transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] Welcome to Pod Save America Only Friends, I'm Erin Ryan.

Speaker 2:
[00:08] I'm Jane Coaston.

Speaker 1:
[00:09] Banter, banter, banter.

Speaker 2:
[00:10] We're bantering, how are you?

Speaker 1:
[00:11] How are you feeling today? I'm getting some interesting cracks in my back. One cool thing about getting older is you're like, ooh, new bones pop every day.

Speaker 2:
[00:20] Yeah, I don't like the day when I was like, I have a back, because you go through so much of your life with your body just being an amorphous blob, and then there's like, oh, I have distinct views about my left shoulder. I don't like that, not fun.

Speaker 1:
[00:32] Yeah, no, I don't like it either, but you know what, I'm excited for today's show.

Speaker 2:
[00:35] I am also excited.

Speaker 1:
[00:37] We are gonna get into two big media stories and one big gross story, if we have time at the very end. I love a gross story. I love a Daily Mail gross story. So we're gonna talk about two media stories before we get to the gross, though. The onion tweaking, one of the biggest reddest noses in America. He's so red. He's so red, he is.

Speaker 2:
[00:56] He's like dangerously red.

Speaker 1:
[00:58] He looks like, I think on our, this fucking guy video on him, I said that he looked like a finger with like a string wrapped around it too many times.

Speaker 2:
[01:06] He looks red enough that I'm like, if you did have to receive a IV, where are you putting it in? Because you know that skin is thick as hell.

Speaker 1:
[01:17] I mean, he has got a pregnancy glow for very strange reason. I don't know how it even happened physically, how that works for him. His blood volume is probably large.

Speaker 2:
[01:27] But yes, he is quite red.

Speaker 1:
[01:28] Yes. So the Onion Purchased Infowars out from under Alex Jones, it appears and is about to relaunch it. So we're going to talk about that. New York Magazine's The Cut has published yet another unhinged personal essay that calls to mind an earlier era of ill-advised confessionals. You and I were both there when the dark magic was written. So whenever something like this comes up and everyone's like, oh my god, I feel like we all have to take a ride on the party bus. But before we get into the show, we have a quick request for everyone listening to this episode of Only Friends. And yes, we know you pay to not hear ads, so we'll keep this brief. We made a survey because we want to know more about you, what you like, what you don't, how we can make your Friends of the Pod subscription better. And if you're one of our Apple or YouTube subscribers, this is kind of our only shot to reach you. Those platforms don't exactly make it easy for us to check in. So this is us shooting our shot. If you've got a few minutes, head to crooked.com/survey and let us know what you think. Again, that's crooked.com/survey. Okay, now let's get to the show.

Speaker 2:
[02:33] So let's start with the Onion purchasing Infowars. And if you feel like the story kind of already happened, it's been going on for a long time. For about the past two years, the Onion has been trying to take over Alex Jones' Infowars to turn it into a parody of itself. Originally, the Onion tried to acquire the site in a bankruptcy sale after Alex Jones was rightfully in my view, bankrupted by saying that the Sandy Hook school shootings that murdered so many very small children were a government hoax to promote gun control. As a side note, I love how all of these government hoaxes slash conspiracy theories are all so brilliant, but then they never actually do the thing that the hoax was supposed to do. The government never got to that stage of taking all our guns away. But anyway, so that bankruptcy sale failed. The Onion did not give up, and on Monday, the Onion announced it had agreed to a new deal to take over Alex Jones' Infowars. It's all just waiting for approval from a judge in Texas, so hopefully very soon. Infowars will turn from a site that peddles lies for evil into a site that peddles lies for the sake of comedy. Here is a clip of Tim Heidecker making the announcement.

Speaker 3:
[03:43] Hey everybody, I got some breaking news for you. It's looking very likely that Global Tetrahedron will seize control of Infowars in the coming days. The folks at Global Tetrahedron have asked me to step in to run the show over there and become a big part of the future. So we're exploring, sorry. My name is Tim Heidecker and I'm just here to let you know that I am now in charge of Infowars. It's an honor to take over the reins and chart a new path towards the future. We're looking forward to relaunching the site soon in the next coming months and we're not really sure what we're going to do with it. We're talking about all sorts of ideas. We were playing around with it being a real estate broker service or a cryptocurrency exchange market, a place to store pictures, almost like a Dropbox account. Not sure, a lot of ideas, but very excited to take this on. I just want to wish everyone, extend a hand of friendship and grace as we proceed through this process. It's not going to be easy, but I can assure you that we have our best intentions in mind. We are in the city of brotherly love and I want to extend that sentiment to all our friends over there. Long time fans and consumers of the Infowars products. We got some exciting products coming as well. We are working with a company that will enable you to turn your piss, urine into gold. So stay tuned for more information about that. And stay with us, stay updated on Infowars for more information as this story develops.

Speaker 2:
[05:33] As you might imagine, Alex Jones did not handle this well. He is not happy with the deal. Here he is talking about it. He is shirtless because the skin walkers have taken the shirt off his back.

Speaker 4:
[05:47] Folks, the Onion has stolen the shirt off of Alex Jones' back at this point. And it's a sad thing to see. Are you an employee of the Onion now, Alex?

Speaker 5:
[05:57] No, we laugh about this. But a year and a half ago, they announced that they now owned us. And it was all a fraud. This time, they even had a court hearing when they're announcing they own us. Which shows, with this judge that's been super corrupt, the state judge, it's already a done deal. But don't worry, we got a bunch of legal avenues. It'd be one thing if they just shut us down. But they are telling the New York Times and obviously more videos that they're going to misrepresent, if you played the trailer. They're going to misrepresent that they're us to confuse people and quote rip people off like Alex Jones did. They're going to make money. But the whole thing is about defaming me. You can't take somebody over and then act like you're somebody if you say it's a parody. You can do a parody of somebody, but none of you took something from them. You've already checked with lawyers. So they're in deep shit. I'm already suing the Democrat Party law firms. I've already got civil rights lawsuits. So you think, look, just because you're wearing my shirt, don't mean you're me.

Speaker 2:
[06:47] I'm just like, I look at that man and I'm like, you could have been an Eastern European power lifter and we could have had something so much better. But the deal calls for the Onion to pay $81,000 a month to license the infowars.com domain brand name, which the receiver says will cover carrying costs to preserve and protect the assets of the receivership estate until an appeal filed by Jones is decided and the path is cleared for sale. That's from NPR. So this has been an ongoing story. And the thing about Infowars, and I've mentioned this to you before, is that like what Alex Jones is doing, even there, and it was interesting watching him talking to his cohost. His cohost seemed kind of amused by all of this, like kind of like, oh, are you an employee of The Onion now? And Alex Jones is like, I know we're joking about this. This is very serious. I'm shirtless. Like the line between, I've mentioned this before, but when Alex Jones was in the midst of divorce proceedings, and you will not be shocked to know that Alex Jones is incredibly divorced, his attorney said that this whole thing that he did, that he has been doing for years, that he did, you know, he was in A Scanner Darkly, that film from early 2000s.

Speaker 1:
[08:00] Yeah, Linklater is a big fan of his.

Speaker 2:
[08:02] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[08:02] We did this fucking guy.

Speaker 2:
[08:03] Oh yes, I'm aware, I'm aware. I know, you got deep into the lore. But like, what he is doing, or what he claimed to be doing in court was performance art. And what is performance art, and what is whatever this is, is like, you know, it's eye of the beholder, whatever. But it's always been interesting watching Infowars in moments in which you can see that Alex Jones is not sure which part to play. You saw that during the Kanye interview, the most unhinged, roughly 30 minutes of television, I've or video I've ever seen. But you can even see this here where he's like, you know, we're going to sue all these law firms and we're very upset about this. But his colleagues seemed kind of amused by all of it. And it's that something that, you know, Infowars has had, I think, a deleterious impact on American culture and on America writ large, especially because, as he notes, you know, we're going to rip people off just like Alex Jones did. And Alex Jones is very offended by this. And I'm like, sir, you sell the same products as Goop, you just relabel them differently. You know, this entire thing is a means by which you can sell vitamins and supplements and those like long lasting foods that you can use when the end comes, which is actually like a, at some point, I would love to talk to you for like another video about the entire industry. What's been going on for like 40 years of pre-prepared meals sold by right wing figures for the end times, that like, oh, here's like oatmeal for 300 years or something like that. But that's the kind of thing that like it's a means by which, you know, Infowars is a means by which of making money. It's just how it has been used to make money that resulted in so much pain and so much anguish for so many people. And with the support of Donald Trump, who called into the show multiple times in 2015, with the support of so many people who all, I think, to some degree thought it was K-Fabe. And whether it was or wasn't, it all, the results have been terrible for everyone.

Speaker 1:
[10:13] Yeah, I mean, here's the thing though. I mean, as we see, Ben Collins is the onion purchasing Infowars. And Ben did some interviews. He did an interview with the Publatory. He's kind of like a bullion with glee over this. I know that they've been working on it for a really long time. And he hates Alex Jones. But I've been thinking about this kind of more holistically. And I feel like everybody's kind of Infowars now, man. Infowars got hugely successful because it was the only one doing the thing it was doing at the time it was doing it. But the market has now become diluted.

Speaker 2:
[10:51] You can just go on Rumble and watch an equivalent of Infowars all the time.

Speaker 1:
[10:55] All of right-wing media is like Infowars. Candice is Infowars. They're all Infowars. Tucker is Infowars. Everybody's Infowars. Megyn Kelly's Infowars. I mean, How the Mighty Have Fallen. But it's so, and even on the left, they're not equivocal, but there is a lot more eagerness to embrace and explore conspiracy related thought at all points on the political spectrum. I feel like reality itself is coming, is dissolving and Alex Jones had a hand in that. So I am so curious how Tim Heidecker as the creative director of this new Infowars project is going to differentiate what is parody from what is reality because what is reality is so insane. Like right now, Candace Owens and Laura Loomer are in like a roast battle on social media and it's so over the top that I'm like, I don't think I could write this as a parody. But I do have a lot of faith in Tim Heidecker because he's always been able to do things that are like a step further than anybody else is doing in comedy. So I'm very curious to see how he's gonna like handle the creative challenge of this.

Speaker 2:
[12:05] I also think that this is all coming at a terrible time for Alex Jones because Donald Trump has betrayed him. And now he's decided that it's time to use the 25th Amendment to get rid of Donald Trump because he's obviously riddled with dementia and his ankles are swelling and he is close to death. So this has been a very hard time for Alex Jones. And I wish him many more hard times to come.

Speaker 1:
[12:27] Likewise, okay, a second topic in the past 48 hours. This story has taken over Twitter feeds and group chats alike, and also the Culture Slack channel at Crooked. It's another one of those same as it ever was. Here's the headline, Losing My Friend Over Govee. She hid her semiglutide use, knowing that I would spiral. She was right, and we haven't spoken since. Okay, so this writer, this essayist wrote a piece that was like a personal essay at XO Jane Style. It happened to me. I know that's a blast from the past, but it was like she was at her friend's house. She was staying at her friend's house where she had, she either was the roommate or she used to be the roommate.

Speaker 2:
[13:14] This person, good friend, had let her live in her home.

Speaker 1:
[13:18] For free.

Speaker 2:
[13:18] For free.

Speaker 1:
[13:19] Because she had to take care of her dog.

Speaker 2:
[13:20] She lost her job. And so she's at this person's apartment to take care of their foster dog, which is a nice thing to do.

Speaker 1:
[13:28] Yeah, so anyway, it seems like this woman, the author, has benefited immensely from the friendship. The friendship has given her a lot of things that she needed and that's great. A lot of us would do something for our friend if we had the resources, but one day she opened up the fridge and saw that there was Govee in there and decided that she can't be friends with her friend anymore. She has like a total spiral and tries to justify it, this sort of like navel gaze-y, like, I can't be your friend because I used to have an eating disorder and now this is-

Speaker 2:
[13:54] She can't go to book club anymore with this person because she wants to discuss it, Miranda July's novel, All Four's, which that's a whole other-

Speaker 1:
[14:06] It's about female indulgence after a time of self-negation in the context of motherhood.

Speaker 2:
[14:11] She can't do this in front of this person because she cannot discuss this while knowing that someone whom she is very close to reportedly is taking Wigovie.

Speaker 1:
[14:27] Yeah. Here's the thing. We don't need to get too in the weeds about the story, but what really got me was that I've worked in women's media for a really long time. Since 2015, I've worked in women's media with some little breaks. I've been doing other things. This style of essay is very familiar to me, and I did this kind of ex-editor thing, looking into it. I looked into the author. She's written three modern love columns, which in one of them, she's written a couple. Her whole bread and butter is writing these personal essays about some wacky shit she's in when it comes to her relationships. There was one, her name is Sophia Ortega, and there's one essay about, she had a series of essays about this boyfriend that she had that was a feeder that wanted her to eat in front of him, and then she couldn't do it, so she decided to open up their relationship. It's all very thought catalog to me.

Speaker 2:
[15:22] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[15:23] So here's my first question, and I know that you probably have the same instincts that I do, is to be like, who is this person? What else have they written? Do they seem like they've got all their marbles? Did you think that this was a responsible piece for the cut to assign to this author? Or do you think that this author is gaming the system? Is she being gamed by writing all of these pieces where she sounds a little bit unhinged and publishing them in various places? Or is the system gaming her by exploiting her ability to clearly have issues with boundaries and privacy and herself? In one of her other pieces, she wrote about how she had to read a book about boundaries and she never got all the way through it.

Speaker 2:
[16:04] I think it's a mutual exploitation. I was just going through some of her modern love pieces. She actually has a very recent one talking about how she started sleeping with someone who was subletting her home. There's another piece that had to do with other stuff going on. I know that those pieces are submitted. The degree to which she was-

Speaker 1:
[16:30] Did you fact check it all? You used to work at The Times, right?

Speaker 2:
[16:32] I did. I don't know if modern love pieces are fact checked. I would guess that they are because I can see where that could go if it wasn't. But I do think that there is an element of mutual exploitation. I think that it is created by an environment we know very well. The reason why people seem really upset by this now, it's interesting to me because you and I came up, like the first things I wrote, which you cannot find.

Speaker 1:
[17:06] Challenge accepted. No, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 2:
[17:09] I will do it.

Speaker 1:
[17:10] I respect boundaries.

Speaker 2:
[17:11] Some of the first things I wrote were of that confessional type of piece because the things that you could get published easily as a woman who was not, I didn't have a political internship. I didn't do any of those things.

Speaker 1:
[17:25] You got to harvest your own organs.

Speaker 2:
[17:26] Yeah. You basically get-

Speaker 1:
[17:28] That's the way you get started.

Speaker 2:
[17:29] Yeah. You give other people stuff about yourself and write about it. People are like, whether it's exo Jane, it happened to me, where you learned things you didn't need to know about other people. But that was that kind of exploitative means by which you could write. It's interesting that men who were writing at that time kind of had the like, I took acid and went to the Westminster dog show, and women had the like, it happened to me, the worst thing you've ever heard of in your entire life.

Speaker 1:
[17:58] Or I took acid and went to CES. Yeah. I combine both of the things.

Speaker 2:
[18:02] I know. But it's like a cartoon state who's an amazing sub stacker. She had a joke thing that was a tweet that was like, clearly unstable person. I'm kind of jealous of my cat for the attention she gets over her worm infection. I'm not going to go to court for this drama. I exiled my husband to the pool house and spent 20K on a pair of sunglasses. The cut. Say less. We're in. I think that that's really the exploitation piece comes in here because the cut knows what it's doing. I just looked. I know.

Speaker 1:
[18:29] But I find it a little bit unethical.

Speaker 2:
[18:33] Oh, it is. Too deeply.

Speaker 1:
[18:35] I mean, I know I can't speak as though I'm morally completely pure and I've never commissioned a piece from somebody where I'm like, oh, should they write this? Is this going to be good for them? As an editor, I think part of your job is to protect your writer. Literally protect your writer from bad writing, protect your writer from saying something that they don't mean that could be misconstrued and get them in trouble, and protect your writer from being crazy in public. Those are the things you're supposed to do. I don't know that it's always-

Speaker 2:
[19:06] I've experienced there is a fairly prominent person who was an editor of mine briefly on a piece, who punched up a piece of mine to such an extent that a bunch of people got very mad at me. I remember looking at the draft and looking at what got published, and I'm like, what happened here?

Speaker 1:
[19:22] Oh, God. Or like the predatory headline, that's another thing that would happen. It's like writers don't usually write their own headlines, but a good shop will have it so a writer can approve the headline before it runs. But not every place does that, and you shouldn't assume that they do.

Speaker 2:
[19:35] No, you should not. Occasionally, an editor needs to protect the writer from themselves, because there are people. We had this conversation yesterday. I was like, is this a real person? Like, is this person?

Speaker 1:
[19:45] Oh, right. I thought they were maybe joking.

Speaker 2:
[19:47] Yeah. But like, I'm pretty sure at this point, I'm like, no, this is a real person.

Speaker 1:
[19:51] This is a real person.

Speaker 2:
[19:52] This is just their thing. But also at a certain point, like I can say the cut knew what it was doing. Currently, it has 556 comments on the cut, which for New York Magazine is a lot of comments. Like, they also, like, for their columns.

Speaker 1:
[20:07] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[20:08] Like, I've read some other pieces that were like deeply, like they just had a great piece talking about a 1980s art gallerist who also was a murderer. And it was super interesting. And I checked yesterday, it may have more now, but I think it had like 10 comments.

Speaker 1:
[20:23] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[20:24] Like, you got to be, like, this is the kind of writing that gets people to engage.

Speaker 1:
[20:31] Yeah, this is, I mean, speaking of, I think that that's just why I wanted to talk about it, to just be like, this is what is happening. This is what this piece is. Like, these are the questions that somebody should ask themselves as they're reading a piece. But you know what, Sophia? Get your bag, girl. If it's working for you, if this is what's working for you, then I like it.

Speaker 2:
[20:49] Get your bag.

Speaker 1:
[20:50] Yeah, do it.

Speaker 2:
[20:51] You're going to write a memoir. Please don't write the memoir. You're going to. I know you are.

Speaker 1:
[20:55] Well, just be careful because the main characters in social media, that doesn't always translate into book sales.

Speaker 2:
[21:03] No, it does not.

Speaker 1:
[21:04] But I want to talk really briefly about one more mutually exploitative thing, this late breaking story about a, I'm going to read the headline because it's extremely daily mail. The headline is, mail plus exclusive, secret sugar daddy sex scandal explodes inside Trump's counterterrorism HQ. Glamorous senior aides, voracious text messages, itemized trophies and her utterly shameless justification. Basically, there's a top level counterterrorism official. She's like 29 years old and she engages in sugar baby relationships with older men who spend money on her, and she demands a lot of money spent on her. One of the men that she-

Speaker 2:
[21:44] She's fond of sultry spaces. I don't know what that means. It's good alliteration, but-

Speaker 1:
[21:49] That is sultry spaces. One of the men that she engaged in a relationship with seems to have some sour grapes and leaked a bunch of this stuff to the Daily Mail.

Speaker 2:
[21:59] Yeah, an older executive and divorced father.

Speaker 1:
[22:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[22:02] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[22:02] We're not going to show you any pictures because it's a Daily Mail and they're very litigious about having pictures re-appropriated or shown elsewhere, but suffice to say, just Google that headline and you'll be able to see some pictures of the woman. Picture the woman with the exact picture, the face of Cash Patel's girlfriend, but just like with slight variations because eventually they all have the same face. This woman is a 29-year-old woman named Julia Varvaro, and yeah, she went on fancy vacations and demanded jewelry and rent payments and stuff, and this guy got really mad and now they're broken up. He said that he found her profile in a sugar baby website shortly after the breakup and he turned it over to the Daily Mail.

Speaker 2:
[22:41] Which is what you do when you're a deeply responsible, very normal person. Of course, I've never forgotten that the Daily Mail, which has an American presence obviously, they love the Trump administration because it brings in their two favorite things, conventionally attractive hot women and people making terrible decisions. The Daily Mail loves that. I remember they were the people who broke the Rob Porter, Hope Hicks thing in the first administration. Then we're like, oh, Rob Porter's been accused of domestic violence. The moment I was like, a conventionally attractive woman is doing something and you can find out what it is. The Daily Mail will hide in your trash for that.

Speaker 1:
[23:25] Absolutely. It's an interesting story though, because this is like a tale as old as time. You have the sugar daddy type guys in his 60s and divorced and old, and then he gets mad when she likes him for his money. It's like, wait, I thought she liked my personality. No, sir, you sold yourself as somebody who was available for money. Anyway, this is a funny thing and it's a fooled again, fell for it again award type situation. There's always going to be men who are like, yeah, this is real love and the woman is like, I want a Cartier bracelet and then they get upset when they don't get a bracelet anymore.

Speaker 2:
[24:04] I will also say that she was a long time regular on One America News in 2024 and talking about how Obama was running a shadow government. There is again, right-wing media is very vulnerable to conventionally attractive women saying the things that you want to hear. I mean, we just saw that story.

Speaker 1:
[24:22] That's why so many men are getting spied on by hot women with no resumes that are suddenly well positioned. Right.

Speaker 2:
[24:28] Or they are attempting to give money to AI profiles of hot women saying mega things, and then putting a nice Indian American man through college.

Speaker 1:
[24:36] Right. They're buying AI-generated footpicks of a woman that doesn't exist, who you could tell didn't exist if you simply Googled her name or tried to read the letters on her military uniform.

Speaker 2:
[24:47] If you cannot read the letters on the signs behind her, don't send her money or ask if she is a boyfriend.

Speaker 1:
[24:54] Those aren't real feet.

Speaker 2:
[24:55] No, they are not real feet.

Speaker 1:
[24:56] You can make your own feet. Put pretty feet in the prompt and it'll give you them for free.

Speaker 2:
[25:01] The Internet is so full of feet.

Speaker 1:
[25:04] So full of feet, exactly. All right. That about wraps up my stories that I wanted to talk about today. Now let's end with a Discord question.

Speaker 2:
[25:12] Shibbles and Bitts asks, do you think once the primary season is over, more Republicans might go against Trump in Congress since he now can't back a challenger to them? And this goes to like an overarching question about like Trump's power over politicians and Republicans. We are currently, as of yesterday, he hit 33% approval in the AP North poll, which is like we are getting towards RIP, great guy, Jimmy Carter territory.

Speaker 1:
[25:42] I'm sorry, but if this were a baseball game, 33% would be a good batting average.

Speaker 2:
[25:46] I'm aware, I'm aware, like yes, like we'd all be like, oh my God, he's the next Sho'ai Otani. He's hitting 333. Like that would be incredible, but that's also, baseball is very hard. It's actually pretty, we are now getting to a level of popularity, like low popularity, where I'm like, this is taking some work. You had to do a foreign war and give up on all your promises and lie to a bunch of people.

Speaker 1:
[26:10] Plus the pedophilia.

Speaker 2:
[26:11] I mean, well, there's that. There's also that, but the issue has long been that the people who vote in GOP primaries love Trump more than they love their own families. But would there be a chance that if you got to the general, would you be like, I'm going to stand up to Trump, it's time someone did, it's time for us to, not even, maybe you just don't even mention Trump at all. Maybe you start talking about like, it's time for the next generation, it's time to be thinking forward, like making that kind of future sounding mouth noises while knowing that Trump will be furious at you, but maybe that's helpful if you want to appear more independent. I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[26:56] Yeah, here's my answer to that question. No, I think it'll be a zero sum game and here's why. I think that the primary is not the threat that these people see. It's one of the threats, but I think that most conservatives and MAGA, GOP people are extremely online and being extremely online season never ends. They never log off and I think that they're more afraid of having people mad at them online or losing followers or not being booked on Tucker Show or not getting attention. They're more afraid of losing the attention.

Speaker 2:
[27:31] The money. There's a lot of money.

Speaker 1:
[27:34] I don't think it's so much money as it's like people. It's just like the shortest little circuit in their brain is they don't want people to get mad and they don't want like what cat turd to tweet at a mean way. I think they don't want to piss Donald Trump off because they don't want to be called out by him and get like that barrage of hate. Because they cannot tell the difference between real and fantasy because they spend too much time online. I'm thinking like you're Mike Lee, not that he would ever go against Trump, but like some podunk representative from my parents' district in Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany, is not going to try to go against Trump and stoke people up, even though he's running for governor, I think.

Speaker 2:
[28:15] Not everybody is going to be a Thomas Massey, who being a libertarian loves making people mad.

Speaker 1:
[28:21] I love Thomas Massey. Unironically, I love him. I could do a whole show on Thomas Massey.

Speaker 2:
[28:27] It's a very specific type of guy. Oh, like a cranky, too smart. When I did a lot of reporting following the Libertarian Convention in 2016, just a whole bunch of that kind of guy.

Speaker 1:
[28:40] Yeah, but he's like a genius.

Speaker 2:
[28:42] He is very smart. He's very smart.

Speaker 1:
[28:43] He built a robot chicken coop.

Speaker 2:
[28:46] He will win his primary. It does not matter what Trump does to him. But most people aren't like that, and they will, I think. The direct incentive of, I don't want to get screamed at by people who know where I live. I totally understand that.

Speaker 1:
[28:58] Oh yeah, because MAGA people online are very scary. That's another thing. It's not just like, I'm being really dismissive about like legit fears that somebody may have.

Speaker 2:
[29:06] No, no, no, they're very scary.

Speaker 1:
[29:07] It's not just people will yell at you online. It's like people might call in a bomb threat to your wife's work. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[29:13] And so like, I think that that's the challenge here, especially because you're dealing with people like, you're dealing with your actual neighbors. You're dealing with people who are in your actual district. And I think like that's why I'm also kind of less, I don't think that more Republicans will start going against Trump in Congress. And I also think like we have seen, like I think polarization is such that there's always like a theoretical Democrat. It reminds me there's a conservative writer, Rod Dreher, who since moved to Hungary and paid by Orbán's government. But that's a side thing. And he was in Louisiana. He used to live in Louisiana where he was married. He no longer is. Again, side note. But like he would write all the time for, he wrote for the American Conservatives magazine. And he'd be like, you know, I really don't like Trump. But then I read this story that there's like a teacher in Seattle who did something and it would always seem as if like, well, I was going to push back on this thing that Trump did or some right winger did. But like a theoretical liberal somewhere else where I don't live, that has zero impact on my actual life, living in a very conservative area of a very conservative state. They did something I don't like. So we just can't have that. And I think that the threat, the omnipresent threat of the theoretical liberal looms so large in the right wing imagination.

Speaker 1:
[30:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[30:37] Like there was so much of Fox News that was just like, somewhere, someone did something we don't like and we are going to ruin their lives. We're going to libs of TikTok them. We're going to ruin everything about them. But we are going to use them as the ultimate boogeyman that like, you might be living in a Trump plus 24 district, but somewhere, there's a trans person existing. What if that trans person theoretically went to the same grocery store as you? Then what? What would happen then? It's like, I do think that there's a degree to which it's not just about Trump. It is about the ways in which Trump and the American right, even pre-Trump, have used the omnipresent threat of the theoretical liberal as a cudgel to keep people in line.

Speaker 1:
[31:25] Yeah. I don't think that primaries are magical recipes for people growing backbones. But who knows? Donald Trump might call somebody's wife ugly, and they might actually have a little bit more moral gumption than Ted Cruz, and they might be like, no, wait a minute, sir. But TBD, I hope that I'm wrong, and I hope that post primaries people are a little bit less afraid of stepping to Trump and speaking up. But on the other hand, I'm not sure that I'm a little bit of a cynic when it comes to this sort of thing. When it comes to the courage of the GOP in 2026.

Speaker 2:
[32:03] I mean, we can always hope. Inshallah. Erin, thanks for hanging out.

Speaker 1:
[32:07] Yeah, thanks for hanging out.

Speaker 2:
[32:08] Thank you for listening to Pod Save America Only Friends, and we will see you guys in two weeks.

Speaker 6:
[32:14] Pod Save America Only Friends is a perfect media production. Our producers are Elijah Cohn, Caroline Reston, and Claire Fogarton. Our video producers are Dan Hefko, Kirill Palaviv, Annie Moffat, and the show is edited by Dan Farrell. Thank you to Ashley Campion, Amy Jones, and Benzie Cruz for production support every week. Our production staff are proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.