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- [00:00]
A
This is an emergency edition of the Commentary magazine daily podcast. This is Sunday, April 26th. It's 10:30 in the morning, and we are gathering, obviously, to talk about the events of last night at the White House Correspondents association dinner at the Washington Hilton, where a gunman was apprehended outside the ballroom. Joining me today, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
And a man in the ballroom was there when this happened, our contributing editor, Eli Lake. Hi, Eli.
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D
Hi, John.
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A
So, Eli, not to do the, you know, like, dramatic, you were there and tell us how you felt and all that, but you were there, tell us how you felt.
- [00:53]
D
Okay, so this was, we should say that the suspect who's in custody, the actual shooting, the event happened like a floor above the actual ballroom. But where my table was to understand the Washington Hilton ballroom is such where there's kind of an outer ring and then another ring and then in the center and then there's a big stage. I was at the outer ring in the sort of area of the CBS Free Press tables. And we heard gunshots. In fact, I smelled, and others around me smelled gunpowder. And then everybody. And then what we could see if you can, you know, so you're at a, you know, you're at a table, everyone's in tuxes and gowns. And then we could see that there was one security person who had his weapon drawn. And that was what we saw from inside the ballroom. So most people, and this was an interesting observation is that I think the younger people had been used to the school shooter drills. And they all immediately, a lot of people, like, immediately kind of got to the floor, crouched under the table or the chairs. And then those of us who were older than that era, we were a little bit confused. And then you started seeing everybody kind of turning on their cell phone cameras to sort of get anything they could. And it was unnerving because, you know, at all of a sudden you started, then we, then I can tell you what you started seeing was members of the cabinet were being rushed to a safe room. And that happened that they that was happening kind of in my area. So you saw Hegseth and Cash Patel and Scott Besant who were there. And just as a matter of background for the listeners, the White House Correspondents Dinner is, you know, a fancy black tie event where big news organizations will have guests who are usually cabinet secretaries or people like that at their table. So it's not just the press and then the president who's on the dais who would address it. The whole room is filled with senior government officials. A lot of lobbyists will go, of course, journalists. But it's really kind of a Washington insider y elite.
- [03:14]
A
We should describe it as follows. So I went to it, I don't know, 20 times in my life. And it's one of the biggest rooms you will ever be in. It's a gigantic ballroom. It fits 3,500 people seated, just as you know. So, like, that means there are 300 tables in the ballroom. And as you mentioned, the ballroom's a little like the Globe Theater or something. Like it's got levels. Yeah, sort of like. And so it's enormous. And it's downstairs from the lobby, so you actually descend to the ballroom, and all the security stuff is above. And I think probably before we even get going, it's worth pointing out that my initial reaction when I was reading about this, hearing about it, is, oh, my God, this is another Secret Service scandal that's about to hit. And that's clearly unfair and untrue and unjust. What actually happened is what is exactly supposed to happen. He tried to breach security by or being in the building, and then dashing past the Secret Service, and they took him down. And so the Secret Service did exactly what it was supposed to. Everybody in the ballroom did exactly what they were supposed to. This is not a failure. It's a success of the process. So the fact that you saw someone's gun drawn that instantly the security for the Cabinet members made their moves, the security on the dais for the vice President and for the President made their moves instantaneously, is one of the first good pieces of good news relating to the Secret Service that I can remember in the last couple of years, which usually has revolved around difficulties, problems, mistakes, errors, and of course, the great failing at Button Butler, Pennsylvania, of not having had someone on the roof where the shooter took the shot at the President, although even he himself said last night in his statement that he doesn't even hold the Secret Service. Like, he's not upset because the sniper on the other side of the roof took the guy who shot at him down in four seconds. Like, he instantly made it and did his job. Anyway, I just thought it's worth pointing out this is a colossal room. The President was never at any. And nobody, as it turns out, was at any actual physical risk because he never got down the stairs even to the ballroom level.
- [05:57]
D
And I can tell you that the security at the Washington Hilton, which is, by the way, the same hotel where President Reagan was shot in 1981 was extraordinary in the sense that even to get. I mean, you have to understand there's a huge kind of traffic circle before you get to the actual hotel. So even to get into that traffic circle which abuts Connecticut Avenue, there was security. I had to show the electronic version of my ticket, and then I had to pick up a physical ticket. And every floor, you had to present the ticket and your identification. It was a huge. I mean, the security was excessive. And I had not been to this in 10 years. And it was much more intense than I had remembered going, because I've gone to a lot of these as well. And then another thing that's different is, I don't know if you remember back in the day, John, but, you know, every news organization would have, like, for an hour, a cocktail hour, and they would have a room or something. But you could go from room to room and say hi to your friends at, like, Fox News or the Washington Post or whatever. This time, you know, you had to pretty much be in one of the media rooms. So I was at the CBS Free Press thing. But you could. I could not then go into, I don't know, the, you know, the Washington Post.
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A
Right. So again, I think this is worth describing.
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D
Yeah.
- [07:21]
A
So anyone who's been to a convention hotel, right. There are rooms on the convention floor where there are 20 or 30 different rooms for breakout sessions and things like that. And at the Correspondence center, every single one of those rooms, and then some of them also had outdoor space. There's sort of an interior garden patio inside the sort of the circular building that is the Washington Hilton. And so the whole thing of the dinner, the dinner was almost incidental to this first hour, hour and a half, where you would walk from room to room 40, 50, 60 different news organizations would have their own little party. And you would go. And if you were somebody like me, who had worked at four or five different places, it was like old home week. You would go to one, you would see people you worked with 10 years ago, then you would see these people, and then at each, there would be a celebrity guest or two. In the early years that I went in the 80s, those were always senators, congressmen or cabinet officials. And then when Clinton hit the scene in 1992, it became a Hollywood spectacle. And then suddenly a list. Celebs were all coming. The great moment that changed the White House Correspondence center was not when, like, Barbra Streisand started coming. It was in 1986 when the brilliant, late, hilarious editor, writer all around good guy person. Mike Kelly, who died tragically in Iraq, was then at the Baltimore sun. And he invited Fawn hall, who you may remember was Oliver North's secretary at an absolutely drop dead gorgeous model level woman. And everybody in the room wanted to get a look at Fawn hall in person. And Mike therefore kind of transformed the dinner because then it was like, who's this year's Fawn Hall? Can we figure out who's the kind of weird person in the world of politics or that we could get a, that we could invite? And so everyone would go, whoa. The Washington Times had so and so that's amazing because Mike was then working for the Baltimore sun and so they got a lot of off the page attention. And now if that, if that element of the dinner is sort of done with because of these security procedures that have gotten tighter and tighter, that, that is another sort of reason why this dinner is probably no longer what is no longer the kind of unbelievable event that it has been in previous years or decades.
- [10:09]
D
Well, the other, the other, the other big. Yeah, the other big thing is that then there are the after parties. So for years, Bloomberg, of all places, which is not considered like the funnest media outlet, but they would have the premier afterparty. So I remember one year during the George W. Bush administration, I went to a Bloomberg after party and I met like the cast of the West Wing to give you a sense. But that was so the Bloomberg. And there's a famous Andy Ferguson column about Peter Beinart. Do you remember this?
- [10:37]
A
Yeah, we published it.
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D
Yeah, you guys published, right? Exactly. And Ferguson is like, Ferguson's like, like Peter's like buttering him up and saying, oh, can I get tickets?
- [10:46]
A
Because Andy was a column at Wes. It was a column, commentary column. And Andy was then a columnist at Bloomberg. And so he gets this obsequious email from Peter Beinard. Oh, buddy, I love your work. You're so amazing. It's fantastic. Hey, listen, you know, I'll be. I just happen to be in the neighborhood. Could I get an invite to the, to the Bloomberg party? You know, so there was a Bloomberg party. There was a Vanity Fair party. This was very.
- [11:17]
D
Yeah, the Vanity Fair party was the other big like superstar thing. And they're usually by the way, also held at like the embassies. So, you know, this year there was. I mean, I didn't end up going to it because what ended up happening was I was with the Free Pressers, right? So we all like found our way to one of the back Exits. And we just were like, this thing is probably canceled. It turned out I just. The dinner kept. Kept going, but we didn't quite know what to do. And, you know, because it was all over the news, my wife was kind of wanting to know, and I just figured it'd probably be good to go home and sort of say, I'm all right. And, you know, it was. I can tell you that there is an adrenaline rush and then a crash when you kind of the whole thing. So, you know, I didn't go to any after parties, but that's kind of a big thing about it. And there was. I mean, I don't know if you remember this, John, in your day, but, you know, there used to be a kind of. It's like a bragging rights. Oh, I saw you at the Bad Fair party. Or you wanted to know there was a certain kind of status as a journalist in Washington that you would get depending on what parties and the more exclusive parties you could be at. And this was. This was a big thing as well.
- [12:27]
A
Yeah, yeah. So there was a famous po. I mean, again, like, we're circling around the real subject here, but, I mean, there was a famous party that a CNN producer named Tammy Haddad had on Sunday, had a brunch.
- [12:43]
D
Oh, I was at that once.
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A
And the Tammy Haddad brunch was. That was where the Washington journalists got to meet again, the West Wingers or, you know, again, Barbra Streisand or something like that. And this was one of these events that I think created the conditions under which Trump eventually ended up coming to power. That is this weird world in which journalists, powerful politicians, lobbyists, and Hollywood all commingled and the sense of rot, of, like, cultural elitist club, you know, clubbable, you know, very un American. Creating this world in which all these people come in. It's very British. Everybody, like, goes, you know, you're a member of the Groucho Club or something like that. It's not American. And that world, which various people that I knew, like Fred Barnes and others, found really repulsive, I totally enjoyed. I had no problem with it. But this was very much a species of the idea that Washington had become this playground and not a place where serious politics was done, but where people were basically just angling to be part of the American social and political and cultural lead and you could all do it at once. And this day was one of the days in which you were either in or you were out. And Trump.
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D
It's a little bit. Yeah, it's a little Bit like the Washington, D.C. equivalent of the Met gala. Right. You know, where it was just you wanted to be seen and if there was something wrong, if you were not, you know, if you were not invited. I remember I was at one. God, what would this have been? I think this was at the Washington Times. And I remember there was a policy that. Because no news organization can give the entire newsroom tickets to go to it, too. That's another thing. So just getting in the door so you get to the actual dinner, let alone the after parties and everything else that you would be able to get, you know, you would be. You could guarantee your seat at the table if you could get the best possible guest. Right. So that was another thing, was like, you know, you were incentivized to, you know, get, you know, I don't know, the deputy Secretary of State or something like that, you know, and that would be like, you know, if you can, if you could wrangle somebody like that into that, and then that would guarantee you, as the journalist, a chance to sit there. So.
- [15:19]
A
Yeah. Okay, so we've circled. So we've now described this event that Trump sort of killed off because, of course, he refused to go during his first term. Then of course, Biden came in, but there was Covid for two years.
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B
Well, we should also just note here how consequential the night has been for Trump in the past.
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D
That's right.
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A
Oh, very important. 2011 White House correspondents dinner. Obama made fun of Trump. And it was at that moment, viciously. Yeah. Because Trump had been backing the birth certificate story. Yeah, yeah. And then Trump basically was humiliated. And you know that that passion is what sort of like, led him inexorably into running for president. So it was consequential.
- [16:05]
D
Although in fairness, Trump was talking about running for president as early as.
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A
No, Yeah, I know, but, but, but people say that something changed at that dinner like that, that people around him.
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B
And if you watch it, it's believable.
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A
Yeah. So what, what's interesting, weirdly, can I
- [16:19]
D
just say, like, that Trump for most of his life and most. Where most of his public celebrity career or whatever, would have been exactly the kind of person that you would find at the Vanity Fair after party would have been exactly the kind of person who would be the kind of insider rubbing elbows with powerful journalists. And he loved that. And he was a TV star.
- [16:41]
A
He was himself and he was a TV star. TV star. Right. But the dinner stopped being what it had been because people didn't want to come to Washington. Hollywood didn't want to come to Washington for the dinner, which is essentially supposed to be a celebration of the President. That's the odd part, is that it's the moment where the President makes a speech and he makes jokes about. It's jokey. And he makes jokes about the journalists. But then at the end, he says, we're all in this together. We're all Americans, free speech, and this is the greatest society on earth because we have a free press. And everybody applauds each other and drinks and toasts and goes off to parties. And it's a moment of great. And Trump, last night, interestingly enough, in his remarks, evoked that. He said he congratulated the head of the White House Correspondents Association. He said it was a beautiful night. He was looking around the room at how civil and cordial and happy everybody seemed to be, and it was really a beautiful evening, and he wants to restage it. He wants it to come back. It was so nice. And. And he was, everybody, this is why
- [17:49]
D
we need a White House ballroom. That was the other part that was.
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C
The interesting thing is that he was. He was complimentary of literally everybody involved in the project. The White House Correspondents association, the Secret Service. You know, he said in that press conference, I'll be the first to complain. I like complaining about the Secret Service if they did something wrong. The Secret Service was great. The security was great. These guys around me were great. The journalists were great. All the people in the hall who aren't journalists were great. I mean, he. It was. It was a loving.
- [18:16]
A
And then he said. And then he. And then he said I was gonna give the most inappropriate speech that has ever been given anywhere. And I still have it. But I don't think if we do this again, I'll be as rough, because I thought that it was a very nice vibe in the room, is essentially what he said. That very unlike him. And of course, he said many things I thought were very interesting. Go ahead, Adrian.
- [18:41]
B
Yeah, he seemed to indicate. He didn't spell it out, but he seemed to sort of indicate that the. The nightmare of it sort of brought them all together in some common way.
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A
Right.
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B
That he. That he felt.
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A
Yeah, right. But I think also.
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D
Can I just get back to the interesting thing about 2011, is that I think 2011, in some ways, you could say the really important thing that happened was that Trump was roasted so mercilessly by Obama, because you can argue that it does set the path towards Trump running, of course, in 2016, win. And here we are in the Trump era. However, at the time, the big news was nobody was aware that as Obama was roasting Trump, he was planning the final parts of the bin Laden raid, which is also a kind of world historic event. So that 2011 White House correspondence dinner is one of those important hinges in American history, I suppose.
- [19:38]
A
Yeah, I mean, so the event itself is very interesting. It's a. As I say, I think there's an element of cultural rot. When I started going in the 1980s, it was a big deal to get the deputy Assistant Secretary of State at your table. And then 10 years later, if you didn't have an Emmy nominated member of the cast of Caroline in the City, you were a B team or a C team. That all shifted the mood and the tone. And also because it was the Reagan 80s and then the Bush 80s and early 90s, that divide between the world of showbiz and the world of Washington was still very much present. The walls fall down and then you just have journalists whoring after the supporting cast members of Caroline in the City. And very unseemly, like, weirdly unseemly, discomforting as journalism itself is like going through this nightmarish decline and jobs are failing and new institutions are failing and becoming half of what they once were. And this was like this one moment when press self congratulation got its, got its like three hours in the sun where, you know, and the press is giving awards to other members of the press and everybody is talking about news. What brilliant reporting some completely hackish, you know, White House reporter did on a breaking news story about something or other that was literally no different from the other hack who wrote a story on the same subject but was better liked by the panel that chose the winner and that sort of thing. So, so let's.
- [21:34]
D
But I mean, again, one more detail from last night. Yeah. Every year there, you know, I don't know if it was like this when you went there, but there are, there are like protests. And you have to understand Connecticut Avenue is one of the large boulevards of Washington. So across, there's like a divide in, in this two, Connecticut Avenue. So across from Washington Hilton, there was a gaggle, I would say, of no more than maybe 30 people, but they were waving Palestinian Iranian flags and they were clearly there. There are a lot of things you could protest about. President Trump and the media, of course, but they were there because they wanted Iran to win the war, and they were there because they were on Team Hezbollah and Team Iran. Now I take some comfort because you could only get 30 people. I mean, it was so in that sense, but they were loud enough. And I thought it was, it was jarring in some ways to see people literally waving the Iranian flag. I think I saw a Hezbollah flag as well. But that was the.
- [22:41]
A
Katie Pavlich, the conservative media personality, had to cross the street. As you said, Connecticut's like, imagine essentially like a six lane highway, but it's a street and there's a cement, there's a concrete divider between the north, south, east, west, which are the two ways it's running. And she has to cross the street probably to get to her car, which is parked on the other side of Connecticut Avenue. And she has to sort of walk around this crowd and somebody hit her on the head.
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D
Wow.
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A
Like smashed her. Like. Now she said it wasn't clear whether that was intentional or not, but it was that kind of thing where they were out in public, they weren't penned up. Right. It's not like in New York now where they basically.
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D
No, no, they weren't penned up. You could see them. And then as you were walking, because, I mean, there's no point in trying to drive anywhere near the event because there is a lot of security. But as you were walking there, there were a few code pink, I don't know, volunteers who had like a pamphlet suggesting that Pete Hegseth should be arrested. That was the other one, as you're sort of going in. But every year there are these protests that I always find it interesting. What are they protesting about? And this year it was like the protest was Team Intifada against the Washington press corps and all these Washington elites.
- [24:04]
A
So bouncing around to point out in Trump's statement that he made from the White House press room, he explicitly connected Iran to the event. He said, when they said, why did this happen? Why would this guy do it? And he said, I don't know. He said, I think he's a lone gunman. He's sick. He's very sick. These people are sick. And, you know, so rather than saying, you know, this was, you know, this was an effort to, you know, sort of disrupt history or something like that, he did go with the crazy lone gunman theory. But he also said, you know, I'm here trying to, to make sure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon. And I don't really understand why, I mean, basically said, I don't really understand why that's controversial. I don't understand why anybody wouldn't support that idea. And that gets to the point about the protesters that you're making, which is you can Say the war is a mistake. You can say that, you know, it's ill considered. I suppose I don't say any of those things, but that's within the bounds of realm of a proper conversation. But the idea that all things being equal, any civilized human being would not prefer, prefer that the regime in Iran not have a nuclear weapon and that efforts to make sure that happened are, all things being equal, moral and just, even if they might be politically unsound or tactically foolish or something like that. It was interesting that he went there. He didn't have to do it. He didn't have to mention Iran at all. And he did. And he wanted to make that connection and he wanted to use this moment to say, I'm really serious about this. Like, it's on my mind as I'm standing here, Iran, you know, like.
- [25:51]
D
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned this because I was thinking about the Vietnam protests before these dinners. And of course, Jane Fonda does go on a disgusting propaganda tour with the Viet Cong and urges Parisoners of war to give up and everything like that. And that was gross. But, but there was a huge backlash in the United States even I think among the anti war movement. The main anti war thing that really gets going in like 67, 68 is like, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Meaning it was not like they were in favor of North. It was like, our boys are getting killed in this meat grinder. And it was. Which again, like, I think that's unfair. You can say whatever you want about it, but that's a, I guess it kind of, you can see how that was a kind of patriotic protest as opposed to literally waving the flag of the enemy like that. And of course, there were elements of the Vietnam protests that did end up getting to that point. Like the Weather Underground was pro Viet Cong and pro North Vietnam, but it was not the mainstream of the anti war movement, was not that at all. They just didn't think it was worth it. And they didn't like the draft and they didn't want, you know, young people.
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B
Same applies, same applies during the Bush years where, where the war protest. I mean, what we're seeing now in terms of protesting the war as opposed to Trump is nothing compared to what we saw during Iraq, when Iraq.
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A
I mean, that's very, that's a very interesting. Of course, we did have hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
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D
Yeah.
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A
On the battlefield in the two Iraq wars. And we don't.
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C
But there, but there is, but you can compare it to Iran also.
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B
But, but, but just. Also, to Eli's point, they weren't pro Taliban. They weren't pro Saddam. That was not the argument that was.
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A
Right.
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B
That. That was. You would never hear such a thing whispered.
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A
Right.
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C
That was like coverage speech at Columbia and at the Ahmadinejad speech at Columbia. The flyers around the quad.
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A
2007. Yeah.
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C
Flyers around the quad were flyers that said things like, Bush is the real nuclear threat, not Ahmadinejad, not Iran, stuff like that. So there were, there were, there were times where with Iran even going back that far, if you went on a college campus, you did hear that. Just like, with like the stuff where you heard like a full obeyed and whatever, you know. But, but it was in that, in, in those, in those environments you did. It was a weird, it was a very weird atmosphere because of that. Because Bush was so hated by them. And so the college kids took it to the level that college kids usually. Yeah, but I got you right in the mainstream.
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A
I got a call in audible here on this because remember that in Ahmadinejan was invited by the president of Colombia. There were protests that the idea that you would invite somebody who had, who was a totalitarian opposite, you know, calling for the elimination of Israel and was himself somebody who had thrown people in jail on speech grounds and stuff like that. And that the department, the Middle Eastern Studies department was objectively pro Iranian. I mean, so that's a slightly different story. Like, that was Joseph Mossad, the professor, and Edward said they were actually pro Iranian. They weren't just like, Bush is terrible. They hated Bush. But that was the first element of, of that stuff. But let's go. Let. I think we need to talk more generally now about what this all portends, because. Abe. Friday. Friday, yeah. In your newsletter, after the Hassan Piker, Nadja Spiegelman, Gia Tolentino, New York Times video about the virtues of theft and murder as an expression of social discontent. And you concluded your newsletter by saying, whatever happened to all that talk about turning down the temperature in America and finding a civilized middle ground? And it is astonishing you were resistant to doing this podcast this morning because you're like, we just did political violence all week. We were talking about Hasan Piker all week and the effort to whitewash this. And I don't know how we can't connect the mood that was being expressed by the New York Times publishing that or putting up that podcast, that video podcast thing, conversation and what Cole Allen did yesterday.
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B
Yeah. And I should point out, and I've been thinking about it all week because I Also had a particular problem with Zoram Hamdani's singling out in his video announcement about a pied a terror tax the Citadel CEO by name, showing where he lived, saying what he paid for his lavish penthouse and creating him as the mob's public enemy number one for the week. So I thought there was this disgusting. I sort of felt some violence in the air this week. Obviously the New York Times put it on their homepage.
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A
Yeah, right. The mayor of New York City literally doxes a person a year after a guy is shot on the street.
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B
A CEO, another CEO.
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A
And by the way, this is something to watch for because Cole Allen is going to be arraigned tomorrow at 1pm According to Midas Touch. So he will be perp walked and arraigned. And he's pretty good looking. How do we not. Based on what we can see, how do we not know that this is not a second Luigi Mangione. We're gonna.
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B
He's got a name hooked up by a Hollywood studio.
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A
Yeah. And he went to Caltech and he designed a wheel. He tried to design. Such a wonderful person. He tried to design a wheelchair to help brakes on a wheelchair. And he's an SAT prep coach who won.
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C
Trump alluded to this in a weird way last night also in the press conference where he said, you know, these guys, they're, they're super geniuses, but they're unstable in some way. You know, but they're, but they're like super geniuses. And he, you know, he, this isn't, this isn't the law. This isn't the lost boy. You know, we've had pro, we've had so many problems in America with the so called lost boys. You know, the guys, you know, I still remember that great article about the guy who was, you know, that, that South Dakota Nazi organization or whatever. Before that he had been like some crazy vegan living on an island, helping the indigenous people or whatever. Like he had, he had ping ponged back and forth from left to right for their cause celebs. Because there was this idea that there's just so many lost young men in America. And this is, this is not a lost. I mean, we don't know yet. He's lost by, by certainly by some definition, obviously. But, but in this sense he's not a loss. He's a sort of member of the elite in a weird, you know, not the governing elite, but the guy who goes to elite colleges. And he.
- [33:15]
D
Right.
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C
And he, and he succeeds. He's a, he's a You know, he's
- [33:18]
B
a, he doesn't seem to have been left behind by, by things.
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C
Yeah, he does. He wasn't left behind, did what he did. People started talking about, well, yeah, he had back surgery. Right. And he was mad at the CEO. Like people try to start connecting it, but there are these cases where these are just, these are just not victims. Luigi Mangioni and this guy, they're not victims, they're not societies.
- [33:41]
D
But this is, this is a very old story with violent radicals. If you go back and you look at Ayman Al Zawahiri, number two in Al Qaeda, he was a doctor, he went to University of Cairo medical school. If you go by Vladimir Lenin came from a very.
- [33:57]
B
You can look at the number one in Al Qaeda too, by the way.
- [33:59]
D
Yeah, number one in Al Qaeda is a scion of the, of a, of a building empire. And you have, you know, you just go through the list. It's a great book. I'm sure you guys know it.
- [34:08]
A
John Wilkes Booth was a member of America's leading acting family. I mean, yeah, this is not the weird lone gunman, obviously. Lee Harvey Oswald being the paradigmatic figure. Then we did have this period of the weird lone gunman, right? Like Arthur Bremer who shot George Wallace Hinckley. Right. Who did it for Jodie Foster. The Manson girls who shot the two different Manson family members who shot at Gerald Ford. There was this period of time where the people that we would look at and say they should, you know, somebody should have like put them in a mental institution were, were running riot. But even man, usually a Ted Kaczynski.
- [34:54]
D
It's usually a Ted Kaczynski who goes to Harvard and is a genius and then cracks and.
- [34:58]
A
Yeah, right, exactly. Okay, so can I just make one point?
- [35:01]
B
I'm sorry, but no, no, because we're talking about. John, you said something to watch for is the valorization of this guy. There's also something else to watch for, which is also. Which has started to happen already. And this speaks to the particular nightmare we're in, which is that not only are we in this age of political assassination and assassination attempts again, but there are all these follow on horrors, one being the valorization of the alleged attempted killer or killer, the other being the anti Semitic conspiracy theories which have already started online in regard to this guy. Someone's showing him wearing an IDF shirt, someone's found that he, his name was searched and was googled in Israel before this. And a whole whatever they're coming up with. So I'm Just saying we have the horror event itself and now we're gonna. Now we're gonna go. Go into. We're gonna go. We're gonna spiral down further.
- [36:08]
A
Yeah. I mean, it literally took five minutes for somebody on Twitter to make up to fake a Google Trends heat map suggesting that on. On Friday, there had been a spike at 6pm in Israel of searches of Cole Allen's name. But if you went to Google Trends and click, put in Cole Allen's name, as I did, there was no such spike. So someone drew a map, you know, basically forged it. You know, 20 million people are going to see that.
- [36:45]
D
If there are any anti Jewish moron conspiracy theorists listening to this podcast, I just want to point something out. How is it possible that the old conspiracy theory is that Bibi has something on Trump and that's why we went to war in Iran, but also Israel's behind an attempted assassination of Trump, which would bring us. J.D. vance, who we now know was against the Iran. What are you doing?
- [37:12]
A
You know, the greatest, the greatest, the greatest.
- [37:15]
D
Keep it together.
- [37:16]
A
The greatest false flag theory is that this was staged so that it would end the controversy over the White House ballroom.
- [37:25]
D
Oh, of course, right. Which is also Israel, in order.
- [37:28]
A
But Israel or not Israel, that Trump wanted this to happen so that he could say, well, we need to build the White House ballroom, because that'll be secure. And, you know, there are, there are like serious Democratic influencers. Like there's a someone named Amy Siskind who basically said that in a tweet last night that, you know, it's like the Manchurian Candidate, you know, where, where the, you know, the shooter shoots the wrong. You know, it turns out the whole assassination attempt is a false flag. Whatever.
- [38:00]
D
Anyway, I think we can now say that Blue sky, or Blue ski, as you call it, Seth, is the. Is the liberal 4chan. It's like that's, that's where the lunatics go to really pump each other up.
- [38:13]
C
And that's where you see people on Twitter. The joke now is when something like this happens, what's the mood on blueski? That's like. Or Blue Sky. That's the thing. They refer to it the way you used to refer to. Yeah, 4chan. Like, you know, some of these crazy subreddits or whatever.
- [38:26]
A
So we're having sort of like a light, you know, like, fun, breezy discussion here. But it should be pointed out, somebody took a. Made a relatively serious effort, even if it was very much a Hail Mary play, to put it mildly, to assassinate the president or leading members of Congress
- [38:44]
D
as they gathered, by the way. That's why I don't think he's going to be valorized. Is that part of the thing about Mangione, and it was disgusting, of course, that he was valorized, is that he not only succeeded, but he kind of evaded the cops for five days.
- [38:57]
A
Yeah. So it was Bonnie and Clyde. Yeah. So there was a buy in climb.
- [39:01]
D
This guy managed to book a room at the Washington Hilton. He had knives and guns on him. And then your plan is to run past, like the first. I mean, how many didn't you think there would be multiple layers of security or something? I mean, it seems like you're right. Hail Mary is the right way to describe it.
- [39:20]
A
So. But I mean, I think it's very important to note that, you know, this is the world that we are living in and that political violence, we have been warning about this in the pages of commentary since early 2016, that political violence is becoming more and more and more normalized. And while Trump bears some early responsibility for the stuff that he said during the 2016 campaign, like, go beat the hell out of the people in the stadium who were protesting against me. And, and that sort of thing that this is now, that it is sort of overwhelmingly on the left that hit efforts at killing or injuring or maiming politicians and political figures is a, is a, is an almost exclusively left wing phenomenon in the United States.
- [40:17]
C
And can I just say something he didn't say last night. He didn't play the. He didn't play the leftists are always trying are trying to kill us card, which was on the table for him if he wanted to. This is now the third attempt on his life alone. But it was interesting that he didn't play that card.
- [40:36]
A
Right. And of course, the most heartbreaking sight last night was seeing the back. Really, we didn't see her face, but the back of Erica Kirk being hustled out of, out of the Washington Hilton, saying, I just want to go home. Sobbing and saying, I just want to want to go home. What is this now? It's nine months since her husband was assassinated in Utah, and the response of some people on the despicable people on the right has been to sort of like, trash her.
- [41:13]
D
Well, John, this is a really good maybe way to end the conversation, because I wonder if this event can maybe further catalyze something that I think has already been happening, which is that the crowd of podcast influencers who, I mean, really, it's Candace Owens, but there's an ecosystem of people who kind of tolerate Candace Owens and think it's wrong to marginalize her. By the way, very similar dynamic to Ezra Klein writing a column saying, hasan Piker's not the enemy. Maybe this is an event where, you know, you've already had Trump breaking with Tucker and Megyn Kelly and so and Candace, but maybe you also now are starting, maybe you can start to see some of the others on the right who've maybe been fence sitters on this stuff, find the carriage of a Ben Shapiro or a Mark Levin and begin to say, enough is enough. You know, we have, you know, we should not incentivize this kind of thing, this kind of conspiracy thinking, because it can have downstream effects that we can't predict and awful with awful results.
- [42:23]
A
I would love to end on that note, but our experience of the last three years has been the opposite. That is, you have an October 7th, and what happens is that antisemitism spikes. It doesn't decline, that political violence classically begets political violence. There was this moment when the violent period, the assassination period in America ended, and that was sort of Reagan, followed three weeks later by the near killing of the pope, Pope John Paul ii, by Mehmet Ali Ajah. Those two events coming so close to one another in 1981 seem to have some kind of a very peculiar, sobering effect on the United States and the world. And this era, which wasn't just happening in the United States. You had the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro, the prime minister of Italy, and or various other people in Europe, and somehow the world went. This has now gone too far. Like something happened and the world reared in horror and it kind of stopped. I just don't, I think we're closer to the beginning of this period than we are to the end of this period.
- [43:45]
C
Well, you have, I mean, the one thing that's different is that you have this politically influential core who, you know, aside from sympathizing with the shooters in some cases, like Luigi Mangione, they do so by raising the evil of the person of the victim or intended victim. So that's, you know, one thing you, one thing you didn't have were influential political voices saying, well, of course they shot at the Pope. He's committed social murder for 37 years.
- [44:15]
B
Yeah.
- [44:16]
A
Or they didn't have a forum. Right.
- [44:18]
C
And now they didn't have the forum. They were crazy people maybe talking to themselves and whatever. But now it's immediately blast out there. And that's one thing, I think, that keeps these things going, this idea that like, well, it's a, you know, social murder. So you can kill this guy, that guy, whatever. There's no way to stop the momentum if the reaction of, like, popular, politically influential people is going to be, yeah, we all get why he did this.
- [44:43]
A
It also doesn't need to be that popular. I mean, that's the thing about Reddit 4chan. You know, you can have a Reddit group with 15 people in it, and if they somehow all, you know, have an ability to figure out how to make a bomb, somebody could make a bomb. It's like there was never this ability to aggregate people in service of evil the way there is now. And that's, I think, one of the things that, as Seth is indicating, prevents the break that Eli is hoping for. I mean, the slamming on the brake that Eli is hoping for, simply because also everybody else is sort of incentivized to point it out, to express outrage against it. Right? To say, oh, my God, look at this person doing this incredibly disgusting thing. Somebody's got to stop them. But that only amplifies the message. It doesn't shut it down. It doesn't quiet it. It then creates a.
- [45:48]
D
But I would rather have that than, like, I mean, again, like the Ezra Klein and then the soft, you know, the chummy podcast with Piker.
- [45:59]
A
Right.
- [46:00]
D
That's more than just simply pointing it out and maybe amplifying the message. That's saying maybe they have a point. I mean, I got into a Twitter thing where I. With Jonathan Chait, and I just made the observation if the cause. I believe, by the way, that Piker's thing is really, this is about the DSA taking over the Democrats or the hard left taking over the Democratic Party. It's a kind of a proxy battle for that. And, you know, it's like, you know, if the DSA succeeds in taking over the Democratic Party, they will run on class warfare in Palestine in 2028. And Che was like, they're not gonna take over the Democratic Party. And I'm like, I hope you're right. But that's why we're talking about Piker right now, because I couldn't have imagined the New York Times editorial pages, as much as I disagree with so much of it, coming up with arguments that would justify this kind of thing. And now here they are.
- [46:52]
A
So, I mean, I totally agree.
- [46:55]
B
I probably sound like a broken record on this point because I wrote about this also this week. But I say none of this happens without the broad sanctioning of anti Semitism. Yeah, I mean, this starts with mobs of people coming out saying, from the river to the sea, globalize the intifada. And then the establishment part of liberalism saying, well, they have a point. That's okay. Let's hear them out. Some people may hear that as anti Semitic, anti Semitism with violent intent. But what is it really? And let's listen to them and let's elevate them and let's elect them. And here we are.
- [47:36]
A
All right. Well, Eli Lake, thank you so much for bringing your eyewitness account to our conversation here. We'll be back tomorrow with a regular podcast for Seth and Abe. I'm John Pothorotz. Keep the candle burning.