On Friday’s RealClearPolitics radio show, Tom Bevan, Phil Wegmann, and Emily Jashinsky discuss the ongoing debate over whether the firing of Jimmy Kimmel is really a free speech issue and the continuing fallout from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, new reporting from Axios that AOC is seriously considering running for president in 2028, plus, this week’s “You Can Not Be Serious?!” picks. Next, Tom Bevan chats with Dr. Scott Atlas, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Co-Founder of the Global Liberty Institute, about his RCP article on the struggles of young people today: ” Understanding and Saving Gen Z To Save America” Finally, psychologist Christopher J. Ferguson speaks to RCP contributor Maggie Miller about his research published in RealClearInvestigations about the reality of domestic violence committed by females: “The Last Taboo: Acknowledging Violent Behavior in Women” You can listen to the show weeknights at 6:00 p.m. on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 and then on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and here on our website. *** First, Tom Bevan, Phil Wegmann, and Emily Jashinsky discuss new details about why ABC chose to suspend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and the ongoing debate over whether this is really a free speech issue. Is Trump’s intention to bring the “fake news media” creating a new threat to free speech? “Apparently, the way this went down is Jimmy Kimmel told the execs at Disney that he was going to double down on his remarks and go after FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr and the executives huddled and decided: No, you’re not!” Tom Bevan explained, paraphrasing reporting from The Wall Street Journal. “These are just these wildly imperfect free-speech martyrs — they’re lazy and unfunny — and yet in this case, you do have the president jawboning about potentially stripping broadcast licenses away,” Phil Wegmann said. “The question is: Who’s going to step off the slippery slope?” “Nobody’s going to back down. Least of all the party who just saw one of their champions gunned down in cold blood,” Emily Jashinsky said. “So it’s a never-ending cycle, and it feels like tipping into the banana-republicanism slide, and that’s depressing – and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say anymore.” *** And then, at minute 12:30, Axios reports that New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is deciding whether to run for the Senate in 2028 or jump straight to running for president. Is it go time? “If AOC does run for president, is it going to be on the Green New Deal, or is it going to be on affordability? How is she going to unite the Democratic Party? What’s going to be their theme moving forward? Because, for the first time in a long time, Donald Trump will have exited, he won’t be there to unify Democrats,” Wegmann said. “Certainly, they can run against JD Vance or Marco Rubio, but, you know, when Trump is gone, they can’t run against him.” “AOC versus JD Vance would actually be a really fascinating race because we haven’t really seen the populist left versus the populist right — and in the younger incarnation than we’ve ever seen before: millennials,” Jashinsky commented. *** In the next segment, around minute 20, the regular Friday “You Can Not Be Serious?!” roundup of outrageous headlines that made us laugh or made us angry. This week, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Daniel Jones, NPR’s “domestic extremism correspondent” bending over backwards not to define the political views of Charlie Kirk’s assassin, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker standing next to a “peacekeeper” who turned out to be a criminal wanted in four states. *** And then, around minute 22, Tom Bevan speaks with Dr. Scott Atlas, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-founder of the Global Liberty Institute, about his RCP article on the struggles of young people today: ” Understanding and Saving Gen Z To Save America” “We have a generation of people, Gen Z, who are very frantic about their perceived harms from hearing words. This is a new concept that’s sort of shocking to people like me,” Atlas said. “It’s not just that they’re fragile, they’re also very susceptible to things, and I feel social contagions are common in their world.” “The question is: Why are they like that?” “It’s a confluence of events. This stuff has been going on gradually for decades, frankly, but this sort of explosion is finally hitting us in this generation,” he said. “We see a severe problem with psychological harms, mental illnesses exploding, and this problem is very urgent.” “There is no single answer, and there are many groups doing these sorts of activities, but we need to have the empowerment of the leaders in Gen Z itself. We need to identify them and mentor them, because they are the hope,” he suggested. *** Finally, at minute 32, psychologist Christopher J. Ferguson speaks to RCP contributor Maggie Miller about his research published in RealClearInvestigations about the reality of domestic violence committed by females: “The Last Taboo: Acknowledging Violent Behavior in Women” Ferguson examines a Canadian study of nearly 36,000 teens found that boys reported significantly higher rates of dating violence than girls over a decade, yet cultural taboos, academic pushback, and fears of undermining women’s advocacy have left male victims overlooked and underserved. You can read more about the interview here. *** Don’t miss an episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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