Your Questions (and Criticisms) of Our Recent Shows

Welcome to another subscriber only ask me anything. You all send in a ton of questions. We are gonna respond to a small fraction of them, I think. Here joining me is our amazing executive producer, Claire Gordon, who has chosen a bunch of questions that mostly don't wanna answer if I had my druthers. But, Claire, thanks for being here this morning. Jet lagged from a late night flight back from California. Hopefully, it'll make this more interesting. The first bunch of questions are really synthesized from a ton of responses we got from the last few episodes, which really flooded our inbox. These are the Mahmood Khalil and Philippe Sands. That's right. And and Hazony got a lot of response too. But definitely, the winner in terms of volume of response was Mahmood Khalil, not only in our inbox, but it got a lot of response out in the world. There was a whole first for the show, a whole New York Post cover story in response to the interview, big headline, deport him. So my first question is just, like, were you surprised that it got that reaction? I find it unbelievably saddening that all these people who, you know, two years ago were styling themselves as great defenders of free speech, listen to an interview with somebody, listen to them speak, And the response is not disagreement. It's deport him. As a way of revealing how unbelievably hollow and cynical that moment in politics was. Like the number of people who I understand, like much of their political careers to be built on them as defenders of free speech, who again responded by saying, this person who has a green card is married to a US citizen and has a child born here should be deported. Whatever you think of what he said means that your commitment to that idea free speech was so paper thin. So I found that depressing, not in a way that was shocking. I've always been fairly cynical about what a lot of that politics was built on, but, I found that, you know, revealing of how little pretense has even gone in in the Trump era to maintaining any kind of consistency with that form of politics. I mean, I think it was also revealing of the different things people heard when he spoke. And there was, part of the interview that got the most reaction, it was also a clip that circulated a lot on social media, was him talking about October 7, and describing the attack as unavoidable. To me, it felt frightening that we had to reach this moment in in in in in the Palestinian struggle. And I I remember I didn't sleep for a number of days, and Noor was very worried about about, like, just, my health. And it was heavy. Like, I I I still remember, like, I was like, this couldn't happen. And What do you mean we had to reach this …