Keep Your Powder Dry

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "Keep Your Powder Dry" – Detailed Summary

Release Date: November 18, 2024

In the "Keep Your Powder Dry" episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast, host John Podhoretz engages in a dynamic discussion with Executive Editor Abe Greenwald, Senior Editor Seth Mandel, and returning guest Noah Rothman. The conversation delves into recent political developments, controversial cabinet nominations, the evolving landscape of social media, the decline of liberal media outlets, and the United States' policy on the ongoing war in Ukraine.

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1. Aftermath of the 14th Annual Commentary Roast

The episode opens with a recount of the 14th Annual Commentary Roast held at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Contrary to expectations of a traditional roast, the event transformed into a series of tributes honoring Natan Sharansky, a revered Jewish hero.

• John Podhoretz [02:06]: "We roasted Natan Sharansky... but instead, it was just a series of tributes to a great Jewish hero."

• Seth Mandel [04:51]: "There was a roast of Natan Sharansky. It was done by Natan Sharansky himself."

Sharansky's unexpected twist impressed the attendees, highlighting his wit and admirable qualities, leaving little negative to critique humorously.

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2. Controversial Nominations for Trump's Cabinet

A significant portion of the discussion centers on President Trump's contentious cabinet nominations, including Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, and Tulsi Gabbard. The hosts express concerns over the potential scandals and lack of thorough vetting for these nominees.

• John Podhoretz [06:10]: "The nominations for Trump's Cabinet remain controversial and maybe getting a little more controversial by the day."

• Noah Rothman [08:47]: "In an earlier age, personal peccadilloes like that would be a bigger obstacle to your advancement onto this Cabinet."

The conversation highlights how nominees with turbulent personal histories could pose risks of compromised positions within the federal government. There's skepticism about the Senate's role in appropriately vetting these appointments, emphasizing the potential fallout from confirmations based on questionable backgrounds.

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3. Impact of Controversial Nominees on Senate Politics

The hosts explore the dynamics within the Senate regarding these nominations, questioning whether senators will prioritize constitutional duties over political pressures.

• Seth Mandel [16:02]: "Tulsi Gabbard, in trouble... she can just kicker to the curb. And who's gonna say her nay?"

• Noah Rothman [14:41]: "They're asking the Senate to set a fuse on a time bomb... the Senate would have to absorb whatever damage results when the thing blows up."

There's a consensus that confirming such nominees without thorough vetting could lead to significant political and ethical dilemmas, potentially damaging the Senate's credibility and the administration's integrity.

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4. Social Media's Role in Political Polarization

The discussion shifts to the rise of alternative social media platforms like Blue Sky, where liberal factions engage in internal disputes and "cancel" each other, exacerbating political divides.

• Seth Mandel [31:32]: "Apostasy is, in some ways, a lot nastier and brutish than anything else... People inside the bubble making trouble."

• John Podhoretz [33:14]: "Blue sky announced... more than 42,000 reports, an all-time high... complaints by people on the left about the political incorrectness of other people on the left."

The hosts critique the liberal community's withdrawal into these platforms, highlighting how internal conflicts and self-cancellations undermine their political efficacy and public presence.

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5. Decline of Liberal Media Outlets

A substantial segment addresses the diminishing influence of liberal media voices, particularly MSNBC and CNN, citing plummeting ratings and financial challenges.

• John Podhoretz [35:06]: "I'm talking about how they’re shrinking, because it’s not getting any news it likes to hear."

• Abe Greenwald [43:30]: "They already know who voted for Trump and why. They don’t like them already."

The hosts lament the lack of proactive engagement from liberal media in understanding and addressing their voter base, attributing this to strategic failures and internal biases that have weakened their ability to influence public discourse.

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6. US Policy and the War in Ukraine

The final discussion revolves around the United States' shifting stance on the war in Ukraine, particularly the decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMs (Army Tactical Missile Systems).

• John Podhoretz [67:01]: "We are following smaller and less powerful militaries in providing the aid that we should have been providing a year ago."

• Noah Rothman [75:47]: "There's nothing, there's no trade here. So I'm going to take something so I can trade. These are very simple concepts."

The conversation critiques the Biden administration's incremental and delayed military support, questioning its effectiveness and strategic coherence. The hosts speculate on how these policies may influence future administrations, particularly the potential for President Trump to adopt a more assertive or alternative approach in dealing with Russian aggression.

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7. Closing Remarks and Future Outlook

As the episode concludes, the hosts reflect on the broader implications of the discussed topics, emphasizing the need for vigilance and strategic foresight in political and media landscapes.

• John Podhoretz [81:38]: "We have a crisis because before the election, then right after the election, the owner of the Washington Post said, we're not endorsing because we're doing everything wrong."

• Noah Rothman [81:56]: "Our friendship with MSNBC... they are trying to intervene to save themselves in some fashion."

The hosts advocate for maintaining awareness and preparedness ("keeping our powder dry") in navigating the complexities of current political and social environments.

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Notable Quotes:

• John Podhoretz [04:04]: "Except that he's very short, but that's about it." (Referring humorously to Natan Sharansky)

• Noah Rothman [08:47]: "I think she's probably offered herself up to being compromised by foreign hostile powers." (Discussing Tulsi Gabbard)

• Seth Mandel [16:02]: "If Tulsi is any kind of trouble, he can just kicker to the curb." (On Trump's potential management of controversial nominees)

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This episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast offers a critical examination of contemporary political strategies, media influence, and international policy decisions, providing listeners with deep insights into the evolving American socio-political fabric.

Transcript

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[John Podhoretz]

This is.

[Noah Rothman]

The sound of your ride home with.

[John Podhoretz]

Dad after he caught you vaping.

[Noah Rothman]

Awkward, isn't it? Most vapes contain seriously addictive levels of nicotine and disappointment.

[John Podhoretz]

Know the real cost of vapes brought to you by the fda.

[Noah Rothman]

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

[John Podhoretz]

Some preach and pain Some diapers no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst.

[Noah Rothman]

Hope for the best.

[John Podhoretz]

Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, November 18, 2024. I am John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Matt Continetti and Christine Rosen are out today for reasons I will explain in a minute. So joining us is our old friend, the inceptor of the Commentary podcast, the man who was responsible for the fact that we do this at all and then left us for the balmy shores of National Review, but is joining us this morning after a wild night we all spent together, Noah Rothman. Noah, welcome back.

[Noah Rothman]

Thank you so much for having me. I don't know if this works anymore because there's video. So the reveal, if you're watching, there's no reveal.

[John Podhoretz]

That's right, there's no reveal. And look at that cute pun. You have cute punham here on the video. And we can see your book, Unjust over your right shoulder and a National Review cover over your left shoulder. This is. And a beautiful picture of your wife Jaron, there on the desk behind you to your left. So this is all a visual feast. And we were last.

[Seth Mandel]

In case anybody was wondering what the inceptor looks like and what the inceptor's office looks like.

[Abe Greenwald]

This is it.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes. Yes. He is the inceptor.

[Noah Rothman]

I like that title.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes. So we were all last night at the Plaza Hotel in New York for the 14th annual commentary roast, which is only 14. We actually missed a year because, of course, of the COVID year. But it still was our 14th roast. We roasted Natan Sharansky, you heard me many times say when I was pitching the roast Here on the podcast, if you were listening, how on earth are you going to roast the greatest living Jewish hero? And the great surprise was, and this was the great reveal, we didn't. There was no roast. It was just a series of tributes to a great Jewish hero. And Sharansky then got up and complained, complained that everybody was too polite and correct and that he expected something better from white male straight people who could be accused of being settler, colonialist and colonial oppressors. So showing, among other astounding qualities that Natan Sharansky possesses an extraordinary wit. He's an extraordinarily witty man.

[Noah Rothman]

Commentary. Got quite a ribbing commentary, which is do comeuppance. I don't know what you expected trying to roast a paragon, but the turnabout is fair play there.

[John Podhoretz]

I expected exactly what happened, which is that I, as I said, I drew people on false pretenses on the basis that maybe they would. This shocking thing was going to happen in front of them. And instead, you know, everybody just, just fell over themselves talking, talking nicely about, about Natan Sharansky, which is actually extremely easy to do in every possible way because he's not only a great hero exemplar of bravery, courage, nine years in the Gulag and then sort of 40 years advocating for freedom and democracy around the world, but he's also a nice guy and he's also a really hilarious guy. And so there's almost nothing bad that you could say about him, except that he's very short, but that's about it. And I don't even know why that's bad.

[Seth Mandel]

And one small correction, there was a roast of Natan Sharansky. It was done by Natan Sharansky.

[John Podhoretz]

That's correct.

[Seth Mandel]

He roasted himself to show the crowd how to do it.

[John Podhoretz]

Could have gone. He was very disappointed, very disappointed.

[Seth Mandel]

He brought up his puppet. He had, you know, he had on an Israeli, you know, satirical, satirical show years ago. He brought up the puppet that they used to make fun of him and, you know, he was ready for it.

[John Podhoretz]

He was great. He was absolutely ready for it. And it was really a wonderful evening. Five hundred and fifty people were present. The room was electric and alive with energy. A lot of podcast listeners came and it was thrilling and delightful to meet them as they seemed thrilled and delighted to meet us. And we'll have another one next year. And if you're listening and have thought about coming, I'll tell you when. And you wanna, you're gonna wanna get your tickets early because we actually did sell out and the ballroom was too crowded, like, it was. It was. We were packed in like sardines. So it was like I said, it.

[Seth Mandel]

Was like a small wedding outside.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they had to. Yeah, we had to. We had to sort of open the room up. I said it was like a small haredi wedding. And so for those who. Those who know what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, but, yeah, so it was really a glorious evening. But now we're back to reality, and the reality is that the nominations for Trump's Cabinet remain controversial and maybe getting a little more controversial by the day. Story about Pete Hegseth, the defense nominee, having settled a sexual assault claim against him for an undisclosed amount of money with a, you know, no finding a fault, no guilt, no nothing. But of course it was bound to come out. And here you have the problem with not doing vetting because obviously Hegseth, had he been properly interviewed or something, would have had to tell the vetters. He's got a messy personal life. He would have had to sort of go into it and lay it out to them so that they could go to Trump and say, well, look, here are the pros, here are the cons. That's not what happened, obviously. And so we're going to have to see where this goes. It seems unfair to deny somebody a confirmation based on something in which he was found at no fault. And that was settled the way that it was settled. But senators, there's nothing to prevent a senator from voting against or for someone. The advising consent rule doesn't say you can't vote for someone if you don't like the. You can vote against them if you don't like the cut of their jib. And that's. And of course, we have another candidate in Matt Gaetz at Justice who similarly has this sword hanging over his head of a. Of a Ethics Committee investigation that involved his connection to somebody who was found to have been a sex trafficker of some kind. He was not found guilty of that, but a story apparently was surfaced that he had. He had sexual relations with an underage girl. And not the best way to start your Cabinet, I think, Noah.

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah, so, I mean, in an earlier age, personal peccadilloes like that would be a bigger obstacle to your advancement onto this Cabinet. It is Donald Trump's Cabinet which changes the equation. It's not just because it's kind of icky. We don't like that behavior and conduct in people who we think should be figures, role models. People to whom you should aspire to emulate. It's that you can open yourself up to being compromised. And that's a big concern in the federal government. It's why we have FBI, should have FBI background checks. I'm less concerned about that in he case, just because his personal issues are pretty public and have been for some time. People are just learning about them now. But he's been a public figure for a very long time, and this is part of his. Part of his personal rap sheet, as it were. I'm more concerned about Gates and I'm more concerned about Tulsa Gabbard Gates, obviously, because we don't know what we don't know. And there's a lot in there, apparently, about this very voluminous file of personal indignities that he seems to so often court. But Tulsi Gabbard has trotted around the world offering herself up to some of the world's worst regimes. I don't think her information security on those sojourns is probably all that sterling. And I think she's probably offered herself up to being compromised by foreign hostile powers. At least the opportunity is there and has been there for years. So I very much like to see a more thorough background check on her, and I suspect we won't be getting one for that very reason.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, so the question with Gabbard is always. I mean, you bring up this question of whether or not she is somebody who should be denied confirmation for the Director of National Intelligence because she cannot be trusted with national secrets. But the counter to that is Trump should get the picks that he wants and that we have no reason. Presumed presumption of innocence would suggest that you don't presume that she was somehow compromised and that if he wants her, he could have her. As long as the Senate says that he can have her and the Senate can decide to think what you think about her. There isn't going to be any more vetting. She's already been. I mean, I guess she hasn't been formally nominated. She's only been nominated by truth Social statement release, press release. So nominations are actually formal processes in which you submit a nomination through channels and has to be, you know, it was sent officially and all of that. Usually it used to be that you wouldn't even do that before you were sworn in because, of course, you don't have any official standing as a president elect. There is no such position, really. But allowances have been made for the continuity of government. And Colin Powell was, like, confirmed before Bush was sworn in that kind of thing. So there are precedents to this. But. So she hasn't been formally. None of them has been formally nominated through the nomination procedure. And so I guess they could be pulled before they even are formally nominated. But clearly Trump has decided he's not going to vet. They're not going to vet. It's going to be up to the Senate to do its own vetting and if a vet is necessary. Or you could just literally have this question of whether or not four senators say. And different senators maybe say, no, I can't vote for. Four of them have to say, no, I can't vote for Gabbard. Four of them can say, I can't vote for Gates. Four of them could say, I can't vote for Hegseth. They could sit around and figure out who's what. So that it's not that they all. They all. It's only four people. And that therefore they get the Trump and the MAGA target on their foreheads. If it's 12 different senators, it's a little harder to sort of target them for destruction. But I don't know. A lot can happen here. Nothing is. Nothing is really set and set in stone.

[Abe Greenwald]

It kind of reminds me the, where we're at with it reminds me of the rhythm of Trump news, which is that there's this flurry. It's like the first round. It's a blistering round. So now you wait for this. Whatever happens in the second round, you're already a little bit numb to it. You know, he's already softened you up and nothing's going to shock you. There's not going to be any wow, holy ass texts this week about picks because he's put us through that sense.

[Noah Rothman]

Of resignation washing over the Senate Republicans, but he's asking them to buy into the inevitable scandal that will result from a confirmation of Matt Gaetz, maybe Tulsi Gabbard. I don't know about Hegseth, but maybe. And who knows what other shocking figures are coming down the pike. But he's saying, Senate, you have to sacrifice your advice and consent role in the Constitution, give even more power to the executive, and don't worry about the precedents there and just give me who I want, because that's the standard operating procedure. President gets who he wants. Maybe you get to police a kook here or there, but that's all you get. Just one bite at that apple and then give the rest over to me and demonstrate your loyalty to me, and then your political careers will be fine, because all you have to worry about is a primary. That dynamic is pretty foreseeable, but they are, they are asking the Senate to set a fuse on a time bomb. And the Senate would have to absorb whatever damage results when the thing blows up. Not if, when the thing blows up. They should know.

[John Podhoretz]

Seth, let's talk about that. So what, what, what would constitute the thing blowing up? Would it be that there would be an actual confirmation hearing at which Democrats, as well as Republicans get to get to ask questions and get to ask uncomfortable questions and obviously Republicans and people doing PR for Republicans and for Trump and their, you know, the blocking tackles on social media and all that will simply say the Democrats have no credibility here. They have no authority. Look, look at the crazies that they, that they allowed to con, you know, Rachel Levine and, and the, the, the trans, the trans guy who was in charge of, of, of nuclear, military, nuclear energy. And, you know, like, you confirmed them, so how can you not confirm? So, and so, on the other hand, these questions are legitimate questions and they will make news and you can say that you can dismiss them. I think once they're in office, they get confirmed and they're in office. I don't know what blows up exactly, except if they're exceptional, if they're, if they behave well, what blows up. That's what I think.

[Seth Mandel]

I, So I think that for Tulsi Gabbard, you're looking for a Michael Flynn type of situation. That's what she reminds me of most. Mike Flynn was initially selected as, at the time, his national security advisor.

[Noah Rothman]

Right?

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

That's what Trump wanted him. And so, and then all this stuff came out about how he had been, his lobbying work and his work with Turkey. Turkey, by the way, plays a very funny role in American politics these days. We have the mayor of New York City indicted. The first, the first sitting mayor is indicted on this stuff, and it's because of Turkey. But Flynn just had so much stuff that came out, and then, you know, Obama's people leaked that he had or claimed to have warned Trump about Flynn. And, and that was, that was not something that made it all that far. It. There was this tidal wave of, oh, my God, this guy really is a security issue. And Tulsi, that's what would blow Tulsi up as well. If she just sounds like a dove, if she just sounds like she's more pro Russia than we would all be comfortable with, it doesn't blow up. I would like it to, but if that's the case. But the line is further down the line is, Mike Flynn. That's what you're looking for. And anything that makes Trump sensitive to the claim, the accusation that he is once again in hock to foreign powers, that's the thing that will make him.

[John Podhoretz]

I think, cut someone loose or not or the opposite. Because, of course, you know, I loathe Michael Flynn, and I think he is. He's a crazy person and has become a crazy person and says disgusting things and he's appalling. But the things that happened that led him resigning after three weeks as national security adviser were trumped up. I mean, the idea that it was illegitimate for him to call the Russians and say, hold off on doing bad stuff, you know, but he was.

[Abe Greenwald]

But he was paid by Russian linked firms to.

[Noah Rothman]

I don't think that would have gotten. It was that. You're right about the trigger, but I don't think that would have gotten him without all the credit.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, all the back.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, he was paid to.

[John Podhoretz]

That was the news event, was the phone call with the Russian foreign minister. That was the triggering event. There was other stuff about him like that he had been paid by Russia Today to go on air and give speeches and things like that. But even that is not really disqualifying. And Trump may think that Flynn got a raw deal. This, again, goes to questions about Trump. We don't really know yet, which is. I don't think he's a loyal person. He doesn't show loyalty down. So he's very transactional. And so he picks Tulsi. If Tulsi is any kind of trouble, he can just kicker to the curb. And who's gonna. Who's gonna say him nay? Who's gonna say, I'm sorry, that's it. I supported you. But your treatment of Tulsi Gabbard, I mean, maybe Glenn Greenwald, who seems to have become a Trumper, would, like, be upset that he ditched Tulsi Gabbard.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, there's also that element of, I.

[John Podhoretz]

Don'T know who's gonna get mad at Trump for ditching anybody, because the people who would get mad at him for ditching Gates or Hegseth or Gabbard are MAGA first. Right. They want.

[Seth Mandel]

But MAGA is also not right. MAGA also doesn't care who they cut loose. As soon as Trump wants to cut somebody loose, his followers, as you say. Well, but I think that there's the question of how much did they do for Trump? And Tulsi Gabbard is in trouble in that sense, because nobody is arguing that Tulsi Gabbard, you know, brought the voters to the yard. Whereas RFK is a much more complicated figure in that sense. He has a base, he has a following. He represents some strain of thinking and some strain of culture that is, that is greater than zero in American society and in politics. And when he dropped, and he specifically dropped out of the race to endorse Trump, we don't know how he might have done, but he is, he is a figure that will have more backing, I think, because he can make the case that he really did help Trump get there and that maybe there's some reason for loyalty. I don't, I think Gabbard looks to me like someone Trump likes and a hanger on and I think those types can get cut really easily. And I think that Matt Gaetz has been very loyal to Trump for a while and he falls somewhere in the middle. So I think Trump is going to look at, you know, does it, should it matter? Would it matter to me if this guy were never here in my movement, in my campaign at all? And the answer for Tulsi is it probably would have never mattered. Matt Gates didn't bring anybody new. But that's why I think RFK is going to be stickier and have the ability to get through where the others do. And I think Hegseth the same. I think Hegseth is probably not going to lose Trump's support.

[John Podhoretz]

He's, he might though. I mean, it's not that he'll lose his support. It'll be more like, it'll be more like what do I need this source for? Like, I don't, I don't need this. And look, he fired three White House chiefs of staff. He fired three national security advisers. He, he fired, he fired two defense secretaries or three defense secretaries. I mean, he has no problem.

[Abe Greenwald]

That was when he, in his thinking, he wasn't picking his people. These are his people. Yeah, and that's that. That was a big part of his going into this.

[Noah Rothman]

They weren't penetrated because they were too disruptive. Like we're just trying to have a really calm, well oiled machine here, guys, and you're messing up the works. No, and this is, there's a faction of the MAGA movement, we don't know how receptive or beholden Trump is to it, that wants to see disruption on a broad scale. And to a certain extent they have a point. But they overestimate the appetite for disruption and chaos. And the sort of day to day mania of Trump administration won, which I think actually Sapped quite a lot of enthusiasm for his movement. What voted voters didn't vote for more Trump chaos. But there's a big faction of the movement that thinks, well, we have a mandate now to move fast and break things.

[John Podhoretz]

I think that's. This is a very important point. So if you take MAGA and you sort of figure out where the MAGA vote is in terms of the United States, if, you know, if you use the primary as an example, it's around 17%. So that is a very large faction of people, but it's still, you know, only a third of his overall vote total. So 17%. He's not running again. Right. He's done after this term. And they only exist to coalesce behind him. So the idea that he needs to do base service is, I think, I don't think that's anything that he would necessarily think I'm psychoanalyzing him or politics, just assuming that he has relatively comprehensible political instincts. So the question is the disruption, which he wants also. But could you say to him, look, you can get what you get with Matt Gaetz, with Mike Lee, who would be just as disruptive, but would be. Would. Is an adult, you know, doesn't have, like, skeletons in his closet. Pick Mike Lee. He'll do it. He'll do what you want, he'll be loyal to you, or something like that. And at which point, maybe, again, I think we figure that at least one of these four incredibly controversial nominations is not going to make it past off the launching pad. Could be more than that. And that in part will be because Trump says, yeah, you know what? I thought this was a great idea. But you know what? There's a lot of fish in the sea and I am the disruptor. So I don't know. Again, I don't think the loyalty necessarily goes in both directions. And he likes rfk, obviously, and he does want that world disrupted. And he does think that vaccines cause autism. He dropped it, but he certainly believed it at one point in his life. And so he's got an ally there. And so, I don't know. I mean, part of the difficulty for us. I was thinking about this, and Matt and Christine not being here makes this a slightly different or truncated conversation. But since we do this every day and since Abe, you're already talking about how the Trump news is so intense, and we only started doing five days a week in March of 2020 because of COVID and the idea was we were going to talk about COVID almost exclusively, you know, keeping Our powder dry and not becoming sort of like a. Just to sort of like a daily scream of nervous Nelly hysteria about everything that happens is going to be a bit of a challenge because he does have the ability, even now, it appears, to drive the news in a way that the Biden people certainly never even wanted to drive the news. A lot of the news Biden made or the Biden people made was news that they made because they did stupid or bad or dumb things and then the world reacted to them, which would be the same with Trump. But he also makes news on his own. And I think how we're going to remain calm while talking about this Aberra, you're muted.

[Abe Greenwald]

It's such a good point. Because the worst thing that can happen that is that people covering the administration, they follow, they run down this development, that development, this development, the next one, everyone. And then they actually miss the story. They miss the larger story, which has, which is, which did happen with him in his first administration. Constantly with the mainstream news happened during the election, for sure. The outrage becomes sideshow spectacle. He likes that. I'm certain for no other reason. He's thrilled with his pick so far because they make news in this way. He is. He has blown up, you know, newsrooms just by virtue of who he's picked so far. He's not. He hasn't been sworn in and he's already off and running. And they will be following and they will. They, meaning the media. They will overshoot their mark. They will run down various stories on all these nominees and some of them will be overblown and they will look silly. Some of them will be on target.

[Noah Rothman]

Have these newsrooms blown up and had this anxiety attack. How would we even know? Because they're all retreating to Blue sky and talking to each other in Jamel Bouie and we have no idea what conversations are happening behind that veil.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, we can join Blue sky too, and watch, apparently. So. Blue sky, in case you don't know, Blue sky is a rival social media network. And over the course of the last two weeks, liberals on Twitter deciding that somehow Twitter was unfair to them. Talk about that in a minute. Have, have my. A million people have opened accounts on Blue sky, the idea being that Blue sky would be a more favorable atmosphere. They won't get flooded with negative comments from conservatives, whatever. And it's a fascinating game because whatever happened. And the idea was Musk was going to destroy Twitter when he bought it and he was going to. He was crippling it by firing 85% of the staff. And he was doing this and he was doing that. And Twitter never lost its perch as the communications device for the media. Its most important job in the culture is that it allows people in the media to talk to each other who don't even know each other and to know what they're thinking about, what they're obsessing over, what's coming down the pike, what the news is now. And there's this idea that maybe we can cripple Twitter's ability to control the news agenda by. We all just. We're all going to go over into this corner and be on our own social media platform, and then we'll talk to each other, and then they won't come and talk to us. Which reminds me of a story from the very beginning of the Internet. Before there was an Internet was aol. So AOL was like pre. Right. Pre Internet, kind of. And there were chat rooms at aol. And there was a. I think it was a vegetarian or a vegan chat room. And Rush Limbaugh, then, in his earliest days as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, but had become a sensation. This is maybe 90, 91, something like that, instructed his people, and he used AOL like he was aol. He had message boards and stuff like that. And he said, let's all go over to the vegan chat room and tell everybody they should eat steak or something like that. And they basically went to the vegan chat room, the ditto heads who listened to Limbaugh. I just think this is a hilarious thing. And they went and they started saying, I love meat and this and that. And basically the vegan chat room was abandoned by the vegans who decided, you know, that they had been invaded and that there was. They. They were powerless to prevent it because you could. Anyone could join any. Any chat room. And so this is what. So if they go to Blue sky, everybody else can go to Blue sky, too, and go there just to troll them. And apparently what's funny about Blue sky is there's some kind of complaint. I haven't joined it yet, but there's some kind of complaint section and. Or like, something where you can click and say someone's said or done something offensive and that they.

[Noah Rothman]

That button gets a workout.

[John Podhoretz]

Wait, no, apparently it does. Blue sky announced, like, last week, sent out a general message saying, we've been overwhelmed by, you know, complaints. And so we're, you know, we're going through them methodically. We promised you we would. But apparently these are complaints by people on the left about the political incorrectness of other people on the left.

[Seth Mandel]

Right? So this is the mezzanine.

[John Podhoretz]

So they're all canceling each other in their own safe space. They're all going like the people, People's Judean Front and the Popular Front of Judea. They're going at each other with hammer and tongs.

[Seth Mandel]

Here are, here are the numbers. As Blueski, as I call it, Blue sky, In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports, an all time high. For one day we're receiving about 3,000 reports per hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360,000 reports. So that was, that was the message they sent out to people saying, be patient with us. We're trying to go through every tweet that people don't like and they're.

[Noah Rothman]

I'm.

[Seth Mandel]

See, I'm calling it tweets, by the way. I don't know what they call it on Blue Ski, but messages, whatever posts, you know, but this is the thing, is that, you know, Noah, I mean, Noah, you basically wrote a book on, on this, or half a book at least on it, on the, on the way that the search for heretics within the liberal world, right?

[Noah Rothman]

Apostasy.

[Seth Mandel]

In this apostasy is that is in some ways a lot more, a lot nastier and brutish than anything else. And that the people who come out to be hated the most are the ones who violate the safe space or what is supposed to be the bubble. If you. It's one thing to, you know, they expect people on the outside of the bubble to make trouble. That's why they built the bubble. But we built the bubble and you're inside the bubble making trouble. That's, you know, right.

[John Podhoretz]

The best.

[Seth Mandel]

That seems to be sort of what's happening.

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[Abe Greenwald]

My favorite part of this is the timing though, because they all decided to go to Blue sky or as Seth says, Blue Ski, which I will now say they all decided to go to Blue Ski when Trump won. Because these are people who think the Internet or social media is the real world and they needed a new real world. They didn't like the world that existed the day after Trump won. Because if you're a hawkish Zionist, Twitter is always a sewer. I mean, it was I, you know, I was getting anti Semitic death threats before Musk. I get him after Musk. Nothing has changed. You know, only if you are a snowflake whose candidate loses. Then you go, I'm leaving. I'm out of this universe.

[Noah Rothman]

I mean, clearly the value proposition here is that it's an epistemic, epistemologically cloistered environment. But the other one is that you can cancel people again, right? I mean, that's what they're doing. They're hitting the cancel button left and right. You couldn't get that done on Twitter anymore. Now we get to cancel doesn't. I mean, we're canceling our own people, but they're the only targets available out there. You got to get the cancel fix, you know, scratched somehow.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, so let's talk a little about this, because there is an amazing, amazing, amazing story in the New York Times from yesterday. Shira Frankel reporting from San Francisco. Liberals are left out in the cold as social media veers right. Hundreds of thousands of posts lauding Mr. Trump's victory filled Truth Social, the social platform that the president elect owns. Speculation about what the new administration would accomplish ran rampant on X, which is owned by Elon Musk. Gab Parlor and other right wing social media sites were flooded with thousands of memes glorifying Mr. Trump. No similar spaces existed for the left. Meta's Instagram threads and Facebook had publicly de emphasized politics leading up to the election. Mr. Musk had transformed Twitter into X and shifted it to the right. It has become starkly evident that the left, the Democrats, do not have the same social media platforms to push their agenda, said Philip Walzaki, a political consultant based in New York. It has left Democrats with a huge deficit. Now, let's just, let's just parse this for a second. Anyone can be on X. Anyone can be on Twitter. Anyone can be on any social media platform. What are they talking about? What happened was they ran a senile person and then they ran a clueless person, and Democrats and liberals got depressed and they had nothing positive to say. And here is the proof of that. The online disparity was evident on November 5th when President when Kamala Harris and Mr. Trump shared messages on social media urging people to vote. Mr. Trump's posts were more widely shared and liked than those by Ms. Harris and her campaign, according to a New York Times review of social media platforms. On Facebook, Mr. Trump's most popular election day post was liked nearly 160,000 times and shared by more than 15,000 people. Ms. Harris most popular Facebook post was liked 18,000 times and shared by 1500 people. And on Instagram, an image that Mr. Trump posted was liked over 2.1 million times. Ms. Harris's most popular post that day was liked 569,000 times. So it's not that they didn't have access, it's that they withdrew their affect. These were signposts of what was going to happen on Election Day. The electorate, according to all these studies over the last two or three weeks, shifted six points to the right in aggregate nationally from 2020, they have access to the social media platforms. They're just not behaving. And people aren't behaving. Liberals and Democratic voters aren't behaving. They're not out there as shock troops because they have been. They've crushed themselves in some fashion, either through the process of Biden making sure that he wasn't primaried so that he then did the switcheroo and cut the heart out of the party, or because they cancel each other so much that everybody got too scared of posting anything. And then comes the news this morning, Noah, about our former, our friends at our former friends at msnbc. Our friends at msnbc, maybe not former on Morning Joe. So Joe and Mika, what did they do this weekend, though?

[Noah Rothman]

Well, I'm, I know about as much about this as you do, which is to say that the tweet, post, whatever it is, crossed my transom and then swiftly disappeared. But I saw it. And from what I gather, there has been a detente. The Joanne Mika made a sojourn, presumably with heads bowed, to Mar a Lago, where they met with Donald Trump. And they have a lot of disagreements, but what they agree on is the need to open up a dialogue. So this is like Nixon to China. Here we are, we are breaking down the barriers that have been built up over these years. All the, it's all fallen away and we're going to at least begin talking to each other again as opposed to at each other again. There's a lot of play, there's a lot of areas to go for go here. But I mean, the first, are any.

[John Podhoretz]

Of them not funny? Because I think they're all funny. But maybe you can say something earnest, see if you can find something earnest to say.

[Noah Rothman]

I'm going as close as I'm going to go do as good as I can. So after 2016, you know, the phenomena was that media outlets, including Morning Joe and many others, said, we don't understand this country anymore. There's an aspect of this country that is ascendant, indeed dominant, and we don't have. Not only do we not have our finger on that pulse, but we do not get it. So they started paradropping reporters into Diners in Middle America, book writers, magazine profile writers, all these people who were conducting an anthropological study of the MAGA movement and its members. And you didn't see that this time around. Once when Trump won the election, it was more of a sense of resignation and betrayal, indeed, like a deep wounding betrayal. And it wasn't the shock and even sort of penitent at an acknowledgement of professional failures. You just didn't see any of that. And this is the first sign or example of something approaching contrition from the folks who were pounding the table very hard and saying, you know, this. And I was among them. I did not think Donald Trump is somebody who was capable of engineering the kind of restoration for himself that he did, but I wasn't shocked by the outcome. And it seems like a lot of the folks who were just talking to themselves in this bubble were shocked by the outcome and betrayed by it. And there's an element of contrition that you would need to see. And we haven't seen it from reporters. We've seen something more like resolve to, as we said in the, the Blueski, you know, conversation to retreat into their, into their, their corners that, you know, ratify what they already believe and not address whatever professional shortcomings led to this moment. And it's, it's good to see Joe and Mika say, no, we're going to go the other way. We're going to, we're going to revive this sort of tired, sort of trite, make fun of all 2016 style. But it was the right approach in 2016, and it's the right one now. It just was never engaged in sincerely.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, you know, I really like, by the way, that we've already got the Blueski thing going.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes. Canon now I think you have memed. You've made a meme. It's an oral meme. Can that work?

[Seth Mandel]

I'll have to ask my kids.

[John Podhoretz]

We're pushing it. We're going to push it. We're going to see if we can push it out. People go there, make little, you know, do that thing on Google where it's like, how do you pronounce B, L, U, E, S? K Y. And then it's like blueski instead of blue sky. Go ahead.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think in 2016, there was a thread of earnestness going, striking through the. Those journalists who said, and of course, it is very easy to make fun of, who are these people who voted for Trump? I have no idea who they are. I have no idea what they were thinking. I didn't know they existed. So they were. That sparked the genuine curiosity. They got bored real quick. They. They dropped it. But I think the difference this time around is I think when mainstream journalists are being honest with themselves and not often, but when they are, they do they already know who voted for Trump and why. They don't like them already. So they're not there. This interest in Trump, America is no longer an interest. It's just a sort of spent disdain.

[Seth Mandel]

The one example of that I'll say, though, is those who have seen the ticket splitting and realize that they do have to figure something out. I mean, AOC went on Instagram, I think it was last week, and actually did a public service. This is me praising AOC when she said, I noticed a lot of you voted for me and also Donald Trump. Please, please explain yourselves why you would vote for me and Donald Trump. And she posted the responses. This was the public service. She didn't. And they were basically like, I think you guys are both real and everybody else is fake. I think that you guys are outside of the establishment, and I don't trust the establishment. There was a lot of stuff like that. But there is this realization, and we tried this in 2016. We tried to explain to people, if somebody voted for Barack Obama twice, and then Donald Trump, you need that voter. You understand? That's the voter you need. That's the guy. Figure out why he went the way he went. But you can't write off the Barack Obama, Donald Trump voter. And so I think some of these AOC at least had the wherewithal to say, wait, are my voters also like that? Now I have AOC Trump voters, right? And so I think that some of the, some of them, at least in Congress, are starting to at least realize that that crossover vote is their own vote, too.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay? So I want to give you guys, I want to commend you guys because you went, you found earnest things to say about Joe and Mika going to Mar A Lago, and I commend you. And I think you are, you're wonderful, but you're, the three of you, you're ridiculous. They went to Mar a Lago because MSNBC's ratings have plunged 80%. 80%.

[Seth Mandel]

We saw Manski. I thought there was going to be a roast.

[John Podhoretz]

I cited. I cited this story about how nobody on social media was responding to Kamala Harris and how the liberal responses represented by Shira Frankel here in the New York Times and others is to say, well, that's just because we don't have a social media platform we control.

[Noah Rothman]

I mean, you're right.

[John Podhoretz]

Everybody's got a clicker and a TV set, and if they're not watching MSNBC or cnn, they're also on the dial, just like Fox. They're right there. So you can hit here in New York, Channel 14 or Channel 78 and watch CNN or MSNBC, or you can hit 44 and watch Fox. Just like you can go to Instagram, TikTok, you can go to Facebook, you can go to X. They're not going because they're shrinking, because they shrank and they're shrinking and the viewership is shrinking because it's not getting any news it likes to hear. And this is a crisis because before the election, then right after the election, the owner of the Washington Post said, we're not endorsing because we're doing everything wrong. I'm losing $100 million a year on this paper. And whatever we did to go democracy dies in darkness. Which worked like in the first Trump term. It's not working anymore, and I'm losing an enormous amount of money. Comcast is thinking of selling MSNBC to get it off its plate because it has. It doesn't need the trouble that MSNBC. MSNBC makes a lot of money. MSNBC makes $200 million a year in profits. CNN makes money like that in profit. But that money is about to go away because that money is mostly in what are called carriage fees from cable companies. And as people cut the cable cord, those fees are going to go way down. And it's not coming from advertising. And Morning Joe is looking at another three, four years before it craters. And they basically run ridiculousness or something like from mtv or they run. They run my pillow ads or the leftist version of my pillow ads infomercials on this channel until it goes away. So they are trying to intervene to save themselves in some fashion by going to Munich and offering peace for our time. They think he's Hitler and now they're going to break bread with him. I'm sorry, that is clown show behavior. You don't get to say he's Hitler on November 5th and then go break bread with him on November 16th. I mean, you can go right ahead. You know, Yasher cost you. You're doing great.

[Abe Greenwald]

But look, I have.

[John Podhoretz]

We.

[Abe Greenwald]

We've got to say this is a zag after a zig after a zag on their part already. I mean, for being honest, John, I remember you being on that show when Trump got the nomination in 2016, and Mika and Joe reassuring you that everything was going to be all right, that you were being too hysterical, you were too upset about this.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes, that is correct.

[Abe Greenwald]

And everything was fine. And then they zagged.

[John Podhoretz]

And then they zagged because their audience needed them to zag. And let's talk about Twitter and cancellation and why there's no escape, why they are in a maze that they cannot get out of. Right after these tweets about the Anton. Them saying, you know, we're gonna. Whatever, we're gonna open lines of communication or something like that. Ron Filipowski, who is a. Who is a guy in Florida who started an immensely useful Twitter feed for the left where he clips crazy things that right wingers say. And then he became. He started running this website called the Midas Touch or Midas Touch or something like that. And they have a podcast that's very successful. And Filipowski said, morning Joe has jumped the shark. And I'm like, oh, boy, it's time. They are eating their own. Here it is. The Bolsheviks are killing the Mensheviks. As I said, the People's Front of Judea is going after the Judean People's Front. I have problems with Trump. I have problems with these nominations and all of that, but if they are going to have a civil war on the left, I am so there for it. This is like my dream come true to watch them eat each other alive.

[Noah Rothman]

It seems like it'll be a sparsely populated battlefield, though. Like, I mean, the.

[John Podhoretz]

There's enough. There are enough people. There are enough people to destroy a good show. Yeah.

[Noah Rothman]

The point that you're making, though, is the most fascinating one, is that Trump, even before Trump, won, if you count the 250,000 Washington Post subscriptions that disappeared overnight, but the cable news, CNN and MSNBC cratering. It's like the left is simply just withdrawing from the political process. They're not as energized and aggravated as they were in 2016. They're just deflated and kind of hard to find. I don't think the left per se, or the media who are beholden to or allied with Democrats can do anything affirmatively to change that. Trump can. Trump can do something to re energize this coalition, and he probably will in relatively short order. But they do seem remarkably deflated.

[Seth Mandel]

There's no last time he. There's no women's march. The last one, and that was in one. They were in the streets immediately. And I think that's the energy, Noah, that you're referring to. There is. Well, let's, let's use. Let's use the word of the year. There's a crime that isn't there set.

[Noah Rothman]

This race as we knew it was ignited by the airport protests. Right. And that was a response, but that was.

[John Podhoretz]

The airport protests happened after the inauguration. The women's march happened the weekend of the inauguration. Yeah. And he handed them this huge issue, but they were still running on crazy energy from three and a half million people in the streets protesting the incoming president. And so they were loaded for bear when he announced the Muslim ban. I don't know if that can happen now. And I do think that we were all wrong. I think a lot of us thought, and the D.C. police made it clear that they thought this, too, that there were going to be riots in the streets if Trump won. Remember that D.C. police insisted that all these downtown locations board themselves up around the White House, around Lafayette park, around, you know, everywhere in case there were riots. And there were no riots. There have been no riots. Maybe they'll start. But I think that a couple of the facts of the election have, like, stabbed liberal and leftist conventional wisdom so profoundly in the heart that they, or, you know, have like, punctured their lungs and they can't get their air back. Like, the main thing being the numbers with Hispanic voters. That isn't supposed to happen. Doctor. The religious doctrine of the left is identitarian. And I heard John Heileman, the famous, you know, American journalist on Hacks on Tap, this podcast with David Alexerod and Mike Murphy saying, I just, I just, it doesn't. I still can't make sense out of the fact that Hispanics voted for this man who calls for deportations, who says nasty things about a judge who, you know, does all that. I just, I understand it happened, but I can't wrap my mind around it. And I'm like, I can. You guys are all totalitarians. They don't like it. They don't like being told what to think. They're all legal. Everyone who didn't vote. Everyone who votes in America is illegal, is a legal immigrant in this country and doesn't. And if they don't like illegals, they don't somehow like them more because Their names end with a vowel, maybe. Is that hard to understand? Maybe a lot of them been here two, three generations. You know what? Puerto Ricans are Americans, period. So, yeah, maybe they could have been insulted by Tony Hinchcliffe. Or maybe they're like, you're doing it again with a comic. The guy's a comic. It wasn't funny. Makes me sick. I'm not gonna blame Trump for it. I mean, it's not hard to understand unless you are bathed. Drenched. Unless you have been marinated in these ideas for two, three decades, you know, and you are now being forced to confront the reality that the public isn't buying. It doesn't want boys and women's in pools with girls. It doesn't want boys playing women's volleyball, punching them in the head and partially paralyzing them because they're willing to wear a dress. Can I just want that?

[Abe Greenwald]

On the question of there being no resistance march, no women's march yet, I think something that has taken the steam out of that is actually the woke jihad protests that have been going on across the country and on campuses and in the streets. Because these were thousands and thousands and thousands of people protesting the Biden administration. Actually, that was, you know, among other things. But they. Among their targets was the Biden administration, who was supposedly facilitating and supporting a genocide. So they don't see the Trump Biden or Trump Harris dichotomy as such a dichotomy, because for them, the problem is the is. Is the US Supporting Israel, period. And that's a. That's a huge number of people who are now who would otherwise have been repurposed to. To oppose Trump. And that's not. That's not where their energy is.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, you know, this is. This is a great point because I think I thought, and I think I said here, like, they were getting training for what they would do after the election. Like, they'd spent a year. They were. They were like, they had learned how to do this and they would do it. They would turn it. We're sitting here going, these picks, Zionist publication. These picks are amazing. I don't know what's going on here. This is like my, you know, this is like a Zionist dream come true, this administration. It's unbelievable, right? They don't see any difference. They don't know. They don't know that appointing Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to Israel is a giant way of poking. Not just poking them in the eye, because maybe it's not a poke in their eye, it's a Poke in the eye of Aaron David Miller and the entire foreign policy establishment that says that Israel is part of the problem and all that. And not to mention Hegseth who said that Israel should pile up bodies in Gaza. I know I shouldn't laugh at that, but I can't help it. You know, Rubio and Mike Waltz and all that. Like, it's unbelievable. But they think that Biden was a Zionist stooge. So we know he wasn't. We think that he changed colors and tunes in around December of 2023 and has became a net negative for Israel in its pursuit of its aims in Gaza and then against Hezbollah and Iran. But if they don't think so, then they got nothing to protest. They think there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two.

[Noah Rothman]

It's a Leninist approach. They want to heighten the contradictions. They don't want the soft, squishy, moderate regime. They want the one that is the most detestable on their terms so they can hasten the vanguard of the revolution.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, there's also, or I told you so, or they are genuinely tickled, many of them that can say, we told you, Kamala Harris, that you would lose if you didn't change course. You didn't change course and you lost. And there's an element of I told you so there that pumps them up, that makes them feel like they played a role in this and all that.

[Noah Rothman]

I think there's something to that when it comes to the results in Dearborn. I honestly do, because there is this rearguard action now on the, you know, a part of some conservatives to say, well, you know, this, the Muslim American community is socially very conservative. I mean, this is the line that we've been hearing from certain quarters on the right for 20 years now. Very socially conservative, has instincts that should align them with the Republican Party. It's not as though these voters went out and just stuck a thumb in Kamala Harris eye over her Israel policy and then voted for an even stronger Israel policy that they supposedly don't like. Right? No, that's exactly what they did. We talk about a metaphor for the entire history of the Middle east in the, in. In the last 50 years. Yeah, we're going to vote for the guy that we don't like even more. Just a sticker to you.

[John Podhoretz]

Anyway, I just. The manifold ironies are great. The issue here is that the country moved right under Biden in response to Biden move five to six points to the right between 20 and 24. That's the story of the election. It's a large story. It has many ramifications. It may have this ramification on how they're behaving on social media and how they're consuming media and how they're going to react over time. You can't assume that they are going to remain quiescent or depressed forever. That's not the way politics works. So far, it doesn't appear that these nominations are stimulating the kind of response that maybe Democrats would have hoped for. But, you know, they'll get back off the mat. I'm just saying it's where they're not going to get back off the mat. Is that their control of the media messaging, which they had the high ground on for eight years, so much so that Trump was kicked off of Twitter, kicked off of the medium that he had sort of made his own in 2016, and it only made him stronger. And the stories and the coverage, the sorts of things that stimulated Alvin Bragg and Letitia James and Fani Willis and Jack Smith and gave them the idea in some sense that they were going to do something that would make them celebrated and powerful and successful, worked against them. So they're they, their own aims. They, they, they were the, they were the gozer, the destructor. They, they are the ones who came up with the Stay Puft Marshmallow man that was going to come kill them in the form of stories that they love to read and made them so happy about Trump being raided and Trump being indicted and Trump being convicted. And that was the form of their destruction. And it's the form of their destruction, the destruction of their business also. So, because it's not just telling, it's.

[Seth Mandel]

Telling also how when you read that about Schiro Frankel's story, right, about progressives or liberals or Democrats feel that they don't have a social media platform anymore to spread their agenda, right? To set their agenda. That's how they looked at Twitter. Like that in itself, I think, is illuminating that they looked at it as a political party, looked at a social media app as how we get our agenda out and not as a social media app, not as how we talk to each other, not as how we hear what other people are thinking and seeing what groups form. When you just sort of do this grand town square experiment, see who's out there, and they flush all the free speech out, right? They, they, they retreated in horror from that idea. But it really is a, it was a bonanza of free, you know, focus groups. If you were paying attention, you could Sit there and listen, essentially listen in to the conversations that people were having. You know, journalist was no longer an email.

[John Podhoretz]

No, Private, right? It was right there, yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

It was no longer private. It was. Ezra Klein was just, you know, telling people to calm down on Twitter. Instead of telling people to calm down on the list server, whatever this, they had the conservative version of that. They could sit there and listen in to everything that was happening and everything people had to say. And, you know, Phil Klein told me something funny the other day where he said that at first, when Trump sort of.

[John Podhoretz]

This is Noah's colleague, Phil Klein at National Review.

[Seth Mandel]

Yes, he said something funny the other day to me, which was that at first, when Trump started rising and they had the comments section at National Review, he was sort of, at first, you know, kind of dismissive of the idea that the comments section were what was telling you where the country was going, Right? Because we as writers and especially people who know, you know, who grew up in the sort of blogosphere era and the blog era, the mantra was never read the comments, right? Make you crazy, what people say in the comments. And he's saying that, you know, and then Trump won. And it was like, oh, it turned out that the comment section was somewhat more representative, right? Of this is what. This is the opportunity you have when you have the Internet in front of you, and instead of running from it, you just say, all right, let's see what people think. And they saw it as a place.

[John Podhoretz]

To release press releases or to organize, right? And I think to organize. I have found Twitter amazingly useful, both when I was posting and then the four and a half years that I stopped posting precisely for this reason, which is that it allowed me to see what people that I disagreed with on both sides, not to both sides, it. But what they were interested in, what was concerning them, what news they were floating where, how they were establishing what you might call the sort of the daily agenda, both for the left and for the right, immensely valuable if you. If that. Your purpose is to understand that. And the idea that people would willingly, out of a need to purify their timelines or their Twitter feeds or whatever, have to leave altogether rather than double down on trying to use it to understand what Elon Musk is doing or to understand what people like Greg Price and others and Molly Hemingway, who are essentially providing you with the inside look at what is going on in the maga brain, that you would shut that off rather than exploit it and use it, is an astonishing factoid. It means get. Gee, I wonder why you don't understand what happened in America. I can understand it's too painful for you to understand it. It was painful for me too. A lot of my priors have been, you know, have found themselves, you know, disproven or unconfirmed by the reality. But you either face it or you're like, I don't want to live in reality. I need to retreat into fantasy. Now, let's talk about one issue before we go two and a half years into the war in Ukraine after Ukraine took some Russian territory early in the summer with the idea that maybe this was a way for Ukraine to get to a point where they could negotiate Russia out of Ukraine in exchange for the land that they would return to Russia. And Russia has savagely counterattacked and then brought in North Korean soldiers to both to ballast them as well as North Korean and Iranian missiles. Joe Biden has decided to allow Ukraine to use the Atacam ballistic missile system in Russian terror to land to go in deeper into Russian territory. When did we start saying that we needed to give the Ukrainians access to ATACMs? Was that say, two years and three months ago? How long has the conversation been that Ukraine, we were supplying.

[Abe Greenwald]

They've been asking. Well, yeah, they've been asking, you know, for, for the whole time and.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

Excuse me. When it really would have made a much bigger difference was before the summer offense, before the spring of summer offensives, when, when they, when Ukraine really needed to fire over the border into Russian territory because Russia was releasing these glide bombs that, that from planes that Ukraine couldn't touch. And they were, and they were losing manpower and Russia was gaining ground. So once again, it's, it's, and it's an, this is an incremental step here too, because my understanding is, the administrator, excuse me, the administration is saying they can only use, they can only fire into Russian territory, into Kursk, Right. Not elsewhere.

[John Podhoretz]

That's right. You could only. They can only fire in one direction, one thing where the North Koreans are. Apparently, that's me if I'm wrong.

[Noah Rothman]

But I think they've opened it up because initially Biden said, okay, well we'll open up long range targets in the south. Right. And this on the, in the Ukrainian, on the other side of the Ukrainian border in the south. But you can't hit these staging areas in the north where Kursk and Belgorod Oblast are. And now they've opened it all up.

[John Podhoretz]

Oh, right, right. Well, okay. But here's the thing. So this is just the seventh iteration of this. Right. First it was we can't give them tanks. Then it was like, okay, we'll give them. Then it's like, we can't give them planes. Then it's like, okay, we'll give it. We'll, okay, we'll give them planes. Every time they finally, they have a fight inside the administration over not escalating, and then they decide they need to do it, they do it six months too late. But here's the question that is raised by this move, which is a huge move, although it's not clear how many missiles we have to give them or how many they have left or anything like that. They're creating a fact on the ground. We are still very unclear about what it is that the administration, the incoming administration actually wants to do to achieve its aim of ending the war quickly. And there, of course, is a classic rule of war, which is escalate to de escalate, which is to say put, let Ukraine have victories so that when they come to the table, Ukraine is not on the back foot and has to accept whatever it was that is being on offer. And we don't know, again, what the incoming administration, but the one thing that Biden may have done is allow Trump to pursue that a little bit. That is to say, doesn't have to say we're, you know, we're making peace on day one. We'll see what happens over the next two months. We'll see how the Ukrainians do. They still have control of this territory. They have now been given the means to punish Russia for trying to invade and take back the territory inside Russia that Ukraine has taken and keep them from doing that. And maybe Trump won't immediately say, we got to come to the table and make a deal. Maybe he'll be like, seems to be working a little bit. Give it a couple months, then we'll, then, then we'll go to Putin and say, come to the table. Here's what we're, here's what we're going to do. You're going to give them back this, they'll give you back that. It's not going to be everything Ukraine wants. It's not going to be what you want, but that's the way it's going to be. What do you think?

[Abe Greenwald]

See, I suspect Biden's thinking is less about trying to change reality on the ground here for Ukraine than it is to send a message to Putin saying, stop bringing in foreign fighters. The US Considers that an escalation. So here, now, we're going to show you an escalation.

[John Podhoretz]

Oh, I agree with you.

[Seth Mandel]

I don't think explicitly what they're saying. But here's the thing. I think that that highlights, only further highlights, the ridiculousness of the administration's policy. Because it's like, all right, fine, we'll give you these weapons only shoot North Koreans, though. I don't want to see you shoot at Russians. Don't shoot a Russian. Shoot a North Korea. Make sure before you shoot them, you check their ID badge. You scope in on the uniform and know what shade of olive the North Koreans uniformed are versus, you know, whatever this is. This is the sort of thing that we've been tearing our hair out the whole time, right? Which is this, this like this sort of tit for tat. All right, fine. So the North Koreans are there, so you can shoot North Koreans. And, and, and really the whole point is that Zelensky want wanted from, you know, especially when he went into Kursk, he said, here's why I went into Kursk, so that the Russians would have to give me something back when I sue for peace. That's ok. It was a very clear, obvious thing. I can't give the Russians anything. So if you force me to the table now, I'm just, you know, I'm going to lose everything.

[John Podhoretz]

I'm surrender. Right?

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

I mean, there's nothing, there's no trade here. So I'm going to take something so I can trade. These are very simple concepts. And he's thinking in terms of these military concepts. And the leader of the free world is like, well, shoot this guy. Don't shoot this guy. And this many miles over the border and this men. And it totally doesn't reflect the reality on the ground now or just the reality of war in general. You can't micromanage a war like this.

[John Podhoretz]

I'm not suggesting that what I just said could happen in, you know, after January 20th has anything to do with Biden's cognitive. Cognitive process, which we don't even know if he has a cognitive process. We don't know who's making these decisions or why they're happening. We do know that France and Britain have already preceded us in allowing the use of what they gave in terms of ballistic missilery. And so in response to the Russian escalation with the foreign fighters, so we're actually leading from behind here. We, we are following, we are following smaller and less powerful militaries in providing the aid that we should have been providing a year ago. But I'm saying that it presents an opportunity. It presents an opportunity to trump to take a third way approach that isn't, you know, Zelensky is a monster and we need to let Russia win the war. Which does seem to be the MAGA position.

[Noah Rothman]

In effect, that is the MICA position. That's J.D. vance's position. That's Tulsi Gabbard's position. I'm very concerned about the conflict that he's going to inherit. We don't know what it's going to look like. All we know is there will be no continuity between this administration and the next. That's what the combatants in this war know. And all they know is that the brakes are off now on Ukraine and Moscow and they have to change the facts on the ground with very limited window of opportunity to do so and then present Donald Trump with whatever those favorable facts are. That is a recipe for some really destabilizing stuff coming down the pike. And maybe Joe Biden knows it and maybe he was very sincere about his pathological fear of escalation. And now because he's no longer president anymore, he just doesn't care. You go, go ahead and escalate all you want. I'm out. You got rid of me. Enjoy your limited nuclear exchange.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, you, you began this war with fears of a limited nuclear exchange and you're coming to the end with fears of a limited nuclear exchange. And I think I, I think the idea that, the idea that Putin is anywhere near that seems mental.

[Noah Rothman]

No, it's quite obvious that it should have been obvious a long, long time ago. Yeah, at the very outset of this war I was pouring over Russian nuclear war fighting doctrine as one does. But it sure became pretty clear that nuclear saber rattling was just the weapon of first resort for this regime up to and including now. The latest violation of the red lines that are supposedly inviolable are foreign fighters and non aligned fighters engaging in combat on Ukrainian soil. That was, that was the inviolable red line from Moscow. That's gone. Just because they wanted to violate it. We should, we should not observe any of these red lines. They're fictional. Especially the fact that nuclear deterrence is a two way street. The Biden administration never really fully internalized that or any of it. Doesn't seem to have read any of the psyops from the, from the 70s that would inform the thinking around this. There wasn't much thinking. There was a lot of feeling.

[John Podhoretz]

So J.D. vance, right, is on, is on, is on that side, but Marco Rubio is on the other side. Mike Waltz said that we should give the Ukrainians ATACMS Pete Hegseth said we should unleash the Ukrainians on the Russians. I don't know what's going to happen to any of these nominations.

[Noah Rothman]

We've all softened that position.

[John Podhoretz]

I'm saying that they said it. I'm saying that they said it a month before the election. They can soften in the immediate aftermath of the election because they are trying to figure out how to conform themselves to some very vague ideas of what the Trump administration's policies are going to be so that they are not having this fight in public.

[Noah Rothman]

But, you know, he's been. He's been good. And even when he sounds notes of caution, you know, we have to pivot to Asia and what have you, he doesn't sound capitulatory. Rubio started to sound more capitulatory. And their rhetoric is going to run up against permanent American national interests in Europe. Sorry. You're going to have to manage 33 members of the Atlantic alliance, all of whom are going to go different directions, some of whom are going to want to take a stronger hand in Ukraine. You have to manage allies as well as adversaries, because when they all start going their own way, infinitely more potential for conflagration suddenly arises. This is hurting.

[John Podhoretz]

Do you really think. Let me just give you a thought experiment, and then we should go. Do you really think that if the United States sends a strong signal that it. It is moving to end the war, that NATO will somehow try to make do with a policy that continues its support of Ukraine's war against Russia without United States support? Because I don't see that happening.

[Noah Rothman]

Not NATO per se, but.

[John Podhoretz]

But individual players in NATO. I just don't. I think once. Once. Once Trump calls everybody to the table, they're going to be at the table. And that's possibly.

[Noah Rothman]

I think Poland and Estonia could do some wacky stuff.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, they could do their own stuff. I don't know.

[Noah Rothman]

Poland doesn't even want you to know how much they're spending on defense.

[John Podhoretz]

I know.

[Noah Rothman]

They lie about it.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Noah Rothman]

They have a much stronger military than they want you to know. Right. And if there's a prospect of a bigger Russian advance if things start coming unstuck, and then you see Russian troop movements, that'll scare the heck out of Europe. If you start to look at Ukraine as a failed state, and that's what they see in Warsaw and that's what they see in Tallinn, then they may have no choice but to introduce covert forces on the other side of the border, just to maintain the Peace.

[Seth Mandel]

Estonia built its first new military base since 1991, since the end of the Cold War, and it was part of that block. So it's, since its independence. In other words, it's the first really that Estonia has. But, so there, there's alarm bells going off and it's, you know, I don't know, it's like 50 miles from the border with Russia, not all the way on the other side of the country also. So there's, there's alarm bells going off and they're showing that alarm bells are going off. But I think that they want the west to see those alarm bells and not. And change course to the extent that they won't have to, seriously. But I don't, I, you know, if.

[Noah Rothman]

They shut it down along the lines of contact somehow, and maybe they trade some territory so Kiev doesn't actually have to get retained possession of Russian Federated Federation territory, and maybe that works out somehow and they buy themselves, you know, another Minsk, another set of Minsk agreements where the justice line of contact is constantly hot. So, you know, that is a, that is something that Moscow can use whenever it wants to extract goods from the west and extort the west until it's terrible, that conflict.

[John Podhoretz]

Right, but that's why I say Trump having more options, whether Biden did not intend to provide Trump with more options. But, and Trump, of course, is not somebody you sit down with and you say, look, here's here are the five things that could happen, you know, because, you know, that's not the way he makes policy, but he is possibly being given a greater menu to choose from about how he wants to proceed here. And really, it's really about how he wants to proceed. What happens in the aftermath of whatever deal is struck, if a deal is struck elsewhere in NATO, particularly in the near abroad of Russia, is something that is going to have to be dealt with after they would like the war. You know, they would like Russia, Poland, Estonia always would like Russia to be consumed with Ukraine so that it doesn't turn its attention toward them. And that is something that somebody may have to say to May, may tell Trump, look, you think, you think you're getting out of this Scot free, you're not getting out of this Scot free. Russia thinks it wins a victory. Its aggressions are not going to cease and then they're going to start on your watch and you're not going to be able to blame them on anybody else. Like it's, it's not Biden's war, then it's, you have to let them, you know, take a bite out of Estonia. You want to do that or you don't care, fine. But you're still. It's all going to be on you. So he's going to have a few more options. That's all I'm saying. And maybe that's. Maybe that will be helpful. Maybe I'm like, you know, whistling Dixie. I don't know. I don't even know why I said whistling Dixie, because I don't know what that analogy really connects to. Anyhow, we've gone. We just did. I'm an old man. I'm getting old, and so I'm talking too long, and we're talking to. You're young, but you're following me, so I'm embarrassed for you guys. Noah, it was fantastic as ever to have you back. And it will not be ere long before where you are, you're with us again.

[Noah Rothman]

It's always a pleasure. Thank you. I used my. My attendance last night to lobby for this one, so don't. Don't thank me too much.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay.

[Noah Rothman]

Well, that's what I wanted.

[John Podhoretz]

Fair. Okay, great.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, your donations was highly appreciated. Thank you.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes. And you did us a solid by. Solid by. By filling out. By filling out our. Our fourth, so it was like. It's like bridge, you know, we needed a fourth, so for Abe and Seth, I'm John Pothort. Keep the candle burning.