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Welcome to our VIP feature for Hot Air as well as a members-only show in the Hughniverse! Duane Patterson and I now are doing a Week in Review show for Friday evenings, exclusive to members in both platforms. Duane has been the Generalissimo behind the Hugh Hewitt Show for more than two decades, and we have partnered on weekly commentary since 2007.

Here are some of the highlights:

• You can almost taste the MSM disappointment over Idalia, Duane says. “Not only did not destroy Ron DeSantis’ career,” he says, “because it didn’t. It became a nothing burger story. You’re not gonna hear anything about Big Bend. You’re not gonna hear it in the Sunday shows this weekend. You’re not gonna hear anything about it.”
• Just how well did DeSantis handle this natural disaster? Duane offers his “metric”: “The quantity and quality of Truth Cocial videos released by Donald Trump the day of the storm.”
• The “Daily Fail” and other media outlets may have been fooled by the scam PAC that claimed to switch from DeSantis to Donald Trump, but everyone else figured out the dirty trick quickly enough. Duane and I have a few laughs at the saps’ expense, but I argue that the timing was strategic — for two reasons.
• “One was to make DeSantis look bad in the middle of handling a hurricane,” I say, and the other was to distract from a story that shows Trump’s actual campaign PAC is all but broke. “They’re trying to distract from the fact that they’ve basically hollowed out their campaign financing now, and they’re going to have to come up with a lot more money for lawyers.”
• From there we progress to the new study on pandemic policy results, which shows that Sweden far outperformed the US and the rest of the EU on the key objective measurement of the excess death rate increase. They got there by prioritizing liberty and individual choice rather than top-down authoritarianism, according to a study published this week.
• It reminds me of The Poseidon Adventure — the book rather than the film, which had different endings. The US is the group led by the madman that loses half of its members and crawls through hell to get out — only to see everyone else get rescued at the other end of the boat without a scratch on them.
• Will people go along with the madman approach again, now that the media and the Biden administration are stoking panic over COVID again? “When it comes to the actual Covid stuff and the thing coming back,” Duane says, “the government’s going to try and shut things down again. They’re going to want everybody to mask up again. They’re going to want everybody to go remote learning. … Are they going to go along with the masks and the school shutdowns and all that stuff again?”
• Joe Biden’s fabulism and the Protection Racket Media get a lot of attention in the last part of our show. The PRM is trying its best to paint a pathological liar as an avuncular “yarn spinner,” or something. Plus we mention Time Magazine’s effort to spin Joe Biden’s secret e-mail accounts.

Be sure to watch it all, and extend the conversation in the comments!