Sponsor/Ad Voice (3:13)

In law, Jared Kushner.

John Podhoretz (3:15)

And then there are people inside the administration who believe that we need to strike. And interestingly enough, they include JD Vance, but also Rubio and Pete Hegseth. If these stories are accurate, I have a theory that when Jared or Wyckoff comes to him and says, I think there's a deal, the word deal, like, makes his sort of like, you know, makes his eyes, you know, it's like spinning his head and he's like, so excited. It's the deal. It's, I'm a deal maker. We could make a deal. Let's see if we can make a deal. And that has a kind of sugar high effect for a little bit. And then he puts terms of a deal on the table. And the Iranians are like, we're not going to make a deal with you. And he's like, all right, fine, now you've offended me double time. You're murdering your people. You're not listening to me. You're reconstituting your nuclear program and you won't make a deal. So, all right, if, if we go, that's going to, I think, have played some kind of a role in the final decision to strike. That's my, I have no evidence of this except watching him for 35 years. And so that's what I'm going with. I'm sticking to it.

Eliana Johnson (4:46)

Well, I think there's a number of reasons that if we strike, I mean, God knows with him, you know, who knows? But when you talk about deals, Trump seemed to have thought he had a deal with the mullahs, at least in the sense that they weren't going to slaughter Iranians in the streets, and they did. So that's a deal that was broken or made Trump look foolish. And I think that, excuse me, is also a part of this equation here. I mean, more and more and more evidence and reporting has come out and eyewitness accounts of what went on in Iran after Trump had said, I think.

Christine Rosen (5:32)

I took care of it, including reporting that Israel supplied intelligence to him. Not clear what that intelligence was, but that was characterized in reports as a smoking gun, that Iran defied his orders to stop killing protesters after they claimed to him they would do so. I also think a major factor in what happened, and the President has spoken to this, was getting a force posture in the region that would reassure Israel and the President himself that if we act, we have forces in the region that would allow us to do so, to inflict maximum damage. And that is just happening right now. I think the USS Abraham Lincoln just in recent days arrived in the region and a week ago, maybe a Week ago, it began moving from the South China Sea over into the Middle East. And so it actually made me wonder how serious was the president when he said, oh, I, you know, I agreed not to do anything because they said they'd stop killing the protesters. It did make me question that. And was he buying time to get forces in the region? Because I have long thought, and I thought since the beginning that he was going to take action. I may yet be wrong, but I have thought that for the past couple of weeks.

Seth Mandel (7:05)

Well, dragging it out is also something that, you know, it would be, it would be wild at this point if he didn't do something because he's been talking about doing something for such a long time that it's very unlike Trump to literally do nothing after making, you know, this, this kind of a scene where over it, like at least do something just so you can say, you know, we hit them, we punch them in the nose or something. And I think he's going to. But I also think that he is, you know, he talks about this, this deal like he tells the Iranians, well, you can, you can head off a strike if you give up your nuclear program and your ballistic missile program and you know, and also stop killing protest.

Christine Rosen (7:53)

Terror proxies and stop killing protests.

John Podhoretz (7:55)

Ye.

Christine Rosen (7:55)

There were four terms this regime will never agree because it would mean the end of the regime.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (8:01)

Right, right.

John Podhoretz (8:02)

And it's interesting because wait, set four terms. No ballistic missiles, no nuclear program, no funding of terror groups, and no killing of protesters. So four points.

Christine Rosen (8:17)

And then actually, I mean, the New York Times, there's David Sanger piece in the New York Times that makes a point that the no killing of protesters appears to have gone off the table. So I'm actually not clear where that one stands, but wherever it stands, Iran is not going to agree to these terms.

John Podhoretz (8:35)

Right, right.

Seth Mandel (8:36)

It's also, it's where you would want to start in any negotiation.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (8:40)

Right.

Seth Mandel (8:40)

I mean, we, you start aiming high anyway. Right. And the Obama and Biden strategy was to, well, what do you guys think that you could do? There was no, like, that's, that's what shows you wasn't a real negotiat negotiations. It was like, all right, this is unrealistic. And maybe, you know, that means there's no deal or whatever. But Trump is starting high by asking for everything that's just kind of normal, you know, because he's not attached to the idea of a deal. He's not, he's not waiting with bated breath for the Iranians to say yes. Obama went in and said, we need a deal.

Abe Greenwald (9:21)

What?

Seth Mandel (9:21)

Any deal we get is going to be better than no deal. That was the line from the administration and the supporters of the Iran deal said. Many of them said reluctantly, look, it's not the deal I would have struck, but it's better than no deal.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (9:38)

Right?

Seth Mandel (9:38)

Better than no deal was a phrase that we heard a lot. Trump doesn't believe in better than no deal right now with Iran, because we're in. We have, we have such the upper hand in this that it would be ridiculous to go begging. And so he starts high. And this is where any normal negotiation should have started. Stop, you know, stop sending Hezbollah to conquer areas in the region like you're, like you're some, you know, like you're the Roman Empire. Stop building your nuclear weapons and stop with the ballistic missiles that are getting us pulled into Ukraine and everything else, because you're resupplying the Russians while you're also threatening the Israelis. And now we got to come in and, you know, battle back the ballistic missiles. You shoot at the Israelis and, and, you know, we got to hear from Ukraine about how the war is never ending there because you're resupplying the Russians like you're, you're making us crazy and you're putting us, our people, in danger, forget about our allies. And it should have been, you know, from the very beginning. They shouldn't have these capabilities, remember?

John Podhoretz (10:41)

Oh, sorry.

Eliana Johnson (10:42)

It happens to be the case that, that the conditions that we're starting out with are also necessary. I mean, any. This is a, this is. Anything short of those of them, of Iran, meeting those conditions is sort of no good to us. I mean, what makes them. The threat they are at this point is the nuclear program, the very large buildup of ballistic missiles and their terror proxies. I mean, that is exactly what we need from them. Halfway measures on any of that does us no good.

Seth Mandel (11:19)

Remember that it's pretty reasonable to ask a country not to do that.

Eliana Johnson (11:22)

Yeah.

John Podhoretz (11:23)

I mean, remember that in the Obama terms, when, when, when people rose up and said, this deal is terrible. And remember, 60% of the American people were opposed to the deal. 62 senators voted against the Iran deal. The way it was structured because of a clever piece of legislative leisure domain, you needed 67 senators to vote against it for the deal to die. So like a reverse treaty, sort of an interesting, weird game that they played. But the deal was not popular, but their effort to push it across the finish line was to say, it's either this or war. So that therefore the only way to forestall war was this lousy deal. And Obama himself, in a major speech, said, is it everything that I would have wanted?

Sponsor/Ad Voice (12:16)

No. Well, it's.

John Podhoretz (12:18)

Oh, great. Oh, it's not everything you would have want. But, you know, in a negotiation, you don't get everything you always want. You get something, somebody else gets something. So Iran got $150 billion. It began violating the deal the minute that the money, the pallets of money showed up there. And so that's what it's like to make a deal with Iran. Like, we have history of making a deal with Iran. And that's why Trump pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018 when he did and said the deal is dead. So it was weird that he was kind of initiating the idea of some kind of a new version of the deal, which I think raises the possibility that you're right, that it's disingenuous that we weren't ready to go yet and that he's been temporizing saying, okay, let's talk about a deal, or we're not. Whatever. And you know. Or the Israelis asked us not to go yet or whatever. Whatever stuff we've been hearing over the last two weeks. What's interesting about this is that while, as Eliana says, David Sanger says that the massacre of the Iranian people is off the table as part of a potential deal, it will still be. It's still the casus belli here. We're not going after Iran because Iran did something untoward.

Christine Rosen (13:40)

Trump doesn't like dead. Trump doesn't like killing and dead people. He has a major aversion to that. And it's part of what happened in Minnesota, too.

John Podhoretz (13:48)

Right. So my point here is it may be off the table, but we're only really going into Iran because the regime was. Chaz. Been challenged from within since December 28, I think, is when the, when the major protests began erupting. They're on a scale that is new, was unprecedented, was in across the country, hundreds of thousands of people, and then led to this, you know, carnage and slaughter. Almost unprecedented in modern times, it appears, beginning on January 8th. And he's the president, I'd state, sitting there. And if we end up firing on the regime, we will do so because of what it's done internally. That's. That's a pretty interesting change for him.

Abe Greenwald (14:40)

Although there were some interesting. A couple of interesting things that Marco Rubio said in front of the Senate yesterday. One I noticed was that he talked about the internal economic conditions in Iran and how unstable the country was from within. He also noted that he thinks that the regime's attempts to quell these protests have worked, that they've actually squashed a lot of them. And at the same time, you have a bipartisan group of senators urging the administration to send money to build up the Internet infrastructure that might allow Iranian protesters to get their message out, to get us these videos to show us what's actually happening inside. So those things, as well as the fact that finally the Europeans are going to designate hopefully IRGC as a terrorist organization. I mean, there's a lot of shifting parts on the chessboard right now that I think speak to perhaps movement towards the regime being toppled. But it really struck me that Rubio was talking so much about the internal parts of the Iranian regime that are unstable right now, because you don't before they were talking about the protesters. And I think the fact that maybe the protesters point wasn't in the list of four points, as Eliana noted, their vagueness on that right now, perhaps that is just buying time till they line up these other pieces. At least I hope so for the sake of the Iranian people.

Seth Mandel (16:01)

Yeah. Well, the IRGC designation as you. Thank you for mentioning that because that's a, that's a really important indication of. John, of what you were saying about the cases Belli. Because that's. The protests are what's getting Emmanuel Macron in France to finally drop his opposition to naming the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization and proscribing them in Europe. I mean, that, that was France was standing up against the momentum every single time this came up in the EU because this sort of designation has to be a unanimous vote. And so there's no, you won't even hold the vote as long as France says, well, we don't really like it. There's no purpose to holding the vote. And whatever. It just, it dies immediately before it even gets off the ground. And this means it's going to go into a vote and they're going to talk about it. It may happen, it may not happen. It probably will happen with France's backing. But the point is that it wasn't even really seriously discussed before because everyone knew that France was opposed. There was no reason to really have a discussion. And so it just stayed on. And the other thing about the IRGC to remember is that the IRGC was not, it's not the Iranian army.

Abe Greenwald (17:15)

Right.

Seth Mandel (17:15)

It was created as a check on the Iranian army, probably first and foremost, among other things. But it was, it was created in the wake of the revolution to make sure it was like as if, you know, Nixon got so, you know, suspicious of the CIA that he created a second CIA to make sure the CIA wasn't eavesdropping on him and didn't try to coup him. Like, that's what, that's what this is. This is a, this is a fundamentally. This is a creation of paranoia, of, you know, of militaristic adventurism. It's a bad. It has no good purpose. It has no normal purpose, because it is not what is sent out there to defend the borders of this country or even abroad. It is sent. It is a. An exclusively ideological paramilitary tied to the people who are killing protesters in the streets. That's all it is. And so it's a. Discussing this is important because it highlights how abnormal Iran has become over the years since the revolution and how, how accepted that that has been. You know, we don't have to go to Canada and say, stop colonizing Lebanon and stop shooting rockets and stuff like that. Like, it's not a normal thing to have to neg with a country like Iran and to have an irgc, even to put on the prescribed terrorists.

John Podhoretz (18:49)

Okay, So I will say this about, you know, the fight against the irgc, which we have been in. And of course, the head of the IRGC was assassinated by, in the first Trump administration, Qasem Soleimani, which was a very important moment in, you know, arguably the high water moment in some ways, of Trump's militaristic foreign policy in his first term. There's a question of the opportunity that has been provided to the west by what has happened in Iran over the past six weeks, by which I mean, ordinarily we would not be adventuring, you know, abroad in search of monsters to destroy if the circumstances arise that the Iranian currency collapses and that millions of people go into the streets to say, this regime should be ended and we're done, we can't take it anymore. And then the regime commits a series of unimaginable crimes against its own people, thus calling into question its legitimacy or simply making the case that it will stay in power solely because of the terror that it can impose and fear that it can create in the hearts of its citizens. All of these things taken together, the west can look at and say, you know, this time really is different. It is in 2022 with the riots after the, you know, after the hijab murder, or it's not 2009, which was a protest about a stolen election, or 2017 which was a protest over rising food prices. This really does go to the heart of the regime and therefore maybe all we need to do is give it a push. Because if this regime is going to slaughter or injure 30 to 50,000 people in 48 hours, the uncertainty that is created by us toppling them, whatever is gonna come after isn't gonna be worse. Like we always have to think like, is it? Do you stick with the devil you know? Because the devil that would replace it would be worse. It's hard to make the case that anything could be worse than this regime based on what it did two weeks ago, because nobody has been worse. No one has done worse. We don't have an example of turning your guns on your own people in the streets. We have examples of civil wars. We have examples of Syrian horrors of the Assad regime going after people with chemical weapons. But those are people who are living in areas that were, had been sort of taken over by a, you know, in a civil war effort to topple the regime. It was a vicious and monstrous kind of warfare, but it was warfare. This is putting down a civilian revolt using guns and then going into hospitals and killing the people who had been injured, who were in the hospitals, just to keep sending the message that there was literally nothing they would not do, which is apparently what Khamenei's order was, which is any means necessary. So you're Trump, you're Macron, you're the west, and you're looking at this and you're going, well, it's worth a shot. Because if we, you know, there are all these, the unintended consequence of getting a bad regime in place of this regime, that bad regiment isn't going to be, you know, oh, you, I wish we were back in the days when we had the mullahs. But, you know, the only thing could wish that.

Eliana Johnson (23:00)

Totally true. But for the non interventionists, there is still the question of, well, we do have to manage whatever comes after, even though it's not going to be. Even though the odds of it being worse are vanishingly small. We're going to have to be involved in whatever goes on next. There's fissile material floating around there, there's weapons and there's energy, there's natural resources. And so whatever happens, it does mean a US footprint of some sort. And there is that contingent in this administration that that is nothing is more horrifying to them.

John Podhoretz (23:53)

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John Podhoretz (27:14)

It's fascinating if you think about it, because of course we're dealing with this question of what is going on in Venezuela after Maduro. And we're dealing with the question that of Trump's hunger to annex or take control of Greenland. Trump is an imperialist of some sort that is so counter to the non interventionist credo, which is at the very least anti imperialist in the sense that, you know, we shouldn't be intervening in the world, you know, because it causes us surros and horror back home. Even if you think that American intervention always backfires and all that, that's a different kind of argument. But Trump is not only not an isolationist, he's sort of like sending out major signals that he's like the opposite of an isolationist in his own ego. They come to him and they say, we could take Maduro and extract him and remove him and arrest him. Then we'll see what happens. It's like, sure. Or we can like make plans, draw plans to take Greenland from Denmark. Now we may look at that and say, that's meshuggah. What the hell is he doing? Or not. More arguments for it than people realize. But talking about what's in his head, if you go to him and say, you know, we could take out the regime in Iran. He's not Jimmy Carter. Like, he's not going to say, we can't do that, that's immoral. Or, you know, like, we can't do, look, look how bad we do at everything. His line in his head is, everybody before me did badly. Bush did this badly, Obama did it badly, Reagan did. They all did it bad. I'm me, so of course when I do it, it's going to be fantastic. There's no problem with it theoretically or ideologically because he doesn't look at the world theoretically or ideologically. It's more like, oh, there's a moment they're coming to me with war plans. It looks like we can succeed, that I can walk around and Say, I took out this terrible regime and you know, and now have, and have taken the oil. So he's taken the oil in Venezuela, he's going to take the oil in Iran. Like he's, that's great for him. So there's been a massive misunderstanding by MAGA that somehow they, their ideas preceded him. He took them in, breathed them in, and then was going to put them in practice, including non interventionism. And this term is many things and many of them are problematic, but non interventionist it ain't. You know, I know Rubio went before the Senate and said, we did not topple the regime. We took out an illegitimate president who was not ruling, who was not the elected president of Venezuela, had no standing to be president of Venezuela and had been indicted under U.S. law. And Rand Paul said to him, you took out the president of another country. And Rubio said he wasn't, he's not the president of Venezuela.

Christine Rosen (30:30)

Sure. But Rubio also said, we'd love to see regime change in Cuba and maybe we'll do it and maybe we won't do it. And unclear, but. So it's not like he was some, you know, so defensive about.

John Podhoretz (30:41)

Not at all.

Christine Rosen (30:42)

And, and the one thing Trump has been clear he, he is for is territorial expansion of the United States, which is not imperialism.

John Podhoretz (30:53)

Yes, that is literally imperialism.

Christine Rosen (30:56)

Look back, I saw our former, you know, former colleague Matt Continetti point out that Trump actually mentioned this in his second inaugural. He talked about, he said the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities. So he is making good on the promise that he made a year ago.

John Podhoretz (31:22)

Right, but he's not a fool. He's obviously committed to it, but he's not a fool. I mean, he's many things, but he's not a fool in this sense. Which is like I say, if in December we've already struck the Iranian regime, we took out the nuclear or buried the nuclear program, or you know, like did critical injury to the nuclear program in a massively successful, you know, almost like world historic 37 hour intervention, putting the regime on the back foot, really causing it massive, I'm sure internal problems, fears, all that along with Israeli, you know, covert actions and all of that. And then like six months later it's like, hey, you know, we can get him out for good. And he's going to say, okay, show me the plan. If the plans are bad, then he probably wouldn't do it. If they say we don't, you know, we we estimate we have a 60% chance of success. He probably wouldn't do it. But if they come to him and there are enough people in the administration who are not, you know, like, rah, Rah, we should just do anything at any time that there will be a voice at the table that says, then this is more risky than you realize. So I'm sure he's heard these voices. Maybe he heard them from Christian Wyckoff.

Christine Rosen (32:42)

That we're not talking about in this. Is he bombed the Houthis.

John Podhoretz (32:45)

Yeah, that's right.

Christine Rosen (32:47)

That's one of the first things he did.

John Podhoretz (32:48)

Right.

Christine Rosen (32:49)

And there was, we saw, because of the signal leak, internal debate about that in the administration. We know for a fact there were voices at the table telling him not to do it. The vice President was telling him not to do it. And he went ahead and did that. And it was clear because Stephen Miller in that chat said, we need to do this because it's what the president wants.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (33:09)

Right.

John Podhoretz (33:11)

So that's my point. So he. You come to him. The real question is, and maybe this is a good sign about, A, the delay, and B, what is going to happen? I think he wants to be told that it's going to work. Right. I mean, part of the difference between the Bush, Cheney view of what was needed after 9, 11, and now is that Bush and Cheney understood that they were doing something risky. And the idea was that the need to take the risk outweighed the problems associated with the risk. And we are now dealing with the consequences of that. And I don't want to litigate the.

Christine Rosen (33:56)

Iraq war in a much riskier time, in a time of much heightened risk to the United States.

John Podhoretz (34:03)

Right. But my point is that they were perfectly aware that this was not a walk in the park or that the regime change was not gonna be a walk in the park. They were maybe naive about how orderly the regime change could be. And they certainly didn't anticipate the nature of the civil war that would erupt almost two years, seriously erupt two years later after the removal of Saddam Hussein. But they were cognizant that they were taking a shot at something that had some prospect of failure. I think Trump doesn't want a prospect of failure. So you go to him and you say, we can go take Maduro out because we have the discombobulation machine. So don't worry. We're gonna land and turn on the discombobulation machine, and then everybody. Caracas is gonna be like, what the hell is happening? And we'll just pull him out of the building and fly him out.

Abe Greenwald (35:05)

I do feel like interventionists in this administration, if they wanna make their case to Trump, should come with like a brand new, cool super weapon. Each time they're asking the administration.

John Podhoretz (35:13)

Well, they are. That's the point. We know they. How do we know that they're happening?

Abe Greenwald (35:17)

And there is a better example here. And folks at the Middle East Forum actually floated this and I liked this idea, which is one of the ways to sell this both politically at home for, for the MAGA coalition or for, you know, the sort of mishmash of conservatives and people on the right is not the example of Iraq, which is the one that's always brought up by the isolationist right. It. And the left, for that matter. It's the support that we gave the Solidarity movement in Poland during the Cold War. The kind of thing where it was actually not a huge investment, no troops, but a lot of money and a strategy of diplomatic pressure, economic pressure, all kinds of different moving parts. But it was very clearly focused. Reagan's words about the Solidarity movement, our support for the opposition was absolutely on point throughout. And that kind of pressure, which allows an already collapsing regime to collapse further because it becomes isolated diplomatically, it becomes tenuous economically. And then you do have defense available, as we did during the Cold War, to move in if necessary. And I think that is a. Is a really interesting thing to suggest as a strategy. It also removes it from the more recent and obviously still very emotionally resonant example of Iraq, which in lots of ways is distinct from some of these other cases.

John Podhoretz (36:34)

I think it's also worth pointing out that the more successes, and I mean, you know, if we go into Iran and topple the regime, that will mean that in the first year essentially of the Trump administration, Israel will, and America will have won the war in Gaza, will have taken out the Iranian nuclear program, will have toppled the regime in Iran, and will have extracted Maduro from Venezuela. So with those in your back pocket, when Podunkia starts acting up and you.

Eliana Johnson (37:14)

Go, ah, ah, ah.

John Podhoretz (37:19)

Hard power turns into soft power. All the president needs to say is, I don't like what you're doing. And, you know, I've got the discombobulation machine.

Seth Mandel (37:34)

I still.

John Podhoretz (37:35)

This is the greatest thing ever. It's like out of Get Smart. It's the discombobulation machine.

Seth Mandel (37:40)

I just, I just keep. I just keep picturing Count Rugen putting the discombobulator up to 50 on Wesley.

John Podhoretz (37:47)

Oh, man, that is a very excellent analogy. Anyway, better than Get Smart, so. So I'm just saying that, you know, when you act, you make it unnecessary to act later because you scare the stuffing. I wasn't gonna say stuffing, but I recognize our ecumenical audience here out of some 2 bit podunk player on the planet who is gonna do something that we don't like. And that's a huge benefit for American foreign policy. They're just. And, you know, something that any American president would be grateful to have in his back pocket. You know, Obama would have been happy to have that in his back pocket. I mean, he tried to use it with our allies instead of with our enemies. That was his. He wanted to, he wanted to threaten Israel, not Iran. You figure that out someday for yourself, John, if you want to.

Eliana Johnson (38:47)

When you talk about Trump wanting to act, when someone comes to him and says, okay, we've, we've, we've brought the risk down to zero. I think this goes a long way in explaining his inability to do anything regarding Russia, Ukraine, because, Because they can't.

John Podhoretz (39:09)

Get the number down.

Eliana Johnson (39:09)

They can't. Yeah, exactly. Right.

John Podhoretz (39:11)

There's no, we can't manage the number. Like, it's. The, the variables are too immensely complicated.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (39:19)

Right.

Eliana Johnson (39:20)

So, like, just all we could do is chase Putin. Chase Putin. Chase Putin.

John Podhoretz (39:23)

Yeah. Or we, you know, we could give, we could give the Ukrainians 100 billion dol. They could still not end up getting back the Donbass or, you know, or, or, or Crimea or whatever. Like it's, you know, it's a, that's right. So, so it seems like a fool's errand to try to go that way for him. I don't, I think it's wrong. I think his, their, their, their calculations are wrong and are probably someone's putting their finger on the scale to make sure that he feels this way. By the way, anybody notice that while this is going, a massive Iranian thing is building up is going on where our Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who is the Director of, Is the coordinator of the, I don't know what is this? Seven different intelligence agencies within the federal government where she was yesterday. Was she in the Situation Room while the ships were heading to, you know, to the, you know, offshore of Iran? Was she, you know, I don't know where, you know, was she at centcom? Was she anywhere?

Eliana Johnson (40:33)

I feel like we haven't heard from her.

John Podhoretz (40:34)

She was, she was in Fulton County, Georgia.

Abe Greenwald (40:38)

She's relitigating the 2020 election.

John Podhoretz (40:40)

Right. She's the Director of National Intelligence. She was in Fulton County, Georgia. As a warrant. Was executed to take possession of the right, of the, of the ballots, of the physical ballots that were, that were. That are the obsessional focus of Stop the Steal people while we are about to maybe go to war in Iran. She's like, you know, riding the elevator at the Hyatt in Atlanta, up and down on the outside of the building. And, you know, she's doing Trump's fitting, though.

Abe Greenwald (41:19)

I mean, this is actually something that I imagine she agreed. It's not that she can agree or disagree. I'm sure she was enthusiastically dispatched because she's trying to get back into the good graces of this administration. She has been sidelined over and over again since her appointment to that role. And this is, this is one of, this is the bad. This is the dark side of Trump. This is his absolute obsession with proving that he legitimately won the 2020 election. And I think it's going to certainly not going to resonate with American voters right now who put elections behind them and move forward. He looks embittered and he looks vindictive, and he looks like he's wasting resources on something that isn't a national problem.

John Podhoretz (41:58)

Okay, but let's talk about flipping the switch on the script. Can you flip a switch?

Abe Greenwald (42:03)

I'm very confused.

John Podhoretz (42:04)

By flipping the script and flipping the switch.

Christine Rosen (42:07)

Yeah, just.

John Podhoretz (42:08)

Okay, just consider the last 24 to 48 hours in Minneapolis after, after the pretty shooting killing. Bavino is out. Noem sidelined Homan in phone calls with Waltz and Fry. Holman negotiating with Waltz and Fry and Trump negotiating with Schumer to make sure that they can get the government not to shut down. If the Democrats are so insistent on revisiting Department of Homeland Security funding, excising Department of Homeland Security funding from the bill that needs to pass by January 31st in order for the government to keep running. Suddenly he's acting like a conventional president. That is to say, okay, we'll negotiate. We'll do this. We'll have a deal. Well, I'm working with the Senate majority leader. My Border Patrol guy is making, you know, is making proper arrangements with the authorities in Minneapolis and Minnesota. He's like, okay, I don't think this worked. We're going another way. And I think the one thing about him is when he does do one of these flips, it'll be next week. Like, what happened in the month of January never happened. It'll be like, I didn't know it was. I don't know. I didn't really know that. Kristi Noam never really, you know, I Heard she's a nice lady. Don't really know her as she goes back back to whatever Dakota she came from. Which I expect will happen pretty soon. Have you heard this scenario where Gnome goes, he nominates DeSantis. DeSantis resigns from the governorship in Florida because he's term limited anyway and appoints his. Whoever it is person as a sort of hold a placeholder for. For Donald and then wherever it is going to be governor. And then DeSantis Re establishes himself as a national figure. And then we have the Vance DeSantis Rubio Bake off for 28.

Seth Mandel (44:29)

No, I thought you were going to say he was. That's. That was to get Rubio out of the Bake off by offering him Florida. I'm going to DeSantis leaves and then.

Christine Rosen (44:38)

You know that in the, in the very unlikely category. Can I, can I rant about another script flip that was not a script flip.

John Podhoretz (44:48)

Sure.

Christine Rosen (44:48)

In my view. We had all sorts of people and now lots of national news articles covering the new video of Alex Preddy that came out that he's the protester who was shot and killed by Border patrol agents the weekend. And the video shows him getting in the face of border Patrol agents and kicking the tail light of federal vehicle. And the articles say, you know, this shows what kind of a new. New cast, new light. That he wasn't merely a peaceful protester, but he was getting in the face of. Of agents. And I just don't think that's right. I think the original video made that clear as well. This new video really showed me nothing new. And I know I wasn't on the podcast the day after on Monday.

John Podhoretz (45:51)

Monday, right.

Christine Rosen (45:52)

You guys talked about this. But I don't, I really don't see why this video should change our analysis of the whole situation at all. Though it does underscore that the idea that really any of this is peaceful protest is total garbage and shows, you know, his behavior. But you can see it in the original video getting up in the faces of these agents that this really is an attempt at woke nullification and that his goal and their goal was to interfere with and prevent the enforcement of federal law and to harass federal law enforcement agents. That doesn't mean that what happened to him is right at all. I don't think it is right. And that while local police don't have to enforce immigration laws, they do have to prevent the harassment of federal immigration officials and they have to prevent local residents from preventing immigration officials from doing their job. And they haven't Been doing that, and I think see that in both videos. And it drove me crazy to hear people saying, oh, well, this video shows us something new. I don't think it shows us anything new. We can see that in every video we've seen out of Minnesota this entire time. The goal of these people is to interfere with federal law enforcement and to prevent them from. From doing their jobs right.

Seth Mandel (47:29)

ABC's David Muir, the most trusted anchor in America. The most watched anchor in America. Thank you for making World News Tonight with David Muir the number one newscast in America. Most trusted, most watched David Muir on abc.

James Patterson (47:45)

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Seth Mandel (48:43)

So in a green light on. On that, because the. I mean, the thing that. That catches you about the video is that he's chasing them. Alex Pretty is chasing ICE officers. They get in their car to drive away, and he chases them. And this is. This is saying, well, this is the atmosphere. And, you know, he spits on them. And then, by the way, he vandalizes the car. He kicks the taillight off, right?

John Podhoretz (49:08)

But he. He spits. Kicks the taillight. And before he does either of those things, he says, attack me, mother F. Right. Which, again, none of this justifies the actions that were taken against him in the last six seconds of his life. But they crystallize the purpose of the demonstrations. Attack me is what the protesters want. And to create confrontations, to delegitimize and discredit federal law enforcement officers who have been given a task by their commanders in Washington. They are not. They didn't. They're not Kyle Rittenhouse. They didn't drive there on their own to cosplay. Being a person helping during a riot. They are creating a riot for the purpose of pushing ICE and Border Patrol agents too far to create incidents that will delegitimize them. And Preddy, what's interesting or new about this is that where I disagree with you is that this now provides a kind of piece of almost novelistic evidence that Freddy wanted something to happen, and the tragedy is that it happened to him but not to somebody else.

Abe Greenwald (50:46)

Well, the tragedy is actually that something didn't happen to him in that first altercation, which is that local law enforcement should have detained him, at the very least, cited him for assault or what some misdemeanor would have done one of.

John Podhoretz (50:59)

Two things, and then would have had.

Christine Rosen (51:03)

His gun holstered in his waistband.

Abe Greenwald (51:05)

And then there were a million, million things he could. That they could have done that might have made him pause before he went back a second.

John Podhoretz (51:12)

That's a really important point.

Christine Rosen (51:14)

Their job was to prevent him from harassing and interfering with federal law enforcement agents who were trying to enforce federal law. He cannot do. Could not do that. I actually. I don't think his behavior had any bearing on the second altercation.

John Podhoretz (51:30)

Right.

Christine Rosen (51:30)

But it does speak to the absence of local law enforcement who were not doing their jobs and to the nature and the purpose of all of these protesters and these stupid people with their whistles and their phones and. And by the way, to what the intent of the words and the rhetoric of Minnesota officials was, have been, who are ginning people up to do these things. Because when you tell citizens that ICE and Border Patrol are the Gestapo and that they're going after Anne Frank and they're trying to round up Anne Frank, the natural reaction. If that were true, people should be out with their whistles and whatever. But by the way, the fact that Alex Preddy is kicking the tail light and people are out with their whistles shows that they're not the Gestapo.

John Podhoretz (52:28)

Right, Right.

Seth Mandel (52:29)

And that. And that's the really important point that Eliade. Part of what's so important about what Eliana is saying is that, you know, we saw, remember the image of the one ICE guy standing outside the. What was it, a hotel? And, yes.

Christine Rosen (52:46)

Running out of his nose.

Seth Mandel (52:47)

Blood running out of his. One guy. Right. With a. Because local law enforcement were not being allowed to go, you know, protect a local. This is a local building, a local institution. Right. I mean, all this stuff falls under local policing, but it's also that they fall. They've put ICE in the situation of being like, all right, you're the one guy with his back against the wall, smashed glass behind you, and blood running down your face, and there's a crowd coming toward you. We could put local police to have A barrier, you know, between the horde running at you and, you know, one guy with a gun, you know, who's hasn't slept in 36 hours and his blood running down his face. But there are, you know, it doesn't excuse if the ICE officer in that situation does something he's not trained to do. But that's the point. Why hasn't there been a barrier, something between. If they're really protesters, then put a line of cops between them and ICE and let them say whatever they want to say and let them hold whatever signs they want to say. Just like we've seen in every other situation in New York where there's massive protests, there are police and the police form a barrier and they stop protesters and counter protesters from brawling. Well, protesters see what happens in New York York.

John Podhoretz (54:02)

We'll see what happens.

Seth Mandel (54:05)

I mean, one thing that's true, but, you know, the purpose is that there's just an easy solution here that's like, no, they're not. The cops would be accused of being there to protect ice. Yeah, but no, what you're seeing is that they're there to make sure that people like Alex Preddy also don't get, you know, hurt or God forbid, killed in these situations.

Abe Greenwald (54:23)

There's a second thing that needs to happen besides local law enforcement. It does speak to Eliana's point about the rhetoric. We've spent a lot of time also criticizing some of the rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration, which I think is fair to do. It has not helped in these situations, particularly Kristi Noem. But what's important to remember is that this is how mainstreamed this moral grandstanding has become, particularly among officials on the left. And if you turn everything into a moral case, if you say this is about, this is like the Holocaust and this is like Anne Frank, that moral grandstanding brings people a lot of positive attention from their own side of the aisle. And it's difficult for these politicians not to speak in those terms anymore because they're so readily awarded for it. First on social media, obviously, but by their own constituents. But it is a very dangerous language to use for people who want to come out and peacefully protest because you're forcing them to see this as a good versus evil rather than a I don't like this policy. I would rather have this policy, which is much cooler minded way of looking at some of these things. So everything is moral grandstanding these days. I mean, it's, it's. And I think Waltz and Fry in particular have given us an example that it's why we like Homan, who the other day, I think I called Homans over and over because I hadn't had enough coffee. But Homan.

John Podhoretz (55:35)

And there was an official.

Abe Greenwald (55:36)

Yeah, there was a Charles Homan is actually what you should do if you're an official on either side of this issue, which is talk about it as an issue, as a policy, as implementation, not using the language of moral grandstanding.

John Podhoretz (55:50)

I mean, some things are being said that are even after 10 years of Trump or 25 years since 9 11, and the rhetoric of the left going haywire about how, you know, George Bush lied us into Iraq or, you know, like 911 was an inside job. Whatever. Whatever stuff you have that the. That the D.A. the admittedly radical D.A. of Philadelphia would literally say, we are going after you. If you're an. If you work for ice, we're going after you. That Stephen Colbert would say, say what you will about the Gestapo, they didn't wear masks. I think Abe pointed out that, gee, I didn't hear any complaining about people wearing masks during the encampment period. Was that okay, that they were wearing masks in order to evade scrutiny by law enforcement, the Hamas supporters, and all of that stuff. And all of that contributes to this unrealistic cosplay atmosphere. And I think what's important about the point, the January 11th, that's the one Preddy. Ten days before his actual killing, Preddy says, attack me, right? He spits on somebody. He kicks out the tail light of a car. Each one of those. Forget the attack me thing, the spitting and the kicking out of the taillight are misdemeanor crimes at the very least, plus the fact that he was in the street, which, by the way, is a misdemeanor. You are not allowed as a human being to stand in the middle of a street unless you're crossing a street in a crosswalk. Like, that's, you know, that's. That's, you know, reckless endangerment or whatever it is. You're not allowed to do that. They had three different things on which he could have been arrested and detained. And two things would have had. One of which is it could have been like, okay, this is a serious business. You're gonna. You're gonna play. We're gonna then think twice about whether or not you want to go back out into the street. If you're gonna kick out a taillight of a car and do property damage to. To it, to an official vehicle or a private vehicle or anybody's vehicle, you don't kick somebody's tail light out with your foot.

Christine Rosen (58:24)

Well, you have a gun on you while.

John Podhoretz (58:26)

And then that's the second point.

Christine Rosen (58:27)

Extra insanity. If you have a gun on you, you should be extra careful in baiting and taunting.

John Podhoretz (58:35)

By the way.

Abe Greenwald (58:38)

Class, they literally teach that lesson over and over.

Christine Rosen (58:41)

Just point out the.

John Podhoretz (58:44)

Yeah, he had a gun. You need to explain that he had a gun. The same gun he had that he had in his waistband 10 days earlier when he kicked out the taillight.

Christine Rosen (58:57)

Can I also just point out the asymmetry and stupidity of this mask point by Colbert? The Hamas nicks on campuses were wearing masks to prevent accountability for defying rules, regulations, and sometimes laws and ICE is wearing masks to prevent themselves from being harassed for enforcing the law.

John Podhoretz (59:18)

Right. To being docs, to having your identities and then people going, going to their house.

Christine Rosen (59:23)

It's not even the same.

John Podhoretz (59:24)

Yeah, right. But I think the important point is if you were arrested for kicking out the taillight, I believe they would take his gun away. In other words, they would say, you've been arrested as you were pursuing this crime, though you are licensed, you committed a misdemeanor crime. We are, we. I would need to look up Minnesota state law, but I believe the surrender of the firearm, he would have to go back to court to get his firearm to reestablish that. The, that the concealed carry permit that he has likely says if you commit a misdemeanor offense, you will, your, your, your per. It will be taken away from you.

Christine Rosen (60:14)

This is also the broken windows theory, you know, type situation where allowing these smaller level chaos and disorder, which was allowed in this case, leads to larger level crime. Chaos and disorder. If this had been stamped out, we wouldn't have had the tragedy that occurred on Saturday.

John Podhoretz (60:38)

Exactly. But I mean, practically speaking, if he had been, if he had gone through this and he would have been arraigned and then released, you know, it's a misdemeanor offense. He would have been held in jail for a week or something like that.

Christine Rosen (60:50)

He would have been put on notice.

John Podhoretz (60:52)

He would have been put on notice and I think they would have taken his gun away, I believe. Or they would have, you know, at least taken it in until, you know, he, there was a procedure and then he wouldn't have had a gun on him 12 days later that got him killed.

Abe Greenwald (61:10)

There's also a moment here now, and this is the political moment that we were talking about earlier where Trump is negotiating with Schumer and Senate Democrats who do have political leverage now because of the public opinion shift against some of the tactics that the administration is using and it does speak directly to issues like the masking. So if you oppose ICE wearing masks, that's, that's now on the table to negotiate in terms of what federal law enforcement should or shouldn't be allowed to do as a matter of procedure. Just like should they wear body cams, are there certain, should, should federal officials be allowed to issue quota requirements for the officers who are enforcing law? All of these things are now things that should, can and should be negotiated, which is how our system is supposed to work. There are Republicans who support some of these reforms and would be happy to see them changed as well in whatever comes out of these negotiations. But that's where you have those battles. You don't listen to late night comedians and, you know, crazies on social media and take it to the streets and try to fight, you know, ICE yourself. All of those are extra political, often violent, certainly harmful ways that also don't lead to long term reform. If you really want to reform ice, you pay very close attention to who your elected official is backing in these coming negotiations and you vote them out. If you don't like it, I mean, I mean, it's slow. It's not as. Again, it doesn't allow you to morally grandson, it doesn't allow you the thrill of doing something transgressive. But it is how our system is meant to work.

Seth Mandel (62:33)

You're supposed to pay attention.

Eliana Johnson (62:35)

I've been thinking about Eliana's first point about the newly released video of the earlier Preddy footage. And I think it makes a difference in this sense. It makes it clear that he was there and was showing up to be attacked. He was there to draw officers to him. He wanted to create some kind of situation in which he could claim victimization by them. And he's not the only one. There's a lot of that going on out there. And as long as that dynamic keeps happening, there's going to be more cases. Because if you go there and you, he, it was like he did everything he could to get them to attack him. Kicking, spitting, having a gun, saying attack me. It shows how easy it is for these agents mistakenly to end up killing someone.

Seth Mandel (63:53)

Can, I mean, yeah, you're asked to, to understand human nature, right? I mean, it's like, well, this is allowed and this is legal and this. But also like you're supposed to understand how people would react in a situation in which, you know, these things happen, right? You're supposed to understand human nature. I mean, that's part of like as Christine says, when you're going through the licensing process for, For a carry permit, you're, you're. If it's like 80% of the, of the training is just them finding other ways to say, don't be a cowboy. That's like, that's, that's the majority of the, of the tr. I mean, there's other stuff, important stuff, too, but it's like that is drilled into your head to the point where you leave a class not really sure you want to carry anymore. You know, it's like, it's like they're trying to. Possibility of having that weapon carry every day. As your instructors sound like they're trying to talk you out of it, even while they're talking up the benefits and the, you know, and the, and the rights to do so precisely because of the immense amount of responsibility and because they, they are saying, like, you're going to join this tribe.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (65:09)

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Seth Mandel (65:09)

Of concealed carriers. Don't. Don't, you know, don't give us a black eye. Don't be the bad apple that makes everybody hate me. I've carried responsibly for 35 years. Don't get in there with a hot head and do something that costs everybody their rights and stuff like that. But it's also about understanding how people perceive the presence of a gun. Right. The instructors tell you over and over again that when you are in a situation, if something arises, you know, somebody harasses you on the street, whatever it is, you need to establish, you need to sort of go above and beyond to establish your lack of desire for a fight if you have a gun on you, because especially law enforcement, when, if and when they arrive, will see the gun fairly or unfairly. I mean, again, it's usually unfairly, but they, People will see the gun as this guy wanted a fight or something, you know, something like that. They see that. And so the, the, the pressure is on you to be able to say, you know, the instructor will say, well, you should be loud when you tell somebody to get away from you so that bystanders see that you tried talking to the person first. Don't do it quietly and don't be like, like, I have a gun, or, you know, put your hand on your hip or something like that. You want everybody to, like, see you basically begging for. For no confrontation and trying desperately to get out of a confrontation because you will be assumed to have wanted a confrontation if you were carrying a weapon later. And you need to somehow offset that.

Abe Greenwald (66:46)

There, there was, you know, I was thinking about how this notion of, remember the notion of John Lewis, I think, made the phrase well known of good trouble during the civil rights movement. And he contrasted, like his MOT always saying, stay out of trouble, which she meant, don't go pick a fight. Don't go out in the world looking for trouble. And the civil rights movement had this sense of civil, peaceful, civil disobedience, peaceful, peaceful protest. You don't actually go and attack law enforcement. That's not the kind of trouble they talked about, good trouble in that way. And there's been this real perversion for these movements, these activist movements that I think really, Eliana is right. They see themselves as going out in on a morally just cause. They are fighting this good fight. And that means they should attack federal law enforcement, because federal law enforcement, they've been told, are fascists. So there's a real perversion of our understanding of what true civil disobedience looks like according to the rights that we have in our Constitution. And again, this is a leadership problem. Those need to be repeated over and over again so people understand what their rights and responsibilities are when they are, when they oppose a policy of their local state, federal governments.

John Podhoretz (67:51)

I just want to read my favorite paragraph of the morning before Eliana does her recommendation. We mentioned him earlier in the week. It's Mike Solana, the editor in chief of Pirate Wires. And here is what he wrote in an item called Frau Swisher's Mad Tribunal. From celebrities sobbing over ice at their luxurious Sundance parties to a very small, very vocal minority of Commi tech employees demanding police political statements from their CEOs, while dollar store journalists cover the various bad things they say on Twitter. America's starting to feel like 2020 again. And nothing so perfectly demonstrated our flashback to cultural authoritarianism as former tech journalist Kara Swisher and her pet eunuch Scott Galloway's demand for explicitly Nuremberg trials targeting their political enemies this week on the anti tech industry podcast Pivot. So do these sideshow freaks really believe deporting illegals is equivalent to Hitler's dictatorship, which concluded an 80 million dead? I sort of don't think so, as the first rule of surviving an actual dictator is not, you know, publicly threatening to kill him, but they do keep saying people who disagree with them belong in prison. And I'm starting to believe they really mean that part. Eliana, you have a recommendation?

Christine Rosen (69:19)

I have a recommendation. I want to credit Hugh Hewitt, who, in my interview with him last week or the week before, brought this book back to mind. I am rereading it Hugh Hewitt asked me about one of my college professors, and I ended up recommending this book on his show. I had a legendary college professor by the name of Charles Hill, went by Charlie Hill. And Hugh brought back to mind a biography of him that was written by one of his students, one of my classmates, Molly Worthen. It's called the man on Whom Nothing Was Lost by Molly Worthen. And he was legendary among a subsection of Yale students, including me and others. And Molly chronicles his career as a Foreign Service officer through Europe to Hong Kong, Israel, as an aide and speechwriter to Henry Kissinger, and ultimately as executive aide to George Shultz in the Reagan administration. He went on to help Schultz write his memoirs. Also served at the UN with Boutros Boutros Gali. And it is a wonderful memoir of a. A wonderful biography of a career in the Foreign Service, but also of a student figuring out, learning that her hero is a real person with flaws. And I highly recommend the book. It's a wonderful read.

Seth Mandel (70:56)

He also, Charles Hill, like, he. He wrote this great book book sort of late in his career about how classic literature factors into understanding grand strategy. And aside from it being a good book and an interesting book, nobody wrote books like that, like before, like it is a. In the world of these academics, it is highly unusual to have such a creative, you know, idea of an academic book and land it perfectly well.

Christine Rosen (71:31)

He wasn't an academic, which was an important part of what made him great. He was a proud generalist. And, Seth, that brings to mind, you know, when I was in college, there was a debate about what's the most important humanity. Was it history, philosophy, or literature? And he debated literature and was always a champion of reading great works of literature. And then, yes, he wrote a book, this book, I can't remember the title now, but talking about grand strategies, grand strategies about grand strategic thinking evident in great works of literature. That is wonderful.

Abe Greenwald (72:17)

I think we have both. Because I can't choose between history and literature. I want all of it.

John Podhoretz (72:22)

He, I think, without question, was in a world in which we talk about the deep state and everything, thing like that. He was the most revered person of his generation in the U.S. foreign Service and a diplomat of extraordinary cultural, political depth. Everyone who worked with him found him astoundingly impressive. And I, when I took over the editorship of commentary in 2009, I got in touch with him because I asked him to review a book or something like that. And he wrote me back and he said, I'm finishing a book of my own, but I really have to tell you, writing is such an agony for me. It's an agony because I just, you know, I always fall short of what it is that I want to produce. And I therefore, like, I would love to say yes to you, but it's just too taxing, emotionally taxing for me to write on assignment. And even there, this little note. And I had only met him once or something like that, but the kind of depth of this response, which I totally understood and I had heard to be the case that some people said, you know, if he could have written under his own name or comfortably written under his own name, he would have been a major American figure in American intellectual life. But it was just. There are people who can manage to produce reams of writing as long as their own names are not on it. It's a famous kind of neurotic deformity of a certain type of intellectual. And he was. He was such a person. So when he actually did finally write his own book, it was like a remarkable creation, but it took him, I don't know, 20 years actually or something like that even to get it done. So the man on whom nothing was lost.

Christine Rosen (74:39)

Yeah. This book gives a sense of the impact that he had after a career in the foreign service on countless numbers of students. And I will say personally, for all of his understanding of every great work of literature and philosophy and history, the personal advice dispensed and the willingness to wade into students personal lives by both him and a couple of others, there was the most important of all wonderful recommendation.

John Podhoretz (75:07)

We'll be back tomorrow. For Abe, Eliana, Seth and Christine, I'm John Bot. Horace. Keep the candle burning.

Sponsor/Ad Voice (75:14)

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