A good source for a sensible treatment of current issues is hard to come by these days. Major news organizations are either divided into Trump-love or Trump-hate camps. Trump-hate overwhelms the programming on MSNBC, NPR, and legacy media. Fox News and the new counter-media – Breitbart, Townhall, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, talk radio, a portion of the podcast world, etc. – carries the flag for Trump-love. So, what is really happening when everything is seen through the lens of Trump-love or Trump-hate? If one of those is your only window to the outside world, reality will be distorted because it is so tightly filtered and shaped to either worship or harm Trump.
I recommend the GoodFellows podcast of the Hoover Institute, hosted by Bill Whalen, as an antidote to this blinkered stridency of, for example, the celebrity hosts of Fox News. Whalen hosts three regular contributors, John Cochrane (economist), H.R. McMaster (national security), and Sir Niall Ferguson (historian), and a guest. In the most recent episode, “The Great X Debate, with Matt Continetti: Vance v. Ferguson, Trump Diplomacy, DOGE, and Hackman” of 2/28/2025 (below), the guest was Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute and the Commentary podcast. Please sit back and watch the 57-minute podcast. It takes commentary and analysis out of the cage-fighting arenas.
This latest installment mostly focused on the Zelenskyy-Trump/Vance dustup on Friday, 2/28. These are just a few of my takeaways with all not in agreement and from a variety of perspectives:
• The Ukraine War is unwinnable for Ukraine. False. The weaknesses of the Russian military were borne out in the fighting. The combined forces of the U.S. and our NATO allies could stop Rusia in weeks if we had the will.
• The economies of Russia, China, and Iran are in a troubled state.
• The U.S. is weak, no longer capable of worldwide predominance. False. McMaster and Cochrane rebut this banality on the Trump Right (Laura Ingraham, et al). The fallacy is used by sectors of the Right to support neo-isolationistic retrenchment.
• The Trump of term #1 is different from the Trump of term #2. This time around, the people who surround him are more likely to feed and accept his ill-founded propensities. Most advisors are neo-isolationists from the MAGA eco-system. The foreign policy and trade issues will likely be viewed through this prism. Ferguson says Trump wants to be a trade-war president, not a war president.
More can be gleaned.
The podcast is a soothing alternative to the partisan bombast of the more popular but compromised outlets. You may not agree with them, but you will come out with the mental gears turning. You may discover a whole world outside the celebrity pundits of talk radio, MSNBC, and Fox News.
RogerG