The Worst Takes of 2025 [TEASER]

The boys catalog the definitive worst takes of the year, from the pundits who misunderstood our political moment to a guy who wants to have sex with a computer.

To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Transcript

Peter: Did we make the joke last year that like the worst take was someone criticizing us? [Michael laughs]

Michael: I think we did.

Peter: I don’t know. I think we might have too.

Michael: What if this whole episode is just us reading feedback to the show? Negative feedback.

Peter: Your worst takes, like, the boys take feedback or whatever.

Michael: Do a tagline.

Peter: I'm doing the zinger. Okay

Michael: Peter.

Peter:  Michael.

Michael: What do you know about the worst takes of 2025?

Peter: All I know is that for the third year in a row, the worst takes of the year were all light criticism of me.

[If Books Could Kill theme]

Michael: So, the year in worst takes, the year in bad takes. This was an incredible year for bad takes. This was one of the championships worst takes years.

Peter: We have kept tabs on the worst takes of the year. 

Michael: Yes. 

Peter: And I think that means that we have between us the actual worst takes of the year.

Michael: This is the definitive list.

Peter: Number one, people saying that I was too nice to Elon Musk.

[laughter]

Michael: No recency bias either. That's just this week what you've been thinking about.

Peter: No recency bias, just the last Bluesky reply I got.

Michael: The only thing you've been thinking and texting me about for the last two weeks.

Peter: 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 sucker.”

Michael: As usual I am using this as an opportunity to reflect on the year that has come behind us. 

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: I think politically the central fact of this year was that it became undeniable that we're in the middle of an authoritarian resurgence. 

Peter: Yeah, yeah. 

Michael: It's really fucking obvious what has happened to the United States at this point. And so, the op ed pages of the country had to deal with it. Like, what are they going to do as this becomes just increasingly thuddingly obvious?

Peter: Right.

Michael: So, I have pulled out a couple of categories of bad takes because they're all interchangeable on some level. So, my first category is just brain dead, both sides-ing. The most egregious example of this is we're not going to talk about it in any detail, but the miserable Olivia Reingold piece in The Free Press saying that you say, “Kids are starving, but they're actually starving in Gaza.” Like just monstrous shit.

Peter: Probably the most disgusting thing I've read this year.

Michael: 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 defending people who are starving children.

Peter: On the grounds that the children were already sick or have a preexisting condition. And like the implication is that it's all faked. 

Michael: People are overreacting.

Peter: And then 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 Reingold and The Free Press. I guess that was meant to be what, your takeaway.

Michael: We also had Megan McArdle wrote an article called the Missing Context from the Elon Musk Salute.

Peter: Hell yeah.

Michael: The Washington Post published in defense of the White House ballroom. Trump versus NIMBYs.

Peter: [laughs] Not in my backyard, but the backyard is the White House.

Michael: Is the White House? Yep. You may think it's bad, but it's actually fine. We also had Bret Stephens writing, “No, Israel is not committing genocide.” Persuasion wrote “The case for tariffs.” Persuasion also published when they go low, we go… low. That is about Gavin Newsom tweets.

Peter: Persuasion is so interesting because it's like, “What if The Free Press had no money? [Michael laughs] What if they were just in it for the love of the game?”

Michael: But then my favorite both sides take this is from June 3, 2025. It's called How History Will Remember Elon Musk by someone named Louise Perry. It's in The New York Times. I'm going to send you the nut graph. This actually isn't my winner. This is an honorary mention.

Peter: For better or worse, Elon Musk is a visionary. Oh, this is just quoting me from the episode. 

Michael: [laughs] You're so mad about this. Officially, you're joking, but you're so mad about this.

Peter: I'm obviously mad. 

[laughter]

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 his foray into 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.

[laughter] 

Michael: No one wants to admit. No one wants to admit it.

Peter: The sun is gradually expanding and so we do at some point need to be a multi planet civilization because Earth will be incinerated.

Michael: This is something that will happen, by the way, in 5 billion years, the human species will be wiped off the planet numerous times over by the time this happens.

Peter: We're going to be killed by either Elon Musk or someone exactly [Michael laughs] like him way before this happens.

Michael: My actual winner for the best achievement in both sidesing is from The Atlantic on June 7, 2025, called “Sometimes a Parade is Just a Parade. Not everything the Trump administration does is a threat to democracy.”

Peter: And this is about the military parade. [laughs]

Michael: The deranged military parade that he wanted to have on his birthday.

Peter: Name one difference between this and every parade you've ever seen. [Michael laughs] Wait, who's the author?

Michael: This is Kori Schake.

Peter: Fake name, right?

Michael: No, I think it's real.

Peter: Now you're glancing around the room. You're like, Kori Schake.

Michael: Well, her real name is Harlem, but she changed it.

Peter: Terrible.

Michael: 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.

Peter: No, it does not. That's not the primary criticism of the military parade. No.

Michael: 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 its glory here.

Peter: The full Schake, as we're calling it. [Michael laughs] 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 Bastille 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.

Michael: It could be doing a thing that it's not doing.

Peter: 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 post on Truth Social, calling his opponents ‘scum.’

Michael: To be fair--

Peter: Will he do the thing that he has always done or will he do a thing that he has never done?

Michael: Yep.

Peter: Even so, the Commander in Chief has a right to engage with the military that Americans elected him to lead. The responsibility of the military and of the country is to look past the President's hollow solipsism and embrace the men and women who defend the United States.

Michael: Look past it, Peter. Look past everything he's ever done in his whole life, everything he does and says.

Peter: Look past the symbolism. Look past the purpose of it.

Michael: Look past the person running it.

Peter: Find a fake purpose.

Michael: Yep. [chuckles]

Peter: And then embrace that.

Michael: This article says at the end, “A version of this essay originally appeared on the AEI Ideas Forum from the American Enterprise Institute.” 

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: So, this person is a fucking ghoul. But The Atlantic is running this right. And The Atlantic has an overwhelmingly center left readership. I think you can see the little gears turning in their brain. What's actually happening in the country is this one-dimensional fascist power grab. Like, it makes no sense to even deny this at this point. But the problem with punditry in this era is 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 to contextualize this.

You could easily talk about like, “How Kim Jong Un does this,” how other countries have militarized as they've fallen 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 takes. They have to do views on things like, “Oh, I need to say something about this.” That's like counterintuitive and interesting.

Peter: The Atlantic and The Times in particular have leadership that really wants to like challenge the views of its liberal readership.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: So, you end up getting these contrarian takes and the bar for the takes that they are willing to entertain as long as they're contrarian is super low.

Michael: 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 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. Yes. If the facts of the thing are different, I feel differently. That's not hypocrisy. That's not an argument in any meaningful way. Yes.

Peter: They're sort of like, well, there is a type of military parade that isn't so bad.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: And it's like, right. [laughs] Okay.

Michael: It's like, well, we do this to celebrate wartime victories. Okay. Do we have a wartime victory? No.

Peter: Our triumph in Afghanistan. Thank you, Joe Biden.

Michael: [laughs] 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 out of the blue on the leader's birthday. I'm not owned by this. I'm just like, rolling my eyes. Like, it makes you look so much worse than the people who are just like, yeah, this thing that is happening is bad.

Peter: I do have one that falls into this category. It is from The New York Times Magazine in January 2025 by Ross Barkan. It's titled Goodbye, ‘Resistance. The Era of Hyperpolitics is Over.”

Michael: I think I've read this.

Peter: This is part of a genre of early 2025 takes that were 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 reenvision what the left and liberalism was going to look like moving forward. Because clearly it had failed. Donald Trump had risen back up.

Michael: This, of course, did not happen after 2020 when Joe Biden won. It did not happen in the 2025 election when democrats soundly beat Republicans of course not but—[crosstalk].

Peter: But the 2025 elections are what I think flips all of this on its 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. Win the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia. All of the trends that the pundits were pointing towards as the death knell for the Democratic Party flipped back. Did all of the pundits who were like, “Well, the shift in the Hispanic vote has completely changed the game.” Did they write their apologies in November? No. No. 

Michael: It's time for Democrats to start saying Latinx, [Peter laughs] it's the only way.

Peter: So, this particular piece in The New York Times Magazine is less about the 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 lack of anti-trump energy, which is true. There was a lot of capitulation among corporations. There was a defeatism among democrats. He says the drama surrounding antifascism faded. Now it can seem tired and alarmist to warn that Trump will end free elections.

Michael: So, cringe. It's so cringe.

Peter: 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 depoliticization. Like, as if Mark Zuckerberg going on Rogan wearing a chain.

Michael: Right.

Peter: And talking about masculinity is the absence of politics. [laughs]

Michael: Right. The real Mark Zuckerberg is finally emerging, yes.

[laughter] 

Peter: Mark Zuckerberg's natural form of a 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.

Michael: Right.

Peter: And they wanted to suck up to him. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: So, Mark Zuckerberg is like, “I do jiu jitsu, by the way.”

Michael: The entire savvy political punditry class, people who like their whole fucking thing is like, electoral politics. Like, “Ah, we must do what is popular.” Completely ignored the fact that, like, Trump is historically one of the most 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 a weird superpower that they have.

Peter: Right.

Michael: But all of these allegedly savvy pundits where it's like, “Well, the country loves deporting 11 million people.”

Peter: Most of the pundits that write this shit are these center to center right, center left dudes. They are deeply insecure about their position in this country.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: 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.” No one agrees with us. It all comes out in these moments because they have very much bought into the idea that they are not real Americans.

Michael: Yeah, totally. Yeah. 

Peter: All right, I am going to send you a little bit more here.

Michael: What comes next might be a more conventional politics, one still grounded in resistance, but perhaps of a quieter type. When Trump signed his executive order to end birthright citizenship, the governors and attorneys general of more than 20 states sued to stop him. Mass protest wasn't required, nor were calls for a fresh antifascist movement. The work was merely done. Democrats seemed 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. Politics will be the static crackling in the background. It won't be everything anymore.

Peter: Dude, think of a worse prediction than this.

Michael: It's crazy.

Peter: If you thought that politics was about to calm down. 

Michael: No, I know.

Peter: When Trump was entering office, when you saw the executive orders piling up, it's hard to believe that this person analyzes politics for a living.

Michael: You're basically taking the first three months or the first two months of an administration and just being like, “Well, this is how it's going to be forever.”

Peter: Democrats were licking their wounds for a bit. I think we were all exhausted, right-

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: -by the 2024 election, but the idea that politics would become less salient.

Michael: Right. [laughs]

Peter: Is what are you basing that on? 

Michael: No.

Peter: He characterizes Trump trying to end birthright citizenship. This aggressive antiimmigrant action that defies 150 years of legal precedent.

Michael: Flatly illegal, unconstitutional. Yeah.

Peter: He says 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. It's like, “Oh, finally, normal politics. They're ending birthright citizenship.” [chuckles]

Michael: Why do these people think that their job is to predict things? This is just the original sin of all of this shit.

Peter: Imagine you're writing this like, Hitler takes power in 33, and you're like, finally things are calming down.

Michael: Do you want to do the next category?

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: If I had spent the last four years of my life talking about how campus sophomores were a threat to free speech and how the left was drifting into totalitarianism. And then we have an authoritarian movement rising that I did not raise an alarm about at all. I might reflect on how I had spent 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 centrist final boss Yascha Mounk. So, these are from persuasion.community.

Peter: That don’t even have persuasion.com-- [chuckles] 

Michael: DEI must change. The Five Dogmas of DEI. Discourse on race has a conformity problem. The psychology behind wokeness. The average college student is illiterate. Teach pluralism, not antiracism. Yes, college students can't read good. Professors need to diversify what they teach. Teach students conservative thought.

Peter: Brutal, Brutal.

Michael: They're just like partying like it's 2021.

Peter: This is related to what I was talking about where for several years now these centrist pundits have been like, “The left is out of control. We need to rein all of this social justice shit in.” And Kamala loses. And they find it very vindicating because they're like, “This is why.” 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.” This is a critique that I largely agree with. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: 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 centrists like Mikie Sherrill in Jersey who are emblematic of that problem, win. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: Everyone just wants to look at the election and just jam their little narratives into it. 

Michael: Totally. 

Peter: Right. And I think you see that sort of continuing into 2025 with these outlets like Persuasion. They have one. This is their only beat.

Michael: The excesses of wokeness.

Peter: Right. The social justice left is out of control and we should reel it in. Meanwhile, the elections of 2025 are the best example of the idea that it's probably not really electorally relevant.

Michael: Yeah. The problem with all of this stuff is that it's just really difficult to draw broad Ideological conclusions from 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 in ballots all of a sudden. And then the 2024 presidential campaign was also totally buck wild. 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 most presidential elections. There's such a huge confluence of factors.

Michael: 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.

Peter: You're aware of my brewing theory that nothing matters. 

Michael: Yes. I'm slowly coming around to Peter Shamshiri thought.

Peter: There's a sort of like half-baked thought I have. This half-baked theory that your messaging doesn't really matter that much. There are all these people who are like, “Well, Elon sees Twitter and that changed the game and shit like that.” Even that is less compelling now. The idea that anything mattered-- [laughs] The idea that anything ideological or from a messaging perspective mattered in 2024. That argument is a lot weaker now in 2025. 

Michael: We have to get to the most 2021 ass take from this year. A lot of these complaints ultimately boil down to vocabulary. It's like people are saying pregnant people, and they should stop saying that. Like, this is what these fucking people whined about for four years ultimately. 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 should be. [Peter laughs] This is about how you're all saying wife guy, and you should stop.

Peter: Is it wife guy endearing.

Michael: Dude. Don't get ahead of ourselves, Peter.

Peter: Okay?

Michael: This guy's so mad. Okay, here is-- It's a little bit long, but I'll send you the first couple paragraphs. He really whines up to something here.

Peter: 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 shortly afterward posted it to Instagram with several iterations of an emoji that felt appropriate. A man smiling with hearts in place of his eyes. [chuckles] I did this because I love her. My love for-- [crosstalk] 

[laughter] 

Michael: I don't want to laugh at this guy, but you just know where he's going with this, and it's so fucking funny.

Peter: He's very mad.

Michael: You know he's going to get to the outrage eventually. And it's like, “Dude, you’re still loving your wife. It's fine.”

Peter: It's so important. I know that I was just complaining about people who criticize me.

Michael: I know you're becoming this guy.

Peter: Well, but you have to understand on some level that you're being insane.

Michael: This is why we don't talk about this publicly. We just text each other and whine about it. But it's really not that big of a deal.

Peter: Until we expand it into a group chat that completely changes our worldview. [Michael laughs] All right, 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 coworkers. He's just, like, describing having a wife.

Michael: He's preemptively defending himself from the wife guy allegations. He's like, “I'm not just a wife guy online,” I'm like, “I like her in person.”

Peter: 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 ate on vacation. So, the first time that someone called me a “wife guy,” I wasn't sure how to react. If you are 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. [Michael laughs] The term, which rose to popularity sometime during the first Trump administration, describes someone whose spousal affection is so ostentatious that it becomes inherently untrustworthy.

Michael: And then he goes on and gives a bunch of examples which are boring and so we're not going to talk about them but then he gets to the conclusion.

Peter: In a world where identity is always being performed on social media, this 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?

Michael: I'm standing up as a wife guy.

Peter: I feel like there's probably a decent percentage of our listeners who haven't really heard this term or aren't super familiar with it, but wife guy is a very clear term of endearment used online.

Michael: If your friends are calling you, like, “Hey, I didn't know you were a wife guy. That's like a nice thing to say. It's an extremely gentle way of teasing you, but it's teasing you about something positive. They're like, “Hey, this guy likes his wife.” 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: He doesn't even have evidence that anyone has said anything mean about him.

Peter: I've always understood wife guy, and I guess I've never really thought about this, right?

Michael: No because you're fucking normal.

Peter: I've always understood wife guy as a friendly way of saying this is someone who genuinely likes their wife.

Michael: Yes.

Peter: Because there's a type of guy when he's talking about his wife, is complaining about his wife. Right?

Michael: Yeah. Or the curvy wife guy thing 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.

Peter: That feels bizarrely performative and weird. That's different. 

Michael: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: But that's not.

Michael: But that's not wife guy. The reason the work- [crosstalk] 

Peter: That is not wife guy. 

Michael: -curvy was at the beginning of it. Was because it's not a normal wife guy. It's a curvy wife guy, which is different.

Peter: This is such advanced analysis that [Michael laughs] curvy wife guy is not a wife guy, actually.

Michael: 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 really condescending to your wife. I don't trust you anymore.” I think it's like his friends on Instagram.

Peter: The lightest teasing--

Michael: [laughs] The lightest fucking teasing.

Peter: The lightest teasing has made him ashamed of his own love for his wife.

Michael: I know. And he's spiraling out and then he pitches it to a fucking magazine.

Peter: He's like, “Hey, can I talk about how people are making fun of me for loving my wife?”

Michael: I have fucking said this to my straight guy friends. I'm like, “Hey, we got a wife guy over here.”

Peter: And they're like, “You.” They just start throwing the F slur at you.” You fucking piece of shit. How fucking dare you.”

Michael:  You call me a slur? I'm going to call you a slur.

Peter: [laughs] That's just a slur for a slur trade of course. [Michael laughs] Like, you'll read The Atlantic, and it's like, you can't even say X and Y anymore.

Michael: And then it's like, “Stop saying X and Y.”

Peter: But they're talking about the R word.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter: Then it's like. But also, you really shouldn't say wife guy.

Michael:  Are you a wife guy, Peter? Do you do posts like this?

Peter: This is different for us because when you have 150,000 followers, you're making your spouse half a public figure, you know?

Michael: Yeah, but I mean, you have a private Instagram account, right?

Peter: No.

Michael: Oh, really? You're not on Instagram at all?

Peter: I have an Instagram account, but I do not use it at all. No.

Michael: Okay. I have one where I post thirst traps, and people in the comments be, “Ooh, another thirst trap.” And I just want to write an article for The Atlantic and melting down. “I was called a thirst trap on the--" [laughs]

Peter: It's not a trap. I am thirsty. 

[laughter] 

Along the same lines of completely misjudging the politics of the last several years. Charles Homans in The New York Times, “Democrats lost voters on transgender rights. Winning them back won't be easy.”

Michael: Oh, God.

Peter: 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.

Michael: It's so infuriating.

Peter: The political shifts in 2025 have demonstrated how incorrect this is.

Michael: Also, maybe you're going to get into this, but also, I've been working on a project in the background about the actual campaign rhetoric in 2024. Kamala Harris did not say the word transgender a single time in any official campaign materials. Like, they did not run on transgender rights. They just didn't.

Peter: They made a very specific effort to avoid it. Yeah, I guess there's this holistic argument that it's associated with the party regardless, which is probably true to some degree.

Michael: 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 there, next time, too. So, what is the actual advice here?

Peter: Democrats proposed an extremely aggressive antiimmigration bill in 2024.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Peter: And Republicans shot it down because they didn't want to give Biden that win. Did that help change the narrative about who's tough on immigration?

Michael: Exactly.

Peter: It didn't move the needle a little bit.

Michael: And also, everyone's like, “Oh, they need to run to the right on immigration.” Okay, they did that and it didn't work.

Peter: They did.

Michael: They need to have an explanation for that rather than cajoling them to do the thing that they already did.

Peter: 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.

Michael: That's the only choice you have.

Peter: Breaking the association is a lot harder. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: We need to find-- We just need to find the coolest trans person that we can and just put them on television a lot. [Michael laughs] You know what I mean?

Michael: That's why the new cohost of this show is Caitlyn Jenner. It's happening. Unproblematic Queen, Caitlyn Jenner.

Peter: So, this is piece centers around a discussion with Lanae Erickson at Third Way, which is the centrist think tank that's, like, stuck in 1994.

Michael: Democrats need to do what they're already doing.

Peter: So, I'm going to have you read this and then I'm going to have you read one of the following paragraphs.

Michael: In some areas, Democratic politicians taking cues 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.

Peter: This is basically like the right wing's 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-trans as you want to be. You can do this Gavin Newsom bullshit. The median voter is going to associate trans rights with the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party. And so, it will be an effective line of attack. So, you actually just need to make the case. Yeah, there's almost no reason to continue talking about this because one of the following paragraphs here basically concedes the point. Here you go.

Michael: 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 postelection Democratic polling project, found that amongst new voters who voted for Mr. Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, 67% believed 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.

Peter: And voters don't care about. It's not a top issue. 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 and their allies on the left who you need in your camp.

Michael: I also think because I've been reading a bunch of Kamala Harris speeches and looking at bunch of campaign materials from 2024, 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 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?

Peter: That's the thing, is that all of the arguments that Democrats want to concede on trans rights are fundamental. I don't think you can concede the sports argument without basically implying that trans women are not real women.

Michael: You're basically asking Democratic candidates to concede to what is a fucking lie. I mean, this whole-- all this gender affirming 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 conspiracy myths. 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.

Peter: A lot of people who are low engagement with politics are just hearing kids are transitioning irreversible medical care for like an 11-year-old who doesn't know what's going on.

Michael: Which is not happening but that's what they're hearing. Yeah.

Peter: It's not happening. If it doesn't happen even less, they will still think that.

Michael: Right, exactly.

Peter: You're not addressing the actual source of the problem, which is the propaganda. Not saying it's an easy thing to address, but conceding on policy grounds doesn't move you anywhere because it was never a genuine policy concern to begin with.

Michael: I think this is 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.”

Peter: Why don't we transition into another topic?

Michael: But she 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.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: So that pisses off trans people, that pisses off transphobes, and it pisses off everybody who just sees a fucking politician worming out of a question. So, they didn't have answer. I think that was a huge mistake. All we had was this thing of like, she wants illegal immigrants to get transgender surgeries in 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 wards of the state. Part of that is transitioning.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: 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 bounce around this, nationwide game of telephone.

Peter: Like, the Democrats approach on a lot of these things where they perceive the right wing as winning is just concede and ignore and this shit does not work politically.

Michael: It does not work. You're just going to get a million attack ads and people are not going to hear anything else from you.

Peter: I also have a somewhat tangential take on the politics of this, which is that Democrats are often trying to thread the needle of accurately describing their policy, but also appealing to the public. Whereas I think Trump's appeal to a lot of people is that he doesn't really equivocate. He's like, “We're going to kick out the bad people and the good people stay” right?

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: 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 keep your message simple. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: So rather than doing this whole like, “Well, we support trans rights, but here are the limitations, blah, blah, blah. It would better to just say something simple that's almost a lie. They want to check your kid’s genitals. You know what I mean? 

Michael: Yes, yes, yes.

Peter: They're doing genital scans. If you don't want that, vote for us. Is it oversimplified? 100%.

Michael: But it's also meaningfully true. I think it's absolutely fair.

Peter: I mean, there's enough truth, right?

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: But my point is stop. Don't worry about the nuances of how true it is, exactly. Get out a message that's roughly on point, that sounds effective, and be done with it.

Michael: Just accept that we live in ideocracy now and fucking roll with it.

Peter: It's so funny how Trump will 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? [Michael laughs] And he'll say that out loud. He'd be like, “We're going to get rid of the bad people and the good people.” And people are like, “Shit, yeah.” And then they watch what ice is doing and they're confused.

Michael: They're like, “I didn't vote for this.”

Peter: I thought the good people were going to stay. It's like, “I bet you did.”

Michael: All right, one more category before we get to the official worse take of the year. One of the major themes of coverage this year was that even when ostensibly left-wing outlets are describing the actions of the Trump administration, they will still find a way to blame the left. So, we're not going to dive into this one, but in June, there was an article in The New York 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 Doge's Woodchipper first. You are the subject of a bad faith right wing attack. You did not fail to tell your story.

Peter: It's so odd to me that every rightwing political victory gets framed as the will of the people manifest.

Michael: Which is not even true in this case because people actually like foreign aid.

Peter: 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 describe 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%.

Michael: So, okay, that's just the honorary mention. The worst example of this year is from March. This is by The New York Times editorial board. It is called the authoritarian end game on higher education.

Peter: But it blames the left.

Michael: Yeah, so it has a whole thing like it's 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 have little stake in it.”

Peter: Oh my God, dude.

Michael: And then it says this.

Peter: 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 and university administrators acted in recent years as liberal ideologues rather than seekers of empirical truth. 

Michael: [00:37:05] Ideologues.

Peter: Academics have tried to silence debate on legitimate questions, including about COVID lockdowns, gender transition treatments and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Michael: Shutting down debate. 

Peter: The insularity of American academia is appalling, said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. It has led to massive resentment against intellectual elites. This insularity does not justify Mr. Trump's policies, but it does help explain the dearth of conservatives defending universities today. Universities will be in a stronger long-term position if they recommit themselves to open debate.

Michael: Brain dead child. The mind of a child.

Peter: 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.

Michael: No. Completely, yes or just like shutting down, ending a debate when it's like, vaccines fucking work, man.

Peter: There are plenty of problems with those paragraphs. Like, what are you talking about exactly? When you're talking about a lack of open debate about these things. I'm going to need specifics if you're claiming that debate is being shut down in some material way.

Michael: And also, now that right wingers are taking over the universities, are they fostering open debate?

Peter: Exactly.

Michael: Are they leaning more empirical truth than ideology really?

Peter: Does caving into the right-wing work? Yeah, look at what they put up. Look at the University of Austin, the Bari Weiss operation. Are they seeking empirical truth or are they just a right-wing college?

Michael: It's obvious this has all been in bad faith the entire time. And The New York Times 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 publish three fucking op eds a week about how higher education is bad and illegitimate and suppressing debate. That's part of why.

Peter: I recently wrote about Greg Lukianoff, 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 claiming that these schools have been violating the law, have been violating principles of free speech, etc., are sort of enthralled to liberal ideology. Haven't you fed this narrative?” And his response was basically, well, if people had listened to us, maybe this wouldn't have happened.

Michael: Oh, my fucking God.

Peter: A 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.”

Michael: Look, I've written 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.

Peter: Well. I don’t know.

Michael: I mean, those should go to Rikers, but still.

Peter: Yeah, I mean I do. We can find a middle ground there. [laughs]

Michael: I think this also serves a psychological purpose too. Like a lot of these things, other their arguments, it's like you think they must have done something to deserve it.

Peter: Not to mention this leaves out that there are various types of academic departments that are in fact right leaning.

Michael: Number one degree is business in America.

Peter: I mean it's true that the humanities are very liberal also. It's true that conservatives don't believe in the humanities.

Michael: Yeah, exactly.

Peter: So, what do you want? What are universities supposed to do when you literally don't believe that sociology is real?

Michael: Also, they don't even believe that like metrology is real. It's like if you think climate change is fake, then produce some fucking work that it's fake. Prove it. 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 in climate change.

Peter: Right.

Michael: All right, do you want to do worsties now?

Peter: Yeah. I have my own category which is Epstein files takes.

Michael: I think I know one of-- I think I know one of them.

Peter: David Brooks in The New York Times headline is “The Epstein Story? Count Me Out.”

Michael: Count me out. This was, I just did an episode with Adrian and 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--

Peter: Spoilers, Michael’s spoilers. 

Michael: It's egregious. 

Peter: Alright. I'm send you a couple bits.

Michael: 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 could 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 salacious, are easy to understand and allow you to offer self-confident opinions with no actual knowledge. What is your knowledge of Mr. Epstein? [Peter laughs] David Brooks, what is your knowledge? Do you have any knowledge?

Peter: He says the most important reason the Epstein story tops our national agenda is that the QAnon mentality has taken over America.

Michael: Yep.

Peter: The QAnon mentality is based on the assumption that the American elite is totally evil and that American institutions are totally corrupt.

Michael: Hate that. I hate that for them.

Peter: This is a sort of analysis that I think, it's like, okay, you're poking at this real thing, which is that a ton of the Epstein discourse is entangled with conspiracism. No question about that. But also, a huge shocking percentage of American elites had some tie to this guy who was a known pedo.

Michael: Right.

Peter: It's very weird to be like, “Ugh, 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.”

Michael: And also, you can't say it's conspiracism when this is true.

Peter: I think it's such a classic dumbass defense to be like, “Oh, so you're saying the American elite is totally evil?” Like, “No, I'm not saying that.”

Michael: People are saying the American elite are covering for evil, which is precisely what you are doing right now in this column, right? And also, what happened to Mr. Moral Clarity over here? His whole thing is 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.

Peter: 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 sowing public cynicism in ways that make the entire progressive project impossible.

Michael: Why is it progressive's fault?

Peter: They are contributing to a public atmosphere in which right wing populism naturally thrives.

Michael: Contributing to an atmosphere is such fucking weasel garbage. What does that even mean? Dude, they're trying to get the truth out about how fucking bad this was.

Peter: Like, having the files released doesn't feed into the conspiracy any more than not having the files released. 

Michael: It's like saying, like, lead in the pipes, investigating how much lead in the pipes there is feeds the conspiracies that 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.

Peter: 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.” Like, oh, yeah, let's not feed into right wing conspiracies and instead let's remind voters that their land is being stolen by foreigners. [Michael laughs] And anyway, yeah, so the bookend 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. 

Michael: Of course.

Peter: So, we don't really know what that dinner was. 

Michael: Right. The extent of their interaction. We don't know this. Yeah.

Peter: 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 straight up doesn't even remember. 

Michael: But also, David Brooks has extensive ties to Larry Summers.

Peter: Right.

Michael: He knows other people in the file. It's very obvious. He's like in these echelons. So, maybe reflect on that a little bit. What did you know people, 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 this tranche of fucking elites. Rather than writing about like, “Hey, I feel bad about the way that I may have aided and embedded this.” You just write about how like, eh, let's focus on something else.

Peter: The Larry Summers thing is a good point because Larry Summers and Epstein are like good friends.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: Well into the period of time when it's known not just like by his friends, but by the broad public who Jeffrey Epstein is.

Michael: Also, 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 podcaster, somebody who I've only met once or twice, got arrested for fucking pedophilia, I feel like someone would tell me like, ‘Hey, you know that guy who hosted that dinner a while ago, he's a fucking pedophile dude, I'd be like, “Oh, fuck.” Word would have gotten around about this.

Peter: There's one other piece about Epstein I wanted to mention. This is Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post. [Michael laughs] Glenn Kessler, of course, The Washington Post Fact checker, we've done an entire episode on him before. Headline, 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 the point in the summer when the White House refused to release the Epstein files. A lot of it is just the like milquetoast, like, “Oh, 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.

Michael: Kessler says, “But no credible allegation 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.

Peter: Dude. Wild thing to put in a fact check article, right? It's like you're holding yourself out as the serious people who are focused on the facts, right?

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: And then you just throw in some speculative guesswork at the end about how if the full file were ever released, you're confident that no connection between Trump and Epstein's crimes would be found.

Michael: It's like, “You know, the politician about whom every accusation is true and [Peter laughs] turns out to be worse than you ever imagined.

Peter: 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 is put two and two together? Why is Donald Trump the most self-interested person in the history of the world [Michael laughs] refusing to release the files? 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: They say if Trump were prominently mentioned, it would have been leaked by now.

Michael: No. 

Peter: Wrong bitch. Wrong bitch.

Michael: We still don't even have his taxes. There's lots of stuff that hasn't been leaked.

Peter: 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.

Michael: Right.

Peter: Why put this in here?

Michael: But this is again the Brooks 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.

Peter: The most selfish person on earth is saying, “Hey, don't look in that box.”

Michael: [laughs] I know. I know.

Peter: And you're like, “I bet there's nothing in there.” The lying-est motherfucker of all time is telling you the most obvious lie of all time. And you're like, “I believe them.”

Michael: All right, are we ready for mine?

Peter: Is this your number one?

Michael: My number one crescendo, the crescendo of the episode emotionally and morally.

Peter: That was not my number one. I have a number one.

Michael: Well, what is yours? Do it.

Peter: No, no, no. There you go.

Michael: Well, I'll do. Okay, I'll do mine, but I'll do a short version of mine.

Peter: Okay, okay.

Michael: To clarify, I personally think the worst take of the year is actually Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, I think. I think that's right.

Michael: However, we already talked 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's New Moralism will Backfire. Under Trump, progressives have embraced the rhetoric of moral clarity. It won't help their cause.

Peter: Thomas, Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Michael: Old Tommy Chats.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]