SILOS RED AND BLUE: Silo Red, Silo Blue!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2025

Large nation, coming apart: On this sprawling campus, we were glad to see what Hillary Clinton said. It was Hillary Clinton the policy person, not Hillary Clinton the candidate.

She wasn't built to be a candidate, as her husband was. We don't mean that as a criticism. Very few people are built that way. It involves a very rare set of attributes and skills.

She wasn't built to be a candidate. She was built for intelligent statements. When she spoke with Norah O'Donnell on Saturday, we were glad to see her say this:

O'DONNELL (10/11/25): Secretary Clinton, let me start with you. Does this diplomatic breakthrough make you hopeful about what's next?

CLINTON: Norah, it does. It’s a really significant first step, and I really commend President Trump and his administration, as well as Arab leaders in the region, for making the commitment to the 20-point plan and seeing a path forward for what’s often called "the day after."

Most importantly, the conflict hopefully will end with the ceasefire. The hostages will be returned. And then the very hard work of rebuilding Gaza, of finding the kind of security that Israel and the Palestinians, after Hamas, deserve to have, moving forward with the other points in the plan, trying to create an opportunity for Palestinians to have a better life and for Israel to have greater peace and security. I am very hopeful...

To see the video, just click here. For The Hill's news report, click this.

To us, that was a grown-up statement. It could still be offered, even today, in this age of the twin towering silos

To us, that was grown-up speech. We had the same reaction when Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) appeared on CNN, speaking with Dana Bash:

BASH (10/11/25): How much credit does President Trump deserve for this deal?

KELLY: I think he should get a lot of credit. I mean, this was his deal. He worked this out. He sent Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner over to negotiate this. And so far, it’s gone well. Hopefully, the hostages get released here—might not be within 24 hours—but certainly, I think, by Monday. And that’s, that's progress. And now we’re going to have to see what happens next.

You know, my hope is the Saudis, the Emiratis, they step up and they do what they said they would do, which is invest in rebuilding Gaza, which 90 percent of the homes have been destroyed. It is such a tragic situation. It’s good to see these 600 aid trucks. That should have been happening over the last two years.

To see the tape, visit this report from Mediaite. 

To us, Senator Kelly doesn't necessarily look like an American president, but he almost always talks like one. And no—we don't really believe that the way "back out of all this now too much for us" involves saying that Stephen Millers acts like he's 4-foot-10.

Amazingly, we first saw that tape from Hillary Clinton on Saturday morning's Fox & Friends Weekend. Inevitably, it was accompanied by a lengthy harangue about the way other Democrats are refusing to give credit to President Trump for what is happening today.

What's happening today is gift from the gods to a set of families, but it's also quite limited. Somewhat cynically, we're inclined to refashion Charlie Hurt's reference to a "peace deal" in this way:

No Buildings Left to Knock Down

We'll admit it. We're inclined to perform that translation, though it may not be fully insightful.

Within the American context, residents of Gaza have long been a forgotten / disappeared people. We were happy to see Clinton and Kelly join with others to talk about the need to rebuild what's left of their war-ravaged land.

Meanwhile, this:

To see the complaints of the friends on Fox & Friends Weekend, you can just click here. It was 6:05 on Saturday morning, but the proselytizing had already begun.

Producers had assembled a list of major Democrats who had allegedly failed to give President Trump his due. The discussion had started in the mandated way—with bitter complaints that the Nobel Prize committee had failed to name President Trump for a ceasefire / hostage release which hadn't happened—which hadn't even started to happen—back at the deadline for nominations for this year's award.

In time, it fell to Hurt, the eternal teen, to read the names of the Democratic miscreants. We haven't checked to see what these six people actually said, but one name may have stood out:

HURT (10/11/25): The idea that you would take a moment like this where you have the biggest, the best shot at true peace that maybe we've ever seen in the history of Israel, and you have people who are looking at it through a political lens, noting that—you know, celebrating the peace deal but refusing to give credit to Donald Trump because they hate Donald Trump more than they love the idea of peace. 

People like former president Barack Obama; Bernie Sanders; Mark Warner, senator from Virginia, supposedly a purple state; Jackie Rosen, a senator from Nevada; [Rep.] Josh Gottheimer from New Jersey; Hakeem Jeffries are among those who would rather—are more upset about the fact that Donald Trump has achieved the peace than they are that peace has broken out.

For the record, "peace" has not yet broken out in the land in question. Over the weekend, we saw Lindsey Graham acknowledging the dangers moving forward, in much the way Hillary Clinton did as she continued her statement.

That said, we thought that one name stood out! Producers had built a giant wall on the Fox & Friends Weekend set showing the six Democrats who hadn't sufficiently credited President Trump for the ceasefire / hostage relief. 

Hurt complained about the way they were looking at the ceasefire "through a political lens," even as he and the other two friends did the same thing in Saturday morning's first segment.

Is it true? Does President Obama "hate Donald Trump more than he loves the idea of peace?" We're willing to guess that the answer is no—but in stepped Rachel Campos-Duffy, so genial among her own:

CAMPOS-DUFFY (continuing directly): Obama's so jealous. 

HURT: Yeahhhh.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Such an ugly look.

It was "such an ugly look," she said. 

We humans are strongly inclined to be tribal—to look for ways to live inside our tribal silos. This particular Fox & Friends Weekend friend is spectacularly genial, but only among her own. 

We feel sure that she could do better. We're hoping that day will come.

At that point, we didn't know that President Obam was already being criticized for failing to credit President Trump for the ceasefire / hostage release. On the other hand, we were aware of the kinds of facts we had noted in our most recent reports.

The previous evening, on one of the most-watched programs in all of American "cable news," two of the clowns the CEO sent had told Fox viewers what you see below. Those viewers had also been told to be upset about the Nobel committee:

GREG GUTFELD (10/10/25): ...Some previous presidents certainly won it for doing a lot less than Trump did. Think about it. 

Barack Obama? He won it before he even sat down to pee in the White House bathroom.

[...]

EMILY COMPAGNO: Obama was awarded it nine months after taking office—as you point out, before he even sat down to pee.

That's the garbage which crawls from the can on the channel which employs the trio of weekend morning friends. As we noted, during that same Gutfeld! show, Red America's viewers and voters were also told this:

GUTFELD: That's Trump's [means of] persuasion—[he's a peacemaker] until you piss him off. 

Then you wake up with a horse in your bed—or a cow in your Irish pub.

[PHOTO of Rosie O'Donnell]

AUDIENCE: [Applause]

We still plan to return you to the podcast Rosie O'Donnell recently authored with Nicolle Wallace. With respect to our own reaction to O'Donnell's presentation, we will tell you this:

She had us when she cited Anne Frank. We were blown away by her account of the way she felt, back when she herself was still a child, when she saw footage of college students having food poured over their heads as they sought the right to be served at a public lunch counter during one of the sit-ins of the 1960s civil right era.

Back to Barack Obama, who sits down to pee. On Gutfeld!, the defectives routinely say that his wife is really a man, and that he himself is either gay, or perhaps is just a woman.

On Saturday night, we also saw a pair of ranting nut-balls on Life, Liberty and Levin assailing him as "a criminal"—nor had we forgotten the fact that President Trump's nut-ball Director of National Intelligence had accused him of taking part in "a treasonous conspiracy" near the end of his second term.

Also this:

For four or five years before he started running for office, President Trump had paraded about on the Fox News Channel, pretending that President Barack Hussein Obama had actually been born in Kenya. Rachel Maddow's drinking pal had been Trump's caddy in that endless, bad-faith assault on the American project. 

More recently, the man Obama failed to credit had told the world that President Obama's political party is "the party of Satan." As best we can tell, the New York Times—like the Fox & Friends Weekend friends themselves—didn't think that astonishing statement was even worth reporting.

Does there possibly come a time when a person who's been slimed in such ways stops feeling the need to honor the nut-ball who's performed and ordered this array of nut-ball conduct? People, we're just asking!

Yesterday, we struggled, all day long, trying to settle on the appropriate format for this week's reports. The questions we'd ask would be this:

How did it ever get this far? 

With that question in mind, once again, riddle us this:

How did it ever reach the place where circus clowns are sent out onto one set of "cable news" shows to spew such garbage as this?

GUTFELD (10/10/25): ...Barack Obama? He won it before he even sat down to pee in the White House bathroom.

[...]

COMPAGNO: Obama was awarded it nine months after taking office—as you point out, before he even sat down to pee.

How did it ever reach the point where a couple of nut-balls said that? Also, where a graduate of Harvard Law School laughs as she pretends to be looking at videotape of a famous person's colonoscopy, right there on the nation's most-watched "cable news" program, right there on the Fox News Channel?

How did it ever get that far? How did it ever reach the point where clowns like those spew garbage like that in the guise of a "cable news" broadcast?

That, of course, is only half of our ongoing question. The second half of our question goes exactly like this:

How did it ever reach the point where nut-balls spew such garbage night after night within Red America—and over here, in Blue America, our tribal elites neither report nor discuss that astounding, destructive act?

We former Americans now live inside a pair of silos—in silos Red and Blue. 

Within one silo, the CEO sends in the clowns. Within the other silo, it's the silence of the lambs. 

Everyone in Silo Blue agrees not to notice or care about what happens in Silo Red. It doesn't matter what the Reds do. We Blues avert our gaze.

How did it ever get this far? Tomorrow, we'll continue to explore the way Silo Red seems to have come into being.

The remarkable culture of Silo Blue is a bit harder to nail down. It's easier to see what's being said than to see what's being avoided.

Long ago and far away, Walter Winchell addressed his early TV gossip reports to "Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea."

Today, we'd like to issue a challenge to the citizens of that failing nation. We'll borrow from President Reagan's famous demand:

"Mr. and Mrs. America, tear down those silo walls!"

Tomorrow: The leading authority's unintentionally comical thumbnail on "Human"

SENDS IN THE CLOWNS: One sits to pee, and the other's a cow!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2025

The New York Times keeps its trap shut: A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY, the flag above Fifth Avenue once said.

It flew repeatedly for several years. The leading authority explains:

A man was lynched yesterday flag

A flag bearing the words "A man was lynched yesterday" was flown from the national headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) between 1936 and 1938 to mark lynchings of black people in the United States. It was part of a decades-long anti-lynching campaign by the NAACP that began after the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington. The flag...was stopped from flying in 1938 after the NAACP's landlord threatened them with eviction if they continued the practice.

[...]

The NAACP first flew the flag on September 8, 1936, to mark the lynching of A. L. McCamy in Dalton, Georgia. The flag continued to be flown at NAACP's headquarters at 69 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan the day after news of a lynching reached the organization. The 6-by-10-foot flag was simple and had the white text "A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY" on a black background. The bold typeface is thought to have been chosen to best convey the message quickly to a crowd of people.

It was a stunningly terrible time. We Blues sometimes avoid acknowledging the following fact but on balance, things don't typically reach that level of horror at the present time.

This very morning, the thought of that recurrent sign popped into our heads. At the direction of its CEO, the Fox News Channel had posted a video beneath this comical dual headline:

Something’s off with today’s Democrats: Greg Gutfeld
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld and the 'Gutfeld!' panelists discuss why Democrats are so unlikable.

Too funny! As you can currently see by clicking this link, that's the way the CEO's corporate lackeys decided to summarize the "issues monologue" which occurred at the start of Thursday night's Gutfeld! show.

Each evening, the host's "issues monologue" follows a couple of minutes of insults packaged in the form of jokes. But what made that presentation so funny?

Simple! That summary could be the summary of the "issues monologue" Greg Gutfeld has delivered almost every night over the past few months. 

That's been the subject of his monologue night after night after night! Once the termagant has told the world about how weird and unlikable Democrats are, a quartet of stooges then take their turn agreeing with what he has said.

Full disclosure! The termagant's insults don't come to an end when his "issues monologue" starts. Last night, his monologue was a bit more specific than much of his usual fare.

Last night, he issued a screed against the way the Nobel committee had failed to honor President Trump. As you can currently see at the Gutfeld! site, the summary of last night's issues monologue looks like this:

Greg Gutfeld: Trump’s a peacemaker until you piss him off
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld and the panel discuss President Donald Trump not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on ‘Gutfeld!'

So went last evening's monologue. Inevitably, the host's devotion to personal insult bled over into the monologue, as it always does.

Sad! The show began airing at 10 o'clock sharp. At 10:04 p.m., the world had already been gifted with this as part of the issues discussion:

GUTFELD (10/10/25): ...Some previous presidents certainly won it for doing a lot less than Trump did. Think about it. 

Barack Obama? He won it before he even sat down to pee in the White House bathroom. 

Should President Obama have received that prize? We can't quite tell you that.

That said, the tortured man who helms this show persistently tells his viewers two things. First, Barack Obama is really a woman. Either that, or Obama is gay.

The host thinks of that garbage as insults. 

Each night, the CEO pries the lid off the can and this is the moral and intellectual disorder which comes crawling out. We ask you to pity the many young men who are being encouraged to perceive the world in such ways.

That said, the little guy was far from done last night. He now listed the many peace deals he said President Trump has brokered.

No serious person seriously believes that Trump has brokered that many peace deals. No one believes that the listing is accurate—but on the Fox News Channel, the list the little guy rattled off is mandated corporate messaging.

As for the host himself, he seems to have a monster stuck in his soul—a monster which won't seem to let him go. He can't simply say whatever it is that he wants to say he believes. Instead, he has to say things of this type, as he did last night at 10:07 p.m.:

GUTFELD: That's Trump's [means of] persuasion—[he's a peacemaker] until you piss him off. 

Then you wake up with a horse in your bed—or a cow in your Irish pub.

[PHOTO of Rosie O'Donnell]

AUDIENCE: [Applause]

Rosie O'Donnell was cast as the cow. This is who the termagant is. We ask you to pity the "masculine children" who are being taught to behave in such ways. 

Nor is it just the guys! At 10:10 p.m., it fell to the former Oakland Raiders cheerleader to offer her thoughts on the topic at hand. At the New York Times, Gutfeld! hacks can now get scored as feminists even as they act out like this:

COMPAGNO: Obama was awarded it nine months after taking office—as you point out, before he even sat down to pee.

The cheerleader wanted to say it too! This is the corporate culture the CEO has chosen

There's much more to say about this heavily watched TV show, and about the rise of right-wing comedy as a messaging tool.

In the realm of political commentary, we'd date the practice to Rush Limbaugh's use of parodic elements on his nationwide radio show starting in the mid-1980s. In the realm of major stand-up comedy, we'd track it to Sam Kinison's comedy of screaming cruelty, but also to Andrew Dice Clay's arena-filling presentation of the angry white working-class man.

(We have a treasured memory about an admirable female comedian with whom we once worked in Atlantic City. She asked us one day, in complete sincerity, why she was being treated so badly as the girlfriend of one of the members of Kinison's posse. That was something like thirty years ago!)

There's also a great deal to say about the way people like Brother Gutfeld (and Kayleigh McEnany) got converted into ardent supporters of President Trump. According to the New York Times, the CEO called Gutfeld in one day, apparently in 2016, and apparently gave him the word about the possible need for that change.

(He may be sincere in his Trump love today. Back in June 2023, the Times seems to say that that's what happened back then.)

We're going to leave it here for today, with President Obama sitting to pee and O'Donnell compared to a cow. We're going to leave you with one other point:

All across the realm of Blue America's timorous and incompetent elites, the better people—the people who "went to the finest schools"—agree that they must never report and must never discuss what actually happens, all day and all night, on this endlessly ridiculous imitation of a "cable news" channel.

It's Suzanne Scott who produces this show. She sits on a massive yacht which bears an unusual name:

Sends in The Angry, Broken Toys, the name on her splendid yacht says.

Just so you'll know: The five women of The View were trashed two separate times during last evening's handful of opening "jokes."

First, they were compared to a band of "dogs." 

(Audience applause. "Too easy," the termagant said.)

Moments later, they were mocked for "the chum" they allegedly stuff in their mouths. This garbage gets dished every night.

This little guy seems to have a woman hatred which won't seem to let him go. If Blue America had a sexual politics (all too plainly, Blue America doesn't), we Blues might be able to see, report and discuss that fact about this 61-year-old furious soul.

He hails from a very sunny place. We feel sure that he could do better than this. We advise you to pity the child.

FRIDAY: This is the faltering horse we rode in on!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2025

Has statistical bungling won? This new column by David Brooks discusses a topic which is important, or at least it's important in theory.

The topic is important if our flailing nation will continue to function in anything like a normal way. It's also important to the extent that our "educational experts," and the journalists who echo them, don't engage in the latest wave of statistical bungling.

Nationally, test scores are down on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Naep). There is no real doubt about that fact. According to Brooks, similar trends are appearing around the world. 

As usual, the experts have fingered the usual suspects, and they've come up with a trio of winners. In this passage, Brooks repeats what some experts have said:

Why Are the Democrats Increasing Inequality?

[...]

We’ve now had 12 years of terrible education statistics. You would have thought this would spark a flurry of reform activity. And it has, but in only one type of people: Republicans. When it comes to education policy, Republicans are now kicking Democrats in the butt.

Schools in blue states like California, Oregon and Washington are languishing, but schools in red states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, traditional laggards, are suddenly doing remarkably well. Roughly 52 percent of Mississippi’s Black fourth graders read at grade level, compared with only 28 percent in California. Louisiana is the only state where fourth-grade achievement levels have returned to pre-pandemic levels. An Urban Institute study adjusted for the demographics of the student bodies found that schools in Mississippi are educating their fourth graders more successfully in math and reading than schools in any other state. Other rising stars include Florida, Texas and Georgia.

[...]

The so-called Southern Surge came about because the red states built around a reading curriculum based on science, not ideology. The schools provide clear accountability information to parents and give them more freedom to choose schools. They send coaches to low-performing classrooms. They use high-quality tutoring, and they don’t promote students who can’t read, reducing the bureaucratic strings that used to control behavior in the classroom. They also hold schools and parents accountable. In Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, a child who isn’t reading at the end of third grade has to repeat it.

Mississippi is painted as the big winner. This recitation has been going on for the past several years, but a problem may lurk in this passage:

"In Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, a child who isn’t reading at the end of third grade has to repeat it."

For today, let's stick with Mississippi. For starters, let's say this:

Making a child repeat third grade may or may not be a good idea; there have always been differing views. That said, when it comes time to take a test like the Naep, this practice does tend to create an apples-to-orange type of comparison between the various states.

Using the voluminous data provided by the Naep, we just looked at the range of ages of Mississippi's fourth grade students compared to the range of ages of fourth graders in California and across the nation. As the data instantly show, Mississippi has a much larger percentage of fourth graders who are older than the typical age for that grade. That suggests the possibility that Brooks' experts are comparing kids in Mississippi who have had four years of graded instruction to kids in California who have had only three.

This critique of the Mississippi miracle been around for years. Have experts been putting their thumbs on the scales, with non-specialists like Brooks getting dragged along?

We'll examine the data in more detail and try to report back with specific statistics. That said, this is very much the horse we rode in on, way back in the 1970s, when we ourselves were teaching fifth grade in the Baltimore City Schools.

Simply put, our educational experts all too frequently aren't. Also, our national journalists tend to follow them along whatever trail they're stampeding down, especially when the experts believe they've found a miracle cure or perhaps just a simple solution.

In various spots around the country, cheating was rampant on statewide testing programs until USA Today and a couple of local newspapers finally figured it out. The educational experts were lost in space. No one at the New York Times ever quite managed to notice that this had been going on.

We first wrote about that phenomenon in the miid-1970s. We heard horror stories about the practice from the highest-ranking editor at one of the biggest "tests of basic skills" of that earlier day.

Decades went by before USA Today finally blew the whistle on this practice. The giant brains at our biggest news organs never quite figured it out.

 (We're speaking here about outright cheating, not about a simpler version of "teaching to the test.") 

We humans! We love love love the simple solution. Also, we're willing to write about a simple solution, though possibly only once.

We've seen a wave of clueless editorials and columns about this new situation of late. We don't know why anyone would avoid teaching phonics, but this editorial by the Wahington Post provides the type of simple-minded assessment we mean:

The reading wars are ending. Phonics won.
California belatedly follows Southern states in abandoning a failed teaching method.

Phonics instruction strikes us as amazingly basic, but the gods of simple solutions pretty much never quit.

Four years of graded instruction may tend to beat just three. To what extent does some such construct lie at the heart of this chase?

SENDS IN THE CLOWNS: Clowns pretend to discuss those health care costs!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2025

CEO's imitation of life: Imitations of (human) life are frequent among us humans. In yesterday morning's report, we treated you to an example.

The CEO of the Fox News Channel had truly sent in the clowns! In this case, the "clowns" to whom we refer included three relatively undistinguished comedians, one of whom is known to us as the nicest guy in the world.

A comedian certainly could know something about climate science, but none of these stumblebums seemed to. As you may recall, that left the star of the show, the seemingly disordered Greg Gutfeld, to propagandize a failing nation in the following way:

GUTFELD (10/2/25): We all love the pope. Why is he weighing in on climate change when all of the data is so corrupted? No one believes in this crap any more—except him!

GUTFELD: You know, Rich, the fact is that all of the data is found to be fraudulent. You can't accurately measure the earth's temperature—you'd need a huge thermometer for one. 

GUTFELD: The pope isn't expected to be up to date on this kind of stuff. And he should know that. He should know that, "Maybe I don't follow the climate science, so maybe I should stay out of it." Trump knows more about this than the pope does. I hate to tell you, Pope!

We know of no reason to believe that this man had any idea concerning what he was talking about. That said, the CEO had sent in the clowns, and millions of people across the nation were propagandized through that trio of sound bites. 

Tribal pleasure was layered in through a succession of ugly insults delivered in the form of alleged jokes.

These presentations represent an imitation of human life. So does the silence which is maintained by Blue America's journalistic and academic elites, where everyone from French and Kristof and Lawrence on down seems to know the rules of the game:

What happens on Fox stays right there on Fox. You don't want to tangle with Fox!

That imitation occurred on the primetime "cable news" program, Gutfeld! Almost surely, Gutfeld! is the most fraudulent example of "broadcast news" ever presented on American cable or air.

Equally stupid is the professional courtesy extended to this imitation of life. And as we've told you, the moral and intellectual squalor which pervades this 10 p.m. show (that's 7 p.m. out on the coast) is slowly being transition to the nation's most-watched cable news program, the Fox News Channel gong show known as The Five.

How fake do "discussions" get on The Five? This Wednesday afternoon's program provided a good example. 

Uh-oh! James Comey had pleaded "not guilty" to a criminal charge. But in a news report in Thursday's print editions of the New York Times, readers were exposed to some of the highly unusual elements of the case:

Comey Pleads Not Guilty and Will Seek to Dismiss Charges as Vindictive

James Comey, the former F.B.I. director targeted by President Trump, pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to charges he lied to Congress. His lawyer said he would move to quickly dismiss the case, calling it a “vindictive” and “selective” prosecution.

[...]

If the hearing offered a guide to the defense’s strategy, it revealed little new about a case deemed so weak by career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia that they refused to have anything to do with it. That reluctance forced the White House to quickly insert a stand-in U.S. attorney to file the indictment.

Mr. Comey’s lead lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald, vented his exasperation in the hearing, saying that his “first substantive contact” with prosecutors came Tuesday night. He said he still had not received specific details of the charges, including the identities of witnesses, beyond the two-page indictment approved by a split grand jury on Sept. 25.

[...]

On the left, at the prosecutors table, sat Lindsey Halligan, who was making her second-ever appearance as a prosecutor after she was hastily installed by Mr. Trump as the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia last month. She was picked after her predecessor was ousted after finding insufficient evidence to indict Mr. Comey.

Ms. Halligan, a former insurance lawyer, did not speak in court. Instead, she spent the hearing rocking and nodding in her chair as a junior federal prosecutor brought in from North Carolina spoke for the Justice Department. 

The long list of peculiarities proceeded from there. None of these oddities were ever mentioned as the corporate tools sent in by the CEO pretended to evaluate the case.

(The relatively agreeable Harold Ford sat in the anti-MAGA chair that day. Had Jessica Tarlov been in his place, she almost surely would have started mentioning these problems. At that point, the interruptions would have begun.)

None of the problem with this case were ever mentioned this day. "You know what? I'm happy they went after this guy," the former VJ Kennedy eventually said. 

"I hope they go after Clapper [next]," she said as the imitation of a discussion mercifully came to an end.

Viewers of the Fox News Channel heard nothing about the long list of apparent irregularities involved in this prosecution.  This kind of sifting typifies the pseudo-discussions engineered by the CEO on this most watched of all such programs.

As Gutfeld transfers his moral and intellectual squalor to this most-watched "cable news" show, how dumb—how embarrassingly childish—does it routinely get on The Five?

For that, we take you to last Friday's program. The CEO, on her yacht, had sent in this collection of clowns:

The Five: Friday, October 3, 2025
Kennedy: Fox News contributor
Jessica Tarlov: alternate co-host, The Five
Jesse Watters: co-host, The Five
Kayleigh McEnany: co-host, Outnumbered
Greg Gutfeld: co-host, The Five

Uh-oh! On this day, Tarlov was there. In the program's opening segment, the players pretended to discuss the issues concerning government funding of health care which lie at the heart of the ongoing government shutdown.

After some silly blather from Watters, McEnany—she's a graduate of Harvard Law School—turned to Tarlov, positioned two seats to her right. At 5:05 p.m., McEnany—she also studied at Oxford—went where the rubber should be meeting the road:

MCENANY (10/3/25): Why does your party want to shut down the government for taxpayer funded health care for illegal immigrants?

That was the question she asked. But are the Democrats doing that? Is that why the Democrats are pursuing their current course?

Major news orgs have largely abandoned the task of trying to fact-check the various claims which lie at the heart of the current messaging war. But of one thing you can feel quite certain:

No citizen watching The Five will ever see a serious attempt to straighten such questions out.

To her credit, McEnany had directly posed a direct question. Here is a bit of what followed:

MCENANY (10/3/25): Why does your party want to shut down the government for taxpayer funded health care for illegal immigrants?

TARLOV: It's just not what's going on...Mike Johnson, and to his credit, he does a ton of interviews. But everybody is pushing back on him about that, showing the actual text, which says—we're talking about people who are lawfully here.

[...]

If you want to pull [that document] out—if you want to go to the part that's below the GOP account, you'll see that it's for people that are here lawfully—protected status, domestic violence survivors, etcetera.

At this point, the complexity had already strained the patience of Gutfeld and Watters past the breaking point. The pair now launched their mandated interruptions of Tarlov, and any semblance of a serious discussion came to an end.

Claims and counter claims flew. The incoherence was general.

McEnany was in the Perino chair this day—the chair reserved for the pro-MAGA panelist who is supposed to give the impression that she isn't completely out of her mind. That said, little attempt at clarification came from her. 

At one point, the pseudo-discussion turned on a conceptual question which has seemed to puzzle the players on this dimwitted entertainment / propaganda / messaging vehicle. That conceptual puzzle goes like this:

Can a person who is "lawfully present" be said to be "an illegal?"

It can get extremely dumb on this imitation news show. With apologies to the gods, Master Gutfeld was soon able to take no more—and with apologies to the gods for what we find ourselves forced to report, here's what he now said and did:

GUTFELD: This is a process that was gamed by illegals, OK? First of all, I looked back and I found out— 

Do you know what has more views that [the Democratic Party's health care] livestream? Rosie O'Donnell's colonoscopy!

PANELISTS: [Laughter]

WATTERS: No!

GUTFELD: And it wasn't—it wasn't even recorded!

WATTERS: Ha ha ha!

GUTFELD: That was four hundred real person views [of the Democratic livestream].

By now, it was 5:09; to appearances, he just couldn't take the tedium any more. And so, he turned to a favorite target. We apologize to the gods, and of course to O'Donnell herself.

In fact, there was no colonoscopy for other players to view. There were no images on his phone. But this is the clown car the corporate CEO has chosen, and soon the Harvard Law School grad was also enjoying the fun:

It was now 5:11. The play-acting had all broken down. The Harvard Law grad said this:

MCENANY: I can't stop thinking about Rosie's colonoscopy. I'm trying to get that image out of my mind

GUTFELD: Here, you want to see some stuff on my phone? 

[Leans over, shows phone to McEnany]

Looks like the Holland Tunnel. 

MCENANY [Delighted laughter]: Greg downloaded it!

There were no images on the phone. There was no colonoscopy there to explore.

We apologize to the gods—and to O'Donnell. As we noted on Monday, we were stunned by O'Donnell's clean, clear voice when we watched her recent podcast with Nicolle Wallace.

We were stunned by the clarity of what we saw and heard. We're still affected by what we saw. We plan to discuss that next week.

We plan to discuss the many things we saw and heard next week. But this is what now passes for the American public discourse when a CEO pries the lid off the can and her messenger children decide to come slithering out.

We have a word for Brother Gutfeld. We regard him as "unrecognizable."

We've never seen anyone anywhere as strange on an American "news" program. Yesterday, we said that he deserves some help. Tomorrow, we'll explain that.

McEnany seemed delighted by the chance to become a clown. Moment later, the pathetic Kennedy was complaining about "the hot turd of overspending" performed by the Democratic Party.

In the end, this seems to be the only way these children know how to talk. Judging from appearances, this is pretty much all they have.

We apologize to the gods—sand to O'Donnell herself—for the necessity of showing you what Blue America's pampered elites have been enabling all these years. That said no modern society can expect to survive a reign of inanity matching this. One observer has even described this tribal inanity as "a revolt from below"—as "The Revenge of the D-Minus Students."

Some of the circus clowns who gets sent in probably were D-minus students. McEnany's situation is different. Her testimony goes like this:

I was never a D-minus student. But I play one on cable TV!

Tomorrow: We visit the CEO's conversion of Gutfeld. Also, who in the world is Kat Timpf?

THURSDAY: At PBS, Brangham spoke to Hotez and Mann!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2025

At Fox, she sent in the clowns: Friend, should Pope Leo XIV have shot off his mouth with all that crap about climate change—about the climate change hoax?

Last Thursday night, in prime time, Greg Gutfeld told millions of viewers that the answer was no, and Heather Zumarraga went along with his play. We know of zero reason to believe that either one of those people has the slightest idea about the current state of climate science or about the actual state of actual climate change.

In these ways, the CEO who tribal name is Sends in The Clowns gets her corporation's messaging out. Gutfeld adds to the enjoyment and fun with his endless stream of misogynist insults.

That's the way the Fox News Channel defrauds the American public. News orgs like the New York Times join in, refusing to report or discuss what happens on that channel' "news" programs.

That was the way the Fox News Channel reacted to the pope. This past Tuesday night, the PBS News Hour took a rather different approach to the question of climate science.

The News Hour didn't send in three flyweight comedians with the goal of scamming the world. Instead, the News Hour spoke to two major scientists. Its synopsis for the segment reads exactly like this:

Authors of ‘Science Under Siege’ warn of concerted effort to discredit science

From its embrace of dubious research about autism, its skepticism over vaccines and its wholesale rejection of the consensus about climate change, the Trump administration has set off alarm bells within the scientific community. William Brangham spoke with two prominent researchers about "Science Under Siege," their new book chronicling what they argue is a concerted war on science.

You can read the transcript or view the tape here. The segment dealt with several topics in addition to climate. The first Q-and-A went like this:

BRANGHAM (10/7/25): In their new book, our guests argue that we're living through a—quote —"anti-science superstorm," where a concerted group of global actors, billionaires, leaders of nation-states, and credentialed experts work to confuse and mislead the public about basic scientific principles, particularly around the twin crises of climate change and pandemic threats.

Their book is called "Science Under Siege," and its authors are familiar to "News Hour" viewers. Dr. Pete Hotez is the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine. And Michael Mann is presidential distinguished professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Gentlemen, so nice to have you both here in person at the NewsHour.

I want to ask you both. In this book, you detail this, that, I mean, as far back as Galileo, there have been attacks on scientists and scientific understanding. Both of you, even with that knowledge, describe how you came into these, your respective fields, and still were in some way shocked at the level of vitriol directed against you.

And I wonder if you could just tell me a little bit about when you first recognized that that was coming at you.

MANN: Yes, thanks, William. It's great to be with you. And it goes back 2.5 decades for me. 

Back in the late 1990s, my co-authors and I published the now well-known hockey stick curve that demonstrated how unprecedented the warming of the past century is, and it implicated human-caused climate change for the increase in the concentration of carbon pollution due to fossil fuel burning.

That was a threat to some powerful vested interests. And so they focused a whole lot of firepower on me to try to discredit me, to intimidate me, to get me fired from my job. And I will tell you, it was sort of like PTSD for me five years ago, when public health scientists like Peter and Tony Fauci found themselves under attack in precisely the same way, the same tactics, and even some of the same players.

And that's where Peter and I sort of started to interact. We became friends. Ultimately, that led to this collaboration.

At Fox, the CEO sends in the clowns, even including a former "wrestler" in the form of a bloated blowhard. At PBS, it was Dr. Hotez and Professor Mann, who admittedly arrived with a dearth of woman-hating jokes.

In our view, Gutfeld needs (and deserves) some help. We'll discuss that in greater detail over the next week or so.

Meanwhile, one last point:

When will Brangham report and discuss the Fox News Channel? How long does PBS plan to make this failing nation wait?

SENDS IN THE CLOWNS: Pope Leo all wet on climate change!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2025

CEO sends in the clowns: Rather famously, Pope Leo XIV hails from right there in Dolton, Illinois, a suburb bordering the far South Side of our own failing nation's Chicago.

He grew up with the White Sox, not with the Cubs. Last Wednesday, October 1, he called for unity on a major issue, or so said the New York Times:

Pope Leo Calls for Unity on Climate at a Divided Moment

In his first significant address on climate change, Pope Leo called on Catholics and citizens of the world on Wednesday to carry on the environmental advocacy of his predecessor, Francis, and not to treat it as a “divisive” issue.

Leo spoke at the opening ceremony of a climate conference to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, a groundbreaking papal document on the urgent need to protect the health of the planet. “The challenges identified in Laudato Si are in fact even more relevant today than they were 10 years ago,” he said.

Speaking for just over 10 minutes in an auditorium where he shared a stage with the actor and former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Brazil’s climate minister, on the grounds of the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, about 17 miles southeast of the Vatican, Leo focused on the action that individuals and local communities can take to alleviate increasing climate pressure.

“Everyone in society, through nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups, must put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls,” he said. “Citizens need to take an active role in political decision making at national, regional and local levels. Only then will it be possible to mitigate the damage done to the environment.”

Rightly or wrongly, wisely or otherwise, that's what the pontiff said. But uh-oh! According to the report in the New Yok Times, back here in the USSR, there seemed to be one dissenter:

Leo, who was elected in May as the first pope from the United States, has remained measured on many potentially controversial issues, and his most forceful comments on Wednesday were references to the words of Francis. “What must be done now to ensure that caring for our common home and listening to the cry of the earth and the poor do not appear as mere passing trends or, worse still, that they be seen and felt as divisive issues?” he said, echoing some of Francis’ most famous phrases.

Speaking a little over a week after President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that climate change was the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” the pope refrained from critiquing any national leader or policy.

One week earlier, President Trump had told the UN, in a rambling address, that this so-called climate change was the "greatest con job ever."

Pope Leo spoke on October 1. One day later, the woman known as "Sends in The Clowns" sent a typical contingent in for one of her "cable news" channel's most watched primetime programs.

The program is known as Gutfeld! The program airs at 10 p.m. in East, 7 p.m. on the coast. It's the third most watched TV show in American "cable news."

Also, the program to which we refer constitutes a fraud on the American public. On this occasion, Suzanne Scott, age 60, the CEO of the Fox News Channel, had sat on the deck of her corporate yacht and had sent in these pretenders:

Gutfeld! show: Thursday, October 2, 2025 
Rich Vos: comedian
Heather Zumarraga: former CNBC contributor
Greg Gutfeld: host
Kat Timpf: comedian
Tyrus: comedian, former professional "wrestler"

Full disclosure! We knew Rich Vos, long ago, as part of the Boston comedy scene. If memory serves, we occasionally found ourselves driving to "one nighters" together.  

Rich Vos, let it be said, is the nicest guy on earth. At any rate, those were the clowns the CEO had sent in this night. She had sent in three comedians, plus one former (business news) contributor.

That was the contingent the CEO had sent. Did we mention the fact that they'd been sent to fill the seats on a primetime TV show on the nation's most-watched "cable news" channel? On the most-watched news channel by far?

Some years before, this same CEO had decided to go with Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters as the new faces of the scandal-ridden Fox News Channel. On this occasion, true to form, the CEO had sent five individuals onto its set, none of whom were going to show the slightest sign of having the slightest idea what they were talking about.

The program had opened the usual way, with its host offering several minutes of remarkably coarse jokes aimed at opponents of MAGA. The insulting jokes he led with this night went down the same old ugly road:

Due to the government shutdown, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), "had to cut back on his diaper service," this program's viewers were told. With respect to Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), "paychecks are no longer being sent to [her] team of electrologists," he said.

As we've noted in the past, he plays that card all the time.  In the past, we've suggested that he needs and deserves some help, but this very strange person's woman hatred seems undisguised and endless.

"It's bad," the gentleman said. "Earlier today, [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had to put her new face on layaway. And until this thing is settled all of Hillary's murders will be out of pocket." 

He now turned to his nightly attack on the women of The View. He said that forty percent of climate emissions come from them alone.

Regular viewers all knew what that meant. Presumably, the problem stemmed from their incessant overeating and their subsequent emissions of gas.

That was a kinder, gentler attack on those women than this strange man normally offers. He proceeded to emit one more example of his incessant gender-based humor:

"Speaking of [The View], Sunny Hostin says she doesn't understand why Pete Hegseth fired the first female officer to lead the Navy. In his defense, she kept wanting to attack countries for things they did ten years ago."

So it went as one of the figureheads of the Fox News Channel opened the evening's show. Two years earlier, he had been chosen by the CEO as the way to escape an era of deeply embarrassing, inexcusable scandals, or so the New York Times had said. 

His jokes this night were milder than usual, but his targets are always the same. Liberal women are too fat and too old. They're so fat that they're like horses or cattle or "livestock."

Also, their faces are wrong.

This is the business the Fox News Channel's CEO has chosen. Meanwhile, there is no known way to get major journalists from Blue America's top orgs to report or discuss the fraudulent conduct which takes place on this "cable news" channel's programs.

Back in June 2023, the New York Times' Flegenheimer and Peters had suggested that the turn to figureheads like Gutfeld and Watters was part of a wider turn, within the national discourse, to a type of "insult conservatism" driven by "right-leaning comedy." Below, you see the passage where the pair of reporters had mind-read the CEO's thinking and motives as she had moved Gutfeld's program closer to a primetime slot back in 2021:

"Installing Mr. Gutfeld where an hour of hard news used to be, Ms. Scott reasoned that pandemic-weary audiences needed some levity."

Readers, please! In that passage, you see one fraud being met by another. Before we're done with these snapshots from this corporate propaganda channel, we'll list a few of the many names who refuse to report what actually happens on this "cable news" channel. 

For now, let's return to last Thursday night, and to the plea from Pope Leo XIV.

Full disclosure! Pope Leo isn't a climate scientist—but neither are any of the manifest flyweights the CEO had sent out onto the Gutfeld! set this night. In the program's second half hour, the host decided that it was time to discuss the ridiculous things the clueless Pope had said. 

The pope's Laudato Si ceremony had involved a ceremonial block of melting ice an emblem of the ongoing loss of natural resources worldwide.

Inevitably, the man who loves to mock the faces—and the lack of sexual attractiveness—of 83-year-old American women was going to start with that melting ice. Here's where this segment started:

"If he's going to bless something frozen, he should start with Kathy Hochul's face." 

Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is the governor of that well-known state. On this garbage can program, Governor Hochul's face is laughable too—and at that point, it was on to this very strange person's assessment of climate change:

GUTFELD: Heather, I'm going to you first so you don't have the Rich Vos curse. 

ZUMARRAGA: Thank you.

GUTFELD: Why—  We all love the pope. Why is he weighing in on climate change when all of the data is so corrupted? No one believes in this crap any more—except him!

ZUMARRAGA: Well, you said that.

GUTFELD: You didn't say that? 

ZUMARRAGA: Well, no. 

Full disclosure. We'll guess that Zumarraga is occasionally on this show because she's youngish enough and because she's conventionally telegenic. 

She's also a pleasant, smiling presence, and she's quite agreeable. That said, there is exactly zero reason to believe that she has anything resembling specialized knowledge about the current state of climate change or climate science. 

To her credit, she showed no sign of wanting to speak about this challenging technical issue. But she'd been sent in on the Gutfeld! show, and she almost surely understood what he was being paid to do.

Continuing directly, she adopted a form of agreement, and she then took a guess:

ZUMARRAGA (continuing directly): But it could be seen as political. Right! I— Popes—this is personal opinion—if possible should refrain from having a political stance. 

He didn't mention President Trump by name, but the timing is interesting and suspect because a few days before, at the U.N., President Trump had criticized global warming. So from the Catholic standpoint...

I don't think Catholics really care at the end of the day. This was a nice gesture, something that's not usually done, but maybe his message would be better spent spreading the word of the gospel.

That was her reaction. She hadn't agreed with Gutfeld's claim that the climate science is a big, discredited pile of crap which no one believes any more. But she had managed to get in line with the general drift of the segment.

Now, Kat Timpf blathered a while. She said nothing of substance. Throwing to Vos, the host went ahead and said it again:

GUTFELD: You know, Rich, the fact is that all of the data is found to be fraudulent. You can't accurately measure the earth's temperature—you'd need a huge thermometer for one. 

Do you think that the pope is just out of date?

Desperately, Vos spun his wheels. In fact, he had nothing to say about this important topic. There's no reason why he should have, but why was he there on that show?

That brought the convo back to the host—and there he went again:

GUTFELD: Here's my problem. The pope isn't expected to be up to date on this kind of stuff. And he should know that. He should know that, "Maybe I don't follow the climate science, so maybe I should stay out of it."

Trump knows more about this than the pope does. I hate to tell you, Pope!

Now the former "wrestler" hemmed and hawed, bringing the segment to a close. This segment was an imitation of life, with the host of the show telling millions of viewers, three separate times, that climate science is a big, discredited hoax.

People will die all over the world because of what the yacht owner does. As for the very strange person she chose to be the face of this channel, he mocks the creation of women's faces and women's bodies, after which pretends that he knows the science.

On her yacht, the CEO had sent in the clowns. This represents an ongoing fraud on the American public—on the very possibility of maintaining an American nation.

Despite those facts, you can't name a single person at the New York Times who's willing to report, or to discuss, what actually happens on this "cable news" channel. Nicholas Kristof isn't willing to go there. How about David French?

No one is willing to say their names, or to quote the actual things they have actually said.

Tomorrow: The garbage can comes to The Five

WEDNESDAY: Can anybody here play this game?

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2025

Two-thirds know little or nothing: Did we read the New York Times wrong? As we noted this very morning, here's what the news report said (and still says):

Pressed on Justice Dept. Politicization, Bondi Goes on Attack

[...] 

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, opened the questioning by asking if the White House had consulted Ms. Bondi on the deployment of federal troops to Chicago. She ignored the question and instead raised her voice to accuse Mr. Durbin, a 28-year veteran of the Senate who has delivered billions of dollars in criminal justice funding to his state, of disloyalty to his constituents.

“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she said.

Right there in paragraphs 4 and 5, that's what the news report says.

In fact, we'd seen that exchange between Durbin and Bondi on three or four cable news programs. We'd seen Bondi offer that accusatory non-answer non-reply to Senator Durbin's question.

That said:

From reading the article in the Times, we got the idea that Senator Durbin had actually "opened the questioning" in the manner described. But looking at the C-Span videotape, we now see that Senator Grassley had questioned Bondi at some length before Durbin took his turn.

According to the C-Span videotape, that accusatory non-reply by AG Bondi actually happened at roughly the 40-minute mark of yesterday's proceedings. 

As we noted yesterday afternoon in a brief aside, different people will have different reactions to Bondi's refusal to answer various questions, and to the unmistakable body language with which she broadcast her disdain for a string of Democratic Party senators.

To us, her behavior looks unmistakably insolent. To others, she may have come across as a heroine of the tribal wars. However you score it, civilizational breakdown is indicated by the relentless behavior you can observe on the C-Span videotape.

Reading Rev's transcript isn't enough. You have to look at the body language to see how stark the dismissal was.

Somehow, we managed to get a misimpression from reading the New York Times. That said, Bondi did return to the jibe she aimed at Senator Durbin a few hours later, as we noted this morning.

She played the same insult card in a scolding non-response to a question from Senator Padilla. As we noted this morning, she rebuked him for the length of time he had spoken, then returned to that same old jibe:

First, Senator Padilla, you've gone on for over five minutes, and I wish that you loved your home state as much as you hate President Trump. We'd be in really good shape then. 

Yes, that's what she said. We've referred to this as a silent secession. Whatever you think of that silent secession, we do think that phrasing is apt.

We've begun to hope that the president's conduct is becoming so weird and so extreme that public opinion will start turning against him in a decisive way. That said, none of us knows how far this administration might be willing to go if some such situation actually starts taking shape.

We'll offer one more observation about the way our national discourse now works or fails to work. Also in today's New York Times, a news report seeks to explain a major policy matter. Here's how that news report starts:

What’s Behind the Dispute Over Extending Health Care Subsidies

At the heart of the government shutdown fight is a dispute over extending expiring subsidies that help people buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Democrats are demanding that Republicans renew the tax breaks that help pay for the coverage, which are set to expire at the end of the year, as part of any funding extension to reopen the government.

Republicans, so far, have said such an extension does not belong on a spending measure, and some have argued that Congress should let the subsidies expire.

Here is a look at the debate.

The Times report continues from there, laying out some basic information. With an eye to the death of the American discourse, we were struck by the way this news report ends.

The news report ends like this:

Before the shutdown, few Americans knew much about this issue. It barely came up during the 2024 presidential race, and the tweaks to a subsidy formula are a bit wonky and technical to understand.

But when surveys ask voters what they think about the policy, they tend to overwhelmingly support an extension of the subsidies.

A recent survey from KFF showed that more than three-quarters of adults, including 59 percent of Republicans, thought Congress should extend the subsidies. But it also showed that nearly two-thirds of people had heard “little” or “nothing at all” about the issue.

That's the way the news report ends. Nearly two-thirds of us the people know little or nothing at all about this important topic. 

To some extent, it's always been like this. To some extent, we'll guess that, thanks to all the civilizational warfare, matters are now somewhat worse.

SENDS IN THE CLOWNS: Scott aligned Fox with a merry imp!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2025

"Deep misogyny," where is thy sting? "How did it ever get this far?" Don Corleone once asked.

With respect to the imitation of life known as the Fox News Channel, we're trying to tell you that tale. 

In yesterday's report, we showed you a dual headline from the New York Times which included an instructive turn of phrase. The dual headline had appeared in June 2023. You can spot the telling phrase here:

How Fox News (Yes, Fox News) Managed to Beat ‘The Tonight Show’
Greg Gutfeld has installed his brand of insult conservatism as the institutional voice for the next generation of Fox News viewer. And it’s catching on.

Well rendered! Greg Gutfeld's "insult conservatism" had been installed as the institutional voice of the Fox News Channel!

As we noted, the Times was reporting the fact that CEO Suzanne Scott was installing Gutfeld and his towel-snapping partner, Jesse Watters as the new faces of this "cable news" channel. The channel was trying to emerge from a pair of ugly and deeply embarrassing scandals. The instructive turn of phrase—the new watchword—was this:

Insult conservatism

CEO Scott was now building her network around something called "insult conservativism." By happenstance, a good example of that wider style was on display, just yesterday, in what's left of the United States Senate.

Pam Bondi was the practitioner. This morning, the New York Times' report on her conduct at yesterday's oversight hearing starts with the session's first Q-and-A:

Pressed on Justice Dept. Politicization, Bondi Goes on Attack

[...] 

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, opened the questioning by asking if the White House had consulted Ms. Bondi on the deployment of federal troops to Chicago. She ignored the question and instead raised her voice to accuse Mr. Durbin, a 28-year veteran of the Senate who has delivered billions of dollars in criminal justice funding to his state, of disloyalty to his constituents.

“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she said.

So the insolent witness said, in response to the day's first question. She apparently loved that first lightning bolt so much that she brought the insult back again, a few hours later, in response to a question from Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA). 

As you can in this clip, she said it at 12:37 p.m.:

First, Senator Padilla, you've gone on for over five minutes, and I wish that you loved your home state as much as you hate President Trump. We'd be in really good shape then.

The AG had gone there again! Different people will have different reactions to these interview stylings.

In the past, we've referred to this sort of thing as a silent secession, where by "silent," we've meant "undeclared." But so it went, all through yesterday's hearing, as the "insult conservatism" prevailed. 

Bondi showcased the insult stylings all through the day. As of June of 2023, CEO Scott's "cable news" channel had apparently decided to adopt this approach as its distinguishing characteristic, or so said the New York Times in that month's report:

As part of a lineup shuffle hastened by [Tucker] Carlson’s ouster in April, Mr. Gutfeld, 58, will move to 10 p.m. next month, a promotion befitting his escalating clout at the network. The changes announced by Fox this week were the network’s first major overhaul of prime time programming since 2017. Jesse Watters will take over Mr. Carlson’s 8 p.m. slot, and both Mr. Gutfeld and Mr. Watters will remain co-hosts of “The Five” at 5 p.m., the most-watched show in cable news.

In consort with Judge Jeanine of Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit fame, Gutfeld and Watters would continue to rule The Five, the nation's most-watched "cable news" show. But Watters would now own the channel's 8 o'clock hour—and the Gutfeld! show would be moving into the primetime 10 p.m. slot, which is 7 p.m. on the coast.

Regarding the insult stylings of Gutfeld himself, reporters Flegenheimer and Peters chose to soften their descriptions, as such high-end mainstream journalists typically do. First, though, let's be fair:

In their profile of Gutfeld's broadcast style, the Timesmen cited his (near constant) "scatological digressions." They even threw in a reference to his "hacky jokes about women drivers," one of the world's greatest throwbacks among lame-brained gender disparagements.  

They said that, in his years as an editor before coming to Fox, he had "spent much of his early career publishing paeans to male obnoxiousness in men’s magazines." Eventually, they were even willing to quote a former associate at Men's Health magazine saying this:

[Chief executive Ardale] Rodale’s daughter Maria, then an executive at the company, recalled Mr. Gutfeld as “deeply misogynistic,” if often consistent with his laddish surroundings. She was especially troubled by his casual disparagement of Prevention (another Rodale title at the time) and its readers, whom Mr. Gutfeld once described as “lonely women with cats and psoriasis.”

[...]

On Mr. Gutfeld’s watch, the magazine edged perceptibly into the culture wars, insulting Girl Scouts, mocking Hillary Clinton’s ankles and ranking “the best and worst colleges for men.”

As with Rush Limbaugh, so too with this guy—the first lady's "cankles" were wrong! Also, Prevention magazine's readers were a bunch of "lonely women with cats." The new figurehead of the Fox News Channel got there before JD Vance! 

In fairness, these hints were allowed to appear. But as is the norm among the mainstream journalists who pretend to profile this peculiar man, Flegenheimer and Peters seemed to feel that they had to bow to the frameworks preferred by the Fox News Channel. 

Speaking in their own voices, they quickly referred to Gutfeld's "merry trolling," through which he "has created a waggish refuge for viewers aghast at the country’s political direction." Later, they referred to "his roguish contrarianism," described as "a kind of insult conservatism that can frame any serious argument as a joke and any joke as a serious argument, leaving viewers to suss out the distinction."

That marvelous phrase appeared right there, right there in the article's text. But as other mainstream journalists have done, Flegenheimer and Peters chose to avert their gaze from the actual shape of this strange man's insult stylings. 

Everyone fakes it for Gutfeld! This past July, Mediaite's Colby Hall described Gutfeld as "a Fox News prankster" right in the headline of his profile. Back in February, Variety's Tatiana Siegel described Gutfeld as an "ascendant court jester...a comic whose self-styled brand is ridiculing liberal hypocrisy." 

Is that what this jester mocks? We would have to describe this passage as pure stone-cold deception:

"Gutfeld!” is a closer match to Bill Maher’s old ABC show “Politically Incorrect,” with co-hosts Kat Timpf and Tyrus helping to anchor conversations that frequently rib the obese, the easily triggered and the hosts of “The View.”

Does this court jester "frequently rib the (female) hosts of The View?” In fact, he routinely compares them to horses and cows, to whales and pigs, but also to cattle and "livestock." 

He trashes them in such braindead ways night after night, and it spirals straight downhill from there. During the 10 p.m. hour, D-list comedians sit around and cheer for whatever he says. 

That's part of what you actually see and hear on this Fox News Channel show. For whatever reason, few journalists want to report that unavoidable fact.

At any rate, whatever! Eventually, Flegenheimer and Peters placed this construction on the motives they attributed to the woman who had, slowly but surely, selected Gutfeld to serve as her network's best man:

His move in 2021 to weeknights at 11 reflected a programming creed of Ms. Scott, who has preferred to cultivate talent internally rather than cast about for fresher faces unfamiliar to viewers. Installing Mr. Gutfeld where an hour of hard news used to be, Ms. Scott reasoned that pandemic-weary audiences needed some levity.

Hard news was OUT and "levity" was IN. For the record, we know of no reason to think that CEO Scott really saw "levity," as opposed to insult and propaganda propagation, as the key offering here. But mainstream journalists have constantly peddled versions of that company line as they have pretended that the "insult conservatism" in question is secretly just the work of a harmless, merry imp.

Gutfeld was transitioned to prime time in 2023. He was said to be replacing an hour of "hard news," though little product of that description ever appears on this channel.

Meanwhile, Suzanne Scott had to work with her man to bring him into line at one point. We'll move to that matter tomorrow.

Her yacht is said to display this name on its stern: "Sends in The Clowns." Scott had chosen to escape an era of ugly and embarrassing scandal by turning to Watters and Gutfeld. But earlier, along the way, Gutfeld had been making his bones in a troubling way—by trashing one Donald J. Trump.

Almost surely, that type of "levity" wasn't going to play at this particular channel. Tomorrow, we'll turn to that part of this long and very dumb road, and we'll show you what happens when the clowns sent in to perform on these shows pretend to be trying to talk about actual matters of substance.

Hard news was gone, long gone. The potential demise of a large, struggling nation came next.

Tomorrow: Pure dumbness all the way down

TUESDAY: Your concerns AREN'T our concerns!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2025

So Karoline Leavitt said: For years, we've been telling you that the Iliad—the war poem which is "often regarded as the first substantial piece of European literature"—provides a portrait of our struggling nation's current situation.

Unfortunately, the Iliad is a portrait of civilizational conflict extending to the death. Let's recall what the leading authority says we're talking about:

Iliad

The Iliad—"[a poem] about Ilion (Troy)"—is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. Like the Odyssey, the poem is divided into 24 books and was written in dactylic hexameter. It contains 15,693 lines in its most widely accepted version. The Iliad is often regarded as the first substantial piece of European literature...

Set toward the end of the Trojan War, a ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Mycenaean Greek states, the poem depicts significant events in the war's final weeks. In particular, it traces the anger of Achilles, a celebrated warrior, from a fierce quarrel between him and King Agamemnon, to the death of the Trojan prince Hector. The narrative moves between wide battleground scenes and more personal interactions.

[...]

Critical themes in the poem include kleos (glory), pride, fate, and wrath. Despite being predominantly known for its tragic and serious themes, the poem also contains instances of comedy and laughter. The poem is frequently described as a "heroic" epic, centered around issues such as war, violence, and the heroic code. It contains detailed descriptions of ancient warfare, including battle tactics and equipment. However, it also explores the social and domestic side of ancient culture in scenes behind the walls of Troy and in the Greek camp.

[...]

The story begins with an invocation to the Muse. The events take place towards the end of the Trojan War, fought between the Trojans and the besieging Achaeans.

That summary omits a central point. From beginning to end, the Iliad is built around themes of sexual politics. More specifically, it's built around the subjugation of the people thought of as women, tracking back to the original reason for the ten years of war, and moving on to the nature of the "fierce quarrel" between Achilles and King Agamemnon which appears at the start of the poem.

The whole thing turns on sexual politics, including overt sexual slavery. For what it's worth, sexual politics is deeply involved in the civilizational struggle now underway between the current warring civilizations—Red America and Blue.

Set that aside for now. For today, we're thinking of the fact that the Iliad is a civilizational struggle which proceeds to the death. There is no possibility of compromise or comity, and no such resolution prevails. 

Two new reports in today's New York Times reminded us of that aspect of the current warfare.

We start with a single comment from Tom Edsall's weekly march to the sea. The remark was made last Thursday by Karoline Leavitt as the current shutdown prevailed.

President Trump had commented on the opportunity the shutdown gives him "to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, [Russell Vought] recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent."

Asked if Trump's suggestion was real, Leavitt answered thusly. We highlight one phrase:

Oh, it’s very real, and the Democrats should know that they put the White House and the president in this position, and if they don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government. It’s very simple: Pass the clean continuing resolution, and all of this goes away. We would not be having these discussions here at the White House today if not for the Democrats voting to shut the government down. This is an unfortunate consequence.

In theory, those congressional constituents back home are also a sitting president's constituents. Maybe we're just picking nits, but that construction jumped out at us this morning.

Also, there was today's Senate testimony by Pam Bondi. In her refusal to answer questions, she came equipped with personalized attack messages directly aimed at the individual Democratic senators who were asking the unanswered questions. 

Any hint of comity is gone. For the record, different people will form different ideas about whether Bondi's attitude is justified.

As portrayed in the Iliad, the Achaeans and the Trojans were vastly different peoples. The only thing they had in common was the desire for control over Helen, radiance of woman, allegedly the most beautiful woman in the world.

Helen had run off to live with her new husband, the younger son of King Priam, inside the walls of Troy. She had abandoned her previous husband, the son of King Agamemnon. 

For ten years, the men of Achaea had fought and died in the dust, furiously trying to get her back, stealing young women from neighboring villages to serve as their sexual slaves. 

There was no path to compromise in the midst of this mayhem. As described by Professor Knox, this is where the fury eventually led after Prince Hector was slain by the madman Achilles, with his body dragged through the dust behind Achilles' chariot as his horrified parents looked on:

The whole poem has been moving toward this duel between the two champions, but there has never been any doubt about the outcome. The husband and father, the beloved protector of his people, the man who stands for the civilized values of the rich city, its social and religious institutions, will go down to defeat at the hands of this man who has no family, who in a private quarrel has caused the death of many of his own fellow soldiers, who now in a private quarrel thinks only of revenge, though that revenge, as he well knows, is the immediate prelude to his own death. And the death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. 

The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

His baby son was thrown from the walls, and so on down the various pathways to Hades from there.

You can interpret that further as you will. Beware of overweening pride in the perfect correctness of one's own tribal group.

That said, that night assault brought with it the death of sacred Troy. As portrayed in the Iliad, a more civilized society had fallen after a ten-year siege by a profoundly furious aggregation. After ten years of brutal war, no civilized solution was going to be possible. 

That's where European literature started. Borrowing from the early Dylan:

Time passes [extremely] slowly up here in the mountains.

SENDS IN THE CLOWNS: The experiment started at 3 a.m.!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2025

Dumbing a nation way down: Her CIA code name is Sends in The Clowns, a respectful nod to the Lenape origins of her Parsippany region.

It's also a toast to the changes at a certain "cable news" channel—the revolution rendered in the years which have followed her ascent to the CEO chair.

She rose to that post in 2018. Was she really the person described in this report from The Guardian?

Meet Suzanne Scott: the new Fox News CEO who enforced 'miniskirt rule'

For Variety's take on that alleged rule, you can just click here.

Whatever! As we noted in yesterday's report, the CEO "has denied enforcing a dress code," though only "through a Fox News spokesperson." For the record, she traffics under the moniker Suzanne Scott "out among them English" (Witness, final declaration). 

With respect to the miniskirt rule, we'll briefly add this:

As of the last appearance by NAME WITHHELD on the 10 p.m. Gutfeld! show (that's 7 p.m. on the coast), the rule had seemed to become a micro miniskirt rule for the designated chair directly to the right of the host.

Were the ladies seated there each night actually wearing skirts at all? At times, opinions differed during this so-called upskirt era. That said:

Among the cultural forces driving the product at this channel has been an impulse to return to the culture of very large upper arms among the men, with extremely short miniskirts sported by the ladies. 

In fairness, there's no ultimate way to say what kind of "sexual politics" should obtain within a large, sprawling nation. But the Fox News Channel has largely moved toward the era of the "new masculinity," though the micromini era seems to have ended, on that particular TV show, over the past few months.

(Repeat: There is no objective way to establish an appropriate sexual politics. Susan Faludi wrote Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women—that was her framing—all the way back in 1991. The cultural pushback against an earlier era's feminism has continued along from there.)

Back to the story we began to tell yesterday, concerning the person called Sends in The Clowns.

"Scott" became CEO in 2018. At that time, the Fox News Channel was mired in a series of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and the like within the channel's realm.

(Similar incidents soon appeared within major mainstream news orgs.)

As the worm turned, those were quickly seen as the glory days at Fox. In the wake of the 2020 election, the age of undisguised, outright lunacy descended on the organization.

This was the age of the fully metaphorical "clowns."

Eventually, the channeled shelled out $784 billion to Dominion Voting Systems for the lunatic claims that had been made on the air by the channels assembly of political/journalistic clowns. As we noted yesterday, these names are named by the leading authority:

 "Dominion focused on allegations made between November 2020 and January 2021 by hosts Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro. Guests who often appeared with these hosts included Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell."

The authority is willing to say those names. As for Scott herself, this email was frequently quoted, even as the culture at the channel was taking another turn:

“I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories."

Scott was referring to Fox reporters who were making accurate statements about the election. They didn't "understand our viewers," Scott had apparently said.

We can't say exactly what she meant by that statement—but behind the scenes, a revolution was now taking place—a type of revolution which had already been widely observed among this nation's basic cable channels.

It's been called "The Great Dumbing Down." One example would be the way the History Channel began living off dimwitted hokum about Ancient Aliens having invaded the earth. Another example would b the way a fine arts channel called Bravo! ended up building itself around the dimwitted spats presented as the soul of the Real Housewives franchise.

As these channels dumbed themselves down. the Fox News Channel was apparently looking or ways to make its product even dumber. This involved a strange experiment which was semi-reported by the New York Times in this report, dual headline included: 

How Fox News (Yes, Fox News) Managed to Beat ‘The Tonight Show’
Greg Gutfeld has installed his brand of insult conservatism as the institutional voice for the next generation of Fox News viewer. And it’s catching on.

The report appeared in June 2023. The TV show on which it centered was about to move from an 11 p.m. starting time—that was 8 p.m. out on the coast—to the prime time spot it currently holds, right there at 10 p.m. Eastern.

What a long, crazy trip it had been! As the news report started, Flegenheimer and Peters described the shape =of "insult conservatism" as practiced by the channel:

How Fox News (Yes, Fox News) Managed to Beat ‘The Tonight Show’

One evening in May, the most-watched man in late-night television these days staked out a curious if characteristic position: A 38-year-old teacher who allegedly had sex with a 16-year-old student, the host said, was the hero this nation needed.

“Can we live in the real world?” asked the host, Greg Gutfeld of Fox News, before invoking the Van Halen song “Hot for Teacher.” “It wasn’t written about ‘Hey, let’s have a responsible relationship with someone close to my age.’”

Reaction on the set of his show, “Gutfeld!”—where a regular, Kat Timpf, declared herself “vehemently against banging kids”—was mixed. The judgments online were swift.

“Fox News Is Now Praising Statutory Rape on Air,” The New Republic wrote, one of nearly a dozen outlets to sternly relay Mr. Gutfeld’s doings on his political satire-ish 11 p.m. hour.

This was the type of product Sends in The Clowns was now going to move into a 10 p.m. spot. That would be 9 p.m. in Chicago, 7 p.m. out on the coast.

In that opening anecdote, Flegenheimer and Peters quoted "a regular, Kat Timpf," a person some might sardonically describe as a "Fox News Channel feminist." The anecdote involved the skanky type of subject matter the CEO had apparently landed on as one of the potent new faces of the reinvented Fox News Channel.

In the age of Donald J. Trump, a long-standing conservative world built around "family values" had rapidly moved in a different direction—toward a culture which was coarser and much, much dumber than anything that had ever been seen on American news broadcasts before.

In effect, Sends in The Clowns had engineered a transition in which the channel would increasingly build its lineups around an aggregation which might be called The Real Flyweights of the Fox News Channel. A long experiment involving a weirdly coarse "insult conservatism" has taken the channel here.

At the Times, it could be said that Flegenheimer and Peters were perhaps over-intellectualizing a bit. But as they continued their report, this is the way they sketched the channel's transition:

Questions of intention and audience fluency—of what viewers are meant to understand about what is uttered on Fox’s air—have shadowed the network’s volatile and damaging recent history, suffusing its gargantuan Dominion settlement over bogus election fraud claims and the attendant departure of Tucker Carlson, its most popular anchor.

Yet as Fox plots its next chapter, executives have placed their non-recreational belief in Mr. Gutfeld, elevating his merry trolling and just-kidding-not-really-but-maybe bearing as an institutional voice for the next generation of viewers.

As part of a lineup shuffle hastened by Mr. Carlson’s ouster in April, Mr. Gutfeld, 58, will move to 10 p.m. next month, a promotion befitting his escalating clout at the network. The changes announced by Fox this week were the network’s first major overhaul of prime time programming since 2017. Jesse Watters will take over Mr. Carlson’s 8 p.m. slot, and both Mr. Gutfeld and Mr. Watters will remain co-hosts of “The Five” at 5 p.m., the most-watched show in cable news.

In Mr. Gutfeld’s telling, his teacher bit and the reaction it spawned are part of the grand plan that has delivered him to the ratings summit of late night, to the surprise and occasional horror of many former colleagues and industry stalwarts. To their eye, he has completed a baffling march from Fox’s 3 a.m. slot to a nightly forum where consciously hacky jokes about women drivers and Hunter Biden’s addictions garner a larger audience than “The Tonight Show.”

Gutfeld and Watters were going to be the new gargoyles of the Fox News Channel. Within the history of the American nation's TV news, it doesn't get dumber than that. 

When TV news arrived on these shores, its earliest icons—people like Murrow, Cronkite and Brinkley—were, to borrow from President Kennedy, deeply experienced American journalists who hailed from the heart of the country. At his inauguration, shortly after Robert Frost had recited The Gift Outright, the new president might have been describing these respected figures as he made this proclamation:

PRESIDENT KENNEDY (1/20/61):  Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Within the realm of televised news, the torch had indeed been passed—to imperfect men who had reported from the battlefields of Europe, even from the Fuhrer's lair. 

These men had been tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace. They seemed to be proud of their nation's heritage.

That was the way we had been. At Fox, they were now being replaced by Bill O'Reilly's former "silly boy in the street," but also by Gutfeld himself, who is surely the least recognizable, coarsest person ever assigned to such a prominent role within American broadcast news.

It's true! The experiments with Gutfeld's "insult conservativism" had actually started on unwatched programs which aired at 3 in the morning (at midnight out on those coast). That lengthy experiment had predated the rise of Trump to political prominence. It had also predated Scott's rise to the top of the Fox "News" Channel.

What a long, peculiar trip it had been! We can't report the thinking behind this unusual bit of product development, but this is the way the leading authority records the chronology of this journalistic descent toward the bottom:

Greg Gutfeld

[...]

Beginning on February 5, 2007, Gutfeld served as host of the late-night talk show Red Eye on the Fox News Channel. The hour-long show initially aired at 2am. ET Monday through Saturday mornings and at 11pm on Saturday evenings. However, beginning in October 2007, the show began airing at 3am Monday through Saturday mornings while retaining its 11pm timeslot on Saturday evenings...On July 11, 2011, Gutfeld became a co-host and panelist on the Fox News political talk show The Five, which airs weekdays at 5:00 P.M. ET. Gutfeld left Red Eye in February 2015, with Tom Shillue succeeding him as host.

On May 31, 2015, Gutfeld began hosting a new weekly late-night talk show on Fox News called The Greg Gutfeld Show, which aired on Saturdays at 10pm. In February 2021, it was announced that beginning in the second quarter, the show would move to weeknights at 11pm; on March 10, it was announced that it would be called Gutfeld! and premiere on April 5, 2021. In August 2021, Gutfeld! overtook The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in the nightly ratings, becoming the highest-rated late-night talk show in the United States (though “Gutfeld!” aired in prime time at 8 p.m. on the West Coast and did not repeat at 11 p.m.).

So went the peculiar experiment. For the record:

In that last highlighted chunk, the leading authority betrays an unavoidable part of mainstream journalistic culture. In these manifestations, the broken toys of the mainstream world insist on reciting the talking-points of the Fox News Channel, even as they parenthetically note that the talking-point they're reciting doesn't actually make sense.

We're going to stop right here for today, adding this one conceptual point:

With the rise of the Gutfeld! show into primetime prominence, the CEO called Sends in The Clowns. was coming ever closer to earning her CIA / tribal name.

The new "clowns" she'd be sending in were now one step closer to literal clowns. They now included the collection of angry male comedians who sit by Gutfeld's side each night and agree with his angry insults and proclamations—with the astounding "insult conservativism" which is built around insults aimed at liberal women and endless jibes about how often President Biden has been "pooping or [BLEEPING] his pants."

That old miniskirt rule looks pretty tame compared to where we've been taken. As of the crackpot claims about Dominion, the "clowns" in question were political clowns. They've now been swapped out for comedians!

Along the way, this has produced the dumbest of all dumbing downs. Tomorrow, we'll continue from there. Can a nation survive this dumbing down, or this silence from Blue America?

Tomorrow: As Suzanne Scott keeps dumbing it down, the finer class of American journalists just keep averting their gaze