TUESDAY: In search of a new form of government!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2025

Rule by opening act: There seem to be quite a few different names for what might be called "rule by the rich." The leading authority on such systems starts with this familiar term:

Plutocracy

A plutocracy (from Ancient Greek πλοῦτος (ploûtos) 'wealth' and κράτος (krátos) 'power') or plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. It can be considered a specific form of oligarchy (rule by the few) where the ruling few are wealthy. The first known use of the term in English dates from 1631. It is not rooted in any established political philosophy.

And so on from there. That same source offers this alternative term:

Oligarchy

Oligarchy (from Ancient Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía) 'rule by few'; from ὀλίγος (olígos) 'few' and ἄρχω (árkhō) 'to rule, command') is a form of government in which power rests with a small number of people. Leaders of such regimes are often referred to as oligarchs, and generally are characterized by having titles of nobility or high amounts of wealth.

[....]

Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as meaning rule by the rich, contrasting it with aristocracy, arguing that oligarchy was a corruption of aristocracy.

Still according to that source, "kleptocracy" refers to "government by corrupt leaders who use political power to steal the wealth of the people." But then again, also this:

Kakistocracy

Kakistocracy (/ˌkækɪˈstɒkrəsi/ KAK-ist-OK-rə-see) is government by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.

The word was coined as early as the 17th century and derives from two Greek words, kákistos (κάκιστος, 'worst') and krátos (κράτος, 'rule'), together meaning 'government by the worst people.'

As far as we know, there is no established term for the form of government toward which our country is currently trending—government by self-assured male comedians. This thought came to mind when we read this report about the most recent proclamation by the extremely thoughtful Jon Stewart:

‘I Cannot F*cking Believe It!’ Jon Stewart Loses It on Democratic Senators Who Caved to Republicans

The Daily Show host Jon Stewart tore into eight Democratic and Independent senators who voted with Republicans to end the government shutdown on Monday, despite previously stating they would not back down.

“I can’t f*cking believe it!” Stewart shouted during his monologue. “And what, you ask, is ‘it’? Well, ‘it’ is the Democrats. You remember the Democrats? They shut down the government last month.”

It doesn't even have to be male comedians. Here goes a second report about someone who largely started out as a comedic monologist:

I Have No Faith’: Whoopi Goldberg Torches Democrats Over Shutdown Compromise With GOP

The View‘s Whoopi Goldberg slammed the eight Senate Democrats who “threw in the towel by siding with the GOP” over ending the government shutdown.

Senate Democrats held out for 40 days, refusing to vote in favor of the continuing resolution until Republicans agreed to negotiate on Affordable Care Act subsidies. That came to an end Sunday night when enough Democrats voted in favor of reopening the government without any guarantees on health care.

Gildberg's analysis is described a bit later in the report

We're flirting with a form of government in which we turn our powers of analysis over to gaggles of ranting comedians and comic actors. According to experts, a comedian could be a source of sound judgment, but some comedians aren't.

That isn't stopping our current array of comedians from loudly voicing their views about the end to the government shutdown. To us, it doesn't seem all that obvious whether the shutdown should have continued. Luckily, many of our comedians have been able to formulate views in which there's no room for doubt.

Fox News has spent years building its messaging product around the brilliance of male comedians and former professional "wrestlers." Other comedians rule the fruited plain through their thoughtful podcasts.

In this way, we the people are flirting with a form of government which has no name. "Sarcasticocracy" has been suggested, but the search goes on.

:

THE DISAPPEARED: Communist Communist Communist Communist!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2025

So goes the Fox News Channel: Who the Sam Hill is Zohran Mamdani? Because he's now mayor-elect of New York City, inquiring minds may want to know.

One day after he was elected, NPR's Rachel Treisman attempted to puzzle it out. Headline included, her "explainer" piece started like this:

EXPLAINER
NYC's next mayor is a democratic socialist. What does that mean?

New York City has elected a democratic socialist as its next mayor.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won with a progressive platform focused on making the city more affordable, through free bus service, frozen rents, universal childcare and a higher minimum wage, among other ideas.

The state assemblymember represented both the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party on the ballot. He quoted prominent late-19th and early-20th century socialist Eugene Debs in his victory speech Tuesday night. And he is a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

[...]

As Mamdani's campaign pushed democratic socialism further into the mainstream, it has also raised questions about what the political ideology is—and isn't.

Most notably, President Trump has frequently and falsely criticized Mamdani as a communist in the lead-up to the election. Mamdani refuted that characterization in a June appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, to which he responded, "I am not."

Mamdani went on to describe his brand of democratic socialism, a term that is largely up to interpretation.

In our view, Treisman went on to make a valiant attempt to describe Mamdani's stated version of "democratic socialism." Four days later, the trio of friends on the Fox News Channel's Fox & Friends Weekend authored an alternate portrait of who and what Mamdani, and the rest of the Democratic Party, actually is and are. 

If we were to paraphrase what was said, we'd paraphrase it like this:

Communist Communist Communist Communist! Obama Obama Obama!

That account of what was said might be oversimplified. But if so, it isn't over-simplified by much.

The portrait in question was painted by this program's three regular co-hosts. Pete Hegseth and Will Cain are now long gone from the mix. The line-up now looks like this:

Co-hosts, Fox & Friends Weekend
Charlie Hurt
Rachel Campos-Duffy
Griff Jenkins

Campos-Duffy remains the straw which stirs this program's drink. As we've often noted, she's an exceptionally genial morning show performer—but only with respect to her friends.

The conversation we're about to describe took place near the start of the program's 7 a.m. hour. A person could spend a week examining the various things which were said, but we're going to move along a bit more quickly. As a general matter, we'll say this:

The conversation these lunkheads created helps illustrate the way our failing nation is being turned into a pair of dueling tribes. It illustrates the problem which arises when a major entity like the Fox News Channel adopts the practice known as "segregation by viewpoint"—when it hires people who will agree with each other on every possible point while giving voice to every aspect of their channel's corporate messaging.

Our guess this morning will be this:

Very few people in Blue America will be aware of how far off the rails these conversations have gone. That's because no major news org or journalist in Blue America reports and discusses the ridiculous fare which is routinely presented on the Fox News Channel. 

For whatever reason, these conversations are disappeared by Blue America's academics and journalists.

The conversation to which we refer starts right here, at 7:03 a.m. It continues along for the next ten minutes. This its principal theme:

Communist Communist Communist Communist! Obama Obama Obama!

As a bit of a saving grace, Campos-Dufy and Hurt didn't perform the vaudeville act they'd been performing in the previous several months. As part of this presentation, Campos-Duffy describes Mamdani as a Communist, and Hurt jumps in with this:

"A full-blown Communist."

At least that wasn't said this day. But as Campos-Duffy motored along, saying Communist Communist Obama Obama, very few other cries of alarm were actually left unsaid.

We won't transcribe the bulk of this segment. It started with videotape of former president Biden speaking at a fund-raider the previous night, with Campos-Duffy offering this:

HURT (11/8/25): Holy cow! It's like, he's not all there

CAMPOS-DUFFY (11/8/25): Again, shame on Jill Biden. She should be taking care of him. She should be enjoying him now that he's back home. Instead, she's like, "Get back out there!" There's no reason for Joe Biden to be out there now because he's not the leader of the party.

No one asked Campos-Duffy how she knew the role Jill Biden had played in this matter. She was simply advancing a familiar bit of demonization aimed at the former first lady.

So far, no Communists had been spotted. Inevitably, that small mercy would soon reach its end. At 7:06, the time-honored term of political panic was heard for the very first time:

CAMPOS-DUFFY: So there is a battle inside of the party. And it's sort of like— 

People say it's, like, the establishment Democrats versus the Communist/socialist wing, and I don't think that's quite what it is. I think it's those who are out and proud as socialists and those who think they still have to hide it, the way Obama did back in 2008.

Within this world, is a Communist the same thing as a socialist? At this juncture, that point still wasn't clear. Nor was it clear what this corporate TV star meant by either of these famous terms.

At the very least, it now seemed to be clear that everyone in the Democratic Party was at least a socialist. Also, that Candidate Obama hid that fact about himself during Campaign 2008.

Obama had always been at least a socialist—but what did that claim even mean? Neither of Campos-Duffy's friends asked, and the colloquy continued from there.

Are the Democrats a bunch of Communists, or are they merely socialists? Campos-Duffy was soon telling her friends this

CAMPOS-DUFFY: The debate isn't, "Are we socialist or Communists or not?" The debate is, "Should we tell everyone or not?"

It's a great point, Jenkins said. Soon we were on to this:

CAMPOS-DUFFY: [Obama] had to lie to us in 2008. But some of us were on to him. [Group laughter] I was!

Obama had lied about being a socialist, or maybe about being a Communist, way back in 2008! But Campos-Duffy had known all along.

With that, the friends began discussing the subpoenas which the DOJ had reportedly been sent to several former officials as part of the latest investigation of "the origins of the Trump-Russia probe." After a series of shaky claims, Campos-Duffy said this about that original probe:

CAMPOS-DUFFY: This weaponization of government—this very Communist idea of "I'm going to use intel agencies that are meant to capture terrorists to go after my own political opponents, and I'm going to use the government to take down a president who was duly elected and concoct this whole Russia collusion thing...—this whole thing was so toxic and it all starts with Obama. 

When you look at Mamdani winning here in New York City as a Communist, don't think about Mamdani—think about Obama. Everything that's bad that's happened, go back to Obama.

Mamdani won New York City as a Communist, we were now told. But it all goes back to Barack Obama, this Obama-loather now said.

Indeed, that original probe had been very Communist, Campos-Duffy said. The other friends nodded along.

People watching this segregated show are routinely handed a novel—a novelized story about recent American history. A different form of moral and intellectual disorder prevails at 10 p.m. each weekday night on the aggressively stupid Gutfeld! show.

Gutfeld! is the third most-watched TV program in our nation's "cable news" industry. The New York Times has finally begun to write about this extremely unusual program—but the Times still seems reluctant to report what happens on this show.

Our guess this morning will be this:

Very few people in Blue America will be aware of how far off the rails the Fox News Channel's major programs have gone. That's because no major journalist or news org in Blue America reports and discusses the contents of this channel's actual fare. 

For whatever reason, the contents of this channel's programs have been disappeared by Blue America's academics and journalists. Campos-Duffy goes unreported and undiscussed. So does the very strange Gutfeld.

Who the heck is Zohran Mamdani? He's a Communist, Fox News viewers were told. 

Also, it all goes back to Barack Obama! It sounds like President Obama was a Communist all along. His conduct was very Communist.

This is very low-end stuff. It's also the soul of the Fox News Channel, and it's worth reporting.

On Gutfeld!, the disorder takes a different form. For whatever reason, the New York Times still refuses to report what actually happens on that extremely strange "cable news" show.

Tomorrow: Blatantly false from the start

MONDAY: Democrats still lack any significant power!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2025

And so, the end of the shutdown came: Should ten Democrats have decided to vote to stop the shutdown? We'll link you to a pair of possible answers.

In this column for the New York Times, Ezra Klein says he wouldn't have voted to end the shutdown, but by the end of his piece, he takes a nuanced view of the matter:

What Were Democrats Thinking?

[...]

More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt. I want to give them their due on this: They are hearing from their constituents and seeing the mounting problems, and they are trying to do what they see as the responsible, moral thing. They do not believe that holding out will lead to Trump restoring the subsidies. They fear that their Republican colleagues would, under mounting pressure, do as Trump had demanded and abolish the filibuster...They don’t think a longer shutdown will cause Trump to cave. They just think it will cause more damage.

If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for this compromise. Shutdowns are an opportunity to make an argument, and the country was just starting to pay attention. If Trump wanted to cancel flights over Thanksgiving rather than keep health care costs down, I don’t see why Democrats should save him from making his priorities so exquisitely clear. And I worry that Democrats have just taught Trump that they will fold under pressure. That’s the kind of lesson he remembers.

But it’s worth keeping this in perspective: The shutdown was a skirmish, not the real battle. Both sides were fighting for position, and Democrats, if you look at the polls, are ending up in a better one than they were when they started. They elevated their best issue—health care—and set the stage for voters to connect higher premiums with Republican rule. It’s not a win, but given how badly shutdowns often go for the opposition party, it’s better than a loss.

Ezra would have continued the shutdown even as people suffered. On the other hand:

What happened isn't a win, he said, but it's better than a loss. That's the way the column ended. 

On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said there was nothing more Democrats could hope to get out of an extended shutdown. He said they had already won the standoff by giving the electorate a chance to see President Trump behaving an undisguised ogre with respect to nutrition assistance and to subsidies for health insurance.

We're inclined to agree with that view. Thanks to Mediaite, here's part of Scarborough's discussion this morning with Senator King (I-Maine).

Some people are responding to the "cave" by the ten Democrats with a great deal of fury. We would offer this:

Those of us in Bue America bought this deal when we did the various things that made Election 2024 turn out the way it did. When we kept pretending that the southern border was closed. When we kept failing to explain what was occurring at the border. When we kept pretending that something seemed to be wrong with President Biden.

When we kept pretending that complaints about inflation and the cost of living were delusions on the part of the voters. When we kept pushing for some of the social justice issues which, rightly or wrongly, went well beyond anything that made sense to a large percentage of American voters.

When we kept pushing and pushing and looking for ways to get Candidate Trump locked up. We kept ignoring the interests of regular people as we invested ourselves in that project.

Under the circumstances, it's a miracle that Candidate Harris came as close as she did. It's a marker of how unpopular Candidate Trump actually was—but we still managed to get him elected to the White House again, and he even emerged with narrow majorities in the Senate and the House.

No, the border wasn't secure—and everyone knew that but us. In the process of pretending otherwise, we created the narrow but absolute power imbalance we're still stuck with today.

Democrats still have no particular power to stop the ogre-adjacent behavior being displayed by President Trump. Also this:

To this day, no one has tried to explain the policy at the southern border during the Biden years. No one has tried to explain, and no one has tried to apologize for all the arrogant dissembling in which we Blues were involved.

At this point, Blue America needs to find a voice the public will trust to explain the current situation involving the way the president is throwing lower-income people under the bus and into the cold. (We've advised you to pity the child with respect to the behavior of the current president.)

It will have to be a voice the American public will be inclined to trust. It might even help if it's a voice which can explain, and perhaps apologize for, our own tribe's unwise behavior during the past however many years.

The border was open and everyone knew it. We Blues were saying that it was secure. Everyone knew it wasn't secure—everyone except us!

Ezra's willing to let the suffering continue. Ezra is clearly a good, decent person. Is it possible that he's imaginably being a tiny bit cavalier, or that it might almost look that way to other good, decent people?

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. In our view, this isn't the easiest call.

THE DISAPPEARED: The New York Times has discovered Greg Gutfeld!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2025

His conduct still gets disappeared: The battle over the government shutdown—the battle over food assistance; the battle over affordable health care—is taking place within a larger context.

We refer to the nation's political discourse, or perhaps to its imitation of same. We've often told you this:

It's relatively easy to be aware of the various things which get reported and said. It can be extremely hard to be aware of the many things which get disappeared.

Many things do get disappeared within the American discourse. Having offered that tantalizing suggestion, we start our week with this:

Viewership numbers for cable news programs are now available for the month of October. Below, you see the way the Nielsen numbers looked last month for the fifteen most watched "cable news" programs.

The numbers represent the average audience for the particular program. For the full report from Adweek, you can just click here:

Here Are the Cable News Ratings for October 2025 / Total viewers
1. The Five, Fox News: 3.7 million
2. Jesse Watters Primetime, Fox News: 3.1 million
3. Gutfeld!, Fox News: 2.8 million
4. Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox News: 2.8 million
5. Hannity, Fox News: 2.6 million
6. The Ingraham Angle, Fox News: 2.6 million
7. The Will Cain Show, Fox News: 2.2 million
8. Outnumbered, Fox News: 2.0 million
9. America’s Newsroom, Fox News: 2.0 million
10. The Faulkner Focus, Fox News: 1.9 million
11. The Story with Martha MacCallum, Fox News: 1.9 million
12. America Reports, Fox News: 1.9 million
13. The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC: 1.6 million
14. Fox News @Night, Fox News: 1.5 million
15. Fox & Friends, Fox News: 1.3 million

You are correct, sir! Among October's most-watched "cable news" programs, fourteen of the top fifteen aired on the Fox News Channel.

(Just so you'll know, CNN's most-watched program was The Arena with Kasie Hunt. Airing at 4 p.m. Eastern, it averaged 611,000 viewers.)

To what extent do these three channels shape the American discourse? That would be hard to determine. But for better or worse, there is no doubt that the Fox News Channel dominates this competition. Across the sweep of the full day, it had three times as many viewers as MSNBC during the month just passed, almost four times as many as CNN.

The Fox News Channel rules the seas and has done so for years! For better or worse, the New York Times has started reacting to that fact, with special attention being paid to that channel's Greg Gutfeld and his band of merry men and women.

To its credit, the New York Times didn't pull Gutfeld's name out of a hat. Along with his towel-snapping pal Jesse Watters, Gutfeld dominates the pseudo-discussions on The Five, where the two lads serve as regular co-hosts. 

On that most-watched program of them all, this pair of potentates tend to split the "interruption of Tarlov" duties, a key part of the program's tribally pleasing frisson. Gutfeld tends to dominate the attempt at conducting something resembling real discussion with the long filibusters in which he delivers his attempts at constructing coherent political theories.

That horseplay plus disquisition performance occurs each day at 5 p.m. Eastern. Three hours later, Watters hosts his own nightly show—the second most-watched TV show in all of cable news.

Gutfeld's eponymous program follows two hours later. 

Due to this double-dipping, Watters is seen by more people, on a nightly basis, than anyone else in cable news. Gutfeld runs a close second. 

Presumably, this helps explain why the New York Times has now featured Gutfeld and his eponymous Gutfeld! show in two large recent profiles. The latest such profile, written by David Marchese, starts off exactly like this, headline included:

The Interview: Fox News Wanted Greg Gutfeld to Do This Interview. He Wasn’t So Sure.

Why can’t conservatives break through on late-night TV? For years, that was an open cultural question. The left, of course, had “The Daily Show” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” among others. Once the Trump era began, progressives could also point to hosts like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers as being politically simpatico. The right had, well, no one.

That is, until Greg Gutfeld. Formerly a health and men’s magazine editor, Gutfeld joined Fox News in 2007 to helm the later-than-late-night chat free-for-all “Red Eye.” He worked his way up the network’s schedule, and in 2021 his new show, “Gutfeld!” started airing on weekday nights at 11 p.m. on the East Coast. (It’s now on at 10 p.m.) Its format is different from traditional host-driven late-night shows: Rather than interview celebrity guests, Gutfeld presides over a round table of regular panelists, among them the former professional wrestler Tyrus and the commentator Kat Timpf, the designated (occasional) contrarian. The overall vibe is insult-heavy, aggressively anti-woke and relentlessly pro-conservative. It’s a successful formula. The show averages over three million viewers a night—numbers that dwarf its competitors’.

That's the way the profile starts. In certain fairly obvious ways, it goes downhill from there.

In other ways, this profile, which takes the form of an interview, can be seen as extremely revealing. The piece appeared online this weekend. It's scheduled to appear next Sunday in the New York Times magazine.

Gutfeld and Watters play prominent roles within the "cable news" industry. Arguably, they've now become the two biggest stars at the dominant Fox News Channel. 

That said:

As we've noted again and again, publications like the New York Times rarely report or discuss what happens on that channel's programs. In that way, the highly unusual content of those TV programs tends to get disappeared.

What does happen on the programs of the Fox News Channel? Last Saturday morning, on Fox & Friends Weekend, we saw a conversation between Rachel, Charlie and Griff which we thought should be reported. We'll start with that three-way exchange tomorrow morning, after which we'll move along to the way Marchese chose to interview Gutfeld—to the basic facts Marchese reported, but also to the basic facts he apparently chose to suppress.

We'll also look at the ludicrous ways Gutfeld answered Marchese's interview questions. At the age of 61, and with Tucker Carlson excepted, Gutfeld may be the strangest person who has ever played a major role on American "cable news."

That said, his disordered behavior has shot this man to the top of the "cable news" pile. Then too, there's the disorder displayed by Marchese himself—or perhaps by his editors—in the things he chose to report about Gutfeld's behavior, but also in the things he chose to suppress.

Stating the obvious, the New York Times is a very important newspaper. We readers are told many things about this world by the New York Times. Other important parts of our struggling nation tend to get disappeared.

For whatever reason, the New York Times has started to talk about Gutfeld. In comments to the Marchese interview / profile, many readers say they'd never heard of Gutfeld until this profile appeared.

Gutfeld and his eponymous program have now been the subject of two lengthy pieces in the Times in the past few months. For whatever reason, the paper still refuses to report what his strange man says and does.

The Fox News Channel rules the waves at the present time. For reasons we can't explain, Blue American orgs like the New York Times still aren't willing to take their customers on that particular sea cruise.

Tomorrow: Fox & Friends Weekend goes off

SATURDAY: We watched an array of Unrecognizables!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2025

Telling this story is hard: At one point, the Harvard Law School graduate said it, though only perhaps in a dream:

I was never a D-minus student, but I play one on cable TV.

At one point, she may have said it. Last night, we were stunned by the manifest dumbness of the first twenty minutes of the Jesse Watters Primetime show. Then, this very morning, Fox & Friends Weekend offered a bit of self-revelation of an extraordinary sort.

As we told you long ago, it's all anthropology now. And as we've told you again and again, the major news orgs of Blue America refuse to report, discuss or critique the very strange behavior which occurs on Fox News Channel programs. 

Also this:

Even after he demolished one part of the White House, those heralded news orgs refused to ask this obvious question:

Is something wrong with this man? Why does he do these things?

If something is wrong with the person in question, that is, of course, a personal tragedy—a loss of human capability. And the evidence suggests that there isn't quite as much of that capability floating around as a person might once have thought.

We're going to stop to ponder now. Telling this story is very hard. Come Monday, where should we start?