The Big Ben Show: UNGA and Israel, and Jimmy Kimmel's Return

Lee Smith and Jon Levine join

Sep 25, 2025

The latest edition of The Big Ben Show is out, and you can listen and subscribe to it here or wherever you get your podcasts. Lee Smith and Jon Levine join to talk about the state of play around the world and in the media. You can also watch the whole thing on YouTube:

On Tuesday night Kimmel did his non-apology apology, which turned out to be his most watched episode in over a decade (its 6 million viewers on television was a full three times the average 2 million viewers for the first season of The Man Show — congrats Jimmy, you’ve still got it!)

One of the best reactions to the whole thing comes from Ethan Strauss, who’s been on the reality of the business involved here from day one as opposed to getting sucked into the nonsense about authoritarian assaults on free speech:

I enjoyed the first eight minutes or so of Kimmel’s monologue but once he started citing all the support he got from his Strike Force Five talk show buddies, I was reminded of the bizarre political monoculture they’d come to represent. Indeed, deep partisans like Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro appear more inclined to criticize their own team than the theoretically neutral Strike Force group seems liable to rip the Democratic Party. The latter might make more sense if Blue World was still culturally dominant. But no, Republicans won the popular vote, young men shifted heavily rightward, Trump-supporting YouTubers gained big followings and the Democrats are at their lowest point since I’ve been sentient.
Prestige media outlets covering Trump vs. Kimmel are understandably sensitive to the former’s authoritarian impulses, but they’ve got a big blindspot to the enduring strangeness of the status quo he’s fighting. I remember an era when the Democrats were more popular but also, paradoxically, mainstream media figures were far less overtly pro Democrat. When you take a step back, it’s sort of crazy that The View is one sided political propaganda. It’s a little weird that Kimmel, ABC’s main content ambassador, posts himself at a Trump protest with family. Yes, Fox News exists, but it’s proudly partisan and on cable. What’s with networks, including their news divisions, continuing to advance a singular perspective?
Having gained power and culture war purchase, Trump World looks at mainstream media outlets and wonders why it’s still largely constant anti THEM propaganda. Not a bit of bias, not a preference, but a persistent total fight against them on normie bastions like the TV networks.
I listened to talented entertainment reporters Matt Belloni and Lucas Shaw discuss the Kimmel situation, with repeated reference to Trump’s “war on the press.” The podcast was informative but unmentioned (or considered) was that this war wasn’t a one way fight. The shooting of Charlie Kirk has catalyzed a sense on the right of being targeted in a manner that’s beyond metaphorical.
This is the situation that Brendan Carr and others within Trump’s administration seek to address. As they try, and, yes, bungle, I am reminded of the quote Ryan Holiday used to begin his book about Peter Thiel taking down Gawker:
I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it. I can’t stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age. What is more, I won’t. That was my discovery: that I didn’t have to.
—Walker Percy, Lancelot
Thiel was sick of a media status quo and went about using his power to alter it, contra rebukes made on the basis of “free speech.” He’d decided he’d had enough. He acted.
The current status quo cannot be viewed as intolerable to members of the prestige press who prefer it. And beyond preferring it, they’re so used to this cultural norm that they cannot even see it. They’re still living in a world wherein “everyone” hates Donald Trump and his movement. The idea that they must change, even a little, isn’t a thought. They’re the reasonable ones. Everyone else is the problem. You see this mentality reflected in (Disney employee) Michael Wilbon’s thoughts on Auburn basketball Bruce Pearl, vocally pro Republican and pro Israel, retiring from his position:
He had become a divisive person, it seems to me, intentionally. And I hope there was pressure to just get him out.
I enjoy Mike Wilbon and believe he’s a good guy. It just speaks to the likely mentality within his millieu that Pearl’s honestly held beliefs read as intentional provocations. When everyone around you has the same idea, contrary ideas aren’t mere differences of opinion: They lack legitimacy. They aren’t even real. People who hold them cannot be tolerated, let alone interfaced with.

Read the rest here.

There Are Only Two Gametes

Carole Hooven in Tablet.

The United States seems to be reaching what one can only hope is the apex of a recent wave of political extremism and ideological division. This situation is not helped by the fact that about 70% of people from both political parties now say that those on the opposite side of the aisle are not only wrong on the issues but also dishonest and immoral—a figure that has risen about 30% over the past decade.
One might have reasonably expected institutions of higher education to shield themselves from these trends and to do their best to maintain an evidence-based culture that thrives on respectful disagreement. Instead, too many university campuses now find themselves at the leading edge of polarization and incivility, having fostered a political and intellectual monoculture in which students and faculty alike fear having their careers destroyed by intolerant adherents of dominant progressive views.
I began my PhD at Harvard in 1999, after spending eight months in western Uganda studying sex differences in the behavior of wild chimpanzees. I loved research, but I loved teaching, the students, and the intellectual climate at Harvard more. So after earning my degree, I found a way to remain at Harvard in a non-tenure-track job, as a lecturer and, ultimately, codirector of the undergraduate program in my department, Human Evolutionary Biology.
I did not censor my views about evolutionary biology in teaching, writing (particularly my book T: The Story of Testosterone) or public speaking. However, stating that there are two sexes on Fox & Friends in 2021 evidently crossed a line. Shortly after that, I was made so uncomfortable on campus and in my department that I felt I had no choice but to leave the job I loved. Survey data confirms what I know from personal experience: that the campus culture at leading universities is in dire need of repair.
I retain a Harvard affiliation as an unpaid associate in the psychology department (in Steven Pinker’s area). Although I keep a low profile on campus, I try to keep up with developments at Harvard, including faculty scholarship relevant to my areas of interest. Recently I came across a book review by Sarah Richardson, professor of the History of Science and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the head of Harvard’s GenderSci Lab, whose work aims to “counter bias and hype in sex difference research, elevate the importance of context, contingency, and variation in the study of gender and sex in biology … and engage the implications of biological claims about gender and sexual diversity for law and public policy relevant to the lives of gender and sexual minorities.“
Although Professor Richardson and I profoundly disagree about the nature of sex, I once invited her to give a guest lecture in my class, and we’ve had many cordial interactions over the years. So I was surprised by what she wrote in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. I was not surprised that Richardson lavished praise on the new book Sex Is a Spectrum, by Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes. However, I was taken aback at her attack on the character and motives of those who hold that sex is binary and that organisms are classified as male or female depending on their capacity to produce, respectively, sperm or eggs.

Read the rest.

Fertility Declines are a Cultural Crisis

Josh Appel in City Journal.

A July working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, concluded that “the decline in fertility across the industrialized world . . . is less a matter of specific economic costs or policies and more a reflection of a broad re-prioritization of parenthood in adult life.” Its authors found that fertility declines “appear[] to stem from a complex mix of factors that shape how people decide to allocate their time, money, and energy,” factors themselves shaped by changing “social and cultural forces.”
One of those “cultural forces” is the increasingly common belief that parenthood impedes happiness. Forty-four percent of adults under 50, for example, said that they don’t want children, as they would rather “focus on other things such as their career or interests,” according to a 2024 Pew survey. Majorities in both age groups—under and over 50—said that not having children “made it easier for them to afford the things they want, have time for hobbies and interests, and save for the future.” An NBC poll released this month found that the top three priorities for men and women aged 18–29 are having a fulfilling career, having enough money to do what they desire, and achieving financial independence. None of those priorities explicitly involved having children.
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, authors of the forthcoming book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, identified the same cultural problem. Berg and Wiseman conducted hundreds of interviews and surveys over the past four years with young Americans. These discussions collectively revealed that “the success narratives of modern liberal life leave little room for having a family.”
What is to be done? Often, advocates treat declining fertility as a purely material challenge, solvable with subsidies and programs. They argue that expanded childcare and generous parental leave will help solve the problem. Yet in countries like Sweden and Finland, which have long implemented such policies, birth rates remain well below replacement level. Despite extensive social-safety nets, subsidized childcare, and some of the most generous parental-leave systems in the world, both nations now record birth rates lower than that of the United States.
To improve birth rates, we need to address the cultural narratives that demean family life. As Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, told me, “If the education system is careerist, materialist, and hedonistic, then spending money on that is only going to drive us deeper into the ditch.”
One way to challenge those narratives, Wilcox argued, is to send children to private schools. “Culture is a product of education,” he said. “If we can advance school choice, that would make a difference in how we culturally view the family.” As Wilcox and his colleagues noted in a report for the Institute for Family Studies, a religious upbringing is tied to higher fertility, which suggests that faith-based education could inculcate the kind of family values that yield higher birth rates.