Latest news with #JesseWatters
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jesse Watters Quotes Maya Angelou to Prove Democrats Should Go to the Gym to Get More Manly
Jesse Watters quoted Maya Angelou to support his theory that Democrats should go to the gym more to get manlier and feel better about themselves. On Monday's episode of 'The Five,' Watters talked about the difference in physique between senators John Thune and Chuck Schumer. He hypothesized that if more Democrats hit the gym they'd feel better about themselves and more people would want to follow them. 'I saw Senator Thune at the gym. The man is jacked, the guy is in great shape and he lifts hard,' Watters said. 'You look at Schumer, he's built like a woman. Men do not want to be led by the party of women. Men want to be led by other men so Democrats need to become men, and then they can persuade men. But they have to lift first.' He continued: 'There's a quote by Maya Angelou, 'People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.' People don't like the way they feel around Democrats because Democrats don't like the way they feel. If they lifted they'd feel better and then everyone around them would feel better.' The group on the show were also commenting on recent headlines that Minnesota governor Tim Walz urged Democrats to 'bully the s–t' out of President Donald Trump and how that may be the wrong tactic. 'Maybe it's time for us to be a little meaner,' the former vice presidential candidate said at the South Carolina Democrat Party's annual convention. 'Maybe it's time for us to be a little more fierce because we have to ferociously push back on this.' Walz added: 'When it's a bully like Donald Trump, you bully the s–t out of him.' The post Jesse Watters Quotes Maya Angelou to Prove Democrats Should Go to the Gym to Get More Manly | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Jesse Watters Spins Musk's Drug Use Report Into Attack on Hunter Biden
Fox News' Jesse Watters used an explosive report about all the drugs that close Trump ally Elon Musk has been taking to instead discuss Hunter Biden. On The Five, Watters responded to the former Trump administration fixture's allegedly bladder-harming ketamine habit—and his ecstasy, Adderall, and mushroom usage—by alluding to the son of Trump's predecessor, ever the target of right-wing complaints. 'Now they are accusing [Musk] of being a drug addict,' Watters began. 'There was drug addicts in the last White House, and there was cocaine all over the place! They didn't say anything about that when an actual drug addict was running the country behind the scenes.' Hunter Biden was a close adviser to his father during his presidency, but unlike Musk, he never attended any Cabinet meetings, nor did he slash the government workforce at the president's direction. Watters thumbed his nose at Friday's report in The New York Times because he himself never saw 'any evidence of drugs.' Watters' fixation on Biden centers around how he has spoken of a past addiction to crack cocaine. Also relevant is a July 2023 incident in which the U.S. Secret Service found a small bag of cocaine in a cubby of a highly trafficked West Wing entryway. Biden's whole family was on vacation at the time of the discovery, and the investigation closed less than two weeks later with authorities unable to identify any suspects, let alone file charges. Yet some Republicans like Donald Trump couldn't help but suggest Biden as the culprit. On Friday, The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld also showed no interest in the report on Musk's alleged drug usage. 'Why should we believe that when it comes out now?' he said. 'What if he came out in support of Biden? We never would have heard about the ketamine, but he's pro-Trump and now you're talking about the ketamine!' Musk had already admitted to using the drug. In March 2024, for instance, he told former CNN host Don Lemon, 'If you've used too much ketamine, you can't really get work done, and I have a lot of work.' But Friday's report claimed Musk's usage was more intense than previously known. Among its other findings was how Musk received advance warnings of drug tests at SpaceX which, as a government contractor, must maintain a drug-free workplace. Also, the White House declined to say whether Musk had been drug tested at all.
Fox News
3 days ago
- Business
- Fox News
Harvard vs. Trump, Did Elon Musk drain the swamp or drown in it and more
JESSE WATTERS - Fox News host gives his take on why Democrats are admitting President Donald Trump was 'right about everything.' Continue watching... HARVARD VS. TRUMP - All the president wants is for the university to obey the law. Continue reading... TRUMPED - Biden cover-up scandal could usher in new era of Republican dominance. Continue reading... LIZ PEEK - Conservative women scare Democrats like Hillary Clinton for good reason. Continue reading... INVISIBLE TAX - Government debt is crushing your finances. Continue reading… JONATHAN TURLEY - Fox News contributor and constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley says Harvard will lose the battle with President Trump. Continue watching... KEEP FIGHTING - U.S. trade with the EU is out of whack. Trump needs to stay tough on tariffs to fix it. Continue reading... STEVE MOORE - Did Elon Musk drain the swamp or drown in it? Continue reading... 'DO NO HARM' - I'm a physician and I'm worried that our health agencies are facing increasing chaos. Continue reading... DAVID MARCUS - Why nobody wants to cut the national debt despite everyone saying they should. Continue reading... WISE UP, DEMS - I'm from Gen Z. I know why Democrats are losing young men: 'We're not a mystery, we're a movement.' Continue reading... CARTOON OF THE DAY - Check out all of our political cartoons...
New York Times
5 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk's Mania
As Elon Musk prepared to make a less than triumphant exit from Washington, he told the Fox News host Jesse Watters earlier this month that his rampage through the bureaucracy had made 'significant progress' in cutting waste and fraud. But there was no hiding that the man whose rockets can gracefully return to earth standing tall on their launchpads had made a bit of a crash landing. His projected cut of $2 trillion from the federal budget had shrunk on paper, at that point, to $165 billion. Tesla stock took a nosedive along with his personal wealth and popularity. And, as he rewrote Silicon Valley's mantra into 'move fast, break things and get out of town,' no one was urging him to stay. Prompted by Watters, Musk shifted the interview seamlessly from eradicating waste to another obsession: the looming eradication of life on earth. 'The sun is gradually expanding, so we do at some point need to be a multiplanetary civilization because earth will be incinerated,' Musk said. 'I'm hearing this for the first time,' Watters said, bemused. 'We have several hundred million years, so don't hold your breath,' Musk assured him. Say what you will about Elon Musk, the man thinks ahead. Over the past couple of decades, Musk has devoted himself to three grand engineering projects, all with the long-term mission of sustaining humanity far into the future. The goal of his rocket company SpaceX is to establish a city on Mars. Tesla is accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. Neuralink aims to eventually wire artificial intelligence into human brains so people can keep pace with machines. 'The guy is our Einstein,' Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive, said two days after President Trump's inauguration. That was before Musk etched a new image for himself — a hyped-up man all in black with dark sunglasses, strutting before a roaring crowd, punching the air with a chain saw, declaring it 'the chain saw for bureaucracy.' Musk embraced Trump after a MAGA conversion, motivated by his fear that regulation was choking innovation and his vow to 'destroy the woke mind virus' after one his children underwent a gender transition. But Musk split with the president on tariffs and the budget bill and the billionaire buddies formally fissured on Wednesday night. Musk took to X to thank the president for allowing him to serve and indicated that he was permanently moving on. Musk's tumultuous four-month adventure shifted his gaze from the long term to the ultimate short-term arena — politics. The wild ride through the halls of official power perhaps fed his taste for drama, celebrity and the adolescent heroism of comic-books and sci-fi. But there is another strand that runs strong in Musk, a techno-futuristic philosophy that might help explain how the man who has fancied himself Batman on a mission to save humanity could also play the dark jokester — the world's richest man who gleefully proclaimed the demise of aid for the world's poorest with a callous quip about how he and his DOGE troops had 'spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.' That philosophy emerged from the world Musk now returns to full time, a world of engineers and utilitarian thinkers and tech billionaires, who seem to have designs on everything — past, present and, especially, future. Existential Threats, Technological Solutions In 2022, Musk reposted a link to a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who was then at Oxford, with the line, 'Likely the most important paper ever written.' In the paper, titled 'Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development,' Bostrom took a stab at calculating the potential lives lost by delaying the development of technology needed to survive 'in the accessible region of the universe' for millions of years. 'The potential for over 10 trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster,' he wrote. Such pie in the sky calculations urging the colonizing of space might seem like unusual territory for a philosophy professor — even one with advanced degrees in physics and computational neuroscience. But Bostrom is among a group of philosophers and technologists that promotes a strain of thinking clunkily labeled longtermism. It's a worldview that aligns with — and supports — Musk's futurist, sometimes fantastical, vision. Longtermism is deeply entwined with effective altruism, a more widely known movement. Effective altruism, which developed from ideas put forth by the philosopher Peter Singer in the early 1970s, argues that well-off people and societies are morally obligated to combat poverty, even far from home. It encourages a strict, utilitarian process for calculating how philanthropy can do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Insecticide-treated bed nets that protect against mosquito-borne malaria in remote regions on the other side of the world, for example, are far more 'effective' when it comes saving lives than donations to a local food bank. The longtermists radically changed the equation by asserting that we have a similar moral obligation to the well-being of our brethren yet to come, those thousands or even millions of years in the future. Of course, there are potentially many, many, many more future people than there are current ones, particularly when you throw in the possibility of nonhuman sentient beings, which some longtermists do. So, simply by the numbers, the case can be made that ensuring the existence of future human civilization by preparing for species-ending risks like a massive asteroid strike or global nuclear annihilation outweighs addressing poverty or starvation for a few hundred million current people. For longtermists, the most pressing threats are often existential, and technology is almost always the cure. This is Musk's sweet spot. The focus of so much of his technology — rocketry, humanoid robotics, even his tunneling company — is intended to converge on making 'human consciousness' multiplanetary, an urgent mission he complains is frustrated by rules and regulators. He calls colonizing Mars 'life insurance of life collectively.' Like an insurance salesman, he has his pitch down. 'For the first time in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of earth, it is possible to extend consciousness beyond our home planet,' he said on Joe Rogan's podcast in February. 'We have to see this as a race against time,' he said. 'Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road where there is either like a nuclear war or something, or we get hit by a meteor or simply civilization might just die with a whimper in adult diapers instead of with a bang?' Musk took his first step toward Mars in 2001 when he donated $5,000 to the Mars Society, which was started by Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who had written the book 'The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.' The next year, Musk started SpaceX. Coincidently or not, this was around the same time Bostrom published a paper titled 'Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards.' It looked at a range of threats: a meteor strike; global disease; runaway artificial intelligence; even the admittedly slim possibility that a future society created a simulated reality that we were now unknowingly living in and which could be turned off. Musk has occasionally invoked this 'simulation theory,' which hearkens back to 'The Matrix,' one of his favorite movies. 'The balance of evidence is such that it would appear unreasonable not to assign a substantial probability to the hypothesis that an existential disaster will do us in,' Bostrom wrote, adding later in the paper, 'With technology, we have some chance, although the greatest risks now turn out to be those generated by technology itself.' Whether or not Musk read the paper, he has echoed Bostrom and other proponents of longtermism, including the philosopher William MacAskill. MacAskill became something of a celebrity intellectual among technologists and financiers, to whom he preached an 'earning-to-give' approach to philanthropy. Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced crypto magnate, was one of his biggest acolytes. Musk touted MacAskill's 2022 book, 'What We Owe the Future,' saying on X — the social media network that he owns — that the explication of longtermist thinking is 'a close match to my philosophy.' Not surprisingly, Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, does not explicitly identify himself with any movement defined by anyone else — or didn't before falling in with MAGA. Bostrom takes no credit for Musk's long view, saying in an email, 'My impression is that Musk is not a follower of any one particular school of thought but is rather inclined to do his own thinking and to reach his own conclusions.' But it is unmistakable how frequently Musk warns of existential threats, usually arrived at via a 'fork in the road.' In 2023, he said artificial intelligence becoming 'far smarter than the smartest human' was 'one of the existential risks that we face, and it's potentially the most pressing one.' In February, referring 'the woke mind virus,' he said in a post on X 'the biggest existential danger to humanity is having it programmed into the A.I.' He claimed that some A.I. platforms (although not the one he owns) will answer that misgendering someone is worse than thermonuclear war. 'The existential problem with that extrapolation is that a super powerful A.I. could decide that the only 100 percent certain way to stop misgendering is to kill all humans,' he said. In 2022, he posted that 'population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.' Earlier this year, wielding his celebrity and money unsuccessfully to swing a Wisconsin Supreme Court election, he told a crowd of supporters: 'I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.' And last August, in a conversation with Trump on X, he said he was endorsing him for president because 'I think we are at the fork in the road of destiny of civilization.' 'Civilizational Suicidal Empathy' There appears to be a tautology to Musk's longtermism: If Musk is battling a threat, it is, by definition, existential. 'Musk is a hero in the Homeric sense, in his mind and in his action,' said Zubrin, of the Mars Society. 'He is someone who is striving to do great deeds to earn eternal glory. He has done some. Just as in Homer, this sort of motivation also has a pathological side.' For Musk, countering existential risks gives him broad license. Fathering 13 children by several women is Musk combating the societal risk of falling birthrates worldwide. 'If you don't make new humans, there's no humanity,' he said in a live interview last fall with Peter Diamandis, an entrepreneur and a Musk associate. 'I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.' In a long-running legal battle between Musk and Tesla shareholders over his projected $55.8 billion compensation package, an email emerged that he wrote to a company lawyer in 2017, explaining that: 'The added comp is just so I can put as much as possible toward minimizing existential risk by putting the money toward Mars if I am successful in leading Tesla to be one of the world's most valuable companies. This is kinda crazy, but it is true.' From that perspective, one can see why it makes sense for Musk to feed tens of billions worth of government programs for the global poor into the 'wood chipper' while, two months later, $5.9 billion in government contracts was fed into Musk's space company. Like many donors to Trump, Musk has gotten a return on his investment in the election. Trump promoted a Mars mission in his inaugural address. A close Musk associate is now the head of NASA. Before the election Musk complained that because of the profusion of regulations, it would 'eventually become illegal to do very large projects, and we won't be able to get to Mars.' Now many of Musk's governmental annoyances are melting away. Critics of longtermism say it appeals to wealthy tech moguls precisely because it adds a sheen of morality to their masters-of-the-universe projects. They also say that the moguls' ultimate goal is a utopian civilization of humans, biological and robotic, all A.I. enhanced. Mollie Gleiberman, an anthropologist at the University of Antwerp who has studied the rise of effective altruism, highlights a paradox of the futuristic tech moguls: Some of the same people warning of the dangers of superintelligent A.I. are also developing A.I., like Musk himself. It's another tautology — technological risk necessitates a technological response. 'The vivid articulation of a fear conjures the thing to be feared into existence,' she wrote in a 2023 paper. Take humanoid robots, for example. During an interview with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, earlier this year, Musk was asked how real the prospect was of killer robots annihilating humanity. 'Twenty percent likely,' he shot back. But given his belief that robots will unleash never-before-seen levels of productivity, Musk reassured Cruz that, barring human annihilation, it is '80 percent likely we will have extreme prosperity for all.' At a Tesla promotional event last year captured on video, Musk's robots were on the move, serving drinks, posing for pictures and dancing. 'It can do anything you want, so it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks,' Musk told guests. 'I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind.' Max Tegmark, an M.I.T. physicist and A.I. researcher, said he bonded with Musk a decade ago over a shared belief that 'A.I. was going to hit us like a tsunami.' Tegmark said Musk distinguishes himself among business leaders by his devotion to not just thinking long term, but acting on it. 'He makes money now and spends it on making the long-term future good,' Tegmark said. Regardless of whether his ultimate goal is reached, the ambition births breakthrough creations along the way for the here and now — reusable rockets, electric cars, a satellite-based internet service, a human-computer link aiding people with neurological damage. Tegmark is president of the Future of Life Institute, which is devoted to the safety of technology, bioengineering and nuclear weapons. Musk, an adviser to the group, donated about $10 million to the institute, which used some of the money to help fund a now-shuttered center at Oxford founded by Bostrom called Future of Humanity Institute. 'People can quibble about his methods and politics,' Tegmark said. But he said Musk's focus on the long-term future and protecting against threats has remained longtermists aren't convinced that Musk has it right, though. 'Longtermism isn't about ignoring present-day suffering in favor of speculative futures,' MacAskill, the philosopher, wrote in an email, adding that the best way to safeguard the future is by 'maintaining the international cooperation needed to address global risks — not dismantling the very institutions that make such cooperation possible.' Singer, the retired Princeton professor whose 1972 essay 'Famine, Affluence and Morality' was the initial spur for the effective altruism movement, is similarly skeptical. 'If you were altruistic at all, you would have paid more attention to the impact that you are having on hundreds of millions of people by the cutback in U.S.A.I.D., or the freeze in U.S.A.I.D., plus the many other things that are happening as well,' he said. Musk is now headed back to the future. Days ago, SpaceX launched another test flight of its supersize Starship. The spacecraft spun out of control and wound up as a debris field in the Indian Ocean. But Musk claims he still plans to shoot for Mars next year. Even Zubrin, the Mars Society president, thinks Musk's Mars colonization plan is 'nuts.' He wants the United States to pursue Mars for the challenge and for science. And he worries that Musk's short-term dive into politics has hurt the long-term goal, since the Mars mission might now be seen as a Musk project and become prone to political turbulence. In February, still deep in the turbulence of Washington, Musk regaled Rogan, the podcast host, with tales of waste from the federal budget. Like the U.S. Agency for International Development, the care and feeding of migrants was a particular DOGE target. It's plausible a tough, careful audit could find money poorly spent, but Musk also came to a more ominous and more predictable conclusion: He had found a new existential threat. 'We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,' he told Rogan. 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They are exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.'
Buzz Feed
5 days ago
- Politics
- Buzz Feed
Reactions: Republican Lawmaker Won't Use Straw
*Big, heavy, tired sigh*. The last time we spoke about Fox News host Jesse Watters, he was criticizing Gov. Tim Walz's masculinity before jumping into his own ideas on how men should behave. "You don't eat soup in public," he said. "You don't cross your legs; and you don't drink from a straw, and one of the reasons you don't drink from a straw is because the way your lips purse. It's very effeminate." Yes, according to Jesse, men shouldn't use straws. In a clip of the deeply unserious exchanges, the correspondent tells Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, "[Watters] says men should not drink out of straws in public, or at all." To which Burchett responds, "I don't drink out of a straw, brother. That's what the women in my house do." As you can imagine, people online were less than impressed. "Masculinity so insecure, even sipping water has gender roles now," one person wrote. "No straws, just straight sips of misogyny and microaggressions." Others critiqued Fox News for centering issues they feel pale in comparison to other policies our leaders could be focusing on: "Imagine your country's on fire and Fox News is debating the gender politics of straws," someone wrote. And tons more shared images of President Donald Trump drinking from a straw or puckering his lips. In response to everything, Burchett sent the following statement to MSNBC: So there you have it! Republican men vs. straws. The ultimate showdown.
