THURSDAY: Greg Gutfeld won't discuss this tonight!

THURSDAY, JULY 31, 2025

Blue journalists won't discuss him: The Washington Post had published a report about conditions at the gulag-adjacent confinement center in El Salvador—the mega-prison to which United States sent 270 men.

According to the Post, many of the deportees "had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules." Below, headline included, we show you some of the basics from the start of the lengthy report:

‘Welcome to hell’: Inside the mega prison where the U.S. deported migrants

One detainee was beaten unconscious. Others emerged from the dark isolation room covered in bruises, struggling to walk or vomiting blood. Another returned to his cell in tears, telling fellow detainees he’d just been sexually assaulted.

“Let’s hit him like a piñata,” guards shouted amid the beatings, detainees recalled, the blows echoing against the metal walls.

They called it “La Isla”—The Island—the cell where Venezuelans deported from the United States by the Trump administration said they suffered some of the worst abuse of their 125 days in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

The matching firsthand accounts across multiple interviews offer the most complete view yet of conditions inside the mega prison, where inmates are denied access to lawyers and almost all contact with the outside world—and where about 14,000 Salvadorans remain incarcerated. Few detainees have ever left CECOT, and fewer have spoken publicly of their experience there.

The Washington Post interviewed 16 of the more than 250 men who were deported by the United States to CECOT, held there for four months and then released this month to Venezuela as part of an international prisoner swap.

The Venezuelans, rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, told The Post they were subjected to repeated beatings that left them bruised, bleeding or injured. They said prison staff restricted medical care for detainees suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure or kidney failure.

That's the way the report begins. As it continues, it describes sadistic behaviors on the part of prison personnel—sadistic behaviors of a type known to exist within our flawed human population.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin is quoted issuing her standard mumble-mouthed official deflections. We feel completely sure that McLaughlin is secretly better than that.

Regarding the legal status of some of the brutalized deportees, the Post offers this later passage:

The Post has found that many of the detainees had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules.

Many of the men had fled political oppression and extreme poverty under Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a U.S. adversary. Some had been granted permission to live and work in the United States. At least two arrived in the U.S. as refugees seeking safety from persecution in Venezuela.

A number suspected they had been detained and deported by the U.S. based solely on their tattoos.

Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas, 35, had temporary protected status shielding him from deportation and worked legally in kitchens and pizzerias to pay for his mother’s breast cancer treatments back home.

Andry Hernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist, entered the U.S. legally with a CBP One appointment, where an official in a preliminary screening determined he had shown a credible fear of persecution as a gay man living and working in Venezuela.

Roger Molina, a food delivery driver and aspiring professional soccer player, had been vetted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and federal law enforcement, flown to the U.S. and conditionally accepted into a State Department resettlement program for refugees.

We don't know what every word means. We'll offer one basic critique: 

Given the fact that the Post was able to speak with only sixteen of the deportees, the Post should have tried to explain the meaning of words like "many" and "some" within such passages as that.

That said, the descriptions of the sadistic behavior are easy to recognize. The United States paid $16 million to El Salvador to pay the costs of such treatment.

Also this:

Greg Gutfeld won't discuss this new report tonight. In a certain kind of way, if you squint your eyes, he's one of the prison guards too.

Meanwhile, our own Blue American journalists won't discuss Greg Gutfeld! They won't report or the things he says and does each night. Nor will they name or discuss the rest of the messenger children at the Fox News Channel—and the list of such strangers is long.

As for Gutfeld, he'll open his show tonight with a few minutes of his "fun, smart, non-lecturey comedy." As we noted in this morning's report, he touched a familiar set of deranged bases at the start pf last evening's "cable news" show, then finished that two- or three-minute, fun / smart segment with this bit of extremely smart comedy:

GUTFELD (7/30/25): Finally, scientists are now dressing pigs in clothes and burying them in Mexico.

Except for one that fled to Ireland.

[PHOTO OF ROSIE O'DONNELL]

AUDIENCE: [Extended yelping and applause]

As a general matter, Gutfeld doesn't agree with O'Donnell's political views. That seems to be the way he prefers to react to women who don't agree with him. 

A few nights back, the gang was noting that it's hard to get a boner at all if photos of O'Donnell are around. This is the way this collection of idiots agree to conduct themselves night after night, often to loud applause.

For now, we offer this question:

Within the bounds of differing national cultures, who is morally worse?

Who is morally worse?
1) The sadistic guards whose sadistic behaviors are described in the Post's report.
2) An American who is being paid $9 million per year to pretend to discuss news topics.
3) The loftier commentators who refuse to report or discuss the behaviors of people like Gutfeld.
4) The people who swore that the southern border was tight as a drum and that President Biden was sharp as a tack.

That last group got President Trump elected again. Which of those four groups is worst?

There are many strangers among us! Hello stranger, the old song says.  

More specifically, that old American song starts off exactly like this:

Hello, stranger, put your loving hand in mine
Hello, stranger, put your loving hand in mine
You are a stranger and you're a friend of mine.

The evocative lyrics continue from there. At one point, the singer finally confesses to "mourning like a dove."

(That' the way the old song goes. For a transplendent rendition, click this.)

HELLO STRANGER: Gutfeld wasn't "mass market" back then!

THURSDAY, JULY 31, 2025

He's very "mass market" today: What did the citizens of sacred Troy think? What did they think in the terrible moment when they first saw the murderous Achaeans coming over the walls?

Their noble prince Hector—their sacred city's greatest defender—had been slain by Achilles. Achilles had then dragged his body behind his chariot as Hector's parents—King Priam and Queen Hecuba—watched in horror from atop their city's high walls.

Soon, the furious victors came over the walls. For hundreds of years, every Greek citizen understood what happened that night, or so said Professor Knox:

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...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.

So it went as sacred Troy died. Is the Blue American civilization, such as it was, being overrun now? 

We can't really say that it isn't! One oddity of the current assault is this:

Even as a furious group of strangers continue to swarm over the walls, those of us in Blue America agree to ignore their advances. This makes us more like the denizens of Camus' fictional Oran, less like the determined Trojans who fought and died as they held off the Achaeans for ten years.

Eventually, the furious Achaeans came over the walls and sacred Troy did in fact die, just as Hector had prophesied. Last evening, Greg Gutfeld started his prime time "cable news" show with a couple of minutes of jokes, as he always does.

Last evening, that handful of jokes lasted until 10:03 p.m.  The handful unspooled like this:

As the premise of his first joke, he restated an unfounded claim about former President Clinton—that he had visited Epstein Island some 28 times.

(Astoundingly, MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace had done the same thing the day before. There's no known cure for this.)

That was the way it started. His second joke turned on the premise that former prime minister Trudeau isn't really a man. 

His third joke—it was based on a survey he misdescribed—turned on the premise that Michelle Obama is a man.  As we've noted, this has become a very familiar source of derision on this little's mutt's program.

That joke about Michelle Obama the secret man produced extended audience applause. Those were the stranger's first three jokes. Predictably enough, his fourth joke went like this:

GUTFELD (7/30/25): Geese have reportedly caused a popular beach in Finland to be covered in "a shocking amount of poop."

"Define shocking amount of poop," said Joe Biden's night nurse.

[PHOTO OF PRESIDENT BIDEN]

AUDIENCE: [Scattered applause]

The jokes about President Biden BLEEPing his pants and soiling the Oval Office had been featured, night after night, all through 2024.

He returned to that theme last night. Soon, we had his latest joke about Ruchard Gere and gerbils.

For unknown reasons, this has become a favorite recent topic. AI Overview fills us in:

The rumor that Richard Gere was hospitalized for a "gerbilling" incident is an urban legend and is completely untrue. The story, which involves the fictitious sexual practice of inserting a gerbil into one's rectum, has circulated for decades, but there's no evidence to support it. According to Reddit users, the rumor likely started as a malicious fabrication and has been perpetuated through word-of-mouth and online discussion. 

The premise dates to 1998. The little guy can't seem to quit it. For the debunking of this ancient claim by Snopes, you can just click here.

By now, it was only 10:02, but the little guy was on a familiar roll. After a joke about "Butt Plug Night" at a WNBA game—inevitably, the WNBA is becoming a favorite target—the little guy offered a joke about Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad and a nationwide rise in "boners."

In closing, inevitably, the little guy turned to this:

GUTFELD: Finally, scientists are now dressing pigs in clothes and burying them in Mexico.

Except for one that fled to Ireland.

[PHOTO OF ROSIE O'DONNELL]

AUDIENCE: [Extended yelping and applause]

By now, it was 10:03 Eastern—7:03 out on the coast. Mercifully, after less than three minutes, he had completed his opening handful of jokes. 

It had been a painfully typical set of jokes from this possibly strange little man, and yes—this is all part of the way a collection of strangers are currently coming over the walls, even as Blue America's hapless defenders insist on looking away.

That was the handful of jokes. To watch that three minutes of jokes, you can just click here.

Strangers were coming over the walls as the audience yelped and cheered. To help you see that strangers can be found almost anywhere, one good and decent person recently said that he himself doesn't care for Gutfeld's brand of humor, but he praised the Fox News Channel's Suzanne Scott for putting Gutfeld's brand of "smart, fun, non-lecturey comedy" on the air.

"Smart!" Yes, that's what he said!

Back in February, a lengthy profile in Variety had misdescribed Gutfeld's comedy in an even more ridiculous way. So it goes at times like these as, for better or worse, a long-established, prevailing culture is perhaps being taken down.

What explains the peculiar behavior of this strange little man with the large "cable news: audience? Incredibly, the fellow is sixty years old, but he still behaves this way on a nightly basis, with tribal helpmates like Tyrus (former professional "wrestler") and Kennedy (former MTV VJ) fake-laughing by his side.

Just for the record, it's more typically the 83-year-old Joy Behar, or the women of The View as a group, who are compared on a nightly basis to cattle, pigs, horses and cows—or, more simply, to "livestock. They're also routinely mocked for being insufficiently sexually attractive to satisfy the requirements of this bizarre, deeply strange little man.

This is all part of the current war on Blue America, much of which is occurring under the radar. That said, this fellow has pretty much always been like this—or so it may seem, based upon a profile which appeared, long ago, in the New York times.

We think we saw the profile once before. Yesterday, with a fortuitous click, we stumbled upon it again.

Warning! It's extremely rare to see a profile in a major publication where the writer makes so little attempt to hide his disdain, or perhaps his contempt, for the person being profiled. 

For that reason, we're surprised that the profile ever appeared. But it did appear, in the New York Times, on September 4, 2003.

The writer of the profile, Warren St. John, was a reporter for the Times from 2002 through 2008. He was apparently 33 at the time his profile appeared. 

St. John didn't try to hide his disdain for the stranger in his midst. The stranger had just been dropped from a publishing post at a certain "lad magazine." Strangely unflattering headline included, the profile started as shown:

A Publishing Pest Moves On

FOR Greg Gutfeld, the 38-year-old former editor of the brooding lad magazine Stuff, the set-up was just too rich: an earnest group of publishing types were gathering at the American Society of Magazine Editors in Manhattan for a seminar in April on ''What Gives a Magazine Buzz.'' His first thought upon hearing of the meeting was, in his words, ''If you need to go to that seminar, you're hopeless.'' His second thought, he said, was dwarfs.

Mr. Gutfeld called a local casting agent and hired three dwarfs for the day. He equipped them with cellphones and bags of potato chips and sent them into the seminar. As editors from Rolling Stone, Glamour and O: The Oprah Magazine opined on the serious business of buzz creation, the actors began chomping loudly on handfuls of potato chips as their cellphones started ringing furiously. (The actors, of course, loudly took the calls.)

After 15 minutes or so of steadily escalating mayhem, the actors were ejected, but not before giving those editors an object lesson in buzz creation, Gutfeld style.

Sipping a Stoli and orange on Wednesday night in the Bellevue, a favorite Hell's Kitchen dive with glam rock on the jukebox and a coffin next to the bar, Mr. Gutfeld said the prank was in keeping with his personal credo. ''I love the idea of showing up at a place and just disrupting it,'' he said.

That's the way the fellow had approached the seminar on creating buzz. 

The pitiful conduct with the "three dwarfs" had happened back in April. Now, though, it was September—and according to the profile, a certain reign had ended at Stuff. 

This is what St John wrote as he continued directly:

A day later, on Thursday, Mr. Gutfeld's reign of disruption came to an end, when he stepped aside as editor of Stuff to become ''director of brand development'' for the magazine, a job in which he is ostensibly to promote his style of bizarro humor in other media, like television. The new arrangement, billed as a promotion for Mr. Gutfeld, has a certain neatness to it; he gets to pursue a long-held ambition to go big with his own brand of dark, self-loathing humor, and Dennis Publishing gets its magazine back from a self-described loud-mouth, troublemaker and freak.

Mark Golin, a friend of Mr. Gutfeld who develops online content at AOL Time Warner and who once edited Maxim, said that the dark nature of his friend's sense of humor limited Stuff's appeal ''to aficionados and people in prison.''

''It's not necessarily the most mass market,'' he said.

It's not necessarily mass market? We'll return to that assessment below. For now, let's return to the fun with the dwarfs:

Later in the profile, St John suggested that Gutfeld had been bumped from his editor's post in part because of that event, but also because of a wide array of arguably strange behaviors.

For better or worse, St. John seemed to disapprove of what he called "lad culture." With respect to Gutfeld's tenure at Stuff, here's part of what that "lad culture" had entailed:

Mr. Gutfeld said that his move is fine with him. During his rampage as Stuff's editor, the magazine's circulation rose from 750,000 to 1.2 million, but it is still far below the 2.5 million readership of its more accessible sibling publication Maxim. But along the way, Mr. Gutfeld said, he has been a frustrated man—frustrated that more people don't acknowledge the brilliance of, say, the Bathroom Tapes, a regular feature that makes editorial fare of conversations tape-recorded in the stalls of women's bathrooms in various Manhattan nightclubs; frustrated that more people don't identify with the self-loathing genius of his profile of a man with leprosy, who, it turned out, had a much more fulfilled life than Mr. Gutfeld himself. (The headline: ''So a Leper Walks Into a Bar—and You Find Out YOUR Life Is a Joke.'')

Mr. Gutfeld thinks he can find his audience through television and the stage. He will be working with the Endeavor Agency in Los Angeles to translate Stuff features into the sort of thing lad culture will watch after a few rounds of Grand Theft Auto III and reruns of ''The Simpsons.'' He wants to make a theater production from the dialogue of the Bathroom Tapes feature, which he sees as a kind of ''Vagina Monologues'' for a male audience.

''It could be huge,'' Mr. Gutfeld said.

Mr. Gutfeld said that his former magazine, and to some degree his life, takes its comic energy from the juxtaposition of the comfortable and familiar with the dark and disturbing. For example, the magazine's always puzzling last page typically features a close-up photo of a cute stuffed animal with a depraved line of text like ''Please kill me.'' Mr. Gutfeld said that joke is emblematic of his world view.

And so on at length, like that.

Was or is anything wrong with Mr. Gutfeld's sense of humor? By contemporary standards, the joking in which he engages now, on a nightly basis, almost insists on being called "openly misogynistic."

That said, is anything wrong with that? Or as these strangers come over the walls, is Blue America simply learning that a lot of people didn't like the structure of the new "sexual politics" which began emerging from the women's movement around, let's say, 1970? Do people just think that it's good clean fun to hear women compared to horses, pigs, cattle and cows on a nightly basis?

A great deal more was included in that somewhat unusual New York Times profile, including Gutfeld's  ruminations upon his lifelong failure to attract women:

Though Stuff is crammed with photos of young models in bikinis, Mr. Gutfeld said his quest to be funny keeps him ''inside my own head.'' He said he hasn't had much luck with women.

''I've dated but I've never been successful in that realm,'' Mr. Gutfeld said. ''I'm a tourist in the real world, and that prevents you from doing what normal people do.''

If he was being quoted fairly, the fellow said he wasn't normal with respect to that realm. There may have been decades of pain lurking there at that point. We've long suggested that we should remember to "pity the child."

Were decades of pain perhaps lurking there? If so, a person could even imagine that the fellow is still lashing out.

St. John made no attempt to hide his utter disdain for the stranger before him. As for that stranger's sensibility, let the word go forth to the nations:

''It's not necessarily the most mass market,'' the stranger himself had said.

Today, that same sensibility seems to be very mass market. It's smeared all over the Fox News Channel, where he joins his towel-snapping bro, Jesse Watters, as one of the two biggest stars.

As people applaud his horses, pigs and cattle jokes, is Blue America going down, even as its sophisticated leading tribunes insist on looking away? Also, what did Emmylou Harris hear, for years, in the mournful lyrics of that mournful Carter Family song?

She sang it again and again. She drew it out in beautiful ways, on this occasion with Ricky Skaggs—in Germany, no less!

Hello Stranger, the first lyric says. We'd love to know what she heard in the evocative, slightly mysterious lyrics of the mournful American song.

Tomorow: What he said, last Thursday night, about Obama's treason

The discography: Regarding the Emmylou Harris renditions, our favorite live performance of Hello Stranger had always been the version she performed with Rodney Crowell.

Alas! It seems to have disappeared from YouTube. Nothing gold can stay?

WEDNESDAY: Finally, the Times explains tariffs!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2025

Shannon Bream takes a dive: President Trump's threats and proposals concerning tariffs have been in the news since basically forever by now.

Yesterday, it finally happened! An explainer piece about the way tariffs work finally appeared in the New York Times!

We'll be brutally honest—we were surprised by the timing. Headline included, here's the way the explainer begins:

Who Pays for U.S. Tariffs, and Where Does the Money Go?

Since his return to office, President Trump has set in motion a global trade war, wielding tariffs to try to achieve multiple goals at once: raising federal revenue, reducing or eliminating trade deficits with other nations and compelling manufacturers to make more of their goods in the United States.

But who actually pays those tariffs, and where does that money go?

Here’s how the process works...

Better late than never, you say? The timing did strike us as odd. But to its credit, the New York Times chose to simplify this topic all the way down.

Continuing directly from above, here's the way the report proceeds. The Times is explaining this very clearly. Will someone alert Shannon Bream?

What is a tariff, and who pays it?

A tariff is essentially a government surcharge on products imported from other countries.

Tariffs are paid by the companies that import the goods. The revenue from U.S. tariffs is paid by U.S. importers to the U.S. Treasury Department.

How does that work?

Here’s an example: If Walmart imports a $100 pair of shoes from Vietnam—which faces a 20 percent tariff under the terms of a preliminary trade deal—Walmart will owe $20 in tariffs to the U.S. government.

That's extremely basic explanation—which is exactly the way a topic like this should be explained. 

You could even call it "Tariffs for Dummies!" But that's exactly the way a topic like this should be explained from the start. 

As the Times report continues, it makes some accurate statements which might sound a bit heretical to some of us Over Here.

You'll have to check that out for yourself. We're going to move to what Shannon Bream did, or failed to do, when she interviewed Howard Lutnick on this past weekend's Fox News Sunday.

Bream is host of Fox News Sunday. Lutnick is the current Secretary of Commerce. At the start of their colloquy, Lutnick assured Bream that August 1 represents a hard and fast deadline concerning tariff deals. 

The following exchange then occurred. At this point, Bream seemed to be playing it tough:

BREAM (7/27/25): Folks are nervous. We have brand new polling on that this week. And we asked in our Fox News polling how people are feeling about things.

The president is under water, by double digits, on the economy, on inflation and [on] tariffs. And they may be reacting to reports like this one from the Yale Budget Lab, estimating that Americans now face "the highest tariff rate since 1910, an average cost of $2,800 per household this year."

So you keep saying that Americans are going to love these deals. They're very skeptical and they're worried at this point. 

Ouch! That seemed like a tough presentation. Lutnick responded with this:

LUTNICK (continuing directly): Well, I think you'll see, as they flow through the market, that what’s going to happen is very few products are actually going to move their price. And basically, 700, 800 billion dollars—maybe it’s possible to get it near trillion dollars of revenue—will come into the United States of America, reducing our deficit.

What do you think is paying for no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, right?

The Secretary continued from there. “I think if you take a look at the whole thing, it’s going to be fannn-tastic.” 

It’s going to be fannn-tastic, the gentleman sillily said. And then, when Lutnick had finished his bout of cheerleading, Bream simply moved ahead with a different apparent challenge.

Along the way, there they had gone again! For perhaps the ten millionth time, a member of the Trump administration had conveyed the impression that money somehow "comes into the United States" when tariff payments are made.

For perhaps the ten millionth time, he had conveyed the impression that foreign entities will be sending us big buckets of cash when those tariffs fully kick in. 

That isn't the way it works, the Times has now explained. And no, that isn't the way it works—but could someone alert Shannon Bream?

Bream is much more fair-and-balanced than the bulk of the players at Fox. Also, she isn't a dope. Lutnick probably knows where the money comes from. We'll guess that Bream definitely does.

That said, the Trump admin has been selling that particular con ever since tariffs were born. When Lutnick stated the con once again, Bream chose to move right along. 

This is the way our discourse works. On various fronts, in various ways, it has worked this way for a long time.

HELLO STRANGER: Everyone seemed to be a rank stranger?

WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2025

So too with Fox News Channel shows: "Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger."

That's what the evocative lyrics say. As we start today, we'll let the Library of Congress flesh out the background to the song:

Rank Stranger—The Stanley Brothers (1960)
Added to the National Registry: 2008
Essay by Cary O'Dell

Though dozens of artists have recorded the song “Rank Stranger” over the years, the Stanley Brothers’ simple, effective treatment remains its definitive version and it was this recording that was named to the National Recording Registry in 2008.

Though strongly associated with the legendary Stanleys, “Rank Stranger” was not authored by them. Instead, it was the work of prolific gospel songwriter Albert E. Brumley, Sr., the composer of such other seminal gospel classics as “Turn Your Radio On” and “I’ll Fly Away.” 

Composed in 1942, “Stranger” would not be popularized until the Stanley Brothers committed it to vinyl at the somewhat late date of 1960...

The Stanleys were, at the time, headlining a live, weekly radio show, the Suwannee River Jamboree, from Live Oak, Florida. The recording was released later that year on their “Sacred Songs from the Hill” album over the Starday label. 

The overview rolls on from there. For the lyrics to Rank Stranger, you can just click here.

As noted, the song was added to the National Recording Registry back in 2008. It involves a persistent theme of southern (white) traditional music—the loss of connection to hearth and home suffered when the individual has been forced to move on:

In my hand I hold a picture of the old home far away.
In the other one my sweetheart I'm thinking of today...

That, once again, is The Original and Great Carter Family, in this case in My Old Clinch Mountain Home. To hear their recording, click here.

In Rank Stranger, the singer returns to his childhood home. When he does, he finds that every recognizable face is gone. 

With that, let's return to our own present-day encounters with a substantial array of strangers, perhaps rank strangers at that.

We often think, as we watch shows on the Fox News Channel, that its performers are drawn from a population we're inclined to call "Unrecognizables." A bit like the people described in Rank Stranger, they almost seem to come from a race we've never encountered in actual life. 

(We're speaking about performers on Fox, not about Trump voters.)

The same could perhaps be said about the rank strangers so numerous among the elites of our own Blue America—the strangers who agree to avert their gaze from what is occurring, day after day and then night after night, on Fox News Channel TV shows as a certain civilization, for better or worse, is being unceremoniously overcome and undone.

As in the Iliad, so too here. A furiously angry population is once again coming over the walls. In the current circumstance, we find it hard to recognize the furiously angry people in question. We also find it (somewhat) hard to recognize their willing enablers within our lazy and indulgent Blue American world.

This week, we're trying to create an historical record—a record of the opening segment on last Thursday's Gutfeld! show. 

During that opening segment, the host of the show offered an astonishing monologue about Director Gabbard's recent claim—her exciting claim that Barack Obama engaged in a "treasonous conspiracy" near the end of his second term as president.

As a simple objective matter, the little guy's furious statements that night were astounding. These tools then played their assigned role in the nightly drama:

Gutfeld!: Thursday, July 24, 2025
Joe Germanotta: owner, Joanne's Trattoria
Kennedy: former VJ
Guy Benson: Fox News contributor
Michael Loftus: comedian

Three of the panelists rushed to agree with every word their employer had said. One of the tools, at least to our eye, found a way to avoid commenting on a series of claims he probably knew to be clownishly bogus.

In yesterday's report, we offered you some of the background to the topic under "discussion" that night. In the days which remain this week, we want to show you the following:

We want to show you what Greg Gutfeld said in his opening "monologue" that evening. Also, we want to show you what the tools then said in support of his claims.

Finally, want to show you what was said in the opening segment of last night's Gutfeld! show. We even want to do that!

By our lights, a mob of Unrecognizables were coming over the walls in last evening's opening segment. Over here, in Blue America, a separate group of strangers were adopting their normal stance:

They were averting their gaze from this cultural onslaught, as they do each day and each night! They were choosing not to report or discuss what happens on the Fox News Channel.

We're going to leave it right there for today. Tomorrow, we'll show you what Gutfeld said at the start of last Thursday's program. If you want to look ahead for yourself, you can watch his presentation simply by clicking here. 

(Needless to say, he had started the program with some jokes about the unbelievable girth of the women on The View. They need to be "rounded up and equipped with cowbells," the angry little guy said.)

We're going to visit those topics. Along the way, we also want you to ponder the strangers who seem to think that Gutfeld! is a comedy show—who even seem to be able to think that Gutfeld and his ever-changing panel of guests are providing something resembling "smart comedy."

Variety took a dive for this TV show earlier this year. Last week, Colby Hall—a good, decent person—almost seemed to follow suit. Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger, the Stanley Brothers once said.

At present, the Fox News Channel is playing an active role in the task of bringing down a certain civilization, such as that civilization has been. Different people have different views about the value of that ongoing war. 

We'll guess that the war has already been won—that we self-impressed Blues have already managed to lose it.

We Blues tend to be self-defeatingly dumb, but also perhaps a bit uncaring. As this warfare is staged every day and then each night, our Blues elites—not unlike a group of strangers—agree to look away from what's occurring, agree to avert their gaze.

Tomorrow: What the angry "cable news" star very angrily said

TUESDAY: There is no cure for being human!

TUESDAY, JULY 29, 2025

Charlamagne crashes and burns: Yesterday, in this news report, the New York Times taught a lesson. 

It taught an (extremely obvious) journalism lesson. The lesson is extremely obvious. More accurately, it's extremely obvious to everyone except our flailing American journalists.

At issue was the latest baldly inappropriate behavior by the sitting president. While attempting to defend his own behavior, he had unloosed one of his standard unfounded allegations about somebody else.

Please talk about the other guy, the disordered chief executive said. Inevitably, one journalist after another rushed to place his unfounded allegation in print:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/28/25): For years, I wouldn't talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn't talk because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, "Don't ever do that again." He stole people that worked for me. 

I said, "Don't ever do that again." He did it again and I threw him out of the place, persona non grata. I threw him out and that was it. I'm glad I did, if you want to know the truth.

And by the way, I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times...

That's what the disordered man said. As he continued, he made a second unfounded statement about somebody else. As every sane person must know by now, this is the sort of thing he does on a regular basis.

Readers, how about it? Did Bill Clinton got to the island 28 times? 

As far as we know, there is no reason to believe that he ever went to the island at all! But then again, so what?

There is no cure for human! At Mediaite, three (3) different journalists rushed out posts which repeated the sitting president's statement, without making any mention of the fact that his statement was wholly unfounded and is almost certainly false.

It's hard to be much dumber than that. That said, we humans will try.

The New York Times wanted to report the bulk of what Trump had said. It didn't want to lend its imprimatur to an unfounded statement which is almost certainly false. 

It didn't want to pass the slander on! And so, its news report starts like this, headline included

Trump Says He Declined Epstein’s Invitation to Visit His Island: ‘I Never Had the Privilege of Going’

President Trump said on Monday that he had “never had the privilege” of visiting Jeffrey Epstein’s private Caribbean island because he had turned down an invitation from the financier.

As part of a continued effort by Mr. Trump to distract, deny and deflect from his long-running relationship with Mr. Epstein, the president vigorously denied that he had ever visited Mr. Epstein’s private islands in the Caribbean, while in the same breath baselessly accusing his predecessor, former President Bill Clinton, of visiting the islands, his latest bid at conspiracy deflection.

That's the way the news report started. The Times reported that Trump's assertion was "baseless" even before it said what the assertion was. It even offered an unflattering explanation for the baseless assertion by Trump.

For our money, we would have made a larger point about the sitting president's misconduct. That said, as it continued, the Times refused to report the specific number of visits the sitting president had baselessly alleged. 

It also went into more detail about the actual state of what is actually known about the matter at hand:

“I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly” a number of times, Mr. Trump said during a trip to Scotland. Mr. Epstein owned two islands in the U.S. Virgin Islands—Little St. James and Great St. James, where he entertained famous friends and allegedly trafficked underage girls for sex.

He continued, “I never had the privilege of going to his island, and I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down.”

Mr. Clinton has denied visiting the islands or having any knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s criminal behavior, and has said he wishes he had never met him. When asked about Mr. Trump’s accusations, an aide to Mr. Clinton pointed to that original denial, adding that it had been 20 years since Mr. Clinton had been in contact with Mr. Epstein.

In 2002, Mr. Clinton had flown on a private jet owned by Mr. Epstein as part of a visit to Africa—a trip which brought a flurry of media attention—but the former president has not been linked by prosecutors or officials to any of the criminal accusations against Mr. Epstein. 

In our view, even the Times didn't do enough in its refusal to honor the sitting president's latest misconduct. But three (3) employees of Mediaite simply reprinted Trump's accusation without making any attempt to note the fact that his claim is completely unfounded.

There is no cure for that. There's no known cure for human.

It wasn't just Mediaite, of course. As we (briefly) noted yesterday, other journalists at other sites rushed to provide the same service. 

Sad! You tend to think it isn't possible for people to go beyond some imagined level of Dumb. Then they get a chance to prove you wrong, and prove you wrong they will!

There's no cure for being human! This fact has also been proved by Charlamagne Tha God, with Mediaite pimping the dumbness around.

You simply can't get dumber than that foolishness from Tha God. For the background behind the silly but pointless painting in question, you can just click here.

(Charlamagne thinks the "liberal media" should be talking about that utterly pointless set of events! Simply put, there is no cure for instinctive reactions like that.)

As we've noted, the so-called "democratization of media" has created a hapless new world. It's a world in which this bromide now obtains:

Every rube a king!

In theory, it sounded like a good idea to create a world in which everyone would have access to high communication platforms. It sounded like a good idea because, dumb as We Tha Humans are, we didn't have the slightest idea who far our bad judgment would go.

There is no cure for being human! Given the communication structures which now exist, there also isn't any obvious way out of this ongoing mess.

President Trump had made his latest bogus claim. He does this all day long.

Our geniuses knew what they should do. Our geniuses spread it all around. After that, Tha God came along and actually managed to top it!

For honor roll students only: By the way, fellow citizens, no:

You're not allowed to make something up, then stick "supposedly" in!

HELLO STRANGER: Russia tried to help Candidate Trump, the Republican solons said!

TUESDAY, JULY 29, 2025

But also, the dope on Kilimnik: We almost wish we didn't suspect that Chris Matthews has it right.

In our bones, we're forced to suspect that he isn't wrong. Over the weekend, he spoke to Charlie Rose on YouTube (who knew?)—and, as Mediaite reports, this is what he said:

Chris Matthews Bluntly Declares: ‘The Country is Moving Towards Trump!’

Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews delivered a head-turning take about President Donald Trump sure to stun many of his left-leaning fans.

In an interview with Charlie Rose posted to YouTube on Saturday, Matthews—the ex-host of Hardball—fired some chin music at liberals who believe, based on recent polls, that Trump is floundering.

“To be honest with you, the country is moving towards Trump!” Matthews said. “These polls, they come out and show him not doing well—I don’t buy that.”

“His strength is still greater than the Democratic strength,” Matthews said. “He is a stronger public figure than the Democratic people. Obama still has tremendous charisma—but Trump has strength. And I think that’s what all voters look for. They want a president who is a strong figure. And he’s got it. It’s just there. And half the country buys it.”

We almost wish we disagreed. That said, we're inclined to suspect that Matthews' view may be correct. 

Strangers keep come over the walls in the current war of the tribes. From our perch in Blue America, it's our guess that this war has already been won, by the other side.

In this latest "war of the all against all," there are the forces streaming over the walls—people who may typically seem a great deal like strangers to us. But then, it also seems to us that we Blues may be strangers to ourselves:

We don't understand who we actually are. We don't understand the way we look to many American voters.

Only a fool would try to predict the outcome of next year's scheduled midterm elections. But at this site, we have a hard time believing that historical patterns will prevail—that Blue America's forces will win.

"Everyone I met seemed to be a rank stranger!" So sang the Stanley Brothers, in their most famous song. 

("I knew not their names and I knew not their faces. I found they were all rank strangers to me.")

So it says, in a haunted song from the American song book. But so it frequently seems to us when we watch the endless array of proselytization shows aired by the Fox News Channel.

We find it very hard to picture who people like Greg Gutfeld and "Kennedy" are. We can't place their peculiar behavior within our own life experience.

Some of the messenger children on the channel strike us as recognizable stooges of a fairly familiar type. The fury of others seems extremely hard to place within our own life experience.

That said, we'll guess these strangers have already won the culture war that's currently under way—the culture war that's being fought with the tools of the Information Age.

Strangers are coming over the walls! This week, we're trying to show you one example of the way their furious war is (successfully) being fought:

Starting on Friday, July 18, Director Gabbard launched the latest "night assault." 

It's widely said that she may have grown up in a cult. We've long advised you to pity the child, but to fear the results which may be observed in the adult.

Director Gabbard came over the walls that day with the latest furious claims. As we noted yesterday, she repeated her claims on Wednesday, July 23, in a White House press event.

Director Gabbard repeated her claims. By the next night, the nuttiest little child of them all could no longer it hold in

Tomorrow, we're going to show you what he said on that evening's edition of Gutfeld! On Thursday, we'll show you what this collection of tools said when the furious little guy had ended his furious monologue:

Gutfeld!: Thursday, July 24, 2025
Joe Germanotta: owner, Joanne's Trattoria
Kennedy: former VJ
Guy Benson: Fox News contributor
Michael Loftus: comedian

There you see the "ship of tools" who magpied for Gutfeld that night.

Some of these panelists may have believed the various things they said. Some of them possibly didn't. To our eye, it looked like Benson may have tried to avoid saying anything at all.

That said, they all seconded the thrust of their furious host. Across the nation, millions of people were watching as this collection of "rank strangers" kept coming over the walls.

Tomorrow, we're going to show you what Gutfeld said that night in his monologue. For today, let's establish the background to his astounding prime time remarks.

The star of this ersatz "cable news" show could hold it in no longer! He set his "smart comedy" to the side as he ranted and railed and let the fury out.

His presentation that night was a road map to the war which has quite likely already been won. At issue that evening was a fairly straightforward factual question:

Did Russia act to help Candidate Trump during the 2016 election? 

Did the Russkies try to help Candidate Trump? On our own, we can't tell you—but like you, we're in luck!

In the wake of that election, a (Republican-led) Senate select committee spent three years investigating such questions. 

Did we mention the fact that this Senate committee was Republican-led? In one way, it isn't clear how much that mattered, since all the senators on the committee agreed with the basic findings of the committee's lengthy report.

In the course of three years of effort, what did that Senate committee find? The leading authority on the work of this Senate committee starts its report as shown:

Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election

The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the United States presidential election, officially titled Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, is the official report in five volumes documenting the findings and conclusions of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee concerning the Russian attack efforts against election infrastructure, Russia's use of social media to affect the election, the U.S. government's response to Russian activities, review of the Intelligence Community Assessment, and counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities. The redacted report is 1,313 pages long. It is divided into five volumes.

The first volume of the report was released on July 25, 2019, and the fifth and last volume was released to the public on August 18, 2020. The Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation extended more than three years, includes interviews of more than 200 witnesses, and reviews more than one million documents. Marco Rubio, acting committee head, said that "no probe into this matter has been more exhaustive.” On the stature of the report, the Senate Intelligence Committee said the report is "the most comprehensive description to date of Russia's activities and the threat they posed."

That's the way the leading authority starts. Senator Rubio (R-Fla.) was acting committee head, replacing the earlier chairman (Richard Burr, R-NC), because Republicans were in control of the Senate during the years in question.

By all accounts, the select committee hadn't been farking around. It had studied this topic for three years. 

Its report was issued in five volumes. As early as Volume II of its report, the committee was offering this as the first of its key findings:

FINDINGS

(1) The committee found that the [Internet Reseach Agency] sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.

Rightly or wrongly, that's what the senators said. In this case, they were talking about the Russian hacking operation directed at materials belonging to the Democratic Party, "at the direction of the Kremlin."

 All the Republicans affirmed that finding, as did all the Democrats.

All told, the committee's report was more than 1300 pages long. In all honesty, the leading authority presents a less than fully impressive report about what the committee found. 

At the very start of the leading authority's report, some of what follows may have been included because of its relevance to issues which are currently being debated. Be that as it may, here we go:

The report by the leading authority continues along as shown:

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee submitted the first part of its five-volume report in July 2019 in which it concluded that the January 2017 Intelligence Community assessment alleging Russian interference was "coherent and well-constructed." The first volume also concluded that the assessment was "proper," learning from analysts that there was "no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions." 

The final and fifth volume, which was the result of three years of investigations, was released on August 18, 2020, ending one of the United States "highest-profile congressional inquiries." The Committee report found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Donald Trump, which included assistance from some of Trump's own advisers.

Oof! That "January 2017 Intelligence Community assessment" is currently being attacked by Director Gabbard. Rightly or wrongly, she regards its publication as a bit of treasonous conduct—or at least, she says she does. 

Rightly or wrongly, the select committee, in the final volume of its report, apparently concluded that the January 2017 assessment had not been treasonous! Along the way, starting with Volume II, the select committee did in fact, rightly or wrongly, state this general view:

The Committee report found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Donald Trump. 

We're not sure where that two-word quotation comes from. But that's a reasonably accurate summary of what the committee unanimously found.

Rightly or wrong, the (Republican-led) select committee found that the Russkies had tried to influence the 2016 election in favor of Candidate Trump! They might have been right about that, or they might have been wrong. But that's what the solons found.

We mention that because Director Gabbard and her enablers keep forgetting to mention that fact as they rant and rail about Barack Obama's treasonous conduct, along with the treasonous conduct of so many others. 

The strangers want them all locked up, and possibly Oprah too!

Director Gabbard claims to be very upset, as do the legions who echo her confusing amalgam of cries and whispers about three thousand concatenations. Along the way, they keep forgetting to mention what that (Republican-led) Senate committee concluded about the 2016 election after three years of study.

For today, we want to direct you to one more thing which the leading authority mentions. As its overview of the Senate committee continues directly, it now offers this:

Like the Mueller report that preceded it, the report does not find a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, but it does go further than the Mueller report in detailing the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies. In particular, it describes Paul Manafort as "a grave counterintelligence threat." According to the report, "some evidence suggests" that Konstantin Kilimnik, to whom Manafort provided polling data, was directly connected to the Russian theft of Clinton-campaign emails. In addition, while Trump's written testimony in the Mueller report stated that he did not recall speaking with Roger Stone about WikiLeaks, the Senate report concludes that "Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone's access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions."

So true! In its final volume, the Senate committee reported that finding about Konstantin Kilimnik. Tomorrow, we'll show you what the furious Gutfeld said about Kilimnik when he melted down on the air, as he likes to do, on last Thursday's evening's "cable news" TV program.

It's a program we don't regard as "smart." Also, we wouldn't describe it as "comedy." 

Hello Stranger! In 1937, it emerged as a Carter Family standard. Its somewhat mysterious lyrics started off like this:

Hello stranger! Put your lovin' hand in mine.

Hello stranger! Put your lovin' hand in mine.

You are a stranger,

And you're a pal of mine.

To hear that recording. click here.

At the present time, it's hard to imagine being pals with the strangers coming over the walls of our failing Blue America. In his nightly conduct, we often see Greg Gutfeld as a deeply puzzling, and remarkably strange, TV human type.

It's hard to imagine him as a pal, but then, we've also asked this question:

As these strangers come over the walls, are some of us in Bue America strangers to ourselves?

Tomorrow: What he said last Thursday night

The discography: The Stanley Brothers' fuller lyrics ran exactly like this:

Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger

No mother or dad, not a friend could I see

They knew not my name and I knew not their faces

I found they were all rank strangers to me.

For complete lyrics, just click here. To hear a recording, click this.

MONDAY: When Trump repeated his latest claim...

MONDAY, JULY 28, 2025

...his enablers rushed to repeat it: What have we meant when we've kept telling you that we humans simply aren't built for this line of work?

When we've said we simply weren't built for the work of self-government? That we simply aren't up to the task?

What have we meant when we've told you that? Consider what the sitting president has now said once again. Also, consider the people who couldn't run fast enough to put his unfounded claim into print, without any hint of a fact-check, a critique or a challenge.

We were going to start with Mediaite, which went down for the count a second time. Instead, let's start with The Hill. 

From there, we'll trundle along to The New Republic—even to the very stable genius Acyn himself!

Some things never end! Today, in Scotland, Trump was asked about Jeffrey Epstein once again. As part of his reply, as if by law, he went ahead and repeated the claim he had launched at the end of last week

He went ahead and said it again! At The Hill, Alex Gangitano's report started like this, headline included:

Trump says he turned down offer to go to Epstein island...

President Trump said Monday he had previously turned down an offer to go to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, calling out other people he said the press should focus on as the president has tried to move on from questions about Epstein.

“I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times. I never went to the island, but [NAME WITHHELD], I hear, went there, he was the head of [NAME WITHHELD]. And many other people that are very big people, nobody ever talks about them,” Trump said while in Scotland meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

That's the way her report starts. We've deleted the name of the other person the journalist may have slandered.

As we've told you before, we humans simply aren't made for this line of work. We simply weren't built for this challenge:

Once again, the president floated the notion that Bill Clinton has been to the island 28 times! People like Gangitano couldn't move quickly enough to publish the inflammatory claim—a claim for which there is no documentary evidence.

Gangitano is eleven years out of college (Villanova, 2014). She's been at The Hill for the past seven years. She worked at Roll Call for four years before that.

It didn't seem to cross her mind that 1) President Trump makes false or unfounded statements all the time, and 2) false or unfounded statements shouldn't be repeated without being identified as such.

She simply went ahead and printed the unsupported claim! And sure enough! One hour later, in a separate report, her colleague at The Hill, Cate Martel, also pimped President Trump's unsupported claim!

(Martel has been at The Hill for ten years! We simply weren't made for this challenge.)

For the record, is there any evidence that Bill Clinton ever went to the island at all? As far as we know, there is not. 

In Friday afternoon's report, we linked you to a report for FactCheck.org which detailed the documented state of play as of 2019. We also noted the fact that the Clinton office has said once again, within this past month, that Clinton had never been to the island. 

Meanwhile, here's what the leading authority currently says about the topic at hand. Warning! Part of this strikes us as misleading:

Flight records obtained in 2016 show Bill Clinton flew 27 times to at least a dozen international locations.

Flight logs did not list any Secret Service detail for at least five flights on a 2002 trip to Asia, and the Secret Service stated that there is no evidence of the former president making a trip to Epstein's private island. In 2019, a Clinton spokesperson stated that, in 2002 and 2003, Clinton took four trips on Epstein's airplane, making stops on three continents, all with his staff and Secret Service detail. At the time of Epstein's 2019 arrest, Clinton's spokeswoman Angel Ureña stated that Clinton had "not spoken to Epstein in well over a decade, and has never been to Little St. James Island, Epstein's ranch in New Mexico, or his residence in Florida."

Just for the sake of clarity—the FactCheck report said that the 27 "flights" (FactCheck said the number was 26) had occurred during a total of only six "trips." For example, on one trip to Africa and London in 2002 in connection with AIDS prevention, Clinton had racked up eleven of his 26 total "flights."

FactCheck reported no trips to the island! As far as we know, no one has ever shown that he ever went there—but then, Donald J. Trump came along!

Has Bill Clinton ever been to the island in question? He and his office have repeatedly said that the answer is no. If there was any evidence that the actual answer was yes, you would have heard about it a million times by now.

Still and all, the actors who get hired as journalists can't seem to help themselves! Even knowing what President Trump is like, they rushed today to repeat his claim about Clinton.

They did it (again!) at Mediaite. They did it at The New Republic. They did it at Raw Story. They pretty much did it all over the map—and where did their inspiration come from? 

Good God! As you can see at various sites, they seem to have taken their inspiration from the latest hapless post by Acyn! We simply aren't smart enough to be a part of this game.

President Trump threw out a hunk of chum. They eagerly snapped it up.

Hello strangers! As the Carter Family once sang:

You are a stranger, and you're a pal of mine.

HELLO STRANGER: A strange little man on a major "news channel"...

MONDAY, JULY 28, 2025

...could no longer hold it in: As of last Thursday night, he could no longer hold it in.

Or at least. that's the way it appeared as the Fox News Channel's Greg Gutfeld swung into action on Gutfeld!, his (prime time) "cable news" program.

(The program airs at 10 p.m.—in the East. It airs at 9 o'clock in the Central Time Zone, at 7 o'clock on the coast.)

Judging from appearances, the little guy with the very large anger could no longer hold it in. "At this stage of the narrative," we may perhaps, be allowed to describe the immediate triggers to the astounding account of the relevant facts he unloosed on the nation that evening.

His account was an unmistakable fraud. The triggering events went like this:

The fellow exploded last Thursday night. Six days earlier—on Friday, July 18—the Trump administration's Director of National Intelligence had issued a hall-of-mirrors press release which carried an eye-catching headline:

New Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency 

Tulsi Gabbard's press release had employed some remarkable language. After presenting a welter of bullet points, it included a statement by Director Gabbard which started off like this:

The issue I am raising is not a partisan issue. It is one that concerns every American. The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government. Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.

"I am providing all documents to the Department of Justice to deliver the accountability that President Trump, his family, and the American people deserve," the Director said at the end of her statement. 

According to Director Gabbard, President Trump and his family deserved nothing less! 

Unmistakably, for better or worse, Gabbard had detonated a major rhetorical bomb. Over that weekend—from Friday, July 18 through Sunday, July 20—she proceeded to appear on three major Fox News Channel / Fox Business shows. 

On those programs, she made it clear that she was accusing President Obama himself of having engaged in that "treasonous conspiracy"—of having engaged in the act of treason which designed to "enact what was essentially a years-long coup."

Back in 2016, President Obama had engaged in an act of treason designed to enact a coup! So said the DNI—but one problem quickly emerged:

As she shuffled the jumble of bullet-points which had appeared in her published statement, certain acts of conflation—of confusion and apparent illogic—instantly seemed to appear. 

Despite this fairly obvious problem, the Director doubled down on her initial claims, in dramatic fashion, on Wednesday, July 23. She did so during an appearance in the White House press briefing room—an appearance whose transcript and videotape you can peruse by clicking here.

At the nine-minute mark of that day's press briefing, scolder-in-chief Karoline Leavitt stepped aside and turned the proceedings over to Gabbard. Dressed in the color of female enfranchisement, Gabbard delivered a thirteen-minute statement, then took questions for an additional seventeen minutes. 

Gabbard commanded the stage at the briefing for thirty minutes in all. Immediately after the handoff occurred, the Director restated major points of her basic claim:

LEAVITT (7/23/25): I will now pass it over to the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to speak more about all of this, and then we will open it up for questions afterwards. Tulsi, thank you for being here.

GABBARD: Thank you very much. Good afternoon. 

At President Trump's direction and with the support and coordination with the House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, today, we've released a declassified oversight majority staff report that was produced in September of 2020.

The stunning revelations that we are releasing today should be of concern to every American. This is not about Democrats or Republicans. This has to do with the integrity of our democratic republic and American voters having faith that the votes cast will count. There is irrefutable evidence that detail how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false. They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn't.

The report that we released today shows in great detail how they carried this out. They manufactured findings from shoddy sources, they suppressed evidence and credible intelligence that disproved their false claims, they disobeyed traditional tradecraft intelligence community standards and withheld the truth from the American people.

In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people who elected Donald Trump in that election in November of 2016, they worked with their partners in the media to promote this lie, ultimately to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, and launching what would be a years-long coup against him and his administration. We're here today because the American people deserve the truth, they deserve accountability, and they deserve justice.

And so on from there, at some length. Having said that, we'll quickly add this:

It almost seemed that the T-bomb had been withdrawn at this point. No version of the word "treason" emerged from the Director's lips during her thirteen-minute statement.

There had still been "a years-long coup," but no claim of treason had been made—but then, the Q-and-A session began. 

At that point, Leavitt threw to Emily Jashinsky of UnHerd, a British news and opinion site. Jashinsky was perched in Leavitt's "new media seat." This exchange occurred:

LEAVITT: Thank you, Tulsi, and we do want to take questions on this topic while the Director has time for this topic. She will leave. I'm happy to take questions on other matters after that, but if anyone has questions for Director Gabbard, you're welcome to ask them. 

We'll start with our new media seat, as always. Emily, go ahead.

JASHINSKY: Thank you, and Director Gabbard, this one is for you. Do you believe that any of this new information implicates former President Obama in criminal behavior?

GABBARD: We have referred and will continue to refer all of these documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate the criminal implications of this.

JASHINSKY: For even former President Obama?

GABBARD: Correct. The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment, there are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.

Obama had likely engaged in criminal conduct. That said, the word "treason" still hadn't been heard. 

At that point, Leavitt called on Ed O'Keefe of CBS News. As usual, the deep state was up to no good.

For that obvious reason, this exchange occurred:

LEAVITT (continuing directly): Ed, go ahead.

O'KEEFE: Director Gabbard, thank you. So just two questions, but to begin on that. The president yesterday, you've inferred that the former president helped lead a coup. Based on what you now see, do you believe President Obama is guilty of treason?

GABBARD: I'm leaving the criminal charges to the Department of Justice. I'm not an attorney, but as I've said previously, when you look at the intent behind creating a fake manufactured intelligence document that directly contradicts multiple assessments that were created by the intelligence community, the expressed intent and what followed afterward can only be described as a years-long coup and a treasonous conspiracy against the American people, our republic, and an attempt to undermine President Trump's administration.

Borrowing from Camus, "The word [treason] had just been uttered for the first time." And yes, Gabbard seemed to say that the former president had engaged in some such conduct.

So it went as Director Gabbard brought her mountains of alleged evidence forward. How complicated can it get within her binders of bullet points? 

The complexification can be a bit overwhelming! Here's what happened next:

O'KEEFE (continuing directly): The Senate Intelligence Committee spent several years looking into this and unanimously agreed in a bipartisan fashion, Secretary of State Rubio was a member of that committee, that there was no political interference. There was a years-long Justice Department investigation into this as well that also concluded no political interference. So help us from a 50,000-foot level, explain—what do you now have that refutes those two [inaudible]?

GABBARD: I will encourage you. In my role as the Director of National Intelligence, my job began, as I said, when I came into this role, was to make sure that we are telling the truth to the American people and that we are ensuring that the intelligence community is not being politicized. So I'm not asking you to take my word for it. I'm asking you and the media to conduct honest journalism, and the American people to see for yourself in the documents that we've released now, close to 200 pages, that point in multiple references, multiple examples to include comments that have been made by senior intelligence professionals who are some still working within these agencies today that confirm the conclusions that we have drawn, that President Obama directed an Intelligence Community Assessment to be created to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a years-long coup to try to undermine President Trump's presidency.

Uh-oh! In a jumble of salad-adjacent locutions, Gabbard said she was asking the media (and the public itself!) to examine "close to 200 pages" of documents as they sought to confirm her swirling array of statements and accusations. 

She was making that simple request! Over at the Fox News Channel, it was extremely unlikely that a very small man with a mountain of anger was going to conduct such a search.

As of Wednesday, July 18, Gabbard was doubling down on her accusations, "treasonous" conduct and all. On Thursday evening, July 19, a major star of "cable news" could no longer hold it in.

The little guy was very angry, as he routinely is. In the next two days, we're going to show you what he told millions of viewers that night, right at the start of his heavily watched, prime time "cable news" program.

Can a sprawling nation expect to survive with people like this angry fellow in seats of "journalistic" power? You're asking a very good question—and all this week, we're going to ask you to ponder who this particular person actually is.

Hello, Stranger! As far as we know, the song emerged, live and direct, from the American song book. In the early years of the recorded music industry, it became one of the trademark songs of "The Original and Great Carter Family."

(Full disclosure! We opened for Johnny and June on one occasion in the late 1990s. Then, we stayed to watch.)

Why did the Carter Family choose to adopt that particular song? Even today, we have no idea.

That said, we're going to float in and out of that song this week as we ask you to contemplate a present-day state of affairs:

As at sacred Troy, so too here! For better or worse, an extremely angry population has been swarming over the walls of the prevailing American city state. The angry, coarse and profane Master Gutfeld, along with the T-bomb throwing Gabbard, is part of that furious swarm.

That said, who are these unfamiliar people? In many ways, this angry, swarming aggregation may seem like puzzling strangers to those of us in Blue America. 

Who are the strangers coming over the walls? They may seem like strangers to many of us, but is it also possible that those of us, in Blue America, are strangers to ourselves?

Last Thursday evening, a furious man on a "cable news" channel could no longer hold it in! We'll admit that he persistently seems like a very strange person to us.

Who in the world is this furious person? Also, who are the strangers in Blue America who are afraid to discuss this small man?

Tomorrow and Wednesday: What the strange man (astoundingly) said 

The discography: We first encountered Hello Stranger when it appeared as the initial cut on Mike Seeger's 1964 Vanguard album. That was during our high school years!

It was the opening track on the album. You can hear it by clicking here.

In the handful of years since then, Emmylou Harris has performed the song again and again. To hear the version she recorded with the late Nicolette Larson, you can just click this. (Our advice: Don't cheat yourself out of listening to this beautiful evocation.)

The story told by that mysterious song has always been a bit hard to decipher. We'll continue to float in and out of its lyrics as we pursue this week's pair of questions:

Who in the world are the furious strangers currently storming Blue America's walls? Also, who are the timorous strangers who insist on pretending that this "night assault" isn't occurring?

SATURDAY: "The images are disturbing," he said!

SATURDAY, JULY 26, 2025

In Gaza, mother and child: We've heard it said that starvation can be a difficult way to die.

It can also be a difficult thing to see, especially so if the starving person is, in fact, a child.

This was the week when the major news orgs began showing photos of such starving children. Yesterday morning, the New York Times did exactly that.

The Times published a very large photograph—a photo which dominated the space above the fold on the front page of its print editions. The caption beneath the photo said this:

Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition. A doctor said the number of children dying of malnutrition in Gaza had risen sharply.

That was a tough photo to look at. Subscribers didn't need to be physicians to suspect that the child in the photograph was perhaps approaching death.  

For those blocked by the newspaper's paywall, the photo can be seen here. To our eye, there's a hint of the Pietà there.

It was a very large photograph. Beneath that photo, a front-page report bore this headline:

Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: 'There Is Nothing'

Online, the dual headline says this:

Gazans Are Dying of Starvation
After 21 months of devastating conflict with Israel, Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians—the young, the old and the sick—are facing what aid groups say is impending famine.

On Thursday evening, the PBS NewsHour had aired a similar report—a report which condemned its viewers to look at similar visuals. Online, the PBS report carries this title:

Inside Gaza’s neonatal wards where babies born into a war zone battle the odds

You can watch that report by clicking here. "A warning," Nick Schifrin says before the visuals start. "The images in this story are disturbing."

We'd offer a different characterization: 

Extremely hard to watch.

Viewing the visuals, we thought of somewhat similar visuals which emerged from Europe, in the last century, after General Eisenhower's troops finally reached some of the sites where, among other atrocities, starvation was occurring. Anne Frank, a sacred child who's known all over the world, was almost able to hang on long enough to be saved.

We thought of a saying—"Never again"—and of a major American movie. 

More on that movie below. For now, this is the way a front-page report begins in today's New York Times:

No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say

For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.

But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.

In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.

Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from—and dying of—starvation.

For ourselves, we don't know why the food aid system has failed to work. But as the Times report continues from there, the reporting becomes more dire:

More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.

Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.

David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.

Israel moved in May toward replacing the U.N.-led aid system that had been in place for most of the 21-month Gaza war, opting instead to back a private, American-run operation guarded by armed U.S. contractors in areas controlled by Israeli military forces. Some aid still comes into Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.

The new system has proved to be much deadlier for Palestinians trying to obtain food handouts. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, almost 1,100 people have been killed by gunfire on their way to get food handouts under the new system, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fired on hungry crowds. Israeli officials have said they fired shots in the air in some instances because the crowds came too close or endangered their forces.

Last evening, on CNN, we watched as a doctor reported from Gaza about those food aid-related shootings. We can't give you the perfect truth about any of these disputed events. But that's what the news report says in today's New York Times.

Never again, or so the vow claimed. Then too, there's the painful 1964 film to which we've already referred:

The Pawnbroker

The Pawnbroker is a 1964 American drama film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sánchez and Morgan Freeman in his feature film debut. The screenplay was an adaptation by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin from the 1961 novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant.

The film was the first produced entirely in the United States to deal with the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a survivor. It earned international acclaim for Steiger, launching his career as an A-list actor... 

In 2008, The Pawnbroker was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

Plot

In Nazi Germany, Sol Nazerman, a German-Jewish university professor, is sent to a concentration camp along with his family. He witnesses his two children die and his wife raped by Nazi officers before she is killed.

Twenty-five years later, Nazerman is haunted by his memories. He operates a pawnshop in an East Harlem slum while living in an anonymous Long Island housing tract with his sister-in-law, who is also a Holocaust survivor, and her husband. Numbed and alienated by his experiences, he has trained himself not to show emotion. He describes himself as beyond bitter, viewing the poor people around him as "scum" and "rejects." He acts uninterested and cynical towards his desperate customers and gives them much less than their pawned goods are worth.

The plot continues from there. For better or worse, the film suggests that a person who, through no fault of his own, becomes the victim of unspeakable viciousness may perhaps, through no immediate fault of his own, be robbed on his own humanity in the process.

We frequently think of [NAME WTHHELD] at such times as these. More specifically, we think of the things she said about President Obama in the first few weeks after October 7.

We marvel anew at the remarkable things she said! We also marvel at the fact that we still see her on cable news programs—sometimes on CNN, sometimes on the Fox News Channel.

Last week, we even saw her praising God, along with Rachel Campos-Duffy, on Fox & Friends Weekend. Once again, we couldn't help remembering what she had said back then.

For the record, very few of us do as much as we possibly could about such events as the ones we're discussing. (We always marvel at the doctors and nurses who volunteer to go to such places to serve.)

Few of us do as much as we could! It might be worth keeping such thoughts in mind before we unload on the others.

FRIDAY: We humans aren't built for this line of work!

FRIDAY, JULY 25, 2025

Trump, Christopher do it again: Everybody makes mistakes. Tommy Christopher just made one.

Also, score a win for Donald J. Trump—a very slimy win.

Below, you see part of a transcript published by Christopher as part of this new report for Mediaite. The transcript includes a flaming misstatement made today by the highly erratic Trump.

It's a flaming misstatement by Trump. Christopher let it go:

REPORTER (7/25/25): Would you offer a pardon or clemency for Ghislaine Maxwell?

TRUMP: Well, I don’t want to talk about that. What I do want to say is that Todd is a great attorney.

But you ought to be speaking about Larry Summers. You ought to be speaking about some of his friends that are hedge fund guys. They’re all over the place.

You ought be speaking about Bill Clinton, who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island.

"I never went to the island," the fellow said.  As far as we know, that statement's correct. As far as we know, no one has ever shown anything different.

On his way to that denial, the sitting president had tossed in a different sort of statement. He said that President Clinton "went to the island 28 times."

He made that claim about Bill Clinton. Christopher let it go.

Our discourse has been hounded by this sort of conduct for at least the 33 years. People are dead all over the world because various people, not excluding mainstream journalists, made bushel baskets of such statements over those many long years, and because other journalists happily repeated the statements or chose to let them go.

What does the record actually show? Within the past week, Clinton has said, for the ten millionth time, that he never went to the island in question. 

As far as we know, no one has prevented any evidence showing anything different. For the record, Clinton managed to present this (repeated) denial without adding a bogus claim about the disordered fellow named Trump.

Trump seems to be borrowing his number—"28 times"—from an actual public record, but it's a public record of something totally different. We take you now to a report by FactCheck.org—a report which was published in August 2019, shortly after Epstein's death:

The Epstein Connections Fueling Conspiracy Theories

In the absence of information about how sex offender Jeffrey Epstein managed to die in prison by an apparent suicide on Aug. 10, outlandish conspiracy theories have cropped up across the political spectrum.

Among the more prominent theories are claims that the Clintons or President Donald Trump is somehow involved. Trump himself shared a comedian’s tweet peddling the baseless suggestion that former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were responsible.

When a reporter asked Trump about that on Aug. 13, the president said he had “no idea” if the Clintons were involved and referenced trips that Bill Clinton had taken on Epstein’s plane.

It’s true that Clinton had ties to Epstein, a wealthy financier who stood accused of sexually abusing dozens of young girls, and that the former president had traveled on Epstein’s plane. But Epstein had ties to Trump, too, and to other politicians who have been named in recently released court documents.

That's the way the report began, with Trump already peddling bogus accusations. Later on, the report detailed the published information about Bill Clinton's rides on that jet:

The Clinton Connection

[...]

By 2002, after Clinton had left office, the former president began to be listed as a passenger on Epstein’s private plane, a fact confirmed by Clinton’s spokesman on Twitter in July. Between Feb. 9, 2002, and Nov. 4, 2003, we counted a total of six trips; two of them were just one-way flights, though. In all, there were a total of 26 flights taken during the six trips, since several trips included multiple stops.

The flight logs for Epstein’s plane were recently unsealed in a lawsuit brought by one of his accusers. Here’s what we found:

Feb. 9, 2002—Clinton hopped a flight from Miami to Westchester, New York, where he lives.

March 19, 2002—Clinton was listed as flying from New York to London and then returning two days later.

May 22, 2002—Clinton flew from Japan to Hong Kong. The next day he flew to Singapore (by way of Shenzhen, China), where he gave a speech. On May 25, he left for Brunei, by way of Bangkok.

July 13, 2002—He attended a wedding in Morocco and then hopped a flight to New York, stopping in the Azores.

Sept. 21, 2002—Clinton left for a nine-day trip to Africa with actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, visiting Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique and South Africa. While there, he worked on HIV and AIDS prevention projects, democratization, and economic development. He finished the trip in England, where he addressed the Labour Party during its annual conference. In a 2002 profile of Epstein, Clinton is quoted as saying through a spokesman, “Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science. I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.” According to the flight records, this was the longest trip Clinton took on Epstein’s plane, and it accounted for 11 of the 26 total flights.

Nov. 4, 2003—About a year after the Africa trip, Clinton took what appears to be his last trip on Epstein’s plane. He flew from Brussels to Oslo, where he had a two-day visit with officials to work on his project to prevent HIV and AIDS in developing countries. He then flew to Hong Kong, by way of Siberia, and finished the trip in Beijing.

Shortly after Epstein’s death, Trump sowed confusion about Clinton’s use of the plane...

And so on from there.

For the record, all these trips were taken before Epstein's criminal conduct became publicly known. In 2019, Trump quickly got busy "sowing confusion," as he's done once again today. 

Now for a look at the record:

As you can see, Clinton was known to have taken 26 "flights," but those 26 flights were part of just 11 "trips." 

Several of the "trips" involved multiple flights around the world in support of the Clinton Foundation's work on AIDS prevention, democratization and economic development. In September 2002, the former president took an extended trip through several continents in support of the foundation's missions. 

That one trip accounted for eleven (11) of the 26 "flights." The trip in November 2003—the trip from Brussels to Oslo to Siberia, then on to Hong Kong and Beijing—also accounted for a substantial number of Clinton's 26 "flights."

He was working on AIDS prevention. Today, as only someone like Trump would do, those journeys were converted into 28 trips to the island—and hapless news orgs around the world are letting his statement go. 

Everybody makes mistakes. Thanks to Christopher's bungle, Mediaite joins the ranks of those orgs.

We've been trying to tell you us something for the past quite a few years. We base our assessment on roughly forty years observing this kind of behavior:

We human being simply aren't built for this line of work! 

We aren't smart enough to do this work, and we aren't sufficiently honest. We prove this again and again and again. Then we prove it some more.

We had actually planned to write about Tulsi Gabbard's latest amazing statement. Before we could accomplish that task, this tired old groaner popped up. 

This sort of thing simply never stops. At present, given the speed of the discourse, there's no possible way to keep up. 

We'll score it as Donald J. Trump's latest win as we move down the road to perdition.