The Big Ben Show: Senator John Kennedy on the MAGA Crackup

Plus MTG and Epstein Files, a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund, and The Post-Literate Society

Nov 20, 2025

The latest edition of The Big Ben Show is here, featuring an interview with Louisiana Senator John Kennedy — listen or watch below, and I hope you’ll subscribe and share:

Is MTG The New Resistance Hero?

Douglas Murray in The Spectator:

In the recent furore over the avowedly racist and Holocaust-denying podcaster Nick Fuentes, a similar process seems to be taking place. Fuentes does in fact have some purchase on parts of the young American right – mainly, it seems, because of his delight in never seeing a taboo he does not wish to trample on. Still, it was striking that when the New York Times ran a piece about him earlier this month, it led with a black and white photograph that made him look positively James Dean-esque. Needless to say, Fuentes does not in any way resemble the late film heartthrob. But for some reason the Times decided to portray him in this light. While the American right is fighting to keep Fuentes out of their ranks, the Times seems keen on slipping him right in there.
The latest person to enjoy a similar transmogrification is Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Until recently you would have been hard-pushed to find a kind word said on the American left about the blonde MAGA Congresswoman. Even most of the American right found her an embarrassment for her behavior on committees and on the floor of the House, as well as for some of her outlandish past social media posts. The kindest thing I ever heard a MAGA figure say about her was that she had a tendency “to get a little too far over her skis.”
Now she is suddenly acceptable. She is on all the left-wing talk shows. CNN has interviewed MTG (as she is sometimes known) sympathetically, and listened with sincerity as she has decried the use of “toxic” rhetoric in politics. The fact that “toxic” was practically MTG’s only brand until yesterday would ordinarily lead to an outburst of skepticism on the US left. But MTG has become “acceptable” because of one thing and one thing alone – which is that the American left sees that she might just have become useful in their war to bring down President Trump.
MTG has recently turned against Trump and the two have traded barbs. Which is quite the turnaround for MTG, who had previously been one of those MAGA loyalists who seemed to discern no clear water between Trump and their Lord and Savior.
The apparent cause of MTG’s turn on the President is the Jeffrey Epstein case. Far be it from me to accuse MTG of being conspiracy-minded, but she is one of those people who believe that absent the release of every file and email that has ever existed relating to Epstein, we are all being lied to about some very major scandals.
The whole Epstein thing is murky as hell, but it is a scandal which promises to deliver more than it actually does. The problem at the moment is that the controversy has once again focused on Trump. The President’s own friendship with Epstein pretty clearly ended some 20 years ago – long before Epstein’s criminal activity became fully known about. They mixed in the same circles, not least because Epstein mixed in just about every circle of the rich and famous.
But ever since Trump returned to office a portion of the left and some Trump-haters on the right seem to have decided that Epstein is the most viable tool to take out the President. You might say that Epstein is for Trump’s second term what fake claims of Russian collusion were to his first.
Yet in order to believe that the Epstein Files contain some smoking gun against the President, you have to believe a number of things. Not least that the Biden administration sat on the Epstein files for four years but didn’t bother to search the material for compromising material on Trump, or that they did search them, found compromising material and chose not to use it – none of which sounds remotely plausible.
Facing a backlash from Greene and others, Trump has now turned from dismissing the whole Epstein furor as a “hoax” to urging Republicans to get behind calls for full transparency. Which they duly did: on Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted 427-1 to compel the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. Trump must be pretty confident that there is nothing especially compromising about him, and that other people will come out of the information worse.
To some extent that is already happening. The latest release of emails include a number between Epstein and the Trump-hating author Michael Wolff. In the run-up to the 2016 election (years after Epstein’s conviction), Wolff offered Epstein PR advice and seemed to be trying to collude with him to take down Trump. Not that Wolff has faced much censure for this. It seems it is OK to offer PR advice to a convicted sex offender so long as the cause is a noble, anti-Trump one.

The Need for a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund

Jordan Chandler Hirsch in Sapir:

Legacy Jewish organizations, designed to appeal to a system of mutual respect and stability, struggle on this terrain. They continue to court cable-TV hosts and newspaper editors, hoping to earn a fair shake; level charges of antisemitism, yearning for public sympathy; and seek coalitions to beat back their adversaries. As a result, they watch, stunned, as figures once beyond the pale of polite society now regularly grace well-watched YouTube channels, or onetime political enemies of the far-Left and far-Right broker modern day Molotov–Ribbentrop pacts for clicks. Each plea to fading authority only underscores our vulnerability. We’re not just losing influence; by communally clinging to institutions, we confirm every anti-establishment suspicion that we are paragons of a discredited order.
The populist wing of the political Right, for example, has recently extended the propensity for smashing sacred cows to questioning the U.S.-Israel alliance and, increasingly, the place of Jews in American public life. The scrutiny ranges from the subtle — wondering, in a “just asking questions” tone, whether Israel and its American Jewish supporters assume a disproportionate place in U.S. foreign policy — to the lurid, accusing Israel of assassinating JFK for opposing its nuclear ambitions.
For understandable reasons, American Jewish leaders often brook no gradations here; they instinctively register questions about Jewish power, whatever their scope or tone, as antisemitism. But whereas some far-right populists suffer from an obsessive fixation on Jewish power and influence — or Jewish Derangement Syndrome (aka JDS) — others find their way to Jew-skepticism through their suspicion of American institutionalism as a whole. Their anti-institutionalism inevitably leads them to a disdain for the Jewish community’s strategy of institutional enmeshment. These conspiracy-curious skeptics are then drawn toward the outright antisemitic accounts of the deranged. Their gateway to Jew-skepticism is institution-skepticism, and since Jews are enmeshed within the institutions they distrust, this brings them into the target line. Were the Jewish community to disentangle itself from the institutional thicket, it wouldn’t be caught in the crosshairs of this increasingly influential segment. Adopting its own non-institutional approach would make the Jewish community less suspect and more transparent as a community working like any other to secure its survival using its own resources.
To survive in this new world, we must rid ourselves of the enmeshment currency and trade autonomy for something better: sovereignty.
What does sovereignty mean in this context? In a sense, it is rather similar to what the anti-institutional forces are calling for. Many of them, especially on the political Right, call for a cold reassessment of inherited entanglements with allies and nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations. They take particular aim at American foreign aid, the greatest recipient of which is, famously, Israel. In the anti-institutionalist view, American treasure is best kept at home and ought not be diverted to other sovereign nations regardless of how much of it ultimately comes back to the United States in weapons contracts and the like.
The anti-institutional world is less wood-paneled boardroom than open-air bazaar. Institutional America was relational, running on shared values and social mores that fostered trust. Anti-institutional America, by contrast, is transactional, with everyone haggling at arm’s length — ad hoc, opportunistic, often devil-may-care. To prosper in the coming transactional disorder of anti-institutionalism, the Jewish community must disentangle itself from the institutions. Instead of investing so much financial and political capital in lobbying efforts to preserve our establishment station, we should invest that money in something we directly control: a Jewish sovereign wealth fund.
A Jewish sovereign wealth fund would represent a new form of Diaspora power, suited to the transactional age. Much like the wealth funds of other nations, it would wield capital as statecraft on behalf of Jewish interests, without apology or pretense.
Consider the recent success of the Gulf states in transactional America. Rather than build grassroots advocacy organizations, they invest in U.S. infrastructure, from AI data centers to critical minerals. Rather than lobby for favorable coverage, they buy sports teams and entertainment properties that shape cultural narratives. Rather than appeal to shared values, they generate mutual profit. They build political alliances not through pleading but by creating dependencies.
Reorienting around the concept of sovereignty would signify a shift toward self-reliance. Institutionalized shtadlanut in America depended on building up others’ resources — namely, those of lawmakers and taxpayers — to secure Jewish protection. A transactional approach, by contrast, would require insourcing rather than outsourcing Jewish security. Instead of building political patronage and pushing for resources through mediating institutions, the Jewish community would ask no one to spend on its behalf and would openly invest its own capital in pursuit of its own interests — indeed, its own happiness.
A wealth fund would allow the Jewish community to invite allies and skeptics alike into mutually beneficial investments. It could help key players solve their problems and achieve their goals, thereby securing support for ours. Skeptics who distrust our institutionalism might respect our show of independence. Anti-establishment forces might welcome Jewish capital that strengthens their projects. Most important, a wealth fund could transform both our psychology and our posture — from supplicants seeking protection into partners offering opportunity. Despite its corporate veneer, a wealth fund would not merely reproduce institutionalism. If shtadlanut sought seats at the institutional table, a wealth fund would build its own table and invite others in.

Rise of the Post-Literate Society

Kat Dee in The Spectator:

Everybody is suddenly recognizing, almost in unison, that many major of the cultural shifts in recent years were accelerated, if not explicitly caused, by Covid lockdowns. In confinement we went online and when we spent more time in cyberspace than in meatspace, our brains began to change.
The most significant shift is that we have turned away from books and reading, and as a result our attention spans are collapsing. The screen is eclipsing the page. In the US, reading for pleasure has crumbled; in Britain, a third of adults no longer read books at all. The “reading revolution” that expanded consciousness in the 18th century is in retreat. But what’s emerging is not illiteracy: it’s post-literacy. We are becoming post-literate.
Daniel Kolitz’s extraordinary Harper’s Magazine piece on the hyperonline masturbatory “gooner” subculture captures this shift, as do phenomena such as TikTok and its seeming monopoly over trend creation, the growing visibility of networks such as 764, the tide of “slop violence” and the ubiquity of what etymologist Adam Aleksic calls “algospeak.”
One aspect of this transformation remains underexamined, though: the rise of voice. Voice memos, podcasts, audiobooks.
I now listen to most news articles and have had to bribe myself to start actually reading them again. Our machines have also started to talk back – first Alexa and Siri, now ChatGPT. We are consuming more sound and thinking out loud. These circumstances explain the rise of “crying in your car” videos: a need to hear yourself speak to understand what you’re feeling. It’s also why there seem to be more information leaks: people are simply not thinking about what they post or share online because voice culture has collapsed their impulse control.
Voice culture destroys the distance between impulse and articulation, thought and expression; between what is felt and what is said. It is perfect for an age that values presence over patience. When we talk to a device, or listen to someone talk into one, we bypass the delay that literacy once demanded. That pause once served as a kind of psychic buffer, a silent interval where imagination and internal modeling could take shape. Writing required withdrawal, a temporary step back from the environment in order to structure experience in words. Its disappearance signals something deeper: the erosion of interiority itself.
The journalist and media theorist Andrey Mir has a name for this shift. He calls it “digital orality,” a return to old oral patterns of thought, but now mediated through digital technology. I spoke to him recently about the sort of humans we’re becoming. He explained that in many ways, what we’re seeing is a return to the past.
“Before writing, humans were immersed in a physical [nature] and social [tribe] environment,” he said. “They received information from their surroundings simultaneously, in what Marshall McLuhan called ‘acoustic space.’ Writing and reading detached humans from the environment and forced them to immerse themselves in the contemplation of ideas and thoughts.”
Mir believes that the inner vision literacy created enabled major cognitive transformations, the first being what he calls a “long focus” on ideas. “If you live in nature and concentrate for too long on your own ideas while detaching from the environment, someone or something can eat you,” he says. “An oral/tribal person has to be immersed in surroundings, not ideas. Writing and reading enabled a delay of reaction, which was used for contemplation. This led to deliberation, which, again, is not typical of ‘natural’ environmental immersion, when individuals react fast, impulsive.”
Reading trained us to think in sequence – to slow down and structure our thoughts. In the absence of reading, this skill is fading. As Mir says: “Writing, just technically, requires a linear organization of content. You need to write any content word after word, sentence after sentence, idea after idea – one thing at a time. The linear nature of writing structured not only writing itself but also thinking and, eventually, the world. The literate mind and the world perceived by it are structured because of the mere technicality of writing.”
The cognitive “inward turn,” enabled by writing, led to theorizing, classification, individualism, self-reflection, the structuring of knowledge and rationalism. So what will the collapse of writing and reading lead to? Mir and I agree that without reading we lose logical thought and impulse control, but we disagree about how important voice culture will be to the future. Mir insists that voice isn’t the point, that I’m focusing on the wrong thing. Digital orality, he argues, happens primarily through text and will continue to. The cognitive shift toward impulsivity and environmental immersion doesn’t necessarily require speaking.

✍️ Feature

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Introduction from Zach Rausch…

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