You can't just retreat into yourself and be like, I don't want to deal with this. Like, we all don't want to deal with this, Pamela. But you have to actually, especially as a journalist, you have to have the capacity to look at the conditions in the country and think about what is necessary and look at like previous historical periods. What has worked to resist fascism? What has not worked? Like you have to be an adult, Pamela. You can't just

retreat. I mean, you even see this among like elected Democrats, right? You had Chuck Schumer

this week saying like, well, you know, once you get on the treadmill next to these Republicans,

it turns out they're not so bad. And we can come to an agreement. It's like, you want that to

be true. I get why people want that to be true. It's not true anymore, though. And at a certain point, you just have to grow up and accept that we don't have a country where you can do this like kumbaya,

we're all going to come together and Republicans are going to be normal. It's just not going to

happen.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb. And I'm Werri Donaghan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are talking about the iconic, the singular, well, the uniquely typical frenemy of the show, one Pamela Paul. Pamela Paul. So what do you know about

Pamela Paul? Who is this woman? So I know of her. I am familiar with her work. It appears

weekly in the New York Times and it resembles itself quite a bit over time. But I have to say that I don't

know nearly enough about Pamela Paul. There are veritable pollologists out there. They are a small

group. They have their own t-shirts and handshakes. And we invited them on to the pod to talk with

us about this puzzling person who just ended her tenure, her reign of terror, her reign of very, very

milk toast takes, and that's Peter Shamsh and Michael Hobbs from If Books Could Kill.

Woohoo! We are such super fans. I'm really grateful to you guys for being here. I feel kind of reclimped

and starstruck, so I'm really glad that we got a little bit of Peter and Michael's time here to discuss the most annoying figurehead of the New York Times opinion section, Ms. Pamela Paul. I'm very confused by this interaction. When somebody asks, are you familiar with Pamela Paul, the other person's supposed to say, all I know is, and then make a joke, and the music kicks out. Yeah, sorry. Don't you guys know the secrets of podcasting?

Well, we weren't going to infringe copyright right in front of you.

So the occasion for this podcast is that Miss Paul has just exited the New York Times opinion section.

She seems to have been let go amid a series of downsizing and layoffs, the perennial media

cuts that happened at the end of every fiscal quarter seem to have taken Miss Paul with

...