PERSONS: The person who took the Franks away...

FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2025

...could be seen on a "cable news" program: This very week, the tariffs arrived. So did the cable news ratings.

With respect to the cable news ratings, we'll let Deadline deliver the mail. We'll perform a bit of editing:

Fox News Tops Q1 And March Ratings As MSNBC And CNN Point To Post-Inauguration Gains

Fox News was up in total viewers and the key demo in the first quarter of 2025 and during the month of March, while its cable news rivals all showed declines from the same period a year ago.

In the first quarter, Fox News averaged 3.01 million total viewers in primetime, up 46% from a year earlier. MSNBC averaged 1.02 million, and CNN posted 558,000. 

[...]

In March, Fox News averaged 3.13 million viewers in primetime, while MSNBC posted 1.18 million, and CNN averaged 591,000. 

[...]

Fox News’ The Five was the top show in the first quarter, averaging 4.55 million, and in March, when it averaged 4.3 million.

The Five is one of the dumbest (and most propagandistic) shows in the history of TV "news." Possibly for that very reason, it continues to rock the world. 

How do other "cable news" programs rank? In this report, Adweek lists the top fifteen shows for the entire first quarter. All but one of the top fifteen airs on the Fox News Channel:

Among Total Viewers (first quarter) 
1) The Five—Fox News (4,300,000)
2) Jesse Watters Primetime—Fox News (4,021,000)
3) Special Report with Bret Baier—Fox News (3,452,000)
4) Gutfeld!—Fox News (3,344,000)
5) Hannity—Fox News (3,338,000) 
6) The Ingraham Angle—Fox News (3,334,000)

[...]

13) The Rachel Maddow Show—MSNBC (2,077,000)
14) Fox News @Night—Fox News (1,784,000)
15) Fox and Friends—Fox News (1,499,000)

The numbers come from Nielsen. They report, we get to decide.

So it goes on "cable news" at the present time. For an example of the squalor to which we've referred, this was part of the "news" as offered at 10:01 Eastern, right away, on last night's Gutfeld! show:

GUTFELD (4/3/25): According to a new book, Obama didn't want Kamala to run for president  and actually worked to undermine her. 

Perhaps he wanted to remain the nation's first black female president.

AUDIENCE: [Mixed reaction]

GUTFELD: I think that was a typo.

President Obama is really a woman; his wife is really a man. These are now persistent themes on this gigantically disordered primetime "cable news" program.

It actually does get worse! That's especially true of the open misogyny and the incel-adjacent raw anger. This is the squalor delivered each night from the soul of a disordered person—a person who's sixty years old! 

That said, a nation staggers into the future with the various persons it has. That includes the vast array of persons in Blue America who have agreed that this moral and intellectual squalor—this primetime descent into incel culture—must never be reported and must never be discussed.

By 10:03 last night, the angry host had started his "issue monologue," but the open misogyny never stops. After playing tape of something President Trump said in releasing those tariffs, he instantly peddled this:

GUTFELD: "Back and forth, back and forth." 

Kind of like how you return a beached whale to the ocean.

[PHOTO of CNN'S Ana Navarro]

On Gutfeld!, anti-Trump women are relentlessly compared to horses, pigs, cows and whales, or more simply to "livestock." 

This sort of thing never stops on this stunningly braindead program. The New York Times and the Washington Post aren't willing to tell you this.

The cable news ratings arrived this week, but so did the tariffs. They blew the talk of the "deportations" and the "arrests" away. 

That said, in a letter to the Washington Post, one reader has now described one of the recent arrests. But he uses a different word:

Letters to the Editor
These jaw-dropping ICE arrests could be from a movie

Regarding the March 28 news article “Calls for Tufts student to be released as Rubio confirms revocation of visa”:

We could have been watching an ugly, inciting incident in a Christopher Nolan movie. A lone young woman walks down an urban street. Suddenly, she’s set upon by six people, four dressed in black, all but one wearing masks to conceal their faces. One rips the cellphone from her hands as two spin her around, remove her backpack and place her in handcuffs. Unfortunately, this is not fiction; it’s a scene from the latest attack on civil liberties under the Trump administration.

The abduction of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raises serious concerns about the protection of our civil liberties...

[...]

J— F—, Meadville, Pennsylvania

This reader called this arrest an "abduction." Whatever you want to call it, he describes the events of that day in a reasonably accurate fashion.

We're amazed, day after day, by the behaviors of the persons we see on the Fox News Channel. Ten years ago, we wouldn't have known that you could get that many people to perform so many scripted recitations. 

We're persistently amazed by the squalor of the Gutfeld! show, but also by the Fox News Channe's unending displays of dumbness.

That said, many persons in Blue America also have a lot of explaining to do. We think, for example, of the two new books which allege, rightly or wrongly, that major figures within the Democratic Party agreed to hide their knowledge and their concerns about the declining cognitive state of President Biden until he staged his massive meltdown during that fateful debate last June.

(On Fox News Channel programs, the children call it "the Democrat Party." That's how stupid and  childish this is.)

Barack Obama is a woman. Ana Navarro is "a beached whale." 

Rep. Tlaib has a troubling mustache. This is the morally squalid, braindead world inhabited by a figure like Gutfeld, whose backing band includes such figures as Tyrus, the former professional "wrestler," along with Kenndy, the former MTV VJ, who we don't yet know how to describe.

Where in the world do these persons come from? They're plucked from the normal distribution within our struggling species.

Back to that abduction or arrest. In Tuesday's report, we recorded the inanity displayed on The Five with respect to one of the "deportations." 

"It's just a gay barber," the eternally fatuous Jesse Watters said, thereby dismissing a possible innocent victim. "He's not into you," the disordered Gutfeld then said.

With respect to that abduction at Tufts, we'll now report our own reaction. As we watched the videotape of that graduate student being taken away by masked men on the street, we thought of one of the most famous arrests of the frequently brutal past century.

We refer to the famous arrest which lies at the heart of this remarkable, remarkably beautiful book:

HarperCollins Publishers
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
By Francine Prose

“Prose’s book is a stunning achievement. . . . Now Anne Frank stands before us. . . a figure who will live not only in history but also in the literature she aspired to create.”  Minneapolis Star Tribune

In our view, the summary by the publisher fails to capture the scope of Prose's remarkable book. It's hard to fight past the "adorable child" framework to arrive at the deeper places Prose explores.

For ourselves, we're most struck by the place where Prose uses the term "fairy tale" to describe one part of what is now a well-documented event:

We refer to the place where the man who arrested Anne Frank and her family and friends dumped the contents of what would become her world-famous book onto the floor of the annex in which she'd been hiding. He did that so he could use the briefcase in which her voluminous writings were kept so he could carry away a small amount of cash and a handful of costume jewelry—the items he'd chosen to steal. 

In a fairy tale straight from the gods, he discarded one of the most important books of the 20th century in favor of a handful of baubles. It's a type of story from deep in prehistory—a story about the inability to see what's truly of value, even when it's right there before us. 

The name of that person has long been known. The leading authority says it:

Anne Frank

[...]

On the morning of 4 August 1944, the [hidden annex] was stormed by a group of German uniformed police led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst. The Franks, Van Pelses, and Pfeffer were taken to RSHA headquarters, where they were interrogated and held overnight.

On 5 August, they were transferred to the Huis van Bewaring (House of Detention), an overcrowded prison on the Weteringschans. Two days later they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp, through which more than 100,000 Jews, mostly Dutch and German, had passed. Having been arrested in hiding, they were considered criminals and sent to the Punishment Barracks for hard labor.

Years later, Silberhauer was extensively interviewed about the arrests in question. According to the leading authority, "his memories of the arrest were notably vivid."

He strikes us as someone who lacked a certain moral sense. We thought we might have seen him lurking about on a recent Fox News Channel telecast.

The TV show to which we refer is One Nation with Brian Kilmeade. The program aired last Sunday night at 10 p.m. Eastern. 

A person we won't name played the videotape of the Tufts arrest. To our ear, he then almost seemed to display a certain pleasure in watching the young woman in question being taken away by six men.

You can watch that fleeting moment yourself. We wonder if a bit of sound has actually been inserted at the beginning of the brief bit of tape to make that young woman's fear more enjoyable.

The person we won't name played the tape of that arrest. On the tape, you could hear a cry of fear—and then, the fellow said this:

UNNAMED CABLE NEWS STAR (3/31/25): How great is that? A pro-Hamas Tufts University student—PhD student—who's in this country on a visa, detained for co-authoring an op-ed, and other things, in a Tufts student newspaper.

"How great is that?" the fellow said. We'll admit that we thought of Silberhauer when we saw him say that.

For the record, we know of no reason to think that the young woman who was "detained" at Tufts is, in fact, "pro-Hamas."

To appearances, she was, in fact, taken away because of a rather innocuous op-ed in the college newspaper. But we know of no "other things" which lie behind this masked abduction. It seems to us that the TV performer may have been making that up.

We'll admit we thought of Silberhauer when we saw him say what he said. Again, we wonder if that squeal you hear at the start of the tape was spliced in by the Fox News Channel to make this arrest more delicious.

Now for a point of personal privilege:

We're fairly sure that we first learned about Anne Frank when this edition of Life magazine appeared. 

It was August 1958. We were ten years old at the time. At the age of 39, Ted Williams had hit .388 the previous year.

We've always remembered reading some such article at that point in time, all by ourselves, alone in our room. In the past, we'd tried to google the article, but we never had any success. 

This week, we tried again, and the posting to which we've linked appeared. We assume that that's the magazine from which we first learned about these events—about the young person who, as Prose describes, is still revered in various countries around the world.

We thought we heard the voice of Silberhauer during that brief moment on the Fox News Channel. That said, a nation moves into the future with the persons it has, and our nation is full of imperfect persons, Red and Blue persons alike.

Our world is also full of detainees—those who have been abducted. We'll close by suggesting this:

Every innocent victim of some such arrest is, in the end, this person. We hope you'll click that link and look. Enlarge those photos so you can see the face of every victim.

In our view, the Fox News Channel is peopled by some deeply puzzling persons. As long as we Blues keep refusing to speak, we'd have to say this has the look, but also the feel, of the national downfall we've chosen.