WEDNESDAY: Michael Lerner got there first!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2026

It's time for Kelly to go: What might a "politics of meaning" look like? What does the term even mean?   

Yesterday, we linked you to the speech in which first lady Hillary Clinton first employed that term. That said, the term had originated with someone else—with someone whose view of the world the first lady admired.   

Shortly after the first lady's address, Daniel Schorr discussed the matter in the Christian Science Monitor:   

Behind the 'Politics of Meaning'  

On April 6, in Austin, Texas, Mrs. Clinton delivered what some are already calling "THE speech." It was a passionate appeal for Americans to develop a sense of community. She spoke of "cities that are filled with hopeless girls with babies and angry boys with guns." She spoke of a "crisis of meaning" and urged the remolding of society by "defining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into the new millenium." What is needed, she said, is a new kind of politics, "the politics of meaning."

The "politics of meaning" is a concept of Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, a liberal Jewish monthly. Did Mrs. Clinton get the phrase from him? Indeed she did. At a subsequent White House reception she said to him, "Am I your mouthpiece or what?" And, "It's amazing how we seem to be on the same wavelength." In a meeting in her office, she told Mr. Lerner that she and her husband had been reading him since 1988.   

And so on from there. In 1996, Lerner published a book on this theme: The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism. 

More on Lerner tomorrow. As for Hillary Clinton, some people felt she'd (unwisely) gotten out beyond the traditional role of an (unelected) first lady by offering such a sweeping reassessment of the American scene in just her third month in the East Wing. 

We can't necessarily say they were wrong, at least as a political matter. Sensibly or otherwise, the first lady absorbed some major body blows in the wake of her speech.

Last week, that famous old term, "the politics of meaning," began to dance in our heads. Can any serious person really believe that our nation can continue in the current way, with poisonous podcasts from the left and the right—with every flyweight a king?   

The rise of those various new technologies has given every furious flyweight the chance to spread misinformation and fury and venom all around the town square. For an example of what we mean, check the part of this opinion piece at Mediaite which describes Megyn Kelly is mainlining venom about the Obamas' daughters—two young women whose views and feelings the routinely poisonous Kelly seems to know nothing about.

Yes, we agree—it gets worse! That said, no nation can survive as a Babel, especially if the competing voices come from people behaving like this. 

Wo what's an intelligent nation to do? An intelligent nation will seek a way to get back out of all this mess. They'll start looking for a way "back out of all this now too much for us."

Is it time for Megyn Kelly to go? A nation can't run on angry inanity. A nation can't run on paired venom.

FAULTY: Who's the most influential of all?

WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2026

Joe Rogan, one columnist says: Our nation is in a world of hurt. It's amazing to see how many people seem to be lingering in various forms of denial.

As we noted yesterday, we thought David Brooks—a good, decent person—was lingering there, last Friday night, on the PBS NewsHour. Before we return to his puzzling conduct, Bret Stephens is attempting to help us see part of the mess we're all in.

Rather, Stephens outlines two parts of the existential mess we're all in. 

Midway through his new column for the New York Times, Stephens describes the pair of titans who performed a three-hour podcast last week. No names are included in the passage posted below, though one titan will be easy to name. 

For the record, Stephens is a man of the center right. This is the truth as he sees it:

Call the Veep, Agent Mulder!

[...]

The truth—that the most influential media figure in America today, with tens of millions of followers on social media, is a jocular bro with an Everyman affect who seems never to have encountered an idiotic or despicable conspiracy theory he isn’t willing to promote (moon-landing denial) or platform (Hitler revisionism). We are a nation that has moved at speed from the realm of fact colored by opinions to a kingdom of delusion infested with fear.

The truth—that the current vice president is by far the worst person ever to hold the office (move over, Aaron Burr, John C. Calhoun and Spiro T. Agnew). ...The prospect of this callow and sinister opportunist taking the place of the erratic buffoon now governing us may be the single scariest thought in world politics today.    

It's easy to see who he's talking about in that second paragraph. In Stephens' opinion, JD Vance is a "callow and sinister opportunist" who is "by far the worst person ever to hold the office" of vice president.

Opinions on that will differ. Opinion will also differ on Stephens' description of President Trump as "the erratic buffoon now governing us."  

Is President Trump an "erratic buffoon?" At present, opinions differ. In fact, they differ quite widely—but Vance is easy to spot in the passage we've posted. 

More interesting, in our view, is the first paragraph we've posted. In that paragraph, Stephens describes "the most influential media figure in America today."   

According to Stephens, who is that person? We'll give you his name:  

Joe Rogan! 

Is it possible that Stephens is right? Is it possible that Rogan—the former host of The Man Show—really is "the most influential media figure" in our flailing nation today?   

At the time of the Vietnam War, it was widely believed that Walter Cronkite—a deeply experienced war correspondent—was the most influential such person. 

(Before his work in World War II, he had served as Moscow bureau chief for CBS News.)

The deeply experienced Walter Cronkite was most influential then. Is it possible that Rogan—"a jocular bro with an Everyman affect"—holds that position today, as our flailing nation keeps starting and stopping its ongoing war with Iran?  

Is it possible? Yes, it probably is. Yes, we suppose it's possible, though it would surely be hard to say.

That said, is Stephens' unflattering description of Rogan accurate? Because we've never listened to Rogan's podcasts, we can't quite tell you that. 

We've never listened to Rogan! But on a daily basis, for years, we've watched the aggressive buffoonism performed on such corporate propaganda shows as The Five and Fox & Friends Weekend, mixed with the ugly aggression of the prehuman Gutfeld! program. 

No serious nation can expect to survive the culture created by such undisguised garbage can "cable news" shows—or the garbage which flows, on an hourly basis, from our failing nation's assortment of deranged podcasters of both the left and the right.  

What happened on last week's podcast, triggering this column by Stephens? Right at the start of his column, Stephens attempts to explain:   

Call the Veep, Agent Mulder!

Somewhere around the two-hour mark in JD Vance’s nearly three-hour podcast interview last week with Joe Rogan, the pair got into a serious conversation about supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena. By serious, I mean it in the sense that Rogan seemed to take the subject seriously while Vance cynically, or cretinously, or cravenly, or credulously or conspiratorially—or perhaps it’s all of the above—played along with him. 

[...]  

By this point, the two men had already propounded one conspiracy theory—that the Los Angeles mayoral election had been rigged (a claim previously debunked by a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor); followed by Vance’s accusation that Joe Biden’s staff got him to eat ice cream “in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable” (a remarkable way of turning naked mendacity into adolescent prurience into another conspiracy theory); followed by an exchange about eating corn dogs in public (because, you know); followed by an argument about whether the Ten Commandments should be mandated in Texas public schools, in which neither man appeared to be aware that the commandments are not originally Christian.  

We've omitted three examples of Vance's pronouncements concerning demons and the like. Regarding Vance's claim about the way Joe Biden ate ice cream, we'll tell you something Stephens probably doesn't know:   

Back in the day, the brain-numbing stupidity about Joe Biden's eating of ice cream sprang full-blown from the empty head of Jesse Watters on a regular basis (along with so much more). On The Five, the other children would titter and chuckle, pretending that this inane behavior made sense.

(After that, it would often be time to over-talk Tarlov again.)

Watters co-hosts The Five each day, then hosts his own program, Jesse Watters Primetime. They're the two most-watched programs in the American "cable news" firmament—and Watters, the most-watched person in cable news, is a gender buffoon and undisguised tribal clown well past all the way down.  

Out of madness of this sort, very bad politics grows. But on Friday evening's PBS NewsHour, David Brooks seemed blissfully unaware of the mess we're all in:

What, us worry? he said.

David Brooks is a good, decent person. Also, he's very bright. Tomorrow, we'll return to an ongoing mystery:  

Why is the world—why on earth—did David Brooks say what he said?   

Tomorrow: Jonathan Capehart's concern

TUESDAY: Hillary Clinton gave a speech!

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2026

On balance, it didn't go well: What the heck is a "politics of meaning?" If we agree that our struggling nation needs a politics of that type, what kind of politics would we be talking about?

As anyone with eyes can see, our flailing nation badly needs a new type of politics. But what's a "politics of meaning?" 

Let's return to the first lady's speech, the one she gave in 1993.   

The first lady was Hillary Clinton. She was in her first year at that post. Perhaps unwisely, she delivered this address at the University of Texas n April 6 of that year. 

The governor of Texas was in the room, and that governor, the late Ann Richards, was actually a Democrat—and she was a woman to boot! Those were different times, but you could possibly squint and see the present day on the horizon. 

The first lady gave a speech in which she said that she could discern a "crisis in meaning" in our American lives. It probably wasn't wise to say that—especially for Hillary Clinton, who had already become a favorite punching bag of certain elements on the right and within the American press.    

She was moving out beyond the role our (unelected) first ladies had traditionally taken, and that may not have been wise. That said, how acute was this crisis—the shortfall of meaning in our lives? 

The crisis was fairly acute! Fairly early in her speech, the first lady even quoted the late Lee Atwater, a lifelong, extremely aggressive Republican strategist who had died in 1991 at just 40 years of age.

On his deathbed, he had famously referred, in a bit of a conversion, to "this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society—this tumor of the soul.” 

That statement "to me will be Lee Atwater’s real lasting legacy," the first lady said, occasioning applause. By the end of the speech, she was quoting Albert Schweizer seeming to say that, while sleeping sickness is a real disease, there is also "a sleeping sickness of the soul." 

Along the way, she had described her own vision in the manner seen here:

CLINTON (4/6/93): And what we each must do is break through the old thinking that has for too long captured us politically and institutionally, so that we can begin to devise new ways of thinking about not only what it means to have economies that don’t discard people like they were excess baggage that we no longer need, but to define our institutional and personal responsibilities in ways that answer this lack of meaning.

We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

We need a new "politics of meaning," she said. We need to fill ourselves up again, thereby defeating this crisis of meaning.

The first lady was surely well intentioned. On the other hand, as a general matter, it probably isn't politically wise to talk like that—to tell several hundred million people about the malaise in which they're trapped, whether that word is employed or not.  

On balance, fairly or otherwise, that attempt to define a "politics of meaning" didn't go especially well, but by last week, we suddenly found ourselves longing for a second bite of the apple, for a new and improved such politics.   

In truth, our flailing nation badly needs a critter like that—a critter you might call a politics of meaning. We badly need a critter like that, but what would some such critter look like? What would a less destructive political culture possibly entail?

"Here comes the sun," George Harrison wrote. "It seems like years since it's been here."

Tomorrow: The late Michael Lerner

FAULTY: Challenged by Bennett, Brooks held firm!

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2026

The courts will protect us, he said: Why in the world did David Brooks say what he said last Friday?  

Brooks appeared with Jonathan Capehart for their usual Friday night spot on the PBS NewsHour. The night before, the sitting president had made a loudly ballyhooed national address.    

Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can read the transcript and watch the videotape of the president's self-ballyhooed speech. Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can do so by clicking here.

The president started with some familiar claims, most of which were inaccurate or misleading. (Some were hard to decipher.) After that, the sitting president stated his major thesis:   

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/16/26): For many years, I've called for bold, swift, and decisive action to protect the integrity of America's elections. Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure, one where cheating and interference are not just difficult but virtually impossible. 

Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Tonight, I'm announcing the immediate declassification, and release of critical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.  

The situation is catastrophic, he said—but how catastrophic is it? Quite catastrophic, he claimed: 

"There's no third-world country that has elections like we have," the president now said. 

By that, he meant there's no country whose election system is as bad as the American system. He described our system in this somewhat garbled presentation:  

PRESIDENT TRUMP (continuing directly): This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes, and really exposes like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference. [sic]

Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you, the American people—our beautiful, our great American people—but that all changes right now.   

As the president read from a teleprompter, he may have skipped part of his text in the first chunk of that presentation. But even where his words didn't parse, his overall claim was clear: 

According to the sitting president, we Americans are beautiful people and we're also great. But according to the sitting president, our election system leaves us exposed to the world:

Our systems are open to hacking by foreign entities—to exploitation and "interference." Or so the president said.

As he continued, the president attempted to defend, and to further explain, that startling representation. 

The sitting president had made a startling accusation. But one night later, as he started to speak with Geoff Bennett of PBS, David Brooks made a remarkable statement of his own.

As we noted yesterday, he started off like this:

BENNETT (7/17/26): So David, what did you hear in that speech last night? What do you think President Trump is trying to accomplish here?   

BROOKS: Oh, subtle. I couldn't figure it out.

(Chuckling)

He was— He's got to get more original in his confabulation. I mean, he's just stuck on this 2020 thing. There's never been any evidence. There's no evidence.    

There's never been any evidence, he said. The president has been relentlessly pushing a confabulation over the past six years.

At one time, a statement like that, by a major journalist, would have qualified as a startling event. But in this age of endlessly weird misstatements by President Trump, Brooks' statement passed without notice—and then, he added this:   

BROOKS (continuing directly): I think the good news is, he doesn't have any policies to actually ruin our election system, as we heard from the secretaries of state. So we're going to have fair elections in this country.   

We're going to have fair elections, he said. As we noted yesterday, we thought that statement—that assertion by Brooks—was just remarkably odd.   

Why did he make that confident statement? We have no idea, in part because no one directly asked.    

On the other hand, Bennett did suggest, a bit later on, that the situation wasn't as simple as Brooks had said. When Bennett offered that suggestion, this exchange occurred:   

BENNETT: David, we spoke on this program last night with Ty Cobb, who was the special counsel during the first Trump administration, and he offered an extraordinary warning. He said that he believes that President Trump is laying the predicate for an emergency declaration around the elections.

Do you see the guardrails holding if President Trump tries to use the apparatus of the federal government to intervene more directly in how elections are administered?

BROOKS: I think so. A lot of people have thought that this [speech] is a predicate for some future action.

I think, if you look at the things he's tried to do, we're helped by the fact that these [elections] are mostly state-run things, so he does not have control. And what isn't state-run is usually congressionally run. 

And so he has tried. The thing he's done successfully is the gerrymandering in Texas. He has rigged elections and Democrats have helped in California. So that part he was successful at in degrading our elections. 

But pretty much everything else he's done, through executive order and other things, courts have overruled him. And so I do not believe he will have the power to actually effect our elections.  

Good grief! What a remarkable statement:

There's really nothing to worry about. The courts will overrule him!

Before the week is done, we'll revisit one particular comment by Yevtushenko. ("Who we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.") 

We'll go there by the end of the week. Tomorrow morning, we'll continue pursuing this immediate question:   

Brooks said we have nothing to worry about. Why in the world, why on earth, would he make that remarkable statement?  

Tomorrow: Jonathan Capehart's concern

MONDAY: The nation's first lady delivered a speech!

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2026

George Harrison wrote a song: It occurred to us some time ago:

If a person spent his entire life as a songwriter, and he only came up with "Here Comes the Sun," that would have been a case of fifty years just extremely well spent.

("And if a person lived in obscurity / Making his friends in that obscurity / Then obscurity is not uninteresting?")  

Stating the obvious, the late George Harrison (1943-2001) didn't live in obscurity. Also, he wrote many more songs than just "Here Comes the Sun."

That said, what out there, well-past-perfect simplicity! Our favorite rendition is here. 

(We'll go with "Colours" as our purest substitute off the bench. It's hard to do something this simple.)  

That said, do songs like those point the way toward a "politics of meaning?" Not toward that specific "politics of meaning," the "politics of meaning" Hillary Clinton described, perhaps unwisely, very early in her very first year as first lady.   

Under the mandated rules of the day, Clinton was savaged for what she said in that speech, delivered at the University of Texas in April 1993. And we don't even mean that we need that general type of a politics of meaning. We're looking for a new politics which both major tribes could endorse.  

"It seems like years since it's been clear?" In our view, Harrison wrote one of the world's most perfect songs.

In this country, we're badly in need of some modernized sort of "awakening." Barring the latest bizarre event, we'll advance our search tomorrow.

FAULTY: The president continued his "nonstop talk!"

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2026

The next night, Brooks reacted: Last Thursday night, the president delivered his major address about our scary elections.   

The next morning, Manohla Dargis described the speech in the New York Times. She even made it a CRITIC'S PICK. Here's part of what she said:

The speech consisted of 12,109 lines of nonlinear, nonstop talk and action featuring gods, mortals, monsters, weird doings, hospitality rituals and oceans of blood, tears and wine.   

No, wait! Actually, that was part of Dargis' review of the new feature film, "The Odyssey." With apologies for the error, here's the actual passage in question:

‘The Odyssey’ Review: Passion in Every Frame   

Throughout his career, Christopher Nolan has taken on big stories—though especially those of men, their struggles and their wars...  

[...]

It seems inevitable that Nolan would eventually take on “The Odyssey,” one of the foundations of Western literature. And why not? The story is a trippy, far-out blast, and has the kind of sinuous, complex layering that has become one of his signatures. Credited to Homer, the original poem consists of 12,109 lines of nonlinear, nonstop talk and action featuring gods, mortals, monsters, weird doings, hospitality rituals and oceans of blood, tears and wine. Whatever the adaptation, the tale is so ingrained in our cultural DNA that even those who haven’t read the original...will be familiar with it. 

That's what Dargis actually said. But as with Homer's endless tale, so too with the sitting president's! 

By now, everyone is familiar with the "nonlinear, nonstop talk" driving its ever-shifting stream of allegations. Everyone is familiar with its "monsters, weird doings and oceans of blood," even though the president's tale has only been around for six years!   

What actually happened, or didn't happen, in the 2020 presidential campaign? Tomorrow, we'll try to fashion a list of the various claims the president made in his 26-minute address.

That said: 

One night later, on Friday night, David Brooks offered his assessment of the address on the PBS NewsHour. As always, he was paired with Jonathan Capehart on the program which occupies the highest end of Blue American journalism.   

David Brooks is a good, decent person. But we thought you should see what he said.   

Full disclosure! In the immediate aftermath of the address, politicians and journalists in Blue America fact-checked the rambling effort within an inch of its life. 

Over in Red America, the Fox News Channel essentially disappeared the address. Fox chose not to discuss it at all, pretended it hadn't occurred.   

One night later, out came Capehart and Brooks for their weekly session with Geoff Bennett. We thought the assessment offered by Brooks was remarkably strange:    

BENNETT (7/17/26): President Trump once again putting false claims about the 2020 election at the center of the national political debate is where we start as we turn tonight to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. 

That's The Atlantic's David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart of MS NOW. Good evening, gentlemen.

CAPEHART: Hey, Geoff.

BENNETT: So, David, what did you hear in that speech last night? What do you think President Trump is trying to accomplish here?   

BROOKS: Oh, subtle. I couldn't figure it out.

(Chuckling)

He was— He's got to get more original in his confabulation. I mean, he's just stuck on this 2020 thing. There's never been any evidence. There's no evidence. 

I think the good news is, he doesn't have any policies to actually ruin our election system, as we heard from the secretaries of state. So we're going to have fair elections in this country.

We're going to have fair elections, he said. We thought that remark by Brooks was amazingly strange.  

As you can see, Bennett began the session by saying that the president's speech had been driven by "false claims." 

As far as we know, that statement is fundamentally accurate—but it represents a new way of doing journalism, an approach which sprang full-blown from the head of Zeus in reaction to the endless counterfactual wanderings of the sitting president.   

Bennett referred to "false claims;" Brooks went with "confabulation." Tomorrow, we'll try to list the various presidential claims they were talking about—but what in the world, what on earth, led Brooks to say something like this:

The good news is, he doesn't have any policies to actually ruin our election system...So we're going to have fair elections. 

Why in the world—why on earth—would Brooks say something like that? Tomorrow, we'll show you why we ask.

In the Odyssey, sacred Homer fashioned a tale full of "monsters, weird doings, and oceans of blood." The sitting president has done something similar in the course of six long years of nonlinear, nonstop talking.

Last Thursday night, we saw two of the brightest bulbs in the Congress express their fear about what President Trump might decide to do this fall to undermine our elections. One night later, up jumped Brooks with a very strange statement. 

There's nothing to worry about, he said. Why is the world did he do that?

Tomorrow: Confabulations and fears