The Monthly Review — June 2025
All of New Outlook's topics, stories, and opinions you missed this past month.
For readers who crave short, snappy reads—whether you’re pressed for time, commuting, or just looking for a quick gateway into bigger ideas.
The Monthly Review is a curated preview of the topics, stories, and opinions I explore on New Outlook—from bite-sized insights to deep dives. Let’s jump in!
➊ A NEW SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM
★★★★★
New Outlook Recommends
Podcast: The Jimmy Dore Show
Episode: “Trump & Palantir Creating Surveillance System Worse Than China”
Published: June 6, 2025
According to former HUD Assistant Director Catherine Austin Fitts, Elon Musk’s main objective in his work with DOGE has been to scoop up and aggregate enough data to allow him to institute a social credit system and deploy what she calls a “control grid.” [Excerpt from The Jimmy Dore Show]
➋ LEGACY MEDIA TAKES ON NEW MEDIA
The soft rebrand of all the major legacy media outlets is happening around the edges:
A few weeks ago, CNN hosted standup comedian Tim Dillon for an hour-long interview—a thing they would’ve never done a few years ago. The interview was an attempt to indirectly smear Dillon and others in his circle, but it failed horribly.
Now New York Times interviews standup comedian Andrew Schulz. Once again, a voice they would’ve never allowed near their brand just a few years ago.
These platforms are doing everything to align themselves with the new media after independent podcasts have proven to be the element that transforms election outcomes. Legacy media is desperately studying new media and its hosts, while also attempting to delegitimize them at the same time. This recent New York Times interview featuring comedian Andrew Schulz puts this on display.
What’s fascinating about both this NYT interview and the CNN interview with Tim Dillon is that these so-called journalists, and publications at large, get to see firsthand how their usual steam-rolling, shady, linguistic tactics against guests do not work against comedians. At every turn, they are politely—though I hate that these comics are even polite about it—called out for being disingenuous in their framing and their attempt to formulate a deceptive narrative.
When you are a so-called journalist within legacy media institutions like The New York Times and you’re asking a standup comic with a popular podcast whether or not he has a responsibility to ask politician guests “difficult questions,” you immediately reveal that you are everything but an actual journalist. The first order of action for any serious journalist would be to ask why his very own employer—The New York Times—does not ask politicians (especially those they’re politically aligned with) any difficult questions.
Perhaps if they did their jobs as journalists, they wouldn’t have to spend time wondering whether a standup comic asked a politician tough questions.
➌ THE ART OF WRITING WITHOUT PANDERING
In 2024, a show—Shogun—whose overarching narrative was driven by its female characters captivated audiences across the world. In just 10-episodes it embodied the pinnacle of writing strong female characters in modern cinema.
There was no “boss woman” narratives.
No “perfect” female characters absent flaws.
And no pandering to Woke feminist audiences.
Why? Because the story was the story. The women’s characters were powerfully written because the writers understood how to depict REAL women and the struggles they faced during the period the show is set in.
It was never complicated. It just takes more common sense and less activism.
➍ THE FRACTURED LEFT
That The Daily Show still has a plethora of rotating hosts is ironically representative of the Democrat’s abject failure in messaging.
They don’t know who their audience is. They don’t know what the electorate want, nor do they care. So what do they do? They go for the catch-all solution: they throw everything at the wall, and throw every type of host that checks all of the identity boxes into the weekly rotation, hoping that something sticks.
While they do this, the only messaging they manage to communicate on a consistent basis is that they are severely fractured, lost, and without a unifying vision. Simply put, they have no brand. And without a brand, mission, or consistent messaging, who’s going to believe that you’re actually paying attention to what the people want?
➎ PRINCIPLES LACKING
It’s a sad reality when you realize that the people who consider themselves dissidents were only waiting to choose their own preferred establishment leaders.
➏ TIM DILLON REACTS TO KASH PATEL’S BOLD FACED LIES
You really have to be in such a delusional state to leave all of your hope in political figures on both the Left & Right.
Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Trump, and many others in the current administration are LYING (pretty terribly, if I might add) right to your face 😂 and MAGA supporters are behaving like good little obedient boys and girls who lack critical thinking skills, or common sense for that matter.
Does belonging to a particular clique matter that much to you all that you will willingly accept lies as truths just to protect your “side”?
It’s sickening to watch how little integrity people really have when their party rises into power.
➐ POLITICAL CHUMPS
The political naïveté of standup comedians who have large platforms in the new media space is laughable. They’re just as much a part of the problem as the media institutions they believe they’re challenging.
If you still believe there are “good people” in the Democratic Party and Republican Party, once again, I’ll let Malcolm X tell you himself:
➑ EMOTIONAL HIJACKING—A PROPAGANDIST’S DREAM
If corporate media and activist groups can get their constituents to viscerally and emotionally react toward political figures or policies without reason, they’ve done their job.
In this way, they’ve manipulated people enough to the point where people feel like they never have to listen to anything their politicial opponents have to say, because, well, “they’re simply evil. And we don’t listen to evil people.”
There is never an attempt to understand the underpinning philosophy of the figures they disagree with. Instead, the only response is always a knee-jerk, raging response that condemns one’s opponents before having heard out the reasoning for their beliefs.
This is quite the propagandistic tactic because it not only effectively poisons one flank of the political aisle, it also affords those who weaponize it to avoid ever having to defend or debate their positions in a concrete way.
➒ DYING FOR NAUGHT
I don’t think I fought for the country.
I fought for some politician’s view on something.
— A VETERAN ON YOUTUBE
➓ NO STONE UNTURNED
If you’re an independent journalist who gets to sit down with a politician, and you’re still giving benefit-of-the-doubt interviews, you’re part of the problem.
What we saw from independent journalists when AOC was first running for office or Vivek Ramaswamy a little while back, should never happen again. Serious journalists, including my own Glenn Greenwald (who’s since spoken about how duped he truly was when he first interviewed AOC), soft-balled these politicians, as a result of hoping that they’d be different.
Journalists of this kind should never give an inch to any of these politicians. The goal should always be what Tucker Carlson managed to pull off in his interview with Ted Cruz — make them expose themselves, their lack of principles, their faulty logic, their woeful ideologies, and their total abdication of the American people.
That’s a wrap! Hope you enjoyed this edition of The Monthly Review. If something resonated, drop a like, leave a comment, and let’s discuss further. Share this with a friend. Thank you for reading, subscribing, and supporting this project. Until next month!
I found you through your substack commentary on the CNN Tim Dillon interview. Looking forward to the NYT try the same with Andrew Schulz. Thanks for the link and roundup.