense, ironically, more expensive.

00:22:12.540 We're spending more money on the police department than ever before.

00:22:15.780 Record amounts after cutting one hundred fifty million dollars from the police budget,

00:22:21.040 eliminating some of the positions.

00:22:22.980 And sadly, our city council has learned no lessons and they're continuing to do this.

00:22:27.560 In the meantime, as taxpayers locally are paying more for less, they're also experiencing

00:22:34.020 slower response times when they call, you know, call nine one one for help.

00:22:37.720 I mean, it's been a disaster.

00:22:38.740 So my hope is that Zoran Mamdani ignores the activists and just really does a real autopsy

00:22:49.140 of what has happened in the aftermath of some of these, you know, BLM reimagining police policies.

00:22:57.560 This has had to have been and I know you've talked about this before, but I'm curious.

00:23:01.500 It just has to have been very disillusioning to watch so much of this play out.

00:23:07.180 And then also, I think back, you know, five plus years ago, the media was so uncritical of

00:23:12.760 some of these Democratic.

00:23:15.260 I mean, I want to say like they're Gavin Newsom was playing political football the entire time,

00:23:19.460 basically.

00:23:19.920 And in many cases, he was getting cheerleaded by the national press.

00:23:23.440 That just has to be enormously frustrating.

00:23:26.540 Well, I mean, I kind of had a big wake up call because I hate to admit it, but I think

00:23:32.300 this is true of most people, right?

00:23:34.240 You think you support certain policies.

00:23:37.820 And then once you experience what those policies are actually like, how they play out, well,

00:23:46.300 you kind of have to admit, well, this isn't really working.

00:23:49.340 Can we tinker with it?

00:23:50.420 Can we recalibrate and what I've noticed is, no, people don't want to recalibrate like

00:23:56.020 like when I came out and I finally started talking publicly about some of the ramifications

00:24:01.680 of these policies.

00:24:03.400 Oh, I got purged from the left real quick.

00:24:06.220 I lost a lot of friends.

00:24:07.720 It was very public.

00:24:09.040 But I have to be honest in what I do for work.

00:24:12.500 I'm not going to lie to my audience.

00:24:13.760 I'm not going to lie about my real opinions and perspective.

00:24:17.620 And what's been really, really harmful is the fact that, you know, legacy media really

00:24:23.900 is dominated by liberal ideology.

00:24:28.060 So, yeah, it doesn't surprise me at all that they provide cover for the likes of Gavin Newsom

00:24:31.500 and, in fact, cheerlead for him.

00:24:33.540 I was going to say, this is actually really interesting because Bernie Sanders, for example,

00:24:36.620 and like Noam Tromsky, have carried this criticism for decades of the media being a bastion of

00:24:44.560 right-wing propaganda.

00:24:46.260 And it is true that the media is generally biased in favor of, for example, war.

00:24:51.440 They get all kinds of money from defense contractors and advertising dollars.

00:24:56.300 And so they, of course, are not going to disclose when somebody who's on their news program is

00:25:01.180 on the board of Lockheed or whatever it is.

00:25:03.500 And, yeah, there's some element of if it bleeds, it leads.

00:25:06.480 And it's similar with pharma.

00:25:07.700 They get a lot of ads from pharma, a lot of money from pharma.

00:25:10.380 And they're just friends with those guys.

00:25:12.020 They go to all the book parties and fun events with those people in the cocktail circuit.

00:25:17.660 But what seems to have shifted to me is that it was this elite cultural leftism.

00:25:25.080 And it's not leftist.

00:25:27.180 It's sort of progressive.

00:25:28.400 I don't even know what you call it.

00:25:29.280 What do you think of that?

00:25:29.900 Yeah, I actually don't think there's much love for leftists in the media.

00:25:34.360 There was a little bit of that, you know, in 2020 after there was all this unrest following

00:25:41.140 the murder of George Floyd.

00:25:42.760 But in reality, I think the media is dominated by liberals.

00:25:46.640 And liberals are different from leftists, right?

00:25:49.940 Leftists typically adopt socialist ideology and are way further to the left than liberals are.

00:25:58.180 Liberals represent the Democratic establishment.

00:26:00.900 And I think if you pay attention, I mean, why do you think Jake Tapper was like, oh, oh,

00:26:07.660 my gosh, I can't believe it.

00:26:09.840 It turns out that Biden was lying about his mental decline.

00:26:13.340 It's like, you know, even if I want to be generous to Tapper and say that, no, no,

00:26:18.720 he wasn't part of the cover up.

00:26:20.240 He was just totally shafted by Biden and crew.

00:26:23.560 And he was tricked by them, whatever.

00:26:26.720 Obviously, Tapper has some sort of bias, right?

00:26:30.660 That's more favorable to the Democratic establishment.

00:26:33.800 So when he's willing to ask tough questions of Republicans, that's great.

00:26:38.440 I want him to keep doing that.

00:26:39.980 But I also want him to be prodding in his interviews of members of the Democratic establishment

00:26:46.880 as well, because if you don't have media that's giving the American people accurate information

00:26:53.760 about both parties, I mean, do you really have a democracy?

00:26:57.880 Are people really going to be able to make the best decision for themselves when they go

00:27:01.460 to the ballot or when they, you know, submit their ballots?

00:27:04.720 So I just I'm sick of it.

00:27:06.780 And I think that's part of the reason why you're seeing this popularity and this emergence

00:27:11.700 of independent media, like I love watching counterpoints and breaking points.

00:27:16.720 I love the fact that you're getting raw opinion and you guys don't try to tinker with the facts.

00:27:22.720 The facts are the facts.

00:27:23.700 You can't change that.

00:27:24.740 But you also want sincerity.

00:27:26.260 You want authenticity.

00:27:27.100 And you do get a lot of that in independent media.

00:27:30.480 You get a lot of robotic garbage, though, when you're watching, you know, cable news or,

00:27:35.380 you know, reading a lot of these old school legacy media outlets.

00:27:39.120 You know, I have some friends that are really disillusioned with independent media, like

00:27:43.000 actually some people in independent media who are really disillusioned with it.

00:27:46.040 And that's a good question for you, Anna, as well as somebody who is like a founder of

00:27:50.240 independent media in this chapter.

00:27:52.820 Do you are you worried about the direction that it's taken where things, you know, maybe

00:27:57.660 are getting like a little dicey, a little propaganda-y in directions that can sometimes be hard

00:28:04.900 for an average viewer to be like, is this person working for the Republican Party or Democrat?

00:28:09.620 Like, does that concern you greatly?

00:28:12.000 It doesn't concern me greatly because I have faith and trust in the American people, right?

00:28:17.020 And I think that they can identify inauthentic nonsense.

00:28:22.980 And a good example of that, honestly, is Charlie Kirk.

00:28:26.020 So Charlie Kirk is obviously running cover for Donald Trump following this whole Epstein

00:28:33.280 cover-up debacle.

00:28:34.780 And there was that big news story about how Trump called all these right-wing influencers

00:28:39.540 people like Charlie Kirk and basically told them, please stop talking about the Epstein

00:28:42.880 thing.

00:28:43.660 And then he announced, I'm not going to talk about this anymore.

00:28:47.660 Got a ton of backlash from his audience, to the credit of his audience, by the way.

00:28:51.580 And the next day was like, oh, when I said that, I just meant specifically that day.

00:28:56.560 I'm not going to talk about it anymore.

00:28:57.920 So it's hilarious.

00:28:59.000 My point is, you know, for the longest time, the media has treated Americans like they're

00:29:05.680 morons and they've gotten away with it because you didn't have as much competition as you

00:29:09.860 have now.

00:29:10.780 Now there's a ton of competition.

00:29:12.080 And guess what?

00:29:12.620 Americans aren't stupid.

00:29:14.120 So I think that there is this trend of more and more voters kind of seeing that both parties,

00:29:20.340 they're getting shafted by both parties and they want something more.

00:29:25.100 And I'm hearing uniparty a lot more these days among people that I would never expect

00:29:30.400 that commentary from.

00:29:31.720 So I'm actually kind of excited to see where this all develops, because there is this like

00:29:38.460 growing number of Americans who actually want accountability.

00:29:43.920 And just compare the reactions to Trump's first term among the MAGA base to what we're

00:29:50.300 experiencing today.

00:29:51.700 The backlash over this Epstein thing is incredible.

00:29:55.580 And I love seeing it.

00:29:56.980 I love seeing it not because I'm not a fan of Trump, but because you have people who voted

00:30:01.280 for Trump standing up and saying, no, we're not going to take this.

00:30:04.060 And that's great.

00:30:05.420 Yeah.

00:30:05.540 Like the line in the sand has been fully exposed.

00:30:08.100 Exactly.

00:30:09.340 Anna Kasparian, this has been wonderful.

00:30:11.460 Thank you so much for stopping by the show.

00:30:12.960 Thank you for having me.

00:30:14.520 And again, congratulations on your show.

00:30:16.120 I wish you luck.

00:30:17.100 Thank you.

00:30:17.660 Appreciate it.

00:30:18.920 All right, everyone.

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00:31:16.440 That's DeltaRescue.org.

00:31:19.020 I'm excited to be joined now by my friend Evita Duffy Alfonso.

00:31:23.920 Evita, thank you for being here.

00:31:26.300 Thanks for having me, Emily.

00:31:28.020 Yeah, I'm drinking Mexican beer for you.

00:31:30.140 I thought that might make you feel more at home.

00:31:32.980 Maybe, but I'm not a beer drinker, but I do appreciate the Mexican vibes.

00:31:37.700 Are you in Wisconsin?

00:31:39.440 I am in Wisconsin.

00:31:41.160 It was, Emily, 55 degrees today in Wisconsin.

00:31:44.860 It's not even summer here.

00:31:45.980 It's awful.

00:31:47.340 I don't even feel badly for you.

00:31:48.700 That actually sounds so nice.

00:31:49.820 It's so bad in D.C. that I'm like 55 degrees.

00:31:52.240 I could wear a winter coat, be content.

00:31:54.520 So I don't know, Evita.

00:31:55.780 You haven't dissuaded me that your situation is really all that hard.

00:32:00.420 Well, my husband's enjoying it.

00:32:01.620 He's obsessed with cold weather.

00:32:03.640 We were living in Florida for a while, and he was miserable.

00:32:06.580 He felt like he was being scared.

00:32:07.880 So he's enjoying it.

00:32:09.120 I'm putting on a coat, going into Walmart.

00:32:11.700 It's bringing back all the memories of never having warm weather here as growing up.

00:32:16.820 Yeah, and for people who don't know, you're way up north of Wisconsin.

00:32:19.620 We're not talking Milwaukee action.

00:32:22.040 You're up there.

00:32:22.980 You're in it.

00:32:24.100 And you're basically an Eskimo.

00:32:25.860 That probably offended someone.

00:32:27.420 Probably, but that's okay.

00:32:28.640 No, but it's beautiful here.

00:32:30.560 Like, I will say, Wisconsin is a wonderful state.

00:32:33.580 The nicest people in the entire continental U.S. live in the north woods of Wisconsin.

00:32:40.300 Of course.

00:32:41.420 I mean, I'm not going to disagree with you on that.

00:32:43.660 Let's maybe talk about some things we will disagree on.

00:32:46.180 We've got Justin Bieber to get to, but we're going to sort of go on a journey until we talk to Justin Bieber.

00:32:52.220 And that journey, people can follow this along, I swear.

00:32:54.660 This is going to be like Charlie Kelly at the, the meme of Charlie Kelly at the, like, what is it?

00:32:59.680 Like a corkboard, right?

00:33:01.460 Where he's doing the Pepe Silva from It's Always Sunny.

00:33:04.100 We're going to take this all the way from Maureen Comey being fired to the new Justin Bieber record.

00:33:09.760 So strap in, Evita, let's start with this story.

00:33:12.960 I'm going to put it up on the screen.

00:33:15.580 Here you see, actually, Maureen Comey, federal prosecutor in Epstein case, fired from U.S. attorney's office.

00:33:22.400 This just broke after 8.30 p.m. East Coast time.

00:33:26.700 Interesting timing, of course, given the Epstein news, but also, Evita, given the ditty news.

00:33:33.060 So I have a lot to ask you about this.

00:33:36.160 Maureen Comey has been in the Southern District of New York for a long time.

00:33:40.040 I think a lot of people would agree prosecutors seem to have botched the ditty prosecution, the RICO charge.

00:33:45.920 Now, in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, sort of looks like an overreach and maybe a bad way to get convictions.

00:33:52.620 But also, Donald Trump has been talking all day about how Comey created, James Comey created the Epstein hoax.

00:34:01.040 And then on top of that, the FBI announced an investigation into Comey and John Brennan just last week.

00:34:07.820 So of all of those various factors that are sort of swimming around Maureen Comey, what do you think actually happened here?

00:34:15.060 Listen, I think that Maureen Comey should have been fired a long time ago.

00:34:18.680 I think that this was a long time coming.

00:34:21.040 I think it was our former boss, Sean Davis, who I first heard make this connection like months ago.

00:34:26.580 That, hey, isn't it weird that this woman who is connected, the daughter of one of the most corrupt men ever in Washington, James Comey, who is this guy that orchestrated the Russia collusion hoax, trying to steal the vote away from the American people, a duly elected president, dethroned him in this deep state coup.

00:34:44.080 So his daughter is connected to these really important cases in the Southern District of New York.

00:34:49.940 You have Epstein.

00:34:50.860 Then you have Sean Combs.

00:34:53.300 And it's bizarre that she's been able to keep this amount of power for as long as she has.

00:34:57.320 And I think this was, again, a long time coming.

00:34:59.600 But it would be interesting, I think, to revisit some of these cases because, again, this is somebody that I don't think is to be trusted given her family connection.

00:35:08.480 There is a conflict of interest if potentially Diddy is the Jeffrey Epstein of the Hollywood world, right?

00:35:15.860 Somebody who is collecting blackmail, potentially, this has been a theory on Hollywood elites at the behest of the feds.

00:35:25.280 And if that were true and it was authorized under James Comey, well, that's a huge conflict to have his daughter prosecuting Diddy.

00:35:31.340 So these are really, I think, questions that need to be looked into, not just that she needs to be removed, but that we need to revisit some of these trials.

00:35:37.120 Okay, so can I ask, I mean, she was also one of the lead prosecutors in the Ghislaine Maxwell case.

00:35:42.320 And Ghislaine Maxwell has been telegraphing that she's, you know, there's an anonymous source in the Daily Mail saying, for example, Ghislaine Maxwell is ready to speak.

00:35:51.120 Obviously, Ghislaine Maxwell has appealed the decision and the court's decision in her own case.

00:35:58.560 So does this have anything to do?

00:36:00.560 I mean, like, basically, I'm just trying to get all of the various factors that could potentially be going into this on the table.

00:36:06.080 Is this potentially Pam Bondi cutting someone loose who could blow the whistle?

00:36:12.980 Is this Pam Bondi finally making a good decision and getting Comey out of the Southern District of New York?

00:36:18.500 Is this purely Diddy related, purely Epstein related?

00:36:21.960 Like, of all of those things happening, did she maybe just, I mean, I don't know.

00:36:27.380 What's your read on this?

00:36:29.160 Well, I don't know.

00:36:29.880 I don't know either.

00:36:30.580 I mean, I think it's hard to tell at this point.

00:36:32.340 It is interesting that, again, like she has these bizarre deep state connections.

00:36:38.000 She has all of this power.

00:36:39.640 She also, in 2024, interestingly, just asked petition to the court that Epstein files remain under on seal because she thought that it would potentially affect a Ghislaine Maxwell retrial in the future.

00:36:53.880 This was in 2024.

00:36:54.700 The judge said, no, I'm not going to keep every file on Jeffrey Epstein under wraps, but some of them I will.

00:37:02.140 So this is also somebody who's petitioning strangely to keep Jeffrey Epstein related information secret for a future potential Ghislaine Maxwell case.

00:37:11.380 Again, like maybe this is maybe she has good reasoning.

00:37:14.380 I'm not really sure what it is, but it's kind of, again, bizarre given the deep state connections that she has.

00:37:20.080 I don't know what Pam Bondi is doing in the situation.

00:37:22.560 I have to say I'm a little unclear on what her what her what her goals are.

00:37:27.560 I guess what her decision making has been from the get go in this administration.

00:37:32.520 I mean, this is somebody who said we have the Epstein files are sitting on my desk.

00:37:37.520 She had Epstein phase one with binder gate.

00:37:40.040 And now she's saying there's nothing.

00:37:41.440 So I think all of us are a little bit confused about what's coming out of the DOJ via Pam Bondi.

00:37:46.520 Yes, let's actually keep pulling at that thread for just another moment, because I have another theory to float by you, which is that as the president himself,

00:37:54.720 I actually think people are underestimating the importance of the argument he's been laying out over the last couple of days,

00:38:00.700 which is now that the Epstein files are a hoax that were cooked up by Comey.

00:38:07.840 And, you know, Ann Coulter, I think, had a great line.

00:38:09.400 She was like, most of what we knew about Epstein came from the Palm Beach Post and the women themselves.

00:38:13.840 But all that is to say, if he is trying to start putting the pieces together to make it look like and there may be some truth to this,

00:38:23.740 I should also add, people like James Comey left little breadcrumbs leading to Donald Trump for some reason in the files.

00:38:34.420 You know, Megyn Kelly has had some reporting to the extent that people say the files may be currently arranged in a way

00:38:40.260 or may be currently organized in a way that points to Donald Trump.

00:38:44.420 And that may be intentional.

00:38:46.340 So now Trump is trying to plant the seeds of this idea that the deep state concocted an Epstein hoax,

00:38:52.280 pointing the finger in Trump's direction.

00:38:54.360 And so in a case like that is the firing of James Comey's daughter.

00:39:00.020 The day that Trump really rolls out this strategy in earnest and starts saying this is a deep state hoax from James Comey.

00:39:07.000 Trump named James Comey on television today to reporters and said that he was part of the Epstein hoax.

00:39:13.740 I wonder if this has something to do with that,

00:39:15.680 if this is setting the stage for an even more vociferous effort on behalf of the Trump administration

00:39:22.960 to start trying to convince dissatisfied Trump supporters that the Epstein case was in some ways cooked up

00:39:32.160 to undermine Trump, just like the Russia collusion hoax, which he himself invoked today.

00:39:37.600 Well, I think that's possible, Emily.

00:39:39.620 And I also think it's possible that there is information in these supposed files that's fake,

00:39:45.080 that's trying to smear President Trump.

00:39:47.060 I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if massive amounts of information on Jeffrey Epstein

00:39:50.680 have been destroyed over the last few years.

00:39:52.980 I mean, this is...

00:39:54.400 And also, I think it was...

00:39:55.520 It would have been in May.

00:39:57.980 It was April or May that we heard that there was actually like a secret backdoor

00:40:03.380 that the FBI had where they were hiding Russia collusion information.

00:40:09.480 And we have no idea what else has been hidden through this backdoor

00:40:12.700 that's just been completely unaccounted for via, you know, the rest of the federal government,

00:40:19.300 FOIA requests.

00:40:20.340 Like, who knows what's being hidden?

00:40:22.440 Who knows what's been destroyed?

00:40:23.980 What's been cooked up?

00:40:25.580 And so I think that the answer, I think, what the American people want is just full transparency.

00:40:31.400 Like, okay, maybe some of it's fake.

00:40:33.380 Maybe some of it's cooked up.

00:40:34.460 Just release it all.

00:40:35.920 We'll decide for ourselves.

00:40:37.640 There are a lot of amazing citizen journalists out there.

00:40:40.260 I think this idea that we're being protected by not releasing the information,

00:40:45.700 whether that's on JFK, MLK, 9-11, whether it's on MKUltra or the Jeffrey Epstein files,

00:40:52.340 is very false.

00:40:53.540 The American people just want transparency.

00:40:55.560 That's all we've been asking for.

00:40:57.080 That's what Trump's entire movement was about in 2016, right?

00:41:01.260 It was this revolt against a corrupt state that we all realized was not the America that

00:41:08.040 our grandparents thought it was.

00:41:10.180 And yeah, I think that it's possible some of it's cooked up.

00:41:12.840 But again, we just want transparency.

00:41:15.000 Well, and while you're here, I have to give a shout out to your lovely mom, who's been

00:41:18.260 massively viral in the last couple of days because of a question she asked Donald Trump

00:41:21.620 on the campaign trail on Fox News about whether he'd released JFK files, 9-11 files, Epstein files.

00:41:27.760 And he said, well, maybe less so, because then in those cases, there may be some phony

00:41:32.260 allegations and people, you know, who are wrapped up in this because they're named in maybe a

00:41:39.960 Jeffrey Epstein's like black book, for example.

00:41:42.100 I think Trump himself was in the black book and it was just a list of contacts.

00:41:45.320 I mean, there's something to that, of course, but you don't need to be totally like you don't

00:41:52.380 need to get unredacted raw files, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and

00:41:58.700 thousands of them.

00:41:59.520 They could just be even like modestly more transparent and it would go a long way.

00:42:06.340 Right.

00:42:06.560 And well, and this is this is the thing like we we know that they have this information.

00:42:10.360 I mean, the Jeffrey Epstein, when his house was raided in New York, people saw the FBI

00:42:16.060 carrying out boxes of tapes like there was a there was a testimony of an agent.

00:42:21.380 She said that, yeah, we did this.

00:42:22.540 We carried tapes out.

00:42:23.940 His entire house was bugged.

00:42:25.420 The same goes for Diddy as well.

00:42:27.260 Right.

00:42:27.440 The FBI raided his home and carried out boxes of tapes.

00:42:30.900 It's like, what happened to this information?

00:42:33.040 Like, where are they now?

00:42:34.500 Who was in them?

00:42:35.860 These are important questions that, again, just for some reason go unanswered.

00:42:39.840 And we're told, oh, well, it's for our safety or it's for the integrity of a future case

00:42:44.880 against Ghislaine Maxwell.

00:42:46.500 Whatever it is, no one cares anymore.

00:42:48.600 We just want the truth.

00:42:50.500 Well, and people feel sort of similarly about the Ghislaine Maxwell prosecution and the Diddy

00:42:54.740 prosecution.

00:42:55.540 Let's move on to Diddy, because that was not only was Diddy sort of, I think at this point,

00:43:02.960 obviously botched in terms of the prosecution.

00:43:05.200 But the Ghislaine Maxwell prosecution raised a lot of eyebrows because what wasn't part of it.

00:43:11.360 And that was Maureen Comey as well.

00:43:13.720 So I said to strap in at the top of the segment, I know we now have the Charlie Kelly meme we

00:43:18.240 can put up on the screen because this is what's happening right now.

00:43:22.660 This is what I feel like every time I talk to Evita, actually, we kind of are, we get

00:43:26.320 each other, we get each other maybe a little too riled up on some of these things.

00:43:30.320 But let's just keep on going along with the ride, because Evita Justin Bieber is out with

00:43:36.620 his new album, Swag.

00:43:38.540 It dropped last Friday.

00:43:40.780 Critics are mostly trashing it.

00:43:42.400 He got a pretty positive review in Rolling Stone.

00:43:44.980 But the fans, I mean, it's doing well on Spotify, for example.

00:43:48.980 It's kind of many such cases.

00:43:50.020 It's like the Rotten Tomatoes phenomenon where you get a bad critic score and a good audience

00:43:54.360 score.

00:43:54.780 But I think some of the reviewers are particularly having trouble with Bieber's vacillating between

00:44:02.360 kind of pro-God, pro-family, like reactionary cultural messaging.

00:44:08.480 He's married very young.

00:44:10.160 He now has a one-year-old son, obviously, with Hailey Bieber.

00:44:13.140 And then some of the more like racy lyrics in his songs.

00:44:17.320 And let me put this review from The Independent up on the screen, actually.

00:44:21.380 And I sent this to you, Evita, so I think you read it.

00:44:26.580 Justin Bieber's swag is a God-fearing, hypersexual slog.

00:44:31.660 Listen, that sounds like a good time.

00:44:34.260 Whatever that means.

00:44:36.340 Well, but OK, so the Diddy connection here is that Bieber, the way that you could look at

00:44:42.160 this, is that Bieber is maybe like free of the psychological weight of Diddy.

00:44:51.140 I mean, in May, Bieber's team came out and said that he was not one of Diddy's victims.

00:44:56.020 At the same time, there are all kinds of accusations swirling around their very close relationship

00:45:01.820 when Bieber was very, very young.

00:45:03.580 And between Scooter Braun and Diddy, you know, Bieber has, he's not with Scooter Braun anymore.

00:45:12.000 He's a long, long, long, long, long time manager.

00:45:14.500 He's obviously seemed like he's struggling.

00:45:17.060 But what do you make of all of this happening with that backdrop?

00:45:21.580 Well, I think that it's pretty obvious that Justin Bieber was victimized by Diddy.

00:45:27.360 I mean, like there's video evidence of it and you can look it up.

00:45:32.300 I'd suggest not looking it up.

00:45:33.980 But he's definitely somebody who was taken advantage of by Diddy, but by a lot of people.

00:45:39.260 I mean, he was, I mean, he was little and he was 12 or 13 years old and he was discovered

00:45:43.700 on YouTube and his parents weren't in the industry able to protect him.

00:45:49.220 And so this is the first time that he's really broken free from his manager, from control really

00:45:55.880 in Hollywood.

00:45:56.460 This is music that's his own.

00:45:57.920 He's saying it's authentic to him.

00:45:59.720 I listened to it.

00:46:00.900 I did not think it was as bad as the reviews are saying.

00:46:03.360 And I also have to wonder, like, is part of the reason why we're seeing so many negative

00:46:07.460 reviews about his music because he has separated from Scooter Braun.

00:46:12.240 They really, they came to a settlement.

00:46:14.320 I think it was like $30 million.

00:46:16.100 Justin Bieber has to pay Scooter Braun's company just to be free.

00:46:20.320 There was a financial dispute relating to not fulfilling a concert that he had.

00:46:25.640 Not in 2022.

00:46:27.060 But the point is, he is free now.

00:46:28.980 This is his music.

00:46:30.320 And I think it's really telling that this is the time that the media has come out and

00:46:33.960 said, the music industry media has come out and said, oh, this music is trash, just as

00:46:37.740 he has freed himself and become independent.

00:46:39.880 And I'll say from that review, Emily, I was expecting a Megan Thee Stallion song.

00:46:44.480 Like, I listened to his songs.

00:46:45.840 It was not that bad.

00:46:46.960 I thought it was fine.

00:46:48.120 It wasn't life-changing or wonderful.

00:46:49.700 But it certainly is not as bad as the music critics were making it out to be.

00:46:54.100 Well, it is really interesting with him because he comes from the sort of hyper-sexual, you

00:47:03.360 and I would probably say, like, demonic world of Hollywood where there is so much exploitation.

00:47:10.720 The Diddy, the entire Diddy case, I think, put that on full display.

00:47:14.680 You referred to him as the Jeffrey Epstein of the music world.

00:47:17.040 And I think what you saw was just patterns of, similarly, cover-ups.

00:47:23.600 You know, people who were taking money from Diddy, who were staying quiet because they

00:47:27.940 were scared of him, because he could influence their careers and their own power.

00:47:32.620 And Bieber was very much in that world for a long, long time.

00:47:37.360 He comes from that world.

00:47:38.240 He's almost native to it because he was so young when he was plucked from obscurity on

00:47:41.680 YouTube and thrust into superstardom.

00:47:43.460 And his grappling with faith has been super compelling.

00:47:49.500 It reminds me, and this is not a good comparison, it's not a charitable comparison, but it does

00:47:54.340 remind me a little bit of Kanye West.

00:47:57.120 And Kanye West ended up going down a horrible direction after first putting out that great,

00:48:04.260 like, fully Christian record.

00:48:06.920 It didn't end well, right?

00:48:08.760 A lot of people were like, Kanye West is saved.

00:48:10.540 His life is, you know, this is his future, and it didn't go in that direction at all.

00:48:16.580 So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that as it pertains to Bieber, because since

00:48:20.440 becoming more and more openly Christian, he's also continued to struggle really immensely

00:48:25.240 in his marriage, as a father, and all of that.

00:48:29.440 Well, I think if you look at this man's past, I mean, first of all, I can't hate Justin Bieber

00:48:34.980 ever.

00:48:35.500 I mean, he really is like a cultural icon for a zillennial-aged female.

00:48:40.720 You're such a loser.

00:48:42.020 The first music video I had ever seen was Justin Bieber.

00:48:45.840 What?

00:48:46.560 It was.

00:48:47.140 It was.

00:48:47.560 And I thought it was so good.

00:48:48.860 I was like, he's so cool.

00:48:51.200 He's at a bowling alley.

00:48:52.560 I thought the girl's outfit with like the skinny jeans and like a sparkly top.

00:48:56.020 I was like, this is amazing.

00:48:57.100 This is so cool.

00:48:58.360 So yes, Justin Bieber is a cultural icon.

00:49:00.560 He is beloved.

00:49:01.180 He has also been in the limelight since he was at a very young age.

00:49:04.820 And I once, I knew this girl once, I actually met her at a YAF event, which Emily, you know.

00:49:11.300 But it was, she lived in California.

00:49:13.800 Her dad was in the music industry and she had met Justin Bieber once at an event and he was

00:49:19.280 being swarmed by people.

00:49:20.820 And he just said, you know, like, just basically I'll take this picture, but like, please leave

00:49:27.180 me alone.

00:49:27.920 Like I just, and we see this constantly for Justin Bieber.

00:49:31.780 Like there are always these viral videos coming out of people swarming him and him just asking

00:49:36.220 like, please, can I have some space?

00:49:37.980 The most viral one was recently where he said, you know, I'm standing on business.

00:49:41.980 And then it just went mega viral.

00:49:43.860 People made fun of him.

00:49:44.960 But the point is that this is somebody who has been in the limelight for a very long time

00:49:48.060 and who also has demons from his past.

00:49:50.300 If you look at what's happened with him and Diddy and the way that Diddy clearly overly

00:49:53.420 sexualized him, potentially abused him, it is very obvious that he is dealing with a

00:49:57.960 traumatic childhood.

00:49:58.880 And so to try and come to Jesus while also having the spotlight on you continually from

00:50:03.820 when you were a young age up until now, it has to be really, really difficult.

00:50:08.460 And I can understand why a lot of people in his position, Connie West, Justin Bieber, others

00:50:13.320 struggle to actually come to Jesus given the circumstances, the temptations, the attention that is surrounding

00:50:20.600 them.

00:50:21.920 Yeah.

00:50:22.280 And, you know, he also, I feel like this was almost, I'm really interested in your take

00:50:27.780 on this because I feel like for people your age, he was almost the beginning.

00:50:32.120 This must have been pre-COVID because he got married in 2018.

00:50:35.400 I think a lot of people think the sort of trad movement started during COVID.

00:50:39.140 But you, I mean, you and I remember because we were probably talking about it at the time.

00:50:41.960 There were a lot of signs that it was picking up momentum before then.

00:50:45.980 And Justin Bieber getting married to Haley Bieber at a really young age and speaking about it,

00:50:53.240 framing their marriage in overtly Christian terms, going to church and all of that.

00:50:59.280 Like, I actually feel like his example was one of the earliest big cultural moments that

00:51:06.020 made it clear a sea change was happening from, on the last episode, we were talking about Lena

00:51:12.720 Dunham and girls and the legacy of girls. She talks about how, you know, circa 2012,

00:51:17.280 when that show was on, there was this movement where the culture was opening and body positivity

00:51:21.780 was happening and people were moving away from slut shaming and all of that. I actually think

00:51:26.300 she's right about that. There was this moment where progressive, cultural progressive movement

00:51:30.720 was ascendant. And, you know, it was treated as ridiculous to say, you know, that Lena Dunham

00:51:37.560 on girls was behaving foolishly, at least on a sexual level and all of that. And then Bieber gets

00:51:45.360 married really young in 2018. We start to, it's not like he created this trend. He's not the Regina

00:51:50.980 George here, but it did, there was something happening that was a backlash, I think, to the,

00:51:56.440 that wave of feminism that was most exemplified by Lena Dunham. And I sort of see him as playing a big

00:52:02.320 role in that. No, I think you're right about that, Emily. And I also think, well, I'll just say,

00:52:09.120 I thought Haley Bieber was a little bit of an icon for a while too. Like this, she's just kind of

00:52:13.580 almost embracing the, the vibe shift that you and I are talking about to the right, even though she's

00:52:20.200 not right wing. And then she did a collab with Planned Parenthood a couple of years ago. No,

00:52:24.620 Haley Bieber, she's not it. I'm not, I'm not, I'm no longer a fan. But yeah, I do think that

00:52:30.240 they contributed to that. I'll say this also, Emily, that Justin Bieber has always been a part

00:52:36.460 of the, the mega church crowd, right? Like these. Oh, here we go. Evita's getting started on

00:52:42.500 Protestantism. I'm sorry. I have to say. I knew she was going to do it. I have to say it, Emily. It's

00:52:47.720 just this, a lot of times these mega churches, they are not grounded in a lot of doctrine.

00:52:53.740 Things can get kind of wild and you have staged performances and it's, it's just, there's not,

00:53:01.320 there's not their tradition. There is not the doctrine that keeps you grounded in your faith

00:53:06.260 and, and, and give substance to it. This is what the Catholic church offers. I'm a Catholic. I'll

00:53:11.220 just say there, there are other Protestant sects that do a better job. Oftentimes these mega churches

00:53:18.140 do not. And I think that's also a contributing problem here. At the same time, Emily, you are seeing

00:53:23.420 a lot of young people embrace Catholicism, authentic tradition and ritual. And so yes,

00:53:30.320 Justin Bieber is kind of part of this cultural moment. And there are others who are discovering

00:53:33.660 the full truth at the same time. And maybe Justin Bieber and Haley Bieber's wedding was like the

00:53:38.400 gateway into all that, which I think is a positive thing ultimately. Well, I think it normalizes it.

00:53:42.980 And yeah, you're right. I mean like the Hill songs and those other sort of evangelical mega churches,

00:53:47.560 which I go to an evangelical mega church, so I'm obviously not opposed categorically, but

00:53:51.700 they are sort of feeling centric, right? Like it's a, it's a postmodern approach to Christianity where

00:53:58.260 it's, they, they may disagree with this, but it's sort of my truth and exploring the gospel through

00:54:05.620 your quote unquote truth, right? Like there's this sort of relativism to it that leads people into a

00:54:13.560 really like bad situation. So I don't disagree with that at all. It was, there's a reason it was

00:54:19.020 popular in Hollywood with the Kardashians and the Biebers and it's because it didn't particularly

00:54:23.740 challenge you. It was sort of more therapeutic on the surface and ultimately not as therapeutic as

00:54:29.860 it, it probably could be. But I, I.

00:54:33.560 It's offensive either. I think it was, it's, it's a, it's a type of Christian brand of Christianity

00:54:38.060 is acceptable to the Hollywood friends that they have, right? It might, it doesn't make them quite

00:54:43.840 as uncomfortable. Do you think some of that is why critics, um, who, I mean, if you're a music

00:54:51.500 critic, it's getting published in a major, um, outlet, you're, I think it's fair to call you sort

00:54:56.860 of elite. You're at the top of your game. If you got the job of reviewing the new Bieber album,

00:55:00.280 uh, for these publications, do you think that's sort of why critics are grossed out or aren't willing

00:55:06.960 to like embrace, uh, the, the new Bieber record? I think that was true of Kanye's Christian album,

00:55:12.020 which by like objective standards was really well done. Um, critics were uncomfortable with it. Do

00:55:20.060 you sense any of that now with Bieber? Yeah. I mean, I think it's, so I would say probably most of it has

00:55:26.740 to do with him leaving the industry. Like that's, that's my sense. Like people are just mad. He's no

00:55:31.200 longer controlled by Scooter Braun. And there's this massive controversy between the two of them.

00:55:34.840 I do think that that could potentially be part of it. And if we're just being honest, I mean,

00:55:39.160 this is always how Christians are treated in Hollywood and it comes through not just

00:55:43.180 interpersonally, but in the type of content that they put out in the world. I mean, when have we

00:55:47.140 ever seen a wholesome show that portrays Christianity in a good way? I mean, the last time I saw Hollywood

00:55:53.540 put a, put a, put a highlight on Catholicism was spotlight where they were accusing Catholic

00:55:58.820 priests of all being rapists, which obviously that's not true, right? But these, this is the kind

00:56:03.280 representation that Christianity is getting in Hollywood. So the fact that potentially there's

00:56:09.440 some animosity there for Justin Bieber being a Christian and trying to live out that lifestyle

00:56:14.080 is definitely a possibility. I also think though, the, the biggest issue here is him separating,

00:56:20.820 going on his own and being independent, which you really don't see very often for a reason in

00:56:26.120 Hollywood. Hmm. Yeah. That's pretty interesting too. There's just something in me that senses he

00:56:31.520 normalized this stuff for, for people. So Bieber's a year younger than me and was mostly popular with

00:56:38.180 people, I think your age, like roughly five years younger than me. And I feel like the millennials were

00:56:43.520 caught up in Taylor Swift, Lena Dunham world, and Zoomers kind of had this different era where things

00:56:50.600 were normalized. Um, I like if Bieber had, yeah, anyway, I don't know if he, I feel like he, he did

00:56:56.280 help normalize and change some of these standards in a way that, uh, opened the doors for the trad

00:57:00.720 movement. Well, I think that if you look at just where Gen Z is at compared to millennials, men, women,

00:57:07.820 black, brown, white, doesn't matter. Every single Gen Z demo is more right-wing than their millennial

00:57:14.780 counterparts. Like this is just what the studies are showing. Um, and there, there's a reason for that.

00:57:19.760 I mean, there's, there's a, a vibe shift that's happening. It's mostly happening online. It's

00:57:24.760 being driven by the online world. And you're seeing just a lot of influencers, cultural influencers,

00:57:30.460 um, internet influencers trending in that direction for whatever reason. I mean, this,

00:57:36.000 and I think it makes sense. I mean, we've been living in the Obama era, right. Of, of like the

00:57:41.260 hipsters with the Starbucks and the like change. The hipsters with the Starbucks and the flannel.

00:57:48.340 It's like such an old description of like hipsterdom circa 2008. Yeah. They're reading vice. Uh, but

00:57:55.800 actually, Evita, you are a literal lumberjack. So the lumberjack moment must have been great for you

00:58:00.500 and your family. Those, they were fake lumberjacks. Those guys like pajama boy and the hipsters,

00:58:05.460 like they weren't climbing trees and log rolling. So they were. Which you actually, people don't know

00:58:09.240 this. If you don't know this about Evita, she is a champion lumberjack. Log roller. Yes.

00:58:16.340 Am I a champion speed climber? Yeah, no, it's, it's true. So that was cultural appropriation on

00:58:21.300 behalf of millennials that I take deep offense to, and I'm still upset about it. And they,

00:58:26.460 they continue, I think, to appropriate lumberjackism. And they also continue to poison us with their

00:58:33.000 voting habits. You, you really tied that up with a bow, Evita. Well done. Thank you, Emily.

00:58:40.520 Let people know where they can follow you. Evita Duffy underscore one on X and on Instagram. Emily,

00:58:47.320 congratulations on your new show. It's really awesome. I'm so excited. And it was still like,

00:58:50.960 and I have to tell you guys before you let me go, Emily, I literally had a nightmare last night.

00:58:55.720 I woke up, I had a nightmare that I, your show was last night and I just slept through it. I'm like,

00:59:01.320 this show is so late. It's so fun, but I'm going to sleep through the show.

00:59:04.260 I made it, but I had a nightmare about it.

00:59:06.380 What is wrong with you? It's not even 10 PM in Wisconsin. Are you 85 years old?

00:59:12.600 I'm trying to get my sleep schedule back to normal. I used to go to bed at two or 3 AM.

00:59:17.840 I know. I remember getting text messages from you at 1 30 in the morning being like,

00:59:22.220 did you know this about Jeffrey Epstein?

00:59:26.060 Yeah. So you'll get those texts from me now, but it'll just be earlier in the day.

00:59:30.900 All right. Well, Evita, I can't wait to have you back. Thank you for being so kind for your kind

00:59:35.300 words. This was a blast and we will see you soon. Thanks, Emily.

00:59:39.020 All right. Well, uh, tax network USA, listen to this. If you're stressed, stressed about back

00:59:44.560 taxes, maybe I should have asked Evita what her tax situation is like. That could have been

00:59:48.580 interesting. Maybe you missed the April deadline or your books are a mess. Don't wait. The IRS is

00:59:53.380 cracking down. Penalties add up fast. 5% per month up to 25% just for not filing, but there's help.

00:59:59.580 Like I mentioned, tax network USA can take the burden off your shoulders and stop the spiral

01:00:04.060 before it gets worse. They've helped thousands of Americans, whether you're an employee, a small

01:00:08.580 business owner, haven't filed in years, messy books, no problem. They've seen it all and know

01:00:13.080 exactly how to clean it up with direct access to powerful IRS programs and expert negotiators

01:00:17.640 on your side. Tax network USA knows how to win. You'll get a free consultation. And if you qualify,

01:00:23.460 they may even be able to reduce or eliminate what you owe. More importantly, they'll help protect you

01:00:27.360 from wage garnishments or bank levies. So don't wait for the next IRS letter. Call 800-958-1000 or

01:00:33.820 visit TNUSA.com to talk to a real expert at Tax Network USA. Take the pressure off. Let Tax Network

01:00:43.100 USA handle your tax issues. I'm not using paper today. I'm using my iPad because my printer wasn't

01:00:49.920 working. That is, as one of the few millennials that owns a printer, the joys of printer ownership are

01:00:56.420 exactly how you would expect. The printer has just never been a perfected technology. We can

01:01:01.640 make all kinds of things, but for some reason, not a functioning printer. Let's talk about NPR.

01:01:07.640 Actually, you know what? I've been saving this. I think we're going to do Stacey Abrams first

01:01:12.880 because NPR is, you know, we're going to get to that in a second. But Stacey Abrams actually told

01:01:19.360 NPR today that she has not ruled out another run for office. Check this out. So Stacey Abrams is

01:01:28.640 promoting her latest novel. And I should say, Governor Stacey Abrams is promoting her new novel.

01:01:35.860 People think she lost the Georgia's governor race. Obviously, the election denialism is strong

01:01:43.340 with Stacey Abrams. So it's only proper to refer to her as Governor Abrams. But she has an interesting

01:01:48.760 career as a novelist going back years and years. She's now writing under her own name. But in this

01:01:54.800 interview with NPR about her novel, look at this. This is amazing. We're actually going to talk about,

01:01:59.620 I just got a pop-up on NPR. NPR.org that said, you count on public media for stories that help you

01:02:06.200 understand your world, voices that bring us closer together. People like you power independent media.

01:02:11.480 We're going to talk about that in just a moment because NPR is truly freaking out about their

01:02:16.340 funding, which is pending in Congress at the moment. So it's no wonder that they're disrupting

01:02:22.080 my efforts to be informed about Governor Abrams with these desperate pleas. But towards the end

01:02:27.540 of the interview, she gets asked whether she'll run for office again in 2026. And she says,

01:02:32.800 I truly have not made any decisions. And that is in part because there's an urgency to 2025 that we

01:02:37.740 cannot ignore. My focus right now is on how do we ensure that we have free

01:02:41.380 and fair elections in 2026? There's a lot of hope being pinned on the 26 midterms.

01:02:47.120 So Stacey Abrams right now is saying that she's worried about the lack of free and fair elections

01:02:51.940 after sowing immense distrust in electoral integrity by claiming that she actually really

01:02:58.060 won the Georgia governor's race. And at least we can give it to Governor Abrams for being consistent.

01:03:03.740 Now, it reminded me when I saw this back in, man, this must have been 2018. Incredible stuff.

01:03:12.420 I was tasked at the Federalist and I forget what, I think it was because, so I had covered in 2017

01:03:20.160 Netroots Nation, which is like the Libs CPAC. And there was this big fight over Stacey Abrams versus

01:03:26.880 Stacey Evans and protests and very typical sort of lefty stuff. And that sort of piqued my interest

01:03:37.000 in Stacey Abrams. And she went on to become more successful in politics. But because I had started

01:03:44.160 looking into her, I knew that she had a career as a romance novelist. Many people aren't aware of this

01:03:51.120 about Stacey Abrams, but I, back in 2018, sacrificed my mental health, sacrificed many,

01:04:01.320 many hours of my life reading, skimming really, all of Stacey Abrams' romance novels. And they are

01:04:07.860 fucking disgusting. I have some excerpts from them that I pulled out. This is not child-friendly,

01:04:15.600 but this is actually prose written by Governor Stacey Abrams, Georgia Governor Stacey Abrams.

01:04:22.160 She used to write under the non-diplume, Selena Montgomery, which is spectacular. And I applaud

01:04:29.040 her for coming up with that non-diplume. It's like basically the best writing that she's ever

01:04:33.600 managed to do. Like the peak was just coming up with her pseudonym. And then from there, it's all

01:04:38.180 downhill. So this is an exchange between someone named Sebastian Kane and Dr. Caitlin Leida in the

01:04:46.060 Selena Montgomery thriller, Secrets and Lies. Again, very much not child-friendly. I can't read

01:04:53.320 this. I don't want to. He thrust deep, control broken, shattered, again and again, deeper and

01:05:00.580 hotter, and further than fantasy. With urgency, she accepted. I'm done. Okay, I can't even get through

01:05:06.600 it. It's too much. It's too much to read aloud. It was one thing reading it silently in my head,

01:05:11.820 but reading it aloud, I don't want to do that to you. And more importantly, I don't want to do it to

01:05:16.260 myself. I'm re-traumatizing myself. Here's one. This is Dr. Ethan Stewart and Mara Reed in the book

01:05:22.780 called Hidden Sins. Watch me love you, he commanded silently. Know that I will always be a part of you.

01:05:29.740 By design, he flowed over every inch of gossamer skin in voracious, tender assault.

01:05:34.960 Voracious, tender assault is sort of like how Stacey Abrams has approached political leadership

01:05:44.220 over the state of Georgia, a voracious and tender assault. Let's go on to NPR at this point,

01:05:51.040 because I can't quite keep doing this to myself or to you. I think it's rather funny that NPR,

01:05:57.020 while it's begging for money, is writing these articles about Stacey Abrams that are just pure,

01:06:05.620 favorable, like reputation, boosting public relations that even Stacey Abrams, like publicist,

01:06:15.020 couldn't dream of, while NPR is trying to tell Republicans that they're worthy of public funding.

01:06:22.840 It's just incredible stuff. So this is, I'm going to share a Daily Beast article on the screen

01:06:30.000 because it includes, I think, some pretty good framing from Republicans who right now, as you

01:06:34.180 may have heard, are working on a rescissions package that's going through Congress that's

01:06:37.380 trying to take back some actually already appropriated congressional funds. And some of that

01:06:43.280 is $1.1 billion for NPR and PBS. And so I want to read this quote from Eric Schmidt, who's really

01:06:52.260 a senator, Republican senator from Missouri, who has really, really championed this, because I think

01:06:58.220 the way he frames it makes it so, so very difficult for NPR to make the case that it is making. And

01:07:06.560 actually, before I get to that quote, I'm going to, let's roll this clip of Catherine Maher on CNN

01:07:12.340 this morning. She's the head of NPR. She's been making her case against the Republican efforts

01:07:18.280 here. Last ditch type of campaign to save what's actually only 2% of NPR's budget, according to the

01:07:28.680 New York Times. It'll have effects. You know, they'll probably make sure that it affects the

01:07:32.780 local stations, the most sympathetic stations most. But private donors will also surely step in and make

01:07:38.860 up some of the gap. Again, 2% of the funding. So let's roll Catherine Maher this morning here.

01:07:43.600 As far as the accusations that were biased, I would stand up and say, please show me a story

01:07:47.940 that concerns you. Because we want to know and we want to bring that conversation back to our newsroom.

01:07:52.740 We believe that as a public broadcaster, we do have an obligation to serve all Americans.

01:07:57.280 And we need to make sure that our coverage reflects the interests and perspective.

01:08:01.040 And we hear from Americans across the political spectrum. That's important to us. And we want to make

01:08:05.860 sure we live up to that. Thank you, Catherine. I would like to submit for your consideration

01:08:10.340 the aforementioned article about Governor Stacey Abrams, in which barely any scintilla of criticism

01:08:18.500 about the doubt that she sowed in election integrity was mentioned, or any of her other various positions

01:08:24.440 over the years, which would easily be mentioned in any article promoting, let's say, a conservative

01:08:30.300 politician's novel. Does that exist? I hope not. But if it did exist, we all know what that article

01:08:37.240 would look like. So for your consideration, Catherine Maher, let's take a look at that maybe.

01:08:42.240 Just something that was published on your site today. Let's go to Eric Schmidt here. This is

01:08:48.140 Missouri Republican Senator Eric Schmidt, who framed it in a way that it is just, what is Catherine Maher

01:08:54.160 even supposed to do? He said, while the actual American people are working long hours to afford

01:08:58.680 groceries and gas, their government has been writing checks to left-wing propaganda outlets and spending

01:09:04.440 billions overseas on countries that hate us. So Catherine Maher's best defense in that situation

01:09:11.220 is actually just that, for example, this is something certain Republicans have pointed out. Actually,

01:09:18.620 Matt Taibbi, not a Republican, who was on the show last week, pointed it out too, that Catherine

01:09:23.120 Maher complained Donald Trump's efforts. It was an executive order at the time to take back funding

01:09:30.380 from NPR amounted to viewpoint discrimination. Oh, well, that's interesting. Which viewpoints might

01:09:36.300 he be discriminating against? Huh? It's a concession, right? That her viewpoint is not just quote-unquote

01:09:43.760 neutral, that NPR is not doing what it pledges to do, what it tells its viewers to do. And I actually

01:09:49.700 think that's sad. I don't have, like, an ideological opposition to, like, well-funded, well-run public

01:09:57.720 broadcasting, whether it's PBS or NPR. I listen to a ton of NPR because, you know, I think I mentioned

01:10:04.420 this the other day, I would drive an old car and sometimes you're going, like, I think 20 minutes

01:10:08.960 in the car and you don't have time to, like, hook up your phone, do the whole thing. And so you just

01:10:14.060 default to what's on the radio. And when you're listening to NPR, it's not a secret. I mean,

01:10:20.160 it's so obviously just written, this is what Anna Kasparian was talking about earlier on the show,

01:10:26.280 it's written and produced by liberals. And that doesn't mean they're necessarily pro-Democrat or

01:10:32.300 anti-Democrat or pro-Republican or anti-Republican. They don't necessarily think of themselves that way.

01:10:37.480 They think of themselves as pro-truth and pro-decency and pro-civility because to them,

01:10:44.020 they are clustered in these bubbles. So much of the programming from NPR, that's, like,

01:10:50.700 mainstream stuff, comes from Washington, comes from Boston, comes from New York. That's where a lot

01:10:56.460 of their big shows come from. And those shows are written and produced by people who spend time

01:11:02.340 with the same people. NPR, the same people who have the same, like, cultural lifestyles and

01:11:07.360 backgrounds. Charles Murray documented this very well in the 2012 book, Coming Apart, about elite

01:11:11.560 sorting. And this is what makes me sad. That's actually new. Americans did not used to be so

01:11:19.340 clustered by socioeconomic status. And what we've lost by spending time with each other in those spaces

01:11:25.900 is a mutual understanding. So as we have sort of separated into these clusters, I mean,

01:11:32.020 Washington, D.C. is one of the best examples. I think three or four of the super zips of the top

01:11:36.740 10 with the highest concentration of wealth in the country are right out here outside of Washington,

01:11:41.500 D.C. is disproportionately, you may have noticed, where a lot of the most important decisions in

01:11:46.480 the country are made. So they're increasingly made by people who don't spend time outside of their

01:11:51.780 socioeconomic bubbles, which just means that they lack an understanding of what happens outside of

01:11:57.640 those socioeconomic bubbles. I've lived in Washington, D.C. for years. It's actually very hard

01:12:02.000 to do when everyone else is college educated and making a certain baseline to live in a city.

01:12:09.020 The example I always mention is how journalists, this must have been like 2013, were shocked on

01:12:15.120 Twitter to discover that the Ford F-150 was the top-selling car in America. It's incredible.

01:12:21.420 It's like if you go like, I don't know, an hour outside of your major metropolitan area,

01:12:26.600 you wouldn't question that at all. It's truly, all you had to do was like take a nice drive,

01:12:32.480 go find a Dairy Queen somewhere, and hang out in the parking lot for five minutes. You'd be like,

01:12:37.720 okay, yes, this is the number one selling car in America. By the way, it was my first car,

01:12:42.000 2002 Ford F-150, which I took the wheel of probably in 2010. Something like that. Great car. I love that car.

01:12:49.400 But the point is, if you're not outside of your socioeconomic bubble, you just have zero idea

01:12:55.400 what's going on, what people care about, how to connect with them. And NPR does gesture in that

01:13:01.400 direction. They will sometimes put people who come in through their app and raise comments that are

01:13:07.560 critical of the left. And so they go through the motions, but the actual, and do that sometimes,

01:13:14.560 and they, you know, they invite Republicans on and they had, I was listening in the car today to a

01:13:20.560 debate that they were having actually on NPR itself. And they had someone like from the Cato Institute

01:13:25.620 on. But it's not as though they don't make any effort to present both sides. It's just very clear

01:13:32.040 that their editorial line is that one side is right and one side is wrong. And that's what Yuri Berliner

01:13:39.580 wrote for the free press when he acted as a whistleblower after years and years

01:13:43.560 of high level journalism at NPR. He said, this is what's happening inside. People don't treat

01:13:48.980 stories that are critical of the left as seriously as they treat those stories when they are about the

01:13:55.020 right. And so now we're in a position where we can't have, this is like the meme, right? Like this

01:14:00.620 is why we can't have nice things anymore. We should be able to have consensus public broadcasting. I don't

01:14:06.260 actually have ideological opposition to that. I do think it's helpful in rural areas. There are now

01:14:10.600 people like Catherine Marr holding hostage basically these emergency alerts saying people in rural areas

01:14:18.600 rely on public broadcasting for emergency alerts. How dare you cut our funding? After doing years and

01:14:23.980 years of clear ideological bullshit, they're now saying, how dare you cut 2% of our budget? We need

01:14:30.920 it for emergency alerts as though that some type of persuasive argument that they are the people with

01:14:37.100 the moral high ground in this debate. It's all completely ridiculous. So it's not just that

01:14:43.780 they're about to get a taste of their own medicine. It's that we are in the media, all of us are about

01:14:48.460 to get a taste of our own medicine, which is this is what happens when you lose the trust of the American

01:14:54.400 people. Nobody has sympathy for you because you haven't done a good job curating or tending to this

01:15:01.940 garden. If NPR is a public garden, they have let all of these weeds sprout up in it. And now they're

01:15:09.460 saying, how dare you? People need to eat this grass or they'll go hungry. Brilliant stuff. Just a 10 out of

01:15:18.940 10 strategy. And I think actually this bill is about to pass. It's going to be a close vote. J.D. Vance had

01:15:25.440 to break the tie just to get into the sort of procedural start of defunding NPR and PBS. Again,

01:15:33.260 I'm not happy about any of this. I think it would be great to live in a world where we can do NPR and

01:15:36.920 we can do PBS well. I like PBS and NPR's like historical content as much as the next person,

01:15:43.960 even though, yes, I object to a lot of the ideology in it. But we can't do this stuff together as a

01:15:49.380 country anymore. And I think that really sucks. But I think it's true that NPR, PBS don't deserve this

01:15:54.500 money. And I think Senator Schmidt put it well. Before we leave you tonight, it has come to my

01:15:58.820 attention that Shane Gillis is hosting the ESPYs and it's been going great. All kinds of viral

01:16:05.800 videos already popping off the internet. I want to start with this one because, well, this one's

01:16:14.820 really something. I just did some some great technical work there. Apologies for the slight

01:16:32.720 delay, but we have Shane Gillis now. All right. You don't have to do that. It was fine. I didn't

01:16:41.000 write it. Actually, there was supposed to be an Epstein joke here, but as it got deleted,

01:16:50.540 probably deleted itself, right? Probably never existed. Actually, let's move on as a country and

01:16:58.000 ignore that. He's been doing some great Belichick jokes and Caitlin Clark jokes as well. And at one

01:17:07.540 point in a sort of the middle of his Belichick shtick, he says, yeah, shouldn't have done that

01:17:14.980 one. I think he was saying that a bookie is what Bill Belichick reads to his girlfriend at night.

01:17:20.520 And he said he reads him. He reads her titles like Good Night Boobs. And the audience had a rather

01:17:27.080 muted reaction. Gillis said that was his favorite. And then he threw in a line. He's like, this is

01:17:31.300 Disney, like Disney, let me do this. And it's actually pretty interesting because as Benny Johnson

01:17:37.560 put it, when he posted that video, we just rolled, he says, comedian Shane Gillis calls January 6th

01:17:42.480 staged and makes a Jeffrey Epstein murder joke that has crowd roaring at the ESPYs. We control culture

01:17:48.480 now. Now, in fairness, Shane Gillis kind of gets lumped in as like MAGA. I don't think Shane

01:17:54.620 Gillis is actually MAGA. But I think that's what makes Benny's point about who's controlling

01:18:00.300 culture now actually even more accurate, which is that people who aren't partisans and aren't

01:18:06.260 really even ideologues, like if you've heard the term barstool conservative, that's sort of

01:18:11.120 your socially liberal, fiscally conservative, anti-woke, Dave Portnoy type who was swayed by

01:18:19.440 Trump in 2024, was excited about the tech momentum for the Trump campaign, and just really

01:18:27.300 dislikes the left. And maybe someone who doesn't love Trump so much as they bitterly hate the left.

01:18:33.820 I think that's probably what Shane Gillis is. And this comes full circle with what we were talking

01:18:38.720 with Anna Kasparian about, which is that the culture is in a position where it has no more

01:18:45.360 patience for these like stilted, uncomfortably sort of elite, self-congratulatory award shows or

01:18:59.300 media outlets like CNN, for example. There's just not room for that anymore. People don't want it. I mean,

01:19:07.720 a small group of people probably want it. Who the hell ever is still watching Stephen Colbert

01:19:12.260 probably wants that. So I shouldn't, you know, minimize the existence of those people. God bless

01:19:17.920 them. Can't be doing, I don't want to be guilty of Colbert erasure on this program because that would

01:19:23.760 be a serious sin. But in all seriousness, most people just have no interest in the stilted,

01:19:31.280 self-congratulatory performances that we see from media and Hollywood. And it's not just

01:19:37.940 MAGA types. Now it's really everyone who sort of has, feels like they've been given permission to say

01:19:43.520 we deserve better than Catherine Marr's version of NPR and whatever else. So Gillis has been,

01:19:52.900 I thought it was funny that he poked fun at Disney and said, they let me do this because there's really

01:19:57.760 a lot of truth to that being why Shane Gillis is up here saying that Caitlin Clark, for example,

01:20:04.080 you know what, I'm not going to spoil the joke because actually he did it better than

01:20:07.540 my delivery would. Go look up what Shane Gillis said about Caitlin Clark. It's hilarious.

01:20:12.360 But he's up there making Jeffrey Epstein jokes and poking at Disney, the corporate parent.

01:20:18.460 And so that does, I think, signify a real cultural shift. Just Gillis' popularity signals a real

01:20:24.240 cultural shift. Lastly, my hot take on Gillis is, is that when he was canceled from Saturday Night

01:20:30.020 Live, because old podcasts in which he was doing some like mocking, I think a lot of it was like

01:20:35.700 mocking impressions of Asians. When he was canceled for that, I actually think he got a lot better.

01:20:42.600 I think it just pushed him to prove that he was legitimately funny. And he became really a

01:20:48.940 pioneer in this new media space and in this cultural shift that happened. And he was smart

01:20:56.540 enough to see where the wind was blowing. And unlike Gavin Newsom, who at least he knows where

01:21:01.340 the wind is blowing, but he lacks the talent or principle to pull it off. Gillis does. So you

01:21:07.200 didn't think this episode was going to end with me saying that Shane Gillis is more talented than

01:21:13.440 Gavin Newsom and more astute than Gavin Newsom. That's a fairly obvious fact, but I don't think

01:21:20.180 anyone could have predicted that's where we would be landing the plane tonight. And yet it is. So as a

01:21:26.720 reminder, Emily at devilmakeairmedia.com. You can shoot me your thoughts over there trying to answer

01:21:31.320 most everyone's emails. So pass along your thoughts. Feel free. We have some fantastic guests lined up for

01:21:38.780 the next couple of weeks. So do not miss a live stream. There's so much fun. Mondays, Wednesdays,

01:21:45.220 10 p.m. live. You can catch up on your podcast apps. You can catch up on YouTube afterwards.

01:21:50.380 Make sure to subscribe, turn on notifications for the channel, and we'll see you back here

01:21:54.080 with more After Party next Monday at 10 p.m.

01:21:56.780 I'm Chris Hadfield, astronaut and citizen of planet Earth. Join me on a journey into the systems that

01:22:09.000 power the world. No politics, just real conversations with real people shaping the future of energy.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - July 19, 2025

Dem Establishment Failures, with Ana Kasparian, and if Bieber Launched the Trad Movement, with Evita Duffy-Alfonso - ＂After Party with Emily Jashinsky＂

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