33 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Ed Condon who is the editor of The Pillar. On the podcast they talk about Biden's Catholicism; how it plays out in his politics and whether it will be a big part of his presidential campaign.
‘Democracy,’ said H.L. Mencken, ‘is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ As we approach 2024, America seems to be proving his point. On Tuesday, a highly unpopular octogenarian President announced that he would be running for re-election next year. Most of Joe Biden’s supporters don’t want him to run and a vast majority of young Democrats would prefer someone younger stood in his place. But everybody knows the reason Biden is staggering on. It’s because his Republican opponent in 2024 will in all likelihood be the man he beat in 2020: Donald J. Trump, arguably the most divisive leader in American history.
Ever since it began in 2016, Tucker Carlson Tonight has been easily the most interesting news show on American television. It was never, as Carlson’s many detractors claim, Trumpist propaganda. On the contrary, Carlson was a rare bright spot of originality in a boringly partisan media landscape. And now he’s gone: fired directly by Rupert Murdoch, I’m reliably told, with no reason given, just a few days after Fox News paid out $787 million to settle with Dominion Voting Systems. ‘It was the older Aussie,’ says my source: ‘the 92-year old-who just called off his engagement and settled for 800 million so that he wouldn’t have to go to Wilmington.’ (The Fox/Dominion trial was held in Wilmington, Delaware.
In America last week, a 92-year-old media titan agreed to pay out a $787 million (£632 million) settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on behalf of his network Fox News. This morning, the 80-year-old Democratic president has announced that he is running for re-election next year, even though polls suggest 70 per cent of Americans don’t want him to. Joe Biden will probably end up facing the 76-year-old Donald Trump, the man at the heart of that Fox/Dominion defamation. Welcome to America, the land where dinosaurs rule. President Biden spent the weekend at Camp David running through his re-election agenda. His video campaign announcement has just aired, kickstarting another 19 months of unpleasant speculation about his health and fitness for high office.
22 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Michael Wolff, author of books on Trump and Rupert Murdoch. On the podcast, they talk about the Dominion vs Fox trial settlement. Why did Fox let this case go on for so long?
One way or another, we’re almost all ‘content creators’ these days, humble social-media serfs toiling away in the Silicon Valley vineyards of the ‘likes’. That’s why dinosaur billionaire media owners – the old kings of content – have taken on mythic qualities even as their empires collapse. It’s why everybody loves the TV show Succession. The Murdochs, the Maxwells, the Bloombergs, who not so long ago were potent figures of vulgar fun, suddenly possess the sort of nostalgic glamour once attached to the landed gentry or the Great Industrialists.
36 min listen
Galen Druke, host of the FiveThirtyEight podcast, joins Freddy Gray on this episode to talk about what to take away from Chicago's election this week, how well the Biden team is handling the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and whether the Democrats would prefer to face up against Ron or Don as the Republican nominee. Produced by Natasha Feroze, Saby Kulkarni and Cindy Yu.
24 min listen
Donald Trump was in court where he pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying records. To discuss, Freddy Gray is joined by Alan Dershowitz, the American lawyer, and Charles Lipson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.
It won’t have escaped Donald Trump’s notice that his arrest has come during Holy Week, when our Lord and Saviour was sentenced by a cruel mob and crucified only to rise again. Trump — aka ‘the Tangerine Jesus’ — has long understood the religious power of politics in America. That’s why ‘I am your retribution’ is his campaign pitch in 2024. It’s why, recovering from Covid in the run up to the 2020 election, he described his recovery as ‘a blessing from God’ and behaved a bit like Lazarus brought back from the dead. It’s why he accuses the Democrats of stealing ‘our sacred elections.
29 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Jacob Heilbrunn about Trump's indictment and whether this could galvanize voters or hurt his presidential campaign.
10 min listen
Natasha Feroze speaks to Katy Balls and Freddy Gray about Biden's upcoming visit to the UK. Given the President's proud Irish roots, how much will he try throw his weight around on Brexit? And how worried are the Democrats about Trump's indictment?
Shall we talk about double standards? People scoff at ‘whataboutery’, yet sometimes an iniquity towards one side becomes so absurd it's sillier not to talk about it. And when it comes to American politics, the Democrats, and the indictment of President Donald J Trump, right-wing Americans have a point. This is a ‘weaponisation’ of the justice system and the unfairness of it reeks. Two weeks ago, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee revealed that the Biden family had, through an associate, received more than $1 million dollars from a Chinese energy company. The documents show that, from 2015 to 2017, Joe Biden’s brother Jim, his son Hunter, and his deceased son’s widow Hallie received significant funds – as did another, mysteriously unnamed ‘Biden’.
Freddy Gray speaks to Patrick J. Deneen, who is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Why Liberalism Failed and has just released a new book Regime Change.
Freddy Gray speaks to the Republican strategist and advisor Roger Stone about Trump's possible arrest; his views on Ron De Santis and the end of honest journalism.
Often spoken of in the same breath, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are not in fact all that similar. Both men inspire devotion among their followers. Both men are egotists, born privileged in New York. Both have weaknesses when it comes to the opposite sex. But Johnson is more of an introvert than Trump and less interested in money. Boris is a voracious reader who writes his own books. Donald might, like the satirical horror novelist Garth Marenghi, be one of the few people who has written more books than he’s read. Still, it is curious how, since the rabble-rousing year of 2016, the lives of Johnson and Trump have overlapped.
The 45th president of the United States of America — and the leading Republican contender to win back the White House in 2024 — may or may not be arrested today or tomorrow. According to his former-lawyer-turned-legal-nemesis Michael Cohen, Donald Trump should escape the indignity of handcuffs but could well be ‘fingerprinted, swabbed [and] mugshotted.’ Cohen insists he doesn’t want to see images of Trump doing a ‘perp walk’ because, he says, ‘he respects the institution of the presidency.’ Trump may despise Stormy Daniels, but he would surely respect the hustle Cohen, a convict himself, is hardly the most credible source.
For more than a decade, bitcoin bores have been banging on about cryptocurrency as the future of money. The emergence and spectacular growth of digital currencies, according to these evangelists, prove that the financial system upon which we all depend is broken. Bitcoin was after all created in 2009, after the great meltdown of 2008, as a revolutionary concept to fight the corrosive global power of central banking. Bitcoin was pitched as the new digital gold. It was limited in supply and could not be centrally controlled – its value couldn’t be distorted by quantitative easing and morally bankrupt governments hooked on debt. Bitcoin wasn’t just for buying illegal stuff online.
How will it look, for the health of American democracy, if the former President Donald Trump is put in handcuffs next week over charges that he paid ‘hush-hush money’ to the porn star Stormy Daniels? The man himself seems to be bracing for legal persecution over what he calls ‘The Stormy Horseface Daniels Extortion Plot.’ He says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and blames his ’sleazebag’ former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims Trump paid him £230,000 to pay off Daniels and another woman called Karen McDougal, who was voted America’s second ‘sexiest playmate of the 1990s.’ Trump has always denied the allegations and says the whole Daniels case is ‘ancient and now many times debunked.
36 min listen
Freddy Gray is joined by Joe Weisenthal, co-host of the Odd Lots podcast at Bloomberg. On the podcast, Joe talks about the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the moral hazard of state intervention. How gloomy should people be?
36 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion and regular contributor to The Spectator to discuss new footage which has emerged from January 6th.
