Adam Friedland Interview Changed Everything For Ritchie Torres

I love how Torres had the nerve to accuse Adam of trying to ambush him with the interview, as if he was forced to do it, when he accepted it against the advice of his top advisor. It was all of his own doing.

As a British viewer having no context to any of this, the congressman seemed absolutely psychotic. His answers were so forced, robotic, and unsympathetic in quite a shocking way. Adam's sincerity and shock were the perfect foil to Torres' insanity.

David Pakman said Ritchie Torres is the person he envisions as leading the progressive movement.

Adam was just having a normal human reaction to attempting to have a productive conversation with a sociopath.

Ten years and we’re all still waiting for Adam to finish a sentence. He’ll get there. We believe in the little guy

Adam mentioning how Bill Clinton or Lindsay Graham would have known how to counter him relating his lived experience with fake humanity, but Ritchie Torres just came across as a sociopath, really makes that interview stick out in my mind as a perfect microcosm of politicians who came up post-Citizens United. Clinton and Graham, as loathsome as they both are, had to cultivate personalities and learn how to manipulate people's emotions to get the power they do. Torres and his entire cohort never had to do that - they've been able to rely on unlimited dark money their ENTIRE careers, legally, so "learning how to pretend to have humanity" has never been necessary. It's the same thing with Hakeem Jeffries. And Adam's interview might be the perfect example of how to publicly take those people apart.

The most galling thing is him trying to tell Adam “oh but have you considered, some Jewish people have pro lsraeI arguments? I bet you never thought about it like that!” As if Adam hadn’t just explicitly described having arguments with his older relatives… it’s like, yeah man, we’ve heard those arguments. They are _bad_ arguments.

Adam speaks like a normal person does and its refreshing.

I believe Adam's honest & heartfelt wmotion in that interview was the perfect counterpoint to Torres' cold soulless one. It exposed Torres in such a way that he cannot go back & try to rhetorically reframe the interview & mitigate its damaging effect on his political ambitions.

It’s refreshing how clueless Adam is about the fact that Torres was seen as being one of those “the future of the party” politicians. In a sense, many progressives viewed him as a compromise candidate if they couldn’t get someone more left wing. Adam truly obliterated Torres’s chances of a run for a higher position.