The Fani Willis train wreck Daddy and the sacks of cash $9,999 Russian McDonalds is so good that Tucker doesn’t care about freedom of the press The political pilgrim The murder of Alexei Navalny A wave of whataboutism Are your 19 year old daughters about to be drafted to fight in Gaza?
Still listening to this great episode, but wanted to share a correction.
The Kevin D. Williamson works for The Dispatch now, not The Bulwark. I only mention this because The Dispatch in my opinion is consistently a great source, while The Bulwark is very hit or miss.
Matt is right that Kevin’s piece is a worthwhile read.
Generalizing, but The Bulwark feels like partisan hacks bitter that they no longer have a home and are now partisan hacks of a different sort, while The Dispatch feels like actual philosophical conservatives with something more to say than, "Trump dangerous/Republicans awful/vote Democrat."
Yeah, a lot of the people there were extremely influential Republican commentators for decades only to be democrat shills at the drop of a hat. It is quite sad and extremely annoying. They go out of their way to to be anti-things that they have spent their entire lives defending because orange man bad.
I was just about to make this same correction, but alas, you beat me to it. :) And agreed about The Dispatch’s reporting; I can’t speak highly enough about it (or KDW).
According to Tucker….the subways are clean and they have fresher bread than us. 🙄
Amazing to watch the crossing of the political wings. Bernie did the Soviet propaganda tours of the 80’s and Tucker is doing the MAGA Putin propaganda tours of 2024.
Fantastic book! I laughed and laughed. Kmele would like this line from it (somewhere), and it was the first time I'd heard the idea: "There's no such thing as race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd all be the same breed."
Gutted by this. If anyone hasn't seen the "Navalny" documentary on HBO (at least over here; believe it was made by CNN Films), I'd highly recommend it. Apart from learning about his background, his team and his attempted assassination (including a prank call with an assassin), you also get an insight into the man's lovely wife and kids. Sweet and funny with each of them, he was. Can't imagine how they're all taking it. 🕯️
Recall the "Luke Combs is a bigot for covering a song by a black lesbian" stuff from a previous episode earlier in the year? Watch this beautiful moment from the Grammys and then let's all give thanks that us normies are winning.
Instead of joining social media fucktard nation in arguing or justifying song covers, she came out of her incredibly private world and, with Combs, gave the biggest and most meaningful fuck you since Samuel L. Jackson in every film in which he's ever said "fuck". And she didn't even have to say it.
Sidenote: Always wanted Dolly and Whitney to do "I Will Always Love You" together. Dolly should pull a Natalie Cole and do a remake with Houston's track.
In this context Tucker is Louie Anderson: "Now I'm washing lettuce. Couple of years I make assistant manager, and that's when the big bucks start rolling in"
I don’t know which felt more sad today…news of Navalny dying or Kmele acknowledging his $4K “spacial computer” (likely code named ‘Vagina Dehydrator’ at Apple HQ during development) is “totally worth it” for “movies & stuff”.
I’m kidding…I think…because of course Navalny was the sadder news even if I’d already accepted what would happen to someone with such courage and conviction in Putin’s Russia…but the Vision Pro thing bummed me out too for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because I used to be the same way with Apple stuff and I miss it.
On another (and probably unrelated) note I am the only one in the house this weekend for the first time in a very long time, and I’m pretty sure I would have given Moynihan a run for his Irish-gened money with my “adult beverage consumption skills” tonight.
I’m sorry in for anything I’ve said and for my likely overuse of quotation marks...I don’t know why they always seem so much more appropriate when inebriated.
ANYWAY, I’m off to likely start an ill advised bourbon-fueled home improvement project. Wish me luck.
Cheers everyone. Have a wonderful (& restful) weekend.
Well, I was trying to be open minded about Tucker with the Putin interview etc. but yeah, those "shorts" about the grocery store and subway were awful propaganda.
I feel like the grocery store one is a particularly awful inversion of reality, as it echoes all those stories about Soviet refugees losing their minds when they saw an American grocery store, like this scene from Moscow on the Hudson
Everyone in conservative world knows about those stories, they're part of the basic mythology of American awesomeness in the face of Soviet tyranny. Tucker had to know he was doing a reverse-Yeltsin-at-Randall's claiming he was radicalized by the grocery store.
Maybe I'm just becoming middle aged, and as Matt said, no one knows or cares about history before a few years ago, so the subtle allusions to great moments in American/Soviet competition go unnoticed.
The key difference that will be missed by unpatriotic dullards.is that Yeltin visited a grocery store basically at random, a store that was given fifteen minutes to prepare. Putin of course would have ensured that the manager of the store Tucker visited had ample notice...and "motivation".
Yeltsin made sure he wasn't seeing a Potemkin village. Tucker is smart enough to know that he is. But the hate-America crowd pays the bills and he's happy to show them what they want to see.
That's amazing. My understanding of the Soviet Union was the long bread lines, I remember this since I am old enough to have grown up through the 80s. Still don't understand the appeal of communism to people.
I want to say it was George Reisman's book Capitalism that had the line "the disadvantage of Capitalism is that it distributes wealth unevenly, whereas socialism distributes poverty across the board". For some people inequality is the greatest sin , even if you have to make everyone miserable to overcome it.
Between the irreversible damage of Novichok and the slow torture they subjected him to, his death was inevitable but not necessarily scheduled. However, I don't know how lucky it was. A martyred dissident may turn out to be a far more powerful symbol for resistance than one who is alive in a cage.
I'm startled to hear that you guys don't keep cash. Lots of people I know have a stash of it hidden in their house or in a safe. Some have hundreds, some have thousands. They're not doing anything illegal, they've just been squirreling away $50 or $100 here and there over the course of many years and keep it in case of any emergency. I think most of us had parents or grandparents who did this after the depression and passed on the tradition.
I’m with Angela. If I ever need to pay a really inexpensive ransom, I’m prepared. I also refuse to part with the roughly $17 worth of kuna in my wallet.
My great-grandmother apparently kept Fani William’s levels of cash hidden all over her house. I wasn’t alive when she died, but I heard they were finding wads of it in strange places for weeks while cleaning out the house--wrapped up to look like bacon in the freezer, sewn into the linings of curtains, buried in the yard, false books, you name it.
I do my best to never ever have cash on my person, as does my wife. I will get the minimum cash necessary if we are going someplace that is cash only (almost nowhere in Chicago in 2024, cashless is more common).
Yes, I was shocked to hear (admiitedly with caveats of uncertainty) that no on US servicemembers had died defending Israel when quite a lot had famously been killed BY Israel!
The immersive experience that Moynihan was crafting existed at the WWI museum in Kansas City. You would wear a VR headset and walk through a built exhibit with narration by Dan Carlin going through different battlefields. I will forever regret not lnowing about it before my wife and I took a trip there. It seems like an unforgettable experience.
There was a teacher in the town where I work who was fired in 2012 for having had some porn past that was discovered. While she had paid a lot of money to have everything wiped from the internet (and we know how that goes), it was discovered and she was ousted. It was fucked for that teacher and further set a precedence of expectation. Many of my students had had her in middle school and it was a topic for months. Teachers have gotten in hot water for all kinds of shit - my colleague and friend was once taken to task for having a bird photo on her Facebook, which was private but other teachers had followed her. Screenshot to the principal and boom - Kim's in trouble. Is it bullshit? Of course. But then, it's important to consider private choices in the public eye for anything when you're working for the public or are a public figure. There's nothing new about this, and Rachel should've known that.
Consider this comparitively minor situation: You're in a restaurant and at the table next you is a teacher talking about having a super orgy all weekend and then switching topics to the storybook of the week in her kindergarten class. And it's your kid's teacher. Would I care? Not really, but I know to be fucking careful about what you say and do in public when you serve minors. I'm not saying live in fear, I'm saying be fucking aware.
Now consider the amount of time spent by students searching up their teacher on OnlyFans and then sitting in class the following day. Will those kids - any kids - take that teacher seriously afterward? Fuck no. Paywalls mean nothing, it takes exactly one kid who can pay, a quick recording by an extension provided and paid for by the district and it's on. My guess is a student got ahold of a video - or a parent did - and went to the DO.
Another important point: Rachel got a job in Arizona. Why in the world would anyone work in a place where the pay is something around the bottom five in the country, there's zero union back (sorry guys, but that shit protects teachers as it is - and yes there are insane problems with it but that's another conversation), and the conservatism is rife - and then proceed to do something highly contentious? It was stupid. Unless you have one of Moynihan's giant bags of money to crawl back into, there's nothing good about a choice like that - nothing good even if.
Teachers get away with a lot of shit - again, another conversation - but castigating a teacher to the extent that they are completely ruined for an act outside of fucking a student (though I know several who have married former students), smoking or selling meth around or to students, killing a student - you get the idea - is preposterous. But should she have lost her job? Of course. Not for the OnlyFans, but for being dumb as shit in her choices. You chose to work with kids, probably don't make accessible nudie videos on a well-known pornish (I'm guessing, never had the pleasure) site.
In the 80's a nurse I knew took a trip to The Soviet Union. She related a story of going out to the Intourist bus in the morning and seeing a dead body on the sidewalk outside the hotel. When they returned in the afternoon, the body was still there but the shoes were gone
Commenting here as I don't know hot to do it over there, but I'm listening to Ken Layne's Matt-enhanced episode of Desert Oracle about the brief heyday of the blogging era, where Ken's mention of view counters brings to mind a zeitgeisty demotivator by Despair, Inc. (a zeitgeisty company if there ever was one), titled "BLOGGING - Never Before Have So Many People With So Little To Say Said So Much To So Few", which I found hysterical at the time as it perfectly illustrated the deluge of hangers-on.
Sadly, they seem to have both retired that particular poster and updated its image, which no longer features the then highly recognizable Blogger-style view counter at the bottom center, gloriously tying it up with "00004 Views".
Still listening to this great episode, but wanted to share a correction.
The Kevin D. Williamson works for The Dispatch now, not The Bulwark. I only mention this because The Dispatch in my opinion is consistently a great source, while The Bulwark is very hit or miss.
Matt is right that Kevin’s piece is a worthwhile read.
https://thedispatch.com/article/the-full-duranty/
Yes, sorry, and I will be doing this for the rest of my life.
Generalizing, but The Bulwark feels like partisan hacks bitter that they no longer have a home and are now partisan hacks of a different sort, while The Dispatch feels like actual philosophical conservatives with something more to say than, "Trump dangerous/Republicans awful/vote Democrat."
I agree on the Bulwark, except for Cathy Young, who is always excellent.
I agree, but I would just add Sonny Bunch as excellent.
I should have mentioned that I really enjoy the "Across the Movie Aisle" podcast.
Indeed, I listen to every episode. It's one of the less political podcasts I listen to.
Oops, I thought he was at The Dispatch. I have no idea why it's so easy to confuse these names that aren't even close to similar.
Yeah, a lot of the people there were extremely influential Republican commentators for decades only to be democrat shills at the drop of a hat. It is quite sad and extremely annoying. They go out of their way to to be anti-things that they have spent their entire lives defending because orange man bad.
I was just about to make this same correction, but alas, you beat me to it. :) And agreed about The Dispatch’s reporting; I can’t speak highly enough about it (or KDW).
I think that almost anyone from The Dispatch would be a great guest; especially KDW.
They had Chris "Simple Country Pundit" Stirewalt on a while back. Great listen.
Unfortunately, this isn't the first time one of the guys has confused The Bulwark and The Dispatch.
It's me. Can't be helped in an oral setting.
who cares
#RIPAlexei
Fuck Putin right in the ear.
And in the other ear
I didn’t think they had the balls to do this. And they think that Putin is looking for a truce?
According to Tucker….the subways are clean and they have fresher bread than us. 🙄
Amazing to watch the crossing of the political wings. Bernie did the Soviet propaganda tours of the 80’s and Tucker is doing the MAGA Putin propaganda tours of 2024.
Tucker needs to read the great P. J. O'Rourke's "Holidays in Hell". "Commies love concrete".
Fantastic book! I laughed and laughed. Kmele would like this line from it (somewhere), and it was the first time I'd heard the idea: "There's no such thing as race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd all be the same breed."
Right? Jeebus.
Fuck.
Gutted by this. If anyone hasn't seen the "Navalny" documentary on HBO (at least over here; believe it was made by CNN Films), I'd highly recommend it. Apart from learning about his background, his team and his attempted assassination (including a prank call with an assassin), you also get an insight into the man's lovely wife and kids. Sweet and funny with each of them, he was. Can't imagine how they're all taking it. 🕯️
Fif' Fam,
Recall the "Luke Combs is a bigot for covering a song by a black lesbian" stuff from a previous episode earlier in the year? Watch this beautiful moment from the Grammys and then let's all give thanks that us normies are winning.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zEqb6xbeuCo&pp=ygUpbHVrZSBjb21icyB0cmFjeSBjaGFwbWFuIGZhc3QgY2FyIGdyYW1teXM%3D
Instead of joining social media fucktard nation in arguing or justifying song covers, she came out of her incredibly private world and, with Combs, gave the biggest and most meaningful fuck you since Samuel L. Jackson in every film in which he's ever said "fuck". And she didn't even have to say it.
Sidenote: Always wanted Dolly and Whitney to do "I Will Always Love You" together. Dolly should pull a Natalie Cole and do a remake with Houston's track.
A thing of beauty
I heard the Tucker grocery store clip today and it was more horrifying than I ever could’ve imagined.
Kmele, I heard your Coming to America joke and I’m here for it.
In this context Tucker is Louie Anderson: "Now I'm washing lettuce. Couple of years I make assistant manager, and that's when the big bucks start rolling in"
We have the golden arcs.
Can we please get clarification about whether or not Moynihan likes Sam Altman
I don’t know which felt more sad today…news of Navalny dying or Kmele acknowledging his $4K “spacial computer” (likely code named ‘Vagina Dehydrator’ at Apple HQ during development) is “totally worth it” for “movies & stuff”.
I’m kidding…I think…because of course Navalny was the sadder news even if I’d already accepted what would happen to someone with such courage and conviction in Putin’s Russia…but the Vision Pro thing bummed me out too for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because I used to be the same way with Apple stuff and I miss it.
On another (and probably unrelated) note I am the only one in the house this weekend for the first time in a very long time, and I’m pretty sure I would have given Moynihan a run for his Irish-gened money with my “adult beverage consumption skills” tonight.
I’m sorry in for anything I’ve said and for my likely overuse of quotation marks...I don’t know why they always seem so much more appropriate when inebriated.
ANYWAY, I’m off to likely start an ill advised bourbon-fueled home improvement project. Wish me luck.
Cheers everyone. Have a wonderful (& restful) weekend.
Don’t drink and power-tool.
What's your bourbon of choice?
Last night it was Four Roses and Bullit Rye.
Update: I’m an idiot. No regrets.
I just wanna be able to rent one long enough to watch Dune Parts 1&2 in 3D. So fucking envious!
Well, I was trying to be open minded about Tucker with the Putin interview etc. but yeah, those "shorts" about the grocery store and subway were awful propaganda.
I feel like the grocery store one is a particularly awful inversion of reality, as it echoes all those stories about Soviet refugees losing their minds when they saw an American grocery store, like this scene from Moscow on the Hudson
https://youtu.be/VHIcmoY3_lE?si=WbXhUG2FkULAblPt
Everyone in conservative world knows about those stories, they're part of the basic mythology of American awesomeness in the face of Soviet tyranny. Tucker had to know he was doing a reverse-Yeltsin-at-Randall's claiming he was radicalized by the grocery store.
Maybe I'm just becoming middle aged, and as Matt said, no one knows or cares about history before a few years ago, so the subtle allusions to great moments in American/Soviet competition go unnoticed.
The key difference that will be missed by unpatriotic dullards.is that Yeltin visited a grocery store basically at random, a store that was given fifteen minutes to prepare. Putin of course would have ensured that the manager of the store Tucker visited had ample notice...and "motivation".
Yeltsin made sure he wasn't seeing a Potemkin village. Tucker is smart enough to know that he is. But the hate-America crowd pays the bills and he's happy to show them what they want to see.
That's amazing. My understanding of the Soviet Union was the long bread lines, I remember this since I am old enough to have grown up through the 80s. Still don't understand the appeal of communism to people.
Just found this gem inspired by your post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MlMQPfoq3I
I want to say it was George Reisman's book Capitalism that had the line "the disadvantage of Capitalism is that it distributes wealth unevenly, whereas socialism distributes poverty across the board". For some people inequality is the greatest sin , even if you have to make everyone miserable to overcome it.
Chances that at some point Tucker will realise he’s been audience captured and start making “help me” hand signals during these videos.
Did Putin time this to humiliate Tucker even more? Or was it just a lucky coincidence?
I was kind of wondering something similar. I think humiliating Tucker was just a bonus.
Between the irreversible damage of Novichok and the slow torture they subjected him to, his death was inevitable but not necessarily scheduled. However, I don't know how lucky it was. A martyred dissident may turn out to be a far more powerful symbol for resistance than one who is alive in a cage.
I'm startled to hear that you guys don't keep cash. Lots of people I know have a stash of it hidden in their house or in a safe. Some have hundreds, some have thousands. They're not doing anything illegal, they've just been squirreling away $50 or $100 here and there over the course of many years and keep it in case of any emergency. I think most of us had parents or grandparents who did this after the depression and passed on the tradition.
I’m with Angela. If I ever need to pay a really inexpensive ransom, I’m prepared. I also refuse to part with the roughly $17 worth of kuna in my wallet.
My great-grandmother apparently kept Fani William’s levels of cash hidden all over her house. I wasn’t alive when she died, but I heard they were finding wads of it in strange places for weeks while cleaning out the house--wrapped up to look like bacon in the freezer, sewn into the linings of curtains, buried in the yard, false books, you name it.
Cash loses value at a much higher rate than most other things
I do my best to never ever have cash on my person, as does my wife. I will get the minimum cash necessary if we are going someplace that is cash only (almost nowhere in Chicago in 2024, cashless is more common).
I probably wouldn't carry cash if I lived in Chicago either, lol.
My husband's boss buried cash in coffee cans in his yard for years and had to find them all when he sold his house.
Over 30 American servicemen were killed in the USS Liberty incident during the Six Day War.
This was my first thought as well. While they weren’t defending Israel per se, they were unquestionably casualties of the conflict.
Yes, I was shocked to hear (admiitedly with caveats of uncertainty) that no on US servicemembers had died defending Israel when quite a lot had famously been killed BY Israel!
The immersive experience that Moynihan was crafting existed at the WWI museum in Kansas City. You would wear a VR headset and walk through a built exhibit with narration by Dan Carlin going through different battlefields. I will forever regret not lnowing about it before my wife and I took a trip there. It seems like an unforgettable experience.
wait what
Re: Rachel Dolezal
There was a teacher in the town where I work who was fired in 2012 for having had some porn past that was discovered. While she had paid a lot of money to have everything wiped from the internet (and we know how that goes), it was discovered and she was ousted. It was fucked for that teacher and further set a precedence of expectation. Many of my students had had her in middle school and it was a topic for months. Teachers have gotten in hot water for all kinds of shit - my colleague and friend was once taken to task for having a bird photo on her Facebook, which was private but other teachers had followed her. Screenshot to the principal and boom - Kim's in trouble. Is it bullshit? Of course. But then, it's important to consider private choices in the public eye for anything when you're working for the public or are a public figure. There's nothing new about this, and Rachel should've known that.
Consider this comparitively minor situation: You're in a restaurant and at the table next you is a teacher talking about having a super orgy all weekend and then switching topics to the storybook of the week in her kindergarten class. And it's your kid's teacher. Would I care? Not really, but I know to be fucking careful about what you say and do in public when you serve minors. I'm not saying live in fear, I'm saying be fucking aware.
Now consider the amount of time spent by students searching up their teacher on OnlyFans and then sitting in class the following day. Will those kids - any kids - take that teacher seriously afterward? Fuck no. Paywalls mean nothing, it takes exactly one kid who can pay, a quick recording by an extension provided and paid for by the district and it's on. My guess is a student got ahold of a video - or a parent did - and went to the DO.
Another important point: Rachel got a job in Arizona. Why in the world would anyone work in a place where the pay is something around the bottom five in the country, there's zero union back (sorry guys, but that shit protects teachers as it is - and yes there are insane problems with it but that's another conversation), and the conservatism is rife - and then proceed to do something highly contentious? It was stupid. Unless you have one of Moynihan's giant bags of money to crawl back into, there's nothing good about a choice like that - nothing good even if.
Teachers get away with a lot of shit - again, another conversation - but castigating a teacher to the extent that they are completely ruined for an act outside of fucking a student (though I know several who have married former students), smoking or selling meth around or to students, killing a student - you get the idea - is preposterous. But should she have lost her job? Of course. Not for the OnlyFans, but for being dumb as shit in her choices. You chose to work with kids, probably don't make accessible nudie videos on a well-known pornish (I'm guessing, never had the pleasure) site.
In the 80's a nurse I knew took a trip to The Soviet Union. She related a story of going out to the Intourist bus in the morning and seeing a dead body on the sidewalk outside the hotel. When they returned in the afternoon, the body was still there but the shoes were gone
Commenting here as I don't know hot to do it over there, but I'm listening to Ken Layne's Matt-enhanced episode of Desert Oracle about the brief heyday of the blogging era, where Ken's mention of view counters brings to mind a zeitgeisty demotivator by Despair, Inc. (a zeitgeisty company if there ever was one), titled "BLOGGING - Never Before Have So Many People With So Little To Say Said So Much To So Few", which I found hysterical at the time as it perfectly illustrated the deluge of hangers-on.
Sadly, they seem to have both retired that particular poster and updated its image, which no longer features the then highly recognizable Blogger-style view counter at the bottom center, gloriously tying it up with "00004 Views".
https://www.desertoracle.com/episode-212-the-typing-life-w-guest-matt-welch/
Commenting for the Brainstorm discussion.