Abe Greenwald (4:38)

It's right there in Genesis.

John Podhoretz (4:40)

Man and woman, right? And that was too much. And once you refuse to accept the woke definition of gender fluidity, once you say, what are you talking about? And moreover, that is harmful. It's harmful for minors in particular. When you try to impose it on them, the whole superstructure begins to fall apart. And I think that was where the radicals and the Democrats went too far and created the conditions for this Trump revolution.

Matthew Continetti (5:14)

I watched the ceremony. I agree, it was extraordinary. And I suddenly had this other thought, which was that when I first got into conservative thought and sort of discovering it, one of the fun things about it intellectually was that counterintuitive ideas could turn out to be correct. For example, it's intuitive. When you see someone who doesn't have money, you think, oh well, then we should provide for them, give them money. But turns out that that has unintended consequences downstream and maybe it's not such a good idea. And that's the conservative counterintuitive idea. And it was a double edged sword because it was interesting and it's right. But it made it harder for people to come to your side because it requires an extra leap sort of in the, in the chain of thinking. Suddenly conservative thought is intuitive thought. Now the, the radicals on the left have made it that easy. There is nothing more intuitive than saying girls will be played with girls, boys will play with boys. The sex that you, that you are is the sex that you are. And I think you could see this on a host of issues now, which I think explains sort of conservatism under Trump and why for the first time in so long, more people self identify as Republicans than as Democrats. They've sort of turned this intuitive counterintuitive problem on its head.

Abe Greenwald (6:53)

Right, okay. So I think both are. The intuitive and the counterintuitive are both working together here a little bit. So, Abe, you're right, that One of the great lessons of, I don't know, political science or social science or something, as laid out in neoconservatism, beginning with the origination of the publication of the Public interest quarterly in 1965, was, yeah, poverty programs may actually exacerbate poverty. That's counterintuitive. But why that happens turns out to be entirely intuitive. If you give somebody $100, rather than him making the hundred dollars, that $100 will be worth less to him than the money made by the sweat of his brow. And he will be less careful with it. He will husband it less. He will expect another hundred dollar payment later. And all of that is perfectly intuitive.

Matthew Continetti (7:55)

It was perfectly logical. I don't know.

Abe Greenwald (7:57)

That's perfectly. Okay, logical, but I mean, fine, perfectly logical. But it also comports, right, in that sense, with everybody's experience, somebody gives you something as opposed to something that you had to work to earn, it means less to you. That's like being a human being. Similarly. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

John Podhoretz (8:19)

Oh, no, I just remember the Fox Butterfield effect that James Tranto always used to put in his Best of the Web column where Fox Butterfield was the New York Times crime reporter. And during the 90s, when crime was finally falling thanks to conservative policies, Fox Butterfield would write an article with the headline, prison Population increases despite fall in crime. Yeah, so that's counterintuitive to liberals, but for conservatives it's extremely. Yeah, if you put the criminals in jail, you'll have less crime.

Abe Greenwald (9:00)

But that is a fantastic example of the way in which being counterintuitive then becomes counterintuitive. In other words, like, you become so blinded by ideology that you fail to see the disaster and logic that you are presenting to people very earnestly as Fox Butterfield was being very earnest. I mean, why are we putting so many people in jail when crime is falling? Right. Qed, literally, that is what the term QED means. I think that the gender ideology thing achieves. So I think, Matt, you're right. You're saying, look where wokeness started, which was with race. Race. And the problem of the way the country has handled African Americans and black people is our original stain. It remains the American original stain. Everybody pretty much agrees that it's an original stain, unless you're some kind of neo Nazi or neo Confederate or, or, you know, some real freak figure on the very far extreme. And so things that connect to that are immediately have heft and weight.

John Podhoretz (10:17)

We want people to have equal rights in this country.

Abe Greenwald (10:20)

Right. And that, of course, is also what Explains some of the not pre wokeness in terms of the expansion of rights from the 60s onward.

John Podhoretz (10:32)

Right.

Abe Greenwald (10:32)

From gender egalitarianism in the sense of women should not be paid less than men. Right. Women should not be denied senior executive positions in government or in private sector because they're women, because they get pregnant, because they. Whatever this system is, we need to make it so.

John Podhoretz (10:55)

That's why same sex marriage succeeded and same sex marriage it was framed as equal rights.

Abe Greenwald (11:01)

Right. It's not fair. You should be able to love whom you of government should not be standing in the way of denying people the right to make households of the sort that they want and all of that based on something else. So this was not.

John Podhoretz (11:14)

And then trans becomes not equal rights, but an imposition.

Abe Greenwald (11:20)

Right. So all of that is equal rights. We're talking about women, gays, blacks even. You could say if you believe that there was some sort of systemic discrimination against other minority groups which we don't have to get into. But there's some logic that you know, like Hispanics weren't being treated fairly. However you want to look at it and say that let's say housing, housing, you need to make sure that people aren't allowed to discriminate in housing. And it's not just against black people or something like that, at least at the state level. Then we get to the definition of what it means to be human, which isn't, you know, where what, what you do with your genital, what you know where, where what you prefer in terms of your sexual congress, but what it means to be human. And that is what the definition of human is that we divide up between males and females. And a very small number of males may be attracted to menace. Very small number of females might be.

John Podhoretz (12:26)

Attracted to women and not just humans by every single organism on the planet that reproduces sexually and male and female.

Abe Greenwald (12:35)

Then you are asked, and this is very important, this is where, you know, the people use the word Orwellian very loosely and incorrectly. But it is part of Orwell's point about language, the misuse of language and the totalitarian ideology that is the subject of 1984 is you are not only asked, but it is demanded of you that you become advocates for and believe in things that you don't believe in. That everything in your being and your system says you do not believe in everything. Says a man is a man, is a woman is a woman. Everything says two plus two equals four. But you know what you have to do in order to be a new kind of person who fits in with the way you are supposed to think. Or you're going to lose your job, you're going to lose your house, you're going to lose your wife, you're going to lose everything. Or you might, you might get someone taking a helmet, putting the helmet on your head with a bunch of rats in it who will eat your head off is to say that two plus two equals five. And increasingly over the course from 2014 or 2015, when Black lives Matter started to the present people in this country, it was demanded of us that we believe things that no one has ever believed before. And that I will say I believe a generation from now, no one will ever believe again. And it was so fast and it was so successful that I think what it exposed was the hollowness of the people who were making the demand. In other words, not even allowing there to be a debate or discussion over whether or not there was something harmful about an 11 year old taking puberty blockers and saying that even that discussion was wrong and that an entire part of the American political and social spectrum simply accepted as though it was like, I don't know, a speed limit. That this was something that they were supposed to think and believe. That, that just made we, we just reelected a guy who was kind of a pariah in many ways. And he got elected to this unprecedented term because whoever he is and whatever he stood for, he was not that he was anti that. That's what that visual yesterday was, is. I know you all think I'm a rapist. You all think that I, I abuse women and I pay off porn star of that. But I'm not letting a boy into a girl's locker room. What's more important to you? What. What has more effect on your daily life as an American? How I, how I conducted myself personally. And I'm not defending this or, I mean this is, this is obviously not anything he said. This is kind of second order implicit. Or am I here to say those people are crazy and we're driving you crazy and we're starting to make it thinkable and even morally praiseworthy to cut off body parts of 14 year olds. Who's better? Me? Who pardons 1500 criminals and says that insurrections are okay at the Capitol or them? And the answer is me. You know the answer. So when you have a kind of binary choice. He now knows how to face down the binary choice that liberals have foisted. This was not our fight. We didn't.

John Podhoretz (16:25)

You're muted, Abe.

Abe Greenwald (16:28)

We didn't start this fight.

Matthew Continetti (16:30)

That would explain why no one was listening to me when I just wanted to kind of augment what you're both saying here. The Orwellian stuff did begin before the trans part of the wokeness came to the fore. For example, the mostly peaceful riots. Right, right. I mean, that's a sort of textbook example.

John Podhoretz (16:56)

Yes.

Matthew Continetti (16:56)

Where you're being asked to look at two plus two and pronounce it.

John Podhoretz (17:02)

Or the remember the professor, the Mizzou professor who said we need some muscle over here.

Abe Greenwald (17:07)

Oh, yeah.

John Podhoretz (17:08)

Against this Asian American student who's I think just watching this protest. It was again, it was a BLM protest. Yeah. So yeah, there was 15.

Abe Greenwald (17:18)

Right, right.

John Podhoretz (17:19)

That was 2015 too.

Abe Greenwald (17:20)

And a professor sicking a mob on.

John Podhoretz (17:23)

A kid and the whole Yale incident with the Halloween Costume.

Abe Greenwald (17:29)

Right. Mrs.

John Podhoretz (17:30)

Right. So you had these kind of previews. But in my view, it really took trans to just say to the American people, whoa, whoa, this has got to stop.

Abe Greenwald (17:43)

And we have so many other examples. Right? And indeed, the virtue being that you, that you argue something that is on its face either offensive or crazy or wrong. Calling Jews Nazis is one of those, saying that Israel is committing a genocide in an area where the population is growing is another. And the demand that you not only accept that argument, but that you echo it and parrot it and then walk around at demonstrations being, expressing your solidarity.

John Podhoretz (18:22)

With it and become violent when you're.

Abe Greenwald (18:24)

Challenged, that is a very important part of creating, enforcing and advancing an orthodoxy. But what, and this is true, has been true forever. But when it really is, we are going to make you argue something that you know is not true. That's what we want. What we want is for you. And by the way, Trump, people do this to crowd size, stuff like that. Argue something that your eyes show and everybody knows implicitly is wrong. That's the best way to create fidelity and fealty for the larger cause. If you are willing to surrender your common sense and your sort of good understanding of something for this supposedly larger point or to fight the bad guys on the other side or something like that, then, then they have you. Then, then you are part of their, you are part of the, this other mob. And it's old, right? I mean, there's one of the great examples in philosophical history, let's just say, of the trans thing, is the Transcendentalists, not to use the word translate, the transcendentalists, philosophers, American philosophers of the 19th century, right, were obsessed and consumed with the question of following Bishop Barclay and stuff. What, what, what was anything real? Is there reality or Is there not real? What, what is, what is, what is nature? Who are we in nature? Is there anything real or something like that? And the two great examples of the refutation of these ideas was when, when Bishop Barclay in 18th century London said, how do we know? How, how, how, how do we know that there is a reality and that everything that was going on isn't just something in our own heads that we're creating as we go? And somebody said to Samuel Johnson, how do you refute Bishop Barclay? And there's a stone on the ground, and he kicked it with his foot. And then he said, I refute it. 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John Podhoretz (26:01)

So can I say what this also reveals, this whole history that we're talking about, and that's the weakness of mainstream liberalism. You know, I don't, I'm not going.

Abe Greenwald (26:17)

To hear what you're talking exactly.

John Podhoretz (26:18)

I'm not going post liberal here. I, I don't want to make sure people understand. I believe in freedom, equality before the law, constitutionalism. However, there was an argument being made throughout this whole period that said the problem is mainstream liberals, liberal elites, people who have, you know, typical Democratic, social, cultural, economic views, foreign policy views, simply don't have the spine to stand down these radical challenges. And you know, they were right. That argument was right because when BLM came along, it took over the Democratic Party and it led to an attitude toward crime and public safety that was catastrophic. And when trans came along, the Democratic Party folded too. And not only folded, but was willing to use the machinery of government that policed civil rights against people who dissented from the trans line. And just as we saw in the 60s when that era's radicals, the black power movement, the anti war movement, the campus movement and counterculture challenged liberalism, mainstream liberalism in the Democratic Party and the mainstream liberals and Democrats folded, the same thing happened this time. And in both cases, the collapse of mainstream liberalism created a conservative counter revolution. And I think that's what we're beginning to see happening here. And it makes it to be a very exciting time to be alive.

Abe Greenwald (28:15)

It is very, very hard for moderation to fight. Moderation is the avoidance of, or the argument that fighting is unnecessary and that reason, free and fair discussion and rational understanding will lead us into a common good. That's what moderation is. Right. I remember in the early 90s when Joe Klein began talking about this incredible phenomenon of the radical middle. The radical middle. People in this country are angry. They're angry and they're furious and they're so angry and they're angry, but they're all in the middle. And in a funny way, you can't really be angry and be in the middle because if you're angry, you're angry at someone or something or some cause or some idea, and then you line yourself up against it and wherever you're aligned, it's not in the middle. The middle is. Well, that idea has some good parts and it has some bad parts. You know, it's sort of like civil, like obviously affirmative, aggressive efforts to recruit talented minority people to jobs. Do it. Being very aggressive about it. As long as you're not unfair to other people, that's good. That's affirmative action. That's the moderate position on affirmative action. And in the end, nobody held it. I mean, everybody sort of holds it, but nobody really held it because if this was something you cared about either, it was like, well, the hell with that. What we need is 20% of the boardroom has got to be black. Or don't you count that way? What about my kid is white? Does that mean he's not going to get into law school just so your kid or get into law school with worse scores and worse grades.

Matthew Continetti (30:20)

This reminds me. Fair, okay. I had a conversation with a friend who I think thinks of himself as being somewhere in the middle. Soon after that video of the California firewoman circulated, right?

Abe Greenwald (30:36)

I mean the one where she explains that you're safer when the person who is trying to say is trying to save you from the fire looks like you.

Matthew Continetti (30:42)

And if a guy is found and if people ask me, can I lift a guy out of a fire? I say if you're, if you're in middle of a fire, you're in the wrong place. And his response was, I think you can do it both. You can hire all the women, all the trans firefighters you want and still have security. And I said, no, you can't. There is always a trade off. And in terms of the radical middle and why you can't have it. John, it reminds me of my favorite quote from your mother, which I probably used more than any other quote, which is at some point you have to join the side you're already on, right?

Abe Greenwald (31:20)

But you don't even know you're on the side. Right. What happened here is that people were driven or driven to a side. This, this fight was entirely unnecessary. The damage done to liberalism, leftism, and, and all this by, by, by trans was an unnecessary fight for them. But the fact that the, that liberals and Democrats had no antibodies to fight this disease that entered into their bloodstream is the salient point. And I will give you, I'll give you another example here on, off this scale. So in 2019, what happened? Elon Omar I, I can't remember if it was Rashida Talib or Ilan Omar said that. So the squad comes into existence in 2018 with the 2018 election and there are four, maybe five members of Congress, right? Was it four? Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib Ayatta Presley and AOC and AOC four. And Ilhan Omar said, you know, with the Jews, it's all about the Benjamins. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, most powerful woman ever in American politics, thought to be the most effective leader, sort of political leader of a party in the last 25 years, at least in this frame, brought together the House Democratic Caucus with the idea that they would issue a note of censure or disapproval for what Rashida Tlaib had said. And she lost. People started having temper tantrums in the conference room about how, why were we attacking each other when Donald Trump is out there being evil? We. We need to stick together and not do this. Yeah, she thought it was a gimme. She was doing this to take this story out of the public and to kind of cauterize a wound before it actually started to separate.

John Podhoretz (33:23)

I remember around that time, Robert Kagan wrote a essay for the Washington Post where he said, you have to be on the squad side because Trump is against the squad. So Trump changed this whole picture, too.

Abe Greenwald (33:36)

So let's rerun history. So let's go back to 2019, and for reasons that we don't really understand, whatever happened, happened in that room, didn't happen. And the House passes a resolution of censure for Ilhan Omar. And I, granted, I'm making a stretch here because we're talking four years before October 7th, but do the campuses, do the elites explode in the Same way in 2023 if this originating wound in the halls of Congress was in fact cauterized, sealed up, and the people who were guilty for it faced some punishment and were worried about doing it the next time? Or was that the message that there would be no consequences on the left for rhetoric and ideas like that, and that that itself, you know, allowed this pool, this septic pool, to grow and fester and get more and more diseased? I don't.

Matthew Continetti (34:51)

Oh, I think it's. I know. I think you're onto something. I don't think it's a direct. Direct line, as you said, but I think that it's a data point, and there's a bunch of contributing data points, because there were many instances of squad members saying things and doing things along these lines, and they all got a pass every time. The worst that they would face, you know, would be like a call for them to be more educated on, you know, the historical plight of the Jews or something like that. And that created altogether an atmosphere that certainly allowed for this.

John Podhoretz (35:29)

And I would just back up A little bit more, John, which is, I do think the role of Trump is critical here because, you know, blm, same sex marriage are established in Obama's second term. And in Obama's second term there's still this sense that history is directional. History is pointing us toward Obama's vision of what equality looks like and what freedom looks like. And it turns out that about half the country is willing to vote for someone who rejects that vision. And I'd say more than half the country rejected it. But because of Trump and Trump's newness and Trump's flaws, he got, you know, about 48% of the vote, 47% of the vote, but still won. And that victory confirmed for the radicals their view of what America was. And so after Trump wins, in need, in need of radical, need of radical change. Right, because that was Ta Nehisi Coates's cover story for the Atlantic after Trump wins is that this is a white supremacist who has won the presidency. And so we need a complete uprooting. And again, mainstream Democrats, the Pelosi's of the world, had already kind of buckled to Ta Nehisi Coates as the intellectual of the era.

Abe Greenwald (36:57)

Right.

John Podhoretz (36:57)

And so when he said that, they said, oh, okay. And so here comes AOC and here comes Ilhan Omar and Rashida Taleb and they start spewing awful things about the United States and about Jews and about Israel. And the Democratic Party doesn't know what to. Oh, well, you know, Trump, Trump, Trump.

Abe Greenwald (37:15)

But my point here is we, we will tend to think or sort of not we, but you know, sort of Republicans or you know, sort of the standard issue. Republicans would tend to think, there's Nancy Pelosi, she's a San, she's a far left San Francisco Democrat. You can see by, you know, oh, she's everything. And that's a misapprehension. Not that I'm saying anything nice about Nancy Pelosi. She represents the shift in the Overton window here, which is to say she was a conventional Democratic left liberal. Anti Semitism sprouted up in the caucus that she was managing and her impulse was to tamp it down and to snuff it out because the consequences of it could be dire. And that was the first moment at which it, that that's the liberalism that Matt, you're talking about that was toothless or lost its capacity to have any kind of moral suasion over the rest of the country.

Matthew Continetti (38:12)

How about Joe Biden who became president trans.

Abe Greenwald (38:16)

Right.

Matthew Continetti (38:16)

You know, I mean, this is A.

Abe Greenwald (38:17)

Guy who's daily communicant at Mass, he's holding his rosary.

John Podhoretz (38:22)

Yeah.

Matthew Continetti (38:22)

Suddenly holding trans celebrations at the White House, he's declaring Easter trans recognition day.

John Podhoretz (38:31)

I see Admiral levine at the HHS.

Abe Greenwald (38:34)

Yeah, yeah. Sam, Sam. Mr. New Binion Energy. Sam Binion luggage.

John Podhoretz (38:39)

A luggage lover.

Abe Greenwald (38:41)

Yeah. Right, Yeah. I mean, all of this is real. I'm just saying that liberalism itself, it's not that there isn't a world in which common sense liberals were looking, could have had they had enough cultural support structure, could have somehow stood against the, the bad guys. But once, once battle lines were drawn. And this is where the 60s are. Very much a fantastic analogy of this. You know, you mentioned Bob Kagan's piece about standing with the squad. And I'm going to tell the story I told a couple months ago to people about what went on at Cornell when Bob Kagan's father, Don, the. One of the great historians of the 20th century, classical historian, was a professor at, at Cornell. And Cornell blew up into, you know, into riot, terrible stuff. And there was a meeting of the good liberals all standing around and, you know, trying to figure out what to do should they issue a letter, should there be this, should there be that, something like that. And they were all standing there. You know, you could sort of imagine the image out of some slightly stupid movie. You know, they're all sitting there in their, in their corduroy jackets with the patches on the elbows, with their pipes and their little beards and they're sort of discussing what they, what they could or could not do. And Myrna Kagan, who was a housewife raising, raising her kid, you know, not, not a, not an academic herself, said, I just have one question for you people. Where are the men? Where are the men? Stand up. Where are the men? And you know, Don left Cornell and went to Yale because he could not, he couldn't bear what was going on there. Where are the men? And so this is actually, you're not allowed to talk that way about that.

John Podhoretz (40:37)

That kind of proves the point that you can't say that in the Democratic Party.

Abe Greenwald (40:41)

Right. But I mean, where that. Who's standing for principle? And this is the problem with the radical middle and moderation, all of that, which is that moderation and calmness and sort of tranquility becomes the end goal in itself. Right. It's the thing that is most important. And so if the radicals are coming at you, you sort of say, can't we just have a cup of coffee? And then they take a two by four and they smash you in the head with it. They're a little more afraid of the people who are the ones, who are the men who are standing up. They know that they're going to get a fight. They're going to get a, they're going to get a fight back. Why do you think Democrats are so scared of Trump right now? Why do you think liberals are all reeling from what Trump is doing? Because what they're, what they were used to is institutions of power in the United States kowtowing to them. And now there's this president staying there who is saying, not only am I not kowtowing to you when you say, oh, federal workers are scared. You can't do this to US Foreign aid. What's gonna happen to the anti malarial drugs that I notice mysteriously have all stopped flowing just because somebody said USAID is gonna move to state or they're suspending and pausing programs. You mean there weren't any anti malarial drugs in the medicine cabinet to be distributed throughout Africa? This just happened last week. Well, maybe this all a bunch of liars. Like it's not. Like it's not. When they said we're suspending programs until we can figure out what's going on. It's not like there weren't 2 billion doses of anti malaria.

John Podhoretz (42:28)

Well, and there are also exceptions. There are exceptions for these life saving programs, we should say. But maybe this is the moment to move to what you really wanted to talk about today, which is the state of the Democrats. And I'll just set it up by saying that the response to Elon Musk and Doge has been, I'd say, hysterical, I think is a good word to say it. Where you have Democrats leading protests outside the Treasury Department, where you have two Democratic congresswomen barging into a private meeting between Speaker Mike Johnson and Treasury Secretary Scott Besant in the Speaker's office. It is something to behold. And it's all over one agency, usaid, which is a very small part of the federal budget. And yet it seems to be kind of the, the symbol of everything the Democrats want from government, which is funding NGOs with social justice purposes. I think that's why they're so angry is that what are you doing canceling these programs? And to most people when they hear the programs that are being canceled, I mean, just flights of fancy involving transgenderism or lgbtq or a comics book in Paraguay. Comic books in Paraguaguay. Or actually NGOs that oppose governments like El Salvador's, that is kind of becoming an ally of Ours. Right. Most people are like, why are we spending that anyway? And yet the Democrats are apoplectic. It's something to behold.

Matthew Continetti (44:22)

So I think Musk himself is a part of this. It's very interesting because, as we've said before of Donald Trump, this time around, he seems calmer, he seems quieter. Musk is publicly a more obnoxious figure than Trump is right now. And when he attaches himself to something, he's the one that's what's gonna draw fire. And that's what's happening here right now.

Abe Greenwald (44:48)

Every talked about this the other day, but, like, every Republican ascendancy features a figure who becomes the tar baby and. And is the monster, demon, villain that everyone can, like, glom onto and say is the representative figure of the evil of the moment. Biggest, most notorious one being Newt Gingrich after the. After the 1994 Republican victory in the House. But, like, dating back forever, like, it's. There's always been one. Ag. Spiro Agnew, Cheney. Cheney, Agnew. I mean, I don't know. Anyway, so Musk now is. Is the one. It's clearly. And if you read this symposium in the New York Times this morning in which Frank Bruni, Patrick Healy, Michelle Goldberg, and Bret Stephens discuss the crisis in the Democratic Party, what they all agree is demonize Musk, That's. This is one good way of. One good way of figuring out how to move forward is everybody hates Elon Musk. He's the. He's the one we need to focus on. He's the. He's taking over the government. He's stealing all the data from opm. Okay, so this is an interesting game. We can discuss whether or not what is going on here is good or bad or legal or illegal. And I don't mean to make light of it, actually. If, in fact, Trump, who has no interest in legal niceties, and Musk, who seems to be somewhat unsupervised, are doing things that are illegal, that should not be permitted, and bad things should happen and all of that. But that's not what's going on. What's going on here is Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. People on the left have hated him for years for reasons that I don't entirely understand. Remember, like when he was on. He went on SNL and the entire cast said, this was disgusting. We shouldn't be having him do this. And this was before he bought Twitter and did all that. So he's a very complex figure in American popular culture, and his approval rating is low, according to Harry Anton and all of that. But he's just doing, he's just doing what Trump said he wants him to do, which is doing a forensic audit of the government. And cleverly they went at the one thing in the US Government to begin with that is the least popular form of spending in the US Government. And that's something, by the way, that I'm upset about. Like, I believe in foreign aid, but, you know, I, for, for, for 40 years, foreign aid has been the least popular form of federal spending for obvious reasons. Why are we spending it there? We should be spending it here. Why are we giving money to somebody in El Salvador when there's a poor person on the streets in Oklahoma City? That doesn't make any sense. And to make the argument, well, we have soft power and hard power. We need this. It helps us with our soft power and all that. That's not, that's, that's something, that's an argument at a second or third order level. Right. People just don't think their tax dollars should be going to. And by the way, should, shouldn't be going.

John Podhoretz (48:08)

It's what Abe was talking about at the top of the show.

Abe Greenwald (48:10)

Yeah. I just want to read one passage from the story in the Washington Post about the DOGE agents who have been going through the computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management.

John Podhoretz (48:23)

Okay.

Abe Greenwald (48:26)

This is the lead story in the Washington Post. Agents of billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Right. So it sounds like Gestapo Hugo Weaving in the Matrix, Right. Have gained access to highly restricted government records on millions of federal employees as part of a broader effort to wrest control over the government's main personnel agency, according to four U.S. officials with knowledge of the developments. The officials, who like others, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, expressed alarm about potential breaches or abuses of such records by members of an administration whose senior most officials have threatened to retaliate against federal workers accused of disloyalty. Okay, this is an executive branch agency, Right. Officials of the executive branch at the direction of the President are looking at the computer programs inside the executive branch.

John Podhoretz (49:27)

Of the President for improper payments.

Abe Greenwald (49:30)

For improper payments and cost savings. Right. Now, the moves at OPM by members of Musk's pseudo governmental DOGE have coincided with similar efforts to gain access to sensitive systems at other agencies. Right? In what way is DOGE pseudo governmental? Right. Trump announced there was going to be this Department of Government Efficiency run by Musk. Now, okay, they haven't dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's, but they're being given access to these by the people, including, confirmed by the Congress. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besant, to look at the computers. Records obtained by the Post show that several members of Musk's Doge team, Dash, some of whom are in their early 20s.

John Podhoretz (50:26)

Right.

Abe Greenwald (50:28)

And come from positions at his private companies, and Dash, were given administrative access to OPM computer systems within days of Trump's inauguration last month. They're in their early twenties. They're in the. I can't.

John Podhoretz (50:44)

They. They have government computers because. Because they work for the government, because the president hired them.

Abe Greenwald (50:52)

So, so, so just. Just to make this clear, the executive branch, there's a new sheriff in town, and he wants to know what's going on in the executive branch of the government. So he's brought in consultants from outside to do an audit of what's going on in the government and made them.

John Podhoretz (51:10)

Employees of the government. So it's not McKenzie, it's not McKinsey. It's government employees doing this.

Abe Greenwald (51:16)

And he's allowed to. And not only is he allowed to, everybody in the country should be like, this should happen every week.

John Podhoretz (51:28)

Oh, yeah.

Abe Greenwald (51:29)

Because according to this thing that I cited last week, according to the Office of government accountability, $380 billion are missing from federal coffers and unaccounted for out of a federal budget of $4 trillion. Or, excuse me, 260 billion. I'm sorry, it wasn't 380 billion.

John Podhoretz (51:53)

Still a lot money.

Abe Greenwald (51:56)

So the people who lost the money are saying, you're not allowed to look at these. I'm going. And, and, and this is where the Democratic Party comes back into it. Are they insane? Because they're. They're standing there having temper tantrums in front of federal buildings, defending federal workers.

John Podhoretz (52:21)

They're defending themselves to come back, but.

Abe Greenwald (52:24)

They also don't want to come back.

John Podhoretz (52:26)

They're the party of government. The Democrats are the party of government. The Democratic Party as we know it would not exist without federal support. And the elected officials of the Democratic Party represent the interests of the permanent government in Washington.

Abe Greenwald (52:42)

Right.

John Podhoretz (52:43)

And it's ancillary institutions like the teachers unions or the labor unions. Right. And so that's why they're so exercised. This is about who's in charge. It's that simple. And for.

Abe Greenwald (52:54)

And Trump's in charge.

John Podhoretz (52:55)

Forty years, though. For 40 years, the Democrats have been in charge of bureaucracy.

Abe Greenwald (52:59)

They've been in charge. And Republicans have only glancingly. And by the way, it may still be glancing. This is only like it's only two weeks into the administration. We don't know how energetic, activist or thoroughgoing this is gonna be in the course of the Trump presidency. He's not well.

John Podhoretz (53:17)

Remember, it was set up for two years. It was originally only supposed to go through the midterm.

Abe Greenwald (53:21)

Right. But what I'm saying is we don't know. This is all shock and awe time. And then there's going to actually have to be the incredibly boring spade work of creating whatever it is you have to create in order to track spending and do this and do that.

John Podhoretz (53:39)

Well, that's where I think they have a different view in Doge, because based on just the reports from Musk and others of his allies, it seems like when they're going through these invoices in the payment systems, I mean, which are extremely, you know, old, I think these, the 20 year olds are hitting delete. If they, if they see something that they think is outside of what the President's priority is, they're just hitting delete. They're just canceling the payment now. So it's very Musk, like in the sense that when he took over Twitter, what did he do? He fired most of the workforce, he completely opened up the records, he threw everything against the wall to see what sticks, and then he hired back people or he created new policies based on what, what he felt was necessary. And this is what Trump has done is Trump has said, elon, do what you do, the companies that you acquire, right. To the federal bureaucracy.

Abe Greenwald (54:46)

Right now, look, it could be bad. There could be illegal things going on. Republicans have a one seat majority in the House, as I keep saying, one car wreck or one heart attack or something like that. And Democrats could take charge and then they can have control of the House and they can take use their investigative powers to torment and torture everybody in Doge and everybody in the White House and everybody on the way they handle these matters.

John Podhoretz (55:11)

Well, Representative Al Green filed impeachment articles against Trump yesterday.

Abe Greenwald (55:18)

Thank God it's only been two weeks. Two weeks. Two weeks in. I'm wondering where they're, where they were.

John Podhoretz (55:23)

I think the Democrats, to maybe make your point, are showing themselves completely at sea here.

Abe Greenwald (55:31)

Right.

John Podhoretz (55:32)

I think we saw it at the dnc. I think when you have in the headlines, in the news, Maxine Waters screaming at the top of her lungs and figures like JB Pritzker talking about how we're not going to let Trump get away with this. It's not good for the Democratic Party. These are the voices that do not present well to the American public for the Democrats.

Abe Greenwald (55:59)

Or Chuck Schumer.

John Podhoretz (56:00)

Or Chuck Schumer.

Abe Greenwald (56:01)

Right. So what does this say? See, what this says to me is I turned on podcasts. I don't ordinarily listen to Ruthless, which is, which is comfortably smug. And Josh Holmes, who used to work for Long ago, worked for Mitch McConnell and stuff like that's this wildly popular, very, you know. Right. You know, very partisan podcast. And basically it's an hour of them giggling. I'm not joking. Like, little clips of Democrats saying things like, we're not going to let Elon Musk look at our data. It's like, and they're just cracking up because, like, this is their dream. The dream come true. Is the Democratic Party lining up to say nobody is allowed to look at the books of government.

John Podhoretz (56:49)

Right.

Abe Greenwald (56:51)

Are they. Have they, have they lost their minds? I mean, I understand they're on their back foot. It's only a couple of weeks. But this thing I mentioned this times colloquium about what's wrong with the Democratic Party. Bret Stephens, who is a contributing editor, Commentary. So just Brett, Michelle Goldberg says, or Patrick Healy was running the conversation, says, who in the Democratic Party can lead their way into the. During this crisis? And Michelle Goldberg says, aoc, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg. And Brett, though I don't remember what he says exactly, but it is as though in paper on paper, as you're reading this or on your computer screen, it flashes to Brett and he is the three people in the front row at the Producers watching the Springtime for Hitler number. Who are the three monkeys? Right? One with the Hannah's mouth, one hand's ears, one of the hands and eyes, because he cannot believe what has just come out of her mouth. So, yes, by all means, take AOC and make her. And by the way, I do think that she may well be the face of the Democratic Party's future. It's not that. That's, that's a, as a, as a prop, a political proposition, that, that is an outrageous thing to say, that it will be good for the Democratic Party. It's really good. If Republicans, if we want some kind of weird reprise of 1972 where Nixon wins by a point and a half or not less than a point in 1968 and then wins by 25 points in 1972, make AOC the new Georgia govern. And let's see. Let's see what America. Let's see how America makes its choice in 2028. So again, it's early, but it's like they're falling into every briar patch every five minutes. And they think things like Trump really screwed up with that executive order on X and Y that he had to, that he had to, you know, take back. But it's also, nobody's going to remember that he did it. He took it back 24 hours later. Then he's, then he's taking over Gaza. He's having the word war with Panama.

John Podhoretz (59:20)

You know, it's like, which executive order did he take back?

Abe Greenwald (59:23)

Which person? One of those personnel order. Like he issued it and then, oh.

John Podhoretz (59:28)

See, I don't even, I don't even remember.

Abe Greenwald (59:30)

You remember. If I could remember, if I weren't so brain dead, you would, you would know which one I was talking about. But where Caroline Levitt had to say no, no, the executive order of the OMB memo.

John Podhoretz (59:40)

You mean the OMB memo.

Abe Greenwald (59:41)

Yeah, right. He hasn't rescinded any executive order. But, but the, you know, the thing.

Matthew Continetti (59:47)

About the Democrats and the liberals here is this is also just where they're comfortable. This is, this is to do what they would really have to do, would take them to a place that is so foreign to them. So what do they know to do? They know to pull their hair out over Trump, over musk, over what's happening, over. They know to elevate the loudest voices among them, to have to sort of go and find another voice and then raise that voice up among them to, as Matt has said before, take on their own party. That's so daunting.

Abe Greenwald (60:23)

It will take time. And it will also be, it will also be in response to real world conditions. As I say, like if this, the.

John Podhoretz (60:31)

Payment system at USAID is not the condition that will cause the reevaluation of the Democrats and of Trump. I mean, yeah, no, they're seizing on this as though it's, I will also say though that what's amazing about USAID and the stories out of it is that yes, it's led to hysteria on the left, but I will say there is also some hysteria on the, on the MAGA side about what you, you would think reading MAGA media that apparently USAID has run not only the entire federal government for the past decade, but also the entire world.

Abe Greenwald (61:11)

The planet.

John Podhoretz (61:12)

The planet. And look, I think it's an out of control agency. I think you can look at senators like Joni Ernst who have said that they've been trying to get accountability of USAID under Samantha Power and they were unable to Secretary of State Rubio who is now the acting director of usaid, said the same thing. I agree. I think there's a lot of wasteful spending there. But come on. It's not actually the octopus that has led us to this impasse. It's one piece of the federal machinery that needs to be reined in.

Abe Greenwald (61:49)

Also. This used to be a shtick of Congress. One of the things that. That congressmen who are interested in, you know, being responsible budgeteers, William Fulbright, various others, would every year dig through when Congress got the federal budget, find, you know, the cowboy poetry museum.

John Podhoretz (62:14)

Rand Paul does it now.

Abe Greenwald (62:16)

Right? Yeah, it's. But it was always a House thing, and it was this. You won't believe what's buried in this budget.

John Podhoretz (62:23)

And we need to change it.

Abe Greenwald (62:24)

And we need to change it. The budget is now 40% larger than it was, just like eight years and clearly on autopilot. Right. And as I said, hundreds of billions of dollars are missing. And you know what the word missing means? It means stolen. Yeah.

John Podhoretz (62:45)

Well, think about all the fraud in.

Abe Greenwald (62:47)

A bank account somewhere. Fraud, right.

John Podhoretz (62:49)

Yeah, the COVID money. Hundreds of billions of dollars was fraudulently paid because of COVID And what's interesting is. And then maybe just talking about that.

Abe Greenwald (62:57)

Right, you're talking about fraud that we know has happened. We're talking about missing money. Right?

John Podhoretz (63:02)

Missing money.

Abe Greenwald (63:02)

Right.

John Podhoretz (63:02)

That's a separate thing you're bringing up. But I'll just say to kind of close on this is, remember the first time Trump ran and in his first presidency, he said, well, he was going to cut the deficit by targeting waste, fraud and abuse, which is an old kind of canard and trope of political discourse going back decades. Again, the difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2, well, this time he actually has an instrument to go after waste, fraud, and abuse. And it's happening in real time these first two weeks. And it's setting off this alarm bell in the night for the Democratic Party, but it could also produce some real savings for. For the taxpayer.

Abe Greenwald (63:48)

So Michelle Goldberg, just to finish this up, Michelle Goldberg is like, where is. Where's the response? And, you know, if you're. And on the one hand, she says, where's the response? Everyone's depressed because Democrats aren't responding. Right. And Trump is just running rush out of everything. He's. He's installing, you know, fascist regime. And on the other hand, she says, politics is homeostatic. We, you know, look, we went from Trump to Biden to Trump. Who knows where we'll be in two years or in four years. That's not knowable. And you need to be calm. So she both is hysterical and calm at the same point. And her second point is correct, and her first point is not. If the Democratic Party were willing to say, it's Trump's honeymoon, he's doing all this stuff. We're regrouping. You know, let's. He's throwing all these lines in the wall. We're gonna say what he's doing is bad. But the minute that things start to go wrong, we're organizing ourselves for the minute things actually start to go wrong. And where he does things that are unpopular or that are, you know, or that are, you know, injurious or he mishandles or is incompetent, and then we're going to pounce. And, you know, it's better to be prudent about pouncing instead of pouncing on everything or even pouncing on things that are popular. There's a long way to go until the next election. I mean, it's two years. There's four years until the next presidential election. Keep your powder dry. If you're going to go off like psychotic lunatics, you're doing his. You're, you're, you're helping him. You're making his case for him. So don't do it. But of course, she also has to say the exact opposite at the same time, which is, this is an unprecedented act of autocratic fascism, that Trump is using Elon Musk as his battering ram, the richest man in the world who is outside of all law and whatever. And. And so they're just at sea. And the ruthless podcast is giggling, and the giggling is the right response, in my view. Now I have to finish up by doing a rare dis Recommends, and Matt Continetti is going to laugh at me and wag his finger and say, I told you.

John Podhoretz (66:15)

Now I can giggle.

Abe Greenwald (66:16)

Okay, so Monday, I think it was Monday, I made a recommendation of a show on I Believe or Tuesday.

John Podhoretz (66:23)

You made it Tuesday because I wasn't.

Abe Greenwald (66:24)

On the show called paradise with Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden as an ex president and the Secret Service agent that is his close friend. And I said, I watched the first episode and it has this crazy twist at the end of the first episode, and I didn't see it coming. And I thought, wow, this is pretty good.

John Podhoretz (66:44)

And then what? And then you texted me.

Abe Greenwald (66:47)

Yeah.

John Podhoretz (66:47)

To tell me to watch it, right? Yes, right away.

Abe Greenwald (66:50)

And he did. And then I did.

Matthew Continetti (66:52)

As did I.

Abe Greenwald (66:53)

Okay. And then that's. Hold on. So you guys. No, but here's why I have to do a disrecommand. Yeah, that's this crazy twist. I shouldn't reveal that maybe.

Matthew Continetti (67:01)

No, no, no, no.

Abe Greenwald (67:02)

I'm not gonna. But I then watched their three other episodes up. So I watched the three other episodes, which I believe you guys both stopped at the end of the pilot.

John Podhoretz (67:12)

Oh, yes.

Abe Greenwald (67:13)

Having. Having. Having not been amused by the twist that I was amused by, shall we say. Or.

Matthew Continetti (67:21)

Or I watched on a little bit.

Abe Greenwald (67:23)

Okay.

John Podhoretz (67:23)

Yeah.

Abe Greenwald (67:25)

Do not watch Paradise.

John Podhoretz (67:28)

I believe what I said. I replied to you after watching the premiere. Yeah. That On Call, which you have also recommended.

Abe Greenwald (67:35)

Last week's recommendation.

John Podhoretz (67:36)

Last week's recommendation On Call is. Was greater than Paradise.

Abe Greenwald (67:41)

And I agreed with that at the time. But the degree to which it is greater than paradise is. You didn't anticipate reckoning. I have this. The three subsequent episodes and there are like four more to go. The level of preposterousness.

John Podhoretz (68:00)

Yes.

Abe Greenwald (68:01)

Has. Has achieved.

John Podhoretz (68:02)

I can only imagine.

Abe Greenwald (68:03)

Yeah.

John Podhoretz (68:04)

Plan 9 from Outer Space type levels. Like Ed Wood type last.

Abe Greenwald (68:08)

No, because that would be a little more amusing.

Matthew Continetti (68:12)

But all the knotted up intrigues also is just.

Abe Greenwald (68:15)

There's a lot of intrigue.

John Podhoretz (68:16)

Well, look, John, the problem with the show is that James Marsden's president is so completely implausible. I mean, so ridiculous. Drinking in the cigarette.

Abe Greenwald (68:29)

I think the problem with the show, he's drinking and having the cigarette because, you know, because something apocalyptic. He knows too much.

John Podhoretz (68:36)

I see. Okay. Right. I see. He's shaken to his core.

Abe Greenwald (68:39)

So he's more like. He's more like. Oh boy. And then when they reveal what's happening, what's going on, but then they reveal the secret at the end of the first episode and there's a big reveal, then you have to live in the world after it's been revealed. And that is just ridiculous comical in these.

John Podhoretz (68:59)

So there was one thing. Let me just ask you this. There's one thing in the premiere that I thought maybe had potential. And that was when it was revealed that James Marsden's dad was played by my guy, Gerald McRaney.

Abe Greenwald (69:12)

Okay. We haven't seen him. Gerald McRaney, one of the great television actors, un. Sort of like weirdly never had like that moment where everyone went, oh my God, is Gerald McRaney the greatest thing.

John Podhoretz (69:28)

Ever kind of happened with Deadwood. But even that there were like four.

Abe Greenwald (69:32)

Or five different shows. He was the guy who played Major dad many, many years ago. And he was in Simon and Simon. And then when he became like 60 years old he was suddenly like the best TV actor who had ever lived. But. And, and we've only seen him. Like we haven't seen any more of him.

John Podhoretz (69:49)

Oh, there you go. So that explains it.

Abe Greenwald (69:51)

Even that is not worth the time. But yes, find I, instead of watching paradise, go to IMDb, look up Gerald McRaney, see whatever else he's been in the last 10 years and watch that because he's amazing.

Matthew Continetti (70:08)

Can I make a more general complaint here about shows that I've noticed recently when I've been watching these scripted shows and, and paradise does this. They make it so that the most prominent ten characters, they each. We have to go on a journey with each other. Boring and boring. And then, and then each journey has to connect up to the main plot some.

John Podhoretz (70:36)

Oh, there's so many flashbacks. Yeah. It's just.

Abe Greenwald (70:39)

Right. So, so, so that's for that we can thank Lost. Right, right.

John Podhoretz (70:45)

That Lost was ruinous, was Lost had.

Abe Greenwald (70:47)

20 characters and then every episode took you into somebody else's path. So you discovered what, what happened to them before they got to the island. That makes them suspicious.

John Podhoretz (70:58)

Can I just briefly make this recommendation of my own? Which also was connected to our text conversation about paradise, which is, you know, over the holidays there was a lot of coverage of this film Carry on on Netflix, starring Taron Edgarton and about a TSA agent and Jason Bateman is the villain, gets caught up in this terrorist plot. And so I thought, okay, this looks like a great concept. And so I started watching it and I began to have second thoughts about the movie. When one of the Bane bad guys appears wearing a red cap. Right. No writing on the red cap, but I guess that'd be two on the nose. So it's just a red cap. And so. Okay. But then I had to turn it off. I could not finish the movie when it is revealed and I'm going to spoil it here for everybody because it's not worth watching. Go ahead. When it's revealed that, you know, the true enemies who are going to use a chemical agent on this airliner in order to kill the reformist member of Congress are the weapons manufacturers. Yeah, the, the weapons manufacturers are doing. And I say can really. I mean, can't they come up with some right. New right wing villains? You know, like some kind of new type of thing? Even, Even, you know, Goldfinger kind of had his own.

Abe Greenwald (72:27)

Yes.

John Podhoretz (72:28)

Stuff.

Abe Greenwald (72:28)

His own.

John Podhoretz (72:28)

His own mishigas. You know, it's kind of creative. Right. They can't do it. It just has to be the defense contractors and Then I turned off the movie.

Abe Greenwald (72:35)

Okay, so now we'll make a recommend, and then we'll be done. Because based off of Carry on, which I also stopped watching, is that Carry on is a weird corkscrew remake or ripoff of a movie from 15 years ago called Red Eye with Killian Murphy and Rachel McAdams. And the setup in all in these movies, and there's another movie called Phone Booth, and something like that is a person is forced by circumstance to become an ordinary person is forced by circumstance to become an assassin. That's the gimmick, is an assassin forces a person to be his weapon. And so it's, of course, a ridiculous. So the. It's a ridiculous setup. So the question is, how do you get. How do you create the world in which that person has no choice but to. But to try to enact what the villain wants while trying to figure out how to. How to. How to screw up and foil the villain's plan? So it is a very high degree of difficulty that is set up by plots like this for obvious reasons.

John Podhoretz (73:47)

Collateral is, in my view, the best example.

Abe Greenwald (73:50)

Does it. The best, right? That's Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. And Red Eye is another. Anyway, Red Eye is really good.

John Podhoretz (73:56)

Okay?

Abe Greenwald (73:57)

And Cillian Murphy, this is, you know, 15 years before he was Oppenheimer. And Rachel McAdams, who was an absolute, like, angel of an actress. And I don't know where it is, but if you just Google Red Eye streaming, I'm sure it's available. Might even be on tubi by now for totally for free. And that if you're gonna. If you liked Carry on, or even if you had our experience with Carry on, this is so much better. Even if you like Carry on, then you should. You should try. Okay, Go on a very long time. Just for the three of us. We'll be back. We'll be back to tomorrow for Abe and Madame John Pot Horse. Keep the candlebar.