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- [00:04]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
John Podhoretz
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.
- [00:18]
Christine Rosen
It'S going Hope for the best Expect.
- [00:21]
Abe Greenwald
The worst Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, June 12, 2025. I am John Pothoridz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:38]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:39]
John Podhoretz
And our Social Commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:43]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [00:46]
John Podhoretz
Another night of curfew, another night of discussions of the evils of American law enforcement on the part of the left. As leftists in the country gather for the no Kings, no tyrants, no everything rally this weekend that they are going to have. And we've been talking about this all week. I don't know that we have anything new to say. I really do think that we're living in a totally bifurcated universe in which we're looking at this and saying, as we keep saying, liberals and Democrats have gone mad. They are opposing the duly sworn duty of American law enforcement officers whose job it is to patrol the border and work on controlling illegal immigration. And they're being demonized. They're being attacked. And this seems to be okay with a lot of people on the left. And on the other hand, I don't think that people on the left see that or think that at all. They think that they're engaged in righteous activity against a nascent dictatorship. And since we don't have a plebiscitory democracy in which we could somehow, you know, like, put the question to the American people, go to the polls and answer it next week, we have to go with pieces of data and information and reporting, all of which can be skewed any which way. So I wanted to ask you guys whether you thought that there is more merit or there might be more political merit in the left's pooh, poohing of the dangers posed by this opposition to ICE and to law enforcement and all of that, whether that has more support in the country and we're blinded by our own ideological blinders not to see it.
- [03:02]
Abe Greenwald
I think. I mean, I think there's support for being wary of Trump and Trump administration initiatives, but I don't think. I don't think there's any political merit in actually obstructing ICE from doing its job and in carrying out demonstrably violent rioting.
- [03:32]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I agree. I think in blue states and blue cities and in dominant media, there is shock and awe when seeing actual law enforcement enforcing the law, because the Overton window in those areas has Shifted so much that just doing their job, which ice, let's recall, for the four years under the Biden administration was basically prevented from doing, told to stand down, told to not follow procedure to release people without actually even going through the process. Another irony of hearing all these folks saying, oh, due process, due process. Under Biden, he was letting people get away without even processing them. So I think that for those people, yes, it's shock, but for the average Normie, I know I keep saying normie voter, but for the average American, it's not shocking. What I do think the hardcore Stephen Miller right wing rhetorical universe misses is that a lot of people, even on the right and center, right and moderate left are concerned about is what do we do going forward with, with people who came here illegally, have lived here for years, probably also paying taxes because they have a government ID number, probably had families, never broke the law, but still did, never broke the law. After breaking the law of coming here illegally, what do we do with those people? Because that is actually the much longer term challenge administratively, legally and socially and culturally. There's a lot of sympathy for those folks. There really is. And I, and I think it's genuine. I don't think it's, I think people acknowledge that they broke the law coming here, but how do we now have some sort of pathway to citizenship for people who do want to stay here, become citizens, without making it clear to the rest of the world that there are no consequences for coming here illegally? That is the real conundrum. And a lot of what Trump's doing now, if it's an effort to get us onto that next larger question, will be useful. But that's actually the thing I have heard very little about from the extreme anti immigrant right.
- [05:30]
John Podhoretz
The problem with your argument there is that 10 years ago or 11 years ago, when the Obama administration first decided that it was going to move on the most sympathetic cases in the world of illegal immigration. Right. Which are kids who were born here of illegals and their families for whom polling then showed enormous reservoirs, not born.
- [05:59]
Christine Rosen
Here, brought here as very young children illegally brought here.
- [06:02]
John Podhoretz
Right. Or born here, but with illegal parents. Right, Right. So you have the dreamers. And then you also had the sort of the question of the illegal parents who, who, whose babies were legal and. Right. Okay. So enormous reservoirs of sympathy for them on all sides of the aisle. And the issue was much less potent in 2014 than it is now. And still nothing could get done because Congress, Republicans in Congress didn't want to do it. And Obama then said I'm just going to do it unilaterally. And the courts slapped him down, as they should, since he did not have the right to create a path to citizenship. Extra, extra, constitutionally. And since then, as we've been talking about, hardline views on immigration have shifted so radically in the direction of restrictionism or outright rejectionism that while there remains sympathy for the neighbor, you know, there's the story about some small town and some very Trumpy town and they discovered that their friend was going to be deported and then they were all upset, even though they all voted for Trump because she's good, so she shouldn't be deported. Right. Which is always the problem when you ideologize issues like this is that is, on the one hand you get sob stories and exceptions that touch everybody's heart, and on the other hand you make it impossible to say we really shouldn't make a gigantic blanket policy that 15 million people should be deported. A, it's impossible and B, you're going to end up sweeping up people that nobody thinks are a danger to anybody else in some gigantic dragnet. Nonetheless, Trump in 2017 said he'd like to do something for the Dreamers, had a session at the White House with leaders of Congress in both parties and by the end of the session or by the end of that week completely changed his tune. Because somebody must have said to him, you can't. You promised something else when you were running for office. This is going to muddy your record on this and make everything very confusing. And after all, we have been working on the policy that we want people in Mexico and South America to believe that they should come nowhere near the border or we're going to throw the book at them. And you're going to muddy that argument by saying, yes, we are going to look for a path for citizenship because then coyotes and whoever else can start gulling people in Central and South America to pay them to come to America by saying, even Trump is for a path to citizens citizenship. So you come in and you do that, right? And now we're in 2025. I don't see that there is any possibility of some kind of a long term compromise that leads to a path to citizenship or anything. That's why it's so hard to see what to do going forward, because we're sort of in a weird world in which. Go ahead.
- [09:34]
Christine Rosen
Sorry, I was going to say, I mean, well, this is a, this is an absolute deficiency on the part of Congress. This is, this is Congress's role. They should have you Know, we've had these efforts that have gone nowhere to have some sort of comprehensive immigration reform. And I think you're absolutely right. And that is on the Democratic Party and particularly on Joe Biden, but it's actually on the Democratic Party since Obama, which was signaling to anyone who wanted to come here illegally that, yeah, sure, come in and maybe we'll have some sort of amnesty or whatnot. I don't think. I think you're absolutely right. Americans are not on the amnesty train anymore. I mean, I'm not and I'm very proud of legal immigration. If there's a path to citizenship with, I mean, maybe it's what they're trying to do right now with a large number of people who they can't actually physically deport, but they're encouraging to self deport or even offering some money, you know, resources to take yourself back to your country, start the process legally. That's one path. Another path is to have some sort of fine or, I don't know, you could make it community service there any number of legislative remedies for people who did come here illegally, stayed, have family, are law abiding now, but still must contend with the fact that they broke the law then. And that's actually what's the difficult thing is that that requires creativity. It requires compromise and negotiation. And the extreme factions on the right and the left don't want to get anywhere near that. Open borders and absolutely closed borders, people cannot come to a compromise. And that is a weakness of Congress right now. And I'm not sure. And Trump actually is not. He's been a very important figure in changing the debate about immigration, but he's not going to be the figure that gets us to that compromise.
- [11:06]
John Podhoretz
There is no that. That's where we get into this world in which Kamala Harris can say we're a nation of immigrants, right? Or this is an immigrant state or something like that. That the decision of the Democratic Party in the person of its last nominee for president completely elides the distinction between legal and illegal immigration means that the Democratic Party is nowhere near approaching this issue itself in a constructive fashion. All we ever do is talk about how crazy Stephen Miller is and how whatever, whatever, but they are not saying what this country has is a problem with people who cross the border illegally. And maybe we need to have compassion or maybe we need to do this, or maybe we need to create a system of fines because we can't simply throw 15 million people out or whatever. But what they're saying is there's no Problem. There's fundamentally no problem.
- [12:19]
Christine Rosen
Well, they're saying compassion should cancel out at law enforcement. And I think conservatives would say you can have compassion, but you also have to enforce the law because there are downstream consequences of not doing that.
- [12:29]
Abe Greenwald
And the Democrats also, over the past few years have completely alighted the distinction between immigration of illegal and legal with asylum seeking too.
- [12:41]
Christine Rosen
Right.
- [12:41]
Abe Greenwald
Like everything became asylum seeker.
- [12:43]
John Podhoretz
Right, right. Well, for, Right.
- [12:46]
Christine Rosen
I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's, there's our listeners might like, there's a long reported piece and real clear politics where someone just went and sat and hung out at an immigration court in New Orleans recently. And that asylum point is very important because one of the things this reporter found and seemed a little surprised by was how savvy a lot of these illegal immigrants are about working the system, not just getting constant delays. Years and years they'll stay here in this country with an order to just come back and report. But the asylum seeking process has been completely abused by, thanks to often taxpayer funded NGOs that come in and say, here's exactly what you need to say. Here's the story you need to say that of course undermines genuine asylum claimants, which is, which is horrifying, but it is, it is something that's true about our system is that it has for many, many decades now been that system of asylum seeking has been exploited.
- [13:38]
John Podhoretz
So, so the asylum seeking system says that a person can apply for asylum to the United States and become a resident of the United States if that person can demonstrate that their fear of persecution or loss of life in their home country is well founded, a well founded fear of persecution. So clearly Mexicans do not meet that standard, by which I mean there is no systematic effort, journalists or, or drug.
- [14:17]
Christine Rosen
Enforcement officers, in which case they might.
- [14:21]
John Podhoretz
But there is no systematic effort to deny or deprive Mexican citizens of their civil rights or to hound them. The fear of persecution is not necessarily from, you know, like gangsters, it's the government. The persecution is governmental persecution. So the, the law was written largely to help us, or whatever it was, to help us bring in people who were dissidents in communist countries who basically should believe that the minute that they stepped on American soil or anywhere and said, I can't go back to my home country because they'll throw me in the Gulag. And you actually here in America have a national interest in hosting me because you're trying to make a larger argument, moral argument, about the superiority of Western democracy over communist totalitarianism. This then spread as it would to country, you know, places where the rule of law is broken down, governments are getting more and more authoritative. They're, they're using, you know, they, they, they jail opponents and they torture people from opposition parties and all of that. And now we have millions of people claiming that they have, they have a fear of persecution in their home countries. And that is not what persecution means. So, but you go somewhere and you say it, just the act of saying it, shift your status.
- [15:53]
Christine Rosen
You can even appeal it. If one immigration court judge in the US says we deny your appeal of asylum, you could then have or deny your asylum claim, you can then appeal it. I mean, again, years and years of these claims.
- [16:03]
John Podhoretz
So, so this system has been America, the American system of being a beacon and light unto the nations to people who wish freedom and are even trying to find freedom or work for freedom in their home countries and are being jailed and tortured and persecuted for it. That, that are our large heartedness is being abused by this gamesmanship. But it, it shows how the lack of seriousness about the issue on the part at least of one American political party has contributed to this crisis. Because clearly there needed to be some reforms to the asylum laws or the regulations governing asylum and because this all became part of the Republicans are racist and Democrats care about ordinary people. And Matt's point, which is, gets even more like sticky or complicated, that there's a great deal of government spending in the United States, particularly in blue states, that is filtered through unions and other to provide social services to people who are not legal residents of the country and thereby hire teachers, hire health care workers, hire all kinds of people who then come under the union's aegis, make the union more powerful and see that money keeps flowing through their coffers. That we have a kind of bizarre world in which public sector workforce, the private sector workforce are at war. By which I mean if you're a teacher, you want government to spend as much money on teachers as possible and so, and throw as much money at schooling systems as possible. So the more people, more kids in the school system, the better it is for you. The whole argument about tightening up restrictions in order to create a fairer playing field for the American working class workforce goes in exactly the opposite direction. These public sector workers who want more legals here are encouraging the presence of the United States of people who are competing with Americans for jobs and lowering the possibility of, you know, raises or what, you know, like they loosen the American workforce. They give an advantage to the employer over the worker and they, and they keep Wages low. I'm not sure I buy that argument, to be honest. But I mean, it is an argument, right? It is a sort of supply demand argument that's hard to dismiss. And so you have the people who speak for workers who are on both sides of this issue and.
- [19:25]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, yeah, no, I just want to clarify. You mean native born workers and, and farmers.
- [19:33]
John Podhoretz
In other words, a native born worker. Right. This is the argument that, that people who have been tough on, who are immigration hawks, from David from, to, you know, I don't know, to Stephen Miller or whatever, say, which is, is that the American working class is in trouble because it cannot raise itself out of wages that are penurious, because we are importing a workforce that competes with native born Americans for jobs. And because there are way more, because there are way more people at this, you know, sort of entry level worker. Employers don't have to compete with workers. And the way they compete with workers is to raise wages and provide benefits.
- [20:18]
Christine Rosen
Okay, so then, then why isn't the Trump administration in concert with its efforts to crack down on illegal immigration and to do more deportation, which is what it's doing, sparking all these riots. Shouldn't they also be punishing and talking about the employers who are illegally hiring illegal and cracking down on them? Because that's actually, that's a missing strain for me. There hasn't been a lot of reporting about it. There hasn't been any rhetoric about it from the White House. If he were serious, that's another choke point, just like the border is. And that is one of the things which I think gives the game away for some of the ideological motivations of this administration, which is what concerns me going forward with actually solving the problem of illegal immigration.
- [20:54]
John Podhoretz
All right, so let's, let's unpack that. So explain to me why they wouldn't, why don't they go after employers?
- [21:02]
Christine Rosen
Because it's. Because the politically useful thing is to demonize foreigners, to demonize people who come to this country to work. And they don't want to demonize the small business owners or the Home Depot manager who hires them or the construction guy who hires them. And that's actually that, that's what I really don't, that's not good for them. That's part of their base. Probably some of these guys are Trump voters and I'm guessing here. But I'm just saying it looks bad to crack down on Americans hiring foreign laborers. It's much, much more politically useful to just complain about an invasion.
- [21:35]
John Pothoridz
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- [23:23]
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- [24:41]
John Podhoretz
The.
- [24:41]
Abe Greenwald
Thing about those who employ the illegals is that that's a diffuse group. I mean, it's not that they're just Trump base. It's everyone. You know, it's not just the Martha's.
- [24:52]
Christine Rosen
Vineyards homeowners who want their gardeners to.
- [24:54]
John Podhoretz
Be inexpensive and Beverly Hills. Right.
- [24:56]
Abe Greenwald
And it's also, you know, morally and sympathetically, like a tricky issue, too, because who wants to turn down a good hard worker who needs a job, you know, who's here?
- [25:11]
John Podhoretz
Well, so I think I have a, I have a darker answer on this about Republicans and how they function in this way, which is this has become a, an incredibly useful political issue for the right. Right. Shift of 40 points and all of that in Republican directions on, on these views. But Americans also hate inflation and Americans also hate that housing costs are going up so much and all of that. So imagine a world in which you really do restrict immigration and you make it so that, so that people who hire people to do things do we verify don't, you know, do whatever they can not to hire illegals because they're too scared. The net result is rising prices everywhere. Things cost more cost, it will cost more to build a house if you have to employ America, you know, you have to pay wages twice as high for, for a work crew that's building a new house, new home, whatever, all the stuff that we're talking about.
- [26:17]
Christine Rosen
You also have to pay all the taxes as an employer, the Social Security, the Medicare.
- [26:21]
John Podhoretz
I mean, so yeah, and you're right, the point is that. Or you're right, it's way more diffuse and the number of people who exist in this, in the, in the ecosystem in which the nature of the current workforce has created a relatively stable price structure that there are shocks to. Right. Like Covid's a shock to it. Or there's a forest fire in Canada. So lumber prices go up, so housing prices go up. There are things that can shock it. And the tariffs are now another way in which it's going to shock. But do I think Republicans and Republican politicians are way more conscious than they admit and are way more cynical about this than we understand that they understand that if they really did what you're talking about and made it a responsibility, responsibility of the employer not to do it and to be punished if they do it, that there will be macroeconomic consequences that will harm Republicans for decades in the form of rising prices. And Democrats will say, you see, they came in, they said we had a big inflationary problem and look what they've done well.
- [27:37]
Christine Rosen
But isn't it even worse and more. I should say it's more cynical than that because we been told to suck it up for the higher prices when it comes to tariffs, because, you know, this is ideologically what Trump has decided.
- [27:48]
John Podhoretz
By Trump and Lutnick.
- [27:50]
Christine Rosen
Right.
- [27:51]
John Podhoretz
Where you only need two dolls.
- [27:52]
Christine Rosen
Not you need your two dolls and your old car doesn't need to be replaced because tariffs are just an American good. But they're not doing that here. So that, I mean, that's where the cynicism really starts to flow in my.
- [28:03]
John Podhoretz
Veins, at least right now, I think.
- [28:06]
Abe Greenwald
And also, I just want to. If the administration were fully successful in cracking down on illegal migrants anyway, wouldn't it have the same economic consequences?
- [28:22]
John Podhoretz
Well, it would, but it would be slower, right? Maybe it would be slower and it would have a kind of a more organic effect. And wages have been rising. So, you know, I mean, part of this is we're shutting or opening doors that already been opened. You know, it's like wages have been rising. And, and, and so the, oh, my God, no one's getting a raise is not true anymore. The whole question was whether or not you could keep prices down so that the wage, the wage increases weren't being eaten up by inflationary price increases. But all that was happening without a crackdown. Now there's a crackdown. So at the very least, the virtue of a crackdown is what it means going forward.
- [29:13]
Christine Rosen
Well. Right.
- [29:14]
John Podhoretz
You can create a net zero influx from now onward. Right. So that sort of like what happened after the financial crisis where America was in such bad economic shape that people weren't coming in from Mexico looking for a better life in the United States because we had a 10% unemployment rate. So people were like, I'm staying here. Like, I'm not going there not to get a job. If you, if Trump scares people enough and, and the net in migration with illegal immigration to the United States goes down to zero over time. That problem helps, but that doesn't, it.
- [29:49]
Christine Rosen
Doesn'T solve the ideological contradiction at the heart of this, which is if he is the law and order president and no one is above the law and anyone who crosses our border illegally is considered a criminal, then the people who hire them are also breaking the law. Why does that not apply to them? And that's actually where the responsibility.
- [30:06]
John Podhoretz
Never like to do that. We never liked that in the United States. Right? So here's the argument. You're a pro lifer, right? You're a pro lifer and you want to Say that there's like no abortion and where is it that you end up running afoul of your own principle or making a case like really difficult. Arrest the doctor. There's an abortion doctor. Arrest him. He's killing, he's killing babies. No, no, we're not going to arrest the doctor. Don't worry. No one's arresting the doctor. No one's going to arrest the guy who's hiring the illegally. He's just another hard working American trying to get through his day. You don't want or people in this, whatever it is, whatever, whatever politicians instinct says is, don't expand out the criminal right.
- [30:56]
Christine Rosen
It punishes Americans, not foreigners.
- [30:59]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [31:00]
Christine Rosen
And that's an understandable reaction to say, well let's take care of them first.
- [31:05]
John Podhoretz
Right?
- [31:05]
Christine Rosen
The foreigners first. Punish them, deport them, deal with the process of that and then maybe we'll look to employers. But another interesting thing, all that at the elite level, this is a career killer. Think of all the people Zoe Baird and others over the years who were found out to have hired illegal folks to be their nannies, to be their housekeepers, not reporting it, didn't pay the taxes. So at the elite level, it's still understood to be a career killer. And so it's not as it's just a very strange contradiction to me for the law and order guy to just overlook. I mean, maybe not in Trump's case, but it is, it's going to be a problem down the line even if he gets the border secured.
- [31:43]
John Podhoretz
Every, not every, but like there are so many major social science problems that we face in this country that reform almost seems impossible. So I'll give you two examples of that. So we're legal. Immigration is one of them. So much of the economy depends on people who do this. If you somehow wish them away to the cornfield, the country would literally collapse because they're doing so much work and there would be no one to replace them and all of that. So that's one thing where we're having some difficulty wrapping our minds around what would happen, what will happen as a result of Trump success in not only stemming the inflow, but in actually reversing and doing something about the illegal immigrants here. Now, two other major issues in the last 60, 70 years or three huge public policy mistakes that nobody knew were public policy mistakes that are almost impossible to fix. One, the decision to tie health care to the employer rather than the individual right happened really in the wake of the Second World War in an effort to create the conditions under which businesses would offer workers benefits, they got a tax break for providing health care or creating a health care program for their workers. And it's now 80 or almost 80 years later. And this system is a catastrophe. Right? That's the, the healthcare system that we're under in which the consumer of the healthcare product plays almost no role in the choices made of which healthcare product to use. Competing for prices, paying less or paying more, going to different kinds of doctors depending on your income level or what, what you're willing to do. And all that, all of that is out of your hands. And we have created this system. The only way to get any kind of cost savings is to empower the individual. And every time we talk about doing it, it's a nightmare because the transition from the old system to the new System would take 10 years and people will die and it'll be absolutely terrible. So like the immigration problem, you have this problem that everybody knows should be fixed and no one knows how to do it except single payer health care, which of course nobody should want, but we could get into. That's number one. Number two, the mortgage interest deduction instituted in 1958 in order to create a boon in housing mortgages reduction has been the most distortive economic impact in the history of this planet because it looks like it's a deal and it's not. Simply increases the cost of housing. Then you get it back at the end of the year through a tax break break. And it's inefficient, it's stupid and you can't get rid of it because again, you could get rid of it. But the 10 year period of time in which you got rid of it, people who had paid X for their house, their house is now worth 35% less than they paid for it two years ago because the tax deduction goes away and they're ruined. And that's millions, if not tens of millions of people. How do you do that transition? That's another one where you think, oh, this is so great, we're going to do this and make it great for people. And then you have the ant, then you have the third version of this which was making it easier for people to get home loans. So there was a time in the United states when about 61% of Americans and incredible, incredibly consistent number over the period of three decades owned their own homes and about 39% of households were rental renters. And there was a national consensus, right to left, Newt Gingrich to Bill Clinton, that what we needed to do to improve American lives. And all this was increase the level of homeownership. And how do you do that? Relax or make banks relax or whatever. Restrictions, rules on who gets to borrow money to buy a house. And the entire world economy cratered in an effort to get that number from 62% to 68%. Right. A 10% increase in the United States alone in home ownership that created the sum prime mortgage market. The entire world economy was nearly destroyed.
- [36:25]
Christine Rosen
I just have to say captured if you ever saw the big short, it's the scene where the, where the exotic dancer looks in the eyes of the guy who's investigating these, the lending market in Florida and says I've got six condos.
- [36:38]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [36:39]
Christine Rosen
I mean it's just that, that brilliantly so.
- [36:42]
John Podhoretz
But the point I'm bringing up is this is where America, it is very hard to reform America is that country is very big, got big and bigger, bigger and bigger. And there are these huge policies that end up having huge effects and fixing them creates short term pain of a sort that no politician who has to face the voters every two years is ever going well. Which to be willing to suffer.
- [37:13]
Christine Rosen
Which is why you do sometimes need the cleansing of populism. And this is actually where Trump is really interesting because on a lot of this stuff he is a radical on enforcement of certain things, tariffs is the outlier because in tariffs he actually is saying all this. He's like we're going to do this radical new thing. I think it's going to work. You're going to experience pain in the near term for long term gain. So that's the one area where he's actually making this argument. He's completely wrong but he's making that argument. The thing is though, in American history we have had these moments where the populist movement kind of blows everything up and then you need the other people to come in and do the more pragmatic incremental reform. The danger now of course is that Congress is out of practice, legislating and compromising. The parties are more polarized. The stuff that was it, she's from, she's a non voting member of Congress, a member from the Virgin Islands. I mean the stuff she's posting on social media, these, this absolutely ridiculous and kind of foul tempered things. But you do need a branch of the government that's actually going to want to build those solutions and that's where the public has to also demand them. So a lot of their demands are being met in this populist moment by Trump. But those long term demands, the Long term thinking, that's what we're missing in our leaders right now.
- [38:31]
John Podhoretz
Oh, the other thing I should mention, because this is actually a test of Congress in 2025 in the big beautiful bill, what the House voted for, that the Senate's going to resist and is already resisting is this question of whether or not Biden efforts to expand Medicaid, which again involve loosening restrictions to make this, these benefits more available to more people, all of which are paid for by debt because no one's paying for them, whether we should tighten them back up again because, because we're, we're basically hastening our path to the fiscal cliff over which we're going to fall. And if we can slow down our rush toward the cliff, maybe other things will happen that will mean that we can avoid the cliff. So, you know, work restrictions and lowering the get raising the level at which you can, you can get this health care benefit for the poor and all of that stuff that only happened two years ago or three years ago. So it's not like it's been solidified multigenerationally like the, like the housing mortgage deduction or something like that. Right. And there's going to be a real battle over this. This could be the first major moment at which Congress says we went too far, we expanded a benefit too far, we need to limit it for the overall fiscal health of the United States. And in fact, this is a benefit that only goes to a relatively small number of people anyway. It's not like it goes to everybody, like Social Security or Medicare, which goes to everybody over 65, you know, and, and Josh Hawley doesn't want to do it and nobody wants to do it, although the House did vote for it. And now the question is, is the Senate going to maintain when it goes through this, is it going to be responsible and take the hit and understand they're going to be ads saying, you know, you've killed babies because of what you've done here, because they're doing the right thing. And then they say, no, that's not what happened. We created, we solved fraud, we stopped fraud, or whatever the counter argument was would be. But.
- [40:53]
Abe Greenwald
A lot of heartache will be falsely blamed on it as well in the, and that'll have political consequences going forward.
- [41:00]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's what I'm saying. But you can also make a counter argument. And part of the skill of being a good politician is figuring out how to make a good counter argument against, you know, against the demagogic argument against you. Speaking of which. And then we should talk about Iran. Tonight is the last New York City mayoral debate. And it turns out that this New York City mayoral election is becoming pretty important when it comes to the ideological journey of the Democratic Party in 2025 because New York has this very complicated ranked choice voting system. I'm not going to go into it. There are now two leaders in the race. There are have been for months. Disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo and communist whelp Zoran Mamdani, whom Matt Continet helped moved into his department when his father became a professor at Columbia two decades ago. One of my favorite details that I've learned this month is that Matt Khan moved the Mamdani family in as part of his collection Columbia work study. The fact that Mamdani's wife and Zoron's mother is a successful movie director and could have paid for her own, you know, like moving van will leave to one side. So this is important because Mamdani is no joke. Like he's not, you know, he's not like a wolf in sheep's clothing. He's a wolf in wolf's clothing. He is a he. He is an open socialist, near communist hater of Israel and anti Semite running to be mayor of New York City. And he is in the second, he's in sort of like the pulpit in second slot in this very complicated system. And Andrew Cuomo is running as nothing. I mean now he's running against Mamdani. Now he has the. It's the classic thing where he was the front runner and so he thought he could run on nothing. Bob, Daddy came up and said I'm going to do this and that and this and that, this and that. And then every white communist in the city said oh that sounds great. It's okay with me because you know, if I don't like what's happening, I'll just go take my tech business and move to South Carolina where taxes are low anyway. So I'll ruin New York with my vote and then I'll go and live, you know, you know, work remotely. So what do I care? So this debate is very important. It's on tonight and there was a poll yesterday. It's a factitious poll because it's head to head poll and that's not the way this race is going to work. In which Mamdani is now leads by four points over Cuomo. It's a poll by Public Policy Polling, a firm that if you have been paying attention for the last 15 years was a comically distortive Democratic push polling firm that basically used its polling to push Democratic, liberal Democratic agenda items. So they've done something you're not supposed to do, which is they polled Cuomo versus Mamdani head to head, even though it's a ranked choice voting thing, and come up with this number. Nonetheless, I hope Cuomo is scared out of his mind and is, you know, because the last debate, Cuomo was awful. And I mean awful the way people. It's like when, you know, somebody hasn't. Has been injured and out of, out of, out of sports for a couple of years and then comes back in the game as a quarterback and then gets tackled 15 times behind the line and doesn't know how to move. He sounded old and quite stupid and he was just trying to remain calm because, of course, his main problem is that he's a psychopathic rageaholic. And so he was trying not to be a psychopathic rageaholic. But he really better show some leg today about the real choice that that's.
- [45:03]
Christine Rosen
Give him a hug like he likes to do with all of his female aides. Right. Because he's Italian, wants a hug.
- [45:09]
Abe Greenwald
I've got a weird feeling about Coleman now. I think. I think people associate him so much with the pandemic now and not in the way that they did at the time, falsely at the time. You know, like they.
- [45:26]
John Podhoretz
He was a hero. You mean? He was a hero.
- [45:28]
Abe Greenwald
Very comforted by him and his daily, you know, briefings and his joking and his going on TV with his brother and all the rest of it. And I really think New Yorkers now look back at that and go, well, I don't really want, I don't want to be reminded of that. I'm not sure what that was. He ended up not being a good guy in some way, but whatever.
- [45:51]
John Podhoretz
From office. Yeah. Right. Because of supposed. Right.
- [45:55]
Abe Greenwald
No, but I'm saying like whatever.
- [45:56]
John Podhoretz
Aids. Yeah.
- [45:57]
Abe Greenwald
Either you either because you don't like him because of the.
- [46:01]
Christine Rosen
Killed all those elderly people in nursing home.
- [46:05]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [46:05]
Abe Greenwald
You know, or.
- [46:06]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [46:07]
Abe Greenwald
So I don't know. Like the, the. I think the blooms coming off that rose.
- [46:13]
John Podhoretz
Well, the bloom is.
- [46:15]
Christine Rosen
But for people who aren't in New York and conservatives who often just shrug and go, oh, you get what you vote for, you know, about any blue city. And I know because I live in a blue city, but, you know, I have a son who's a New Yorker now. I. What is it, what is it going to signal about the Democratic Party Party more broadly if he wins? If the socialist wins. Endorsed by AOC Is that going to signal a shift in the in, you know, for the midterms and then maybe for 20, 28 of the party just going all in on what has not worked but that their base really loves? Or is it an outlier? Because I think, I mean, New York, really New York politics can sometimes, as we saw during the Giuliani area era, I mean it can be a shift kind of early shift in in the larger story.
- [46:59]
Unknown
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- [47:18]
John Podhoretz
See whether what I am wearing is.
- [47:19]
Unknown
In fact a Quint sweater, a Quince linen shoe shirt, a Quince polo shirt, and more often than not, in fact it is. That is how committed I am to Quince, which I only got to know because they started advertising on the podcast. I got one free sample shirt that was so great that I started buying more and buying more sweaters and buying more shirts.
- [47:45]
John Podhoretz
And so I am very much a.
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Unknown
Walking advertisement for Quints. And this is a non walking advertisement for Quince, which has all the things.
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John Podhoretz
You actually want to wear this summer.
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Unknown
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- [48:55]
Dr. Rob Williams
Rob Williams, executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation. Survivors of the Holocaust have long been the bravest voices 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.
- [49:29]
John Podhoretz
I don't think there's any question that if Mamdani comes on the, you know, up the pike, laps Cuomo and wins this primary, that it will be a huge moment. It will be an endorsing moment for the Sanders AOC wing. Remember, this is a city of eight and a half million people. That makes it like, equivalent to the sixth or seventh largest state in the country or something like that. It's obviously, it's New York City, so it's the center of everything. And he is really, really, really left wing. I mean, he is not like he is more left wing than aoc. He is more left wing than Sanders. He is actually. And he is, and this is the most sort of frightening thing for me in a city that is 12 to 14% Jewish, he is actively, openly hostile to Israel and to the issues involving Jews and anti Semitism since October 7th. And ordinarily that would make him unelectable simply because Jews would vote in a bloc to knock him out. As happened, by the way, in Westchester in the district where Jamaal Bowman lost his seat in 2024, where Jews came out basically at a block and knocked him and killed his candidacy because he was so vile. And so Mamdani victory will have many, many, many larger meanings. Imagine a Stacey Abrams victory as opposed to a Stacey Abrams defeat. That's the way to look at this. He could turn into Stacey Abrams. If he loses, you know, he sort of become a star. Maybe he's a really good fundraiser reality.
- [51:19]
Christine Rosen
Show together that I would actually watch.
- [51:21]
John Podhoretz
Right, right. But I'm just saying that, you know, imagine the America in which Stacey Abrams prevails in 2018, doesn't lose by 50,000 votes, but prevails. The narrative of 2020 in which you had to get Joe Biden as your nominee because Stacey Abrams lost. And you needed somebody, you needed somebody moderate to be the presidential nominee, if you could changes. And so the. The people who look like they were losers because they were too left wing in 2019 in the Democratic Party don't look like they're such losers anymore. And so like that. But it's a. It's a. And by the way, the challenge now, because of the next two weeks is going to be how nationalized is that mayoral race going to be? Because stuff is going on, obviously, in the Middle east with Israel and Iran and the United States. States.
- [52:24]
Christine Rosen
Can we just note, because so many media outlets are not noting that Hamas murdered five humanitarian workers distributing aid in Gaza. And I Have not. I mean, I've seen little mentions here and there, but proving literally killing people who are bringing aid to the people they claim to represent and care for. So that I just, it's been infuriating to see how little coverage that stories has received.
- [52:48]
John Podhoretz
So I just wanted to, I mean, yeah, they ambushed a truck. It's possible that a couple of aid workers were taken hostage because, you know, there's nothing they like more now, you know, than to take some more hostages and torment every everybody else. My guess is that the reason that the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense have been issuing these mandates that all non essential American personnel get out of Kuwait, Kuwait, Bahrain, other places, and that American official families of Americans and Americans working in Israel stay in the Tel Aviv area, if they live in the Tel Aviv area, is that they have some kind of actionable intelligence that there are going to be moves made on Americans and that Americans should get out, that there will be efforts to take American hostage or assassinate Americans or something. If it is true, these reports that we're hearing that Israel is readying an attack on Iran just at the time that remarkably enough, the Trump administration has now, it appears, finally decided that this peace initiative with Iran is a fool's errand. Even Steve Witkoff is now saying that Iran isn't serious. And you know, he has been spending months doing whatever he could to build trust and connections and all of that. And the Iranians are speaking in an extraordinarily belligerent fashion. You know, they are literally threatening to kill Americans in the Middle east should any attack individual Americans. Like so. And we're taking this seriously, which means that we don't think it's just hot air. We are taking defensive measures with family members of embassy officials, military members, sencom. You know, there are a lot of American families in the Middle east living with, you know, regular duty military personnel and, and, and officials who work at the embassy and stuff like that, and they're all being told to leave. So they must know something.
- [54:54]
Christine Rosen
Trump was out of his normal habit, not talkative about it last night when he was asked questions about it when he went to the Kennedy Center Les Mis opening, he kept walking. He, he was very terse, which for him is unusual when with regard to any sort of ongoing negotiation.
- [55:13]
Abe Greenwald
What he did say in another interview about Iran though is funny because it's, it's a kind of repeat of what he did with Putin in that he said, I don't know, something happened, something.
- [55:25]
John Podhoretz
Changed.
- [55:27]
Abe Greenwald
On the Iranians part. You know, they were they were good now, which is his way, you know, nothing changed, right?
- [55:36]
John Podhoretz
I mean, what's interesting is that nothing changed. Like, this is the fascinating thing about the politics in the Middle east with, you know, anti American or non American or non Western forces, which is like they don't play us like a piano. Like you would think they would know how to snow us and play, play along and all of that. And it's like the Palestinians, Hamas, Iran, Saudi Arabia, when it was at some of these other places, like, they don't say, no, no, we only want peace. They say, you're the great Satan and we will destroy you and Israel will be wiped off the map. It's like, why are you. I mean, you know, in some ways, thank you. Because like you're making my case for me that you need to be restrained and destroyed because you're a force for evil and genocidally minded. But you know, you would think that maybe, you know, they would play the game a little better like Hamas can killing aid workers. Maybe they think that everybody in America who is on their side will remain on their side. Maybe they're right because, you know, the people who are on their side are morally depraved already. But I mean, I don't think this is very helpful to people who want to say that, you know, Israel's at fault here. Gaza humanitarian mission has been delivering 1.3 million meals a day to Gaza in the for the last week. But like they are feeding the Gazans, the hunger issue is over, which is why Hamas targeted the truck for murder and hostage taking.
- [57:18]
Christine Rosen
This is a broader challenge of a pop. Any populist administration though, it's both a strength and a weakness that they have the memories of goldfish. I mean, Trump's administration, Trump is currently negotiating with a regime that's tried to assassinate him. So his willingness to set that aside and still try something, even though I think we're all in agreement it was a fool's errand and was going nowhere, is still like, that's actually where having any sense of sort of old school diplomacy. History has both sometimes serves him. I think it did in his previous administration with the Abraham Accords. But in other cases such as this one just delays the inevitable.
- [57:53]
Abe Greenwald
And regarding John, the question of, you know, this doesn't help Hamas, you know, publicly. This goes to Christine's point. Who's, who's reporting it? Who's, I mean, where is the nine, you know, the four New York Times top stories on it, you know, next to each other?
- [58:15]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, no, the New York Times is too busy publishing columns by Tom Friedman saying Israel's government threatens all Jews worldwide. Someone should take that guy, that 4 foot 3 inch homunculus, and put him on an ice floe. Already it's been 50 years of his narish kite and now he's just tilting into open anti Zionism and anti Semitism of the sort that he has been hinting at forever so he can go pound sand and shut his thinking trap. But there it is. I mean, it's kind of exposing itself. But you're right, the, you know, one, one other comic thing about the New York Times and I want to move on to a recommendation. So Bibi Netanyahu survived a no confidence vote or kind of vote, you know, in, in the, in the Knesset last night. So he had a 68 seat majority. It's now down to 66. He survived it. 53 people voted against the government. So he survived it. The entire fight that would tank his government is on the far right. It all has to do with his, what he's promised and what deals he's making with the far right parties, some of them Haredi parties, about draft legislation and various other things. And Isabel Kirchner of the New York Times does a story about how Bibi has been weakened by this no confidence vote, which isn't really true because he's from A, survived it and B, he only, he didn't even lose anybody in the no confidence, but he's now lost one. He's lost two seats in the aftermath of no confidence, but he still has a 10 majority. He's got 66 seats out of that. He needs 61. He's got 66. But it's like, boy, the opposition really dealt him a stunning blow. They just did. They had no role in the political difficulties that Bibi is facing. In fact, as my sister Ruthie said to me, they made it worse because if they weren't saying they're slavering, thinking that they could bring Bibi down, one of the right wing parties, Shas, decided when it was like on the knife's edge to say, we can't, we gotta go with, we gotta go with Netanyahu. Because if we tank this government, who knows what these lunatics will take away from that. We pretty, we pretty much better stand together here. Even though I would rather that he'd be gone or something like that. So far from it being a sign that the opposition had, had beaten Bibi or like done something terrible to Bibi, it's the opposite. They may have strengthened his hand and the New York Times and its unfailing ability to misrepresent and mischaracterize things has done exactly that. So congratulations to everybody there to Joe Kahn, the editor who is the heir to the Staples fortune and. And whose work there is as wonderful as the experience of trying to shop at a Staples. If you've tried to shop at a Staples lately, but you wait online for 30 minutes while the people behind the counter talk to each other and don't ring you up. So Joe Kahn and his family have done us a huge service in both of these areas. Okay, I want to make a recommendation. Last night I went to see Wes Anderson's new movie, the Phoenician Scheme. Wes Anderson is a taste. If you don't know who he is, you can look him up. A lot of people can't stand him. They think he's too mannered and too twee and his work is too artificial. This movie, as has been true of his last three or four movies, has some of the funniest slapstick moments of the last film. 50 years. I mean, I laughed out loud six or seven times almost to the point of falling out of my chair at the Phoenician Scheme, which is a very elaborate story about a mid century international businessman trying to construct a gigantic project somewhere in the North African desert. And all of the industrialists that he has brought on to help him do it, who are also trying to destroy, destroy his project. One scene in particular that is worth the price of admission is Brian Cranston and Tom Hanks as the Sacramento guys who are going to take over the entire scheme and bankrupt our hero Benicio Del Toro through the means of a basketball 2 on 2 game played in a gigantic train tunnel. That is about four minutes of just sheer joy. So that's my recommendation. The Phoenician Scheme. Wes Anderson's new movie, which I think breaks wide tomorrow, like will be in and around.
- [63:33]
Christine Rosen
Can I bigfoot on your recommendation and say I was a skeptic, A Wes Anderson skeptic for many years until I realized he's the only director who was able to coax a legitimate performance out of Gwyneth Paltrow in the Royal Tenenbaums. I love the Royal Tenenbaums. I've actually seen it several times. I don't like all of his movies, but that one, for people who maybe need a kind of gateway drug into the Wes Anderson universe is pretty hilarious, right?
- [63:57]
John Podhoretz
I mean, it's just there's no one making movies like him. I'm not sure there ever has been. He's kind of combines both Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati. You know the looks of his movies are unlike anything else and he has just become very free. He just creates hilarious moments like just crazy almost like silent movie like I say, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin moments that.
- [64:28]
Christine Rosen
Are with serious actors like Ralph Lyons was in the Grand Budapest Hotel. He gets these, these very serious actors to do quirky, hilarious things in a total deadpan which is hard to pull off actually.
- [64:38]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. I mean the cast of this movie is Benicio Del Toro. Bill Murray plays God Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston as a kind of comedy duo. Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Cera who is hilarious like a like a sort of like powerhouse comic performance from Michael Cera whom I would not ordinarily think of as that. Anyway, big fan. Phoenician scheme. We'll be back tomorrow. For Christina Nabo, I'm John Podworth's Keep the Candle Burning.