Archer's Line Podcast

You may have seen the headlines. Anthropic , the company behind Claude, refused to let the Pentagon use its AI for lethal strikes or mass surveillance. So Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump cut them off. OpenAI , the company behind ChatGPT, stepped in and agreed to work with the Pentagon. If you’re opposed to Trump, this sounds simple. Anthropic is the good guy. OpenAI is the bad guy. But before you ca...

There comes a point where you have to say, “Maybe we’re not overreacting enough.” Over the weekend, Democracy Docket and The Washington Post reported on a draft executive order from President Trump that would dramatically change how U.S. elections are run. The document is dated April 12, 2025. Its title sounds reasonable enough: “Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States...

Paid subscribers get early access to this and other exclusive articles. Netflix was expected to make a serious run at Warner Bros. Discovery. Instead, after meetings at the White House and the Justice Department, it walked away. Suddenly, the deal was “no longer financially attractive.” That clears the runway for David Ellison — the Paramount Skydance chief who has made it clear he’s comfortable a...

The Pentagon is pressuring Anthropic , the company behind the AI model Claude, to remove limits on how its technology can be used by the U.S. military . If Anthropic refuses, the Defense Department could cancel its $200 million contract. Officials have reportedly warned the company that it could be labeled a “supply chain risk.” They have even raised the possibility of invoking the Defense Product...

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that Americans cannot sue the U.S. Postal Service for damages when postal workers intentionally destroy or refuse to deliver mail. The case is USPS v. Konan . The majority opinion was written by Clarence Thomas . Every Republican-appointed justice joined him except Neil Gorsuch , who sided with Sonia Sotomayor in dissent. What the Case Was About Lebene Konan...

News networks, journalists, and assorted politics junkies will gather to watch the State of the Union address tonight. Though I think there may be fewer politics junkies because, well, they’re quite burned out. Given President Trump’s recent behavior, I think just about everyone knows what to expect from him. He says it’ll be a long one, because “we have a lot to talk about.” It’s safe to assume t...

Make no mistake: this Supreme Court ruling is big. It’s big for the economy, which has been sluggish. And it’s big for presidential power. Archer's 🏹 Line is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. In a 6–3 decision, the Court ruled that President Trump overstepped his authority when he used a 1977 law — the Internatio...

FCC Chair Brendan Carr says the equal time rule isn’t just for TV. It applies to radio, too. “We haven’t seen the same issues on the radio side,” Carr said Wednesday. “But the equal time rule applies across broadcast. And we’ll look at anything that comes up.” This follows Stephen Colbert’s claim that CBS wouldn’t let him air an interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico as primary votin...

Every now and then, the world creeps up on us while we’re focused elsewhere — Ukraine, Gaza, inflation, elections — and suddenly we’re staring down the barrel of a crisis bigger than the last one. That’s where we are with Iran right now: not in the distant realm of “what if,” but in the very real possibility of a sustained military campaign involving the United States and Israel, possibly within w...

Stephen Colbert taped an interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico , who’s running for the U.S. Senate. It was a standard political conversation — commentary, sharp questions, a few funny asides. It would have been just another Colbert interview with a political figure. Hardly worth mentioning. Until CBS lawyers wouldn’t let him air it. Colbert told his audience the network blocked it over “equ...

Americans are more down about their future than at any point in nearly 20 years. A new Gallup poll finds that in 2025, only 59% of Americans expect their lives to be good 5 years from now. That’s the lowest reading since Gallup started asking the question. Gallup tracks how people feel about their lives now and how they think they’ll feel in the future. Most of the time, those two move together. I...

Every February, right on cue, the same line makes the rounds: Valentine’s Day was invented by greeting card companies to make us feel inadequate and spend money. The joke was immortalized in the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , when Jim Carrey’s character says that the holiday was created “to make people feel like crap.” It’s a good line. It’s also wrong. Valentine’s Day predates...

Paid subscribers to Archer’s🏹Line got early access to this post. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and supporting independent journalism. If you want to understand Pam Bondi’s performance at Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, you have to rewind. All the way back to Florida. All the way back to Jeffrey Epstein . Florida, 2007–2008 Jeffrey Epstein was under investigation...

There are lots of different ways to assess Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appearance today before the House Judiciary committee. Combative. Surly. Disdainful. Acting as if she doesn’t answer to Congress — as if Congress answers to her. But here’s what stood out to me: she seemed like someone in trouble with the president, scrambling to regain his favor. I don’t know if that’s true. That’s just my im...

Donald Trump has spent years calling the free press “the enemy of the people.” It’s the same framing used by authoritarian leaders everywhere to justify control, intimidation, and the eventual capture of media institutions. What’s happening with Nexstar–Tegna fits the pattern. The Nexstar Media Group–Tegna deal would merge two major local TV owners, letting Nexstar absorb Tegna’s stations and shar...

Demoralization isn’t despair. It’s worse. Despair is emotional. Demoralization is structural. It’s what happens when people stop believing that effort matters, that institutions can work, that truth can be defended, or that resistance is worth the cost. You don’t need tanks in the streets to achieve it. You only need time, pressure, and the gradual erosion of belief. Which is why the ongoing dimin...

Anxiety dreams — almost everyone has them. And usually they involve whatever it is you do for a living. Mine are about radio. I had one the other morning. One I couldn’t escape. I’d realize I was dreaming and wake up — but when I went back to sleep, I dropped right back into the same dream. Here’s how it went: When I arrived for my shift at an all-news station, everything in the studio had been ch...

Last week, the Trump administration made an extraordinary move in its long-running effort to undermine the 2020 election: federal agents searched an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia. That alone is disturbing and unprecedented — especially given President Trump’s call for Republicans, one of our two major political parties, to “take over elections.” What’s just as striking is how badly th...

For two years, Donald Trump and his supporters demanded one thing: Release the Epstein files. They made it a rally chant, a purity test, and a political weapon. You’ve seen the videos from JD Vance, Kash Patel, and the biggest voices in the right-wing podosphere in the run-up to the election. But as soon as the files got close to daylight — and especially once new material started threatening peop...

Charles Feldman and Rob Archer reunite for a new edition of “In Depth” as it used to be heard on KNX! Okay, not really, but we’re sitting down for a chat about the lost art of interviewing politicians... also Charles’s viral moment with Donald Trump from 1990 (Trump was NOT happy — thin-skinned even then.) And, check out Charles’ podcast SOS America here . TheRobArcher is a reader-supported public...