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- [00:04]
Eliana Johnson
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
John Podhoretz
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, Expect.
- [00:21]
Matthew Continetti
The worst, hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast Today. Today is Thursday, September 18, 2025. I'm Jon Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:36]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, John.
- [00:37]
John Podhoretz
Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [00:40]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:41]
John Podhoretz
And joining us today, Matt's successor as the editor of the Washington Free Beacon and a superstar in her own right, Eliana Johnson. Welcome back, Eliana.
- [00:52]
Eliana Johnson
Hi, John. Great to be with you guys.
- [00:56]
Abe Greenwald
So, you know, I need to begin with a correction.
- [00:59]
John Podhoretz
Yes.
- [01:00]
Abe Greenwald
Yesterday I misidentified Donald Trump's would be assassin, Ryan Ruth. And I identified him by the name of a washed up actor named Brandon Ruth.
- [01:18]
John Podhoretz
I don't want to call him washed up. He didn't do anything. He was the failed Superman I've never seen.
- [01:25]
Abe Greenwald
I don't know why he was in I guess I saw the Superman movie, Superman Returns. Well, no, I saw the most recent Superman movie and then I was saying to myself, I never saw Superman Returns which had this person, Brandon Ruth. And maybe that was why he was on in my consciousness and not Ryan Ruth. So I apologize to the readers who.
- [01:50]
John Podhoretz
Listeners and to Brandon Ruth, who does not deserve to be called.
- [01:55]
Abe Greenwald
I am correct. Yeah. I don't mean to imply and I let's not take this show off the air.
- [02:01]
John Podhoretz
Yes.
- [02:02]
Abe Greenwald
Because I made this mistake.
- [02:03]
John Podhoretz
Now I also must correct something that I a mistake I've made two or three times that I don't frankly understand why. But just I the other yesterday referred to the the characters murdered in the Crime and Punishment by Raskolnikov as Raskolnikov's landlady and her daughter. And in fact, it was a pawnbroker. The landlady is a major character at the beginning of Crime and Punishment, but it is the pawnbroker that he is negotiating with or has been having trouble with murders. And I it was just like a brain emanation that I got wrong and I apologize for that too. Now, don't cancel me for that either. It would be a very interesting Federal Communications Commission that was so offended by the mischaracterization of an of a Russian novel from 18 from the 1860s. That would be we be living in a different civilization were it the case that this were the sort of thing that could get you taken off the air. It is not. We got to talk about this. Jimmy Kimmel Suspension Jimmy Kimmel, of course, ABC's late night host. And the fact that six or seven hours after the FCC chairman Brendan Carr appeared on the podcast of one Benny Johnson, known to several of us in many different ways, basically said, you know, people are going to be in a lot of trouble if they don't do something about the evidence. We're basically throwing, threatening ABC in some measure with the power of the fcc. And ABC apparently had emergency meetings.
- [04:12]
Eliana Johnson
And you want to start with what Kimmel said?
- [04:14]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I think that's the place to start.
- [04:15]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I'm going to. Now. Okay, here's. I literally have. I can read to you what Kimmel said on Monday. On Monday. He said this on Monday after a weekend in which people, liberals and people on the left, having gotten what turned out to be entirely correct information from leaks from law enforcement on what Tyler Robinson, the alleged shooter, had been texting his. The relations that he had as a. That he was involved in the furry community, that he had a trans boyfriend, and that his. And that he had moved to the left in a way uncomfortable to his family. It was only on Tuesday that all of that was meat was put on the bones by the prosecuting attorney's press conference in which or event in which he announced the charges and read out, you know, the evidence. But over the weekend, even though these details were in the Wall Street Journal and other places, there was a desperate effort.
- [05:20]
Abe Greenwald
Spencer Cox had talked about, that's right, the government and on Sunday had alluded to it.
- [05:25]
John Podhoretz
And then there was meat put on the bones by information in the Wall Street Journal. Usually Eliana is one of the people here who has spent time laboring in the vineyards of the mainstream media. You would not question the validity of a very, very specific report from a credible mainstream outlet. If you were from another credible mainstream outlet. Right. You would say, well, the Wall Street Journal isn't, you know, some isn't Twitter. It's not like some anonymous account on Twitter. They get a leak, they verify it. That goes through an editorial process. They decide that it's okay to publish it like it goes through screenings. And so most people in the mainstream media would accept the validity of the information that was being proffered by an outlet like the Wall Street Journal. But here, people from Lawrence Tribe to help Heather Cox Richardson, the most popular person on Substack, to all sorts of other people were saying that this was not true or that this was a false flag, that Tyler Robinson was a groiper, which is to say a person on the fringes of the Right. Far beyond maga, this world of sort of Pepe the Frog, lunatic, anti Semitic, you know, fascistic haters. And that he was doing this either to tag liberals with the murder of Charlie Kirk or because they hated Charlie. He hated Charlie Kirk because Charlie Kirk was friendly to Israel or something. And they were basically retailing this all weekend even though the information was out that Tyler Robinson was who I believe we now know him to be. And then on Monday evening, Jimmy Kimmel, host, host of a nationally televised late night talk show, says the following. The MAGA folks reached a new low over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them. Now, if you want to be a literary critic or like a deep analyst of rhetoric and grammar, you will notice that Kimmel does not say that he was maga. What he does here is say that MAGA people are desperately trying to run away from the idea that he was anything other than one of them. So there is in this statement a kind of weird self plausible deniability aspect because he doesn't say MAGA hit a new low this weekend because one of their own killed Charlie Kirk. He says MAGA hit a new low because they were desperately trying to prove that Tyler Robinson wasn't maga.
- [08:20]
Abe Greenwald
That's a very.
- [08:21]
Eliana Johnson
What is.
- [08:25]
Matthew Continetti
If he wasn't maga, why would he.
- [08:31]
John Podhoretz
That's what you are going to hear. You're already hearing it from the defenders of Jimmy Kimmel saying he never said that MAGA killed.
- [08:40]
Abe Greenwald
I don't think I've heard that at all. What I've heard from the defenders of.
- [08:43]
John Podhoretz
Jimmy, Alex Edelman say, okay, Alex settlement said, I, I. You heard it?
- [08:47]
Abe Greenwald
I haven't heard it.
- [08:47]
John Podhoretz
No, I heard it. I saw Brian Stelter say it. Can't keep up.
- [08:52]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, that's what they're saying, but more I think saying that the government has suppressed Jimmy Kimmel's First Amendment rights to lie about the identity of the killer of Charlie Kirk. And that's where, that's where your original beginning on Brendan Carr's comments, the FCC chairman who was responding to the general uproar on the right over Jimmy Kimmel telling Benny Johnson that, look, this is a problem for Disney and they can either handle it the easy way or the hard way, which implies an FCC investigation or ruling. And then within hours we got the word that first that the initial reports were that the affiliates, so not the network that produces the show, which is abc, owned by Disney, but the affiliates that broadcast the show were pulling Jimmy Kimmel show off the air indefinitely. And then we got word subsequently that the decision had come from Disney and from Disney CEO Bob Iger.
- [10:11]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so here's the funny part about this. Not to get in the weeds, people. This is very hard to understand. Abc, these networks do not own the majority of the stations that broadcast their work. In fact, each of them, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, own about 35 of the 200 plus stations that air their work. Corporations, in this case, two different corporations, Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar, the two largest television station owning corporations in the country. And by the way, who own affiliates. This did not used to be the case. But they own ABC affiliates, they own CBS affiliates, they own NBC affiliates. Nexstar says we're pulling the show indefinitely. Sinclair says not only are we pulling the show indefinitely, we are going to air a tribute to Charlie Kirk on Friday night in the time slot. We, we expect Jimmy Kimmel to issue a full apology for the show for his shocking words and for Jimmy Kimmel to make a substantial donation to Turning Point usa. Now, Sinclair is known in the world of broadcasting as a conservative company. And in fact, there has been talk for years that Sinclair was going to start its own news network. It was gonna, it was gonna, you know, create a centralized thing to sort of rival Fox with a centralized new. It's never quite panned out that way. But as Eric Erickson, our friend, said on Twitter last night, these are stations that broadcast overwhelming. The stations that both these companies own broadcast in conservative markets, in conservative territories. And they had very serious reason to worry that their audiences would go bananas about the continued presence of Kimmel.
- [12:15]
Abe Greenwald
However, I bet the audiences already were going bananas. I bet they're already getting calls.
- [12:19]
Eliana Johnson
However, can I just add one thing to this? NextStar has conservative ownership and they are in the process of buying Tegna, another local broadcasting group. And they need FCC approval to do that.
- [12:38]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [12:39]
Eliana Johnson
So I would just say to all of the folks on the left tweeting about how this is, you know, First Amendment government suppression of Jimmy Kimmel, It's a lot more complicated than that. And that these local affiliates, many of them are in red states, in red communities with audiences who do not like. Between Jimmy Kimmel and the View, which airs on ABC, having 10 hours a week of virulently anti Trump content.
- [13:10]
Abe Greenwald
It's not just anti Trump. It's the same type of broad brush, yes. That is painted about anyone who supports Donald Trump.
- [13:18]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [13:19]
Abe Greenwald
That speaks to again, this disturbing trend since Charlie Kirk's assassination, which is the Blue half of the country. It's not talking about Charlie Kirk's assassination. They're talking about all of the kind of secondary consequences of it. They're talking about the political violence on both sides. They're talking about the. Isn't it time for the right to tamp down its rhetoric? Jimmy Kimmel was joking about how this guy, the assassin, was maga. And then he was also telling some crude jokes about Trump's behavior after the assassination.
- [14:04]
Eliana Johnson
Charlie Kirk, he said Trump was mourning Kirk the way a four year old would mourn a goldfish.
- [14:08]
Abe Greenwald
Exactly. There's no reckoning with the place that Charlie Kirk held among millions of fellow Americans. And instead it's an evasion of that reality, an attempt to move off what happened last week. And this is, this, I think, is just generating all of the kind of conflicts we're seeing, whether it's the citizens who are being fired or otherwise sanctioned because of their, their celebration or rationalization of the assassination, or it's, it's this which as Eliana says, is so tied up in business and regulatory law and the, the, the desire among Disney and Disney CEO to kind of move beyond its reputation it acquired over the past decade as Woke Central. But all of this, I think is of a piece with two sides of the country completely talking past one another.
- [15:12]
John Podhoretz
Look, here's two things about this. The reason I brought up the stations and the structure, and it's a very complicated structure is not to get really boring. But the original sin here was the drafting and formation and, and passage of the Federal Communications act of 1934, which, which has given the federal government said the public owns the airwaves, which means, according to New Deal thinking, that the government owns the airwaves and the government can parcel out licenses to people to use parts of the airwave spectrum to broadcast. And therefore every television station in the country goes through a process every five years of relicensing itself. It pays very little money. There's very little sort of, that goes to the government in terms of paying for the use of the spectrum. And so all kinds of things happened as a result of the passage of this act. The fact that there was such consolidation that there ended up for 40 years being three and only three broadcast networks because you needed to pay the, you needed to play this political game in order to get your TV license and then hold onto it. And the networks and the government and the FCC were sort of hand in glove with each other. And it's still the case that broadcast networks have to go through this dance and it once again, not that I want to. What about here? But it was the game. It was liberals beginning in the 1980s who started playing games or political games with the licensing process, saying things like, if. If companies don't have enough black African American people on their management boards or on their whatever, then their license should be revoked. There's a lot of leftist revoke the license of, you know, W H Q Z in Pasquie, Idaho, unless they give Jesse Jackson, who was the big expostulator of this, they come to him and say, please tell us who we should put on our board.
- [17:28]
Abe Greenwald
The conservative commentator Armstrong Williams became very wealthy because he was often turned to in order to assure minority ownership of certain broadcast outlets.
- [17:43]
John Podhoretz
Right. So I only bring this up to say that the incestuous relationship of the government and the broadcast field and politics is. Is 90 years old. And had that act not been passed, we would have been a freer. There would have been more free speech. There would have been the world that was created by cable and all that. That sort of broke the hold of this government licensing system. And now YouTube, YouTube, all this stuff, streaming, whatever.
- [18:11]
Abe Greenwald
FCC doesn't control YouTube in the way it controls broadcasting.
- [18:15]
John Podhoretz
It does not control cable, it does not control streaming, and it does not control satellite, I think. Right, nothing. The only thing that it has any control over is spectrum, which is over the air broadcasting. That's radio stations and television stations. Everything else that is transmitted in other fashion it does not have control over. So why do I bring this up? I bring this up because I am very upset about what's gone on and what Brandon Carr has done here and I'll talk about that in a minute. But once again we find ourselves in a place where the expressions of outrage and the idea that fascism is now, you know, are. We are now we've entered the fascist era. This is not a drill. You know, first they came for Jimmy Kimmel and I said nothing. All that kind of rhetoric that is going on, it's like, well, where have you been? What do you think you people do when you play games in the popular culture? You try to take the high ground and then you defend the high ground by simultaneously making it impossible for alternate views to get expressed and by playing footsie with power. Then the game of footsie with power shifts when the political atmosphere shifts and an unconventional countercultural person becomes President of the United States with an entire following that he then puts into his administration that isn't going to play by those rules anymore.
- [19:53]
Abe Greenwald
This is such an important point because this is what makes the second Trump administration so unique. It is the first Republican administration.
- [20:05]
John Podhoretz
To.
- [20:05]
Abe Greenwald
Use the machinery set up by progressives over the past century in order to politicize the economy, in order to pursue social objectives through regulation against progressivism. This never happened before. So when you look at the universities and Trump's crackdown on anti Semitism in the universities, all of that is based on the contracts between the federal government and the universities containing civil rights language that for decades progressive administrations, Democratic administrations had used to pursue their policy objectives. And most, and Republican administrations for the most part not thinking about using it for conservative ends because that wasn't part of the conservative mentality. Now we have this administration that is post conservative in a lot of ways and it's basically using the progressive machinery for anti progressive ends. And, and I think this is important too. It's doing so at a, in a cultural context where it can, it can get away with a lot. Because what we've seen since COVID and since the Biden administration is a larger cultural shift toward to the right where as Eliana says, the people, the, that actual audiences in these local markets, they're not going to stand for it anymore. Why do they have to listen to Joy Behar for an hour in the morning insult them and then Jimmy Kimmel turn, turn the MAGA. Turn this terrible event for MAGA and for the country into somehow MAGA's fault.
- [22:09]
John Podhoretz
Let's talk about myths. Okay. You know how cold weather can give you a cold. That's a myth. How we only use 10% of our brains. That's a myth. You know what else is a myth? Thread count. I fell for it. I've fallen for it several times in my life. And it's, you know, from the sheets you buy when they have high thread counts that it really can be a total fraud because it's simply a measure of fabric density and isn't a good indicator of quality. Quality. If you want great sheets, you need to look at thread quality, not count. Bollen Branch uses the highest quality organic cotton threads for long lasting sheets that get softer over time. That's my experience with them. That's my wife's experience with them. That's Abe's experience with them. We are bowling Branch people and we are because they get softer with every wash. It is a wonderful thing. Bolin brand sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave. Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become softer. As I said with every wash comes with a 30 night worry free guarantee. So feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make. With Bolin branch. Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets@bolandbranch.com commentary that's B O L L A n D B R a n c h.com commentary to say 15% and unlock free shipping exclusions apply. John here to talk to you about my beloved quince. You know, cooler temps are rolling in and as always, quince is where I'm turning for fall. Staples that actually last from cashmere to denim to boots. The quality holds up and the price still blows me away. You know Those super soft 100 Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just 60 bucks? I got a drawer full of them. Their denim is durable, fits right and their real leather jackets bring that clean, classic edge without the elevated price tag. So what makes quints different? They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen. So you get top tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. I'm going to be putting on those sweaters as soon as it gets cool enough to need them. I spent the summer wearing quince polos. I am a quince man through and through. It's a go to across the board. You know, they got accessories of all kinds. Just go to quint.com to see what I'm talking about. You keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quint. Go to quint.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q I N C.com commentary free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com/complymented well, they don't. So the classic answer to that would be that you don't want, don't watch and then you'll hurt his ratings. The show will make less money and eventually it will be canceled because it is, it is inimical to the possibility the, you know, the corporate responsibility of ABC to make money for its, for, for its shareholders and for its, you know, and for its stock price to be, to be good. The problem here is that it is, you're right, that it's post conservative, meaning people on the right did not go at cultural institutions in this way because we believe that the federal government should not exercise power in this fashion and that we don't like it when liberals do it and we're certainly not going to do it when we have power because we believe, believe in a different understanding of freedom. And the Trump world is like, well, the hell with all that. You know what, you guys are playing by Marques of Queensberry rules. And they're ultimate fighters and they obey no rules. And we're always going to lose if we, if we obey all of these niceties, you know, so there's something else.
- [26:07]
Matthew Continetti
About the administration's use of all this architecture that was set up by liberals to control these various institutions and channels, which is that Trump and the rest of the administration, they do this stuff right out in the open, which you would think would be better in some way, yet it's somehow more unsettling. I think people like when you, when you're not overt about getting your way, you know, they're more comfortable with you, with you leaning on people behind the scenes. They find out about it later, well, that was kind of bad. But they have this sense of the brazenness of it. So everything he does along these lines doesn't matter if there were 15 predecessors who did it more quietly. Every time he does it, it becomes this big scandal.
- [27:12]
John Podhoretz
Look. Right. So that's one way of looking at. Oh, go ahead, Elian.
- [27:16]
Eliana Johnson
I'm sorry, this is just a follow on, on what Matt was saying. I think insofar as the normal public is concerned, they are sick and tired of the left having a chokehold on every single elite institution in American life, whether it's Hollywood or the universities or corporate America, and they are eager to see the Trump administration break this, whether it's using the FCC or other means. And I don't think the administration will pay a penalty for use of these post conservative means. I think there's broad support for it.
- [28:05]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, can I just.
- [28:06]
Eliana Johnson
And look, with the universities, there were exactly the same First Amendment issues raised.
- [28:13]
Abe Greenwald
Right. And again, you know, what happened because of the technique and circumstances is it's not really a First Amendment case because this is. The private company ended up making.
- [28:26]
Eliana Johnson
Exactly. They did it themselves.
- [28:28]
Abe Greenwald
It's just so, I mean, now it's true, it made this decision after Carr's comments and with full awareness that this merger Eliana described would have to be approved by the fcc. But nonetheless, they did make this decision. And I just, I think that again, returns me to the sociological context of what's been going on over the past week. This has happened before, not entirely similar circumstances, but I do think we should mention that Bill Maher was canceled by ABC from the same time slot after comments he made in the wake of September 11th. His comments that he had, you know, the terrorists weren't actually the cowards that everyone was describing them as. They were they were the cowards. Yeah, and that was the. They're not the cowards.
- [29:26]
John Podhoretz
We're the cat removed from abc.
- [29:28]
Abe Greenwald
Except Bill Maher, comic, done very well. There was a lag between Mars comments and his cancellation. It was about six months when they've. ABC just let him go. And then of course, he's been on HBO ever since. But the fact is, at moments of trauma and crisis, speech undergoes much stricter scrutiny than usual. And I believe that what strikes me is that liberals don't see what happened last week as a moment of trauma and crisis. They see it as just another marking point in our tit for tat cycle of political violence. And that, I think, is what they need. They need to recognize that what happened last week is enormous, is enormous for much of the country.
- [30:34]
Eliana Johnson
A proof point of that, and I think important to note, is that Jimmy Kimmel was going to go on the air and while he was going to address the controversy around his remarks, he was not going to apologize. He was going to explain how his remarks were taken out of context.
- [30:54]
John Podhoretz
Right? Now, here's the thing. Play it back. Go back to Tuesday. Tuesday morning, I think it was the morning, maybe it was like early afternoon. The prosecutor in Utah comes out and presents the evidence that is leading to the indictment of Tyler Robinson on capital charges of murder. And the evidence is overwhelming. I mean, it's the beyond. You know, unless you think it was all literally invented, you know, it was. It's as. It's as rock solid presentation of evidence of motive, means, opportunity, purpose, intent. And the fact that this was not the act, this was not an activist schizophrenic doing something. Jimmy Kimmel tapes at 6 o' clock in the after, you know, 6 o' clock or something in LA. He heard it could have come out, say it's Tuesday night, and said, you know, yesterday I said something intemperate or I said something about how there was a new low in the way MAGA was handling this and I was wrong. And what I said, I said in ignorance and I shouldn't have said it. Would that have been enough to forestall this? You know, it's funny because the world would say, I think ordinarily you'd say, yeah, probably, but in a weird parallel to what Trump was told by Roy Cohn 40, 50 years ago, which is, don't never apologize and always keep moving forward aggressively. If you're going to be an aggressor, you have to be aggressive at all times and in all ways. I think the world of Trump hatred has completely inhered the exact same message, which is, you know, it's not that hard to say you're sorry and even to mean it. Maybe if you don't mean it, then you shouldn't say it. But, like, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. You go on and you say, just for the sake of, you know, I said something flippant or I said it in a way that. And, you know, and I shouldn't have said it. I think it probably would have been enough. I don't think that One third of ABC's affiliates would have said to ABC, we're never running the Jimmy Kimmel show ever again because he's such a jerk. And our audiences are offended and we're offended. I mean, the Sinclair statement is a statement of outrage. It's not performative. You know, and this kind of like, you know what? It's had this quality of like, you know what? We've been putting up with your crap Jimmy Kimmel for like 10 years and enough is enough. You say you're sorry, you grovel, you give Charlie Kirk's Turning Point a lot of money. And then maybe, maybe we'll think about putting you back on our stations again. But we are under no obligation in any understanding of our contract with ABC or our standing as a corporation to provide you with this platform. You go right ahead, keep doing what you're doing. You're not doing it on our property.
- [34:20]
Abe Greenwald
I think that there's. So to introduce another historical example, John F. Kennedy was shot in November 1963 by a Marxist Leninist Castro supporter who had defected to the Soviet Union. And within hours after the defector was killed himself, murdered himself, the narrative began to take hold that Kennedy was killed by a right wing extremist of whom there were many in Dallas. And this myth has persisted up until this very day. And Jim Pearson has wrote an excellent.
- [35:09]
John Podhoretz
Book on it called Camelot and the Cultural Revolution.
- [35:12]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, but one of the most important books, I actually think, published in the 21st century. That was about to happen here. It was about to happen here. And it's true, the evidence is so overwhelmingly clear of the identity of the assassin and his motivation for it, which we didn't quite get. I mean, the identity of Lee Harvey Oswald is clear once you start learning about him. But since he was killed, we never got the full airing of what drove him to assassinate the President. But I don't think we can underestimate the outrage on the right, right. At seeing in real time over the weekend liberals Progressives, the Heather Cox Richardsons of the world and Democratic representatives in Congress blame what happened on conservatives. Yeah, and that just brings me to something else we should talk about too. Because even though I believe the right has fought back that right and Jimmy Kimmel's suspension is part of that fight, to say no, you have to reckon with Tyler Robinson's politics and motivation here and his identity. It's happening in a different way among the so called MAGA influencer crowd where they are now trying to blame Charlie Kirk's assassination on the Jews and on Israel. And that, that is just as bad and needs to be fought back with just as much intensity. We need to fight against the left.
- [36:54]
John Podhoretz
Right, we need to go into this in detail. But I do want to conclude this by talking about Brandon Carr and the fcc, because we have created, we have established the context that Jimmy Kimmel has total free speech rights like everybody else. What he does not have is the right to the platform. Anyone can say anything they want and he can go, he can sort of substack and say anything he wants and all of that. You do not have the right to have the platform. It's a private, you know, unless he buys his own television station somehow or starts a cable channel or does a YouTube and does whatever he wants. ABC owns the platform. It hired him, it can fire him, it can suspend him, it can give him say, goes once a week instead of five times a week. Whatever. Free speech does not provide you with the means of the expression of your speech. And that is the error that is being made here by the people who are saying Jimmy Kimmel's speech is being curtailed. However, the chairman of the FCC threatening private companies with government action for political reasons is very, very, very bad. It is bad, it is immoral. It is unconstitutional. If we had a different political structure in the United States, and we may, I mean maybe In November of 2026, a miracle will happen. And Democrat, it will be a miracle if this happens. But Democrats take control of the Senate and they can go after Brendan Carr's jugular on the Government Oversight Committee for his overreach and overstepping of all bounds of appropriate behavior at the fcc. And all this being said, and my loathing of Jimmy Kimmel, which by the way dates back to when he was a misogynistic slime ball on this horrible show, the man show on Comedy Central which was as, which was anti woke before there was woke, but its version of anti wokeism was to be like Maxim magazine on the air and objectify women and salacious and not funny and all that. Matt's smiling because I think, well, I'm.
- [39:16]
Abe Greenwald
Getting close to my editorial standards at the Free Beacon here as you're talking about showing cheesecake and stuff.
- [39:24]
John Podhoretz
No, no, I don't mind cheesecake. That was.
- [39:25]
Abe Greenwald
Okay.
- [39:26]
John Podhoretz
All right.
- [39:26]
Abe Greenwald
That was kind of a running gag when I was the editor of the Free People.
- [39:30]
John Podhoretz
Jimmy Kimmel just sort of like Howard. The journey of Howard Stern we talked about a couple months ago has become this, like, voice and expostulate of woke when his entire career was built on, you know what? You know what people like breasts. That's what you like, and you know it. And we're showing it and blah, blah, whatever.
- [39:45]
Eliana Johnson
Okay, so we like the old Kimmel, John.
- [39:48]
John Podhoretz
I see. I didn't like the old Kimmel because I didn't think it was funny, but whatever. So my point is that he has total free speech. He doesn't have a right to the platform. But where the post conservative. Where I am a conservative and MAGA is post conservative is I do not believe that you should use the levers of government power in a manner that I think is unconstitutional. Well, and that is. It's not fascistic. But it is.
- [40:15]
Abe Greenwald
And of course, the post conservative response is. Everything we're worried about Brendan Carr doing.
- [40:22]
John Podhoretz
They already did.
- [40:23]
Abe Greenwald
Has already been done.
- [40:24]
John Podhoretz
And that is true.
- [40:26]
Abe Greenwald
And I know. And whether it's the Obama administration and Benghazi. Yeah, right. I mean, and the origins of that attack. Or as you know, I gotta say, Roseanne Barr pointed out, you know, imagine having.
- [40:44]
John Podhoretz
Yes. After having been fired by abc, off its own show.
- [40:49]
Abe Greenwald
Extremely. Much more successful show, by the way, than Jimmy Kimmel's right now.
- [40:53]
John Podhoretz
Or for having tweeted something, actually, I think fairly disgusting about Valerie Jarrett. Nonetheless, she was deplatformed and removed and all of that. And did anybody go, you know, I'm a little uncomfortable with the fact that. Okay, fair enough. I mean, what.
- [41:08]
Abe Greenwald
And that's. I think what you were saying earlier is motivating all of this, is that this, the MAGA movement, and many Trump supporters are just like, you know what? This has been done to us for so long. And we're. We're. Instead of playing by the rules of neutrality that we have done in the past, we are now going to play by the progressive rules.
- [41:31]
John Podhoretz
So my nephew Noam Bloom, who tweets as Neon Taster eight years ago, pinpointed this in a tweet that is the most concise version of what we have been talking. What Matt was just talking about here which is. It's a dialogue. Three lines, quote. I told you what Obama was doing was a slippery slope, but Trump is much worse. Yeah, that's how slopes work. A slippery slope, when you start at the top of the slope. Yeah, you're just slipping a little bit. And then, you know, by the way, like a boulder down the hill and this. So you start with Obama and canceling, you know, and doing what? Saying if you want to. If you want your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Then you go into. Then you go into Biden. Suspending the rights of eviction, the government, and there too, very importantly, creating the Department of Disinformation with Nina Kobowitz. And like having government visit tech companies to say, how are we going to suppress the speech of people who are threatening so many other people? By saying. By saying we're not telling the truth about COVID when in fact they weren't telling the truth about COVID or like we're overestimating things. It's a slippery slope. Obama pushed the rock down the hill. Trump. It accelerated during Trump. And then when Biden came along, we had a year and a half to two years of actual government suppression of speech. The use of levers of power that had never been used before. The Centers for Disease Control, like I say, controlling evictions in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control, interfering with private contract of. Of rental properties like this is.
- [43:21]
Matthew Continetti
You know, it's worth saying, though, that the. By the way, historically, I mean, this. The door was opened by Woodrow Wilson. I mean, you know, in this country, I mean, if you want to talk about, you know, violations of First Amendment and. Yeah, you know, cracking down on dissent, you know, we've not seen the like of that since.
- [43:41]
Abe Greenwald
I agree, Abe, and I think that to the, to the Trump supporters, it's. They're not so much continuing this downward slide of the boulder. They believe these actions actually push the boulder back up the hill a little bit. They believe that this is a form of deterrence. Now, they could be wrong about that. And there is always the chance in a 5050 nation that when the White House goes back to a progressive Democrat, all of these actions will be used as precedent for the climate emergency or the reason to fix prices and wages or suppression of conservative speech once again.
- [44:29]
John Podhoretz
But that is what the Obama said when they started doing stuff. I mean, the real moment that this began with Obama was when he basically told hedge funds and others who held Chrysler's debt and other debt that they were. That the unions were going to be the first were the first ones to get the money out when the government decided to cover for the defaulting of loans in the, in the auto industry after the financial meltdown. And basically, you know, he basically said, I'm rewriting eight centuries of contract law. You're going to wait your wait. We're deciding who gets the first money, and it's the unions, not you. And you know what? You want to complain, you complain. But then I'm going to be really angry at you and I'm going to set my 53% landslide vote and tell them how terrible you are, and let's see what happens there. And they all folded and kept quiet because it was too dangerous to go. So again, precedent, that's 2009. And as I say, but the problem here is that we have no evidence the boulder is ever pushed back up the Hill. That's the crisis that we're in and the cultural crisis that we're in, by which I mean, I agree, like you need some kind of form of deterrent, mutual assured destruction, where, you know, you can go at me at the fcc, I can go at you at the fcc. You know, we should all do. We should make an agreement that we're not using the FCC as a political weapon henceforth. But that's just not how it works. People don't forswear the use of. That's what Mitch McConnell said to Harry Reid when Harry Reid invoked.
- [46:16]
Abe Greenwald
It's not how it's been working right. For the past since Obama doesn't work like that anymore.
- [46:23]
John Podhoretz
If you do this, if you suspend the 60 votes for, for a federal judgeship, Right. I'm going to end up suspending the 50 votes for the Supreme Court judge. 60 votes. And you know what? Fafo like, don't do it. I'm telling you right now, don't do it because I'm going to do it now because I can't unilaterally disarm in the face of you. And we can say that Obama started or Woodrow Wilson started it. No, it's never finished. It will never finish.
- [46:51]
Matthew Continetti
We should also add to this just for context, I think, I think what the Biden administration did in terms of suppressing dissent and speech is in some ways worse because as we said before, the FCC has absolutely no control of the Internet. Right. And nevertheless, the White House, in coordination with social media platforms, crackdown on. You weren't. You couldn't show the factually true Hunter Biden story. You couldn't. You would get kicked off the platform if you gave a certain dissenting opinion on the origins of COVID and so forth. So there's, there's, there's a lot of this that has gone on in so many abuses of, in so many ways. Not even using, you know, create, just going outside the architecture that was created to manipulate.
- [47:53]
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- [48:49]
Oliver Darcy
I'm Oliver Darcy.
- [48:50]
John Passantino
And I'm John Passantino.
- [48:51]
Oliver Darcy
We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now through our nightly newsletter, Status.
- [49:00]
John Passantino
And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Power Lines.
- [49:05]
Oliver Darcy
Every Friday, we're breaking down the biggest stories shaping the industry, explaining why they matter and saying the things most people are thinking but too timid to say out loud.
- [49:14]
John Passantino
No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis that isn't afraid to call it like it is. We also pull back the curtain via our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes.
- [49:23]
Oliver Darcy
My understanding, having reported this, is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.
- [49:40]
John Passantino
Oh my God, that's Power Lines. Presented by Status. Follow Power lines and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app.
- [49:55]
Eliana Johnson
That was much worse, by the way. And I think it's part of this rage at the left wing control of elite institutions that exists not through any formal mechanism, but simply through networks of people being in these places.
- [50:10]
Abe Greenwald
And credentialism.
- [50:12]
Eliana Johnson
Exactly.
- [50:13]
John Podhoretz
And having the degree. What sociologists would call, you know, kin affiliation, which is the literal kin affiliation.
- [50:21]
Abe Greenwald
Like many cases, you are a.
- [50:23]
John Podhoretz
You are a lawyer in the Biden White House. And you know what, you're married to the general counsel at Facebook or something. And so this conversation doesn't just take place with Brendan Carr going on, you know, going on a friendly podcast and threatening goes on at the dinner table, that this world is very hermetic. The liberal world, on the one hand, is large and controls many institutions. On the other hand, it's very hermetic. People go to 20 different schools. They all went to high school together. It's a. It's a. You know, it's a sort of aristocracy. And it was. Is able to transmit these messages to each other quietly in a. You might say, almost, and then create this kind of phalanx of coverage, which is to say, when people say, you can't say Jay Bhattacharya, a noted scientist at Stanford, can't say. You're going about this Covid thing all wrong. You can't. Who are you to deplatform?
- [51:21]
Abe Greenwald
Half human, half. Half the country is invisible to them.
- [51:24]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [51:25]
Abe Greenwald
And I think this is the point.
- [51:26]
John Podhoretz
Or it's visible and frightening. Like, it's not visible. It's like, we need to shut them down.
- [51:31]
Abe Greenwald
Who are they going to murder?
- [51:33]
John Podhoretz
All of us.
- [51:33]
Abe Greenwald
Right. And that, you know, this is a similar point is made by Barton Swaim in the. In his new column in the Journal today where he says, you know, that the coverage of Charlie Kirk's assassination was just. In liberal media institutions were just so ignorant. Just ignorant. Or in the way you say, hostile because of these stereotypes or misjudgments in a way that conservatives couldn't really do. Because conservatives, as we can see even in the Kimmel case, are very aware of what the other side is doing and what they're saying and what they're about.
- [52:16]
John Podhoretz
So let. Let's move on to what you brought up, which was. It's really disturbing, that. Very disturbing. And. And so let's just lay it out that there were these two alternate scenarios being laid out by lunatic. One the one hand, it's not lunatic, because basically much of the liberal left participated in the idea that it's probably the case that Tyler Robinson was a conservative revisionist in Utah and all of that.
- [52:42]
Abe Greenwald
His family was conservative. His family was conservative. Yeah.
- [52:46]
John Podhoretz
So then there's another alternate line about what has gone on here, which is that from the woke Right to beyond the woke. Right. Which is something fishy is going on with the Jews in Israel and Charlie.
- [53:05]
Abe Greenwald
Was caught up in it.
- [53:06]
John Podhoretz
Charlie had decided, according to this alternate reality, that he didn't like Israel's behavior or he was.
- [53:18]
Abe Greenwald
He was being anguished by criticisms from pro Israel people and allies of his.
- [53:26]
John Podhoretz
And threatened according to another narrative, conspiracy theorist.
- [53:32]
Abe Greenwald
Blackmailed, blackmailed, blackmailed.
- [53:35]
John Podhoretz
And. And Candace Owens basically said that Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager blackmailed Charlie Kirk into silence at a party in the Hamptons. And everybody who was at that party, including Ackman says of course I didn't do that. People who were in the said nothing like this ever happened and it doesn't matter. Israel blackmailing Charlie Kirk into being pro Israel and and then kills him. Maybe because he's about to come out. He had had a conversation with Tucker Carlson in which he's about to come out against Israel and then somebody shoots him. It must be the Mossad.
- [54:19]
Eliana Johnson
Well, let's step back for, for one second. I think it might be useful. This seems to have started with the day of Kirk's day death. Bibi Netanyahu gave a statement, a public statement, moving statement very. In which he said that Kirk was a once in a generation figure and he was murdered for speaking truth and defending freedom. And he called him a lion hearted supporter of Israel. And that seemed to have been. That triggered Tucker Carlson Bridge too far for those on the right who hate the Jewish state. From Tucker Carlson to Candace Owen and others who were triggered by that and did not want to see the prime minister of Israel associated in any way with Charlie Kirk and began to come out and see say you know what, Charlie Kirk really actually hated Israel and therein began this war over his legacy.
- [55:31]
Abe Greenwald
And it gets even crazier now that now Charlie Kirk was going to. He was on the verge of converting to Catholicism or he. Tucker had someone saying to him, well he was really interested in Russian Orthodoxy. I mean this attempt to kind of transform Kirk into what this, you know, call it woke. Right. Call it the MAGA influencers again though it's hard to say what they influence except the online discourse. They're trying to take him and transform him into something he was plainly not right. And that's often what happens. You know, it is often what happens in the wake of a martyrdom now.
- [56:11]
John Podhoretz
But here is the creepiest part though. So the creepy part is you look at this and go, oh, this is also crazy. And you know, Candace Owens is now the definition of crazy. And maybe it's her marketing tool to be the, to like, establish the craziest possible position. And Tucker is doing the same thing. And they're bad. And there's, they're, they're also nuts. And they, they're, they're openly anti Semitic. And there's no question about it. That's not where things got scary yesterday and the day before yesterday. Two things scared me. Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a rational person and I think is a crazy person and a conspiracy theorist and believes in Jewish space, lasers and all that kind of stuff. But she issued this statement which seems to have been triggered by the fact that Ben Shapiro, the most prominent Jewish voice in the new media or the. Whatever, whatever you want to call the world of the sort of podcasting media, Orthodox Jew, had hosted, guest hosted Charlie Kirk's show on, yes, Thursday or Wednesday.
- [57:30]
Eliana Johnson
Ben and two colleagues, Right.
- [57:32]
John Podhoretz
And pledged a million dollars to Turning Point usa. And this led Marjorie Taylor Greene to assert, though she doesn't name Shapiro, that Jews were attempting to take over this Christian organization, Turning Point usa, and that people who were in fealty to a foreign power, meaning Israel, and are not believers in the one true Christ.
- [58:06]
Eliana Johnson
Need.
- [58:06]
John Podhoretz
To keep their grubby, long, pointy nosed protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hands off our wonderful Christian Turning Point USA organization. She's a sitting member of Congress from the great state of Georgia. That is terrifying. Even more terrifying is that Megyn Kelly, my old friend, used to live down the street from me, known her for 20 years, has a lot of money, got $60 million in a settlement from NBC, so it can't be about money. Has been increasingly podcasting, like moving into that space occupied by Tucker and Candace Owens, rather than being sort of mainstream ish, and basically said, you know, anytime I say anything that even is mildly critical of Israel, they all come down on me. And Charlie was having the same experience, as I understand it. And what the hell is going on in this country. Megyn Kelly. So it's not just the world of. That's Megyn Kelly, who was adjacent, but not really part of the crazy anti Semitic Right. But is now apparently wanting to play footsie with them, win them over, say, yeah, this is really bad. Candace Owens is a. Israel is committing genocide and is destroyed and is killing Christians for purposeful.
- [59:43]
Abe Greenwald
I just want to point out I.
- [59:45]
Matthew Continetti
Have a theory that. I'm sorry, I'll be quick. When you are, when you're playing footsie in public, you're already there all the way in private. I've seen it over and over. Someone starts to say, you know, I support Israel, but there's something fishy about. By the way, which Meghan also said. She, she when, when Cenk Weger said that the nonsensical left wing podcaster. Yeah. Hates Israel. Left wing podcaster. When he tweeted out, in the wake of the Operation Midnight Hammer, there was that ridiculous intelligence leak that said that, that the nuclear reactors were not destroyed. Chenk Uyghur tweeted out, this is, this is neocons or Israel who want to drag the US into a larger war. 90% of the time when something like this happens, it's Israel. And Megyn Kelly said, I agree. And I. And a bell went off my head then and I said, here we go.
- [60:56]
Abe Greenwald
But this is, you know, populating this podcast world. It's, it's online. It is representative, I do think of the highly engaged online and podcast audience. The Free Beacon and Eliana had a great piece just yesterday that it's not representative of MAGA or MAGA youth in general when you look at polling, but.
- [61:26]
John Podhoretz
It'S definitely a poll, right? You did, you and Echelon.
- [61:29]
Abe Greenwald
Free Beacon and Echelon did the poll. Yeah, but I just want to. Again, I'm history boy. Today, I want to talk about the Wellstone Memorial. In 2002, when Paul Wellstone, the senator of Eliana's home state, was going to.
- [61:44]
Eliana Johnson
Say, you're hitting close to home here.
- [61:46]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I'm sure you have a take on it, too. But when he died in the plane crash ahead of the 2002 midterm elections, it was a shock and it was an awful, tragic accident. Wellstone was beloved on the left and many people on the right, including me, admired Paul Wellstone. You know, he was, he was a professor and he had his progressive convictions. And you could appreciate that Walter Mondale, the former vice president, stepped in to take his nomination and there was a big memorial held, televised for Wellstone in a arena that turned into a extremely polarizing and vitriolic progressive slash Democratic political rally. And it's my view that the rally, which was supposed to be a memorial, actually catapulted Norm Coleman into that Senate seat, which he held for the next six years.
- [62:52]
John Podhoretz
Of course, it was Democratic.
- [62:53]
Abe Greenwald
Just as an aside, Al Franken stole it from him. We'll check the facts.
- [62:56]
John Podhoretz
Right. Election integrity.
- [62:58]
Abe Greenwald
Nonetheless, he held it for six years. The great Norm Call. So when I think about what's going to happen this weekend, Turning Point has an NFL stadium they're going to fill with people, young people who are supporters of Charlie Kirk who are grievously wounded by his assassination. And they're filling it up with the MAGA universe from the President on down. I do wonder what, what the message and tone of the of that is going to be. And I'm especially worried about one of the speakers and that is Tucker Carlson, who has already used a platform given to him by the Vice President of the United States when Vice President Vance hosted Charlie's show in his honor to attack Israel and the Jews for Charlie Kirk's assassination.
- [63:59]
John Podhoretz
It was frankly disgusting for the Prime Minister of Israel to commemorate the death of Charlie Kirk and say that he was an ally.
- [64:06]
Abe Greenwald
And I just think it would just.
- [64:10]
Eliana Johnson
For anybody to try to appropriate Charlie's legacy for their own ends as Carlson tries to appropriate for Charlie's legacy.
- [64:18]
Abe Greenwald
And I just think it would be terrible if that's what's coming out of this weekend's memorial when we should really be doing.
- [64:24]
John Podhoretz
By the way, this memorial is also frightening, I think in a bunch of potential ways. I mean, not that what'll happen will happen, but 65,000 people. So in the crowd of 65,000 people, there are going to be a thousand who are there to disrupt is my guess. Like not. They're not going to have guns. They're not going to be able to get guns in. There'll be magnetometers like crazy. The President's going to be, their vice President's going to be there. But are they going to start screaming? Are they going to start standing up with signs? Are they going to, you know, code pink things and all of that? And I'm scared because I'm honestly scared because that's, that's where you could get like at any, like at a sports. If you're, if, if you go to, you know, Yankee Stadium and you show up in a Red Sox hat and you start cheering for the Red Sox, a drunken guy two rows behind you could throw a beer at your head just because you're, you know, that's a serves that happens in America and one bad incident here and it's a powder keg. I mean not the stadium. It's just America is sort of in a powder.
- [65:34]
Abe Greenwald
They should still celebrate his legacy and they should still continue his work.
- [65:38]
John Podhoretz
I don't disagree.
- [65:41]
Eliana Johnson
Just to go back to the conspiracy theories for a second, I think it's important to state what appears to me to have been the truth of the matter on this. But I'm interested in your guys thoughts on this too. And the truth of it seems to have been that Charlie was an ardent Zionist. And he took heat from some for platforming Tucker Carlson at a Turning Point usa. No, no, no. He did.
- [66:14]
Abe Greenwald
Even earlier.
- [66:16]
Eliana Johnson
He did, yeah. He did take criticism for inviting Tucker Carter Carlson to a Turning Point event at which Carlson took the stage and said Jeffrey Epstein is a Mossad asset and other conspiratorial things implicating Israel and the Jews. And he also appears to have been frustrated for feeling that he couldn't criticize Israel's conduct of the war, but nonetheless remained a wholehearted supporter of Israel and the Jewish state. That seems to me to be the truth of the matter.
- [66:55]
Matthew Continetti
I agree. And I also want to say that we, we call this faction, people have taken to calling this faction the woke Right for very good reasons. They model the woke Left. They are like the Woke Left in many ways and terms of their sensitivity and their rules. And they do have a inclination towards cancel culture. I think some, sometimes when people call what they do cancel culture, it's not. It's not. But nevertheless, there is a bit of that going on. But one of the other things they have in common with the woke Left is that just as the left went down these roads that ordinary liberals couldn't care less about, and we're like, what is this nonsense you're going on about? I have like, kitchen table problems and like, real world problems. That's what, that's what they're doing. On the right, the average Trump voter is not thinking, is not getting into the weeds about this fake Mossad plot against Charlie Kirk. This is, this is the equivalent of like, you know, say the right pronouns or, you know, whatever nonsense the woke Left was up to. They are spiraling off into their own thing that has no connection to the everyday lives on the left or the right.
- [68:18]
Eliana Johnson
And that's what our poll showed. Actually, the poll that the Free Beacon conducted with Echelon Insights is that folks on the right may be tuning in to Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, these guys, but a majority of their audiences remain supportive of Israel. And a plurality, you know, 38%, a big part, just don't have views on this and remain open to persuasion. But, you know, largely people who are taking in this fulminating against Israel and the Jewish state haven't been persuaded by them.
- [69:00]
John Podhoretz
Right. Look, the parallel here is remarkably strong because the. Well, let me put it this way. Let me move on to slightly different way. Something is also going on here behind the scenes that people should understand and that we probably have to go. So we're talking about a marketplace or we're talking About a marketplace in which these celebrities, influencers, podcasters, speakers are all in this ecosystem on the right. That is a new thing in American culture, media, society, right? The, the explosion of the podcast world and the creation of the YouTube visual personality and all of that is new and the like, the rules haven't been set and there's, it's a, it's a, it's a marketplace. And what I would say is Tucker's, Tucker Carlson's war and Marjorie Taylor Greene's participation and others, really a war against Ben Shapiro, who is kind of like the founder, one of the one or two founders of this entire ecosystem, has a nakedly raw commercial aspect to it. They are fighting for supremacy and leadership and being the number one podcast on Apple in the country, conservative space, and getting, you know, the largest audience on YouTube for ads and all of that. And so it is not simply an ideological war that is going on here. It is that there is for some of them a real interest in finding a way to delegitimize Shapiro so they can convince his audience to migrate to them for clicks for audience for the YouTube algorithm and to make more money and to have more influence. And that is creepy because they're doing it. That's fine. That's. You are, you know, it's a total, you know, blood sport trying to be number one in the media, but implicating his faith. Also claiming that, you know, Ben, who is a friend of, you know, certainly is a friend of the evangelical Christian and is, you know, is like a.
- [71:24]
Abe Greenwald
This is part of it, John. It's a huge fight for the soul of evangelical Christianity that's so big that we're splintering evangelicalism from Israel and a belief in, you know, what Christians call the Old Testament as the prelude to the New Testament. This is driving a lot of it as well as, as you say, pecuniary interest.
- [71:46]
John Podhoretz
Right? So that, that is a, that's a, that's a huge issue. It's clear that Erica Kirk, based on her, Charlie's widow, based on her remarkable eulogy, she is looking at him as a religious leader or his example, being religious like he was, he loved Christ.
- [72:04]
Abe Greenwald
Seemed to be where he was headed.
- [72:05]
John Podhoretz
Church, right? Once you go to church, he wants you to get married, he wants you to be fruitful and multiply. That's what we did, that's what we want you to do. And so that's where she's going, I think. And then the question is, can she be somehow hijacked and co opted into this much more political or can this whole thing be into this?
- [72:24]
Abe Greenwald
I know we're spending a lot of time, but there's three different. There's Charlie as a religious figure, right? Then there's Trump. You know, Trump is not anti Israel. As we talk about here. Trump is gonna talk about carrying on Charlie's political work. And so there's a huge push within the Republican Party and with. Within MAGA Inc. To make sure that what Charlie Kirk accomplished in registering college students, in making Trump conservatism appealing to young people, that continues. So there's a religious axis, there's a political axis, and then there is this dark, conspiratorial, anti Semitic axis as well that needs to be challenged and combated at every turn.
- [73:11]
John Podhoretz
It is terrifying that it exists. That's, that's. It is. You know, it makes me sound sort of like, I don't know, wimpy, to put it that way, rather than say we will fight it and we will fight them on the beaches and all of that, but like that, that basically these, these people who have gone in this direction are basically handmaidens of a multi decade psyop led. Andy McCarthy talked about it on our show yesterday. Led by the Muslim Brotherhood and led on and then added on to by gutter for the last generation. And they are simply operating as the shock troops of a, of an effort to turn America and the world against the Jews. And they are bowing to it. They have been seduced by it. And it's a real thing and it is very dangerous. And it's dangerous to us here and it's dangerous to civilization as we know it. Eliana Johnson, thank you so much for this cheerful day here at the Commentary podcast. I hope, I hope we have, we have, you know, made sure that you have just a spring in your step as you, as we, as we say goodbye.
- [74:44]
Eliana Johnson
Thanks for having me.
- [74:45]
John Podhoretz
You bet.
- [74:45]
Eliana Johnson
And so I have a spring in my step just from being in your company, John.
- [74:49]
John Podhoretz
Oh, and same here, here. And for Abe and Matt. We'll be back tomorrow. I'm John Pot horde's Keep the Candle bur.