Richard Helppie's Common Bridge
The problems we have in the country are solvable, but not solvable the way we’re approaching them today, because of partisan politics. Richard Helppie, a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist seeks to find a place in the middle where common sense discussions can bridge the current great divide.
Richard Helppie's Common Bridge
Episode 280- Laughing Through the Gaslight: Unspinning the News- With Jenna McCarthy
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Ever wondered how a successful women's magazine writer and humor columnist became one of Substack's most incisive media critics? Jenna McCarthy never planned to write about "government corruption, health policy, and politics" - she was perfectly content crafting witty pieces about relationships and lifestyle topics for major publications. Then COVID happened, and suddenly McCarthy found herself questioning policies that "weren't making sense" and facing social media suspensions for her skepticism.
McCarthy's journey from mainstream publishing to independent journalism mirrors the broader transformation happening across the media landscape. With refreshing candor and razor-sharp humor, she dissects how traditional news outlets have abandoned objective reporting in favor of narrative advancement. "When I was growing up," McCarthy reflects, "never once did it occur to me that the news was anything other than fact." That assumption has been thoroughly shattered.
Through specific examples - from selective coverage of political scandals to disturbing revelations about organ harvesting practices - McCarthy and host Rich Helppie explore the systematic ways that important information is kept from public view. Their conversation reveals how humor can function as a powerful antidote to gaslighting, allowing audiences to process difficult truths while maintaining their sanity. As McCarthy explains, her readers tell her: "I stopped reading the news because I can't handle all that negativity. But now I don't have to watch it - Jenna will watch it and summarize it in a way that I can laugh but also know what's going on."
Whether discussing the college debt crisis, media bias in political coverage, or her upcoming books on overlooked medical treatments, McCarthy demonstrates how independent voices are filling crucial information gaps left by mainstream outlets. For anyone concerned about finding truth in a post-facts world, this conversation offers both insights and hope.
Subscribe to find more conversations that bridge political divides and explore important issues with depth, nuance, and occasional laughter.
Engage the conversation on Substack at The Common Bridge!
Introduction to The Common Bridge
Speaker 1Welcome to this episode of Season 6 of the Common Bridge, where policy and current events are discussed in a fiercely nonpartisan manner. The host, richard Helpe, is a philanthropist, entrepreneur and political analyst who has reached over 5 million listeners, viewers and readers around the world. With our surging growth in audience and subscriptions, the Common Bridge continues to expand its reach. The show is available on the Substack website and the Substack app Simply search for the Common Bridge continues to expand its reach. The show is available on the Substack website and the Substack app Simply search for the Common Bridge. You can also find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. The Common Bridge draws guests and audiences from around the political spectrum and we invite you to become a free or paid subscriber on your favorite medium.
Speaker 2Hello, welcome to the Common Bridge. I'm your host, rich Helpe, and I've got a great guest today. You're going to be informed and have some fun with Jenna McCarthy. Jenna, welcome to the Common Bridge, I'm glad to have you here.
Speaker 3Hi Rich, I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker 2Well, Jenna and I share something in common. That is, our amusement and disdain for the established media ecosystem. Now I go at it saying where can we get facts and figures and document? She does the same thing, but she's way wittier. We're going to get into that a little bit and just let me give you a little teaser. Do you know that you can donate your organs before you're even dead, maybe against your will? And for those of you that have seen our president go off, how many people have said that stuffing a dirty gym sock in his mouth might be an appropriate reaction? Well, we've got Jenna McCarthy here today, who's done all of those things. So, Jenna, you've been on Substack as a contributor for some time. This is not your first writing gig, so tell our listening and viewing and reading audience how did you get to this point and what brought you to Substack.
Speaker 3Oh, it's been a long meandering path, but I have been writing professionally for more than 30 years. I started in the early 90s. I lived in New York City and I was a magazine editor. I was a women's magazine editor, so I wrote for Mademoiselle and Shape and Self and Details and Glamour. I was a beauty editor, I was a fashion editor, I had a car column, I had a sex column. I wrote about all sorts of things that I knew nothing about. So essentially I was a researcher and what.
Speaker 3Why people hired me, I think is because I was a humor writer. So they would give me these horrible topics LASIK surgery or you know something that wasn't inherently interesting and say, please, we have to do a story on this, can you please make it interesting? So I was in that women's magazine world for many years, loved it. You know I always joke. If you ever read a getter better body story, I probably wrote it.
Speaker 3I was writing for all the fitness magazines and then, about maybe 18 years ago, I started writing books. I started with nonfiction and then I wrote some novels and then I wrote some middle grade fiction and again, the commonality that's not how most authors tend to write and I was. I was published with big, big publishers. I was published with, you know, random House and Berkeley and HarperCollins. I was. These weren't all just self-published things, but I again, the commonality was always the humor, right, even my children's books, my middle grade fiction, everything had to be a little bit funny. I never had any interest or intention of writing about government corruption and, you know, health policy and politics. I was as apolitical as a human being could be.
Speaker 3I used to call myself a sit down comedian, right, I'm just, I'm funny and I'm funny behind a keyboard. And then, you know, covid happened and I had a big platform and a bigger and a bigger voice and I, you know, a lot of things weren't making sense to me. I call myself a conspiracy theorist, you know I um, the locking up healthy people wasn't making sense and masking healthy people Wasn't making sense. And the stickers in the grocery store and the. You know, you're safe when you're sitting, but when you stand up you'd better have that mask on. And there was just so much craziness that, you know, for me it was like it was fodder, it was. If you're, if you're, a humor writer, that crap was funny, like. So I started making fun of all the crazy, and you know, here we are. I mean right Things spiraled Um.
Speaker 3I lost a lot of friends. Why was I questioning things? Why was I questioning those safe and effective vaccines and why this and why that? I got shut down on Facebook. I got shut down on Instagram for questioning Um, so Substack was this beautiful haven. It was a beacon. Um, you know, I could. I could find other people to follow, people could find me, um, and so that's that's kind of how I got here. It's still sometimes amuses me when I, when, when I'm looking at what I'm writing because I really was. I wrote about marriage and relationships and funny things. It was kittens in sunshine I didn't want to write about. You know corruption and genocide and you know all the other stuff that's happening in the world.
Speaker 2But, like I said, here we are, you know all the other stuff that's happening in the world. But, like I said, here we are Indeed and some of the things you said HHS regulates health care as well as a mall cop could guard the Pentagon. You described other things as a horror movie with the billing department, which I thought was really good. And then, as I dug into some of your writings, not only are they funny but they are well-researched, and we went through a period in COVID when you couldn't be funny.
Speaker 2I remember I went into a restaurant in Los Angeles and they said do you have a vaccine card? And I said yeah, they go. Can I see it? I said no, and they said you can't come in. And I said why they go? You might not be vaccinated. I said are you vaccinated? Yes, I said then what difference does it make? And the only answer is well, maybe the hostess's vaccine didn't work. So the logic is you want me to take a thing that might not work because yours might not work.
Speaker 2And we did some serious research on the vaccines with Dr Baker We've had Dr Birx on our show before and their point of views and I think that's worth looking at but the policy response was insane, like we're going to give these shots to children, which there was never a case to do, that, that people that were perfectly healthy, who could have gotten us to herd immunity quicker, were locked away away, so they couldn't do that. We had Martin Kulldorff, one of the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration, on early, but nobody's poked anybody in the eye as effectively as I think you have, and I appreciate that. And I also appreciate the fact that you're a bipartisan fist thrower and some of the takedowns you made on on our president are worth the price of admission. Let's tell people how to get in touch with you, what's the name of this, of your sub stack, and how should people find you um, the name of my sub stack.
Speaker 3It sounds horrific but it's not. It's genocide. J my name is Jenna. Jenna's side it sounds like genocide. That was intentional. I'm sharp enough to realize the parallel there. I thought it was funny. I've had a few people say oh, did you mean to do that? Yes, I did. If you can't spell Jenna's side, my name is Jenna, not Jenny McCarthy. You can also go to JennaMcCarthycom and you can find a link to my Substack. But Substack is where I do most of my work these days.
Speaker 2Yeah, and look, it's fresh, it's crisp, it's funny, it's poignant. And you know we're sitting in this era right now. I think we're teetering on the bridge of the old ecosystem, which is corrupt for media, and the new media model that's coming. Let's take a case in point. We're recording this on July 28.
Speaker 2There was recently revelations well-documented, well-timelined about what happened to create the Russian collusion hoax who did it, when they did it, why they did it. Here's the receipts. In the CIA there's been great writers Matt Taibbi and others, chris Bray that have meticulously gone through this and presented this on Substack. Yet if you went to the splash page of the New York Times right as that story broke, there were five headlines that had the name Epstein in them. Over the weekend, the defender of the we think Tulsi Gabbard doesn't have any credibility and I'm not making this up is Jeffrey Toobin, famed public masturbator, jeffrey Toobin. So you know that when the only person you can get to talk about your side is Jeffrey Toobin, you've lost. But neither CBS or ABC even mentioned the story on Sunday. It was all Epstein all the time. How do we get out of that? Or are those of us that like documentation and timelines? Are we just like SOL here?
Speaker 3Well, first of all, mainstream media is dead. Right, like I mean and there have been people harping on this for far longer than I was paying attention that the mainstream media is the fourth branch of government. It's captured, they collude, there's there. They're no more than you know. It's a mouthpiece, it's propaganda. If they want us to hear it, it will be in the New York Times.
Speaker 3When I was growing up, I was going to write. I wasn't necessarily going to be a journalist where I was out there pounding the pavement, but I was really fascinated by that career and never once did it occur to me that the news was anything other than fact. Right, it was fact, it's. It's raining over here, there was a mudslide over here, this building was broken into. This government has made this decision. There was no filter.
Speaker 3Oh well, that guy's probably a Democrat, and that's why he said that, or that guy's raging right winger. That's why he said that we didn't know if Walter Cronkite or Peter Jen's raging right winger. That's why he said that we didn't know if Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings was left or right. It wasn't opinion. Now it's so obviously opinions like there are headlines in the Washington Post and the New York Times that will literally you know Trump. This is how dumb Trump is Like. I get it. You don't like the guy. That's fine, you're entitled to. But journalism is supposed to be who, what, when, where, why. That's it. The president of the United States made this decision on this date. Here's the ramifications of it. You know you're, and, but they don't. They no longer can separate opinion or or political affiliation.
Speaker 2It starts with narrative, that this is the story and now we're going to fit that in. And you know, again I'll mention Toobin again because it's just so hilarious that they could find a show like that to do that. But again, I imagine any job that is out in the public eye it'd be difficult for that guy to get anymore. I I've employed thousands of people. We couldn't probably hire that guy again, right, because the liability of that, if he does it again, would be on us. But look, let's go through some of the recent things that you've written, because I think it really speaks to it. I think you have a great style for doing this. Most recently, and I'm just going to read the headline, it says the Gaslight Olympics, now with more autism. And the kind of the punchline in this is the writer is trying to say, because we want to get to the root cause of autism and maybe have less of it, that the people that are thinking that way want to eliminate her autistic son.
Speaker 3It was a hint. Yeah, the author was the father. It was the. Read me the headline of that story. It was something like unlike RFK Jr, I don't want to cure my son's autism. I think that was the headline. And that caught my eye because you know who wouldn't want a normal, sorry, healthy existence for their child, who would willingly sign up for, like you're, you're creating your dream child right when you're 18 years old. You're not married yet You're going to say, oh, I hope she has blonde hair and blue eyes and she's funny and smart and profoundly autistic. You are not going to say that. You know you do. You want to give your child every advantage. And what I think this guy was conflating is he's saying I already have, I already have an, a severely autistic child. He's completely nonverbal, he's completely dependent. They've never spoken a word to each other. There is, of course, you love that child, my child has anxiety.
Speaker 3I don't love her despite her anxiety or even because of her anxiety. I love her because she's my child and she's perfect the way she is. I would not change her. But that doesn't mean if I were going to now help her design her future child, I would actively check check the anxiety box. I wouldn't. I would wish that she didn't have to deal with that.
Speaker 2And you wouldn't be wishing for eliminating her. You'd want to alleviate her anxiety but not eliminate her. And the way that you put this, it's the gaslighting, and I've seen some, frankly, weapons-grade gaslighting in my time, nothing like that. Let's go on to a couple of other things, because you've got so much good stuff, stuff, it's hard to narrow in on one thing, so, uh, I put out a lot.
Speaker 3I'm very prolific.
Speaker 2I do write a lot you do and I hope people follow you. It's genocide on substackcom jenna mccarthy. Please look her up to great springboard into the news.
Speaker 3And way funnier than the new york times because it's intentionally funny well, what's so kind is like people tell all the time I stopped reading the news because I can't handle all that negativity. But now they're like, oh, I don't have to watch it, Jenna will watch it and just summarize it in a way that I can laugh but also know what's going on. So that means a lot to me.
Speaker 2Indeed Okay. So you wrote a column college degrees the new landlines no job, massive debt. Column college degrees the new landlines no job, massive debt. Thanks academia and you cite a figure from Newsweek that confidence in the usefulness of a college has plummeted from 85% just 10 years ago to 56%, and I love the way you put this. To put that in perspective, significantly more of your neighbors now believe in karma than in a solid return on investment from a bachelor's degree well, for one thing, I have one daughter that just graduated in may from a four year university.
Speaker 3Um, the cost was so exorbitant and you know we're we're helping her pay that we are paying loans. It's close to a quarter of a million dollars for a state school. It's absolute insanity. My youngest daughter didn't go to college. She's actually a model. She signed with an agency and they wanted her to immediately start working when she turned 18. She's been living in Korea and Italy and New York and and the education she's gotten by, you know, navigating complex transportation systems and haggling in three different currencies, and you know like really experiencing the world.
Speaker 3And obviously that's an extreme example. Not everyone gets that opportunity. But you know, there really is this dichotomy between you're going to graduate school with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in debt and get a $40,000 a year job and be paying that off forever. And you know, part of that article is talking about how trade schools are really exploding in a way that they haven't Like it used to. People would look down on that like, oh, you couldn't get into college. You went and got an electrician's degree or certification, whatever, and now it's like dude, that guy's making $250,000 a year, a year out after he's doing a paid apprenticeship, so he's not going into debt, he's working right out of the gate. He's making great money. He's setting his own hours Like we. We, I think that you know. We've just. I mean, do we want to go down the Rockefeller? You know medicine? The Rockefeller school, it's all. It's all the same right.
Speaker 3Our education system in this country was designed to build obedient little drones. And it starts in elementary school. With every 45 minutes they ring a bell, you switch to another boring task. They ring a bell, you switch to another boring task. You get a tiny little recess to rejuvenate. So you know there's no mutiny on the bounty. But then you come back. Another boring ring the bell you know.
Speaker 2So, look, we need foundations in education. We need to know how to do computation, we need to know how to do reading, we need to know how to express ourselves in speaking and writing, and we need physics, and we need logic and physical activity.
Speaker 2Yeah, physical activity. But look, you can't build a bridge without physics and mathematics, right? You can't expect someone to reason if they've been in a classroom that constantly tells them that they're wonderful. And look, the way that college is financed is insane. It is the only place other than the mafia where you can borrow money and owe more money than what you actually borrowed, even if you've been paying it back. And the sad truth about it schools, including many state schools, are dependent on basically subprime loans from people with no credit history and no assets. And that's what's fueling those big campuses and the field houses and everything else.
Speaker 2And to me, the easy solution here is excise tax on every one of those endowments, pay off the debt and then don't allow them to do it again. Let them be at risk for the payment of the loan. And then people have to decide what they're going to spend money on. Look, an accounting degree you can make money. What they're going to spend money on Look, an accounting degree, you can make money right. A pre-law, pre-med you can do that. Computer science all works right, you're going to get a job doing something. And humanities are a wonderful thing to have.
Speaker 3Again. I came from my sister. My older sister was the first person in our family to actually go to college and she wound up going on to Duke Medical School, but I was next. I went to Florida State University, which was a big deal in my family. My dad was a high school dropout. My mom had had one year of secretarial school. That was it. We knew nothing about college. We didn't know how it worked.
Speaker 3I got to college and created this whole you know a schedule of really fun sounding classes and when I went to register they were like are you a freshman? I was like, yeah, I am. They're like you can't take any of these. I did not know how anything worked. I was like, yeah, I am, they're like you can't take any of these. I did not know how anything worked. I was so, so dumb and I changed my major 15 times and they were always at one point and I'm I'm again. This is. It is what it is. I changed my major to leisure services because I heard that was a really good way to get a job at club med and that was going to be super fun right, I was going to go just do some super, because I had no idea what I wanted to do.
Speaker 2Look, I think that's a great way to spend the undergraduate times. Yeah, change 15 times. It's the last time in a person's life when it's all about them. They have, you know, no spouse mortgage job. You know whatever. Yeah, do it. You might take a class in oceanography and go. You know what? There it is. That's what I want to do and that's what it's about. All right, here's another headline from you, and this is explosive. Well, you actually used the word explosive in the headline.
Speaker 2Trump informed he may have met Epstein, and the opening paragraph says the Wall Street Journal is on a hell of a roll. Last week, the outlet famously dropped a breathlessly exclusive bombshell a raunchy letter Trump allegedly sent to Epstein. Now, my take on this is yeah, trump and Epstein knew each other. They're New Yorkers and they live a stone's throw apart from each other in Palm Beach. Also, three terms of a Democratic president, three full election cycles, all intent on smearing Donald Trump. Not a peep about Epstein and all of a sudden, it's front page news. It's even knocking important stories like hey, we found receipts on where Russiagate started. What made you write this column about Trump and Epstein? Because I want to say this you swore off writing about this and you wrote some more.
Speaker 3I said maybe I said this may or may not be my last Epstein post, but this one wrote itself. This goes back to what you asked earlier, right, like what in the God forsaken hell has happened to our media. So the headline on this story from the Washington Post was not Trump definitively found in the Epstein files or, you know, trump found to have a timeshare on little St James. It was. Trump was informed that he was in the Epstein files. No, blank. First of all, the flight logs have been public for months. Right, everybody knows Trump, knew Epstein. Everybody there's been. You know Getty images floating around of the two of them. Like you said, they were two really wealthy, really powerful people in the same social circles. I find out my neighbor's an axe murderer. The police show up, they come and arrest him. They interview me on TV. Did you know that guy? Well, I mean, he was my neighbor One time he borrowed my shovel, but there's the photo of him and I now I associate with ax murders. It just happens, like you and again, I'm not defending Trump we don't know, right, we don't know what. We don't know. We don't know why they're not telling us. We don't know if there's some big grand scheme.
Speaker 3Personally, like I said, I'm a conspiracy theorist. I do find it very interesting that basically Democrats didn't really care about the Epstein thing until Trump said, yeah, there's nothing to see there, and then all of a sudden they're the ones demanding for the release. So one of my pieces I wrote about this was and many people have speculated this since. I'm not saying I invented this, but you know, maybe this was Trump's way of getting them to be interested in it. It is because as soon as he says now they go oh, he's in it. That's why it's a cover up. So, you know, I, I, I would like that information to come out. Obviously, you know, I don't need any dirty details. Please, god, spare me those but I would like to know who the Nefarious characters are in our government and in our industries that we worship, which celebrities are dirty dogs and so we know not to support them in the last six months where they're taking down big networks of international pedophiles all right, that is happening and they're not again making the papers.
Speaker 2And, of course, if the president's involved with something like that, then he has to go and he has to face charges, period, full stop. Although I'm thinking, okay, if you had that on the guy and you said we got to stop him and you're meeting with Obama and Kerry and Clinton and Comey and Cla said we got to stop him and you're meeting with, you know Obama and you know Kerry and Clinton and Comey and Clapper, and you go okay, guys, we got this film of Trump with an underage girl. All right, let's run with that. And someone says no, no, no, let's use this fake pee tape thing from Russia instead. And they go. You know what that's a better idea Like that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2It doesn't happen and, as you wrote, trump has been seen in a room with Bill Clinton, which makes him a feminist policy wonk with a global foundation to donate organs anymore. How did you come across this and what a horrible thing this is to find out? You know you're donating your kidneys today while you wake up from a accident or something.
Speaker 3Yeah, so the majority of the time I look for my inspiration, if you will, in the mainstream media, because my shtick is, you know, making fun of things. Right, it's making fun of that headline, it's pointing out the fact that this major newsworthy thing happened and not a single legacy media outlet covered it. So I look at what they're covering, which tells me what they're not covering right, and so that's where I usually start. But of course, I spend a lot of time on X. I'm a big fan of Bobby Kennedy, so I follow him. So Bobby, actually, I don't I won't say he broke this story, but he had a press conference that that basically said people are now going to have to confirm that you're actually dead before they start harvesting your organs. That was like the part that I caught and I was like wait, wait, what? That's not a thing. How is that not a thing? And it, you know, it turns out there's a lot of really dirty in the um, in the organ harvesting world. Um, it is extraordinary, extraordinarily lucrative, right? So when they can, if somebody gets in an accident and they say, oh there, you know, there's a DNR, okay, we're going to let this person pass. I mean, you're worth millions and millions between you know they can take your corneas, they can take skin for skin grafting. They can take your liver, your heart, your you know parts of your brain. There's, there's so much, and so there, of course, whenever there is an industry that has that potential to be that lucrative, there are dirty dogs, and in this particular story, they found this was one organ harvesting operation, just one that is, you know, a nonprofit organization and you can go onto their website and fill out their form and immediately become a donor and they're, you know, on the standby and they tell you how many lives you can save and how great it is, how many lives they've saved since they've started. But this one organization they studied like 150 cases and 30% were not dead at the time that the harvesting was initiated 30%, and there are stories of people waking up.
Speaker 3I heard them talking about all this, but I couldn't communicate. And so what Bobby Kennedy is saying is there's got to be some really clear, clear, impenetrable boundaries around this right Like there's. There's no question. So a lot of people, when I wrote about this were were replying in the comments that there's no legal. I don't know this to be true, but a lot of people said this there's no legal definition of brain debt. That's number one and number two you're the minute your body debt dies, the minute your heart isn't pumping, your organs are worthless. You can only ever get a viable transplant organ from a living person right there. Just, there has to be serious rules around this, like it's one thing to say, okay, this, you know, this person unequivocally will never walk, talk, you know, exist in any meaningful way again. Yes, I would like my organs donated versus yeah, we don't see a lot of activity and we kind of think this might be the end.
Speaker 3You know, like I have a very good friend who had a brain aneurysm, was in a coma for like two and a half months. He's French, so his family was still in France and this was as adults, but you know he was living in the States and they his wife and you know the rest of his family made the decision they were going to pull the plug and the mom came in from France the day she got there. He woke up. Yeah, they had given him a four percent chance of ever having any type of of brain activity again and they said, if he did, he would be so severely disabled that you know the guy is walking, talking. He was a boat captain before he's driving his boat again. I mean, it was not an easy recovery. He had to learn how to feed himself and walk and all that thing, but like they were literally ready to pull the plug.
Speaker 2Medical science is really. It's an art and a science and these are difficult. But in today's media environment people are going to look at that and go. Well, you know, if Bobby Kennedy is in favor of waiting until people are dead before we harvest organs, he must be wrong. We should. You know we should be able to go into the senior living facilities. And you know just like we need a heart today, or a knee or whatever, let's go get it. You know just like we need a heart today, or a knee or whatever, let's go get it.
Speaker 2You know, as we kind of look at some of these other headlines and you have so many good ones and like I'm a fan of snark, all right, I just, I mean, I live on snark. Okay, I was punished often as a child for doing that in school, but so it's well-practiced. So you know, whistleblower, this is one of your headlines. Fbi botched the Hillary Clinton probe and then the subhead. The FBI quote says while it may appear we ignored key evidence, we assure you this was part of a broader strategy of not doing anything prematurely or at all. And then you come back and find, as you research this, that the FBI barely glanced at evidence because it wasn't going in the right direction.
Speaker 2And one of the things too, like in all the craziness of this cover-up, was Mrs Clinton claiming oh, I didn't give the email a thought. No, because Colin Powell had a Yahoo account, which takes like a minute to set up A private server is a completely different thing. I worked in tech business for 40 plus years. That is a lot of work to do something like that. What made you like, at this point in the game I'm getting some pushback on some things I'm posting. Someone said well, you know, that happened 10 years ago. Like why do we care?
Speaker 3Why do we care? I mean, how long can you cover it up? Don't you want to know that you've been lied to? Don't you want to know? And look like you said, this isn't a partisan thing, right, it happens on both sides. The new administration comes in and they want to, you know, dig up dirt on the old people, uh, and and vice versa. Um, but you know, to me it's, it's just really telling, um and and again, as a as a writer, what's being reported and what isn't right. So like, so like in the Hillary case, for example, not only did not one legacy media outlet say new information discovered in the Hillary Clinton email probe, every single legacy media mention of it was. Trump administration tries to deflect from Epstein scandal. That's their spin on everything. So it's it. It's just more indication of the rot in the media, do you?
Speaker 2look, this is the other thing to our president and we we've kind of been beaten up on the media today, but this guy has a propensity for saying stupid things like uh uh maybe I'm thinking about a third term like shut up, you're not gonna do that, all right. And uh, I think I'm gonna take over canada. Like a you don't want it and b you're not gonna do it, so shut up you know, like so good at poking the bear like he.
Speaker 3he knows that if he says any of that, I'm going to conquer Greenland. We're going to, you know, annex Canada, whatever that people are the Gulf of America. They're going to lose their minds. And he loves that. He loves getting under Democrat skin, he loves it.
Speaker 2Look. But the thing is, where he was ineffective in his first term was for being undisciplined. Ok, he didn't read the presidential daily briefings. He was up, you know, tweeting, probably sitting on the throne at 3 am and picking fights with Hollywood actresses. And so this time around, grow the F up and act like a president, because last night they announced a trade deal with the European Union. Other countries are paying more of their own defense costs. In June, the United States ran a surplus because spending is down 7% and we had a quadrupling in tariff income and it was $26 billion, but still it's in the black and, like dude, just shut up and talk about that stuff as well.
Speaker 3If I could tell you if I had a penny, for every time I've thought exactly that, watching him talk just like, oh, don't say it, don't say it, just no, no, no, no, no, no, somebody, somebody, give him the hook. Where are his people? Where are the people? Like when he's like, you know, and the press knows how to go to him too, they'll ask him about. Hillary Doesn't have stupid lady, she's a stupid lady. Yeah, no, no, be a tiny bit presidential. Don't give them that fodder. Just say you know what. I wish her well. I'd rather not talk about her, not her biggest fan. I wish her well. Why can you not be diplomatic, intelligent? Why do you have to? You know, it's very, very big, very huge. It's very. People love my, you know, love my Gulf of America.
Speaker 2Well, look, he said Jelaine Maxwell. I said I wish her well because she was going to prison and I was like aha, okay, that guy jumped on. But, jen, as we come to the near the end of our time here again I want to encourage people come to Substack. There's lots of serious journalists, serious writers that are putting out really good product. Of course, we want you to be on the Common Bridge and we want to feature contributors to Substack because of the diversity of thought, because of the research and, frankly, because of the entertainment. And I'm not just talking Dave Barry, I'm talking Jenna McCarthy. So, jenna, bring us home here Any closing comments that you've got for the listeners, the readers and the viewers of the Common Bridge.
Speaker 3Wow, well, we didn't get to kind of. One thing that's really passionate of passion of mine is books. I am still writing books. I last year I put out an anthology call of COVID related stories. They're mostly funny, they're very heartwarming. It's called Yankee Doodle Soup for the Fringy Tinfoil Hat Wearing Conspiracy. There is soul. Uh, yankee doodle soup for the fringy tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist soul.
Speaker 3Um, prior to that I wrote with dr pierre corey the war on ivermectin, which was about all the ways that this inexpensive, life-saving uh, award-winning, nobel prize winning medication could have ended the pandemic and was kept from us. Um, I wrote that with Dr Pierre Corey and now Dr Corey and I are almost finished with the war on chlorine dioxide, which is a little molecule that, what ivermectin was to COVID, chlorine dioxide could be to health in general. It has positive implications in cancer, asthma, skin conditions you name it malaria, I mean, I could go on for days HIV, so getting a really deep scientific education in that that will be out. And anything you want to know about all this you can find on either my Substack or my website, jennamccarthycom.
Speaker 2Okay, jennamccarthycom is the website. Jenna's side is on Substack and with our guest today, jenna McCarthy, a great fun conversation. This is your host, rich. Helpe signing off on the Common Bridge.
Speaker 1Thanks for joining us on the Common Bridge. Subscribe to the Common Bridge on substackcom or use their Substack app, where you can find more interviews, columns, videos and nonpartisan discussions of the day. Just search for the Common Bridge. You can also find the Common Bridge on Mission Control Radio on your RadioGarden app.