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Paid membership with connected payment account required. Let's bring in Eli Lake, our Free Press columnist, host of Re-Education Podcast. Eli, welcome. Well, thank you so much. It's great to be here, Brian.
I love the show. Well, thank you. I mean, go ahead. If I can just ask your listeners, on the Honestly Podcast feed, I have a great episode this week called The Election of Laughter and Forgetting, which looks at the last five weeks from the lens of the tech novelist Milan Tandera. Don't be intimidated.
You'll be able to follow it. But I think it's an important lesson because the memory hauling, which is a term invented by George Orwell, of the big, big question on all of these headlines that you just read is who's running the country? I mean, if Joe Biden is not mentally fit enough to run for reelection, is he mentally fit to be the president? And we have the media and our political discourse that seems to entirely drop that question.
And that's what that episode is about. Well, I mean, they have dropped that question and the whole story about how he got kicked to the curb. Nancy Pelosi's volunteering it.
I guess she has a book coming out, but no one seems curious. How a guy that said repeatedly, I am not going anywhere. And he goes, I got big crowds, three network interviews, four rallies. And then one weekend he decides it's too much.
I quit. And he doesn't do it on camera. He waits another day to do it. And when he does do it, then he disappears. Yeah.
Yeah. And then we don't hear about him, hear about it for days. We don't know who's running the country. How did Kamala Harris have a whole campaign ready to go?
How did she consolidate all those delegates almost immediately? That's hardly somebody caught by surprise. There's stories to be written there. I agree. And I that's why I think while the polls have tightened up, I think Trump wins in November because most Americans can't still won't be able to get their head around that very big question. And little things that dominate social media, like J.D. Vance and cat ladies, really, I don't think most American people are going to be paying attention to those stories. But I think that they all understand that the president shouldn't be the president right now. And they'd like to know who is making these important decisions as the world spins off its axis. You started, you know, when you talk about the headlines, you know, there might be a regional war in the Middle East after the weekend.
Who knows? We've got a potential revolution in Venezuela. The stock market is not looking great right now. There are really big things that we need a president to do. That's the job. And I am not persuaded. I don't think most people would be persuaded that Joe Biden is up to that job.
All right. So Joe Biden is one thing. Can you tell me anybody that really would honestly tell you that Kamala Harris is up for the job? She has done nothing for the last three and a half years and her stances leading up to when she was trying to be president are horrific. I mean, she's pro Sanctuary City.
She's pro giving. She co-sponsored a bill, Medicare for All with Bernie Sanders. We know about the fracking ban. We know about the offshore drilling ban. Well, we know also that she was off for cutting the defense budget. If she doesn't believe things like that, we need to know what changed and why. Don't you think?
A hundred percent. And that's the problem here is that the process of a primary is where those matters are adjudicated. It's I mean, listen, it's normal in our politics. Politicians will flip flop all the time. But they have to explain it to the voters and they have to be challenged within their own primary. And if you if what you have right now and I don't know if it can continue, is you have a Democratic nominee who is not being challenged in any way by the media. And the only chance is going to be the debate that, you know, they just the debate, I guess, single that they just agreed to.
And it really is incumbent on Trump, not just for his own political interests, but really because he's the one who has to vet Kamala Harris when the mainstream legacy press at this point seems entirely uninterested in demanding interviews, demanding press conferences and getting her to say in her own words what her campaign aides are whispering. I mean, that to me is amazing. OK, you've changed your position on fracking. Can you explain why?
And, you know, be honest. Is it because you want to win Pennsylvania? Because that's probably not going to be good enough. People aren't going to believe that you really have changed your position on fracking. So that's, I think, a big thing coming up.
And we'll see if she can get away with it. Look, I think that, you know, the president's speech, for example, at the RNC, first half great, the second half not great. I think that when you're interviewing, when you're ripping Governor Kemp in Georgia, you're losing. Not great. Right. I'll tell you right now what I think is great. I'm not saying my word is gospel, but I'll just give you my opinion.
But I also am saying J.D. Vance had a fantastic week. He really showed himself the certainty on issues, the willingness to take questions. They're walking over to Air Force Two. My opinion had a fantastic week.
They think that he's, I'm watching other channels, they say he's flailing. Now, the president of the United States did one hour, unscripted press conference. Come one, come all. Listen to some of these responses.
Cut 13. You could feel the desperation in that press conference today. What you saw was a man who was melting down. Donald Trump is shook. This is what Donald Trump looks like when he is losing. The old bull was pawing and snorting and he just couldn't stand being, you know, that the vice president is in the limelight now. A panicked Donald Trump tries to force his way back into the spotlight in the laziest way possible, Frank.
Really? Laziest way possible? An hour press conference? Lazy? OK. This is a route. Do it yourself.
Do one of those yourself. I mean, come on. So I agree. I mean, listen, I didn't watch the entire thing.
I saw some clips of it. It was kind of vintage Trump. He does have the patter of a kind of nightclub comic. This is part of his appeal for a lot of Americans. You know, we all know that don't you know, they don't take him literally.
They take him seriously. That has been a cliche about Trump for some time. But the bigger point here is that the other his his opponent, the current vice president, seems to only be doing. She's not even really doing media. I mean, he's doing once rallies and same speech over and over again.
And these canned social media things like her phone call with one of the influencers and all of that stuff. And I'm just like, well, that's that's not a substitute for explaining how you have changed your positions, what your vision is for leading the country. But most importantly, what did you know and when did you know it about Joe Biden's declining mental condition?
I mean, that is a huge question. And the fact that overnight Joe Biden went from a selfish man trapped by the delusion that he can be president until he's 86. Which I think was the reality to this guy is the second coming of George Washington and Cincinnati's. Is reminiscent of like the late Soviet era in the sense that there was listen, we are not the Soviet Union. There aren't, you know, secret police knocking on people's door in the dead of night and our gulags and things like that. So I'm not it's not a perfect analogy, but this one kind of thing is it is a weird historical rhyme because late Soviet, the late Soviet condition in Eastern Europe in particular, but also, you know, in Russia itself, was that most people didn't believe anything from the government or the official media. And I think we're kind of in this position now.
So when you play that, those clips like say, oh, you think what he's breaking down, everything like that. I look at that and I'm saying, OK, yeah, there is going to be a base of people on the coast, probably who think that's the real story. But I think there's going to be millions of Americans who are going to look at that and say, you know, I don't believe anything you guys say. And that the media has a real issue right here. There's a legitimation trust crisis that they're facing and that they've been facing that. I think we'll see what happens in November. But I think that that's going to be a big part of the story here.
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That's get cash dot com. So one of your stories that you wrote, I'm fascinated by because we're getting to know who Tim Walz is. Seventy percent of the country don't. But the liberal governor from Minnesota, you say all the wrong people are celebrating Tim Walz. In what respect? Well, what I mean by that is the people, the fringe or maybe it's not a fringe, the faction of the Democratic Party that thinks that Israel in its defensive war against Hamas is committing a genocide that supported the idea of abolishing the police or defunding the police. That represents a kind of real radicalism, which is much deeper than who wins a particular election or what policy you would like seem to think that the selection of Tim Walz because he wasn't Josh Shapiro was a great thing and represented, you know, see change the Democratic Party. And I don't have any reporting and I actually don't think that Kamala Harris made the decision of Walz over Shapiro because she herself is anti-Semitic. She's married to a Jewish man, obviously.
I think, though, that what it shows is that there was there's an anti-Semitic faction of the Democratic Party that decided to make it an issue, a litmus test over Josh Shapiro. And whether she had the best reasons in the world or not for choosing Walz, she has appeared to cave to that pressure. And so if you're and so if you are not willing to say you people who call for death to America, you people who celebrate Hamas on college campuses are not part of the Democratic Party. And I don't want your vote, which is what we would call a sister soldier moment for what Bill Clinton did in 1992 when he was running. If she's not willing to do that, then it opens the question of, OK, well, do these people who don't have America's interests in their hearts and don't have, you know, our, you know, our foreign policy interests that are in their hearts. Do these people have a seat at the table in a Kamala Harris administration? Because I don't necessarily think that they're going to dictate policy, but they but it looks like Kamala Harris is trying to say, we don't want to alienate you. We don't want you to you know, we still want you to vote for us.
And, you know, we're going to listen to you. And so even though she says even what she doesn't say it, her national security adviser, Phil Gordon, said she's not interested in an arms embargo in Israel. OK, but she needs to say that and she needs to say it and saying, if you're interested in an arms embargo in Israel, I think that's nuts. And we don't have anything to do with you. But she's not willing to go that far.
She is not. Eli Lake, our guest, the choice. I said the choice.
No, just the free press. You talk about the wrong people celebrating because Jamal Bowman, Elon Omar think it's a great thing. And if you really want to be a moderate, if you wanted a moderate, they'd be upset by this.
Right. And the reason why they were battling for Joe Biden, the last one standing is because Joe Biden operated as a leftist. These spending programs were not something a moderate would pursue.
This green this green agenda is not something a moderate pursues. Well, you know, Brian, you're really hitting on something that's so important because I think a lot of people didn't notice that. But remember, in July, when we had the crisis for the Biden presidency, who were the people that were all 100 percent in his corner? It was the squad. Yep. AOC came out and said Biden's our president.
He's our guy. Now, why was that their position? Because if you remember, in 2020, Biden was presented as the normie nonprogressive alternative to the hard left kind of candidates that were vying for the nomination. Well, I think it's because they know that Biden was going to lose and that they believe that the DSA wing of the party would be able to take over the party after a collapse in November. And that to me, it was really telling when I saw Bernie and when I saw AOC coming out four square against Biden.
And I realized at that moment, I think we all did. Who were the people who were pushing to the side? Well, it was the kind of Clinton, Obama, you know, people who've been running the Democrats for 30 years. It wasn't the upstart socialist.
The socialists were happy with Biden being the nominee because they thought he would lose. That's my this is my opinion. And they believe that once he did lose, they would have they would be able to run the table. And I think that that's that that was their plan.
And I don't know if Connell necessarily complicates that, but that's that's how they're thinking about it. Hey, Eli, fascinating conversation. We have to make sure that at least American people get to know what they're voting for.
Right now, they have no idea. Re-education podcast is a chance to find out the latest and go inside what has happened over the last few a few weeks just in this political cycle. Eli, thank you. Thank you, Brian.
Kill me. I'm Guy Benson. Join me weekdays at 3 p.m. Eastern as we break down the biggest stories of the day with some of the biggest newsmakers and guests. Listen live on the Fox News app or get the free podcast at GuyBensonShow.com.
