Loading summary
Transcript72 lines
- [00:00]
A
Today's episode of the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast is brought to you by the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. At a time when higher education has lost its way, the Hamilton School, the University of Florida, is setting a new standard, offering an elite education that's anything but elitist. Led by world class scholars, Hamilton is reviving the classic liberal arts tradition grounded in the great works of Western civilization and the founding principles of the American Republic. In small discussion based classes, students study history, philosophy, economics, literature and America's founding texts, developing the discipline, eloquence and moral confidence to lead with purpose in their careers, their communities and their lives. Learn more at hamilton. Ufl. Edu Commentary. That's Hamilton ufl. Edu Commentary. The Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Leading a revolution in higher education.
- [01:10]
B
Hope for the best.
- [01:15]
A
Expect the worst.
- [01:17]
B
Some preacher pain, Some die of thirst.
- [01:21]
A
The way of knowing which way it's going. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Thursday, December 18th, 2025. I'm Abe Greenwald, the executive editor of Commentary. Joining me today are our Social Commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:49]
C
Hi, Abe.
- [01:51]
A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:54]
D
Hi, Abe.
- [01:56]
A
Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [01:59]
E
Hi, Abe.
- [02:01]
A
And happy to have with us Commentaries editor John Podhoritz. Hi, John.
- [02:06]
B
Hi, Abe. I just want to start by thanking everybody. The outpouring of sympathy and good wishes and wonderful thoughts relating to the passing of my father, Norman, just two days ago. I think it was two days ago. Yeah. Tuesday night at 8pm have been overwhelming. And you're all very, very. You've all been very kind. And some of the writing that has been done in commemoration of him has been also overwhelming in its power and moving force. Jonathan Tobin has a. Has an extraordinary piece on the Jewish News Service. Elliot Kaufman has a wonderful piece on the new Wall Street Journal, Vertical opinion, vertical free expression. Yuval Levin in National Review, our old colleague Noah Rothman in National Review, Catherine Lopez and National Review. A wonderful editorial and National Review and even the obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post were stunningly respectful, thorough, made very few errors of fact, and were very fair to somebody who was indeed extraordinarily controversial through much of his professional life. So as my sister Ruthie and my sister Naomi both said, it's really a terrible shame that he isn't around to be reading all of this stuff, because he loved nothing more than praise. And one of the remarkable qualities that he possessed was that a person as hungry for affirmation and praise and respect and sort of like celebration, was at the same time so willing to risk and threaten and. And. And expose himself to attack and to the ostracism for holding opinions that the people who he wanted to praise him most of all would subject him to, for having heterodox opinions that he could not in all good conscience suppress. Many careerists, more careerist people, more conscious of the slings and arrows of reputation, would have been far more circumspect, far more cautious, or would have simply stuffed down their objections to the common consensus and. And the collective opinion of their peers. And he was just constitutionally unable to do that. And it was very costly to him emotionally, personally. You know, he wrote a whole book about how he lost many, if not most of his friends in his 30s for holding these. Holding these views, but never regretted the fidelity that he showed to the ideas that he thought were important, that he believed and were being trampled upon or violated or poisoned by the very people who were supposed to be upholding the best in intellectual tradition and upholding the virtues of the Western canon and upholding the virtues of the American experiment, because they had all benefited, as had he, so much in so many ways, from the gift of being an American. And there he sat in the 1960s and watched the intellectual class of the United States siding with the enemies of America, siding with the enemies of the Jewish people, siding with the communist regimes and totalitarian thinkers and despots and monsters, as though they were not themselves the beneficiaries of the very system that was coming under attack and assault. And it was an extraordinarily brave way to live. And I can tell you, growing up with him and my sisters can tell you growing up with him, that it was brave because it was so painful. And, you know, like bravery, you don't get to be called brave if there isn't. If your bravery doesn't put you at risk or in danger. Like that's what bravery is, is doing the thing that your instinct might tell you you shouldn't or you couldn't or you can't. Because everything in you says, protect yourself. You know, cushion yourself. You know, don't, don't. Don't risk everything, and you do it anyway. And so he was an. Not just to me, but this is what I'm learning from what people are writing me and from these pieces. He was such an exemplar of what it meant to be an. A person living an honest intellectual life because he put his fidelity to the things that he believed most above his personal comfort and his personal Ambitions and his personal wants, I would say. Yeah. Thank you.
- [08:46]
A
No, it's also just incredible, John, in hearing you talk about his life and the fights that he had, how much he sort of his story embodies kind of the ongoing battles. It's all so relevant today when you talk about people who are befriending despots and enemies of the Jewish people and of the US and also, I was thinking, today, people are happy to change positions, change sides, to go with the current. Exactly the opposite of what you're describing. Your father did.
- [09:32]
B
But that is the nature. That is human nature. You look at it, and you look at people who. Yeah. Who sort of. Whose opinions twist in the wind. And, you know, you think of, like Polonius's speech in Hamlet, you know, which is. Which is curdled wisdom. It is, don't do anything. Be mindful of everything that you say and do, lest it interfere with your material success. And the. And. And the. And the. And the sort of weak good opinion of others. And so, of course, then as now, people are inconstant in there. One of the things that he was so repelled by or so disappointed by in his experience in the late 1960s and early 1970s was that he knew perfectly well that the people, a lot of the people who had been his comrades and friends and drinking buddies and all of that, knew that the 60s radicals were purveyors of evil. But they were scared of them, and they didn't want to cross them, and they didn't want them to start calling them old men who were out of it. Sound familiar to anybody about right now? Which is why I wanted to spend a minute saying that this was a particularly appropriate week for my friend Ben Shapiro to go on the offensive at the Heritage Foundation.
- [11:24]
E
But, John, one thing before that, because it actually relates to Ben, who's exactly my age, you know, thinking about your dad and the role he played, I mean, there's. There's so much to say about it. But our friend Tom Cotton gave remarks on the Senate floor about him. And Tom is also around my age. And one of the things he said was that he discovered Commentary magazine and your dad's writing as a young man, and that prevented him from ever being a man of the left because he was persuaded at such a young age. And it made me think, you know, when I was growing up around my house, my. My dad happens to be. My dad was a man of the left and became a man of the right. But when I came along, and I was growing up in our Library at home. I don't think my dad ever threw away an issue of Commentary. So in our library there were just stacks of Commentary magazines. And it's like a memory. It's something I'll always remember. But what Tom said, what, you know, and so my dad wouldn't argue with me or try to persuade me. He would just say, like, you should read this or you should read that. And he would put books and magazines in front of me. And I wondered, there's Tom Cotton and there's Ben Shapiro and so many others. I've never been on the left. And I wondered how many other people are there like that who came into contact with Norman Pittoretz's writing and the writing of his friends who never became a part of the left because, because of that. And for us, reading writing that was mischievous countercultural fun. Like that allowed us to, like, push back against the institutions that we were a part of. Like, we were pushing back against our elders. Like every institution I've ever been a part of, basically, from my high school to my college to, you know, some major reportorial institutions, were all left wing institutions. And then we would like, you know, read Commentary magazine in our, in the dorm room and go argue with our professors or, you know, whatever. And what occurred to me was it's so different from like, what's happening on college campuses today where students are totally aligned with their professors, basically, and they are there to receive the wisdom of the left. And it's just, you know, so it's a wonderful thing that he did, passing along this knowledge to people. And Ben, in his remarks at Heritage, and I'll let you talk about this, you know, talks about becoming a columnist at the age of 17.
- [14:15]
B
Yeah, well, so I was just thinking, to get back to Ben, but about this question of students and professors in alignment and this kind of world of says, conformity, intellectual conformity, in the place where supposedly the life of the mind is supposed to take root and create the next generation of people who can, who know abstract ideas and can think independently and are supposed to be the transmission points of our culture from its earliest moments into the present. And how that broke down somehow. But it, it broke down in an interesting way. My, my father was very insistent or very much a believer that I should attend the University of Chicago. He himself having attended Columbia College in 1946 as a, as a poor kid on, on scholarship. And Columbia and Chicago had many things in common at the time. And what they had in common was something common which was the common core that was you came to college and for at least the first two years, you did not have much in the way of choice. You were going to be presented with the Western canon and educated in it as a foundation. Then you pick a major and you go on. But you, by that point were supposed to have read the Greeks, the Romans, the great works of English literature, great works of French and European literature, great works of Russian literature and philosophy. Right? The sort of, the, the philosophical tradition from, from Plato through Kant, through Machiavelli through Rousseau and, and, and, and even to, you know, bad thinkers like Marx and others. But that this was what it meant to be an educated person and your hands as a student at a school like Columbia or a school like in the 40s or a school like Chicago until the sort of late 80s, early 90s, it was, you are unformed, Clay. We are going to spend some time forming you in the, in the image of the west, and then you are to go on and learn. And he would, he thought that was. And my mother as well thought that that was what was necessary to serve as a prophylactic against the creeping bad ideas that the elite in America had started to champion without let up in the late 60s and early 70s. I bring that up to say that he was a believer, as you would say, that you can't write free verse until you learn the rules of poetry you want. You can write free verse, but you can't write good free verse if you can't write a sonnet first. And that this was a very, very notable, powerful, potent idea also because it meant you needed to be exposed sometimes to ideas that were bad, that were in fact pernicious, and that it had bad consequences. Like, I think he would say, the tradition that Rousseau began, the sort of philosophical, romantic tradition of Rousseau that Marx then became the fullest flowering of. In many ways, you needed to know it, learn it, understand it, to reject it. Because if you rejected it without. If you rejected bad ideas without actually having had some exposure to them, then you yourself could be exposed as being thin and foolish and you didn't know what you were talking about and all of that. And so that idea of the. That and so kids weren't aligned or not aligned with their professors, that the, the theory at Columbia of the Common Core was, you don't know anything. You're 17 years old or 18 years old, you're coming to us so that we can teach you something, sit back and listen and read and learn. And then when you are, when you have the capacity, when you have the knowledge base, then the arguments can start. And so education in that sense was the exposure to ideas, at which point those ideas could undergo real world tests based on what was going on around you at the time. How did you feel about America in 1949 when you learned that the Soviet Union had the atomic bomb? What did you think of the Soviet Union's behavior in Eastern Europe, or their efforts to subvert Turkey and Greece or something like that? Until you knew what communism was, until you understood what its philosophical framework was and what the other philosophical framework that it had arisen to fight against were, you wouldn't be a person who could participate honestly and seriously in the conversations about which was the better system and which was the better path.
- [20:06]
A
John the thing is the, the kids who today don't get any of that. They never catch up. That's it. Then they're set free into the world and they never can grasp the traditions to even to have the actual debates. They go out into the world and they live their lives never knowing any of this, never having the real. Which is why all the arguments and debates seem so flimsy and ephemeral, because they're not actually grounded in what they used to be grounded in.
- [20:49]
F
Hey, John.
- [20:49]
B
Here.
- [20:50]
F
Okay, no gift cards this year. I'll tell you why don't give a gift card as a present because you can give an aura frame. An aura frame. I got one sitting right in front of me.
- [20:59]
B
They're amazing.
- [21:00]
F
It's like having a high definition screen showing your life in photographs so easily downloaded from your photo app into the aura app showing you videos, photos organized.
- [21:15]
B
However you want to organize them from the moment that you have a digital photo.
- [21:21]
F
Go back 30, 40 years. If you have them scanned up to the present, you can figure out how much time each photo spends on the screen before it moves on to the next one. Unlimited numbers. You can actually preload the photos before it ships by downloading the app. And they'll put it on there so that when you send it to your relative or to your loved one, the photos are there just when they plug it in. And you can personalize your gift by adding a message before it arrives. You can't wrap togetherness, but you can frame it and for a limited time save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com that's a U R A frames.com to get $35 off Aura's best selling carver mat frames named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code commentary at checkout. That's a U r a frames.com promo code Commentary this deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.
- [22:30]
B
It's very easy to do an ad.
- [22:32]
F
For something when you're sitting as you're recording the ad wearing the product that you are supposed to endorse. And in my case that is a quince Mongolian cashmere sweater. That's what I am wearing at this moment. And at quince you can pick one up for 50 bucks when you'd normally drop $200 or more on the same thing. Plus wool coats that actually hold up to daily wear and still look good. I myself have a quince puffer that I'm wearing over the sweater when I go out on these cold November days. By partnering directly with trusted factories that maintain high standards for craftsmanship and ethical practices, Quince cuts out the middleman and markups. That means premium quality at half the cost of other high end brands. So you can give luxury pieces without the luxury price tag. So get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with quints. Don't wait. Go to quints.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.
- [23:38]
B
Now available in Canada too.
- [23:40]
F
That's quite nce.com/complyarma free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/complyarma well it's worse than that, right?
- [23:53]
C
They, they were taught only the criticism of the core ideas and one of the most long term destructive radical things that the radicals in academia did. It wasn't just sit ins in the president's office and demands for, you know, and rioting and all the stuff that they did. It was the demolition of any sort of core curriculum. Those programs that you just described, John, which weren't just at elite universities but were at state universities. The California system had them, other state university systems had them. They were just the norm. And the lack of confidence in that sort of civilizational educational tool by the administrators who just took it for granted was immediately threatened by the radicals. And the radicals knew if we eliminate these programs it will be almost impossible to ever bring them back in that form again. And today the only schools that teach that sort of thing, with few exceptions, are classical educational schools, small, small radical offshoots who are doing it in direct protest to what the university system has become.
- [24:54]
E
I would add to that to two other things. The first is if you when you mix into that the gospel, gospel of self esteem, you get supremely confident morons who have only been taught, you know, how wonderful they are when they actually don't know anything. And the things they've been taught are completely moronic and stupid. And then the.
- [25:17]
A
Such a good book title, supremely Confident morons.
- [25:22]
E
And then. And then the academy's tendency, anyway, toward extreme specialization. So when you take out a required core curriculum that's by that, by its nature, like, pushes towards some kind of general, you know, generalization or generalism, which I think is good because the world is kind of a general place. And if you're trying to educate people to understand the world and operate the world, being a generalist is a good thing. But academics, like, they have to get a PhD in something. You're supposed to be an expert in something. And so we are, you know, we are graduating people who are like, you know, think it's really great to know a lot about, like, Indonesian basket weaving in 1776-1778, or queer Palestinian poetry, you know, in the 16th century. I don't even know. And then they're extremely confident that they are correct in all of their opinions. And that is dangerous. And I was educated by people who, you know, the contemporaries of Norman Podhoritz, who constantly pushed back on this idea that specialization is good and said, no, being a generalist is good. Trying to understand the world is good. And beyond that, like, you can't even just be an economist because economics doesn't exist off by itself. It mixes with politics and business and, you know, what CEOs have to do. They have to understand, like, how all these things intersect together. So if you want to be a smart person, you know, who's successful in the world, try to understand how all, you know, every subject on Earth collides.
- [27:09]
B
Let me, let me.
- [27:10]
D
That also affects, like, how you think in the future, too, beyond college. I mean, you get set in your ways because. So Norman Potter has a. He tells a kind of funny story about the Vietnam War in the early days. He talks about how there was no real attention on it when trouble was brewing, right? There was no. The storm clouds were gathering in Vietnam and there wasn't that much interest. And he ran what, you know, he said was one of the first articles in the mainstream magazine about it. And it was, like, very generalized. It was like, here's what's happening over there. Here's what looks what, you know, here's what people are trying to do and et cetera. And then, you know, he says his position at the time was, you know, kind of wary of the idea that war was the only way to prevent what was, you know, going on, but that, you know, they were sort of learning as they went. And he. Then he published another piece by, you know, somebody who understood the situation. And it was also not stride in, like, we gotta go in guns blazing.
- [28:13]
B
Nor was it, you know, very much.
- [28:16]
D
It was again, it was a second, like, very general piece talking about all the different facets of this and the dangers of their own instincts, Right? Everybody's priors had them set up to want to intervene in a specific way. And both these articles talked, like, checked their own priors in that way. And then he says, you know, he always assumed, though, you know, it wasn't clear at first, all the implications of it. He always assumed that everybody more or less agreed, at least in his world, that, you know, the spread of communism by. At gunpoint wasn't good. You know, like that, like, basic thing. And that they. He thought they were all talking about, you know, what might be the best way to intervene in that and, you know, stop, you know, the spread of communism at gunpoint. And that's when he. And when the hard left, which, you know, he was a part of, you know, the sort of new left got into it, it was like, no, what's bad about communism? What's bad about spreading communism by. By the bullet? And that's when he was like, what? This is, you know, this is like, kind of insane. But he, you know, from his. From his own group, they were like, trying to slowly roll out a way to try to understand this corner of the world. And the left immediately sort of came bull. Rushing in through the door like, no, we've decided Communism is good and communist revolution is good and all that. They came with the most extreme, prepackaged ideas and could not find a way to apply them in any sort of moderate way. It was just hammer now.
- [29:56]
B
Yeah. And by the way, the one thing. And I wanted to ask you, Seth, to reflect on this that I haven't been talking about. But. So, you know, obviously he was. He was one of the foremost lay Jewish thinkers of his time. And he. His story is that he had a grandfather, my grandmother's father, Meshitsik, who became a very early. I mean, became a chassid when he moved to the United States and grew a long beard. And he was a very, very cruel man. He was vicious to his children. He was physically violent to my grandmother, who was his favorite of his children, and very sour, unpleasant, unhappy person. And so. And his own father was something of an atheist, came to the United States Took off his yarmulka, did not go to shul, you know, was a working man, very sardonic about all this. But on his. But my grand, my grandfather, his father had a heart attack, which I think probably wasn't really a heart attack. It was probably a nervous breakdown that was called a heart attack. But he had a heart attack in 1940, something or other, as when my father was in high school or something like that. And on what appeared to be his deathbed, out of nowhere made my father promise that he would continue his studies in Jewish matters and history and, and, and faith and in Hebrew. And my father made him this promise. And then he recovered. And so my father was cornered. And so as he was a student at Columbia in The beginning in 1946, six blocks north of Columbia is the Jewish Theological Seminary, which is the center of which, which, which create, essentially created conservative Jewry and is, remains the, the, the sort of formal institution of conservative Jewry. If there is, if there is a Vatican of conservative Jewry, it is the Jewish Theological Seminary. And so he began studying there as a, as a young, as a young man while he was in college and studying texts. And he ended up not only learned in the precepts of Western culture from the Common Core and from Columbia as a student of English literature, but he was among the most literate non religious people in America when it came to Jewish matters, which of course was immensely helpful to him when he became editor of Commentary and published, among other things, some very significant theological work. In the pages of Commentary, primarily an essay by the theologian Emil Falkenheim on Jewish life and Jewish thought after the Holocaust. That is one of the four or five most significant pieces of writing, post war pieces of writing on Jewish thinking without question, and will be read and studied 250 years from now. Key moment as an editor for him was that the most notable moment in that article is the proposition that in the wake of Hitler there is a 614th commandment, let there be Jews. We cannot provide a posthumous victory to Hitler in the disappearance of the Jewish people. And this is a very, very well known idea in Jewish thought. And he wrote it. My father is the inventor of the 614th Commandment idea, as he says, as he has said it was in there. But Falkenheim hadn't surfaced it, so he surfaced it. And Falkenheim, who was apparently not only a very nice man but a wonderful writer to work with, was delighted at this editorial suggestion. And it was the center, heart of this having a grounding in the great tradition of Jewish thought and knowing the Bible as he knew the Bible and knowing the Bible well enough to late in his life write an entire book about the prophets. That though many Jews are very liberal, and though many rabbis are very liberal, and though many of the traditions of Conservative Judaism are very liberal, nonetheless, it provides a spinal anchor when you want to say what matters most. What matters most? Do material pleasures matter most? He was not a very materialist person, trust me. We grew up in a household where we had a door as a door bought by the door store as our dining room table, you know, with screwed in legs. You know, he managed. God was lucky and granted him some weird windfalls in the course of his life, but he never did a single thing to make money, neither he nor my mother. And, you know, we never took vacations, we never went on trips. There were very. We were not. We did not live a luxury life in any way. When he got older, he was much more comfortable once he had no longer had kids in college or to educate in private school or something like that. But he never did a thing to. For his own. To sort of advance his own material comforts. And I think that, that. Because of what mattered to him were the ideas and that he. And his values were. That I'm not really crazy about, but his values were. The values of you were to lead a meaningful life and a life of meaning. And though he was not a religious, he did not lead a religious life in the sense that, you know, he didn't live according to the Jewish calendar and he didn'. He stopped keeping kosher and he didn't, you know, he went to shul only on, you know, only on the high holy days and things like that. To his marrow, through his. In his head, 75 times a day, there came a Jewish thought. And it was. And as he got older and older and in his 80s and in his 90s, he was consumed with ideas about Judaism and Jewry. He sat in the last years of his life watching YouTubes of sermons, speeches, classes, listening to Jewish liturgical music, listening to, you know, singing totally fluent in Hebrew, remain fluent Yiddish, all of this. And so this was. These were. These two, you know, it's like the classic Leo Strauss line, which is, do you. Are you, you know, are you from Athens or are you from Jerusalem? And he was from both, basically. And they combined to make him a very, very, very serious person who took the world and everything in it with deadly seriousness.
- [38:32]
D
Yeah. And I think why he was so able to do that was because he was very Good at separating the two. He didn't believe that Athens and Jerusalem were the same place. And he didn't believe that Athens, Jerusalem was a divided city like east and West Berlin or something. He really kept them on different planes. Right. And he always. He talked a lot about Jews and the Jewish place in America. And he always said that he was not saying that Jewish law or Jewish tradition meant you should vote this way or that. He was always very careful about not blending the two in order to, you know, for his own political benefit. He'd never brought in God as an ace in the hole as a trump card for his argument and be like, well, how could you do this? You know, he. I mean, he said, you know, he. He also said, you know, nothing could redeem the Holocaust. But, you know, he was very talked. I was just reading some of his stuff on the. On the Six Day War, and he was talking about how he was, you know, this was a redempt, a sort of personal redemption. But, you know, he didn't believe that God made political things happen in order to express, you know, this sort of feeling of Jewish destiny.
- [39:58]
B
Now, I think what's important about what you're saying is it connects to what you said about. Hey, wait a minute, what are you talking about? That Che and Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro and the weathermen are all people worthy of celebration. Have you all gone nuts? Like, that's not what. That's not what the ideas that we were taught told us. And similarly, it is not that one is to support Israel. I would say this, for example, because God commanded was what, are you crazy? There's Israel. Of course we should support it. Here are the 17 reasons why. It's a democracy. It's like America, and it springs from the same cultural civilizational fundament as the United States. It is a natural ally. And of course, I support it because I'm a Jew and I think there should be a Jewish state. Though, as I've often joked, for a Zionist, he sure didn't like going there. He hated there. He didn't like it and he didn't enjoy it. And it wasn't anything, you know, and then to have. Have. And then his punishment was that his beloved daughter ended up making aliyah and having four. Four, you know, children. And there he now has four great grandchildren who are. Who. Who. Who live there. And so, you know, he, you know, his dislike meant that, you know, whatever, either as a form of rebellion or as a form of actual fulfillment of what he believed. But what he didn't actually feel. But it was more that separation of Athens and Jerusalem, by which I mean it's not. I am bound. God commandeth me to speak out for my people. Though of course God does command you that. And he was in that sense a very good Jew. But he. His idea was what? What are you nuts? Like that. So much of neoconservatism, properly understood, is what are you nuts? What do you mean?
- [42:01]
D
Also that when you.
- [42:02]
B
What do you mean? You should treat prison, you should like be soft on crime. My mother is living in crime. My parents are living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Like they can't go out of their apartment after 4:30 in the afternoon. You're giving me all this guff about how it's all because of how, you know, the underprivileged have, you know, it's understandable that they like commit economic crimes. Are you. What's the matter with you? Are you crazy? This isn't the way the world is supposed to be real. Like common sense, like, cut out the bullshit. Crime's bad, law and order is good. America is good. Because look at what America is compared to everywhere else. And Israel is good compared to like Egypt, you know, what the hell is Egypt? And that was a real part of the. Again, if you like have this immense philosophical, theological, cultural grounding, you were also able to see clearly. It's this great. His favorite quote, which was this quote, Barton Swaim surfaced again in his wonderful piece about my dad yesterday, which is the fact to which we have got to cling as to a life belt, is that it is possible to be a normal, decent person and yet to be fully alive. That was George Orwell and that idea, which is like, he was an exceptional person. He was exceptional in his education. He was exceptional in his social, personal, political journey. It's not a common thing to go from being the son of a milkman to being one of the most eminent thinkers and you know, battlers of your time. But what he was doing was saying that guy over there, that guy who just, you know, like runs a tire repair service and is working hard for his family and, you know, goes to church every Sunday and he's a normal, decent person and he is fully alive and he doesn't need to be an intellectual to have his life have meaning. That is a.
- [44:29]
D
If you can separate those things, the Athens and Jerusalem, right? The point is, if you can separate them, you take them as ideas much more seriously. So he doesn't necessarily see the church going guy as not an intellectual. The things that that guy is grappling with in his life he had a real respect for, because he was able to not throw everything into the same pot, but he was able to look at those things, look at religious ideas as ideas and, you know, really turn them over in his mind. And you can, you know, you can really explore things if you don't look immediately to instrumentalize them. And that was the thing he was constantly staving off from the left was the desperate obsession with instrumentalizing anything as soon as they came in contact with it.
- [45:23]
B
Right. Okay, so I do want to just quickly go back to Ben Shapiro. Ben is a very dear friend of mine, and so I stipulate that here. And I'm very proud of him as a friend, which is why I wanted to call this out. But I don't think just as a friend, and as I say, it's very apposite that this happened this week with my father's passing, because there is a bit of a torch being passed or a mantle going down the generations. Because what Ben did last night at the Heritage foundation was say no in thunder to the horrible, wretched new rightist Tucker Carlson. New Tucker Carlson being an intellectual version on the right of the weathermen of the 60s. On the, on the, on the extremes of being a thinker of ignorance, who is a promoter of others and their ignorance. The way the radical chic people said that the Black Panthers were somehow more knowledgeable about American society than other people. He brings on these fourth rate schlepper, idiot, psycho, you know, autodidact falsifiers and tries to help them create a counter history. And Ben said, the right cannot have this and remain a force for good in American life. And we're not even now talking entirely, though I will not divorce the anti Semitism and the Jew hatred from any of this, because anti Semitism and Jew hatred are the corrupting poison of Western culture and have been forever. But it is not in Ben's if the gripers and people like this are the wave of the future, if they are taking over the conservative movement, if they are the way a successful podcaster builds an audience and gets advertisers and all of that. What Ben did last night was act against interest. He went at his audience and said, you are being taken down a road to evil and you, the Heritage foundation institution of glory that, as Eliana mentioned, was the first place to help promote the ideas that he was writing about as a 17 year old. What you are doing is wrong and bad and evil and it must be opposed. And that is very Much in the tradition of my father, leading figure of the left in the 1960s, seeing the turn toward anti Semitism after the Six Day War, seeing the hard left turn on the United States as Tucker Carlson and these monsters are turning and spitting on and defecating on the United States and saying, I don't care what this does to me, this must end. That was an act of bravery. We need to celebrate the act. It was an act of bravery because he is a businessman who is running a for profit business that might be very much injured by what he did here and therefore it is to be celebrated. And he has, he has acted in my, in, you know, in a way that was exemplified by my father. And there is so little of it going on now. So little of it. Megyn Kelly whoring after these people, you know, all of that, you know, Nick, you know, all of this stuff. And he tried for a long time, Ben, to figure out if there was a way to make common cause with people to his right who could gain audience, who could help promote the ideas that were potent and powerful and would be helpful to America. That was why he brought Candace Owens onto his staff years ago and all of that. And it turns out that, that the answer is no. There is no common cause. There is no way to sit on the same stage at Turning Point USA with Fuentes and Candace and Tucker and say we're all part of one big tent. We are not in that tent. They are poisoning the tent. They are poisoning the ground. And calling that out very important. Yeah.
- [50:06]
A
You know, I just want to say I think it's going to be a long fight is what I'm starting to sort of come around to, to get these people out. But I will say there's something like a crack up going on among them, which, which is a healthy indication, I think. You know, all this infighting, as I say, it's going to be a long fight. It's not the end.
- [50:31]
B
Look, the long fight against the New Left that my father helped start with others in the 1960s, that fight goes on too. Who do you think the professoriate that Eliana was referring to, those are the children and grandchildren of the very people that my father went to war with over the goodness of the United States, the value of Israel, the horrors of, of communist, leftist totalitarianism, that's. They're just the same people that those ideas didn't go away. They morphed into intersectionality, into Foucaulian, this, you know, whatever, into settler colonialist, you know, propaganda ideas and all of that. And so, yeah, the fight will never end.
- [51:22]
C
Well, Tucker.
- [51:23]
B
And they may fall apart the way. The way, say the. The really radical left fell apart in the early 1970s when it got really violent, when they started, you know, blowing up military recruitment centers and kidnapping Patty Hearst and doing whatever the hell else they did. And then finally mass suicide at the People's Temple in 1979. That really did bring that world of leftist madness to a close. The groipers and people like that have not gone. Gone, you know, full. Have not actually, you know, weaponized or gone actualization all the way the way the new left did then. But they may yet. And so, but so the fight. We're still in that fight with the left and the right. We may be in that fight with the right in the same way for the next 40 years.
- [52:15]
E
Sorry, Christine, I want to push back on you a tiny bit, but it's in praise of. It's actually in praise of Ben, where you said he's acting against interest, and I think one could argue that. But I think Ben admirably has said that his primary interest here is not actually his business.
- [52:35]
B
Right.
- [52:36]
E
And he said, like, what I'm interested in here is the ideas and what I'm talking about here are the principles, and those are a strong national defense and limited government and individual freedom and traditional values. And to the extent that cost me clicks and, you know, the young kids, so be it. And friendships, so be it. Because I got into this because I cared about the ideas and believed in the ideas, and I think that is admirable, truly. And I do think that the far right or that some segments of the right are at risk of falling into the trap that the left fell into, which is there were a lot of grownups on the left over the past however many years, 10 years, who looked at the kids and said, yeah, this stuff is crazy. Like the trans. The pronouns, the, you know, race, racial ideology, whatever it is. But, like, that's where things are going. And so we're going to tolerate it at the New York Times. We're going to fire James Bennett. We're going to, like, allow the hysterics over Tom Cotton because, like, that's the future and okay. Like, well, we'll be okay with it.
- [54:05]
F
It.
- [54:06]
E
And we're hearing, like, a lot of the same murmurings on the right of, like, that's where the kids are and that's the future, and that's like, there's an inevitable march towards that. Well, as it turns out, like, the American people looked at the Kids march through the institutions on the left and they said we don't like that. That's weird. And I do think there's a real risk for the right that the American people look at the groipers or the groiper adjacent and they say we don't like that. That's weird. They're weird.
- [54:45]
A
And Doug, here we have the limu.
- [54:47]
B
Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
- [54:56]
A
Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [55:00]
E
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [55:03]
B
Cut the camera.
- [55:04]
A
They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com.
- [55:07]
C
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings.
- [55:10]
B
Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance company.
- [55:11]
A
And affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
- [55:13]
G
Want a secret to free holiday gifts? Free. Yes. Really. It's TikTok slash and free. You pick one to three products, share your unique link with friends and watch the price drop drop in real time all the way to zero. That's a free items with free shipping ready to try, download and open TikTok search free tap to join and start slashing.
- [55:39]
B
Now.
- [55:44]
C
Adding to that and I think this the what Abe said about it being a generational conflict is the fact that those kids are the tucker is reaping what the 60s radicals sowed on college campuses, which is they come out of their educational experience either K through 12 or if they go on to higher education with no sense of history. That's why he can bring on these cut rate pseudo historians and try to rewrite what world war what happened during World War II and cast the west as the villain and why he can, you know, sort of attempt to really distort and manipulate our understanding of our past. And that is really dangerous. The left attempted to do that and to some extent succeeded in the academic space. This is a much more populous space. And so he's coming with an already ignorant audience who's never been taught kind of general history of the west and the purpose and meaning of the West. And then he's manipulating them and he's giving them a narrative that's incredibly appealing, particularly for young men about, you know, they've had it out to get you. I'm going to show you what's really behind the curtain, the kind of paranoiac conspiracy theorizing. And what concerns me is that that will be a challenge generationally to solve.
- [56:58]
A
And you know, he's also by the way, giving them giving these young Americans without proper religious training. He's giving them his wacky version of Catholicism on top of he's shaping a sort of religion for them as well.
- [57:20]
B
Should we spend a couple minutes to.
- [57:21]
D
Have Ben do this? Because the intro, the very loud part of the intra Right fight right now has a lot of people that I don't really know how to react to. Like, I'm watching, you know, I'm watching like, Laura Loomer and, you know, some of these other guys. Yeah, yeah, well, and also Alex Jones, who was the latest to stick his pipe, his head up and, you know, all these crazy, you know, fake Christian patriots were trying to tell you to hate Jews and that Jews are. And I'm sitting there going, you know, Alex Jones versus Tucker and Laura Loomer, you know, versus Candace Owens. And it's like. And then Ben comes into the picture and I'm like, thank you, God. Because I don't have any. I don't have any mixed feelings about cheering on Ben Shapiro. The way I might, you know, if I hear Alex Jones say lay off the Jews or something like that.
- [58:25]
B
Okay, well, I, I think we'll leave it. I wanted to say one last thing. I don't think I said it at the beginning. I was hesitant about coming on today and we're not going to have a podcast tomorrow because tomorrow is the. We will be having the funeral for my father. But I was hesitant because I did not want to seem disrespectful of his passing, but I wanted to let everybody know he died literally a month shy of his 96.6th birthday. And he died. I am at peace, as are my sisters, my. My. My kids and their cousins. Their. His grandchildren are taking it a little harder in some ways, which is a lovely tribute to him as a grandfather. He did have 13 grandchildren and 16 great grandchildren that he leaves to carry on his legacy. But he died peacefully, in no pain. He was never sick. He did not have underlying diseases. He had. He was in a wheelchair because he no longer had physical strength. And, you know, like all people, you know, his. His hearing was lousy and, you know, he dreamed very vividly and sometimes got his dreams confused with the actual reality of things, but was paying attention to the news and watching things. And as I said, my. My piece was delving into Daniel Mendelsohn's translation of the Odyssey to. And then asked my sister to get him Alexander Pope's deathless translation of the Odyssey to see what.
- [60:19]
E
When.
- [60:19]
B
What ways they might have. Have differed. He didn't really get to pursue that very much because he got pneumonia last Friday and, you know, got the pneumonia cleared up, but it was really the last moment. But he was never in pain. He went in with. Peacefully and. Exactly as he would have wished to have left this mortal coil and. And lived a. A glorious life beloved by. By many. By so many, even as he was hated by others who. Whose contempt are as evanescent and meaningless as a. As a passing cloud now. And. And so I come to you, talking to you this way. I'm not devastated. I'm not, you know, I'm not bereft. I got more from him as a father than most people could get from a father, because I not only got love and support and remarkable kindness and generosity, but also the intellectual foundation that I mentioned that I got from my schooling and he got from his schooling, I got in my household growing up every day with him and my mother and. And Eliana says that her father would say, here, read this, and here, read that. And that was my life from the age of five or six. And we just lived in a household full of books, many of which he had purchased in England, in Cambridge, when he was a. When he was a young man. When I was a young man. It was only 20 years removed from when he was a young man. So, you know, the entire. You know, the entire corpus of English literature was in. And I mean, that, like, was in our apartment and there for me or my sisters to just pull off the shelves when we got interested in a writer or something like that. Didn't have to go to a library. Didn't have to. And then if we were. If we didn't know what we were reading about, we could just ask him at the dinner table, and we would have a conversation that. I'm very sad that such things as, you know, iPhones didn't exist then at the time, because we could have recorded them, and they would have been really remarkable documents of how to raise somebody, not only with moral instruction, but also aesthetic and literary and political instruction. And he was really, really funny. He was really funny and witty and clever and. And amusing. And he was also very moody and was, you know, stormy. And a lot of the way that he had. Was compelled to live his life because of his fidelity to principle meant that he was lonely. He was, you know, he. He was lonely, and he felt alone. And he. And he was. It was. He was saddened by. By that and by the loss of the circle that he had enjoyed so much in his 20s and his 30s. But, you know, the level of his appreciation of the work that my sisters, all four of us, became writers and editors. My sister Rachel, who wrote stories and book reviews for Commentary. My sister Naomi, who was an editorial writer for many years. My sister Ruthie, who is even now a columnist with the Jewish News Syndicate and was an editor of the Jerusalem Post for 25 years. And then, and then, and then me and his, the level of his appreciation for our work. A lot of writers are jealous of their children or like, sort of, you know, little, like, you know, Atlas, like eat their children, you know, because they don't want, they don't want the competition or they don't like the, they like the idea of somebody following them, but not too, not too close and not to. And his pride in the work that I did at Commentary and all of that were soul enhancing and a real example of what it means to be a genuinely spiritually generous person. So his passing, I'll miss him. But I am so happy that he moved on the way that he did, that he did not suffer, and that he died knowing that he was loved by the people who deserve to know him and deserve to love him. So that's why I thought it was meet and proper for me to come on and talk about him today, even though the official mourning period for him has not begun. Because the way you do this in Judaism is it begins with the interment and then comes the period of Shiva, the period of mourning, which will begin for me tomorrow afternoon. And so, yeah, we will not have a podcast tomorrow and we're working out how we're going to handle the next couple of weeks around the holidays. But thank you and thank all of you guys.
- [66:32]
H
Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month. Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com switch.
- [66:52]
G
Upfront payment of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.