Episode 113: The 2025 Daytime Cursties (with Michael Hobbes)

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobbs. And I'm Moira Dottigan.

Speaker 2 Whether we like it or not, we're Inbed with the Right.

Speaker 2 So, Adrian, today we are joined once again by our very special guest and friend of the show, Michael Hobbs. Hi, Michael.

Speaker 1 I can't believe you guys just like go into recording the show and you don't just like hang out for 30 minutes before you start.

Speaker 1 You like hit record and then you're like, welcome to Inbed with the Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we're an all-business podcast now. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We just start recording. We're like, how was your week? What have you been up to? What do you think of this album?

Speaker 2 Well, look, I mean, like, if that comes up organically, we also, we are really thrilled that you're joining us and that you would grace this little award show with

Speaker 2 star Wattage and Charisma, you know, for the third year in a row. So like, we want to be very mindful of your time.

Speaker 1 I'm taking time out of my busy reading terrible bullshit schedule to read some terrible bullshit with you guys.

Speaker 2 Well, I also heard that we took you away from a bouldering wall.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I was bouldering earlier and now I'm like kind of sleepy. So

Speaker 1 you might just get long silences and like deep breaths from me over here.

Speaker 2 That's the inbid with the right promise, folks. Long silences, deep breaths.
I'm just announcing that I'm at my worst. And then if I'm okay, then you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Speaker 1 I do this in all interactions now. Nice.

Speaker 2 Nice. Yeah, I mean, we weren't recording for the gold material before this, which was that Michael explained to Amora what bouldering was, which is like very funny to me.

Speaker 1 Some gay men don't have limp wrists. Some of us have very strong wrists.
Yeah. Battling stereotypes.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 2 So when we approached you about this, about the third annual Kirsties, you were like, wait, is this the one about most cursed discourses of sex and gender? How are you going to do this? Yeah.

Speaker 2 You've already done them all. And it's like, yeah, fuck.
We did a lot. It's been a busy year for sex and gender.
I don't know if you heard. And we were here for a lot of it.

Speaker 1 You guys are out of Helens to talk about. That's right.
Problematic Helens.

Speaker 2 Should we introduce the Kirsties? Because this is our tradition, but perhaps not every listener

Speaker 2 has come with us. This is our annual rundown of, as you may have heard, the most cursed discourses around sex and gender of the year.

Speaker 2 We award these very special awards to several different themes every year. Michael has joined us for all of these.

Speaker 1 Yes, and it's very scientific. It's not something we just put together in the last hour and 45 minutes.
It's something that's like super deliberate. We think about it all year long.

Speaker 2 Like an Atlantic cover story. This has been deeply researched.

Speaker 1 Meticulously fact-checked. Yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think you're right that like we do this now once a week, right? We are a prolific podcast. Like there's a lot, but we had to sort of dig a little deeper this year.

Speaker 2 We were like, all right, let's expand our horizons.

Speaker 1 Also, it's weird because I feel like bad gender discourse has now just infected literally everything else. Yeah.
Yeah. Where it's like health grifters, it's all a bunch of gender shit.

Speaker 2 Politics is all a bunch of gender shit now So it's somehow it's like everywhere and nowhere at once So it's hard to like talk about the worst gender discourse of the year because all discourse is gender discourse now Yeah, so what we decided to do given this problem we were like well, you know, they have the big Academy awards and then they have the ones that they sort of like rattle off like right before the commercial break or like they have like the daytime MEs and whatever like the ones that you kind of give out to like people that you don't really care about.

Speaker 2 Oh, why don't we do the daytime curses or the technical curses or whatever? And we were going to focus it on achievements in anti-awokeness because I think it was a banner year for anti-awokeness.

Speaker 2 You guys all outdid yourselves.

Speaker 1 That's because wokeness was so amok this year. I know.
This was the year that wokeness really went over the edge.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 So it's time to finally put a stop to it.

Speaker 2 Well, it's first time to actually define it, but they didn't get around to that yet.

Speaker 2 They got around to talking about it's dead or it's back or it's not dead or it has changed or it's now right wing rather than left wing. Ah, yeah.

Speaker 1 This was the year of the woke right.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 2 And so in the spirit of clowning on those who have already plentifully clowned themselves, here we present for your listening pleasure the third annual daytime cursedies.

Speaker 1 We're only going to get through like one-tenth of the shit that we identified, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Some of them will go faster than others. Some of them are more cursed than others.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 None of mine will go fast.

Speaker 2 Just to warn you. So, yeah.
So today is all about achievements and dumbass anti-woke punditry. Fuck yeah.

Speaker 2 Because it was, as we said, a banner year for it and we feel like celebrating our special friends before they you know take over cbs cnn

Speaker 2 or i don't know fucking cigar aficionado for all i know yeah yeah so um we're gonna dive right in these are not i think in any order at least in my case are you guys doing ascending order no no i am doing the order in which i thought of them yeah same the very scientific method in which i uh wrote my ideas down in a google doc yeah and i like went to the atlantic archives and i was like oh this garbage that I forgot about.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm already picturing the ones you're doing and I'm excited. Because those things, like, they whisp by, you know, it's crazy.

Speaker 2 You drive along on the highway and then there's like a, like a geyser or like a cool museum and you're like, that would be when you already passed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And that's the thing with Atlantic cover stories, Atlantic stories. Like you clown about it for like six hours and then something else happens in your life and you forget it ever happened.

Speaker 1 You're like, why is that geyser complaining about pronouns for the 33rd time this year?

Speaker 2 In fairness, that's how long it takes them to write these.

Speaker 2 Also, I think part of what has become really fascinating to me about these discourse cycles, the anti-woke discourse cycle, or the cursed gender discourse cycle, is that it is so iterative.

Speaker 2 It's so often the same thing in like a slightly new package, like often some of the same actors, basically always the same complaints, right?

Speaker 2 So, one of the things I think we, I hope we get a chance to do is like tease out some of the recurring themes and be like, this was really distinguished in pronoun panic, or this is a, you know, quintessential example of of a campus moral panic, you know, and just try to like figure out what it is that makes these stories tick a little bit and why I think that they are starting to have for their peddlers a little bit of a diminishing return.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's also our brains are so broken that whenever you see these, you can only put them in categories because you've seen so many.

Speaker 1 It's like your plumber comes over and he's like, Oh, that's this kind of problem because you've seen everything so many times.

Speaker 2 There's your problem right here.

Speaker 2 That anecdote isn't even true, and you've got two of them.

Speaker 2 I apologize for the ethnic ethnic accent.

Speaker 2 Marky, I edit that out. I'm going to get canceled.
You're insulting Mario and Luigi already. We've just barely made it into the seven-minute mark.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 never get the German guy to do an Italian accent.

Speaker 2 But the other reason I think we're focusing on anti-awokeness is because part of the experience of 2025, of course, was that

Speaker 2 for years, people like Michael Hobbes have been pointing out when places like the Atlantic have shot out these gigantic pieces, be like, don't we have bigger fish to fry with an incipient fascist movement in this country?

Speaker 2 Well, now the incipient fascist movement is here and doing a whole lot of stuff,

Speaker 2 which makes these kind of even funnier. Because you kind of sense that these people are reckoning with that, are understanding it to some extent.

Speaker 2 But because they're all, frankly, dum-dums and absolute wusses, they're not, with very few exceptions, genuinely reckoning with this, but try to like pull their old bullshit because it's the only trick they know how to perform

Speaker 2 in a moment that couldn't be historically less suited for it.

Speaker 1 Totally. And also, I think that also explains the woke right thing, where they have to think, like, oh, I didn't waste the last four years of my life complaining about these excesses of wokeness.

Speaker 1 Actually, the right learned it from the left.

Speaker 1 And it's actually all this stuff that was going on on the left, the totalitarianism on the left, has now fed into the totalitarianism on the right, which doesn't hold it to any empirical scrutiny whatsoever.

Speaker 1 No, but it's like they fill a psychological need for people. Like, I'm not a piece of shit.
I haven't wasted my journalism career.

Speaker 1 No, no, I was actually identifying the little tentacles of this before it became the party in power. But like, no, you were just wrong.

Speaker 1 All of us, you especially were pointing out like how wrong this was the entire time. None of these people wanted free speech.
The minute they get in power, they start cracking down on free speech.

Speaker 1 They were lying the entire time. But there's no, we're not ever going to get like a reflection on like, why did we do this for four years straight?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So the TLDR of this episode is, yes, these people did waste their lives.
Yes, they're terrible journalists. Yes, they're pieces of shit.
Yes.

Speaker 2 If you're one of these authors listening right now, yeah, go within yourself, my brother yeah and if not come along for this fun romp yeah the only thing we have the power to do is make fun of these people for three dollars a month yeah that is it that's right excuse me it's five dollars a month we're very classy we're the we're the expensive

Speaker 2 yeah we're the good damn look this mountain of cocaine is not going to fund itself man

Speaker 2 All right, shall we dig in? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Who wants to start?

Speaker 2 Adrian, I think you should go first. Go ahead.

Speaker 2 So it may come as a shock to some of our listeners, but apart from being a professor, being a gay guy, having a face made for podcasting, I also am a huge nerd. And so

Speaker 2 my first story of anti-awokeness comes out of a space that I know well and I like, which has to do with Dungeons and Dragons.

Speaker 1 I didn't know you were a D ⁇ D guy. Oh, yeah.
You have like a regular game?

Speaker 2 Weekly, yeah.

Speaker 1 No, wait. Do you DM?

Speaker 2 I'm the DM, yeah. What? Of course he is.

Speaker 1 So that's like another podcast that you're hosting weekly, but just like privately?

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 2 I have a long-running group. Okay.
I'm I'm recording this because everything sort of came together very quickly. I am doing this on graph paper.

Speaker 2 There's graph paper right below my computer with a bunch of markers lying to my right and a bunch of miniatures behind the screen. No way.
Oh, yeah. It's like such a wholesome hobby.

Speaker 1 I'm like not a DD guy, but I think it's so cool that it's like taken over the culture in the last 10 years.

Speaker 2 It's very fun. And that is exactly what this article was kind of about.
Like DD has been having a bit of a moment, right? We got a movie.

Speaker 2 Like for a long time, if you were a fan of DD, you could either watch like a Saturday morning cartoon, you could get shouted at by Christian moms, or you could watch a terrible movie starring Thora Birch and Jeremy Irons and some of the worst CGI I ever put on screen.

Speaker 2 Well, now Stranger Things is out, so that's cool. People like, well, people no longer like Stranger Things, but they liked it for a while.
There's a movie starring Chris Pine.

Speaker 2 I mean, like, come on, that's like a person you've heard of. Yeah.
Yeah. And the young seem to be enjoying this hobby.

Speaker 2 So obviously, certain media have to like jump on on the bandwagon that like somehow this success is actually a bad thing. Yes.

Speaker 2 And that people enjoying this, especially the young, are enjoying it the wrong way.

Speaker 2 And what vocabulary do we have for that other than wokeness? It's going to be a wokeness story. This is from the Telegraph,

Speaker 2 how woke virtue signaling ruined dungeons and dragons.

Speaker 1 That's why nobody plays it anymore. It's been ruined by the wokeness.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, no, it's like, that's the thing. The entire article is based on the opposite being true of what's manifestly true, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 The article wants to make the claim that, like, this is going to hurt DD, right? Go woke, go broke.

Speaker 2 But they have to write up against the fact that, like, and I don't have to love every part of this, but like, right. It's very manifestly not going broke.
Right.

Speaker 2 And that's why more people than ever are into this thing.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Wokeness is like, it's branded as both an elite affectation and something that the young people are inflicting on the old. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And this has to like cut across both of those intuitive associations, right?

Speaker 2 Like on the one hand, you're saying that like fancy people are ruining this game that has exploded in popularity and become very widespread, right?

Speaker 2 So like it's only so popular because the elite have taken it over is kind of a contradiction in terms.

Speaker 2 But then the other complaint is like wokeness as coded as young.

Speaker 2 is about like, oh, these young people have ruined my children's game.

Speaker 1 And it's like, well, I think it might be kind of more for them anyway. Yeah.
Also, I think the core instinct behind so many of these pieces is just like other people are having fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And like that makes me mad for some reason. And then you have to justify it.
But like you can play D and D whatever way you want to play. If you want to play it super traditional, whatever, like.

Speaker 1 have a blast. It's happening in your living room.
So like no one gives a shit.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's interesting, right?

Speaker 2 So the subhead of this piece in The Telegraph is, quote, longtime fans of the fantasy role-playing game are unhappy about the Stranger Things generation invading their realm.

Speaker 2 And I think you're exactly right. Like if you know anything about D ⁇ D, you know that it's pretty hard for anyone to invade your realm, right?

Speaker 2 Like in the end, like you buy a book, you buy some dice, you sit down around your dining room table and you play it as you say, exactly the way you want.

Speaker 2 If you don't like something in the module as it's written, you change it, right? I did that in the 80s and 90s with stuff that was super homophobic.

Speaker 2 And now if you are super homophobic, you get to do it with the stuff that's less homophobic. If you really need that homophobia in order to really have this campaign land or whatever.

Speaker 2 This reminds me of like Tradcast and the Latin Mass. They're like, how dare you take the anti-Semitic stuff out of the Mass,

Speaker 2 Vatican II? And it's like, well, you can always put it back in if you really want to.

Speaker 1 The Stranger Things generation is ruining Vatican Mass.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I hate it. Yeah, I mean, so it's just a chef's kiss of like kind of bad faith framing, I would say, right?

Speaker 2 Like any person who's been playing different editions of the game will tell you that like it was far woker like 10 years ago, like depending on what we mean by that.

Speaker 2 There's also this kind of bizarre generational conflict being constructed here, given the fact that like Stranger Things, I don't know if you've seen seen the new season yet, but like that shit's 10 years old.

Speaker 2 Those kids are like in their mid-20s. They grew up.
Yeah. Yeah.
They have had work done. Like I think Millie Bobby Brown is a mother.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like the people who got inspired by the first season of Stranger Things are out of college probably by now if they if they sort of it hit sort of for them at 14, 15 or whatever.

Speaker 2 And this whole funny juxtaposition between long-term fans and a new generation is really telling.

Speaker 2 Like the whole framing is clearly meant to invoke sort of a gamergate logic of like the real fans versus Johnny Com Lately's basically.

Speaker 2 And A, it doesn't really matter as much in the TT RPG space as it does in like video games where presumably you might all hang out on the same Discord server or whatever.

Speaker 2 But also, just in case I need to keep digging on that hole of nerdiness I started with, I have been to Gen Con, the large DD convention that happens annually several times.

Speaker 2 And I'm telling you, I've been over the space of a decade and like, it's a pretty gay ass and pretty gender queer place, right? Like,

Speaker 2 science fiction fandom, fantasy fandom tends to be pretty queer. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And this game where you get to pretend to be someone else, like bingo, like it tends to be enjoyed by, you know, by people who don't see themselves fitting into sort of the dominant modes of our society.

Speaker 2 This is outcasts are sort of the top demographic for this game, I think, since 1975 or whatever.

Speaker 1 yeah they're they're pissed off that like weirdos are finally into dnd

Speaker 2 it's like singularly less weird than ever men yeah yeah yeah and so this thing has been blowing around youtube for a long time which is probably where this telegraph writer got it from but the evidence this is something i know michael you posted about on blue sky that the evidence in the article is just something that yeah even if you don't care about dnd has to be seen to be believed it's so good yeah because we both we both know how thin these articles always are so whenever you see a headline you're like i want to see the evidence Because isn't the premise of the piece?

Speaker 1 It's kind of like old D ⁇ D people are like sick of all the wokeness. It's trying to be, it's pretending to be descriptive.

Speaker 1 And then you're like, okay, what is your example of like a classic DD person who's like mad about the wokeness?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So hold on to your butts.
This is exhibit one. Feels like everything is focus grouped into an inclusive oblivion.

Speaker 2 Races and classes and a fantasy make-believe role-playing game are gradually being reduced to aesthetics, wrote one gamer. Thanks, OneGamer.
I guess.

Speaker 1 No link either. I love that there's no link and you have to Google the phrase to find the source.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Did you look it up? I didn't even look it up. I'm like, what's one gamer?

Speaker 1 It's from a Reddit thread.

Speaker 2 There's a Reddit thread,

Speaker 1 which was actually quite thoughtful on the like DD subreddit where somebody said, like, hey, I'm really not trying to start like a whole bunch of drama, but like, what do you guys think about this accusation that DD is too woke?

Speaker 1 And people had like adults had like an adult conversation about this. And this comment was actually like relatively thoughtful.

Speaker 1 And it said, like, I don't really have a problem with wokeness, but I think aesthetically, like some of the inclusionary stuff has like kind of, like, I guess orcs aren't evil anymore.

Speaker 1 Like, it used to be like orcs were the bad guys. And then there's this reclamation of like, well, maybe they're more three-dimensional than that.

Speaker 1 But then this person was saying that the problem with that is that then you have all these like characters and classes and stuff that aren't that different from each other anymore. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because it can be kind of problematic, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But like.

Speaker 1 That to me is like kind of a thoughtful comment. I don't know if I agree with it or disagree with it because I don't know enough about D ⁇ D.

Speaker 1 But it's just like, oh yeah, like some of the rough edges have kind of been shaved off in this push for inclusivity.

Speaker 1 And so it isn't really a complaint about like, like, oh man, there's always these woke people around. It seems like someone just kind of thinking out loud about this.

Speaker 1 And there's like a bunch of thoughtful replies to it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I mean, I have to say that, of course, complaining about DND having the edges sanded off is often sort of code for talking about the fact that, you know, it used to be, it was put out by this company called TSR for a long time.

Speaker 2 TSR went bankrupt and was bought by Wizards of the Coaster, the people who make Magic the Gathering, which in turn got bought by Hasbro.

Speaker 2 And there are definitely complaints, and I think there's something to them, that like that has led to sort of top-down decisions from, you know, a toy manufacturer that maybe doesn't take the way people actually play this game into account.

Speaker 2 Because like things did get kind of fucked up for D ⁇ D in 2025, but had nothing to do with this. So that's exhibit one.
Exhibit two, enter a worst guy you know.

Speaker 2 And the richest guy you know, Elon Musk, who, quote, grew up playing D ⁇ D in South Africa. It's like, yeah, sure.
With his Nazi friends or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And like his butler. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so he apparently tweeted nobody and i mean nobody gets to trash e gary gygax and the geniuses who created dungeons and dragons gary gygax is one of the creators of dungeons and dragons what the fuck is wrong with hasbro and watsie so wizards of the coast may they burn in hell uh now this tweet is from 2024 right uh the story was ostensibly tagged to the new edition of dnd coming out which elon musk could not have read at the time even though i guess maybe he read it in exactly the same way that like he also has played every video game in the sense that he paid for someone to do it and then lied about it.

Speaker 2 I don't know, but like a year really, really matters here, like in terms of like whether or not these are just long-standing complaints or whether there's really a kind of change happening.

Speaker 2 Like the article is trying to construe like that this has been about a recent change, but like, no, this thing is Elon Musk's long-standing complaint and there's no way that man plays regular D ⁇ D, right?

Speaker 2 I think very unlikely.

Speaker 1 That's also the weird thing is this like construction of like, you're taking away my childhood or something. Yeah.
And like, I don't know, you don't play DD anymore.

Speaker 1 No one's going to remove the memories that you have of playing it when you were a kid. It's, it's fine.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like time took away your childhood. You are, in fact, an adult now.
Yeah, don't tell him that. He hates that.

Speaker 2 And then exhibit three that the article presents is a visual one.

Speaker 1 I saw it in the article.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I saw it before I realized what it was.
And I was like, okay, we're talking about the romantic craze. Yeah, which people have been requesting.
We're getting to that, you guys.

Speaker 2 We have to do that one. Yeah.
It's a simmering moral panic.

Speaker 1 Romantic?

Speaker 2 Do you know this? It's like...

Speaker 1 No, I'm not on TikTok. I don't, I'm no, I don't interact with the youths.
Whatever the fuck is going on on TikTok, I never know about it.

Speaker 2 Actually, this seems to be like largely something adults consume. It's a genre of like romance novel and like fan fiction.
Okay. In which the, like, I think basically always male lead love interest

Speaker 2 is like a jack-o'-lantern or like a Minotaur or something. And it's like, it's clearly like an offshoot of like the Twilight vibe.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
They're like quite sexual books.

Speaker 2 Like they're romance novels. There's like a lot of horny stuff in there.
And it's, and sometimes it's like, it's with a dragon. I don't know.
But that also sounds great.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Horny trolls.
That seems like a other people seem to be having fun and they should go have fun. And that seems great.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 I'm broadly fine with it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wokeness has ruined Shrek porn.

Speaker 2 I'm really mad.

Speaker 1 I'm so someone's taken my childhood from me.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Chuck Tingle come on the pod and defend the dinosaur porn.
But maybe we should like describe this image that is in the dock, which is like from okay, I don't know anything about DND.

Speaker 2 This appears to be some sort of festival scene. It's like a medieval village, but there's also like a flying alien with a lot of eyeballs.
Yeah, that is called a beholder.

Speaker 1 Adrian, stop.

Speaker 2 Adrian, we're never, we're never gonna get through this if you stop us every two seconds.

Speaker 1 Actually, actually, you guys.

Speaker 2 Look, man, you gotta come

Speaker 2 correct, guys. This is uh

Speaker 2 just let us get through this, man.

Speaker 1 I'm so glad Adrian is not describing you.

Speaker 2 We've been here for like 45 minutes. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 No, no, look, I'm a seasoned dungeon master. I know exactly how to be concise in setting the scene.

Speaker 1 How to drip the lore. Well done, Adrian.

Speaker 2 Too much world building suffocates the flow of play. Jesus Christ.
You're a video gamer. You know this.

Speaker 1 No, I know, exactly.

Speaker 1 But it's basically, it's like a fantasy image that is like the gayest thing I've ever seen. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like people cavorting and like, what it, I shouldn't be asking you this, Adrian, but like briefly, what is this? Like, it's like a minotaur in the foreground?

Speaker 2 Just like making out the data. It's a gay male couple.
Yeah. I think that's a tiefling or something like that.
I don't know. There's like a little guy in a red vest who is like clearly not white.

Speaker 2 And then his boyfriend is a much bigger guy who is blue.

Speaker 1 So they're both not white, Moira.

Speaker 2 Technically.

Speaker 1 I'm sure they're so pissed off about this. They're like, I don't care if one of them is blue, but one of them needs to be white.
That's right.

Speaker 2 But But yeah, so this is... This blue guy has horns.
Yeah. So this was part of the promotion for Pride Month, I believe, from the D ⁇ D team.

Speaker 2 It did not appear in any of the products for the actual game. And yeah, it is about the gayest thing you've ever seen.
And people lost their goddamn minds over it.

Speaker 1 I did like a little bit of internet archaeology for this too.

Speaker 1 And it seemed like this whole, the article was constructing this whole thing that like traditional D ⁇ D players are mad at the young kids coming in.

Speaker 1 But it seemed like it was literally just a recap of this Twitter blow-up about this image.

Speaker 1 It doesn't seem like there's actually like a culture clash or anything going on within D ⁇ D. It seems like it's just a fancier way of saying people on Twitter were mad about this image in 2024.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Right.

Speaker 2 Like the idea that like people sort of do kind of romanticy stuff with this game, that's of course something that like, you know, like true war game heads probably don't like, but that's been going on since the 80s.

Speaker 2 I'm sure. Yeah.
I mean, like, I was part of that.

Speaker 1 Dude, I have a friend who is a LARPer who does like LARPing like full on. And he says this is like the horniest community that like they'll do LARPing festival stuff all day.

Speaker 1 And then it's just like a total like orgy at night. Like, I don't know if they keep the masks on.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know to what level the role-playing remains, but it's like Dungeons and Dragons has also always had like kind of a horny element. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Which also seems wholesome and cool.

Speaker 2 Nerds are a horny group of people. Yeah.
That's part of their culture. Yes.
Well, and I mean, like, the other thing is like, it's a nerdy hobby, but it's also, it really appeals to theater kids.

Speaker 2 Another group that famously loves the good older horny, yeah.

Speaker 1 This is why I don't do it.

Speaker 1 I went to LARPing. I went to LARPing once with a friend of mine who's really into it, and I was like, This is great, glad for you, but these are not my people.

Speaker 2 And this is like where to me, like the historian alarm bells go off.

Speaker 2 For instance, the article says, like, there's also been a heated debate around new adventure books, such as Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, which draws on the storytelling traditions of non-Western cultures and includes a helpful pronunciation guide.

Speaker 2 And, like, this is where I, as a 45-year-old nerd, go,

Speaker 2 point of order, I have books from the late 80s that had pronunciation guides. Like ADD in the 1980s had settings that were kind of based on the 2001 nights on the Arabian Nights, right?

Speaker 2 There was one that was kind of based on ancient Japan, blah, blah, blah. And of course, they had pronunciation guides and they had little very 80s kind of like notes about cultural sensitivity, right?

Speaker 2 A lot of that today reads a little tone-deaf. And when you can still buy these as PDFs, there is a note from Wizards of the Coast saying, like, hey, please don't hold us to this.

Speaker 2 Like, we just didn't change anything. This is from 1988.
But that being said, it's all fully available.

Speaker 2 And when you read through it, you get the idea that, like, yeah, this is, of course, a community that is interested in different cultures and in different fantasy worlds.

Speaker 2 And the idea that it's all just like knights in shining armor and like return with a hard V kind of medievalism.

Speaker 2 It's just like, that's probably what that guy who wrote the article thought, but like, that's not, in fact, true of the game at all.

Speaker 1 And also, all they're mad about really is the availability of these guidance documents that you can feel free to just ignore them and mispronounce the words. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, again, there's no like Dungeons and Dragons like lifeguard who's stopping you from doing what you want to do. You can just pronounce it however you want to pronounce it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And then the final exhibit in the article, I think it's the one where the real rub is like why this guy cared and why it's in the telegraph.

Speaker 2 Quote, hand in hand with these changes, DND has dropped the term racist in the context of the elves, dwarves, and other creatures that gamers can play as.

Speaker 2 I think that's what it's about, that they're just like, oh no, you got rid of the word race.

Speaker 1 But what do they call them now?

Speaker 2 Categories or something? I'm not even sure what the new edition calls them. I think lineages is a pretty common thing.
Like, yeah, they've just replaced it and they're like, we don't love.

Speaker 2 that word and why would we do this?

Speaker 1 I can't believe this boils down to a vocabulary complaint. Adrian, the first time this ever happened, they're just complaining about a fucking word they don't like.

Speaker 2 That's like all of mine, too. I mean, like, it's already a petty premise.
Like, you're complaining about ways other people who you don't know are playing a game that you play.

Speaker 2 That you probably don't even play. Yeah.
Or, like, like, nominally to have fun with your friends, right? Yeah. It's like, why do you care?

Speaker 2 Like, you're putting so much effort into something that has so far a remove from mattering. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 It's just like the proportion of significance to effort is always so distended on these.

Speaker 1 This is like there was a day when UK TERFs discovered Grindr because someone posted screenshots of Grindr. They're like trans women on Grindr.

Speaker 1 Like somebody put a screenshot like there's trans women on Grindr now, which no one on Grindr fucking cares about. Like trans people are part of our community.
No one on Grindr gives a shit.

Speaker 2 Fork found in kitchen. Who the fuck cares? Yeah, who gives a shit?

Speaker 1 But these like, these like dumb UK, like these basically middle-aged women in the UK were like melting down about like Grindr. They're like, oh, Grindr has fallen.

Speaker 1 And we're like, you could just let us have this one. This is not something that you guys have any ownership over.
You can just let the people who are on Grindr be upset or not upset about this.

Speaker 1 But it was like, they were worked up into a frenzy about like this thing that they don't use. And I feel like that's so many of these things.

Speaker 1 I mean, at least Elon potentially at one point played D ⁇ D. But like a lot of these people.
I'm assuming don't play D ⁇ D. They're just like pissed off to be pissed off, I guess.

Speaker 2 Is my guess too? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Somewhere there's a 19-year-old old with pink hair and they then pronounce and they just cannot stomach that person's existence just knowing that they're out there somewhere is like keeping them up at night it's like you guys have to get like lives and hobbies you guys need to be horny larping you could all be horny larping right now yeah

Speaker 2 it's a fucking waste but so here's the really weird thing like as i suggested and this is this is why i brought this up even though it's frankly a little rechocher DD has been having a super complicated year in 2025.

Speaker 2 There was a problem with like third-party content providers.

Speaker 2 They tried to create kind of an online system where people could play live called Sigil, which they kind of had to write off as like a $100 million loss. It's a pretty big deal.

Speaker 2 The new edition is apparently not selling that well. But on the other hand, of course, like Stranger Things is back.

Speaker 2 Critical Role, the actual play show is back, which always helps their numbers, right? Big things are happening one way or the other in the DD world.

Speaker 2 And what's interesting about it is that none of this seems to be reflected in this article or in this debate, right? Which is so interesting.

Speaker 2 Complaining about woke becomes this way of cutting across the actual ways in which our world is changing and to kind of create this fan fiction about it, right?

Speaker 2 Where like everything means something else. It's almost like the way like QAnon can be like, well, if you look at the hand position or if you look at like that word he's using, right?

Speaker 2 Like it's just this way to like not have the conversation that every normal person is having, but get to have your own private like twin language conversation with like the other like woke speakers in your life.

Speaker 1 But this has always been the thing that we've complained about about the wokeness panic is that there's also an opportunity cost that because you're complaining about wokeness all the time, you can't have an adult conversation about things like

Speaker 1 social media, the fact that we've given so much of our lives over to social media algorithms is like a genuine problem, but it was all categorized under this like wokeness.

Speaker 1 Like they're taking the Hunter Biden laptop story offline. And like that, that's maybe a subset of the issue, but there is a real issue here.

Speaker 1 But it all gets subsumed under this dumb fucking topic of wokeness that then ends up like they're bunking it and we're debunking it.

Speaker 1 We're having this like binary conversation about whether or not it's like a wokeness thing when like there's an actual shift, like a really major shift happening.

Speaker 1 I mean, they even referenced this thread on the D ⁇ D subreddit, which I generally like, I spent a while scrolling through it. It was like thoughtful.

Speaker 1 I didn't agree with everything, but it was like adults having an adult conversation about the shifts going on kind of ideologically within Dungeons and Dragons.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, this is actually super interesting.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you could write something interesting about that. Yeah.
But it's like, they don't try. They're just like, okay, what are the three pieces of ammunition I need to make this like a news article?

Speaker 2 It reminds me of that. Like, you want to like make a like a dumb bastardized version of that very nice Toni Morrison quote.

Speaker 2 It's like the very serious function of racism is to distract you from doing your work. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's like the very serious function of anti-woke discourses is to distract you from having a substantive conversation about the underlying reality.

Speaker 1 From all the horny LARPing you could be doing. That's right.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, who wants to go next? Moira, go, go. Okay.
All right. I'm going to draw you guys's attention to something that I saw and I wanted to bring it up.

Speaker 2 It's new, but it felt to me almost like from out of time. It felt to me like something that would have gone viral like two or three years ago.

Speaker 2 And that is an article that was published in the Atlantic, I believe, on December 2nd. called Accommodation Nation.

Speaker 2 America's Colleges Have an Extra Time on Test Problem. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
When I read that, I was like, I checked the dates. I was like, oh, this feels like such a throwback.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
It is a campus moral panic piece.

Speaker 2 It is trying to talk about college kids as overly sensitive, as coddled, as like weak, but in a manipulative, conniving kind of way where they're like. weaponizing their weakness.

Speaker 2 You know, it felt like it was about a Title IX, you know, controversy or like, you know, somebody getting a professor in trouble for using the N-word.

Speaker 2 But what it actually was is this article in the Atlantic magazine by a woman named Rose Horowitz, who is like a new staff writer, newish staff writer there. She's mostly on the campus beat.

Speaker 2 Not a real beat, not a real beat, but not a real beat.

Speaker 2 It is her job to generate this kind of article. Yes, right.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And her piece suggests that students at really elite colleges, this is like kind of confined to elite colleges, are cheating by getting themselves these like dubious psychiatric diagnoses for things like anxiety or ADD ADD

Speaker 2 that are then classified as disabilities that can get them extra time on tests. Like Adrian and I both teach, Adrian a little more often than I do.
We both like teach at a university.

Speaker 2 I've encountered students who do give a disability letter at the beginning of the term.

Speaker 2 They're like, heads up, this is like a form that I've been issued by, you know, the Stanford Equal Education Access Office about my disability. I might need this.
Like this might come up.

Speaker 2 I don't think I've ever had anybody actually ask for that accommodation, but it's like kind of a shockingly small ask, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's not actually clear to me how much of an advantage extra time on a test really confers.

Speaker 1 And also the thing that struck me, because again, as soon as I see these headlines, I'm like, okay, what is your evidence? There's no evidence. of the numbers of kids getting extra time on tests.

Speaker 1 There's evidence of increasing percentage of kids with disabilities, but then it just says some of them will get extra time on tests.

Speaker 1 But I mean, the headline of the article is America has an extra time on test problem. You don't have data about the extra time on the tests.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So there's just nothing there.
Yeah. So you're right, Michael.

Speaker 2 Like this doesn't actually cite any evidence saying that what it claims is happening, that like all of these kids are taking extra time on tests that they don't really need.

Speaker 2 There's no evidence that that's happening at all, right?

Speaker 2 What it does is it cites a few statistics about the rate of student eligibility for extra time accommodations, like basically like students who have some sort of like time related or attention or mental health related diagnosis at really just a handful of hyper elite institutions.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Harvard, Brown, and Amherst College.
Literally, like that's it.

Speaker 1 And then it does actually have some national data, which is like much, much, much lower rates.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 So I mean, I guess you could say that that's an elite school problem, maybe, but again, it does not have evidence of its central claim. How many people are getting these accommodations?

Speaker 1 It just has how many people are eligible for the accommodations. It's that's a completely different phenomenon.

Speaker 2 It's only how many people can take them, not how many students are taking them. Rose Horowitz tries to imply

Speaker 2 that what is happening here is that rich kids are taking on this cynical tone.

Speaker 2 And she quotes like some anonymous instructors, really, one anonymous instructor who clearly kind of just hates his students, being like, you hear students with disability, you think of a kid in a wheelchair, but it's not a kid in a wheelchair.

Speaker 2 It's a kid who who has adhd who wants extra time i can look at these kids and they're fine yeah great like thank you anonymous adjunct who hates life and himself but this is like something that she says and does provide other statistics saying that you know okay the rate of this diagnosis is less high at less elite institutions and her thesis for why that might be her sort of like causal venture is that rich kids are like evil and cynical and weak and manipulative, right?

Speaker 2 And not what seems a little more likely to me, which is that rich kids are being screened for mental health problems, you half wit.

Speaker 2 And like they are the ones being diagnosed with ADHD because they're the ones whose parents are sending them to a fucking psychiatrist.

Speaker 1 Also, after I posted that on Blue Sky, a lot of people, I mean, this is also anecdotal, but people posted saying like it cost us $1,500 to get our daughter diagnosed and to get her accommodations at school.

Speaker 1 It's not like, oh yeah, my daughter is like worried sometimes. And they're like, you get double the time on the test.
It's like a formal process that you have to go through to get these designations.

Speaker 1 And from what I've heard anyway, it's like not easy. Yeah.
And so again, this is like something a responsible journalist would look into. Like, is this being given out too easily?

Speaker 1 And there's nothing in here about the process.

Speaker 2 So in a little bit of a defense of this writer, the adjunct that she quotes, like you could talk to a lot of people. This is something you hear very frequently.

Speaker 2 I myself, I share exactly your skepticism over the, oh, those kids are too coddled or or whatever narrative.

Speaker 2 That being said, you can go into any college campus and find especially older instructors talking like this. So this perception does exist and it does exist, especially at elite colleges.

Speaker 2 What I find really interesting about it is it seems to come from a very naive understanding of what exactly college work looks like, right?

Speaker 2 Where it's like, what do we think these kids do where like an extra half an hour would matter all that much, right? If you're doing a final exam, which is the classic place where this happens, right?

Speaker 2 Like it's drawing on between 10 to 14 weeks of instruction. Do we really think that the 20 minutes are such a huge unfair advantage if you, I don't know, haven't done the fucking reading?

Speaker 2 Like, no, like whether or not you've done the fucking reading is going to be pretty dispositive, frankly.

Speaker 2 And the other thing, of course, is that like she does sort of these kind of interesting comparison things, where I think Moore is exactly right.

Speaker 2 Like it does seem that kids with more resources are getting more readily diagnosed. And there's two different ways of reading that data.

Speaker 2 But the other thing is, of course, it's sort of saying, like, these kids have a leg up against kids from other universities. Like, well, no, because this is all internal, right?

Speaker 2 If all this were true, it would mean that some kids at Harvard score above where they should be compared to other kids at Harvard due to these diagnoses.

Speaker 2 And it's like, well, that doesn't actually mean anything, right? Like the same thing about grade inflation.

Speaker 2 It's like, well, yeah, if you inflate grades like crazy, an A from Harvard is not going to mean that much anymore, right? And it turns out, like, our employers aren't the college board.

Speaker 2 They aren't, you know, our employers are like, did you take this class? Not like, did you get an A plus or an A, right?

Speaker 2 Like maybe in law school, maybe in some professional, pre-professional programs, this might still work. But in the end, like.
Google wants to know, did you complete CS106A at Stanford?

Speaker 2 Not like, how did you do? How did the others do? Did you get an accommodation, et cetera, et cetera. They're just like, oh yeah, he knows what he needs to know to be a programmer for us.

Speaker 2 And we will now exploit him for a couple of years, right? Like that's all they want.

Speaker 2 So it's like, yes, you're going to hear this complaint at a lot of colleges, but it has an understanding of merit and accomplishment that is actually very much divorced from the logic of how these places actually internally operate.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 And also, I think on the perceptions thing, I mean, it's just an objective fact that like there's many more of these accommodations than there would have been if you were a teacher 40 years ago.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 That's not really like the sort of empirics of that aren't. really up for debate.
And so if you were a teacher 40 years ago, like, yeah, you would notice like, oh man, it's probably a hassle.

Speaker 1 There's probably more paperwork. There's probably just more you have to do on the accommodations of students.

Speaker 1 That like, I don't know, it seems fine that people would notice that, but the thesis of the article and of this whole panic is that people are faking their status to get accommodations and that they are being overly generously given out.

Speaker 1 And there's just no evidence of that whatsoever. You could easily argue that they were under given out 40 years ago when they essentially didn't exist at all.

Speaker 1 And so we're now in a world where like, yeah, some people are getting accommodations, but I'm sorry, until we have evidence that people with like anxiety and ADHD and whatever else are getting accommodations unjustly.

Speaker 1 I'm just not going to be mad. I'm going to be happy that people are able to kind of go through the process and get the help that they need until we have real evidence that this is a problem.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to assume that it's like, that's great. If you need two hours on the test and everybody else gets an hour, awesome.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's something here where it like presumes that the increase in diagnoses among this cohort is due to cynicism and not due to like increased awareness of mental health conditions or like lobbying by people who have been historically like exploited or excluded from higher education on the basis of these like mental health conditions in the past.

Speaker 2 Right. And not because of like screening.
Like it reminds me a lot of like RFK's thesis about autism.

Speaker 2 He's like, well, autism rates went up really heavily over the last like latter half of the 20th century. It's like, yeah, because they started testing.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like because of mental, like because healthcare became a lot more accessible. Right.
Not because like we can suddenly vaccinate for polio.

Speaker 1 Right. It also rests on this assumption that like kids are coming to you guys as professors and saying, like, I have ADHD.
I'm not going to turn in my assignment.

Speaker 1 And you're like, okay, I'll give you an A anyway.

Speaker 1 The idea that schools are just giving out these accommodations with no process, no assessment, they're indifferent to whether kids are gaming the system.

Speaker 1 I mean, again, maybe that's true, but you'd have to show evidence of it. I mean, what is the process to get these accommodations?

Speaker 1 Is it just like you ask and you get them, or do you have to show a doctor's note? Or it's like, there's an empirical thing here of like, is it too easy to get these accommodations?

Speaker 1 None of this is interrogated by the author at all. And we always see this in these pieces.

Speaker 1 They look at this sort of tangentially related phenomenon, like there's more kids with disabilities in colleges now.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 And then they extrapolate kids are faking disabilities, which we do not know, to get accommodations, which we also do not know. So they're like three degrees away from the actual data at this point.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 There's a real fixation, I would say, on college kids getting away with something. Like there's this real sense that like

Speaker 2 they shouldn't be there, right? They maybe didn't deserve it. And now they're getting away with it.
Right.

Speaker 2 And in the Atlantic, basically, like college kids are getting away with stuff was like the last two years, right? It was Gaza protests and it was this, right?

Speaker 2 Like every three months, like, what are college kids getting away with now? Right.

Speaker 2 And even some of the chat GPT stuff is frankly like going in that direction, where it's like, oh, they're all cheating, cheating, cheating.

Speaker 2 And it's like, well, maybe, but like, it's probably more complicated than that.

Speaker 2 But like, the idea that like certain elites are basking in ill-gotten gains seems to have taken real root at the Atlantic.

Speaker 2 And oddly enough, it seems to be about blue-haired college students, not about the billionaires that fucking are feasting on the carcass of the American centralized government.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wanted to talk about how I thought that this article hit a few of the classic moral panic buttons. One of them is what you say, Adrienne, which is notion that

Speaker 2 young people in general, but really like elite college students in particular, are like nefarious and undeserving. That's like a really common thread.

Speaker 2 And it's something that emerges, I think maybe not coincidentally, as these elite spaces became more dominated by women and more welcoming to people of color, right?

Speaker 2 The notion that these institutions are not what they used to be, that they no longer give meaningful accreditation of, you know, an elite class, that they no longer recognize merit is something that I think comes from the integration of like women and students of color into these institutions and then has to be sort of like retrofit into a more polite container.

Speaker 2 Another one that I wanted to tip on is like this notion that like mental illness isn't real is like also something I think we see in a lot of these discourses.

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, you think you have PTSD and all the kids have ADHD now because their moms don't want to deal with them or like whatever it is.

Speaker 2 The notion that psychiatric illnesses, because they might have social causes and because they often might not present in like a physical form or be like empirically identifiable in like the workings of the brain itself are sort of like bullshit and a product more of human weakness or human cynicism is something I see a lot in a ton of these sort of wokeness panics.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's not a real condition like low-T. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's the real crisis. I almost felt like them publishing this piece was a little bit of wish casting.
They're like, this is the campus discourse we're used to having. Yes.

Speaker 2 This is the campus discourse we want to have. When what actually happened on campuses in 2025 was like massive assaults on academic freedom by the Trump administration, right?

Speaker 2 Like these shakedowns in which major institutions, including some of the ones that were name-checked in this piece as being too nice to their students, were told to crack down on pro-Palestine speech, told to get rid of like ethnic and gender studies departments, told to like eliminate the ability of trans students to participate in sports, told to get rid of all these student affiliate groups, right?

Speaker 2 Like real like speech speech and academic freedom extortions coming from the federal government. That's not what the panic is.

Speaker 2 The panic is somebody who has ADHD, which, you know, maybe is real, is taking another 20 minutes on a Blue Book exam. It's like, who could possibly give a shit?

Speaker 2 And the answer is only the Atlantic magazine. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I was just going to say Atlantic got it Atlantic. Like it's very much, because I think what they're doing, I don't know if they're conscious of this, is they're taking this right wing.

Speaker 1 I think this is like the moral panic of next year.

Speaker 1 I think now that they've kind of won on the trans stuff, they're now applying that whole social contagion model to all forms of mental conditions, right?

Speaker 1 Once they're like, well, the internet has tricked kids into thinking they're trans. They're now saying the internet's tricked kids into thinking they're ADHD, depressed, anxious, whatever.
Gay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Gay. I mean, whatever.
Like, we're all just kind of like rewinding to the fucking panics of yesteryear. And this is part of an assault of trying to get rid of disability accommodations.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is what the right wants. It's a very obvious assault on anything that would make it easier to have a condition like this.

Speaker 1 But then, of course, what the Atlantic does is they then launder it into, oh, it's actually about elites. Did you know rich kids are the ones who are doing this?

Speaker 1 They're joining this effort, essentially, right?

Speaker 1 Or they're giving it ammunition that you as a left-wing person can be like, oh, I actually kind of also think these disability accommodations have gone too far. There's no real evidence of it.

Speaker 1 And it's not going to harm the rich kids. It's going to harm everybody else.

Speaker 1 And these disability accommodations, there's no fucking evidence that they're actually giving anybody an unfair advantage, but I'm going to join the effort to dismantle them, or at least I'm going to be enough on board that when the effort to dismantle them succeeds, I'm not going to be all that pissed off.

Speaker 1 That's basically what they do with trans rights, right? That you're like, oh, it's up for debate, whatever. I don't really care about these laws.
It's precisely the same thing.

Speaker 2 I wanted to give one last beat on this before we move on, because I was like, who is Rose Horror Witch?

Speaker 2 This was not one of the people I had on my like mental roster as anti-woke writers, like Thomas Chatterton Williams or Jonathan

Speaker 2 or I don't know, like John McWalter or whoever it should be.

Speaker 1 Literally the whole Atlantic NASDAQ.

Speaker 1 Just reading names in alphabetical order.

Speaker 2 Not Adam.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, except the one guy.

Speaker 2 But like, I was like, okay, well, who is she? And so I looked her up and it turns out she's on, she's a staff writer at the Atlantic.

Speaker 2 She has been on the elite college beat for the Atlantic for a little while now. And that's for good reason because she graduated from Yale about 20 minutes ago in 2023.

Speaker 1 But how, how much time did she have to take her tests? How many hours?

Speaker 2 Well, I will say

Speaker 2 on her LinkedIn, which I looked at because I'm a bitch. Oh, boy,

Speaker 2 wait, no, she fully lists on her public resume that she got summa cum laude on all of her exams at Phillips Exeter, one of the nation's fanciest boarding prep schools, which is, yes, a high school.

Speaker 2 So if this person seems

Speaker 2 like they are paying attention to things that don't matter and giving them really high stakes, it might be because they're like literally a child and still listing their high school gpa on their resume this is so mean of you're just like fuck it

Speaker 2 who what kind of a fucking loser looks their high school grades on them lingering listen i hope this woman never experiences the kind of thing that will make her realize that this doesn't matter right like this is the kind of preoccupation that you can only have if nothing bad has ever happened to you or nothing like really real has ever happened to you and i just hope she gets to keep living that way like god bless but also it's the problem with the fucking atlantic because like this is not a real beat.

Speaker 1 Like, the higher education beat, all she's going to do is write about fucking SJW garbage. Like, this is Michael Powell had this beat at the New York Times.

Speaker 1 He's like, the name of his actual beat was like, free speech debates in higher education. It's like, I guess, the moral panic beat.
Like, this is not a real beat.

Speaker 1 And so it's not really her that's the problem.

Speaker 1 It's the fact that they think this is like a vertical that they need to have like a category of news on their website of like excesses in higher education, which is basically what they've done for a decade.

Speaker 2 Well, somebody is taking a paycheck to launder right-wing grievance through an organ of like elite consensus at the Atlantic, right? I don't know. I hold them responsible for that.

Speaker 2 Like, fucking, I mean,

Speaker 1 she sucks for putting her high school on her linking, let's be clear.

Speaker 1 But the work, I mean, ultimately, she's responsible, but also the Atlantic is like, has created the structure in which these ghouls are able to succeed. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I do think that, especially for people who've just graduated college, like they're close enough to the experience of college that they

Speaker 2 probably know that they're peddling a bunch of bullshit to people if they do these highly selective things.

Speaker 2 But 2025 is also the story of people no longer having to experience real cognitive dissonance with these things.

Speaker 2 I mean, I heard about a university that keeps going on and on about how students aren't tough enough and how they have to toughen up, et cetera, et cetera,

Speaker 2 and then banned student graduation speakers just to avoid hearing the words free Palestine. It's my university.
I heard that 11 of their students are actually on trial for felonies. Yeah.

Speaker 2 For doing a civil disobedience in the president's office. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I did not know about that because I only read the Atlantic.

Speaker 1 I don't learn of things like this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Michael, you got to wait for someone to get an extra 15 minutes on a term paper.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Then that shit's going to go wild on the Atlantic.

Speaker 2 So, Michael, do you want to hear mine? Let's go through yours.

Speaker 1 You guys, I think all of us have been watching the very sad, but also kind of funny destruction of the Washington Post happening all year so on november 16th of 2025 the washington post editorial board like the actual official editorial board of the washington post published seattle's coming socialist experiment

Speaker 1 this was a story about the worrying woman that seattle washington uh has just elected as mayor uh we have mail in ballot so it takes like two weeks for all the votes to get counted so ours was after Zoron Mamdani won but I think it's kind of part of the whole like Zoron meltdown of like, oh no, there's like socialists taking over cities, whatever.

Speaker 1 So ours is named Katie Wilson.

Speaker 1 Actually, can I, can I send you guys text to read? Please do it like my podcast.

Speaker 2 Yes, please. I'll read it.
Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600 square foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter.

Speaker 2 By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. Wow.

Speaker 2 To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for, quote, free childcare and other goodies.

Speaker 1 Did you guys know about this? She doesn't own a car. She fucking rents.
She lives in a rented apartment

Speaker 1 with a family. And her parents help her with her child care costs.
It's extremely worrying stuff.

Speaker 1 And then to make up for this, she is going to charge all of us money and then provide, quote, free childcare.

Speaker 1 Because childcare is not free because it's like, oh, it's theft from the government or something.

Speaker 2 It's so hilarious to me that, like, as a bunch of billionaires is literally fleecing like NASA and like USAID and they're like, oh no, she's stealing from people to like make sure kids can go to school.

Speaker 2 Like, right. I mean, of all the things that are being thieves in America in 2025, that's the one you pick.

Speaker 1 But did you know the mayor of Seattle doesn't own a car?

Speaker 2 It's based. It is shocking that they try to frame it as a scandal in itself that she is not rich.
Yeah. It's fascinating.
It's genuinely shocking. She can't afford to own a home.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, well, yeah, neither can most of her constituents.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But what's so weird is this actually became an attack line in the mayoral campaign.

Speaker 1 So she was running against this Bruce Harrell guy, who's kind of like our Andrew Cuomo, sort of Tammany Hall-style Democrat guy who's like kind of knows everybody, but just like doesn't do anything with power.

Speaker 1 Just like one of those guys who just wants more and more power, but doesn't fucking do anything useful with it.

Speaker 1 Katie Wilson participated in an article in one of the local papers that was called, Katie Wilson Can Barely Afford to Live in Seattle. That's why she wants to be mayor.

Speaker 1 And it was her talking about her challenges with affordability. She essentially founded an NGO.
That's like what she does. She's like a community organizer.

Speaker 1 And that doesn't pay very much money in Seattle. And Seattle is getting extremely expensive.
And so, yeah, it's really hard to afford child care.

Speaker 1 And so she's talking about this. And one of the reasons she wants to help people in the city and like run for office is to make things easier for affordability.

Speaker 1 It's like they're taking like the reason that she's running and casting it as like a downside. And it's like, no.

Speaker 2 How could we trust her if she can't even afford child care? Yeah, like she doesn't even have her own butler. I mean, it's just like so comically out of touch.
And it also is sort of doing her a favor.

Speaker 2 I'm like, all of this sounds appealing. Like, this sounds like it's actually central to her appeal.

Speaker 1 Totally. They try to do this with Zoron, too, where they're like, his old tweets are about how like capitalism is bad.
And like, he wants to make rent lower. And you're like, dope.
This is awesome.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're like, you're saying that to a nation that lost its collective shit over the hottest CEO assassin. Like, I mean,

Speaker 2 you might want to read the room, my friend. Like, people are very guillotine-pilled.

Speaker 2 And if you're like, wow, this is somebody who's not an elite as an attack line, it's actually just being like, you can't trust him. He's too good looking.

Speaker 2 And, you know, it's just like, it's not like actually hurting her, but it's, it's such a hell that the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos now, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, yeah, completely.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I've, I've seen this in a couple of their mostly editorial board pieces, but more and more, just like the rest of the op-ed page.

Speaker 2 It's just like, oh, this is just straight up a cater to Jeff Bezos' personal opinion and nobody else would share it, right?

Speaker 2 Nobody else is like, God, I don't trust this woman because she thinks childcare is too expensive. Nobody else finds that disqualifying.
Yeah. So I think that's so interesting.

Speaker 2 Like 2025 is obviously the year when sort of billionaires fully took over our media.

Speaker 2 And one of the things that I didn't have on my bingo card as a side effect of that is that like more and more of our media is targeted at an audience of like one or 15, like they're 15 freak friends, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I write about this a little bit in my forthcoming book, what Tech calls governing, where like X became unusable because it needed to stroke Elon Musk's ego.

Speaker 2 Yeah, CBS is gonna be a shit show, not necessarily because people aren't conservative, they're plenty of conservatives, it's because it's being made for billionaires.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and WAPO has the same problem that it's like there to like tickle Jeff Bezos' ball sack. And like, turns out that's not compelling content.
People are like, I don't, I don't like this.

Speaker 1 I don't it's like that with the free press, too. There's not that many paid subscribers, but like rich Silicon Valley Valley guys love that shit and they're willing to throw money at it.

Speaker 1 But like the audience for this stuff, thankfully, isn't that large.

Speaker 1 It's just the 50 people in the country who love it happen to all be billionaires.

Speaker 1 And so what's very weird about this, like, this extremely strange attack on her is that this attack was then taken up by the mayor himself in like his attack ads on her.

Speaker 1 So he, he sent out, I got this. He sent out mailers to people with the headline, Katie Wilson is not who,

Speaker 1 Katie Wilson is not who she says she is. As if she's like an imposter.
She's never, by the way, never lied about this. This comes from an interview where she was like speaking about this openly.

Speaker 1 Like it's difficult to live in Seattle because it's unaffordable. This was not like

Speaker 1 you got like leaked documents showing that her parents help her. Bruce Harrell, the guy who was making this attack line, earns somewhere between $500,000 and $1.2 million a year.

Speaker 1 He's a multi-millionaire. So he's going after her for renting.
And it's like, sorry, are we, who's the man of the people in this scenario?

Speaker 1 And then what's also amazing is that then there's follow-up reporting from her parents who say that they're not even really supporting her.

Speaker 1 So what happened is she's been the head of this NGO essentially in Seattle for 14 years. She's always been financially independent.

Speaker 1 And when she started running for office because she'd be so busy, her parents reached out to her and were like, hey, do you need any help with child care? We're happy to chip in.

Speaker 1 And she was like, hey, thanks. So this was something that was just temporary and extremely brief.
And it doesn't sound like it was like that much money anyway.

Speaker 1 So it's like, not only is this just like a completely ridiculous attack line, but it's also not meaningfully true.

Speaker 2 And then the free press dug in and was like, did you know the mom is actually her aunt?

Speaker 1 It did feel very similar to that thing that's over.

Speaker 1 They're out of anything to say. Like they have nothing to attack her on.
So they're just taking like, you get help from your parents.

Speaker 1 Like, I think a lot of people in Seattle, because it's so unaffordable, are getting help from their parents, whether they admit it or not.

Speaker 1 Like, a lot of people have like their parents paying for their phone plan or something. Yeah.
So, like, this is actually kind of like weirdly relatable, right?

Speaker 2 I also think, like, it's a testament, as you said, Mike, to like how little they actually have on her, that they're attacking something that's in fact a strength, right?

Speaker 2 Like with Zoron, you could see them flailing. Like they tried to

Speaker 2 globalize the Antifada stick. They couldn't do it.
They tried to make the thing where he like eats with his hands stick and nobody really gave a shit about that.

Speaker 2 And like, so they finally landed on like, oh, it was actually his, his second cousin or his first cousin once removed, but he called her his aunt. And it's just like, okay, this is

Speaker 2 just displaying your own desperation. Yeah, yeah.
Like your own out of touchness. And that kind of reminds me of that, too.
It says, like, she doesn't own a car.

Speaker 2 And it's like, well, she might be more willing to invest in public transit. Like, I don't know.
It's like, not so bad.

Speaker 1 This is actually like the main kind of heart of the piece and what made me see like much more clearly the parallels with Zorong. So this is like the core of their arguments.

Speaker 1 I'm going to send this to the group chat.

Speaker 2 Should I read? Yeah, go for it.

Speaker 2 14 years ago, after working odd jobs as a barista, baker, lab technician, and legal assistant, Wilson co-founded an advocacy group called Transit Riders Union to agitate agitate for better public transportation paid for by new and higher taxes.

Speaker 2 She says she decided to challenge Mayor Bruce Harrell earlier this year after he opposed a new tax on high earners to pay for housing construction.

Speaker 2 She campaigned on a local capital gains tax, a digital advertising tax, and a statewide wealth tax.

Speaker 1 So this is essentially the case that she is a socialist. Yeah.
My favorite thing here is she's agitating for better public transportation, comma, paid for by new and higher taxes. I don't know.

Speaker 2 That sounds great. I'm a how else are we going to do that?

Speaker 1 But that's also, that's not socialism.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's how governments work. We all chip in a little bit and we get like roads and we get like free education and we get like, that's just society.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the very notion of like public goods as being geared towards the collective good or the good of the like common people is like here itself cast us suspicious.

Speaker 2 There's also like a very like anti-bus and anti-transit strain in this kind of like pro-billionaire centrist like think tank slop that you see coming out against Zoran and I guess now against also against Kitty Wilson.

Speaker 2 I'm like, why do you guys hate the bus so much? Especially

Speaker 2 they keep reinventing it with all these like uber pools and stuff. They keep reinventing the bus.
A startup does that like twice a year. Right.
But they hate the actual bus.

Speaker 1 It's so weird. I think this is like another thread that we saw all year and will probably get worse for fuck's sake.
They're resurrecting essentially the communist smear from McCarthyism.

Speaker 1 They're like, oh, we're surrounded by communists. But then when they try to substantiate it, it's just like, oh, she wants to tax people and provide public services.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, again, I don't, I mean, I'm hoping anyway, this stuff is just so transparent.

Speaker 2 The Eisenhower administration, like, paid for the highway system how? Like, right.

Speaker 1 And if that's socialism, we're already socialists. So what are you fucking complaining about then?

Speaker 2 Like, the socialist smear, I think, is also going to have diminishing returns because you're trying to make that case to an electorate who actually doesn't have any living memory of the USSR as like an actual threat.

Speaker 2 And people are like, well, why am I supposed to hate socialism again? Like, what's so wrong with it? We've actually like never experienced it. What we're living in is like...

Speaker 2 like intense upward concentration of wealth and like social deprivation and crumbling social services.

Speaker 2 And there's no socialist threat that we're like using to duck and cover because we were all born in the 90s. Like you're not talking to people who grew up like you did,

Speaker 2 pissing themselves for like an air raid drill, you know? It's just not.

Speaker 1 I think people think of Denmark. I think when they, you hear socialists, I think most young people will be like, oh, so yeah, Denmark, Sweden, like these countries seem fine to me.

Speaker 2 I would love a Scandinavian style social democracy. Give me one of those baby boxes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the bike lanes. Give me the big ass bike lanes.
Yes. So I actually, for we, we did a episode about Zoran Mamdani, like the Zoron Mamdani meltdown.
And for that, I watched.

Speaker 1 God help me, a entire podcast interview between Andrew Cuomo and fucking Logan Paul.

Speaker 2 So when Andrew Cuomo went on Logan Paul's podcast called Impulsive, by the way.

Speaker 1 And it has like the most egregious product placement you've ever seen. They're sitting on either side of like a can of energy drink the entire time.

Speaker 1 But anyway, it's two hosts and they're like, they're talking to Andrew Kuoma about like, you know, why do you hate this or Mamdani guy? Like, what's so bad about him?

Speaker 1 And he's like, well, did you know that he wants to levy a 16% tax on millionaires in New York City?

Speaker 1 They're going to have to pay 16% of their income and they're, none of them are going to want to live in New York City anymore.

Speaker 1 And then to his great credit, one of the co-hosts of Logan Paul's podcast is like, well, what's the tax now? And Andrew Coomo is like, oh, it's 11%.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 1 oh, okay. So we already have this, but it would be socialism if it was 16% instead of 11%?

Speaker 1 They can't even describe what it means to be a socialist. It's so fascinating to me.

Speaker 2 Well, it has to be undefined because they have to be able to apply it to everything they don't like, right?

Speaker 2 When you like bound a term that way, you actually limit your own ability to wield it as a weapon.

Speaker 2 So I think it's a feature, not a bug that they can't define this actually, because like then people would be able to say, well, like, no, that's not what that means.

Speaker 1 Right. Or like, this is fine.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like taxing millionaires 16%

Speaker 1 would be okay. I don't know.

Speaker 2 These are all such documents of like uber rich self-radicalization. Like part of why these people hate the bus is because they have to share the space with people who are different from them.

Speaker 2 That is, I mean, I think people have been saying this for a while now.

Speaker 2 That is really the only filter bubble that matters right now is that our uber rich find find it disgusting to have to share space with the rest of us and are using their pretty substantial political muscle to make that happen.

Speaker 2 Right. To make sure that we don't get into the doom bunker in New Zealand and that only they and their closest blood bags get to do it.

Speaker 1 There's also like, not that I'm like disappointed or surprised or whatever, but like this is fucking slop. Like the quality of argumentation here is just so bad, right?

Speaker 1 It doesn't even know what socialism is. It doesn't seem to know anything about the mayoral race.

Speaker 1 It's also like all these rich rich people are getting radicalized, but they're also just like dumbing themselves down because they're in this like echo chamber of just like right-wing garbage all the time.

Speaker 1 Like, this is the kind of thing you would fail a high schooler for writing. It's like, sorry, you say she's a socialist, but all you're describing is things that we already have in place.

Speaker 1 This is like sub-national reviews, like Breitbart-level argumentation that's now appearing in the Washington Post. And it's like, do you not understand how embarrassing this is?

Speaker 2 Well, it's the other thing about like billionaire capture of these mega mainstream media outlets is that like more and more of it is really just like an intellectual job creation program for conservatives, right?

Speaker 2 It's crazy. Yeah.
It's nuts how much of a leg up they get. And then you have people who are doing real like breaking news reporting that's legitimate and they all are just like exiled to Substack now.

Speaker 2 It's kind of nuts. It's kind of amazing how quickly the quality of our national media has degraded over the course of the past year.
Right.

Speaker 1 And Substack is also owned by right-wingers.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I mean, yeah.

Speaker 1 The one place that's kind of quote-unquote working for independent journalists is also a place that you really can't trust, right? What the algorithms are showing you, et cetera.

Speaker 1 So anyway, that was mine. I live in a socialist hellscape.

Speaker 2 Nice. I get to visit one when I want to come see my wife.
So I love my socialist hellscape. I love Zora and Montani's New York.
San Francisco instead has a billionaire.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we have another billionaire.

Speaker 2 He's an heir, right? Yeah, Levi Strauss. Levi Strauss.
Okay. Yeah.
Right. The jeans.
Jeans.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You guys have like the worst.

Speaker 2 It's like a terrible, terrible local man. It's awful.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't know how.

Speaker 2 So he pointed all these people to the board board of supervisors who turned out to just be like very obvious crooks. And now like he's had to get rid of them.
Nice.

Speaker 1 It's been fun seeing East Coast corruption come to the West Coast. I did that for the last couple of years.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 We can do it too.

Speaker 2 Yeah. We can do the same thing as you East Coasters.
We just go far out and then we

Speaker 2 just crowd until you go again. Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right. Should I do my number two? Yeah.
So my second one is about an old friend of mine from Europe who finally finally decided to take a gap year in the United States.

Speaker 2 It's the concept of Islamogushisme and a standby, I would say, or a real, real old saw over in Europe, especially in France, as you can no doubt tell by the name.

Speaker 1 European anti-wokeism is so fun because they don't have any wokeism.

Speaker 1 They're just like, it's like, it's kind of a mirage here, too, but it's just like, you guys know you're like still extremely like racist and unequal, but they're like, oh, it's gone too far, like the anti-racism.

Speaker 1 It's like, it's barely visible from space.

Speaker 2 They're like, I have helped this story about Oberlin. Yeah,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 1 I'm stealing this point from you, obviously, but still.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but this is like my second accent joke of the night.

Speaker 2 Mark, we got to cut all this. I'm getting canceled.
Okay, it's never racist to make fun of the French. I'm sorry.
It's just never bad.

Speaker 1 It's not racist if they deserve it. That's what I learned.

Speaker 2 That's right. But, like, Adrian, what is Islamogauchism? Yeah, so this is a concept that's been around in France since the early or mid-aughts, I would say.
It's kind of come come to the U.S.

Speaker 2 in waves, but it never sort of lands. Part of it is it sounds snooty in French and possibly like a cheese.

Speaker 2 And also it sort of very obviously kind of rehashes sort of post-9-11 kind of discourses that I think we've sort of left behind. But in 2025, a lot of that came back because there was some

Speaker 2 true post-9-11 style Islamophobia making a huge return thanks to one Andrew Cuomo and his, you know, misbegotten quest to become mayor of New York City.

Speaker 2 And so in the coverage of Mamdani's campaign for City Hall and especially his role as a socialist Muslim,

Speaker 2 you ended up getting a lot of these. So for instance, in the Wall Street Journal, this is from October, James Kurchik, Mr.

Speaker 2 Mamdani shares the DSA's fascination with the revolutionary potential of political Islam, a seemingly oxymoronic ideological tendency the French call Islamo-Goshisme or Islamo-leftism.

Speaker 1 I love that they throw that in. What is that even doing in the paragraph? It's not like helping anything.
It's very funny. The famously racist French call it this.

Speaker 2 What it is, is that like the anti-Islam beat has lain a little fallow in the United States. And I think that they therefore, our far right draws a lot of inspiration from the continent.

Speaker 2 And but I'm guessing as Kirchik wrote wrote Islamogushisme, and then his editor was like, you got to explain that, James, right?

Speaker 2 Because what's happening is that like people in Denmark, in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany will be fully conversant with this idea.

Speaker 2 But in the United States, you got to explain it to people.

Speaker 2 And our right-wingers, thanks to, you know, the largesse of, you know, someone like Victor Orban, like, do spend a lot more time in Euro spaces than the voters you're trying to reach on Staten Island, right?

Speaker 2 So I think that's what's happening here.

Speaker 2 The idea of Islam agoshizm ⁇ it comes out of complaints from the left after 9-11 that a lot of the crackdowns on Islamist terror were ultimately racist and were ultimately violations of civil liberties.

Speaker 1 So it is true.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 It is an accurate description of reality.

Speaker 2 But then this leads to the notion on the right and in some parts of what we might call the center, which always seems to go right on this question,

Speaker 2 that it is a problem that the left, and particularly like the young left, is insufficiently antagonistic towards radical Islam or towards the forces of terror.

Speaker 2 And I think you really saw a resurgence of that panic, this notion like, oh, it's a real problem that the American left and like American young people are not racist enough towards Arabs and towards like the Muslim world.

Speaker 1 That's the French discourse. All the Western Europe discourse is just like openly like, we hate Arabs.
And so we will take any ammunition for this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we need to be more racist. Yeah.
But like the notion that like it's a problem that the American left isn't racist enough towards these people really got revived before Mom Dani.

Speaker 2 It got revived with the Gaza in campus. Yeah, right.
Like, look at these young people.

Speaker 2 They don't even think that Arabs are the subhuman disposable population against whom violence is always justified.

Speaker 2 Like, well, how are we going to maintain our civilization if we can't instill that fundamental principle in them? It's like, it's a real investment.

Speaker 1 It's all that do you condemn Hamas shit.

Speaker 2 It's all like, yeah, like, you basically join Hamas if you're like, I don't think children should starve. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But so remember that, like, after 9-11, like, there were two versions of this, and those still exist in this charge of Islamogoshism.

Speaker 2 On the one hand, there was this idea that the postmodern anything goes left didn't have the moral fortitude to call out Islamic fundamentalism where it reared its head, basically.

Speaker 2 The other was, oh no, these people are actually secretly in alliance with them, which is shading a lot more into great replacement theory. Now,

Speaker 2 another piece from the Wall Street Journal, from a guy named Sadanand Dumay or Dum, I'm not sure, says, all this may not make Mr.

Speaker 2 Mamdani an Islamist, but it does make him appear sympathetic to Islamists. Once, someone like Mr.

Speaker 2 Mamdani couldn't have been a member in good standing of the left, but for at least two decades, here we go, leftist groups and Islamists have formed a de facto alliance based on their common contempt for Israel in particular and the West in general.

Speaker 1 Me and Peter talked about this exact parallel graph and this exact piece in the Mamdani derangement syndrome episode.

Speaker 2 because he's basically saying like well he's not an islamist but he's actually an islamist like within the space of the paragraph he just like completely contradicts himself and it's insane there's no evidence of this whatsoever but let's be clear like this guy doom or dumae is not just saying the left is overly deferential they misunderstand for tolerance what is actually fakelessness etc etc we've all heard those kinds of criticisms what he's saying is a de facto alliance yeah yeah yeah we have like hamas wristbands right yeah yes i mean and as Maura's saying, like around the Gaza protests, especially from Europe, where a lot of people sort of got sort of drop shipped into fucking Brown University, like spoke with two students who wouldn't speak with them, and then like had to file for like Le Monde or fucking like Sutto Chutzaitem or whatever the fuck it was, right?

Speaker 2 And what these people would write, they'd be like, oh, you know, actually, like Hamas has like tons of like networks and through the funding, these universities get massive donations from Qatar and from the UAE.

Speaker 2 And that's how they sink their teeth and their talents into these universities. You have to just follow the money, you guys, right? And you're like, first of, that's insane.

Speaker 2 Second of, you understand that's an address in any conspiracy theory, right? You're just applying it to Arabic people, right?

Speaker 2 You're literally doing the protocols of the elders of Zion, except you're doing it to Arabs.

Speaker 1 I only follow two influencers on Instagram, my friend Matt and Deborah Messing,

Speaker 2 Hornstein, friend of the show.

Speaker 1 And Deborah Messing, who's like a full full psycho. She posts like 20 times a day.

Speaker 1 She had this thing where it was like, once you realize you're instructed by Islam to lie, like it says in the Quran that like you have to lie about everything is obviously fucking completely non-true.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just science. Once you realize this, then you understand like Zuran Mamdani's true nature.

Speaker 1 And it's like, you're just convincing yourself that this person is like basically a demon and like everything he says is false. You're basically using the lack of evidence as evidence, right?

Speaker 1 Like if he says things that aren't like anti-Semitic, you're like, oh, oh but he's secretly anti-semitic it's like you can see these people whipping themselves into this bizarre frenzy if he seems like unbigoted and normal that's only because he is in fact such a liar exactly totally and so conspiratorial and conniving yeah because he's instructed to lie so none of his words are true so like okay there's no evidence of this he's just saying normal

Speaker 2 is what you're saying yeah yeah i mean also like hating the west is really fun here but yeah yeah just very quickly this is neither here nor there but like i made hung listen to the entirety of Matt Bernstein's Deborah Messing episode.

Speaker 2 He was kind of a low-key like Will and Grace fan. And the entire two hours, he just goes, oh, no, oh, no.
Oh, no. Yeah, dude.

Speaker 2 He had never checked in with her. And I was just like,

Speaker 2 his face was just falling the entire time. I was like, this is awful.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 This is bad. We should link to Matt's excellent episode in the show notes.
Oh, yeah, we will. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But yeah, so Islamo-leftism, it's this really interesting thing where like, it's either a guilt by association, right?

Speaker 2 saying like, oh, these people are relativists, although really what it is, is they're describing people as liberal, people who are saying like, I'm against the surveillance state, even if it sometimes catches an Islamist terrorist, right?

Speaker 2 Like, it's really an attack on liberalism, but a lot of self-professed liberals don't seem to understand that. And then it sort of gets lumped together with this idea of post-colonial studies, right?

Speaker 2 Throw that in there. Why not? Yeah, right?

Speaker 1 Like, oh, gender studies, yeah.

Speaker 2 The reason Judith Butler is against, you know, murdering children in Gaza is because thinks of them as like legitimate carriers of a freedom struggle, not because like Judith Butler, as a philosopher, has a

Speaker 2 ethical stance on the maiming of children and not doing it, right?

Speaker 2 And then it shades into this idea, just a straightforward conspiracy theory, where they never actually have to enunciate what the conspiracy is, right? They're like, oh, these people are in cahoots.

Speaker 2 And it's like, okay, well now we're talking in what way? Right.

Speaker 2 And they never do. They never do.
They never explicate this. I wrote an entire piece for the New Republic about this, where like it's just about association.
It's just about kind of repetition.

Speaker 2 And it's just about like not distinguishing between a critique of the West or, let's say, like critical appreciation of the West, where you're like, oh, it's got some good things, but here are some things we could fix, you guys.

Speaker 2 And outright violent and murderous attacks on those countries. It's just, it's completely like, as with all the terms we're talking about today, it lives in this kind of undefined state.

Speaker 2 It's like Schrödinger's Islamoleftism.

Speaker 2 And that is, in fact, why I think it's never quite made the transition because the moment you translate it, you kind of have to nail down what the fuck you're talking about.

Speaker 2 Are you accusing someone of actually being on a group chat with Hamas? Or are you just saying like, oh, you make it easier for them to do what they're doing or something like that?

Speaker 2 Well, now it's one or the other, right?

Speaker 1 But you can also... The other thing they can retreat behind is they're not really specific about what the purpose of this alliance is, right? Because it's like, oh, they want to destroy the West.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which is this thing that is like so vague. It's, you know, it sounds totalizing and like this existential threat.

Speaker 1 But then, of course, I imagine if you try to get them to specify what they mean, they'll be like, oh, well, DD is woke now. Yeah.
Or like, whatever.

Speaker 1 It's like these little symbols of something, but it's not clear what they're like. They're always melting down about the dumbest shit.

Speaker 1 Like there's a fucking black elf on like the Lord of the Rings TV show on Amazon. It's always these like little cultural signifiers that they're melting down about.

Speaker 1 And they often classify that as like destroying the West. And I was struck by in that ridiculous viral essay by the Oklahoma student that was like a whole big thing this week.

Speaker 1 She mentioned somewhere in her essay, she's like, I don't think we should destroy gender.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And like, this is something that J.K. Rowling says all the time.
Yeah. And it's like, what are you? No one can do that.
No one wants to do that.

Speaker 1 No one even, it's not even clear what the fuck that means. But it's like, you can claim this thing in this extremely existential threat kind of way,

Speaker 1 but also never really substantiate what the fuck that means or how that would take place.

Speaker 2 And your only evidence of it is like, yeah, there's all gender restrooms now or something like ultimately doesn't matter that much all right who wants to go next with their second one moira go ahead it's your turn i wanted to talk about one of the weirder moments to me for this year and something that i find a little like uncanny about the trump 2 era is that sometimes i have to

Speaker 2 root for people I actually don't like that much or find kind of annoying.

Speaker 1 Are you talking about how Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way?

Speaker 2 I know. Is that where you're going? I think last morning we did that, Michael, it did not go well.

Speaker 2 We all got cooked online for that.

Speaker 2 No, I wanted to talk about the kind of sad reality that I had to hand it to Jimmy Kimmel this year. Oh, yeah.
Because a couple of days after that Charlie Kirk shooting back in September,

Speaker 2 Jimmy Kimmel went on his late show monologue and talked about how the right were, you know, kind of trying to milk the Kirk assassination for all it's worth, which I think is something that's like only gotten more vulgar and obvious in the months since in retrospect.

Speaker 2 But he also said, like, oh, yeah, they're trying to pretend that the shooter wasn't one of them.

Speaker 2 And for that, supposedly, the Trump administration's FCC czar threatened to revoke ABC's broadcast license if they left Jimmy Kimmel on the air. So Jimmy Kimmel was suspended.

Speaker 2 His show was taken off the air for a few days and caused this like massive

Speaker 2 outcry among like, you know, consumers, like liberal or middle-class consumers of television that really made Jimmy Kimmel a pretty, like, I think an unambiguous free speech hero.

Speaker 1 We need the Bank C posters of him with his fist up.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It was like kind of maddening because I'm like, the man show guy.

Speaker 1 Wait, do we not like him? I like know almost nothing about him. I like have not paid attention to him for like a decade.
I don't know anything about him. I just find him annoying.

Speaker 2 I retain the right as like the only radical feminist still working to hate men for like the same amount of information that men hate famous women. I'm like, I don't like his fucking face.

Speaker 2 I think his voice is annoying.

Speaker 1 Fuck this person.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like I get the vibe that he's kind of broy and fratty, and I don't feel that I have to investigate further. But he's like a woke bro.
I love the woke bros.

Speaker 1 I will take the woke bros.

Speaker 2 No, he wasn't a broke bro. He had the man show.

Speaker 2 It it was like the like i was a child being subjected to like everyone around me watching these women like on trampolines drinking beer are you really about to tell me that the man show has aged poorly

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 something called the man show does not hold up jimmy kimos for the man show maura donnegan's for the they them show

Speaker 2 Would actually watch, would watch the they them show. It would probably be hilarious.
But

Speaker 2 this annoyed me a little because I was was like okay this is going on at the same time as a lot of these like crackdowns on the academic sphere are going on yeah yeah yeah it's weird what we choose as like the hero like the martyr yeah yeah it's like a pre-publication attack right there's also of course like immigrants like being kidnapped right and taken away from their families like mahmoud khalil for like disfavored speech violations, right?

Speaker 2 So it was a little like, okay, you guys are really leading in

Speaker 2 to like the whitest guy you could find that this happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
On the other hand, like like he didn't back down.

Speaker 2 It was a moment of like consumer backlash and popular backlash really showing the limits of the Trump administration, right? This is also at a moment when, you know, I think

Speaker 2 after November, after the Mom Donnie election, after like the big shifts in polling, like the vibe sort of shifted back a little bit, right?

Speaker 2 You know, Trump, I think, is still going to do quite a bit of damage.

Speaker 2 And I don't think, you know, the maximally racist era in Republican politics that he ushered in is by any means over but the notion that sort of prevailed in the spring of 2025 like oh he can do anything and there's absolutely no one who's going to stop him absolutely everybody's going to roll over like it's cooked like we're we're kaput that like sort of started to recede a little bit yeah in the fall i think it was kind of stuff like this like they really wanted to use the Charlie Kirk death as a moment to like just, they were like, we are so happy to have this corpse, right?

Speaker 2 They were so thrilled that they got that assassination and they were using it as an excuse for a lot of repression a lot of people did get fired right for being like yeah I don't think this guy was so great like when he was alive and they got pushback and they got pushback from like normies like they got pushback from people who saw a very clear first amendment violation yeah I mean, it was a testament to like the power of numbers, right?

Speaker 1 And like, I love it when the normies get engaged. Like, it's always a little weird what engages people, but like, I'll take it.

Speaker 1 Like, I still think it's so fascinating that Boris Johnson got pushed out of office by like the fact that he had parties and not the fact that he got like tens of thousands of people killed with his actual policies.

Speaker 1 But also, I'll take it. He sucks shit.
I'm like, yeah, you know what? If this is what radicalizes people, fuck yes, fuck that guy. But like, it's so interesting to be like, which moments poke through.

Speaker 1 Like, I'll talk to my normie friends about politics and they'll mention stuff like this.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, all right, if this is what does it, but also I, yeah, I, it was a show that like, we're not totally powerless.

Speaker 1 If like lots and lots lots and lots of people do something, they will back down. And people also, people hate this shit.

Speaker 1 I feel like a lot of the stuff that he's doing, people just don't know about it. And it's like, if you can get people to know about it, people are pissed.

Speaker 1 And this thing, we've had this, this tedious discourse all year, like, it's time for the Democrats to move to the right.

Speaker 1 And it's time to moderate, kind of like accept the fact that like we now live in this like right-wing hellscape. And I don't think that's true.

Speaker 2 Like, no.

Speaker 1 Trump is one of the most historically unpopular presidents ever. And if you describe his actual policies to people, they, they literally think it's not real.
They're like, oh, no, you're mistaken.

Speaker 1 Like, the most important thing is just getting information to people about what is happening. Cause any decent human being would be like, what the fuck is this?

Speaker 2 Well, it's also interesting, right? Like, we have Trump and people like him across the globe have been running under this banner of populism.

Speaker 2 And somehow, because our media themselves are just about as far from populism as anyone can be, they sort of credited a bunch of astroturf billionaire shit as genuinely populist.

Speaker 2 Now, of course, there are people who are genuinely MAGA out there, but the opposite of it was always cast as elite, right?

Speaker 2 Which meant that a majority of Americans were always implicitly cast as inauthentic, inorganic, right? Not real Americans.

Speaker 2 Well, it turns out we shop. It turns out we watch TV.
It turns out we do all these things.

Speaker 1 We play D D, apparently, despite it being woke.

Speaker 2 D D, exactly, right? We may only exist as sock puppets in your imagination, but the problem for you is that we ain't. We are not sock puppets.

Speaker 2 And I think that's why they're often unprepared for this blowback when they're like oh like yeah like there are millions of these people out there and they have opinions and they react poorly towards having our billionaire sugar daddy's opinions crammed down their throat because he happened to like what charlie kirk did yeah yeah yeah yeah i think it's a revelation that you know clearly a lot of people on the far right, one of the things that billionaires have very obviously cooked brains about is the notion that there's nobody who really does disagree with them, right?

Speaker 2 Nobody disagrees with them in good faith.

Speaker 1 Because we're paid by Hamas. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's virtuous. single woke mind virus.
Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's not true.
And I really treasure moments when it can be made obvious and unavoidable for them that it's not true.

Speaker 1 That's why I treasure the man show. That's why I watch archived episodes of the man show,

Speaker 1 famously unproblematic, perfect man show every night.

Speaker 2 And now he's back on television. Trump administration backed down.
Disney didn't do what it seemed like they were going to do, right? They got more scared by consumer blowback.

Speaker 2 A bunch of people like canceled their Hulu subscriptions over this.

Speaker 2 Like, it was a thing where like voting with your dollar, trying to encourage the massive corporation to like calculate that they faced smaller liabilities and smaller risks by actually defying the Trump administration

Speaker 2 really worked.

Speaker 1 That's another thing that is really important to tell corporations that like this is not a dollars and cents decision in every case, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. And it's like, you can push back against these people, actually.
They tend to like the Trump administration tends to back down when they experience pushback. Yeah.
They're all chicken shit.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, they're chicken shit.
And if you, and if, especially if they can see

Speaker 2 some way to declare victory, right? Like they will obviously back down. They always declare victory, but they frequently are like pissing themselves as they do so.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's two things that make me less sanguine about this, though.

Speaker 2 One is that it very clearly shows that the lack of pushback we've gotten from ostensibly liberal elites this year is not because somehow the Trump juggernaut caught them unawares.

Speaker 2 It's because they kind of agree on some level.

Speaker 1 I do think

Speaker 1 that is

Speaker 2 like a lot of our media corporations, a lot of our universities just think that immigrants have it coming, that queer people have it coming, that non-white people have it coming and didn't deserve their station within these institutions.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the problem. Like, once these houses of cards crumble, you realize, like, oh shit, you didn't lift a finger and you didn't lift a finger for ideological reasons.
Right.

Speaker 2 And then the other thing, of course, is that poor Stephen Colbert is still out at CBS News and I'm guessing going to be replaced by Olivia Rheingold anytime soon. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Or Jamie Kerchik or somebody else going to see the Islamogoshism show. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The Islamogoshism comedy hour. Meanwhile, I will be making the they them show

Speaker 2 on YouTube. Subscribe to my Patreon for it.

Speaker 1 Like fucking wine.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 So for this, I was thinking about like, what are the stories from this year, like the takes, the anti-woke takes from this year that I can't stop thinking about, right?

Speaker 1 And the one that I thought of the first time, like I think about it all the time, is in November of this year, David Brooks, the New York Times, wrote an article called The Epstein Story, Count Me Out,

Speaker 1 which I just think is the perfect encapsulation of just like his whole thing.

Speaker 1 And I think like what you were saying, Adrian, these kind of the centrist elite hive mind is like, I mean, I mean, it's especially cynical for David Brooks to be doing this because he, he, his whole thing is like moral virtues and religion and like how we need to bring back these like spiritual values to public life.

Speaker 1 And he wrote a whole fucking book called The Road to Character, right? And it's like, oh, we need to have more morality in public life.

Speaker 2 And this unbelievable moral transgression happens, right?

Speaker 1 Like the worst thing that it's, it's hard to even say anything about Epstein because it's so just obviously fucking evil. Like what else can you even say about it? Right.
And what does he do?

Speaker 1 He's like, eh, I don't think we should talk about it that much. Eh, it doesn't really interest me, right? It's just, it's absolute perfection.

Speaker 2 I really love the fact that like David Brooks as a guy clearly holds those currently in power to a lower moral standards

Speaker 2 than to like students and random internet users.

Speaker 1 It is reverse Spider-Man. It is with great power comes less responsibilities.
I just want 100% his actual view. Yes.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to send you guys the anti-wokist part of this column.

Speaker 2 Please. Okay, I can read this.

Speaker 2 I have been especially startled to see Roe Khanna, a House Democrat and one of the most impressive politicians in America, use the phrase, quote, the Epstein class, unquote, in his public statements.

Speaker 2 In an interview with my colleague David Lionart this week, Khanna explained that he had gotten the phrase from voters who asked him if he was on the side of, quote, forgotten Americans or, quote, the Epstein class.

Speaker 2 I know a thing or two about the American elite.

Speaker 2 Sandwiches. And if you've read my work, you may be sick of my assaults on the educated elites for being insular, self-indulgent, and smug.

Speaker 2 But the phrase, the Epstein class, is inaccurate, unfair, and irresponsible. Say what you will about our financial, education, nonprofit, and political elites, but they are not mass rapists.

Speaker 2 Won't someone please think of our financial, educational, nonprofit, and political elite?

Speaker 1 They're being smeared. The real victims of the Epstein scandal are people who are being accused of this thing.

Speaker 2 By being too rich.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's basically a word that I don't like.

Speaker 1 Again, it's like you look at this massive moral catastrophe, and the only thing you have to say about it is like the people who are upset are using the wrong words.

Speaker 1 That's that's all any of these people can offer on these like massive scandals.

Speaker 1 Like somebody who is allegedly like an expert in morality, like someone who's put morality at the center of his public career has nothing to fucking say about Epstein, right?

Speaker 1 And I also think it's a total misstatement of like what's going on here because I don't actually think that when you talk about the Epstein class or like, you know, what people are so pissed off about this, I don't think people think that every single member of the elite is a mass rapist.

Speaker 1 What they think is that people are protecting rapists and looking away from rapists and aiding and abetting rapists, which is exactly what David Brooks is doing, right?

Speaker 1 He's doing the thing which makes people hate this shit, right? He's like, ah, it's not that big of a deal. Let's look away from it.
Ah, aren't the people upset about it?

Speaker 1 Like, aren't they the real villains? It's like, David, you're doing the fucking thing that pisses us off. This is just a moral catastrophe.
You can just talk about it as such.

Speaker 2 Something that really pisses me off in general about like coverage of the Epstein case is that this is a situation in which there's like no shortage of victims, right? Yes.

Speaker 2 Like not everybody's coming forward, I think for like very good reasons. Like a lot of women are like, I do not want to revisit this part of my life.

Speaker 2 I do not want the scrutiny or the heat or the attacks or whatever. And I get that, but there's a lot of women who have come forward, right?

Speaker 1 I think it's in the hundreds. I believe it's in the hundreds.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.
It's, it's a shocking number of people who they were doing this to. And instead of

Speaker 2 their lives or what was done to them.

Speaker 2 or like their dignity or what they might be owed in the wake of all of this, basically none of that is getting passed around in in these discussions it's entirely a political football like oh you know there were democrats on there too i don't give a shit oh yeah please burn it to the ground send bill clinton out on a ice flow like i don't give a

Speaker 2 about preserving not larry summers these guys you know jesus christ you know it's like the reality exposed

Speaker 2 by the Epstein case is about the moral rot of elites. And I think more generally, about the like ubiquity of sexual violence in like young women's lives, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the latter part just gets completely ignored in this football back and forth of who is handling it bad, who looks worse. And I'm like, no, fuck you.

Speaker 2 Like this, there's actual people who are actually hurt here.

Speaker 1 This is also the sickness that I think I've dedicated a lot of my recent career to is everything has to be at this kind of meta level about like, what is the best messaging? What is the best strategy?

Speaker 1 David Brooks could have called up one of the victims and just said, hey, what was your story? Like, what happened? And he could have just written a column. Like, I spoke to one of the victims.

Speaker 1 It's a really horrible story. Here's what happened.
This guy was a fucking monster. You could just talk about this moral problem as a moral problem, and that's it.

Speaker 1 You don't need to do this, like, second, third, fourth order shit.

Speaker 2 Shout out to Michelle Goodwin at Miss Magazine, who actually did do that. She has a very good interview with one of the Epstein victims on her podcast that I encourage people to listen to.

Speaker 2 Like, there's real stories to be here. It's not just a matter of like

Speaker 2 who's polling best or who it's hurting electorally, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, one of them just published a book and you just read the fucking book and tell people what is in it. Like,

Speaker 1 it's not hard to do this, but it's like everyone's brain has to go to this higher meta level and to somehow place themselves above it. But that's exactly the problem.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what's offensive about this.

Speaker 2 I mean, I also think, not to come back to sort of like the elite complicity, that is sort of David Brooks' whole deal. He, I think, is not implicated in any of this, obviously, directly.

Speaker 2 But the thing is, I think David Brooks is deeply invested in a world in which everyone has and knows their place.

Speaker 2 And I think on some fundamental level, he thinks that it is not the place of Larry Summers to be scrutinized in this way. Totally.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And he may not say this outright, but if you hooked him up to a lie detector, I think you'd find out that he may think that what happened to the Epstein victims was their lot in life, and that is exactly where they deserved to be.

Speaker 2 And I think that is in a big way what enabled these people to thrive.

Speaker 2 That they had a very clear, very active sense of who was due what, right? Right. Like what was due to the people of their station, what was due to those who they deemed their lessers.

Speaker 2 And the problem is that a lot of our elite media think the same way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They wouldn't do what Epstein or his friends did, but like the value system behind it is not foreign to them.

Speaker 2 Totally.

Speaker 1 And also, I feel like one of the main things that come out of the Epstein Enos was also just what a fucking mediocre guy he was. Oh, yeah.
And how like mediocre and shitty like Larry Summers was.

Speaker 2 Like the whole thing is this weird club of like just shit dudes just like midwit fucking dumbasses who are running like most of the institutions of American life at this point and like we're all supposed to be marveling at these people's intellect or how great they are but it's like no like burn it down I don't fucking care they're petty they're narcissistic they're small minded they are like needfully social climbing yeah like a shocking number of these guys actually were going to Jeffrey Epstein for like sex and dating advice also.

Speaker 1 It's so gross, dude. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Which is what seems to suggest, at least to me, that they saw what they all seemed to know he was doing with these girls or to these girls as aspirational, right?

Speaker 1 And also what's amazing to me, too, about Epstein is that if you look into his record, right, he was like a donor to various institutions and stuff. He was also a...
totally explicit eugenicist.

Speaker 1 So even if, I mean, I don't think this is plausible, but even if you didn't know about the sex stuff, he's a guy that gives money to like weird biological garbage. He wanted like a breeding ranch.

Speaker 1 It's like on every level, like he's a mediocre intellect. He's a piece of shit.
He's a sexual psycho. It's like, sorry, everyone seems to have known at least some of this and didn't care.

Speaker 1 And I think also like, I don't think David Brooks is whatever implicated or anything. I don't want to accuse him of anything, but it's like he does know these people.

Speaker 1 He's been on panels with Larry Summers. He's sort of, I imagine he would have emailed back and forth with various people in various positions of power.
That's kind of what he's doing.

Speaker 1 He's like, ah, stop talking about, stop talking about my friends. Right.
I think that's what he's getting at.

Speaker 1 Even if he's not implicated in any kind of direct way, he just wants to shift the topic to something else.

Speaker 2 Which is gruesome because it's exactly the same mechanism that protected Epstein for so long.

Speaker 1 That's our friend. Yes.
That's our friend.

Speaker 2 Leave him alone. Completely.
It's not that bad. You guys are overreacting.
That's what allowed him to rape children for quite some time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I also think that one prediction for 2026 I have is that we're going to get another meta discourse about hasn't the punishing of Epstein's friends and fellow travelers gone far enough or too far, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And the interesting thing is, right, like the way we're talking about summers, we're not talking about professional sanctions yet, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 What we're talking about is that you can't read that email about the peril about the assistant professor he's trying to fuck you.

Speaker 1 It's so gross. It's so gross.

Speaker 2 And who he's checking in with his sex pest pedophile island owner friend how to accomplish this, right? You can't read that and look at that man with any degree of respect. And that's the thing.

Speaker 2 Like the cancer culture stuff has always also been just about the fact that they think they naturally deserve our respect and our admiration independent of how they conduct themselves.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, man, you send that email. And people are going to lose all fucking respect for you.

Speaker 2 At the very least, maybe more should happen, but the very least that's going to happen is that people are like, oh, fucking A.

Speaker 2 But we're going to get a story next year about how like they've been punished.

Speaker 2 And the punishment will just be our withholding our admiration us being like yikes dude that's gross right he's like furiously googling for someone specific who has been called a member of the epstein class so he can write like a long feature story i guarantee you guys there is already a group chat or like a really sad group email where guys in the epstein files your larry summers your who have yous are already talking to guys from me too and they're already like cross-referencing lawyers and pr people like it's this is something that they do they have a yeah yeah very dense network of mutual encouragement the group chat will have been started by drum roll thomas chatterton williams thank you for playing

Speaker 1 we're gonna get an open letter out of this for

Speaker 2 that's right

Speaker 2 should that be it should that be our edition of the 2025

Speaker 2 hell yeah

Speaker 2 All right. Well, thank you so much, listeners, for coming on this deranged journey with us of the first ever and possibly last daytime Christie's.

Speaker 2 We got to narrow this down next time because holy shit, we've been recording for a long time. We really have.
But thank you, Mike, for doing this. It's always such a pleasure to have you on.

Speaker 2 And thank you for keeping us sane during these increasingly insane years.

Speaker 1 I'll see you next week.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Mike.

Speaker 2 In Bedwith the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com. Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.
Our title music is by Katie Lau.