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Jul 14·edited Jul 14

John has his own podcast. Let him spew his shit in that podcast. As a paying subscriber to this podcast I am voicing my displeasure with John and stand behind calls to remove him (fire him if you want to put it that way) I’m not calling for his own substack to be removed. Just that he should no longer be part of the one subscribe to. Freedom of speech I am all for… but as he knows…speech has consequences.

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Jul 14·edited Jul 14

Don't agree with John being cancelled from TGS, not that it's any of our decisions anyway. I'd much rather hear Glenn and John have a serious conversation about the state of political polarization in this country and how it's made even seemingly reasonable people like John say some truly questionable things. I don't think John is a bad person by any means, but unfortunately Trump seems to trigger certain individuals and bring out the worst in them. That being said, I don't believe anyone should be judged only by their worst moments.

Personally, I'm a little disappointed because the red line when it comes to free speech has always been speech that incites violence towards others. Obviously I'm not suggesting any sort of casual link between what John said on this show and the incident that occurred today, but when you have a platform with a certain reach like TGS, to have a host openly espouse sympathy for political assassination seems to me to be at best playing with fire and at worst something far worse.

In the past I've spent time at various far right sites like Stormfront where I routinely encountered truly crude and incendiary rhetoric. By contrast, TGS has always struck me as an oasis of dispassionate reason and intellectual humility. I'm a bit disappointed that John said what he did on this show, but at this point it is what it is. Hopefully we can all take a moment to quell the flames of polarization and use this as a learning experience moving forward, rather than as a reason to further cancel and condemn and harden us into opposing tribes.

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