SATURDAY: Who in the world was he talking about?

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2026

Yevtushenko, Watters: You're right! There was no mention of the president's ballyhooed national address on yesterday's edition of The Five.   

Answering yesterday afternoon's question, the Fox News Channel's apparent disappearing of the president's speech continued! In place of any such discussion, the normal standards of The Five prevailed:   

The program's first segment was dominated by Jesse Watters' mocking presentation regarding Ashley Webb, a visibly awkward transgender woman who somehow got onto the undercard up in Maine this past Thursday night.  

What "undercard" are we talking about? We'll let CNN explain:   

Maine Democrats’ first debate laid bare their difficulty in replacing Graham Platner   

As Maine Democrats prepare to replace Graham Platner as their Senate nominee, eight candidates pitched themselves as best prepared to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins over two hours of debates Thursday night.

The first hour featured four candidates who were on the primary ballot in different races this year. All lost—but all earned at least 20% of the vote in their contests.

Former public health official Nirav Shah pointed to his performance in the gubernatorial primary (he earned the most first-place votes, but finished second once ranked-choice votes were tabulated). Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson touted his state-level accomplishments. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows highlighted her attempt to disqualify President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot...

The second hour was an undercard of sorts, with four lesser-known candidates looking to break through in the abbreviated race...

And so on from there.

How had this collection of candidates been assembled? We aren't entirely sure.

According to the New York Times, "twelve Maine Democrats ha[d] signed up to run to replace Graham Platner." We've seen no one explain why eight potential nominees, not twelve, took part in Thursday's two-tier event.   

At least three debaters in the first group possessed traditional qualifications. (We saw Shah do a town hall event on C-Span last weekend. We thought he was quite sharp.)

By way of contrast, Webb does not have traditional qualifications. Her performance was extremely uneasy—and as we mentioned, she identifies as transgender. 

Inevitably, this invited the extended ridicule from Watters which came at the start of yesterday's The Five, with a mocking lead-in from Kayleigh McEnany. Inevitably, producers had decided to direct the program's focus to the least polished, least qualified, of the possible nominees.

Plus, she was transgender! Watters took over from there.

After Watters finished his several minutes of mugging, no one, including Jessica Tarlov, found it within him- or herself to challenge what he had done.   

We'll suggest that you watch the way yesterday's program started, with a "disclaimer" from the clown star-adjacent McEnany that "this is not a skit from SNL."  To do so, just click here.

The Five is our rapidly failing nation's most-watched "cable news" program. Its audience is roughly three times the size of primetime programs on MS NOW. Yesterday's imitation of life is very much the way the program is typically designed to run.   

The president's Thursday night address was once again disappeared! Instead, the gang settled on the least capable of the eight Democratic hopefuls, then let the mockery of that transgender person flow.   

"No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko said, long ago. Along the way, in that eternal poem, he even offered this: 

People   

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. 

[...]

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?   

Who we knew as faulty. The poem continues from there.

"No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko plainly said. But who in the world was he talking about right at the start of his poem? 

Could he possibly have been talking about people like those you see on The Five? People like the unnamed people who produce that show?   

You're asking an excellent question! He was likely talking about the millions lost under Stalin—or about the thirty-three thousand, and after that the thousands more, described by the leading authority:  

Babi Yar 

Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, in which some 33,771 Jews were murdered. Other victims of massacres at the site included Soviet prisoners of war, communists and Romanies. It is estimated that a total of between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar during the German occupation.   

The decision to murder all the Jews in Kyiv was made by the German military governor Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch...Sonderkommando 4a and the 45th Battalion of the German Order Police conducted the shootings. Servicemen of the 303rd Battalion of the German Order Police at this time guarded the outer perimeter of the execution site.

The massacre was the largest mass-murder by the Nazi regime during the campaign against the Soviet Union, and it has been called "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust" to that particular date...  

With much, much more after that. Because Yevtushenko's most famous poem is Babi Yar (or Babiyy Yar), that may be who he was talking about at the start of People. 

We're sure there are different views about the poem, Babi Yar. The leading authority says this:   

Yevgeny Yevtushenko 

[...]   

Yevtushenko was one of the authors politically active during the Khrushchev Thaw. In 1961, he wrote what would become perhaps his most famous poem, Babiyy Yar, in which he denounced the Soviet distortion of historical fact regarding the Nazi massacre of the Jewish population of Kyiv in September 1941, as well as the anti-Semitism still widespread in the Soviet Union. 

The usual Soviet policy in relation to the Holocaust in Russia was to describe it as general atrocities against Soviet citizens and to avoid mentioning that it was a genocide of the Jews. However, Yevtushenko's work Babiyy Yar "spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but the Soviet government's own persecution of Jewish people." 

The poem was published in a major newspaper, Literaturnaya Gazeta, achieved widespread circulation in numerous copies, and later was set to music, together with four other Yevtushenko poems, by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar. 

Of Yevtushenko's work, Shostakovich has said, "Morality is a sister of conscience. And perhaps God is with Yevtushenko when he speaks of conscience. Every morning, in place of prayers, I reread or repeat by memory two poems by Yevtushenko: 'Career' or 'Boots'."   

We're sure that there are other views. Along the way in Babi Yar, Yevtushenko, in translation, is able to offer this: 

Babi Yar 

[...]

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The “Union of the Russian People!”

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes...  

And so on from there. At this site, as we've noted before, we consider Anne Frank to be a sacred being, though others may have alternate views. 

(Very happy, very young.) 

For a different translation, through PBS, you can just click here.   

That's who he may have been thinking about when he made his remarkable statement. That said, he quite explicitly went beyond that. Quite explicitly, Yevtushenko claimed that no people are uninteresting. 

He stated that view about everyone. We'll offer more musings next week.

Next week: "The politics of meaning?"