Matt (4:48)

No, I think you're absolutely right to say that public opinion changes and it's changed in the case of Israel and will continue to change. I take it, from the perspective of someone who is increasingly maddened by life in the echo chamber. And I've been thinking about this in recent days. The same apparatus of interested parties and global media that has brought us this narrative onslaught for a decade is now shifting to accuse Israel of war crimes and genocide and to create the impression that Republicans and conservatives are revolting against continued support for the state of Israel. And this is what I call the echo chamber. It was given that name in David Samuel's amazing piece about Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, nicknamed Hamas in the Obama administration, who was the public opinion guru behind support for the Iran deal in 2015. And Rhodes told David in the course of this New York Times Magazine profile that his work was essentially to feed 25 year old reporters who know nothing, a line that the only alternative to the Iran nuclear deal was a regime change war that would embroil America for years and kill thousands of Americans. And guess what? He was able to do that because, as he put it, none. These reporters know absolutely nothing. But that same machinery was then used, as we've been learning in recent weeks, to portray Donald Trump as a Russian agent in 2016 and into the first years of his administration. It was then used to suppress any dissent over the idea that the COVID virus came from eating a bat in some wet market. Whereas evidence, even at the time was pointing to the fact that the COVID 19 pandemic originated in the Wuhan virology lab. Then the echo chamber was used to say that Joe Biden was in perfect health. How dare, how dare you question his cognitive decline. And as soon as we had the debate In June of 2024, the narrative switched to, oh my God, Joe Biden's going to bring us all down. We need to kick him off. What? Why is he refusing our entreaties to drop out? He's going to go down as the worst president ever. And then when he did drop out on 2020 July, around that time, 2024, the narrative switch back to, yes, Joe Biden, you're a hero who will save democracy. And we have hot brat Kamala Summer.

John Podhoretz (7:45)

Woohoo.

Matt (7:45)

Let's go, let's go. Now we have the Gaza is starving. Gaza is. Gaza has a famine. Israel's committing genocide. Let's let's. This is now the time to announce a Palestinian state, even though Hamas is continuing to harbor these hostages and is continuing to reject any of the cease fire proposals Israel has. And moreover, this new narrative that I'm getting from the mainstream media that somehow the right is buckling in its support for Israel is being propagated despite all the evidence to the contrary. It began with this Playbook article earlier this week saying that MAGA was in revolt over Israel over Trump's support for Israel. The MAGA piece and Playbook was based on three a quotation from Steve Bannon, who has turned anti Israel on his podcast since earlier this summer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's certifiable and whose comments on Jews go back years and we know where she stands. And our former colleague Sohrab Omari, who has also turned into a vociferous critic of Israel in recent months. That was it. That was the only evidence. And then we have a follow up now from the other pillar of the Washington establishment, Axios am, which says this morning the same thing, that Republicans are in revolt. It features a quote from one of Bannon's proteges, Jack Posobiech, who points out that there's a split in generational support on the right for Israel. And you know what? That's fair. That shows up in the data and you can see that online. And then what are its other two pieces of evidence? Marjorie Taylor Greene, and this is my favorite part. You know that paragon of the Republican Party, the man who speaks for every Republican in Washington, D.C. representative Tom Massie of Kentucky. He is really just at the vanguard of what Republicans and conservatives think the Tom Massey, Donald Trump's most hated Republican. Right. And so this, this happens. This is what I read in my inbox. And then I turn to Truth Social to see what the president is up to and what does he post? President Trump, the fastest way to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is for Hamas to surrender and release the hostages. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, all caps. That is where the opinion lies. That is where the decisions are being made. And we have to resist falling into the echo chamber, which continues to exist despite a decade of being proven wrong again, again and again.

John Podhoretz (10:34)

Can I just say thank you for your attention to this matter, Matt, because that's the one thing that's missing from, from the, from the true social truth tweet, whatever you, whatever we call truth, his truth, Trump's truth. What's more, Trump Witkoff, Stephen Wycoff, his emissary, is in Israel today. And the first actions that we're told are being taken are sanctions, not against Hamas, but against the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. So the Palestinian Authority is the governing body of the west bank and the PLO is the, or Fatah is the dominating party in the government of the west bank, which is currently in its 19th year of a four year term, just so we understand how the democracy works in this region. So the administration appears to be hardening its pro Israel position, which of course is not surprising in the dynamic not only of the echo chamber, but of the Washington power chamber. And I want to talk about the Senate vote last night on aid to Israel. But before we get to that, Christine, you are, you know, a decade into a career trying to make sense out of, not that you're, you haven't had more experience over a longer period of time writing about everything, but trying to make sense out of the distortive effects of Internet culture and I guess Internet political culture on our common civilization, our common culture and all of that. And what we, I think we see since October 7th is what people came to call, you know, the moving or the opening or whatever, the Overton window in which views that were expressed after October 7th on a very extreme splinter element of the left and then were given purchase and body by active leftist activists on college campuses have now spread to the Senate, which again, I think there's a larger political story there. But, but how much do you think this tale that Matt talks about in relation to the echo chamber is a species not of the traditional 1982 polling that shows. But you know that I that's why I started with that. You know that yes, opinions can alter over, you know, and can be the same as 43 years ago, but are really a species of the ways in which news or fake news or false news or complete distortions and falsehoods can grab and bury, burrow themselves into people's consciousnesses.

Christine Rosen (13:36)

Well, it's Matt's absolutely right to point to the thread that this has been going on for decades. What social media platforms in particular have done is serve as a massive accelerant. And that's I think, why you can wake up this morning and see Axios quoting positively someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene who only a few years ago they were or even more recently denouncing as a correctly as a conspiracy theorist who has as posited all kinds of theories about the Jews that would never have been acceptable on the floor of the House of Representatives or at least not said out loud on the floor of the House of Representatives. So that the acceptance of more extreme conspiracy theories and anti Semitism has been growing for a while. The accelerant of social media has aided it. But I think when we look at Particularly post October 7th platforms like TikTok, what the big shift that I've seen that has really impacted our elected officials, unfortunately is the power of images, because so much of this information is no longer a link to a story that describes someone saying something with all the context, however misguided or biased it might be. And we saw this play out, by the way, with the New York Times recent correction on not on its major Twitter handle that all of its readers check. But when it had to acknowledge that it used a false image of a child that was suffering from a condition to argue that this was starvation. Most young people especially. But more and more of our elected officials are getting reactions from their constituents who have only seen a jarring shocking image image or a little snippet of video. And that is hard to counter with fact. That's hard to counter with evidence. That's very difficult to contextualize for people whose entire news diet is now mainly that form of consumption. So it's completely explicable if you've been seeing what social media in particular and sites like TikTok have been doing to our sense of cohesion and political culture. But the accelerant aspect of it is what's really in conflict with how our democratic norms and democratic processes have worked before this. It is why we are getting more extreme figures elected to Congress because they can converse with constituents in that language, I think it's bad for our institutions, but it is something that, that Donald Trump in particular early on understood and used to his advantage in building his own coalition. I think if our politics is shifting in that direction, we need some of our more thoughtful leaders, particularly in places like the Senate, to do what I think senators like Tom Cotton and others have done, which is understand the power of these tools and use them wisely rather than just as accelerants to more polarization.

Matt (16:06)

I just want to follow up. You mentioned the Senate. So last night there was a vote on a series of anti Israel resolutions that Bernie Sanders proposed. And I have the list of the senators who have voted for at least one of the anti Israel resolutions. And I'm looking down the list, and you know what I don't see behind any of their names in our. It's all these and the two independents, right? Houkakis with the Ds. And yet what do I get every morning? Splits in MAGA cleavages in the Republican Party. Clearly an attempt to divert attention from the fact that the Democratic Party is the one that has jettisoned all support for Israel. The Democratic Party is the one that is nominating Zoran Mamdani to be the mayor of New York City. Just as what happens after Hamas says, no ceasefire, we're keeping the hostages, we don't care if you continue to kill us all. That's good for us in the long run. We get a media campaign accusing Israel of war crimes.

Abe Greenwald (17:12)

But there is just, I don't want to brush over entirely. There is a group or a group askewl within MAGA that is undeniably and vociferously anti Israel. Not talking about Senate. I'm talking about influencers, led, of course, by Tucker and all the manosphere people that we've, we've spoken about. That is real. That is real. And are they. The question to me is, is this, Are they trying to influence Trump policy? Are they trying to supplant Trump and become MAGA in the future?

John Podhoretz (18:01)

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Matthew Continetti (20:02)

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John Podhoretz (20:56)

I think there is a genuine phenomenon going on here that relates to the fact that Trump is a lame duck. I mean, he's not acting like a lame duck. He is using the powers of the presidency, at least in these first seven months, with remarkable agility and skill getting his way. And this is not like any second term that we've ever seen. Usually the second term begins and with maybe the exception of Bill Clinton pushing through welfare reform in 1990 or, you know, sort of the balanced budget deal stuff in 1997. No, no second term has ever gone this way. Again, not really a second term. Like there's no precise parallel in the modern era. But he's not going to be president in 2029. And the fight over the party's future, at least among resourceful, intelligent, determined, and I think quite morally unspeakable people, but nonetheless skilled and smart and able and understanding that the future is up for grabs, are planting flags all over the place and trying to do so inside the administration by creating two separate streams of policy views, policy views that are being expressed by the President and the White House and will be the policies of the administration without question. And then the policy views of this emanating out of J.D. vance's office through the kind of the world of the restrainers and the American people who wrote for the American conservative and for the American mind and who have populated, you know, conferences in the last four years thrown by Charlie Kirk and all of that, all of whom are attempting to install little bits and pieces of policy around the administration that will caught, that will provide some kind of a basis or a platform for some kind of a run for the dominance of the party as Trump and obviously with grave difficulty, exits the stage. So that's part of it.

Matt (23:13)

Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's a little more complicated. Look at Vice President Vance. He is the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination. Whether he likes it or not, he is Donald Trump's guy. He's going to have to defend Donald Trump's policies. And you know what? At this point right now, defending Donald Trump's policies inside the Republican Party is a pretty good political bet because Donald Trump continues to be the most popular, the most dynamic and the most important Republican since Ronald Reagan. So in a way, there may be people who have these views who are around JD Vance, who might work for JD Vance, who might be under 40 and work in low level positions for JD Vance. But I don't even think that's where JD Vance is. And all of his public comments, of course, have defended the administration, whether it's the 12 Day War, that he gave a speech in Ohio earlier this week on the one big beautiful bill. He said, yes, the pictures are terrible, but we Hamas needs to release the hostages. So there, there's, what might happen is there's a space created to some for someone to challenge Vance from this perspective, from this more restrainer, more anti Israel perspective. But I don't, I Don't know how viable that is.

John Podhoretz (24:36)

I don't know.

Matt (24:37)

Donald Trump's Republican Party. And just on Charlie Kirk, too.

John Podhoretz (24:39)

Yeah.

Matt (24:41)

Yes. There are plenty of young kids who go to these TPUSA conferences who are anti Israel and maybe even anti Semitic, but Kirk has not moved that way. Kirk has opened the debate.

John Podhoretz (24:54)

So he was. He was putting his toe in the water last week three or four different ways about how maybe Israel's gone too far and stuff like that. And then I think he pulled back. But that's Charlie Kirk, meaning there is a. There is a. There is a pool of water to dip your toe in. And it is being cultivated or is being, you know, it's being kind of like cleaned and kept. Kept from drying up by Maga. By this. Because the argument that I would make is, Vance, just like George H.W. bush in 1988 or whatever, can't just run as Trump. He's gonna have to say, I'm Trump plus Trump plus what? Trump plus what. What Bush did was, I'm Trump plus. I don't want, you know, thousand points of light and kinder, kinder, gentler, and, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna plant a billion trees. That's. That's Bush moving to the. That was H.W. bush moving to the center. To say this was all too harsh. Reagan's wonderful, but he was just a bit too harsh. And so maybe if you're like, if you don't like parts of that, you can come to me. I don't know that that's the direction that the right is going to want to go in. And 20, it may be like Trump wasn't harsh enough. I know it's a little hard to imagine that you could try to get to Trump's right if you're JD Vance, but you could. I mean, there's a long way to go and I don't want to like, speculate, and I have no idea what the issue set will be.

Matt (26:28)

My point is 2028, right now in the concrete world of politics and not the echo chamber, yes, it is the Democratic Party party, but the over that is organizing its politics against the state of Israel.

John Podhoretz (26:41)

Yes, but the overton window question remains on all sides, which is to say if in on October 8, 2023, what Democrats did yesterday, 27 Democrats voting against aid to Israel on the grounds and saying so that Israel is committing war crimes, that this are one of our closest Democratic allies, openly accusing it of committing war crimes, humanity creating a humanitarian disaster that it is all too clear, has been created by the, by the, by the party that started and is continuing to force the continuation of the war by not doing what Trump said and giving up and sending the hostages back home. That they could get there, the 27 Democrats could get there, would have seemed fantastical on October 8, 2023. And this is why, when you mentioned Mamdani, that's why what happened here in New York, you may say it's New York. You're always, it's the media. All you ever do is talk about New York and America's bigger and all of that. Mamdani is a very, very big moment in this, in this political moment or in the history of this century. Why do I say that? Because Mamdani, in an off year election, after the election of a president of the other party, has signaled that in a very large, in a place with eight and a half million people, so larger than many states, the most left wing and the most anti Israel candidate can win in a Democratic primary. And this is, this is the special election. It's not a special election, but this is the parallel or the cognate to the special elections in 2009 and 2010 when the Tea Party emerged in the Republican Party to provide discipline inside the Republican Party for the message that what Barack Obama wants to do is outside the bounds of what we consider acceptable. It is socialist, it is anti capitalist, he doesn't like America. We're going to walk around and read the Constitution and put it in our pocket and talk about the glories of the Constitution that he is trampling on. And if you were like a mainstream mushy Republican who wanted to go along, to get along and maybe make a deal, maybe say, you know what, maybe this health care thing, we should try it or something like that, you were going to get destroyed. And it formed an internal disciplinary structure inside the Republican Party that was like a boulder rolling down the hill from 202009 onward till we got to Trump. And the boulder literally rolling over the Republican National Committee headquarters and every other structure in the Republican Party.

Christine Rosen (29:31)

But to Matt's earlier point, I do think it's useful to point out just how escalatory the rhetoric against Israel has become among Democratic Party leaders. I mean, you now have elected Democratic senators boasting, saying, I'm not going to vote with Israel, even though I'm Jewish, I'm Jewish and I'm still against Israel. I mean, that's the level that that's the norm now, which I find extreme in the sense of how quickly that's become the way they feel pressured to respond. And so Mandani, in that sense, is this extremely gilded, caged canary that's being lowered into our political culture right now.

John Podhoretz (30:05)

I don't think he's being lowered. I think that you would not have this vote in the way that you had this vote without the Mamdani primary victory. That was a.

Christine Rosen (30:14)

You think that's a message to the Senate?

John Podhoretz (30:16)

Yeah. First of all, the Senate minority leader who was up, Chuck Schumer, who was. Who did not vote for this. No. But who is up for. Who is up for reelection next year? I think he's going to retire. I think he's going to be Mitch McConnell. I don't think he's going to run in the, in the Democratic primary in New York because he will lose. Matt's making a face. I think he's going to lose. Well, not.

Matt (30:43)

I'm not saying he wouldn't lose, but I just to take a step back here.

John Podhoretz (30:49)

Okay.

Matt (30:50)

Schumer just landed a whale in recruiting Roy Cooper, the former governor of North Carolina, to go into the Senate race. My understanding is he's trying to recruit Sherrod Brown to go back into the Ohio race to challenge John Husted, and he's trying to get Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, to go and challenge Susan Collins. So Schumer, as a political inside man, still has cards up his sleeves.

John Podhoretz (31:18)

And that will not affect a single vote in the New York State Democratic primary next year.

Matt (31:24)

But it might affect his decision to run for reelection. And that's. That's where I disagree with. I don't think.

John Podhoretz (31:30)

Re election.

Matt (31:31)

I don't think he's going to retire.

John Podhoretz (31:32)

Let me just put it this way. I'm saying that he could preemptively retire because he doesn't want to lose or if he sees.

Matt (31:41)

Why would he preemptively retire if he thinks that they have a path to a Senate majority next year because he's.

John Podhoretz (31:46)

Going to lose the primary.

Matt (31:47)

Okay. Well, that. I don't think he thinks he's going to lose.

John Podhoretz (31:50)

We don't know what he thinks. We don't know what he thinks and we don't know.

Matt (31:53)

And a lot of you, you acknowledge that Doran Mamdani's political profile does have something to do with the unique characteristics of New York City, including the demographic.

John Podhoretz (32:03)

Composition where 70% of the vote that he would need to win statewide in a primary resides. 75%. Something like that. The Republic, the Democratic Party in New York State is focused in New York City. So if Mamdani, we Don't know what's going to happen with Mamdani, and this is preliminary, but I'm just using him as an example, which is to say that there is a move, a lot of the reason that these senators voted against all aid to Israel and made statements that they would never in a million years have made before, like Raphael Warnock and others saying outrageous and slanderous things about the Jewish state are because they're looking to fundraising and they are looking to races next year, and they are looking to shore their support up on their left because they don't have a right to shore. They don't have an all right.

Christine Rosen (33:05)

Has no leadership right now. It's very old. And the. I do think that much of Mamdani's appeal is his youth and seeming energy as much as it is his, you know, extreme positions, because he. He's already pulling back from a few of those, saying, I've learned, like, about whether we should defund the police in the wake of this horrible killing in Manhattan. He's like, well, I've learned. I've grown, by the way.

John Podhoretz (33:28)

Yeah. And he didn't.

Matt (33:29)

He didn't actually back down from.

John Podhoretz (33:33)

I got to tell you guys, because I heard it last night and you didn't, because I watch local news in New York City. He's starting to refer to himself in the third person. He's 33 years old. Mom. Donnie is a person whose views are, you know, are tempered by experience. He called himself mom doing that.

Matt (33:54)

He's doing the Bob Dole.

John Podhoretz (33:55)

Yeah, except he called himself Mom. Donnie, like Bob Dole's. Like Bob Doll is not gonna do. He said Mom Donnie, like Mr. D. Swell your head, buddy. You only got half a million votes.

Matt (34:09)

Just spent the past week in his compound in Uganda. So I think that would do wonders for ego.

John Podhoretz (34:14)

Maybe.

Matt (34:14)

Maybe that I agree.

John Podhoretz (34:16)

But I thought that was an interesting touch. Just you could.

Matt (34:18)

I just wanted. I want to say I get your point. I would look at it this way. What is the currency in the Democratic Party right now? Sheer, unadulterated, unmediated anger. That's what you have to express. That was why Cory Booker beclowned himself yet again on the Senate floor the other day and, by the way, set up a political problem for. For his party by holding up police funding in a bill. But how can you express your anger? Well, you can go after one of the planks of Donald Trump's foreign policy, which is support for the state of Israel. And so, yes, this is. This vote is responding to currents into the Democratic Party and the rise of the socialist left. But even that rise of the socialist left is part of this more general outrage and desire to fight. Even though you're not really fighting, you're just really angry and expressing far left opinions that no one in their right mind will will agree with at the end of the day.

John Podhoretz (35:32)

Can I give you just a quick thing to support you, Matt, in your.

Matt (35:37)

Can always be something to support me.

John Podhoretz (35:39)

In the, in the conversation that you and Abe were having about the Republican Party. And again, I think that we are on a teeter totter a little bit or, you know, things are unstable and situational. And if Israel can bring this war to a conclusion that is seems to be unambiguously that it was a success for Israel and that the hostages or a lot of the hostages got back. However you want to slice it, a lot of this, a lot of the instability on the right, I think will, will, will stop. But a Jewish insider this morning points out summarizes this new Gallup poll that I alluded to with only about a third of Americans now supporting Israel's military action with 60% disapproving, whereas half of Americans supported it at the beginning of the war, which is, by the way, a smaller number than I had thought. Gallup's polling has been like 10 points worse for Israel than anybody else's polling over the last 20 months or something and it's pretty consistent. So either that's I don't know what that's about. There's been a lot more. However, here's the point. The drop off has come entirely from Democrats, 36% support in November 23, while 8% do now. Independents 47% in 23, while 25 support now 8% of Democrats in this poll say they support Israel's military action in Gaza. Among Republicans, however, support for Israel's military efforts has remained significant. The exact same share of Republicans who backed Israel's war Against Hamas in November 2023, 71% continue to support Israel's efforts today. Trump's decision to strike Israel's nuclear facilities has, if anything, bolstered GOP support for Israel. So we have this conversation going on among the, you know, supporters of Israel and Israelis and Israeli thinkers here, which is it's now happened. Support for Israel is now a partisan matter. Republicans support Israel and Democrats oppose. And this is how terrible this is terrible. Decades of bipartisan support in the United States are over and if you go dig in, people will start blaming Israel for this, like Netanyahu should never have given that speech in 2015 to the Congress against the Iran deal. You know, that really, that really turned the. But it was the first time that Democratic lawmakers felt it easy to attack and criticize him, which is nonsense, but nonetheless a kind of mythos that arose in 2015. I just think this is a naturally occurring development about which Israel, Jews, Zionists in America can do nothing. And it is very difficult for Jews and Zionist Jews in the United States who continue to want to support, to give their financial support to and to be part of the larger Democratic Party coalition. The cognitive dissonance here is going to get screechingly loud in their ears like the worst 12 tone music you have ever heard. And how, if, if Israel is important to them, what is, what's going to happen over the course of, let's just say, just say the next two and a half years as donors are approached for support from presidential, from nascent presidential candidacies, from this aggressive effort to do something to forestall the Republican Republicans growing their advantage in the Senate, which is what people kind of expect is despite your talk, Matt, of the terrific recruiting being done, getting the most popular politician in North Carolina to run for Senate next year and the best candidate to run against Susan Collins in Maine, though Maine is littered with the corpses of people who think Sherrod Brown lost.

Matt (40:12)

Right. Not necessarily he's the best bet either. But they're probably the best recruits they can hope for.

John Podhoretz (40:18)

But nonetheless. So they're doing this aggressive recruit, whatever. But you know, who is I, I mean I hate to put this way because it's now makes me sound like I'm the, you know, in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But you have no idea or people have no idea just how disproportionate the fundraising support not only in, on the, on the Democratic but also on the Republican side in American politics is from American jews make up 2% of the population and maybe a factor of 10 or more when it comes to dollars that are given to support political causes and political campaigns. And this vote yesterday is a, is a potential stake through the heart of a lot of high level Democratic Jewish support for candidates. Even though I assume that most Jews that I'm talking about here dislike Trump or they're now in a totally schizophrenic mood toward Trump where they don't like the stuff of the universities, they don't like the judges and they hate ICE and they don't like any of this, but they like Israel. And then now they're going to be all schizophrenic about this. But how, how you're going to go in and spend tens of millions of dollars on Zoram Mamdani's party in 20, 26, 27 and 28, that's a very open question there.

Christine Rosen (41:45)

One other thread here that we should pull just for a second is that there, there's still a lot of denial on the part of the Democratic Party about the nonwhite voters it lost to Trump in the last election and why those voters went to the right. And they're not, I don't think think of them as MAGA at all. I think they are very opportunistic, but they really, really voted against a lot of the cultural and social issues the Democrats have made the core of their coalition. And our, our colleague Rui Tajira, Liberal Patriot and other writers there have been just methodically going through the list of some of those issues, obviously transgender and others and race, and asking, so where have the Democrats learned a lesson? Where have they pulled back from these extreme positions? Every single one. They're doubling down. And that's going to also affect them, I think, both in the middle, therefore.

John Podhoretz (42:31)

About Sweeney, please, time to talk.

Matt (42:34)

I talk about Sydney Sweeney. All I I could talk about Sydney Sweeney any day of the week. I'm pulling any day, any time. So I'm happy that Christine had the segue there.

John Podhoretz (42:47)

Yes.

Christine Rosen (42:48)

Okay. So here's the thing about the Sydney Sweeney story, which I'm sure all our listeners will appreciate. I actually find it to be a wonderful reminder of something deeply great in American, which is that we love equality. And so there are a few things in life that are unequally distributed, and physical beauty is one of them. And it's very frustrating to people when physical beauty, which is unequally distributed and not really earned, is rewarded. And I think we're seeing that with the response to Sydney Sweeney, who is, by the way, she's got youth, she's got blondness, she's got pulchritude. It's like she's literally amazing and gorgeous to look at. And that's great. And she should earn lots of money selling blue jeans or whatever else she wants. But the hatred, the vitriol, the wild overreaction and the idea that this is somehow about some coded Nazi eugenics theory is I think it speaks to two things. One, the back, the obvious embrace of a backlash against this idea that beauty comes in every size and looks like anything. No, beauty is rare and, and a privilege. And some people have it and some people never Will. And that's just a reality of human. Human existence. She's got it in spades and she knows it, and she's embracing it, and she's making money off of it. And good for her. There's a lot of people in this country who do not like that message, even though I think it's hilarious how much they've overreacted to her obvious appeal.

Mark Alpert (44:06)

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Donny Deutsch (44:53)

Hey, this is Donny Deutsch. I host the podcast on Brand that comes twice a week. We give you two for the price of one. One day a week, we do our big interviews with our big personalities. Some of the biggest names are politics, entertainment, culture, and business. And on the second wave, we do what we call our brands of the week. These are the brands that shaping the zeitgeist. Who's up, who's down, and you can really enjoy both of them. So tune in twice a week to on Brand. You can get them anywhere. You get podcasts, Spotify, Apple, anyplace else. We look forward to seeing you and hearing from you.

Matt (45:26)

So we should say what the overreaction was about? Yes.

Christine Rosen (45:30)

They said it's coded because they did a play on the word blue jeans. J E A N.

Matt (45:36)

American Eagle jeans.

Christine Rosen (45:39)

Yeah. Which actually harks back to a Brooke Shields ad back in the 80s where she's like, nothing comes between me and Mike Calvin's.

John Podhoretz (45:46)

I mean, that was a disgusting ad.

Christine Rosen (45:48)

Yes, it was.

John Podhoretz (45:48)

Brooke Shields was 14 years old. Sydney Sweeney, I believe, is 28 years old.

Christine Rosen (45:53)

Yes.

John Podhoretz (45:54)

And has done an ad which is all about how, don't I look fantastic in these jeans?

Christine Rosen (46:00)

She doesn't have to say it. She just looks at the camera.

John Podhoretz (46:02)

It's great. Yeah. I look great in my jeans, Right.

Christine Rosen (46:07)

And I've got good genes. Yeah.

John Podhoretz (46:10)

So I got two things to say about Sydney Sweeney. Number one, she first made a real impression on me in the first season of the White Lotus as the daughter of. As this daughter of privilege who had brought her African American friend along with her on holiday. And they're sitting there reading. I think they're reading Judith Butler. I mean, they're reading some feminist text lying by the pool in Hawaii. And they keep attacking her brother and her, you know, for their terrible privilege and their sexism and all of that. And meanwhile, you know, sauntering around in their bikinis and, you know, being as provocative as possible possible. A brilliant piece of satire of rich, privileged leftism as has ever been done. So she almost sort of emerged as this Janus face of modern contemporary femalehood, in which she plays a character who's preaching Judith Butler while wearing the skimpiest bikini that you've ever seen in your entire life. And it's a very good performance. And it makes up for the fact that she didn't seem very good in the other stuff that sort of made her a big star. It made her seem like she was more than just a pretty face and a great body. So that's number one. Number two, if I can get incredibly pretentious for a minute, the first great satire of totalitarianism. The first satire of anything, maybe, but really the first great set is a play by Aristophanes called the assembly of Women, which is about how Athens has taken over by its women. And it turns out that they are monstrous collectively and very envious of beautiful women. And they pass monstrous laws among them that anybody can have sex with anybody else as long as the first people you have sex with are older and uglier. That's in order to balance out the genetic injustice.

Christine Rosen (48:39)

I will point out this play was written by a man I just. Just for the record.

John Podhoretz (48:43)

I understand. But that's why it's so funny, in my view, like it is. It is sort of a male paranoid fantasy. But first of all, it's one of the funniest things ever written. And in the end, at the end of this play, because of all this response, there's been all this response about how this ad makes me feel bad as a person of color. This ad is making me. Is reestablishing whiteness as a standard of beauty. This ad is. You know, what about is fat shaming this ad? Is this. The sad. Is that. How about. How I feel, say thousands of people on TikTok, thus providing American Eagle jeans with hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity and turning it into now, which was the reverse of Dylan Mulvaney. Like Dylan Mulvaney comes advertises Bud Light and destroys Bud Light. American Eagle, which is facing the prospect of Amazon going directly into the jeans market, which is a thing that isn't much talked about. Amazon is about, I hear, is about to like, go and present its own line of jeans. And so this is a way of getting ahead of that. Potentially has just done itself an enormous favor. I'm sure it's going to increase market share, you know, for me. Yeah.

Abe Greenwald (49:58)

So just as a note on how powerful this social justice stuff is, I watched the ad, I saw then it, it ends with, sydney Sweeney has good genes. J E A N S. Right. And then I read the complaints and they almost got me. You know, like this is this, this speaks to Christine's point about, like this, this thread in American culture where, you know, reading the, reading the complaints, they almost got me. I was almost like, well, they are playing with obviously the, the, the genes and jeans. Yeah, it's not great. I don't care. Ultimately, they didn't get me, but like, they almost got me because it's, it's because we are, at the end of the day that we are obsessed with equality.

Matt (50:58)

Yeah, I'm not. I don't care. I love Sydney Sweeney. I want more Sydney Sweeney in my life. That has been basically my rule for the past couple years. And so I'm happy to see her. Yes, I'm happy to see her once again, big exhibit her, her, her savvy and guile, which if you have been following her career closely as I have, she's very sharp in how she leverages her, her beauty in order to create publicity in order to make films which would not be a success. Successful. And here she is again in this little snippet of an ad doing the same thing. Why? Because she's great. We all. What's not about her, can I add?

Christine Rosen (51:49)

She, she had a response. Somebody, some critic, movie critic dissed her performance in that sort of, you know, frothy rom com she did a few years ago and said, you know, oh, well, she's a pretty face, but she can't act. And she had a wonderful kind of like, like, okay, whatever. She just rolls right off her back. And she does understand. I think one of the reasons Matt's absolutely right about her career trajectory is she knows she has a shelf life. So why shouldn't she do absolutely everything she can? Right now? She's, I think she makes like Baskin Robin.

Matt (52:18)

Also, I also want to contrast her with another young woman who I follow very closely. The supermodel Emily Radishowski. Right. Who is a socialist, anti Zionist political idiot, but very beautiful. And yet somehow when Emily Radajowski shows up wearing next to nothing, I don't hear the chorus of woke social justice warriors go up in arms. But Sydney Sweeney, who happens to have roots in middle America and has commented years ago how she kind of gets the MAGA phenomenon. She is always the object of vitriol. I'm the believer in equality, John. I believe in treating both Sydney Sweeney and Emily Ratajowski as beautiful objects to. Why don't I get any credit?

John Podhoretz (53:14)

Your nobility is beyond reproach.

Matt (53:18)

Thank you.

John Podhoretz (53:18)

But Abe is onto something and so are you and so is Christine, which is that ad is about more than that ad. It is not an accident that it is provocative ideologically. That's why I could contrast it to Dylan Mulvaney. They're like, we are making an ad. It looks exactly like the Calvin Klein ads of the 1980s. Doesn't exactly look like the Brooke Shields ad. It looks like an even weirder Calvin Klein ad made in the 1980s that was set in a basement rec room that was likened to porn. That it looked like a porn movie of the 1980s, only it was a Calvin Klein ad for jeans. That is the setting of that ad. Whoever directed it, whoever conceived it, this was very knowing and it was purposeful. And the idea is sexy is back. That is what that. And you know what that means. A sexy girl in sexy jeans with her shirt halfway buttoned down, showing her cleavage. That is what America in 2025 can be again. After 10 years or eight years since MeToo of this notion that only the male gaze is interested in portrayals of conventional old line sexuality in which men are attracted and women are given some perhaps impossible goal to aspire to physically. And that's culture. That's. That's why I mentioned Aristophanes 2500 years ago. Aristophanes was making fun of this idea that beauty is unjust and that if, you know, left to their own devices, jealous people will outlaw beauty or criminalize beauty because it makes them feel bad. And you know who it doesn't make feel bad? Most of the rest of us, really, who don't have that particular problem just looking at somebody beautiful. Because that's what aesthetics is about, is admiring beauty.

Christine Rosen (55:42)

I would say people should read Roger Scruton's excellent short little volume about beauty. It has, it touches on a lot of these issues and is really fantastic. But there's another thing that happened, I think in the last decade and it's not that we were told that ugly. Well, we were told that men were. Could be women and that they were even better at being women than women themselves. So as a woman, I can look at Sydney Sweeney and go, it's awesome that that's what's being celebrated because she's actually female. And as far as I know, those are her own parts. She hasn't even been like, seriously, you know, plasticized like, like some of our starlets have. So that's great. But also this idea that, that having any sort of sense of human understanding of beauty is wrong because actually we are wired to see certain faces as prettier than others or more handsome than others. Certain body shapes. This is actually our wiring as, as a species. So you can, you can allow for a vast range of what is considered attractive. And that's true of everyone. One of the comments I saw about the Sydney Sweeney was from a male friend of mine who loves a good looking woman but was like, she's not my type, but he likes something a little different. That's great. But the idea that you can't hold up what is objectively a beautiful young woman and say, isn't she hot and she's selling jeans, that, that is controversial as a sign of just how far afield we've gone theoretically about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be beautiful in our culture in the last decade.

John Podhoretz (57:04)

Okay, so we have.

Abe Greenwald (57:05)

I just.

John Podhoretz (57:05)

Sorry.

Abe Greenwald (57:06)

I just think we're focusing on the good genes part quite enough because that's also very deliberate. And here's I full the way the culture war works and the explosion of rage over this ad on the left. Here's what I fully expect to happen now. I'm looking to see when white supremacists start embracing Sydney Sweeney as like Pepe the Frog, but they don't have. And all the fun will be sucked out of everything they already have.

Matt (57:41)

Where do you think that people's physical characteristics come from? The sky. Yeah, but besides come from your genes.

John Podhoretz (57:49)

Besides which it's meaningless. Let me just talk about Sydney.

Abe Greenwald (57:52)

It's not meaningless. I'm not offended. But, but it's, but it's, it's. It's purposefully winking at something.

Christine Rosen (58:00)

They're winking at something.

John Podhoretz (58:02)

They're winking at something. But what they're winking at also is the humorlessness of the idea that putting an ad up with a, you know, obese woman in a bikini is something you're supposed to say, oh, that's what I like. You know, that's. I. That's. That's sexy. Or, here's this trans drag queen. Here's this drag queen pretending to be a woman. I'm. Wow, now I really should drink Bud Light to show that I'm, you know, sufficiently ideologically.

Matt (58:34)

It's a patient gesture to what Christine is saying.

John Podhoretz (58:37)

Human.

Matt (58:37)

Human nature. This is n. This is nature. Nature is what cannot be helped. You cannot help this.

John Podhoretz (58:42)

Yeah.

Matt (58:42)

And the left, in its utopian desires, is always trying to revolt against it. And that's what we're seeing play out. And that's exactly. That's what he knew. That's why human nature hasn't changed since his time.

John Podhoretz (58:52)

And so that's why we have two recommendations today. Beauty by Roger Scruton. A really wonderful short essay on this question of how, as I think Scruton said, beauty speaks to us directly, like the voice of an intimate friend. We cannot look away. We cannot but listen to is what we want out of life is a little beauty that's like in the midst of all of our ugliness, what we. What. What helps us through the day are little moments where we can enjoy beauty that's in 10,000 different ways. And there's that. And then there's the assembly of Women by Aristophanes. The greatest political play or the greatest political satire of politics. Not necessarily of, you know, the political. Like Gulliver's Travels is a greater political.

Christine Rosen (59:42)

Satire or of the female nature, necessarily.

John Podhoretz (59:45)

Or of the female nature. But it is a genuinely great. It's a. It's about totalitarianism, and before totalitarianism had a name. And so you can read that, too. There we go. Very high brow while we talk about an ad for jeans. So that's the kind of transcendence you can get here on the Commentary magazine podcast. We'll be back tomorrow. For Christine, Matt, and Abe, I'm John Pawart's Keep the Candle bur.