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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
Hello, and TGIF. Thank God it's... Thank God it's... My name is Nellie Bowles. I'm here again with the news of the week, and to help me think it all through is the host of Blocked and Reported and the funniest woman in Washington state. It's Katie Herzog. It's a very low bar, but thank you, Nellie. Ha ha ha ha! Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do
Okay, this week was Easter, followed by Tax Day. And because my producer knows about sports, he wants me to also say we kicked off the NBA playoffs. But the news that many were celebrating, or perhaps lamenting, is where we are going to start today, which is that a federal judge in Florida struck down the Biden administration's mask mandate. We
We begin this morning with that ruling by a federal judge in Florida. The decision overturns the Biden administration's mask mandate on planes, trains, and other forms of public transportation. Now, the judge said the CDC exceeded its authority by issuing a public health measure requiring masks. As soon as the mask mandate goes, you see these amazing viral videos. Masks are optional for employees, customers, following White House. In New York.
of flight attendants literally singing and dancing down the aisles of planes. You can follow them and wave them in the air like you just don't care. People are tossing their masks in the air. I mean, it was like a celebratory atmosphere. I know, two years. It's really good to see what people look like. Oh my God, it's so disgusting. Oh my God.
There was clearly a crowd of people, I would say the majority of Americans, who felt they had been freed in some last final way, like COVID was hanging on in this vestige. And finally, they were done. And that felt really good. But, of course, this being masks and this being in year three of COVID...
There are many who were very upset about this. You're in a tube where I feel like people cough more when they get on there. They get on the flight and everybody's hacking up a lung, and now people are like, yay, whipping off the mask. And if I got on that flight and all of a sudden there was an announcement mid-flight, I can't get off the plane. A Washington Post columnist called these, quote,
The whoops of selfish delight. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took things even further by predicting that there's going to be widespread violence against people who decide to remain masked.
saying, quote, soon we'll be seeing many incidents in which those who choose to protect themselves with KN95s, et cetera, face harassment, even violence, because this was never about freedom. And of course, the Justice Department on Wednesday night announced they would be appealing to fight for the mask mandate. It's official. The Justice Department has filed an appeal in federal court hoping to require people on planes and trains to wear masks.
Katie, so you're a perma-masker. I want you to bring you out to talk about this and to just get your take on why are we still in the mask wars? Is it ever going to end? Well, I'm a perma-masker because it's either that or get braces. And I figured that this is an easier way to hide the fact that my teeth are crooked. So I'm not looking forward to this new reality.
I thought that these videos were fun to watch. There's something about watching people's joy that should spark joy within ourselves. And I think the videos also, besides the fact that people don't like wearing masks, and I will say I am not a perma-masker. I hate wearing a mask. Taking off the mask is sort of, it's a symbol of something else, right? It's a symbol that we're moving on. So I think that was also part of why
people had this spontaneous outburst of joy. It's not just because we like to lick the people sitting beside us on an airplane seat. There's also something symbolic about this here. And to be clear,
This doesn't ban masks. If you want to wear an N95, which I can see why some people would, especially if you're medically vulnerable, if you're older, if you're paranoid, put on the N95 and go ahead and get on a plane. Of course. Right. And there's also the fact that planes
are actually safer than many other places, like say a crowded restaurant or a club, because planes, the way planes exchange air, you have fresh air within a plane every few minutes. So these are actually relatively safe places to be unmasked. We also know that the cloth masks that people have been wearing typically on planes are not that effective. So if you
feel like you need a mask, go ahead and wear it. I highly doubt that there's going to be outbreaks of violence. I think Krugman is being incredibly paranoid here. Okay, counterpoint. On planes, people love doing security theater. Oh, totally. Like, airplanes make a lot of sense as a battleground because if you think about...
After 9-11, we all started having to take our shoes off and do all this sort of security theater that's been proven to be pretty useless to actually protect you on a plane. And that's remained. We still have that. And I think people are sort of comforted by that. So maybe there's a desire somewhere to keep a little bit of like COVID security theater.
I don't know. I don't think people actually do like taking their shoes off or, you know, not bringing the big bottle of shampoo because apparently only three ounce bottles of shampoo are safe to fly with. I think people are tired of this stuff. And there's all
Always exceptions, right? There's exceptions for the people who have TSA pre-check or whatever it is. There's always exceptions to these rules. I would like to see rational, reasonable policies when it comes to masking, when it comes to TSA theater. And I think I'm in line with the majority of people here. Okay. Next up is a bit of a sadder one, which is our leadership crisis, specifically the fact that they are all very old.
In these United States, our founders laid out minimum age requirements for Congress, but never put a cap on a maximum age. Right now, we have the oldest president who's ever taken office. Joe Biden will be celebrating his 80th birthday this year. We also have the oldest Congress ever. I mean, the average age of a sitting senator is 64 years old. That's retirement age for a lot of people.
with many members not just in their 70s but deep into their 80s. Nancy Pelosi is 82. Mitch McConnell is 80. Chuck Grassley is 88. It's hard to say when do we take the car keys away from grandma for normal people. And so
How do we think about senators who are making laws that impact our daily lives? This is a very old crowd. And some of this is starting to sort of bubble up as being a real problem. The Chronicle says it spoke to four sitting senators, one representative, and three former Feinstein staffers, none of whom would agree to be named. And then last week, you had a whistleblower, a California lawmaker, who went to the San Francisco Chronicle to talk about
how the 88-year-old Senator Dianne Feinstein needs to retire. And one of whom said this: "I have worked with Feinstein for a long time, long enough to know what she was like just a few years ago. Always in command, always in charge, on top of the details. Basically, couldn't resist a conversation where she was driving some bill or some idea.
All of that is gone. It's been reported over the past few years that the senator's become extremely forgetful and is no longer the very sharp fighter that she's been for decades. And then this week...
President Biden, who has had a lot of senior moments over the course of his presidency, and honestly, has been a sort of gaffe-prone guy for a lot of his life, even before he got old, let's be fair. But this last week, there's been a few glaring moments. Thank you.
In a video from an Easter event, you can see him talking to a party bystander about Afghanistan when someone on his staff in a bunny costume comes up to physically intervene between Biden and the party bystander and directs the president, who looks genuinely very confused about where he's supposed to go, where he's supposed to be, or maybe even where he is at the moment. In another one, he ends a speech saying,
Ben turns to his right and seems to shake hands with the thin air. He walks back and forth on stage, looking, again, pretty confused.
Now, there is nothing wrong with being old. I mean, me be fair. And we shouldn't shame people for their age or like make fun of Biden for being an elderly statesman. And there's also a good argument that actually having older politicians isn't a crazy thing because older people tend to be kind of gentler. They've seen a lot of life. They're a little more moderate. You know, I don't know if I actually want a bunch of 20 somethings in Congress, but
But I do think it's fair to take a moment and think about what it means that so many of our leaders are this old. I think one thing that this tells us is that we maybe need some congressional term limits. That said...
Some people age better than others. You know, I wouldn't want, for instance, Noam Chomsky in the White House right now. But and I also don't think he's 110. But I also think that the American public hasn't shied away from electing older leaders. Joe Biden beat out a lot of young people to win the primary. Donald Trump won.
beat out a lot of younger people to win his primary. I think that more people, if given the choice today, I think more people would probably choose Joe Biden over Kamala Harris, even though he is having these senior moments. Yes. And I think it really just, it's case to case. You know, Americans love some old people. We love Betty White, right?
I think it really just comes down to performance. And part of what's happening with Joe Biden is these senior moments, I think. But also there's just a lot of other things going on that are impacting the perception of his presidency. And I don't really think that his gaffes are at the top of the list of concerns that Americans have about him. Yeah. I think the reason it freaked me out a little bit is because of the Russia-Ukraine stuff. And it's like,
oh, wow, this is getting really bad. Maybe a war is actually going to start. Why is Putin wandering around with the nuclear football? And then I'm seeing video of the president being led around by a guy in a bunny costume. And I'm like, this is making me nervous, like actually. Yeah. Well, that actually brings me to what I want to talk about next, which is that I think a lot of people are feeling this sort of nervousness around Biden right now because his polls are looking extremely rough.
like really bad. There is brand new polling out on the presidential approval rating, and it's not good for President Biden. I know this has been the case for a few months, so it doesn't feel new, but a new Quinnipiac poll shows that only 33% of Americans approve of how the president's doing his job. Well, 54% disapprove.
Looking closer then, you've got 18% who feel strongly about that approval and 43% who feel very strongly about their disapproval. You know, there was always that thing, oh, Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating at this point in his presidency. We did it over and over and over and over again. Well, at this point in his presidency, Donald Trump's number is actually, his average approval rating is one point higher than
than Joe Biden's, which is at 41%, Donald Trump at 42%. A first-term president at this point in his presidency, this is the lowest. This is the lowest for anyone who was elected to the presidency and didn't get up there through the vice presidency. This is a really, really, really bad number.
And what to me was really the most shocking is that Biden's approval among young people, the 18 to 34-year-old demo, is literally lower than Trump's was in this same poll from the same firm in March 2018. You could say, of course, maybe Biden's numbers are bad with young people because young people are really liberal and Biden's such a moderate. And so, of course, they don't like this moderate old man.
But that doesn't totally make sense because that number of youth approval was 19 points higher just a year ago. And the group that's seen the most dramatic decrease in support for the president is young black Americans, whose approval of the president has dropped 30 points in a year.
So what gives? What are the reasons? Some theories, I think it's COVID. I think it's inflation. I think a big part of it also is crime. Like black Americans rank the issue of crime and violence as their number one concern, way above COVID, way above racism, even the economy. And the spike in violent crimes around the country is climbing. Or I don't know, Katie, am I too crime focused? Is this, why is Biden unpopular right now? Is it just he has bad vibes?
Well, yeah. I mean, the polling does bear out that people, Black Americans in particular, are worried about crime. This is obvious. But I don't think that necessarily translates to disapproval of the president because crime is really a local issue. There's not much that the president can do from the White House to lower crime rates. That's something that I think will see downstream effects in local and statewide elections. And I think that's something that we'll see.
To me, just intuitively, I think the issue is the economy. As another aging president said, it's the economy, stupid. Every time you go to the store and your grocery bill is a third or twice as much as it was six months ago, you're going to blame someone for that.
Biden keeps focusing on, you know, he says that the gas prices are the fault of COVID and Putin. I think it's more complicated than that. But yes, historically, when the economy is doing poorly, presidents suffer. So I don't know what he can do to fix this. But even with low unemployment rates, people are still suffering. And I think Biden and the Democrats are really going to pay the pay the price for this at the polls come November. Yeah, the Putin's price hike thing is so shocking.
out of touch to me. It's like, just admit that COVID policies helped drive inflation up and be honest with Americans and say,
you know, hard sacrifices had to be made. We had to save ourselves from going into a recession during the middle of a pandemic. And we had to do big bailouts of the American population. Right. It's like respectful to the American like citizens to just be honest. There's something about the Putin's price hike, like little meme that's like rhyming or whatever, a little pee pee. Like it just bothered me. OK. Yeah.
Enough about politics. Let's turn to the other thing that controls our lives, probably a lot more than Biden does, to be honest, which is tech. This week in a segment I'm calling Words We Can No Longer Type, there's a new sensitivity reader. And it's not even a human. It's literally what I'm typing into right now. It's what I'm looking at at this very moment. And it's Google Docs. An update for Google Docs rolling out this month.
is going to not just give a squiggle line under a word that's maybe misspelled. It's going to give a squiggle line under a word that is insensitive, according to the algorithm. So let's say you type the word "landlord." Google Docs will suggest you use the word "proprietor."
The word mother is, of course, verboten. So when a reporter for the tech news site Motherboard, which is a pretty lefty tech news site, was playing around in this new Google Docs sensitivity reader mode, Google Docs underlined the name of their site. They underlined Motherboard and alerted the reporter, saying, "'Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.'"
So, Katie, when you hear about the parent board reporting as someone who's already banned from Google products, what do you make of this? I want to see Microsoft Word come out with a competitor, which I imagine would be clippy, just showing up and yelling at you for being racist or sexist or problematic. I highly doubt that this.
this will roll out to the general public. I think there's been enough attention on this now so that Google will probably backtrack. It'll be the Google Glass of 2022. I love the idea of Clippy, but the better competitor would be Clippy as like your Microsoft Word MAGA word processor. And it'd be like, hey, snowflakes, let's start your document.
Okay, so talking about Google Docs is actually a good transition because I wanted to talk about a little bit of media news this week. And I actually usually avoid media news because I think reporters spend way too much time on it for obvious reasons. But this week was some pretty wild stuff. Basically, the big headline is CNN Plus appears to be shutting down. CNN is an icon of the cable and satellite age.
But now cable is competing with streaming. And there isn't a streaming subscription service for TV news in the United States. So for anyone who hasn't been following, for the past year or so, CNN's been poaching talent from around the media world. CNN's hired hundreds of people and created dozens of new shows for the service. They got NPR host Audie Cornish, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace.
a bunch of people like that, to make an exclusive online streaming platform called CNN+. It's a big deal in the media business because it's the biggest bet any company has made in the news streaming world. And a few weeks ago, with $300 million behind it, they launched.
Do you think any of this has to do with race? Yes. There are people spending five to 20 years in prison for something that is now legal. Do you think this is a gender issue? Would they be calling a guy crazy? I have much to say about what's being said. I'm listening. Here we go. And then, as many of us suspected...
no one showed up to watch. Well, it's big news in the media world. CNN Plus shutting down. This is just a month after it launched. Variety was first to report today that CNN's new parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, will end the streaming service. Then you've got on Apple the problem with Jon Stewart, which is Jon Stewart's revival project. My name's Jon Stewart. I've been away from television for some time. This is what I look like now.
We're talking about this country. What's okay, what isn't? What are the priorities? That has to change or nothing will change. And it's basically turned into an hour-long interview series that's like a mushy blend of liberal rants from like a year or two ago, reheated and put back on Apple TV. I think at its core, I think white people...
put blame on Black people for the position that they are in. It's been apparently a ratings disaster, fell to something like 40,000 viewers. I know that I am racist, and I know that I'm racist because I, every single day, uphold the systems and the structures of racism.
And if we don't start having a conversation about that and about the ways that we are complicit every day daily, if we don't talk about it, then we are never going to see movement. Remember, Jon Stewart, before he retired from Comedy Central, The Daily Show was one of the most watched shows on TV. This guy was amazing. I remember I watched it every night. I loved it. Now he has less than half the viewers that we get on an average podcast.
Us. And our podcast is bad. And then over on Spotify, after years of trying to make a hit podcast with the Obamas,
They've basically failed and the deal's falling apart and the Obamas are leaving Spotify and trying to find a new home or whatever. But basically, it didn't really work. Yeah. The CNN Plus thing, I think, is hilarious. I feel bad for the people who quit their jobs like Audi Cornish and and jump ship to go to this this new endeavor. McKinsey apparently guaranteed them that this was going to be a success. I think.
The head of CNN, I don't remember who it is now that Jeff Zucker's gone, could have gone to a local Walmart and polled five people and gotten a better response to the question, is this going to sell? This seems obviously designed to fail from the beginning, especially considering that CNN's ratings have been dropping for years. Why would people pay more for content that they don't want in the first place? And regarding Jon Stewart,
My podcast, my dumb podcast that costs zero dollars to produce gets more weekly listeners than the guy who was the most famous, most successful television comedian of our generation or of a generation. That's crazy to me. Yeah. The media landscape is really changing. I think people don't care about this highly produced content that is just going to regurgitate things that they can get anywhere else.
Jon Stewart should be able to differentiate himself. But if you've watched his show, it's just like being on blue checkmark Twitter. It's not interesting. He's not saying anything new. No wonder people aren't going to pay for it or aren't going to watch it. That your audience and Jon Stewart's audience are the same is so amazing to me. I mean, it really, I mean, this is an insult, but I actually, it's unbelievable. Like it's, this is, we're really seeing a huge shift in, in,
what's happening here. I think the people who wanted to start CNN Plus just believed that the old world could be saved in some way, that like, that people would still take
take this content that they like foie gras duck it down the American gullet and they'd be happy and say thank you. They're still living in a world where there were just not that many options about what to watch. Now there's endless TV content. There's endless podcasts. You have to really differentiate yourself if you're going to catch on. And these outlets have obviously failed to do that, which is
seemed obvious from the beginning. And so they just, CNN in particular, just blew $300 million on nothing. Before we go on, though, I have to say CNN Plus did hire one of our canceled heroes, Alison Roman. And all I can say is she was too good for CNN Plus. And we can't wait to see where she goes next. I think she's going to open up a Puerto Rican-themed restaurant complete with costumes. ♪
Okay, next up, libs of TikTok. This was the other big headline of the week. So Katie, since you are a lib and I know what kind of haircut you have, so I'm assuming you're on TikTok. What is libs of TikTok and why was it all I was hearing about this week?
So Libs of TikTok is a massively popular social media account. And this week they are in the news because Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz unmasked the voice behind Libs of TikTok, which turns out it's a random real estate agent in New York.
And what this woman does is she finds videos of progressive, queer, non-binary, pink-haired, young leftists and liberals. Just picture the stereotype of the they-them online liberal. And she reposts them. God is non-binary. God is queer. God is autistic. Let me unpack that for you.
If you support the truckers in Ottawa in any capacity, I'm going to assume that you are a fucking Nazi. Like picture somebody with 45 piercings in their face crying because a five-year-old misgendered them. Being super straight is the all lives matter of sexualities. It's not a real sexuality. It literally is just something that's made up to make fun of trans people and to hate on trans people.
I understand that he is my main pronoun, but sometimes it's nice to, you know, hear the they portion of the pronoun. That just never happens because I appear more masculine. So I just don't know if people think it just negates the fact that the they part is there just because I'm built like a bear. That's what these videos are. And they're incredibly popular. They're very cringy. Look at your face, Ty. Makeup? You put makeup on it? Mm-hmm. How old are you?
Seven. No, how old are you? Seven! You're four. No, I'm seven! Are you a boy or a girl? A girl. A girl? Mm-hmm. Were you born a girl? Mm-hmm. Were you born a girl? Yes. When you were a baby, were you a girl? Yes. Are you in a boy's body, though? Yes. Yeah.
And they're popular, I think, in part, A, because they're funny and B, because it's a glimpse into this world that is sort of emerging around us and one that people are deeply concerned about. Whether they should be or not is a separate question, but it is a world that people are concerned about. This is it. This is my uterus.
She scrubbed off all the blood. That is my cervix. That's what a cervix looks like, y'all. And I also got a LED plug-in LED stand with it. So it lights up different color and spins while it displays it, which is so cool. So if the only reason you don't want to date someone boils down to the fact that they're trans, that's transphobia right there. Let's go over a couple of situations.
She's finding these videos to make fun of these people. Yeah, yeah. And I'll admit, it is sometimes very funny. I'm boy and I'm girl. I'm not girl, I'm not boy. I cut both my boobs off.
I just added "bug" to my list of pronouns. So here's a very quick tutorial on how to use "bug"/"bugs" pronouns in sentences. Like, she posted a video of a person recently, or maybe this isn't actually a person, someone who doesn't identify as a man or woman but identifies as a fish.
And this person says their pronouns are fish, fishes, fish self. This video in particular is actually kind of sweet because the person is listening to music and dancing and seems very joyful.
But what Libs of TikTok does is basically hold up random people for ridicule on the internet. And it's kind of effective. This account has gotten people, at least a couple of teachers, fired from their jobs. If it weren't for public school, I wouldn't know shit about the gay community. Unless it's a private school, parents need to stay the fuck out of classrooms.
They've got nearly a million followers on Twitter, way more this week when they did last week, thanks to Taylor Lorenz. Joe Rogan has talked about how it's the funniest thing on Twitter. But I think there are real reasons to be concerned about the content that this account is putting out there. For instance, all of this groomer talk that has emerged in the past few weeks, we talked about this on the last episode of TGIF, a lot of this comes from libs of TikTok. And some of their content
is straight up homophobic. In a now-deleted tweet, the woman referred to the Trevor Project as "groomers." In one video, she reposted a TikTok from a teacher who said that his student asked if he was gay based on his voice.
But the teacher came out and had this conversation with the class, a fifth grade class. And Libs of TikTok's comment on this was any teacher who comes out to their class should be fired immediately. And so I think that this account is really feeding into this weird moral panic that's happening on the right now about gay issues. So the Washington Post, when they published this story, essentially doxing a private citizen. And I think you can absolutely argue that her
that her name is newsworthy because this account does have clear influence. They also shared her address. They linked to her real estate license, which was connected to her actual address.
And so when the Washington Post published this story, it looked like the Washington Post is involved in this sort of catty call out of a private citizen. And the end result of this is Libs of TikTok more popular than ever. Taylor Lorenz, less popular than ever. So, Katie, I want to push back on just a couple of things. So first, the way you're describing Libs of TikTok, I
as sort of a call-out culture. I would describe lives of TikTok as conservative reporting. I would say they're doing journalism. There are a whole lot of reporters in the mainstream media who cut their teeth by going to small-town America and finding private citizens in diners grumbling something racist, get their name, get their age, and put it on the front page of The New York Times. That's a tried-and-true way to become a star reporter.
So lives of TikTok, you could see that as the mirror image of this. You could see it as doing the exact same thing, which is finding the most wackadoodle person in the leftist world or in the queer world and say and putting them on blast and and holding them up and saying, well, this is what you guys are. Just in the same way that you've got The New York Times holding up the most racist Trumper and saying this is who you guys are.
I agree with you that this is a tactic that many reporters have also taken on. I think it's a bad one, though. I think we all need to hold ourselves to higher standards. And I also think that if you're somebody who is concerned about cancel culture, that this is an example of it. Taking some out-of-context video, some random person who has done something that you personally disagree with and saying, this person should be fired from their job. And I object to that when it happens on the left, and I object to it when it happens on the right. I will say...
The account can be funny. I follow it myself. But I just fundamentally disagree with this tactic, whether it's the New York Times or the Washington Post or Libs of TikTok, taking random people, putting them in the spotlight and saying, hey, everybody, let's laugh at this dumbass. Let's get this dumbass fired. I don't think it's good for the republic. I don't think it's good for culture. And
I don't and I definitely don't think it's good for the media when the media does it, which it does. It totally does it. But I just don't think it's good either way. I mean, I agree. No, I agree with you fundamentally that it's cruel. Finding people who aren't famous and making them famous when it's done by the right, when it's done by the left, when it's done by The New York Times and when it's done by Libs of TikTok is a cruel activity.
And shouldn't be done. So, yeah, I know. I guess I agree with you. I just sort of like emotionally I'm sort of I really I really understand lives of TikTok and I really get the rage that they feel. And I think one of the reasons it's resonated so much is that.
For so long, the American media has found the craziest QAnon-believing wackadoodles on the right and denied that anything like this exists on the left. All the crazies have to be on the right. All the people with extreme beliefs are on the right. The left is just very sensible liberals talking politely over wine. And so...
I understand emotionally the impulse to start pointing out to the left and saying, hey, you've got some QAnons in your crowd, too. I completely, yeah, I get that as well. I think that where both the New York Times and Libs of TikTok or any media outlet fails is by not offering context. And so if the time goes and covers some context,
QAnon pool party and makes it seem like this is the entire right. And the lips of TikTok uses this language all the time. She says the left, the left believes that there is nothing that the left believes. There is nothing that the right believes. These concepts are silly. We're talking about millions of people here. And so holding these, these,
weird non-binary fish people up as representative is no more fair than holding up the QAnon believer as representative of all Republicans or everybody on the right. I will say it is funny. It is funny. And I have mixed feelings about the reporting on this from the Washington Post. But I don't think that Libs of TikTok is any sort of hero. And if you if you object when the left does this, you should object when the right does it as well. Yeah.
Regardless of how you feel about the account, I think that what this shows us is that The Washington Post and Libs of TikTok are frankly not that different when it comes down to it. They're all in the gutter now. Reporters are influencers. Twitter is the media. People are doxing each other left or right. There's hypocrisy everywhere. And I think the story to keep an eye out for is how is this going to accelerate? How much are we going to see The Washington Post turning more into places like Libs of TikTok every day?
Okay, we will be right back with the last word. And I promise it's funny. Hang around, which is a joke you'll get when you hear the next segment. Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Welcome back. And for our final piece of news this week, Katie, it is testicle tanning. And it's going to be me arguing that testicle tanning is good.
Somehow in the past few decades, all the favored hobbies of the hippies and California health nuts like me, so things like radical healthy eating, avoiding seed oils, skepticism of pharmaceuticals, advocacy of animal rights, only eating grass-fed beef, all that stuff, and extensive outdoor nudity, in this case, sunning one's testicles, have become parts of the new conservative culture.
So this week, Tucker Carlson, the most watched man on television by far, released a long trailer for his upcoming special on The End of Men. Once a society collapses, then, you're in hard times. Well...
In it, he's got experts talking about bromeopathic therapy. And yes, I keep saying it, testicle tanning with bromeopathic therapy.
Of course, a video showing it. You saw in the clip there, if you want to optimize and take it to another level, expose yourself to red light therapy. There's a massive amount of that. Which is testicle tanning. It's testicle tanning, but it's also full body red light therapy, which has massive amount of benefits. He's got guys talking about falling testosterone levels, which is legitimately alarming. So obviously half the viewers right now are like, what? That's testicle tanning? That's crazy.
But my view is, OK, testosterone levels crash and nobody says anything about it. That's crazy. So why is it crazy to seek solutions? It's not crazy to seek solutions. And I think I was recently in this case, chemicals from plastics and personal care products are likely in part to blame for what's going on. So this this trailer comes out and of course, the left mocks the whole thing.
The point I want to try to make is that if your goal is for people to come together and be alarmed about all the crap and chemicals in our environment, and if some people want to be alarmed about that crap because they're worried about their penis size, why alienate them? Why not embrace these guys? Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. There's no reason a conservative environmental movement can't be revived.
Big tent anti-pollutant thinking means sunscreen skeptical moms, old lefties, swayable Republicans, and ball tanners all come together as one. Once again, lesbians are left out of the big tent. No, but I guess my question for you is like, why is it that whenever anything is embraced as a conservative thing, it suddenly has to become completely rejected by the left? In this case, yes.
What might be being embraced as a conservative thing is like grass fed meat and environmentalism. Yeah, this could be an opportunity for lots of deferring factions that normally go to war with each other to come together for something that really matters, you know, testicles. And yet this just becomes more culture war fodder. If anybody but Tucker Carlson had done this, maybe maybe Democrats and lefties would be more amenable. But I guess they're just going to continue to watch their balls shrink to make points. Yeah.
To me, this is like a dream of dreams, honestly. Nightmare of nightmares. I am so thrilled that there's a conservative, masculine movement for environmental safety. Manly men are now saying that it's our duty to have the air and the water be really clean. I don't know. I just was watching the rage towards Tucker and the mockery of these guys, and I was thinking, like, this is the best environmental news we've had in years, decades.
Yeah, we're at a moment now when people across the political spectrum are caring more about things like the environment and our bodies and the health of ourselves and the planet and our fellow man. And of course, our own testicles and that of our husbands and sons.
And so if this is what it takes to bring people together, I think you're right, Nellie. Maybe some optimism is warranted. I forced it out of you. TGIF. TGIF. Thank you, Katie. And thank you, Tucker. And as always, please go to listen to Blocked and Reported. You can find it at blockedandreported.org. This has been TGIF. It's a podcast inspired by my weekly news roundup that I publish at Common Sense. Go sign up to get it every Friday.
TGIF, everyone.