Honestly with Bari Weiss

Our newsroom reflects our readers: We aren’t voting in unison. Today, Bari Weiss explains how The Free Press is handling Election Day inside the office.  Read Bari’s full essay. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bullshit is an American tradition. Think the theatrics of P.T. Barnum, miracle products sold ad nauseam on television in the 1980s and, of course, politicians. Who can forget President Bill Clinton saying “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is” during his grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky scandal? And then there’s Donald Trump. He presents as a man with no fact-checking filter, someone happily buying his own convenient bullshit. That’s not quite the same thing as lying.  That isn’t to say Trump doesn’t lie. He’s a politician, after all. But he exists outside the binary of truth and lies. It’s the netherworld of flimflam, hyperbole, sales pitches, and ad copy delivered with all the quiet dignity of a wet T-shirt contest. Donald Trump is a very modern artist, weaving a barrage of anecdotes, fake and real statistics, gossip, and memes into a nebulous and suggestive species of patter.  Democrats have tried to paint Trump as an American Hitler, a Russian agent, a man consumed with evil and hatred. But what they fail to understand is that Trump’s casual relationship to the truth is an echo of past politicians. He is hardly the first bullshitter to ascend to the White House; he’s just the best ever to do it. He paints a picture of a reality he would like us to see, not as it really is.  In this respect, Trump is the crack cocaine variant of many of his predecessors. Ronald Reagan was a folksy, sentimental bullshitter, a president as a Hallmark greeting card. Bill Clinton was a slick bullshitter, perfect for spinning stories at the dawn of the cable news era. Today, Eli Lake explores the soft spot that Americans have for bullshitters like Trump, and their disdain for liars like Richard Nixon. He argues that if you want to understand why Trump may be on the verge of winning the White House again, you have to reckon with our country’s relationship to the pungent brown stuff. It pervades everything from our economy to our culture. Bullshit is dangerous when it comes to science. But in politics, bullshit is sadly essential.  If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Need a break from political programming? Well, today we have a special treat: It’s The Free Press’s scary movie Halloween special! It’s that time of year: changing leaves, pumpkin spice lattes, animal costumes with sex appeal and, of course, gory, bloody, nightmare-inducing horror movies. We all remember the first horror movie that we were allowed to watch—or maybe that we weren’t allowed to watch, but saw anyway: Silence of the Lambs, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, Jaws, Carrie, Halloween, or The Shining. For today’s host Suzy Weiss, it was 20 minutes of the movie It—the TV miniseries from 1990, not the 2017 remake. Suzy remembers seeing Pennywise the Clown on the screen and thinking, This will take me years to get over. She still sometimes checks the drain! Year after year, horror movies are consistently profitable—more so than dramas—but they are snubbed when it comes to award shows and critical acclaim. But here at The Free Press, we value and love horror, so much that we’ve gathered our scariest FP writers—Suzy Weiss, River Page, and Kat Rosenfield—to analyze four new horror movies. River, Kat, and Suzy will review MaXXXine, set in grimy and glamorous 1980s Hollywood, about a night killer who targets a porn star who herself is targeting big-screen stardom. Apartment 7A, a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby, about a woman taken in by an unassuming family. Longlegs, a serial killer story about an FBI agent trying to crack the case. And The Substance, about a woman who takes the latest anti-aging elixir, but at a harrowing cost. They talk about what they loved, what they hated, and how they think each movie relates to our current social ills. We’ll also note this episode has spoilers, so let this be a warning! Happy Halloween, folks! If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are no perfect candidates. But what do you do when both candidates are not just imperfect but deeply flawed, and seen by many as unqualified for the job? We are just one week away from a presidential election that will decide if the next four years are helmed by Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump. I know many people who are still undecided. Some of them work at The Free Press. These undecided voters have just one presidential debate to reference, and as my friends at Open to Debate said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “I can confidently state that we haven’t yet seen a real presidential debate this year. Debates have devolved into political theater, with combative candidates, biased media, agenda-driven moderators, and a fixation on social-media sound bites. This structure fails to deliver the substance voters need.” So today, we are here without the pageantry, makeup, or muted mics, to host not Trump vs. Kamala—though the invitation is still open—but instead two very smart people who represent each side of the choice that we are going to make a week from today.  Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, and host of the podcast Making Sense. Today, he will explain why he is voting for Kamala Harris. Sam has spoken passionately and consistently on this issue since Trump came onto the scene; Sam calls him “the most dangerous cult leader on Earth” and highlights Trump’s character flaws. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse; he mocked a disabled reporter; he said John McCain wasn’t a hero; he called veterans “suckers and losers”; if we kept going with examples, we’d be here all day. Sam’s biggest issue is January 6 and Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Sam writes, “The spectacle of a sitting president refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, culminating in an attack on the Capitol, remains the most shocking violation of political norms to occur in my lifetime.”  On the other side, Ben Shapiro—lawyer, co-founder of The Daily Wire, best-selling author, and host of The Ben Shapiro Show—will explain why he is voting for Donald Trump. Ben argues that we were a better country under Trump and that his policies make us safer and more prosperous. There were no hot wars, no inflation crisis, and less traffic at the southern border with Trump as president. He makes the case that Trump will not be abandoned by the experts who advised him during his first administration, and he will delegate responsibilities to capable and trustworthy policymakers. He also argues that Kamala is an “incompetent and unqualified vice president” and that “radicalism defines her.”  I suspect if you’re listening to this show, you know these two names and have listened to their shows before. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ben and Sam are two of the smartest, most influential, and most insightful voices on the American political scene. That’s one of the reasons we’re so thrilled to host this conversation today. The other is because it’s exactly the kind of conversation we need more of in this country, especially at this moment. I challenge you to think of one debate you heard during this election that was passionate and provocative, but also civil and respectful, between a Trump supporter and a Harris supporter. I can’t think of one. That’s why we put this together. And we really think you’re going to appreciate what you hear. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we’re standing at the precipice of what could be a third world war. At the very least, the thing that we refer to as the “Free World” is burning at its outer edges. Just a few weeks ago, Iran launched its largest-ever ballistic missile attack against Israel, while its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, continue to wage war against Israel, making use of the steady flow of weaponry and funding from Iran—which is ever closer to having nuclear weapons. The war in Ukraine continues to rage, with both sides engaged in intense fighting across multiple fronts. After over a year and a half of relentless Russian bombardment, Ukraine is barely holding the line as the grinding war of attrition drags on. According to The Wall Street Journal, more than one million people on both sides of the border have been killed or injured. And then there’s China, which has lately been attacking Philippine and Vietnamese vessels in the South China Sea, terrorizing international waters with impunity as the world watches anxiously. Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran have solidified a new axis of autocracy, united in its goal to unravel the Pax Americana and undermine American dominance. The question on our minds tonight is: What should America do about it? Many Americans are saying they don’t want the United States to continue leading the world order. A 2023 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey revealed that 42 percent of Americans think that the U.S. should stay out of world affairs, which is the highest number recorded since 1974. It is easy to talk about foreign policy as an abstract idea because war, for us, is thousands of miles away. But foreign policy is a matter of life and death. Not just for people around the world, but for the more than two million Americans that serve in our armed forces. It’s conventional wisdom that American voters don’t prioritize foreign policy. But this year, given the state of the world, that might be different. Which is why we hosted a debate, live in NYC, on this very topic.  Arguing that, yes, the U.S. should still police the world is Bret Stephens. Stephens is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and editor in chief of Sapir. As a foreign affairs columnist of The Wall Street Journal, he was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. And he is the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder. Bret was joined by James Kirchick, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, writer at large for Air Mail, and contributing writer for Tablet. He is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. He is also a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Arguing that no, the U.S. should not still police the world is none other than Matt Taibbi. Taibbi is a journalist, the founder of Racket News, and the author of 10 books, including four New York Times bestsellers. Matt was joined by Lee Fang. Lee is an independent investigative journalist, primarily writing on Substack at LeeFang.com. From 2015 to 2023, he was a reporter for The Intercept. Be it resolved: The U.S. should still police the world. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices