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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
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- [00:33]
Seth Mandel
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.
- [00:47]
John Podhoretz
It'S going Hope for the best, expect.
- [00:51]
Seth Mandel
The worst welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Friday, May 30, 2025. I am John Pottaw, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
- [01:08]
Christine Rosen
Hi John.
- [01:08]
Seth Mandel
And our Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
- [01:11]
John Podhoretz
Hi John.
- [01:12]
Seth Mandel
Okay, I'm just going to read to you. One of my favorite weekly moments, particularly on a Friday, is the release of Nellie Bowles's newsletter at the Free Press, one of the more delightful forms of political commentary in America, tgif. And I'm just going to read you the opening paragraph because I think it gets to the difficulty one has in reconciling oneself, at least if the one in this case is me or I, depending on how you want to phrase it grammatically with the ongoing day to day business of the Trump administration, even when it is doing things that I admire or have been hoping somebody would do for a long time. In a section called I Can't Afford a Pardon, Nelly writes, the White House vending machine is giving out pardons this week. Scott Jenkins, a Virginia sheriff convicted of conspiracy, fraud and bribery for accepting piles of cash in exchange for letting rich folks have fake sheriff badges, got a Trump pardon. So did reality show stars and fraudsters Todd and Julie Chrisley, who'd initially been sentenced to 12 and seven years respectively for conspiring to commit bank fraud and obviously conspiracy to commit tax evasion. And a random tax criminal has also been pardoned right after his mother gave Trumpo $1 million at a fundraising dinner. That gentleman had been ordered to pay the state $4 million restitution alongside his prison sentence. So the $1 million payment to the president is a better deal in some ways at this point, paying your taxes directly to the Trump family is a better deal and probably safer than using the irs. Trump wanted to slash red tape and slash red tape he has. Now he just puts a briefcase on the table and nods. I pay my cleaning lady in cash, and that's how I will probably pay my taxes now, too. Every April, I will throw wads of dirty bills in a brown paper bag, scroll my Social Security number on it, and leave it at Tiffany Trump's door. How do I calculate what's owed? Well, it's based on my income, of course, plus extra in my case for being a blue state libtard and for not losing the baby weight deductions offered for pictures of a local ballot showing Trump written in for every option, especially library board. Being a guy with beer cozies and acceptably strong biceps because we need more of you fellows. And being a woman with anything other above a B cup, I get two or three deductions this year. So, yeah, was handing out pardons day. And this comes at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day. Last night, angry at the fact that a trade court had ruled that his tariffs were unconstitutional before an appeal court stayed that decision, or sort of frozen place, Trump decided to go onto Truth Social and say that Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society, hates this country. The person that he leaned on to pick to help him pick the three Supreme Court justices whom he did pick and who are there on the Supreme Court rendering important decisions, though maybe he feels that they're not going to render the decisions that he wants in any given case or have not yet rendered them in the way that he would want them. So, oh, Abe Greenwald has joined us. So here he is, Abe Greenwald. All right. So as I say, my experience is that every time I want to say, look, this is what you get. It's good, everything's good. And then terrible things happen that are unprecedented, that are sickening or that put an extraordinarily bad taste in your mouth.
- [04:59]
John Podhoretz
You forgot to add that he appointed Paul Ingrazia a right wing Andrew Tate, supporting him.
- [05:06]
Seth Mandel
Right wing is. Calling him right wing is an injustice to us. Paul Ingrassia is a white supremacist.
- [05:12]
John Podhoretz
Yes.
- [05:12]
Seth Mandel
Psychotic white supremacist monster. More evil people on in, in the sort of larger universe of the social, of the social media horror shows that have emerged. And he is now running ethics, an ethics panel at the White House. He's 30 years old. He's a supporter of Andrew Tate. Like you said, his Twitter feed is repulsive. He, he is repulsive. This is, I don't even know what to compare this to. This would be like putting the head of only fans in charge of the blue laws or, you know, the Guy from Boogie Nights in charge of the Motion Picture association of America or something like that.
- [06:00]
Abe Greenwald
But, you know, to your point about, like, you know, when you think, well, this is okay, and that's okay, and. And then something awful happens, I think if you truly, fully abandon any idea that Trump is anything resembling conservative, it all falls into place and nothing is that shocking anymore. It turns out there's more than one way to be against liberals and progressives. It's not only you don't have to be conservative. You could be many other things. Trump found this other thing to be that is anti liberal, anti woke. Sometimes that fits in, that sort of ends up being somewhere near the right, not conservative at all. And if you just think of it in those terms, nothing shocks anymore. Because as long as it's about Trump having enemies, it makes sense. He has certain enemies, and that's what this is about.
- [07:22]
John Podhoretz
And he has no sense of history, which is why he can go after Leonard Leo in the Federal Society, which is basically going after his own first term in office. So many presidential immunity decisions, a lot of the decisions that he relied upon, even to be back in the White House are the result of this project on behalf of the Federal Society to get conservative justices appointed, conservative judges in the pipeline. So that, that, to me, shows. It's. Maybe it's because it's nearing the end of the week. It's sort of the temperamental toddler Trump that emerges occasionally on Truth Social. And this is, again, it speaks to the issue of his temperament, which is that if someone else had sat him down for 10 minutes and talked to him about what Leonard Leo and the Federal Society have done for conservative principles in the judiciary, maybe he wouldn't have put that up there. But again, he's impulsive. It's like a toddler.
- [08:08]
Abe Greenwald
But maybe he would have anyway.
- [08:10]
John Podhoretz
I mean, he has. No, the past matters. Not at all. It's only the moment in the moment.
- [08:15]
Christine Rosen
Where it's like, you know, you watch the Cabinet meetings where they go around one by one, and each Cabinet member opens by saying a terrible disease that Donald Trump cured recently in, in an infant or something by touching their forehead, like, and, and then you see, even when people, like, they were just swearing in the other day, people were. People are doing it when they get sworn in by Trump. He just wants nothing but love. He just, he just wants. He just wants to be loved. He's a big guy.
- [08:47]
Seth Mandel
Just want to be like. But he wants. He, he wants. Sorry that we're all psychologizing him here. He's Selling pardons. He is shaking down news organizations. He wants, CBS has gone to him, Paramount has gone to him with a bribe, a $15 million bribe to make this lawsuit against 60 Minutes go away and to make nice because Paramount is trying to sell itself to Skydance for Shari Redstone, the owner of Paramount, to get herself out of the media business and settle all of her past accounts. And it is nakedly the case that just as ABC paid Trump $15 million, although then that money is going to be used for something or other, he wants them to pay him off. Right.
- [09:39]
Christine Rosen
But that's not why he's mad at Leonard Leo.
- [09:40]
Seth Mandel
No, it's not. But what I'm saying here is that, is that we can say, well, you know, he does things that are conservative, not conservative, and all this, something else is going on here, by which I mean that he, he finds himself in the fortunate position of having a completely servile Republican Party terrified of him. Because if he gets mad at you, he will, you know, make a primary against you and throw you out of office and then thereby get somebody who is even more, who is more, who is totally servile as your replacement. If that person can, can win. And he is like going to town, he's got his kids going around the world raising billions of dollars. I mean, this is, this really genuinely. I mean, my joke is like we just spent years having litigating the question of whether or not Hunter Biden got 5 or 10 million dollars out of China and the Middle east in a really repulsive form of back scratching and influence peddling and influence selling. And it looks to me like the Trump family is looked at the Biden family and said, what a bunch of losers. If you're going to be going out and selling influence at this level, the, the word that be ends with the letters I L L I O N should have a B in front of it instead of an M. Like you're just, you don't sell real estate this cheap. What's the matter with you? You're talk about a sign that Hunter Biden is contemptible. Like, if you're going to be a crook, be a good crook. If you're going to, if you're going to, if you're going to influence pedal, like, use the power of the United States the way it deserves to be used. Like sells this way.
- [11:32]
John Podhoretz
This is another example that we're often, I think correctly harsh about the Democratic Party right now being in disarray and not really under, not being able to determine whether it should move back towards the center or further to the left. The truth is we don't have a legitimate conservative opposition to Trump either because of what you just said about the Republican Party. And to Abe's earlier point, he's not a conservative. He is a weird amalgam of populism, old school Democrat, you know, kind of big city politicking and, you know, whatever characterological problems he brings to the table. But this idea that he should be able to be seen as the carrier of conservatism, I would like to see. Name one politician right now who we would think embodies traditional Republican conservatism of the old sort. Anyone is there? I mean, maybe DeSantis has gone pretty. Yeah, Mitch McConnell, who's leaving and is old. Yeah. So that's the other problem, is that we don't have. I mean, plenty of intellectuals are making the argument about conservatism, but we don't have a lot of political leadership doing it. So in that sense, there are no breaks on what he's trying to do. There is no. There's nothing to stop him. And so when he does these, the grifting deals and whatnot, I mean, that's not conservatism either. I personally get enraged when people think that I am anything like Trump in terms of my values and principles. He has very different motivations, but they are not conservative. And we need a healthy conservatism in this country.
- [13:01]
Seth Mandel
I frankly don't really understand it. I mean, maybe, maybe if we're going to get back to the psychological, it's that this is the way we keep score. This is the way he keeps score. We would ordinarily keep score by saying, you're the President of the United States. You have climbed to the top of the greasiest pole the world has ever seen. You are one of only 46 people to have held this most important job in almost 250 years. 240 years. You have nothing to prove. You don't need to make CBS bend the knee to you. You don't need to have your sons go out and raise money, you know, from Abu Dhabi and various emirates to show that you are the big cheese. You're already the big cheese. But that's how I would look at it. And I'm not sure that's the way he looks at it. He looks at it as. It's not enough unless the Cabinet bends the knee, the Republican Party bends the knee. CBS bends the. Bending himself to what he is president for.
- [14:10]
John Podhoretz
He's not comparing himself to previous presidents. This is why he's doing exactly what he criticized Biden and Republicans have been criticizing the Biden administration doing. We should, by the way, besides an age limit on presidents, we need to reform the presidential pardon power that is long overdue. It's abuses in this administration, only the most recent. But he's comparing himself to other leaders across the globe, people who do not exist within liberal democracies, people who do not have to answer to the, to the voters every four years or every two years. He's looking at people who actually like Putin and others, not because I think he wants to model their system and our system on theirs, but just in terms of the kind of how caprice is, how they govern, because they can. I think he admires that in the sense that he doesn't want to have to answer things. This is why he's calling. You know, I told, I predicted. I just want to say I predicted Carolyn Levitt's press conference yesterday where she went on and on about unelected judges. I mean, that to him is why do I have to answer for my decisions? I think something's right. The country's behind me because I won. I shouldn't have to deal with any of these details. And Musk is leaving today, which is interesting. That's something we should talk about in terms of, that's one bookend to the beginning of this, this second term.
- [15:20]
Christine Rosen
Well, that's maybe why he's so grumpy, because, you know, as you said, it's very, it's very difficult for men of a certain age to make friends. You know, we're always hearing about once, you know, we reach middle age, we stop making friends and, you know, his friend is leaving. It's very hard for him to make new friends. He made a friend and his friend is now leaving.
- [15:43]
Anthony Scaramucci
Hi, I'm Anthony Scaramucci and I'd like to tell you about my new show, Lost Boys. It's a limited edition series. It's hosted by myself and Professor Scott Galloway. We're having honest conversations about a topic no one wants to talk about. The crisis that young men are facing nowadays. Our talks discuss why so many young men are struggling to find purpose, connection and identity in today's world. We dig into what's really going on. Politics, culture, loneliness, even rage. And what we can do to help change. Change the narrative. This is a six part series that will challenge your assumptions and encourage you to continue the conversation from the dinner table to the office. Follow and listen to Lost Boys on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to Lostboys Men and sign up to get the latest episodes and news. Hello, this is Dr. Rob Williams, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation. Survivors of the Holocaust have long been the bravest voices speaking, speaking out against anti Semitism and all forms of hate around the world, whether it's European anti Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s or the anti Semitism we see on our streets and campuses today. We'll explore it on the USC Shoah Foundation's new podcast, Searching for Never Again. We'll hear stories that are heartbreaking and stories that are inspiring. Every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever fine podcasts can be found.
- [17:19]
Seth Mandel
Leonard Leo so the Federalist Society is the single most successful public policy influence experiment of my lifetime.
- [17:33]
John Podhoretz
And as I saw conservative experiment, a.
- [17:35]
Seth Mandel
Conservative experiment, as I, well, I would say experiment because I'll explain why for a second. So, I mean, I saw it a borning part of it was born at Yale. Part of it was born at the University of Chicago when I was an undergraduate. And it really started out as a group of scholarly law students who were interested in constitutional law had come to believe that liberal jurisprudence was revising the Constitution by, you know, opinion and, and was not hewing to its original standards, was finding in the Constitution rights that did not exist and was not obeying the rights that did exist and just sort of got together to have meetings and discuss this as law students. And over time, they started having chapters at other schools. And this effort grew organically along with the installation of the Reagan administration and the idea that one of the reasons that the turn to the right in the United States had happened was that liberal and leftist judges had gone so soft on crime that they had made America somewhat uninhabitable and that they were again finding things in the Constitution like the right to racial quotas that did not exist and the right to forced busing in schools that did not exist and all kinds of things like that. And over the past four decades, being first, it was bad to be in the Federalist Society because it meant that judges who had clerkships to hand out didn't want you because you were too controversial. And then it became a way for conservative judges to locate people, as there were more conservative judges to locate people that they, that they could have as clerks who would hew to their views and follow their precepts until such time as over time, you know, tens of thousands of people are members of the Federalist Society, all lawyers right of center joined the Federalist Society practically. And then it became a vehicle for administrations concerned to find and states and to locate people who could serve in, you know, in these lifetime appointments who would hew to conservative principle. And Leonard Leo is therefore an unbelievably successful figure, but he's a successful figure because he is ideologically consistent from the time he was a kid until now. And he and others who are there. And what it is is judicial restraint, original intent, finding in finding in the Constitution the grounds to make decisions that will, you know, have effects on American policy. And so the main thing that the judiciary represents is a check on untrammeled executive and legislative power. That is what the judiciary in its fundamental role here, in part exists to do, either to settle controversies between the executive, Supreme Court, controversies between the executive and legislative branches, or, as I say, to sort of be a voice for restraint in the sense that what they go back to is the original understanding of the United States and not to everything else. To say that Leonard Leo hates America. I've never, by the way, I've never met Leonard Leo. So this is not. He's not an old friend of mine. I don't know, you know, all of that. I know a lot of people who are involved in the Federalist Society, but him, I don't know. But Trump hates America in that sense. That is, as you say, what he does not like about America is what makes America America, which is to say that the president can't wave his hand and impose tariffs.
- [21:43]
John Podhoretz
The Constitution is our supreme ruler, not the president.
- [21:46]
Seth Mandel
That's right. The people are the supreme ruler in the United States. The president is their employee, and he is governed by a set of restraints called the Constitution. And Trump doesn't like it. And when he doesn't like it and fights it and says, I don't know if I'm going to obey this and I'm going to obey that. If you're going to accuse anybody of hating America, Trump is the one who deserves that accusation under these circumstances, and not Leonard Leo, who has spent his career trying to preserve an understanding of the United States against an onslaught that attempt that we have been fighting also to say, oh, sure, you can just suspend student debt. You know, of course it's okay to discriminate against Asian Americans at Harvard. Sure. Because we have other goals in mind. And no, we're going to stop you. We're going to stop that. We're going to stop it when it comes to us. And we can find a harm being done to the plaintiff who is making this argument.
- [22:46]
John Podhoretz
Although we should note that so far, in all of these battles with the judiciary, Trump has erred more on the side of rhetorical bluster than actually defiance, sheer defiance. So despite a lot of the overheated rhetoric coming from his Truth Social account and some of the members of his administration he hasn't yet defied, I mean, they're appealing certain rulings, but. But his talk doesn't exactly match his walk here, thank goodness, because he needs to defer to what the Supreme Court tells him to do.
- [23:15]
Christine Rosen
And also, you have to remember that the. The reason Trump liked the judges that adhere to the Constitution and, you know, an ideology of originalism and all of that had nothing to do with their belief systems or their ideology. You know, it's not like Trump was for originalism and now he's against it. It's not even like the filibuster arguments that we have where the two sides just keep switching sides. He liked the judges because they got him essentially elected president. The Supreme Court seat was open, the conservative majority was in danger, was up for grabs, and he came out with a list of the type of judges that he would appoint in the Federalist Society. And all those who influenced that did him a very big favor by mobilizing a very smart list of judges and helping him. And the reason that it was somebody needs to do that for him is because he did not. He. He did not then and does not now care what judges believe. What was good about those judges is that conservatives who may have been wary of him otherwise, or before the death of a Supreme Court justice, may have felt that not enough was at stake in the election to pull the lever for Trump. That these judges pushed some people over the line. That's literally it. The judges helped him, and now he wants a judge, and conservatives don't. And it doesn't matter to him whether the ideology is the same or different than the other guys. But he didn't like, you know, Amy Coney Barrett is a. Is a brilliant justice, but he doesn't think so. He doesn't care. He doesn't find her intellectually stimulating. He doesn't, you know, he doesn't get what makes her a superstar to the conservative and originalist right. He doesn't. None of that is even going through his mind. What he sees is a transaction.
- [25:25]
Seth Mandel
It's baggage.
- [25:27]
Abe Greenwald
To the extent that it goes through his mind, He. It's like, you know, for him, as far as he's concerned, his appeal is that he doesn't have to sell conservative ideas. It's a, it's too heavy a lift, it's too complicated. So that, you know, like he doesn't need, he doesn't want to be bogged down with all that. You know, he's, he, he can, he can sell a much simpler product day after day, which is him, which is deals, which is entertainment, which is, you know, he's unfortunately, as he sees it, attached to this other thing, to this conservative stuff.
- [26:08]
John Podhoretz
It also, it strikes me, I'm sorry, I'm so jet lagged in myself. But it also strikes me that in this second term, you know, the worry is that, oh, he's going to become a fascist authoritarian. You know, now he has unlimited power and he doesn't care because he's only got this one term left. But in fact, what it reminds me of is more like when someone from like a backwater little town becomes super celebrity famous very quickly and then they surround themselves with all the people from their little town, you know, like the, the two bit meth dealer, the, the guy who used to work with them at the fast food place. All maybe decent people, but they get, but they bring, he brings in right now completely unvetted people this second term. So the first term he obviously learned the lesson that he shouldn't listen to the experts because he ended up firing a lot of those people. But the people now, they're not even vet. I was thinking about Matt Gates, this anti Semitic woman who's been appointed a spokesperson. That is a dod. I mean he's just throwing people at the wall who, you know, everyone on social media then that vets these people for him like we're doing with Ingrassia and saying these are not acceptable terms for us. You cannot put these, you know, white supremacists or anti Semites or obvious, you know, federal government hating lunatics in power, but he does it anyway. So in that sense it's like he's just, he's got his inner circle and yes, we've talked about the loyalty, but it does strike me that the lack of vetting this time is, is very undisciplined.
- [27:28]
Seth Mandel
It's not lack of vetting. See I, there's, that's also where I.
- [27:30]
John Podhoretz
Think it's his true self coming out in these appointments.
- [27:33]
Seth Mandel
Well, first of all, it's not just him. So in 2016, he came in, he was a party of one. He was this unlikely person. He got these votes, he got in and he didn't have a Trump movement. There was no MAGA movement in that sense. It was built over the course of the first term, the loyalists and then over the course of the four years of the interregnum. And so there were people who got jobs in the Trump first term who had been loyal to him or early adopters of Trumpism or maga ism or something like that. I don't know, like Sebastian Gorka obviously, Michael Flynn, who was fired very early and probably for unjust reasons, although he's not, I think, an emotionally or mentally stable person. So it's good that he was a national security advisor. Various other things over the course of the eight years. There are now thousands of people who are sort of plug in a bowl in some generalized policy sense who comment on things on Twitter and they have some kind of a podcast or they, they're on a radio show or they're on one of those mini networks, you know, one America or whatever. And he's now installing them all over the place, including the case of this woman whose name I can't remember, who says Leo Frank, the victim of the, the lynching in Atlanta in 1913 or 1915 that led to the creation of the Anti Defamation League. What was guilty of raping this teenage girl, which we know he was not. And he was in fact you. I mean the Leo Frank truther has a high ranking job. And this guy Paul in Gracia who literally said the day after October 7th, that October 7th was a psyop by Israel just as Ukraine was performing a psyop against Russia. The war with Ukraine and Russia was a Ukrainian psyop to get western and Covid and the vaccine was a psyop. This guy now has a, has a major job. So he's not putting them in because he's the president. But it's also all the people around him who are doing personnel and they are installing loyalists and they don't care. And in fact, maybe the more extreme a person is the better, in part because there will be no protection for them. They're there to help him get whatever it is that he wants and they have no loyalty to anything. They don't have a loyalty to the Constitution, they don't have a loyalty to truth. They don't have a loyalty to good conduct, good behavior. They in fact are demonstrably bad. I don't know if they're bad people. I expect they are bad people. I don't think you can say that. I really think if you spend five minutes that you can say that Leo Frank was justly lynched. First of all, can anyone be justly lynched? Second of all that Leo Frank was guilty of rape. You only say that because you are up to something bad, morally, spiritually bad, and notably anti Semitic. That is the problem is that Trumpism now is a real thing. And the reward, the people that Trumpism rewards are like, not good for the country. They're bad. It's not bad to be loyal to the person that you work for. It's good. It's good. Political organizations need that. I'm not saying that that is not the case. And Trump does have a reason to think that there are people in the ambit of the right whom he would hire, who would be bad for him, who would leak against him or whatever. I'm sure everybody thought that Sasha Vindman was like a good, solid neocon, you know, military man, freedom lover, whatever. And then he basically engineers the first impeachment from his perch at the National Security Council, ginning up a false charge that Trump had betrayed the country on that famous perfect phone call. So he's got reason to say, I can't pick people from the general pool of Republican normies because I can't trust them. But the people he can trust, a lot of them are really bad. And I don't mean bad because I don't like their policies. I mean they're bad people.
- [32:24]
John Podhoretz
Well, this was the challenge, remember in the first term, where the, the attempt to construct an intellectual scaffolding around MAGA was. This was interesting to watch. It was funny to see all these intellectuals say, oh, these are the principles. It's very different from the old conservative principles, which we know don't work. And liberal principles, which of course also don't work. But they never quite constructed the full building, right? They had this kind of teetering scaffolding made out of bamboo. He, he gets booted out of office. The intellectual scaffolding then became justifying that the 2020 election was stolen. And then when he wins again, they're busily, the people now busily constructing the building are the same ones who are on the outskirts, the podcasters, the entertainers. He has a lot of entertainers in this administration. People who spend their days in the sort of murkiest corners of the, of the Internet and talking about the worst sort of conspiracy theories. And this is far beyond just the people who are suspicious of the so called deep state. There is some reason for healthy skepticism about the way some of our administrative agencies have worked over the past few decades. That's more than this. So there. I think this goes to Seth's point about the judiciary, where if and the Federal Society, if you don't have principles, you don't. You can do anything. And so that's why these people are very comfortable. In the second Trump administration, if you. If you have no principle except loyalty, you can bring in anti Semites, you can bring in misogynists who support Andrew Tate. It doesn't matter, as long as they're doing the thing that they were hired to do, which in, in Gracia's case, is now to vet that. He's vetting the people who will be appointed to important positions at the doj.
- [33:58]
Abe Greenwald
You know, I think in some really important way, we have to consider the fact that the left facilitated this in the sense that they ended up occupying such a weird, small, indefensible corner ideologically that no one could get with that represented and spoke for no one, that to oppose them, you no longer had to be conservative. You didn't have you. You could be somewhere, anywhere else in the 90% of the ideological world. That wasn't where they were. That wasn't saying trans people, we see you today. And, you know, whatever other crazy thing they were pushing, and also the wrongdoings of the Biden administration, you didn't have to be conservative to oppose, to say, this has to stop. This is craziness. It broadened the opposition. They broadened their own opposition to the point where all you have to do is say, I'm against that.
- [35:20]
Christine Rosen
I'm not.
- [35:21]
Abe Greenwald
I think that I don't want to replace it with this. With this good principled thing, necessarily. I don't know why I'm against it, but I just know I'm against that. I want to crush that. And that's.
- [35:31]
John Podhoretz
And that's all.
- [35:31]
Seth Mandel
To be clear, you're not talking about sort of like the, you know, an intellectual art. You're talking about just an ordinary voter saying, I'm looking at this and whatever Biden is, I don't want any part of it.
- [35:42]
John Podhoretz
I know what a man and a woman are, for example.
- [35:47]
Seth Mandel
Idea. And then it's, of course, also like, I don't. These people. There's a senile guy running for president, and somebody is saying, that's okay, and that is not okay with me. And you know what else? When his vice president takes over in the big switcheroo, I'm like, there's something fishy going on, right? Yeah. That's not the way things are supposed to go. Maybe Trump is crazy, but he's not that. Like. So you're right. Like, there's some kind of this weird Gaslighting, which is a combination of ideological gaslighting, like, like Obama saying, if you want your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Or, you know, that that's my, that's, that's my, my all time favorite. Or the JCPOA keeps Iran from developing a nuclear bomb when it actually enshrined Iran's right to build a nuclear bomb. Various other things like that. Where you go, no, no, that, that's not true. What he is saying and what he is doing is not true. And he knows it's not true. And he's saying it literally in our faces that it's not true. And some. And then of course, you then add on Biden's infirmity and saying that it's okay for, you know, calling a bill that raises, you know, the cost $2 billion, $2 trillion, the inflation reduction act, all that stuff saying if anybody says that maybe something, you know, came, that the, that Covid came from, from a lab in China instead of from somebody eating a bat, that they deserve to have their free speech rights revoked at some point, you're just like, okay, I'm going to take a flyer on this guy again, because why not? But here's the why not. I'm not saying that a vote for Harris would have, you know, if we were, if we played a counterfactual and Harris won in November and we were sitting here at the beginning, you know, almost at the beginning of June, five months into her presidency, that we wouldn't be pulling our hair out and smashing our heads against the wall at the horrible things that she was doing. Because I'm sure that would be the case. But this is a, just a different set of circumstances and intellectual honesty and simple like good taste and understanding of how America has functioned should say that. It's not that I don't think he's Hitler, he's something else. He's more like Peron or he's more like Noriega. You know, if you're going to like, compare, he is looking to enrich himself and his family and, and, and have the world pay obeisance to him. And in some ways he's going to do good things with the power that he holds. And in many ways he's doing bad things with the power he holds.
- [38:26]
John Podhoretz
But see, that's. I'm sorry to interrupt, but that is a good way to put it. I like that he kind of behaves like a small state potentate or dictator, you know, mild, mild dictator. Ish, but mainly corrupt. A corrupt leader of a very small place, but he happens to be running the most powerful country on earth. And that's where the disconnect is. He's, he's wheeling and dealing like he's a Noriega, but, you know, with the, with the drug cartels, but he's the President of the United States. And this having. I just spent some time in Europe and everybody keeps asking, and I will say it is not a good thing that our natural allies in the free world no longer trust us. And they apply that to all of us. I mean, unfortunately, that is where the leadership is lacking for Trump. And Trump can be quite happy making his deals and enriching his own children, but the respect for our country has declined significantly among the very people who should be most, I mean, yes, cynical and a little bit snobby towards us, but still our natural allies.
- [39:25]
Christine Rosen
I mean, and also, like, let's look at, see, I think yesterday's news on the Make America Healthy again. The Maha report, Open AI. Yeah, this, this, this to me was a really big. This to me was exactly what I was afraid of with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Getting to be Secretary of Health and Human Services as opposed to, you know, put in charge of some agency or one specific project or something like that. You know, people said, well, he's good. He's just gonna, he's gonna focus on what he's gonna focus on. But you can't limit the focus when somebody is the cabinet secretary of the entire agency. And this Baja report that they put out, you know, seven or so of the studies that were cited didn't actually exist. Others were misinterpreted. And the White House's response was that there were formatting errors in the document. Two different.
- [40:21]
Seth Mandel
What?
- [40:22]
Christine Rosen
Caroline Levitt said that at the pudding, but also the HHS spokesman also said that, that this was the answer that they had settled on if there were formatting problems. And so there's also this sense of like, well, it doesn't really matter. It's not just that you get your chance with Trump. Like, if you're somebody who wants to give a shot because you're the opposite of the type of health officials who were in power in the Biden administration. And therefore, let's see what you can do is that they'll stand behind the stuff that comes out of this, you know, and they'll say, you know, here's what HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said. Minor citation and formatting errors have been correct. It okay, but not like the made up science. Now, the story also goes on to say that the Trump White House has requested $500 million from Congress for, to put the Maha report into action in some sense and that they intend for this stuff to result in policy. So, you know, it's not just like, wow, this guy is a crazy person on Twitter and thinks like, you know, not, not that I'm minimizing that. But it's like, on the one hand, there is this. The America starts to look ridiculous. And as Christine said, you know, people stop trusting and don't know who they can talk to and don't know who they can work with and all that stuff. And the other side is that we spend half a billion dollars on fake science because we were angry about spending half of the other guy spending half a billion dollars on a different kind of fake science four years ago. And what seems to be happening is there's no way to get, like, there's no way, apparently there's no way to spend $500 million on good science. There's just competing bad sciences, you know, and not, not that, not that everybody's the same in this regard, but that when you talk about, you know, the legacy of this, you're going to see laws and regulations and policies that stick or are going to have to be undone, otherwise they'll stick, that are based on literal AI hallucinations.
- [42:38]
Seth Mandel
I think I told this story a couple of years ago that I have a. I have a friend who has decided to test various AIs, you know, as they come online by asking them to write an essay, biographical essay, about me. I don't, I, I actually have not really used AI or chat GBT or these things at all because I'm unnerved by them. But for some reason this is, he's amused by this. So he asked them to write these, you know, like, tell me about John Pod Horace or something like that. And one of the most interesting aspects of this is that every time one or another or another one of these different programs, or they're not programs, whatever you would call them, writes an essay and it's, you know, a thousand words long or 750 words long, and they note my long career as a movie critic. And then they say, he said this about X Movie. And they quote me saying something and I never said sounds like a line from Movie Review sounds like something. It doesn't really sound like something I would have written, to be honest, but it's like a line from a movie review. The AI understands what movie criticism looks like or sounds like and what a movie is and that you. How and how maybe a conservative person would react to a liberal movie or something like that. But it's. But the quotes are not real. So when I read this story about the Baja Non existent studies, I was like, well, obviously somebody said, write me a report to release. Now, I assume that AI will get better, but remember, AI does not have access unless it is sold to it to copyrighted material.
- [44:32]
John Podhoretz
Okay, that's unfortunately not true because I.
- [44:34]
Seth Mandel
Plugged in someone just sold. Right. Okay.
- [44:37]
John Podhoretz
They have actually Meta. Meta's. AI has without copyright. Total and total violation of copyright. If you're an author, you can go type your name. I think the Atlantic had the link in a story a few months ago. You can type your name or titles of your books into the, into the search engine and it'll show you. And every single thing I have published, which I hold the copyright to, has been used to train AI without my express permission. That's true of millions of writers. They are, they are, they are doing this because they're. It's like ask for forgiveness, not permission. So they are training on this stuff and to the, to the issue of a government document. Think about the historical record. So even if they correct it or withdraw the hallucinations, if this is how these people are producing documents, and I don't think this is a partisan problem, this is going to be true on the left as well as the right, no matter who's in charge. How do we determine which footnote is real? I have spent. If you spend time in the archives and you do scholarly work, you check every footnote in a monograph just to make sure that the person. Because you're reading the same manuscript. I have many times disputed an interpretation that a fellow historian made about a letter we were both reading. That's, that's part of the work. It's painstaking. It's, it's effective if you're, if you're doing it honestly. And it's exactly what everyone wants to skip over and use AI to do. And AI can't do that yet. Maybe it will. But I think it's, it's tra. First of all, it's training on, on the work of scholars and others who, without permission. And it's these hallucinations. They have not solved that problem. I think that's going to remain a problem for a while.
- [46:04]
Seth Mandel
Well, you know, not to Nat should be here for this, but Christine, a speculative fiction fan, you know that one of the features of Dune, which is, you know, probably the best read, one of the best read science fiction novels ever Written is that Dune exists in a world after essentially like a Terminator like event where the computers gained consciousness and went to war and tried to destroy humanity. And so in this world that follows that we are in, no one can use machines. And so people have to be trained to become human computers using genetic, they do genetic engineering, but you cannot use essentially AI. It's, it's. And so Frank Herbert, 60 years ago saw this coming, that there would be a way in which senti, you know, if, if intelligence achieves, you know, if sort of intelligence as some kind of abstract principle achieves consciousness in some fashion or an ability to do, make these calculations 10,000 times faster than a human can ever make them. Just as people like our kids, Christine's and my kids and Seth's kids eventually like, are in college and are starting to get the prep professor saying, you have to write a paper in the classroom or do an exam in a blue book or something like that, because I can no longer trust that you are not having a machine write this paper.
- [47:46]
John Podhoretz
That's why it's. The danger with AI isn't sentience, it's the slope. There's so much slop and that's now getting into government documents.
- [47:54]
Seth Mandel
The sentience will hasten the slop. So they, they go together. In other words, human cognition will decline as people increasingly rely on machines to teach them how to think. Or in other words, we used to learn, have to learn how to think. Part of the scholarship that you're talking about is not just for the purposes of establishing a proper historical record. It is also a way of teaching you, as you're doing it, how to think about the subject that you were using. And that the thing, the idea, maybe a motivating idea you had to write your PhD dissertation was incorrect because you find a document that disproves the thing that you are trying to prove and then suddenly you have to recalculate because the complication gets so extreme anyway. The fact that in, you know, only a few years into this AI era of, of, you know, the writing aspect of it, that the largest department in the federal government house, the Department of Health and Human Services run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who wants to like stop Moderna from making an MRNA, a new MRNA vaccine for bird flu, and have everybody eat whole grains and do whatever they do and swim in filthy rivers and Rock Creek park or whatever it is, is in fact the largest single department in the federal government. It has the most money, it administers the most money because it is where Medicare and Medicaid come from. And it's no joke. Like, you know, if, if, if you found out that some ancillary department, you know, the Office of Economic Opportunity or something like that, produced a report that was written by AI, you'd have a big laugh and it would be funny and you would say you're an idiot. And the guy would get, who ran it, would get fired and for being so sloppy. This is the baby, this is like the dream baby of the secretary of HHS in his mission to change America.
- [50:04]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, it's, it's perfect. It's perfect that AI came along with the slop when it did. If you think back, it was 2017 that Kellyanne Conway went on Meet the Press and defended something someone in the administration said that was false by saying they were offering alternative facts. And that became a sort of conceptual meme. This alternative facts, fake news. And we're also in an age where if you want, if you have an argument and you need a study for the argument, you can find the study. There's no definitive, there's no study that disproves. There are studies that disprove what you want and prove what you want. You could pick anyone. So it's all out there. So then along comes this technology that just spits out alternative facts. And it is, of course it's going to be used, it's going to be seized on. It is like it is the perfect complement to the sort of era of argumentation and debate that we are in. And it's always wrong. My only real exposure to AI is that it's built into Google now. So when you Google anything, you first get this, you like it, this essay.
- [51:38]
Seth Mandel
At the top of the page and summary.
- [51:40]
John Podhoretz
You can get that, you can get rid of that if you don't like to see complicated.
- [51:44]
Abe Greenwald
But what I, what I do instead of getting rid of it is ignore it the way I would ignore ads that come up. Because it's dead wrong. It has nothing to do with anything. Every time it's an alternative fact.
- [52:01]
Christine Rosen
And the other thing is that this is a self perpetuating cycle, right? Because AI slop comes up with something that didn't exist. Robert F. Kennedy's report, Maha report, that's going to get a half a billion dollars of funding behind it to make policy, cites this and uses it and explains in the text why this is a, why this proves such and such. And then in the future when AI goes trawling for info to answer your questions, it's going to come across the MAHA report and it's going. Which is authored by so and so in the White House, and it's going to pull it and it's going to include it in its group, and that is going to become not AI slope, but it's just going to become like, well, here's a source. It's a literal source. You can follow the citation. The source takes you to an actual government report authored by an actual. Well, supposedly authored by an actual human we know. Probably not actually authored by. By, you know, a human. But the point is that it is laundering its own slop. It has bought a car wash. It is. This is like Breaking Bad. AI has bought a car wash to clean its own slop and put the AI slop back into circulation as non slop, as non traceable legal tender.
- [53:33]
Seth Mandel
So everything is terrible is what we're saying.
- [53:37]
John Podhoretz
Happy Friday.
- [53:40]
Seth Mandel
Happy Friday. I want to make a recommendation. I'm going to warn people, to begin with, that the book that I'm about to recommend is Sexual. It's a memoir. It's sexually very explicit. And so if you, if you, if that is unbearable to you, which it. I mean, parts of this book, there are a couple of pages here and there that I had to skip over fast because I found them very discomforting. But there's a remarkable American memoir that's just been published. It's called Theater Kid. It's by a guy named Jeffrey Seller, and it is his life story. Jeffrey Seller is the most inventive Broadway producer of the last 30 years. And he tells. At the end of the book, he tells the story of how he climbed up some stairs somewhere to listen to a guy playing some songs about turning 30 and being unsatisfied. And that was Jonathan Larson. And that was the genesis of the show Rent. And he was at the time himself working as a lowly booker for traveling shows that went to summer theaters and theaters around the country. 25, 26 years old himself, no producing experience, no money, no nothing. And over the course of five years, he and Larson and, you know, basically created this show called Rent that changed Broadway forever. Rock opera. Larson died on the verge of its being produced at the age of 35, which is one of those great, horrible, you know, like, melodramatic theater stories. But he didn't just stop there. Then he goes, climbs up the stairs to another thing, and he hears this show where they have puppets singing songs about being adults. And he helps shape that into Avenue Q, which has run for 20 years. Various places wanted Tony just as rent one and Tony and then at the same time he climbed some stairs and he hears this, these kids from Wesleyan performing songs about Washington Heights. And that was Lin Manuel Miranda and that was his first show in the Heights. And then he produces Hamilton. So this guy produced Rent, Avenue Q in the Heights and Hamilton in a 30 year career as well as some other shows that didn't do so well. Where did he come from? How did this happen? And his life story is that he grew up as a lower middle class Jewish kid adopted in the outskirts of Detroit with a father, a reckless, weird, crazy father who had had a terrible motorcycle accident when he was very little and ended up sort of with short term memory loss and a complete inability to self regulate his spending or what he wanted to do or anything like that. A very bitter mother and a very bitter sister. And theater, finding theater as a little kid saved him. But as a description of this, of how you climb out of, you know, it's a sort of torturous personal situation by finding a calling and an avocation and a subject and this country again, allowing you to kind of work your will. If you have a will and you have a way and you have real talent. It is like one of these great American pull yourself up by your bootstraps memoirs. As I say, it gets very sexually explicit. He's gay and he describes a lot of gay sex in the book. And even if the sex were, were not gay, I didn't need that. Like I don't care about his sex life. It's of no consequence to me. And so, you know, that's discomforting and somebody should have edited it out. But it's a, it's an extraordinary book. As I say, it's called Theater Kid. The author is Jeffrey Seller Sel. And it's not just for people who are interested in theater. It's also. He's not a creative, you know, he's not a writer. He, he tried to write, he tried to do. He realized that he was somebody who could help other people make their work into something that a lot of people would want to see. That's itself an extraordinary and unusual talent, not unlike being an editor, but also being able to raise money to help make this stuff happen. And it's, it's really a remarkable book. Theater Kid by Jeffrey Seller. So everything is terrible, but Theater Kid is good, even though it has the terrible parts to it, which is like America now. We'll be back on Monday for Abe, Seth and Christina and John Pothor's Keep the Candle Burning.