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The Reality Taboo

Ness and Jeff

A wide-ranging discussion of politics, religion, current events...no topic is off limits.

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20 episodes
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Avg 1 hr
English

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#139
Saturday · 44 min
AfD Wins Big, Macklemore Gets Banned
Alternative for Germany (AfD) just won nearly 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, and the firewall that has kept it out of power since its founding is starting to crack. Jeff and Ness give some background on German political history since the end of World War II for context, then break down how it happened and what an AfD state government could actually do. Then Macklemore says "Free Palestine" from the stage at MetLife Stadium and gets dropped from Ed Sheeran's tour after Robert Kraft rallies fellow NFL owners behind an ultimatum.
#138
September 13 · 51 min
Clancy and Coxon: The Human Threat and the Machine Threat
A confessed child killer, a case that no suffering could equal what her children endured, and a competing willingness to still hear her defense, plus what the survey data says about who wants her freed. Then: an Anthropic researcher whose resignation set off a Washington panic that might be more marketing than warning.
#137
September 5 · 52 min
A Dog-Riding Selfie Becomes an AI Magic Card (Plus Clancy v Hendrix and the Tyler Robinson Plea)
Ness turns a dog-riding selfie into a shockingly authentic AI-generated Magic card, kicking off a bigger conversation about what happens to kids growing up in a world where AI does the creating for them, and whether authenticity and originality still mean anything. Ness and Jeff also get into the publishing industry's AI authorship crisis and debate whether a fully AI-generated book would be worth reading. Plus: a comparison of public reaction to Lindsay Clancy and Shiloh Hendrix ("better dead than racist"), and a quick take on Tyler Robinson's not guilty plea in the Kirk case.
#136
August 29 · 53 min
Did zionism kill Jason Arday?
Ness discusses why they came for Arday when they did, how Andrew Wilson lost the debate to Candace Owens and why Karmelo Anthony's defense team messed up in failing to grasp how widespread the sentiment it's better to be dead than to be racist is in modern America
#135
August 22 · 52 min
Jason Arday: Charlatan or Victim of a Lynch Mob?
In 2023, Jason Arday became the youngest Black professor in Cambridge's history, a self-made story of overcoming autism, illiteracy, and poverty to reach the academy's highest ranks. By August 2026 he was dead, and the story behind the story had collapsed. Jeff and Ness trace the full arc: the plagiarism findings that unraveled his thesis and publications, the biographical claims that shifted or disappeared under scrutiny, and the fight over what it all means, from the "lynching" framing embraced by his defenders to the charge that his career is proof of a rotten, affirmative-action-run-amok academy.
#134
August 15 · 1 hr 12 min
Rewriting the Record: From Hunter Biden's Laptop to Netflix's James Garfield
Tucker Carlson and Hunter Biden's new interview: Hunter now denies a laptop that strong documented evidence says existed, and Jeff and Ness dig into why both he and Tucker appear to be lying about it, speculating on what Tucker's angle is this time. Meanwhile, Netflix's Death by Lightning rewrites James Garfield's actual record on Chinese exclusion into a 2025 morality play. Plus: male names that have quietly become female names over the decades, and a quick hit on how religiosity correlates with fertility, abortion support, and death penalty support.
#133
August 8 · 53 min
Immigration is killing free speech
Ness discusses how the most important factor in support for free speech is being native to America and how immigration is destroying support for free speech with the Shiloh Hendrix case as a launching off point
#132
August 1 · 1 hr
Andrew Tate's American Defenders
Jeff and Ness discuss the prosecution of the Tate brothers and why so much of the American Right still defends them. Then: a look back at the WTO protests of 1999, and how different the political nature of opposition to global trade is today compared to then. Finally: the dynamics of race-swapping in popular culture, touching on Nolan's The Odyssey and Amazon's The Rings of Power versus Peter Jackson's original trilogy.
#131
July 25 · 2 hr 1 min
Final Fantasy and the Socio Sexual Hierarchy (SSH)
Ness applies the SSH to a selection of movies, tv series and Final Fantasy games
#130
July 18 · 1 hr 7 min
Justice for Charlie Kirk?
Jeff and Ness dig into the Tyler Robinson preliminary hearing in the Charlie Kirk murder case: what the prosecution's evidence actually shows, and what it doesn't. Plus: public perception of the Supreme Court's political lean, how 2026's grievances against the government stack up against 1776's, and the grim case of Henry Nowak, where the "better dead than racist" meme became real.
#129
July 11 · 1 hr 11 min
Graham Platner and the Politics of Consent
Graham Platner ran for Senate in Maine as the candidate progressive politics claims to want: a combat veteran and working-class outsider running against the establishment. Then it collapsed, and Platner ended up folding to the very establishment he built his campaign fighting against. Jeff and Ness dig into the allegation that ended his campaign: Jenny Racicot's account of a 2021 encounter, laid out to Politico and CNN.
#128
July 3 · 53 min
Trump v. Barbara: Birthright Citizenship at the Supreme Court
SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Barbara, striking down Trump's executive order and affirming birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. Jeff and Ness break down the opinion and the fractured majority behind it, then turn to the U.S. military drawdown in the Gulf and Oracle's AI-driven layoffs.
#127
June 27 · 53 min
Donald Trump, Exposer-in-Chief
Jeff and Ness examine what Trump has actually revealed about American power by working through the collapse of U.S. military hegemony, why corporate media mobilized for MeToo but stayed quiet on Epstein's network and the Pakistani grooming gangs, Kanye West's managed apology tour as a humiliation ritual for reintegration into the mainstream, and what the Democratic primary results in New York City signal about the coming realignment of elite political power.
June 20 · 56 min
Protect the Musk
Elon Musk just became the world's first trillionaire — worth more than the next four richest people combined — and Ness and Jeff touch on the retribution they think may be coming his way. They also discuss the possible end of America's global military dominance, compare Musk's fortune against Rockefeller, Walmart, and Nvidia, then pivot to a fresh Economist/YouGov poll on how Americans feel about whether the country has drifted from or lived up to its founding ideals — plus the one constitutional amendment nearly everyone agrees on. And UFC Freedom 250 talk.
#125
June 13 · 1 hr 18 min
Karmelo Anthony, Jeff Metcalf, and the False God
On April 2, 2025, Karmelo Anthony, 17, a Black teenager, stabbed Austin Metcalf, 17, a White teenager, through the heart at a track meet in Frisco, Texas. Anthony was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 35 years. What followed was more revealing than the crime. Jeff Metcalf — Austin's father — spent 14 months performing public Christian forgiveness and racial universalism, insisting the killing was never about race, rejecting White grievance activists, and extending grace to the family of his son's killer. The other side raised $630,000 for Anthony's defense and called Metcalf a racist anyway. Jeff Metcalf is a case study in a particular kind of White American — older, Christian, colorblind by conviction — who believes that if he just refuses to see race, race will return the favor. It won't. And it may take something as extreme as a son's murder to dislodge that belief.
#124
June 8 · 51 min
Killed in California, the green movement is dead
Ness discusses how Steyer's defeat and the voracious energy appetite of AI spell the end of the green movement, how Henry Nowak's murder is a tragically perfect microcosm of what is happening to the West, Tucker Carlson's unpopularity, Helen of Troy in black face and how science is not subservient to truth
#123
May 30 · 51 min
The Most Expensive Primary in History: Massie Goes Down
Thomas Massie just lost the most expensive House primary in American history — $32.6 million to take out one congressman. Jeff and Ness break down the Massie-Gallrein race: who bankrolled it, why Massie made himself a target for Trump, and what the demographics of Kentucky's 4th District tell you about the populist story being sold around this race. Plus: Tucker Carlson weighs in, and his reaction says as much about his faction as it does about the result.
#122
May 23 · 48 min
Massie gets massacred
Ness discusses MIGA's successful defenestration of Thomas Massie, Reform's successful approach in the UK, looks at what the media had to say about demographic replacement a generation ago, compares the book of Trump to the book of Exodus and contrasts the Jesus of Constantine the book of Revelation and even the Gospels to the Churchian Jesus of today
#121
May 14 · 58 min
The Number That Launched a Thousand Mandates
In late 2020, the world was told Pfizer's COVID vaccine was "95% effective." That number became the foundation for government mandates, employment requirements, and the social pressure placed on anyone who asked questions. But what did 95% actually mean? Ness and Jeff break down what the trial data actually showed — an absolute risk reduction of less than one percent, a two-month follow-up window, and a control group dissolved before long-term safety comparisons were possible. Then they trace how politicians, doctors, and the media didn't just spin that data — they flatly misrepresented it.
#120
May 11 · 51 min
The day Daily Wire died
Ness discusses the massive layoffs and downsizing at the Daily Wire and what it illustrates about the right's inability to maintain any kind of institutional power, how DOGE is even deader than DW, why Trump's failure to flip-flop on things that matter are why he is so viscerally hated and shares a clip of the head of NPR explaining a favorite observation of the show - that the truth is merely incidental

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