For me, when it comes to podcasts, it’s “never say never.” I think I may finally have cracked the code for relatively easy formatting, making podcasts less of a chore (for me), more fun for everyone (I hope), and (possibly) a viable addition to  American Thinker’s written content.

Today’s topics are what Obamacare has done to ERs, the drop in fuel prices, WaPo journalists who dare not speak “their” truth, what Google AI is alleged to have done to Robby Starbuck, and the fall of John Cleese, the avatar for all bad things from the “intellectual” left.

You can also watch the video on YouTube or listen to it on Libsyn and Apple Podcasts.

UPDATE: Once again, someone incredibly kind has provided a transcript:

American Thinker Takeaways October 24, 2025

ANDREA: Hello, it’s Andrea and I am back trying again with a podcast. I keep refining my technical abilities because this is a constant learning curve for me which I consider to be a good thing because an old brain needs to learn new tricks. That’s part of how you stay limber. Sometimes it’s a frustrating process. This is the second time I’ve done this whole thing because I forgot to tell the recording program which audio input device to work. But I am ready. I am ready now. So, the way I’m doing it this time, I actually have a long riff about John Cleese, whom I’ve always admired as a comedian, and he turns out to have feet of clay, but his feet of clay actually have some intersting aspects to them, so I wanted to do a fairly long riff about it. But I’m going to save that for the end so that people who are bored can just drop off and ignore it. And I’ll start with some shorter points I hope to make and we’ll see if my new technology makes this a smoother experience for me and for you.

What I wanted to start with is a story from last week’s Daily Wire, and frankly, this is a smug story because it’s something that I predicted years ago when I was still writing at my blog Bookwoorm Room, and of course it came to fruition. So the report from the Daily Wire written by Amanda Prestigiacomo is entitled “Why ER Wait Times Are So Out Of Control- And How To Fix Them”. And the pertinent paragraphs are “According to Niklas Kleinorth, a policy analyst at the Paragon Health Institute, the problem is largely due to the lack of financial incentives in the American healthcare system. ‘I think that the increased ER wait times are actually one of the big broken promises of Obamacare,’ Kleinworth told the Daily Wire on Thursday. ‘When that law was passed, we were promised that if you gave people more healthcare coverage, they would see their primary care physician instead of going to the ER. They would have more access. But we’ve actually seen the opposite. We’ve seen that a lot of the financial incentives for people to take care of themselves and go see their regular physician haven’t come to fruition,’ he explained. ‘And so now people are going to the emergency room to get routine care instead.’” He’s almost right. And the reason I say that is because I predicted that the emergency rooms would be completely overburdened. I predicted that in 2009. And the reason I did is because I have a friend who made different life choices than mine. And her life choices included drugs and dropping out, whereas my life choices were more traditional middle class to upper middle class life choices. So my friend lives in a world of people who, even more than she, have made drug life choices. She always worked, but many of her friends, they’ve worked intermittently, they’re often on welfare, they get food stamps. And what’s really important to know about them is they live very marginal lives because those are the lives they choose because the most important thing in their lives is drugs. And we’re not even talking heroin, we’re just talking stoners, maybe a methamphetamine addict here and there. But mostly just sort of stoners, people with no ambition, no focus, no self-discipline, and they do not aspire to a middle-class lifestyle and that includes not aspiring to the middle class norm of taking good care of yourself. We middle-class people, we watch what we eat, we exercise, we get regular check-ups, we have all our systems checked, we have blood drawn, we have scans, and we have relationships with our physicians. That’s not what these people do. And what happened when Obamacare was being debated and actually went into, became law, I heard this from my friend, is that the people in her circle were absolutely not going to pay for it. They had been going to the ER for free because that’s how they got their care, because ERs are required by law to treat anyone who shows up. And they didn’t see any reason to change that. Even though they might comprehensive, wonderful, middle-class insurance for fifty dollars or twenty-five dollars a month, that was money out of pocket to get what they wanted for free, which is emergency care. One of my friend’s friends, he goes to the ER whenever he gets a bad cold or because he tends to scavenge from garbage cans, whenever he gets food poisoning, just heads to the ER. He’s not going to pay anything for the month. So I always knew that the incentives were completely crazy because the geniuses of the Democrat party were incapable of understanding that there are many people in America that don’t share their values. And of  course that was all before Obama sort-of and then Biden explosively opened the border to illegal aliens, to the ER. My same friend, when she went to the ER in central Oregon, so not near Portland, she waited ten hours for what was a fairly serious complaint, although I’m happy to say it came to nothing, and she was the only person waiting in the waiting room who spoke English. So this was central Oregon, the ER was filled with Spanish-speakers getting their free medical care. So, anyway, this was a smug little comment of mine because this is something I’ve predicted for well over a decade and it came to pass. So, it’s very very sad, it’s tremendously sad for the American people who’ve seen their medical system destroyed, we need to bring free market principles back to the medical system as much as possible. Private insurance, which used to be truly for emergencies has now become something that just is a cost-shifting device, and that, on the one hand, pumps free money into the system as well as all the government’s subsidies, which raises prices. The other thing that raises prices is even as the government subsidizes things and people have insurance, both the government and the insurance companies pay providers only pennies on the dollar. So, and even further price inflation comes because the providers keep raising their prices so that when they get pennies on the dollar, they’re still adequately compensated for their costs and make a profit. So, the expenses of the insurance system, part of them is because we’ve reached a technological level that extends far beyond the doctor’s black bag, his few pills and his scalpel. And now we have constant systems that see inside the body and blood tests and G-d-knows-what. But a lot of it is just pure inflationary pressure from poor policies. As places like Quest Diagnostic show, when you turn blood tests into a business, whenever I’ve gone there for very specific reasons to me, I’m often there for my routine medical tests, they’re affordable, the waiting room is packed, it’s efficient, it’s a wonderful service. I highly recommend Quest based on my own experience. Anyway, onto the next topic.

Next, I’m going to cover a bit of news for consumers and for the Trump administration. And it also raises a couple of points that are worth mentioning, plus a little smug on my part. I guess you could call the theme of the first part of this podcast ‘Andrea is smug’. So, this is an article, again, from the Daily Wire, which I was looking at earlier this week and last week. And it’s by Hank Berrien and the headline is “Gas Prices Plummet After Trump Rebuilds Ties With Saudis Biden Snubbed”. And the lead paragraph is “Gas prices have finally fallen into territory drivres have long hoped for but rarely seen in recent years. The nastional average now sits at $2.98 per gallon, down 4.1 cents in a week and about 15 cents lower than a year ago. Just last month, prices were nearly 20 cents higher, and many Americans had resigned themselves to payinf ‘$3 or more forever’ under the current economic status quo.” Where I live, gas prices are down a dollar per gallon from where they were peaking a year or more ago and I can’t even imagine what it is in California, the Californians pay for it. And then, snip snip snip, back to the article. “But the ‘why’ behind the supply-side motion connects directly to how the United States engages major producers- especially OPEC members like Saudi Arabia. President Donald Trump’s dealings with the Saudis have re-energized the U.S.-Saudi partnership.” So there are a few things to pick apart here. One is, I know a lot of people don’t want to buy fuel from the Saudis, but they are our ally, and in their own peculiar way and I recognize the Wahhabism that they spread all over the world that turn regional moderate Muslims into fanatic killers and the women black-clad, but the current Saudi administration Muhammed bin Salman, he is subject to all the constraints of being a Saudi crown prince, something of a reformer. He’s interested in Abraham Accords, and he recognizes that his kingdom has to modernize so I’m actually kind of a fan of his, while recognizing who he is and what stands for. So, we do have to deal with Saudi Arabia. Otherwise we’re buying gas from Venezuela and other really nasty places which are even worse than Saudi Arabia and ironically which pollute more, because of course the whole price- purpose of Democrat policies was to clean the Earth, but as with electric cars, all they did was move the pollution elsewhere. Electric cars, especially in some regions still rely on gasoline to power them except the gasoline is at the electric plant, not at the exhaust pipe of the car. It was always going to be, we have to get our fossil fuel from somewhere. The modern world runs on fossil fuel, and as I like to add, the only thing that really ended slavery, yes, people became more moral and recognized that all men are brothers and it’s morally wrong to enslave people, but the other thing is that humans since time immemorial have tried to shift labor onto those whom they can enslave. Because physical labor’s hard. And what fossil fuels did is they turned machines into our slaves. We no longer need to huge- use human slaves. Slavery was evil and needed to end, but it arguably would have ended anyway although we might have ended up with a Chinese system of wage slaves- much greater wage slaves than the communists ever imagined was happening in the Western world. Anyway, that’s another topic. But we need fossil fuel and America should be producing it, but Biden shut down production and California shut down all but one of its oil refineries or maybe all of its oil refineries. So we turn to Saudi Arabia and that gets to the point of about Trump. Trump has personal relationships with people. One of the things that drives Democrats crazy is whenever he’s negotiating with someone he says nice things about them. They think when he says nice things about Putin and Kim Jong Un that he’s an idiot who can be used by those people. But Trump’s philosophy is “if I want something from someone, I’m not going to get it by abusing them”. And of course, Biden didn’t understand that, so he promptly abused the Saudis and then was surprised when they started withholding fossil fuel and raising prices. Trump sees symbiotic, organic relationships with people and you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Again, it doesn’t mean he always makes perfect deals, it doesn’t mean I agree with him on everything, but he’s doing the right thing to serve the American people and for that, I am grateful.

This is a real quick one. It came from last week and this time from the New York Post, “Bari Weiss asked ’60 Minutes’ senior staffers why the country thinks they’re biased”. And you probably heard this story, and I’m just going to read you the first few paragraphs of an essay by Ariel Zilber from the New York Post from last week, earlier this week actually. “Bari Weis startled ’60 Minutes’ staffers during a private meeting last week by asking why Americans view the show as biased- another sign of the new CBS News chief’s aggressive approach to reshaping the network, according to a report. Weiss,” quote, “’surprised senior staff… when she asked a provocative question: Why does the country think you’re biased?’” endquote, “the New York Times reported on Sunday, citing three people who attended the Midtown Manhattan session. The exchange was met with” quote, “‘stunned awkwardness,’” close quote, “the paper said.” The implication is that the bias- the journalists were forced to confront the fact that they are biased because they couldn’t answer the question, that’s why they were silent. I happen to have another read on it. I think what happened is that they were silent because they knew they couldn’t be reported saying “we’re not biased, Americans are stupid”. So all they could do was sit there silently, and it is a tragedy. Media have always been biased. In revolutionary wartimes they were biased, but they wore their biases openly on their sleeves. The thing about today’s mainstream media is that they still insist on the pretense that they are not biased, or that they sit at the center or that they are even-handed. And more and more Americans are waking up to the fact that that’s a lie. And their waking up is a very good thing.

On to the next thing I saved. This one’s a little heavier, although it shouldn’t take too long to discuss. I use AI a lot. AI has made my life immensely easier. I have a subscription to ChatGPT because it makes extraordinarily good images which you may have noticed cropping up more and more in the posts I make and the posts generally at American Thinker. Other editors use different AI services but the virtue of AI is you get exactly the image you want and you don’t have to worry about being attacked for copyright violation. We are not a wealthy outlet, so we don’t have the money to pay for photographs, so we’ve always used public domain or creative commons that are labeled clearly as creative commons, nevertheless, someone will say, “oh no, you used our image” and it’s a fight for us, so we really like having AI. And ChatGPT in my estimation makes the most fabulous AI images, and I’ve learned how to use the system to create political images even if ChatGPT doesn’t want to. I also use AI a lot to collate information I know is out there. So I use it, I’ll have a question that might take me an hour to find all the articles that I know are out there and ChatGPT will find them in a matter of seconds. I never rely on ChatGPT for facts I haven’t confirmed or don’t know deep in my bones already are correct, you know, like the Declaration of Independence was- July 14, 1776. I don’t need to confirm that. Nevertheless, all of these sites are left-wing biased. They’re hostile to white people, remember the big kerfuffle when you’d ask one of these sites to do a picture of the founding fathers and they all came out black and things like that. So there are a lot of problems. It’s also not just the bias of the engineers but there’s a garbage in, garbage out problem which is that they are programmed, for example, to look to top 30 news sites and Wikipedia, which are all left-wing garbage. So you can sort-of try to educate it. When Charlie Kirk died, I asked ChatGPT to create a respectful image. If you asked for a respectful image of a well-known figure, ChatGPT will create it, and I said create a respectful image of the late Charlie Kirk, and ChatGPT said “Charlie Kirk’s not dead”. And I sent it a link to an article saying Charlie Kirk’s dead, so you can educate it up to a point but little dots of conservativism educating AI well, doesn’t work too well. But it turns out that when you get to Google AI, something very sinister is going on. At least it’s to one person: Robby Starbuck was a music producer and he may still be, but he became a political activist. He’s a conservative guy. He’s done a bit- a lot about exposing corporations that cater to conservatives and yet behind the scenes have been radically pro-DEI in their business dealings. The one that he did most notably was exposing Harley-Davidson for being in radically leftist-run country- company behind-the-scenes. So it was catering to people who do not believe in DEI and yet it was not- behind-the-scenes, it was not that. Anyway, he wrote the other day, maybe two days ago, “Huge news: I’m suing Google today”. This is at his X, and I’m just going to read it to you because it’s fascinating. “What you’re about to see is insane. Since 2023, GoogleAI (that’s Bard, Gemini and Gemma), has been defaming me with fake criminal allegations including sexual assault, child rape, abuse, fraud, stalking, drug charges, and even saying I was in Epstein’s flight logs. All 100% fake. All generated by Google’s AI. I have ZERO criminal record or allegations. So why did Google do it? Google’s AI says that I was targeted because of my political views.” We all know that. I mean, because again, garbage in, garbage out. Someone at GoogleAI did this, someone set an algorithm. It was a bad action. Here’s the crazy thing. I’m going back to what Robby Starbuck writes. “Google execs KNEW for 2 YEARS that this was happening because I told them and my lawyers sent cease and desist letters multiple times. This morning, my team @dhillonlaw”- which means Dhillon’s old law firm- “filed my lawsuit against Google and now I’m going public with all the receipts- because this can’t ever happen to anyone else.” The receipts are in a video which obviously I’m not including here. Going back to Starbuck’s: “Google’s AI didn’t just lie- it built fake worlds to make its lies look real: fake victims, fake therapy records, fake court records, fake police records, fake relationships fake ‘news’ stories. It even fabricated statements denouncing me from President Trump, Elon Musk and J. D. Vance over sexual assaults that Google completely invented. One of the most dystopian things I’ve ever seen is how dedicated their AI was to doubling down on the lies. Google’s AI routinely cited fake sources by creating fake links to REAL media outlets and shows, complete with fake headlines so readers would trust the information. It would continue to do this even if you called the AI out for lying or sending fake links. In short, it was creating fake legacy media reports as a way to launder trust with users so they would believe elaborate lies that it told. Some of the news outlets/people that Google’s AI impersonated are listed below.” And then he lists Joe Rogan, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Daily Wire, Daily Beast, Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, Megyn Kelly, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Theo Von, Washington Post, on and on. And now I’m going back to Starbuck’s: “As a rule: AI must never harm humans. It must never defame or manipulate- no matter your politics. Bias in AI is a very, VERY serious issue. If we don’t fix this now, we’re in big trouble. This can destroy lives, reputations and livelihoods. If we don’t win this fight then you no longer control your reputation because AI will define who you are to the rest of the world. You better hope it likes you.” And he adds at the end is “How @sundarpichai,” the head of Google, “handles this will be extremely telling.” And then he also urges Congress to “reevaluate everything Google has been telling them about how they’re working to be unbiased- because” he writes, “if Google can fabricate crimes about me today, then it can smear ANY conservative tomorrow and rig the information flow during elections. In future elections, that can decide who runs our country.” That is really, really, really serious stuff. And as I said, I’m very careful how I rely on ChatGPT. I have to actually know something and have seen it by looking at a news source first, having read it myself. But we’ve seen this before, people- one of the things I pay attention to is lawyers who have used AI to write legal briefs for the court that only to discover that it wasn’t just that AI got the law wrong. AI actually invented law. It invented whole cases with beautiful citations to cases that never existed because if you tell AI to do something, first it will try to do it legitimately, and then it will try to do it illegitimately. So we’re in a brave new world and something needs to be done to fix it.

Okay, now I’m at the John Cleese bit that that I promised. And this is going to be a bit long because it brings in a lot of stuff. AI can fake things, but it’s a reminder that also humans can fake things. And that superficial thinkers and people who find things that support their own biases can create ecosystems of dangerous, dangerous disinformation. And in this case, it’s John Cleese. Now, I was an early adopter of Monty Python. It came to our local PBS station in the US maybe in 1972 or ’73. I was a tween when it came and boy, did it tickle my sense of humor. I’ve always been a huge Monty Python fan. I still think one of the best bits in comedy is Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, when Eric Idle’s character says he wants to be called Loretta, and John Cleese’s character says he’s bat-fecal-matter-crazy. Not in so many words, but that you can’t make up your own sexual identity. I’m not sure John Cleese would believe that nowadays because it turns out that John Cleese is a completely, fanatically crazed anti-Trumper, pro-socialism, leftist. He’s all about pro-Ukraine, and readers know that I’m ambivalent about that because it’s… what’s happening to the innocents involved truly breaks my heart. I mean the people, the civilians being killed in Ukraine is an unutterable tragedy. As are the troops that are part of Putin’s… that he just does the typical Soviet thing of sending people into the guns with the hope that human bodies will eventually absorb the enemies’ bullets until there are no bullets and so what if several million people die? That’s the Russian way of doing things. But Cleese is interesting because he’s become radically anti-Israel. He was always kind of socialist, soft-leftist Israel. But he’s now really radically anti-Israel and it’s based on really ugly Internet garbage. And that’s what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to show that anything he says or tweets is not reliable, that it’s driven by his biases, and that it’s operating on a completely dishonest infrastructure. So, I’ll try not to be too long on this but I’ll be a little long, so if you tune out, now’s the time to do it. Accept my premise, John Cleese has lost my respect because he’s just a bottom feeder who is using the bottom to attack Israel at a time when anti-semitism is hugely on the rise. So I’ve put these in chronological order mostly because that’s how I like to operate. And so, for what it’s worth, that how you’re going to see these things.

Back in the old days, 2016, 2017, 2020, John Cleese the comedian was friendly to Jewish humor. In May 2020, he tweeted: “I was talking to a Jewish friend about the extraordinary richness of Jewish humour, and I asked him, ‘Are there any good Gentile jokes?’” in his, are there? In that same year, 2020, he said “I was thinking of the greatest Jewish joke. Hymie is complaining to G-d that he never wins the lottery. G-d replies ‘Hymie, meet me half way. Buy a ticket.’” That’s a famous joke. In 2016, “The world knows the Jewish people have a great sense of humour, and a lot of their best jokes are self-deprecating.” And there was something else he… so he’s Jewish humor, good. He likes Jewish humor. But the tone starts changing. Also in 2020: “Weekend Quiz. The President of which country below, just fired the prosecutor who was investigating his finances.” And he’s got this list of countries: “San Salvador, Poland, Paraguay, Venezuela, Hungary, Israel, Mali, Brazil…” Of course, it’s Israel. Because he hates Netanyahu. Netanyahu, this is in 2020. He hates Netanyahu. Bibi is bad. Now, for some reason John Cleese was not perturbed as best as I can tell by the fact that Biden forced Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son. So, and what was going on in Israel was very, very complicated because Israel has a judicial system that is totally uncontrolled, it’s completely self-sufficient, and it’s hard, hard left. The judicial system, the prosecutors and the courts have been trying for years to destroy Bibi, and that was why Trump during his speech at the Knesset said that, you know, to the President, “just pardon him”. Because basically Bibi is… they’re trying to unthrone him for allegedly accepting bribes of cigars and whiskey. So it’s just… So 2020, what you see is he stereotypes Jews, they’re funny people, and I hate Netanyahu.

February 6, 2022. So this is a year and a half before October 7th attack. Someone named Chris McGreal tweets out “The Guardian’s view on Amnesty’s Israel report.” And Amnesty International, it’s a hard left organization and a whole lot of really bad countries get a pass but never Israel. It’s like the NGO version of the UN. You know, you turn a blind eye to abuse everywhere, but Israel is evil and it’s… the obsession. And so John Cleese tweets out “It is NOT anti-semitic to criticize Israel. What matters is… is the criticism fair”. So now you have to ask yourself if Cleese’s criticism is fair.

After the October 7th attack, as best as I can tell, Cleese had nothing to say about the massacre of 1200 men, women and children. Burned in ovens, about nurseries splattered with blood, about women literally being raped and tortured to death, about… as we know now that Yahia Sinwar gave instructions which the people of Hamas, and it’s just… and it’s not just the people of Hamas, but also the thousands of men from Gaza who joined them on this. The instructions were explicit: Be as brutal as possible, be as sadistic as possible and film it so the world can see it. Even Nazis didn’t do this. They kept records for themselves but they tried to keep it secret from the world. So this woman named Layla Moran said “You can be pro-Israel and still care about people… in Palestine” and you can be pro-Palestine and still care about people in Israel. Here was John Cleese’s report after this unbelievable massacre, and admittedly by October 29, Israel had started moving into Gaza going after Hamas, a military entity that had embedded itself among civilians. And he said “Please read the rest of this summary. It summarizes my thoughts: On the one hand”- and now it’s right back to Bibi Netanyahu- “On the one hand, we have the most right wing ‘government’ in Israeli history- one that is trying to put itself above the law, led by [a] man who should be in jail for corruption, and kept in power by tiny groups of Judaic fundamentalists. On the other, we have equally fanatical terrorists, rejected by 62% of the people in Gaza, using appalling cruelties to destroy a country set up by the United Nations in 1947. Please don’t ask me to take sides.” So, he is saying that Bibi Netanyahu is exactly the same as Hamas. He has no words for the hostages for what they suffered, and ‘don’t ask me to take sides’, they’re completely the same. A liberal democracy where any citizen has full civil rights, that as the war went on proved to be the most humane war combatant in the history of war, feeding its enemies, giving them food, giving them water, having the lowest civilian casualty rate in war history, especially in urban warfare, losing its tactical advantage by broadcasting notice of upcoming battles and bombings so that civilians could clear out. But for John Cleese, you know, Hamas and you know, most of the people in Gaza don’t support it. Of course they do. 85% of them elected it and they kept putting it in power. Not a single person in Gaza as it turned out ever helped one of the hostages. And in fact, they joined in in abusing them, the thousands of… it’s all for kakta, it’s a completely inverted worldview, but wait, it gets worse.

April 16, 2024. This is when Iran sent missiles into Israel, and the reason they were ineffective was because Israel has used a lot of money to protect its people. Israel? Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, and Hamas sent almost 28,000 rockets into Israel. Israel didn’t have Iron Dome, bomb shelters, sirens, and all sorts of protective systems. Probably 60 or 70,000 Israelis would have died. It would’ve been their Battle of Britain. And so, when Iran sent missiles, Israel stopped them. They’d had Iron Dome because it invested in it. Unlike Hamas, which invested in tunnels and bombs. And so John Cleese wrote, “I now suspect that the intention behind Iran’s rather ineffective attack on Israel was to make sure that Netanyahu stays in power”. So, according to him, Bibi Netanyahu is in cahoots with the mullahs in Iran. The same mullahs who have as their oft-stated goal to destroy Israel and that created the “ring of fire” around Israel of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and itself. So, maybe he’s got dementia. It gets worse!

A guy named Ryan Grim on October 19th tweeted out “Soon after the explosion in Rafah, I’m told by a source familiar, the White House and the Pentagon knew that the incident was caused by an Israeli settler bulldozer running over unexploded ordnance- contradicting Netanyahu’s claim that Hamas had popped up from tunnels.” Matt Gaetz, who thank G-d he didn’t become attorney general, because he’s really vile, says “Bibi is now actively sabotaging Trump’s peace [plan].” And John Cleese reposted this. And now we’re getting to my point about John Cleese being a consumer of misinformation and using his platform to broadcast it. Because, and again, this I checked the sites, sources that ChatGPT cites. So this is not just me saying it or ChatGPT summarizing it. “I found no credible, traceable public official statement or major independent investigation from the U.S. government (White House, Pentagon, Intelligence Community) that confirms U.S. officials definitely concluded ‘bulldozer plus unexploded ordnance’ was the cause. The claim rests on an anonymous ‘source familiar with the matter’ in this guy Grim’s post. That alone does not meet standard thresholds for verification in major reporting.” It doesn’t even meet standard thresholds for verification in minor reporting, is my addition. That’s not ChatGPT. Back to ChatGPT. “The outlets propagating the claim are often less established, and sometimes appear to reflect one narrative source; thus the risk of echoing unverified or single-source claim is higher.” Ya think? The Israeli military said that version is nonsense. Yes. But none of that stopped John Cleese. Let’s go on.

The really bad one, this is unbelievably nasty. On October 20th, John Cleese reposted something by the Jewish Voice. “Jewish Voice”. It’s Jewish, right? And it has a video of the ultra-orthodox protesting in New York. And what it says is “Thousands of Orthodox Jewish protestors have gathered as far as the eye can see in Midtown New York. American Jews have united against the Israeli army. The IDF is a perverse, genocidal, anti-Semitic army. Zionists are worse than Haman”- or Haman, or however you want to pronounce it- “of ancient times, the Inquisition, and the Nazis. Zionists are never Jews.” And this is what John Cleese decides to retweet. Now, first of all, what the video shows is a bunch of Orthodox Jews who are protesting, not against the IDF, but against a new Israeli policy. Beginning with the new Israeli state, there was a policy that said that ultra-orthodox did not have to serve in the military. Service in the military’s mandatory for everyone else in Israel. And in ’48, you know, I think Israel really thought ‘one and done’. It’s a war, we’ll have an army, we’re always going to have defense. But the ultra-orthodox, they’re the core of keeping Judaism alive, so we don’t want to expose them to the military. But it’s been war after war after war after war, and the Israeli people are resentful of the fact that their sons are being sent to die while the ultra-orthodox sit and study the Torah. They are diminishing the value of studying the the Torah. But they also are saying that those studying the Torah are diminishing the value of the sons and daughters of Israel who are sent to die. So it is a big deal. But this was not a protest against the IDF. It was a protest against a new law that says that moving forward, the ultra-orthodox are also going to get conscripted into the military because it simply isn’t fair that they should be spared the battlefield. You can view it whichever way you like but that’s what the protest is about. But the rest of this post, I mean, “the IDF is perverse, genocidal, anti-Semitic?” Zionists are evil? I mean, what the heck, from the Jewish Voice? Well, if you look at the Jewish voice, and I don’t know if John Cleese did, “Jews United Against Zionism & the State of Israel”. It is an absolutely radical anti-Israel site that has the word “Jewish” in it. And it’s just a reminder, you know, they were already capos in the concentration camps, we have discussed at American Thinker in many articles. There are Jews who hate being Jewish and some of it dress it up in the Torah but most of them dress it up in the fact that they really, really, really hate the fact that G-d imposes moral strictures on people. These are the same people who also hate Christians for abiding by those strictures. But this is the kind of misinformation that is venomous, genocidal, anti-Semitic misinformation that John Cleese retweets.

But wait! There’s more. On October 20th, Brent Freeman tweeted out “Today we learned that the Prime Minister of Israel repeatedly raped, choked and beat Virginia Guiffre”- you know, the gal who was on Epstein Island- “and the media today won’t even say his name or the country he was the Prime Minister of. It’s impossible to hate the media enough.” And John Cleese climbs in, “Our Press is hopelessly corrupt.” Although he accepts every left-wing thing. Brent Freeman doesn’t say, but Brent Freeman implies that the Prime Minister is Bibi Netanyahu. And of course John Cleese implies the same, because who is the Israeli Prime Minister today? Bibi Netanyahu. Well, this is serious misinformation. And let me say as a prelude that I have my doubts about Virginia Giuffre. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead. She was already eighteen years old when she ended up on Epstein Island. So this was not a pedophilia thing. My sense of Epstein and, I may be wrong, so I’m not saying this as a certainty, is that, like Bill Clinton, he liked young women. Ripe young women. He wasn’t into little girls. That ebephilia, or whatever. [Ephebophilia], or something like that, which is about late adolescence. Epstein was not into little kids. Now, both aren’t good, but it’s worth acknowledging that in many states, you can get married at sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, that… when my mother had me and my sister in her late thirties, most people thought she was our grandmother because all of the young women with whom she was associating had their babies right out of high school at seventeen or eighteen. So we’ve had a huge cultural shift. I’m not defending Epstein. Epstein was a super creepy guy, a corrupt guy. I think he blackmailed people a lot. Perhaps over really sick sex with little girls or perhaps on going to the island and consorting with prostitutes, which is something to be blackmailed about anyway. Not getting into Epstein, I know many of you will disagree with me, don’t want to hear about it. I recognize Epstein was bad, I’m not sure that Virginia Gruff-Ruff, whatever, had an unbelievably traumatic life, if necessarily a reliable narrator. As many may remember, she badmouthed Alan Dershowitz and then had to back down from it because he could prove that he wasn’t where she said he was. He had represented Jeffery Epstein and that’s okay. Everybody’s entitled to defense under the law. It doesn’t mean you agree with or like your client, or that you consort with them and their sex slaves and sex girls. So, her narrative is so over-the-top, I’ve just… I don’t know. Again, don’t argue with me on this. I’m just saying I don’t know and I have some of my own ideas and you’re not going to change my mind. But anyway, so the whole implication here is that it’s Bibi Netanyahu who’s been raping children and abusing them and yadda yadda yadda. Well, not really.

So, it turns out that the underlying tweet under all of this, it was Ehud Barak, and I forgot to, the thing that’s on the screen if you can see it, this was another one tweeted. I just forgot to clip the part where it says John Cleese retweeted it. And it said, it said correctly that it was Ehud Barak. So a guy named Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, who is an Israeli, apparently, tweets “Wait. So you are telling me Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister and most decorated IDF soldier ever, raped and beat a fifteen-year-old girl? Shouldn’t this be a somewhat bigger story?” Well the interesting thing about that is that there are a couple of lies in there. For one thing, she was eighteen, so she was a legal adult. And for another thing, it doesn’t mention that Israeli Prime Minister Barak, although Giuffre did accuse him several years before, something he vigorously denies, he is not the person named in her memoir. So, if you go to the New York Post story that this Ephraim-Ben whatever, Sharadi El-Ephraim [Shaiel Ben-Ephraim] tweeted out, what it says is “Prominent Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre was brutally bloodied, beaten and raped by a” quote, “‘well-known prime minister’” close quote, “in a series of savage encounters that finally helped the teenager break free from the sex trafficker’s spell.” Again, let me make clear, she alleges this. We don’t know what actually happened. However, the article goes on, she “simply referred to the deranged man as the ‘Prime Minister’ saying she was afraid the brute would” quote, “seek to hurt her”, close quote, “if she printed his name.” So, nobody’s name. We don’t know who it is. “In the past, however, she pointed to Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak in court filings as one of the many elites who had raped her, a claim he has repeatedly denied.” So, this whole narrative, first it implies Bibi Netanyahu, but also to the extent Ehud Barak, the narrative forgets to mention that Barak has vigorously denied this, and nobody else has alleged this. And even Virginia G. did not state a name in her things. So, maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t. But the narrative is fake to the extent it implies that it was Ehud Barak.

And by the way, who is this Shaiel Ben-Ephraim that John Cleese is retweeting? Well, in 2020, “a postdoctoral fellow left UCLA following multiple accusations of sexual harassment on Twitter. Starting in early June, several Twitter users accused Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, of sexual harassment, stating that he sent private messages harassing them, invited underage people for drinks and sent minors unsolicited inappropriate photos.” In other words, he’s the kind who would liked to go to Epstein Island if those allegations are true. What is true about this man is that he’s no Israel-lover. He may be an Israeli, but according to the Internet, and again, this seems to be accurate, “his notable views and activities include criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza: [he’s] voiced strong condemnation of what he describes as” quote, “’the slaughter of civilians’” close quote, “in Gaza and has criticized the Israeli government for withholding aid,” even though Israel sent in tons and tons and tons of aid. So much so that the UN has admitted that Gaza has at least three more months of supplies. “Highlighting Palestinian suffering:” Ben-Ephraim, “he has brought attention to the humanitarian crisis inside Gaza’s hospitals and has documented alleged torture and mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners by Israel.” In other words, this is a self-loathing Jew and a self-hating Israeli. Probably not the most reliable reporter, but again, John Cleese, it fit in with his biases.

Next. He, John Cleese, on October 21st, did a… retweeted something. And he said “Trump’s doing”. It’s by a guy named AdameMedia, or Adam E. Media. “BREAKING: This is insane. Screenshots reveal that after learning the IDF is LURING American journalists into ambushes for Israelis to kill them the U.S. embassy has REFUSED to offer ANY assistance…” Oh my G-d, this should be the front page of the New York Times because the New York Times hates Israel. Uh oh. There is absolutely no- and I looked for it myself, and I had ChatGPT confirm, “There is no publicly confirmed investigation or credible open source that shows the IDF intentionally and knowingly used American journalists as bait for ambushes.” So this is totally untrue. And the fact is there have been journalists killed, I should say, quote, unquote, “journalists”. In every instance, those journalists Israel provided fairly compelling proof showing that they were members of Hamas and terrorists and had, you know, one famous, one had been part of the Gaza raid, the raid from Gaza on October 7th so they’re not really journalists. Just like the New York Times reporters aren’t really journalists or the MSNBC people. They’re just Democrat party activists.

And then in response to complaints that what he was doing, John Cleese today said “I can remember when Israel was an admirable socialist democracy”. And there you have it. John Cleese, and I have not looked up his net worth, but I’m willing to bet it’s substantial, is angry that Israel has parted ways with its socialist past. Yes indeed, Israel was a socialist country. My father was a socialist and then he came to America and moderated and found a home in the Democrat party and he eventually voted for Reagan. So, as my Dad grew older, like me, he grew wiser and stopped being leftist and became conservatives. But John Cleese is old and not wise, and he has no excuse.

And finally, another tweet John Cleese did today. Someone named Tariq says “Everyone knew this was a scam,” speaking of the settlements. “There are now two Gazas: the 58% occupied by Israel, completely flattened, which has been completely purged of Palestinians. And the 42% that is now a concentration camp, where all survivors live without sufficient food, water, shelter, or medicine.” Well, what Israel did was withdraw behind the line, and on one side of the line is Hamas, and Israel is no longer provisioning it, so maybe it really doesn’t have food and water and shelter, although certainly it’s squirreled enough away from the aid. Amd then on the other side is an area where Israel is going to be joined by national forces to help bring the Arab people back who call themselves Palestinians and readers know that there’s no such thing as a Palestinian. It is a political term from the 1960s that Yasser Arafat and the Soviet Union came up with to create a people where none existed before. These were just Arabs, almost all of whom drifted into the region after the 1830s. Unlike the Jews who have been there in an unbroken line for about 3,800 years but whatever. John Cleese retweets this with the message “The Trump massacre is going to profit well from Netanyahu’s massacre. No wonder they want him pardoned.” Anyway, that’s it for John Cleese. It’s a mixture of leftist malevolence, anti-Semitism, and, as I said very significantly, an ecosystem of lies that he unquestioningly recycles and broadcasts. And so it’s not just AI that propagates misinformation and this truly is misinformation. It’s not just opinions with which one disagrees, these are unproven facts or fake things. This is very, very dangerous and this is part of the rising anti-Semitism in the world, and since I’m Jewish it concerns me a great deal. And it should concern everyone because the reality is, I’ve been saying for decades is that a country that treats its Jews well is inevitably going to be a country in which everyone else thrives. Because the same conditions that make for Jews to be allowed to live in peace mean that there’s greater individual liberty for other citizens. And people given sufficient individual liberty, of course, without anarchy, thrive and become hugely successful. And the countries become hugely successful. And countries that treat their Jews badly tend to fare badly because the same qualities that make Jews scapegoats also mean that their own people are oppressed. Not as badly, and I’ll leave you with a joke and wrap this up.

Anyway, the joke is it’s an old joke from the Soviet Union. The joke is that a rumor goes around that the store has sausages. And it’s a winter’s day, people’s cupboards are bare, and they start lining up very early in the morning, four in the morning, because there’s going to be sausages at the store. And the line is very long and the weather is freezing. And after about six hours, an official comes out and says “We don’t have as many sausages as we thought, so all Jews must leave the line.” And so the Jews, empty stomachs, empty baskets, leave the line. And then another couple of hours go by and it’s cold, it hasn’t warmed up, you know, it’s Moscow, and the official comes out again and says, “We don’t have as many sausages as we thought, so all people who are not Communist party members must leave the line.” And so they go home, empty stomachs, empty baskets. And left, the ones who are left are party members and they’re waiting and waiting in the chill and by now it’s been ten hours and they’re empurpled with cold. And the official comes out and says “I regret to inform you that there are no sausages, Everyone must go home.” At which point one person in the line turns to another and says, “Thos damn Jews, they get all the luck.” And that pretty much sums it all up. As always, thank you so much for listening, I am extremely grateful. Just thank you.