Hunting Jews and Restoring the Military

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "Hunting Jews and Restoring the Military" – Detailed Summary

Release Date: November 13, 2024

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Introduction

In the November 13, 2024 episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast, host John Podhoretz along with his panel of experts—Christine Rosen, Abe Greenwald, Seth Mandel, and Matthew Continetti—delve into the alarming rise of anti-Semitic violence and discuss the broader implications for national security and policy. The episode, titled "Hunting Jews and Restoring the Military," addresses recent pogroms, systemic failures in government responses, the role of educational institutions, and pivotal political appointments affecting the Jewish community and military integrity.

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Rising Anti-Semitism: Incidents and Analysis

Amsterdam Pogrom and U.S. Incidents

The discussion kicks off with John Podhoretz highlighting a disturbing series of events:

• Amsterdam Pogrom: The panel reflects on what Podhoretz describes as "the actual first pogrom" in his lifetime, where gangs hunted Jews in Amsterdam. He notes, “visible evidence of a actual urban incident in which gangs of people were hunting down Jewish people in the streets of Amsterdam” (03:00).

• U.S. Incidents: Podhoretz draws parallels to similar violent actions across the United States over the previous nine days, including:

  • An illegal immigrant from Mauritania assaulted a Sabbath synagogue attendee while shouting "Alu Akbar".
  • Violent attacks on Jewish families in Brooklyn, where children were physically harassed.
  • Random assaults near DePaul University in Chicago targeting individuals identified as Israeli veterans.

Christine Rosen adds context, emphasizing the communal aspect in Europe:

“In a place like Amsterdam, you have a community that's with you on this hunt. It's a different demographic reality there” (04:54).

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Government and Institutional Responses

Policy Failures in the Netherlands

The panel discusses the insufficient protection measures for Jewish individuals in Amsterdam. Seth Mandel explains that prominent figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and Dutch legislator, faced government withdrawal of protection following the murder of Theo van Gogh. This regulatory retreat was ostensibly based on technicalities, leaving her vulnerable and eventually forcing her to relocate to the United States.

U.S. Government and Hate Crime Legislation

Abel Greenwald and Seth Mandel debate the effectiveness of U.S. hate crime legislation:

“And there is a kind of a hierarchy of awareness about these incidents... politically conservative Jews had been saying sort of, there's a kind of 'I told you so' moment about the left here” (07:28).

Mandel points out, “the first order response from authorities... is not to say we will find the perpetrators and they will be punished... it's to tell Jews you have to alter your appearance, behavior, routine” (06:57).

This reveals a systemic issue where victims are often compelled to change themselves rather than perpetrators being held accountable.

University Responses to Anti-Semitism

The conversation shifts to how universities handle anti-Semitic incidents:

• Harvard and Tufts: Instances where administrations took stances against Republicans and pro-Israel individuals, effectively suppressing free speech. For example, a Harvard student leader advocated banning Republicans from study programs, and Tufts officials rejected fellowship applications from supporters of Congressman Seth Moulton’s policies.

“They literally think that it's okay to suppress speech... argue that it is their right to suppress partisan participation” (20:43).

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Movements Contributing to Anti-Semitism

Black Lives Matter and Women's March

The panel critiques movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the Women's March for harboring anti-Semitic sentiments:

• Christine Rosen states, “the organizational thinking somehow connected to the police problem here” (40:35), highlighting the inherent anti-Semitism within these movements.

• Seth Mandel adds, “They expect Jews to be white. That's their whole message. Stop being Jewish, be white” (40:15).

These movements are accused of institutionalizing anti-Semitic ideologies under the guise of broader social justice causes.

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Restoring the Military: Political Appointments and Implications

Nomination of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to the controversial nomination of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and author, as the U.S. Secretary of Defense. The panel debates his qualifications and potential impact:

• Matthew Continetti acknowledges Hegseth’s alignment with Trump's national security views, describing his stance as similar to prominent conservative figures:

  “He is very tough toward Iran, pretty clear-eyed about what the Chinese Communist Party is up to” (49:36).

• John Podhoretz references Hegseth’s book, "The War on Warriors", critiquing modern military policies that prioritize social justice over traditional military discipline:

  “The shoehorning of diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory... are anathema to everything the American military stands for” (56:57).

• Seth Mandel emphasizes Hegseth’s direct communication style akin to a soldier, which could transform the bureaucratic nature of the Pentagon:

  “He talks like a soldier, he writes like a soldier” (57:07).

Challenges in Confirmation

Concerns are raised about Hegseth’s ability to be confirmed due to his outspoken views on issues like women in combat and racial policies within the military:

“If he opposes women in combat... one more person in the Republican caucus could say... we’re going to vote against you” (62:12).

Comparisons to Historical Figures

Podhoretz likens current political dynamics to Jacksonian politics, suggesting Hegseth embodies a populist, tough-on-defense stance reminiscent of Andrew Jackson’s unorthodox presidency:

“Trump is a sort of Jackson... he does not obey the rules, the laws that have been written, customs, prior customs” (73:11).

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Literary and Intellectual References

"A Life for Liberty" by Randy Barnett

Podhoretz highlights Randy Barnett's book, which chronicles his journey from an originalist legal thinker to a prosecutor in Chicago, emphasizing the intellectual underpinnings of originalist interpretations of the Constitution.

George Will describes it as “a nourishing three deck club sandwich” (55:13).

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Concluding Insights and Future Implications

Impact of Political Appointments and Media Influence

The panel discusses the broader implications of political appointments like Hegseth’s and the shifting landscape of media influence:

• Matthew Continetti suggests that public appearances, such as Hegseth’s potential spot on Joe Rogan Experience, could amplify his influence beyond traditional media outlets.

“This will all be a question inside the Republican caucus, maybe on Susan Collins...” (80:25).

Hope for Change Amidst Chaos

Despite the bleakness, John Podhoretz expresses a nuanced hope that the election outcomes will allow for real-time discussions on pressing issues rather than being mired in political stagnation.

“We have news in the real sense of news... thank God for that” (88:56).

Final Remarks

The episode wraps up with acknowledgments of the complex interplay between rising anti-Semitism, governmental responses, and the reshaping of military leadership. The panel underscores the urgency of addressing these challenges to protect Jewish communities and restore the integrity of the U.S. military.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• John Podhoretz on the Amsterdam pogrom:

  “Visible evidence of a actual urban incident in which gangs of people were hunting down Jewish people in the streets of Amsterdam.” (03:00)

• Seth Mandel on governmental protection failures:

  “...the first order response from authorities... is to tell Jews you have to alter your appearance, behavior, routine.” (06:57)

• Christine Rosen on European communal hunting:

  “In a place like Amsterdam, you have a community that's with you on this hunt.” (04:54)

• John Podhoretz on Pete Hegseth’s military rhetoric:

  “The shoehorning of diversity, equity and inclusion... are anathema to everything the American military stands for.” (56:57)

• Matthew Continetti on media influence in confirmation hearings:

  “...the podcast culture has become the populist political culture of our moment.” (82:30)

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Conclusion

The "Hunting Jews and Restoring the Military" episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast presents a comprehensive examination of the resurgence of anti-Semitic violence and its intersection with governmental policies and military appointments. By interweaving detailed incidents, policy critiques, and discussions on influential political figures, the panel underscores the urgent need for robust responses to protect vulnerable communities and ensure the integrity of national defense institutions.

Transcript

[John Podhoretz]

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No way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best.

[Christine Rosen]

Expect the worst, Hope for the best.

[John Podhoretz]

Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, November 13th. November 13th, that was the day that Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence. That request came from his wife. Yes, it is. Odd Couple Day. Happy Odd Couple Day to all who observe. I'm John Pod Horitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald.

[Christine Rosen]

IA Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

And Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.

[Matthew Continetti]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

So the story of the week that we have not gotten to is not just the week, but the month, the year, perhaps the century is the approximate. Thing we need to discuss is what happened in Amsterdam last Thursday night. The actual first pogrom that we have seen in my lifetime. Visible evidence of a actual urban incident in which gangs of people were hunting down Jewish people in the streets of Amsterdam. And this is major event not only in itself, because we, as we have all year seen things that we had not thought we would see again in our lifetimes, certainly maybe not in Europe after what happened in Europe 80 years ago. But as it was happening in Amsterdam, we had numerous incidents in the United States in the last eight or nine days, all of which have a quality of hunting not dissimilar to the fact that the Amsterdam pogrom was called a Jew hunt. In the WhatsApp group, messages that were being shared by those who participated in it and who apparently organized themselves through Uber and other transportation apps detailing where people were, where they were going, where you could find groups of Jews leaving the soccer stadium, what subway lines they were taking, what hotels they were staying in. And this again was called a Jew hunt. In Chicago, of course, we had a illegal immigrant from Mauritania hunting down a Sabbath synagogue goer, shooting him while yelling Alu Akbar. A little boy in Brooklyn. You've probably seen the footage walking down the street again on, on Shabbat with his father and being pulled away Lifted up off the ground physically by a masked man. The father quickly pulls the kid back to him. Another kid riding a bicycle again in Brooklyn, slapped off his bicycle by a man standing nearby. Two guys in front of the DePaul University Student center in Chicago being tackled out of nowhere. One of them wearing a shirt that says, I'm an Israeli war veteran. Ask me anything. Um, and so this. The randomness of those things, which is the way you hunt people in the United States. Because what frightens people in a country this large is random assaults, like random attacks, have this quality of. This unnerving quality. Uh, a place like Amsterdam, you would do it in. In. In groups, because that's a sort of a more. Smaller, more homogeneous place, easier to target.

[Christine Rosen]

Also, can I add, John, that place like Amsterdam, you have. There's a community that's with you on this hunt. It's a different demographic reality there.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. So Dan Senor had Ian Hsi Ali on his podcast to talk about this, which, of course, was very into Ion, who was written for Commentary, was a legislator in the Dutch parliament, a. Herself, a refugee from fundamentalist Islam in Somalia, comes to Holland to save herself, goes to the University of leiden, gets a PhD, goes to work for a think tank, becomes a legislator. And because she was under such threat, because she would speak honestly about the threat of radical Islam, was under police guard. This is in the early part of the 21st century, in the first years of the 21st century. And then inexplicably, out of nowhere, the Dutch government sort of announced it would no longer protect her.

[Seth Mandel]

No, not inexplicably. Several. Several prominent political figures and artists were murdered. She was next on a. On a list including. Her name was on a list. And they withdrew. They basically were threatening. On a technicality that was clearly drummed up, threatening to revoke her citizenship because of what they claimed was a technicality on her application.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes, for. Right, yes, right. Yes.

[Seth Mandel]

And she.

[John Podhoretz]

After the murder of Theo van Gogh, who was a filmmaker and then a parliamentarian. Anyway, the. Who were. Who were. Yeah. Speaking out against radical Islam, open Muslim immigration to the Netherlands. And of course, she then has moved to the United States.

[Seth Mandel]

And I just add when she came to the US and was looking for an institution there, there was one institution in Washington that took her in, even with all of the security challenges, and that was the American Enterprise Institute. She came to AEI and was there and did work, excellent work there for a while before she moved to the West Coast. And we were very grateful to have her. And, you know, There were lots of institutions in Washington that didn't want someone that came with the threats against her or quite frankly what she stood for.

[John Podhoretz]

In on the podcast, Ayaan basically said, well these are the, what we saw here was the chickens coming home to roost that we saw in chrysalis or that she experienced in, you know, in chrysalis form that you create this ideology, this kind of pan nationalist ideology which is what she referred to in the piece she wrote for us called the tragedy of Mr. Consensus. And that, and that over time you then create, as our old friend Noel Rothman would have said on this podcast, the permission structure that leads inevitably to something like what happened at the soccer stadium, including the fact that there was some evidence that the authorities in the Netherlands knew or monitoring or had some advance notice that trouble was in the offing and deliberately apparently did not move to pre position assets and forces except directly outside the stadium to guide people out of the immediate perimeter of the stadium, then stopping at some point saying this is as far as we go. You can go into the, into the metro by yourself.

[Abe Greenwald]

So they knew the fans not to.

[John Podhoretz]

Take taxis and they told fans not to take taxis. Exactly.

[Abe Greenwald]

So they knew what was coming, they knew they didn't want to.

[John Podhoretz]

And the policy of the, of the, of the city of Amsterdam and the government of the Netherlands is to de escalate or not to engage or some version of that, or they didn't even necessarily have confidence that the, that the police force wouldn't somehow side with the protesters, something like that. So I have a piece in the new issue of Commentary which will be out available today, a couple of pieces on the issue. But, but our Ed letter, the Ed letter which I write, the opening page in the magazine echoed very much by Brett Stevens superb column today in the New York Times which is about why this is happening and how this has happened. And this is what the Jew hunt is on. Is my point that we kept thinking last year, how can this get worse? How can things get worse than the campus scenes or the marches or whatever. And how it can get worse is that individual Jews at random are going to, are being targeted for violent assault. And it's ironic what happens now that.

[Matthew Continetti]

Israel is winning its fight, winning its fight in Gaza, pursuing its objective of uprooting Hezbollah's infrastructure in Lebanon, showing Iran that Iran's air defense systems no longer exist and Israeli pilots can travel across the region and be home for breakfast. Directed by female navigators. As Israel's security situation is improving, the state of the diaspora is Declining. And this is the next front in the conflict is protecting Jews worldwide. As Abe said earlier this week, this is what globalize the Intifada means. And so we have to take every measure now while supporting Israel, also recognizing this threat to Jews around the world.

[Abe Greenwald]

Can I add one of the an incident to that list also? There was a few days ago a Maccabi youth soccer team, which is 17 and under in Berlin, was spat on during a match in a heavily apparently Turkish Muslim neighborhood. And after the game were chased home. People came with knives and sticks and helped chase the teenage soccer players home. Now, Maccabee Berlin, this is the Maccabee sports structure in Germany was, you know, made at the. Founded basically at the turn of the 20th century so that Jews could have a place to play and to work out and all this other stuff. And also it was more egalitarian than others. You know, the main gymnasium groups or whatever in Germany, the non sectarian ones didn't allow women to vote and all sorts of stuff on that. And the Jewish one was very egalitarian. And so they, you know, they had these clubs and they were slowly whittled away in Germany by, you know, by threats, by, you know, by attacks and then eventually by law and were closed down. And Maccabee Berlin is the legacy organization that was reestablished about, you know, 20 years or so after the Holocaust when there was a moment to reestablish Jewish cultural life in Germany. So there's a lot of symbolism around the specific targets. And also what's happening is we say this all the time, we talk about historical echoes, but, you know, a Maccabee Berlin sports team being chased with knives is like the original echo.

[John Podhoretz]

And of course, what you have here is an imported population, right? The story of the story of Nazi Germany and the Final Solution and the war against the Jews is that it was an indigenous German cultural outgrowth of indigenous German culture and the growth of these ideas over a century. And because of ruinous and destructive ideas about immigration and the idea that you could simply wholesale allow into Europe millions upon millions upon millions of people for understandably humanitarian reasons, who have absolutely no connection to Western ideas about coexistence and rule of law and a liberal understanding of, of the integration of minority populations into a majority respecting each other's minority status and all of that. And now. So they've essentially imported Final Solution thinking through massive.

[Seth Mandel]

But it's a little more complicated than that, I think. I mean, in Germany in particular, Turkish migration has been going on for many. I mean, this is a multigenerational German population. Now what's worth exploring is why and how it has become so radicalized to violence in recent memory. Because some of these young men chasing Jews down the street are probably third or fourth generation German now. I mean, these are people whose parents and grandparents came in the 20th century and so they are German. There's a very large Turkish population. But the radicalization, and I think Ayaan and others who saw this very early on in parts of Europe have spoken to this. It does kind of go hand in hand with what Abe was saying, a kind of intellectual movement that started, which people thought wouldn't lead to action about globalized the Intifada, about all these sort of this idea of Israel as this threat somehow to the rest of the world. And that has taken hold and it has been taught over and over again for several generations. And now the violence, we see the violence, which is the logical conclusion of that.

[Christine Rosen]

I mean, you know, the idea of globalizing the Intifada had come to Islamist thinkers and leaders decades before it came to American campuses. And this is the fruit of a plan to radicalize in Western countries. Much easier to do in Europe also, because European countries, the fabric that sort of holds them together is different in many respects than it is from the fabric here which is so intimately tied with our ideals and notions of individual liberty and state.

[John Podhoretz]

No, that's absolutely true. I should mention, following Christine's point about the Turkish populations in Germany and elsewhere, that of course this is true. In Britain also, which it's not Turkish, there is a South Asian Pakistani population, you know, and the Indian population within the Commonwealth or you know, some version of the old British Empire that also two or three, four generations in London and in, and in Britain that has gotten radicalized over the past 25, 30 years in particular, and part of the radicalization is due. There's a kind of bifurcated ideological cause of it. On the one hand, you have a lot of this population coming into these cities, including Paris and others, to be a cheap workforce and they are not integrated. The blood and soil of Europe, where you can't really become French, right, does leave these populations who live in the bodily outside Paris or, you know, or in Rotherham in Britain or whatever, does leave them outside. They are outsiders. You can't really become British, you know, you can't become root and soil French. So on the one hand they have this outsider status that will never be cured. And on the other hand, the Mr. Consensus people that Ayaan Hirsi Ali talked about don't believe in, you know, believe in multiculturalism or believe that, you know, one does not visit one's moral codes on people from a different culture. They are allowed to bring their own culture and live and practice by their own rules, which is certainly true here about religious faith and all that, but it's not true about social organization or how you live.

[Matthew Continetti]

I think we have in the United States more resources to combat the problem because, like Abe says, the structure of our polity. You have the First Amendment, you have the Second Amendment. You have a widespread civil society, thanks to our tax code, which is often absent in Europe. You have, thanks to the election, a Department of Education that could hit colleges and universities hard with investigations and lawsuits for violating the safety of Jewish students on campus. There's a good article in the Free Press just the other day about a group of Columbia alumni. I'm a Columbia alum, but this group of Columbia alumni estimate that Columbia could be subject to three different Title 6 investigations by the Trump Education Department in the next year, causing it untold losses.

[John Podhoretz]

Because of the three and a half billion dollars and a half billion federal money that goes to Columbia directly to Colombia. Three and a half billion dollars that could be cut off if those investigations find Columbia because of the atmosphere that.

[Matthew Continetti]

The administrative successive administrations at Columbia have allowed to take root at what was once a great university. So my hope is that before Donald Trump closes the Department of Education, which he is also promising to do, he just lets these investigations take place so we can enforce the law and the equal rights of Jewish students on campus.

[John Podhoretz]

It's those who we have that don't.

[Matthew Continetti]

Think Europe has right.

[John Podhoretz]

It's the Department of Government Accountability, the doge under, under Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy announced yesterday by Donald Trump. Well, one of the places you could find efficiencies would be to locate excessive spending on college campuses that are going to support these kinds of things, save billions of dollars and, you know, start looking at that tax exemption that exists for the endowments of major universities that are, that are interfering with the civil rights of Americans.

[Matthew Continetti]

Part of the TCGA, the Trump tax cut in 2017, was a tax on endowments of certain size. And as part of the tax negotiations that are going to take place next year to renew the tcga, I fully expect the endowment tax to go up because you have to get revenue from somewhere. I think all parts of the Republican Party have no interest in helping these universities, which have become dens of anti Semitism, keep their endowments the size of, you know, the GDP of small African nations.

[John Podhoretz]

Can I add that, Casas? I wouldn't say Casas, Bella, but let's say reasons to adduce that you should do this, not only actually on grounds that aren't even particularly Department of Education grounds, but are the grounds in the tax code that involve tax exemption came up. Just in the past week, two very interesting things happened. One at Harvard and one at Tufts. At Harvard, the student head of the Institute of Politics, apparently an undergrad, there's some undergraduate who gets to be like the student president of the Institute of Politics, wrote a piece from the Harvard Crimson saying that no Republican should ever be allowed to study or be made a fellow at the Institute of Politics because of the threat to democracy posed by Trump. This piece was published. The key element of the tax code involving the nonprofit sector is that nonprofits like Commentary and others cannot lobby or advocate for specific political parties or candidates. That is the red line. That is when you stop being a nonprofit. Somebody said the quiet part out loud. We cannot allow Republicans to be here. Now. The head of the, not the non student head of the Institute of Politics, recognizing the Notron bomb that had just been set off in his little corner of Harvard Yard, issued a statement saying, no, no, we must speak to everybody. But what's there is there. What's been said cannot be unsaid. And at Tufts, after Seth Moulton, who was not a Republican Democrat from Massachusetts, said, I don't believe that my teenage daughters should have to play sports against biological males who can injure them. The chairman of the political science department at Tufts sends a letter, issues a statement or something like it saying, we will not accept any applications for fellowship or anything from anyone who works for Seth Moulton. Whereupon the another political science professor, Eitan Hirsch, issues a statement saying, no, that's not right. No, I'll contact me, Seth Moulton, and I will work with you to let your, to let people from your office step on the Tufts campus. But these people live in such a bubble in such a world in which they literally think that it's okay to suppress speech. And to that they are now, they're now arguing that it is their right to suppress partisan participation in institutes at Harvard and to deny elected congressmen access to their campus.

[Matthew Continetti]

So the universities have always been the most Europeanized, fair enough spaces zones in the United States, right? And so it shows you what, what can happen if you don't, if you don't hold them to account. And so I think that's where the real the, the real fight will be. And of Course two, we'll have a UN Ambassador, Elise Stefanik, who will be highlighting these issues every day globally. Like I say, you know, Israel is doing very well, I think, in the war against the ring of fire, the Iranian proxies. But this larger battle for the safety of world Jewry is where a lot of attention and resources need to be paid. And I think they'll be coming in the come in the next few months.

[John Podhoretz]

But I think we do have to focus on the fact that we were treated to kind of our bizarrely happy place, which is the fact that there is a fight on the college campuses and that people are fighting back to the globalized intifada that involves this random, these random crimes on a daily basis all across America, the purpose of which is to unnerve and menace and harass Jews so that we will go underground, so that we will stop wearing our Magenda vid necklaces and our hostage necklaces and men who wear will.

[Seth Mandel]

This is actually, I'm sorry to interrupt, but this point, this is actually something that I think gets, even in news media that's covering these stories capably gets overlooked, which is that the first order response from authorities in many of these countries and even unfortunately on many college campuses and in local governments across the US Is not to say we will find the perpetrators and they will be punished to the full extent of the law. It's to tell Jews you, well, here are all the ways you have to alter your appearance, your behavior, your routine, where you worship, how you worship, what your children can do in terms of coming to and from school, forcing this burden on the population that is being targeted for the harassment and the violence. And there is no other group that I can think of in American society in particular that is treated that way that is horrific. And that is a form of discrimination that I think is worth every time we see that said or done or even hinted at, that should be absolutely condemned for what it is.

[John Podhoretz]

Very important, very important. Also because we mentioned the Department of Education and the work that was done in the first term of the Trump administration to combat anti which did start in the Department of Education during Trump's first term. Now, there will be a question about the Department of Justice. We don't know who's going to be the Attorney General. We don't know who his subject deputies will be. But in every single case here you have, even though a lot of people are on the right are concerned about it, but it has been revoked and it's still there. Hate crimes legislation and hate crimes regulations that mean that every single time a Jew is punched on the street, that can be raised to a federal offense and the entire weight of the US Government can be brought to bear on every single incident.

[Seth Mandel]

And that's important because local prosecutors will not always prosecute these cases or see them as motivated by hate. Here in D.C. the only kosher restaurant on the eve of Kristallnacht was vandalized. And the local officials the next day said, well, we don't really know the motive. We can't really speak to motive. I mean, this is so that dodge is in part why I'm very ambivalent about hate crimes legislation.

[John Podhoretz]

That's why I mentioned we all are.

[Seth Mandel]

But one of the reasons it's there is so that when a local progressive prosecutor says, ah, nothing to see here, you, the feds can step in and actually, you know, prosecute the crime.

[John Podhoretz]

And, and this is a. We're, we're in a unique circumstance because I, I don't know, you know, in the absence of sort of moments in the United States like the, the rise of the Klan after the, after birth of a nation became such a, a cultural signpost in the late teens and twenties, I don't know of a circumstance in which you can say that there seems to be an organized effort that we don't really understand the tentacles of inside the United States because of free speech and because the government can't just sort of dip in and take a look and all. We don't understand what's going on here. But it beggars the imagination to say that these things are happening totally without some form of guidance or something, that they're happening every day.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, you know, on the happening every day point, there's, I want to point out, there's a kind of a hierarchy of awareness about these incidents. You know, after October 7th, politically liberal Jews were sort of shocked to see the response and the degree of anti Semitism, anti Israel animus in the country. And I think we're all shocked to some degree. But politically conservative Jews had been saying sort of, there's a kind of I told you so moment about the left here. Right. And then if you go deeper, my orthodox and Hasidic friends say we've been going through this for years with, it's been a, I mean, years, well before October 7, attacks in their communities with no response. It's just, it's part of weather these.

[John Podhoretz]

Knockout punches, then the knockout attacks that I think we started writing about in 2017 that caused the organization in Borough park and other places of Self defense of communities. The Shomarim and others who walk around the neighborhood watching, you know, watching like a neighborhood watch to make sure either that these incidents don't happen or if they're happening, that they are documented. Which is part of what's different about what's happening now is that we get to see them. I mean, it's horrifying to see them. I wish I ward didn't have to look at them. But better that they be documented, that they not be documented. And in fact, like, the guy who grabbed the kid in Brooklyn, excuse me, the guy who slapped the kid off the bike in Brooklyn was arrested because there was iPhone, Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

And also their security cameras. You know, there was a time not that long ago in New York when security cameras were obviously just for show. Nobody thought otherwise. And they, you know, eventually had to kind of turn them on or fix them in part because you had outbreaks of, of robberies and things that, you know, and the storekeeper said, well, we got to get these things working. But for a while you didn't expect to be able to look at the security cam footage in New York, especially in the outer boroughs, and find anything. And that has changed in part just because of the crime situation changed. And now what you're seeing is what Abe says, which is, you know, you saw a video the other day for the first time, but, you know, that was the 27th time it happened on this block since, you know, 2016, whatever it is, you know, they sort of have. And then the other problem is that you have the. It tends to be the case that the more observant or more religious community they are, especially in New York, especially in Brooklyn, the less likely they probably are to trust the city government and the police force enough to make the complaints. So the other thing that you hear is, and you hear this with all minority groups and hate crimes and all stuff like that, but it is, it is certainly true in this as well, which is that they are under reported as they are now. So even the ones you're seeing, which feels like, wow, we're seeing a lot more of this. Right, but those have been.

[John Podhoretz]

Right, but that's just, that's. That's a. There's a circumstantial or a time specific part of that because it say, take New York. And this then goes to what Christine's talking about with the prosecutors or in other cities or other police forces in other cities. I don't think that would have been the case during the Giuliani era. I think, I think there would have been an idea that the mayor and the police department, what they were looking for, they were looking actively to enforce the law, to find perpetrators and to punish them.

[Seth Mandel]

And that grabbed that kid had what.

[John Podhoretz]

Been arrested 30 already times since 2013 with the, with the elevation of Bill de Blasio to the mayoralty. That has not been the case in New York. And the understanding is that that is not what the mayor and the city government, the people who are elected, the city council, whatever, do not believe that the purpose of the police department is to either inter interfere with an atmosphere of crime and disrupt it and prevent crimes from happening by making it clear how serious the enforcement is going to be, or to bring the full force of the law down on somebody who nonetheless breaks the rules.

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[Seth Mandel]

The cops for a minute. I mean, this is true in a lot of cities. They're understaffed and demoralized after the Black Lives Matter summer. And when they do arrest these people, they arrest them, they read them their rights, cuff them, stuff them, process all the paperwork. They see them released the next day by a DA who will never, ever prosecute. And that will be moralizing as well.

[John Podhoretz]

That's right. And to Abe's point, about the liberal Jews who have awakened, I had this weird moment yesterday, and this puts me in mind of like, speaking, you know, speaking honestly about something, even though it's uncomfortable. So Sheryl Sandberg, of course, the, you know, maybe the most famous female executive in America. Number two at Lean In.

[Seth Mandel]

When you say that, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, number two at Microsoft. It. Microsoft. It is Microsoft, right? Sheryl Sandberg. No, Facebook. She's no longer there. But of course she wrote Lean In. She wrote this, you know, 5 million selling book, Lean, Lean in and all of that. And Charles Sandberg was radicalized by October 7th and she gave a speech to the, to the General assembly of the Federation.

[Matthew Continetti]

Good way.

[John Podhoretz]

Radicalized, yes, in a good way. But that's my question. So her speech, which is very heartfelt and sort of like I didn't really understand before October 7th, and now I see and I understand and I grew up in a Reform hall that we. Reform home. We kept. I went to Jewish home. We kept. We kept kosher. But I wasn't. It just didn't seem to affect me or my. Now I'm taking my kid to call it, like, I'm worried about safety. How could this have happened? And, you know, now I'm awakened to it. I made this documentary about the. About the sexual violence on October 7th. And things are just terrible. And for some weird reason, very earnest. She's now, you know, obviously an act, a force for good in making clear to the world what's going on. But I was very. I was angered when I read this very long piece about her speech in the Jerusalem Post, and I couldn't quite get it down. And I was thinking about what Abe said about politically conservative Jews and Orthodox Jews, you know, when I started worrying about antisemitism in the United States. When Jesse Jackson ran for president. That was 40 years ago. That was Jesse Jackson's bid. When he started talking about Jaime Town and he had the Fruit of Islam of the Nation of Islam run by Louis Farrakhan, who said the Jews are the source of evil in the modern world as his. As his bodyguard and all of that. That's really when I started worrying that anti Semitism could break out in a serious way. And you know what else? Then there was. There were breakouts of anti Semitic violence, including, you know, the scenes in Crown Heights in 1991 and. And Al Sharpton and C. Vernon Mason and others leading, you know, T. Freddy's fashion mart in 1994, which was set on fire and seven people got killed because Al Sharpton talked about Jewish interlopers taking over businesses in Harlem, that kind of thing. So where was Cheryl sent?

[Matthew Continetti]

Way of a very good Wall Street Journal opinion journal documentary.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes. Made by Michael Pack, called Find the Jew or Where's the.

[Matthew Continetti]

I thought it was called the Crown Heights Pogrom or something like that, but maybe you're right. Find the Jew, I think.

[John Podhoretz]

Find the Jew, I think. Anyway, made by Michael Pack, partially the work of our friend Elliot Kaufman and. And very, very worthy. Very worthy of being watched. But, yeah, so. So where was Sheryl Sandberg and you know where she was. She was implementing DEI things and, you know, having meetings, I'm sure, at Facebook with the people. Some people who were coming to meetings earnestly at Facebook to talk about Facebook policy were. Were celebrating the hang gliders of October 7th. Like, she. She was part. She was part of the problem. She wasn't just ignoring or not understanding the personal impact of this. She was creating. She was part of the leadership, business leadership of the United States that led people to believe that these views were acceptable and that they were within the realm of the acceptable. And then hiring everybody from the colleges and departments that preach these gospels and all of that. So that's why I got angry. And maybe it's unfair because people come to realizations of things and it is unfair, but I, but I did have this sort of gut, like, you know, maybe if you had been on this 15 years ago, but this is really important.

[Seth Mandel]

I'm sorry to interrupt, but actually your instinct, I think, isn't to punish, you know, to criticize her specifically. I think what you getting at, and correct me if I'm wrong, is really important because in the US the whole racial reckoning that we had when people started looking around and the explosion of DEI stuff was very much, for lack of a better phrase, a black and white issue, Right. It was like we owe a debt to African Americans in this society that we haven't paid. We have to change all these things. We have to talk about race in new ways. But one of the core elements of that, and it came out again, another little early signal when feminist groups for the Women's March denied Jewish women who wanted to march in this feminist march, this protest of Donald Trump's first election because they wanted to carry an Israel flag and they said no. So there has always been this undercurrent of antisemitism in a lot of these left leaning movements that we've not reckoned with.

[Matthew Continetti]

Linda Sarsour.

[Seth Mandel]

Exactly.

[Matthew Continetti]

One of the organizers of the huge anti Semite is antisemitic, pro Hamas and.

[Abe Greenwald]

Her and her fellow organizers were as eventually the Women's March sort of disintegrated over fellow organizers. Farrakhan connections. Yeah, specifically Farrakhan again had come up just as it did in the, you know, in the third three decades ago that John was talking.

[Christine Rosen]

The same goes for Black Lives Matter, which was from its founding explicitly, it articulated anti Israel antisemitic ideas, policy proposals that they, that was that the organizational thinking somehow connected to the police problem here.

[Seth Mandel]

They expect Jews to be white. That's their whole message. Stop being Jewish, be white.

[Matthew Continetti]

Who was wheeled out the first day of the Democratic convention this year, but Jesse Jackson to see how in many ways, Kamala Harris, Tim Wall's party is the Jesse Jackson Party.

[Christine Rosen]

Hey, who benefited? Who got a little piece of the action from the, from the Harris campaign?

[Seth Mandel]

Al Sharpton.

[Abe Greenwald]

That's right.

[Matthew Continetti]

Al Sharpton. Yes.

[Abe Greenwald]

Go Back to go back, by the way, on the.

[Christine Rosen]

John, you're not unfair. There's plenty of complicity to go around.

[Abe Greenwald]

But also on the protest groups, right away, we. We could start with Occupy Wall street, because that's anti Semitic element.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes.

[Abe Greenwald]

The Jews are the bankers and Zionist bankers controlling the. That was like classic anti Semitism of the sort that you can't not notice. That was like Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Henry Ford style anti Semitism at, you know, down in Zuccotti park on film every single day for everyone to see. And that was over about a decade ago.

[John Podhoretz]

So that. So the, so the, the root idea here. And again, this gets back to maybe why it was a big unfail. Sandberg. So the root idea is intersectionality. Right. As laid out by Kimberly Crenshaw, law professor at ucla, who basically said that all oppression is the same, that there is a. There is a connections to all forms of oppression of minorities, except Jews apparently are not a minority, even though we make up 0.01% of the population of the planet Earth. But all forms of oppression are the same and that the oppressors are the same. And so if you oppress a Palestinian, you're oppressing a black. There's no difference between an oppressed Palestinian and an oppressed black person in Compton. And this is a worldwide problem of oppression at the hands of a white supremacist. You think Sheryl Sandberg had Kimberly, or Sheryl Sandberg's company had Kimberly Crenshaw as a consultant? I bet you it did. I bet you that if it wasn't, Kimberly Crenshaw was one of Kimberly Crenshaw's.

[Matthew Continetti]

At the very least, she was invited to a Meta VR headset demonstration. Always bringing people in to try on the headset. It's great. But, you know, I could see Kimberly Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander, they're walking in, they're getting the taste of the VR.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. So I'm just saying that it's not just that you weren't paying attention. It's that either by omission or commission, you were part of the world that allowed these ideas to germinate and to sprout and then fester and poison the atmosphere until such a time as the people who have been poisoned by it are. Sorry if you're hearing this. Someone's outside my window.

[Matthew Continetti]

Streets of New York, the streets of my life. Lin Manuel Miranda is going to write a song about what goes on outside your window during the Commentary podcast.

[Seth Mandel]

Can I add one other thing to your point, John? Which is. And it is a worse than that thing, actually. There is a kind of imprisonment of any thoughtful liberal, you know, whether they're a white feminist or a Jewish, you know, radical feminist, if they go against the underlying intersectional ideology, they are accused of being racist. And it's an accusation. It's as if you're not with all of us. You're against every single one of us. And so it's very difficult for them conceptually to point to the antisemitism. And this is why, to Seth's point, it took a long time for the Women's March to oust the people who were just blatantly anti Semitic. And the Jewish feminists were like, what are you talking about? Look at their behavior. It was difficult for them to separate those strands because they will be completely cast out of the supposedly groups of the best people. That's the problem.

[John Podhoretz]

So we've just been doing a little bit of cheap intellectual history here, trying.

[Seth Mandel]

To speak for yourself. My intellectual history is expensive.

[John Podhoretz]

Fair enough, yours is expensive. But what is not all that expensive, but is a work of sterling intellectual history in the form of autobiography. That is Randy Barnett's new book, A Life for Liberty, the Making of an American Originalist. Randy is a Georgetown law professor friend of the podcast, one of the real pioneers in establishing the centrality of originalist interpretations of the Constitution. And his book tells the story of how Randy, a 12 year old Jewish boy growing up in Polish Catholic Calumet City, debated on behalf of Barry Goldwater in front of his entire junior high school. Then, when he learned in law school how the Supreme Court had gutted every limit on government power, he became disillusioned about the Constitution or about how it was being interpreted. So he pursued his dream of being a big city prosecutor in Chicago, fighting crime and corruption in Cook County. And then little did he imagine that some 50 years later, a majority of the Supreme Court would identify as originalists. With his role in bringing about the sea change and understanding of the Constitution that had led him to becoming a prosecutor and leaving originally the field of constitutional law. From arguing in the Supreme Court to developing the theory of originalism, to devising the constitutional challenge to Obamacare, Randy Barnett has been in the thick of the fight to restore our lost Constitution. George Will called the life for liberty a nourishing three deck club sandwich. Elegantly blending autobiography, a guide to today's argument surrounding jurisprudential originalism, and a participant story of how some recent constitutional history was made. Delicious. That's George Will's word. Delicious. That's what he says about a life for liberty. The Making of an American Originalist. An inspiring book for anyone who loves the Constitution. And it would make a great gift as we approach Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever, Kwanzaa to any student who aspires to make a difference. It's available wherever books are sold. So the surprise, the surprise. Yesterday, out of nowhere, the appointment for secretary of defense goes to Pete Hegseth, 44 years old, Fox News host, author of four books and a pretty outspoken person, I would say. Apparently the general line is, who the hell is this guy? I read in the Politico everybody in the defense establishment saying, who the hell is this guy? Well, this is a very complicated story and we're going to talk about it. But I would say one important element that is worth discussing is that of all the people who are, who have written about the military in the last 10 or 15 years, he is unquestionably the best known because of Fox, because of the fact that his latest book, which is called I'm sorry, I've been reading it all Night and I don't even can't remember the title, the War on Warriors, number one bestseller. So it's likely that in terms of writing about the military, this is the best selling book since American Sniper. So he's not known to, you know, somebody at Rand or somebody at Brookings because, of course, they would never turn on, they would never deign to turn on Fox and see Pete Hegseth. But he's very famous among people who actually care about, care about the military in the United States and its composition and all of that. And so I'm not, I'm not even going to defend the nomination in that because we should talk about some of the issues with it. But the whole who the hell is this guy? Sounds pretty familiar, right? And I can tell you this, which is that what he is is there's been all this talk we mentioned yesterday about Jacksonianism and, you know, is it Trump's a Jacksonian, all that this is foreign policy. Pete Hegseth is the Jacksonian. And I'll explain to you why in a little bit. But what did you guys make of the appointment of Pete Hegseth?

[Matthew Continetti]

Yeah, a couple things. You know, the Democrats have Mayor Pete, now the Republicans have MAGA Pete. It's a contest of Pete's. My views on Mayor Pete have been very clear. I have more positive views about MAGA Pete. Say that I think as surprising as this pick was, it is in line with other picks that Donald Trump has made in the weeks since he won the election. He's looking for loyalists, people he trusts, and he's looking for people who look the part and who are good on tv. And the portfolio of national security views that Pete Hagseth has discussed on Fox includes things that are very similar to what you might hear from a Mike Waltz or an Elise Stefanik or a potential Marco Rubio nominee at Secretary of State. You want to correct for the excesses of the woke military. That's his book. But are also pretty tough toward Iran, pretty clear eyed about what the Chinese Communist Party is up to and wants to have a fighting force that is more attuned to the concerns of the soldiers than, say, the general officers and the Pentagon bureaucracy. So as surprising as it was, I do think it kind of fits into the overall arc of what Trump has been proposing for his national security team. And just one other brief thought is any aspiring pundits or people interested in government service or, you know, want to build a career in journalism, you're going to want to try to be the weekend anchor on Fox and Friends. That is the position that Tucker Carlson had before his career rebirth and now he's huge. And he was then replaced by Pete, who it could now well be the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America. So that, boys and girls, that's what you want to be weekend.

[John Podhoretz]

And it's only two days, friends, it's only the two day job days a week. Two days a week. You may lose your weekend or you have to get up. Really, really, you have to get Friday night.

[Matthew Continetti]

But it's the long game. You're playing a long game.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, there's a mistake that people make about this TV stuff, which is to, to see the fact that Trump may have gotten to know this person or other on TV as an automatic negative because it means that they're just a TV person or something like that. I don't, I don't know Pete very well. And so I don't have quite a strong opinion on being made Secretary of defense. But I would say that I remember having a similar conversation when John Bolton was hired by Trump in the first administration. And all the major news organizations, cnn, MSNBC, everywhere had all these stories up. You know, Trump picks Fox News personality John Bolton. And I just remember thinking FOX News personality John Bolton, like the guy who in the 80s was, you know, with George H.W. bush, strong arming countries behind the scenes at the UN not to recognize Palestine as a state, you know, and all this other Stuff it's like for, for the, for people's and our entire life, some of us, our entire lifetimes before John Bolton became a Fox News personality. And so Charles C.W. cook at our friend at National Review said something I felt very smart, which was Pete Hegseth is on tv. So is Michael Strahan. But you don't think of Michael Strahan first and foremost as TV commentator. You still think of him as this, you know, this great football player. And so there's a mistake that people make.

[John Podhoretz]

I don't.

[Abe Greenwald]

I. Right. But there is like this, you know, oh, he's on tv, therefore he must not be serious. But you know, straight really people make it to tv, especially in the Strahan situation because they've, you know, Tom Brady is on tv.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

You know, we don't say like TV personality Tom, you know, so there's an element of this that you have to Michael Strange not to Harris get tripped up interview.

[John Podhoretz]

That's true.

[Matthew Continetti]

He's right.

[John Podhoretz]

He's doing very well. People yelled at him for it. But I just want to talk about so Hegseth, what's interesting here is that he's written a book about the declining American education he has read. He has now written a book about the politicization of the Pentagon. What's interesting about him is the tone of these books because what he adduces or what he describes is not anything that would come as a surprise to people like us or to conservatives who do this, you know, for a living at think tanks and otherwise. He is talking about problems where issues of readiness and that sort of thing are ignored in favor of a more fashionable political matters. What matters is the tone. And that's why I say he is a Jacksonian. I'm just going to read a passage from the War on Warriors which I which I have spent many hours reading since he was. I heard about the appointment last night.

[Matthew Continetti]

You do the homework.

[John Podhoretz]

I do the homework. Okay. This book comes at a moment and I write this without hyperbole that we should be in panic mode, almost desperate, willing to do anything necessary to defeat the quote, fundamental transformation of the American military and end the war on our warriors in battle for the American mind, which was his book about education based on the longevity and sheer power of the left's educational takeover. I argued for an educational insurgency, a tactical retreat from the educational system to regroup, save our your kids and build new faith filled schools. The War on Warriors calls for the exact opposite. In this book, there is no time or room for an insurgency. We must wage a frontal assault, a swift counterattack in broad daylight. If we wait for nightfall, they will regroup. If we retreat from the system to rebuild, it's gone. And building another American military is not an option. We have only one Pentagon, one Secretary of Defense, one army. If we lose it, we are toast. And then he goes on to say this. We will lose the current woke. Victory is broad, but it is not deep. The shoehorning of diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory, feminism, genderism, safetyism, climate worship, manufactured violent extremism, straight up weirdo shit and a grab bag of social justice causes that infect today's fighting force have nothing to do with making our military more capable. They are anathema to everything the American military stands for. A natural antibody is poised to kick in. If we fight to unleash it, it will take stone cold leadership, unbending courage and unyielding fidelity to the Constitution. If we give the social justice Websters time to dig into a trench, then the American military will cease to exist as a real fighting force, except against our own people. And this is one of the more measured passages.

[Seth Mandel]

Okay, can I, can I posit something? Let me posit something because I've. And I like. I will await to see whether this guy can even get confirmed. I mean that his confirmability, we should.

[John Podhoretz]

Talk about that too.

[Seth Mandel]

But what I. What's interesting about Trump choosing him and to Seth's point about the TV thing, is that what bothers, I think certainly the media elite, probably a fair amount of the Republican elite too, is that this guy talks like a soldier, which is awesome. He's very blunt. He talks like a soldier, he writes like a soldier. And that position, which is Sec. Defense, is a political position in many ways. We are used to seeing not politicians in that role, but bureaucrats. There's something very bureaucratic about the way our secretaries of defense tend to both talk to the media and talk to Congress. And this guy threatens to really change the tone of that position itself if he's confirmed.

[Matthew Continetti]

Well, look, I mean, you know, we had defense secretaries like Don Rumsfeld and Bob Gates, and then since then it's been a rocky road. And we've had two generals now, Mattis and Austin both have big problems. And Mattis two years in left, we've not had a kind of strong secretary of defense for a while. Austin, of course, you know, took leave when AWOL without telling anybody about the surgery.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. For. Right. And he's basically, he was basically off the job for two months.

[Matthew Continetti]

So I agree. The condescension with which some people are greeting Pete Hegseth is remarkable. The guy went to Princeton and Harvard. He's written these books that are conservative books, right.

[John Podhoretz]

That you're saying he's on 1, 2 bronze stars. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a platoon.

[Matthew Continetti]

So much work with veterans. I just know from my, my appearances on Fox and I see, I see him at work with veterans. This is a guy, I think, who's going to inspire a lot of young men to join. And that is the face of the military.

[John Podhoretz]

This is, this is where the rubber beats the road on confirmation. Because much of what the war on warriors is about is that it's about a war on men. And he actually explicitly says white men. He talks about how the Biden, how Mark Milley and Austin shut the government down for a day, shut the military down, a stand down day, so that there could be. Everyone in the military, everywhere in the world should get lectured to about critical race theory and white privilege and the danger of what he. Of what is referred to by as patriot extremism. A new threat adduced to the American military in the form of patriot extremism. Now here's what's interesting about that, which is of course, the military does not have a role domestically in the United States. It is not. It is under the Posse Comitatus act of 1871, the US military cannot operate inside the United States. So if there's a problem with patriot extremism, as is laid out, that is not the remit of the military. Maybe it's the remit of the FBI. Maybe it's the remit of every police department. The military is out defending the United States beyond our borders. That's what they do. And so this is beside the point. Millie goes before the House and talks about how he's really seen how it's really important to examine your own white privilege. Thus implicitly saying that the hundreds of thousands of people under his command, if they are white, are themselves like him, holders of unconscious bias and need to have their consciousnesses raised. And he says, you want to destroy people's readiness. You want to destroy their feeling of connection to their country that they're willing to die for. This is the way you do it. And it's a war on men. And that's where the trouble is going to come. He is, he opposes women in combat. There is at least one US Senator, a Republican senator, Joni Ernst, who is a veteran pilot. I don't know that she's going to like hearing that. I don't know that she can't then turn to her fellow female senators, Lisa Rakowski and Susan Collins, and say, I don't like this guy. And then you just need one more person in the Republican caucus to say, if you do this, we're going to vote against you. To have Trump withdraw the nomination or to have say he's for the second time because he was up for Veterans affairs at one point and they pulled the nomination before it actually could come to a vote. Have him say, I'm not going to do this again. And by the. And thanks very much, Mr. President, because you just sold me a million more books and probably got me more money at Fox for not, you know, for having had to withdraw my nomination.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yeah, it's a possibility. I do think if it gets to a confirmation hearing, a lot of people are going to be watching that hearing. And you have, you know, you have kind of the Oliver north type hearing or the Pat Buchanan type hearing. A lot of people are going to pay attention and see how he performs. I expect he would perform pretty well. He might change some of these views. You know, 53 senators gives this Trump administration more wiggle room in the Cabinet selection. But you're right, if there's Republicans who want to make this about some of his ideas or make this about kind of identity politics, then it might be in jeopardy. But I think as of now, a lot of Republicans are greeting this nomination by saying, oh, that's unusual. And then they start thinking about it and kind of starting to like it.

[John Podhoretz]

So I want to explain why, I mean, when I say that he is a Jacksonian. So in the, in the, in the context of American history, Jackson was the first person not from the American political intellectual aristocracy to become president of the United States. And the idea was that his ascension was greeted with horror by the Adams family and others, you know, who had the genteel manners of the highly educated, you know, knew three languages and, you know, wrote beautifully and all of that, you know, and Jackson was a, you know, was a roughneck, you know, who was famous for killing Indians and a tough guy and somebody who could not get it into his head what currency meant that kind of thing, and came into the White House and, you know, peed on the floor and whatever, whatever it was that was alleged to happen with him. He was sort of thought of as an uncivilized barbarian who had somehow stormed the gates of our new Athens and had, had, had dirtied it. Right. And so that's Trump. Right. That's why, that's why People say that Trump is a sort of Jackson. He does. He does not obey the rules, the laws that have been written, customs, prior customs. Well, well, Hexat's an interesting case because he sort of like, is a preacher, like J.D. vance of Princeton and Harvard, and then basically writes a book in which he has this sentence. And I'm sorry, it's getting. I'm getting dirty here. The unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington. Now, I don't really like that. Such a person look down. That's what I cannot. You know what I like? Page turner. For you. It's porn. It's like. It's. Honestly, it is. Abe is having this experience. Abe loves him, too. You've been silent so far. All you have to do is listen to clips of him speak and you're like, he's my id. This guy. This guy is speaking deep truths from well inside my. That I have suppressed in the name of civility and virtue and good taste.

[Christine Rosen]

You all seem to be anti. Anti Pete. I'm pro Pete.

[John Podhoretz]

No, I think Matt's reasonably pro Pete.

[Matthew Continetti]

You're probably in my mouth. You're the pro Pete of all, Abe.

[John Podhoretz]

That. That's what.

[Matthew Continetti]

That's what you could say.

[John Podhoretz]

Go ahead.

[Christine Rosen]

I like the pick.

[John Podhoretz]

I like.

[Christine Rosen]

Look, I like it maybe in part because I'm uncertain of how far it'll go. So maybe I like it as a pick more than an eventuality. But at this point, when you have Lloyd Austin presiding over the Afghanistan debacle disappearing without anyone noticing for weeks.

[Matthew Continetti]

The balloon.

[Christine Rosen]

Yeah. Letting a. Letting a Chinese spy balloon fly over the entire country, knowing about it in advance.

[John Podhoretz]

Sure.

[Christine Rosen]

Maybe we don't need a bureaucrat, so.

[John Podhoretz]

No. Right. And by the way. By the way, the classic thing about a place like the Pentagon is it's not necessarily bureaucrat. I mean, it's famously the. Maybe the worst Secretary of defense of all time, in some ways, was the ultimate bureaucrat. That was Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense under Lyndon Johnson and, you know, and created the metric system for. For claiming that we were doing well in Vietnam. The metrics system. Excuse me, when we were not that kind of thing. And. And, you know, bloodlessly talking about casualties as though they were water and that kind of thing. So there are bureaucrats, and then there are.

[Christine Rosen]

Rumsfeld, too, was obsessed with minutia about.

[John Podhoretz]

Right, yeah. There's the bureaucrats, and then there were the generals, and the generals are themselves bureaucrats. That's the thing they play the game, they client rise through the system. That's Colin Powell, that's Lloyd Austin, that's Mark Milley. Colin Palin never ended up as secretary of defense, but he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was national security adviser. And what these guys are is they are brilliant maneuvers within the Washington system. And that is Trump wanted people like that at the beginning because he thought that they would because he was speaking the language that he thought they liked. But he didn't understand that they already learned that their masters were somewhere else. And that's also one of the subjects of the war on warriors, which is whom do they serve? Are they the leaders of this group of people who live under a different set of rules and law and governed by a different set of priorities than Americans who are not in uniform? You know, they do not have free speech rights in the same way they do not have. There are all kinds of things they don't have and there are all kinds of liberties they surrender to serve as a cohesive.

[Abe Greenwald]

This is the whole. This is the basic insight from Robert Nisbett, you know, the old conservative sociologist, which was that the in or the paradox is that in order to have a the survival of a liberal democracy, you cannot have a military that mirrors the liberal democracy. You can't be liberal democratic military if you are to extend the life of a liberal democracy.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. And Hegseth in my now favorite book, you know, I this is like for me, I'm not finished yet, but it's sort of like, you know, Barchester Towers by trollop Anna Karenina and the War.

[Matthew Continetti]

On Warriors can be our recommends for the.

[John Podhoretz]

It's already our recommends because I've never.

[Matthew Continetti]

Seen you so excited about it.

[Seth Mandel]

Sense one caveat though, to your point about how they have to follow a different code of conduct when they're enlisted men and women. His personal life suggests once he was no longer in service.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, a lack of personal discipline. That is correct.

[Seth Mandel]

Very messy. I mean I'm no judgment. I'm just saying, like come up and.

[John Podhoretz]

We will be hearing about that. But he makes the point that the military is an organization that is dedicated to molding people. Right. It is in fact a social justice organization. Question is how you mold them. Are you molding them into being warriors from whom you expect honor and courage and self sacrifice, or are you molding them into being woke and these. You can't do both is what he says. Wokeism is the opposite of military and martial discipline. It is the opposite of what attracts people to the military. Which is that they want a structure. They want, they want to be tested. He tells a story about how somebody said to him in his first days as somebody in the military, like, you don't want to miss your war. And what did that mean? Was it. And he ended up fighting in Iraq, a war that he now opposes. But he said what it meant was the whole purpose of being in the military is to be tested and ultimately to be tested in war. And you don't want to miss your war because that's not that you want to fight in war, but that's where you learn sort of like Calvinism. It's where you learn whether you, whether you have the grace that you are seeking, whether you are put in the position where you have to face these terrible threats and overcome them and be a hero, you know, and that the Pentagon's priorities under Obama and under Biden were entirely the opposite, because they're about fitting the military into a civilian, understand, into a liberal civilian understanding of what it means to be a citizen and not to be the protector and guardian of everybody else. So it's, it's deep. It's, it's very vulgar. It's, as you can hear from my quotes and all that, and it is very unambiguous, let's say, so that there's a. So much in here that if the confirmation hearing gets hostile or, you know, or tense, you know, just read aloud from the book. If you're, I mean, Elizabeth Warren, I.

[Matthew Continetti]

Mean, must see tv.

[John Podhoretz]

Must absolutely. Must see absolute. Must see tv. Anyway, it's, it's a. It. You know, I don't think any of us expected, that's to say he's done something that he might have done in another in 2016, 2017, which is that he picked somebody he likes on TV, but in 2016, 2017, he was picking people he liked on TV who I don't think were particularly formidable often and.

[Matthew Continetti]

Who he didn't know.

[John Podhoretz]

And who he didn't know. And he knows that from tv.

[Matthew Continetti]

He's gotten to know Hegseth very, very.

[John Podhoretz]

Well over the last decade and is a cleverer choice, I think, is what I'm saying. And what Trump says he wants to, or we hear out of Mar? A Lago is he wants to fire woke generals. Now, maybe you could say he wants to do this because, you know, he's trying to set up the military for his home.

[Matthew Continetti]

Well, that's what they're saying on msnbc.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. But that's in here, by the way. There is a whole passage in here about how a lot of generals need to be fired because they have. They are neglecting or they are turning their back on their core duty as people in the American, as leaders in the American military, which is to serve the soldiers. That's why they're there. They're not just to lead them, they're to serve there, to provide them with the space to do what they need to do and to defend them and to defend who they are and what they do.

[Matthew Continetti]

I just have had this, you know, moment of clarity recently where I think I spent a long time thinking of the Pentagon in the way that I thought of it 30 years ago when I was a kid and in the age of the Colin Powell, the Joint Chiefs and General Schwarzkopf, you know, and Dick Cheney as the Secretary of Defense. You look at the Pentagon, you say, this institution knows what it's doing. It is on task, right? It is lethal. It is leading America. And that's the leadership. Of course, the soldiers have not changed. I mean, the people who put their lives on the line are the best of us. But now you look at the Pentagon and you see it, and I just see another bureaucracy, right, that is failing the soldiers, failing the frontline troops that actually expelled troops because they wouldn't take the COVID vaccination, right? And so it needs a revamp. You know, you think about the billions and billions that go through that institution on what. Where we're seeing the future of warfare right now in Ukraine, in the Middle east, asymmetries. It's not about these huge multibillion dollar platforms. It's about who has the best drone and the best laser defense that can be affordable and effective. So I agree. I think we need a disruptor here.

[John Podhoretz]

I think that's. Look, and we haven't even talked about, like, how great he is on Israel. So this is like we're now, we're now beyond a trifecta into like, I don't even understand what's happening here. I mean, I've been told for years. I've been told for years. And look, this was my great concern about Trump dating back to 2015, that his early support, you know, there was that early support online that organized horrible anti Semitic campaigns against Seth's wife Bethany, against Ben Shapiro, me, to a much lesser, much, much lesser extent than the two of them. This kind of thing where you got this feeling that Iraq had been turned over by Trump's ascension and that he had these, you know, he had these kind of troops that were like neo Nazi shock troops. He wasn't responsible for them if they just supported him, as he would say. But this was very unnerving. It really was. And we published stuff about it in 2016 about the, the intellectual dark web as Barry Weissman calling them, you know, who were anti Democratic and really were redolent of fascistic thinking. Mencius, mold bug and people, you know, Bronze Age pervert. These are actual essayists, online essayists and people like that. And it was very, very unnerving.

[Abe Greenwald]

And it's like the, it's like the old, the old joke, the apocryphal story about the New York times calling meatloaf Mr. Loaf. Yeah, Mr. Pervert had this.

[John Podhoretz]

Exactly, exactly. Anyway, as my sister texted me yesterday, the joke going around Israel is that, you know, the, the Biden administration sought to sanction individual Israelis for their behavior on the West Bank. And the idea is now in the Trump administration, any Israel, Israeli who doesn't move to the west bank is going to be sanctioned by the Trump administration. The way this is going.

[Matthew Continetti]

And we haven't mentioned Huckabee nominated Israel. Can't get much more pro Israel than Mike Huckabee.

[John Podhoretz]

Again, more pregnant than that. Not in the last couple of months. Just like Mike Waltz, Pete Hex has said, we need to loosen the restraints on the Ukrainian military and let them use, let them use everything that is to hand to defeat Russia. So we now have two leading figures, national security advisor nominee and the Pentagon nominee who in are within earshot of, you know, of the election. We're not with Tucker and we're not with the, we're not with the, the MAGA foreign policy.

[Seth Mandel]

Has anyone done a wellness check on Tucker?

[John Podhoretz]

He's crawled in a fetal position without a name.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yeah, they're a little bit unnerved, I'd say, by a lot of these picks. But I think there's a lot of trust in Trump too. So I haven't checked on their reaction to Hegseth, but it sounds pretty ecstatic.

[John Podhoretz]

I have to say.

[Matthew Continetti]

Some people are dredging up older, older video clips of him and everything. But of course, you could do the same thing for our next vice president. Right. And that didn't really matter in the end for Trump. So. Yeah, I would just look at it and you look at these appointments and we still. So that the. I know we're running up against time here, but the apple that hasn't fallen from the tree is Secretary of State.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. We had Mark Caputo.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yes. Everybody seems to say that it's headed that way. And I don't know what, what it's about, whether it's MAGA stuff or whether it's Florida politics and who is going to replace him that's holding up the nomination of Rubio. But that's the one thing that we're still waiting for. If it is Rubio, this is a Jacksonian peace through strength national security team, not the kind of neo isolationism that we've been talking about on the podcast for years. You know, it's not going to be full on war of all against all. Not far from it that Trump doesn't want that. But it is definitely the idea that you need to be intimidating, you need to restore deterrence. And as the saying goes, if you want peace, prepare for war. That's the idea that motivates, I think, a lot of these figures being selected for key national security posts and from.

[Abe Greenwald]

My conversations with people who are realists or further away from neoconservatism or whatever, that Rubio is the least objectionable of the first crop of pigs. In other words, they're actually not that worried about having a Secretary of State who uses flowers flowery language about democracy. It's very similar to the point, Matt, you made the other day, which was you put the idealist at State, you put the realist at the Pentagon.

[Matthew Continetti]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, so actually there is a kind of fusionism here, whereas I've encountered a lot less resistance to Rubio, specifically being at the Department of State and where some of these people are, that he might be striking a balance that is making everybody feel somewhat comfortable with the general direction.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, but the reason that they have that with Rubio is that Rubio has played a long game with them on the matters that he will not have anything to do with the Secretary of State. Right. He has moved toward them on economics, he has moved toward them on trade, although I guess the Secretary of State can play some role in trade. But he has become an economic nationalist when he was not one. And he has become somebody who believes in, you know, using the government to help people, you know, family agenda and that sort of thing. And so he has inoculated himself a little bit without really changing very much on foreign policy, where he was easily the most neocon person to run for office since George W. As Secretary of.

[Abe Greenwald]

State, he's not going to be doing anything with paid family leave. So it almost doesn't matter. Like, the things they think about almost don't matter.

[John Podhoretz]

That's how politics, that's where politics is interesting. Like he did. He has done a lot for Them and other guises. And similarly with Hegseth, one of the reasons that they are ecstatic about Hegseth, aside from his being on Fox and being Trumpy and all of that, is he's a culture warrior in a non culture warrior, a place where you have to be people like us to understand that there's a culture war in the Pentagon. And they do, they have, they are worried about this. They've been worried about the transing of the military and the, and the fact that, you know, women and men serve together on nuclear submarines for three months, the women end up pregnant and all of that.

[Seth Mandel]

You know, recruits can't meet basic physical standards. I mean, they're having a real recruitment problem. That is. That should be very number one priority.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. So I'm just saying, like it's, it's an interesting. This is a much more interesting. Aside from the fact that it's, you know, you're on. They're unnerved and I'm nerved. Right. And Abe is nerved. Like we are. We are so nerved by what nerve are you people? Interesting. Like, I didn't expect who was going to be that it was going to be this interesting.

[Seth Mandel]

It's going to be a hit. There are going to be some really.

[John Podhoretz]

Negative stories about him in the next few days.

[Abe Greenwald]

Sure.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. But, but no, I mean, I don't know that he's gonna, I don't know that he's gonna make it. If, you know, I think it's very hard for Trump not to get what he wants out of the, out of the Republican. It would be very punishing if that were the case. But the women in combat thing I think is kind of. Which by the way, I agree with nonetheless, I think is, you know, could be a kind of killer app.

[Matthew Continetti]

I think politics of confirmation may have changed and because of 2024. And you know, Christine's absolutely right, there's going to be a lot of negative stories. But then what happens when Hegseth goes on Joe Rogan and talks for three hours about defense and his life? And you know, that has much more power, I think now than a hit placed in the New York Times. That's what we saw in 2024. So I he. One of the comments about women in combat comes from this podcast hosted by Sean Ryan, I think. And again, it's one of these long interviews you just hear from the person. It's, it's much. It's unmediated that I think will help, will help him if people are exposed to him in that way. And can he defend himself when he gets before the.

[Abe Greenwald]

And formation politics, by the way, have changed also because of Brett Kavanaugh.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

Not just 2024.

[John Podhoretz]

What we just saw turn well, that, that Brent Kavanaugh was. Because somebody beat them in one. That's why. Like the idea. And then.

[Abe Greenwald]

And they threw everything, literally everything at him. And then to some extent, Amy Coney Barrett was the nominee for the Supreme Court, again, to some extent, because she had sort of triggered them when she had nominated to a lower court. And we had the whole fight about, you know, the Catholic thing and the organizations that she was a member of or whatever those two. I think, you know, just Trump just said we're just going to keep rolling. And they rolled and got what they wanted anyway. And I think the politics have changed in the wake especially of Cap.

[John Podhoretz]

So I think last, last point then we really are, we have gone crazy long here. But when you say the politics of Congress and you mentioned like he goes on Joe Rogan. So it has been for many, many decades the Minhag, the custom that the nominee for a nominee is not to go on a public relations tour, that he's to go visit every senator and have a conversation and keep quiet until the confirmation hearing, not expose himself, not say things that might be used against him or that would get the senators angry because they're having private conversations about things and he can be more candid or whatever. That's a, that's like a real thing that's out the window. This is we're in a new era. And what's more, Joe Rogan, 40 million people will listen to Pete Hegseth on Joe Rogan. He is also a, he's though he's left Fox News as of this morning. He is, of course, part of the Fox News family. And what are the two main facts here? Right. Is the podcast culture has become the populist political culture of our moment. That's number one. And number two, 75% of the cable TV news audience is a Fox audience. 75%. So MSNBC can scream and yell and try to transmit messages into the brains of Democratic senators. That won't matter at all. That will have no effect. The mainstream media will have no effect on this. This will all be a question inside the Republican caucus, maybe on Susan Collins, who has a tough race in 2026 in a state, although she did you know, she, she, she won her last election by nine points, even though she was supposed to lose or be tied with her rival. But it's still, it's still a state that's gotten bluer and she's getting older and all of that, so maybe she would want to be heterodox, but she's only one person. And so, you know, yeah, like, if he campaigns, if Trump says, you go out there and you tell them, open the mouth and say what you need to say. It's a new. The old rules no longer apply. Those confirmation will settle.

[Christine Rosen]

I know you said the last point. I just want to add one last point, which is, I think this is another case, and this is something that holds true for the entire reality of Trump's reelection. Another case where the Biden administration's lurid failures and transgressions and chaos has made previously unthinkable much more thinkable. You know, after seeing the way that the Defense Department has conducted itself during this last administration, there is no. There is now. You could say, well, who knows, you.

[John Podhoretz]

Know, Look, I just want to say one thing. I am so thrilled that the election is over and that we. I'm just thinking about how we spent two years, as I think I said right before the election in Sart, no exit, having the same conversation about what might happen while we were sitting in anticipation with nothing happening, in part because we had a senile candidate for president and we had Trump in a courtroom for six months and all of that. So we were sort of filling time with speculation and the fact that we're actually able to talk about real things that are happening in real time that have real world consequences, and that there's news in the real sense of news is a great liberation. So I want to thank America for its electoral choice. If only. If only that it changed the topics that we get to talk about. Because if Harris had been. Had won, you know, we would just be sort of talking about how they were rearranging the deck chairs on the Biden, Harris, Titanic, the ceasefire. The same. And the ceasefire.

[Abe Greenwald]

Talking about the ceasefire.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. Anyway, so that's my gratitude. I'm not expressing gratitude for the election of Trump. I am expressing gratitude for the fact that the election of Trump means that we have. We're. We're getting to talk about other stuff and thank God for that. So until tomorrow, for Ape, Seth, Christine and Matt, I'm John Podhorn. Keep the cattle.