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Foreign. Expect the worst. Some drinks and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, expect the worst. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, April 30, 2026. I am Jon Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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D
Hi, John.
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A
And our Thursday guy.
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D
He needs a better nickname than Thursday Guy.
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A
Thursday Guy.
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E
Isn't that the Chesterton story? The man who is Thursday.
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A
The man who is Thursday.
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E
Yeah.
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Free expression at the Wall Street Journal columnist and AEI Poobah Matthew Continetti.
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E
Hi, Matt. Hi, John.
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A
News literally just coming across the transom as we are beginning this podcast. Maine Governor Janet Mills recruited with great fanfare only four or five months ago to run in the Senate race against the venerable Susan Collins, the Republican in Maine who defies, has defied for several cycles the expectation that she could be voted out as senator. The Democrats very excited to get Janet Mills, the sitting governor in the race, found herself under in Pickett's charge against this radical Nazi tattooed rich kid posing as a working class SOT named Graham Platner. And apparently Platner has run her out of the race. She has suspended her campaign. He will then obviously become the Democratic nominee for the Senate if there was any doubt that he would have prevailed in a contest against Mills, which seems. Seemed obviously to be in doubt. And now Mills has made that clear. Matt, what do you make of this moment, which I think probably is making some Republicans at least feel a little relieved by the prospects of retaining the Senate in November?
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E
Well, my first reaction is to credit our friend Josh Kraushar with fantastic timing because in his newsletter this morning, Josh has a very good piece about the Democratic Tea party and whether 2026 is shaping up to be like 2010 and 2012 on the Republican side when the Tea Party enthusiasm in reaction to Barack Obama led some Republican primary voters to nominate candidates who are just too far from the mainstream of the American electorate. This was fig figures like, you know, Christine, I'm not a witch in the Senate race for the Senate races. Yeah. And then of course, we had, in 2012, we had a candidate in Indiana, I believe, who was talking about legitimate rape, whether it was, whether, you know, illegitimate rape leads to pregnancy or not. And in any case, there was also in 2010, the Nevada candidate who was talking about how, you know.
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A
Sharon Angle.
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E
Sharon Angle, who was talking about how we could, you know, why not? Why don't we just trade chickens for medical services? Which incidentally, not a bad idea. You know, some of these people, they got a bad rap, that's all I'm gonna say. But nonetheless, their positions, their statements put them at odds with the mainstream electorate. And it cost the Republicans Senate. And that's why the Republicans didn't take the Senate until 2014, kind of the third election of the Obama years. So Josh argues that that could be what is happening here on the Democratic side. When you look at candidates like Graham Platner, when you look at candidates like Abdul Al said in Michigan, others who are playing in House races, all fit the profile of anti Israel socialists who are now gaining steam within the Democratic electorate. But when confronted with a choice between Graham Platner, who not only has that Nazi associated tattoo, he claims he's going to get it removed, you know, we haven't seen the evidence of that. Last week we had the revelation that he had been posting on Reddit his show of respect for Hamas tactics in a brutal raid that led to the deaths of Israelis. This guy is terrible. And main voters are going to be asked to choose between him and Susan Collins and it will be a measure of how intense anti Trump fervor has become, whether voters are just so anti Trump that they don't care whether they put Graham Platner in the Senate over Susan Collins, who's been there for a long time. She brings home the bacon. She knows everybody in that small state. It's going to be a real test of where the Democratic Party is headed. And I'm afraid the Democrats are going to fail a test.
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A
Can we talk a little about the fact that the, the issues that the Tea Party were obsessed with and that also then led them, led some of them inexorably to these relatively extreme, crazy sounding positions were nonetheless at the center of the American political discussion about what was going on in the United States of America. Abortion, which was still obviously an open question, taxation, the size of government, the application of the Constitution to the presidency, and all of that totally central to the goings on of Americans in their daily lives. The obsession with Israel on the part of this Democratic Tea Party is very interesting because we're obsessed with Israel. Commentary is a publication whose mandate is in part a Zionist mandate to defend Israel and America and the West. So I have no problem. It's at the center of my life. But I am part of a minority of 2% of the United States and an even smaller minority of a conservative part of that 2% majority of the United States minority in the United States. The fact that the Democratic Party is driven ideologically by its views on this country of 10 million people 9,000 miles away is really kind of stunning because do we know what Graham Platner thinks about, let's say, the job numbers today, which are not so bad? Does he come out and talk about how 2% growth, which we also heard about this morning, isn't sufficient to make people in Maine put food on the table? That's not where the juice is in his campaign. That's not where the juice is in Abdullah Saeed's campaign or in the juice of the Jews. Right.
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C
So, but that's the point. The juice is not Israel. Right. The juice is the Jews. Like, right. It's. This is, this is.
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A
But again, The Jews are 2% of the population of the United States.
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C
But we should be clear that people
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A
out of 8 billion. Right.
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C
That this is, we should be clear that this is. You know, I don't, I don't, I don't want people, you know, I don't want the Democrats running for Senate with Nazi tattoos. It's just like the. Feels like a, you know, a terrible new installment of a Stig Larson book, the Boy with the Nazi Tattoo. But I don't, I don't want them getting away with. Well, we're, I'll tell you why we're obsessed with Israel. Because there's a genocide, because there's this, because I care about human rights. I, you know, I think the, the lesson of everything that's going on right now is that there's no actual distinction. What's driving the news is the fact that it's about the Jews and that this, and that running, gaining political influence and power through populist slandering of the Jews is an old trick, but a very, very, very dangerous one that is happening here now.
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E
Yeah. And Israel, of course, you know, this is something that Netanyahu said in the past and we've mentioned on the podcast, but Israel is a stand in for America in a lot of ways. And so it's not an accident that the most anti Israel or anti Semitic voices in the Democratic Party are associated actually not with the Democratic Party, but with the Democratic Socialists of America, which is the far left, radical, revolutionary wing of American politics that is essentially taking over the Democratic Party step by step. And Platner's nomination is just another step in that process. And so it's hatred of Israel, but Israel's a stand in for a covenantal nation, for the exceptional nations. Right. Just as America is as a stand in for the free enterprise system. Right. Israel's a startup nation after its socialist past. Right. And socialists like, you know, the old line Marxists like Bernie Sanders can't stand that. Right. You know, and so when we're fighting over Israel, we're fighting over the United States of America. And I think that, you know, Susan Collins is a pretty savvy poll. I think she'll be able to draw that distinction very effectively. But other Republicans or other people who are challenged, even Democrats like John Fetterman, as they're fighting this tendency within their own party, they need to make those stakes clear as well. I mean, this is an agenda that will start with cutting off support for the state of Israel, but will end with intentionally trying to remake America on very radical and you know, awful foundations.
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D
I think this, this important distinction that Matt is making between the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, the Platner campaign and certainly Mamdani and some other candidates we've seen, I, I've often seen them start talking about the Jews or Israel or genocide. Exactly. When they're starting to have to come to some detailed expression of their economic program. Cuz their economic program isn't gonna help the citizens of either the city that they're running for mayor or the state of, by the way. Cause I've spent many summers there, has a, I think the first synagogue was built there in like the 1840s. I mean, they have a long standing rich tradition of Jews in Maine. I met a guy who wrote a book about it. I mean, there's a really wonderful community there. But I think all Susan Collins has to do is talk about kitchen table issues and say, look, we're worried about gas prices just like you are. We're trying to get the economy, you know, to start booming again. We're gonna lower your taxes, we're gonna do all these things. She just has to stick to that message. And she is, I think the Trump label doesn't stick to her in the same way it might to other Republicans. She's always been pretty independent. She's been somewhat critical of the President here and there, so. And, and as you both said, I mean, she understands the state of Maine. So Platner can, I'm not sure, going up against her on economic issues which remain very important to voters in Maine and elsewhere. I don't think he's got a strong message on that. I've, I've been watching some of his clips and he just see traffics in Cliche.
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A
So, but again. So what's important here is you're saying, you know, this is an avenue for Collins and it's not the best publicity for him in a state like Maine. Mamdani, of course, ran as a Democratic Socialist. He wants, he's already announcing this ridiculous city owned grocery store to, at a cost of $30 million to open in about 50 years. Whereas an entrepreneur wanted to open a grocery store in New York and rented a space. He would have that grocery store up and running in six weeks. But that's not the way it works in the world of democratic socialism. He wants free buses, he wants this, he wants that. But that's not where, as we said, that's not where the juice for his campaign came from. He was a Post encampments, post October 7 candidate who took the opposing side against the United States and Israel. And I'm just curious about what that says about one of the two major political parties in the United States. That it is consumed by an issue that is a very little moment. We should add to most Americans.
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B
We should add here that in figuring out what it says about that party that even those Democrats who are not the ones that Matt is talking about, revolutionary or Democratic socialist, they have felt obliged to give lip service and say, I won't accept AIPAC money, vote no for Earth movers to Israel and so on. So it's not just the revolutionaries, it's the reverberation that they're having throughout the party on all types of Democrats.
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C
And we should also add that Chuck Schumer says that Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand say that the, the DSCC is behind Platner. So the, the, the, you know, not just the highest ranking elected Jewish official, whatever Chuck Schumer likes to call himself, but you know, even more significantly, the party, the party has officially said yes, we're behind it.
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E
I want to just slightly push back against what you're saying, John, though, in the sense that what's going on in Israel is of no moment, not just on the kind of the principal level that I was talking about how Israel's a stand in America. But the truth is we're now in a conflict with Iran and the gas prices jumped another 7 cents. They're now at $4.30 a gallon for the national average. They're much more expensive in blue states because of the silly green energy policies that are counterproductive. And so I fear that there will be a window of opportunity here for a campaign like Platner's to say, look, Israel got us into this mess in the Middle East. Just read the New York Times from last month, that long report. And if you want $4, you want gas to go down, well, vote for me and I'm going to stop Trump's war and I'm going to cut off aid to Israel and finally get us all out of the Middle East. Because I was over there once and I don't want to do again. Look, I disagree with that vehemently. I also don't think Israel is the reason why we're in this conflict. And I think this conflict, as everybody knows, is justified and worthwhile and working. Nonetheless, though, we have to understand that for a lot of Americans who don't pay attention to this, they do notice the gas price. They do see the headlines and like, what's going on again? Why are we doing this again? And this is where, like we were saying, candidates who are opposing the Democratic Socialist takeover of the Democratic Party need to be more effective in articulating what they actually stand for. You know, and this is, this is where I'm more concerned than not these days, that Trump needs to talk about what's happening in the Middle east regularly. He needs to do it from the position has, from a set speech, not just a true social post. Because the truth is, when Trump does articulate what's happening in the Middle east and why and what the stakes are, it seems that there's a slight improvement in perceptions of the war, perceptions of his leadership. And then we saw that with the State of the Union where he talked about Iran. That was before the conflict began. We saw it with the video message that he released on February 28 when Operation Evict Fury was launched. We saw it in that White House address a few weeks ago, before the ceasefire. But now that we're in this period of limbo, the battle of the blockades, he needs to be more assertive. And candidates who are running against these anti war socialists also are going to have to state the reasons for what's going on and why short term payment at the pump is necessary to ensure a Middle east where Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and cannot terrorize the region and the world and cannot shut off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz at will, or else candidates like Platner, they could win.
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A
Okay, so my pushback to your pushback is, yes, that this is situationally fortunate for Platner. In other words, you're saying, look, there are a host of issues that he can draw on based on what happened since February 28th that can help him resonate with the economic issues and the issues of 2026. But that's not how he got here, and it's not how Mamdani got here. And this is cesspoint, which is the juice is the Jews. Let's even pull back from Israel a little bit. The Democratic Party is becoming, if not functionally Anti Semitic. It is becoming a party that questions America's relation to American Jewry and American Jewry's relation to America. And I don't want to catastrophize because I mean it's bad enough, but it is. We are sitting here a day after this guy went on a stabbing spree in Golders Green in the most Jewish neighborhood of London, stabbing a 30 year old guy and a 70 year old guy. He was on the radar screen of the anti extremism, anti terrorism crime fighting organization. They knew who he was. He's a Somali immigrant to Britain and now a nationalized, either a citizen or however they refer to it in permanent resident or something. They knew who he was, they didn't do anything about him. We're going to find out in the next couple of days that he's been involved in 10,000 different things, I'm sure. And it's not that what happens there can happen here because we are very different countries with very different makeups.
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E
But it does happen here.
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A
Well, it does. I mean, it does. But yeah, it does. Obviously. I'm sorry, I shouldn't.
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E
Colorado, I mean, no, but our law
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A
enforcement then goes and like, you know the classic, I think we're British, we're
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E
proactive about it and we have a First Amendment that says, you know what, these Muslim immigrants may pose a problem to Jewish populations. Where you can't say that in Great Britain.
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A
Right. So it does happen here. But you know, you have, It is a very important moment. We have been spending decades and now we can actually talk about the Supreme Court a little bit, talking about whether or not the Republican Party is functionally discriminatory, supportive of white people against minorities and pushing the interests of white people and suppressing minorities from Latinos to blacks to others and has an antisemitism problem and all of that. And we are looking at the ideological capture of the Democratic Party by forces that are dehumanizing to Jews and that lionize on their physical person the most evil. I mean that's the Graham Platner story with the tattoo. He has inked his body with the symbol of genocide. It is on his physical person and he is going to be a candidate for the U.S. senate. Now if I told you that it's
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C
not stopping the party from supporting him.
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A
Right? But if I told you that some crazy lunatic right winger like James Fishback or whatever who's running for governor in Florida had a Nazi tattoo, that would be something where we would say, well, I guess that makes sense. Or Democrats would say well, you see, he's got a Nazi tattoo. Platner has inked himself with his body. He is now gonna be the, you know, $100 million is gonna be spent trying to get him elected by the Democratic Party. I mean, just think about that for a minute because they need to win those four seats or three seats, whatever to get control of the Senate and they are going to pour resources into a functionally anti Semitic candidates campaign. And in 1990, when the former head of the Klan became the Republican candidate for governor of Louisiana, David Duke, George H.W. bush told the voters of that state not to vote for the Republican candidate and said, I do not support him, he should not be elected. Vote for the other guy. And it's now 36 years later and Chuck Schumer, as Seth says, the guy who walks around saying, I'm the highest elected Jew in American history is endorsing the guy whose body speaks of the genocide of the Jews.
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B
I think one way to look at this is as an evolution of wokeness on the left. 2020 was the year that anti white sentiment broke out like mad among Democrats, the left generally. They spoke about white privilege, white values, de centering your whiteness. And obviously that in time that came around to be a very problematic, destructive message for them.
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Now
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post October 7th they had this opportunity to go, oh well wait a minute, this one, this is, this can we can get. It's not the whites, it's the Jews. More people who's going to object to that? We already have people on the right who agree with us here and the world is condemning this Jewish state. Now we've got, this is our new evil and I think they're running with it. They need some target, some mean force to demonize and fight against no matter what.
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A
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D
I think that I'm so glad you brought up the the wokeness aspect of this because I think there are now, in retrospect, two moments that serve as canaries in the coal mine for where we are now with Platner. The first is the squad and the the sort the way in which the Democratic Party handled the squad, handled their outburst, refused to cens, refused to talk about antisemitism without linking it to his, you know, anti Islam feeling. So that was one that was sort of laid the groundwork. But the second thing is the, the anti whiteness stuff because I remember that moment during the women's march where Jewish progressive women were told they could not march alongside their progressive peers because they were Jewish. They could not show an Israeli flag, they could not show any pride. And that for me, I started tracking how often those not at all subtle claims of dual loyalty which would never be leveled against any other racial, ethnic or religious group in the Democratic Party coalition, but started to be leveled against any Jewish group who agreed with them on every single political message and that never, that breach was never repaired. A lot of those women left the organization. Certainly in the women's organizations they had to separate from from participating in those their politics didn't change. But the mere fact that they were Jewish and Zionist meant that they were In a sense, cast out. So because the never did the hygiene that we often talk about both sides needing at moments in their history, it's just been allowed to expand and you
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B
could plug in all the anti white sort of ideas and terms for Jews. This is not, I'm not denying that antisemitism is something special, something unique, but you can, you know, white privilege is Jewish supremacy. You know, white fragility is the Jewish sensitivity to criticism of Israel.
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E
You know, Jews are white until we're not.
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A
Yeah, yeah, well, we're not white actually, but okay, yeah, no, they want.
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E
In the mind of the left, if you ask Whoopi Goldberg, Jews are white until. No, actually, no, they're not.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And to Abe's point, you know, Julian Casablancas, the, the, the Strokes singer, like that was literally just the, you know, the scandal of the day or week or whatever you wanted, you know, to. When he went on the, you know, the Subway podcast and, and said, you know, here's my hottest take. You know, Zionists in America take advantage of their white privilege. Like literally what, what he, what, what Abe just said. I mean, the, the, you know, a famous singer who just performed at, you know, a festival. But I also, I wanna make one.
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A
By the way, his father, his father used his white privilege to rape 14 year old girls. So maybe he should like tend to his own family garden. Julian Casablancas father, John Casablancas, who is a fashion model agent and literally was sleeping with Stephanie Seymour when she was 14 years old. And so I'm not taking any moral lessons from a person with that disease lineage. I just wanted to put that out there. Okay, go ahead. Sorry.
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C
No, and I want to make a related point which is not to minimize anything, but just to point out how you could make the argument that the embrace of Graham Platner is also
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A
more
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C
unnecessary than in many other like situations. And what I mean is Susan Collins is not the, you know, the vanguard of the dark night of fascism descending upon America. Right. Susan, if Susan Collins makes you back the guy with the Nazi tattoo, you were always gonna back the guy with the Nazi tattoo. Susan Collins trying to beat Susan Collins is the worst excuse I've ever heard in my life. It's like one thing. If you were running against David Duke, you could imagine there are Republicans. I mean, look, if Graham Platner were running against say, a Marjorie Taylor Greene, we would be having a different discussion. The discussion, because he's running against Susan Collins. And then the other thing is, it's
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E
not about Susan Collins.
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C
I know, but that's Trump is everything.
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A
It's about Trump, but it's about Trump and it's about Janet Mills. So forget Susan Collins for a minute.
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C
But also the other thing is that,
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A
but Seth, wait a sec. Wait a sec.
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C
Yeah, go ahead.
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A
What Graham Platter has done here is take out the sitting governor of his own state, who is a popular politician, though old. Right. Her main, the main rap against her being the nominee is that she's 79 years old, but otherwise a popular governor of an ideologically complex state, an ideal candidate, and he just took her down. And that's more important than how you fight against Susan Collins, because the people who took her down, the main voters who want her down don't care. I mean, Matt's right that ultimately when Chuck Schumer. And they're thinking about Trump. No, but so are they want Platner.
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E
The energy on the Democratic Party is so anti Trump that it has normalized violence and created a culture of assassination on the left. It has normalized anti American rhetoric that you would never assumed would come from the Democratic Party. It has normalized now a unified front against the state of Israel, that it's the Democratic Party. 70% of American Jews vote for Democratic candidates. Harry Truman was the first president to recognize the state of Israel on its birth right, ensure its creation. And then you think, you look at, and I'll say it, you look at the Republicans who have gone to the Democratic Party since Trump's rise, and now they are embracing people like Mamdani, and it's all because of Donald Trump and their hatred of Donald Trump and the
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C
thing about the thing about the main
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A
country in the end, you know, but let's not talk about the main. I actually. So we're here in 30 minutes and I really want to get to the Supreme Court case, this landmark Supreme Court case that was decided yesterday, Louisiana versus Calais. Because obviously when we're talking about all this stuff, anti whiteness, whiteness and all this, this is a case involving the Voting Rights act and particularly the Voting Rights act of 1982 and how it has been applied by states and in this case particularly by Louisiana after the census of 2020. And this hits very hard for me because I'm very, I've been working in these fields as a journalist and editor for 40 years. And I vividly remember in 1990, after the 1982 Voting Rights act was passed, and then there was the census of 1990, and then it was time to redraw the districts according to the rules of the, you know, with this new Voting Rights act and how it was going to affect the way this. The districts would be redrawn. And I was outraged, outraged because as a neoconservative opponent of affirmative action, a believer in race, in race neutrality, colorblindness, counting one by one, and all of that. And as somebody who was aligned on the right, I watched as the national Republican Party, in a Machiavellian fashion, saw this incredible opportunity in the language of the Voting Rights act, which said that, you know, you can't draw districts, discriminate, you know, to. You can't draw districts in a way that would result in discriminatory. You had to allow people proper choice in the election of candidates. And Republicans at the Republican National Committee and at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and others said to themselves, you know, it'd be really fantastic. Let's join in with Democrats, particularly black Democrats, and do whatever we can to create the conditions under which a lot of black and Latino Democrats are elected. And how are we going to do that? Under the provisions of the Voting Rights act, we're going to shove them into districts where they become majorities, and we're going to draw districts to enhance the number of people who will be elected as black representatives. And why did they do this? Because it cleared the districts. It whitened up and conservative up districts that were very split all over the south, and made it possible, in part for the Republican Revolution of 1994 to happen, because they shoved black people into 90% districts to ensure that there would be a black representative, thus fulfilling what appeared to be a wondrous Democratic mandate to have more black representation in Congress, but in fact, eliminating choice, in some ways making it impossible for black voters to have a realistic choice in a district that focused on their own individual, parochial concerns, where they lived, all of
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E
that
- [38:55]
A
between a white and a black candidate in a primary or in an election or something like that. And it had this amazing effect, which is it did, in fact, vastly increase the number of black representatives in the House of Representatives. And it was totally violative, in my view, of the 15th Amendment of the Constitution. And that was something that I thought at the time. I commissioned articles from various people at the various publications that I worked at writing about this at the time. And that is what Justice Alito found or described in his majority opinion yesterday, that unless the discrimination in these districts is intentional, that its purpose is to deny the civil rights of minority voters, that you cannot use race as a factor in drawing, or you can a little bit. It's a little complicated because Clarence Thomas, in His concurrence said, you guys didn't go far enough in banning the use of race, which shouldn't be used at all. But this idea that the 15th Amendment, under the 15th Amendment, only intentional discrimination designed to prevent black voters from having a choice or minority voters from having a choice, not that you actively engage in creating the conditions under which blacks are represented by blacks in these states, that that is unconstitutional. And Justice Dobbs was very important to a lot of people in the world of jurisprudence. And the Asian American students case at Harvard was important. This is very important to me. This is something, this is a 40 year, 50 year effort to rebalance things so that after we've got rid of de jure discrimination in the United States, we've been fighting for three generations over what constitutes de facto discrimination and how to fight it. And it has been axiomatic. Both parties have kind of agreed that the way to do it is tokenism is having black people represent black people, Latino people represent Latino people. And if that clears the decks to make the House more propitious for Republicans, so much the better. Cuz Democrats aren't gonna complain about it because they are believers in racial quotas. They are believers in proportional representation.
- [41:32]
D
This is what's interesting about it. Cuz it did something else that you didn't mention, but that I think is now gonna become very clear. It prevented, I looked it up. In 2024, not a single Republican won one of these majority minority districts. Not one. So they're safe Democratic seats. They have been for a long time. And what that means is that the constituents in these districts have never had a representative who's actually had to win their vote. It's a shoo in. And we know where these districts are. They're off in the suburban or right outside these Democratic run cities. The people who live in them have all kinds of issues they're dealing with because there is no competition. No one has to win their vote. And so now Democrats and Republicans have to go back to winning constituencies votes. And that's I think a healthy thing for democracy.
- [42:14]
B
And it's healthy. I just want to just expand on that. It's healthy for black candidates to try to win white constituents votes and it's healthy for white candidates to try to win black constituents votes.
- [42:28]
E
You know, I complain a lot on this program about NPR's Up First. That's their condensed morning edition.
- [42:35]
D
You gotta stop listening. Why do you do that to yourself?
- [42:39]
A
Know thine enemy.
- [42:40]
E
You know, today Michelle Martin said three words about the Supreme Court that were music to my ears. And I had a smile all the way into work. And the three words were conservative, Republican, supermajority. Now she was complaining about it. And of course, you know, just because they're correcting a mistake isn't preventing the left from hyperventilating and saying that the Voting Rights act has been gutted. That's the word you'll see almost copy and pasted into every Democratic press release. But what's really happening, it seems to me, is the decision in Louisiana v. Calais. This case written, the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, is a wonderful example of evolutionary conservatism, a real Burkean conservatism. Burke, of course, says that the change is the means of our preservation. And so conservatives have to update our institutions in order to keep the fundamentals intact. Right. So what has the Supreme Court been doing since, I think, 2013 when Chief Justice Roberts in his Shelby county decision said that preclearance right, which was another part of the Voting Rights act, where states had to get their new map signed off by the Justice Department, by the federal, by the executive branch of government. Justice Roberts said that that was outdated, that the south has changed. And so that was one change. You mentioned the affirmative action decisions in 2023. Right. Those decisions which reinforce the principle that this is a colorblind Constitution, people should be treated by the law based on their conduct on, not their physical characteristics. Well, that was a updating of how we viewed race and admissions and race and hiring from earlier decisions, the Bakke decision and then the gretter decision in 2003, where then Justice Sandra Day O' Connor said, well, affirmative, we need affirmative action right now, but we might not need it in 20 years. And of course, in 20 years, the Supreme Court said, it's time to stop. We can't do this. And this is the same thing these districts were conceived at, at a time when, of course, the south did have a system of segregation where Southern majorities were trying to suppress black voters. But as Justice Alito says in the syllabus here, and I think it's important to say that the four here I'm going to just quote, four historical developments are of particular note. First, vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the south, which has made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination. Second, a full blown two party system has emerged in the states where section two suits are most common. And there is frequently a correlation between race and party preference. That's the part that Christine was talking about. These essentially just guarantee Democratic seats. Third, he points out that the court has held previously that state gerrymandering is not justiciable in federal courts. So except for these majority minority districts, you really don't have standing to complain about a gerrymander at the federal level.
- [46:10]
B
At the federal level, right.
- [46:11]
A
At the federal level, the federal government cannot interfere in state.
- [46:15]
E
In a state. That's our system of drawerism.
- [46:17]
A
Census maps.
- [46:18]
E
And then the fourth change he points out is that because of technology. I mean, at the time in 1990, Ben Ginsburg was saying, look, we can draw these maps with computers. Now imagine if you get Mythos involved, right? I mean, it will be artificial intelligence maps, right? You have to run for the hills. So the country has changed. We're a different country now, right? Black voter, Black voting participation is up, up huge. And we saw that when we were fighting over the Georgia state election bill, where it turns out that, you know, voter ID is imposed against claims that this will disenfranchise minorities. And what do we find? We find that actually minority participation goes up once you have a voter ID requirement. The country has changed. Alito and the 6, 3 majorities recognizes that change. And I think it's a good day for America. And by the way, I just love how easily Democrats go from praising the Supreme Court when they knock down Trump's tariffs or when they tell Trump he has to take the National Guard out of the city of Chicago to denouncing the Supreme Court when it actually decides to decide cases on the constitutional principle of equality before the law.
- [47:33]
D
Can I add one other thing? I think all of that is absolutely true, and I think it is going to show something else in the years to come, which is that the effort by leaders of the Democratic Party to cloak their clearly partisan behavior in the moral shroud of the civil rights movement has worn thin in terms of the public's view of this. So, yes, you're right. We've seen all these press releases. They all sort of sound the same thing. They all, It's Jim Crow, Jim Crow, Jim Crow. This is the playbook. But I think it's not cynical for American voters to look at that now and say, no, no, they don't get to do that anymore. That's not as effective as it was perhaps, in 1990. And that's, again, that's also a good thing. That's an evolution of a culture that wants colorblindness, recognizes it, and isn't going to be swayed by moral brow beating.
- [48:20]
A
Okay, Two quotes from both, one from Alito's decision and Then one from Elena
- [48:27]
D
Kagan's dissent, which she stood and read, which is unusual. That's a sort of. She was clearly very agitated exercised.
- [48:37]
A
So Alito says plainly the inquiry into discrimination must focus on evidence that has more than a remote bearing on what the 15th amendment prohibits. What the 15th amendment prohibits is present day intentional racial discrimination. Regarding voting discrimination that occurred some time ago is something else. Far more germane are current data and current political conditions that shed light on current intentional discrimination. If you cannot show that there is an intent to discriminate in 2022, when you're drawing the map, not that Jim Crow existed until the 1960s, you are violating the 15th Amendment. And here is how Kagan responds to that. Under the Court's new view of Section two, a state can, without legal consequences, systematically dilute minority citizens voting power. Now, Abe just said it's good for Republicans or white candidates to have to pursue black voters. It is good for black candidates or Democrats to pursue white or Republican voters. That is a positive. That has an effect on how ideological governance can be tempered by real world circumstances. More heterogeneous districts that will impose upon their elected officials a more flavored sense of what it is to represent your district. Right. I mean, so you could argue that by shoving people into white districts and black districts, you are diluting their voting power. It's just a question of what you define as voting power. Are you diluting it solely because you're not letting them vote for a black person? Or are you diluting it because you are making them vote for a liberal or a conservative because there's no choice.
- [50:51]
E
Voting power to elect Democrats?
- [50:53]
A
That's what she means, right? That is what she means. But what I'm saying is she takes it as axiomatic and I take it that this is a heartfelt decision. That's why I say that Democrats, liberals believe in proportional representation and they believe in counting by race. And this is something they believe deeply. They believe counting by race for diversity reasons. They believe it in order to remedy past discrimination. They believe it for 17 different things, but they do believe in it and we don't. And then my outrage that I began describing this was that the Republican Party, seeing political advantage in 1991 and the possibility of political advantage which turned out to be real. It was a real. It was part of the element that caused the Republican Revolution of 1994, betrayed its principles on matters of colorblindness and counting by race and all of that in order to pursue this naked political and partisan aim and this corrects that stain, it doesn't correct it for the Republican party, but it means if you can't draw districts this way, we can have a fight between a rational black candidate and a rational white candidate in a district in Louisiana that is 50, 50 white and black. And let's see what happens. Let's see what the white candidate does. Cuz he has to win at least 5 or 10% of the black vote, at least if not more, in order to prevail and vice versa. We could have a lot, we could have a change in the way this performative Congress that we are also repulsed by because it does not govern any longer and it's only playing pretend Congress. Well, that may not survive a Congress in which you have people who come in who have hard fought races and they come in and they've made promises, often promises that will be ideologically anathematic to the party that they're in. But they've made these promises and then they have to fulfill them. And we could have a new politics that emerges over the course of 10 years in which Congress returns to its role of being the primary engine of how political change and law and policy are made.
- [53:27]
D
There's also a really fascinating amount of social science research over the last 10 or 20 years looking at the question of would a white person vote for a black candidate? Would a black person vote for a white candidate? And all of it is heartening news. It really is about the candidates, the worthiness and the issues that the voter cares about. It's not about race and rates of inter, interracial marriage in this country and approval of interracial marriage in this country. And particularly if, if you grew up in the south and you, you know, are used to sort of the way that the south is described by the oldsters in the Democratic Party, it doesn't reflect at all the reality for several decades, to say nothing of the current reality in the South.
- [54:05]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [54:06]
E
It's another example of how partisan polarization is now more extensive than racial polarization in America. So while I hope your vision of a Congress that uses this to take up its Article 1 powers comes true, at the end of the day, what this means is now the gerrymanders are going to be based on partisan allegiance rather than this kind of minority set aside which has been the case for the last generation. And that doesn't really help our politics in my view, but it does, I think help the comedy between America's different races and ethnicities.
- [54:46]
A
Right. Should we talk a little about Pete Hegseth's appearance yesterday before the Senate.
- [54:54]
E
He looked great. He always does.
- [55:00]
A
Okay, so we are pressing up hard against this question. 60 Day War Powers Resolution question and whether or not the Congress will have to vote on the continuation of the war. Remember that there is not an administration, an executive branch, since the passage of the War Powers Resolution that accepts its constitutionality. There would be no different if Obama found himself in this position, you know, or if Hillary Clinton had been president or Biden or something like that. Executive branches do not accept the validity of the War Powers Resolution. Nonetheless, it is there and it would be a modality or a means by which the war could be kind of halted or at least in some fashion already.
- [55:52]
E
That's what I don't. I find a little bit confusing. It's like, does a ceasefire. Is that covered in the War Powers act where you just declare this. I noticed that Congressman Bacon actually.
- [56:04]
A
Clock ticking. Well, right.
- [56:06]
E
I mean, a few people in Congress.
- [56:08]
C
It depends if you hold by beyond or Beij Shammai.
- [56:11]
E
Yeah, right. I mean, we need to consult the perkeyapos. It's like, because, you know, we've been in a ceasefire since April 8. Does that mean he has to notify Congress about the. Is the blockade the same as a war? I find it all very confusing. And I agree with you that no administration believes this is constitutional. I agree with them. And so it's hard to see what comes out of this. I mean, did the War Powers Resolution stop Obama from the Libya war, which went on for months and months? Congress voted against our involvement in Kosovo in 99. It didn't stop Clinton. So I think that Trump has the freedom to act here. The real question is, what is he going to do to change the conditions on the ground where we're in this, as we said, battle of blockades, that neither side is yielding. And certainly if the ceasefire which has been in place was meant to induce Iran to give up their nuclear program diplomatically, well, then the ceasefire has failed.
- [57:21]
A
Well, okay, so we have a conundrum. Trump faces a huge conundrum. The blockade is working. The economic fury aspect of Operation Fury is working. However, its effect is to lengthen the conflict. Call it a war, don't call it a war. Because of the ceasefire, the conflict will continue until the Iranians are really bled dry. But that is a matter of months. Military engagement, and I don't know what kind of military engagement which we have stopped, has the possibility of bringing the war to a conclusion. Not because we bombed them back to the Stone Age, but because. But because we eliminate Whatever vestiges they have left. And the Iranian people are suffering and they are fighting with each other and the Israelis continue their decapitation campaign. Their incredible intelligence and our incredible intelligence about who the leaders are and how to get them and all of that. And that could go faster, but of course it's bloodier. There's bombs, there's this, there's that Trump wants, Republicans seem to want this to end faster, but of course maybe the way to win this is for it to go on longer. But the polling says get it over with. So that's.
- [58:57]
C
And there's also the question of enforcement actions, whether those enforcement actions are part of the war. Right. We discussed recently about how one of the strategic changes that the Trump administration has made is they're going after the so called shadow fleet that bring boats, that, ships that change their names and flags and identities and whatever and carry oil to China from Iranian ports. And they go through. There's this, you know, there's spots along the route where they, there's low tide or whatever, ships come next to each other. They literally, people, literally physically, person by person, transfer oil from one ship to the next, whatever, all this other stuff. And we were talking about this, the Trump administration has gone after them outside of the zone of the blockade. Is that part of the war? Because we have sanctions on the law books. So, and we, and that the, the enforcement of those sanctions requires naval intervention of these ships. Every ship that is, every ship that, you know, that we try, that we have to turn around and they call it disabling, but it just means escorting, you know, off the path somewhere else. Escorting means, you know, a Navy ship is escorting it. I mean, you need, you probably need more than one ship per every one ship you escort. I would think, because you probably need backup within the area, whatever. There's a whole military structure to the idea of policing the high seas and rerouting sanctions, evading ships. And that is a military exercise. And so, you know, does that continue? Can that continue? Can that be effective? If we decide that the blockade of the port is war, but not that. And so you go out and do, I mean, they have to have. This is part of the reason I think Trump, you know, should, should, you know, talk more to the American people about what we're doing. But, but the point is that there isn't, there isn't a critique of the, there isn't a process critique of the war. That makes real sense to me that, that, that brings it all together and shows an understanding of all the different parts that we're doing, I just hear unconstitutional. It's war, it's bad.
- [61:14]
E
I think the blockade and the ceasefire could go on indefinitely, except for the fact that Iran is still holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage. And so, in my view, what Trump needs to do is initiate operations to clear a path for vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, escorted by the U.S. navy and our assets. And once that is established, and we can do it. We've been planning for it for decades. We did it before, during the Tanker war in the late 1980s. Once that's established, Iran has no leverage. And so their political pressure they're putting on Trump through the price of oil, the increased price of gasoline, that will be lessened. The Strait won't go back to what it was before the conflict, but at least some vessels will get through. And the signal that America will be protecting freedom of navigation and the free flow of commercial traffic in the global commons, which America has been doing since the 1780s, will be upheld. And that's what's important. And I think that does mean a resumption of the military campaign. Not necessarily the type of full, epic fury that we saw before, but simply restarting the military campaign in order to guarantee safe passage for reflagged vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. You combine that with the blockade, and the situation's over for the Iranian regime.
- [62:53]
A
And from what we can tell, that seems to be what is on the table inside the administration is this change in strategy that involves a combination of factors here. But I do think, going back to the political problem, this conundrum is that Trump is not going to get an early end to the war. The Iranians have not cooperated in the sense of saying we're done, and they're not doing that. And they've managed to figure out a way to persist and proceed. And so we are again at war with ourselves or negotiating with ourselves about how much were willing to do and willing to take. The oddity politically is that while the length of the war corresponds to negative feelings about Trump and Republicans or whatever, if you game it out and we're at the end of April and the election is in November, and a really serious effort is made through the summer to do what Matt is talking about, you could have by September a crash in oil prices before people start to vote. I don't want to use this as a political argument for why we should persist in doing whatever it is that we're doing. But it's not as though American success and the mission that Matt is describing, along with the UAE breaking OPEC pipelines, opening different routes, different methodologies of getting oil into the open waters are pursued. When those come online, which take a couple of months, we're talking about a different set of political circumstances and domestic political circumstances. But of course, that's not guaranteed. You can't guarantee that oil prices are gonna be lower in September or something like that. But that is a thing and it's part of. And since Trump decided to take this risk and take this gamble, he's going to have to steel himself to do the thing that you have to do sometimes in war, which is hold firm while everybody around you is panicking. That is a classic problem in all conflicts, in all martial conflicts. And it happens inside armies, inside navies, inside governments.
- [65:31]
D
It does. It then does still leave the question of the nuclear materials and the nuclear capabilities. And it. And if this scenario plays out, as Matt described it, which I hope it does, because that's a successful scenario, the negotiating position of whatever's left of the Iranian regime becomes a really open question, I think. I mean, that's where, what are they going to do with the nuclear materials? Because that has always been the articulated vision of this administration with regard to this conflict.
- [66:00]
C
Well, so, by the way, not to one track, mind it, but just there is a way to tie this to everything we've been talking about, we were talking about in the first half of the show, which is you can run against this as Democrat, you can run against this war. It is unpopular enough that you can run against it for political advantage as an unconstitutional expression of presidential power as a, quote, unquote, dumb war, as an. And you can focus on the economics of it and the costs going up. And you could say Americans are paying the price and we're not even seeing victory, blah, blah, blah. Or you can say the Israelis are controlling American foreign policy and, and brainwashed Trump into this. And we wouldn't be this if not for like, again, it's one of those cases where there are these like normal brained arguments sitting right there.
- [66:53]
E
If there's anything that's happening right now, it's the Americans controlling Israeli policy by forcing Israel to maintain this stupid ceasefire in the north against Hezbollah when Hezbollah is violating it every day.
- [67:06]
A
Well, Israel, the weirdness is how we're doing that and we haven't even talked about this, which is Israel is hitting back at Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon in the, you know, in the direct zone in which Israel and Hezbollah have been fighting for 40 years. But it appears that what we are insisting that they do is leave Hezbollah in Beirut alone. Alone. And you can't do.
- [67:34]
E
How can you do that?
- [67:35]
A
They can't prevail if they are handcuffed from going after Hezbollah in its headquarters. So that is a right. But. So, yeah, far from Israel controlling us, we are now making Israel's task in Lebanon harder. But people can argue whatever it is they wanna argue. That's, that's the nature of our free flowing political debate. And Matt Continetti, you have a recommendation?
- [67:59]
E
I do, John, thank you very much. I want to recommend a book. It's kind of a literary study. It's a book called Monsters in the My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bix. And I guess in a way it's good that we started with Maine and we're going to end with Maine. Caroline Bix was a professor in Boston where she specialized in Shakespeare before she became the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine in Orono, which is where Stephen King graduated, where he graduated from in 1972, I believe. And she, as the Stephen E. King professor, was allowed something very few people have enjoyed, which is she has access to the Stephen King archive at his home in Bangor, Maine. That's the Stephen King House. Many people drive by it. It's got these great sculptures of dragons and spiders and it has all of his literary archives. And so Caroline Bix has written just a fantastic study of early King works. There's Carrie. There's the short story collection Night Shift. There's the great vampire novel Salem's Lot. There's the Shining, perhaps one of the, you know, my top three Stephen Kings. And there's Pet Sematary, which is the novel that King says scares him the most of all of the things that he's written. And they're just fantastic studies of these books, which, if you're a Stephen King fan, you've read sometimes more than once. And you'll learn a lot about the books and how he created them, different changes in the manuscript. But most interesting for me is you learn a lot about how Stephen King thinks about writing because he engaged with Professor Bix during this whole process. She interviewed him. They would exchange emails. She'd ask him, well, why did you do this? Why did you do that? And he just responds in his very frank way, as anyone who's ever seen his social media knows. He can be very direct. And you learn a lot about writing from it. It's a great companion to his nonfiction work on writing, which is also. So if you're a Stephen King fan, you're gonna love Monsters in the Archives. And I'm one of those fans, so I love it.
- [70:19]
A
Can I quickly tell you my Stephen King story? Why I feel like I own Stephen King? That I am the original Stephen King fan? I know when I was 13 years old and I was going to meet my mother and my father to go to my grandmother's house in Brooklyn, and I came from school and my mother worked at 53rd and 5th and there was a double day store at the corner of 56th and 5th. And I was a little early, so I was wandering through and there's the new and new books table. And ordinarily I didn't buy books because my father could order books for free as the editor of Commentary. But I was looking at this book and there was this little skinny book. It's called Carrie and it has these eyes on the COVID And I picked it up and I sort of looked at it and I bought it. And then I went to my grandmother's house and, you know, dinner. And I was. Since I was a kid and there was a whole family thing. Like I got to go in the other room to watch tv. But in this case, I went into the other room and I had this book called Carrie and I started reading it and I finished it late that night or something like that, and it hadn't come out yet, really. It hadn't been reviewed, nothing like that. It came out, it made very little, little noise until it was sold into paperback. And then when it went into paperback, then it became a big bestseller. And that was where King started emerging. And so in one of those weird ways, it's like you buy an album. You bought an album at a record store that turned out it was the first record of Bob Dylan or something like that. So this is 52, 53 years ago. And I remain. I have this weird possessive feeling about Stephen King that, like he is mine own. And I note that he has published 66 novels since the publication of Carrie.
- [72:17]
D
Although didn't he mention that he. When he was in his cocaine phase? He doesn't remember writing Cujo. I do. I do recall an interviewer, he's like,
- [72:24]
A
I don't know how that happened.
- [72:25]
E
Yeah, he'll talk about that.
- [72:26]
C
And for baseball fans, there's also. They're making a movie of the Girl who Loved Tom Gordon.
- [72:31]
A
Right.
- [72:31]
C
That's been in the works since.
- [72:33]
A
Oh, I think there are 104 movies. Yeah, because he wrote.
- [72:37]
E
Because he published 200 most adapted American
- [72:39]
A
author, I believe Yeah, I think Dickens is the most adapted.
- [72:44]
E
Yeah.
- [72:45]
A
Yeah, I bet. In the history of film. Yeah, I bet.
- [72:48]
B
I have read a Stephen King book that none of you devotees have read.
- [72:54]
A
What is that?
- [72:55]
B
Road Work.
- [72:57]
A
Oh, I've read Road Work.
- [72:59]
E
That's part of the Bachman books.
- [73:00]
B
Yeah. You read it?
- [73:02]
E
Yeah, it's part of the. I have the Bachman Book Four book collection because that was packaged with the novel he won't allow to be published, Rage, which was an early novel about a school. A school shooting.
- [73:13]
A
Shooting, Right. Yeah.
- [73:14]
B
I've lost the bet. We'll discuss payment after this.
- [73:18]
E
Yeah, I've read most of Stephen King and I say one more thing, which is I think he deserves a place in the Library of America, for sure. The problem is, what do you put in? Because there's no way you can do the collected Stephen King in the Library of America. It'd be its own library. So I don't know. I think you put in maybe the Shining. You put in. I think you have to put in the Stand. And then I think you have to put in just a volume of his short stories.
- [73:45]
D
Yeah.
- [73:46]
E
The short stories between Night Shift, Skeleton Crew I just recommended on the podcast last year, you like it Darker, his most recent short story collection, which is fabulous. So that'd be kind of my recommendation, but I'm sure others would have different ones.
- [74:02]
A
I would just mention one thing. If you don't like supernatural story, if you find the supernatural elements something that are very off putting, I would recommend Dolores Claiborne, which is a book. Which is a suspense novel. It's a complicated book about a woman who comes home. Her mother has been accused of killing the woman whose housekeeper she was. And there's no supernatural element to it whatsoever. And it is a. Like the other great main writer, Elizabeth Strout Stout. Why am I having Trouble? Olive Kittredge, the other great main writer of our time. The portrait of the lives of working class people and the wealthy in Maine is magnificent. And he is one thing, he's our Dickens. He's also sort of like our Mark Twain or something like that. He's an original, totally original American writer who has created a corpus of work that would be unproducible in any other country in any other circumstance. And people will be reading these books 100 years from now, which is like description of a great writer. And if you had told me in 1974 that this guy would be sort of like the most enduring, aside from being incredibly bestselling, but the most enduring American writer of our time, which I think he is. I mean, he has been publishing regularly for more than half a century and with no sign of let up in his. I guess he's in his 80s now. I'm not even sure. I mean, there's nothing. Never been anything like him. So there we go. So the title of the book again,
- [75:50]
E
Monsters in the Archives. My one recommendation is if you haven't read Pet Sematary, or even if you have and you don't like thinking about it that much, that's me. You can skip the first chapter and just go and read about the Shining and Curious.
- [76:03]
D
Scariest book ever.
- [76:04]
E
It truly is. Yeah, Pet Sematary is a terrifying novel.
- [76:08]
A
Yeah, so is Cujo, by the way, which is like my. My idea of a. Which also is not supernatural, by the way.
- [76:15]
E
Shawshank Redemption is not supernatural.
- [76:18]
A
That's a short story.
- [76:19]
B
Nor is road work.
- [76:20]
E
Nor is Roadwork, which is.
- [76:22]
A
It's about road work.
- [76:24]
E
Yeah, and Vietnam too, if I remember correctly.
- [76:27]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [76:30]
A
Okay, so there we have it. We'll be back tomorrow. For Matt, Seth, Abe and Christine, I'm John Pavlortz. Keep the candle burning.