Two free clips. Watch them both, and then I am going to ask you for something.
One. Andy Borowitz and the puppet show. That’s the video above.
Fox invited Andy Borowitz on the air. What they wanted was not a comedian. They wanted a prop—somebody to walk out, hold the position they had already written for him, and stand there while the host knocked it down on camera. A puppet show with a guest chair.
He turned it down. Then he came on our show and said the thing nobody with a network contract will say out loud:
“I am a Democrat. I’ve never pretended to be both sidesy.”
Thirty years of being told that satire has to hit both sides equally or it is not fair. It was always bullshit, and Andy just said so on our air, with his name on it. Equal-opportunity satire is a lie when one side is doing all the lying. Watch the whole thing:
Two. Hunter Biden, no handlers, no ground rules.
David Shuster and I sat down with Hunter Biden on Wednesday. No pre-approved questions. Nothing off the table.
He broke news on his father’s health—the real prognosis, which is a great deal better than what you read last week from people who never picked up a phone to ask. He talked about addiction, about grief, about getting sober and staying there. And he had some things to say about Kamala Harris, Don Jr., and Jake Tapper that I would happily watch a second time.
Try booking that interview at the network that wanted Borowitz to read from a script.
And that was one week.
Since last Saturday, here is what went out to paid subscribers at Blue Amp:
Ellie Leonard finding Epstein emailing “trump tower” on November 13, 2016—five days after Trump won.
David Shuster on the nuclear threat story: who is credible, who is not, and what Trump already denied once.
Seth Bodnar, the Green Beret running for Senate in Montana as an independent, on what he thinks of Pete Hegseth’s loyalty tests.
Brett Di Resta on the midterm races nobody is talking about that Democrats can actually win.
And the week’s funniest AI political satire, ranked, because you cannot do this all day without laughing.
Andy Borowitz and Hunter Biden in the same week. That is not a normal week. That is what happens when the people who fund this operation are readers instead of advertisers, and nobody upstairs has to approve the guest list.
So here is the ask.
Everything above lives behind the wall now, and I am not going to apologize for that. Your subscriptions pay for everything that makes this possible. That is the whole model. It is why nobody hands us a script.
Our back-to-school sale is on until Monday. Forty percent off your first year: $36 instead of $60. That is three dollars a month—less than a quarter of what the monthly plan costs—for four live shows a week, the full archive, and every interview like these two.
There are 73 days until the midterms. I am not going to tell you this is the most important election of our lifetimes, because you already know that, and you did not need an email from me to figure it out. What I will tell you is that the coverage you are going to want between now and November 3 costs us money to make, and this is the week it is cheapest to come along.
Offer ends Monday, August 31, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. It renews at the regular $60 next August, and you can cancel any time before that.
If you are already a paid subscriber: thank you, genuinely, and you are the reason Hunter Biden had a chair to sit in. The $36 price works on gift subscriptions too, all week, if there is somebody in your life who keeps sending you Fox News clips and asking whether they are real.
Watch the clips. Then come sit at the grown-ups’ table.
—Cliff
