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- [00:00]
John Podhoretz
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say, this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary hope for the.
- [02:23]
Abe Greenwald
Expect a worse Some preacher.
- [02:25]
John Podhoretz
Pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing this way it's going Hope.
- [02:33]
Abe Greenwald
For the best expect the worst.
- [02:38]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, September 9, 2025. I am John Pot Horitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Grant Greenwald. Hi Abe.
- [02:52]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [02:54]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [02:57]
Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
- [02:57]
John Podhoretz
And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
- [03:01]
Christine Rosen
Hi John.
- [03:05]
John Podhoretz
Quick question to you guys. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal, Literally, with a graphic treatment that takes screens and things pop out and compares Images and all this have taken this 50th birthday greeting from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, which apparently was in this bound book given to Epstein on his 50th birthday, and have subjected it to forensic analysis. We read the note a couple weeks ago and this story clearly isn't going away. I just think it's interesting that this event that took place 20 years ago relating to somebody who was thrown in jail 17 years ago, who was rearrested eight years ago, and then who killed himself in prison six years ago, is surfacing and resurfacing and resurfacing and resurfacing with this one connection that he and Trump were friendly or friends or Trump was at his birthday party or something like that. When that's it. I mean, I think that Jeffrey Epson story is worthy of study, consideration, and an example of how an elite can go really bad. I not denying that. And I think it's like a version of some kind of 19th century novel in its most horrifying form, kind of Balzac plus Dickens plus Trollope plus a Bronte sister all together in its graphic horror and sense of the social thickness that can protect somebody who is a very bad person. But is this just. Is this about Trump? Is this now? Yes, it's just about Trump.
- [04:54]
Christine Rosen
Okay, well, it's about Trump because of what you just described, which is. Well, first of all, it's also about the fact that he's just blatantly lying that he didn't send the note and that, you know, he's threatening to sue the Wall Street Journal and all this, and that his attempts to deny that it was his handwriting are not, I think, will probably not serve him well long term. But it's that he was part of that same elite, the elite that he actually won political capital and twice won the presidency decrying and saying, I'm not that guy. I'm going to protect you from those people. He was part of that inner circle for most of his adult life is the water he swam in. And I think that's why he's so vehement about wanting it all to go away. And I think holding him and all the other disgusting people who participated in this sort of behavior, particularly with regard to the charges of sexual abuse of women, they should be punished, even if it does take decades, because justice doesn't have an end point or a timeline or an end date. And even if you're the President of the United States, you know, you should be held accountable. Now, he's not accused of any of Those things, some of the. That Epstein himself was. But I think it's important because of who he claims to be now versus what the evidence shows he was only fairly recently in the past.
- [06:04]
John Podhoretz
Bill Clinton has a note in this book also which is almost indecipherable. It's almost. It's. It's like a version of Clinton's denial, non denials that whatever it was he square scribbled on this piece of paper, even Grok apparently couldn't properly translate it.
- [06:21]
Abe Greenwald
So that's how, you know, he wrote.
- [06:23]
John Podhoretz
It, by the way, he wrote one. Woody Allen wrote one, which was typed on an old manual typewriter. What I'm just fascinated by the fact that this story, which has been a sort of a bugbear or an obsession on the right, has now become a mainstream media obsession on the main sort of moderate left, left to. Moderate left to the Midas touch people to everybody who is part of the Trumpian resistance. Because, you know, the more you dig into this, not that I think they really care that much, but the more you dig into this, yes, the sitting president, United States, seems to have had this relationship with one of the most evil people who lived in our time. But then so did Bill Clinton and so did Bill Gates, the single most important philanthropist of our time and President of Harvard, all these other people. And it's not as though if it begins and ends with Trump, the discrediting of an entire elite really might happen. If something. If you were to blow the hinges off the Epstein story somehow and this file gets released and we know who everybody was, who was his friend and who was on his island and all of that stuff. I just. Maybe people don't care that they're moderate Democrat orbit is also going to be thrown off its axis and looped into the sun simply because this is a Hail Mary play to get Trump. But I'm just curious, that's all, because it just isn't stopping. I see.
- [07:57]
Seth Mandel
I just have this larger problem with the story, which is that I at this point have no idea what Epstein actually did. I mean, we know some of what he did, but I have no idea if the sort of. The larger Epstein industry, Epstein conspiracy industry is anywhere near the target or not at this point in terms of this story about sex trafficking for other people with the purpose of blackmailing them. We don't know. We just don't know this, as far as I can tell. Um, so I. So to me there's.
- [08:35]
John Podhoretz
There can.
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Seth Mandel
The effort is to connect Trump to something that itself is sort of barely There, I mean, well, I think the man himself, we know he was a bad guy. Yes.
- [08:47]
Abe Greenwald
But, well, I think that's what's so appropriate about it.
- [08:50]
John Podhoretz
Right?
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Abe Greenwald
Which is that Trump, when Trump rose to, when he entered politics, he brought, he sort of opened the hellmouth of conspiracy theorists on the right. That ended in the, you know, comet ping pong, you know, affair and all that stuff, which was all based on the idea that people were trafficking people in government, in positions of power were trafficking children. And so it was never exactly clear what anybody thought was going on, but it was just suddenly, in the age of Trump, this was a really powerful thing on the right. The idea, it was really sticky, the idea that people in power were trafficking children. And it's sort of, you know, hoist on your own petard in a way, because, you know, it's not like Trump discouraged any of this. You know, it's not like he tamped any of it down. But, but I think the vagueness is actually the point because I don't think anybody, you know, the whole conspiracy culture is about, you know, this guy was obviously bad, he was obviously protected, some sort of code of silence. He had an island with a weird temple. What's on the island? What's in the temple? What, like there's too much to the Epstein story that, that is, that piques your curiosity, that it's the kind of story that as soon as you're able to connect the story in some way to the sitting President of the United States, it's not really going to go away because it's, it's, it's that weird and attention grabbed.
- [10:26]
Christine Rosen
Look, maybe if he just said what a couple of prominent men have said, which is, you know what, I really regret ever, ever meeting Epstein and being involved with him in any way, shape or form, which a couple of people have said and done, and that's really the only appropriate response if they even had hints of what he was about in his, in Epstein's own private life with, with what was going on with these women. So he could have just said that. But I think part of why the story continues for Trump is his denial, is his belligerence is sending Carolyn Levin to the podium time and time again to say, this is all fake news. This is like Russiagate. No, it's not. So now we have a drawing and a letter and we have, we have these, these things trickling out which, as Seth says, feeds the conspiracy. But he could put a stop to this pretty quickly by just saying, look, you know, I regret this. I I knew him in this way. Just lay out the facts.
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John Podhoretz
Well, you can't do it.
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Abe Greenwald
And that's what happened with Stormy Daniels. Right.
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John Podhoretz
He.
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Abe Greenwald
He got into extra trouble with Stormy precisely because he wouldn't just say, yes, it happened. What do you. What do you want? I slept with a porn star, so sue me. He refused to admit any fault and therefore had to construct this bizarre defense.
- [11:28]
John Podhoretz
So if you were he, and you looked at your life history over the last 10 years, would you take away from his denial of his relationship with Stormy Daniels, that it was destructive to him? No. Because he got to be president again. Yes. He was prosecuted. Yes. There. Yes. Tish James, you know, came after him with the 34 charges or the 91 charges that were reduced to 34 charges over the Stormy Daniels payments and all of that. But, you know, he lived through that. And Roy cone told him the thing to do was never to apologize and to deny. And he's followed that strategy, and he's twice been elected President of the United States. So if I were he, maybe I would follow exactly the same policy. I'm. Here's what we know about Epstein. We know that he himself confessed to. To acts of sexual molestation of underage girls whom he trafficked. And we know that. We know that Ghislaine Maxwell, his confederate, though she confessed to nothing, was convicted of aiding and abetting him and perhaps participating in those molestations. We also know that he. That Melinda Gates divorced Bill Gates based on his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. That's what she says in her memoir, that she ended the marriage and that it was about Epstein. She hasn't said what about Epstein. She hasn't said why about Epstein. But we know that. We know that Leslie Wexner of the Limited gave him a $70 million townhouse for no particular reason and then later complained when Epstein was arrested for the second time that he had been fleeced by Epstein and would have nothing more to do with him. And we know that Leon Black of Apollo was forced to leave Apollo after paying Epstein $158 million for tax advice, which would make him. If you were to follow the general rules involving what it means to pay somebody for tax advice, you might give him a cut of whatever it was that he helped save you by helping you come up with this instrument to avoid paying taxes. That would suggest that Leon Black made somewhere in the. In the neighborhood of $10 billion that Epstein helped him, you know, sort of shelter, which he didn't. So those are the. Those are the four things we know and Then this, this remarkable report in the New York Times yesterday about efforts at JP Morgan, his main banker, to remove him as a client of JP Morgan's on the grounds that, A, he was a convicted child molester and felon, and B, that due to the increased scrutiny of banks like JP Morgan, his constant trafficking in enormous sums of withdrawn cash, which ordinarily would trigger investigations, since anytime you spend more than $10,000 in cash, you know, somehow you're supposed to report it to the Feds so that you're not money laundering or whatever. That somehow this wasn't happening. He was taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in cash. That something apparently people don't do at this banking level. And yet he was protected for years. And JP Morgan finally cut him off and targeted one specific senior official at J.P. morgan and who had left J.P. morgan, by the way. But, like, who was blamed for protecting him when the New York Times investigation published yesterday revealed that everybody, that several people inside JP Morgan were protecting him, and probably Jamie Dimon, the CEO at the time, who claimed he didn't know anything and he, you know, nothing was going on with this person who was one of apparently the firm's two or three biggest private banking clients for many, many years. So it is unlikely to, extremely unlikely to impossible, that Jamie Dimon was not intimately aware of issues regarding him. And then we know, of course, all of these efforts to make connections with Larry Summers and had a connection with Alan Dershowitz and his. And this thing that Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel, said when he said he just knew everybody and connected everybody to everybody, it's all really, really hard. It's. It's nightmarish. And it does suggest. That's why I mentioned Balzac and the Brontes, because the Brontes wrote, or at least Emily Bronte wrote very sexually perverse, very sexually perverse novel, the Brontes Trollope, writing about mysterious financiers who are liars and cheats. And Balzac, who did describe Parisian society in the 1830s and 80s as some kind of weird, vast conspiracy of interests between politicians, bankers and the Church that were sort of running everything. And a mysterious group of people called the 13 who were kind of manipulating all of French society. But those were novels and this is real. And there is Trump sitting there. It just strikes me as now, it's like they come at him. They. They're constantly trying to find some angle at which to come at Trump that will destroy Trump. And you would think by now that they would stop because Nothing is going to destroy him. And maybe they think on the parts of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's new staff and the Midas touch and all of that, that because conservatives and right wingers like Thomas Massie and people are really obsessed with this story, that this is a new way in for them because they're not running blocking tackle for him the way the right usually has been running blocking tackle for him. But it's not going to work. There's clearly no, I mean, if there's a smoking gun, it's been 20 years, the smoking gun would have come out. That's my view. But I mean, maybe it just, like, it's just, this is, they just can't help themselves. Like, he's the worst person in the world. Everything he does is evil. So there, here's a new evil story that they can jump on and no one can say, look, they could say, well, you're, it's not liberal bias. I mean, look at Thomas Massie, the most right wing member of Congress who, you know, won't let this go.
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Abe Greenwald
Yeah, well, but I mean, that's also part of the Trump era, which is that Thomas Massie is, you know, this is just retribution. Like Trump cuts Thomas Massie loose over the big beautiful bill and all the stuff they were fighting about. And so Massie has a way to come back at Trump. Like, this is, in a way, this is all kind of the same elite pettiness, you know, that, that, that it's, that, that we've been watching all along. There's like, there's no new scoop. There's just like, there's a reason for Thomas Massie to throw this in Trump's face. And there's a reason for the media to pick up on Thomas Massie throwing it in Trump's face. And there's, you know, that's, it's, it's just, it's, it's everybody, everybody is taking their shot, I guess, is what I'm saying.
- [18:42]
Christine Rosen
But it's also, but there's also this broader cultural phenomenon that predates Trump, but which he has been an extreme beneficiary of, which is the mainstreaming of conspiratorial mindsets towards everything, which is, I think, quite different from healthy mistrust or skepticism about elite institutions, which we spend a lot of time parsing here on the podcast. The mainstreaming of conspiracy theories is extremely useful for someone who knows how to ride the wave. And Trump has, as Seth said, ridden that wave very well. The problem becomes understanding that conspiracy Theories never have an end. There's always going to be some new information or some new, you know, secret stuff that someone had, you know, oppressed or whatnot. This is why people still believe that the moon landing was fake. So in Trump's case, that's what he's facing now is that the conspiracy no longer helps him. He might be part of it, but I think to John's point, that's actually less important than the mindset of people in his voting coalition who for whom this raises skepticism about him because he has these very loyal fans. But this is a splinter within MAGA that's going well, Wait a minute. It's not just Massie either. I think in terms of like, in terms of politicals leaders, yes. But in terms of average MAGA Trumpers, this is raising questions for them too. And that's something that could be dangerous for him.
- [20:00]
John Podhoretz
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So you get top tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. I'm going to be putting on those sweaters as soon as it gets cool enough to need them. I spent the summer wearing Quince Polos. I am a quints man through and through. It's a go to across the board. You know, they got accessories of all kinds. Just go to quince.com to see what I'm talking about. You keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quints and go to quince.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E dot com commentary. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com commentary let me, let me ask you a deeper question then. So Trump is a believer in conspiracy theories and he ran as a believer in conspiracy theories, right? When asked basically, well, how can you go at Hillary Clinton when you, you know, had them, the Clintons were at your wedding. He's like, that's what you do when you're a person like me and there are people like the Clintons, you have them at your wedding because there's all kinds of stuff going on here up in the empyrean levels at which I live that you don't, can't even begin to understand. So if a person like this who makes billions of dollars, becomes a major figure and traverses show business, real estate, business influence peddling, and now, you know, rises to the summit of American politics, says everything's a conspiracy, doesn't that maybe mean that everything is a conspiracy? I mean, he's not a, he's not a countercultural figure anymore. You can, you cannot look at him and say that the guy who went on Alex Jones in 2011 but is now the President, United States in 2025 is a resident of the fever swamps. Either America is the fever swamps and we're all in it the muck together, or there's something to what he's saying that we need to pay heed to. And unfortunately for him, maybe the Epstein story is the perfect example of this because it deals with. You've got the head of a hedge fund, you got the head of a major American corpor that makes women's clothing, you've got the President of Harvard, you've got America's foremost appellate lawyer, you've got the former President of the United States, you've got the man who invented, practically invented the personal computer and had the largest single philanthropic enterprise the world has ever seen. And they're all his buddies and they'll fly to his island and they do this and they do that. And Donald Trump.
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Abe Greenwald
So what about his name is Epstein, which to a lot of people is also key.
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John Podhoretz
Well, we can. Right, okay. So we put, put all that together. So maybe, maybe we are living in a world in which conspiracies are successful.
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Christine Rosen
Well, of course we are. I mean that's, he ran on the fact that he, the 2020 election was stolen from him and that, and he has packed his second term administration with people for whom that was a litmus test for them to even be employed in this. That has become, and when I say that's become mainstream, I mean it's vetting technique for loyalty now. And you know, if you, if you think about what that means for political trust and for how our system operates, we can all kind of shrug. We've all been a little desensitized, I think, to what that means. But that is a big lie. It's a big lie that is unproven and a lot of people in this country believe it. Which means each election will be a further stress test of whether people believe the system is rigged or not. And Trump won by arguing the system was rigged. He won both times on that variations of that message. So Democrats are certainly going to adopt that platform too. I mean, we've seen election denialism spring up on that side of the aisle over the years as well.
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John Podhoretz
Election denialism effectively began with the Democrats in 2000 and 2004. And in 2004 it was the Diebold voting machines. In 2000 it was literally the result in Florida and denying the fact that, that, that Bush had won Florida, which many recounts showed because of the butterfly ballot, that in fact Gore won Florida, but Bush was conspiratorially because the Supreme Court was in a conspiracy with him. So, yeah, both sides are in place. But again, you know, one of the issues with Trump and the January 6th conspiracy that the January 6th committee wanted to prove and what I think, you know, Jack Smith wanted to get to the bottom of, if he could, was Trump saying, I know the, you know, getting a quote where Trump said, I know that the election wasn't stolen, but I'm going to use this anyway because that's what'll help me in the future. And therefore he would be, you know, his behavior on, on January 6th would be part of a conspiracy to overturn the results of the election. And he could have been, you know, arrested and convicted for that. But what, no, what people didn't talk about, particularly people who were supporters of the January 6 committee and all, all those efforts, was he probably did does believe it. He did believe it. He does believe it. He thinks everything is rigged. Now, if you grow up in the world of New York City real estate, you have good reason to think everything is rigged. As I've said many times on this podcast, developing real estate in New York is a very dirty business because there is, particularly on Manhattan Island. Manhattan is a finite island that's overbuilt. So if sites arise where you can actually do something, they become political footballs and you use every means to hand, use every weapon to hand to get an upper hand to get yourself the right to develop on that site. And Trump lost way more of those battles than he ever won. He built three buildings in New York City in his entire career as a real estate developer. He is a small time real estate developer in New York City terms compared to other people. And he clearly believes that that world was rigged against him and that he other people had better access and better ways of handling this politically. So that's, that's what he, that's what he genuinely thinks. So it's, if you genuinely think it, then and then you win the presidency genuinely thinking it. And it's not disqualifying. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I'm not sure what I'm. I don't have a point at the end of this peroration. I'm just sort of like thinking this through. And now let me connect it to policy terms I sent you guys. There's this story or the news came out yesterday that the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is the annual report that we receive on how students are doing in American elementary and secondary education, came out with a not surprising but horrifying stat that particularly at the lower level, or not particularly, but entirely in the lower quintiles in American education among 12th graders who graduated in June or May and June of last year, which included my daughter, one of my children, that these are the lowest scores on record and that fully a third of American graduating seniors do not have elementary reading comprehension skills. That's 33%. That's 4.5 million people graduated last year or around that. And a third of them do not have elementary reading skills. So that's again, math corner. I'm not going there. I'm going to try to do the math on that. But it's, you know, it's fewer than 2 million and more than 1 million people who are, who have finished, who are now voters and you know, self supporting adults and all of that who do not know how to read. This has never happened before. And the conspiracy theory I want to lay out for you is this. It's not a conspiracy theory, but it's a policy conspiracy theory. So I went back and did a little back of the book research. Back of the. What do you want? Whatever you want to call it.
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Christine Rosen
The envelope.
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John Podhoretz
Envelope, right. Okay. In 1982, which was the year that America was alerted that there was an educational crisis in this country by the report issued by the Department of Investigation called the Nation at Risk, which detailed the fact that over the previous, I think five to seven years, America had slipped from being in the top four or five countries in terms of educational performance into the 20s compared to other countries. And that began the education reform movement, began the movement in which we started spending a lot more money at the federal level trying to fix this educational crisis. And money was thrown at education at the state and local levels in a way it had never been before. Okay. In 1982, total spending on US education was $204.7 billion, which equates to about 600 billion in current dollars. There were at that time around 55 or 54 million students in the school system, in the, at all levels of, you know, between the ages of 5 and 18. That number rose to about 60 million in 2024. So we were spending about 536 billion in 1982 in our current dollars. Population goes up about 12% in American schools. And last year we spent 1.68 trillion, so the population goes up 12%. We are spending 300% more than we were in 1982. And the educational performance in our schools has been in severe decline over those four decades as the spending has increased threefold. Nobody cares because the people who run the educational system in the country are part of a conspiracy policy, conspiracy to say that the problem is money or the problem is social injustice, or the problem is parenting, or the problem is anything but them.
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Christine Rosen
But that it's worse. It's worse than that though, because that group, largely comprised of teachers unions and the bureaucrats who run various school districts, are 100% in the pocket of the Democratic Party. And they're elected because that's the one of the biggest donors to the Democrats. It's why Randy Weingarten, head of the big teachers union, was one of the first guests in Biden's White House when he won election. And they are using that political power to thwart any efforts to, to experiment in education. They've been doing that for a long time with charter schools, with homeschooling, with all these efforts. So they, they actually are behaving like a very aggressive monopoly industry. But the reason it's so disturbing and linking it to the conspiracy theories is that these numbers, this data that we get, it's a stand in for critical thinking skills. And we have an entire generation of America's children that have been encouraged in their classrooms in large part by also the marriage of bad ed tech brought into these public school classrooms and forced on kids at a very young age to outsource their critical thinking to be told. And you know, I will bet you money today that one of the responses to these terrible scores will be tech companies, particularly AI tech companies who want to get into schools with their products, saying, well, what we need to do is give each child an AI tutor and then they'll be better. But we know, and in fact, there's a wonderful essay in the Atlantic recently by a high school student describing exactly how she and her peers are already outsourcing their brains to these technologies because there's no consequence for it. They are not being taught to think critically about information they're being told to let ChatGPT do the work and then they can summarize it, slap it up there. They're not actually learning critical thinking and evaluation skills. And that should worry us because they are the future citizens who will be running this country. And if they can't construct a paragraph long analysis of something they've read in their own words, they're not going to really be able to deal with some of these complicated policy questions.
- [36:08]
Abe Greenwald
They're also, they're not just like not able to, to, you know, explain something that they've read. They're not reading. Right. Like the, the reading. Reading comprehension is falling because reading is falling in a, in a way that's been hard to measure. Exactly. Because the word, the horror stories that we've been hearing are, which are believable and ring true and coming from sources who wouldn't lie about them. Right. College professors, for the most part are responsible for trying to get these kids to read. They're not tallied statistically in a way that we can read, you know, in the Wall Street Journal and, you know, sort of ingest them the way we normally do and feed them into, you know, this like, ranking system and whatever. The stories coming out of from college professors saying my kids don't read are hugely alarming because they are, in response, not being given reading assignments that match the readings, the length of reading assignments they used to get. In other words, professors are sort of giving in to this idea that students really don't have the attention Spanish to read, you know, long assignments, process them and then move on to the next long assignment class. Like when I was in college, you know, I had, I remember having teachers who would assign a book between classes, right. And you would have, you know, at most a week that meant to read the book. And I had one teacher who used to do these, like he used to give pop quizzes on the reading. Not pop quizzes actually, because they, we knew they were coming, but quizzes on the reading that were like mad libs. Like you'd have to remember words from the book and, you know, you had 200, 300 pages to read or whatever in, in that time, that was pretty normal. And so, you know, teachers now are sort of like, well, they're not going to do the reading, so why should I give it to them? So I don't know what the solution is, but the reading comprehension problem is a kind of chicken and egg thing. Or maybe it's, you know, this vicious cycle where we're here, okay, but schools are Letting them just say we don't want to read.
- [38:20]
Seth Mandel
Here's to me, the scary part, it's not necessarily a problem. I mean, I think it's terrible. But if you graduate with marginal to poor reading skills, you could do just fine in life because that AI technology will be there for you every other step of the way. It's what people use to put together a business plan or a proposal or to send an introductory email or whatever else. So that the AI skill, the facility with AI is the skill that is going to prepare you for the rest of the world, so for the rest of your adult life.
- [39:06]
John Podhoretz
So that's a, that's a.
- [39:08]
Christine Rosen
But on the other end of that too though, we're building, and this is the vision of some of the AI leaders right now. We're building a society where the AI that you've used to craft your business plan is then emailed to someone who uses AI to, to summarize it into two bullet points for them. And so at the end of the day, the humans aren't actually communicating ideas with each other.
- [39:26]
John Podhoretz
Well, okay, so first of all, Seth, your, your, your analysis is well taken, but the issue is actually not. According to the naep, with the cohort of people who go to and succeed at high level colleges, apparently reading scores at the top quintile have remained steady. It's the promise of an America in which we have an educated citizenry that goes from the bottom to the top that is now a massive failure. That it is poor people who can't read. And they can't read because they're not being taught. They haven't been taught to read and no one's making them read and all that. And you may be right that people can get along without being able to read and make life for themselves without being able to read. And there will always be poor people, there always be wealthier people. There will be people at the upper echelons and people in the lower echelons. But you are making it impossible for people to rise from, it's almost impossible to rise from a disadvantaged position without a moment at some point in your life before you were 18 years old, where somebody looks at you, points at you and says you can be more than you are now. Let me show you how to do this math problem. Let me take you aside and give you a book to read. You have skills, you have abilities, you have talents. And here's the thing that gets me. It's we keep thinking the teachers who are teaching today are like the teachers of 40 years ago that, you know, we had, let's say who you know were. These are people who are teaching now in schools who are themselves the product of the world of a nation at risk, right? A person who was 15, you know, who was 10 years old when a nation at risk came, came out saying our educational standards are declining, we have to do something, is 50 years old now, that person isn't 30. And that per. And so every 50 year old in the. Who is teaching in American schools in the United States comes from the time, comes in a period of educational decline, was educated during a period of advancing educational decline at which at every level standards had to be ratcheted downward simply because with the exception of like if you're a doctor or you're an engineer or something like that, the standards end up being subjective. Like obviously if you are going to build buildings or you know, design things that have to work in the real world, technically you need to be good at what you do. But you know, if you can, if you, if you can major in comic books and read comic books, then, you know, who's to say that your analysis of the new run of Hawkeye wasn't better than the old run of Hawkeye? It's not important. And then you go off and you get an education degree and then you start teaching a kid. And you yourself never read. I don't know. I mean, you probably read the Great Gatsby. But you know, if you're teaching English, but you may not have read any of the great 19th century novels so you could introduce them to somebody. I don't know, it's just. So the conspiracy part here is that the, the elite has become, as I guess is always true of elites, but they get stormed over time and broken into by, by, by ambitious people who are not in them. The self preservation of this world of people who for two generations have been allowing our educational system to collapse has been. Is a wonderment to see because they transmuted lead into gold. Here's what happened. The educational system is terrible. We need to do something about it. So the teachers unions immediately go, you're right, it's terrible. Give us more money, hire more administrators to help us figure out who needs extra time and accommodations to make it easier for them to be in school. Hire DEI people. Because the problem here is that is that, you know, African American and Hispanic kids live in a systematically oppressive world and they need special treatment of some sort or other to just simply pull them across the finish line. Don't say the problem is that we stink and that we all need to be fired and that we need to pay people $200,000 a year to teach English because who are really good at it. So that maybe they'll come out of universities and do that instead of, well, lawyers, I don't know.
- [44:19]
Christine Rosen
But in there though as well. Another factor here, a major factor is the schools of education that are training these teachers that succumb to every single new faddish theory about education. And this is particularly damning when it comes to teaching reading because there were all these departures from what they we knew to work in terms of building literacy, particularly for young children. And it destroyed reading in a generation. And it wasn't until enough people went back to the old ways and said actually we know this works, let's go back to this which is happening now. But you. That there's a lost generation of kids who really never learned properly how to process words and to really become the kind of readers that we lament no longer exist. But in part they, they were never put on that path. And I think that's part of the, the broader cultural problem here is, is out of higher education as well. There's a vast number of people whose jobs now currently are pushing paper and having meetings and various emails and whatever it is. And they know they're the emperor has no clothes. They know that they're likely to be obsolete. And there was a really interesting subset. I'll try to find it so I can written from a first person perspective of someone who went around and asked all of his friends in London who work in finance, who work in management and they were all admitting that they go into the office, they do their paper pushing, they set up their meetings also they can do a side hustle of something actually creative that's meaningful for them because they understand their work, whether it's consulting or management to be lacking in any sort of meaning or purpose. And they see AI coming down the pipeline now, making that a very stark reality for them. So there is, I think both at the K through 12 level, at the higher education level, but even in our sort of mid level management empire, a lot of people who are asking these questions and should be the concern is that we will not have the educated citizenry to help reshape those workplaces in ways that give people meaningful work when the work they do now comes to an end.
- [46:08]
Seth Mandel
You know, it's kind of like when, you know, people say, or kids say why do I have to do this? When am I going to need trigonometry in my Life, right?
- [46:18]
Christine Rosen
I said that all the time.
- [46:19]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah, of course.
- [46:21]
Seth Mandel
Now that's everything. When am I gonna need reading? When am I gonna need history? It's all fake anyway, right? As we're now being constantly told, you know, when am I gonna need statistics? When am I gonna need. So there's this. I mean, that's a really fragile. We're in a sort of dangerous place here where we've almost sort of innovated ourselves out of the framework of a refined civilization.
- [46:51]
Christine Rosen
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- [47:21]
Abe Greenwald
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Abe Greenwald
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John Podhoretz
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Abe Greenwald
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John Podhoretz
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- [47:51]
Abe Greenwald
I also, I think that there's, you know, not to dwell on the. On the college situation, but we just had this story the other day about grade inflation at Harvard, Right. And I think that's part of it, which is that there are gatekeepers who have just thrown the gates open. Right. Grade inflation to me means the students should be getting lower grades. And the feedback mechanism that that should set in motion should tell these students that they better read more carefully and they better do better work and then they'll get better grades. That's the. That's like the. That's the feedback mechanism. But they're just giving people A's because it's Harvard and you expect to get A's. And look, they pay a lot of money to be here and the customer is always right. And so it does feel like there is still a system, right? You can give people the grades they deserve, and that might actually change the way kids read and study and do classwork and stuff like that. It's possible.
- [48:50]
Christine Rosen
You can't, though, because then your enrollments decline and then your department wonders why they're paying you to have these anyway?
- [48:56]
John Podhoretz
Harvard was always an easy A. That's the joke of that article, was that when I was in college 45 years ago, everybody knew that the thing about Harvard was it was impossible to get into and that it was impossible not to make Phi Beta Kappa if you were there. Once you got in, it was a skate like that. That was what everybody said. So the fact that that piece was written about Harvard was sort of comic in its own way. Professors didn't grade anything. TAs graded everything, and they didn't care. It was all like, we're all Harvard men now. Everything is. Everything is hunky dory. You're right that the problem with not applying standards is that then there's no way to apply standards. Like, there's no way for anybody to grow if they're not told you've reached this level. Right. I mean, obviously there are things in life where this happens all the time, like athletics. You know, if you're. If you start playing golf and you, you know, you have a 30 handicap, your goal is to get a 20 handicap and then a 50, and then see if you can become a scratch golfer. And nobody. There's no way. There's no way to argue with the score is what it is. There's a ball and a cup and a. And a. And a club and a flag.
- [50:17]
Christine Rosen
Mulligan.
- [50:18]
John Podhoretz
Well, there's a mulligan, but there's.
- [50:19]
Christine Rosen
That's our educational system now. One big mulligan.
- [50:21]
John Podhoretz
That's right. Yes, absolutely. Okay, but I'm just saying, like, they're in sports. Everybody understands that training, you know, it's one of the reasons people love sports and why sports have become increasingly important as opposed to Less America. Because it's the one thing that there seems to be some weird objective standard for where it's like somebody wins and somebody loses and somebody does this and people are.
- [50:46]
Abe Greenwald
It's the only application of math. To answer Abe's question, when people say, when am I going to need trigonometry? You're going to need it for Moneyball.
- [50:53]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. Or you're going to need geometry for golf. How else do you learn how to play golf?
- [51:00]
Christine Rosen
Course. Very useful if you shoot pool. That's actually very true.
- [51:03]
John Podhoretz
Anyway, I'm only bringing this up to say that you're right, that declining standards lead to declining standards lead to declining standards. Though Trump doesn't understand this because he himself has never read a book. And we're only talking about reading here because that's what the naep story is about, it's about reading 12th grade reading a president who doesn't read a book. You have a world in which the elite is effectively now telling you to stop reading books because they'll be read for you by Grok and all of that. Why should. It's, it's, you know, we're all the people who are going to preserve the world of the edgy. It's, it's, it is like we are going back into medieval times in which there's going to be this like small monastic elite with no hair but you know, like on the top of their heads, sitting in a room doing something incredibly unfamiliar, which is with a codex, reading like. And, and they will be, you know, saving Western civilization as they sit in their abbeys while everybody else turns into idiocracy. I mean that's the only, that's one version of this future. But you can see I'm saying technically, systematically, the teachers unions, the education departments, all of that fulfill a non epstein conspiracy like view in which the truth was told about something that was happening that needed to be nipped in the bud, which was educational decline. And we did everything wrong because the people who were responsible for the decline got to choose how to fix the decline that they were responsible for. And what did they choose? They chose corruption, they chose self dealing, they chose, they chose the adults as opposed to the children whom they were supposed to save. They chose to enrich and enlarge their own power at the expense of the people that education is for. And that's. And so the world that Trump describes in his conspiracy theories though this is not a conspiracy in that sense because the levers are not secret. We can see them at work. They're right in front of our eyes. So therefore you can't really call it that. Just that the system has become a system of self perpetuation of an elite that has no sense of social response, has no real sense of social response for the well being of the running what it means to preserve America so that it can remain the greatest engine of prosperity and freedom and all of that that the world has ever seen.
- [53:42]
Christine Rosen
The rewards of conspiratorial thinking now are far, far greater than they were say at the beginning of the Republic when there were plenty of conspiracy theories afloat. And every era of American history has, has featured conspiratorial thinking. But the combination of its, of its elite acceptance and technology's ability to spread it makes it a kind of hyper conspiratorial time. And add to that mistrust Add to that a poor education system and that is a, that is a population that is going to be very open minded about believing some deeply disturbing things.
- [54:18]
John Podhoretz
Well, you know, there's this last moment in the week of, you know, controversy over RFK Jr. And his testimony and all that because he's of course is one of America's leading conspiracy theorists. And I know that the whole point of the conspiracy theory is that it's the, it's the, you locate a problem and then there's a conspiracy that has arisen according to the conspiracy theorists, to perpetuate the problem to enrich somebody or other. And the perpetuation of the problem is necessary because that keeps things going, keeps the spigot flowing. So he has been part of this vaccines cause autism world that was effectively discredited literally 20 years ago with the arrest and conviction of Andrew Wakefield on the grounds that he had, that he had falsified data suggesting that there was a vaccine linked to autism. Autism, the British researcher. But they still say it and RFK was still saying it and it's still anti vaxx and all that. So here's the report that's about to come out. Autism is caused by Tylenol. Okay. So the point is autism is caused by something. There's some big company that is profiting from it, that is hiding this from us. So we thought it was big pharma vaccines, but we're perfectly happy to move on to acetaminophen if we have to. There's gotta be something, you know, and if that turns out to be as fraudulent as I assume that it is, then it'll be trans fats that caused autism.
- [55:54]
Christine Rosen
Well, it's not that it's necessarily gonna be proven wrong. I think again in the conspiratorial age we live in, you need that one thing, you need one villain. It's very difficult for people look, actually know the older the father that, that slightly increases risk for autism. There, there are a number of factors that we know. Yeah, but there's no conspiracy and there's no conspiracy that. Right. Well there's also no one to blame. There, there's like we, there are things we can know that are very complicated and, and we, there's a lot we don't know about autism. But it's much, it's a much more compelling argument to say a big company's out to get you. And, and that's why autism rates are increasing. It's also, it's also diagnosed more frequently now because people know more about it.
- [56:33]
John Podhoretz
We Know, Right.
- [56:34]
Christine Rosen
The complicated reasoning is what people in favor of the very simple Manichean good, evil, black, white, Tylenol conspiracy.
- [56:42]
John Podhoretz
But so there he is sitting atop the HHS bureaucracy and he just flipped the script on what it was that he has been saying for much of his adult life was the cause of this terrible condition that is so preventable if we just don't do X. And now there's a new thing that we shouldn't do and that, that will, that will solve that. Now for, by the way, for all I know, it's true. You know, like everyone took aspirin and there was no Tylenol. And then a lot of pregnant women took thalidomide too.
- [57:16]
Christine Rosen
I mean, there are things that pregnant.
- [57:18]
John Podhoretz
Women have been given that autism rates were lower than they are now. And the only, the only over the counter pain reliever was aspirin. And then aspirin turned out to have problems with people's stomachs. And there was a condition called rise syndrome if you took too much aspirin and then a new pain reliever introduced called acetaminophen, and then autism rates went up. So maybe that's. Yes. Now that, that's the dividing line. Maybe it's. I don't know. I. But you know, the point is that on the one hand, there are people who will believe in anything, right? RFK Jr will believe in anything as long as it fits this narrative. And then there are people like me who now believe in nothing. Like believe that anything that a conspiracy theorist says might be true is by definition not true because it's being said by a crazy lunatic conspiracy theorist. But maybe it's true. In this case it would be true. And it's not true that Tylenol knew that, that people who made acetaminophen knew that there, that it was causing autism and that they covered it up. It may just be a tragic, you know, a tragic coincidence or a tragic thing that no one looked to look at before. But, but I really doubt that. But I suppose it's, I suppose it's possible. Quick note. Explosions have just been heard in or detected in the city of Doha in Qatar. If that is the case, that would suggest that the Israelis have decided that the, that the protected members of Hamas who are living in Qatar are no longer protected as they move apparently very, very deliberately, but very seriously into Gaza City. We now know that Hamas rejected the final American offer, although I read in the New York Times that the negotiations have stalled, which is a pretty funny way of saying somebody says this is My final offer. And you say no. And therefore negotiations have stalled. When I walk away from, you know, if I, if I'm offering money on a house and somebody says no, I then walk away and buy another house. The negotiation didn't stall, it ended.
- [59:21]
Abe Greenwald
It's just a, it's a, it's just a pause. I believe it's called a cease talks.
- [59:25]
John Podhoretz
There's a cease pause in the fire talks anyway. But if so, this is talk about a talk about a new strategy in the war, the new strategy where there has been this one little sector of the, you know, sort of the puppet masters in gutter who have been let alone in part. So there should be a negotiating partner to bring the war to an end. And last week the IDF said, or, you know, basically the Israeli government said, no one is safe now. No one. No, no person who is involved in this should deem them, think that they are, that they can escape our justice. That is the most significant escalation of the, you know, I'm very curious to.
- [60:06]
Seth Mandel
What extent the US Is aware or had an advanced knowledge of this and what the Trump administration's position is on this, if this is, in fact what happened. Given all the administration ties and attempts to cajole and deal with Qatar.
- [60:26]
John Podhoretz
I have two answers to that. Number one is we may not have known, but if so, it's because there was an explicit conversation where whoever is talking to Israel and the person in Israel who's talking to whoever's in America said, I don't want to know. You go ahead and do what you want to do. I don't want to know. You do what you have to do.
- [60:47]
Abe Greenwald
That's right. I had, I had a, I had a.
- [60:49]
John Podhoretz
Here's your blank check. Just if you're taking a blank check, I don't want to know.
- [60:54]
Abe Greenwald
I had, I had a congregational rabbi as a kid who was, he was the rabbi of a, of a modern Orthodox congregation. And so there was a lot of, and ahead of a school that there was. That meant there were a lot of people who didn't necessarily keep Shabbos and all the laws and stuff like that. And he had to sort of figure out a way to be an Orthodox, a strictly Orthodox rabbi to a congregation and a school that was filled with people who were not. And what he settled on was don't ask if you asked him if you were allowed to do this.
- [61:23]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [61:24]
Abe Greenwald
And he answered, don't ask me. Yeah, it was, the answer was no, but you didn't get an official answer. So the United States Says, don't ask me. Yeah, but also, I want to know how they had time to do that. And apparently, drone. Greta Thunberg's boat in Tunisia last night, because the fire on board led to the. The flotilla saying that somebody had bombed. Bombed their boat from a drone. So lots of serious things going.
- [61:53]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, they bombed their boat from a drone because they were smoking a bong and it fell onto the deck and something caught fire. That. That's. And that. That's the story. And I'm sticking to that story, because as much as I would love to see Greta Thunberg get hit by a drone, I don't think anybody is wasting a drone on Greta Thunberg. I don't want Greta Thunberg to be hit by a drone. By a truck, maybe, you know, by a. By lightning. Some version of that lightning is better than. No one really did it. It's fine with me. Anti.
- [62:29]
Abe Greenwald
Maybe that's what happened in car. Maybe that's the explosion in Qatar.
- [62:33]
John Podhoretz
Anyway, so there. There. There we have it. I'm gonna make a quick recommendation. It's a complicated recommendation, but it's gonna be quick. There is a show on Netflix called Long Story Short. It is. It is an animated series 10 episodes long. When I say it's an animated series, it's essentially a dramatic situation comedy about a Jewish family in Northern California. It need not have been animated. It could just as easily have been acted by living people. But the person who made it is an animator, Raphael Bob Waxburg, who made BoJack Horseman. And it's essentially the story of his. It's a sort of nightmarish story about his family in some ways, because they're way more successful and way happier, I think, in real life than this family that we see on Long Story Short is. It is the most accurate depiction of a Jewish family in the history of television in its details about a mildly observant Jewish family and what it means to be mildly observant. There are issues with it. It's very PC. The only really happy people in it, of course, are a lesbian couple who have no conflicts and no difficulties and no problems, whereas everybody else is, like, riven with neuroses and anxieties about their relationships and everything else. But, of course, there is this one perfect couple, which is not only lesbian, but interracial, which is just very politically convenient. And so if that stuff annoys you, trust me, I appreciate your annoyance. But it's really a remarkable piece of work called Long Story Short on Netflix, and I can't recommend it. Highly enough. And I actually have a big piece coming out in commentary on that and the other Netflix Jewish show, Nobody Wants this, you know, which is partially a delightful romantic comedy and partially the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And so I try to go through that on that subject. But if you were gonna watch that show, you probably watched it already because it was a huge hit. Anyway, so long story short, on Netflix, we'll be back tomorrow for Seth, Christine and Abam. Jon Bud Horowitz Keep the candle burning. Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change your receipt, did the sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5 only at McDonald's for a limited time. Prices and participation may vary.