SILO RED, SILO BLUE: Kayleigh converted, and so did Greg!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2025

They're now part of Numbskull Chic: There they sat, enjoying themselves! Two Fridays ago, on The Five, they engaged in some Numbskull Chic.

They were engaged in American Numbskull Chic—in the familiar gong-show stylings of Fox News Numbskull Chic. 

She had emerged from Harvard Law School; he rates as the channel's top numbskull. Despite their differences, there they sat, citing disputed claims about health care—and on this nation's most-watched "cable news" show, they behaved like a pair of clowns.

It started out like this:

GUTFELD (10/3/25): 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].

For background, see last Friday's report.

That is typical fare on this dimwitted, garbage can forum. Moments later, up jumped the Harvard Law School grad:

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. That was just an enjoyable insult aimed at the fading hope of maintaining a viable American nation.

No modern nation can hope to survive these purveyors of Imbecile Chic. Nor can some such nation survive the refusal of elites inside Silo Blue  to report and discuss this daily and nightly behavior.

Kayleigh McEnany, 37 years old, had long been a high achiever. She has no lack of requisite smarts.

We'd be willing to say that she's smart as a whip. We've shown you the basics before:

Kayleigh McEnany 

Kayleigh Michelle McEnany (born April 18, 1988) is an American political commentator, media personality, and former political spokesperson who served as the 33rd White House press secretary during the first Trump administration from 2020 to 2021.

Early in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, she was a critic of Donald Trump but over time became one of his staunchest defenders. 

[...]

McEnany attended the Academy of the Holy Names, a private Catholic preparatory school in Tampa. After graduating, she majored in international politics at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., and she studied abroad at St Edmund Hall, Oxford...

McEnany attended the University of Miami School of Law for her first (1L) year before transferring to Harvard Law School. At the Miami School of Law, McEnany received the Bruce J. Winick Award for Excellence, a scholarship awarded to students in the top 1% of their class. She graduated from Harvard in 2016.

After studying at Oxford and graduating from Georgetown, she crushed it at Miami Law School, then moved on to Harvard. 

Today, she's one of President Trump's "staunchest defenders"—but that's not the way it started. According to that same leading authority, she experienced a conversion at one point, as quite a few others have done:

While in law school, McEnany appeared on CNN as a paid commentator. She supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. In early 2015, before becoming a Trump supporter, McEnany was highly critical of him, declaring on CNN and Fox Business that "Donald Trump has shown himself to be a showman" and it was "unfortunate" and "inauthentic" to call him a Republican. McEnany called his comments about Mexican immigrants "racist." 

According to Michael Marcantonio, a fellow summer [2015] associate at a law firm, she began supporting Trump after accepting Marcantonio's advice, which he gave to her over cocktails. In an interview with the New York Times, Marcantonio recalled telling McEnany, "Donald Trump is going to be your nominee," and that if "a smart, young, blond Harvard graduate" wanted "to get on television and have a career as a political pundit, you would be wise to be an early backer."

On August 5, 2017, McEnany left her position at CNN. The following day, she hosted a 90-second webcast, Real News Update on Trump's personal Facebook page. She praised Trump throughout the segment, saying she had brought the "real news" to the American people.

And so on from there. 

We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of everything said in that brief history. But if you click some links within that overview and read about her initial views, it sounds like McEnany was close to being "woke-adjacent" back when she was anti-Trump.

Today, she's MAGA all the way down, which is her perfect right—and she has her own weekend show on the Fox News Channel. The conversion may have been completely sincere—but there she was on October 3, the Harvard Law School grad, pretending to peer up a good person's colon for the amusement of Silo Red.

What a freaking embarrassment! But then, according to the New York Times, the Trump-worshipping Young Master Gutfeld is a convert too—and it sounds like the CEO may have decided to clue him.

The profile appeared in June 2023:

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

[...]

[During calendar year 2015], he also often did something that feels disorienting to rewatch, given the host’s present disdain for those who moralize about Mr. Trump: He moralized about Mr. Trump.

“I’ve heard people defend him about making fun of a disability, making fun of John McCain, making fun of women,” he said on “The Five” in December 2015, accusing a Fox colleague of “Trumpsplaining” away his behavior. “No one will ever stop defending the crass stuff he says.”

Say what? Was this numbskull woke back then too? Candidate Trump was making fun of women—and he didn't even seem to like that!

We'll guess that he, like McEnany, was still voicing support for some degree of the standard Republicanism of the era before Candidate Trump changed the party's public profile.

That would only be a guess. But as he complained about how crass Trump was, this is what happened next:

Before the election, Suzanne Scott, now the chief executive of Fox News Media, hosted Mr. Gutfeld in her office.

Mr. Trump had no chance anyway, he told her.

“She was like, ‘Greg, you should maybe prepare,’” he remembered, “‘for what happens if he wins.’”

So it said in the New York Times in that June 2023 profile. We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of that anecdote—but it sounds like the CEO called him into her office and suggested that he might want to reorder his stance.

In fairness, CEO Suzanne Scott was running a business. He was one of her corporate assets, and she may have delivered the word. We'll note that the story is sourced to Gutfeld. According to Flegenheimer and Peters, he told that story himself.

Today, this pair of clowns are the type of performers who like to laugh and giggle and play and pretend that they're peering up colons. This is classic Numbskull Chic—as is the silence of the Silo Blue lambs with respect to this ongoing Silo Red conduct.

We'll leave you today with one more point—a point which is skated past in that June 2023 profile.

We'll try to get back to a somewhat unlikely "Fox News feminist" before our discussions are through. But for today, let's return to the large role played by "comedy stylings" in the invention of Numbskull Chic.

That New York Times profile mentioned a book—a seemingly significant 2022 book which largely passed beneath the radar:

Mr. Gutfeld broadly validates the median Fox viewer on the issues that resonate most, including the fate of Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Gutfeld criticized sharply in 2016 before a well-timed recalibration.

He has accused others in late night of failing to adjust as he has and submitting instead to what he sees as an epidemic of left-wing humorlessness.

“It was like Trump was such an existential evil that even joking about it is unseemly,” Mr. Gutfeld said, seated inside his ample Soho apartment (previously occupied by Lindsay Lohan) with a vape pen between his fingers and a large painting of himself in plain view. “I was very anti-Trump up until when he won, and then I had to realize, ‘OK, do I continue as a broken person?’ Because he legitimately was breaking people. Because once the thing that you hate wins, what do you do?”

What Mr. Gutfeld did, in part, was capitalize on a defining talent that he and the former president share: 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.

“There’s sort of a nihilism at the core of that,” said Nick Marx, a Colorado State University professor and co-author of “That’s Not Funny,” a book about right-leaning comedy. He suggested that Mr. Gutfeld’s shtick was the troubling culmination of Fox’s commingling of news and entertainment.

The book in question emerged in June 2022. Here is a fuller profile:

That's Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them
By Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx 
May 3, 202
University of California Press

We don't think we heard of the book in real time. To the best of our recollection, we first stumbled upon it quite recently.

That said, it seems that conservative elements had been experimenting with humor as a messaging device, possibly stretching all the way back to Rush Limbaugh and his "feminazis."

For whatever reason, the Fox News Channel experimented with Gutfeld for years, dating back to his original shows at 2 [sic] and 3 [sic] in the morning. Today, CEO Scott sends in coffles of clowns one after another—and a Harvard Law school graduate is willing to behave in the way we've described on our floundering nation's most-watched "cable news" TV program.

Silo Blue gazes off into space. Writing about a different era, Professor Knox, in 1990, described the lesson all Greeks drew from the death of sacred Troy:

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.

That's the stern lesson the death of Troy taught. Also:

No civilization, no matter how self-impressed, can really expect to survive the fury of the Fox News Channel's Dumbbell Clowncar Chic. 

In short, Silo Blue needs to fight back—and it needs to fight back the right way.

Final point:

The two conversions we've discussed may even have been sincere. But the embarrassing conduct called Numbskull Chic represents an assault on this flailing nation's hope to survive.

There's no excuse for what these people do. Will Silo Blue ever dare speak?

Probably tomorrow: Interruption of Jessica Chic

BREAKING: We expect to be posting by mid-afternoon!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2025:

In the meantime, Lewis in Saudi:  We don't expect to be posting until mid-afternoon. On this, the third Friday in the cycle, it's just another medical Monday!

In the meantime, this:

We're fortunate that we get to read Helen Lewis because we subscribe to The Atlantic. In her most recent essay, Lewis was off in Saudi at the recent comedy festival there.

The highlighted comment posted below brought us right out of our chairs. Leis is commenting on one of the curiosities of the so-called "democratization of media"—the democratization under which our society's most basic functioning finds itself under attack:

I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia

[...]

Louis C.K. was once the titan of thoughtful American comedy—evidence of a strange recent trend of treating comics as public intellectuals, even philosopher kings, rather than entertainers whose success is measured in laughs per minute. He had a sitcom, Louie, that was loosely based on his life, and he had the admiration and envy of his peers. Then, in 2017, The New York Times published one of the most consequential stories of the #MeToo era...

Lewis continues from there. But what a long, strange "recent trend" it has been, in which the spread of platforms like "cable news," talk radio and podcasts have created a world in which we the people look to a bunch of stand-up comedians as the preferred source of insight and wisdom.

We thought the New York Times had made a mistake when it began treating stand-up comedians as "artists." However many years later, we now have the daily spectacle of such Fox News Channel programs as The Five and Gutfeld!, with some of the least-informed people on the planet messaging one of our two major tribes.

There's much more to say about the role of comedy (and of comedy's various beards and "stylings") in the creation of our failing nation's current intellectual squalor. For right now, we'll leave it right here, with Lewis getting it right. 

THURSDAY: Towel-snapping fun with The Five!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2025

What they do with Tarlov: It's as we said in this morning's report. On our most-watched "cable news" TV show, this was the tease in question:

Up next! Who's got the better beach bod, Trump or Sleepy?

GG's "poop mug" was right there on the table before him. It functions as his security blanket. Scripted dimwit tease to the side, the guy seems to need some help.

As it turned out, the next segment—Segment 2—didn't actually turn on President Biden's beach bod. That said, along the way, Katie Pavlich said this about what the Democrats are foolishly doing at the present time:

PAVLITCH (10/15/25): Democrats are focused on the wrong guy. Trump is not running for re-election. He is done in 2028, and yet Democrats continue to go after him. 

Presidential hopefuls like Gavin Newsom just can't get over the fact that he just needs to come up with his own ideas, can't just copy Trump for everything he does—and they're just not authentic.

Trump isn't running for re-election? Steve Bannon just got through saying, once again, that Trump will run again in 2028, though that assumes that we'll still be having elections at that point in time.

Setting that matter to the side, President Trump is currently seizing control of the nation and the world. On The Five, Pavlich thinks the Dems are silly for paying attention to him!

The Five is a deeply stupidified version of what a news broadcast might have been like at one time. Basically, it's The Big Weekend Show plus a punching bag, as the silly boy later said:

WATTERS: This show's different, because we let Harold talk, you know?

FORD: Thank you.

WATTERS: It's not a pile-on. We don't just cut you off, like with Jessica. We listen.

PANEL: [GENERAL HILARITY]

Those are the corporation's children—the corporation's children at play. Also, that is no program for intelligent humans. That's an unmistakable message being beamed from within a dimwit culture.

As we've noted again and again, Jessica Tarlov's days in this braindead program's liberal chair give The Five its unique frisson. As soon as she starts to make a point, the group interruptions start, much as the silly boy Watters said.

Harold Ford is more accommodating in his days in the liberal chair. For that reason, he is allowed to speak.

That said, Gutfeld's interactions with Ford have started taking on an unpleasant racial air, turning on this imagined premise:

Why does Harold say "ax" instead of "ask?"

GiGi just keeps floating that rot. The little guy has an anger inside which won't seem to let him go.

For Hemingway, Paris was "a moveable feast." The Five is a braindead garbage can which gets opened each day at 5.

It's an assault on the dying American experiment.  We Blues just let this go.

SILO RED, SILO BLUE: McEnany in Silo Red!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2025

No country for big-brained humans: With the World Series drawing near, we think of the time Ralph Branca was forced to walk off the mound.

Right there at Gotham's Polo Grounds, he had surrendered the Bobby Thompson home run blast which came to be known as "the shot heard round the world." If memory serves, he had to walk all the way to the door in the center field wall, roughly 500 feet from home plate, to enter the losing team's clubhouse and dressing room.

We were only 3 at that time. More than thirty years later, we saw the late comedian, Bob Woods, forced to walk off the stage at Baltimore's brand new, struggling City Light comedy club.

For a reason we won't describe, the Sunday night show had started with only two patrons present. Midway through the gentleman's headline set, the patrons decided to leave.

Brother Woods, a national act, did the sensible thing—he slowly walked off the stage. Yesterday, a long stream of American journalists followed suit, trudging out of the Pentagon and off into the light. 

This morning, the New York Times describes what happened under the headline shown below. As an aside, we're happy to see that Eric Wemple had gone from the Washington Post to the Times:

How the Pentagon Is Blocking Out News Organizations

Wednesday was a major moment for the coverage of the United States military. Scores of journalists with access to the Pentagon handed in their press passes rather than sign on to new rules laid out by Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense.

The news organizations that have refused to agree to the rules include large organizations such as The New York Times, NBC News and Fox News, as well as many smaller publications that focus entirely on the military. At least one news organization, the conservative cable network One America News, has agreed to the new terms.

The new rules codify sharp limitations on access and raise the prospect of punishment—including revocation of credentials—for simply requesting information on matters of public interest.

So has behaved the emperor Hegseth, one of the nation's new men.

Scores of reporters single-filed out. To read about this event without a paywall, the Associated Press tells the tale under this headline:

Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules

Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon on Wednesday rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work, pushing journalists who cover the American military further from the seat of its power. The nation’s leadership called the new rules “common sense” to help regulate a “very disruptive” press.

News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information—classified or otherwise—that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.

Many of the reporters waited to leave together at a 4 p.m. deadline set by the Defense Department to get out of the building. As the hour approached, boxes of documents lined a Pentagon corridor and reporters carried chairs, a copying machine, books and old photos to the parking lot from suddenly abandoned workspaces. Shortly after 4, about 40 to 50 journalists left together after handing in badges.

It was a bit like The Grapes of Wrath when the Okies are forced to head out. As you'll note, Fox News joined the Times and the Washington Post is loading up its belongings and silently moving on.

Thus ruled the Sultan Hegseth, late of the Fox & Friends Weekend TV show as seen on the "cable news" messaging unit known as the Fox News Channel.

Morning Joe began with this topic this morning. They arrived here way too late.

Back in 2015, Joe and Mika were still social friends of the new candidate, Candidate Trump. Over the previous four years, he had been pretending that President Obama had been born in Kenya, not in the United States. 

Joe and Mika kept cavorting with him on their show anyway. It was Rachel Maddow's drinking pal who had been his enabler on the Fox News Channel during those gong-show years.

(Today, the drinking pal is at Newsmax. Like so many other things, Rachel's tolerance for what her buddy did for those four years has never been explained, nor will anyone ever ask.)

We recall telling the analysts that Mika and the new candidate needed to go rent a room during that peculiar first year. If memory serves, Joe and Mika broke with the candidate in January 2016, when he began pretending that he didn't know who this "David Duke" actually was.

That break came way too late. This morning's New York Times crawls with headlines about the way the ship is being redirected. That includes a headline about the retribution the candidate promised during the 2024 campaign.

On Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays, the candidate had said that the pledge meant that his enemies would be punished. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and alternate Saturdays, he said the retribution would just be about all the winning. 

It was much like that with respect to deportations, with "mass deportation" promised one day, "the worst of the worst" the next. Different voters heard different things. Many heard no such statements at all.

At least a decade ago, we began recalling—and we began posting, right at this site—what Professor Brown had mysteriously said, during a Phi Beta Kappa address, all the way back in May 1960. This is the puzzling passage which had come to mind:

Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis

[...]

I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery...and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...

There comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries...by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.

The power which makes all things new is magic. What our time needs is mystery: what our time needs is magic. Who would not say that only a miracle can save us?

For the full text of Prodessor Brown's address, you can just click this.

We don't know what he was talking about in that unusual passage. We have no idea how we ever knew about that statement—how we knew about it well enough to remember it fifty years later.

For the record, Norman O. Brown was very hot in the 1960s. When he died in 2002, the New York times did a full-length obituary.

This morning, we highlight what may be the only passage of that speech which remains relevant. "Only a miracle can save us? That's what the classicist said at the time, even before President Kennedy squeaked into the Oval Office and unveiled The New Frontier.

This morning, the headlines at the New York Times suggest that the die has been cast. Different people will have different views about that apparent turn of the screw, but some of the dual headlines say this:

Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules
The new rules codify strict limitations on access to and raise the prospect of punishment for requesting information on matters of public interest.

Trump Considers Overhaul of Refugee System That Would Favor White People
The proposals would transform a program aimed at helping the most vulnerable people in the world into one that gives preference to mostly white people who say they are being persecuted.

Trump Administration Authorizes Covert C.I.A. Action in Venezuela
The development comes as the U.S. military is drawing up options for President Trump to consider, including possible strikes inside the country.

Trump Rattles Vaccine Experts Over Aluminum
The president’s call for removal of the metal from childhood inoculations set off alarms. About half of shots for polio, whooping cough and other diseases would be affected.

U.S. Attorney Was Forced Out After Clashes Over How to Handle Russia Inquiry
The departures of Todd Gilbert and his deputy in the Western District of Virginia show the pressure being brought on prosecutors to pursue the president’s perceived foes.

Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump From Firing Government Workers During Shutdown
Labor groups are set to square off against the Trump administration one day after the president renewed his threat to cut “Democrat programs.”

U.S. Says It Revoked Visas of Some People Who Criticized Charlie Kirk
The State Department’s X account listed six examples of people who it said had made comments about the assassination of Mr. Kirk, a right-wing activist, and said it was withdrawing their visas.

Racist and Homophobic Texts From Young Republican Officials Prompt Backlash
Some local G.O.P. officials who participated in the text exchanges are losing their jobs or being pressured to resign. But top Republicans have been dismissive.

Trump Administration Decimates Birth Control Office in Layoffs
The layoffs have raised fears that the administration could be effectively ending an initiative that provides contraception for millions of low-income women.

Different people will have different views about the actions described in those reports. Some people may challenge the accuracy of the reporting.

That said, we also note this "news analysis" piece, and this news report from the recent achievement of peace:

NEWS ANALYSIS
Oval Office Becomes a Diorama of Power Dynamics as Trump Goes After Rivals
Top officials, unwilling to fight for the historical independence of their institutions, watched on Wednesday as President Trump continued his pursuit of controlling law enforcement.

With Truce in Place, Hamas Pursues Bloody Crackdown on Rivals in Gaza
A video this week captured Hamas fighters in Gaza executing Palestinian rivals as the militant group tries to assert that it is still the dominant force in the territory after two years of war with Israel.

The president was naming the rivals he seems to want to see jailed. Also, another bloody crackdown in Gaza.

It seems there must have been plenty of topics to discuss and clarify on the nation's most-watched "cable news" program—but if you thought that, you should possibly think again. 

The first fat joke came at 5:02 p.m., triggered by Den Mother Dana. Greg Gutfeld took her "Goliath" reference and ran, after which he teased the program's second segment in the following manner:

Up next! Who's got the better beach bod, Trump or Sleepy?

That was the tease he delivered. You can see his "poop mug" sitting before him on the table as the chuckle-rich day rolled along. 

Let's just say that the major topics were AWOL from the day's show. Gaza was gone, long gone, as was the exodus from the Pentagon.

The program had five segments in all. Here were the final three, with plenty of time for towel-snapping and some good solid all around fun:

Segment 3: Cheryl Hines was interviewed poorly on The Five

Segment 4: Alec Baldwin had a fender bender (no charges, no one hurt)

Segment 5: Katie Porters interview meltdown

An enjoyable time was had by all. We'll let a few of the chyrons speaks for themselves:

CHERYL HINES BATTLES "THE VIEW"

ALEC BALDWIN: I HIT A BIG FAT TREE

KATIE PORTER HINTS OF MORE PSYCHO VIDEOS

That fifth segment quickly went south. In this report for Mediaite, Charlie Nash provides video and transcript about where these simpleton flyweights went:

Fox Co-Host Briskly Tries to Change the Subject After Jesse Watters Says Jennifer Aniston Used to Be ‘Much Better Looking’

Fox News’ The Five co-host Harold Ford Jr. awkwardly tried to move the show “on to the next segment,” Wednesday, after Jesse Watters remarked that Friends star Jennifer Aniston “was much better looking” before.

“People didn’t get attractive until the internet,” argued co-host Greg Gutfeld during a segment on former Democratic congresswoman Katie Porter. “Watch ‘Friends,’ they’re not even hot.”

And so on from there. Gutfeld often assigns himself the task of reporting that Taylor Swift is only a 5 or a 6.

That is no country for [intelligent] men. But almost surely, this was the most-watched "cable news" program of the day here in this broken nation.

The poop mug was there at 5. Was it there again at 10? Believe it or not, the Gutfeld! program opened with an assessment of a very difficult (scientific) topic—the topic of transgender identity and transgender science. These were the flyweights the Fox News Channel called upon for their review:

Gutfeld!: Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Tyrus: former professional "wrestler"
Kennedy: former MTV VJ
Greg Gutfeld: host
Molly Hemingway: Fox News contributor
Jeff Dye: comedian

Each of these medical specialists took a turn pretending to outline the science. Needless to say, the bloated blowhard spoke last. We know of no obvious reason to believe that these messenger children had any real idea what they were talking about.

Needless to say, the gang also did a segment about how (physically) unattractive Porter is. This seems to be pretty much what these messengers have.

That is no "cable news" channel for intelligent men or women. Nor is Gutfeld! a comedy show, s observers sometimes say they think.

As we've noted, Gutfeld! is a propaganda / messaging show which hides behind a corporate beard of so-called "comedy stylings." The channel groomed its host for this role for many years, starting way back when it gave him his own nightly show at 3 a.m.

This is the work of Silo Red. The major orgs within Silo Blue are committed to ignoring what happens there. With that in mind:

It's quite a decision to move from the Harvard Law School to a role inside this tribal madhouse. Kayleigh McEnany made that decision. As we noted yesterday, this is the way she prepared:

Kayleigh McEnany

Kayleigh Michelle McEnany (born April 18, 1988) is an American political commentator, media personality, and former political spokesperson who served as the 33rd White House press secretary during the first Trump administration from 2020 to 2021.

Early in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, she was a critic of Donald Trump but over time became one of his staunchest defenders.

[...]

McEnany was born and raised in Tampa, Florida...McEnany attended the Academy of the Holy Names, a private Catholic preparatory school in Tampa. After graduating, she majored in international politics at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., and she studied abroad at St Edmund Hall, Oxford...

McEnany attended the University of Miami School of Law for her first (1L) year before transferring to Harvard Law School. At the Miami School of Law, McEnany received the Bruce J. Winick Award for Excellence, a scholarship awarded to students in the top 1% of their class. She graduated from Harvard in 2016.

From Harvard Law to a pile of junk. But also, from standard issue anti-Trump to a role as one of his staunchest defenders.

The fellow with the poop mug blazed a similar trail. Based on a New York Times report, the CEO may have given him the word that it was time to get right.

Broadcasting from inside Silo Red, the Fox News Channel has been feeding this gruel to the nation's largest "cable news" audience by far. Broadcasting from inside Silo Blue, the people who went to the finest schools have agreed that they must never report or discuss what happens over there.

We leave you today with a basic question. Which silo contains the big-brained humans of whom Wikipedia comically speaks?

We think it's time for these silos to go. It may of course be too late.

Tomorrow: McEnany and Gutfeld flip; an anthropologist explains

WEDNESDAY: What happens when empires fall apart?

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2025

The center, failing to hold: Can the Democratic Party survive—regain some measure of control? 

Everything is possible, of course, but our doubts continue to grow. We'll start with CNN's eccentric figure filbert, Harry Enten, floating a gloomy assessment:

CNN Data Chief Reveals Dems’ Chances of Taking the House in 2026 ‘Have Gone Plummeting Down’

CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten on Wednesday explained how the Democratic Party’s chances of retaking the House of Representatives have sharply declined in recent months.

During a Wednesday morning segment, Enten took a closer look at the highly-anticipated midterm elections in 2026...

As Enten noted, the prediction market Kalshi had the Democrats’ chances of retaking the House at a staggering 83% in April 2025. Since then, however, the GOP has taken a big out of that lead.

According to Enten's source, Democratic chances of retaking the House have slid to 63%, which of course is still more than half. We have no idea if there's any value to such assessments. But when we go looking for the juice, we don't have much luck seeing it.

How do large, sprawling empires come undone? In this case, along came the democratization of media, and there went the republic. People can't tell the wheat from the chaff, just as it ever was.

We'll start with this limited, dumb example:

Baier Claps Back at MAGA Fans Over [Fox News Channel's Rejection] of Trump Pentagon Policy

Fox News anchor Bret Baier clapped back at MAGA fans upset about the network joining a protest of the Trump Pentagon’s proposed press policies, even politely responding to a viewer who called him a “moron.”

The network is among those protesting the new policy that was announced by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and which sparked immediate outrage from the Pentagon Press Association as an “unprecedented message of intimidation.”

The Fox News Chanel has joined the various enemies of the people in rejecting Pete Hegseth's proposed restriction on coverage of the Defense Department. That leaves Bret Baier dealing with incoming from clueless MAGA supporters out in Red America—from people who don't understand that they're being conned again, through certain factual representations, by the disordered Hegseth.

On balance, we the people were never up to the challenge, on our own, of knowing where the fraudsters were. To cite one example, the forerunner to the FDA was created to guard us against our tendency to fall for the various music men., with their various "elixir remedies" and their famous "diphtheria antitoxin derived from tetanus-contaminated serum," which was "originally collected from a horse named Jim who had contracted tetanus."

Our gullibility didn't mean that we were bad people. It meant that we were people people. 

Today, though, as an empire comes undone, Robert Kennedy Jr. has come along with his endless versions of that serum originally collected from Jim. 

All these years later, with many voices ringing in many ears through the wonders of various media, many of us still can't see that something is totally wrong with the guy. We can't see that something is wrong with him, and the press corps doesn't like to discuss the personal histories of people named Kennedy, even when the life stories in question are as disordered as his. 

Meanwhile, a segment has emerged in Red America which is willing to say and do anything. This is a new example:

Mike Johnson Doesn’t Hold Back as He Slams No Kings Rally: ‘We Call It the Hate America Rally’

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) mockingly dubbed the upcoming “No Kings” protests against President Donald Trump a “Hate America Rally,” with Johnson saying the crowd will be littered with a bunch of communists and terrorist supporters who loathe their own country.

The speaker shared his prediction while talking to reporters about the government shutdown on Wednesday morning.

“I encourage you to watch—we call it the ‘Hate America Rally’—that’ll happen Saturday,” Johnson said. “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet ya see pro-Hamas supporters, I bet you you see Antifa-types, I bet ya see the Marxists in full display. The people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.”

We'd call that a silent secession, delivered in a measured tone of voice. The sitting president tends to be louder. When he called the Democratic Party "the party of Satan," the finer people at the New York Times knew that mustn't report that remarkable fact, not even on page one.

For whatever reason or reasons, a certain portion of Red America has decided we're no longer a single people. Borrowing from a sensational Hollywood script, they're mad as Hell about various matters and they aren't going to take it any more. 

Nor are they willing to say that they've stepped over the side of the ship.

Over here in Blue America, our journalistic, academic and political elites thoroughly lack the juice. In all honesty, Kamala Harris was never presidential timber—she proved that in 2019; also, almost no one ever is—but she won't stop stampeding around and begging for ridicule by saying things like this:

Kamala Harris Bizarrely Boasts She May Have Been ‘Most Qualified’ Presidential Candidate ‘Ever’

Former Vice President Kamala Harris submitted that [some] people have said she is the “most qualified” presidential candidate in the history of the United States during a recent interview with reporter and Pivot podcast co-host Kara Swisher on Oct. 9.

That's a foolish thing to say, but she says such things on the regular. That doesn't make her a bad person. It means she isn't presidential timber, like almost everyone else, including almost every known United States senator.

Almost no one ever is! Joe Biden wasn't presidential timber—he proved that in 1987, then again in 2007—but a succession of accidents put him in the White House in 2021, and after some unexplained, rather strange policy decisions and an insistence on running again, we now have the reigning tsar of the Middle East back in the Oval again and seizing control of the nation's reins of power.

He has filled his playroom with broken toys, with histories of extremely strange childhoods. His niece says he's likely a sociopath. Our press corps has no established language with which to discuss such facts, and it has no desire to do so. 

Over here in Blue America, our elected officials don't know how to "talk pork to the people," to quote Al Gore's father back in 1970. You saw the recent meltdown by Katie Porter—or given the way information flow currently works, it's possible that you didn't. 

We're hoping that Candidate Spanberger can holds on in Virginia in the wake of what the AG candidate once said and did. Is New Jersey still looking good? We feel the encroachment of doubts.

Let's switch allusions at this point, moving from The Second Coming (Yeats) to Sunday Morning (Stevens). 

Sunday Morning

[....]

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe

[...]

The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

We threw in the Palestine line simply to provide currency. But as you watch people like Porter crashing and burning, we Blues are flailing in the wake of "that old catastrophe" known as the subjugation of an entire people on the basis of that old monster, "race."

(Also, and good God: extensive backlash RE sexual / gender politics, with us Blues pretending that we can't understand what some of the objections are.)

The old catastrophe can still control the ebb and flow of American feeling. Now that the media have been democratized—now that every D-list comedian is selling some serum derived from Jim on some podcast somewhere—we find that we the voters, Red and Blue, can't tell wheat from chaff.

That's true among us Blue voters too. Over on the Fox News Channel, new clown cars roll up to the set every hour. This is the way things call apart when large empires can no longer hold.

Over there, inside Silo Red, there are plenty of valid complaints about what has come from our own Silo Blue. In Silo Red, the tools simply don't know how to regulate their anger and their sense of entitlement / privilege 

Over here, in Silo Blue, we don't know how to see the various things we've done over the long sweep of the past sixty years. We aren't the people we've claimed to be. Despite our occasional college degrees, it turns out that we're people people too!

When he called the Dems "the party of Satan," the New York Times ran and hid. So too when Tucker said he'd been attacked by demons right there in his bed with his dogs. When Noem said, two separate times, that ICE caught one "illegal" who was so bad—who was such a cannibal—that he tried to eat his own arm so he could escape his restraints.

She told the story two separate times, on TV! Also, the president's magic bed! But as our organs avert their gaze, we Blues are still living with the 1988 Jon Lovitz line—I can't believe we're losing to this guy!

For the record, Enten still has it at 63%. One final question regarding the slightly eccentric Enten:

Goodness gracious! Where did CNN get that guy?

Full disclosure: Harry Enten seems like s good, decent person. Full and complete info here.

SILO RED, SILO BLUE: From Harvard Law School to Silo Red!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2025

What makes Kayleigh run? In translation, Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Lapdog, ends in the following way:

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

As written, and in translation, that's how the story ends.

Nabokov described Lady with Lapdog as "one of the greatest stories ever written." He gave six reasons why it was great, the sixth of which was this: "the story does not really end."

That was a story about a love which was forbidden under the prevailing rules of a given age. It was also a story about a man who finally discovers his soul, to his surprise, perhaps a bit later in life.

"The most difficult part was only beginning?" That's the way matters stand in Gaza, or at least so many specialists say. We'll link you to excerpts from a pair of opinion columns at the New York Times:

Bret Stephens
Why Israel Won the War
Israelis rallied and won—at least inasmuch as a lasting victory is ever possible in the Middle East...The current cease-fire brings a set of difficult questions about what comes next—for Israelis and Palestinians and everyone else invested in their future. 

Thomas Friedman
Mr. Trump, on the Middle East, Please Move Fast and Break Things
I realize it is early, but right now I don’t even see the baby steps to the next phase. I see no U.N. resolution on the table creating the Arab/international peacekeeping force to oversee Hamas’s disarmament and security in Gaza until a proper Palestinian security force can be created. I see no money on the table for the billions that will be needed for reconstruction, and I have no idea who is supposed to appoint and manage the cabinet of Palestinian technocrats who are supposed to run Gaza instead of Hamas, which is already using its Interior Ministry and police forces to reassert control in Gaza.

Stephens and Friedman are different people, coming at this from different perspectives. But they're saying a somewhat similar thing about what may lie ahead.

Similarly, here's a news analysis piece by the Times' Halbfinger and Rasgon. Also, a Washington Post opinion piece by Max Boot:

David Halbfinger, Adam Rasgon
Now Comes the Hard Part for the Gaza Cease-Fire Plan
Getting Israel’s hostages released from Gaza and stopping the war may have taken two years and the direct efforts of the American president and the leaders of several Arab and Muslim nations. But that was almost certainly the easy part.

Getting Hamas to give up its weapons, and demilitarizing the Gaza Strip—key preconditions for Israel to pull out of Gaza fully, as both President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Monday—could prove a lot harder.

Max Boot
Why the Gaza ceasefire won’t lead to lasting peace
The war’s end presents an opportunity...to resurrect the long-dormant two-state solution. But while the Trump peace plan slightly opens the door to Palestinian statehood—it speaks of creating conditions “for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood”—both Israel and Hamas appear intent on slamming that door shut.

The first precondition for making progress toward lasting peace would be for Hamas to disarm—point 13 of Trump’s 20-point peace plan—leading to the “demilitarization of Gaza.” Far from giving up its weapons, however, Hamas has reemerged to assert control over the parts of the Gaza Strip that are no longer under Israeli occupation.

Friend, do those observers all seem to hail from some perch inside the deep state? We give you the current perspective from the Wall Street Journal:

Ma'Ayeh et al.
After Israeli Withdrawal, Hamas Launches Violent Crackdown on Rivals in Gaza
As Israeli troops pulled back last week to facilitate a deal that freed the living hostages still held in Gaza, Hamas surged security forces in behind them—a public assertion of authority intended to make clear the group remains the enclave’s governing power.

The most difficult part is just beginning—unless you're taking you cues from the clown show staged last night in the Fox News Channel. On the primetime show in question, the status of events in Isreal and Gaza were pseudo-assessed by this grab bag of usual suspects:

Gutfeld!: Tuesday, October 14, 2025
Tyrus: former professional "wrestler"
Kat Timpf: comedian
Greg Gutfeld: host
Erin Maguire: Republican strategist
Joe DeVito: comedian

A different discussion emerged from this group, in which everyone agreed with the host of the show.

How dumb can these corporate messengers get? The bloated blowhard closed the short pseudo-discussion. This is why such analyses are being written, the fatuous fellow now said:

TYRUS (10/14/25): I think it's jealousy.

GUTFELD: Yeah.

TYRUS: ...We've heard amazing depictions of how this all went down. I think my favorite one was [adopts mocking voice], "Oh, now they think it's peace because Gaza's nothing but rubble?"

 Whose fault was that? Hamas!

This was a highly simplistic pseudo-discussion, ordered up by the CEO who's known as "Sends in The Clowns."

Meanwhile, can termagants have rabbit ears? As best we can tell, the host hasn't compared the women of The View to horses or cattle or even to "livestock" this week. Last night, though, his opening brief patter of jokes included this observation:

GUTFELD: On today's show, Joy Behar said, quote, "Republicans are afraid of us."

Come on! It's not like being a stupid bitch is contagious!

AUDIENCE: [Laughter]

GUTFELD: It was actually worse—the original draft. I'm not kidding.

Yes, that's what he said. That's what he said in Silo Red, as Silo Blue loudly snored.

(The Fox News feminist sat there and took it. On Monday evening's show, she said that Candidate Spanberger (D-Va.) looks like the kind of woman who pees standing up, if you get what that means.)

This is the type of imitation of life the CEO orders. Millions of people who watch this program believe they're watching real discussions of actual news events.

As we noted at the end of last week, the squalor of this squalid TV show is slowly spreading down into The Five. This brings us back to Kayleigh McEnany who giggled and played, at the end of last week, as she pretended that she was looking at videotape of a famous person's colonoscopy.

"It looks like the Holland Tunnel in there," she said, speaking on the nation's most-watched "cable news" program.

Full disclosure:

We've been using language during this report which isn't traditional journalistic language. Over here in Blue America, our journalists lack an established language for talking about sheer stupidity performed by unqualified players.

We ourselves aren't especially qualified to discuss the state of play in Gaza. That's why we would link you to people who are.

On the imitation of life called the Fox News Channel, such distinctions are being broken down, discarded. At some point, McEnany decided that she would enlist for a role in the production of this powerful corporate product.

As we began to sketch last Friday, McEnany can't be portrayed as dumb. Her academic record seems to rule that out. Here's what the good book tells us:

Kayleigh McEnany

Kayleigh Michelle McEnany (born April 18, 1988) is an American political commentator, media personality, and former political spokesperson who served as the 33rd White House press secretary during the first Trump administration from 2020 to 2021.

Early in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, she was a critic of Donald Trump but over time became one of his staunchest defenders.

[...]

McEnany was born and raised in Tampa, Florida...McEnany attended the Academy of the Holy Names, a private Catholic preparatory school in Tampa. After graduating, she majored in international politics at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., and she studied abroad at St Edmund Hall, Oxford...

McEnany attended the University of Miami School of Law for her first (1L) year before transferring to Harvard Law School. At the Miami School of Law, McEnany received the Bruce J. Winick Award for Excellence, a scholarship awarded to students in the top 1% of their class. She graduated from Harvard in 2016.

Following her stint at Oxford, she rocked the world as a first law student, then got shipped to the Harvard Law School. Along the way, she flipped on Trump. Since then, she has signed on for a significant role inside Silo Red at the Fox News Channel.

She signed on to play a role in that channel's endless array of silly pseudo-discussions. Last week, that had her saying, on The Five, that the non-existent videotape of somebody's colon looked like the Holland Tunnel.

It's time to tear these silos down, but how do people get into these silos? Why would this high-IQ player behave in these ways?

For the record, Gutfeld himself got flipped RE Trump. In his case, it seems that he may have flipped on the advice of the CEO. But what makes these transitions occur? When we return tomorrow, let's take a quick look at the record.

Today, the hard part is just beginning for people who want to see real peace in the theater at hand. Unless you watch the Fox News Channel, in which case the president has accomplished his latest peace deal and only the jealous say different.

Over here inside Silo Blue, this is all completely OK. We Blues lack an established language for discussing corporate product of this type—for discussing this type of dimwitted assault on the very possibility of the American project.

Tomorrow: What made the two stars flip?