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Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast is brought to you today by the University of Austin. Just imagine a university where students turn down the University of Chicago and flee Columbia's Hamas rallies to read great books and small seminars, discuss the Bible and politics with Commentary contributors like Leah Leibovitz and Mike Duran, and apprentice with America's top entrepreneurs. This place exists. Our friend Barry Weiss co founded it. It's called the University of Austin, or uatx. While Harvard hands out A's like candy, UATX produces the Navy Seals in the mind. No great inflation and a simple application based purely on test scores. And UATX is free because it just eliminated tuition forever. So learn more@ustin.org.
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B
The best, expect the worst.
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A
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going.
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C
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
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A
And yes. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Wednesday, January 14, 2026. I am John Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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D
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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E
Hi, John.
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A
And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
So we have a lot of moving parts today. Obviously, we are awaiting what exactly the American response is going to be to the astounding level of state violence against protesters in Iran and what this means about the future of that regime. We have continuing ideological and physical conflicts going on in Minnesota and other places relating to the ice, efforts to deal with illegal immigration and events in the wake of the shooting of Renee Good. And we have at the Supreme Court a pretty remarkable oral argument on the question of transgenderism in sports that revealed, I would say, some intellectual liabilities among the justices who seem to be sympathetic to the idea that trans people should be allowed in the sport that is not the sport, or they should be allowed in the sport to play against people who are not of the gender into which they were born.
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C
In particular, you might say assigned at birth.
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A
I don't. I can't. I don't even understand how to use this vocabulary. So I'm just gonna say that I don't understand it. Apparently, Katanji Brown Jackson doesn't understand a lot of this modern technology terminology because she referred yesterday to CIS ginger people, meaning cisgender people, which is another way that we say heterosexuals.
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D
Cis ginger means you were born with red hair.
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A
Well, I was gonna say ginger is obviously a very, you know, is a category of very unimpeachable long Standing cisgender. Cisgender, I think is. Is really a stereotype. It's a terrible stereotype to assume that just somebody who is redheaded would be, you know, cis. But I have.
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C
I have several children. I have several children whose hair color was assigned at birth.
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A
It was red, quite red. And that means that they're gonna need more anesthetic.
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C
Yes, they do.
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A
And. And they can't drink grapefruit juice. What is the. There's a. There's some weird thing about grapefruit.
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C
Maybe it's not grapefruit, but the anesthetic is a real thing. Yes.
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A
Right. Yeah.
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F
Okay.
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C
It's hard to knock them. It's hard to knock out Cis. Ginger. Ginger people.
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A
Okay, fair.
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F
Fair enough.
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A
So that was a good one. This is ginger moment. And then there was this other moment in which it's a little hard to describe, so you might want to look it up, in which she dumbfounded the. Essentially the. One of the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case when she said, well, doesn't the law need, you know, exceptions? And the lawyer said, yeah, that's what these laws are, exceptions. And then the question is whether they're acceptable exceptions. It was a fascinating moment and shows the sort of, like, level of argumentation on behalf of the argument that a person born a boy pretending to be a girl or claiming to be a girl or wanting to be a girl gets to play against girls. That the justices who are sympathetic to this really don't know how to argue their point and so go to weird places. Whereas, say, Justice Alito and Justice Kavanaugh kind of zero in on the fact that Alito basically said, what is your definition of sex or gender? And the lawyer for the aclu, one of the people who was arguing for the I for the designation, said, we don't have a definition of sex.
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B
There was a mic drop moment in this argument where Alito asked, how can a court determine whether there's discrimination on the basis of sex without knowing what sex means for equal protection purposes?
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A
That was right. That was the follow on to the him. I mean, he basically walked the lawyer. Yes.
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B
They declined. And he said, how can the court determine whether there is sex discrimination when you can't tell us what sex means for equal protection purposes?
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A
Right. Now, that is what we call good lawyering. That is to say, he walked the ACLU lawyer into basically into the buzzsaw of elementary logic. He is a very brilliant man and handled himself very brilliantly, unlike some of his colleagues. Christine, what do you make of the entire proceeding?
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E
Well, I think the fact that you were stumbling over how to properly use language and pronouns and definitional terms at the beginning of this podcast, that is a feature, not a bug, if you're a transgender activist. The confusion created by pronouns and language, which started years ago, I think came. We saw its full blossoming during the arguments. And it's important to understand that the radical groups that are. That are promoting this idea that biological males should compete against girls in sport, they are desperately looking for that exceptional case. And so we have two cases that came before the court, one out of Idaho, one out of West Virginia. The West Virginia case is fascinating because this is a boy who started puberty blockers before male puberty would normally set in. So, like nine or 10 years old, the parents started giving this boy puberty blockers. And the argument that this plaintiff makes is I should be able to compete with the girls because I never went through male puberty. They're trying to find a wedge issue which, you know, will not be treated as an. As an exceptional case. If this argument wins, they will say, well, look, they let this person go, so all should go. And this is really important because there are two major issues with regard to boys playing in girls sport. The first is obviously fairness. And so the equal protection question of whether you're compromising the rights of girls to have fair treatment on the playing field. The Title nine issues that were brought into these cases and discussed before the court, those are important. But there's a second issue that I think doesn't get enough attention, and that's safety, physical safety for the girls who do play sport. Because even if you haven't gone through male puberty, the average boy is heavier, faster, has more mass, muscle mass, even at the age of 8 or 9 or 10, than the average girl. And so there is still a risk. And we see this. We've seen this played out in these debates. You know, a male volleyball player who is playing on a girls team sports spiked a ball into a girl's face on the opposing team, and she has a permanent head injury and neck injury from that because he's stronger. So the safety issue, I think, has to be given as much visibility here. But the equal protection claim, the claim, both that and the Title IX claims, I think, were very rigorously questioned by all of the conservative justices. And Gorsuch, who in an employment case years before actually did extend rights to transgender employees, so adults in employment situations shouldn't be discriminated against, had some very probing questions with regard to whether that would apply in the case of sport, and certainly in the case of the purview of Title 9. So for me, who's been following this issue for a long time, it was heartening to see the bumbling on the part of the liberal justices trying to explain something that actually isn't explainable because identity and biology are not the same thing. And they were really honing in on that. Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Barrett had a couple of great questions for that regard. So I would say let's look very closely at this decision when it comes down, because if they try to carve out little exceptions, that's actually not good. We do need the court to be pretty firm about protecting women's safety and protecting women's equal opportunity to play sports.
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D
I want to make a point that's not a legal point here, but I was just struck by something when Christine was explaining this strikes me that in looking for this exception, they've created these very depraved incentives. In other words, they're hunting, saying, look, look how if we find someone that look how young, we interrupted their puberty, that's the sort of brass ring to win the case. And that came through in just what little I saw of the reporting on it yesterday. I mean, that's how I felt about it. They were defending this case. I saw there was a. There was a little. Some footage of the kid and talking about how young he was when he got the puberty blockers. And I'm just sitting there saying, this is a. I'm really unsettled that this is the sort of winning argument that we came in so early, chemically.
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A
Well, you know, that child is likely.
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E
Sterile, by the way, will never be able to have children himself if he ever transitions or even, you know, remains.
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B
I mean, I think the other. The other plaintiff in the case, Christine, you're following this more closely than I am, but I believe. Doesn't want.
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E
Withdrew. Withdrew the name. Yes. Yes. Tried to get. Tried to get out of the case at the last minute, but the court still heard the arguments, and they'll make a ruling on whether there's, you know, that case continues. That's the equal protection case out of Idaho. Yes.
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B
Right. So my understanding was the. The other plaintiff said that he. I guess she wants to. Filed the case when she was in high school and wants to now, you know, be a college student without the public attention and go on with the private life, which struck me as kind of how we all feel about this issue. Like, let's move on and have our lives and, like, drop this issue from, you know, public debate.
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A
I think Abe has hit on a very important aspect of this because the argument directly is we took a very little kid and we applied medical magic that turned this kid from one thing into another thing, Metamorphosed a boy into a girl using medications and maybe surgeries, I guess not surgeries, but hormones. Right. Okay, so this is the thing that America that, that is, I think unquestionably the thing that unnerves people the most about this issue, period. When you say, look, parent a kid, the kid suicidal kid wants, the parent says, okay, we, you know, the society doesn't interpose itself between parents and children. However you want to slice it, that is one thing. People are unnerved. And I'm not just talking about conservatives or, you know, family centric people, whatever. Most people in my experience, and granted this is anecdotal, but, you know, I mean, this is, this is where the rubber meets the road. Like you're drugging up a seven or eight year old and doing stuff to that kid and that's bad. Like, I think people go and like, if it's the central argument to be made to defend the idea that that kid should be playing sports in the girls league, there is something fortunate about the fact that this kind of means the Supreme Court does not have a choice to engage directly in the question.
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E
Well, this is actually why it's such a fascinating two cases because the other thing to think about is that I think it's between 27, 28 states have passed laws banning boys and girls sports. So there's this larger federalism question which I think Kavanaugh brought up during the discussion and during the arguments where he said, you know, should we even be weighing in on this yet? Because there's clearly this division of opinion with strong passions on either side and the states are figuring this out for themselves. So that, I mean, it was very, very a lot of echoes of Roe v. Wade in 1973, where the states are moving in certain directions and there might come a moment where three fourths of the states have decided boys shouldn't play in girls sports. And so they have an option there. There's a path to saying, you know, the states decide on a state by state case basis. So that's also out there as an option.
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A
Right. Well, obviously the thing about Supreme Court decisions is that they coming to a consensus that reaches a majority. You can have justices that will have a more expansive, want to make a more expansive ruling, but they don't have enough to achieve the five votes. So they default to the less expansive ruling, and then we'll write a concurrence or something like that to lay out the argument in the case, which is, I guess, what we should expect one way or another, Justice Alito to do, based on his behavior yesterday, that he will write some kind of an opinion, if it's not the majority opinion that lays out this question of you guys are. You guys are making arguments about the most fundamental things in life without even an understanding of defining what those fundaments are. Because that is actually beyond the scope of law. That, you know, this gets to mysteries of existence that are, you know, that are not. If we can't define sex, that's because the legal definition of sex isn't up for grabs. Like, it's. It's obviously, it can be defined. You don't want to define it because you want it to be fluid. And so it can't be fluid. It is what it is. It is the thing that happens when the zygote splits into multiple cells is that it sex differentiates and goes XX and XY with chromosomes. And that happens before the development of the brain stem, before the development of most of the parts of the body. You know, it is. It is the defining feature of what it means to be human almost. And you're not going to go there. Whether. How. How first things he would go, how first things Alito would go is not clear. But I do think that there is that that question is that that then defines the sort of the outer limit of where the Supreme Court could go. The we're not even going to rule on this because the states are solving it is probably the least right. Or is. Is the. You know what we're punting. This is already happening. The public is essentially deciding it in the form of their elected representatives. They're making the decision, if you don't like that this is a decision in the state that you live in, you can move to another state that has other rules and like that.
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E
Well, the constitutional question is fascinating. And the forcing advocates who want to maintain some fluid definition of sex is important because the word sex doesn't occur in the Constitution and the word women doesn't appear until the 19th Amendment. And so there's, you know, I have this insane scenario where although I would not support an equal rights amendment, I kind of want one because it would actually force a definition of sex. You would have to define it in legal terms that then everybody would accept. Like, if this is for women, this is how we define women. This is who's covered by this amendment. But that is actually one of the, one of the challenges here is that they very much want to make fluid biological realities that in certain, again, in certain contexts, most people don't mind if some, an adult wants to live as the opposite sex. We're very tolerant people. But there are very specific cases, locker rooms, women's prisons on the sporting field, where that becomes either a security or physical threat to biological women or a something that's obviously patently unfair. And I think Clarence Thomas kind of gets the award for the most blunt but useful example because he said something to the effect of, well, what if a mediocre male tennis player looks over and says, well, I can be the top person on the women's team, even though I'm really bad on the men's team. And that has happened over and over in high school and college sport. And the other argument made on the transgender rights team is, well, this is just a very small number of people. We shouldn't even really be bothered about this. Which of course is contradictory if they're demanding a special carve out and special special rights for this category of people. So all of these things are. Have been in the conservative idea sphere for a long time. We all have followed this. But I think a lot of Americans, to Abe's earlier point, woke up, read this story, and thought, why is a 9 year old having his puberty blocked? What's going on here?
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As I'm talking to you, my dog.
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G
Georgie, who's 4, is sitting at my feet. I didn't want her in the first place. We got her for the kids was Covid. They felt bad. They needed some entertainment from a dog. We got a dog and now she's.
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Kind of my dog.
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A
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G
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C
And beyond the unfairness, though, I feel like once you take this to the Supreme Court, the unfairness argument, which is a very strong argument, is almost beside the point because you have to define something if there are going to be laws around it. So if you, if you, if you tell the Supreme Court you can't define sex, then a lot of laws just disappear off the books. I mean, we, we have a corpus of law that, you know, that default that, that has categories.
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A
But this is literally, I think who should explain because most people have never read a piece of legislation and I don't recommend it. It's, you know, it's, it's like reading stereo instructions. If that term even means anything anymore. There are no but you Know, used to get this manual explaining how your stereo works that was translated from the Japanese, and you had no idea what was going on. But. So I don't recommend reading legislation, but when you read legislation, this is how legislation starts. The first 10 pages of a piece of legislation sets out very specifically defining the terms that are used in the legislation precisely to narrow its focus to the target of the legislation and to make sure that it does not slop over into areas in which the legislation is not intended to have a controlling force. And so when that exchange happened between Alito and the ACLU person, it goes to the very centrality of the rule of law, which is we're making a law about widgets. A widget is defined as an object no larger than 3 inches by 4 inches that has a purpose in manufacturing. Two, that purpose in manufacturing is to create a channel for electricity to go. Three, a channel of electricity is a pathway for which it did it like that. So that it's only about the widget. You can't say, oh, because of this law, I can now use this to talk about a hairdryer or, you know, or a dam or a nuclear weapon. Like that is the centerpiece of our legal system, is you define laws precisely so that laws cannot be held to be about anything. And therefore, this was, I think, a very, again, extraordinarily useful exchange that gave the game away to anybody who was serious about not being antinomian and having our laws be about things that follow the common sense rule. Right, That's. We've now been talking about this for a week because of Minneapolis and the shooting of Renee Good, which is what is a reason. How does a reasonable person understand.
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F
X.
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A
And we are given very specific guidelines in law as to what a reasonable person should or should not understand. By the way, laws are written to define those things. And so this is one area in which the ability, the desire to make sure that things can slop over into other categories and muddy everything as opposed to clarifying everything. That is what this kind of radical effort to redefine common sense understandings of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what marriage is, what this is, what that is, why that's so important to the radical agenda that is really behind all of this, I think. Okay, so speaking of Minneapolis, Eliana, you noted just before you came on the air that the Democratic Party is saying some pretty remarkable things about the fact that a law enforcement agency of the United States government populated by citizens of the United States who are risking their lives to do what they think is right and helping keep America safe and do the jobs that they're assigned to do. Some rhetoric is being used by leading Democratic officials that is probably worth highlighting.
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B
You know, I thought it was worth noting that it just so happens that the chairman of the Democratic Party, whose name is Ken Martin, he was little known when he was selected. He's little known as the chairman now, as the chairman of the Democratic Party, but he was the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party before he became chairman of the Democratic Party. And he has been outspoken in previous days comparing President Trump and the Trump administration to the regime in Tehran and said the following over the weekend on social media. He said, from Tehran to my birthplace of Minneapolis, people are rising up against systems that wield violence without accountability. Solidarity across borders means opposing authoritarian power everywhere and defending the right to live free from fear and state violence. So this struck me for a couple of reasons. One, it is another, yet another Minnesota figure who has risen to national prominence who's using totally irresponsible rhetoric and who I think helps explain why Minnesota is in the position that it is. And he went on to say, if comparing the US To Iran makes you angry, ask why, killing protesters, crushing dissent, kidnapping and disappearing legal citizens, ignoring courts, threatening critics, terrorizing communities, that's authoritarian behavior anywhere. And he's saying this when the Trump administration is standing up to the murderous and authoritarian regime in Tehran. And it just struck me that he is the embodiment, along with Keith Ellison and Tim Walls in Minnesota, of the utter failure of progressive governance in that state and of the irresponsible rhetoric that has led Minnesota and the Democratic Party to where it is now?
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D
It all goes back.
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E
Go ahead.
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D
I just have to go straight back to Obama. Do you remember when in the run up to the JCPOA when he and John Kerry were desperate for the deal, he made a speech talking about. It was in an interview saying, look, there are extremists in Tehran and extremists at the GOP that don't want this to happen.
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A
Yeah. Well, I'm struck by watching the Golden Globes on Sunday night, the rhetoric question. So it was not that politicized. I mean, compared to things in the past, it was almost apolitical. But there was this one moment when Judd Apatow, in the midst of very funny speech he made in giving the Best director award, said, I believe now we are living in a dictatorship. And then he went on. It was. That was sort of like the one big statement that was said of course, if we were living in a dictatorship, he would not say, I believe we are living in a dictatorship. We're living in a dictatorship. And you say publicly on television, I believe we're living in a dictatorship. You get off stage and a federal official shows up with a gun and arrests you and throws you in prison.
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B
Exactly like Ken Martin would be gunned down in the streets if the Trump administration was akin to.
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A
Or seized, you know, or seized, handcuffed and thrown into. Thrown into Evan. Prison. Right.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So the cosplaying of we are becoming a totalitarian or fascist dictatorship is belied by the fact that people say they.
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B
Can say we are exactly right.
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A
In other words, it's like a Rube Goldberg machine. Not that I don't think that the Trump administration, I think it does behave extra constitutionally. I believe. I believe that there are a lot of issues that are. It is legitimate and justified and merited to be concerned about the ludicrous overreach of Trump's executive actions and his executive authority. And those are to be debated. But when you go to, we are now, this is now a fascist country because of this horrible, semi inexplicable moment on a street in Minneapolis, one moment, one time, one day, one week ago, whereas right now in Tehran, as many as 20,000 people may have been killed by the regime in the last three days.
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B
The tragedy in Minneapolis that was arguably caused in part by irresponsible rhetoric like that of Ken Martin and Keith Ellison and Tim Walls, encouraging people to go behave in the way that these protesters did because they're telling them that we live in a dictatorship and you need to go out, you know, and protest it and use it.
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E
I've been struck, because I've been struck in a dis discussions with some of my very liberal, very anti ice, very obviously anti Trump friends, that we can even move it earlier than that, because these images are coming out of blue states and sanctuary cities and in places where enforcement's going on in red states that are non sanctuary cities, they're happening peacefully as a transfer. Usually in courts, when someone's arrested or arraigned for a crime, it's found, they're found to be illegal, they are turned over to ICE for deportation. And you don't have. You're not on the street, you don't have people trying to block the vehicles. You don't have all this ICE Watch stuff going on, because the local state governments are. Both are working hand in hand with federal law enforcement policy. And so there's, there's A sense in which the cosplay happens and as an intentional downstream effect of sanctuary city claims. And that, to me, was the point. Point where if you want to get into the why is ice? We've had this discussion, why is I still, you know, paramilitary this and doing that and masking their faces. You really do have to go back to how this all started, because we are having peaceful exchanges of criminal, illegal aliens handed over from courts in red states to ICE all the time. And that is what Trump promised in his campaign. So there really is, again, a very. A blue state, red state, huge difference here. And the images are the point. There was another image that was making the rounds yesterday of a woman being pulled out of her car. And you can already see the same sort of mirror, funhouse mirror effect on the left and the right for interpreting what had happened to her.
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A
Remember that there was a great inestimable advantage, the fact that the epicenter of the protests against Israel and pro Hamas in the United States took place largely in New York. And I say that because the New York City police for the last 25 years have been so extensively well trained in how not to get baited by people who are seeking to get them to pick up their truncheon and smash them over the head so that there is iPhone footage of police, police brutality. They are so well trained. And you see what goes on. You saw the kinds of insults that they. And nationwide, obviously, that they. That they have to deal with the kind of vile things that are thrown in their faces and all of that, and the kind of stand there and.
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C
Get spit on for hours.
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A
Well, spitting on is like, by the way, which is. Which is a criminal offense. Like spitting on someone is a. It's a mystery in some places, but in some places it can be a felony. Something rises to a felony if it turns out that someone is. No knows they're sick, for example, anyway. But they would not. They were like Buckingham palace guards. They did not respond. And then you would see moments, like on the campus of Emory University where there would be a moment when the cops would go, okay, that's it. You know, you've been insulting me and throwing things at me for three hours. Sociology professor with tenure, you know, living in your grand ivory tower.
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B
As you know, Colombia is starving us and creating a famine.
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A
Right? Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, there are these moments at which some police, like, they just can't take it anymore. And the images that we're seeing now through these iPhone, cameras and all of that, we don't Know what led up to it. We don't know what preceded it. And then people very confidently say things like, I mean, you know, it's not illegal to insult, you know, to insult a police officer. It's not, you know, it's not illegal to da, da, da, da, da. Well, it's like, well, you know, what a. I'm not sure, you know, what happened right before that woman was pulled out of the car, number one. And number two, it's not legal to resist the legitimate orders of a law enforcement official. Who tells you to get out of your car. When you put your car in the middle of a street and parked it and you won't get out of the car and you won't move the car, that's also not legal. And so there's all this burden on the authorities that is placed by conventional, on the. They're supposed to have absolute perfect knowledge. They're supposed to have absolute perfect conduct, all of that. And the whole thing that's going on now is they're being baited and baited and baited. That's what all of this resistance protest is about, is baiting ICE and law enforcement officers to misbehave or to look like they're misbehaving to discredit policies that these people do not like.
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D
But, John, when you bring up the NYPD and the Hamas protesters, you know that the NYPD responding the way they did, like everything else is a trade off because, yes, so they fail. So they didn't give the protesters the moments and the photo ops they wanted. But the protesters got away with far too much at the same time and therefore escalated and felt word spread and the protests became more raucous with impunity. At some point, yeah, it has to stop being the job of law enforcement officers to not get baited.
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A
I agree with you.
- [39:11]
C
But to be fair, one aspect of that, though, that's one aspect of that that you know, I've been thinking about a lot lately, is what we call a protest. Right? When Abe talks about, you know, you know, Hamas, nix, protesting in New York, there were at least, you know, people holding signs on one side, facing off against the cops and stuff like that. And that is morphing into things that are not protests. Like we say, everybody has the right to peacefully protest. But since when is using your car to block a road a protest that's in action with a vehicle that is dangerous and illegal in almost every instance? I mean, you can't. Yeah, you're not supposed to be able to block the road but certainly it's not the First Amendment that enables you to block a road because you're upset about something, right? I mean, this is. It's not a protest. It is an action. And so we've had this sort of this mission creep of, you know, or maybe it better to say defining protests, you know, defining deviants down as. As the Supreme Court once said, is that how we define protests has simply become, I'm angry about something and I'm doing something about it. Therefore, that's protest. It's like I'm doing this in protest of that thing. But that's not a protest. It's not a, you know, it's not a First Amendment demonstration or anything like that. The way that cops have been forced to talk about, by the way, that you see what police sometimes in statements and in social media posts referring to an incident as having happened at, you know, a First Amendment, a demonstration of First Amendment rights or, you know, whatever this. This thing is. And that, I think, is the point at what Abe is getting at, which is like, you want to protest, hold a sign, right? And chant something at a cop, even if it's insulting its speech. And it's clearly marked as a protest. And look, you have a permit and all this other stuff, but the cops are not supposed to let you drive toward them in cars, but not just supposed to let that. That stuff become legitimate behavior, not just against cops, but in society in general.
- [41:33]
A
The thing about the campus protests is that there was never any reason for police departments to get involved in them. No. Why? Because those people should have been expelled and removed from campus, not by police officers, but by the administrations of these private institutions that can literally remove them from the campus forever. And there's. It's now even easier than it used to be because access on campuses is now basically through a card to use a, you know, tell to whatever you call those things and you know, pass cards. And you just. You just deactivate somebody's pass card and you take their stuff and you put it in boxes from their, you know, dorm room and you put it on a van and say by. And those protests would have dried up everywhere. It was the cowardice, the pusillanimity, the loathsome hunger to curry favor with the protesters, quote, quote, unquote, that then over time compelled local police forces to get involved. You know, Columbia ended up finally calling the NYPD to help. When Hamilton hall was occupied a year earlier, if a thousand of those kids had been. Had been expelled, there would have been no Hamilton hall protests.
- [43:11]
B
It Wouldn't have been a thousand kids and.
- [43:14]
F
Right.
- [43:14]
A
It would have been 50 kids. Right.
- [43:16]
B
Remember, Dartmouth was a great example of this. At dart up at Dartmouth, two or three students protested outside the president's office, and they were arrested and removed. And that prevented a mass protest from starting. At Dartmouth College, the president there took a hard line against this. At Columbia, the encampment and elsewhere, the encampment was allowed to fester, to grow. And then it was removed and it came back. The administration negotiated with these people. They had faculty intermediaries. They're going back and forth. They didn't. They. They signaled they didn't want to bring in the police. Oh, my gosh, it'd be so terrible if we had to bring in law enforcement. As opposed to.
- [44:09]
C
At Northwestern, they paid them off to leave by, like, offering scholarships.
- [44:14]
B
At Brown, they did the same thing. As opposed to, at the first sign of behavior that violated school policy, remove physically removing students and indicating there will be zero tolerance for this kind of behavior. And where we saw administrators do that, there was no problem on these campuses.
- [44:39]
A
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- [44:42]
F
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A
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F
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A
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F
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- [46:00]
C
Commentary and Hamilton hall is a good example because they literally took janitors hostage. Like people were not allowed to leave the building by use of force. You Know, it was like. And, you know, verbally abuse them and all that other stuff. But a scuffle broke out. There were, you know, to work. Two employees at the college sued the college because they were, you know, they were not just harassed, but they were physically assaulted in an attempt to stop them from leaving a building that's just taking somebody hostage. And so it's like, you, you know, you. Why wouldn't you. And then there was this whole discussion about, well, was it extreme to call the police? Was it extreme to call on the police to defuse a hostage situation? Who should you mean? Should they have called in the National Guard instead? I mean, what are we talking about here? They're holding people hostage in a building that they have no right to be in. And they're talking about whether it's.
- [47:02]
D
It's.
- [47:03]
C
It's, you know, it's, you know, an overreach to call the police, but we have the police to do. Precisely, to be called in in certain situations where nobody else has the training to do it. An administrator is not supposed to, you know, a school administrator is not supposed to walk over to a bank heist and negotiate with the guy on the inside. You know, whenever you watch those movies, it's never, you know, let's call the local college administrator or the local dei, you know, fellow and, you know, and try to negotiate with the guy holding the bank hostage. You call the police. It's. It's not any different if the hostage situation is taking place on a campus just because there happen to be professors and school administrators nearby or more available, you call the police in situations that call for the police, and they have mangled this whole. Our whole understanding or the public's understanding of what the appropriate use of law enforcement is to now be seen as illegitimate. Everywhere you see an ICE officer, you tail them, you follow them, you follow them around town, you block a road, you see a police officer doing this, you question them. You, you know, ask for their badge number. You do this. It is assumed that the forces that are there to keep public order are, by definition, illegitimate. And that was something that the campus protests really made happen in, you know, practically overnight.
- [48:50]
A
In the end, the idea that, you know, America's highest ideals are represented by protesting is, of course, an artifact of the civil rights movement and the training that was provided by the decision of the civil rights movement to follow Gandhi and nonviolence methods of protest. Right. Which was controversial in the sense that, like, obviously, Malcolm X believed that this was kowtowing to the powers that be and that Things need to be more confrontational. It was a, an extraordinarily difficult ask on the part of the civil rights movement to have people do sit in, you know, be non violent and basically open themselves up to the possibility that goons, local law enforcement, goons in the south and elsewhere would beat the crap out of them. And the purpose of it, of course, was either to get them to break or indeed to create these images of illegitimate conduct on the part of these unjust state governments that were advocating for segregationist policies that the Supreme Court itself had already basically found unconstitutional, but that they were still, they were still using. Now we have training that is being given to protesters nationwide by nonprofits, highly well funded nonprofits by the Open Society Institute and others. And they are teaching protesters how to be provocative and confrontational and to try to push the buttons of law enforcement. And you can see the difference because the country watched the civil rights protests and found a great dignity in the behavior of the protesters and a horrifying goonship in those who assaulted them and went up, up to them. And the moral authority of the, of the leaders of these states and their police forces and all of that was drained. And it helped accelerate the progress toward the Civil Rights act of 19 of 1964.
- [51:23]
E
Those, their, their effort was moral persuasion. And that's why the use of those at the time, you're absolutely correct, controversial tactics, they, they did train in those because it went against what most people thought should be happening, given the violence and racism. But the difference now, I would say is the protesters who are being trained, their goal is actually the fracturing of our society. They're not trying to persuade anyone that ICE should be eliminated. They actually, the disorder is the point. And I think that it shows you something about the, where the moral center of this nation's idea of protest and right and wrong has shifted. They're also playing to a much bigger attention seeking, constant presence on social media.
- [52:08]
A
Right.
- [52:08]
E
That matters.
- [52:09]
A
So in the king, in the war between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Martin Luther King said, we want our share of the American dream. We want full participation, full entry, a full place in the American story and in the American Dream. And Martin and Malcolm X said the American dream is a lie. Plymouth Rock landed on us. We are its victims. This system is rotted at the core there. We get nothing from it. So we need to do is work what we work, do what we can to overthrow it. And so over the last 60 years, Malcolm X's approach, which was rejected and was seen to be extremist and crazy in the 1960s has obviously become much more fashionable. Much more, you know, it's much more, you know, sexy. It doesn't have the gravitas. But, you know, nothing has gravitas anymore. So why would this have gravitas? I'm just struck by the fact that you had this thing which is you want to participate in the civil rights movement. You are going to be asked to do things that are unbelievably, that go against your impulses, right? Which is somebody swings something at you, you're going to grab it and try to prevent that from happening, or you're going to swing a punch back. That's human nature. Someone is coming at you, you fight or flight instinct, you might have fight. And you have to restrain that impulse and let it happen because you are part of something larger. And what we want to have happen will happen much more easily, much more readily. And you will be a hero of resistance for not acting. And now, as I say, the hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent teaching people how to insult, offend and push buttons of law enforcement officials to make them do things to them that are, you know, that they would never do otherwise. And that is a total shift.
- [54:22]
B
One other related point, we have a piece in the Free Beacon this morning about the foundations that are funding these radical groups. And they are the most elite, you know, wealthiest liberal foundations. The ford foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, George Soros, Open Society Foundations. And I think it's important to note these foundations are not in the public mind associated with left radicalism. They are not scrutinized by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. The head of the Ford foundation is the former dean of Yale Law School. These, you know, these foundations are enormously wealthy. They are held in high esteem. And given that they are funneling loads of money into these, the most radical organizations in American life, they deserve to be tied to this activity that they're funding, and they deserve to really be scrutinized by the press. I'm not holding my breath on that. But people should know this is the work that the largest charitable foundations in American life are doing. And this is what the elites, you know, Heather Gerken, the former dean of Yale Law School, now running the Ford foundation. Folks at the MacArthur Foundation, George Soros is Open Society Foundation. This is what they are putting their dollars to.
- [55:53]
A
Absolutely. Christine, you have a recommendation today?
- [55:58]
E
Perhaps I do. And it hopefully dovetails nicely with our discussion of polarization because I went back and revisited Mario Vargas Llosa. I'm learning Spanish, so I get to be pronounce the double Ls as a Y today, even though usually I would say losa. Like I say burrito, not burrito, but I am learning Spanish, so. But he wrote a series of essays. It's technically kind of a intellectual history of some of his own intellectual heroes. Adam Smith, Isaiah Berlin and others. But the opening essay about which the book is titled is called the Call of the Tribe. So if you only read that opening essay, you'll get the gist of it. But I would encourage people to read the whole book. He just revisits his own youthful radicalism, his. His Marxism, his socialism. But he does it in this deeply humane way where he explains, like, this is why this was persuasive to me. And this is why I was surprised that my fellow intellectual continued to become, you know, eventually became a Stalinist or didn't understand Cuba's regime as being repressive. But it's an intellectual journey and it's. It's told with grace and humility, and it's quite persuasive. It was persuasive to me because I think a lot of what the challenge on the right and the left is these days is that there isn't space to do that in the same way that there was in earlier eras, because you're held to account for every single thing you say, and changing your mind becomes a sign of weakness or a sign of, you know, contradiction of your intellectual thought. Anyway, the Call of the Tribe is a wonderful antidote to that, and it also contains these beautiful little histories of, you know, Adam Smith. And he really delved into biography of the people he was studying. So it was. There's a translation from the Spanish by a guy named John King, and the translation's quite good. But he looks at Karl Popper, Raymond Aaron, Isaiah Berlin, Hayek Gassett, just. Just Some of the 20th century and 19th and 18th centuries greatest thinkers and assesses his own life story and understanding of their work in a way that I think is just. It's just very compelling. Even if I don't. I don't always end up landing on his side of the political arguments he makes. But it's a wonderful little book called the Call of the Tribe.
- [58:22]
A
He is one of my favorite writers who was writing in, you know, the time of my being alive. The, I think unambiguously the greatest South American writer, though Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was his friend and then later very serious, determined political, ideological enemy, is obviously sort of held in higher pop esteem. But if you. If you want to read an absolutely wonderful fictional account of Vargas Llosa's life and. And. And his country, Peru. And he wrote a novel in the early 80s called Aunt Julia and the Script Writer, which is among the most delightful books I have ever read. His political essays are extraordinary. And his account, for example, of his failed campaign to be the president of Peru, which I think is called A.
- [59:26]
G
Fish out of Water.
- [59:28]
A
It's got a very odd title, and I can't think of it at the moment, but is also a sort of rueful account of what happens when an intellectual decides to become a politician and how little training being a thinker gives you for what you actually have to do to get votes from poor people who don't read your books and don't really care that you are, you know, just a wonderful representative of your country's cultural history. He was a genuinely great writer with one extremely weird blackout. Like what you call it, like, sort of like an ideological weakness or. He was very, very hostile to the state of Israel in ways that are very discomforting and are not. Don't make sense, given the rest of his politics. So I only mention that because it is the one really disturbing element of somebody who otherwise had unimpeachable and fascinating and really kind of like singular career as a great writer.
- [60:39]
E
Yes, that is an important caveat. The Call of the Tribe is also very good at showing, reminding conservatives. And I needed this reminder that we share so much with liberalism, sort of classic liberalism, and both sides, both liberalism and conservatism, need each other to be. To sort of push and pull at each other's ideas and to find those common threads. And I lament that we have less and less of that in our public intellectual life these days.
- [61:09]
A
All right, so we will be back again tomorrow. So for Christine, Seth, Eliana and Abe, I'm John Pod Horowitz. Keep the candle burning.