The Commentary Magazine Podcast
Apologia for Assassinations
Today's podcast looks at the disgraceful media effort to equalize the Ohio migrant story with the Trump assassination story and what it says about the media and about us. Give a listen.
It is Ryan C. Chris here. People always say it's good to unwind, but that's easier said than done. The exception, Champa Casino. They actually make it easier done than said, or at least the same. Champa Casino is an online social casino with hundreds of casino-style games like Slots and Blackjack. Play for fun, play for free, for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Sign up now and collect your free welcome bonus at ChampaCasino.com. Sponsored by Champa Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. [Music] Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, September 17th, 2024. I am John Pudhards, the editor of commentary magazine with me. As always, executive editor, a Greenwald High Abe. Hi, John. Senior editor, Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth. Hi, John. And media commentary, calmness, and author of the new book, The Extinction of Experience Being Human in a Disembodied World. Christine, Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John. So, we continue on with the fallout from the second assassination attempt on Donald. Trump, I have a post up at commentary.org. Paul, I should know this by heart, the assassination wish fulfillment since I wrote it. And I want to just go through a little bit of what I say and then ask you guys to respond. I was noticing throughout the day, yesterday, that the story was twinned with the story of the ongoing troubles in Springfield, Ohio, where the Haitian migrants were accused by JD Vance and Donald Trump, some Haitian migrants, of eating domesticated animals last week. And it seemed very clear to me that by putting these two stories together, let me just give examples of how these two stories were being put together. Nora O'Donnell on the CBS Evening News last night. Donald Trump is blaming Democrats for inflaming political rhetoric, she said, because Trump said, "The way you're talking about me is putting me in danger." He said that Biden and Harris are putting him in danger. But the former president's own words seem to be increasing the threat of political violence in Springfield, Ohio. That's where a false and ugly accusation against Haitians, thousands of whom are legal permanent residents, is impacting daily life. This morning on Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski introduced a report by Garrett Hake about the goings on yesterday in relation to the briefings about Ryan Rous assassination attempt, and then immediately blended into a package, or basically a monologue, about all of the times that Trump has called for or see or has encouraged violence. All of this, together to me, seems to suggest as well as a Washington Post story that says, "The secret service told Trump years ago that golfing is not safe, and he should not golf," because that gives assassins a clear target at him, but nevertheless, he persisted. A story clearly put out by the Secret Service to try to deal with its collapsing reputation, and the fact that it has become a disgrace to everybody whose eyeballs are on it. Put all these together, you get Trump is asking for it. Trump was asking for it. He's been asking for it. He started it. He encouraged violence. He is asking for it. Most important detail to add in here is that yesterday afternoon, Ohio government, Ohio governor Mike DeWine, who has been very angry about Trump and Vance retelling these stories about Springfield, Ohio calling them garbage, announced that according, I guess, to FBI or intelligence or whatever, that there have been 33 threats made to institutions in Springfield, Ohio schools and the city hall in particular. All of them hoaxes, all of them emanating from abroad by bad actors attempting to interfere with our politics. A fact that was not noted in the Nora O'Donnell coverage yesterday or on Mika Brzezinski during Mika Brzezinski's preposterous monologue, or much of anywhere, as far as I can tell. What is going on here? How are we living in a world in which a guy can be the target of two assassins, one of whom missed him by millimeters, and the story is he talked trash about Haitian migrants and therefore, you know, QED. Well, I think you get at some of the most important points in your piece. You know, this is wish fulfillment for a lot of Democrats. No, they wouldn't say that in polite company. Of course, if you accuse them of wanting to wish death upon someone, they would be horrified. But it is. If you look at the accumulation of the rhetoric, not just about this most recent attempt, but after the first one, the inability of people whose professional obligation is to report on fact and make sure the public is informed about what's going on are deliberately avoiding doing their jobs because they dislike Donald Trump so much. But I do think from a media standpoint, the most important point is the one you just made. Why are they not reporting this major piece of news from the governor of Ohio? A governor whose statements they were happy to repeat when he was criticizing Donald Trump. It's because it is inconvenient to the narrative, and the narrative is the larger overarching thing here with regard to what's happening in Springfield, Ohio, with regard to the migrant crisis, with regard to Donald Trump. So I think that's part of it. The other, the other interesting thing is that there are a few other data points on the Secret Service that emerged yesterday. One, Donald Trump did say, I need more protection. I need more agents on my detail. He said that outright. He had not said that before, but he has said that. And the Secret Service has got its hat in its hand to Congress this week asking for a lot more money saying they need funding. So they're endorsed by Biden. Yes, right. Biden said they need more money. They need more money. Yeah, like they're going to get more money after this. Good luck to you. Well, it doesn't matter how much money you throw at a problem. If the institutional rot in this particular agency is not fixed, a new leadership brought in and houses cleaned, as they say, then I don't think that's going to solve the problem. So there are there like behind the scenes funding issues with the Secret Service. I thought that Trump statement immediately after the attempted assassination saying, you know, thanking the agents who who thwarted it was good. But he did add that important point, and that's another thing. But and quite frankly, both Harris and Trump probably need more people on their detail. It's not just that Trump is at risk with the escalation of the violence and the rhetoric on both sides. Maybe we do need to rethink how we protect candidates for president. And that was the problem also with the with the what I took away from the Washington Post story was that the secret that the the Secret Service is doing exactly the wrong thing here by leaking this stuff, right? They should be that presumably they're being told from the top down, keep your traps shut, right? They're so they are there's no like 50 50 here where like half the country is like, well, you know, I think I think they've been doing a pretty good job or whatever, like they are in the dock. And so from the top down, they need to be saying, the last thing you do is leak to the Washington Post that this is the guy's fault, the guy who was shot at fault. And that sort of tells me there's a still this sort of institutional discipline problem within the Secret Service that they know exactly the wrong thing to do and say. And they keep saying and doing the those exact wrong things. They can't stop it from happening. And that is not going to be fixed with money either. Well, money is not the issue. First of all, we're about to get this report. I thought it was going to be yesterday. But apparently it's today on the Secret Service's behavior in Butler. And it's not about money. It's about how they deploy their forces. It's not that they don't have enough money to have enough people in Butler, Pennsylvania decision was made on the size of the detail that Trump would have on the basis of the understanding that this was all he needed. And they admitted yesterday that they did not cover the golf course. They did not establish a full perimeter around the golf course when he went to golf, which is obviously something they could have done. You don't say, well, you know, we didn't do it. They could have done it. They didn't do it. And as it happens, somebody who was not in the deterrent, that's to create the deterrent that means that there is no shooter in a sniper blind who gets there at 1.52 a.m. 12 hours before he Trump is about to approach to the hole where he might be able to take a shot at him. He just can't get there at all because the perimeter is shut down or you walk the perimeter. This was a happenstance that somebody had had been on the hole ahead of Trump and walked the hole and saw a glisten of the rifle. Had Ralph, the would be assassin, been more circumspect or had he had the rifle up instead of out or whatever, wouldn't have been seen. And then he would have had his, you know, he might have been able to take a shot. That was another leak, by the way, which is he wouldn't have had a good sight line anyway. Oh, really? Like, that's you. That's really where you want to go there. You wouldn't have had a good sight line. But but they already had somebody who I 20 year old kid with not much experience with guns, nearly blew his head off. So I don't know how good a sight line you need. I know you I know snipers are really talented and they need distance and all of that. But you know, I don't know what kind of sort of conflicts with their other excuse because their other excuses that it was dangerous for him to be there because there was this sight line where cameras would could go on the perimeter and get a good photograph of him. Therefore, it was Trump's fault for being in the spot where cameras and also guns therefore could see. So they did it's country. It's contradicting. So if they know, right. So if they know that this is a spot from which people take photographs of Trump while he's golfing, you would think that somebody who studies the photographs would say, Oh, that's where I could sit with my gun. So maybe they should be looking at photographs and saying, there's a spot where someone could sit with a gun. We'll just go stand there for a couple hours or 15 minutes until he passes the hole. There's there's another issue that I think you raise very well in your piece and it speaks to the morning Joe comment you made where there, you know, Brzezinski does this whole montage of all the supposedly violent remarks that that Trump made. If I recall correctly what she said, some of the things she said weren't true. It was the both, you know, find people on both sides. You know, a lot of the stuff that has been debunked is not violent speech by Trump. All put together with stuff that is actually quite incendiary that he has said over the years. And I think the media no longer has any credibility with Americans, including Americans who dislike Trump when it comes to scolding any politician with regard to violent rhetoric. I mean, if you go back through a lot of Joe Biden's tweets over the last few years, you'll see rhetoric that if you just switch the avatar and it was Donald Trump saying it would seem quite insightful. But that's never called out, right? That's fighting, the defender of democracy. Exciting. I don't think you want to say inside fault. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry. I had my second cup of coffee and it was a late night, but yeah, inciting violent rhetoric. So let's go back to that, by the way, because let's go go go to an example from when he was vice president, right? And he said Mitt Romney, they're going to put you all back in chains. He said to a black audience, well, what if somebody in that audience is like, Oh, my God, they're going to put my children in chains. I better go do something about this before they put my children in chains. There are people who are very literal minded and he said what he said. And you know, it's like, that's why you're not supposed to say stuff like that. But this is, yeah, go ahead. This is why I think, I mean, to focus on the media point for a second, the pairing of the assassination attempts on Trump with his incendiary language in the past, some of it accurate, some of it made up as Christine says, this is first and foremost defensive on the media's part. This is their way of saying, Hey, we can't say, I'm, I'm, they're getting the sense that we have gone too far in talking about him as a, as a threat. It is our language that has gotten the country a little crazy, at least contributed to it. And we got to deflect here. And that is absolutely what I'm getting at this also. It's interesting that Christine used the term avatar because I think there's a certain degree it does this speaks to some of the themes in your book, actually, Christine. There's a sense in which all these players are avatars. And Trump is not a human being shot at. He is this thing that's out there that pops up on social media that wreaks havoc. He is a, he's a meme. He's placed into, you know, dancing memes and he's this and he's adding whatever he's not a real human being. So I think the whole idea of political assassination, we are at least a layer removed from the, the ramifications of it in this age in a way that we haven't been before. Well, there is a guy on Twitter, he now runs this left wing website blog thing called Midas Touch. His name is Ron Philopowski. And he's a, he's a useful follow if you are looking for a useful follow, even though if you are right of center, he will annoy you and make you sick. The way that certain people on the MAGA right are useful follows because he does a lot of work clipping, finding clips, showing you things, finding interesting, embarrassing things. And like it's, it's, it's, it's good, it's good in front. But so he quoted a tweet, but this is also what he's like. So he quoted a tweet by Donald Trump Jr. that said, why don't you see what it's like to have to go tell your five children that somebody just shot at their grandfather for a second time? Why don't you, why don't you go see what that's like? So I'm not a fan of Donald Trump Jr.'s to put it mildly. I think he's a kind of disgraceful public figure. And I am a, and a net negative for our public life. But that was a kind of a heartfelt thing to say. And Philopowski's response was, did you tell your children about how we were stepping out on your fiance? Because there was a story about how Donald Trump Jr. had been somewhere a month ago with a woman who is not Kimberly Guilfoyle, his fiance, somewhere or other. This is not, this guy, his father has just been shot at twice. His father just did subject of a second assassin or, you know, wasn't shot at the second time. That's where, now he's not MSNBC, right? He is a partisan leftist Democrat. His entire feed is dedicated to trying to defeat Trump and make fun of Trump and make Trump look bad and all of that. But that impulse, that deep impulse to take everything and every, and any emotion that is expressed somewhere, that does not conform with your emotional makeup and trash it and crumple it up and throw it in a garbage can and insult somebody who for once in his life didn't say something that maybe was particularly controversial. I think is telling, and it's telling because Ryan Rouse on in one of his many tweets that we have now read, what did he, what phrase did he use three or four months ago? He said, democracy is on the ballot. That's a Biden phrase. That is an MSNBC phrase. That is a media phrase. Democracy is on the ballot and the logical extension, which I think is what Abe is saying, the logical extension of the theory that democracy is on the ballot and that this election is central to the future of the country not becoming an authoritarian state, provides the emotional and moral justification for the assassination of Donald Trump. And that's why in my post, I say that the implicit message of all of this is that Trump is asking for it. He's golfing where he shouldn't golf. He's talking trash about migrants. So he's upsetting people. What he did to cheeks in Butler, Pennsylvania and why, why he shot at him, we don't know what he's asking for it. And the reason that they say he's asking for it is because they can't say, which I think is the other point that you're all making. He deserves it. He should be shot. You know what? He should be killed. If he's killed, our future will be better off. And my post says, you people have no idea what you are playing with. This is the monkeys. Yeah. This is the monkeys. Right. Yeah. This is the monkeys paw. Remember the story of the monkeys paw? People get a paw, get this thing where they can make three wishes. And each wish becomes more catastrophic than the last, particularly when totally out of good motive and love and desire, they wish their dead son back to life. And the dead son, you know, is a monstrous, foolish court, you know, is gonna kill everybody. Well, that's that's what you said. I mean, I think that's what you were saying in your post when you said they're not horrified. Right. I mean, that was that was the thing, which is like, you can, you can fake sympathy to a certain degree, but you can't fake horror. Like, that's a natural response that you can see in someone's eyes when they speak and like that, they can't like, they're not feeling that next level, you know, horrified feeling of what they just saw. And you can't really hide that. And they're trying to talk their way around. But the truth is that if you're not like shaken by this kind of thing, but they've manufactured horror about the end of democracy for so many years now that it almost, it's almost as if they can't experience genuine horror, the idea that another human, an American politician would be shot regardless of whether he has a D or an R after his name, because they want him shot. Right. Well, that's what I'm saying. I don't think I can manufacture horror because there are so many people. I'm not saying the ones that I'm talking about. I'm saying that there are tens of millions of people in this country who would dance a jig to hear that Donald Trump had been assassinated. Now that may be true, by the way of Biden, that may be true of any major politician, whenever when Ronald Reagan was nearly killed in 1981, people in my dorm, around my bill, you know, 1981, people were like, people who were like high fiving each other, although I don't think high fives were a thing then. But I mean, it was there were people who were happy and thought maybe he had been killed. And there were op-eds published in college newspapers about how he deserved it or whatever. And he had only been president for seven weeks, by the way, like he hadn't done evil, horrible things yet. I mean, so this is this is a deep human impulse. Whenever you have a political rival is to think, well, you know what the cleanest thing would be for him to just vanish. So there are two ways people can vanish. They can, you know, die of natural causes, have a heart attack and die or whatever, or they can be killed. And then if you really want them gone and they're killed or forced out by Nancy Pelosi, that's a third option. Okay, yeah, right. Exactly. Right. But look, I mean, when I say the story of Trump all along, right, which is like the not not necessarily assassination, but sort of even starting from the Republican primaries in 2016, the idea that can't somebody do something. And I don't mean that in a necessarily violent. The 25th amendment, right, the 25th amendment or, you know, so-and-so needs to run or now it's even now it's like, well, if only George W. Bush would come out and endorse Kamala, that would there's there's the theme of the past near decade has been can it isn't there a switch that someone can flip? And that is an important point because I, and I say this in the post, I understand this emotion. I do not want Trump. Here is the Republican nominee. I did not want him to be president in 2016. I did not want I did not want him to not accept the results of the election. I wanted him to be impeached and convicted after the after the January 6th thing. I did not want him running for office. Again, I did not want him winning the primary. All of that I he I wished it were otherwise. I wish it were otherwise. I wish everything had been otherwise. I don't wish us to be in this situation where Trump is one nominee and Kamala Harris who can't even be interviewed by a local station in Philadelphia without making an embarrassing, cringe-inducing fool of herself in weird in a weird preview of what is to come if she becomes president of the United States. She managed to avoid seeming like Selena Meyer in the debate from Veep. And in this interview, she is Selena Meyer. She was Selena Meyer times two. She was Veep to the deepening. And you know, I don't want to be in this position. But you wish at your peril because this country would not survive. When I say it won't survive. I mean, do we want civil war? Donald Trump is assassinated by a political opponent. That will be the closest we will come to civil war in 160 years without question. Would there in 1968, whole half of cities, Washington, Chicago, various cities were burned down as a result of the Martin Luther King assassination. So let's not. Yeah. And we're at a much lower compared to that era. We're at a much lower trust in federal government in particular. Pew just had some numbers out. It's like 20 22% of Americans trust their government. That's extremely low. Right. So it's an extraordinary sign of widespread immaturity that the liberal world, the liberal America can't accept basic reality. I mean, you can hate it. You can protest against it. You could try to change it in constructive ways. But this like frozen temper tantrum that they've been in of just no, I won't. We can't somehow, it has to go. What is that? That's not, I mean, you know, we sit here and we listen to Ilhan Omar, you know, talk about Jews in Israel and Rashida Tlaib. We're not advocating anything insane. Oh, I would like them both to drop dead though. I mean, but that's not a wish. That's not a real, like, it's like they should drop to famous. It's a Yiddish afraid. They should drop dead. But that means you're not making them drop dead. Nor would I want anyone to do anything to make them drop. Right. That's my point. But that's the wish fulfillment danger, you see, because if it turned out that we were having these conversations about Ilhan Omar, and then somebody got in a car and drove to Washington and went to a softball game and tried to kill Ilhan Omar, that would be the worst possible, which of course happened in 2017. And Steve Scalise nearly died in such a shooting. That would be the worst possible thing for my, for the things that I hold most dear and most important, which is that, you know, American support for Israel remains strong and that the idea being that Israel is the civilized player and that the people who supported are the supporters of civilization as opposed to the supporters of chaos and terrorism. And that would be an act of terrorism. And it would be a monstrous and disastrous thing. So, of course, I don't wish anything like that to happen. I would say it would be more important that they be protected than other people for precisely this reason. But this has also upended the longtime left leaning narrative about domestic terrorism, which is that it's angry right-wing guys picking up guns and going after people, right? This, the last couple of shooters have not been of the right. They have been, they have been, from what we can understand, people who are more sympathetic to those, to candidates on the left. So, that also has been, I think, difficult. There's been a cognitive dissonance among the intelligentsia who write about this stuff, having to come to terms with that, because any time there's been left-wing violence, and this was true in the Antifa riot summer, we were always reminded with all these statistics that the biggest domestic terror threat isn't all these people occupying a federal courthouse on the West Coast. It's these angry white guys, these militants, and they do exist. But I think there is, again, an unwillingness to accept that the impulse towards violence, not just the rhetoric, but the actual actionable behavior on the left has grown in recent decades. We are at some kind of a civilizational crossroads. That's part of the subject of Christine's book, "The Extinction of Experience." That crossroads, we can stay at that crossroads for a long time. I don't mean the light's going to turn red or green, and then we're going to head down a road that we can ever get off of. But when I say we're at an international crossroads, it is that the no-rospan permission structure for thinking the unthinkable, that's the wishful filament part that I'm talking about here, which is think through Mika Przezinski, if you are capable, or Nora Donald, if you are capable, or the people who are writing the stories in Washington most, if you are capable, of what history tells us about when such incidents take place and what they do. I mean, the most obvious example is the World War I, which was in many ways the most destructive event in world history, certainly the most costly war in world history, in some rankings, began by an assassination, right? We've spent 60 years dealing with the Kennedy assassination. Imagine a world in which Ronald Reagan's assassination had been successful, yes, I suppose if you think that supply-side economics was a terrible thing, that would be fine. 1881, Tsar Alexander II is assassinated. He was a liberalizer, assassinated. His son, Alexander III, becomes a reactionary retrogressive, creates the conditions over the course of the next 30-some-odd years for the Bolshevik takeover of Russia and the horrors into which the world descended in the 20th century as a result of Soviet totalitarianism. You are choosing your own adventure and none of the paths are good. Aside from huge widespread cataclysm here as a result, what does the assassination of a presidential candidate, how does that figure into one scheme to preserve democracy? What about that? What about this system that is so precious and so fragile and so on the brink of disintegration? What happens to that when we're this close to an election day and a candidate is taken out? Yeah, because that's the question is the degree to which that talking point is disingenuous. No one really thinks democracy is on the ballot. I'm sure Anne Applebaum thinks democracy is on the ballot because she's an expert on Ukraine and suddenly her ability to understand the complexities of the relations between Ukraine and the Soviet Union and the 1920s desserts her when she talks about America, which she writes about as though she's writing seven days in May or is writing a non-humorous version of Dr. Strangelove. I'm sure there are people who think they don't really think democracy is on the ballot. It's a soundbite. It's a phrase to use to gin up money and support and terror on your side so that as they would say that line, that this is the most important election we've ever had and everything is so you can get people like their heart beating every time they think about what might happen if your rival wins. And one of the things that the democracy is on the ballot type people also say is that they talk a lot about the they say things like, if I were a foreign correspondent covering this country, the way that American reporters cover foreign countries, what would I say about Trump and all this stuff, right? That's a common line. Like if I were coming from, if I were covering this, but this were taking place, you know, in Kazakhstan or something, I would have a very easy time saying, well, this guy is a wannabe dictator and, you know, all that stuff. But now is also a good time to say if you were covering this in some other country and one of the nominees was just shot at twice, how would you cover that? You know, it doesn't always, it doesn't all go in one direction. The whole like, well, this would, this is clearly banana republic stuff. If you could just take a step back is always sort of focused on what Trump is doing and what Trump represents. But you know, this is, we were getting into that kind of chaotic situation with this where people just keep taking shots at one of the major nominees with a couple months to go before the election. It also shows a real distrust of not just our institutions, I understand the distrust of institutions, many of which have failed and lied to the American people. So that distrust in a way has been earned. It's Constitution Day. Today's Constitution Day. We're supposed to be celebrating our Constitution, which is and remains an incredible document. And I feel like a lot of the rhetoric of the democracy in danger. I mean, it was 2021. There was a New York Times headline that like, will this be the end of democracy or something? Or will 2024 be the year democracy ends? It shows an absolute lack of mistrust in the document that started our whole experiment here. And we know that there's a lot of distrust because we know there are a fair number of people on the left who want to, you know, radically alter the Supreme Court because they're not getting the decisions they want. They want to radically change, you know, the way the electoral college works. So there is a real, there's a disrespect, I think, that comes out in that sort of attack on the Constitution. So when they're talking about democracy, they're talking about their side winning elections. They're actually not talking about democracy. If they were, they'd have a healthier respect for our Constitution. This is where the talk about the 2020 Trump's refusal to concede in 2020 and everything that happened in the two months after it, I find very upsetting as listeners will know, as I said before, and Trump's conduct was disgraceful. I think he should have been impeached and convicted for his conduct for encouraging the riot at the Capitol, which I believe he did. The story of the 2020 election is a story of the thickness and richness and complexity of this country, saving this country from a very potentially bad outcome, because the story of 2020 was the utter failure of Trump and his forces to marshal the tools of power to keep him in power, not his success at it, right? The system one cases that he lost every one of. No, there was not a single slate of electors recognized and sent to the cap. By the way, that had happened in the United States in 1948, different sets of electors were sent to the Capitol in 1948. And I think later also, maybe even 19s, I can't remember when, but segregationists were playing this games with sending separate sets of electors. That didn't happen. Pence didn't, and Pence said, I don't even have a modality if I wanted to do what the president wants me to do. I don't even have a method which to do it. There's nothing that says I have any ability not to accept the box with the elector ballots in it. It's not like, okay, I'm there to accept the box. I'm not there to say I'm not accepting the box. There's no thing and there's nothing anywhere that says I can even do that. We have thousands of elective offices aside from the presidency. We have hundreds of elective offices in Washington, aside from the presidency. And every effort that I know about that is an effort to simplify, streamline and make this process less thick is a liberal and leftist effort. The empowerment of the imperial presidency is not until Donald Trump said, well, okay, if you're going to do this, I'm going to do this pretty much. The empowerment of the imperial presidency is a democratic party and liberal leftist this is their rodeo. And as you say, they don't want an electoral college. They don't want, you know, they want the Supreme Court to have to be packed or whatever, all of that. Again, monkeys paw, like, let's see how you like it. By the way, let's see how you like it. This is why I mentioned I didn't go into this in scenarios. But when you start an era of assassinations, it doesn't stop. So you get JFK, then you get RF, you get Martin Luther King, you get RFK, you get George Wallace crippled by assassins. Well, you get two assassination attempts on Gerald Ford, you get the kidnapping and murder of the Italian prime minister, Dolfo Moro in or I'll bet you in 1979, you get Reagan and John Paul the second nearly killed both within three weeks of each other, at which point, after 18 years of this frenzy of assassinations, somehow the world spat out no more. I don't know how it happened. I don't really understand it. It was a generation of a satcher and that effort to blow up in black hole. That's right. At the at the conservative party conference of black hole, their old Mountbatten blown up in in in in India. I mean, it was constant. The last serious assassination on the planet, I think, was you talk Robin in 1995? Like we this is not a thing. You want to make it a thing in Japan? Yeah. Oh, I'll be I'm sorry. That's right. I mean, so it so it'll never end. I mean, assassination is the oldest political act in the book. What is a Shakespeare play without somebody killing a king? You know, or Christopher Marlow play about somebody killing a king. But so it's the oldest game in the book, but you want you want to start in with Trump getting shot. Let's say you like it when Harris gets shot in the in the middle of her say, let's see what happens when a governor gets shot from walking around. Let's see what happens when and you know, it starts and it doesn't end. And that's why it has to be ended now here right now. And this rhetoric and logic that is being used by the mainstream media is going to get an era of assassination started again, because it creates the permission structure for people to be assassins. It says you are worthy if you are an assassin. It's worse than that, because it's not just rhetoric now. It's not just kind of partisan rhetoric. It's trying to normalize the motive for assassination when the person who who you dislike politically is is actually succeeding at doing this kind of unbelievable thing, which is to come back from a from a crushing defeat being booted out of office by the American people to come back and say, yeah, I'm going to do this again. I'm trying this again. But that normalization of motive is the thing that really disturbs me. And it is, I know people were joking. It's not really, it's very dark humor, if it's a joke, but saying, Oh, your skirts, Trump skirt was too short. This is a reference to the idea that if a woman is raped, she brought it on herself if she was dressed a certain way or behaving a certain way or acting a certain way. But there is an attempt to normalize motive here. And that is, that is very worrisome, because it's kind of consistent across many media institutions right now, not just the far left MSNBC talking heads, but that's an actual point. That's an actual point, because isn't that what we've seen with the protesters have a point in Chicago? That's right. But to some point, you are supporting a group that murders and wounds 5,000 people in a single morning in Israel on October 7th. And we are heading toward October 7th with the most horrifying trans valuation of values I've ever seen in which somehow October 7th is going to be converted by pro Hamas forces into a day of mourning and celebration of their cause and not of the not of the slaughter of Israelis. That's the normalization too. The normalization of radical anti-Semitic activity. We just had that we have just been informed that Russell Wichford, the professor at Cornell, who professed himself exhilarated by the murder and an injury of 5,000 of my people and our people is back teaching at Cornell, having taken a voluntary leave and having had no reprimand whatsoever, including by the way, like Cornell could have given him a million dollars to go away on the grounds that maybe they can't get rid of him as a tenured professor, but his presence on campus is so uniquely destructive that out of whatever billions of dollars they have in their endowment, they could buy him off to get him the hell out of Ithaca, because that person should not be on campus exhilarated by the murder of Jews when there are thousands of Jews wandering around Cornell trying to get to class and having their dining hall nearly, you know, threatened with having been blown up just last October. And, you know, that's a thing Cornell didn't do. And that is a thing again, normalization of radical, nihilistic mass violence and the support of mass violence in the place that is supposed to be the progenitor and the defender and the holder of the traditions of civilization. Well, that's where that's where it is a slow, the slow boil begins, right? The normalization language then becomes a kind of tacit acceptance, which when partnered with no consequences, whether criminal justice consequences or the, as you say, what should have been shame on Cornell, shame on them. They should get rid of this guy. He should lose his position there. But by not doing those things, it makes it more, it makes it easier for future radicals to come through and say, well, here's an example of how you should treat me too. It is Ryan Seacrest here. There was a recent social media trend which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to Chumbakasino.com. It's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumbakasino has over a hundred online casino style games, all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now at Chumbakasino.com. Sponsored by Chumbakasino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. Let's do a little, let's do a little raw naked punditry as Jonah Goldberg, who was supposed to be on the podcast tomorrow, by the way, would say raw punditry. So we are now getting a sheet of polls in all taken post debate all over the place, high quality polls, and clearly any delusion that people might have had that Trump didn't lose the debate or Harris wasn't helped by the debate should be now laid to rest. Every poll shows a measurable bump for Harris nationally, at least. Some of them pretty significant. I mean, two or three points, four points, something like that. Closer in the battleground states, the extent that you can measure those, still a razor thin election. But I do think that Trump did himself no favors last week. And this is the other point about the, you know, they're reading the dogs stuff is it didn't work. Like we had a conversation last week about whether this was smart because it would be a slow acting way of keeping the thing in the news. It didn't work. Like something like 21% of people said that hearing that made them less likely to vote for Trump. And nobody said that it made them more likely to vote for Trump. And they couldn't stop because of course, anything he does, he has to then double down on because otherwise it would be the mission and error. And Roy Cohn told him 50 years ago, you should never say you were sorry about anything. Anybody have any thoughts about this? Matt's not here. So he's usually the one who like parro rates. But the poll, well, the thing about the polls and all of this and our friend, Mark Halpern, whose newsletter has been, I think, very consistently reminding readers of this. They're baffling because they're very close, but also because we're not sure of the reasons why undecided voters are independent voters in some of these key states. What their motivation is like, what do they see? Because it's clear that, you know, the Trump ceiling, which we've talked about many times, but Kamala Harris remains a weird sort of sphinx to those voters as well. Now we have a take on her. We think we understand where she's coming from. And but I think a lot of voters found much of that convention appealing. She's certainly a contrast both generationally and tonally from Donald Trump. And they were, you know, and they saw the excitement of Democratic voters rushing back home to a better candidate. But they are still unsettled by her. And that's why her media appearance is the one you, the local media appearance you mentioned earlier, John, and the one she'll do today with the National Association of Black Journalists, those matter because their events in her campaign, because she does them so rarely. So I think the unsettled feeling, the uncertainty people have about Harris, won't necessarily translate in the polls, but it might we might obviously see it on election day. But I think that's the uneasiness of people reading too much into some of these recent polls. It just I mean, it just means that this is more a warning shot to the right than it is like something that should make the left like thrilled, which is he did really badly. Don't pretend otherwise. Like there's no point there's no point in going along with this. Stop. Stop. I would say if you want Trump to win, stop using your megaphone to enhance the story that animals were being eaten in Ohio because it's not helping. So if you want to help your guy, even if he says the way you help me is to talk about how we're creating stories that, you know, as JD Van said, I'll create a story to try to create a narrative that I need people to be talking about migrants. Plenty of people were talking about migrants before it's the number two issue in the country. They didn't need amplification help here. This wasn't like it was the number 11 story and they really needed to move up on the charts. You know, it's already number two, you know, with a bullet. So thanks a lot, you know, and there were and there were real scandalous news stories about migrant crime. Yeah, you didn't you didn't need to go somewhere else. Yeah, well, he did Trump did that border speech. That was that was an almost a cartoonish event because and we talked about it on the pot at the time, which was he he went to the border with families of people who had been killed by illegal immigrants and the mothers, you know, grieving mothers were standing behind him. And, you know, he stepped up to the microphone and he said, you know, it's a really it's a really sad time in this country right now, you know, the president just got pushed aside and it's unfair and this and he went into like a it was like a minute and a half rambling about Biden about what they're doing to Biden and how he ended up against crime law. Right. And it really was I remember counting it was like close to 90 seconds. It was it was the whole beginning from the first words of his thing. And you just sat there going like, what what's what's happening here? But behind him, right? The staging of it was correct. He was at the border. He was at a fence. He had the the families, right? And he's sort of, I think they're sort of looking at what else they can do and say precisely because this issue, they did succeed in the I mean, not in this time, but in the in the past and and through the past, you know, decade or so of bringing immigration to this number two spot on concerns. It's there. It's like, what else can you do? Maybe we'll tell them they're eating dogs. How do you get it to John? Yeah. Do you still think there's going to be more debates? Yes. Because the race is frozen. And I don't see how it gets unfrozen. And now she's here's one of the reasons I think they're going to be more debates. The interview with her on was that Philadelphia, I can't with Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. Okay. So in her convention speech, in her introductory speech, she said, my child in middle class, love small business. I want to help people about it. In her convention speech, she said, my child in middle class, my mother had a friend, she was a small business woman. I love small business people. Donald Trump doesn't like abortion. Yeah. In her debate, she said, child in middle class, love my mother, my second mother, she was a small business person. Donald Trump says it's about abortion. And then she gave her then with Dana Bash, she said, I'm in child in middle class. And then she did exact she is like locked. It's like she's lip syncing to the 45. You know the best you remember people you would go on American bandstand. Now I'm dating myself again as an old man, go on American bandstand with Dick Clark. And one of the reasons it was fun to watch is that they didn't perform live. They just lip synced to the to the 45, which you knew if they performed live, they would have sounded a little different than you would have gone. Oh, I don't like that. I want to hear the phrasing the way I want to like it. Seth loves live concerts. I don't because I want to hear I want to hear the 45. She is now but now it's really not. She's like a one hit wonder. And she's gone into now we're just hearing the same single. She's a pair. She's becoming a parody of herself. Every and parents parody. Right. So, she needs new material. She can't go. I'm sorry. She can't go on like this for 50 days. The very thing that you cite Mark's newsletter saying is the idea that she maybe she's too liberal has purchase because she's not saying anything to change the impression that she's too liberal. And since she says the same things over and over and over again, she's not changing any perceptions of her in her favor. All she's doing is solidifying democratic support for her. But this is where I think they the gamble that they took on her and it kind of worked through the convention. But I don't think it works now. And you're right. There's too long a stretch before the before the end of the game is that she wouldn't have to do the specifics. She wouldn't have to really defend Biden's policies because she would talk about her values. And that's why she keeps repeating. I'm from the middle class. It has become a meme now online where someone says, honey, will you clean out the garage? And he says, as a man, as a person who grew up middle class, I can't really do that for you. But there she really has doubled down on that. And she's very consistent and disciplined in the few interviews she's given by by sticking to. You don't need to know specifics because you know my values. Well, I don't think that is enough for people. And I and this and we don't know especially this interview with the black journalists, like how she gonna, you know, there've been these several occasions now where she changes her tone. And people say, oh, the code shifting is normal. This is just why people don't understand maybe. Yeah, but a lot of but a lot of voters don't understand it either. And she she's doing either she should explain that this is, you know, enlighten us with how this is a normal thing or not. But she just seems to be pandering. So whether she panders with the journalists today, whether she whether she gives specifics, it will be interesting to watch. There's a friendly crowd for her very friendly Trump bombed with this group. So okay, but we'll see. Trump still isn't saying yes. He'll say yes, the minute day it the minute today, or he'll issue a proposal or something. I mean, I don't know, maybe he shouldn't do one. I have no idea because he of course does badly in the debates. But I cannot, there is something in me that resists the possibility that this that that that what we saw there is the last time we're going to see them in proximity to each other between now and the election. The election is too close. Things are too weird. He is a weird candidate. He is now a weirder candidate because of the assassination attempts. The weirdness of her candidacy is going to come into stark a relief during the month of October. If she continues to be this utterly vapid vapor of a candidate, it is going to start it is going to start unnerving people that she says nothing. You know, I mean, she is, you know, we mentioned it before, maybe this will be our commentary recommends right now, which is the movie being there from 1979 based on the novel by Yurza Kaczynski, directed by Hal Ashby starring Peter Sellers. I was supposed to get to do my recommendation today. Okay. Well, then, well, no, well, I didn't remember that. So I'm just saying, she is Chaunce the gardener. She is Chaunce the gardener. She is saying things like, we should all tend our garden. And everyone's going, my God, this is so great. And then, yeah, he gets away with it because it's satire. But it's somebody they're going to be like, what the hell does she be? And then it's going to be like, you know what, maybe she's not really middle class from other with a cancer researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where she spent her teenage years. And by the way, I looked both at her autobiography and at the worship book published about her in 2019 called Kamala's Way. And for the fact that she spent seven years in Montreal, there's one paragraph in her memoir. And she goes right from San Francisco to Howard University. And nothing about the fact that she grew up in Canada. Now, I'm not saying that it matters that she grew up in Canada. But like, somebody's going to be like, what did she do in Canada? Is anyone gone to interview her classmates from high school in Canada? Who is she? Yeah. No, I mean, it's going to somebody we're going to say, if you don't feed the informational beast, people are going to have to go out and find things to talk about with her. But that's the thing is that the instinct in the media is not to do that. The instinct in the media right with Romney, we knew that he cut someone's hair with Rick Perry. We knew that he lived near a very racist rock. There was a series of these stories that were like, well, that's clearly the best they could do. And I think that we all said at the time, something to the effect of, this is what happens when you send somebody, when somebody gets a lead on a beat on an investigative story. And it doesn't really pan out, but they've put so much into it that they want to at least publish whatever they have. But you see the instinct is exactly the opposite with that, with Republicans, like, if it's just a rock, then we'll publish the rock, whatever we have. And with her, it's like, no, we don't publish whatever we have. We don't even go looking to see what we have. And that doesn't even necessarily mean that September 17th. It is September 17th. The election is not till November 5th. She can't say the same things this way. Now, if she were talking policy, I think she kind of could, like, as I, George W. Bush in 2000, focused on four major policy items. But they were substantive discussion points that he was trying to put over, saying, if I'm president, here's how I'm going to be different, particularly on education. I have this plan with this thing, and we're going to do this, and we're going to do that. It's no child left behind, and we're going to have standards, and we're going to have testing, and we're going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? So that was substantive, but focused. This is, you know, my values. And at some point, it's like, we don't, what values do we know? I don't know what her values are. What does that even mean? What does it even mean that she has values? I mean, to get us back to where the values of the American people really lie. That's, that's, which are the values of the, her values are the values of valuations. I don't know. I, I, I know, uh, that's why, yes, I think there will, there will be more debates. Okay. I can't do she can't, the first debate can't repeat itself exactly also, which is why Trump should want it, because it's like, you can't, what's she going to do, memorize that performance and do it again? You know, she doesn't have them, she's not going to have the same moderators. You're not going to have the same questions. Like he should have the same questions fed towards the fans. Right. As the affidavit that the, the, the ABC worker, where did that story go? Where did that show go? I don't know, because we don't, first of all, it's a weird story. The story we're talking about here is that somebody issued an affidavit, had it notarized on the day before the debate on September 9th, working in ABC, saying ABC is essentially colluding with the Harris campaign. They changed the podium. They didn't give her the exact questions, but they gave her sort of the direction. ABC is very biased. I've been working here for 10 years. It's very biased sincerely, but the name of the, the person who gave the affidavit is blacked out, as is the name of the notary. And so we don't know who this is, what this is. And, you know, if somebody were really, you know, Ben Shapiro, my friend Ben Shapiro should offer this guy a million dollars or whoever, or this one a million dollars and offer him a job to work at the daily wire to come out and, and, and testify, something like somebody ought to do that. If someone's gonna, you know, Chris Rufo offered like $5,000 from someone to prove that they were eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, which is really a great use of non-profit taxpayer money. But, this is where, this is, this is where Andrew Breitbart would, would, that, this was his thing. That was his lane. Right, exactly. Anyway, I don't know. So, but that, that story is very odd because ABC, as far as I know, has not said this affidavit is false, by the way. They're just, they're just letting it lie. I know. Anyway, okay. So now we're really going far field. Christine, you have a recommend and you're not going to be here tomorrow. So I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to step on my moment, John. Okay. No, I'm, I'm, as you all know, I love speculative fiction. And I, and I'm still on my Japanese fiction moratorium because I heard, I heard the complaints, I've taken them on board. But I did read a new, this is not Japanese, a friend actually sent me a new work of speculative fiction called Loneliness and Company. It's a novel by Charlie Dieroff. I am almost done with it. It's in some ways uneven, but in many ways, really, really fascinating. It's, you know, it's dystopian, but it's a near future that I think a lot of us can recognize. The problem of loneliness has been supposedly been removed from what's called the emotional index. They've gotten rid of loneliness, but it turns out people are still suffering from it. So this very ambitious young woman is, is hired by what she thinks is a company to figure out why people are lonely and to create an AI type program of that becomes a friend to these lonely people to treat loneliness. So as you can see, obviously this, this book is like, goes straight to a lot of my nonfiction concerns, but it's, it's very well written. She has a very light touch. She's a wonderful writer. I would say it's uneven in the sense that it can be quite heavy handed on the anti technology part, which, you know, generally I am sympathetic to, but I, in fiction, I like, I like a lighter touch with that. But I think if you're, it also has a really fascinating portrait of New York City, because everyone's left New York, it's a city that nobody wants to live in. And she's, she's returned to New York to do this, this odd job, which spins into a, you know, I won't know spoilers, but it spins into something that turns out not to be what it seems. But it gives a kind of interesting dystopian look at New York. So if you're a New Yorker, you might find that interesting. But I, look, it's, it's, I read it in, you know, like half a day, I'm almost done with it. I'm going to finish it on the airplane tomorrow, but it's, it's worth, if you like speculative fiction, it's a new entry in that genre of new speculative fiction writers, loneliness and company by Charlie Dieroff, D-Y-R-O-F-F. And that's our location. Fantastic. Well, we'll be back tomorrow for Christine, Abe, and Seth on John Pabourts. Keep the camera bright. We're the Lucky Land Sluts. You can get Lucky just about anywhere. Daily Beloved. We're gathered here today. Has anyone seen the bride and groom? Sorry, sorry, we're here. We were getting lucky in the limo when we lost track of time. No, Lucky Land Casino, with cash prizes that add up quicker than a guest registry. But in that case, I pronounce you lucky. Play for free at LuckyLand Sluts dot com. No purchase necessary. BGW Graboid were prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply.