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- [00:00]
A
You know, we got a Covid dog. My family like a lot of people, feeling lonely, kids feeling lonely. We got ourselves 13 pound Havanese. Wasn't 13 when we got it, named Georgie. And we, of course, now love this dog. Dog comes with me to the office every day. I'll do anything for this dog. And that's why I want to talk to you about, as a pet owner, about the ASPCA Pet Health Insurance Program. Quick message from today's sponsor. These days we insure just about everything. Cars that lose value the second we drive them, phones we trade in every two years, trips we haven't even taken yet. But our pets, who are truly irreplaceable, often go unprotected. With ASPCA pet health insurance, you can get help with unexpected vet bills and make sure your dog or cat gets the care they need, when they need it. And when you're looking out for them, there's a little extra something in it for you, too. When you enroll in an ASPCA pet health insurance plan, you could get a $25Amazon gift card. It's a little treat for you while you're doing something great for your pet. The program offers customizable accident and illness plans, making it easier to get your pet the care they may need. To Explore coverage, visit aspcapetinsurance.com commentary that's aspcapetinsurance.Com commentary. Eligibility restrictions apply. Visit aspcapetinsurance.COM AmazonTerms for more info. This is a paid advertisement. Insurance is underwritten by either Independence American Insurance Company or United States Fire Insurance Company and produced by PTZ Insurance Agency Ltd. The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance. Hope for the best, Expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, Expect the worst Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, February 10, 2026. I'm Jon Pot Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi, John.
- [02:28]
A
Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [02:31]
C
Hi, John.
- [02:32]
A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
- [02:35]
A
And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [02:39]
E
Hi, John.
- [02:40]
A
Well, Eliana, being a responsible person in Washington with a real sense of what we need to talk about as opposed to our own personal obsessions with their own stuff. The government is about to shut down again. Or shut down for five hours, or shut down for 72 hours and some of it may shut down and some of it may now shut down. And the question is, is this just, this is just dysfunction as usual, or should we be more concerned about the dysfunction and what it portends for the rest of the year and for the election?
- [03:13]
E
Well, I'm not sure this is dysfunction per se. This is disagreement over real issues between the two parties. This is over the funding of the Department of Homeland Security. And this has been brought to a head by the ICE operations in Minnesota. Notably, ICE is already funded. And so this disagreement is about funding funding the rest of the Department of Homeland Security, including TSA and other things. The rest of the government was funded about two weeks ago and they agreed to extend DHS funding for two weeks to try to reach an agreement about reforming ICE operations. And so the question now is when funding expires Friday, will they will the two parties, Republicans and Democrats, say we're going to extend it again, pass another CR to continue negotiations? And the disagreements at this point really seem to be over whether ICE officials will remove their masks, number one, which Republicans argue would expose them to doxing and more, more doxing and harassment than they are already exposed to. And two would, which I think is a bigger issue. Should ICE have to get judicial warrants for their operations, which would essentially grind their operations to a halt. They would have to reach a, they would have to present evidence and get a judge's approval before most of their operations. And in any situation that's quickly moving or they're trying to get somebody who might flip, it would really delay their actions and this would flood the courts. And the courts are already overwhelmed in Minnesota. We've seen this coming through many judges rulings. And so I think it's hard to see Republicans ever agreeing to this. But, but if there are good faith negotiations taking place between the two parties, we may see another extension on Friday. So the question is do we get another one of those for two weeks, a month, six weeks for the parties to debate this and does the White House weigh in and how much does the White House press John Thune and Republican senators to give if at all on this or does it press them to be hardline? Note notably, I think the farther away we get from the the killings in Minnesota of Alex Preddy and Renee Good, the harder a line Republicans will take on these two issues. And I also think it's worth noting they have already agreed to one of the Democrats demand, which is body cameras, which Tom Homan in Minnesota said that was something he wanted, that they want these things recorded for Everybody to see. In many cases, it actually exonerates the behavior of the ICE officers. So that's what's happening in, in, on Capitol Hill in D.C. and between Capitol, Capitol Hill in the White House.
- [06:26]
C
It would be. I, I'm curious if the Republicans will have, or perhaps this is, this actually is the administration's role because much of what the. I know Senator Jackie Rosen and others said, well, we want, we want Border Patrol and ICE to function more like our FBI does. Our FBI doesn't wear military gear. It doesn't mask, it doesn't do all these things. But of course they have a different job. They get these detainers. They have people who are sometimes certainly at risk of high risk of fleeing, but also potentially violent criminals. And they have a different role going in getting them and, and working through the system that way. It would be nice to hear the Republicans offer a thoughtful message about why they have to conduct their business differently than say, an FBI agent would because they're both federal law enforcement. I, I'm curious what that would look like. The masking thing to me is tough. That's a tough issue because they are getting doxed. But it also leads to a much different approach to civilian behavior. One answer obviously is to get the local police to deal with the crowds of protesters so that we don't have these interactions directly with ICE or Border Patrol. But there are. The body camera thing is fantastic because years ago this was a left wing cause. Every police officer should have a body camera. So lots of departments ended up getting body cameras and it did, as Eliana said, often exonerate the officers because you would see someone running at an officer with a knife and then they got shot and then there was no claim of police brutality. I think they should have cameras as much for their own protection in terms of what the chain of events is as, as well as for transparency. But I'm, I not, I don't know about the masks. I'm kind of ambivalent about that.
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B
See, the fun, just the thing about the masks is they have so much symbolic power among the anti ICE crowd. Like they're really worked up over the masks. It's an easy issue to promote and to use to demonize ice. And I've got to say, as far as I can tell, on balance, they should have masks. If they're getting doxed, it's very serious. People are going after them with intended deadly force.
- [08:36]
A
I'm very troubled by the masking, I have to say, and I think it is optics and it is emotional and Maybe it's irrational, but part of the role of law enforcement is to represent authority. And the idea is that there's a person there and of course you can see his face because he's doing something righteous. And when someone is masked, it makes you think there's something untoward. It's a little creepy. Looks like, you know, in the middle of a street, people can't, who are federal law enforcement officers can't be. Their faces can't be seen. We know from masking altogether, from having lived under masks, everybody in the United States for a year practically, depending on where you lived, that all kinds of bad stuff happens when people are masked socially, that social interactions are very much crippled by masking because you cannot see the full face of the person that you are facing and that you therefore misread all kinds of social signals that are taking place under the mask. Someone's looking at your child. I mean, this is back to the pandemic. You look at a kid, you have a smile on your face, but the mask is covering your mouth and the parent thinks you're a predator because they can't see the full face. That kind of thing. I find it disturbing and I think like. And I think many people find it disturbing. And this is not the Hill, in my view, politically for Republicans or supporters of law enforcement or ICE to die on, which is, I mean, maybe this is a terrible thing because it'll mean that people will resign from ICE and the Border Patrol if they can't mask. But if that's the case, then we have way bigger problems. I mean, I don't know quite what to say. But the other problem is that the FBI does not do a lot of arresting. In fact, I think the FBI probably does an unbelievably. If the FBI actually stages arrests in the United States, maybe it's half a percent out of all of the 100% of arrests in the United States. The FBI is not the, is not the like lead agency in hardly any crimes except for like kidnapping. I mean, there's no. The FBI is not, does not. It can. It obviously is a law enforcement agency, but it sure, everybody that the FBI arrests when they arrest, say a white collar criminal or something like that is gotten through as a result of a warrant. So what the argument is for ICE's behavior without warrants is that they're doing more of a policing job. That is police obviously don't get a warrant if they see somebody doing something illegal on a street or if they have to bust into a. I mean, depends on the circumstance. But if they are in, if they're chasing someone or something, they don't have to get a warrant. And they are. Therefore, there are all kinds of rules written about when you need a warrant and when police can arrest somebody in the normal course of business.
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D
But the police are not usually wearing masks.
- [12:11]
A
It's not just that, though, the police are first responders, and ICE is kind of a first responder, so maybe it shouldn't get a warrant. But the part of the reason that you don't have to get a warrant is that it's presumed that if you have some kind of intelligence or information that suggests that X, Y or Z Place is a workplace or something like that that is only made up of illegals, that you have a justified reason not to signal your approach and to go on a raid or something like that. But there's a reason the public finds this discomforting, because it's not what law enforcement looks like to us. You know, and so the people who are already on the, who are in the world that says that everybody who is illegal in the United States should be deported. And I know, I know in polls, 60% say there should be mass deportations, but we, we are seeing some weird disjunction between that number and the way people seem to be. Then they say 70% say they've gone too far in Minneapolis. Well, how have they gone too? What does that mean, that they've gone too far? What it means is that it doesn't look right to people. The combination of the confrontations with the public, the shootings, the masking, and the general sense that these guys seem to be out abroad in search of monsters to destroy does not seem to be giving the American people confidence in the behavior of ICE and the Border Patrol. Right.
- [13:53]
E
I think that, like, what this, and we all sort of know it, what the debate is really about is that Democrats don't want illegal immigrants deported. They really, really don't. And the masks, like we can really, we can have a debate about. The Trump administration has conceded much of the point by drawing down in Minnesota. And I believe that in other jurisdictions where there aren't hostile confrontations between the, between the public trying to impede ICE operations and putting the agents at risk. And, you know, in other cities, the mask probably wouldn't be necessary, but the judicial warrant issue is about actually trying to stop these guys and making it much harder for them to deport immigrants, which is why Democrats are for them. Like we, the, the, the four of us can debate it on the merits all we want. But for Democrats, it's like, hey, let's throw sand in the gears and slow you guys down and make it harder because we want to keep these people here. Um, and it's maybe worth talking about the CBS News story yesterday, which I don't have it up in front of me, but I think it's, you know, the upshot of it was like, you know, 4, 40. Only 40% of the people deported were convicted of crimes or arrested by ICE were convicted of crime.
- [15:30]
A
I think it's 14.
- [15:31]
E
I think 14 were violent crimes. But it was a larger, larger percentage. Let me, let me pull it up.
- [15:38]
A
Yeah, Less than, here's, here's less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump's first year back in office had violent criminal records.
- [15:46]
E
Right. I think it's 40% were nonviolent, you know, drug trafficking.
- [15:52]
A
Nearly 40%. Right. Did not have any, nearly 40% didn't have any criminal record of all. At all. So that means that 60% had some kind of criminal record.
- [16:02]
C
Well, and even like, you know, there.
- [16:04]
E
Was this, I mean, I read that piece and thought, I'm not sure this shows what they're trying, you know, what they, what they're trying to show, because that seems to me like a lot. And then it does raise the question of, you know, what Homan got at in his press conference, which he said, we're going to focus on the violent criminals, but you're not. It doesn't mean you're safe if you came over the country illegally. So what is the posture that we want to adopt in this, in this country? Like, should we deport people who merely, you know, committed the civil offensive, crossing over illegally? Like, that's a debate we can have and we know the Democrats answer. In fact, I heard, I can't remember who it was being interviewed, a Democrat being interviewed on a podcast. And they were asked, where are you on deporting someone for a dui? And like, the person you know wouldn't give an answer. And it's like that, that is an offense. That's actually a life endangering offense.
- [17:03]
A
Yes.
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E
You know, you can also somebody doing that. And one, you know, that happening one time is unaccept. One death because of that is unacceptable for someone who shouldn't have been in the country in the first place.
- [17:14]
C
There was one other story over the weekend, like. Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say there was one other story over the weekend that ties into the CBS story, and it was in the New York Times Sunday paper about it was a very gauzy profile of a family that is self deporting back to Mexico. And they've lived here, I think 20 or 30 years, had kids here. And it goes on and on. And I'm reading this, you know, trying to be open minded about their story, but it, it's revealed during the story that they don't just commit the offense of crossing the border, they, they stole Social Security numbers, used them as their ID the entire time we're here. That's identity theft. If you've ever been the victim of identity theft, you know, it can cause huge headaches. There have been other stories we know of this ruining the lives of law abiding American citizens because someone stole their identity. So they, they actually are committing crimes, just even if they don't get a DUI or they don't, you know, rob a bank. That is a kind of crime that has a trickle down effect on the, on American citizens. And so I agree with Eliana, there needs to be a clarification of what the posture is about. Nonviolent people who come here, steal IDs, work and then retire back to Mexico, each of them getting the payout that the Trump administration is giving people who self deport, which they acknowledge in the story was always their intention to come here to work illegally, to build money, to have kids here who have the benefits of citizenship, and then to retire back in Mexico. And so I didn't really feel, I didn't feel they were terrible human beings, but I also didn't feel sorry for them. I kind of thought, all right, you had to move your retirement up by 10 years, but you've committed a federal crime for decades and never been brought to account for it.
- [18:45]
A
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- [21:44]
B
Christine brings up something very important here. The truth is, if you're here illegally, you can't make your way without committing follow on crimes. You cannot get around. You cannot make a living. You cannot find housing. You can't because you have no legal documentation for yourself. So you need to to subvert the system in order to get by. And that, as Christine says, is not victimless, right?
- [22:18]
D
But also I think like in some senses, the discussion kind of misses the point, which is why do we need a line about who to arrest if someone is here illegally. Why can't, like, I'm the biggest squish on immigration I know. But why, why do you need a.
- [22:40]
C
Follow on.
- [22:43]
D
You know, follow on conviction for something once they're here? This is what I don't understand. The point of immigration enforcement is to enforce immigration law. And to set on top of that, this idea that if you only commit certain crimes once you're here illegally, the whole discussion sounds kind of funny to me. So that, that's one thing. The other thing is that I don't, I never like the stats that say X percent of those arrested were, you know, whatever. People get arrested in the course of raids, in the course of investigations, get arrested, they get released. The investigation. You know, it's kind of like when New York was going through this debate over stop and frisk. And the people arguing against stop and frisk were like less than 4% of people stopped by the cops and stop and frisk had an illegal gun on them. And it's like, well, yeah, and that number's going to keep going down. That's why they're doing stop and frisk, because it's stopping people from carrying guns on the street.
- [23:52]
A
Okay, but deterring, using, using people, excuse me, using people who are not members of a criminal underclass to provide the mass numbers for deterrence is the reason stop and Frisk ended. Because when they were stopping half a million people a year in New York City on stop and frisk and 450,000 of them had never even held a gun, there's a point at which you start saying there are diminishing returns from this policy and that it seems to be going slowly on entropic terms and that you are starting to alienate ordinary law abiding citizens by having a cop say, hey, you stop there, I'm going to frisk you for a second. Now, we all go through this at the tsa. You get called out and then they frisk you. So it's much less of a, an offense that it might have been in other times. But that's that that example may not work the way you want it to work. If the numbers suggest, I mean, Eliana is looking at this and says the numbers are, look, According to this, 40% of the people who have been, you know, detained or something have no criminal record. So as Abe would say, if you add everything up together, including what you have to do to stay in the country, 60% have broken the law. But that's where you have to say, is that percentage sufficient to make people comfortable with the aggressiveness of ICE in the Border Patrol in 2025 and 2026. That is a Rorschach test. Because overwhelming numbers of Republicans will say yes, and I think relatively overwhelming numbers of Democrats will say no. And I don't see that.
- [25:51]
D
But see that I agree with, because those are two different things, though, as I see them, is whether ICE can arrest someone who's here, can or should arrest someone who's here illegally, and whether they should put on masks and go to the Twin Cities and do the things that they're doing. That's the thing. If, if, if they arrest somebody who is here illegally and it, and, and it doesn't cause any sort of ruckus, no one's going to really object to that. Right. Because it's part of their job to enforce immigration. The question is how the enforcement. So what I'm saying is, I understand why we're saying what they're doing in Minnesota is bad. I don't understand why the solution to that would be restrictions on who they can arrest on top of their found their foundational mandate.
- [26:47]
A
Okay, so this, can I just add.
- [26:49]
C
One thing to that, which is important because we talk about this in terms of optics, but it actually. Look, during Obama's two terms as president, he deported millions of people. Millions. I think it was like 3 million people just deported. They were arrested. They were deported. They arrested their deported. These are, this was not a situation that became a natural national culture war in the way it has now. And the, the one, the sticking point here is that there are people in the Trump administration and around, you know, the MAGA movement who want it to be aggressive, who want it to look, you know, military, who like what that says about the strength of the country as they understand Trump problem is voters like that.
- [27:29]
E
And Trump also campaigned on it. He made it a big issue. It was a big failure for the Biden administration. It's like it's a core issue for Trump in a way that, like, Obama wanted to hide it away. He didn't exactly say, this is a central issue that I'm going to solve for you.
- [27:45]
C
But he was solving until, until the.
- [27:47]
D
Voters, you know, he would brag about it when he had to, though. No, but until the people defending him would say Obama deported more people than Trump. How can you say that this is all Obama's fault?
- [27:58]
A
All immigration policy appears to have, appears to be directed or guided or comes a cropper because of the law of unintended consequences. Right. So Obama deports people the way presidents have always. The way these agencies have always deported people. Then he announces the legalization of the dreamers. And then 3 million people try to cross the border because the word gets out in Mexico and South America that the policy is changing and that if you could just get yourself across the border, even though that's not true, what they were being peddled was not accurate. Get yourself across the border and you'll get legal. And so he undercut his own quiet success at dealing with the immigration problem, which, by the way, had already been cut in half because of the financial crisis. Like, people stopped crossing the borders in the number that they were crossing them in the 2000s because America was in recession. And you don't, like, go to America to look for a job when the unemployment rate is 10%. Like, that's not a rational way to spend your time. But every time you look at this. So Trump, obviously, if Trump is going to get more aggressive. The number of people who are going to be arrested or taken by ICE or whatever, who are not violent criminals, who are not violent, is going to go way up because you're doing more of it. And therefore you're gonna. Your. Your net is not only gonna, like, be focused on violent criminals, but on civil people who commit these civil offenses. Like the identity fraud that Christine talks about or whatever. Yeah, like. Like taking on. That's. I think probably the biggest one is, my guess is like, false use of a Social Security number or something like.
- [29:55]
C
That, which can take years to correct if you're the person whose number they stole. It can.
- [29:59]
A
There's in the dead Social Security number, like, not of the per. You know, which is why sometimes we have. There's trouble. But you remember when they found that thing where it's like, we're paying Social Security to somebody who's 150 years old.
- [30:16]
C
You remember, remember survivor benefits people, though, from the debt. I mean, it can mess up survivor benefit payments. So people steal those dead people's numbers can.
- [30:24]
A
But it's the. It also works in reverse, which is that you have a person in your family who dies and you a don't want to say that they're dead, number one, so you collect their benefits. And then two, once you do that, you also sell the number. You know, there's like millions of these numbers around. You sell the number so that someone can, you know, like, deploy the number and say they're somebody else, and then they're too.
- [30:53]
C
It's a crime.
- [30:53]
D
It's fraud.
- [30:54]
A
It's a crime. And yes, and you should. And you can be deported for it, but it's not violent. So when Homan says, we're going to focus on violent criminals, that is a huge step down, because the number of nonviolent civil offenders of immigration laws went way up in 2025 because they got so aggressive. And then you have this Rorschach test thing, which is. Yeah, and this is the problem when you have a socially controversial thing happened, which is that if you don't have consensus on this across the political spectrum, you turn something that shouldn't be controversial into something controversial. And that's why you don't necessarily want to make the most aggressive stand on a delicate issue, because you have the. You have the danger of discrediting your approach when people are a lot less comfortable with it than you might wish they would be. Which is, I think, what Trump had discovered in January, which is that you come at them with all this polling that says, everybody's for your mass deportations. Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. And then some bad stuff happens in Minneapolis, and then they turn. And then Trump's like, we need to change policy here because you.
- [32:17]
C
But to the point that we began with, which is discussion of the government shutdown and really masks and a few little things, the Republicans and the Democrats in the Senate bickering over masks actually is great for both of them, both sides, because then they don't have to deal with comprehensive immigration reform, which is something neither party has wanted to touch for decades, but that is clearly necessary, because it doesn't. This system does not allow for us to deal with all the people who came here illegally and stayed under Biden. And it certainly doesn't deal with the question of what Americans actually want in terms of a path to citizenship for people who come here legally or on a temporary work visa or what we haven't. We need comprehensive reform. And so both sides.
- [32:58]
A
I think it's even worse than that because you say both sides don't want to touch it. And I don't think that's true. Republicans touched it twice. Bush proposed comprehensive reform in 2005. And in 2013, after the Republican autopsy of the. Of the Romney defeat, the Gang of Eight tried to come up with a. An immigration reform package that Trump used as a lever to say Washington is insanely out of touch. So there was this. There is this centrist. There was this center block that wanted to come up with a solution that involved increased this, but with some naturalization and some this and some that and a. The Right doesn't like it anymore in any way shape or if it ever did. But the right doesn't like it because if you're going to do comprehensive immigration for it, you have to have some path to citizenship. You're not just going to say here's our comprehensive no immigration and everyone gets thrown out. That's not immigration reform. Because you're not giving anything to the other side to let them sign on. And then there is the shonda of the Democrats on the left who don't want immigration reform. They are perfectly happy in a weird way with the system as it is because it demonizes Republicans. And sufficient numbers of illegals get into various states to keep their numbers up for the census. Like that's the weird quiet issue here is the Democratic interest in not having massive deportations because under Supreme Court rulings estates, the census will count non citizens as residents and thereby apportion congressional districts and electoral votes based on those numbers. If you have some.
- [34:58]
C
And that was all the flights, all those flights during the Biden administration where people would come across the border and then they fly them to some other. They, you know, paper them and then fly them to weird locations all over the country. Yeah, it wasn't a conspiracy theory. I mean it was. Somebody in the administration understood that.
- [35:13]
A
Yeah, I mean, very cynical. It's a very cynical thing. So that the emotional at least if.
- [35:18]
D
You'Re Ron DeSantis, you're nice and you, and you send them to, you know, luxury, Martha's Vineyard.
- [35:24]
A
No, but it's like, you know, we're a nation of immigrants and you know, no one's illegal, that no human being is illegal and all of that. So you stir up the sort of sentimental opinions of you know, sort of mushy left wing people when you're actually doing something unbelievably cynical. That means that you have no interest whatsoever in reform because the status quo is serving your political interest defensively. Which is to say that there is a massive problem in blue states of net immigration. Keep reading about this 2030, there's going to be this huge shift in electoral votes and, and congressional seats. And at the very least, if they can keep things where they are now with the same numbers of population that exists now, that will prevent a total catastrophic collapse of the sort of the Democratic base in the House in particular and maybe make sure that the electoral colleges, you know, isn't made incredibly more difficult for Democrats to get over the 270 number. So that's also at work. And then you have this third thing Which I wanted to mention because there are some weird things happening in Democratic politics because of the Mamdani, you know, the squad leading to Mamdani, leading to Mamdani winning. Every Democrat in a district that might, you know, every ordinary Democrat now has a vested interest in being pretty radical on immigration issues or on this DHS issue in order to prevent someone from rising on their left and knocking them out in a primary this year. Like this, it's, this is like 2015. This is like Eric, this is like brat knocking over. What was his name? Eric Cantor. Right. I mean, as the radical movement that ended up culminating in Trump and the Republican Party started showing weird success in weird places, knocking out people in primaries, every standard issue Democrat is now afraid of their left, somebody in their district coming out of nowhere, you know, and, and, and, and eating their lunch and you know, when they've never had to run before. You know, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez did this in 2018. That started the whole thing where she knocked off Joe Crowley in a race in which she got 15,000 votes and he got 10,000 votes. And he'd been in the house for 20 years and didn't know that he had to run for office against this, against this sort of, you know, cocktail waitress essentially. And he did. And she's obviously bartender. She was a server. I don't think she was a bartender. Wasn't she a server? I don't think she was a mixologist.
- [38:24]
D
The proper term now is, is flight attendant.
- [38:28]
A
Okay. Anyway, I'm just saying like, you know, so they, now, you now go to them and say, okay, we need to make this deal on dhs. And they're like, I'm not making any deal. You want to say, I surrender to Trump. You know, I'm gonna have some, you know, 24 year old psychotic running against me and they're gonna win. So this is what you put in front of me.
- [38:55]
D
This is what just, literally just happened in the New Jersey primary. Tom Malinowski, he, it was, it was, I mean, we could talk about the fact that AIPAC went in against him and you know what, but the purpose of the, the way that AIPAC went against him was to reinforce the idea among Democratic voters that he was too pro ICE and he was too pro immigration reform and a, an AOC type.
- [39:23]
A
Yeah.
- [39:23]
D
Snuck in a three way battle and, and, and one. At least I know. Is it official?
- [39:33]
A
It's official.
- [39:34]
D
It's official.
- [39:34]
A
Yeah.
- [39:35]
D
But so I remember I lost Tom Malinowski a primary last week. So we're watching it play out in real time.
- [39:42]
A
Yeah. So I'm just saying. So you have a. Democrats needing to make sure that, like, there isn't. There aren't mass deportations because it's politically disadvantageous for the morally. They believe there shouldn't be mass deportations. And defensively, they need to protect themselves, elected officials against insurgents on the left who will use any idea that they are making any kind of deal with the evil Republican Nazi monsters. They're handing somebody a cudgel to beat them with. So I don't understand how they come. They make a deal, is what I'm saying, even though it seems to me it's really bad. Like, they can get out over their skis, overplay their hand. They had great political success in the last month as Homan's climb down and everything shows. Like, this is a net negative for Trump. And they, they, they're. They have made very good use of it. They could go too far. Like, I guess, as Eliana says, the further we get from the pretty and good killings, the more likely it is that the public will say, hey, wait a minute, like, stop talking trash about people who are putting their lives on the line as federal law enforcement officers. Like, we like law enforcement. Law enforcement. I don't know where I got a Boston accent there for a second. Speaking of which, could you believe how bad that Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck was on two different commercials. One he did a Boston accent, and the other he was like, deaged to be goodwill hunting and, like, seriously was terrible. Okay, anyway, I think was the point.
- [41:26]
D
The point of that commercial, I think was bringing Urkel back. No, wasn't. Was that Urkel who was there.
- [41:31]
A
And there was, there was. Saved by the bell. And there was, there was. There was friends.
- [41:35]
C
Fresh Prince. Fresh Prince and Fresh Prince.
- [41:37]
A
Like, it was a different world. The.
- [41:40]
C
What's her name? Jasmine guy.
- [41:41]
A
Jasmine guy.
- [41:42]
C
Come on, you guys.
- [41:42]
A
Yes.
- [41:43]
C
Did none of you watch television in the 80s?
- [41:46]
D
But where was Dwayne Wayne? How could you not have Dwayne Wayne.
- [41:49]
A
Show up and flip his for too much money? You don't know what his agent did. Anyway. Okay, so to move on from the sublime, from the, from the. From the ridiculous that we. I just moved us into. I want to talk about something depressing because, you know, that's really our mandate here. Gallup came out with a poll this morning. It's. It's a. I'm sorry, I'm just trying to find the numbers here. Where is it? Okay, so this is a thing they do every five Years, which is how do you feel about the coming five years? Optimism, pessimism. Right. So or no, they do it every year. I'm sorry, but. So the lowest number in history. They've been doing this poll every year for 20 years. Do you anticipate life will be better or you will have a high quality life in five years or not? And current life satisfaction where you are in that. And we have current life satisfaction at 62% and expectations for future life satisfaction at 59%. And though you might think, wow, 60% say they're happy with their lives. Twenty years ago, that number was routinely 78 to 80%. Like it was one of those amazing facts when people said Americans are so unhappy in life, everyone is so unhappy and the system is so terrible. And then you actually ask people whether they were, whether they were, were generally happy or generally unhappy and like were satisfied with their lives. And close to 80% of people would say they were. And now we're now at 60% and falling. That's very striking. And it just is what it is. Like you, you can't argue. It's, this is where people are going to be like, they shouldn't feel that way. And I agree, Like, Ben Shapiro gave a wonderful speech which you can read on the City Journal's website today. He won an award at the City Journal in Florida. And he gave a speech about how America is awesome and how the right and left together seem to have this weird predilection for trashing and trash talking America. And they are contributing to an atmosphere of hopelessness and despair among Americans when they should be, when they have no business doing that, particularly the right. But whatever, whether, whether that's true or not, this is measuring something real existential, which is a sense of American dissatisfaction.
- [44:34]
B
And so when I, when I read the Gallup poll, I did have my first thought was wow, I am surprised that, that the number is over 50% just based on what you hear, hear from people on both sides about how terrible everything supposedly is. And then by the way, in the same poll, when asked if adults were asked, do you consider are you thriving? That was below 50%. That's 49%, which is in some ways more depressing. Half the country, little more than half the country, doesn't think that they doesn't consider their lives to be thriving at this moment.
- [45:28]
C
There's an interesting debate that's been going on for a couple of years now and the book, a recent book by Brink Lindsay, the Permanent Problem, which is about mass flourishing in an era of Mass, Plenty. And I think the. The discussion we've had off and on, on the podcast about the abundance liberalism, this idea that the populist revolution that's happened not just here, but in a lot of the Western developed nations is the result of people looking for spiritual fulfillment, feeling a void, feeling mistrustful. And so you have people on the left who point to that and say, that's because capitalism's terrible. We're in late stage capitalism. Capitalism is the villain. We should burn it all down and become socialist, like in the city of New York. And then you have people on the right saying, all the institutions betrayed you. We shouldn't trust, and we should burn it all down and build something new, whatever look like. And then there's a whole roiling center on the right and the left trying to figure out, is there a future for liberalism? Can we actually rebuild these institutions? They're the squishes, they're the moderates. I would put myself in there, too. It's not actually.
- [46:27]
A
When you say liberalism, you do not mean what we consider democratic, not progressive politics. Liberalism.
- [46:33]
C
Classical liberalism.
- [46:34]
A
Classical liberalism.
- [46:35]
C
Right. What our founders thought.
- [46:37]
A
The rights of. The centrality of the rights of the individual and, you know, rule of law. Yes, rule of law.
- [46:43]
C
Individual rights, freedom.
- [46:45]
A
Yeah.
- [46:45]
C
Okay, so it's. It's. But it. But Lindsay's books has sparked a really ongoing debate, particularly among economists, about what happens when you have material abundance, which really, by measures of poverty and whatnot we have now. Not everybody experiences that material abundance the same, obviously, but once you have that, what happens to a society? What does it look for? Where does it. What's its purpose if it's not, you know, conquering a frontier in one century and then building wealth the next century. And those are actually existential questions. And so it doesn't. I was not surprised at all to see those figures, because we're at this weird transitional moment in many ways in terms of how we understand what our society should look like and what our individual purpose should be. And filling that void are a lot of bad influencers, bad populists, bad radicals, because they're giving people a message. That seems like an answer. And a lot of our moderate institutions are not doing that well.
- [47:40]
A
Little bit of history for you. It took us a long time to decide to do this podcast. Our old colleague Noah Rothman wanted to. I didn't want to. I was very skeptical. I was nervous about starting a new effort at Commentary. How would we do it? Is it the right decision? What if it doesn't go? What if it makes us look foolish, all that uncertainty. But making that leap was one of the best decisions we ever made here. And you know what? Over time, Shopify has helped ease some of our worries with its expertise, helpful tools and easy to use platform that has helped us so much in our E commerce. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to Commentary magazine, which of course is a household name for you. Get started with your own design studio. Accelerate your efficiency. Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert. With world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. It's time to turn those what ifs into Ka Ching. Shopify today is your way to do that. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com, commentary. Go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary so we've had little bits and pieces of this conversation over the last month on the podcast. You know the sort of the, the rise in online gambling as evidenced by all the commercials that you were seeing, you saw on the super bowl, you're seeing during the Olympics and all this draftkings and Kalshi and I don't know, you know, Poly Market, I mean all this stuff that is going on there, which is institutionalized vice, I don't think and there's nobody in the world, you know, you can be a libertarian and say the government doesn't have the right to tell you you can't gamble. But I don't think there's anybody on earth who thinks that a society in which people spend a lot of time gambling is a healthy society. I mean I don't care where you are on the political spectrum. And in fact one of the, one of the best claims of the kind of anti capitalist left is that the wealthy, you know, one of the, that it's, it's, there's something morally depraved about the fact that the very wealthy and stuff like that effectively a lot of people have gotten there through gambling, which is to say they bet on the stock market and they bet successfully and then they make a huge amount of money. Now there's all sorts of ways people will explain to you that the stock market isn't gambling because it's balanced by the invisible hand. It's the hundreds of millions of people making collect ultimately making a kind of not collective decision. But you know that it's all a question of interpreting what people want and where it goes. But so you have gambling, right? You have the, you have the complete kind of decriminalization almost everywhere of marijuana, right. And then you have just the total availability of pornography and access to pornography. So you have almost all of the vices that all the major religions kind of rose to help give people a reason to engage in healthy rather than life destroying activities. And we are in a kind of, I don't know, wild west of vice where every.
- [51:28]
C
Charles, by the way, has a great piece in that most recent issue of National Affairs. Oh, Charles Lehman, Charles Layman, sorry, called the case for prohibiting vice that I would. It. It tackles a lot of it. It's a very totally on theme for that. But just for, for our listeners, if they want to kind of go into.
- [51:45]
A
Yeah, I mean, so you have this happening and then you have we're not throat. You have people saying, we're not thriving, we look forward to the future without much hope and all of that or purposelessness. And it all seems, I mean, I think it's. There's no way. It's not connected. It's all connected. People are, you know, people are losing themselves.
- [52:11]
D
Definitely the other. Right. People who, people who feel hopeless about the immediate future might be more willing to take a gamble, you know, and see if they can, you know, get the dice to roll in their way because they feel that they don't have a sort of legitimate path otherwise, that the opportunities aren't there.
- [52:29]
A
Right.
- [52:30]
E
I think if you add social media use into the mix of this as another vice, the endless scrolling and tiktoking and Instagramming for young people, the combination of that with gambling, pornography, you can understand why many people feel depressed and despondent. And there's a lot of data to suggest a connection between the two. And then the attendant feelings of shame that these things bring when people are engaged in them in a. In ways that are addictive and, you know, unsettling, and the way that they change young people's social interactions and brains and behaviors and dating patterns, it's just hugely, hugely harmful and damaging.
- [53:24]
B
You know, John, when you talk about the biblical breaks, excuse me, on our base instincts, don't forget the admonition against covetousness.
- [53:39]
A
Right.
- [53:39]
B
Which is another huge issue now, right. I mean, what is inequity about and what is populism, you know, basically, you know, about what's the job. So that's another one that is just. That's a current running through the body politic, right?
- [53:57]
C
Now, well, in the social media point also obviously plays into politics in a sense that I think often gets overlooked. And that's that that rural angry people who feel like their core institutions and core faith in those institutions been hollowed out over the years. Whether you were someone who was a factory worker, you know, kind of a good small town living American, those resentments didn't used to have a way to be amplified and heard by others, not heard by the media, not heard by other politicians. It was something that was very much a local concern. And now these are all in. These become instantly national concerns, which I think in some sense is good for the people whose concerns were often overlooked in so called flyover states. But I think it also fuels the sense of rage and enemy and anger at institutions for having overlooked them for so long. And that of course is very harvestable resource for politicians who want to make hay of it, as I think that's where a lot of the populist movement has seen opportunity and also seen some more voting success. That is an unstable coalition though, as we've seen just with the numbers on, on a lot of these key issues for MAGA in the last few months with Trump.
- [55:06]
A
I just think it's interesting. I just finished reading this remarkable German novel called Effingers, which was published in 1951. And it's basically a story of a German Jewish family over the course of 50 years, culminating in the Holocaust by someone named Gabriel Tarjeet or Targeet. And the reason I bring it up is that when it moves into Weimar, when the war is over, the First World War, which only comes up in the second half of this very long book, it describes everything that we know at a distance. The hyperinflation and basically the feeling among Germans that they were being made to suffer, that this was an act of vengeance against them. The behavior of the, of the other European powers and sticking it to them and making them. And you know, when at some point, you know, a billion marks equals a dollar because of the hyperinflation and there's nothing to be done about it. And so she describes very meticulously what happens to even wealthy people in a, in a circumstance, very wealthy people in a circumstance like this where, you know, they can't even, you know, they're like eating turnips because they can't, meat is too expensive even for the rich and stuff like that. And how a society starts to atomize on the basis of genuine, even if it's deserved, you know, a penury and pain. We are living in A world in which 96% of people in the United States are employed. Unemployment rate is 4%. Right. The standard of living in the United States is the highest. Given all the givens, health measures of wealth, all of that is we have the highest standard of living any human being, any peoples have ever had in the history of the Earth. The famous thing where a poor person in America has a better life than the royal family in France in the 19th century or, you know, or in Spain or somewhere like that, you know, if you get sick, you can be cured. If you were. If you were royal, you had the same diseases as everybody else, and there was no cure and all that stuff. And so something is going on here. The problem here is not material circumstance, which is what people want. It is soul sickness. And that's what I'm saying. When people say they're not thriving or if they're looking forward without, you know, optimism or something like that, they are saying we are soul sick. And now the question is, what do you do about a society that is soul sick? Because when it's in the middle of the soul sickness, it's not gonna. It's gonna have a bad way of measuring what the cure is if you say you're soul sick. So, you know, we should do, let's liberalize pot laws so everybody can get high or, you know, but the soul.
- [58:20]
C
Sickness is combined with a completely legitimate sense that, and this is true on the left and the right, that the system is rigged in favor of elites. And if you're not a member of that. And this, I think also is. Explains why the Epstein scandal continues to dominate everybody's. But it's this idea that the elites have the game rigged. So it doesn't matter if you find purpose and meaning and you find a good job and you do all the right things, you still are not going to win in the game of life, because the system, the game itself is rigged. And I think that sensibility combined with anomy and purposelessness is why there's a lot more openness, as Seth was saying earlier, to just getting stoned or gambling, taking risk, because you're like, well, if the system's rigged, I might as well roll the dice. And that's dangerous for long term.
- [59:02]
D
What do I have to lose is a very powerful motivator.
- [59:05]
A
But I think that. That even that is the result of the revolution, of rising expectations, because I don't think there was ever a moment in the history of the world where. Where people didn't think the system was rigged. And it Was like. And complaining about the system being rigged was like saying. Was like complaining about the weather. Like it was the nature of things, that society was stratified. People at the top had too much and people at the bottom didn't have enough and all of that. There was just. There was no modality to deal with it. And there was, you know, the way you dealt with it was trying to find satisfaction in your own, you know, tending to your own garden. As you know, as Pangloss would say, you know, just try to take care of yourself and your fan and take the pleasures of life as they come rather than measuring yourself against, you know.
- [59:54]
C
That'S comparison and envy. I'm talking about the fact that even someone who makes that choice these days feels like they still struggle because of the way the system is rigged. So they can't buy a house and just hang out and tend their own garden because they can't afford it. They can't. I'm again, I'm not in total agreement with.
- [60:10]
A
No, I'm not. I'm not disagreeing with you.
- [60:11]
C
There's a lot of transparency in terms of also seeing who is the person inside the system doing these things are rigging. And that's why I think the Epstein files, not to keep bringing it up, but the, but the absolute dump of information. You know, people sorting through and trying to find a name because it reassures them that they were right all along that the system was rigged, even if it's not in fact rigged.
- [60:31]
A
Right, well, so there's a piece in on Toby Young's Daily Skeptic. This is a website out of London and it is by Michael Wolf, one of the most despicable journalists who has ever lived. And he wrote it in 2015 and he wrote it at the behest of Jeffrey Epstein in some weird notion of Epstein trying to cleanse his reputation to get Bill Gates to give him more control over Bill Gates money. It's sort of explained in a preface. I don't really understand it and I don't really care. And as I say, Michael Wolff is a despicable person. But this piece, which is about 10,000 words long, is absolutely eye opening and precedent shattering because it is the only time that you have ever heard in anything someone like you hear Epstein's voice. You don't hear it because you're reading it. But he's quoted on the Record extensively and it's about the world that he lived in and in which people came to his townhouse and basically courted him and dealt with him and all of this. And it's a partially, it's a defense of Epstein saying he didn't really do it. You know, it was all a cash grab by the people who sued him and all kinds of. Which is, again, despicable. But the portrait, the reason that it must be read is that it is like the world that Trump came around to destroy, even though Trump himself is a part of it. And now he's rebuilding it in his own image with the multi billion dollar games he's playing with Gutter and the, you know, and the Witkoffs and his sons and all of that. But this is the number of a list billionaire academic celebrities and famous people who are at his dinner parties coming to his house. He sits there all day like a potentate as people come to hear his wisdom and eat his chocolates and eat the special pistachios that he got from the finance minister of, you know, Abu Dhabi or, you know, or the Emirates or whatever it is, and his advice and guidance to them and what he was interested in and all of this. And you read it and you're like, this is demonic. Like it is. You're like looking at a world. And refreshingly, in this case, I don't feel any implication with this world because it's all kind of this mushy neoliberal Clintonian world of the kind of like post Cold War liberals who decided that they loved money and that they loved Silicon Valley and they loved the progress and they loved.
- [63:33]
C
Not just liberals, though. I mean, Jon Ossoff in Georgia is getting some mileage out of talking about the Epstein class. He's. He's a Democrat.
- [63:39]
A
I know, but I'm saying he is. He is because I'm saying the world in this piece, which is, was written in 2015, so it's important to point that out, is the world of the Clinton and post Clinton ambit. Right.
- [63:55]
D
And the, and the Times piece that ran the other day was centralized on the Clinton Global Initiative.
- [64:03]
A
Right.
- [64:03]
D
And not necessarily Epstein, but Ghislaine Maxwell's involvement literally in that. And apparently she was, it was her and Bill's brainchild, according to her. And the article seems to substantiate that to some extent.
- [64:19]
C
Well, and Lutnick is now implicated, though this is interesting. Like, this is the most recent, right?
- [64:23]
A
Howard Lutnick.
- [64:24]
C
Yeah. So he went to the island. I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on together.
- [64:28]
A
They had a business, they lived, they were next door neighbors. So they were kind of.
- [64:33]
C
He lied about how, how much he continued his Affiliation with him after he was convicted child sex offender.
- [64:39]
A
Yeah, my favorite.
- [64:40]
C
For me, this is a dividing line. I will give a lot of. Look, I'll say people had poor judgment or maybe they just got caught up in the net. But once he was a convicted sex offender.
- [64:49]
A
Yeah.
- [64:49]
C
Probably should not hang out with him or have any business dealings with him.
- [64:53]
A
Clearly told people that, you know how it is. I had to, you know, it was going to be a lot worse. I had to make a deal. You know, they mistreated Martha Stewart and they're mistreating me now and that kind of non.
- [65:07]
C
You know, I mean, Martha was not procuring children.
- [65:11]
A
I agree with you.
- [65:12]
C
He claimed they did mistreation charges.
- [65:15]
A
In this piece, Woolf offers the argument that Epstein would make that he didn't actually do it. And I'm sure Epstein made that argument to plenty of other people who may have raised this. And I'm sure it's absolute garbage. But the thing is, it is a portrait of this world that spreads from Larry Summers at Harvard and his wife Elisa New to Sergey Brin and the people at Google to the finance ministers of the Middle east to the Clintons to, you know, Leslie Wexner to Leon Black. And they're all coming to this townhouse to kind of serve, pay obeisance to Epstein. And remember the descriptions of what that townhouse was like. That there were like, the banisters were breasts. Like when you put your hand on the banister or walk up the banister, or there were, like, naked. Like, the subtle decorating touches and the cornices and the light fixtures were breasts and vulva and stuff like that. Like, it's not like they could turn a blind eye to it or like. Well, I read about it, but I don't know. Was right there, literally installed in the walls of the place that they were visiting.
- [66:48]
C
A tasteful Georgia o' Keeffe painting. Come on. Sorry.
- [66:52]
A
So, you know. Yeah, like, this is the elite. This was the elite. This is the Democratic elite. Ossoff is very smart to try to find his way to establish himself as a cultural critic of it, because that's kind of Trumpian like to say. I, you know, I thought that these were admirable people. I've learned otherwise. They suck. They stink. And we need a new, you know, we need to destroy them. Problem. The thing is, like, we do, but I don't, you know, I don't know how you do it exactly, but. Seth, you have a recommendation.
- [67:36]
D
I do, and it's. It is. It is the. My recommendation is the cure for pessimism and this feeling. And in fact, highly appropriate to what we've been discussing today. My recommendation is the new Netflix documentary miracle, about the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, at which, of course, the most famous hockey game worldwide was played, which was when the US Beat the USSR in the semifinals and then went on to win the gold. In popular memory, by the way, I think everybody just kind of thinks that they won the gold by beating the Russians. They still had another game to play after that. But it is. The Netflix documentary has unseen footage, unaired footage. It has interviews with the players. The players are there at Lake Placid, sitting in the box at the arena currently. You know, they're current. You know, they came back and sort of had a reunion, and they're being interviewed there. They're also interviewed in their homes privately, so they interviewed together, private. They have a lot. A lot of stuff that we just haven't seen before, and we're used to seeing this through. I mean, I think probably the Disney movie is the. Is what people think first when they think of. Of, you know, the Miracle on Ice. And so. And that was a dramatization of it. This is. This is. You really get to see a lot that you didn't, that you haven't gotten to see. And it's surprising because there is anything left that we haven't seen about this. This thing. But it is framed beautifully. And they. They talk about how, you know, we as American America needed a win. You know, Carter was still president. They were interviewing people. They show interviews of people on gas line. You know, one guy rolls down his window to the. And says to the newsman, I this is my second gas line today, and I'm out of gas again. Like, there was a feeling that America.
- [69:38]
A
Needed the hostages were. Hostages were in Iran, in the embassy.
- [69:44]
D
And all of this. And the Olympics, to top it all off, the Olympics were hosted by the United States, so they were here. So the Russians, who were a mach. A hockey machine, Right? One of the points made in the documentary is that although the Americans were not allowed to be professionals because the rules said you couldn't be professional hockey players, all the Soviet teams were essentially professional because the state took very good care to cultivate and reward these things. So they were like the professional team. They were this. This hockey machine. And you meet all these, all the players, the American players, and they were, you know, half of them are, you know, Irish Catholics from Boston. You know, one guy, the goalie, Jim Craig, who is wonderful in this, he talks about growing up. He grew up in a three family house in Boston. Fourteen children, six adults. So these were not, you know, wealthy summer camp, you know, kids. These were not like these. These were working class kids, you know, who. Who were really likable and really relatable to an America that at that, at that moment was feeling like, I can't afford gas to put in my car. There was something relatable about the heroes.
- [71:03]
A
Okay, okay, we got it. We gotta go. Miracle. Netflix.
- [71:09]
D
Miracle on Netflix.
- [71:10]
A
You can also watch Miracle, same title on Disney plus the fictionalized version, which may not be as powerful as this, but does have an astounding Kurt Russell performance as her Brooks. Anyway, so watch that. We'll be back tomorrow. For Seth, Abe, Christine and Eliana. I'm John. Pod. Horace. Keep the camel burn.
- [71:43]
C
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- [72:11]
A
Experian.