Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has rebranded his position as Secretary of War, followed the U.S. military invasion of Venezuela with a revealing press strategy: he shut out the Pentagon press corps and instead traveled with a hand-picked group of right-wing influencers and loyalist outlets on what the Pentagon itself branded the Arsenal of Freedom Tour. The timing was striking.
Before I turn to either, I'm going to anticipate something that will be said in the dialogue with Helen Lewis, where she talked about one of our challenges in the face of the way modern media works is to keep rediscovering old truths. And so I wanna open this show this week by talking about an old truth. If you've been reading in the news, you [may have] seen that the NATO alliance is under even more intense pressure than ever before.
Liz Truss, Britain's shortest-serving prime minister, began the first edition of her YouTube show with a vow to unmask the evil-doers attempting to bring down Britain, the US and Europe. She would, she explained, reveal how an international network of leftists work to subvert democracy and the will of the people. Despite her bleak monologue, Truss pointed to hope from across the Atlantic.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk has done what years of media fractures couldn't. It forced Fox News to choose between its institutional alliances and the influencer class that increasingly dominates the right and in doing so, to decide whether it would defend mainstream conservatism or surrender the field entirely to conspiracism. Fox & Friends made that choice explicit on Thursday morning, lining up behind Erika Kirk and rebuking the conspiracy theories pushed by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
In the Trump era, the real center of gravity on the American right has never been the Republican Party. It has been the people who talk to the Republican base every daythe broadcasters, the livestreamers, the podcasters, the influencers. They form the ecosystem that shapes belief, defines enemies, and decides who is ascendant or finished. And that is why the most significant political story unfolding right now isn't happening on Capitol Hill or inside the White House.
What do thousands of pages of newly released material reveal about the well-documented relationship between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and President Donald Trump? Not much of anything, according to some of the right-wing influencers who have long been clamoring for the government to release more information about Epstein and his crimes. "To me, these are nothingburgers. If they're even real," pro-Trump podcaster Jon Herold said on his Badlands Media Rumble livestream on Wednesday.
On October 30, Newsmax - the TV network for people who think Fox News is too liberal, basically - aired an AI-generated video purportedly showing a woman raging at a supermarket cashier, threatening to walk out with her haul of groceries without paying because "they cut her food stamps." The video is fake. And it's the same one that the actual Fox presented as genuine in an article it ran to drum up outrage over the perceived abuses of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,
Reporters carry their belongings from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on October 15, 2025 after U.S. and international news outlets including The New York Times, AP, AFP and Fox News declined to sign new restrictive Pentagon media rules, and were stripped of their press access credentials.
Last week, I caught wind that House Speaker Mike Johnson, along with several top House Republican leaders, had held an exclusive press briefing about the government shutdown that was restricted to "new media." The contents of the meeting were published as a "scoop" by the Washington Reporter - a Congress-focused publication founded by several GOP operatives that'd been established as a Punchbowl for conservatives - which described the call as "set[ting] the record straight" and
How long after the initial episode where you made the comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Monday episode, did you realize there was a problem?
But two sources familiar with the matter told the Daily News on Monday that Chell is now finalizing his retirement plans. The sources said he plans to seek a disability pension that would provide him with a tax-free, lifetime benefit equal to 75% of his salary. He's applying for the disability pension because of an ankle injury he sustained on Randalls Island while on duty last year, the sources added.
Almost immediately, numerous right-wing commentators and news outlets were very willing to speculate that, given the timing, the shooter must have been trans. Within the hour, former congressman and Fox commentator Jason Chaffetz, giving an "eyewitness account" of the scene, said: "I don't think it was a coincidence that the shot rang out when you have a question about transgender mass shootings. Hopefully I am wrong. I will probably get criticized for jumping to conclusions. ... I don't think that is a coincidence, but we will see."
