Today we’re talking all things Elon with Ryan Mac, a reporter at the NYT and the co-author along with Kate Conger of CHARACTER LIMITS: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Ryan’s probably reported more on Elon than pretty much anyone in the press and he gives us his perspective on what’s happened, what moves Elon has made that he also made during his career in business, and what we might expect in the upcoming weeks.
Thanks!
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Watch this episode on YouTube. Today, we’re catching up on President Trump’s latest tariff moves, the newly appointed DNC chair, and USAID’s place on Doge’s chopping block. Tune in!
Today on The Gist a look at USAID’s role in global diplomacy and whether shuttering it makes any sense. And in The Spiel, how the punishments for January 6th rioters compare to those handed down for Black Lives Matter protesters. Plus, the conclusion of our interview with retired Air Force General Jay Santee who details breaks down the high-risk mission to neutralize Syria’s chemical weapons and compares it to Israel's more ad-hoc bombing of stockpiles.
On this episode of "The Federalist Radio Hour," Daniel Cameron, former attorney general of Kentucky and CEO of the 1792 Exchange, joins The Federalist's Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to discuss the dangers of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies and analyze the shift away from woke corporations.
If you care about combating the corrupt media that continue to inflict devastating damage, please give a gift to help The Federalist do the real journalism America needs.
If the Chinese hacked the U.S. government the way private citizen Elon has, it would be a major act of cyber warfare. And since Elon is a government contractor, he's now in a position to make policy calls that benefit his own companies and hurt his competitors—following the Russian oligarch model. We are in a completely lawless realm, and this is likely to continue until he is stopped. Meanwhile, government employees are being forced to choose between conforming or protecting the public. Plus, Elon is also sabotaging America's soft power and influence in Africa while he and the other tech overlords plot how to derail Europe's effort to regulate them.
Is America’s place in the world at a crossroads? The New York Times’ Michael D. Shear returns to unpack the first two weeks of Trump's second term and the domestic and international response to an emboldened executive branch wielding unprecedented power.
Ravi and Michael first review the administration’s high-stakes opening moves, from sweeping tariffs to an immigration crackdown, and discuss how a GOP-controlled Congress could enable some of Trump’s most aggressive policies yet. They also examine the Biden administration’s final days and the evolving dynamic between Trump and Obama.
Finally, they turn to the international fallout: Mexico has already deployed troops, Canada is preparing economic retaliation, and China is purported to be weighing its response to an economic showdown, all while Europe braces for its own clash with Washington. Is this a strategic reindustrialization effort or a political gamble with global consequences? With world leaders recalibrating their approach to a more focused and forceful Trump, Ravi and Michael discuss whether we’ve entered a new era of uncertainty.
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The graduating class of 2025 is the largest the country has ever seen — around 3.9 million students. That's according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.
And it'll likely be the largest group for a while.
That's because starting next school year, the number of high school seniors is expected to drop sharply. That's partly due to low birth rates connected to the 2008 recession.
We discuss how colleges and universities are grappling with declining enrollment.
In the morning, a tariff war; in the evening, a declaration of a truce in the tariff war. If there's no tariff war, was there ever going to be a tariff war? Were we silly for taking it seriously? And what does this portend for the talks with Israel on its war with Hamas, now currently quiescent? Give a listen.
Did you know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with naked dwarfs? Did you know that Catherine the Great—long smeared as a nymphomaniac—was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod’s genitals once exploded with maggots?
Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and it’s hard to remember any of it. But not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pages that you cannot put down.
While most of Sebag’s books are biographies of people, Jerusalem is a biography of a city—a city, as he writes, that is “the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice in heaven and on earth.” The book takes you through Jerusalem’s 3,000-year history, from King David to Bibi Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, and it has just been reissued in paperback.
With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel and with Trump a few weeks into his second presidency, we could not think of a better person to talk to than Simon about this moment and how to understand it.
Header 6:The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.
If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.
With Donald Trump's blessing, Elon Musk and a small crew of inexperienced software engineers take near full control of the government, moving to shut down USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and taking control of a critical payment system at the Treasury Department. Trump delays his trade war with Canada and Mexico by a month after securing minor concessions that were probably already in the works. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats begin to push back harder—though whether it'll be enough is still an open question. Jon, Lovett, and Tommy break down all the latest, and Lovett speaks with former Obama and Biden economic adviser Brian Deese about just how bad things could get if a real trade war kicks off over the next four years.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
