If Books Could Kill - The Worst Takes of 2025 [TEASER]

00:00:00.000 Did we make the joke last year that like the worst take was someone criticizing us?

00:00:04.860 I think we did.

00:00:06.200 I think we might have too.

00:00:07.600 What if this whole episode is just us reading feedback to the show?

00:00:10.620 Negative feedback.

00:00:11.480 Your worst takes, like the boys take feedback or whatever.

00:00:15.320 Do a tagline.

00:00:17.660 I'm doing the zinger.

00:00:18.780 Okay.

00:00:19.200 Peter.

00:00:20.000 Michael.

00:00:20.660 What do you know about the worst takes of 2025?

00:00:23.380 All I know is that for the third year in a row, the worst takes of the year were all

00:00:28.420 light criticism of me.

00:00:30.000 so the year in worst takes the year in bad takes uh this was an incredible year for bad takes this

00:00:50.100 was one of the championship worst takes years we have sort of kept tabs on the worst takes of the

00:00:57.140 year yes and i think that means that we have we have between us the actual worst takes of the

00:01:02.060 year this is the definitive list number one people saying that i was too nice to elon musk

00:01:07.040 no recency bias either just this week what you've been thinking about no recency bias

00:01:13.520 just the last blue sky reply i got the only thing you've been thinking and uh texting me about for 1.00

00:01:19.120 the last two weeks you do a two-parter about how this guy is the biggest piece of shit on earth 0.98

00:01:22.960 And then at one point you're like, hey, and by the way, he knows how to do vertical integration. 1.00

00:01:27.700 And then people are like, Peter, you're a sucker. 0.96

00:01:29.800 As usual, I am using this as an opportunity to reflect on the year that has come behind us. 0.98

00:01:36.540 I think politically the central fact of this year was that it became undeniable that we're in the middle of an authoritarian resurgence. 0.70

00:01:43.560 It's really fucking obvious what has happened to the United States at this point.

00:01:46.700 And so the op-ed pages of the country had to like deal with it. 0.87

00:01:51.420 Like, what are they going to do as this becomes just increasingly thuddingly obvious?

00:01:56.480 Right.

00:01:56.660 So I have pulled out a couple of categories of bad takes because they're all kind of

00:02:02.220 interchangeable on some level.

00:02:03.920 So my first category is just brain dead, both sides.

00:02:08.040 The most egregious example of this is, we're not going to talk about it in any detail,

00:02:12.480 but the miserable Olivia Reingold piece in the free press saying that, like, you say

00:02:17.480 kids are starving, but they're actually starving in Gaza.

00:02:20.880 like just yeah monstrous probably the most disgusting thing i've read this year morally

00:02:25.640 it's the worst thing we saw this year it's absolutely egregious there's just not that

00:02:29.420 much to say about it because it's like you're you're defending people who are starving children

00:02:33.220 on the grounds that the children were already sick or have a pre-existing condition uh and

00:02:39.320 like the implication is that it's all faked or people are overreacting and then like a month

00:02:43.540 after that piece came out, there is this big partnership among all of these various UN agencies

00:02:51.580 and NGOs, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. They declared famine in Gaza.

00:02:58.960 So it was like their word against Olivia Rheingold and the free press, I guess. That was meant to be 0.96

00:03:05.060 your takeaway. We also had Megan McArdle wrote an article called The Missing Context from the 0.61

00:03:10.620 Elon Musk salute. Hell yeah. The Washington Post published in defense of the White House ballroom,

00:03:16.000 Trump versus NIMBYs. Not in my backyard, but the backyard is the White House backyard. 0.73

00:03:23.380 Yep. You may think it's bad, but it's actually fine. We also had Brett Stevens writing,

00:03:27.220 no, comma, Israel is not committing genocide. Persuasion wrote the case for tariffs.

00:03:32.840 Persuasion also published, when they go low, we go dot, dot, dot low. That is about Gavin Newsom's

00:03:39.760 tweets persuasion is so interesting because it's like what if the free press had no money

00:03:44.180 what if they were just in it for the love of the game but then my favorite both sides take

00:03:49.860 this is from uh june 3rd 2025 it's called how history will remember elon musk yes by someone

00:03:57.240 named louise perry it's in the new york times i'm gonna send you the nut graph this actually isn't

00:04:02.580 my winner this is a honorary mention for better or worse elon musk is a visionary oh this is just

00:04:07.900 this is just quoting me from the episode you're so mad about this officially you're joking but

00:04:14.060 you're so mad about this no i'm obviously mad i have no doubt that he's volatile and reckless 0.96

00:04:21.100 but those who dismiss him as a fraud or an idiot have not been paying close attention 0.99

00:04:24.880 yes his time meddling with the federal government has come to an end and yes perhaps his foray into 0.99

00:04:30.140 politics was in part a disappointment to him but mr musk's vision goes well beyond washington

00:04:36.020 He has always been clear on this point and continues to tell anyone who will listen.

00:04:39.580 Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun, he told Fox News last month.

00:04:46.120 No one wants to admit.

00:04:47.300 No one wants to admit it.

00:04:48.040 The sun is gradually expanding.

00:04:50.320 The sun is gradually expanding.

00:04:54.760 And so we do at some point need to be a multi-planet civilization because Earth will be incinerated.

00:05:00.140 This is something that will happen, by the way, in 5 billion years.

00:05:03.260 The human species will be wiped off the planet like numerous times over by the time this happens.

00:05:09.100 We're going to be killed by either Elon Musk or someone exactly like him way before this happens.

00:05:14.760 My actual winner for the best achievement in both sides is from the Atlantic on June 7th,

00:05:21.560 2025 called Sometimes a Parade is Just a Parade.

00:05:25.820 Not everything the Trump administration does is a threat to democracy.

00:05:29.320 And this is about the military parade.

00:05:30.720 The deranged military parade that he wanted to have on his birthday.

00:05:34.100 Name one difference between this and every parade you've ever seen.

00:05:38.220 Wait, who's the author?

00:05:39.820 This is Corey Shaikh.

00:05:41.240 Fake name, right?

00:05:42.220 No, I think it's real.

00:05:42.780 It's like you're glancing around the room.

00:05:44.620 You're like, Corey Shaikh.

00:05:47.440 Well, her real name is Harlem, but she changed it.

00:05:49.620 Terrible.

00:05:49.920 She starts by summarizing the criticism of the parade.

00:05:54.180 She says, criticism of the display begins with its price tag, estimated as high as $45 million.

00:05:59.800 No, it does not.

00:06:00.440 That's not the primary criticism of the military parade.

00:06:04.500 No.

00:06:04.700 And then she gives a bunch of examples of that, which we're not going to read because they're

00:06:06.920 boring.

00:06:07.840 She then says, other prominent critics of the Trump administration have expressed concern

00:06:11.480 that the parade's real purpose is to use the military to intimidate the president's critics.

00:06:16.220 Then she gives some examples of that.

00:06:17.660 And then, Peter, she responds to the criticism.

00:06:21.340 Oh.

00:06:21.820 This is slightly long, but we want to get the full argument in all its glory here.

00:06:26.840 The full shake, as we're calling it.

00:06:28.540 But these critics may well be projecting more general concerns about Trump onto a parade.

00:06:34.060 Not everything the Trump administration does is destructive to democracy.

00:06:37.260 And the example of Bastille Day in France suggests that dictatorships are not the only governments to hold military displays.

00:06:43.520 The U.S. itself has been known to mount victory parades after successful military campaigns.

00:06:47.940 In today's climate, a military parade could offer an opportunity to counter misperceptions about the armed forces.

00:06:53.440 It could bring Americans closer to service members and juice military recruitment, all of which is sorely needed.

00:06:59.160 It could be doing a thing that it's not doing.

00:07:01.580 I don't, okay.

00:07:02.340 The risk, of course, is that Trump will use the occasion not to celebrate the troops,

00:07:06.200 but to corrode their professionalism by proclaiming them his military and his generals.

00:07:11.440 This is a president known to mix politics with honoring the military,

00:07:14.960 as he did at Arlington National Cemetery at West Point's commencement, 0.99

00:07:18.580 and in a Memorial Day post on True Social, calling his opponents scum. 0.99

00:07:23.440 To be fair. 0.96

00:07:24.640 Will he do the thing that he has always done or will he do a thing that he has never done?

00:07:29.660 Yep.

00:07:30.480 Even so, the commander in chief has a right to engage with the military that Americans elected him to lead.

00:07:36.140 The responsibility of the military and of the country is to look past the president's hollow solipsism and embrace the men and women who defend the United States.

00:07:43.500 Look past it, Peter.

00:07:44.740 Look past everything he's ever done in his whole life.

00:07:47.380 Everything he does and says.

00:07:49.360 Look past the symbolism.

00:07:50.780 Look past the purpose of it.

00:07:52.520 Look past the person running it.

00:07:53.980 Find a fake purpose.

00:07:55.200 Yep.

00:07:55.680 And then embrace that.

00:07:57.020 This article says at the end, a version of this essay originally appeared on the AEI

00:08:01.900 Ideas Forum from the American Enterprise Institute. 0.99

00:08:04.920 So this person is a fucking ghoul. 1.00

00:08:06.260 But the Atlantic is running this, right? 1.00

00:08:07.960 And the Atlantic has like a overwhelmingly kind of center left readership.

00:08:12.320 I think like you can see the little gears turning in their brain.

00:08:16.460 What's actually happening in the country is this one dimensional fascist power grab.

00:08:20.560 Like, it makes no sense to even deny this at this point.

00:08:23.440 But the problem with punditry in this era is that that's not that interesting.

00:08:27.720 Just be like, hey, this thing that looks super fascist is actually really fascist.

00:08:30.920 People don't want to do that.

00:08:32.120 And these people don't think that their job is, like, to contextualize this.

00:08:36.320 Like, you could easily talk about, like, how Kim Jong-un does this, how other countries have militarized as they've fallen down the slope into authoritarianism.

00:08:43.420 It's like a very familiar pattern.

00:08:44.920 But people don't think it's, like, their job to, like, read things or give historical context.

00:08:48.540 So they have to do, like, takes.

00:08:50.140 They have to do views on things like, oh, I need to say something about this that's like counterintuitive and interesting.

00:08:55.600 The Atlantic and The Times in particular have leadership that really wants to like challenge the views of its liberal readership.

00:09:05.020 Yeah.

00:09:05.220 So you end up getting these contrarian takes and the bar for the takes that they are willing to entertain as long as they're contrarian is super low.

00:09:18.300 What I'm so amazed at is how people don't seem to be able to notice, like, how dumb a lot of these arguments are. 0.69

00:09:25.340 Like, you think it's bad that your next door neighbor is beating his wife. 0.98

00:09:29.140 But if he wasn't beating his wife, you would feel differently.

00:09:32.140 Right.

00:09:32.380 Well, yes.

00:09:32.660 If the facts of the thing are different, I feel differently.

00:09:35.460 That's not hypocrisy.

00:09:37.220 That's not an argument in any meaningful way.

00:09:39.180 Yes.

00:09:39.620 They're sort of like, well, there is a type of military parade that isn't so bad.

00:09:44.780 Yeah.

00:09:45.380 And it's like, right.

00:09:47.240 Okay.

00:09:47.640 It's like, well, we do this to celebrate wartime victories.

00:09:51.420 OK, do we have a wartime victory?

00:09:52.840 No.

00:09:53.300 Our triumph in Afghanistan.

00:09:54.960 Thank you, Joe Biden. 0.63

00:09:56.640 And like France does this.

00:09:58.040 Well, yeah, France does this every year.

00:09:59.340 There's like a long tradition of doing this in France.

00:10:01.000 It's something they do all the time.

00:10:02.040 They don't do this like out of the blue on the leader's birthday.

00:10:05.320 So it's not I'm not owned by this.

00:10:06.900 I'm just like rolling my eyes.

00:10:07.920 Like it makes you look so much worse than the people who are just like, yeah, this thing

00:10:11.180 that is happening is bad.

00:10:12.520 I do have one that that sort of falls into this category.

00:10:15.600 It is from the New York Times magazine in January 2025 by Ross Barkin.

00:10:23.600 It's titled, Goodbye Resistance, the Era of Hyperpolitics is Over.

00:10:28.720 I think I've read this.

00:10:29.540 This is part of a genre of early 2025 takes that were sort of like taking for granted

00:10:37.880 that the left and liberals and Democrats, that they had suffered a defeat that really meant

00:10:46.180 the end of the project and that we needed to sort of re-envision what the left and liberalism was

00:10:51.980 going to look like moving forward because clearly it had failed, right? Donald Trump had risen back

00:10:56.220 up. This, of course, did not happen after 2020 when Joe Biden won. It did not happen in the 2025

00:11:01.400 elections when Democrats soundly beat Republicans? Of course not. But the 2025 elections are what I

00:11:08.540 think flips all of this on its head. Because a year ago, everyone was like, Democrats have

00:11:15.380 taken a set of positions that the public hates, despises, and they need to completely revamp.

00:11:23.120 A few months later, they clear out the competition in all these major elections,

00:11:29.920 Right. When the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, all of the trends that the pundits were pointing towards as like the death knell for the Democratic Party flipped back.

00:11:44.880 Did all of the pundits who were like, well, you know, the shift in the Hispanic vote has completely changed the game.

00:11:50.880 Did they write their apologies in November?

00:11:54.880 No, no. Right.

00:11:56.060 It's time for Democrats to start saying Latinx.

00:11:58.320 it's the only way so this particular piece in new york times magazine is less about the like

00:12:05.780 partisan particulars and more about political aesthetics and style he notes that both sides

00:12:14.280 of the aisle were very hyper engaged during trump's first term and that in early 2025 we'd

00:12:21.200 seen a sort of lack of anti-trump energy yeah which is sort of true right there was a lot of

00:12:26.140 capitulation among corporations. There was sort of a defeatism among Democrats. He says the drama

00:12:33.700 surrounding anti-fascism faded. Now it can seem tired and alarmist to warn that Trump will end

00:12:39.480 free elections. So cringe. It's so cringe. The corporations and politicians that once paid lip

00:12:44.240 service to the values of alarmed liberals now feel free to reverse course. Mark Zuckerberg,

00:12:49.440 the chief executive of Meta, went on Joe Rogan's show to express his desire for a corporate culture

00:12:54.360 that celebrates masculinity and aggression he's framing this as depoliticization right like as if

00:13:01.640 mark zuckerberg going on rogan wearing a chain right and talking about masculinity

00:13:08.060 is the absence of politics right the real mark zuckerberg is finally emerging yes

00:13:14.000 mark zuckerberg's a natural form of a cool dude a cool masculine dude what was actually happening

00:13:24.100 in the corporate world was that everyone was very aware that Trump was about to make everything

00:13:28.940 very political.

00:13:30.140 Right. 0.99

00:13:30.460 And they wanted to suck up to him. 0.99

00:13:31.880 Yeah, yeah. 0.98

00:13:32.140 So Mark Zuckerberg is like, I do jujitsu, by the way. 0.99

00:13:36.960 The entire sort of savvy political punditry class, people who like their whole fucking 0.95

00:13:41.600 thing is like electoral politics, right? 0.95

00:13:43.360 Like, oh, we must do what is popular, completely ignored the fact that like Trump is historically

00:13:48.140 one of the most unpopular presidents ever.

00:13:50.000 And his agenda is wildly unpopular. 1.00

00:13:52.960 People hate this shit. 1.00

00:13:54.680 People think that you are lying when you tell them what his actual agenda is. 1.00

00:13:58.920 That's actually like a weird superpower that they have.

00:14:00.960 But all of these like allegedly savvy pundits were like, well, the country loves deporting 11 million people. 0.99

00:14:07.100 Most of the pundits that write this sort of shit are these like center to center right, center left sort of dudes. 0.99

00:14:14.160 They are deeply insecure about their position in this country. 0.99

00:14:17.860 And so every time Democrats win, they're like, oh, this is kind of a fluke.

00:14:22.720 And every time Republicans win, they're like, oh, this proves it.

00:14:26.580 Right.

00:14:26.760 No one agrees with us.

00:14:28.300 Right.

00:14:29.000 It all comes out in these moments because they have very much bought into the idea that they are not real Americans.

00:14:36.200 Yeah, totally.

00:14:36.740 Yeah.

00:14:36.880 All right.

00:14:37.100 I am going to send you a little bit more here.

00:14:39.220 What comes next might be a more conventional politics, one still grounded in resistance, but perhaps of a quieter type.

00:14:45.800 When Trump signed his executive order to end birthright citizenship, the governors and attorneys general of more than 20 states sued to stop him.

00:14:52.240 Mass protest wasn't required, nor were calls for a fresh anti-fascist movement.

00:14:56.780 The work was merely done.

00:14:58.100 Democrats seem to be saying, implicitly, that this was enough.

00:15:01.000 Action without performance.

00:15:02.540 What is probably not soon returning, regardless, is the white-hot activism of the last decade.

00:15:07.660 Politics will be the static crackling in the background.

00:15:10.560 It won't be everything anymore.

00:15:12.660 Dude, think of a worse prediction than this.

00:15:14.560 It's crazy.

00:15:15.600 If you thought that politics was about to calm down.

00:15:19.420 No, I know.

00:15:19.780 When Trump was entering office, when like when you saw the executive orders piling up, it's hard to believe that this person analyzes politics for a living.

00:15:28.360 You're basically taking the first three months or the first like two months of an administration and just being like, well, this is how it's going to be forever.

00:15:34.800 Democrats were licking their wounds for a bit.

00:15:36.760 I think we were all sort of exhausted.

00:15:38.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:15:39.000 Right.

00:15:39.440 By the by the 2024 election.

00:15:43.000 Yeah.

00:15:43.160 But the idea that, like, politics would become less salient is what are you basing that on?

00:15:51.000 No.

00:15:51.280 He characterizes Trump trying to end birthright citizenship.

00:15:54.460 Yeah.

00:15:54.940 This, like, aggressive anti-immigrant action that defies 150 years of legal precedent.

00:16:01.200 Flatly illegal, unconstitutional.

00:16:02.780 Yeah.

00:16:02.940 He says that that is ordinary because the opposition to it manifested in the courts rather than in protests, which isn't even entirely true.

00:16:12.000 it's like entirely about procedure and optics to these guys right it's like oh finally normal

00:16:18.840 politics they're ending birthright citizenship why do these people think that their job is like 0.98

00:16:22.900 to predict things this is just like this the the original sin of all of this shit imagine imagine 0.93

00:16:28.060 like like you're writing this like like hitler takes power in 33 and you're like finally things 0.93

00:16:33.500 are calming down uh do you want to do the next category yeah if i had spent the last four years

00:16:38.480 of my life, talking about how campus sophomores were a threat to free speech and how the left

00:16:44.080 was drifting into totalitarianism. And then we have an authoritarian movement rising that I

00:16:49.740 did not raise an alarm about at all. I might reflect on how I had spent my career. I might

00:16:55.200 change the way that I cover events in American politics. I'm about to read you some headlines

00:17:00.560 from Persuasion, the newsletter of Reactionary Center's final boss, Yasha Monk. So these are

00:17:07.820 from persuasion.community.

00:17:10.660 They don't even have persuasion.com.

00:17:12.760 DEI must change.

00:17:14.300 The five dogmas of DEI.

00:17:16.060 Discourse on race has a conformity problem.

00:17:18.320 The psychology behind wokeness.

00:17:20.240 The average college student is illiterate.

00:17:22.460 Teach pluralism, not anti-racism.

00:17:24.960 Yes, comma, college students can't read good.

00:17:27.800 Professors need to diversify what they teach. 0.73

00:17:30.200 Teach students conservative thought.

00:17:31.860 Brutal.

00:17:32.460 Brutal.

00:17:32.900 They're just like partying like it's 2021.

00:17:35.600 want this is related to what i was talking about where for several years now these centrist pundits 0.97

00:17:42.300 have been like the left is out of control we need to rein all of this social justice shit in right

00:17:48.520 and kamala loses and they find it very vindicating because they're like this is why right this fits 0.95

00:17:55.080 perfectly with our narrative yeah i'll also say there are people on the left who get this wrong

00:17:59.720 too there are people on the left who basically have said like democrats abandoned like the

00:18:05.140 material concerns of working people right this is a critique that i like largely agree with yeah

00:18:11.600 there are there are people that basically in the wake of the election said like this is why they

00:18:15.300 lost and then you had like relatively boring centrists like mikey sherrill in jersey who

00:18:22.720 are emblematic of that problem win yeah everyone just wants to to look at the election and like

00:18:31.280 just jam their little narratives into it right and i think you see that like that sort of like

00:18:36.720 continuing into 2025 with these outlets like persuasion they have one this is their only beat

00:18:42.280 yeah yeah like the excesses of wokeness yeah this right the social justice left is out of control

00:18:47.120 and we should reel it in meanwhile like 20 the elections of 2025 are the best example

00:18:52.940 of the idea that that that it's probably not really electorally relevant yeah the problem

00:18:58.200 with all of this stuff is that it's just really difficult to draw broad ideological conclusions

00:19:03.260 from like any presidential election, especially the last few that we've had. Like the 2020 election

00:19:07.880 was in the middle of COVID. Neither candidate was really campaigning. And also turnout was

00:19:12.780 all over the place because all these states implemented mail-in ballots all of a sudden.

00:19:16.500 And then the 2024 presidential campaign was also totally buck wild, right? You had Biden dropping

00:19:21.080 out. You had inflation. You had Trump coming back. Like both of these things are just really

00:19:27.140 difficult to draw any large conclusion from and that's kind of true of like most presidential

00:19:33.200 elections right is that there there's such a huge confluence of factors i don't know that any of

00:19:39.120 them are like a referendum on where the country's ideology is much less where it's going to stay for

00:19:45.920 the next 30 years or whatever you're aware of my my brewing theory that nothing matters i'm i'm

00:19:52.020 slowly coming around to Peter Shemshiri thought. There's a sort of like half-baked thought I have,

00:19:57.420 this half-baked theory that like your messaging doesn't really matter that much. Yeah, yeah.

00:20:03.200 There are all these people who are like, well, you know, Elon sees Twitter and that like changed 0.91

00:20:07.740 the game and shit like that. Even that is less compelling now, right? The idea that anything

00:20:13.800 mattered, like the idea that anything like ideological or from a messaging perspective

00:20:20.160 mattered in 2024, that argument is a lot weaker now in 2025, right?

00:20:28.020 We have to get to the most 2021 ass take from this year. A lot of these complaints ultimately

00:20:36.580 boil down to like vocabulary. It's like people are saying pregnant people and they should stop

00:20:40.600 saying that. Like this is what these fucking people whined about for four years ultimately. 0.99

00:20:44.620 Yeah. 0.99

00:20:44.800 In June of 2025, there was an article in The Atlantic called,

00:20:50.320 What's So Shocking About a Man Who Loves His Wife?

00:20:52.980 The term wife guy is now a pejorative.

00:20:55.500 It shouldn't be.

00:20:58.340 This is about how you're all saying wife guy and you should stop.

00:21:02.760 Isn't wife guy endearing?

00:21:04.440 Dude, don't get ahead of ourselves, Peter. 0.99

00:21:07.340 Okay.

00:21:07.660 This guy's so mad.

00:21:09.100 Okay.

00:21:09.520 Here is, it's a little bit long, but I'll send you the first couple paragraphs.

00:21:12.780 he really like winds up to something here a few sundays ago i was in a car ride home with my wife

00:21:17.540 when the light caught her face in a lovely way i snapped a photo and shortly afterward posted it

00:21:21.820 to instagram with several iterations of an emoji that felt appropriate a man smiling with hearts

00:21:27.260 in place of his eyes i did this because i love her my love i don't want to laugh at this guy 0.52

00:21:33.720 but you just know where he's going with this and it's so fucking funny he's very mad you know he's

00:21:38.900 gonna get to the outrage eventually and it's like dude you're just loving your wife it's fine it's 0.65

00:21:43.480 so important i know that i was just complaining about people who criticize me i know you're

00:21:50.140 becoming this guy well like but you have to chat you have to understand on some level that you're

00:21:55.540 being insane this is why we don't talk about this publicly we just like text each other and whine

00:21:59.460 about it but it's really not that big of a deal um until we expand it into a group chat that

00:22:04.500 completely changes our worldview all right he goes on my love for my wife does not exist solely

00:22:10.460 online i often express it directly to her or talk about her in glowing terms to friends and

00:22:15.160 co-workers he's just like describing having a wife he's preemptively defending himself from

00:22:18.500 the wife guy allegations he's like i'm not just a white guy online i'm like i like her in person

00:22:22.480 we live together we go out to dinner uh he says it feels natural as natural as sharing my feelings

00:22:29.460 about anything to the internet in the same way i'd post about how much i'm enjoying my twin peaks

00:22:33.920 rewatch or the particularly good sandwich i ate on vacation so the first time that someone called

00:22:38.920 me a wife guy i wasn't sure how to react if you are encountering this phrase for the first time

00:22:44.720 and think wife guy surely must mean a guy who loves his wife you would be dead wrong

00:22:49.340 the term which rose to popularity sometime during the first trump administration

00:22:54.960 describes someone whose spousal affection is so ostentatious that it becomes inherently

00:23:00.120 untrustworthy and then he goes on to give a bunch of examples which are boring and so we're not

00:23:03.720 going to talk about them but then he gets to the conclusion in a world where identity is always

00:23:07.500 being performed on social media this particular identity is clearly one to avoid but i a guy who

00:23:14.680 loves his wife can't help but conclude that valuable terrain is being seeded when we think

00:23:20.080 poorly of the wife guy many men accustomed to bottling up their feelings are already afraid

00:23:25.620 to show what's in their heart and on their mind, if some of them are actually moved to

00:23:29.820 express their love publicly and unabashedly, is this so wrong?

00:23:33.560 I'm standing up as a wife guy.

00:23:34.940 I feel like there's probably a decent percentage of our listeners who haven't really heard

00:23:39.200 this term or aren't like super familiar with it.

00:23:41.220 But wife guy is like a very clear term of endearment used online.

00:23:47.760 If your friends are calling you like, hey, I didn't know you were a wife guy. 1.00

00:23:51.860 That's like a nice thing to say.

00:23:53.140 it's like an extremely gentle way of teasing you yeah it's like teasing you about something

00:23:58.020 positive they're like hey this guy likes his wife yeah he doesn't even have like evidence that like

00:24:02.120 anyone has said anything mean about him i've always understood wife guy and i guess i've never

00:24:06.300 really thought about this because you're fucking normal i've always understood wife guy as a sort

00:24:12.420 of friendly way of saying this is someone who genuinely likes their wife yes because there's 0.98

00:24:18.340 a type of guy who's when he's talking about his wife is sort of is complaining about his wife

00:24:22.940 front yeah or the the curvy wife guy thing was was basically like you might think my wife is ugly but

00:24:28.840 i think she's beautiful and it came off as like a backhanded insult of his wife i think that's why

00:24:32.800 people reacted so negatively to that that feels bizarrely performative and weird that's different

00:24:36.480 but that's not but that's not wife guy the reason the word curvy was at the beginning of it was

00:24:40.680 because it's not a normal wife guy it's a curvy wife guy which is different this is such advanced

00:24:43.880 analysis we're like that curvy wife guy is not a wife guy actually but the whole thing with all of 0.92

00:24:48.660 these fucking vocabulary complaints is the complete collapse of context there's no example of someone 0.98

00:24:52.680 to be like hey stop being a wife guy this is like really condescending to your wife i don't trust 0.99

00:24:56.380 you anymore i think it's like his friends on instagram the lightest teasing the lightest 0.99

00:25:01.340 fucking teasing the lightest teasing has made him ashamed of his own love for his wife 0.98

00:25:05.180 and he's like spiraling out and then he pitches it to a fucking magazine it's like hey can i talk 1.00

00:25:10.520 about how people are making fun of me for loving my wife i have fucking said this to like my straight 0.98

00:25:15.240 guy friends i'm like hey we got a wife guy over here and they're like they're like you they just 1.00

00:25:19.160 start throwing the f-slur at you you fucking piece of shit how fucking dare you you call me 1.00

00:25:23.260 a slur i'm gonna call you a slur that's just a slur for a slur trade of course like you'll read 1.00

00:25:31.080 the atlantic and it's like you can't even say x and y anymore and then it's like stop saying x 0.64

00:25:36.340 but they're talking about like the r word and yeah yeah and it's like but also you really

00:25:40.780 shouldn't say wife yeah are you a wife guy peter do you do post like this this is different for

00:25:46.280 this is different for us because when you have like 150,000 followers, you're like making your

00:25:51.580 spouse like half a public figure, you know? Yeah. But I mean, you have a private Instagram account,

00:25:55.580 right? No. Oh, really? You're on Instagram at all? I have an Instagram account, but I do not use it

00:26:00.380 at all. No. Okay. I have one where I post thirst traps and people in the comments be like, oh,

00:26:05.220 another thirst trap. And I just want to like write an article for the Atlantic and like melting down

00:26:09.420 I'm like, I was called a thirst trap on the end.

00:26:11.500 It's not a trap.

00:26:12.680 I am thirsty.

00:26:16.540 Along the same lines of completely misjudging the politics of the last several years, Charles

00:26:25.420 Homans in the New York Times, Democrats lost voters on transgender rights.

00:26:31.220 Winning them back won't be easy. 0.80

00:26:33.040 Oh, God.

00:26:33.800 We've talked about this before.

00:26:35.360 And so we don't need to spend like a ton of time on this.

00:26:37.300 But I do think we need to call out the fact that trans people were functionally blamed for the 2024 election by a ton of people.

00:26:45.980 It's so infuriating.

00:26:47.060 The political shifts in 2025 have demonstrated how incorrect this is.

00:26:51.640 Also, I mean, maybe you're going to get into this, but also I've been working on a project kind of in the background about the actual campaign rhetoric in 2024.

00:26:59.240 Kamala Harris did not say the word transgender a single time in any official campaign materials.

00:27:04.700 Like they did not run on transgender rights. 0.99

00:27:06.760 they just didn't. They made they made a very specific effort to avoid it. Yeah. You know, 1.00

00:27:11.380 I guess I guess there's this holistic argument that it's like associated with the party regardless,

00:27:15.300 which might is probably true to some degree. But then that's going to be true. Even if Democrats

00:27:19.220 run to the center, which everybody keeps telling him to do, that's going to be there next time,

00:27:22.900 too. So what is the actual advice here? Democrats proposed an extremely aggressive

00:27:28.600 anti-immigration bill in 2024. Yeah, exactly. And Republicans shot it down because they didn't want

00:27:34.300 to give Biden that sort of win, right?

00:27:37.980 Did that help change the narrative

00:27:39.660 about who's tough on immigration?

00:27:41.400 No, it didn't move the needle a little bit.

00:27:44.380 And also everyone's like,

00:27:45.160 oh, they need to run to the right on immigration.

00:27:46.880 Okay, they did that and it didn't work.

00:27:48.880 You need to have an explanation for that

00:27:51.160 rather than cajoling them

00:27:53.340 to do the thing that they already did.

00:27:55.100 I mean, that's the thing is,

00:27:56.000 I think if your party is associated

00:27:58.440 with these things,

00:27:59.820 the actual way to improve your messaging

00:28:02.300 is by making people like those things.

00:28:05.180 That's the only choice you have.

00:28:05.980 Breaking the association is a lot harder.

00:28:08.460 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:09.000 We need to find,

00:28:09.740 we just need to find the coolest trans person that we can

00:28:12.720 and just put them on television a lot.

00:28:14.640 You know what I mean?

00:28:15.620 That's why the new co-host of this show is Caitlyn Jenner.

00:28:18.720 It's happening.

00:28:20.060 Unproblematic queen, Caitlyn Jenner.

00:28:21.460 So this piece centers around a discussion

00:28:23.160 with Linnaeus Erickson at Third Way,

00:28:26.260 which is the centrist think tank

00:28:27.600 that's like stuck in 1994.

00:28:30.160 Democrats need to do what they're already doing.

00:28:31.460 So I'm going to have you read this, and then I'm going to have you read one of the following paragraphs.

00:28:36.340 In some areas, Democratic politicians, taking cues from liberal advocacy groups, found themselves signing onto positions about which even their own voters were uncertain and have become more so in recent years.

00:28:47.240 This is particularly true of transgender rights, where polls now show majority support for some restrictions that advocates have fiercely opposed and have sought to hold politicians accountable for backing.

00:28:56.280 This is basically like the right wing's been winning the messaging war, so we need to surrender. 0.98

00:29:00.980 And it's like, I don't think that is how this shit works. 0.99

00:29:03.780 I think that what actually happens is that no matter what you do, you can be as anti-trans 0.99

00:29:08.340 as you want to be. 0.99

00:29:09.020 You can do this Gavin Newsom bullshit. 0.99

00:29:10.940 Yeah. 0.99

00:29:11.180 The median voter is going to associate trans rights with the Democratic Party more than

00:29:16.140 the Republican Party. 0.83

00:29:17.320 And so it will be an effective line of attack.

00:29:19.020 So you actually just need to make the case.

00:29:21.320 Yeah.

00:29:21.560 There's almost no reason to continue talking about this because the one of the following

00:29:26.700 paragraphs here basically concedes the point.

00:29:29.940 Here you go.

00:29:30.500 Of course, of course. Although there's no evidence that transgender rights was a top 1.00

00:29:34.720 issue for most voters in 2024, Democratic strategists believe that these attacks did

00:29:39.440 have an impact. Blueprint, a post-election Democratic polling project, found that among

00:29:43.560 swing voters who broke for Mr. Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, 67% believed Democrats were

00:29:48.680 too focused on identity politics. Yes, that's a perception. Perceptions are not reality. Then you

00:29:54.120 have to ask, what affects the perception of this? Because you've just acknowledged it's not the

00:29:58.440 reality and voters don't care about right it's not a top issue right like the voters the the

00:30:04.200 people for whom trans rights is super salient fall into two groups one anti-trans nutjobs yeah on the

00:30:12.400 right who you'll never persuade yeah and two trans people and their allies on the left who like you

00:30:18.600 need in your camp i also think that i because i've been like reading a bunch of kamala harris

00:30:23.060 speeches and like looking at a bunch of campaign materials from 2024 i think the actual mistake on

00:30:27.820 trans rights was allowing this absurd out of context clip about how prisoners should

00:30:32.660 get gender reassignment surgery to kind of go out into the world with no response to

00:30:37.960 it. 0.63

00:30:38.140 When if you actually think about the policy in question, the state provides medical care

00:30:42.600 to prisoners. 0.99

00:30:43.600 Trans medical care is medical care. 0.70

00:30:45.500 And so prisoners will get trans medical care as part of that.

00:30:48.320 Like, why should we carve out this one form of care?

00:30:52.340 That's the thing is that all of the arguments that Democrats want to concede on trans rights are fundamental, right?

00:31:00.740 Like I don't think you can concede the sports argument without basically implying that trans women are not real women. 0.99

00:31:10.760 You're basically asking Democratic candidates to concede to what is a fucking lie. 1.00

00:31:13.660 I mean this whole – all this gender affirming care for kids stuff is a fucking lie. 0.99

00:31:16.840 A vanishingly small number of kids transition every year. 0.98

00:31:19.780 They are assessed.

00:31:20.740 You're signing on to a lie.

00:31:21.780 You're signing on to something that is equivalent to climate change is not real, the 2020 election was stolen, vaccines cause autism.

00:31:28.880 And so what you need to do is push back against the conspiracy myths. 0.99

00:31:31.640 Right now, there is a megaphone from the right talking shit about trans people and nothing from the left saying anything good about trans people. 0.97

00:31:38.520 A lot of people who are low engagement with politics are just hearing like kids are transitioning, irreversible medical care for like an 11-year-old who doesn't know what's going on. 0.98

00:31:48.760 Which is not happening, but that's what they're hearing, yeah.

00:31:50.880 It's not happening now. If it doesn't happen even less, they will still think that, right?

00:31:56.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, yeah.

00:31:57.300 You're not addressing the actual source of the problem, which is the propaganda, right?

00:32:01.480 Right, right.

00:32:01.760 I'm not saying it's an easy thing to address, but conceding on policy grounds doesn't move you anywhere.

00:32:07.680 Right.

00:32:07.840 Because it was never a genuine policy concern to begin with.

00:32:10.980 I think this is actually one of the lessons from the 2024 campaign. If you look at interviews with Kamala Harris, she was asked directly numerous times about transgender rights, and she would change the subject.

00:32:20.880 She'd be like, well, I'm not really concerned about that.

00:32:22.720 What I'm concerned about is middle class wages.

00:32:24.740 Why don't we transition into another topic? 0.97

00:32:27.140 But she literally, it's like she was pressed on this and she did the thing that people 0.85

00:32:30.480 hate to see politicians doing where they will not answer a question.

00:32:34.120 So that pisses off trans people, that pisses off trans folks, and it pisses off everybody 0.99

00:32:37.660 who just sees a fucking politician worming out of a question, right? 0.99

00:32:40.900 So they didn't have an answer. 0.99

00:32:42.360 I think that was a huge mistake, right?

00:32:45.020 All we had was this thing of like, she wants illegal immigrants to get transgender surgeries 1.00

00:32:49.840 in prison, which is obviously fucking deranged. 0.99

00:32:51.900 But like there was no real counter narrative to this that like, yeah, it's an extremely 0.99

00:32:55.560 small number of people.

00:32:56.880 We are a civilized society that provides medical care to people who are wards of the state. 0.99

00:33:01.480 Part of that is transitioning. 0.98

00:33:02.740 Yeah.

00:33:03.020 Why do you have a problem with that? 0.95

00:33:04.480 There's no fucking actual argument here. 0.94

00:33:06.520 Because it was never answered, all of the right wing derangement was just allowed to 0.97

00:33:10.580 like bounce around this like nationwide game of telephone.

00:33:12.820 Like the Democrats approach on a lot of these things where they where they perceive the

00:33:17.040 right wing as winning is just like concede and ignore.

00:33:22.980 Yeah. 1.00

00:33:23.240 And like this shit does not work politically. 1.00

00:33:25.780 It does not work. 1.00

00:33:26.620 You're just going to get a million attack ads and people are not going to hear anything

00:33:29.380 else from you.

00:33:30.120 I also have a somewhat tangential take on the politics of this, which is that Democrats

00:33:34.200 are often trying to thread the needle of like accurately describing their policy, but also

00:33:39.880 appealing to the public.

00:33:41.380 Whereas I think Trump's appeal to a lot of people is he doesn't really equivocate.

00:33:45.860 Yeah.

00:33:45.960 He's like, we're going to kick out the bad people and the good people stay, right?

00:33:50.740 Now, that's obviously not what his immigration policy is. 0.99

00:33:54.940 But the lesson I take from that is that it's pretty important to just bullshit and keep 0.99

00:34:01.560 your message simple, right? 0.99

00:34:03.140 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:03.500 So rather than doing this whole like, well, we support trans rights, but here are the

00:34:08.440 limitations, blah, blah, blah.

00:34:10.360 It would be better to just say something simple that's almost a lie.

00:34:14.760 Right. 1.00

00:34:14.900 They want to check your kids' genitals. 0.99

00:34:16.780 You know what I mean? 0.99

00:34:17.260 Yes, yes, yes.

00:34:18.400 They're doing genital scans.

00:34:19.900 Yeah.

00:34:20.060 If you don't want that, vote for us.

00:34:22.220 Yeah, exactly.

00:34:22.600 Is it oversimplified?

00:34:23.740 100%.

00:34:24.140 But it's also meaningfully true.

00:34:25.440 I think it's absolutely fair enough.

00:34:26.540 I mean, there's enough truth, right?

00:34:28.460 Yeah.

00:34:28.720 But my point is, stop.

00:34:31.200 Don't worry about the nuances of how true it is exactly.

00:34:36.740 Get out a message that's roughly on point, that sounds effective, and be done with it. 0.98

00:34:41.120 Just accept that we live in idiocracy now and fucking roll with it. 0.98

00:34:44.080 It's so funny. 0.98

00:34:44.900 how Trump will like make up a policy position that literally everyone agrees with. Wouldn't

00:34:50.580 it be good if we could get rid of the bad people and keep the good people? And he'll

00:34:55.220 say that out loud. He'll be like, we're going to get rid of the bad people and the good

00:34:59.400 people. And people are like, shit. Yeah. And then they watch what ICE is doing and they're 1.00

00:35:04.160 like confused. They're like, I didn't vote for this. I thought the good people were going

00:35:07.520 to stay. It's like, I bet you did. All right. One more category before we get to the official

00:35:11.260 worst take of the year. One of the major themes of coverage this year was that even when ostensibly

00:35:17.360 left-wing outlets are describing the actions of the Trump administration, they will still find a

00:35:21.340 way to blame the left. So we're not going to dive into this one, but in June, there was an article

00:35:27.140 in the New York Times called, I worked at USAID for eight years. This is our biggest failure.

00:35:32.500 It says, I worked at USAID in East Africa over the past eight and a half years,

00:35:36.400 selling the story of American foreign aid to people in Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

00:35:41.260 Our inability to tell this story to Americans is our great failure.

00:35:45.200 It is what put the agency into Doge's wood chipper first.

00:35:49.380 You are the subject of a bad faith right wing attack.

00:35:53.640 You did not fail to tell your story.

00:35:55.600 It's so odd to me that every right wing political victory gets framed as like the will of the 0.78

00:36:02.600 people manifest, which is not even true in this case because people actually like foreign

00:36:05.800 aid.

00:36:06.180 I mean, people do like foreign aid, although there are ways that you can frame it in polling.

00:36:10.780 where it does poorly.

00:36:13.220 But if you just describe what they're doing

00:36:14.980 and the actual cost of it, people like it.

00:36:17.340 The same people who

00:36:18.500 disapprove of foreign aid, if you ask them how much

00:36:21.000 of the budget they think it is, they're like,

00:36:23.440 I don't know, 50%.

00:36:24.560 That's just the honorary mention.

00:36:26.760 The worst example of this this year is

00:36:28.940 from March. This is by the

00:36:30.980 New York Times editorial board.

00:36:32.880 It is called The Authoritarian Endgame

00:36:35.080 on Higher Education.

00:36:36.760 But it blames the left.

00:36:38.120 Yeah, so it has a whole thing, like a quite lucid description of what the Trump administration is doing.

00:36:42.000 But then it says, we understand why Americans don't trust higher education and feel they have little stake in it.

00:36:47.520 Oh my god, dude.

00:36:48.220 And then it says this.

00:36:51.180 For people in higher education, this is a moment both to be bolder about trumpeting its strengths and to be more reflective about addressing its weaknesses.

00:36:57.900 About those shortcomings, too many professors and university administrators acted in recent years as liberal ideologues rather than seekers of empirical truth.

00:37:05.340 Ideologues.

00:37:05.820 Academics have tried to silence debate on legitimate questions, including about COVID

00:37:10.240 lockdowns, gender transition treatments, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

00:37:15.100 Shutting down debate.

00:37:15.820 The insularity of American academia is appalling, said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan

00:37:20.080 University.

00:37:21.260 It has led to massive resentment against intellectual elites.

00:37:24.760 This insularity does not justify Mr. Trump's policies, but it does help explain the dearth

00:37:28.360 of conservatives defending universities today.

00:37:31.180 Universities will be in a stronger long-term position if they recommit themselves to open

00:37:34.840 debate.

00:37:35.140 brain dead child the mind of a child this is the thing is that they say that they're committed

00:37:39.500 to open debate but what they're not actually ready for is the liberals winning those debates

00:37:46.220 no completely yes or just like shutting down like ending a debate when it's like vaccines 0.93

00:37:49.740 fucking work man there are plenty of problems with the with that those paragraphs like what 0.86

00:37:54.800 are you talking about exactly when you're talking about a lack of open debate about these things 0.99

00:37:59.440 right i'm gonna need specifics if you're if you're claiming that debate is being shut down

00:38:04.460 in some material way.

00:38:05.680 And also now that right-wingers

00:38:07.020 are taking over the universities,

00:38:08.060 are they fostering open debate?

00:38:09.260 Right, exactly.

00:38:10.080 Are they leaning more

00:38:11.220 into empirical truth

00:38:12.620 than ideology, really?

00:38:14.020 Does caving in

00:38:14.920 to the right-wing work?

00:38:16.780 Yeah.

00:38:17.040 Look at what they put up, right?

00:38:18.100 Look at the University of Austin,

00:38:19.740 the Barry Weiss operation.

00:38:21.620 Are they seeking empirical truth

00:38:23.580 or are they just a right-wing college?

00:38:25.420 It's obvious this has all been

00:38:26.460 in bad faith the entire time.

00:38:28.120 And the New York Times

00:38:29.000 has been helping to promote 1.00

00:38:30.500 this bad faith attack

00:38:32.040 on institutions of higher education.

00:38:33.960 and then saying, oh, why don't Americans trust higher education? 0.99

00:38:36.860 You publish three fucking op-eds a week about how higher education is bad and illegitimate 0.99

00:38:41.580 and suppressing debate. 1.00

00:38:43.020 That's part of why.

00:38:44.240 I recently wrote about Greg Lukianoff, the head of FIRE, the free speech organization

00:38:50.140 that focuses a lot on college campuses.

00:38:52.560 He was interviewed by The Times a couple months ago.

00:38:55.300 And the host asked him a question that I've been looking for someone to ask him, which

00:38:59.520 is basically the trump administration is attacking these schools you've been uh you've been claiming

00:39:06.600 that these schools have been um violating the law have been uh violating principles of free speech

00:39:14.000 etc are corrupt you know are corrupted by or are sort of enthralled to liberal ideology

00:39:19.060 haven't you fed this narrative and his response was basically well if people had listened to us

00:39:27.140 maybe this wouldn't have happened. 0.99

00:39:28.680 Oh, my fucking God. 0.99

00:39:29.660 A response that I think completely misunderstands what's happening on the right. 0.99

00:39:34.660 And for someone in his position to say that, I think it's really embarrassing.

00:39:38.680 Look, I've written seven articles every month about how people playing their Bluetooth speakers

00:39:43.260 on public transit are the worst people in society.

00:39:45.940 Now that those people are being murdered in broad daylight, torture camps, deported to

00:39:50.500 other countries, I'm just going to keep writing those op-eds anyway.

00:39:53.920 Well, I don't know.

00:39:55.200 I mean, those people should go to Rikers, but still.

00:39:56.120 Yeah, I was like, I mean, I do, we can find a middle ground there.

00:39:59.140 I think this also serves a psychological purpose too, like a lot of these other arguments.

00:40:03.080 It's like, you think they must have done something to deserve it.

00:40:06.020 Not to mention, this leaves out that like, there are various types of academic departments

00:40:11.600 that are in fact right-leaning.

00:40:13.360 Number one degree is business in America.

00:40:15.480 I mean, it's true that the humanities are very liberal.

00:40:18.100 Also, it's true that conservatives don't believe in the humanities.

00:40:21.040 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:21.820 So like, what do you want?

00:40:23.480 Like, what are universities supposed to do when you literally don't believe that sociology is real?

00:40:28.540 Also, they don't even believe that, like, meteorology is real. 0.97

00:40:30.720 It's like, if you think climate change is fake, then produce some fucking work that it's fake. 0.97

00:40:33.680 Prove it, right? 0.98

00:40:34.360 They can't prove it.

00:40:35.300 I'm sorry.

00:40:36.100 Institutions of knowledge production are going to go where the knowledge is. 0.97

00:40:39.460 And right now, if you are hiring geologists, they're all going to be liberal because they all fucking believe in climate change. 0.95

00:40:44.160 Right. 0.98

00:40:44.420 All right.

00:40:44.600 Do you want to do worsties now?

00:40:47.540 Yeah.

00:40:48.080 I have my own category, which is Epstein Files takes.

00:40:51.880 I think I know what one of them is

00:40:54.000 I think I know what one of them is

00:40:55.500 David Brooks in the New York Times

00:40:57.300 Headline is The Epstein Story 0.50

00:40:59.960 Count Me Out

00:41:01.180 I just did an episode with

00:41:03.460 Adrian Moira on In Bed with the Right

00:41:05.400 About the most cursed discourses of the year

00:41:07.300 And that was one of mine

00:41:07.980 And that was before I knew about

00:41:09.780 Spoilers, Michaels, spoilers

00:41:11.840 I'm going to send you a couple bits

00:41:15.400 I know these by memory, Peter

00:41:17.220 Never before have I been so uncertain about the future

00:41:19.660 Think of all the giant issues

00:41:21.360 that confront us. Artificial intelligence, potential financial bubbles, the decline of

00:41:25.380 democracy, the rise of global authoritarianism, the collapse of reading scores, and general

00:41:29.520 literacy. China's sudden scientific and technological dominance, Russian advances

00:41:33.480 in Ukraine. I could go on and on. So what has America's political class decided to obsess about

00:41:38.300 over the past several months? Jeffrey Epstein. Why is Epstein the top issue in American life

00:41:42.800 right now? Well, in an age in which more and more people get their news from short videos,

00:41:46.660 if you're in politics, the media, or online, it pays to focus on topics that are salacious,

00:41:51.080 are easy to understand and allow you to offer self-confident opinions with no actual knowledge.

00:41:56.480 What is your knowledge of Mr. Epstein?

00:41:58.780 David Brooks, what is your knowledge?

00:42:00.360 Do you have any knowledge?

00:42:01.540 He says the most important reason the Epstein story tops our national agenda 1.00

00:42:05.540 is that the QAnon mentality has taken over America. 0.99

00:42:09.440 The QAnon mentality is based on the assumption that the American elite is totally evil 0.78

00:42:13.860 and that American institutions are totally corrupt. 0.76

00:42:16.620 I hate that. 0.99

00:42:17.000 I hate that for them.

00:42:17.660 This is this is the sort of analysis that I think like it's like, OK, you're poking at this real thing, which is that like a ton of the Epstein discourse is like entangled with conspiracism.

00:42:27.860 No, no question about that. But like also a huge shocking percentage of American elites had some tie to this guy who was a known pedo. 0.71

00:42:40.860 right it's very weird to be like oh this is just because people assume the american elite is

00:42:46.980 totally evil and it's like no there's an actual interesting thing going on here and also you 0.98

00:42:52.300 can't say it's conspiracism when this is true i think it's such a classic dumbass defense to be 0.99

00:42:58.480 like so you're saying oh so you're saying the american elite is totally evil like no i'm not 0.98

00:43:03.200 saying that people are saying the american elite are covering for evil which is precisely what you

00:43:06.920 are doing right now in this column right also what happened to mr moral clarity over here his

00:43:11.500 whole thing is like about morality like shouldn't you be offended at the immorality of what's going 0.98

00:43:16.400 on about your fucking friends being so grossly immoral but the immorality you're complaining 0.97

00:43:22.420 about is like the people who are upset about this thing that happened he says what i don't 1.00

00:43:26.980 understand is why some democrats are hopping on this bandwagon they may believe that the epstein

00:43:32.120 file release will somehow hurt trump but they are undermining public trust and sowing public

00:43:37.360 cynicism in ways that make the entire progressive project impossible why is it progressives fault

00:43:42.320 they are contributing to a public atmosphere in which right-wing populism naturally thrives 0.99

00:43:47.100 contributing to an atmosphere of such fucking weasel garbage what does that even mean dude 0.99

00:43:50.760 they're trying to get the truth out about how fucking bad this was like having the files released 0.98

00:43:55.360 doesn't feed right into the conspiracy any more than not having the files released right it's 0.89

00:44:01.000 I saying like lead in the pipes, like investigating how much lead in the pipes there is feeds the kind 0.98

00:44:05.260 of conspiracism that like resorts to chemtrails and shit. It's like, well, one of them is true 0.93

00:44:08.900 and one of them is false. We should actually insist on getting true things out into the

00:44:13.060 public and debunking things that are not true. He says, these are genuine challenges. If I were

00:44:16.940 a democratic politician, I might try telling the truth, which in my version would go something

00:44:21.200 like this. The elites didn't betray you, but they did ignore you. They didn't mean to harm you,

00:44:26.720 But they didn't see you in the 1970s as deindustrialization took your jobs in the ensuing decades as your families and communities broke apart during all those decades when high immigration levels made you feel like a stranger in your own land.

00:44:38.980 It's like, oh, yeah, let's not feed into right wing conspiracism.

00:44:42.420 Right. 0.86

00:44:42.640 And instead, let's remind voters that their land is being stolen by foreigners. 0.99

00:44:47.440 And anyway, yeah. 0.87

00:44:48.840 So the bookend here is that just a couple of days ago, there's another Epstein file drop from the government.

00:44:56.320 and they include photographs of david brooks at a dinner that epstein was attending of course so

00:45:04.260 we don't really know what that dinner was we don't right the extent of their interaction we

00:45:09.260 don't know this yeah you know the the new york times put out a statement basically being like

00:45:13.380 these are two guys who are at a lot of big public dinners and they showed up at one dinner together

00:45:17.940 it's possible that he doesn't straight up doesn't even remember right also david brooks has like

00:45:23.060 extensive ties to larry summers right he knows other people in the file it's very obvious he's

00:45:27.900 like in these like echelons so like maybe reflect on that a little bit what did you know people like

00:45:33.660 rumors get around about this when this guy got arrested and a lot of your friends know him surely

00:45:38.580 there's like texts back and forth about like what people knew what people didn't know maybe reflect 0.97

00:45:43.260 on that the fact that there's ties between you and like this tranche of fucking elites rather 0.84

00:45:49.500 than writing about like hey i feel bad about the way that i may have aided and embedded this 0.93

00:45:53.020 you just write about how like let's focus on something else the larry summers thing is a good

00:45:56.880 point because like larry summers and epstein are like good friends yeah well into the period of

00:46:02.940 time when it's known not just like a by his friends but by the broad public who jeffrey

00:46:10.000 epstein is so i've been to various things with like i don't know i've met people at like random

00:46:13.720 dinners and shit if some like i don't know fellow podcaster somebody who've only met once or twice 0.69

00:46:18.140 got arrested for fucking pedophilia, I feel like someone would tell me like, hey, you 0.99

00:46:22.040 know that guy who like hosted that dinner a while ago? 1.00

00:46:23.980 He's a fucking pedophile, dude. 1.00

00:46:25.040 I'd be like, oh, fuck. 1.00

00:46:26.420 Word would have gotten around about this. 0.99

00:46:28.240 There's one other piece about Epstein I want to mention.

00:46:30.680 This is Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post.

00:46:34.380 We've of course, Glenn Kessler, of course, the Washington Post fact checker.

00:46:39.560 We've done an entire episode on him before.

00:46:42.320 Headline, Trump and Epstein had a relationship, but there's no evidence of Trump wrongdoing.

00:46:47.440 This is intended to be a fact check piece.

00:46:50.420 It's from right after the point in the summer when the White House refused to release the Epstein files.

00:46:57.580 A lot of it is just the sort of like milquetoast, like, you know, oh, we don't know much about the extent of Trump's ties to Epstein.

00:47:05.040 What makes it a contender for a worse take is the final few sentences, which are remarkable and I'm going to send to you.

00:47:13.180 Kessler says, but no credible allegation has emerged to connect Trump to any of Epstein's

00:47:17.700 crimes.

00:47:18.680 If the full file is ever released, we're confident that no connection would be found.

00:47:23.300 Rest assured, if Trump were prominently mentioned, it would have been leaked by now.

00:47:27.720 God.

00:47:28.660 Dude, wild thing to put in a fact check article, right?

00:47:32.200 It's like you're holding yourself out as the serious people who are focused on the facts,

00:47:37.540 right?

00:47:37.960 Yeah.

00:47:38.220 And then you just throw in some speculative guesswork at the end about how if the full

00:47:43.060 file were ever released, you're confident that no connection between Trump and Epstein's crimes

00:47:48.540 would be found? It's like, you know, the politician about whom every accusation is true and turns out

00:47:54.100 to be worse than you ever imagined. If this entire fact check, we're like, look, here's the deal with

00:47:59.760 Trump and Epstein. And the bottom line is we don't really know a lot. Yeah, I think that would

00:48:03.360 actually be a relatively reasonable fact check to put out there. But why speculate about what's in

00:48:10.360 the files, especially when the White House has refused, like, put two and two together.

00:48:16.840 Right.

00:48:17.080 Why is Donald Trump, the most self-interested person in the history of the world, refusing

00:48:24.620 to release the files?

00:48:27.200 Yeah.

00:48:27.380 They say if Trump were prominently mentioned, it would have been leaked by now.

00:48:31.660 No. 1.00

00:48:32.780 Wrong, bitch. 1.00

00:48:33.840 Wrong, bitch. 1.00

00:48:34.560 We still don't even have his taxes, right? 0.99

00:48:36.020 There's lots of stuff that hasn't been leaked.

00:48:37.140 We have now seen more of the files.

00:48:40.420 And what do you know, Trump is in fact prominently mentioned and it wasn't leaked before.

00:48:45.140 Right.

00:48:45.520 Why put this in here?

00:48:46.680 But this is, again, the Brooks thing where it's like what people are mad at is this instinct.

00:48:51.460 Your instinct is to be like, oh, I don't know anything, but it's probably no big deal.

00:48:55.360 Why is that your instinct?

00:48:56.380 Why is your instinct to avoid accountability for the most powerful person in the world?

00:49:00.600 Your instinct should be to hold him accountable.

00:49:02.520 The most selfish person on earth is saying, hey, don't look in that box.

00:49:08.320 I know.

00:49:09.280 And you're like, I bet there's nothing in there. 1.00

00:49:13.000 The lyingest motherfucker of all time. 1.00

00:49:15.700 Right. 1.00

00:49:16.000 Is telling you the most obvious lie of all time.

00:49:18.840 And you're like, I believe him.

00:49:20.480 All right.

00:49:20.780 Are we ready for mine?

00:49:21.700 Is this your number one?

00:49:23.140 My number one crescendo, the crescendo of the episode, emotionally and morally.

00:49:27.320 That was not my number one.

00:49:28.220 I have a number one.

00:49:29.060 Well, what is yours?

00:49:30.040 Do it.

00:49:30.400 No, no, no.

00:49:30.980 There you go.

00:49:31.400 Well, I'll do.

00:49:31.960 Okay.

00:49:32.040 I'll do mine, but I'll do a short version of mine.

00:49:33.560 Okay.

00:49:33.840 Okay.

00:49:34.120 To clarify, I personally think the worst take of the year is actually Charlie Kirk was doing

00:49:38.960 politics the right way.

00:49:40.100 Yeah.

00:49:40.500 Yeah.

00:49:40.640 I think that's right.

00:49:41.560 However, we already talked about it for two hours, so we're going to do the second worst

00:49:44.380 take of the year.

00:49:45.260 This is from November 13th, 2025 in The Atlantic.

00:49:49.180 The left's new moralism will backfire.

00:49:52.060 Subhead, under Trump, progressives have embraced the rhetoric of moral clarity.

00:49:56.040 It won't help their cause.

00:49:57.360 Thomas.

00:49:58.440 Thomas.

00:49:59.300 Chatterton Williams.

00:50:00.100 Old Tommy chat.

00:50:02.040 Thank you.

If Books Could Kill - December 29, 2025

The Worst Takes of 2025 [TEASER]

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