The Worst Takes of 2025 [TEASER]

I think we did. I think we might have to.

“What if this whole episode is just us reading feedback to the show, negative feedback?”

Your worst take the boy like the boy's take feedback or whatever? Do uh, tagline. I'm doing this thing, um, okay. Peter. Michael.

What do you know about the worst takes of 2025? All I know is that for the third year in a row, the worst takes of the year were all light criticism of me.

So, the year in worst takes, the year in bed takes, uh, this was an incredible year for

bad takes, this was one of the championship worst takes years. We have sort of kept tabs on the worst takes of the year. And I think that means that we have, we have between us, the actual worst takes of the year. This is the definitive list. Number one, people saying that I was too nice to Elon Musk.

[laughing] No reasons to advise either, that's just this week what you've been thinking about. No reasons to advise, just the last blue sky reply I got.

“The only thing you've been thinking and uh, texting me about for the last two weeks.”

You do a two parter about how this guy is the biggest piece of shit on earth. And then at one point you're like, hey, and by the way, he knows how to do vertical integration. And then people are like, Peter, you're a sucker. As usual, I am using this as an opportunity to reflect on the year that has come behind us. Yeah. I think politically the central fact of this year was that it became undeniable

that we're in the middle of an authoritarian resurgence. Yeah, it's really fucking obvious what has happened to United States at this point. And so the op-ed pages of the country had to like deal with it. Like, what are they going to do as this becomes just increasingly thuddingly obvious. So I have pulled out a couple of categories of bad takes because they're all

kind of interchangeable on some of them. So my first category is just brain dead, both sizing.

The most like, like, egregious example of this is we're not going to talk about it in any detail, but the miserable Olivia wrangle piece in the free press saying that like you say kids are starving, but they're actually starving in Gaza. Like just monstrous shit.

“Probably the most disgusting thing I've read this year. Yeah, morally it's the worst thing we saw this year.”

It's absolutely egregious. There's just not that much to say about it because it's like you're you're defending people who are starving children. On the grounds that the children were already sick or have a preexisting condition and like the implication is that it's all fate or people are overacting. And then like a month after that piece came out there is this big partnership among all of these various UN agencies and NGOs, the integrated food security,

phase classification. They declared famine in Gaza. So it was like their word against Olivia wrangle in the free press. That was meant to be what you're takeaway. We also had Megan McCartel wrote an article called The Missing Context from the Elon Musk Salute. The Washington Post published indefense of the White House ballroom Trump versus Nimbees. Not in my backyard, but the backyard is the White House. Yep, you may think it's bad, but it's actually fine. We also had Brett Stevens writing,

no, comma Israel is not committing genocide. Persuasion wrote the case for tariffs. Yeah, persuasion also published when they go low, we go dot dot dot, low. That is about Gavin Newsom's tweets. Persuasion is so interesting because it's like what if the free press had no money? What if they were just in it for the love of the game? But then my favorite both sides take. This is from June third, 2025. It's called How History will remember Elon Musk by someone named Louise Perry. It's

in the New York Times. I'm gonna send you the Nut Graph. This actually isn't my winner. This is a honorary mention. For better words, Elon Musk is a visionary. Oh, this is just this is just quoting me from the upper end. You're so mad about this. I'm obviously mad. I have no doubt that he's volatile and reckless, but those who dismiss him as a fraud or an idiot have not been paying close attention. Yes, his time meddling with the federal government has come to an end, and yes,

perhaps as Faray and the politics was in part a disappointment to him. But Mr. Musk's vision goes

well beyond Washington. He has always been clear on this point, and continues to tell anyone who will

listen. Eventually, all life on earth will be destroyed by the sun. He told Fox News last month. No one wants to admit. No one wants to admit it. The sun is gradually expanding. The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multi-planet civilization because Earth will be incinerated. This is something that will happen by the way in five billion years. The human

to be killed by either Elon Musk or someone exactly like him way before this happens. My actual winner for the best achievement in both sizing is from the Atlantic on June 7th, 2025, called sometimes a parade is just a parade. Not everything the Trump administration does is a threat to democracy. And this is about the military parade. The deranged military parade that he wanted to have on his birthday, name one difference between this and every parade you've ever seen. Wait, who's who's the

“author? This is Cory Shake. Fake name, right? No, I think it's real. It's like you're now you're”

glancing around the room. You're like Cory Shake. Well, real name is Harlem, but she changed it. Terrible. She starts by summarizing the criticism of the parade. She says criticism of the display

begins with its price tag estimated as high as $45 million dollars. No, which is not. That's

not. That's not the primary criticism of the military parade. No, and then she gives a bunch of examples of that, which we're not going to read because they're boring. She then says other prominent critics of the Trump administration have expressed concern that the parade's real purpose is to use the military to intimidate the president's critics. Then she gives some examples of that. And then Peter, she responds to the criticism. This is slightly long, but we want to get the full argument in

all it's glory here. The full shake, as we're calling it. But these critics may well be projecting more general concerns about Trump onto a parade. Not everything the Trump administration does

“is destructive to democracy. And the example of bestial day in France suggests that dictatorships”

are not the only governments to hold military displays. The US itself has been known to mount

victory parades after successful military campaigns. In today's climate, a military parade could offer an opportunity to counter misperceptions about the armed forces. It could bring Americans closer to service members and juice military recruitment, all of which is sorely needed. It could be doing a thing that it's not doing. I don't, okay. The risk, of course, is that Trump will use the occasion not to celebrate the troops, but to corrode their professionalism

by proclaiming them his military and his generals. This is a president known to mix politics with honoring the military, as he did at Arlington National Cemetery at West Point's Commencement, and in a memorial day posed on true social calling his opponents scum. To be fair, will he do the

thing that he has always done, or will he do a thing that he has never done? Yeah. Even so,

the Commander-in-Chief has a right to engage with the military, the Americans elected him to lead. The responsibility of the military and of the country is to look past the president's hollow solopsism and embrace the men and women who defend the United States. Look past it, Peter. Look past everything he's ever done in his whole life. Everything he does and says, look past the symbolism. Look past the purpose of it. Look past the person running it. Find a fake

purpose. Yep. And then embrace that. This article says at the end, a version of this essay originally appeared on the AEI ideas forum from the American Enterprise Institute. So this person is a fucking ghoul, but the Atlantic is running this, right? And the Atlantic has like a

“overwhelmingly kind of center-left readership. I think like you can see the little gears turning in”

their brain. What's actually happening in the country is this one-dimensional fascist power crap. Like it makes no sense to even deny this at this point. The problem with Punditree in this era is that that's not that interesting. Just be like, hey, this thing that looks super fascist is actually really fascist. People don't want to do that. And these people don't think that their job is like to contextualize this. Like you would easily talk about like how Kim Jong-un does

this. How other countries have militarized as they fall down the slope into authoritarianism. It's like a very familiar pattern. But people don't think it's like their job to like read things or give historical context. So they have to do like tapes. They have to do views on things. Like, oh, I need to say something about this. That's like counterintuitive and interesting. The Atlantic and the Times in particular have leadership that really wants to like challenge

the views of its liberal readership. Yeah. So you end up getting these contrarian takes and it end the bar for the takes that they are willing to entertain. As long as their contrarian is super low. What I'm so amazed at is how people don't seem to be able to notice like how dumb a lot of these arguments are like you you think it's bad that your next-door neighbor is beating his wife. But if he wasn't beating his wife, you would feel differently.

But yes, if the facts of the thing are different, I feel differently. That's not that's on a hypocrisy. That's not an argument in any meaningful way. Yes. There's sort of like, well, there is there is a type of military parade that isn't so bad. Yeah. And it's like right. I okay. It's like, well, we do this to celebrate wartime victories. Okay, do we have a wartime victory? No. Our triumphant Afghanistan. Thank you, Joe Biden. And like France does this. Well,

yeah, France does this every year. There's like a long tradition of doing this in France. It's something they do all the time. They don't do this like out of the blue on the leader's birthday.

worse than the people who are just like, yeah, this thing that is happening is bad. I do have one that that sort of falls into this category. It is from the New York Times magazine in January

“2025 by Ross Barkin. It's titled Goodby Resistance, The Era of Hyper politics is over. I think I've read”

this. This is part of a genre of early 2025 takes that we're sort of like taking for granted that the left and liberals and Democrats, that they had suffered a defeat that really meant the end of the project and that we needed to sort of reinvision what the left and liberalism was going to look like moving forward because clearly it had failed, right Donald Trump had risen back up. This of course did not happen after 2020 when Joe Biden won, but did not happen in the 2025

elections when Democrats soundly beat Republicans, of course not, but the 2025 elections are what I think flips all of this on his head because a year ago, everyone was like Democrats have taken a set of positions that the public hates, despises and they need to completely revamp a few months later, they clear out the competition in all these major elections, right, when the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, all of the trends that the pundits were pointing towards as like

the death now for the Democratic party. Yeah, I flipped back. Did all of the pundits who were like, well, you know, the shift in the Hispanic vote has completely changed the game. Did they right their apologies in November? No, no, right. It's time for Democrats to start saying Latinx.

“It's the only way. So this particular piece in New York Times magazine is less about”

the like partisan particulars and more about political aesthetics and style. He notes that

both sides of the aisle were very hyper-engaged during Trump's first term and that in early 2025,

we'd seen a sort of lack of anti-Trump energy, which is sort of true, right, there was a lot of capitulation among corporations. There was sort of a defeatism among Democrats. He says the drama surrounding anti-fascism faded. Now it could seem tired and alarmists to warn the Trump will end free elections. So cringe, it's so cringe. The corporations and politicians that once paid lip service to the values of alarmed liberals now feel free to reverse course. Mark Zuckerberg,

the chief executive of meta, went on Joe Rogan's show to express his desire for a corporate culture that celebrates masculinity and aggression. He's framing this as deep politicization, right,

“like as if Mark Zuckerberg going on Rogan, wearing a chain, right, and talking about masculinity,”

is the absence of politics. The real Mark Zuckerberg is finally emerging. Yes,

then Mark Zuckerberg's natural form of a cool deal of cool masculine dude. What was actually happening in the corporate world was that everyone was very aware that Trump was about to make everything very political. Right. And they wanted to suck up to him. Yeah. So Mark Zuckerberg is like, I do jujitsu by the way. The entire sort of savvy political punditry class, people who like their whole fucking thing is like electoral politics, right? Like, oh, we must do what is popular,

completely ignored the fact that Trump is historically one of those unpopular presidents ever. And his agenda is wildly unpopular. People hate this shit. People think that you are lying when you tell them what his actual agenda is. That's actually like a weird superpower that they have. Right. But all of these like allegedly savvy pundits, we're like, well, the country loves

deporting 11 million people. Most of the pundits that write this sort of shit are these like

center to center right, center left, sort of dudes. They are deeply insecure about their position in this country. And so every time Democrats win, they're like, oh, this is kind of a fluke. And every time Republicans win, they're like, oh, this proves it. Right. No one agrees with us. Right. It all comes out in these moments because they have very much bought into the idea that they are not real Americans. Yeah. Totally. All right. I'm going to send you a little bit more here.

What comes next might be a more conventional politics when still ground it in resistance, but perhaps a quieter type. When Trump signed his executive order to end birthright citizenship, the governor's an attorney's general of more than 20 states sued to stop him. Math protest wasn't required. Nor were calls for a fresh anti-fascist movement. The work was merely done. Democrats seem to be saying implicitly that this was enough. Action without performance.

What is probably not soon returning regardless is the white hot activism of the last decade.

Dude, think of a worse prediction than this. It's crazy. If you thought that politics was about to calm down. No, I know. When Trump was entering office, when like when you saw the executive orders piling up, it's hard to believe that this person analyzes politics for a living. You're

basically taking the first three months or the first like two months of administration. And just

being like, well, this is how it's going to be forever. Democrats were looking their wounds for a bit.

“I think they're all sort of exhausted. Yeah. Right. By the by the 2024 election. Yeah. But the idea that”

like politics would become less salient. Right. Is what are you basing that on? No. He characterizes Trump trying to end birthright citizenship. Yeah. This like aggressive anti-immigrant action that defies 150 years of legal precedent. Flatly illegal unconstitutional. Yeah. He says that that is ordinary because the opposition to it manifested in the courts rather than in protests, which isn't even entirely true. It's like entirely about procedure and optics to these guys. Right. It's like,

oh, finally, normal politics. They're ending birthright citizenship. Right. Why did these people

think that their job is like to predict things? This is just like the original sin of all of this shit. Imagine imagine like you're writing this like like Hitler takes power in 33 and you're like, finally, things are calming down. Do you want to do the next category? Yeah. If I had spent

“the last four years of my life talking about how like campus sophomores were a threat to free”

speech and how the left was drifting into totalitarianism and then we have like an authoritarian movement rising that I like did not raise an alarm about at all. Yeah. I might reflect on how I admit my career. I might change the way that I cover events in American politics. I'm about to read you some headlines from Persuasion, the newsletter of reactionary centers final boss, Yasha Monk. So these are from Persuasion.community. They don't even have Persuasion.com.

DEI must change. The five dogmas of DEI. Discourse on race has a conformity problem, the psychology behind wokeness. The average college student is a literate. Teach pluralism, not anti-racism. Yes, comma college students can't read good. Professors need to diversify what they teach. Teach students conservative thoughts, brutal, brutal. They're just like partying like it's 2021. This is related to what I was talking about where for several years now,

these centers, pundits have been like the left is out of control. We need to rain all of this social justice shit in, right? And comma loses and they find it very vindicating because they're like this is why, right? This fits perfectly with our narrative. I'll also say, there are people on the left

who get this wrong too. There are people on the left who basically have said like Democrats abandoned

like the material concerns of working people, right? This is a critique that I like largely agree with. There are people that basically in the wake of the election said like this is why they lost. And then you had like relatively boring centrist like Mikey Cheryl in Jersey who are emblematic of that problem win. Yeah, everyone just wants to look at the election and like just jam

“their little narratives into it, right? And I think you see that like that's sort of like continuing”

into 2025 with these outlets like persuasion. They have one. This is their only beat, right? Like the excesses of wokeness. This right, the social justice left is out of control and we should reel it in. Meanwhile like 20 25 are the best example of the idea that that that that it's may probably not really electrically relevant. Yeah, the problem with all of this stuff is that it's just really difficult to draw broad ideological conclusions from like any presidential election,

especially the last few that we've had. Like the 2020 election was in the middle of COVID, neither candidate was really campaigning and also turnout was all over the place because all these states implemented mail and ballots all of a sudden. And then the 2024 presidential campaign was also totally buck wild, right? You had Biden dropping out, you had inflation, you had Trump coming back, like both of these things are just really difficult to draw any large conclusion from. And that's

kind of true of like most presidential elections, right, is that there there's such a huge confluence of factors. I don't know that any of them are like a referendum on where the country's ideology is, much less where it's going to stay for the next 30 years or whatever. You're aware of my my brewing theory that nothing matters. I'm I'm slowly coming around to Peter Shimshiri thought. There's a sort of like half-baked thought I have this half-baked theory that like

your messaging doesn't really matter that much. Yeah, yeah. There are all these people who were like, well, you know, Elon sees Twitter and that like changed the the game and and shit like that.

anything like ideological or from a messaging perspective mattered in 2024, that argument is a lot weaker now in 2025, right? We have to get to the most 2021 ass take from this year. A lot of these

complaints ultimately boil down to like vocabulary. It's like people are saying pregnant people

and they should stop saying that like this is what these fucking people wind about for four years, ultimately. Yeah. In June of 2025, there was an article in the Atlantic called what's so shocking about a man who loves his wife. The term "wife guy" is now a pejorative. It shouldn't be.

“This is about how you're all saying "wife guy" and you should stop. Isn't "wife guy" in”

dear? Dude, don't get ahead of ourselves Peter. Okay. This guy's so mad. Okay, here is it's a little bit long, but I'll send you the first couple paragraphs. You really like winds up to something here. A few Sundays ago, I was in a car ride home with my wife when the light caught her face in a lovely way. I snapped a photo and surely afterward posted it to Instagram with several iterations of an emoji that felt appropriate. A man smiling with hearts in place of his eyes. I did this

because I love her. My love. I don't want to laugh at this guy but you just know where he's going with us and it's so fucking funny. He's very mad. He's so he's you know he's going to get to the outrage eventually and it's like you're just out of loving your wife. It's fine. It's so important. I know that I was just complaining about people who criticize me. I know you're becoming this guy. Well, like, but you have to chat. You have to understand on some level that you're being insane.

This is why we don't talk about this publicly. We just like text each other and whine about it. But it's really not that big of a deal. Until we expanded into a group chat that completely changes our world world. All right. Yes, he goes on. My love for my wife does not exist solely online. I often express it directly to her or talk about her in glowing terms to friends and co-workers. He's

“just like describing having a wife. He's free. I believe it. He's free. I believe it. We live together.”

We go out to dinner. He says it feels natural as natural as sharing my feelings about anything to the internet. In the same way I'd post about how much I'm enjoying my twin peaks rewatch or the particularly good sandwich I eat on vacation. So the first time that someone called me a wife guy, I wasn't sure how to react. If you're encountering this phrase for the first time and think wife guy surely must mean a guy who loves his wife, you would be dead wrong. The term is

rose to popularity sometime during the first come-to-ministration described someone whose spousal affection is so ostentatious that it becomes inherently untrustworthy. And then he goes on even as a bunch of examples, which are boring and so we're not going to talk about them, but then he

gets to the conclusion. In a world where identity is always being performed on social media,

that's particular identity is clearly one to avoid. But I, a guy who loves his wife, can't help but conclude that valuable terrain is being seeded when we think poorly of the wife guy. Many men accustomed to bottling up their feelings are already afraid to show what's in their heart and on their mind. If some of them are actually moved to express their love publicly and unabashedly, is this so wrong? I'm standing up as a wife guy. I feel like there's probably a decent

percentage of our listeners who haven't really heard this term or aren't like super familiar with it, but wife guy is like a very clear term of endearment. Yes, you do. If your friends are calling you like, hey, I don't know your wife guy. That's like a nice thing to say. It's like an extremely gentle way of teasing you. But it's like teasing you about something positive. They're like, hey, this guy likes his wife. Yeah. He doesn't even have like evidence that like anyone is

setting anything mean about him. I've always understood wife guy and I guess I've never really

thought about this, right? Because you're fucking normal. I've always understood wife guy as a sort of friendly way of saying this is someone who genuinely likes their wife. Yes. Because there's a type of guy who's when he's talking about his wife is sort of is complaining about his wife. Friends. Yeah. Or the the curvy wife guy thing was was basically like, you might think my wife is ugly,

“but I think she's beautiful. And it came off as like a backhanded insult of his wife. I think that's why”

people reacted so negatively to that. That feels bizarrely performative and weird. That's different. Yeah. But that's not. But that's not wife guy. The reason that wasn't her wife was at the beginning of it was because it's not a normal wife guy. It's a curvy wife guy which is different. This is such advanced analysis. Like that curvy wife guy is not a wife guy actually. But the whole thing with all of these fucking vocabulary complaints is the complete collapse of context. There's no

example of someone being like, hey, stop being a wife guy. This is like really condescending your wife. I don't trust you anymore. I think it's like his friends on Instagram. The lightest teasing. The lightest fucking teasing. The lightest teasing has made him ashamed of his own love for his wife. And he's like spiraling out and then he pitches it to a fucking magazine. It's like, hey, can I talk about how people are making fun of me for loving my wife?

And they're like, they're like, they just start throwing the f-slur at you.

I'm fucking busy shit. I fucking dare you. You called me a slur. I'm going to call you a slur. That's just a slur for a slur trade, of course. Like you'll read the Atlantic and it's like, you can't even say X and Y anymore. And then it's like, stop saying X and Y. But they're talking about like the R word and it's like, but also you really shouldn't say wife guy.

Are you a wife guy Peter? Do you do post like this? This is different for this is different for us because

“when you have like 150,000 followers, you're like making your spouse like half a public figure, you know?”

Yeah, but I mean, you have a private Instagram account, right? No. Oh, really you're on an Instagram at all? I have an Instagram account, but I do not use it at all. Okay. I have one where I post thirst traps and people in the comments are like, "Oh, another thirst trap." And I just want to write an article for the Atlantic and like melting down. Like I was called a thirst trap on the internet.

It's not a trap. I am thirsty. Along the same lines of completely misjudging the politics of the last several years, Charles Homes in the New York Times, Democrats lost voters on transgender rights, winning them back won't be easy. God. We've talked about this before. And so we don't need to spend like a ton of time on this, but I do think we need to call out the fact

that trans people were functionally blamed for the 2024 election by a ton of people. It's so infuriating. The political shifts in 2025 have demonstrated how incorrect this is. Also, I mean, maybe you're going to get into this, but also, I've been working on a project kind of in the background about the actual campaign rhetoric in 2024. Commentaries did not say the word transgender a single time in any official campaign materials.

Like they did not run on transgender rights. They just did. They made a very specific effort to avoid it. I guess there's this holistic argument that it's like associated with the party regardless, which might be, it's probably true to some degree. But then that's going to be true even if Democrats run to the center, which everybody keeps telling them to do, that's going to be their next time, too.

So what is the actual advice here? Democrats proposed an extremely aggressive anti-immigration bill in 2024. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And Republicans shot it down because they didn't want to give Biden that sort of win. Right? Did that help change the narrative about who's tough on immigration? Exactly. Yeah. It didn't move the needle a little bit.

And also everyone's like, oh, they need to run to the right on immigration. Okay, they did that and it didn't. We need to have an explanation for that rather than controlling them to do the thing that they already did. I mean, that's the thing is I think if your party is associated with these things, the actual way to improve your messaging is by making people like those things. That's the only choice you have. Breaking the association is a lot harder.

Yeah. Yeah. We need to find we just need to find the coolest trans person that we can and just put

“my television a lot. You know what I mean? That's why the new co-host of this show is Caitlyn Jenner.”

It's happening. Unproblematic queen, Caitlyn Jenner. So this piece centers around a discussion with

Lene Ericson at third way, which is the centrist thing tank that's like stuck in 1994.

Democrats need to do what they're already doing. So I'm going to have you read this and then I'm going to have you read one of the following paragraphs. In some areas, Democratic politicians to confuse from liberal advocacy groups found themselves signing onto positions about which even their own voters were uncertain and have become more so in recent years. This is particularly true of transgender rights where polls now show majority support for some restrictions that advocates

have fiercely opposed and have sought to hold politicians accountable for backing. This is basically like the right wings been winning the messaging war. So we need to surrender. It's like I don't think that is how this shit works. I think that what actually happens is that no matter what you do, you can be as anti-transz you want to be. You can do this Gavin Newsom bullshit. The median voter is going to associate trans rights with a Democratic party more than their Republican party. And so

it will be an effective line of attack. So you actually just need to make the case. There's almost no reason to continue talking about this because the one of the following paragraphs here basically conceits the point. Here you go. Of course. Of course. Although there's no evidence that transgender rights was a top issue for most voters in 2024, Democratic strategists believe that these attacks did have an impact. Blueprint, a post-election Democratic polling project,

found that among some voters who broke for Mr. Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, 67% believe Democrats were too focused on identity politics. Yes, that's a perception.

“Perceptions are not reality. Then you have to ask what affects the perception of this because”

you've just acknowledged it's not the reality. And voters don't care about, right? It's not a top issue, right? Like the voters, the people for whom trans rights is super salient fall into two

groups. One anti-trans nut jobs on the right who you'll never persuade. And two trans people

like reading a bunch of common hair speeches and like looking at a bunch of campaign materials from 2021. I think the actual mistake on trans rights was allowing this absurd out-of-context clip about how prisoners should get gender reassignment surgery to kind of go out into the world with no response to it when if you actually think about the policy in question, the state provides medical care to prisoners. Trans medical care is medical care. And so prisoners will get trans medical care as part of that. Like

why should we carve out this one form of care? That's thing is that all of the arguments that Democrats want to concede on trans rights are fundamental, right? Like I don't think you can concede

the sports argument without basically implying that trans women are not real women.

You're basically asking Democratic candidates to concede what is a fucking lie? I mean this whole all is gender firm and care for kids stuff is a fucking lie. A vanishingly small number of kids transition every year. They are assessed. You're signing on to a lie. You're signing on to something that is equivalent to climate change is not real. The 2020 election was stolen. Vaccines cause

“autism. And so what you need to do is push back against the conspiracyments. Right now there is”

a megaphone from the right talking shit about trans people and nothing from the left saying anything good about trans people. A lot of people who are low engagement with politics are just hearing like kids are transitioning a reversible medical care for like an 11 year old who doesn't know what's going on. Which is not happening. But that's what they're hearing. Yeah. It's not happening now. If it doesn't happen even less, they will still think that. You're not addressing the actual

source of the problem which is the propaganda, right? Right. Not saying it's an easy thing to address.

But conceding on policy ground doesn't move you anywhere because it was never a genuine policy

concern to begin with. I think it's actually one of the lessons from the 2024 campaign. If you look at interviews with Kamala Harris, she was asked directly numerous times about transgender rights and she would change the subject. She'd be like, well, I'm not really concerned about that. What I'm concerned about is middle class wages. Why don't we transition into another topic? Which literally it's like she was pressed on this and she did the thing that people hate to see politicians doing

where they will not answer a question. Yeah. So that pisses off trans people that pisses off trans folks and it pisses off everybody who just sees a fucking politician warming out of a

“question, right? So they didn't have an answer. I think that was a huge mistake, right? All we had”

was this thing of like, she wants illegal immigrants to get transgender surgeries and prison, which is obviously fucking deranged. But like, there was no real counter narrative to this. That like, yeah, it's an extremely small number of people. We are a civilized society that provides medical care to people who are words of the state, part of that is transitioning. Yeah. Why do you have a problem with that? There's no fucking actual argument here.

But because it was never answered, all of the right wing derangement was just allowed to like bounce

around this like nationwide game of telephone. Like the Democrats approach on a lot of these things, where they where they perceive the right wing as winning is just like conceit and ignore. Yeah. And like this shit does not work. Public does not work. You're just going to get a million attack ads and people are not going to hear anything else from you. I also have a somewhat tangential take on the politics of this, which is that the Democrats are often trying to thread the

“needle of like accurately describing their policy, but also appealing to the public, whereas I think”

Trump's appeal to a lot of people is he doesn't really equivocate. Yeah. He's like, we're going to kick out the bad people and the good people stay. Right. Yeah. That's obviously not what his immigration policy is. But the lesson I take from that is that it's pretty important to just bullshit and and keep your message simple. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it rather than doing this whole like, well, we support trans rights, but here are the limitations of blah, blah, blah. It would be better to just say

something simple that's almost the lie. Right. They want to check your kids' genitals. You know what I mean? Like they're they're doing genitals scans. Yeah. If you don't want that vote for us. Yeah. Is it oversimplified? 100%. But that's a meaningfully true. I think it's absolutely. I mean, there's a there and there's enough truth, right? Yeah. But my point is stop. Don't worry about where like the the new wants is of how true it is exactly. Get out of message. That's roughly on point.

Yeah. That sounds effective and be done with it. Just accept that we live in idiocracy now and fucking roll with it. It's so funny how Trump will like make up a policy position that literally everyone agrees with wouldn't it be good if we could get rid of the bad people and keep the good people and he'll say that out loud. He'll be like the bad we're going to get rid of the bad people and the good people. And people are like shit. Yeah. And then like the gosh what ice is doing and

they're like confused. They're like I didn't vote for those. I thought the good people were going to stay. It's like I bet you did. Right. One more category before we get to the official worst take of the year. One of the major themes of coverage this year was that even when ostensibly left

the left. So we're not going to dive into this one, but in June there was an article in

“your Times called I worked at USAID for eight years. This is our biggest failure. It says I worked”

at USAID in East Africa over the past eight and a half years selling the story of American foreign aid to people in Rwanda, Ethiopia and Kenya. Our inability to tell this story to Americans

is our great failure. It is what put the agency into Dosh's woodchipper first. You are the subject

of a bad faith right wing attack. You did not fail to tell your story. It's so odd to me that every right wing political victory gets framed as like the will of the people manifest, which is not even true in this case because people actually like foreign aid. I mean people do like foreign aid although there are ways that you can frame it in polling where it does poorly. But if you just subscribe what they're doing and the actual cost of it, people like it. The same people who

disapprove of foreign aid if you ask them how much of the budget they think it is, they're like, I don't know, 50%. Okay. That's just the honorary mention. The worst example of this this year is from March. This is by the New York Times editorial board. It is called the authoritarian endgame

on higher education. But it blames the left. Yeah. So it has a whole thing like a quite lucid

description of what the Trump administration is doing. But then it says we understand why Americans don't trust higher education and feel they had little stake in it. Oh my god. Do then it says this? For people in higher education, this is a moment both to be bolder about trumpeting its strengths and to be more reflective about addressing its weaknesses. About those shortcomings. Too many professors in university administrators acted in recent years as liberal

ideologues rather than seekers of empirical truth. Ideal. Academics have tried to silenced debate on legitimate questions, including about COVID lockdowns, gender transition treatments, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. The insolarity of American academia is appalling. Said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. It is led to massive resentment against intellectual elites. This insolarity does not justify Mr. Trump's policies, but it does help explain

the dirt of conservatives defending universities today. Universities will be in a stronger long-term position if they recommit themselves to open debate. Brain dead child. The mind of a child. This is the thing is that they say that they're committed to open debate. But what they're not actually ready for is the liberals winning those debates? No, completely. Yes. We're just like shutting down, like ending a debate when it's like vaccines fucking work, man. There are plenty of problems with

that those paragraphs. Like, what are you talking about exactly when you're talking about a lack of open debate about these things, right? I'm going to need specifics if you're if you're claiming that debate is being shut down in some material way. And also now that now that right wingers are taking over the universities, are they fostering open debate? Exactly. Are they leaning more into your empirical truth than ideology? Really? Discaping into the right

ring work? Yeah. Look at what they put up, right? Look at the, like, University of Austin, the

“Barry Weiss operation. Are they seeking empirical truth? Or are they just a right wing college?”

It's obvious this has all been in bad faith the entire time. And then your time has been helping to promote this bad faith attack on institutions of higher education. And then saying, oh, why don't Americans trust higher education? You published three fucking opits a week about how higher education is bad and illegitimate and suppressing debate? That's part of why. I recently wrote about Greg Luke on off the head of fire, the free speech organization that focuses

a lot on college campuses. He was interviewed by the times a couple months ago. And the host

asked him a question that I've been looking for someone to ask him, which is basically

the Trump administration is attacking these schools. You've been, you've been claiming that these schools have been violating the law, have been violating principles of free speech, et cetera, are corrupted by our sort of enthralled to liberal ideology and haven't you fed this narrative. And his response was basically, well, if people had listened to us, maybe this wouldn't have happened.

“Oh, my fucking God, our response that I think completely misunderstands what's happening on the right.”

And for someone in his position to say that, I think it's really embarrassing. Look, I've ridden seven articles every month about how people playing their Bluetooth speakers on public transit are the worst people in society. Now that those people are being murdered in broad daylight, torture camps, deported to other countries, I'm just going to keep writing those op-eds anyway. Well, I'm just going to go to records. Yeah, I'm just like, I mean, I do, we can find a

middle ground there. I think it's also serves a psychological purpose, too, like a lot of these other arguments. It's like, you think they must have done something to deserve it. Not to mention, this leaves out that like, there are various types of academic departments that are, in fact, right, leaning. Number one degree is business in America. I mean, it's true that the humanities are very liberal. Also, it's true that conservatives don't believe in the humanities.

supposed to do when you literally don't believe that psychology is real? Also, they don't even

believe that like, meteorology is real. It's like, if you think climate change is fake, then produce some fucking work that it's fake, prove it, right? They can't prove it. I'm sorry, institutions of knowledge production are going to go where the knowledge is. And right now, if you are hiring geologists, they're all going to be liberal because they all fucking believe a climate change. Right. All right. Do you want to do worst, worsties now? Yeah, I have my own category,

“which is Epstein files takes. I think I know one of them is, I think I know one of them.”

David Brooks in the New York Times, headline is the Epstein story. Count me out. This is I just did an episode with Adrian Moira on in bed with the right about the most cursed discourses of the year, and that was one of mine. And that was before I knew about spoilers, my goals, spoilers. All right. I'm going to send you a couple of bits. I like, I know these by memory, Peter.

Never before have I been so uncertain about the future. Think of all the giant issues that

confront us, artificial intelligence, potential financial bubbles, the decline of democracy, the rise of global authoritarianism, the collapse of reading scores, and general literacy. China's sudden scientific and technological dominance, Russian advances in Ukraine, I can go on and on. So what has America's political class decided to obsess about over the past several months? Jeffrey Epstein. Why is Epstein the top issue in American life right now? Well,

in an age in which more and more people get their news from short videos, if you're in politics, the media or online, it pays to focus on topics that are soullacious, are easy to understand, and allow you to offer self-confident opinions with no actual knowledge. What is your knowledge of Mr. Epstein? He's your knowledge. Do you have any knowledge? He says the most important reason. The Epstein story tops our national agenda is that the QAnon mentality has taken over America.

Yep. The QAnon mentality is based on the assumption that the American elite is totally evil, and that American institutions are totally corrupt. I hate that for them. This is a sort of analysis

“that I think it's like, okay, you're poking at this real thing, which is that like a ton of”

the Epstein discourse is like entangled with conspiracism. No, no question about that. You're like, also a huge shocking percentage of American elites had some tie to this guy who was a known pedo. Right. It's very weird to be like, oh, this is just because people assume the American elite is totally evil. And it's like, no, there's an actual, interesting thing going on here. And also, you can't say it's conspiracism when this is true. I think it's such a classic

dumbass defense to be like, so you're saying, oh, so you're saying the American elite is totally evil. But no, I'm not saying that. People are saying the American elite are covering for evil, which is precisely what you are doing right now in this column. Right. I know also what happened to Mr. Morrell clarity over here. His whole thing is like about morality. Like, shouldn't you be offended at the immorality of what's going on about your fucking friends

being so grossly immoral? But the immorality you're complaining about is like the people who are

“upset about this thing that happened? He says what I don't understand is why some”

Democrats are hopping on this bandwagon. They may believe that the Epstein file release will somehow hurt Trump. But they are undermining public trust and sewing public cynicism in ways that make the entire progressive project impossible. Why is it progressives fault? They are contributing to a public atmosphere in which right-wing populism naturally thrives. Contributing to an atmosphere as such fucking weasel garbage. What does that even mean, dude? They're trying to get the truth out

about how fucking bad it was. Like having the files released doesn't feed right into the conspiracy anymore than not having the files released. Right. It's like saying like, led in the pipes, like investigating how much led in the pipes there is feeds the kind of conspiracism that like resorts to chemtrails and shit. It's like, well, one of them is true and one of them is false. We should actually insist on getting true things out into the public and debunking things that

are not true. He says these are genuine challenges. If I were a democratic politician, I might try telling the truth, which in my version would go something like this. The elites didn't betray you, but they did ignore you. They didn't mean to harm you, but they didn't see you in the 1970s as deindustrialization took your jobs in the ensuing decades as your families and communities broke apart during all those decades when high immigration levels made you feel like a stranger in your

own land. Oh, yeah. Let's not feed into right wing conspiracies. Right. And instead, let's remind voters that their land is being stolen by farmers. And anyway, though, yeah. So the the book end here is that just a couple days ago, there's another Epstein file drop from the government and they include photographs of David Brooks at a dinner that Epstein was attending. Of course. So we don't really know what that dinner was. We don't. Right. The extent of their interaction. We don't know this.

Yeah. You know, the the New York Times put out a statement basically being like, these are two

guys who are at a lot of big public dinners and they showed up at one dinner together. It's possible that he doesn't straight up doesn't even remember. Right. David Brooks has like extensive

like echelons. So like maybe reflect on that a little bit. What did you know? People were like

rumors get around about this when this guy got arrested and a lot of your friends know him. Surely there's like texts back and forth about like what people knew what people didn't know. Maybe reflect on that. The fact that there's ties between you and like this trench of fucking elites rather than writing about like, hey, I feel bad about the way that I may have hated and embedded this. You just write about how like, eh, let's focus on something else.

The Larry Summers thing is a good point because like Larry Summers and Epstein are like good friends. Yeah. Well into the period of time when it's known, not just like a buy his friends, but buy the broad public who Jeffrey Epstein is. So I've been to various things with like, I don't know, I've met people at like random dinners and shit. If some like, I don't know, fellow podcast or somebody who have only met once you twice got arrested for fucking pedophilia,

“I think someone would tell me like, hey, you know that guy who like hosted that dinner awhile ago,”

he's a fucking pedophile dude. I'd be like, oh fuck, word would have gotten around about this. There's one other piece about Epstein I want to mention. This is Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post. Oh, of course. Glenn Kessler, of course, the Washington Post fact checker. We've done an entire episode on him before. Pedeline Trump and Epstein had a relationship, but there's no evidence of Trump wrongdoing. This is intended to be a fact check piece.

It's from right after when right after the point in the summer when the White House refused to release the Epstein files, a lot of it is just the sort of like milk toast. Like, you know, we don't know much about the extent of Trump's ties to Epstein. What makes it a contender for a worst take is the final few sentences, which are remarkable, and I'm going to send to you. Kessler says, but no credible allocation has emerged to connect Trump to any of Epstein's crimes.

If the full file is ever released, we're confident that no connection would be found. Rest assured. If Trump were prominently mentioned, it would have been leaked by now. God. Wild thing to put in a fact check article, right? It's like you're holding yourself out as the the serious people who are focused on the facts, right? Yeah. And then you just throw in some speculative guess work at the end about how if the full file were ever released,

your confident that no connection between Trump and Epstein's crimes would be found. It's like, uh, you know, the politician about whom every accusation is true and turns out to be worse than you ever imagined. If this entire fact check, we're like, look, here's the deal

“with Trump and Epstein and the bottom line is we don't really know a lot. I think that would actually”

be a relatively reasonable fact check to put out there. But why speculate about what's in the files, especially when the White House has refused, like, put two and two together, right? Why is Donald Trump the most self-interested person in the history of the world refusing to release the files? Yeah. They say if Trump were prominently mentioned, it would have been leaked by now. No, wrong bitch, wrong bitch. We still even have his taxes, right? There's lots of stuff

that hasn't been leaked. We have now seen more of the files and what do you know? Trump is, in fact, prominently mentioned and it wasn't leaked before. Right. Why would this tenure? But this, this is again, the books thing where it's like, what people are mad at is this instinct. Your instinct is to be like, oh, I don't know anything, but like, it's probably no big deal.

Why is that your instinct? Why is your instinct to avoid accountability for the most powerful

person in the world? Your instinct should be to hold him accountable. The most selfish person on earth is saying, hey, don't look in that house. I know. And you're like, I bet there's nothing in there. The lying is the mother fucker of all time is telling you the most obvious lie of all time.

“And you're like, I believe them. Are we ready for mine? Is this is this your number one?”

My number one crescendo is a crescendo of the episode emotionally and morally. That was not my number one. I have a number one. What is yours? Do it. No, no, no, no, you go. Well, I'll do. Okay. I'll do mine, but I'll do a short version of mine. Okay. Okay. Okay. Two clarify. I personally think the worst take of the year is actually Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think that's right.

However, we're going to talk about it for two hours. So we're going to do the second worst take of the year.

This is from November 13, 2025 in the Atlantic. The left new moralism will backfire. Subhead under Trump, progressives have embraced the rhetoric of moral clarity. It won't help their cons. Thomas, Thomas, Chatterton Williams. Oh, Tommy Jats.